Nothing Ventured

by Roderick Price

  “Yes. Well, I work in the research department. How can I help you?”

  “The Civilian Conservation Corp ran a series of seismic tests in the 1930s across a number of the states. I’m with the DOE and we are trying to determine how many states still have those tapes in storage. Could you research that for me?”

  “What kind of seismic tapes?”

  “Not really sure,” said Martin, trying to sound every bit like a Washington clerk, “but it sounds like they are the kind that show if there is oil underground.”

  “So, what are you calling about?”

  “Well,” said Martin. “Just wondering if you have the tapes or not.”

  “Why? What does the DOE care?” said the research analyst.

  “Apparently one of the states, I believe it was West Virginia, stumbled on to them in the basement of one of their state office buildings. They analyzed them. Now they think they might have some big oil fields in their state. Think they’re the Beverly Hillbillies or something. I just need to know if you have the tapes, okay?”

  “Okay, okay. Do you know what year the tapes were made?”

  “Let’s see, on my list here, it shows the Wisconsin tapes were probably made in 1931 or 1932. I have reference numbers on them too, you know, the federal file numbers, but some states don’t use the fed numbers; they use their own.”

  “We use our own numbers here, but we can cross reference to alternate index numbers as well. What are they?”

  Martin had the sequence numbers right in front of him. He slowly read off the labels for the seven canisters. Even as he read, he could hear the clacking of the computer keyboard on the other end of the phone. Almost as soon as he had finished reading off the numbers the guy replied.

  “Got’em. Well I don’t actually have them, but I see them referenced and catalogued here and I assume they are in storage somewhere. Looks like they are in the basement archives. What do you want me to do with them?”

  “Nothing right now,” said Martin. “Right now, we’re just doing an inventory and once we get organized, the Department of Energy might want to bring them to Washington for analysis. We’d have our geophysicists look at them to see if there might be oil underground in Wisconsin. They’re doing some study on energy supply but I’m sure it’ll be months before they get around to doing anything.”

  “Do you want me to verify that they’re in our possession and give you a call back?”

  “Well for now I’m going to mark you off as “in possession” and we’ll worry about that later. Half of the states I’ve called have thrown them out or lost them. Even if yours don’t actually show up later, it’s no big deal. It’s not like Wisconsin is sitting on top of an Arab oil field or something. Course that’s what West Virginia thought, too,” Martin feigned a laugh. “Now they think the state lands have fifty billion dollars’ worth of oil on them.”

  “Jesus,” said the research analyst. “Okay, well give me a call back if you need something.”

  “Oh yes, I’m not sure I got your name or extension,” said Martin smiling. The kid was so helpful. Martin listened patiently as the guy recited the spelling of his name and phone number. When he was done, Martin said okay, he had gotten it down, and repeated the last four digits of the extension again. He thanked the kid for being so helpful and said he’d call again if he needed something. The kid never even asked Martin his name or follow up phone number. It was all pretty easy.

  Walking later to the door of his apartment, Martin found the golf bag package leaning against his apartment door. Martin unlocked the door, dragged the bag with the original Wisconsin tapes into his apartment and pulled a cold beer out of the refrigerator. He flipped on ESPN and called Taylor.

  “Well,” he said to Taylor, “I think things are shaping up. Hilton will probably get the digital print-outs today from Anita and I just called your boy and gave him the tape sequence numbers and some story about West Virginia thinking they got billions in oil underground.”

  “Okay, well the tapes have been laying there for a few days now and I haven’t heard or seen anything yet.” Taylor was relaxed.

  “My guess is that after they think about it, somebody in research is going to be giving you a call, and then the fun will start. The kid was pretty good; I think things were clicking with him,” said Martin.

  “Okay we’ll see what happens,” said Taylor.

  “I’ve been thinking about us,” said Martin.

  “What have you been thinking?”

  “Good stuff, well maybe bad stuff,” said Martin laughing. ESPN had an NBA highlight film running. “Sometimes the bad stuff is the good stuff.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you too. Definitely the bad stuff,” said Taylor.

  “All right, I don’t think we should talk long. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

  “Okay baby, love you.”

  “Love you.”

  The very next morning Taylor had been sitting in her office reading the transcripts on the Wisconsin Power nuclear case, over in Genoa. They wanted to expand the nuclear generator. Her secretary came in and said the head of research needed to see her urgently. Taylor had a relatively light day scheduled in the office, but she asked her secretary to schedule it for after lunch. She didn’t want to do anything to show her hand. She was wondering how many of them from the research department would show up. When she got back from lunch it was just two of them, the bright kid she had given Martin’s number to and the head of the DNR research group. She was definitely getting older, she thought to herself. The “kid” was probably twenty-eight. She walked up and exchanged greetings. She knew from her library days that research was long, tedious and thankless, but usually meant the difference between winning and losing in the courtroom. They rose up out of their chairs to follow her into the office. The kid bent over and picked up seven gray tape canisters off the floor that were lying at his feet.

  “May I close your door, Ms. Thompson?” said the department head respectfully. He had to be nearing sixty. Taylor recognized the suit, a cheap, light brown polyester. She eyed the stitching around the lapel. She was pretty sure her father had exactly the same one. The right stem of his heavy black plastic eyeglasses had been bent or broken and he had done an excellent job of taping it with black shiny electrical tape, the kind she kept around in the kitchen drawer for minor emergencies. It was a great patch job, but Taylor had been at the department now ten years, and as far back as she could remember, she would occasionally be in a meeting with this guy and he had always sported these broken frames.

  “Sure, feel free to close the door.” As they settled down into the old leather chairs in her office, the kid placed the tapes down at his feet and she motioned for the two of them to sit. “So, are we going to watch movies here or what?” Taylor said jokingly looking at the stack of tape canisters. Neither of them showed much of a sense of humor. The old man started right in.

  “Alan here, got a call yesterday from somebody in Washington. DOE, he thinks. Fairly routine call, a guy just checking to see if we had some records that had been turned over by the feds back in the thirties. As you can imagine, we get calls like this all the time. Usually they relate specifically to some piece of federal land, a lot of times for a federal road project, or FAA airport, or some other such federal project. This call was a little different and I want Alan to tell you about it.”

  “The entire call was probably only a minute long. A guy from DOE was just checking to see if we had some tapes. I did a quick look up and of course we had them. Well, I wasn’t sure we had them, but I looked them up on Filex when I was talking to him and told him we had them catalogued.”

  “Okay, what’s on the tapes?” said Taylor impatiently.

  “Geological information. Underground seismic information from the 1930s,” said the kid.

  “Where in heaven’s name did that come from?”

  “I haven’t been able to verify the source for sure, but the guy sa
id that during the thirties a CCC work project made seismic tapes across a number of states.”

  “Why?”

  “Probably just a public works project during the depression, who knows? But the guy said that the Department of Energy is planning to do a study on energy supplies and one of the areas they wanted to look at was domestic oil supplies, so he was wondering if we had our tapes.”

  “So, the tapes would show if we had oil underground?” said Taylor. “Gentlemen the last time I checked, I live in Wisconsin, not Texas where they actually do have oil.” Taylor was smiling.

  “I know what you mean, but he also said that one of the other states, West Virginia, looked at their tapes and they think they might have found a big oil discovery that they didn’t know about. By the way, I did some quick research. Not all of the oil is in Texas and Oklahoma. The Rockefellers didn’t make their money from oil in Texas or Oklahoma or Louisiana—they made it from oil in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and even New York state. Standard Oil was incorporated in New Jersey. And it’s not just the East Coast, either. Illinois had four million barrels of oil production last year. Michigan, more than that.”

  It seemed they were getting Taylor’s attention. “Who owns the tapes?” asked Taylor.

  “Well,” said the old man, “the law is not really clear on that. Officially, the Feds probably owns them, usually the agency that paid for the research. But when they shut down the CCC, they turned the tapes over to us. They’re seventy years old, for goodness sake.”

  “Who called us?”

  “Stupid me, I didn’t even get the guy’s name or phone number. I get a dozen routine inquiries a day and if I can answer the question over the phone, I don’t even log the call. The guy was either from the DOE or the USGS, I’m not even sure which.”

  “And he wanted the tapes?” asked Taylor.

  “Actually no. He said he was just doing pre-op work on a planning study and wasn’t sure he’d need them.”

  “The tapes are probably just garbage anyway,” said Taylor flatly. This was going exactly according to the plan that she and Martin had put together.

  The department head spoke up, “Well, after we did some digging yesterday, we found the tapes in the basement of the capitol. Alan asked if he could take one down to engineering or geology over at the university and have somebody take a look at it.”

  Alan interrupted. He was excited. “The tape’s in perfect condition. They’ve been sitting in the basement right here in the capitol at sixty-six degrees and they’re not brittle or anything. And this is the good part. After the engineering guy got the tape working, it’s some weird old format that nobody uses anymore. But he called one of the professors over in the geology department and they sent a post-doc over to look at the print outs. The guy wants more time, and I promised to say that everything was off the record, but he took one look at the plots that had been printed and said they showed very, very large deposits of oil on them.”

  “How large is very, very large?”

  “The guy wouldn’t say. And I only had one of the tapes with me anyway. That’s not the best news either.”

  “Go on.”

  “The oil’s under state land.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s only one tape, right? But the post-doc said some of the deepest deposits were under the Chequamegon State Forest. The state owns it if it’s in the State Forest. The oil in Illinois and even Michigan is mostly under private land, so all the state gets is an excise tax, kind of like a sales tax, when the oil’s sold. But as I said, if the oil’s under state land, we own it—the state owns it—and we can do whatever we want with it.”

  Taylor remained calm, “Well, if it’s in the middle of a state forest, I’m not sure we’d to do any oil drilling there.” Now she leaned back slowly, folded her hands and rested her chin thoughtfully on her hands. She continued. “This could be huge. At the same time, I believe we should treat this very cautiously until we know more. I need to brief the governor. You guys keep a lid on this and I’ll see if he’s around today and I’ll give you a call. And for God’s sake, take good care of those tapes.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Anita had sent the courier over to Hilton with the latest file she had lifted from Martin. Hilton looked over the file, some of the same maps, but this time with all of the detailed data. Sure enough, it was northern Wisconsin. And it wasn’t timber, like Martin had suggested. Now Hilton was sure. It was oil. Huge oil. Martin had tried to throw Hilton and Larry off the track by talking about some crazy timber idea. Now Hilton just needed to put some major heat on Martin to get him to back out of the deal. That probably wouldn’t be too hard if Hilton used the right kind of persuasion. Larry usually did this kind of work for Hilton, but he was in Wisconsin. Hilton hadn’t heard from Larry in a few days either. Larry had left a message the other day and said his cellular phone didn’t work once he got thirty miles from Superior. His cabin didn’t have a phone, either.

  These maps were fantastic. The oil was in large, deep reservoirs. Some of the fattest damn pay sand Hilton had ever seen. In Wisconsin. Who would have guessed? He put the seismic shots up against the spreadsheet; a billion barrels of oil. An elephant. Only one or two of these came along in the oil industry every decade or so. The last one had been in Irian Jaya, somewhere down in Indonesia. Usually people only found these after spending hundreds of millions looking for them in West Africa, or the Arctic, or some other godforsaken place. This was not exactly like the small stuff he had drilled up in the old Austin Chalk. As good as anything he had seen in the deep waters of the Gulf Coast, and this was on dry land; drilling would be inexpensive. In Wisconsin, of all places. Seemed like Martin had mentioned he was from Wisconsin. He must have been poking around on his own looking at geology studies, and somehow stumbled onto this stuff in Wisconsin.

  If Hilton was going to put pressure on Martin, he needed to do it fast. When word of this leaked out, nobody would be leasing anything anymore. The major oil companies would swoop in on top of Martin and lock Hilton, and everyone else, out of the play. Hilton needed to get some cash, too. It was going to take money. Money and force. The carrot and the stick he used to tell his guys. If he just used force, Martin might just go to someone else, but if he used money and force, Martin would cave in and hand things over without being a problem. Once Martin got the picture he would come around. Hilton had seen it a million times. For ten or twenty thousand he could get someone to put a gun to Martin’s head, but that would complicate things and add a couple more people to the equation. With Larry out, and with the size of this opportunity, Hilton couldn’t trust it to someone else. He needed more than fifty thousand for this. Hilton thought maybe three hundred thousand would do it. He settled on a half million. He didn’t have that kind of money lying around. Truth of the matter was that other than the equity in his house, he could scrape together maybe two hundred thousand. For the last two or three years he had been spending twice as much as he had made. And he had been losing money on his secret trading with Gannon. Hilton had run his net worth down to almost nothing. Gannon owed him a few favors. Gannon needed to get him some money.

  After spending half of his day dealing with Gannon, Hilton parked his Mercedes down in the common area designated for visitors and then walked across the pool area to Building K. Like most of the big apartment complexes built in Houston back in the seventies, Memorial Creole was huge and spread out. In Manhattan they build up, in Houston, with its cheap land, they build out. Sometimes the buildings were named after trees or flowers, but usually they were just letters shown plainly on signs by the side of each building. Memorial Creole was no exception. Pretty nice place, it was one of the nicer in the area. Word got out that a lot of well-to-do men were living at The Creole during or after a divorce. After that, it wasn’t long before the women started moving in, too. From time to time, Hilton had ended up back here at their place with them, before, during and after his marriages. Nice guard house, too. Very se
cure. But in a late model Mercedes in Houston you could drive right through security. A nod or a casual wave to almost any of the security guards and the gate went up. The turnover was ridiculous at these security jobs, and no new security guard wanted to stop someone who might have been living in the place for five years. That could cause a complaint to the resident manager. This guard was a young one, too. Hilton hadn’t even bothered to roll down the window as he went by.

  Hilton took the shiny new key and slipped it into the lock. Without even jiggling it, the door opened. Anita had whined a little bit when he told her he needed an imprint of Martin’s apartment key. But when he had asked nicely and told her he just needed to sneak in and look around to see if he could find out more on the Chequamegon maps, she finally agreed. She took the clay ball that Hilton had wrapped up carefully with a piece of saran wrap and headed down the hall toward Martin’s office. Lots of times Martin would leave his keys hanging in a desk drawer or just lying out on his desk the entire day. She had encouraged the guys to ask Martin out to lunch to get him to loosen up a little. Then it was a simple matter to stop by his office with a stack of mail and make a quick imprint of the key. There were a couple of car keys and a few smaller keys on the chain, but only two that looked like they could be apartment keys. She made an imprint of one of the keys on the front of the clay pad and the second key on the back and handed it off to Hilton that afternoon. An hour later, Hilton had two nice, new, shiny keys. He was sure one of them would open Martin’s apartment. He was right.

  Hilton opened the door slowly and listened for a moment, calling Martin’s name. He had called Anita on his car phone to confirm that Martin was still at work, but there could be a guest, a repairman, a cleaning person; who knows. When he got no answer, he entered and softly closed the door behind him, being sure to turn the deadbolt behind him. He set the briefcase up on the kitchen table and ducked down the hall to glance in the bathroom, two bedrooms and back to the living room. He got a feel for the layout. Nobody else was around. There wasn’t a garage, but there was covered parking out the sliding door by the breakfast room. Hilton moved the briefcase over to the coffee table where it was out of line of sight from the breakfast area. Then he opened it. He took the handgun in his right hand and laid it gently on the table. He took a few moments with his left hand to straighten the neat stacks of money lining the briefcase. If Martin was smart, he was about to come into a lot of money. Hilton closed the case back up and sat it under the coffee table.