“As God is my witness,” Buck said. “Round the middle of August, a couple weeks after that invasion of Kuwait, this fella comes to my office. Arab fella. Spoke real good English. Told me that he was representing a sheikh from Kuwait. Said they’d just got out of Kuwait City by the skin of their teeth. Brought a bunch of their money out with ’em.”
“And came out here to Forks County, Iowa?”
“That’s what I asked him!” Buck said, a little too insistently. “Why the hell would they come here? Well, turns out that the nephew of this sheikh was a student here at EIU and had a nice big house rented for himself—you know how these Arabs throw money around—and so when they escaped from the Iraqis, this was as good a place as any for them to go to ground.”
“Did you meet these people?”
“I wouldn’t believe a word of it until I saw the sheikh personally,” Buck insisted. “So this fella took me to the house and I met the guy. He was the real thing, boy, all dressed up in the robes, with the towel on his head and the whole bit, sitting there watching CNN twenty-four hours a day. He shows me a carry-on bag full of cash—must have been hundreds of thousands of bucks in it.
“Well,” Buck continued, fortifying himself with a swig of coffee that had a strong odor of schnapps rising from it, “this sheikh is a real operator. He was looking for someplace to put his money. And I’m sure he put a lot of it into stocks and other investments, like any sane person would. But he wanted to launch a little venture right here in Forks, too, and that’s why they needed yours truly.”
“What kind of venture?” Clyde asked.
Buck frowned and leaned his head toward Clyde’s, still reluctant to blurt out the secret he had held for the remarkable span of three months. “A high-tech thing. I told you his nephew was at EIU, right?”
“Right.”
“Guess what he’s studying there.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Chemical engineering. And what’s the most important chemical in the world, Clyde?”
Looking at Buck, Clyde was tempted to answer that it was ethanol. But he shook his head and shrugged in mystification.
“Water. They don’t have enough fresh water in that part of the world. So this nephew was working on desalination technology. And he came up with an invention, Clyde. A new technology that could take the salt out of seawater much cheaper than the way they do it now. He made it work at the test-tube level, but in order to test whether it would work commercially, they had to build a pilot facility. I’m just telling you what they told me, Clyde.”
“So the sheikh needed you to sell him a building that was suitable for housing a small chemical plant.”
“Just for starters, Clyde. Any real-estate agent could do that. But they needed more. They needed a full-fledged partner. That’s why they came to me.”
“You lost me there, Buck,” Clyde confessed. “Why didn’t they just buy the building and send you on your way?”
“Because of the need for absolute secrecy and discretion. If word got out about this invention, the big boys would be all over them in no time—Du Pont, Monsanto, all those guys. They’d reverse-engineer the process and steal it.”
Clyde said, “I still don’t follow.”
“Aw, come on, Clyde. You know what kind of town this is. If some raghead with a twenty-thousand-dollar Rolex comes waltzing in and plunks down a sack of C-notes to buy an abandoned building, you don’t think word’s gonna get out? Hell, they might as well just broadcast it over the tornado sirens.”
“I see,” Clyde said. “They needed you to front for them.”
Buck was offended. “Well, there’s a little more to it than that, Clyde, or else they wouldn’t have cut me in for such a nice chunk of the deal. I was the local partner, the man on the ground, on the scene. You know what I mean.”
“Sure,” Clyde said.
“So I was the one who bought the building, and I was the one who hired the laborers and so on and soforth.”
“Laborers?”
“Yeah. The building was a disaster area, so I hired Tab to clean it out. And when they started building the pilot plant, I made the arrangements with Tab to go out and pick up the materials and deliver them. The grad students took care of actually putting it together.”
“But they never showed their faces outside.”
“Now you’re getting it, Clyde. We had to arrange this whole thing so that not a single raghead face ever showed itself to the outside world, not a single raghead voice was ever heard on the phone. Instead, it was yours truly who handled all interface functions.”
“Did they get their equipment all put together, Buck?”
Buck shrugged and copped a “Who, me?” look. “I don’t know, Clyde, I guess so. They wouldn’t let me inside the place—didn’t want me to see any of their trade secrets.”
“You got orders on the phone from the sheikh,” Clyde said, “and you went out and spent money and gave orders to Tab, but you never saw anything.”
“Right. Except it wasn’t on the phone, it was on this radio thing that they gave me. These guys were so paranoid, they wouldn’t even use the phone.”