“Anyway,” Foster went on, “that was the moment of my . . . conversion, I guess you’d call it. I tendered my resignation the next week, took my stock options, cashed in half a mil worth, and bought this place. So, now, I hunt and fish, do a little guide work in the fall, read a lot, wrote a little book about what oil products do to the environment, and that’s about it.”
It was the book that had attracted Mark’s attention, of course. The brown-smudge story was in its poorly written preface. Foster was a believer, but not a screwball. His house had electricity and phone service. Mark saw his high-end Gateway computer on the floor next to his desk. Even satellite TV, plus the usual Chevy pickup truck with a gun-rack in the back window . . . and a diesel-powered backhoe. So, maybe he believed, but he wasn’t too crazy about it. That was good, Mark thought. He just had to be crazy enough. Foster was. Killing the fish-and-game cop was proof of that.
Foster returned the friendly stare. He’d met guys like this during his time in Exxon. A suit, but a clever one, the kind who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty. Molecular biochemistry. They hadn’t had that major at the Colorado School of Mines, but Foster also subscribed to Science News, and knew what it was all about. A meddler with life . . . but, strangely, one who understood about the deer and elk. Well, the world was a complex place. Just then, his visitor saw the Lucite block on the coffee table. Mark picked it up.
“What’s this?”
Foster grinned over his drink. “What’s it look like?”
“Well, it’s either iron pyrite or it’s-”
“Ain’t iron. I do know my rocks, sir.”
“Gold? Where from?”
“Found it in my stream, ’bout three hundred yards over yonder.” Foster pointed.
“That’s a fair-sized nugget.”
“Five and a half ounces. About two thousand dollars. You know, people – white people – been living right on this ranch on this spot for over a hundred years, but nobody ever saw that in the creek. One day I’ll have to backtrack up, see if it’s a good formation. Ought to be, that’s quartz on the bottom of the big one. Quartz-and-gold formations tend to be pretty rich, ‘cuz of the way the stuff bubbled up from the earth’s core. This area’s fairly volcanic, all the hot springs and stuff,” he reminded his guest. “We even get the occasional earth tremor.”
“So, you might own your own gold mine?”
A good laugh. “Yep. Ironic, ain’t it? I paid the going rate for grazing land – not even that much ‘cuz o’ the hills. The last guy to ranch around here bitched that his cattle lost every pound they gained grazin’ by climbing up to where the grass was.”
“How rich?”
A shrug. “No tellin’, but if I showed that to some guys I went to school with, well, some folks would invest ten or twenty million finding out. Like I said, it’s a quartz formation. People gamble big time on those. Price of gold is depressed, but if it comes out of the ground pretty pure well, it’s a shitload more valuable than coal, y’know?”
“So, why don’t you?. . .”
“‘Cuz I don’t need it, and it’s an ugly process to watch. Worsen drilling oil, even. You can pretty much clean that up. But a mine -no way. Never goes away. The tailing don’t go away. The arsenic gets into the ground water and takes forever to leach out. Anyway, it’s a pretty coupla rocks in the plastic, and if I ever need the money, well, I know what to do.”
“How often you check the creek?”
“When I fish-brown trout here, see?” He pointed to a big one hanging on the log wall. “Every third or fourth time, I find another one. Actually, I h time, I find another one. Actually, I figure the deposit must have been uncovered fairly recently, else folks would have spotted it a long time ago. Hell, maybe I should track it down, see where it starts, but I’d just be tempting myself. Why bother?” Foster concluded. “I might have a weak moment and go against my principles. Anyway, not like it’s gonna run away, is it?”
Mark grunted. “Guess not. Got any more of these?”
“Sure.” Foster rose and pulled open a desk drawer. He tossed a leather pouch over. Mark caught it, surprised by the weight, almost ten pounds. He pulled the drawstring and extracted a nugget. About the size of a half-dollar, half gold, half quartz, all the more beautiful for the imperfection.
“You married?” Foster asked.
“Yeah. Wife, two kids.”
“Keep it, then. Make a pendant out of it, give it to her for her birthday or something.”
“I can’t do that. This is worth a couple of thousand dollars.”
Foster waved his hand. “Shit, just takin’ up space in my desk. Why not make somebody happy with it? ‘Sides, you understand, Mark. I think you really do.”
Yep, Mark thought, this was a recruit. “What if I told you there was a way to make that brown smudge go away? . . .’
A quizzical look. “You talking about some organism to eat it or something?”
Mark looked up. “No, not exactly . . .” How much could he tell him now? He’d have to be very careful. It was only their first meeting.
“Getting the aircraft is your business. Where to fly it, that we can help with,” Popov assured his host.
“Where?” the host asked.
“The key is to become lost to air-traffic-control radar and also to travel far enough that fighter aircraft cannot track you, as you know. Then if you can land in a friendly place, and dispose of the flight crew upon reaching your destination, repainting the aircraft is no great task. It can he destroyed later, even dismantled for sale of the important parts, the engines and such. They can easily disappear into the international black market, with the change of a few identity plates,” Popov explained. “This has happened more than once, as you know. Western intelligence and police agencies do not advertise the fact, of course.”
“The world is awash with radar systems,” the host objected.
“True,” Popov conceded, “but air-traffic radars do not see aircraft. They see the return signals from aircraft radar transponders. Only military radars see the aircraft themselves, and what African country has a proper air-defense network? Also, with the addition of a simple jammer to the aircraft’s radio systems, you can further reduce the ability of anyone to track you. Your escape is not a problem, if you get as far as an international airport, my friend. That,” he reminded them, “is the difficult part. Once you disappear over Africa-well, that is your choice then. Your country of destination can be selected for ideological purity or for a monetary exchange. Your choice. I recommend the former, but the latter is possible,” Popov concluded. Africa was not yet a hotbed of international law and integrity, but it did have hundreds of airports capable of servicing jetliners.
“A pity about Ernst,” the host said quietly.
“Ernst was a fool!” his lady friend countered with an angry gesture. “He should have robbed a smaller bank. All the way in the middle of Bern. He was trying to make a statement,” Petra Dortmund sneered. Popov had known her only by reputation until today. She might have been pretty, even beautiful, once, but now her once-blond hair was dyed brown, and her thin face was severe, the cheeks sunken and hollow, the eyes rimmed in dark circles. She was almost unrecognizable, which explained why European police hadn’t snatched her up yet, along with her longtime lover, Hans Furchtner.
Furchtner had gone the other way. He was a good thirty kilos overweight, his thick dark hair had either fallen out or been shaved, and the beard was gone. He looked like a banker now, fat and happy, no longer the driven, serious, committed communist he’d been in the ’70s and ’80s-at least not visibly so. They lived in a decent house in the mountains south of Munich. What neighbors they had thought them to be artists-both of them painted, a hobby unknown to their country’s police. They even sold the occasional work in small galleries, which was enough to feed them, though not to maintain their lifestyle.
They must have missed the safe houses in the old DDR and Czechoslovakia, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought. Just get off the aircraft and get taken away by car to comfortable if not quite lavish quarters, leave there to shop in the ‘special’ stores maintained for the local Party elite, get visited frequently by serious, quiet intelligence officers who would feed them information with which to plan their next operation. Furchtner and Dortmund had accomplished several decent operations, the best being the kidnapping and interrogation of an American sergeant who serviced nuclear artillery shells-this mission had been assigned them by the Soviet GRU. Much had been learned from that, most of it still useful, as the sergeant had been an expert on the American PAL-permissible action link-safety systems. His body had later been discovered in the snowy mid-winter mountains of southern Bavaria, apparently the result of a nasty traffic accident. Or so GRU thought, based on the reports of its agents within the NATO high command.