by G. R. Cody
He travelled back down the road to a small motel he had passed not five mile before, procured a room, and slept for twelve hours. He woke the next morning and researched where he was. He was in the middle of the Blackfeet Native American reservation, just on the edge of Glacier National Park. After a few hours, he had read everything he could about the place and its people. But nothing he read could explain why gold would be shipped to this particular location, especially on land protected by the Department of the Interior.
By now, it was early evening, and Felix went outside to a small picnic area to have a cigarette. A moment later, a light blue pickup truck stopped at the office, and then drove to the building just down from his. To his astonishment, Eve Pemberton got out of the passenger side, and was helped inside a room by what appeared to be a local man. The man left after just a few minutes.
Felix wondered whether he should make his presence known. He knew now that Eve was an FBI agent. He had seen her ID in Robert’s plane on the way to Florida as she slept. He was relatively confident she was on a case, and he decided to watch and wait.
He returned to his room, but opened his curtains. He could see the door to Eve’s room while he lay on his bed. He had not waited long before he saw three men approach her door and blow open the lock.
Felix fought the urge to leap into action; he knew he needed to keep his presence a secret. He watched as they corralled Eve out of her room and into the back of the white van in which they had arrived. Once they pulled away, he quickly got into his rental car and followed.
He watched as Arthur led Eve down into a storm cellar near the turbines, then not a minute later the other two men walked out of the cellar and waited there. Another moment later, Arthur emerged, closed and locked the cellar shut, and the three men walked to the man house some two hundred yards away.
Felix was in a quandary. They had been down long enough to shoot Eve, but he didn’t hear a shot. He hadn’t been down long enough to have killed her any other way, which suggested that she was still alive. He was desperate to get to Eve in that cellar, but the land was flat and exposed, and he would most definitely be seen if he tried to get to it. The sun was just now setting, so Felix decided to wait for cover of darkness to try and make his way to her.
Felix got back in the car and waited, watching for any signs of movement. As the sky turned from dark blue to black, floodlights began to illuminate around the house, but fortunately they didn’t reach as far as the cellar. There was one light on in the house, on the main floor, which seemed to be emanating from a living area. The rest of the house was dark. If he was careful, he could walk to the cellar undetected in about three minutes.
Felix opened his car door, but as he did he saw the front door of the house open, about a half dozen men with flashlights emerged and made their way to the cellar.
Felix shut the door back softly as to not make any noise that would attract their attention, and watched again through the zoom lens of his camera. The men unlocked and opened the cellar door, and within moments two men emerged carrying what looked to be an unconscious woman tied to a chair toward the house, with one man as an escort with a flashlight. Then, to his surprise, he viewed another chair, in which seemed to be a bound man, being carried out by two more men, again with an escort with a flashlight.
The men carried the two bodies into the house, and the door shut behind them.
Felix was paralyzed. He couldn’t get to the house without being detected. The entire perimeter of the house awash in flood lighting. He knew he only had one option left, but it may take more time than Eve and whoever the other man was had.
Felix sent a text, waited for a response, pocketed his cell phone and headed for the cellar.
CHAPTER 20
Eve slowly opened her eyes, which registered the front of her blouse, which was now wet with her saliva. She was still bound to the chair, but she could instantly tell that she was not where she was when she was knocked out. It was warm, and there was a smell of flowers and a recently cleaned house that filled her nostrils. The chair was on a Persian rug which was spread across a highly polished hardwood floor.
She kept her head down and her eyes half open, not wanting to alert any of her captors, if they were in the room, that she had awoken. She couldn’t hear anything or anyone around her, with the exception of what she had heard just before someone had injected something into her neck. Not far from her, she could hear labored breathing, almost snoring.
Eve peaked over to her right, and her heart felt as if it stopped for a couple of beats. Tied to another chair, not ten yards from her, passed out and with a large knot on his forehead, was Robert.
At that moment, Eve heard a door open. She lifted her head, and saw Arthur enter alone. He had no emotion on his face, and was wearing a dark blue pinstriped three piece suit with a solid red tie. His hair was slicked and he looked as if he were prepared for a meeting.
The room where they were seemed to be on a second floor. The walls were white, and to Eve’s right, just passed Robert, was a long, curved window that looked out over the Shurner property. Eve could make out the wind turbines in the distance to the left.
Arthur moved into the room and headed toward the bar, seemingly unaware that Eve had awoken. He poured himself a drink, picked up a chair by the back with his other hand, and walked across the room, setting the chair facing and opposite Eve roughly five yards away. Eve saw that he had his sidearm tucked against his left side in its holster.
Arthur sat, still not looking at Eve, took a sip of what looked like scotch, and stared out the window as if he were biding his time, waiting for something.
“So,” Eve had decided to confront him, “who do you really work for?”
Arthur smiled, but still focused his attention out the window. He did not answer for a few seconds, but finally said, “Whomever gets me what I want, Eve. CNC, MI6, Homeland Security, wherever I am needed. And right now, that’s here.”
“And what is it you want?” Eve inquired.
“As much money as possible, of course,” Arthur answered her with a derisive tone, and finally turned and his eyes met hers. “And to be trusted by someone who can deliver that to me.”
“And who might that be?” Eve quipped.
“You’re an intelligent girl, Eve,” Arthur chided her. “Take a look around and make a deduction.”
“I’m obviously at Shurner’s ranch,” Eve said, “but that’s what I don’t understand. Shurner wanted me to turn myself in to Homeland Security, but you texted me to do the opposite…”
“Shurner didn’t want you in HSA’s hands, but he couldn’t afford to be seen as contrary to a federal agency at that moment,” Arthur said,
“but that’s why he had me text you. I was supposed to corral you with Felix’s help, but it appears someone else at MI6 had other designs and convinced Felix to run from Puerto Rico with you.”
“So,” Eve continued, “Stolen gold and a lake turning red. And now I’m being held prisoner. Any way you could fill in the gaps for me?”
“I’m afraid not, Eve,” Arthur said. “I mean, you aren’t getting out of this, but it’s not my place. Anyway, your friend Felix is much further along than you are in understanding what’s going on, but we will have him corralled soon as well.”
“But it is my place,” said a new voice, coming from the door through which Arthur had entered. His voice was dripping with a southern drawl; his hair and mustache were both white, and he was wearing jeans and riding gear, as if he had been hunting. His presence gave Eve the impression of what it may have been like to meet Teddy Roosevelt.
Fred Shurner, CEO and founder of CNC, strode toward Eve, and continued.
“Miss Pemberton, I am terribly sorry that we have had to do what we have had to do, but if you had followed my instruction before, none of this would have been necessary, and you would have been blissfully ignorant of everything you know now, and everything I will explain to you tonight.”
Shurner th
en strode to the bar and picked up a glass, talking as he put ice and bourbon into it.
“Miss Pemberton, I know you are vaguely aware of the money that is owed the Blackfeet tribe by the U.S. government. About the settlement and the $3.4 billion that has been demanded to be paid. We have Billy’s pickup truck bugged. Have for years.
“The settlement of the Cobell case requires the U.S. government to pay out roughly $3.4 million within the next year, or a high rate of interest is applied. But unfortunately, the U.S. Treasury Department never made a provision for the settlement with Congress. They always thought they would either win the case or, more likely, that they could stall the final settlement until most, if not all, of the eligible beneficiaries passed away. So when the case was settled, there was no money appropriated in the budget for this payment.
“The judge in the case has always been a very harsh critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is a division of the Department of the Interior. And, to be honest, rightfully so. But he was also very critical of the Department of the Treasury, because decades ago, the DOI outsourced the individual Indian accounts maintenance to Treasury. The Treasury had enough egg on its face from the decades of account mismanagement, and the Treasury Secretary wasn’t about to add to its horrendous image by admitting that the payments weren’t in the budget.
“So, the Treasury Secretary devised a plan. He knew he had vast stores of gold held in reserves in Federal Reserve branches, and also in Western Europe which, in essence, were sitting there unutilized. Treasury would divert the gold from the branches, immediately smelt it and convert it into colloidal gold, or molecularly ionized gold and water solution. Because the Treasury was in essence stealing from itself, they could control when, or whether, reports of its disappearance were disseminated. Once news of the thefts reached the public, with such a large supply of gold supposedly missing, the market price of gold would soar.”
“But there is a problem with that, isn’t there?” Eve asked. “The gold is collateral for IMF loans.”
“Yes, but only a temporary one,” Shurner continued. “Once prices had reached a point where both the Cobell settlement payment could be made and the value of the collateral reserves could be returned to the IMF in the form of cash, Treasury could use the price increase arbitrage to pay off both debts with the same amount of gold that had been diverted. They would put the gold on the open market and satisfy both liabilities.”
“But wouldn’t the plan collapse when Treasury put the gold on the market?” Eve inquired. “It would be relatively transparent that the gold being sold was the gold that had supposedly been stolen.”
“Very true, Miss Pemberton,” Shurner confirmed, and smiled. “And that’s where I and the Blackfeet Nation came in. You are quite right that the Treasury could not sell the gold on its own account. However, if somehow a large gold reserve was found on Blackfeet land, or say, in a lake on Blackfeet soil, the mineral rights, and thus ownership of the gold revenues, would be the Blackfeet’s. And they could instruct the DOI to sell the gold to any third party at a price just under the recently inflated market, in an amount that equates to the amount Treasury needs in cash to satisfy their collateral agreements with the IMF.
“As a private party with sufficient means to purchase that amount of gold, I act as intermediary. That way, Treasury is never involved in the sale, and DOI is only involved as the seller of assets under trust of Blackfeet assets, a function that it is obligated to perform. And I get gold at a discount that I can then immediately turn around and sell at inflated market rates and clear a reasonable return.
“And because the price of gold will have increased so significantly, there would still be enough gold left over in Goose Lake to more than cover the $3.4 billion that the Bureau of Indian Affairs owes them under the Cobell settlement.
“Given my position in the news media arena, the Treasury could instruct me when to break the story of the stolen gold, by a thief who would never be found, at the precise time when the gold diverted to Goose Lake was sufficient at projected increased market values to cover both debts. Which, incidentally, will be tomorrow morning.
“Everybody wins. Treasury, the IMF, the Blackfeet and me. And given Treasury had possession of the gold all along, there never really was a theft; one can’t steal from oneself.”
“Robert and I don’t seem to be winning. So,” Eve asked when Shurner had lifted his glass to his lips, “Are you trying to convince me that this is all legal and above board?”
“Oh, I’m not saying that everything is above board,” Shurner said. “Of course, the U.S. Treasury has reneged on a contractual obligation with the IMF by not keeping sufficient collateral related to their loans, but the IMF thinks it was stolen, and that Treasury is on its way to recovering it. Which, based on what I’ve already said, they are. Just not in the form that one might expect.
“And anyway, that agreement is a transnational contractual issue and would technically be adjudicated by the World Court, which would never take up a case like this in the first place,” Shurner explained. “It’s really just an agreement that effects reputation and trust rather than a legal question.
“And technically no U.S. laws have been broken. At least until now,” Shurner said, as he swooped his glass in front of him at Robert and her.
“Well, if that is all true,” Eve asked, “why am I and Robert tied up and being held against our will?”
“Perception and timing, my dear,” Shurner said. “This has to play itself as planned, or it all falls apart. None of this works if anyone finds out that the gold in Goose Lake is the stolen, or more appropriately, misplaced gold.”
And at this moment, she knew that she would not survive. Nor would Robert; nor would Felix when they found him. Until that point, she had hope. It was like having an ache, but refusing to see the doctor, or having a knock in your engine but refusing to see a mechanic. The more something is unknown, the greater the possibility of the illusion of hope.
The details had to remain a secret. Only the end result could be known, not the actual facts that led to it. Not only did the ends justify the means, in order for the ends to be accepted, the means had to be disguised. A secret between only those who devised it. If the true nature of the plan was ever revealed, whether legal or not, Shurner and Treasury had manipulated the international gold market to their benefit, and the public trust of the U.S. Treasury would be irrevocably damaged.
And they were loose ends. Collateral damage. The flies in the ointment.
Arthur rose to his feet, and Eve saw him reach under his left arm. Eve closed her eyes as the hopelessness and panic washed over her. Next to her, Robert continued to lightly snore.
Eve heard the shot ring out and a body hit the floor. Since she was still here, she knew that Robert was gone. The panic made her heart race, and she thought it would explode before the bullet ripped through her brain. She closed her eyes more tightly, waiting for the shot.
But instead, in a thick, southern accent, she heard, “D…d…don’t shoot!”
Chapter 21
Eve raised her head up and immediately turned it to her right. Robert was still bound in his chair, but he was now awake and staring at Arthur’s body at his feet. His face was white, and his eyes registered terror and incomprehension.
Arthur lay dead just feet from Robert, blood beginning to pool under his face, which was flat against the Persian rug. Fred Shurmer was now kneeling in front of his chair, his hands locked behind his head, sobbing and muttering incoherently.
“Untie them both!” demanded a familiar voice. Eve tried to turn her head, but she couldn’t see Felix, but she knew it was him. Robert was tugging at his ropes; panic had set in and he could not keep his eyes, which were as large as platters now, off of Arthur’s prone body in front of him.
“NOW!” Felix shouted, as Shurner had not moved, hands still behind his head and shaking violently. But this command made Shurner spring to his feet and start working feverishly on Eve’s hand
s first.
Felix came into view, stepping between Eve and Robert with a pistol aimed at Shurner’s head, and moved in front of Eve. Eve could see that Felix couldn’t contain a wry grin.
“Agent Pemberton,” Felix greeted Eve with obvious derision. “Seems like I made it just in time.”
“Agent Leiter,” Eve said, smiling, while Robert moved his gaze back and forth between them in rapid succession. “Yes. Thanks for the assist.”
By now, Shurner had freed Eve’s hands, and was working on her feet.