Chapter 16

“Well,” I said, brushing my hands together, “that was easy.” I was in Wolf’s borrowed Blazer, as we trundled down the two hundred miles or so, back to Navajo-land.

Wolf laughed. “Wait ‘til his lawyers get ahold of that hand-written contract. If their re-write comes back with under twenty-five pages, I’ll eat my hat. The hand-written contract would have been sufficient one hundred years ago, but this is 1977, and Intel is a big company with a board of directors and millions of shareholders. They have a bureaucracy that has to be appeased.”

“So, you’re saying that we DON’T have a deal?”

“Not saying that at all,” Wolf demurred. “I think Asandro is sold, and he runs Intel, at least for now. Let’s hope his skinny skunkworks can provide a working version of the 1024 chip fairly soon. Or at least making progress on it. As the Navajo Chief said at our first meeting, ‘Delivering the goods walks, bullshit is just talk.’ We have to see if THEIR ability to deliver walks.”

Flower reached over from the back seat and slapped Wolf’s shoulder. “HEY. She’s only a child, you know. Watch your language!”

“Gee ... I don’t remember the Chief saying exactly that.” I chuckled.

“You didn’t see her muscling those engineer slash chip-doctors around,” Wolf said in self-defense. “Well ... it wasn’t exactly what the Chief said in those words, but it was pretty close.”

“So,” I said, changing the topic, “do you think Clearwater can handle the site survey guy without supervision?”

“You see, my lovely wife,” Wolf threw over his shoulder, “how she deals with senior officers of the Navajo Nation?” He redirected his comments to me, “Yes, I am fairly sure he can handle the site survey. He is their financial and industry guy, and you did point to a spot on the map. That was Red’s doing, I assume.”

I knew he thought Red was the Great Spirit. I knew Red wasn’t really. “I sure didn’t know enough about anything to do it on my own. It was from a dream I had in Wild Mustang’s sweat lodge.”

“Ugh...,” he grunted in a Wild Mustang impression, “Sweat lodge dreams plenty good.” Then he lapsed into his favorite form of communication: silence.

I accommodated him.

Red?

[Here, as always.]

We don’t have any money, do we?

[About $150 dollars.]

You know any loan sharks we could borrow from? I mean, with tomorrow’s newspapers available, we could pay it back, for sure, by the next day.

[Loan sharks? I don’t think so.]

I was kidding about the loan sharks. Geez! Take a joke!

[Lexi, I am abiological. I don’t do jokes. But there may be a way to borrow some funds temporarily and without anyone finding out. Steal is a more apt description than borrow.]

Tell me more, O Great Abiological Entity.

[On certain days, Colombian banks electronically transfer a large amount of dollars to certain Swiss banks. I assume the Colombian banks are connected with drug producers. In this case, electronically means by fax. They don’t have the Internet, remember. I can flip a few bits in the fax and ‘borrow’ a few dollars. The receiving bank will acknowledge the wrong amount. The sending bank will disagree. It will go back and forth for a few hours, and soon enough it will be the next day. And we will be able to replace the money. In the meantime, it’ll be in our account.]

How much do you think we can ‘borrow?’

[Without attracting any attention? It would be a small sum. Maybe only $100,000.]

$100,000? That wouldn’t attract attention? Are you sure?

[No, not sure. The monthly transfer is about $100 million. So I calculate the chance of immediate negative attention at less than thirty percent.]

Thirty percent is way too high. Suppose we ‘borrow’ only $10,000 or even $5,000?

[Well, in reviewing the past year’s transactions, I’ve seen the Swiss bank just accept the Colombian bank’s word for a small error ... like $5,000. They just acknowledge the error and make up the difference from their own funds.]

So, no chance it’ll attract attention?

[Not if we just send the money back to the Colombians, pretending it came from Switzerland. I calculate the chance at under one percent. It is most likely both sides will pretend it’s just a ‘glitch.’]

When is the next transaction due to take place?

[They’ve done it as soon as the tenth of the month, and as late as the twelfth. They are really regular.]

That’s tomorrow! Can we set up a brokerage account that quickly?

[That is just a matter of filling in forms and getting signatures. I could do that now, if you want. I will produce your signature.]

Umm ... yeah, initial deposit is $5,000. Wait! Do you really think we can do $10,000?

[It will increase the risk only slightly. I’m sure we can do that.]

Okay. Make it $10,000. And make sure to get me tomorrow’s Wall St. Journal.

[I can do that now.]

The WSJ for March 10 appeared in my mind. I started to look through the stock listings but then I remembered: we don’t have any money, yet. Now that the Intel issue was behind me, I was ready to move on.

Red, why didn’t you tell me about this way of getting overnight money instead of that Las Vegas bet scheme?

[Because you asked me for something you could bet on. I can’t give you everything in the world that you MAY be interested in. It would be an overwhelming amount of data.]

You’re right. But now we have to wait until March 28. By the way, you ended a sentence with a preposition. That must violate the grammar rules.