There was the sound of an object brushing against a piñon tree, and Riley and Günter turned toward the sound. Something or someone was creeping uphill following the route Riley had taken to get to the summit. Riley and Günter dropped to the ground, and Riley quietly drew her gun. A man appeared in the near total darkness. Riley recognized the silhouette. A tall, lean man wearing night vision goggles with a duffel bag hooked over his shoulder. She stood and tucked the gun back into her jeans.
“I was worried about you,” Riley said to Emerson. “I didn’t know where you were.”
“I was just below you when they swept the hillside with the spotlight. I had the benefit of the goggles, and I knew there were men left behind. I stayed hidden until the men were picked up and the truck drove off. Then I followed your trail of dislodged rocks and broken branches.”
“Did the Siddhar teach you tracking skills?” Riley asked.
“I didn’t need tracking skills. It was like a herd of buffalo had rushed uphill,” Emerson said. “Is that Günter Grunwald?”
Günter stepped forward and extended his hand. “Please excuse my appearance. This has been a trying experience.”
Emerson shook Günter’s hand and looked beyond him over the rim of the bluff.
“Area 51,” Emerson said. “Easy to imagine aliens down there. The salt flat is quite impressive.”
Riley nodded agreement.
“I’ve been down there and I didn’t see any aliens,” Günter said. “Unless you count Rollo.”
“Why are you here?” Emerson asked Günter.
“Good question. I don’t have a good answer. I’m trapped. I can’t get out of the country. I don’t have a passport. I can’t get help from law enforcement. I don’t know whom to trust. My brothers are hunting for me, and they’ll kill me if they find me. I guess I would like to do something to expose what’s going on here, but I haven’t a clue how to go about that. So I hang here and watch.”
“How did you get into this mess?” Riley asked him.
“Did either of you know Yvette Jaworski?”
Emerson and Riley shook their heads no.
“You wouldn’t have liked her,” Günter said. “No one did. She was not a likable person. She was disagreeable, negative, argumentative, opinionated, and belligerent. And I don’t say this just because she was a strong woman. If she’d been a man, people still would have called her a jerk.
“But there was something about her that touched me. Maybe it was that despite how intensely unpleasant Yvette was, all she really wanted was to be liked. To have friends. She just didn’t know how to go about it.
“So when she came back from Munich with a wild story about the gold trade being compromised, people didn’t pay attention, not only because the tale was wild and unbelievable, but because no one wanted to listen to anything Yvette Jaworski said.
“I was assigned by my brother to deal with her. He always gave me the bad jobs. It was his way of reminding me that I was lower on the totem pole than he was. What he didn’t understand was that I didn’t want to be higher on the totem pole. I didn’t want to be on the totem pole at all. I just wanted to make enough to live comfortably. And collect gold.
“I loved gold. Not money. Gold. I loved its history and its luster and its pure chemical makeup. I loved the stories of buried treasure, real or imagined. ‘The Gold-Bug’ by Poe. Treasure Island by Stevenson. The Sign of Four by Conan Doyle. And the real ones. The money pit in Oak Island. The Beale ciphers in Virginia. Mosby’s treasure. I never thought of finding them. I just loved that they were out there, so tantalizingly close and yet so far.
“And Yvette, she was a goldbug like me. So when I went to talk to her, we at least had that in common. We could trade stories of treasures and treasure hunting. In fact, she once gave me a replica of the gold bug from the story. It was quite beautiful. You should see it.”
“We have,” said Emerson.
“You’ve been to my home?”
“Yes.”
“How was my wife?”
“Coping. She’s thinking about selling the house.”
“Is she?” Günter was silent for a beat. “Is my boat still there?”
“It was at the dock when we visited last week,” Emerson said.
“That’s good,” Günter said. “I love that boat.”
“What was Yvette’s wild story?” Riley asked.
“Oh. Yes. It was the Germans that started it. When they began to talk about repatriating their gold.”
“Why did they want to do that?”
Günter shrugged. “It was their gold, and I guess they just wanted to see it.”
“Precisely,” Emerson said. “One should be able to see one’s gold.”
“In fact, a lot of nations have started talking about getting their gold back,” Günter said. “Switzerland. The Netherlands. Venezuela moved its gold to Brazil. Think of it. Venezuela thought Brazil was a safer place to store their gold than America.
“Maybe that was what started it. Plan 79. That crazy idea my brothers had. Maybe it started way before that.” Günter removed a gold coin from his pocket and showed it to Emerson and Riley. “My brothers have been minting these for years. From the stolen gold.”
Riley took it from Günter and held it in her hand. “Why coins? Isn’t it easier just to keep the gold in bars?” She handed the coin to Emerson.
Emerson examined the coin closely. “You can’t very well go to the grocery store and pay for a loaf of bread with a thirty-pound gold bar. The coins are meant to be used as currency.”
“Why does it have an image of Lord Voldemort dressed up like Julius Caesar on it?” Riley asked.
Günter looked a little embarrassed. “It’s difficult to see in the dark but my father’s face is engraved on this coin.”
“And,” Emerson continued, “Caesar was the first of the Roman emperors. The man responsible for ending five hundred years of democracy in the Roman civilization.”
Günter nodded. “I guess. My father never had much respect for democracy. Always said it was nothing more than mob rule. Anyway, I just discovered the coins by accident. My brothers never bothered to tell me about them or what they were intended for. It kind of hurt. They’ve excluded me from the family for my entire life.”
Emerson returned the coin to Günter. “Well, every form of currency needs a name. All the good ones, like Drachmas and Dinars are already taken so let’s call them Grunwalds.”
Günter looked appalled. “That sounds ridiculous. It makes them sound like some sort of funny money you’d get at Disney World to pay for souveneirs.”
“Well, your brothers should have thought of that before they put a picture of Lord Voldemort on the coins,” Emerson said. “Really, they have nobody to blame but themselves.”
“So, you began stealing coins?” Riley asked Günter.
“Yeah. They were kept in a vault in the D.C. office. I took just a couple at first. When no one said anything, I took more. I filled my briefcase with them. I guess I liked the idea of stealing from my brothers. I guess it was my way of getting back at them for all the times they’d slighted me over the years.
“I had to hide them somewhere, for safekeeping. In the beginning I put them in plaster statues of Saint Nicholas and buried them in my yard.”
“For Christmas?” Riley asked.
“Hardly,” Günter said with a sad smile. “Saint Nicholas is also the patron saint of thieves.”
“Of repentant thieves,” Emerson said.
“I guess I didn’t read the fine print.”
“Your wife said the gardener found some of them. She was in the process of exhuming one from a flower bed when we went to visit her.”
“I mostly buried them in the flower beds because it was easier digging. Not a lot of them. Maybe ten or twelve. It never occurred to me that at some point a bush would get replaced. When the first one got dug up I tried to find the others, but I was like a squirrel burying nuts. I couldn’t remember where I put the stupid things. I even went over the yard with a metal detector one night but obviously didn’t find all of them.”
“What about the rest of the gold?” Riley asked Günter.
“Underwater,” Günter said, putting the coin back in his pocket. “It was fun stealing from my brothers and hiding the…Grunwalds. It stopped being fun when two executives from Blane-Grunwald were tasked with calming the Germans down. Lawrence Tatum and Daniel Ferguson.”
“Those are the two men who committed suicide last month,” Emerson said.
Günter nodded, grim-faced. “The Germans were insisting on repatriating their gold. Not only that, but they were insisting that it not be recast. Gold has a fingerprint. By using a battery of techniques to look at the relative amounts of impurities, including platinum, palladium, lead, thallium, and bismuth, it’s possible to tell one horde of gold from another. But once it is melted down and recast, the print is erased.
“The Germans not only wanted the same amount of bullion they had deposited back in the 1950s, they wanted that precise gold.
“To the U.S., this seemed like an unreasonable demand. We dragged our feet. We returned only a paltry amount of gold. Tatum and Ferguson tried to persuade the Germans that everything was fine, that the gold would be returned to them eventually. Unfortunately for Tatum and Ferguson, they requested a visit to the Federal Reserve so they could personally assure the Germans that all was well.
“Two weeks later, they both ‘jumped’ out of the windows of office buildings, one in London, the other in Tokyo. That was when my friend Yvette got involved.
“She was in Munich, on another matter, when she heard about the suicides. She knew that the Germans were unhappy, but like everyone else, she thought Germans were always unhappy. She didn’t believe in conspiracies. Not at first. Then she began to investigate.
“By the time she came back to Washington, she was a full-fledged convert. And like any convert, she wanted to spread the word. The Federal Reserve was being looted, she said. And it may have been going on for the last twenty years.
“Everyone was used to tuning Yvette out, so nobody paid any attention. I was given instructions to listen to her calmly and shut her up. To humor her. So I did. I even went to New York, to the Fed, just to show her she was wrong.
“Sadly, she was right. She was right about everything. The gold was being stolen and replaced by tungsten bars. On a massive scale. I found out about Plan 79.”
“Why ‘79’?” Riley asked.
“The nucleus of the gold atom has seventy-nine protons and seventy-nine neutrons. It must have seemed like a good code name for the operation. A plot by a cadre of nefarious central bankers working with the Federal Reserve, hoping to corner the gold market and control the world’s finances.
“I rushed back to Washington to tell my brothers what I’d discovered. I even brought fake gold bars with me, as evidence. I thought they’d be shocked. I thought I’d have a hard time convincing them of the truth. Instead, they listened very calmly. And then they congratulated me on figuring it out. Werner laughed. Hans said it took me long enough. And Manny just patted me on the head.
“Then I told them I knew about the coins. That got their attention. And I told them that I’d stolen forty million dollars’ worth. They really sat up and took notice then. Six hundred thousand, my ass!”
“What did they say when you told them?” Emerson asked.
“What could they say? I had the gold. I either kept quiet or talked. And if I tried to talk, I knew they’d shut me up. Permanently. But I didn’t need to tell anyone. I knew the secret. I was like the hero of ‘The Gold-Bug,’ who’d figured out the key to the treasure. It was a glorious feeling. That was enough for me.”
“So what went wrong?” Riley asked.
“Yvette went wrong. She couldn’t let it go. I told her to walk away, but she wouldn’t listen. We both knew where they were sending the gold. They were sending it to a place where no one could look for it. Where secrecy was paramount. Where the crazies had built up another myth entirely. Groom Lake. Area 51. When Yvette suddenly disappeared, I knew she’d gone to Groom Lake to snoop around, so I went after her.”
“Why?” Riley asked.
“Another good question without a good answer. I was afraid she’d screw everything up. I was afraid she’d find the gold and blow the whistle on all of us and finally someone would believe her. It wasn’t like I was innocent in all this. I had millions in bootlegged gold coins hidden away. Anyway, I thought I might be able to find her in time and persuade her to abandon the hunt.”
“And?”
“I found her but it was too late. At least it was too late for her.” He looked over at the salt flat. “There’s a whole network of caves underneath the salt flats. People think extraterrestrial spaceships and alien bodies are hidden down there. I wish they were right.”
“You’ve been in there?” Emerson asked.
“Yes. It’s incredible. There’s more gold than you can possibly imagine. God, I’m sick of the stuff.”
“But no alien corpses,” Riley said.
“No. Just Yvette’s. With her head smashed in. When I saw her I couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. It had just happened. And I was almost next. Rollo was there with his scalpel. He came after me and I panicked. I grabbed a gold bar and threw it at him and caught him on the side of his head. I don’t know how I managed to hit him. I was so scared, my vision was blurred. He staggered back and I hit him with another bar. Square in the forehead. Right between his eyes. I turned and ran and I’ve been running ever since.”
“This place is a fortress,” Riley said. “How did you and Yvette get in?”
“She told me she had an access pass. I think it was bogus but it got her in.”
“And you?”
“I’d done some research online. I’d studied satellite photos of the area and I’d eavesdropped on Werner and heard him talking about tunnels. I knew about the mining operation. Lead and silver were discovered in the southern part of the Groom Range in 1864. There are still entrances into those tunnels. I made a good guess based on my eavesdropping and chose the tunnel that led me to the gold. It turns out that security is high aboveground but lacking below. Some of the tunnels are randomly patrolled, and some not at all. There are cameras in the area close to the gold stash but they look rusted out. I’m not sure they’re maintained. Although Rollo did know Yvette was in the gold vault. And he also knew I was there. So some of the security cameras must be functioning.”