“I need to look around.”
“Can’t you look around here? Is this about Maxine?”
“It’s about gold.”
“If it’s that you still want to see your gold, I’m pretty sure I can get you a picture.”
“A picture won’t tell me what I need to know, so we’re going to New York to the Federal Reserve gold vault.”
“You aren’t thinking about stealing your gold, are you?”
“That question is wrong on so many levels. First of all, the Federal Reserve Bank holds gold from almost every country, but not from individual citizens. So my gold isn’t in that vault. Second, we’re not going to steal from it. We’re just going to look around. Then, if we have time, we’ll look around in the Blane-Grunwald gold vault for Knight gold. And even if I did steal gold from Blane-Grunwald it wouldn’t be stealing because it’s my gold.”
“You mean if we have time after serving our sentences in federal prison?”
“You’re funny when you exaggerate like that.”
“I’m not exaggerating!”
“What can you tell me about the Federal Reserve vault?”
“Not much. I skipped that course when I was at Harvard.”
“But you worked for Günter, and he was the Blane-Grunwald gold guru.”
“I got him coffee and sandwiches, and copied documents. My knowledge isn’t extensive. I know that the Federal Reserve vault holds more gold than Fort Knox. Fort Knox only holds about four thousand six hundred tons of gold. The Federal Reserve vault holds approximately seven thousand. That’s a lot of gold.”
“Indeed. It’s nearly a quarter of the world’s gold reserves. Blane-Grunwald’s vault holds nearly that much as well. The gold is stored in New York in vaults resting on bedrock, eighty feet below street level. The walls of the vaults are steel-reinforced concrete. The vaults are impenetrable.”
Riley gave him a single raised eyebrow. “But you’re going to penetrate it?”
“Yes. The countries let us keep their gold because they trust the United States government. They started storing it there during and immediately after World War Two, when it looked like America was the safest place on the planet. So they keep it all in tidy lockers.”
“Lockers? You make it sound like high school.”
“The vault lockers are a bit bigger.”
Riley thought he was probably cute bu
t nonconforming in high school. He wouldn’t have been one of the Goth kids. He would have been the kid who spoke Klingon and ignored his homework because it was tedious.
“Getting back to the gold, it makes sense to have it all in one place, after all,” Emerson said. “If country A wants to make a monetary deal with country B, all it has to do is shift the gold from one locker to another. It’s like the world map in a single vault.”
Riley nodded. “I get that.”
“Recently, the trust has been shaken. And Germany’s Bundesbank asked to repatriate their gold.”
“Repatriate?”
“They want it back. In Germany. But the Fed is dragging its feet. To date they’ve only given back a portion of it.”
“Why won’t the Fed give it back?” Riley asked.
“Logistics, they say. But what if the gold isn’t there? What if someone has been replacing it with fakes like the one we found in Maxine’s apartment?”
“That would take years.”
“What if it has taken years? What if it’s the longest and largest con in the world?”