‘And you would be a very wealthy man for the rest of your life,’ Mitchell pointed out, ‘as you are now. Compare that with the consequences of not complying … ’
Mitchell turned away and strode from the aircraft before Seavers could reply, leaving the man standing alone and facing either complete ruin or the loss of a family business almost half a century in the making.
In the wake of Mitchell’s departure Seavers looked at his watch and the date upon it, and made a decision. The Bilderberg meeting was due to start tomorrow and Seavers knew he had little time left to waste.
As Mitchell vanished, so Seaver’s wife and children boarded the jet. Huck got out of his seat and forced a smile onto his face. His wife, Andrea, saw through him like glass as she looked over her shoulder out of the jet’s entrance.
‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing!’ Huck boomed as he hugged his children. ‘Everything’s going to be great!’
***
VIII
Seavers Incorporated,
Kentucky
‘I guess this is what you get for a lifetime in fossil fuels.’
Lopez looked up at the glossy, immaculate headquarters building of one of the most powerful energy companies in the country and removed her sunglasses to better absorb the affluence on display.
Chrome, glass and marble dominated the foyer of the building, which was built using purposefully unnatural angles, all sloping roofs and angular outcrops of marble and glass. Ethan had imagined that an oil company or similar based in Kentucky would have wanted to blend in somewhat with the folksy nature of the state rather than construct something as ugly as the building before him now and slap it in the middle of Lexington.
‘I saw at least three limousines in the parking lot as we pulled in,’ Lopez said as they walked toward the foyer entrance.
‘We’ve seen this sort of thing before in New Mexico,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘Generally, the more money there is to be made, the more corrupt the people behind it will become.’
The foyer’s glass doors opened automatically as they approached with a soft hiss, and Ethan walked inside with Lopez to be confronted with marble floors, more glass and a single reception desk. A young woman sitting behind the desk welcomed them with a broad smile that actually looked as though she meant it.
‘Good morning, how can I help?’
Ethan affected an equivalent smile as he strode up to the desk.
‘Good morning, we’d like to speak to Huck Seavers to determine whether he was responsible for the disappearance of three hundred people from the town of Clearwater, Missouri.’
The receptionist’s studied smile slipped a little as clouds of confusion passed behind her eyes.
‘Um, our CEO is not in today and I don’t know anything about a town called Clearwater. Do you have an appointment?’
‘No, we don’t,’ Lopez admitted. ‘However, it’s important that we speak to Mr Seavers. We understand that his company was involved in a mining application close to Clearwater and that the town was involved in a legal battle to try to prevent him from beginning operations. Every single person in that town has vanished, and we need to know why.’
‘As I said, I don’t know anything about a town called Clearwater, but I’ll make contact with Mr Seavers and see if he is able to meet with you in the future.’
‘Where is Mr Seavers?’ Ethan asked.
‘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 require
d 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.
‘You said that Seavers Incorporated had somehow managed to lose three hundred million dollars,’ Lopez said to Jarvis. ‘That’s about half of the arbitrary sum that Ethan just mentioned. What if Seavers is involved with the people that are behind this, maybe providing some of the cost of paying them off in order to maintain his mining rights in the area? It’s a quid pro quo; Seavers Incorporated gets to continue making profit from fossil fuels dug from the mountains of Kentucky, while Majestic Twelve or the government or whoever else is behind this continues to keep any kind of novel energy device under wraps, thus keeping control of power generation countrywide.’
Jarvis was nodding slowly as Lopez spoke, assessing the information as the vehicle in which they drove descended off the highway and turned south for a small town just outside the city.
‘It’s not impossible,’ he admitted. ‘But in order to make people completely vanish, you would need something like the FBI’s Witness Protection Scheme in order to give them new lives, new documents, legal papers and so on. It wouldn’t be enough to simply forge them a new life – it would have to be a life that would stand up to scrutiny from local law enforcement, not to mention the fact that if these people have been paid off they suddenly possess large sums of money. The IRS would become suspicious of any such activity in the accounts of people who had been previously modest in their incomes, so that would also have to be addressed. I doubt that a small, albeit powerful cabal like Majestic Twelve would be able to organise all of this and make it happen.’
Ethan nodded.
‘It’s gotta be the FBI,’ he said. ‘They’re the only ones with sufficient expertise to make people disappear completely. The question is, how do we get paperwork from the FBI concerning a program that’s specifically designed to stop anybody from getting paperwork for it?’
‘We don’t,’ Jarvis admitted. ‘We’ll have to do it the old way. People disappear when they want to, but most of them are terrible at it. They take up old hobbies, let slip their identities in conversation, although we have to remember that the people we’re seeking have a good financial reason to stay quiet and they’re not fleeing from anything. They have a lot of money to spend, and it’s my guess that some will be more thrifty than others. We need to find out if there’s anybody in the town of Clearwater that had an unusual hobby, or was perhaps poor in their judgement of how to spend money.’
‘It’s also worth a shot that many of the people involved would not have wanted to leave Missouri,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘They could be convinced to move town, but they may not have wanted to go too far. They may have families, other dependents, people who relied upon them and whom they would not want to be separated from. The FBI might be behind this, but these people aren’t criminals or in fear of their lives from criminal gangs, so it would have been a hard push for the FBI to convince them to break full contact with their nearest and dearest. Silence is all that’s required, on what happened at Clearwater.’
Amber Ryan looked up at her. ‘Red McKenzie.’
‘Who?’
‘He’s a mechanic, spends all his time fixing up old trucks for the loggers,’ Amber explained. ‘His house looked like a junkyard, old rusting chassis on the lawn and stuff like that. He was never happy unless his head was buried under a hood, a total petrol head. He won’t change his ways much and he likely won’t have gone very far.’
Ethan closed the file.
‘It’s the only way, if McKenzie’s a weak link in the disappearances then we can maybe track him down. Why not try pulling a list of recent home purchases within fifty clicks of Clearwater and see if anything pops?’
***
IX
Winchester, Missouri
The quiet, leafy cul–de–sac that Ethan and Lopez drove into was a far cry from the cramped surroundings of Clearwater some fifty miles to the south. Large, modern homes with double garages overlooked perfectly manicured lawns, flawless asphalt roads and spotless sidewalks as Ethan pulled into the curb and switched off the engine.
‘Looks like somebody’s gone up in the world,’ Lopez observed as she climbed out of the vehicle, the sun warm on her face and the sky flecked with a handful of white clouds.
Amber climbed out behind Lopez as Ethan glanced at a photograph of a man named Red McKenzie, or Mac for short. Mac had worked in the town of Clearwater for more than thirty years as an automobile repair man, carving a trade fixing the four–wheel drives of loggers moving in and out of the town. His property in Clearwater had been in a trailer park out back of the town and fairly close to the local bar, presumably so he could stagger his way home with greater ease at night.
Ethan looked up at the five bedroom house before him, complete with double garage and what looked like a brand–new Ford Ranger parked on the drive. The garage was open, as was the hood of the Ford Ranger, and he could hear somebody tinkering with tools as they walked up the drive.
Ethan
glanced at Lopez, who understood what Ethan wanted without even so much as a gesture. Lopez walked up one side of the truck as Ethan walked up the other, Amber hanging back out of sight as they approached Mac.
It was possible that Mac was partially deaf, or more likely that he was so engrossed in tinkering beneath the hood of the Ford that he did not notice either Ethan or Lopez moving to stand either side of him. Despite the immaculate house and brand–new vehicle, Mac was dressed in an ancient pair of dungarees smeared with paint, grease and oil, and he was wearing a baseball cap of a similar vintage. His jaw was heavily forested with silvery stubble and there was a faint whiff of cigarettes and alcohol about the guy as Ethan rapped his knuckles on the Ford’s hood.
Mac McKenzie jerked upright and a pair of hazy gray eyes fixed upon Ethan in surprise.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he croaked, one hand tightly gripping a wrench.
‘Take it easy,’ Ethan said as he raised his hands. ‘We’re just here to ask you some questions.’
Mac turned and saw Lopez standing behind him, and his frosty demeanour changed instantly.
‘Well you can ask me any questions you like, honey,’ he said as a toothy yellow grin spread across his features.
‘That’s just as well, because we’ve got a lot of questions to ask,’ Lopez purred in reply. ‘How’s the new house working out?’
McKenzie peered back and forth between Ethan and Lopez, and he replied carefully.
‘Me, I’ve lived here all my life. My Pa and my grandpa both lived just down the road, you can check the census if you like.’
Ethan grinned, McKenzie’s response clearly a patter taught by whoever paid him off.
‘Yeah, we know,’ Ethan replied. ‘The census will show exactly what the people that paid you to come here want it to show, and there will be no record of you or your family ever living in a town called Clearwater.’
The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2) Page 6
