Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35372 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 177(@200wpm)___ 141(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
If it's not an arrest, what is it?
Federal prosecution.
Witness deal.
Execution with paperwork.
Some version of all three.
The folder on his desk is thick. Not padded-for-performance thick. Actually thick. Like someone spent real time puttin' this relic together.
I watch him turn a page. Then another. Then he closes it.
He looks up.
Hazel eyes. The dead kind. Not angry or calculating, just genuinely unbothered. Like he's already decided how this ends and the conversation between now and then is just procedure.
There's a beat where neither of us says anything, and I get the distinct impression he's done this enough times that he's comfortable in the silence and I'm supposed to feel the opposite.
I don't give him the satisfaction of confirmation.
Finally, he takes a breath. "I'm—" and then there's this pause. The kind of pause a man takes when he's choosin' which version of himself to introduce. "Call me… Mike."
All right. Well, clearly this is gonna be a game of 'let's play games'.
Fine with me.
I know what I did and why I'm here.
He knows what I did and why I'm here too.
But if he's not gonna get to the point, then neither am I. So I say, "Mornin', Mike. How can I help ya today?"
The corners of his mouth lift, just a bit. "You ever heard of the Bakken formation?"
Yeah. He got me there. Because before I can lock it down, the confusion spirals into my brain, making me tilt my head and squint my eyes. I'm not even sure what he said, that's how unfamiliar I am with the words that just came out of his fuckin' mouth.
But I play it cool. "Can't say that I have."
"No," he agrees. "You wouldn't."
Which is a provocation in my eyes. No, of course not. You're just a dumb biker. Which, fair. I am. "So what's it got to do with me?"
"The Bakken formation," he says, lookin' out the window now at the still spectacular sunrise, "is roughly two hundred thousand square miles of subsurface rock sitting under Montana, North Dakota, and two Canadian provinces. It's named after a farmer, discovered in the fifties, and ignored for decades because nobody could figure out how to pull the oil out cheap enough to bother with it." He pauses for a moment to pull himself away from the sunrise and take me in. "You following me so far?"
I'm not. But I can play. "Rocks. Farmer. Oil."
"Perfect," Mike says.
Again, the corners of his mouth lift up just a bit.
Just enough to be insulting.
"Current estimates put recoverable reserves somewhere between seven and eighteen billion barrels depending on who you ask and how honest they're feeling. Hydraulic fracturing solved the cost problem around 2000, production boomed past what the pipeline infrastructure could handle, and now you've got more oil moving through that corridor than the state has capacity to track—which, for our purposes, is the only part of that sentence that matters to you, specifically."
Again he pauses to squint. To clock me.
"All right," I say. "You're movin' oil?"
"We're movin' oil."
"And this oil is what… secret or somethin'?"
"Somethin' like that."
"OK. Well, Mike. I like a man who gets to the point. So do you have any plans on makin' yours?"
Now I get a real smile out of him. Not a happy smile, no. This is the smile of satisfaction. The smile that understands that his meetin' with me is progressin' the way he wants it to.
"There are twenty-one wells in a sixty-mile radius of where you're sitting. They produce. They sell. None of it hits a state report. The revenue moves through a chain of companies you will never find the end of, and it lands in accounts that don't belong to anyone with a name you'd recognize." He leans forward. "Now, most people at this point in the conversation ask me what the money's for. What gets funded. What gets built. And that's the wrong question, Legion."
He waits. Wants me to ask.
I don't.
"The right question," he says, "is who."
Who. Well. That's interestin'. I guess. He's funding people. People that do things. Black budget shit. Things that don't come with paperwork, at least not the kind you can audit.
"Your predecessor understood the arrangement," he says.
Brick's ghost appears. Takes a seat at the table between us.
Not dead Brick. Useful Brick.
Brick who kept things runnin' smooth and didn't ask the kind of questions that make men like Mike have to do paperwork.
"Your club has value," Mike says, like he's reading a property assessment. "Not your men. Not your guns. Your roads. Every unmarked access point and service route through a hundred miles of terrain. And more importantly—which one's passable in April. Which one floods out the first week of runoff. Which one the rancher at mile twelve will shoot at you for usin'. Which gate's been welded shut since 1987 and nobody's bothered to take off the map. Which landowner takes cash, which one takes a favor, and which one you just don't drive past at all. Satellites photograph roads, Legion. They don't tell you which one's the right one. They can't tell you if it rained last Tuesday and caused a flash flood that will take a month to dry out. That infrastructure took decades to build. It's not replaceable."