"Jackson," Nate said, snorting. "That figures."
Joe fast-forwarded to the fifth and last bookmark.
There it was, WYO 22-8BXX again. From the day before, the day Judy Demming was shot. They had come back. There were two of them again, and despite the sun on the windshield and the smoked-glass windshield, this time he could see their profiles. The driver matched with the first shot: lean, silver-haired.Whoever it was was back again, three times in three days. The passenger was harder to see because of glare on the glass, but there was something about his silhouette, the tilt of his head, the jut of his jaw, that seemed strangely familiar to Joe. Inside his head, alarm bells went off. He realized he was shaking not only with the cold but also with excitement.
"I know this guy," Joe said.
"Who is he?"
"I'm not sure. But there's something about him. I've seen him before. I just can't make him out on the screen." Joe wonderedif he could send the image to the Wyoming DCI in the morning for enhancing. He didn't know if they worked on Sundays.He doubted it.
The cabin door opened and Marybeth came out.
"It's cold out here, guys," she said. "You can come in now. The girls are in bed."
"Joe thinks he's figured something out," Nate said.
"Maybe," Joe said.
"Aren't you going to offer me a cigar?" Marybeth asked, looking from Joe to Nate. Joe couldn't believe it.
Nate opened his "Fuses and Toilet Paper" box, and she took one. Joe watched in amazement as she clipped off the tip, lit it, and blew out the smoke.
"Good," she said.
"You're smoking a cigar," Joe said, dumbfounded. Marybeth raised her eyebrows at him as if to say, Why not?
"This is real interesting," Nate said, holding up a sheaf of paper. "I might have found something too."
"Sounds like we'll be up for a while," she said. "I almost missed it," Nate said once they were inside and had spread the documents out on a table. Sheridan and Lucy were in bed sleeping, lumps amid strewn covers. "I was concentratingon this Swiss company called Genetech. They're the ones who have the bio-prospecting permit in Yellowstone Cutlertold us about. Judy couldn't remember the name. Remember the 'million-dollar slime' they found at Sunburst that's used for genetic typing? They've made millions off of it, according to these documents and what Cutler said."
Joe took the cover sheet from the Genetech file and read it over. Based in Geneva, the company was partially owned by the Swiss government but had majority private financing. Genetech's bioengineers were also researching hot springs microbesin New Zealand and Iceland to try to mine more useful microbe thermophiles, but as yet could not find a match for the particular specimen they'd found in Yellowstone.
"Would the microbe be worth killing over?" Joe asked rhetorically.
"Absolutely," Nate said. "The company's made a fortune so far exploiting it."
"So we have a suspect?" Marybeth asked. "A Swiss bioengineeringfirm?"
"That's what I was thinking at first," Nate said, "but I've changed my mind. I don't think this has anything at all to do with Genetech, other than they were the company that originally found the microbe and obtained the permit to harvest it from Yellowstone."
Joe explained to Marybeth what Cutler had told him about the permitting process-how sloppy and controversial it seemed to be, how environmental purists like Rick Hoening and others were opposed to it.
"I tend to agree with them," she said. "If it's illegal to dig a mine, hunt, or do any logging in a national park, how can you justify taking microbes for commercial purposes? I don't know enough about it to have an opinion either way, but it's not consistentwith their policy, is it?"
"Nope," Nate said.
"Then why would the Park Service grant permits to companiesto do this kind of prospecting?"
"Bucks," Nate said. "Parks always need more money."
Joe was beginning to get what Nate was driving at.
"So we've got Genetech, who has a permit extending anotherfive years to exclusively harvest this particular microbe," Nate said, digging out a copy of the agreement. He showed them where it was signed by the superintendent of the park as well as the chief ranger. "But it seems there's another company in this pile of papers Marybeth brought with her that desperatelywants a permit as well."
Nate turned to Marybeth. "Where did you get this particular list of companies?"
She nodded to Joe.
"I saw the names on binders in Clay McCann's office," Joe said.
"Okay," Nate said, his voice rising, "that's the connection- Clay McCann. Now we come to a company called EnerDyne."
This was the file Nate had waved in the air earlier. He summarizedit: "EnerDyne was incorporated just last year in the State of Colorado. The incorporation papers are filed with the secretary of state there, and Marybeth was smart to print out the documents when she did her search. EnerDyne has several floors of offices in downtown Denver, a pretty large payroll, but no income as yet according to the records."
"How can they stay in business?" Joe asked.
"I'm getting to that," Nate said, excited.
"Please get to it with your voices down," Marybeth cautioned,gesturing at her sleeping daughters. According to the papers filed with the Colorado secretaryof state, Nate said, EnerDyne was a research, development, and engineering firm created to implement coal gasification projects throughout North America.
"Coal what?" Marybeth asked.
"Gasification," Joe said. "Turning hard coal into gas that can be transported in pipelines and distributed. I remember reading about it back when we had the mineral rights dispute around Saddlestring. Energy companies have been trying to figure out how to do it economically for years. The technology is there, but it's too expensive to do in a cost-effective way, at least so far. They'd have to build big plants to turn the coal into gas, and since coal only costs pennies per ton to mine and ship, it doesn't make financial sense."
"That's right," Nate said. "Wyoming and other states have billions of tons of coal in the ground. There are seams of coal in the West that are miles thick and stretch across half the state-the largest deposits in the world. If that coal could be made into gas, it could solve all of our energy problems and change the face of the economy. We could be energy independent."
"My God," she said.
"If it could be done cheaply," Nate said, "it would be what everybody wants."
"But nobody has figured out how to process coal into gas that way," Joe said.
"Which is why it's significant how EnerDyne plans to do it," Nate said. "It says here their plans are proprietary, but they do have to leak a little the general concept of it to the SEC in order to be listed as a public company and to attract investors. And what it says here is 'EnerDyne is the leading company in the world in a new method to organically gasify coal.' "
"Organically?" Joe said.
"Think about it," Nate said.
Joe and Marybeth exchanged looks, and it seemed to hit them both at the same time.
"Microbes," Joe said. "They want to find a microbe that will react naturally with coal to produce gas."
"They think they can find it in Yellowstone," Marybeth said.
"And maybe they have," Nate said.
"Flamers," Joe said. "Free fire."
Marybeth looked at him.
"There's a little seam of coal near Sunburst geyser. It's next to the flamers Hoening talked about and I went and lit."
"Oh, man," Nate said, and whistled.
"Maybe someone figured out that the microbes in Sunburst were reacting with that stream of coal to produce gas just under the surface. And if that particular thermophile was introduced to one of those miles-thick seams of coal Nate was talking about…"
"It would be worth billions," Nate said.
Marybeth said, "But they'd need a permit to do it. And if they thought there would be a protest by environmentalists to block any new permits, that might definitely be worth killing for."