Rick picked up the conversation again, and I marveled. It was like we had rehearsed exactly how to do this. “So,” he said, “you have about nine million Euros in the bank?”
“Give or take a few hundred thousand,” Niklas agreed.
“And how much cash and stock in Von Dietz Global do you own between you?”
Gisela was seething. “What has this got to do with our deal? This is none of your business.”
Niklas stood by her on this one. “From the beginning, we all agreed—including my grandmother—that we would not touch a penny of our Von Dietz holdings for these actions. It would put the whole company at risk, which has been in our family for generations.”
“Fine. We are just trying to assess how much value our deal holds for you. If your assets are about nine million, then we ask this question. How would you like to triple that amount?”
Niklas’s head snapped up so fast it made him wince. Pain flickered across his face. Gisela didn’t react at all. She turned to her son. “They’re talking about the gold.”
“Yes, we are,” I said. “Forty-two bars, or about thirty million dollars’ worth.” That wasn’t precisely true—Clay had brought up two of the bars, but what the hay? What were a couple of bars of gold between business partners?
Rick again. “And this comes to you tax free, with virtually no risk to you, with very little out-of-pocket cost to obtain it, and with no chance that it can ever be traced back to you.”
“Assuming it is yours to offer, which is highly unlikely, why would you give it to us?” Niklas asked. But the hunger in his eyes was unmistakable.
“Because to get it, you have to agree that these funds will never be used to harm us or retaliate against my family or any of the families that you have been persecuting.”
“She’s lying,” Gisela said. “They would never give it up. Especially after losing twenty million dollars’ worth of rhodium.”
I knew this was going to be the hardest part of our pitch, so I was ready. “My family is worth more to me than ten tons of gold. I know you find this hard to believe, but we have a good life in little old Hanksville. We don’t need castles and bank accounts and servants running around calling us Lady Gisela or Jolly Old St. Niklas to be happy.”
There was a quick flash of anger on Niklas’s face, but I hurried on. “If giving you the gold frees my family and gets you out of our lives once and for all, then it is worth every dime of it.”
“But it’s not yours to give. The FBI has already recovered it.”
“That’s right,” Niklas said. “Once we learned about the gold from El Cobra, we were going to go after it. So I hired a man to scope out the approximate site. He reported that a few days after your escape, an FBI dive team came in and recovered it.”
“They brought up two bars,” I answered. “That’s all. The rest of it is still down there, buried in mud and silt, in about fifty feet of water.”
“No way they would leave that down there,” Niklas said, shaking his head. “No way.”
“You’re wrong, and here’s why. It makes them very nervous to have thirty million dollars in gold bars sitting around in an evidence locker. Since the gold was generated by the pouch, my family is technically the legal owner of it. Once the case is closed, if no other legitimate owners have come forth, then it all reverts to us.”
Rick and I both stopped talking, watching their faces as they looked at each other and digested what we had told them.
Gisela spoke first. “And you’re telling us that the FBI is not guarding it right now? That you’re not leading us into a trap?”
“If you mean, do they actually have live bodies on site watching it, no. No one except two senior members of the FBI, my family, Rick, El Cobra, and Eileen even know where it sank. Even my journal doesn’t tell you that.”
Mother and son exchanged quick glances. “She wrote about it,” Gisela explained, “but she didn’t say exactly where it happened.”
I went on, deciding that nothing short of the truth was going to satisfy them. “The FBI set up a hidden, solar-powered video camera in the rocks on the nearest shoreline. The camera is activated by any motion that comes into its field of view. The video feed is then transmitted to the regional office in Salt Lake City.”
“And how long would it take them to get a team on site?”
“Between two and three hours by chopper. But you are a couple of smart people. I assume you’ll find a way to work around that.”
“Do you know where the camera is?”
“Not precisely, but I have a general idea. I don’t think it would be hard to find.”
“Will the lake be frozen over by now?” Niklas asked.
This was good. These two steel-trap minds were obviously taking us seriously.
“No,” Rick said. “Lake Powell is far enough south that only a tiny portion of the northernmost inlets ever freeze. The main lake never does.”
“In October,” I added, “daytime temperatures are often in the seventies, and at night it’s around fifty. You can check that online.”
“And what guarantee do you offer that this is not a very clever trap?” Niklas asked. He might have a headache, but his brain was working just fine.
“It’s very simple,” I said. I looked at Rick, and he nodded. “You take the two of us as hostages. When you recover the gold, leave us behind on the lake. At that time of year, it could take a day or two before someone finds us. By then you’ll be out of the country.”
They looked at each other. Something unspoken passed between them; then Niklas nodded. “We want one other guarantee.”
“What?”
“Your grandfather will be our third hostage.”
I hadn’t seen that one coming, though I suppose I should have. “I don’t know where he is,” I stammered.
“Oh,” Gisela said with a grim smile, “I think he’s not far away.”
Rick stood up. “Agreed. If we can find him. But for that, Danni’s family will be left here unharmed. The FBI and Interpol will be asked to stay back until dawn this morning, by which time you will be long gone. And we will neither see nor hear anything from you two ever again. Is that your understanding?”
Mother and son exchanged more glances, then both nodded. Niklas turned and looked up at Raul. “Tell the others. Leave the family locked in their room, but no one—and I mean no one—even goes close to them. We will leave here in three hours. In the meantime, you will handcuff Danni and Rick to their chairs here and keep them under guard until we come back for them.”
Raul nodded curtly. “And what about the old man?”
The same side door of the library opened, and Grandpère stepped in. “The old man is right here,” he said, baring his wrists as he came forward.
Gisela eyed him with loathing. “Get him something to wear, Niklas,” she muttered. “We can’t be taking him through airports like that.”
CHAPTER 40
Slick Rock Canyon, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, San Juan County, Utah
October 27, 2011
The four of us sat on deck chairs on the stern of the houseboat and watched the two approaching watercraft. Grandpère, Rick, and I sat in the shade of the awning. Niklas preferred the afternoon sunshine. Since Europeans rarely saw it in October, I wasn’t surprised. Another guard stood like a stone Buddha, his eyes never leaving us.
The fishing boat and the Jet Ski cut their engines to idle and came gliding in toward the beach. Raul was driving the boat and had Jean-Claude and two other guards with him. They had all the paraphernalia of a group of fishermen but were in actuality the diving team. Gisela, wearing a black wet suit, was on the Jet Ski. Her function was to go out into the main channel, well out of the field of view of the camera, and watch for any possible interruption.
Niklas got to his feet with ease. Though it had been only a few day
s since he was hit with the chandelier, he showed no residual effects. I could still see the glaring white spot on the back of his head where Dr. Bauer had shaved it for the stitches, but that was all. Alvin, who always remained on the boat with us, quickly moved along with Niklas, as he always did.
Of the four other guards who accompanied us, Alvin had the look of being the most professional of the lot, which explained why he was assigned to stay behind and make sure we didn’t try anything. He never let us out of his sight. Even when we went inside to go to the bathroom, he followed us in and took up station just outside the bathroom door. I had nicknamed him Alvin because he always wore a red baseball cap tipped way back on his head, like Alvin the chipmunk, and had a round face with puffy cheeks.
Grandpère, Rick, and I didn’t get up from our chairs as the boat and Jet Ski gently nosed onto shore. As I watched Gisela dismount and come toward us, I marveled yet again at this seventy-one-year-old-woman. In the sleekness of the neoprene suit, her body was slim enough to cause women forty and fifty years her junior to turn green with envy. Her energy was inexhaustible, and her excitement about their diving expedition was unabashed. Though she still wore oversized sunglasses to hide the ugly bruises around her eyes, the swelling of the battered nose was now all but gone and her natural beauty was almost back to normal. To my pleasant surprise, although I ended up with a noticeable bruise on my forehead from smacking her in the face with my head, my eyes never went black and blue.
“Is that the last of it, Mama?” Niklas called out.
“Not quite. We’ve got six more bars located, but that still leaves us five short of the forty-two. But one more trip will do it.”
Getting up, I walked over to join Niklas at the railing. I leaned on the rail, looking down at her. “Not forty-two,” I called to Gisela. “Only forty. Remember? The FBI brought up two bars—one to give to us and one to use as evidence in the trials.”
She was instantly suspicious, but Niklas nodded. “That’s right, Mama. She did tell us that.”
“What’s two gold bars among friends?” I chirped.
She didn’t think that was funny at all. “At seventeen hundred dollars an ounce, every bar is worth nearly three quarters of a million dollars, so it is not some silly joke.”
To an outside observer, exchanges such as this would have quickly revealed that this was not some warm and homey family group out on holiday together. The tension between us was growing each day. But Grandpère decided to pacify her a little. “I will tell you how to find those other three bars. After Danni and I jumped out of the boat and were on the sandbar, El Cobra and Eileen took off. But by that point, the pouch was producing gold bars so fast, they were afraid the boat was going to swamp. It wasn’t, of course, not at that point, but they were in a panic. So they turned the boat around and started coming back toward us, screaming at Danni to make the pouch stop making the gold. Then they started throwing bars of gold overboard.”
“How many?” Gisela asked.
“Two for sure, maybe three. Based on your count, it looks like it was three. That took place about fifty to seventy-five yards upstream from where their boat sank.”
She was watching him through narrowed eyes. “Are you volunteering to help us find them?”
He nodded. “Anything we can do to get you on your way.”
Niklas nodded. “We’ll take him and Danni back out with us after lunch. They can show us where they are.”
Grandpère nodded. “But of course.” Then he turned to Niklas and, in a much softer voice, said, “It was greed that destroyed El Cobra. Be careful you don’t make the same mistake.”
For several seconds, their eyes locked—Niklas’s dark and angry, Grandpère’s calm, almost serene. Then Niklas relaxed. “Aren’t you forgetting something, old man?” he said. “The pouch is nothing but a pile of ashes now. You don’t scare us.” He turned and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Raul. Jean-Claude. Get this load of bars onto the houseboat. There are sandwiches and beer on the table. After you get something to eat, refuel both the boat and the Jet Ski. I want you on your way again in no more than twenty minutes. If we’re going to be out of here before dark, we need to get this done and start packing up.”
With our help, Doc and Jean-Claude found the three missing bars in less than half an hour. They had the other six bars in the boat with them in just under another hour after that, and we started back for the houseboat.
I have to admit, this mother-son team ran one slick operation. One of the reasons I had told Gisela and Niklas about the FBI camera was in hopes that they would try to neutralize it somehow and thereby alert the FBI in Salt Lake. We didn’t know if Clay was still in Europe heading up the search for us, or if he’d come back. We had no way to contact him, of course.
As it turned out, their solution to the camera problem was very simple and absolutely brilliant. First, they never went near the camera. Second, they made sure the camera saw nothing that would raise suspicion. So Niklas rented a houseboat, one Jet Ski, and one of those aluminum, flat-bottomed boats preferred by fishermen. No speedboat like El Cobra had rented. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Fishing at Lake Powell was good year round, but a lot of the more dedicated fishermen liked the off season the best. The colder waters and the elimination of thousands of watercraft racing back and forth across the surface made for some excellent fishing. So having a group of fishermen, mostly men, hanging around Slick Rock Canyon was nothing out of the ordinary, and I finally had to accept the fact that the FBI wouldn’t be coming.
An elated Niklas sensed our dismay and continually reminded us of the motto that drove everything he and Gisela did. “Plan impeccably. Strike boldly. Exit swiftly. And leave nothing to chance. Nothing!” And it had worked.
Up to this point, they hadn’t taken any of us out to the dive site with them, so I wasn’t sure exactly how they were working the actual recovery. Now we had a chance to see it for ourselves. They took me and Grandpère with them and left Rick with Niklas and Alvin. We left in the fishing boat and headed at a leisurely pace back toward the mouth of the canyon. About the time we reached the main channel, Gisela roared past us on the Jet Ski and took up her station out in the main channel to watch for any possible intruders.
Stopping well short of the sandbar—and well out of the field of view of the video camera—we anchored in the deep shade of one of the towering cliffs. The three guards got out their fishing rods and tackle while Raul and Jean-Claude quickly removed their life jackets and clothing to reveal wet suits. They donned scuba gear, grabbed their underwater metal detectors, and slipped over the side, leaving hardly a ripple in the smooth surface of the lake.
We stayed in place until they radioed that they had found what they were looking for. Then the “fishermen” moved down past the sandbar and anchored again. Out came the fishing rods and the beer. Moments later Doc and Jean-Claude came up on the side of the boat opposite the camera. The gold was handed up. When they were finished, the boat started back up the canyon far enough to be out of sight of the camera, where we waited for our two scuba divers to return.
Slick. Professional. Flawless. We were back to the houseboat with the remaining bars before two o’clock.
When we had been on the houseboat in Iceberg Canyon back in June, El Cobra had used a simple plan to escape. Disable the houseboat, destroy any ability to communicate with the outside world, then leave everyone but me and Grandpère there while he and the rest of the team disappeared. I knew that couldn’t happen this time because they had over a thousand pounds of gold to transport, and only the houseboat could do that. I really believed that they did not plan to harm us, but I was trying to work out in my mind how they would make sure they had time to get away before we could somehow sound the alarm.
Here again, it was so simple that I should have seen it sooner. By the time they got everything packed up and the last of the gold transferred to the
houseboat—about three fifteen—the sun was well past its zenith, and Doc and Jean-Claude urged the men on to greater speed. Driving a houseboat on Lake Powell at night could be downright dangerous. Especially on a moonless night like tonight. There were too many obstacles that even the powerful searchlights could miss. Doc took the three of us off the boat a short distance up the beach, where we watched them work. As they took in the mooring lines, started the twin engines, and lifted anchor, Gisela came over to us. She didn’t even give us a second glance. “Raul,” she said, “take care. Give us at least three hours; then you know what to do.”
Man, that comment made my stomach drop like a rock. But her next words helped me relax again. “They are not to be harmed. I mean it. Not unless they physically try to overpower you.”
He nodded, his face set in stone as always.
“We’ll see you in three days.” And she turned and went back to the boat. Five minutes later they were gone, leaving the fishing boat, the Jet Ski, and the four of us behind. Doc didn’t utter another a word. Rick, Grandpère, and I sat on the sand together; Doc sat with his pistol on his lap a short distance away. The sun went down about six o’clock, and the air temperature immediately started to drop. By full dark, I was grateful that I had on long pants and a jacket. Even then, I knew that by morning, we might be in danger of hypothermia. The forecast was for lows in the upper forties or low fifties.
I should mention here that once we had walked out of the villa, or wherever it was that we were—my ability to communicate with Rick through the mind had stopped completely. I wasn’t sure if this was because Gisela had destroyed the pouch or because our “tutor” was letting us find our own way. Either way, it was a bitter blow. I fiercely missed Rick’s counsel, his coaching, and his guidance. Even his occasional gentle rebuke was a loss. As the time dragged on at a snail’s pace, how I wished that we could have conversed with each other to keep up our spirits.