VIA REGISTERED MAIL - RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED
MacLean Arkansas, LLC
c/o Shaughnessy, McGuire & Wenzel, LLP
180 Century Park East, 35th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90067
Attn: Daniel J. Wenzel, Esq.
Re: Order of Immediate Possession/22 Rural Route 1, Macon Grove, Arkansas
Ladies and Gentlemen:
This Order of Immediate Possession (this "OIP") constitutes the formal exercise by the United States of America through the Department of Justice (the "Department") of its sovereign right of eminent domain under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution over all right, title, and interest in and to that certain real property in the County of Pike, State of Arkansas, commonly known as 22 Rural Route 1, Macon Grove, Arkansas, more particularly described in Exhibit "A" attached hereto and hereby incorporated herein by this reference, all improvements thereon, and all easements, leases, privileges, licenses, tenements, and hereditaments thereunto appertaining, including, without limitation, all subsurface minerals (collectively, the “Property”), for the public purpose of establishing a federal environmental preserve thereon, which right, title, and interest at present are vested in MacLean Arkansas, LLC (the "Titleholder") in fee simple by way of that certain Warranty Deed recorded as Instrument 238715 in Book Number 347 at Page 112 in the Official Records of the County of Pike, State of Arkansas.
Pursuant to the certified appraisal enclosed herein, the Department estimates the fair market value of the Property at Fifty Million Seven Hundred Thousand Five Hundred Twenty Two Dollars ($50,700,522.00), the sum of which is tendered to Titleholder in full by way of the check enclosed herein, less all monetary liens of record.
This OIP shall be recorded in the Official Records of the County of Pike, State of Arkansas. Possession of the Property shall transfer immediately to the U.S. General Services Administration as agent for the United States Government upon the recording of this OIP, regardless of the depositing or cashing of the enclosed check.
The United States Government hereby grants Titleholder a temporary revocable license over the Property for a duration of twenty (20) calendar days (the "License Period") for the sole purpose of removing any and all chattels from the Property, which License Period shall commence immediately upon the recordation of this OIP. Pursuant to federal law and the above mentioned transfer of possession, any and all removal, boring or mining—exploratory or otherwise—of any subsurface elements whatsoever, including, without limitation, solid or liquid minerals, by Titleholder or its employees, contractors, or agents at any time hereafter shall constitute an actionable federal criminal offense.
In the event that you have any questions, please direct all inquiries to this office.
Very Truly Yours,
W. Frederic Quentin, Esq.
Deputy Director
Environment and Natural Resources Division
Wenzel read the letter again, then a third time, to make certain he had not failed to notice any important details. He dialed MacLean’s private line.
“Hello,” MacLean answered. Wenzel heard sprinklers in the background. Gardening, he concluded. After diamonds, roses were MacLean’s latest obsession in his sacred quest for beauty.
“It’s Dan. I’m afraid I have some more bad news.”
“From our friend Carlton?”
“From DOJ, but unfortunately not from our friend Carlton. The federal government is exercising eminent domain over the Arkansas property to turn it into an environmental preserve.”
“Eminent domain?”
“Under the Fifth Amendment, the federal government can take any private property it wants, as long as it does so for a public purpose and pays fair market value for it. DOJ’s estimated the land to be about $51 million. I’m sorry, Max. Any hope for the mine is history.”
“All those stones? All those beautiful stones? Gone? Just like that? What if we oppose the taking? What if we argue the government hasn’t paid us enough for the land? What if we attack the government’s appraisal? Or argue it isn’t for a—what did you say? A public purpose? They’ll have to give us access to underground samples! We can prove there are diam—”
“Thought about that. It won’t work. This isn’t cut and paste, by the-book real property litigation. Whoever is behind this has faked reports dating back to the 1920s, destroyed countless others, killed Osage, and nearly framed me. Do you honestly think that they’re going to let us expose what’s under that land in open court? And as for arguing it isn’t for a public purpose, it’s a good argument but hasn’t been working in the courts lately. An environmental preserve will pass the test with flying colors. I’m sorry, Max.”
“All those stones. Those beautiful stones. Lost.” MacLean’s voice dropped. It was not profit MacLean mourned. His enterprises generated more money than he could ever spend. It was the loss of beauty. MacLean loved the prospect of mining the tiny brilliant pebbles, having them cut, and pouring them in his hands.
Wenzel suspected MacLean had thought of them incessantly. Obsessively. Dreamed of them. Fondled them in his mind’s eye. Now, with the short stroke of a cheap government ballpoint pen, the beauty was gone. “I know this is difficult for you, but as your lawyer and your friend, not to mention your business partner, I advise you to drop this thing, Max. Take the government’s money and forget all about the diamonds. At $51 million, you made a killing on the property. Let it go.”
“No,” MacLean replied coldly. “Listen to me carefully, Dan. I don’t give a flying flip who these bastards are. They’ve taken my stones. Our stones. And like Carlton says, the federal government isn’t doing this clean and fair because it needs the land. Someone else is behind this. Someone we haven’t found yet. I may be out of the family business, but no one takes from me like a thief in the night. Now you get on the phone to Carlton and do what you need to do. I want to know who is responsible for this. I want to meet them face to face.”
“Max, I—”
“Do it.”
22 SPY
Waterboer Mines Limited
Johannesburg, Republic of South Africa
4:04 P.M.
The sheet of paper was commonplace. Similar to millions of other pieces of cellulose shuffled daily between the white collars of corporations around the globe. Except for the fact that this particular page was among others, which, when collated into the blue leather book, constituted a complete list of disbursements by Waterboer to foreign individuals, businesses, and government organs during the previous fiscal year.
Not the public list. That list was far shorter. Names and numbers on a public list had to be legal. This was a long list, complete to the last detail, highly classified as an internal document only. Waterboer adhered rather fanatically to its policy of non-disclosure. Its paranoid secrecy was born of legitimate concern. The disclosure of almost any entry in the ledger to an external source would spell financial distress and government prosecution, at best. At worst, it would shut down Waterboer Mines Limited.
Piet Lassiter, aka Piet Den Haar, was not a member of the Waterboer inner circle. The South African was employed as a computer technician. A technician who enjoyed snooping and otherwise placing his well-trained hands on documents that were none of his concern. It was not the place of Den Haar to browse through the internal list in Van Kaeke’s office on the fifth story of the stone-faced concrete and steel office building on Main Street. Chief Accountant Van Kaeke had gone to the men’s room down the mahogany-paneled hallway while Den Haar fiddled with the man’s computer into which he had introduced a simple disabling virus an hour before via a standard, company-wide email.
Seeing no danger, he hunched over the desk and scanned the page. The amounts listed staggered him. He stopped at the fifteenth entry:
$5,000,000 L. Pyashinev/Bank of Vanuatu/117833714
These guys really do have everyone in their pocket. He continued.
$25,000,000 (250Kcts.) Russkost/Bank of Vanuatu/117837622
Russkost. The Russian nationalists. Further down, a third entry caught his eye.
$350,000 Delpin, J./Virginia/cash
Virginia? Too close to Washington. Too close for comfort. The entry below it was far more cryptic.
$20,000,000 Cleveland Metals, Inc./Bank of Vanuatu/113567854
Cleveland Metals, Inc.? It sounded like an American corporation. Twenty million dollars to a U.S. corporation through some obscure bank? For a corporation prohibited from transacting business legally in the United States, the sum was enormous.
What was Cleveland Metals?
The notation was unclear but captured Den Haar’s interest to such an extent that he failed to hear Van Kaeke’s silent return. He would have been caught in flagrante delicto if not for the casual greeting of a secretary.
Den Haar knelt down near Van Kaeke’s computer hard drive and continued fiddling.
Den Haar generally consumed a pint of beer after work at the local white collar pub across from the stone-faced Waterboer headquarters. Today, he skipped his daily ritual and instead proceeded past the bristling security devices of the corporate compound and into the warm summer sunset. Several blocks away, he drove his dusty red MG into another underground garage on Stockdale Street. The lot was home to the Olde English Garage, a cavern dedicated to the maintenance of the British automotive heritage and any motor vehicle with a paying owner.
The smell of the dimly lit garage lay somewhere between an abandoned gasoline station and a church. Dented hulks of vintage Jaguars, weathered Austin Healeys, and the odd patrician Bentley rusted and collected dust in quasi-darkness, monuments to the fading glory of hand-built automobiles. More contemporary models presented their undersides from the undignified elevation of hydraulic hoists. Light bulbs imprisoned by wire mesh hung from rows of moldy cement. A man in greasy blue coveralls banged gingerly at the muffler assembly of a British Racing Green Jaguar sedan, cursing it back into service.
Den Haar parked the MG next to a bright blue 1963 Mini Cooper. Without a word, he stepped from the MG and into the Mini. The pair of keys under the seat started the overpowered lawn mower engine. A minute later, he drove out of the underground garage.
The last slivers of orange sunlight illuminated the austere interior of the Mini as Den Haar put the glorified go-cart through its paces. Five miles later, he pulled over to the side of the road and took a tiny Motorola cellular telephone with a glass-faced attachment from the glove box, removed a pen-like instrument and switched the unit on. He scrawled a message in code on the glass with the inkless pen and composed a number on the telephone keypad. When the line answered, it paused as encryption devices matched. A green light blinked on. He pushed the ‘send’ key and shut the unit off, replaced it in the glove compartment, and drove off.
Den Haar exhaled a sigh of relief. The already untraceable unit would receive a new SIM when he returned the Mini to the garage tomorrow morning. The procedure was as unnecessary as the code he had used, Den Haar reasoned, because the message itself was scrambled by a cryptographic chip that used natural atmospheric non-repetitive algorithms to scramble the message, which was unscrambled over 9,000 miles to the northwest. But his employer’s policy dictated the use of code, so code he used.
Den Haar savored the smell of the purple jacaranda blossoms as he turned into an alley. Perhaps he’d call that girl. What was her name? Molly. Yes, Molly. The movies, perhaps. Maybe even dinner. She was very blonde and very—well, she was very feminine.
He fantasized about Molly’s attributes as he walked up the creaking staircase to his second floor abode. Lust pounded in his veins. The sun faded beneath the horizon. Yellowish light from the old fixtures installed in the hallway ceiling forty years before supplanted the rose-colored afterglow of the dusk sky. He smiled languidly, thought of champagne, perfume, and soft flesh as he pushed open the door.
A strong hand suddenly clamped down on his right arm, yanked him inside the apartment with tremendous force. He gasped as the air was knocked out of his lungs. The door slammed shut and cast him into darkness. Someone had drawn the drapes. He could see nothing. Worse, he was unarmed. A debilitating wave of adrenaline drowned him. He thrashed at his invisible assailant blindly until a fist slammed into his jaw and knocked him to the ground. Before he could get back on his feet, a thick boot positioned itself firmly on his windpipe. He lay on the floor, immobilized.
A second man flicked the lights on, blinding him. He struggled to breathe against the pressure of the boot and the ooze of blood in his mouth. He blinked at the bright light, stared up the silencer and muzzle of an enormous IMI Desert Eagle handgun into the demonic eyes of a hulking thug in a rumpled beige suit.
Den Haar was familiar with the handgun. Manufactured by Israeli Military Industries, it could bore a hole through a person’s chest from over one hundred yards. This one was an inch from his skull, and the psychotic glare from the thug’s oddly mismatched eyes betrayed murderous intent. He vaguely remembered seeing the thug before.
In a single sweeping movement, the man lifted him from the floor with a single tree trunk-sized arm and pounded him against the wall. Strangely, he reflected his apartment was in shambles. Bookcases lay overturned on the hardwood floor, the contents of shelves and cupboards strewn on the floor in heaps. The wood dining table was flipped onto its back like a helpless insect.
The man with one blue and one black eye spoke in a calm, oily voice: “Good evening, Mr. Den Haar.”
Den Haar twitched at the heavy Afrikaaner intonation.
“But why mince words? Good evening, Mr. Lassiter.” The hairs on Lassiter’s neck prickled with fear.
“You’ve got the wrong man. Take what you want. My wallet is in my suit pocket. Just please don’t hurt me.”
The man’s right eye twitched slightly. “Come now, Mr. Lassiter. Be reasonable. It isn’t your wallet we want.” He moved his face to within inches of Lassiter. “It’s your life.”
The Afrikaaner fired a single shot into Lassiter’s chest. Lassiter lay still on the hardwood floor in his entryway. With studied calm and gloved hands, the Afrikaaner removed Lassiter’s wallet from his suit pocket and liberated its cash. His companion moved the television and stereo equipment through the front door. It would look like a burglary gone wrong. The Afrikaaner swept the scene with a cold professional gaze, smiled before he shut the door with a gloved hand.
Lassiter gasped in pain. Already, feeling had disappeared from his arms. He could not reach the telephone a mere five feet distant. Anyway, it was probably disconnected. He felt his life ebbing away fast. Soon the pain ceased. Waves of calm washed over him. As darkness swirled about him, Lassiter began to pray.
Our Father. Who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name...
23 MEETING
Main Justice Building
Washington, D.C.
4:55 P.M.
Erika walked into Carlton’s office just as he answered the telephone.
“Pat Carlton.” He motioned for her to come in and shut the door.
“It’s Dave Mazursky.” The Senate aide was panting, his words rushed.
“Hi, David. Did you find anyth—”
“I did. You were right. I mailed you something. Can we meet? I can’t really talk on the phone.”
“That’s a switch, isn’t it? You wanting to meet me.” He chuckled.
“I’m serious.”
“How about the Coast in ten minutes? That work for you?”
“I’m on my way.”
Once again, Erika held onto the Shark’s door handle for dear life and cringed in the passenger seat as Carlton accelerated up Pennsylvania Avenue, then onto Constitution Avenue toward Capitol Hill, Sinatra crooning through the speakers. The wheels slipped on slushy snow, nearly sending the massive Caddy fishtailing around the corner. The car slid on the ice, came to a halt inches from another car’s bumper in front of the Tortilla Coast, directly across the street from the white brick Republican National Committee headquarters. Two blo
cks up, the resplendent Capitol dome glittered white. The light atop the dome was shining: Congress was in night session. Reminiscent of a postcard, the sight never ceased to mesmerize Carlton. Tonight, the view was veiled by his own foreboding.
Erika uncramped herself from her seat and stepped onto the sidewalk. “I think I need a drink.”
“Still not used to the Shark?”
“I’d feel safer with Jaws, thank you.”
The two rushed around the corner and into the Tortilla Coast, another one of Carlton’s regular Hill haunts. They joined hordes of Hill people who trampled through the swinging doors to join fellow members of the legislative herd amid a fog of blue cigarette smoke at the House-side watering hole. “It’s packed in here. Let’s split up, see if we can find him.”
Happy hour on the Hill was time to make up for grueling hours in cubbyholes poring over proposed legislation, vote counts, committee reports, and constituent mail delivered by the truckload. Carlton walked around the crowded room, searching for Mazursky. The worn rectangular oak bar was mobbed by the legislative crowd, unleashed from a long day’s work on the Hill. The happily inebriated patrons seemed unaffected by the deafening noise or the presence of opposing party members. As Speaker Tip O’Neill once remarked, after five o’clock all people on the Hill are friends.
No sign of Mazursky.
“He’s not in the restaurant section either,” Erika said. They pushed through the crowd toward the bar. It was three rows deep with thirsty patrons. Erika was oblivious to the fact men stared at her. Carlton scowled at them, back off. He was surprised by the intensity of his possessiveness, though now he did not shy away from the emotion. He enjoyed the warmth of Erika’s closeness, the fact she was with him. He thought about the impropriety of associating with a female subordinate outside of office hours, again at a bar. But this was an office matter, he rationalized, ever the lawyer. It’s not as though it was a date.
Patrick Carlton 01 - The Diamond Conspiracy Page 15