Termination Shock

“I’ve been meaning to ask you sort of an odd question.”

“Ask away.”

“Brazos,” she said, looking out over the river. “Why does the name sound so familiar to me? What am I missing?”

“You’ve been seeing the word on financial statements ever since you became old enough to read them,” Willem said.

“Bingo! So I’m not crazy.”

Willem shook his head. “On the contrary.”

“So my next question is . . .”

“At the place where this river empties into the Gulf of Mexico,” Willem said, “south of Houston, there are some mounds—natural formations—rich in sulfur. At the beginning of the twentieth century some businessmen started a company called Brazos Sulfur to mine those deposits. There was a lot of crossover between those guys and early oilmen. This was the era when the oil industry was just going ballistic around here.”

“The gushers you see in old photos.”

“Spindletop and all that. The origin of Gulf and Texaco and others.”

“You are a gusher of obscure industrial history, Willem!”

“You’re too kind. The only reason I know any of this is that it came to light during the last few weeks when I was putting together that packet of information about Dr. Schmidt.”

“How is T.R. mixed up in it?”

“His great-grandfather Karl Schmidt was one of the founders of Brazos Sulfur. As well as an oilman. That’s how T.R. got his name. Karl was an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. Named his son—Dr. Schmidt’s grandfather—after him.”

“All right,” Saskia said, “so I’m getting the picture of how it all started, more than a century ago. But why would I be seeing the word ‘Brazos’ on financial statements? I’m not aware of any investments in sulfur mines.”

Willem nodded. “But you are aware, if I may make a blindingly obvious point, that your family from the very beginning were investors in Royal Dutch Shell.”

“It just came up in conversation,” Saskia said drily.

Willem nodded. “If you follow the history of Brazos Sulfur through the twentieth century, it expands to other domes—those sulfur-rich mounds—in the Gulf Coast and then diversifies to other minerals. Manganese, nickel, potash. Kaolin, which is a kind of fancy clay used to make paint and diarrhea medicine. So about as unglamorous as you can get.”

“How is sulfur used?”

“Tires and fertilizer.”

“I see your point about the glamour.”

“They changed the name to Brazos Mining. They went wherever the minerals were. There’s not a lot of margin in clay and potash. They ended up in places like Cuba. Congo. Indonesia.”

“Ah,” Saskia said, “now it’s all starting to come together.”

“Like a lot of other Western companies they got kicked out of former colonies during the post-war period. Castro kicked them out of Cuba and so on. But they have, I guess you could say, tendrils all over the place—interlocking boards of directors with oil companies. Connections to big establishment figures—Rockefellers, Bushes, and so on. During the 1960s, after they’d been kicked out of Cuba and the Congo, they got wind that a geologist from our country had climbed the highest mountain in New Guinea—which is on the formerly Dutch half of the island—and seen a huge mineral deposit. Mostly copper. But where there’s copper there’s probably gold. The scale of it was unbelievable. Just sitting there in plain sight.”

“In one of the least accessible places on Earth!” Saskia protested.

Willem nodded. “And at extremely high altitude to boot. They didn’t have a prayer of getting to it without local knowledge and connections. So Brazos Mining put together a joint venture with Shell—which I need hardly tell you knew everything there was to know about doing business in the Dutch East Indies—and created Brazos RoDuSh, which went on to create—”

“The world’s largest open pit mine on the top of a mountain surrounded by the New Guinea jungle!” Saskia now knew exactly what Willem was talking about. The place was famous for its hugeness and infamous for political reasons.

“Exactly.”

“I own part of that.”

Willem nodded. “You have owned part of it since you became old enough to own things. Brazos RoDuSh has appeared somewhere on every financial statement you have ever read.”

“How are they doing?” Saskia asked. She was trying to be mischievous. But it didn’t come through. She winked at Willem. But maybe it just looked like she was trying to get a trickle of sweat out of her eye. She really needed to work on her ability to project puckish wit. Maybe it would help if she were actually more witty.

“I won’t go over the politics, the history with you,” Willem began.

“Of Indonesia and West Papua and all that.”

He nodded. “But the Asian economic book created a fantastically huge demand for copper and so they quintupled their value in a short period of time. More recently as you know there has been trouble in Papua and the stock has performed less admirably.”

“But . . . bringing it all back to the here and now . . . T.R. Schmidt is also an investor in Brazos RoDuSh?”

“He was born there.”

“In New Guinea!?”