In retrospect, another long-overdue win at chess and the Senator’s raging tantrum might have been preferable to falling in with her insane plot. To Chalk’s surprise, some of her maunderings had made sense in the moment. Tonight, driving on the bridge, they rang in his ears like a Siren beckoning his ship to founder.
When his attention had wandered, she said, “Hear me out, Maynard. The decentralized terrorist leadership makes all the shootings, kidnappings, and bombings appear random. Now think about it like Brown would, but on a macro scale. The terrorist attacks are the tiny water molecules successfully whamming into our much larger Coalition pollen. With me so far?”
“Pollen. Terrorists.”
“Exactly. Well, I am going to introduce a couple of high-energy water molecules of my own into the mix.”
Chalk had lost the thread of her theory, as he hoped to lose the chess game. Lily had yet to notice she could have him in check in only two more moves. He moaned, “Oh dear God, speak English.”
“Hang in there. If I add the corrupting forces of untold riches, coupled with the sudden realization of near divine power over life and death, if I give them all that, and all at once, it will screw them up completely! Their thing is privation, and making do, low-tech, but high concept. This is like plate tectonics on their usual playing field. It’ll fry their wiring. If I can’t get in the terrorist’s face, I will get in his head. Really fuck him up.”
No problem for a Senator with her enormous slush funds for gray and black ops.
A few nights later, after she had won another chess game, she said, “Fort Knox.”
This time, Chalk perked up and listened like she was Scheherazade herself. “Fort Knox? Do tell.”
“You know I go over my General Accounting Office reports and audits with a fine-tooth comb. So there’s this old supplemental audit, GAO-66-406Z. Inside that, way at the back, there’s a reference in Appendix XIV: viiq to something called Extra-Reserve Materiel. I figure anything extra in Fort Knox is bound to be interesting.” Ever the gardener, Lily kept digging.
Twenty-seven documents later she found an actual inventory. At odd times in history, the fort’s Extra Reserve Materiel turned out to be well-known items like the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, and parts of a Gutenberg Bible. The Magna Carta was once placed there. All that was a great big magna whatever to the Senator.
Eyes agleam, she said, “Listen to this. Extra-Reserve Materiel is also made up of large caches of gold listed under a special heading: Form at Acquisition. That’s international payments in foreign coin and bullion for tariffs, arms, and gold held in trust from countries that over time have simply ceased to exist. Now get this, Form at Acquisition also lists gold captured in war or on exploratory Lewis and Clark-type expeditions.”
Chalk was impressed. He was usually not so interested in gold himself. It was bulky and heavy. It was hard to hide, and one could not simply wire gold around the world. He would like it fine, once it was converted. He preferred less unwieldy commodities, currencies that could be reduced to electrons and binary code and beamed into numbered accounts off shore. The problem with gold is that eventually a trader always wants to lay hands on it. To grope it. And that’s where it gets sticky.
The Senator explained that foreign specie was sometimes melted into coin bars slightly less pure than bullion mined and minted in America. But since the United States had beaucoup gold of its own, these caches were not always cast into the standard shape for U.S. Reserve ingots; those measured seven inches by three and 5/8 inches by one and 3/4 inches. Like a mason’s brick. But thinner. This was perfect for the Senator. “This Form at Acquisition stuff is gold alright, but it’s technically off the books. I mean, how tasty! My favorite!”
She still had Chalk’s ear. “This is where it gets really interesting, kiddo! There’s this old cache that was liberated from Peru in the mid-nineteenth century by a crackpot Scottish-American fortune hunter. MacRath Ruthven. After robbing those Indians blind, Ruthven barely gets back to the States alive, and he stores the gold in a Richmond Hill warehouse in Georgia. Then guess what?”
“What, Lil’? Tell me what.”
“The Civil War, that’s what! The Confederates commandeer the warehouse for use as an ammo dump, and the Ruthven Consignment, as it was later known, gets shoved to the back wall behind barrels of powder and stacks of round shot.
“Now, even though Ruthven was a loyal southerner, he kept quiet about the gold. Hoped to retire very comfortably. No such luck. He took the secret of the gold to his grave at the second battle of Fort McAllister in 1863. All other records of the gold? Burned with the rest of Atlanta! Picture the Lost Ark getting stashed in a big warehouse at the end of that Spielberg movie.”
This might be important to Chalk. Lily Morgan had a good point. Treasure did not have to be buried to vanish. It could simply be forgotten in plain sight. War, which was itself the child of amnesia, had helped orphan the Ruthven Consignment. Only for a time.
The Senator’s filibuster continued. “So when General Sherman’s outriders discovered the cache during his Savannah Campaign, it was taken into government custody. Eventually it was delivered to Fort Knox when the vault was finished in 1936. There it’s sat all this while, until now!”
Chalk could not believe it. “What have you done, Lily?”
The Senator lowered her voice. “I called a few old friends, and I got it! Government appropriation for diplomatic operations, or some such bullshit. Maynard, with my committees and security clearances, the GAO boys aren’t allowed to tell me no. It’s positively un-American! Now here’s the best part. I got the entire Ruthven Consignment at the Reserve’s 1934 statutory price of thirty-five dollars an ounce. The GAO never revalued the hoard in any of their subsequent audits. Forgot all about it! And they can’t reassess it now without getting taken out to the woodshed for their mistake. So you and I will simply make it go away. It’s a total win-win.” She was beaming. If Lily loved anything as much as roses, it was a bargain.
Chalk said, “Nice work. That’s the gold. You mentioned hawking plans or something? You got them stashed at Fort Knox?”
She leveled a meaningful look at him. “Kid stuff. For a man of your talents.”
Morgan later told Chalk that her operatives had reached out to radicalized nuclear engineers in Turkey. Istanbul is the equivalent of Radio Shack for black market fissile materials. Highly enriched uranium, usually swiped from former Soviet silos and centrifuges, could be got for a price. When the geeks there came through with the plans that could specifically accommodate actual stolen material, the lady from Wisconsin was financed, supplied, and ready to follow her idols, Joan of Arc and Boudicca, into battle. Into her own Holy War.
Soon she was flogging her new assets in the terrorist market the way a divorced mother of five shows off her new breast implants at the town pool. Discreetly, but not too discreetly, promoting their availability to the right customer. Within weeks she had found the perfect extremist patsies. Chalk brokered a sale of the plans, and their purchase using the gold, between two opposing factions; the Iranian Shi’a Sons of Allah, and the Iraqi Sunni Martyrs of the Caliph. Now he knew she’d switched a real nuke for the blueprints they had discussed.
At the time, he admired that Lily was working both ends. This kind of chaos was bound to shake loose some serious money along the way, and he was just the man to scoop it up. Lily was a piece of work. Chalk smiled as he idly watched the lights of a lone freighter heading up the Chesapeake to Baltimore. His agents contacted only one side at a time. Neither faction realized that in the initial negotiations, his own operatives stood in for the real militants across the table. The warm-ups were handled anonymously, with coded signs and countersigns. Senator Morgan and Chalk counted on the Islamist tunnel vision, and they weren’t disappointed. The hapless fundamentalists were tent-pole erect for this amazing deal. Blind to its magnificent improbability.