An Eye for Gold

by Sarah Andrews

  Forcing his mind back to the business at hand, Kyle scanned the sweeping curves of the yellow and brown landscape, again just as MacCallum had taught him. He turned slowly in a full circle, examining the flanks of the mountain ranges that surrounded him. MacCallum was out here somewhere. He knew it. He could feel him like he could smell a woman’s scent long after she had left a room. He spat, disgusted with himself. First bicycle tires and now women’s perfume. MacCallum had always had this discomforting effect on him. Sweat beaded up on Kyle’s forehead. He swiped at it impatiently and told himself that the day was already getting hot.

  MacCallum was here. Kyle scrambled mentally to classify this awareness as not a sexual connection, but a sensual one. A whore at the Bronco Betty had explained the distinction to him once, as she had first bumped his hand and then caressed it. As he’d looked into her vixen eyes, he had seen that she was playing with his mind. Yes, that was it, MacCallum had the same fucking quality as perfume—-pervasive and teasing—and, just like the women who wore such scents, seemed always to have gotten there before him, no matter where ‘there’ was. He had known MacCallum for decades, had worked with him in Mexico, Bolivia, Australia, and all over Nevada; and always, always The Don had found whatever precious metal they were looking for like it had been lying on the ground while he, Kyle, stumbled about like a blind man. The goons up the corporate ladder fucking loved MacCallum, let him wander in and out as he pleased, whacking at a rock sample here and there, and leave the details to some poor shithead down the line. And, Kyle thought bitterly, am that shithead. They seem to forget that I’m his partner, not his assistant!

  At the same time, I love the son of a bitch. Kyle shook his head, exhausted by his thoughts. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to fathom this. Whether they know it or not, Granville needs me, he told himself. Because without me, MacCallum would never stay focused. Just look at him. Things get a little hot, and he wanders off somewhere.

  Kyle opened his eyes again and scanned the desert basin in which he and his vehicle stood, hoping for the telltale wisp of dust that would indicate the movement of another vehicle. He saw none. He faced west. Short, sparse grasses danced in the wind, and the cobalt blue sky stretched on past the dry mountains toward the Black Rock Desert and California and Oregon beyond. He crouched down and squinted sideways at the grasses. By following subtle interruptions in their dance, he could trace the faint trails left by the passage of even one off-road vehicle, a trick who else but Don MacCallum had taught him. On this day he could discern only the local branch of the Emigrant Trail, the Applegate-Lassen spur that led over to Rabbithole Springs, and that was a well-beaten track. He scanned the mountains once again. He saw the divots left by an earlier generation of gold exploration, tiny interruptions in the pattern of desert scrub that could only have been made by some mad prospector’s feverish scrabbling with pick and shovel. But he could not see MacCallum’s beige Ford Explorer. The crafty old piss brain always rented beige, the better to blend in with his surroundings. He’d laughingly told Kyle it made him harder to spot.

  Kyle cursed under his breath, climbed back into the dark green Explorer that he had rented, and turned the vehicle to the north, choosing the graded dirt road instead of the faint track. Why risk getting stuck when he really had no idea where the son of a bitch was?

  As the air conditioner whooshed into action and cooled his brain, he impulsively spun the wheel, veering off onto a road that led to the west into Rosebud Canyon. Perhaps the old squatter who lived up there would know where MacCallum had gone. Then he hesitated, once again braking the vehicle to a stop. It would take him a while to prepare himself for a conversation with that old crapper. Pulling the Explorer to the edge of the road, he lowered the windows to keep the heat from reaching unbearable levels inside the cab, switched off the ignition and adjusted the seat, laying the back as close to horizontal as it would go, closed his eyes, and let his mind drift in the languid channels it most preferred to navigate.

  9

  “I CAN’T CALL YOU BOTH TOM LATIMER,” I ANnounced as we rolled northeast along Interstate 80 from Reno toward Lovelock. “Stephen Giles might not care who the hell you are and never even ask your names, but I do.”

  “You do what?” asked Tom Latimer the First.

  “Care. Who in hell you are. I care. Or should I just call you J. Edgar Hoover?”

  The younger agent laughed as he took one hand off the wheel and offered it to me. “Sebastian Walker. You can call me Ian.”

  I shook his hand, then turned around and stared at the older man, who sat lounging in the backseat with his eyes once again closed. Feeling my scrutiny, he opened one eye and stuck out a long, dry hand. “Theodore. You can call me Ted.”

  I took his hand and shook it. ‘Ted who?”

  He opened the other eye. “Roosevelt. I think we’re cousins, Eleanor dear.”

  I popped open my seat belt, leaned over the seat back and tried to punch him. Both men roared with laughter.

  As their laughter died down, I hung there on the seat back and stared into ‘Ted’s” eyes for a while. He stared back. He was playing a game with me, and I didn’t like it one bit And I wondered why he felt the need to manipulate me like this. I liked playing things straight up and out in the open, doing business cleanly and without the power plays. When I’d worked with him on the dinosaur case, he had been more . . . I thought a while, trying to put my finger on the difference I was encountering in the man. On that case, he had been covert because his work required it, but he had stayed out of my face. He had been more respectful.

  still hanging over the back of the seat, I said, “Your identification, please.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  I took a breath, flaring my nostrils in anger. “Now!”

  He pulled a leather wallet out of a pocket and opened it. I found myself looking at a Utah state driver’s license. Which belonged to Thomas J. Latimer.

  “Oh,” I said numbly. “Some days a cigar is just a cigar.”

  His expression still blank, he returned the wallet to his pocket, re-closed his eyes, and folded his arms across his chest.

  I twisted back to face forward, slumped down into my seat, and scowled out at the desert landscape through which we were traveling. I was out in the middle of nowhere, all right, but my problems had come with me, and it seemed I had a new one who was in fact named Tom Latimer.

  The desert is a place that usually calms me. To the left of the road were low brown hills with mountains beyond; to the right, a glimpse into the Carson Sink, a bleached white tract of salt pans where the last trickles of the Carson River lay desiccating in the rising heat The temperature had begun to rise by the time we had left the BLM office, and now was ticking its way into the nineties. I lowered the window and stuck an arm out to feel the hot dry air blast past the palm of my hand, and wished I were alone so I could remember who I was and where I thought I was going.

  Five minutes’ meditation did nothing to sort out my emotional life, so I decided instead to focus on the so-called job that had been laid before me. I said, “Much as I’m enjoying this sojourn in the Silver State, I am at something of a loss to understand why we’re still here. I mean, didn’t we fly in here to talk to someone who no longer counts herself among the living?’

  “Mmm-hm,” the man in the backseat murmured.

  “Then case closed. Why aren’t we on our way home? That guy Giles sure seemed to think the game was over. Or wanted us to think it was.”

  J. Edgar Theodore Tom Latimer Roosevelt Hoover stretched and yawned. “We began this investigation at the request of die BLM, yes, but that doesn’t mean we end it at their convenience.”

  “Huh?”

  Tom spread out one broad, flat palm and drew an imaginary diagram on it. “It goes like this. The BLM gave us a whistle because, it has been alleged, Patricia Gilmore might be salting the numbers regarding how many of a certain species were present on land Granville Resources wants to develop into a possible mine
. Granville has put together a limited partnership and bought up some old claims and filled in with some new ones—”

  “The 1872 mining law,” I interjected.

  With a hint of condescension, Ian said, “Yes, Em, they get to claim the minerals that they as citizens already own.” Then he moderated his tone and continued. “Their idea has been to form a district out of some old mining prospects. Some of the claims go back quite a way. There’s a lot of history here. Some of the districts were first prospected by men who came across with the wagon trains in 1849 or earlier. Of course, the land itself belongs to the federal government, and must be tended in a way that supports the common good—i.e., Granville can’t just go after the minerals like miners used to do. They have to pay rent, and to do anything with the land, they have to get permits—approval for grading roads and exploratory drilling pads—and they have to restore all disused roads and such to their original condition.”

  “Thank you, Ian,” I said, repressing an urge to call him professor. “Now, if this exploratory drilling actually locates mineable gold, do you suppose it will be an underground mine, or open pit? Either would impact the environment, but the open pit will at least initially more strongly impact the flora and fauna. We don’t want to shrink the wee critters’ habitat so far that we kill them off.”

  “Some of the newer mines around here are open pit, others are underground,” he said vaguely.

  I said, “But even underground mining disrupts the habitat. There are roads and culverts leading up to it, and more importantly, stockpiles and ponds. They cover acres, and possibly the same acres the endangered species like. So tell me, is the species in question in fact endangered?” I asked.

  Ian said, “Well, there’s a save-the-desert organization that’s been hassling Granville, and apparently also our pal Giles.”

  I said, “So Giles wants off the hot seat, right? Citizens arguing? Call out the FBI!”

  Tom answered with soft laughter.

  A bit defensively, Ian said, “I don’t take Giles for the final arbiter of government policy, either, but it’s not his job to direct policy, only to enforce it. The save-the-desert guys get all in an uproar, screaming that the mining practices wreak havoc on the environment.” He whipped his hands off the wheel in a pantomime of an old lady scared by a mouse.

  Ian’s attitude was beginning to rankle me. There was a presumption of correctness in his tone, and worse yet, a presumption of entitlement. As a geologist who made her living looking for oil, I was hardly on the side of the angels where pure environmentalism was concerned, but I didn’t think that our exploitation of resources went without an impact worth pondering. Challenging the tone of voice that Ian was using, I said, “I’ll bet the environmentalists especially distrust the deep open-pit mining, because if they mine below the water table, they have to pump like hell to keep die groundwater from flooding the workings. They pump the deeper underground mines, too. And dropping the water table even locally might change the plant community, which of course is the food supply for the poor little endangered species, whatever it is.”

  “It’s a mouse,” Ian said.

  “A mouse?” I asked, incredulous. “This is all about mice! The people who call themselves environmentalists don’t really care about mice! If they ever found so much as a wee mouse turd in the silverware drawer of one of their swanky kitchens they’d be setting traps and laying but strychnine cocktails in five tenths of a nanosecond, and you bet they wouldn’t file an environmental impact report first”

  Ian said, “Or how about the yahoo who burns fossil fuels to make a special trip to the convenience store in his forty-thousand-dollar car that was made in Japan of iron ores refined in the U.S. to buy a latté made from beans grown on South American slopes that are now eroding like hell because the forest’s been stripped off to plant coffee?” He took a breath. “And then drives home and gets on the Internet and sends fifty e-mails to lobby to shut down the ‘unecological’ mining operations that produced the iron for his car and the gold that makes those mystical little electronic connections in his computer work!”

  I was sorry I’d got him started. It wasn’t that I didn’t agree with him, at least in part; it was the judgmental attitude that bothered me. I’d learned a long time ago that judgment could be a way of avoiding part of the truth. ‘Temper, temper,” I said.

  Ian shrugged his shoulders. “That jackass with the latté is really just boo-hooing over the endangered mouse as a tool to obstruct the mining.”

  “There I agree,” I said. “That’s using science in the service of politics. A basic distortion of the process. I just wish people would stand up and say, I want to stop this mining. It looks bad to me. I don’t trust it Then we could all come out in the open and compare notes and make an informed decision about which land to mine, and which to leave as a place to go when we need peace and quiet, and which to leave to the blessed little mice.”

  “We have a system sort of like that, don’t we?” Tom said, smiling. “Scrape off a half-ton of pork-barrel politics, and that’s what we call Congress.”

  “You’ll have to scrape off the lobbyists, too,” I said. “I think ‘One Man, One Vote’ became ‘One Dollar, One Vote’ a while ago. I wish I had your faith in government.”

  As a scientist, I knew how intricately everything in our ecosystem was linked together. Nature has no true islands. A volcano erupts in the South Pacific, dumping ash into the upper atmosphere, and the climate starts to shift. Ten thousand miles away in the Great Basin, it might contribute to a bad season for grass growth and mouse reproduction, and a certain number of coyotes were going to die. That was all just how it was. But here I was, the highest predator the planet had produced, speeding across the desert in an automobile, unlinked from climatic imperatives. Even the lunch I ate this day would have arrived by truck from somewhere else. The impact of my actions would be infinitely harder to define.

  “Just tell me about this mouse,” I sighed.

  Ian shot me a guarded look and said, “Well, mice it is. A kangaroo mouse, to be exact, Microdipodops megacephalus. And the only way this mouse is going to get into your silverware drawer is if you carry it out into the Kamma Mountains and leave it there for them. It occurs on the slopes of just a few mountain ranges in northwestern Nevada. In fact, it was not even known to occur there until Granville Resources bought up the claims and began to examine their holdings.”

  I heaved a sigh. “Okay, let me see if I understand all this. Granville wants to develop a mining claim. Certain interests would prefer that they not. The BLM says that to build roads and drill test holes, they have to get permits.”‘

  Ian said, “The law further stipulates that in an environmentally sensitive area, they have to file an environmental impact report before they can get those permits.”

  I said, “And the anti-mining interests have perhaps used the presence of the mice to say that the environmental impact would mean good-bye mice. But Pat Gilmore’s preliminary work showed that the mice were multiplying rather than decreasing in numbers, and perhaps even broadening their range. Granville would love it if these rodents were not endangered, and the anti-mining interests might in fact be disappointed.”

  Ian curled his upper lip in a sneer. “That would depend on whether they were in fact pro-mouse, or just anti-mining.”

  I turned a palm upward. “So then what’s the problem? Can’t the BLM just do its job? Or do they think Pat Gilmore sold out to Granville? Or do they have some agenda they’re not telling us about?” As Ian’s lips began to curl again, I hastened to add, “Forgive my skepticism, but as I think I made clear, my antennae perk up wherever science meets self-interest.”

  Tom said, “That’s exactly why I brought you along, Em.”

  I turned around in my seat and studied him closely. His eyes were closed, as if he were once again asleep. I said, “Maybe I should be asking this differently: What’s all this got to do with the FBI?”

  Tom took a moment before
answering, his eyes still closed. “That’s simple. It has been suggested that, for whatever reason, Pat Gilmore was knowingly presenting incorrect results. That is fraud. On federal land, that means the feds have to step in and settle the squabble.”

  “But isn’t it a little unusual that you would be called in this early? Doesn’t the BLM have some internal way of dealing with such matters?”

  Tom opened one eye and stared at me, his expression unreadable. “Yes. But the BLM called, and we ride.” The eye closed.

  We ride. For a moment, I contemplated the thought of Tom Latimer as Cavalry scout. He would have been good: The lone smart guy who rides ahead of the soldiers, scopes out the situation, reports to the general, and then has the brains to scram out of there before the bullets and arrows start flying. The poor man had been born about a hundred and fifty years too late.

  And he was still holding back an important part of the story, I could feel it in my bones. I asked, “So what do we do first, Kimosabe?”

  He opened that eye again. “We check her story.”

  “How?”

  The eye closed. He resettled himself in his apparent slumber. “Oh, you know the game; you poke around here and there. First you talk to the guy who gave your BLM guy the idea that something was wrong.”

  “Who? Someone who works for the save-the-desert people?”

  “No, there’s another certified, bona fide wildlife biologist from the same company who says she kited her figures. He’s the man we’re about to meet.”

  10

  VIRGIL DAVIS SHOT A HAND OUT TO STOP THE MEchanical pencil on his drafting table from rattling as a thirty-ton ore truck rumbled past the corrugated steel building in which he sat. He sighed, his heavy shoulders slumping with fatigue. This bit with the permitting did not bode well for the speedy advancement of the new project and a speedy advance was what he needed, now that the price of gold had fallen even farther into the toilet and cut his operating margin to the quick. He needed to get a new property on line to provide die correct economy of scale. To move forward with the job of creative finesse that was called mining. To stay employed at all. The new project would be higher grade—more gold per ton of ore—it just had to.