Chương 62: Chapter 61: The First Client

Léon came through about six months in, we'd known about his visit for two months. On his side, it was a Thursday morning. Bill and I had came to the facility early to meet him. When led by Cem, Léon was met with the gate, he looked at it like something he was already pricing it.

"You could have told me," he said.

"Would you have signed the NDA?" He thought about it.

"No."

"Then I couldn't have." We drove him to the city the way I drove everyone now. Parked outside. Walked him in. Twice he touched a wall. Once, a doorframe. In the main street he stopped and looked down the whole clean length of it. The vault door woke under my palm. Ella had fond a moment in her busy schedule to tune to door to my mana. Léon watched that speachless.

Inside, the sight finally made in smile like a small kid that had found a new toy and would cherish it like it was a treasure, exept this time he was facing an actual treasure. He did the math without asking for a calculator. In his head. Then I took him to the far shelves, and he froze immediately when he saw what they had to offer. He soon unwrapped a cloth bundle. The three red stones, brought back like an apology. He'd had them for months or days depending on how you looked at it.

"I showed these to people who know stones," he said.

"Three countries. No database has them. No deposit produces them. The one expert I trust called them odd." He looked at the shelves they'd come from. Rows of them. Red, green, the pale violet. Smoldering quietly in the globe light.

"You have shelves," he said. He wrapped the three stones back up. Set them where they'd been, carefully. Then he stood in front of the gold and we spoke about more pressing matters.

"The stones are a story for another day. The gold is today's business. Bill's arrangement works, but it works for low volume. This—" his hand moved down the rows, "—this is not a small amount by any stretch of the mind. Moving it, discreetly, at volume—" he paused, and chose the words like he was writing them down, "—that is a logistical challenge. A real country-scale challenge." He wasn't wrong. The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Something in the back of my head turned the problem over. It came back up facing the other way. I didn't say anything in the vault. In the corridor, I caught Bill's eye.

"I think I have an idea," I said. He waited.

"An absolutely ludicurous one." Bill looked at me for a moment.

"Those are the best kind," he said, and kept walking. We put the tables together in the centre of the town that evening. Everyone came. Even Léon, who was the only one there in a coat. The first topic was people.

"The assembly line is two people," Tomas said.

"It should be six."

"A nurse," Sofia said.

"Someone who's seen a bad day and didn't look away."

"After the next acreage," Mara said.

"Labor follows land. Not the other way around." Marek said one word, and it was a number, and it was smaller than everyone else's. Bill wrote it all down. Round two. The second topic was mine.

"I want to put something on the table," I said. Then I told them what I'd been chewing since the video. The story was already being told. By strangers, badly, with CGI jokes and a police file. I'd moderated communities for a living. If you don't tell your story, it gets told anyway, and worse.

"We could tell it," I said.

"On our terms. Control what's known, and when, and how much. Stay ahead of it for once." Marek said, "No." Not no-but. Just no. Bill gave his opinion.

"Every question we can't answer will just make the situation worst," he said.

"You're proposing we generate questions on a world-wide scale." Ella said the last part.

"Anyone who learns this place exists, carry the potential to be blinded by it's own greed." she said.

"You want to invite the world to the door. The wrong one comes first. If people in power get involved we might end up unable to move freely, or worst." She looked at me.

"They always come first." I looked at my notes. The arguments were still good.

"Okay," I said, and meant it about eighty percent. The table moved on. The third topic, I had to dig for.

"There's a problem Léon named today," I said.

"Moving things quietly, at scale. He called it a country-scale challenge. But it made me realise that we actually do not have that problem." I let that sit for a second.

"In fact, we're the only people on Earth who don't have that problem. We're sitting on a lot of wealth that we can't and shouldn't move around too fast. But the problem itself — quiet freight — that's a service. Everyone on Earth with a border has it. We're the only ones who could solve it." Bill turned his pen around.

"It's the world's best smuggling operation with extra steps," he said.

"Ask me how that reads in court." He didn't wait.

"It reads however the paperwork says it reads. The paperwork is the hard part. The paperwork is always the hard part."

"The lot was one door in one place, and it got filmed," Marek said. Slowly everyone was catching up with my idea.

"As a company we'd open a thousand doors a day. It's quite a risk."

"We need to think about this carefully." Andrej said, from the end of the table. It surprised me a little, because the engineers had been quiet. We looked at Léon. Léon had been quiet the whole meeting. I had barely learned anything about him since he had came through. He took his time.

"Most of my best clients' problems are freight problems," he said.

"Most of my problems are freight problems." He straightened his coat.

"I have a customs situation I've had for twenty years. If you're serious, I'm the first name on your list — and I pay in clean cash, gold, jewels... Or whatever fits your taste."

"we can look into." Bill said. Nobody shook hands. What would we have been shaking on. But the table stayed noisy for another hour. Marek started a list on his own pad. Bill's pen didn't stop moving. And Léon left through the gate before the second sun finished setting we had found an agreement.