Dollar Down
pronunciation must have worked. He thanked me
and complimented my Chinese.
    "That's as far as I go, Mr. Li."
    He scowled when he heard his name.
    "I'm looking for a translator. I found you on the
Internet and called your number. Your wife said you would be
here."
    Li's face relaxed. "What languages?"
    "Chinese to English I have the document with me, if
you're interested." I handed him the papers without waiting for
a response.
    " Nan ... nan ... hen nan ." He
repeated the word "difficult" and tossed in a "very" as he
scanned the pages.
    "What's the subject matter?" I said.
    "You don't even know what this is?"
    I shook my head.
    "Very technical. It's about petroleum processing, but I
can't even understand the Chinese very well. There is a lot of
math and chemistry. I don't think I can translate it to
English."
    "Do you know anyone who can?"
    "Maybe. I know a student here studying chemical
engineering. His father is an old friend."
    Mr. Li called the young man, and an hour later I was
having coffee with David Chou. He added a little more detail.
The paper described a process for converting bitumen into oil,
that is turn tar into liquid. It was a bit too expensive to be a
major factor in the world's oil market, but technological
advances were making it cheaper.
    "Do you know Orimulsion?" I said.
    "Yes, my field is petrochemicals."
    "Mine isn't, so can you tell me why anyone would want
to convert it when it's probably cheaper to produce emulsified
bitumen? "
    "Orimulsion isn't suitable for much except firing
electric power plants, and even there you need to have a plant
close to a large water source. Besides, in the conversion
process you can extract some of the pollutants, like
sulfur."
    "How does the price of synthetic oil compare to Saudi
crude, for example?"
    "That's difficult to say. There are a lot of ways to refine
or liquefy bitumen—chemical processes, heat, even microbes."
David paused and smiled, "And then there was that big
earthquake."
    "Earthquake?"
    "You know Sodom and Gomorrah?"
    "Not intimately."
    "Ha," he said politely and continued. "Back in the
nineteen nineties, a pair of British geologists, Harris and
Beardow as I remember, decided they had located the site of
the cities on a peninsula that was swallowed by the Dead Sea.
The area in the Biblical age was bitumen rich, and the locals
probably mined the stuff for fuel. The type of soil there is
subject to liquefaction in a severe earthquake. One hits, and
suddenly the bitumen turns into more flammable liquid. A
lamp gets knocked over and poof, fire and brimstone.
    "Maybe that means God wasn't angry at sodomites
after all. He was out to zap oilmen." He laughed. "I like Bible
stories."
    I didn't ask him to tell anymore, but I did ask how long
the translation would take.
    "About a week."
    Long time. There would be a bonus, I said, if he could
find someone to help speed up the turnaround. Tomorrow
would be good. He said he would need help with it any way,
since some sections were outside his expertise. He would
check with acquaintances and call back. In truth there was
probably no need to rush. It didn't look like anything but a
technical report for the Orimulsion study. The only thing that
seemed interesting was the language it was written in. China
was the world's biggest energy consumer. It would make sense
for the country to develop technology that would help it
diversify its source of supply. It wasn't part of the study as far
as I knew.
    I called the Scotsman, McNulty, to check on his success
in bugging Mumby's apartment. He had planted listening
devices in each room and video surveillance at the front and
back doors. Next, I checked with Pascal. He was still working
on it, but expected to have bugs in place in the PDVSA team's
office by tonight and in their apartments by tomorrow morning,
assuming they went to work on time.
    My next contact was Abe Granger at Global Risk. His
experts had traced Trevor's deal with the investment bank. He
had bet three

Similar Books

Savage Impulses

Danielle Dubois

The Devil’s Pawn

Elizabeth Finn

Cry to Heaven

Anne Rice

Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder

Jo Nesbø, mike lowery

The Drinker

Hans Fallada