Chalk had no time for finesse. “Why just for now? You coming down with a cold or something?”
“Possible lead poisoning, if you follow me.”
Chalk’s exasperation was not entirely a sham. “Is somebody besides me about to put a bullet in your empty noggin? We both know that’d leave you unimpaired. You do your best thinking with that uncircumcised heathen shvanse of yours. Remember Spring Break in Bangkok in ’86?”
Yusef dropped his guarded manner at the recollection. “Maynard Gone Wild. I remember. Listen, your guy Tom Chase? He made the delivery. Two days back. Sorry I didn’t get to you before. My people are loving your people.”
Waves of relief and amazement swept over Chalk. Surprised as he was that Dick Blackshaw had come through after all, he did his best to mask it with Yusef. He succumbed part way to his excitement and gave a geeky thumbs-up to Slagget indicating all was well.
He blustered, “You bloody-fucking-lice-covered-turd-burgling-son-of-a-two-bit-clapped-up-one-legged-Gorgon-faced marsupial! You should have told me! Dammit, that’s why you do business with me, because we communicate! Oh what the hell. On time or early, it’s all good.”
Again Yusef said, “For now.”
Chalk fugued back and forth between the joy of his recent reprieve, and complete confusion. Yusef was still not happy about something.
Chalk said, “Don’t be such a droopy-drawers. You got the stuff.”
Then Yusef said, “The gold appears to be here, as you say. So until my principals know what I know, everything’s fine.”
“What do you know that the rest of us don’t? This line is encrypted, Yusef. Even if they bugged your end, this whole conversation is scrambled. So spit it out. You said the gold is there. It is what it is. Shiny. Heavy. Mysteriously warm to the touch. Luminously yellow in hue. It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that bling. You have enough of that crap to fill every cavity in every tooth in the Kush a hundred thousand times over.”
“No argument from me, Maynard. I’m calling to tell you that somebody, maybe the other side, maybe one of your people, played a sharp game. It’s going to come out. You trust Tom Chase?”
Chalk bristled. “What the hell do you mean?”
“Something seemed wrong with him. For a guy who was four days early, he was in a lather to get moving. I signed off on the delivery, turned the purchased item over to him as agreed. It started bothering me. So I checked the gold.”
Chalk’s vertebrae turned to stacked ice cubes. “And?”
Yusef continued, “First one box, then the next. I checked them all. Two bars were missing.”
Chalk said, “Holy hell, man I always negotiate a lagniappe for you. So my courier got a little greedy. Two missing bars still means a full shipment. Are you pissed you didn’t get your bonus? You know I’ll make it up to you. Is that all that’s got your ass in a pucker?”
Yusef said, “No. The remaining bars aren’t gold. They’re soft, heavy, yellow in hue, as you put it. The entire shipment is lead. Gold-plated lead. I scraped it with my pocket knife. Under the thinnest coating of gold was a layer of what must be nickel. Beneath that, a thin layer of copper. Under that, lots and lots of worthless lead. Nothing more. It probably took less than the two missing bars of the real gold to finish-plate all the dummies. Honestly, it was a beautiful job, but it’s one ape-dick huge problem for me.”
“Jesus Effing Christ!” bellowed Chalk.
Yusef continued, “If it’s your mule, he’s fucked both of us sideways and dry. I’m planning to disappear, Maynard. Before my principals discover what’s happened. Since I signed off on the delivery, they’re going to blame me. Hunt me down. Murder me, but only after they torture my wife and children to death in front of me. And then they’re going to serve you up like flank steak to their pit bulls. If I were you, I’d get out of Dodge for a while. Like for the rest of your life. These people won’t forget this sort of thing. You saved my life once, Maynard. I just returned the favor. As of now, we’re even.”
Chalk agreed, “This is damn serious. Damn serious. What the hell kind of plans did all that gold buy, anyway? It was for some kind of weapon, right? A nuke missile?”
Yusef was quiet for a moment. “A nuke, yes. But Maynard, you honestly think someone would pay all that money for plans a fourth grader could download off the Internet? No. Your guy Tom Chase received a full-scale working model.”
With that, Yusef rang off.
An astonished Maynard Chalk sized things up. If Dick Blackshaw had indeed returned home with all the spoils of his double-cross, then Smith Island, an eight-thousand-acre sandbar in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, was now a nuclear power. Somewhere out there within seventy miles of Washington, D.C. was a crazy redneck toting a suitcase full of New World Order.
CHAPTER 12
Ellis retrieved the shovels from Miss Dotsy’s forepeak. Before they buried the boxes in a shallow pit, they checked the contents of each one. Now they knew. One box containing a weapon of mass destruction that could annihilate all life in a dozen zip codes, and would do so in a hair more than twenty-two hours. Nineteen boxes full of gold. There were empty slots in one box for three bars. Ben had brought one bar up, and it lay in his saltbox, stashed in the couch. He had found a second bar in his father’s coat pocket, but had placed it back in its box. Two bars were apparently missing. They did the math.
Ellis said, “You ready for this? At a seventeen hundred dollars a Troy ounce, with four hundred ounces to the bar, and twelve bars to the box, it looks like each box here but the short one is worth 8.16 million.”
Ben blinked a few times in disbelief as he continued the incredible arithmetic. “Times nineteen boxes, minus two bars at four hundred troy ounces each. Ellis, that’s nigh on 154 million.” Ben shook his head slowly. “A million here; a million there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Ellis smiled. “Time’s the thing we don’t get enough of. The presence of a certain bomb brings my point home, in case you missed it. And pretty soon, somebody with a lot of juice is going to come looking for it. What do you think they’ll do when they find us?”
Despite the pressure bearing down on them, they listened for a moment to the wind rattling cold reeds and branches. A desolate sound. These were men whose combined net worth that morning had amounted to four paltry figures. That, plus a quick nod toward their good character, was all they possessed.
And character was stretching thin to breaking. Fatigue and shock were working them over from within. Though decent men, they were not immune to the ancient deficits of humankind. The gold infected them. It polluted them both with a toxic brew of greed, fear, doubt, and mistrust. Strewing the last pine needles and dead leaves over the pit as camouflage, they each realized that now they were the only two men in the entire world who knew where this fortune lay buried. It only needed one death-blow from either of them, and a little more spadework for a grave. With that, the chance for betrayal disappeared.
And the survivor’s fortune doubled.
Tonight, Ben was also nagged by a feeling that there were far too many loose ends. Ellis was not coming clean. In the service, Ben had trusted his superiors enough to believe that when he was ordered to take down a target, it was for the right reasons, and no questions need be asked. Out here on Deep Banks Island, that wasn’t good enough. Ben hated working in the dark in every regard.
What happened next was inevitable. Sensing the moment of truth, Knocker Ellis’s grip tightened on the weathered shank of the shovel. Ben felt the pressure of the broken knife he had tucked into his belt. Felt those few ounces of steel calling to him louder than tons of gold.