Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  It was very unusual for her to drive this late in the evening. After she had changed back into jeans, a sweatshirt and a baseball cap, she took the canisters and packed them back into the golf bag Martin had given her. She carefully wrapped the bag and covered it with duct tape and slapped Martin’s Creole apartment address on it. Then she threw the bag into the trunk of her car. She drove over to a UPS shipping place on the East Side and paid for the shipment in cash. One day delivery. A hundred eighty bucks. Martin would have the original Wisconsin tapes by 10 a.m. the next day. By nine she was back at her house, sitting in front of her television watching CNN. The fake tapes which showed huge oil reserves under the woods in northern Wisconsin were sitting in official Records Management storage in the capitol basement. Now the fun was about to begin.

  CHAPTER 36

  It was Tuesday. One thing about Hilton, if he said he was going to be there at noon, he would be there at noon. Sometimes he was a little earlier, but he was never late. It didn’t do their relationship any good for her to be standing by herself in the lobby waiting for him to pick her up or him to be idling outside the building in his white Mercedes waiting for her to show up. Hilton was in a great mood and they headed for the hotel. She walked directly to the bar while he went to the front desk. She ordered drinks for both of them and sat patiently for him to return. He said she looked great. The oil market was up some. He had had a good morning. He looked great, too, as he came walking back from the registration desk. They grabbed their drinks and took an elevator up to the room.

  Did she have any information on his little friend Martin? Anita had been doing some research on Martin the way Hilton had asked. She had definitely found some things that looked out of the ordinary. Looking at the history files, she indicated Martin had processed a very large file that had been on the system that looked especially odd because she hadn’t checked it in, and it wasn’t set up for archiving. In the same directory she had found a set of spreadsheet documents with a related set of names, and she had printed them off. They looked to her like the reservoir-sizing spreadsheets they used in the economic valuation and planning phase. She had also found a few geophysical summaries that described the structures of the formations, but she didn’t understand them. Anita had it all in a big folder which she handed to Hilton and she suggested he take a look. He sat down in a stuffed chair in the corner of the room. His eyes widened as he reviewed the first page, widening even more with the second and the third. He was certainly no geologist, but it was clear this was an economic analysis of an oil field—a huge one! The spreadsheets showed that at forty dollars a barrel, the net present value of the field was almost fifty billion dollars. The drilling costs were high, especially costs for drilling mud, but production costs were low. Hilton guessed the oil was probably deep, maybe even under an existing field, and the pay sand must be very thick and the porosity excellent. A field like this was as large as the original finds in the Permian Basin back in the twenties; as big as anything in the Gulf of Mexico in the last twenty years. He turned frantically from page to page trying to determine the location, a clue on the geography, or an errant location or field reference. Finally, he saw some latitude and longitude references and Martin plugged those into his phone. The coordinates fell in north central Wisconsin. The files were referenced by Martin as related to a folder he had named the “Chequam.file,” which sounded a bit like Eastern Europe or maybe one of the Russian fields Basin was exploring. But Anita had said the directory was secured and no one other than Martin was using it. It was possible that this was just the profile on a new field Martin was working on in Russia, but Hilton had a feeling he was on to something. A field this huge came along once in a lifetime and Hilton had to find out more. Anita said when she got back to the office she would do more digging and let him know if she found anything else. Still peering at the sheaf of pages, Hilton turned from page to page and back again while he sipped his drink. Anita finally suggested maybe he would want to look through the material in more detail later. They had better things to do. She laughed.

  They had their own little routine. She would go in and use the bathroom while he pulled the drapes, got undressed and got into bed. Then she would come out of the bath and slide in next to him. Today was going to be a little bit different. If she was going to keep doing this, she was going to get what she wanted out of it. She unzipped the dress and slid it down over her hips and then stepped out of it and hung it on the hook behind the door. She was on fire. From her purse she took lipstick and rouge to freshen up. Then she leaned back on her heels just as she had done in the early hours this morning and stared at herself in the mirror. She ran her hands up her smooth nylon covered thighs, over her hips and up to her breasts. She slowly opened the bathroom door and stood in the dim yellow light; her hips thrown to one side as she leaned lustily against the side of the door. Hilton was in the bed not five feet away, staring at her from under the sheets.

  “Oh baby,” he said quietly, “you look fantastic. Come on over here.”

  She stood quietly for a few seconds, looking at Hilton lying in the bed. She smiled. She was supposed to walk over and crawl in next to him like she had done so many times before. She walked slowly over to the foot of the bed and pulled back the covers as if she was going to get in with him. But she kept pulling until the sheet, the blanket and the comforter, all of them were pulled back off Hilton, over his feet and onto the floor. She stood there for a moment surveying him as he lay completely exposed in the dim shadows.

  Hilton raised up off the pillow and began to move towards her. He reached his arm out toward her, trying to grab her.

  She pushed him back on the bed. “Not yet, Hilton. You’ve got some work to do.” And she quickly jumped on the bed and straddled him. “Okay,” she said. “You know what to do.”

  He looked up at her momentarily, her dark hair falling over her shoulders, her breasts jutting out over her corset. She felt a wave of heat rush over her. Two years together, and for once, Anita was first. After she was done with him, he rocked her wildly and in five minutes he had spent himself and collapsed back onto the mattress. Immediately, she moved off him and retreated to the bathroom to shower off. When she opened the door again, Hilton was sitting quietly in the chair in the corner. As they walked down the hallway to the parking lot, he trailed behind her, nervously jingling his keys in his hand. He opened the door for her and then stood patiently as she took her time getting in the car.

  She started conversation that was casual, but businesslike on the drive back to the office. When they arrived at the office, she quickly got out of the car and leaned down back through the door. He could see down through the V in the front of her dress that now she wore no bra, and her breasts hung down to meet his gaze. She didn’t smile, and had nothing to say. She was starting to conclude that she was going nowhere with Hilton. She just looked him straight in the eye.

  “If you want to call me again, you can call me again,” she said. “But if you call… there need to be some changes in our future. I have no idea where we’re going.” Then she sauntered into the office building. Hilton sat in the car, watching her walk from the car. When he found himself still staring, he quickly checked his rearview mirror and then pulled slowly away from the curb.

  Later in the day, he had called. It was either call, or never see her again. He was unsure of himself now. He asked what she meant. She had been matter-of-fact. She was tired of being second. She was tired of putting everything into their relationship and not getting anything back. She said that she had been with other men before and she knew how to handle them. Hilton was already half-divorced. If Hilton didn’t want to make any type of commitment, it was time for her to move on. She told him that he should think it over and let her know. Then, just like he had done a hundred times before, she abruptly hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER 37

  Martin sat down at his desk and typed in his password, staring patiently at the traffic again lined up on the Kat
y Freeway for the morning crawl into work. First, he signed on the computer as a Group User that they used for some of their projects. Then he attempted to get into his Chequam.file Directory. He had password-protected it, of course and received a message indicating that access was denied. He smiled when he received the message; his little security system was working. Logging off as a Group User, he signed on with his own user password and went into the Chequam Directory. Scrolling down the listing of files, his eyes focused on the column headed “last accessed” and found them all to be the same day. But it wasn’t the last date he had last accessed the files—it was the same day he had lunch with Hilton. In fact, there was even a “time” heading which showed they had been accessed around 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon. Hilton hadn’t wasted anytime. Anita had come back from lunch and scoured through Martin’s files and took the bait. She got access to the fake Wisconsin oil files. Martin had thought Hilton would check him out after their lunch. Martin guessed Hilton might call Anita in the next few days after Martin’s lunch with Hilton and ask her to snoop around. In fact, he must have called her immediately after lunch and told her he wanted to her to comb through Martin’s files. “What was Martin up to?” He could envision Hilton asking Anita. Hilton was a lot hungrier than Martin gave him credit for, and a lot more aggressive. By now, Hilton would certainly have concluded that the leases were for oil, not timber or metals. Hilton wasn’t stupid. Martin assumed that by now Larry had certainly found the old “Elephant Hunting in Michigan” article, that Martin had left for Larry among the maps. Larry would certainly conclude now that this was about oil. Well, Martin couldn’t be absolutely sure Larry had found the Michigan article, but Larry would have had to open those maps where Martin had tucked the Michigan newspaper article. Certainly, Larry was able to put two and two together. Did it make any difference if Larry figured it out on his own? By now Hilton would have told Larry it looked like it was all about oil. Hilton would still be putting the details together, but Hilton would know Martin was doing something with an oil find, and a big one, at that.

  Martin smiled to himself. He had planted those files for Anita to find. Hilton must have been pretty excited when he saw the reservoir-size projections from the files. Performing a tricky search command on his workstation, Martin could see that, in fact, Anita was the only one that had accessed the Chequam files. Martin guessed Anita had not only discovered the files but had undoubtedly printed off some copies for Hilton. Again, Hilton must have gone crazy when he had seen those numbers. Larry had the locations of all of the leases Martin supposedly wanted. But it was time for another dose of information for Hilton and Anita. God knows Hilton would have Anita scanning Martin’s files everyday looking for more information. Martin took one of his back-up tapes from his briefcase and headed down to the map room that contained one of the local tape drives. He easily snapped the tape into place and then walked back to his office. This file was for Chequamegon and it had all of the latitude and longitude markers, all of the elevations and all of the underground horizons data. This kind of detail would be discovered by Anita and then Hilton would know all of the information about the big oil find, locations, depths and size. It would only take a few minutes for Hilton or Larry to confirm that the oil reserves lined up with the leases Martin said he needed for timber.

  On the way back to his office from the plotting room, Martin stopped on the way for one of his special coffees; this morning it was Indonesian Bali Blend. He selected the tape drive as his source device, and began to download the huge file into his directory. Every few seconds the computer would give him an update of the time remaining to complete transfer and after eight minutes he had transferred the entire tape. Then he walked down the hall, coffee cup in hand, and removed the tape. Now it was 7:30 a.m. Anita never made it into the office before quarter after eight and by then he would be busy on one of his other projects.

  Only a few employees had shown up in the Basin office by now. Martin didn’t see Anita actually walk in the door, but about nine he was meeting with some of the guys in the map room and he saw her walk by with a handful of files. At lunch time, he checked the access on the big digital file that he had loaded earlier in the morning and saw that they had, indeed, been accessed by Anita at nine thirty. Shortly before four in the afternoon, Martin checked activity against the file again and found there had been no further access. Clearly Anita had found Martin’s latest file and gotten what she needed that morning. He pulled the file up on his screen and issued a simple delete command. There would be no physical evidence that the huge file ever existed. Then he found the directory with the assortment of spreadsheets he had prepared and deleted those off the company computers, as well. Basin Oil only did full back-ups after each month’s accounting close. Martin had been careful to place the files on the server only after this closing date. Daily backups were done, but they were only three days deep. In two more days, there would be no record of anything.

  The days after Martin’s blow up in the office had seemed a bit awkward for everyone. Martin had come back to the office and apologized, saying that the breakup of his marriage had really been getting to him. Publicly he had agreed to be “suspended” for a week while management considered whether to continue his employment. Privately, Basin’s President had made arrangement to pay him while suspended, so it had been like a vacation. For management, he was too good a geologist to let go, yet it would send the wrong message to the troops if there had been no reprimand or suspension for his behavior.

  People had been careful around him for a few days when he first got back. No one stopped coming by his office to visit, but everyone was cool toward him. Anita wanted to be his best friend and kept bugging him, after his “little tirade,” as his boss had called it. But things were pretty much getting back to normal—or so it seemed. He emptied the trash bin on his desktop and did a “find” command on “Chequam” getting a “file not found response.” He smiled quietly to himself. A day’s work done. It was exactly 4:00 p.m. By now Taylor had placed the fake tapes in Wisconsin Records Management and Larry was in northern Wisconsin getting leases signed. Given the circumstances, Martin didn’t feel bad about leaving a little early. Nobody was going to say anything to him. He mouthed the words “see you later” at Anita and walked out to his car.

  CHAPTER 38

  It was time for Martin to light the fire. When they were finalizing their plan, Taylor had given Martin the name of one of the more aggressive young research analysts in the Department of Natural Resources. Taylor insisted Martin’s first call go to him. Martin pulled over in the bus lane at the corner of Ashford and Memorial. He grabbed his new burner phone and called the central number at the DNR. Then he asked for Extension 2944, the number Taylor had given him for the smart, aggressive young DNR analyst. The guy picked up on the first ring.

  “Yes, I am calling from the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. and I was just transferred from the Capitol switchboard. Is this the research department for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources?”