“Who’s behind this, Seth?”
“That’s like asking how original sin got started. I did two tours in Vietnam. I believed in what we were doing there. Then I spent the next thirty-five years picking snakes out of my head. My dad had a great expression. He’d say, ‘Son, if everybody agrees on it, it’s wrong.’ ”
Seth’s eyes crinkled when he grinned.
I walked back downstream to my car. When I drove back out of the main dirt road, Seth’s Jeep was gone. For a moment I thought I saw a flash of light on metal or a pair of binoculars across the river. I stopped my car and stared at the trees on the opposite bank until my eyes burned, then told myself the sunlight was simply dancing on the early morning wetness of the trees and that my eyes and mind were playing tricks on me.
TEMPLE CALLED ME at the office later in the day. “Karsten Mabus is the CEO of the parent company that owns Global Research,” she said. “He’s been in the biotech business for around twenty years. Owns homes in Arlington, Palm Beach, East Hampton, Santa Barbara, and a place he just built out on Highway Twelve. Has a degree in American Studies from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard. He never married, although he appears to be a ladies’ man. His estimated worth is over five hundred million.”
“How about a military record?”
“None.”
“Did he ever live in Texas?”
I heard her leafing through some papers. “He owns a company in Houston and one in Dallas,” she said.
“When he mentioned my father’s death, he said my father would be mighty proud of me.”
“Like he was home folks?” she said.
“That’s right.”
“According to a feature on him in The Washington Post, he was born in Minneapolis and grew up there and in Milwaukee. The article says his father was a hardware store owner and his mother a school-teacher. Except I couldn’t find any records on the family in either city.”
“What’s his connection to Finley?”
“A friend and campaign contributor, as far as I can see.”
“Do you have any idea what Global Research does?”
“They have lots of government contracts. Some of them have to do with genetically altered foods. Some of their other dealings are anybody’s guess. They’re a high-security outfit. It’s amazing their facility was successfully burglarized…Did you just hear something on your line?”
“Yeah, I think we’re tapped,” I said.
“Tapped?” she said.
“Tapped,” I said.
THAT SAME DAY Johnny American Horse and two of his workers were putting in a rail fence on a new dude ranch out on Highway 12, not far from the Idaho line, when a panel truck stopped in a rooster tail of dust and the driver, an unshaved man wearing aviator’s shades, slacks, and a dirty white shirt, got out and approached Johnny with a grin at the corner of his mouth. “Got some sportsman’s hardware to sell before I move out to California,” he said.
“Like what?” Johnny said.
The driver threw open the back door of the truck, exposing at least a dozen shotguns and rifles that were laid out
on a blanket. “I’ll sell them individual or the whole bunch. Dirt cheap, brother. I’ll take pretty near any offer,” he said.
Johnny shook his head and went back to setting a post in a hole and packing crushed rock around it.
“How about you fellows?” the man asked the two white boys working with Johnny.
“Johnny doesn’t pay us that kind of money,” one of them replied.
The boys laughed. The driver of the panel truck picked up an AR-15 that was wrapped in an oilcloth, released the magazine, and pulled back the bolt to show the gun was empty. Instead, a shell ejected from the chamber. “Damn, my nephew left a round in there,” he said.
Johnny picked the shell out of the dirt and threw it inside the truck. The man held out the rifle for Johnny to examine it. “Three hundred dollars,” he said.
“It’s worth six, easy,” Johnny said.