Chapter 4

A week before the next meeting of the County Board, we got home to find a voicemail from Dan, the gold dealer.

“Hey, Kevin, I know your schedule fluctuates, but I have some remodel work and wondered if you might be interested in doing it. The amount is only half of the work you did for me last time, but if you’re interested, give me a call.”

Using the portal, I exited in a corner of a nearby parking garage that I knew wasn’t covered by video cameras and walked into the building to see Dan. He was surprised to see me, thinking I’d brought gold without calling ahead. Instead, I explained that I had the gold, but much of it was in the form of old coins from the wrecks of Spanish Galleons. He was surprised, knowing the coins could be sold at a premium until I gave him an idea of just how many coins I had. We ended up agreeing that I would bring a thousand pounds of gold and three thousand pounds of silver. Both the gold and silver markets had just begun rising quickly now after a couple of years of a slow, but steady increase. In the last month, gold had jumped to around $3,500 an ounce. I could tell that he wanted to ask me about the gold, but was probably worried about upsetting me.

The next day we drove into Atlanta, once again armed to the teeth. In the back of the pickup and the trailer we towed were four thousand pounds of gold and silver, about half in ingots and the remainder in coins. With the weight of three passengers, a tank of gas, and the weapons, I could tell that we were heavily loaded.

Dan was excited when he saw so many cloth bags and watched as the guards loaded ten different carts with bags before we took the freight elevator. It still took eight trips in the freight elevator to avoid overloading it. The assay was much faster this time since the coins were all very similar in content. The gold coins assayed at 92 percent and the silver at 91.7 percent. The estimated value was nearly sixty million, most of that from the gold, although silver prices were creeping up at a faster rate than gold.

Being cheaper per ounce, silver was easier for people to buy, so more silver was being purchased, sending the price up a little faster than gold. In addition, silver was used in many electronic components and wasn’t recycled efficiently. While gold was also used, far more silver was lost to our landfills. I didn’t care anymore. I had more than enough of both, and a ready source for more. Once again, he sent the notification to the government, including half of what we earned to offset any taxes due this year. Then he shredded and burned the paperwork.

While we waited for our building permits to be approved, we raided two more Spanish ships. These were ships whose wreckage and cargo have never been found. One had been scuttled, blown up by the Spanish crew rather than allow it to fall into English hands. It was supposed to be carrying ten million Pesos at the time. By the time the ship was blown up by the crew, we had unloaded almost twenty million Pesos. Evidently, smuggling was rampant in the era with merchants smuggling valuables to avoid the 25% tax. A rough estimate of what we got from the ship was nineteen tons of gold and just over three hundred fifty tons of silver, as well as five hundred pounds of emeralds. That was in addition to all the other valuable cargo. No wonder we were exhausted!

Once recovered from that ordeal, our next target was a Manila galleon that sank in a sudden storm. We had plenty of time to do a thorough job before the ship sank and ended up with the entire garage and the basement of the house filled with pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, mace, cardamom, tamarind, camphor, myrrh, lac, indigo, dyewood, ivory, ebony, porcelain, lacquerware, and of course, silk, diamonds, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, and pearls.

Knowing that I intended to sell the cargo in ancient times, I even took as much of the wine as I could at the last minute.

This time I went to Amsterdam, probably the largest and wealthiest trading city in Europe back then. Finding someone who spoke English took no time at all and I was surprised to learn that taxes were practically non-existent. I was also surprised at how many ships were in port. The good news was that people wondering which ship delivered my goods would be a minor issue. The bad news was the lack of available warehouse space.

Copying what I did in London, I found a farm along a canal willing to sell me land where I could build a large warehouse right on the canal. The builders were surprised at the size of the warehouse I wanted but were happy to have the work.

A month later, we started filling the just-completed warehouse. This time, we organized things a bit better, and sorted like items together, stacking barrels neatly. The jewels were sold separately from the rest of the goods. I sold the jewels in both Medieval Amsterdam and London, as well as in foreign markets in the present. I had one distinct advantage over the other merchants who sold Portuguese goods from the Orient in Medieval Amsterdam. While I accepted silver, I also accepted gold.

The Portuguese merchants needed silver to take back to buy their next cargo since silver was the only currency accepted in the Orient. European goods sold poorly in the Orient, and they didn’t want gold for some reason. Amsterdam merchants had to buy silver from German silver markets to pay for the goods they bought from the Orient, adding to their overall cost. I had planned to take anything that didn’t sell quickly in Amsterdam to London to sell, but there was nothing left after three days.

Our next project was a fleet that sank in 1504. We only had four days to search each ship for the valuables aboard. While the ships were still in Santo Domingo, I scattered poisoned grain in all thirty-two caravels that we would be emptying. Thirty-two sounds like a lot, but all the cargo from these ships could have been carried aboard two galleons. The poison would have more than a week to work its magic before I had to go back into the bowels of the ships.

Even as the ships were preparing to cast off, I again began creeping through the tight confines belowdecks. With the time travel available via the portal, I could simultaneously spend time on each of the ships, and even in two different parts of the same ship. Even though I was on each ship simultaneously, it took four days aboard each ship and nearly five months to finish. It was odd to be working in one ship and know that I was also aboard each of the other ships at the same time. It took me a while to wrap my brain around that facet of time travel. I had to take two days off after emptying each ship to spend time relaxing outside. I felt like I’d been trapped in a cramped cage after several hours inside a ship.

After almost being caught twice, I installed tiny motion sensors in the passageways leading to where I was working so Amy or Vickie could warn me if someone was coming. They also operated the lift we used to remove the heavy loads from the ships. Five months later, using a rented crane and up to my knees in sea water as the ship was sinking, we pulled the final item from the final ship, a solid gold table weighing more than three thousand pounds. Besides the table, we had recovered more than two thousand pounds of gold nuggets, seventeen small chests of pearls, as well as jade, emeralds, and the usual assortment of hides, feathers, cacao, Campeche wood, cochineal, indigo, sugar, and tobacco just from the last ship. Multiply that by thirty-two!

Dan was excited to get the nuggets from the ships and what the girls had panned while they weren’t helping me. With gold prices rising and with gold and silver in such demand, I continued selling Dan the ingots smelted by the Spanish but kept as many of the coins as I could. I had plenty of money in the bank for the moment, even if it was worth less each month. I still hoped to create a safe place for my family to live and wasn’t quite sure how to go about doing it.

I also had nearly four hundred muffin pan ingots from melting down the gold table. I thought about selling the table from one of my three medieval European warehouses but couldn’t imagine anyone being able to afford it. I also doubted that the mint director would melt down the table; he’d probably have the government buy it.

Instead, I took my muffin pan ingots to my buddy in 1859 at the Philadelphia Mint and accepted gold and silver coins in return. The coins were bulky but were fairly easy to store. More and more current-day businesses were now accepting gold and silver coins in payment, frequently offering discounts to customers paying with bullion or precious metal coins. I even considered making my own coins but quickly abandoned the idea after thinking about the logistics and especially the time it would require.

My newest medieval warehouse in Lubeck (in what is now Germany) was the beneficiary of the other goods from the fleet of ships. I didn’t want people in any one of the cities to realize how much I was selling, hence the use of three different cities. Like I did in London, I purchased a farm less than a mile downstream from the city. I let the family I bought it from stay in the house and continue working the land for a small percentage of what they made each year. The purchase price I paid allowed them to buy more breeding stock and more tools, as well as to buy two indentures to help increase production. They also profited nicely by renting places on the floor to sleep and selling wine, ale, and food to wealthy merchants when I held the auctions.

The medieval Lubeck merchants were excited when they heard that I represented a fleet of privateers because they only had three sources for the Oriental goods. The primary one was Portuguese ships that made the trip to the Orient and returned with spices. Like merchants in Amsterdam, these merchants had to pay the Portuguese in silver. Obtaining enough silver incurred additional costs since they had to obtain it from the same sources the Amsterdam merchants did.

The other two sources selling Spanish and Portuguese goods from the Orient were privateers or merchants who managed to purchase the goods after they passed through the hands of a string of Spanish or Portuguese middlemen. The Spanish government didn’t allow the New World ports to trade with foreign countries. The latter two were their only semi-dependable sources of goods from the Spanish colonies in the New World.

Since the gems I plundered from the Spanish ships were becoming more valuable in the present time, I began selling those, insisting on gold or silver in payment. I continued to provide Dan with enough gold nuggets and muffin tin ingots of gold, and now Spanish silver ingots, to keep him profitable.

Doctors Carlos and Ruy Medina started working in the old free clinic about halfway through our looting of the thirty-two caravels. Carlos insisted on knowing how I earned so much money. “What I will show you absolutely has to remain a secret. Divulging it to even one person could cost all of us our lives,” I warned. He agreed, and after discussing the situation with Sheila, I adjusted her programming to guarantee that nobody could take control of the portal without my authorization.

With that done, I took the good doctor with me one evening. He stared, slack-jawed, as he watched us hover above the New World Spanish port of Santo Domingo. There were dozens of wooden ships in the harbor.

Then I explained how the portal worked. By then, we knew that the portal could also access thirty-nine planets besides earth. “Are the other planets habitable?” he asked me.

The portal answered for me because I was too stunned by the question to answer. “Six of the planets will not sustain human life forms but may be visited for less than a day with no adverse side effects. Staying longer than one day will cause problems due to the ratio of oxygen in the atmosphere or the presence of other gasses in the atmosphere. Visits should be no more frequent than once a week. Breathing from a self-contained supply of air would allow for an indefinite stay.”

“So, if the country goes to shit, we could theoretically escape to another planet and rebuild our lives there?” he asked.

“Easily, especially since your planet is by far the most technologically advanced of the planets,” Sheila replied.

Sheila’s answer floored me. Despite Larry’s dire predictions, and my concurrence, I hadn’t even thought of going to another planet to build a safe place to live. Instead, I’d concentrated on making our new home as secure as possible.

Speaking of our new home, my old crew and their families had moved into some of the empty homes and were hard at work building said home. Since Ron had a Florida contractor’s license (as did I) they hired two local contractors to build the twelve-foot granite walls around the property and a third to help with the Georgia Steel warehouses I wanted. Trucks loaded with rock and other building supplies came and went from seven in the morning to sundown, seven days a week. The local companies appreciated the work because new construction had all but ceased. I told Frank and Larry to keep an eye on the men from the local companies, hinting that we would soon need lots of hardworking, trustworthy men for a huge project.

At first, my former construction crew didn’t understand why I wanted one warehouse constructed to such a high standard when the rest were Georgia Steel buildings. They were flabbergasted when I explained about installing bank vault doors for each of the three storage rooms inside that building. When Larry suggested a series of “panic rooms” scattered throughout the house, I quickly agreed. If the house were attacked, we could use the portal to rescue anyone in a panic room and whisk them away to safety. Of course, that depended on having a safe place to escape to.

As an afterthought, we also added a room-sized freezer and a room-sized walk-in refrigerator, as well as several rooms to store dry goods.

And to a man (and woman), my old crew insisted on joining me in Florida.

When the vault doors were installed six months later, the girls and I started transferring our cache of gold, silver, and jewels into one of the vaults. Despite how much I was spending, both the pile of coins and precious metals, as well as my normal bank account, continued to grow as we emptied more and more ill-fated treasure ships.

We used the overhead electric winch we’d installed in each vault, yet another thing the construction crews found odd. Each vault had heavy-duty steel warehouse shelving along both sides and across the back. We bought aluminum trays similar to trays designed to hold casino chips. Each tray held ten rows of poker chips and stacked neatly and securely. The difference was that ours held coins, mostly gold and silver, sorted by country, denomination, and era. On the floor were sturdy plastic pallets where we stacked ingots. Each pallet held ingots of one type of metal, usually gold or silver, although we began stockpiling ingots of any other metals, too. I actually bought standard molds to make five- and ten-pound ingots of gold and silver to replace my muffin ingots.

During the months I spent looting the thirty-two ships, I was also busy overseeing the construction of our new home, the clinic, and the wall, making sure that the two doctors got moved safely, as well as a million other details. Not the least of those details was continuing to hire security. Larry used his military contacts to hire veterans, many of whom had been among our military’s elite forces. Once he had hired a handful of men, referrals from the new hires were enough to fill what Larry felt we needed.

So many security guards necessitated us adding a ten-lane firing range for them to use to maintain or improve their proficiency. The covered firing range was built between two warehouses in the north part of the lot on the land I’d originally envisioned for building our house. Now, that land had the warehouses and the firing range. The range had four firing lanes that were one hundred feet long, and six, five-hundred-yards long. I couldn’t believe all the weapons that Larry had been able to purchase and wasn’t sure that all of them were legal for us to own.

With the way the country was falling apart around us, I had no problem with him buying the weapons, legal or not, and hiring even more armed guards.

Long before we finished the construction of our new home, based on Dr. Medina’s comment, I’d decided that it would be prudent to build an off-world haven, especially when the local construction crews and the security men asked if they could move their extended families into the existing houses for safety from the rising crime and violence. My crew from Georgia had already moved in.

The remaining houses on the property quickly filled with families and their extended families and we still needed more places to put people. That necessitated yet another chat with the banks, this one about the remainder of the property to the south of us.

That part of the property extended another six miles to the south, and the farther south the property was, the higher the percentage of homes that were both standing and occupied. Nearly half of the lots had existing homes, and about a quarter of those were still occupied. For the four miles directly south of us, the occupancy rate was low enough that I considered buying it.

With the economy as bad as it was, I knew that few, if any, of the families still living in those homes would move, even if they had defaulted on their mortgage. The authorities didn’t have enough resources to protect people and to force non-violent people from their homes. In all likelihood, however, they had been far enough away from Charlie’s direct hit that their homes had survived mostly intact, and the mortgages had probably been paid off unless they had moved in post-Charlie.

The bankers were excited with my offer to buy over half of the remaining property, and glad that they wouldn’t have to deal with existing owners this time. I bought the remaining property for about half of what I paid for the first part, even though it was a much bigger parcel. That’s how much more desperate the banks had gotten in such a brief time and how much property values had dropped.