Observation Two

Standing Divided

by Michael E. Lloyd

Chapter 13
Chapter 14 part 1
appear in this issue.

Chapter 14: True Grit

part 2 of 3

At ten o’clock, Salvatore casually introduced his old pal Toni to the Forretan receptionist, making it appear that his arrival had been an event long anticipated by Norman Crofton. Since she could see no good reason why the smartly dressed and polite young man should not spend the morning in the open area with the PR Manager’s obviously well-trusted buddy Signor Pirone, she was happy to issue him with a day visitor’s badge.

‘Follow me, Toni, and don’t say a word ...’

As soon as they reached the library, Salvatore turned his back on his new colleague and picked up the phone.

‘Good morning, Norm,’ he said, very quietly and rather awkwardly. ‘This is Sal.’

‘Hmm. How’ya doing, son?’

‘I’m well, thank you, Norm.’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘Look, I know I got off to a bad start last week, and we haven’t spoken since then — but I’m calling to say I’m sorry I annoyed you and Maelene, and also to give you a nice surprise ...’

‘Hmm. All right, Sal — apology made, apology accepted. Long as ya mean it.’

‘I mean it.’

‘So, what else ya got?’

‘I have an old friend with me right now, name of Toni Murano. He’s a professional music journalist, and he’s just arrived in town, and he’s really keen to meet up with people who love those good ol’ Carolina Shag Dance songs. I thought of you straight away, and I fancied you might enjoy a little chat with him, if you have a few minutes to spare some time this morning ...’

‘Well, that’s mighty considerate of ya. Can’t think of a better excuse for a li’l coffee break. Seeya at the water cooler in a coupla minutes ...’

‘Er ... actually, Toni has brought you a little gift to thank you for your time, and it might embarrass you both if he hands it over in public. Can I bring him along to your office for a few minutes, instead? How do you like your coffee?’

Carla, in un-made close attendance but ready soon to take the stage, registered this dialogue with broad satisfaction and very specific admiration for Salvatore’s most effective performance.

Salvatore knocked, opened Norman’s door, and ushered his partner in.

‘Norm, this is Toni. I’ll let him introduce himself properly. I have to go back for the coffees ...’

Crofton stood up, came around his desk, and shook the newcomer’s hand in welcome.

‘Tony, right? Good to meet ya, Tony. Music journalist, eh? I’ve been wondering when somebody would finally decide I was worth an interview!’

‘I’m very pleased to meet you too, Mr Crofton ...’

‘It’s Norm. Say, whad’ya think of the latest 93.1 FM playlist?’

Carla had been awaiting her moment outside and still un-made, expecting Toni to establish at least the pretence of an interview before she would need to make her entrance. But she decided at once that, with this early, heavy-duty question from the wrong side of the table, the moment had most definitely already arrived.

And before Norman could react to Toni’s rather helpless look, his eyes lighted on another, even more unscheduled visitor, who was smilingly breezing through the still-open door and singing a classic Tams song encouraging him to be young, be foolish and be happy. Bypassing the bogus journalist, Carla made straight for the rapidly wilting PR man himself, while Salvatore, still hovering in the corridor outside, gently pulled the door closed behind her ...

Good morning, Norm. I am very glad to be back with you. And I should like to introduce Carla, who will also be assisting us with the remainder of our enquiries.

‘Pretty girl, Chief!’

Yes indeed. And let me tell you a little more about young Toni here. He is not, I regret, a gift-bearing writer, so there is no imminent prospect of your name in lights in the music press. But he is a talented and well-informed young musician, and you should take a few minutes, later, to get to know him and his interests.

And with your blessing, he will be joining Salvatore in your building here until our work with you is complete.

‘Understood. No choice again, I guess.’

No choice, but no big issue either, Norm.

Now, as you can imagine, we are extremely keen to learn the results of your long drawn-out research work. Let us begin with what you can tell us about those world-wide sources of lutetium ...

‘OK. Well, as ya know, Chief, it’s one of the so-called “Rare Earth Elements”. And in any sample of REE ore, there’s usually only a tiny amount of lutetium alongside the other more abundant elements. It’s also particularly hard to get at. So it’s really expensive, right?

‘Up till the mid-sixties it was mostly extracted from monazite ores, in a few small operations here and abroad. But demand for the REEs started to increase, with the new technology boom — and there were also issues with radioactivity in those particular minerals. So people were keen to find alternative sources.

‘And some guys had already found ’em, in the Mojave Desert in California! Really significant REE deposits. Only ones in the country. Mainly in bastnaesite ores, and most of them with no radioactivity problems. They’d just been waiting for their moment.

‘Since then, there’s been a large mining operation over at Mountain Pass. It was the USA’s main source of REEs for about twenty years. But for lots of environmental and economic reasons, they suspended all new ore extractions there a while ago. Since then, they’ve been using up the stockpiles. And those only partly meet the national demand. The rest is imported from China ...’

China, Norm? A country far less advanced than your own, providing you with the bulk of your needs for some important commodities?

‘Well yeah, and then again, no. They’re far more advanced than a lotta people think. Their economy’s developing real fast. But sure — the States has pretty much lost control of its own destiny in a lot of areas like this.’

So, to complete the story ...

‘Well, the Chinese basically took over the world’s REE supply, from the start of the nineties. They get their lutetium from two main sources. There’s one big iron-based deposit in Mongolia, but they also have large reserves in lateritic ores in the southern tropics — and those are richer in lutetium and the other heavy elements than most other types, and it’s easier to mine and extract all the REEs from them.’

Thank you, Norm. It is good to have an apparently complete picture at last.

And now we should like to focus, as we said before, on those very interesting new operations in California ...

‘OK. Well, y’already know we found a tiny deposit of a real special ore a few years ago, out to the west of our own state here, close to the Georgia border. That’s the one ya’ll are calling “Gerontite” — the stuff that had a really high concentration of lutetium. We code-named it “Zultrite” ... but there ain’t many people who’ve ever heard that name, Chief! Because our specialist team searched for months after that, but darned if they could find any more. Doggone April Fool, we reckoned after a while.

‘And then, a few weeks into that project, they started thinking about Mountain Pass ...

‘They took their exclusive knowledge of the features of the new “zultrite” ore, and the geology of the South Carolina site, and lots of modern computer power and recent data, and so on, and they projected the most likely site for a similar fluke deposit in the Mojave Desert. And they calculated that if they did manage to find something like it over there, it would probably be in far greater quantities than the tiny amounts discovered here, and the lutetium in the ore would probably be even more highly concentrated.

‘The location they chose was in an isolated, previously unexplored area of the Clark Mountain foothills, well outside the boundaries of the existing, high-security mine. And would ya believe it, they struck lucky after only three weeks! And we staked our legal claim at once.’

That’s remarkable, Norm. But did they not call great attention to themselves in doing this, considering the relatively primitive methods which we observe are normally applied in such explorations on Earth?

‘No, that’s the beauty of it! Forretan’s a really smart outfit. That’s how we made our name and kept it! The team designed and built some very lightweight probing equipment, nicely disguised as strong walking sticks, coupled to some very tightly programmed, portable analysis equipment, which they stored in their backpacks. So they were able to conduct hundreds of sample probings as they simply wandered around the area and paused to admire the view. Anyone in the business who was aware of their presence would have assumed they were just doing some very high-level survey work. And the layman would have taken them for a bunch of college kids on a study trip!’

Aha. A little closer to our own methods and levels of sophistication. Very good, Norm. Please continue ...

‘OK. Well, Forretan has a lot of quiet connections with some very powerful people. So while all this was going on, we were opening a few doors in parallel, just in case we did hit the jackpot. And once the team had collected some real samples, and done their initial field analyses, and we’d then sent a few off to CKGS and received their own assessment (and those Danes really are the soul of discretion!), we knew we were in business!’

And precisely which business is that, Norm?

‘Good question! I just don’t know. Everyone’s aware that lutetium is very useful for a range of specialist industrial applications, but it was always so expensive to obtain that the market for it stayed quite small. Then, quite suddenly, there was this newly-formed Californian outfit called Brighter Vale, biting at our heels every day, trying to find out the state of our lutetium explorations and insisting on having first refusal to the development rights. Don’t quite know how they got wind of what we were doing, but I have my suspicions ...

‘Now, we recognise a selling opportunity when we see one. Sometimes it’s a good move to make a big noise, get lots of approaches, play hard to get, all that stuff — eventually the guys holding the real cards stay in the game, and ya sell to the best bidder in a frantic last round of wheeler-dealing. But sometimes ya figure, right up front, “Hey, this offer is too good to be true, which means it might not last very long ...” — and then ya sell the rights, very fast. If the buyers have played it smart, well, good for them — this is America, and we’ve still made a packet, and we often have the “top drawer” in reserve as well! And if they were wrong ... well, tough! And that’s exactly how we felt about this one.

‘Course, the sale itself had to be public knowledge. But we just stated that the small discovery we had made was a regular REE field, and we made sure that only part of the true financial settlement was shown in the legal documentation.’

Ah, yes. A mode of operation which we are coming to recognise as standard.

So, Norm: do tell me more about the people in Brighter Vale.

‘Well, I know next to nothing about their top dogs. All the business negotiations were conducted by my boss and their legal reps. Saw the draft contract of sale once. It just had an address in Los Angeles, and only one company owner’s name on it. Can’t remember what it was — something like John Jones. I always had the feeling that was probably just a ghost name, anyway. Never saw the final document, never saw the witnesses’ names.

‘Anyhow, I guessed ya’d ask me about this. That’s why I wasn’t ready for ya on Saturday. I’ve been quietly searching through our Registry and our databases. Over and over again. All gone.’

I beg your pardon?

‘Scrubbed. Deleted. Blanko. Every paper and electronic file related to Brighter Vale has been removed. Even the contract. Only place there might still be records is in the computer archive tapes. But they’re held off-site, and if I request those there’ll be lots of questions asked, and it’ll take days to get hold of ’em, and even then ...’

Why do you think this has happened?

‘Must have been the exploration team. The guys who made the big find out in California. Part of the deal with Brighter Vale was that the whole group would quit Forretan on the spot, and start a simple little mining operation up there, fast as they could.

‘One of ’em must have been told by our management to go in and remove all the records before they quit. Sheesh, that deal must have been even more confidential that I realised ...’

And let me guess, Norm — no forwarding addresses for any of the team?

‘Standard practice, Chief.’

I see. Well, for us that may turn out to be good news as much as bad.

So, without resorting to further discussions with any of your own colleagues, you know nothing about the Brighter Vale management team, with the exception of just that vaguely remembered name. Correct?

‘Not quite. There is one other guy. He’s the only one I was ever allowed to deal with. Had to call him a coupla times to agree on a few technical points for the contract — timetable, exact location and size of the parcel of land, that sort of stuff. He was OK. A bit west coast, ya know, but OK ...’

So who is this very special person, Norm?

‘They called him their Chief Scientist. Professor Humphrey Bond.’

And are you still in a position to make contact with him?

‘Yeah, and no, again. I don’t have any paper or computer files of my own for Brighter Vale. I was expressly forbidden to hold any, throughout the process. Had to keep handwritten notes, always locked away, and shred them all at the end.

‘But I do remember the address on that contract. It was real short and simple. And I do have Bond’s cell phone number on a piece of paper in my safe. Boss told me it would only be valid till the deal was completed. I kept it anyhow — just in case. Maybe he still uses that old phone after all ...’

Understood. Well, it could be worse. There is hope. But is this really all you can tell us about Brighter Vale’s operation? Do you seriously know nothing of their actual application of this wonderful new source of lutetium-rich “Gerontite”?

‘Correct. Best kept secret in the USA, I reckon. Ya find Humphrey, ya maybe get some answers soon. I can give ya nothing more, unless ya want a very long wait and a lot more people involved ...’

No, we do not want that. But we should like you to make contact with Humphrey for us.

‘Bad idea, Chief. If I try calling him after all this time, he’s gonna get very suspicious. Much better if ya think of some good reason to talk to him direct.’

Very well, Norm. I shall trust your judgment on that front. I have taken note of the company address in Los Angeles — thank you. But I see you cannot recall the professor’s old phone number. Please retrieve it and provide it to me at our next meeting.

‘Will do.’

To be continued ...