Even then, the Riverside Mall project was sinking like a lead boat. There were no stores signed up, and no prospect of any. It was a combination of the abysmal economy and the fact that there was no one who was fool enough to sign up for a site that was inevitably going to flood some time in the next twenty years. Tulsa summers were getting wetter, not drier; “hundred-year floods” were happening every couple of years.

He had a choice at that point; close the project down and take a loss, or keep going and chance a bigger one. But the rest of the investors in the project would demand their money back, and that would be a disaster.

Until he picked up the bundle—and “John Smith” at Romulus Insurance gave him that fateful little call. His name wasn’t Smith, of course, but that was how Rod was told to refer to him from the time of that conversation.

It started badly, with “John Smith” telling him he’d been checking into the Riverside Mall project for Romulus, and that it didn’t look good. That he didn’t see how Romulus could possibly insure a project that was going to go under at any moment.

Rod tried to bluff; John Smith wasn’t having any.

But then the conversation took an abrupt U-turn. Smith suggested that he might “forget” some of the things he’d uncovered in his report, for a price. But that wasn’t all Smith had in mind.

“You’re a good businessman, Mr. Calligan,” Smith had said. “Let me make you a proposition.”

John suggested that there might possibly be a way to close down the project and still turn a profit—if he could find a way to get some kind of extremists or terrorists to close the project down for him because of sabotage.

He was holding the bundle at the time, and that was when the entire plan sprang into his mind, as if it had been placed there. He and Smith had most of the details worked out between them before he’d hung up.

First, he would go to a remote Indian burial ground on private land, a place he knew existed because he had camped and hunted there as a young boy. The place was supposed to be haunted, and none of his friends would stay there overnight or take any of the artifacts that occasionally surfaced in the area. Now he was glad he knew it existed, because it was going to be the key to his plan. He would dig up some of those graves, take the bones and artifacts, and seed his own site with them.