The Lithium Caper

By Niall Gibbons

The force of lithium to power future electric vehicles and the renewable energy revolution ignites a race to control the world’s largest deposit in the mountains of Uzbekistan.

Thanks to good luck and charm, Mitch Nolan, a philandering divinity school dropout, leads America’s quest for the resource. A quest in which Mitch faces the Russian mob, the CIA, the DEA, an Afghan warlord, and an exotic Uzbek princess.

Join Mitch as he leads America’s quest for lithium—the commodity that will pace the next industrial revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9798886547658

Book preview

1

My name is Mícheál Nolan. I’m called Mitch by my friends. The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles doesn’t issue licenses with the Irish fada diacritic mark so when people look at my driver’s license, they think my first name is a misprint. I’m from a second-generation Boston Irish family; I’m unmarried, and my parents divorced over ten years ago. I have an older sister, Madailéin, who seems to be permanently pregnant. Right now, Maddie has six kids and is married to a nerd genius who made $100-plus million from the IPO of the Blockchain company he founded. Madi’s student loans from Immaculata University are more than paid off. Now she’s on the school’s endowment committee when she isn’t in the maternity ward.

I live in Manhattan now, and by profession, you could call me an investment banker, although I never studied finance or economics in college. I work for Cardigan Bank, an old-line Yankee bank that was founded in the mid-nineteenth century. I was in the same cubicle on the eleventh floor for six years and helped the bank manage, administer, and pitch the treasure of the affluent few, the high net-worth individuals. We call them Hinwees. They’re the people who live large, and it’s our job to do everything to keep it that way. The more money they have, the more they can do with it—good and bad.

Cardigan is also an investment bank. We finance infrastructure projects like power plants, mines, toll roads, and pipelines. We’ve been a pillar of Yankee banking since the Grant administration when Cardigan cut its investment banking teeth on America’s railroads.

I’m not one of those Harvard or Wharton School MBAs that are a dime a dozen on Wall Street. I got a BA from Georgetown in theology with a minor in Ottoman studies. Catholic theologians teach that the affluent few adore at the altar of Mammon, and their bankers are Mammon’s acolytes. Luke says in chapter 16, verse 13 that you can’t serve God and money, but private wealth bankers do everything they can to prove him wrong.

I was accepted into the Georgetown graduate theology program, which I thought would be my ticket into one of the academe’s cushy ivory towers. All I would have to do is present a paper now and then in order to become a professional conference attendee at some of the world’s most up-market tourist destinations, where I could help wayward ladies back onto the path to godliness. The Georgetown program carried five years of full funding including tuition, health care, and a generous stipend. I was enjoying my life as a grad student for two years after getting my BA and enjoying Georgetown’s M Street nightlife. But that was before I lost control of my carnality with the spouse of a faculty member.

I met Rabbi Pinsky’s wife over the punch bowl at a theology department function one Sunday afternoon. She was fortyish, full-breasted, and had large doe-like chocolate eyes. But she was no deer in the headlights. Thomas Aquinas said lust is a sin of voluptuous emotions that unloosen the human spirit. The rabbi’s wife was certainly voluptuous, and she seemed to have an interest in loosening more than my spirit.

I am not inexperienced with women. In fact, some would say that I treat women like they have an expiry date. There was a semiserious infatuation one summer and a steamy affair with Wendy the cocktail waitress at Clyde’s on M Street. But Mrs. Pinsky was a mature woman, and that was a mountain I’d not yet climbed. I’m six feet, four inches and about 220 pounds, with a wavy thatch of black Irish hair and Carolina blue eyes. Somebody at Crayola ought to name a crayon after them. Bedroom Blue could be a big seller. And give me credit for the sixth sense with women, sizing up their points quickly: I knew the rabbi’s wife was interested in more than my graduate thesis when she brushed up against me several times at the punch bowl. Oh, excuse me, she said, clumsy me. Her apology was accompanied by a come-hither eye.

As things progressed that day, the good rabbi and his wife invited me around for lunch the following Sunday to discuss some of my research. Up I showed with some roses from the Social Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue. I was met at the door by an absolutely zaftig Mrs. Pinsky in a summery silken blouse, clearly sans bra. She was quite happy to see me and loved the flowers while smiling and then taking my hand as she ushered me into the Pinsky parlor. She put the bouquet down and eyed me with a look of sly amusement. She was sorry, but we would have to wait for the rabbi, who had been unavoidably detained at a late-running conference on campus.

He won’t be able to join us till after two, she said in mock regret. That was when she approached me head-on and pushed those D-cup mammaries into my chest and then fondled the Nolan family jewels. With a deep, husky voice she asked, "What could we ever do while we wait?"

Nothing coquettish about Mrs. Pinsky!

I reached up and grabbed those voluptuous boobies with each hand, and before she could gasp, I covered her mouth with mine, playing tonsil hockey, as I pushed her onto the Pinsky couch. From there we gave the couch manufacturer’s warranty a stern test as we frantically bounced up and down, first me on top and then Mrs. Pinsky, who, by now, was just Rhoda. She began thrusting up and down like a frenzied monkey on a stick and making moans and little shrieks until the charge that was building in my loins suddenly burst into a full flood of carnal electricity as we reached ecumenical nirvana.

It was the first of several educational experiences that summer with Rhoda Pinsky, who showed me that orthodox Jewish intercourse through a sheet with a hole in it is just a rumor for some. I now know otherwise. Sadly, my summer extracurricular class in Rogering Rhoda was cut short. It happened during an afternoon visit to study the rabbi’s private collection of research texts on the Babylonian Talmud, which were his pride and joy. But alas, Rabbi Hershel Pinsky came home unannounced and ruined study hour when he unexpectedly found his other pride and joy, Rhoda, in flagrante delicto with a gentile graduate student.

The next day I was called into the theology dean’s office. Father Brendan McDermott was about to give me a stern dressing down, for which I was prepared. I figured it would be an Act of Contrition and maybe five trips around my rosary beads. But I didn’t think my scholarship was in jeopardy. After all, Rhoda Pinsky wasn’t even Catholic. Alas, I was sadly mistaken. The plump old codger—we called him Friar Tuck—had a fringe of gray-white hair around a splotchy, bald scalp. His cherubic cheeks were lined with broken blood vessels, and his bulbous red nose was probably the result of too many after-mass whiskeys over the years. He said that my assault on a faculty member’s wife was an intolerable breach of Georgetown Theology School’s code of ethical conduct and an unforgivable act of depravity. If Friar Tuck only knew who initiated the act.

Nolan, he said, launching into a sermon, "I’ve been watching you for some time. I know about the parties at your apartment and your philandering in the M Street bars. I was hoping that some tiny bit of God’s grace would change you for the better, put you on the path to goodness. Alas, God’s light has not shined upon you. And now it has come to this! The ultimate infamy! And with a faculty member’s wife, no less. What do you have to say for yourself?"

With my very best penitent voice, I said that I was sorry and that I had heard the voice of our Savior to whom I had repented and I was overjoyed that He had accepted my heartfelt apology and commitment to community service as my penance.

"If I thought for a moment that you were truly sorry, he said, now squinting at me with obvious disbelief behind a raised forefinger, and that you had truly heard God’s voice, I might reconsider my decision to expel you. But you violated a faculty member’s wife—a woman from another faith! So you must suffer the consequences. Nolan, you are hereby expelled from Georgetown Divinity."

But, Father, I sniveled, adding some falsetto, I spent the evening in church asking for forgiveness, and the Lord heard my entreaty. Please don’t do this. Please…

Friar Tuck’s face suddenly reddened even more, his body stiffened, and he pounded his desk. You lying scoundrel! he yelled at me in his best fire and brimstone. You were seen wobbling down M Street last night with a young tart hanging all over you!

But…but, Father… I stammered, I’ve nearly finished my thesis on salvation and soteriology.

He looked at me for a moment, clasping his hands in a church steeple, and said, Have you indeed? Then he spoke in a calmer, much deeper voice, You have become a low creature, Nolan, and you will find salvation elusive. But you are still one of God’s children. This is not the end, for you can still find your faith. I will pray that the Almighty guides you onto the right path. But this matter is closed. You are expelled, effective immediately.

I didn’t listen to much else of Friar Tuck’s harangue because my mind was already racing ahead with thoughts on what could be my next move. What were my options? I’d been cast adrift in a world where I suddenly had no means of support. I was confused and clueless as to what my future might hold.

Now the job pickings for comparative theologians outside academia or any church are pretty slim to begin with, but they are next to none for someone with a specialization in Ottoman culture and Tsarist Turkestan. With no academic references available, my career as a theologian was finished. Goodbye, International Conference on Interfaith Dialogue and World Religion in Athens.

In rapid succession, I thought about the Army Chaplain Corps for about a microsecond, but the military required an ecclesiastical endorsement, and who knows, I might get shot at. I may be big and well-muscled, but I’m not stupid.

Chaplain Corps? Bad idea. Barista at Starbucks? Selling used cars? I was in a quandary.

* * *

That evening I arranged to commiserate over a few drinks with my buddy Bob Ryan, who was at Georgetown’s McDonough Business School. We hang out at Clyde’s, where our psychotherapist and former Notre Dame football player, Eddie, is also the head bartender. Bob was interning that summer at Carillon, a big investment bank headquartered in DC. Bob promised to put me in touch with Cardigan Bank in New York where he had interviewed a week before. Cardigan was looking for someone with languages to work as a client development trainee in the bank’s private wealth division. The Cardigan job wasn’t a fit for Bob, but it looked like a life ring for a disgraced divinity student. Bob’s father, Jack Ryan, knew some "very senior people" at Cardigan, so Bob twisted his father’s arm to make a call on my behalf. It also turned out that my father knew one of the directors at Cardigan from his CIA days. My father is an interesting guy about whom I’ll tell you in a bit. Suffice to say, I was coming into the Cardigan interview well announced.

I was unschooled when it came to financing. To be honest, I could barely manage a checkbook. But with my well-placed references and my ability to ad-lib, I had a great interview. They loved my rather unique combination of Turkish and Russian and grabbed onto the fact that I’d spent two summers at Moscow State University studying the history of Russian Turkestan and the local female talent. The Turkestan region had belonged to the Ottomans until the Tsars took control in the nineteenth century. By the end of the interview, they asked me when I could start! So I was able to flannel my way through the door as a multilingual business development trainee even though I was a spreadsheet illiterate. My transition from theology school to the world of private banking took less than a month.

2

I certainly had no idea that my father had any contacts in waspy, Yankee banking circles, but Gaibrial Padraig Nolan is full of surprises, as I’ve learned over the years. Dad studied electrical engineering at Boston College. BC may be located in the Athens of America, but it is definitely not waspy. Its roots are blue-collar Jesuit. Dad went from BC into an engineering career at the CIA. Along the way, he was posted to Istanbul for six years, and so we moved there with him as a family. My sister and I thought he was with an oil rig company. It was many years later that my sister and I learned he was what they call a nonofficial cover intelligence officer. NOCs don’t work in embassies and don’t carry diplomatic passports.

It was in Istanbul’s maze of mosques and bazaars that I developed my interest in the Ottoman Empire and its cultural underpinnings, especially Turkestan. My mop of black Irish hair certainly made me look like a Turk, albeit a blue-eyed one, and I learned to speak like one. I seem to have an ear for languages because I pick them up quickly.

After our family returned from Turkey, a combination of my Irish Catholic grandmother’s inflexible view of protestants and my father’s continuing travel finally took its toll on my parents’ marriage. You see, Mom was not Catholic. So she and Grandma barely spoke. I remember worrying about how Grandma would react to my Sri Lankan senior prom date about whom she said, She’s a nice girl. At least she’s not a protestant heretic.

Over the years, Mom and Dad had drifted in different directions. After we moved back to the States, Dad still traveled a lot of the time, and so Mom found an interest in doing charitable work and fundraising in her episcopal parish. I suppose the fact that her son was a theology student didn’t hurt her candidacy for her parish vestry board, which was an antiseptic crowd of fruit punch drinkers and the polar opposite of my father. So it was no surprise to Maddie and me when Mom and Dad divorced. We both knew they were going through the motions toward the end of their marriage. What did come as a surprise though was when Mom announced her choice of a new husband a year later: it was none other than her widower parish priest, Calvin Claggett! I’ve often wondered whether Mom…well, you know what I was wondering. Virginia Nolan? Nah, too straitlaced.

Maddie, her bearded billionaire husband in his sandals along with their au pair, and their kids came East for the wedding. I walked Mom down the aisle. The nuptials that steamy Washington summer day were officiated by a gay female bishop who was later defrocked after pleading guilty to driving under the influence. Newspaper accounts of the incident quoted her as saying, I was unaware that the punch was alcoholic. She pleaded innocence, but the judge was unsympathetic. Seems Her Excellency blew a .23 on the police breathalyzer, which is enough to fell an elephant. I was sure that the rumbling noise from the afternoon thundershower was my South Boston grandmother, having a fit of apoplexy in heaven as she watched her grandson walk down the aisle with her former daughter-in-law in a marriage to an apostate clergyman with a lesbian jezebel sealing the union in a proddy temple.

Mom’s choice of a new husband was indeed the polar opposite of my father, who, as you already know, is of Irish descent and who, as you might also suspect, enjoys a jar now and then. The Reverend Calvin Claggett, on the other hand, was a teetotaler whose Christian abstinence made him deadly dull. After my humiliating expulsion from Georgetown, I was no longer welcome in the Claggett household. It wasn’t as upsetting as you’d think though because it eliminated the possibility of any bruised feelings over who dined where during the holidays. Besides, Bushmills isn’t served at the Claggett’s.

Now my father, Gaibrial Padraig Nolan, is a completely different story. After the divorce, he moved into a townhouse in an upmarket part of Washington along the Potomac Palisades together with his black Labrador retriever, named Angleton. Dad liked to frequent a park in the area with Angleton where he would hook up with neglected Spring Valley housewives and their dogs. If you don’t know Washington, let me just say that Spring Valley zip code has one of the five highest per capita incomes in the nation. It’s also full of needy middle-aged housewives anxiously seeking someone to care for. My father was most obliging in this respect. He frequently hosted his caregiving lady friends for afternoon tea and other diversions—as I discovered to my amusement one afternoon when I arrived at his place, unannounced. I should have taken note of the Range Rover SUV parked in front of his garage with a yapping Yorkshire terrier in the back seat. To the lady caregiver’s embarrassment, I created a situation best described as coitus interruptus.

I guess you could say my predisposition to pleasures of the flesh is proof that the apple never falls far from the tree.

* * *

Cardigan Bank has no formal training program for its new hires, and to my surprise, they don’t have any hard and fast prerequisites for a job in the private wealth division either. We want our new hires to learn primarily by observing and then by doing, said my new boss, Brian Winthrop. The doing part will come when you’re in front of potential clients as part of a relationship development team. A great deal of my early doing turned out to be latte runs to Starbucks while the observing part involved taking copious notes at client meetings mixed with editing Google translations. But when the people whose job it was to bring in new money began to appreciate my languages, I became the Cardigan go-to guy for Russian and Turkish PowerPoint presentations. After a year, I was a regular part of Cardigan road show teams in Europe, Turkey, and the former Soviet republics.

Considering all the baggage I brought to my banking career, I’ve done well. Cardigan pays me a decent buck with a generous expense account. I’ve traveled the world doing client development with the famous, the wannabe-famous, and the infamous. A majority of the latter group resided in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Banks in the wealth management business sponsor high-end cultural events because they bring what the military calls a target-rich environment of Hinwees into the bank’s crosshairs. Believe me, there’s nothing pro bono about our participation in most of these charity events. We’re there because the affluent are there. We target wealthy audiences with advertising in luxury lifestyle magazines like Architectural Digest, Country Living, and Tatler. We are among the tier one sponsors at events like Wimbledon, America’s Cup, the Cannes Film Festival, and another dozen or so art exhibitions around the globe. In short, the bank acts as a good corporate citizen. I was a Cardigan regular on the promotional circuit in places like Berlin, Istanbul, London, Minsk, and Moscow.

* * *

I try to appreciate art as much as the next person, but I grew up in an Irish Catholic family (except for Mom) where art appreciation was mostly the Blessed Mother or Jesus on mass cards in memory of dead relatives. Mass cards are more like souvenirs from the Irish wake where everybody exchanges hugs and fake smiles in a drunken send-off of the dearly departed. Except for some fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italians that I learned about during my theology studies, I never developed an interest in fine arts. Standing around art exhibitions is tedious, but it has its rewards if you land a Hinwee client.

An unanticipated reward came into my life when I was in London and met Darcy Danforth at a Pimlico gallery. The fine art community considered her a hot commodity. I certainly agreed, but for entirely different reasons. The girl was table grade, as Bob Ryan says when describing hot women.

She was a tall, statuesque creature with deep, rich auburn hair that glistened in the gallery lights. It reminded me of the dusty coat of a red fox, and a fox she was. She exuded a casual elegance with delicate features and skin like fine porcelain. She was dressed in a simple but elegant slim-fitting charcoal-gray suit and white silk blouse. I enjoyed watching how gracefully she glided between viewer groups. She was smart and sexy yet not too self-aware. At one of her stops, an older gent engaged her about the zeitgeist of her work. To someone like me, raised on holy pictures, zeitgeist was a word used by pseudointellectuals of the wine and cheese set who think paint smudges on a canvas tell us something about the cosmos.

Darcy Danforth was smooth. She would politely chat up the patrons, but I could tell it was all pretense. As something of a master dissembler, myself, I know a bit about these things. I could hear her slightly accented velvety voice. Vassar maybe? "So nice of you to say. Yes, I find inspiration for my work in the warmer climes. Ahh, no. I’m sorry, I have other plans afterward, but thanks." Poor girl. Getting hit on by rich geezers. And why not? Her lips looked as if they had been lacquered in a deep scarlet and her emerald green eyes glimmered like chips of ice with that same hint of carnal mischief that I know so well. Definitely a candidate for another new crayon at the Crayola Company: Green Goddess, maybe? And the view from the neck down only got better. I followed her long, pale neck to the open collar of her blouse and onto her exquisite décolletage.

It’s impolite to stare, she said, passing by and regarding me with arched brows and a knowing smile.

I’m sorry, I replied. I didn’t realize I was staring. I was just admiring your…ahh, the product.

To which she looked down her front and then to each side then turning back at me with a look of playful concern. Did I spill?

No, but I have a question for you, though, I riposted. Do you enjoy standing around stuffy art galleries, sipping cheap bubbly from plastic glasses, and listening to horny old men bullshit you about your paintings when you know all they want to do is get into your pants?

Oh, I absolutely adore it, she answered with a Cheshire Cat grin, rolling those captivating green eyes upward toward the ceiling.

Oh, well, then maybe I shouldn’t ask if you’d be interested in getting out of here and going to dinner with me at a crazy restaurant in Knightsbridge.

I don’t usually go out with stalkers, but give me five minutes to get my things, she said as her face lit up with lusty expectation. And oh, what’s your name…you smooth-talking Casanova?

Mitch, Mitch Nolan, I intoned in a faux Daniel Craig Bond imitation.

About five minutes later, she arrived with a flourish in a sweeping trench coat, jauntily tossing that magnificent cinnamon hair with a self-assured arrogance. She had plenty to be arrogant about too. I don’t mind admitting that I could feel that familiar urge coursing through my loins. Only it was different this time; it was accompanied by a tingling in my stomach.

Over a very un-English madcap Italian dinner at Sale e Pepe, I learned that Darcy Danforth, of the Philadelphia Danforth’s, was a child of privilege, having made her debut at the Union League where the Danforths were among the founding members in the nineteenth century. Darcy was what bankers call Old Money. She took up painting in a sort of adolescent rebellion against joining the social set and a life of eating watercress sandwiches at the Philadelphia Cricket Club from the tailgate of a Range Rover. I loved her description of her alma mater, Wellesley: A Marxist boot camp that taught the utopian goals of socialism assisted by yoga and dope.

She was funny, self-assured, and quite independent. Darcy was the whole package. I made a run at her over dinner, but my nightcap invitation was declined. But those seductive Green Goddess eyes couldn’t lie. That’s the Nolan sixth sense. Her tell said it was only a matter of time. We hooked up again the next evening for dinner at Bar Boulud bistro in her hotel, the Mandarin Oriental.

Any preferences? I asked, scanning the à la carte offerings.

Do you like salmon? she asked.

Yes, but I’m trying to limit my mercury consumption.

She chuckled and continued to scan the Bar Boulud carte. I followed with another bon mot, I wonder if they’re serving the warmed water crackers spread with pastes, jellies, peanut butter, and other unused kitchen unguents. Those seductive Green Goddess eyes were examining me from behind anime-length eyelashes, and her eyebrows crooked upward as those amazing red lips morphed into an amused smile, revealing more of her startlingly white teeth.

You’re funny, Mitch Nolan, she said, the chuckle had now become a good laugh as her face brightened and her green eyes became even more beguiling. This just encouraged me even more.

The place had a high-end ambience, and as we worked our way through Le Tartare de Veau with black truffle, quaffing a couple of glasses of 2005 Neyret Gachet along the way, we laughed about the antics of some of the art scene groupies. By the time we had demolished a Tarte Tatin and half a bottle of Chateau de Suduiraut between us, Darcy was positively purring. Traveling for Cardigan on the Hinwee hustle has refined my tastes.

Are you married, Mitch Nolan? she asked, notching her eyebrows upward again.

No, and I’m not attached either.

Is that your standard pickup line with all women? she asked, cocking her head to one side.

No, only the ones I want to go to bed with, I said, now