‘He boarded his private jet this morning,’ the receptionist replied with some satisfaction. ‘I believe that he is on his way to Holland, and from there to the Middle East. He won’t be home for several days I’m afraid.’
‘Thanks for your time,’ Ethan said to the receptionist and promptly turned his back on her and strode for the exit.
‘We not going to be able to get anything out of anybody who works here,’ Lopez pointed out as they returned to the sunshine outside the building. ‘The only thing we can really do is try to figure out a way of tracking down the people who lived in Clearwater. Three hundred people can’t have just vanished into thin air.’
Ethan reached their vehicle, an unmarked SUV as unremarkable as any other in the state or even the country. He and Lopez climbed in to be met with Amber’s ferocious glare.
‘Was he in there?’
‘No,’ Lopez replied. ‘He’s out of the country on business.’
Amber folded her arms across her chest and fumed in silence as Doug Jarvis looked over the passenger seat into the back, having joined them from Washington DC.
‘Europe?’
‘Yeah,’ Lopez said. ‘Seavers is out of the country for some days. The receptionist made it pretty clear we wouldn’t be getting any further than the foyer.’
‘What have you got on the company’s financials?’ Ethan asked.
Jarvis was holding a thick file that he leafed through idly as he spoke.
‘Seavers Incorporated is a very large company, but given that it’s fully invested in mountaintop mining its accounts are actually rather simple. The business is divided into regions named alpha one, beta three, charlie five and so on, with individual sub companies founded for each region to simplify bookkeeping at a state level. I had a team at the DIA go over the accounts with a fine tooth comb going back ten years, and we found nothing unusual to suggest that there are any kind of financial indiscretions occurring at Seavers Incorporated. In fact, as far as major corporations go, it appears on the face of it to be clean as a whistle.’
‘On the face of it?’ Lopez asked.
Jarvis opened a particular section of the file which had been marked with colored tabs.
‘The company’s profits and dividends are drawn via a series of offshore accounts, much like most corporations who seek to avoid excessive taxation by using such havens to store company profits. Huck Seavers and his family’s finances are operated out of these accounts, and our people did manage to find a few minor discrepancies that they haven’t yet been able to solve.’
‘What kind of discrepancies?’
‘Seemingly random withdrawals of large sums into temporary accounts,’ Jarvis replied. ‘We’re tracing where those sums went, but it’s going to take a while. In short, Seavers Incorporated is making payments to accounts that no longer exist, shifting money around various countries and banks before it finally vanishes into thin air, rather like the population of Clearwater.’
‘So, you think they’re money laundering or something?’ Lopez asked.
‘Seavers Incorporated has been involved in numerous lawsuits over the past ten years,’ Jarvis explained. ‘Their mountaintop mining programs are claimed to be environmentally sound operations that do not affect the surrounding terrain and wilderness. However, multiple claims have been made of contaminated groundwater and inadequate clean — up operations over the years, mostly by townsfolk living within a few miles of Huck Seaver’s operations. The vast majority of these claims are being quashed, Huck’s lawyers far too powerful for ordinary townsfolk to take on and have any hope of winning. However, of the few that have been successful in gaining damages against Seavers incorporated, the pay outs involved do not match the payouts listed by Seavers Incorporated as having gone to claimants over the years. That means that the money is going somewhere else, and it’s not a small amount. My guys estimate that Seavers Incorporated has paid something in excess of three hundred million dollars in the last decade alone, and we have no idea where that money has gone.’
Ethan leaned back in the seat as the SUV drove along the highway, heading back to the roadside motel where they had decided to hole up. The town of Clearwater had deliberately been made to look as though nobody had lived there for fifty years, and the extent of the changes had gone far beyond simply coating the town in a layer of grime. National census details had been altered and trees felled to block access to deter civilians from wandering aimlessly into the remains of the town. The digital details of hundreds of people had been completely removed from the national archives. The power required to do that in terms of legal access and sheer workforce was considerable, and seemed far beyond the reach of Seavers Incorporated and even the shadowy machinations of Majestic Twelve.
‘There has to be some kind of government connection,’ Ethan said. ‘What if we’re looking at this the wrong way around?’
‘What you mean?’ Lopez asked.
‘What if the government or whoever is behind this did not make the people of Clearwater vanish? What if the people of Clearwater vanished voluntarily?’
‘I doubt that three hundred people are going to simultaneously decide to up sticks and leave their entire lives behind,’ Jarvis pointed out. ‘What could possibly make them do something like that in such a hurry and … ’
Jarvis’s eyes widened as he understood where Ethan was coming from.
‘Money,’ Ethan said. ‘You said that towns have disappeared before, in Africa and Siberia?’
‘Yes, several years ago.’
‘So what if the residents were paid to move?’ Ethan suggested. ‘What if what we’ve got here is in fact bribery? It would not be expensive to move an African tribe, as they have little money to start with. Presumably a town in Siberia would also be inherently poor, the task of paying sufficient money for them to disappear and start new lives elsewhere within the reach of a company like Seavers Incorporated.’
‘But why?’ Lopez asked. ‘If Seavers Incorporated or indeed Majestic Twelve is behind this they’ve already recovered the device that Stanley Meyer supposedly created. They could simply have walked out of here, never to be seen again, and the whole thing would have been swept under the carpet.’
‘That’s my point,’ Ethan said. ‘It wouldn’t have been swept under the carpet because the townsfolk were in on all this, and they would have approached the media. It’s possible that the media could be silenced by the government, but not by a corporation like Seaver’s. If what Stanley Meyer created was a world changing energy creation device … ’
‘It was,’ Amber insisted sulkily.
‘ … then the risk would be too great if the townsfolk suddenly decided to make a big noise about what had happened. They needed to be silenced, completely, and presumably mass murder is not on the cards for government agencies. The only way they could reasonably do that is to offer them a sum of money sufficient that they would never want to talk about what happened.’
It was, in some respects, rather simple. A government like that of the United States, with its close ties to energy companies and the oil of the Middle East, would undoubtedly lose trillions of dollars in revenue for the loss of taxation and profit from fossil fuels should a device like Stanley Meyer’s ever come to see the light of day. Even if they offered every family in the town of Clearwater ten million dollars, six hundred million dollars in total, still a tremendous sum of money and beyond even the coffers of Seavers Incorporated, it remained a paltry sum compared to the lost revenue that Stanley’s Meyer’s device represented. The US government could, and would, generate that sum of money in order to maintain profits over the coming years and decades.