Another Plot

“Milt,” said Mary, tired of the con­ver­sa­tion. “You didn’t real­ly want to be an astronaut?”

“No, it was a means to an end. Noth­ing more.”

“I wish you wouldn’t antag­o­nize our broth­er. He scares me.”

“Mor­ris is a fool,” Milt said.

“A dan­ger­ous one.

“True, we can­not under­es­ti­mate him.”

“Then why all this mess­ing around with the fake iden­ti­ty and the trip to the Moon?” Mary asked.

“I took some­thing that he didn’t deserve to have.”

“The arti­facts?!”

“Yes,” Mil­ton said, nod­ding slight­ly. “They dis­ap­peared from his vault a lit­tle over two years ago.”

“Broth­er, I real­ize you want to pun­ish Mor­ris for what he did to dad.”

“Oh, he has yet to pay for that.”

“Dammit, Milt!”

“Don’t wor­ry, Mary. Mor­ris will not find the arti­facts. He might fig­ure out where they are, but for now, they are beyond his reach.”

“You mean?”

“Yes, I took them with me.”

“Did Annie Mac­In­turn­er know?” asked Mary.

“No. She nev­er sus­pect­ed that she unloaded them herself.”

“Now what?”

“Now, I see if Carmike is the kind of man, I think he is,” said Milton.

“Des­per­ate, you mean,” Mary said, nar­row­ing her eyes.

“Yeah.”

“How do you do that?”

“We’ll need some mon­ey,” said Milt.

“How much?”

“Hun­dreds of millions.”

“Okay, I got most of that myself,” Mary said.

“We’ll need to make it look like typ­i­cal investors. Noth­ing too much from any­one, so we can keep it anony­mous. Big investors attract the wrong attention.”

“What about Mark?”

“To hell with him,” Mil­ton said.

“I thought you two…”

“Noth­ing of the sort. He’s an ego­ma­ni­ac like his father. I have no use for him.”

“He’ll fig­ure this out and want in,” Mary said.

“Of course he will. We need to make sure he’s always on the out­side, look­ing in. I want his inter­est sole­ly fixed on Nils.”