David Schaffer hung up the phone after talking to Tom Corcoran. He tried to curb his emotion. He’d had plenty of leads before that turned out to be zilch, so until he could check it out, he couldn’t afford to let himself get excited. Still, he couldn’t resist a little daydreaming. He’d been trying to track down the map for years. And each year he didn’t find it made it more valuable. Not because he wanted it and couldn’t get it. Coltan was one of the most valuable substances in the world today.
He went downstairs for dinner. As his wife, Carol, poured him a glass of Cabernet, he smiled. It was a rare event.
“Good news?” Carol asked.
“Maybe.”
“Well, that’s nice.” She went back into the kitchen to get their meal. As he heard her opening and closing the refrigerator, he realized they’d reached the state of détente of couples who should never have married. There was no overt aggression, no hostility towards each other. They shared mostly—indifference. Which wasn’t unusual. At least for David.
He hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but it was better than stainless steel. He was the only child of upwardly mobile parents: his mother a doctor, his father an insurance executive. By the time he was six, he’d become king of the household, and used his position to manipulate his parents. “Boundaries” were not words in the Schaffer family vocabulary, and David was given everything he wanted, mostly to ease his mother’s guilt for not being home during the day.
Still, he was a shy child, and slow to develop social skills. At one point his mother thought he might have Asperger’s, but the kid shrink she took him to said he was lonely and needed to socialize.
As he grew up, though, David preferred to be home and by himself for one important reason. When his babysitter was on the phone or watching soaps, which was almost all the time, he had the opportunity to go through his parents’ possessions. He was twelve when he found out his father had a mistress on the side; fourteen when he figured out the combination of the wall safe in their bedroom. And on the day his mother accidentally left her cell phone at home he learned she had a significant prescription drug addiction.
David never used the secrets he’d uncovered, but they made him realize that information was power, and he vowed to always have the right information. In high school, he wasn’t a bully, but he always seemed to have dirt on the other kids. Most didn’t like him much, but figured it was safer to keep him close than to make him an enemy.
After four unremarkable years in college, David decided to build a career in electronics. He was no Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg. David didn’t have their vision or ambition. The best place for him, he figured, would be to copy what others built.
By the mid-eighties he’d convinced his parents to take a second mortgage on the house so they could underwrite his business: a company that would manufacture components for all the electronic devices that were turning from drawing board dreams into reality. It turned out he had a good head for business, and within five years, Schaffer Electronics turned a profit.
His most important task was to acquire a steady supply of raw materials, and David scoured the world for vendors. When he started the company, he needed plastics that were both light and heat resistant to house electronic components. By the nineties, however, the market had changed. Smaller, more portable devices like cell phones, game systems, and laptops dominated, and David expanded into electronic capacitors, essential components for the new power supplies. And for those he needed a supplier who could sell him coltan at a reasonable price.
David found that company in Macedonian Metals, a huge conglomerate headquartered in Delaware. As usual, David did his due diligence before he approached them. He had plenty of resources at his disposal, mostly former intelligence operatives who were now infiltrating the corporate world to ferret out information about a company’s competitors, suppliers, and strategic partners.
Through them David discovered that Macedonian was using child labor in Africa to work the coltan mines. Through them David also found out Macedonian was supplying African rebels who were mining the stuff with arms so they could overthrow whatever government happened to be in power. Armed with his intel, he approached Macedonian executives and managed to snag a contract for coltan at a very attractive price.
It was an astute move, but David knew it wouldn’t last. He was at the mercy of a huge company that could jack up their prices at any time. He needed a stable supply, preferably his own, if he was to become a major player.
His break came from a retired CIA official who was doing corporate espionage. David had hired him to find out where more coltan could be found. The man told him about one of his former CIA buddies named Walters who knew about a map of a mine in Angola that supposedly held the key to the future. David had his guy get in touch with Walters to find out what the substance in the mine was.
When he learned it was coltan, David rejoiced. This could be his salvation. If David could control the mine, there would be no limit to his fortune. He would get contracts from Motorola, Apple, and Sony. At the very least, he would no longer be dependent on Macedonian. He decided to underwrite an operation to get the map.
Then all hell broke loose. The map, which pointed to a shithole outpost called Dundo, apparently belonged to a Cuban who had become an asset to the agency. But Walters, who had run the asset, was unexpectedly gunned down in Havana, and the map—as well as the asset—disappeared. To make matters worse, as he’d feared, the price of coltan spiked, increasing almost six hundred percent in less than a year. Everyone was going after the stuff, including the Chinese. Schaffer’s profits tanked, and the future of the company was suddenly in jeopardy.
Because it was the one thing he couldn’t have, it became the only thing worth having. Over the next twenty years, David downsized his company, laid off employees, and made do with a meager—but overpriced—supply of coltan from Macedonian. But he continued to obsess over the map. It became his holy grail, a beacon obscured, luring him with salvation.
Over the years he commissioned satellite photos of Angola, put out feelers to the intelligence and financial communities, and sifted through reports from geologists and analysts. He never entertained the notion of failure. He had no doubt that he would eventually locate the map, mine the territory, and reap the rewards.
So when his banker Tom Corcoran called, David knew this was his chance.