"Not a great deal, to be honest," I replied in answer to Sigrid's question. "My lawyer told me about missing money and difficult investments, but that's about the extent of it."
Sigrid drew the stack of files over to her, took the top one off the pile and flipped it open.
"There is no missing money, but you are correct on the investments." She passed some pages over to me. I lifted the first and found myself looking at a color picture of a pie graph with a table of financial information underneath.
"What am I lookin' at here?" When I was told the Queen needed my help, examining financial statements wasn't exactly what I had pictured.
"A summation of the Queen's investment portfolio." The pie graph was simple; the small slice was labelled trusts, a bigger slice labelled liquid assets, a larger one for bonds, and the final two pieces as large as each other: stocks and gold. I scanned the tables below the colorful graph. It listed the individual stock investments and a small table below listed the bonds and a number of investment properties. "The Queen has not been immune from the global financial crisis. This was last year, this is how it looks now..."
She passed over another piece of paper with another graph, where gold was far and away the largest slice of the pie, everything else reduced to paltry slices.
"Alright…" I said warily. Why was the Investigator being so open with me about the Queen's finances? Why would the Queen want me to see this? Was it a trick?
"The Queen is the youngest monarch in the United States, in fact, in all the Americas. The simple fact of her youth places her at a unique disadvantage in terms of wealth acquisition."
"Okay,"I said slowly, trying to make sense of the pages in front of me. Sigrid looked at me like I was slow. And in that moment I certainly felt it.
"Simply put, she hasn't existed long enough as a vampire to accumulate the same amount of wealth as her neighboring allies." She gestured to the rest of the files on the table. "That said, she has been smart to diversify her assets and has built considerable wealth in the last decades; however, Oklahoma is a poor state with a low ratio of vampires to humans. She needs to maintain and continue accumulating wealth in order to solidify and strengthen her monarchy."
I swallowed and nodded slightly. This was sounding more complex than I anticipated and it was making me scared, and I still couldn't see how I figured into the equation.
"Your lawyer was correct in his estimation of Freyda's investments," she continued. "They haven't been performing well for a number of quarters. With only a small portion of her portfolio made up by liquid assets and a large percentage tied up with stocks and bonds that are performing poorly, very poorly, Oklahoma's wealth has been largely reliant on her physical investment in gold. It is her fail safe."
Sigrid reached across the table and withdrew a slim touchscreen tablet computer from underneath some manila folders. She unlocked the device and navigated through to a document, one which required a thumbprint password, and she then handed it across to me. It was another spreadsheet, listing three banks each with multiple accounts and holdings.
She pointed to one column, displaying information for the Oklahoma Corporate Credit Union.
"This is where majority of the gold is kept. The credit union has built an additional safe under the premises specifically for Queen Freyda. And this is how much was being housed there." She pointed to a figure and continued speaking, "Gold is a safe investment. It is often considered the backbone of any good investment portfolio and it allows a degree of risk with other ventures when it is there as a backup. She has some leeway with making risky investment decisions when she has a backup plan with gold."
"Okay," I said, wary of her finger hovering above the number. "What does this number represent?"
"The Queen has … acquired, through her years in Europe, a significant amount of gold bullion—the standard 400-troy-ounce." She looked at me as if I knew what that meant and I gave a slight nod, having utterly no clue. "That number represents the amount of gold bars. Their current market value is approximately a quarter of a million per bar."
I let out puff of surprise. "You're joking."
"I rarely joke," she concluded, giving me that oft-used alien expression vampires all seemed to share.
"Why that's…" I stared at the figure her finger hovered above. I swallowed again, my mouth suddenly dry.
"Close to five million dollars' worth of gold," Sigrid finished for me. She flipped the lid closed on the tablet case with a crack and I jumped. "Telepath, everything I have told you—and what I am about to tell you—is confidential. If this information leaves this room you will be in breach of your NDA, and you will face the wrath of the Queen and her subjects. You will die." The same fang made a reappearance from behind her curling lips and Thalia hissed. My breath caught in my throat, though indignation was quickly rising. Who was she to threaten me?
"Enough," Sigrid said holding up a hand, quietening Thalia but doing nothing for the racing of my heart. "I am simply reminding her how serious the nature of this business is," she told Thalia.
Like I could forget with Ms. Fangy right in front of me and the painted versions of Freyda and Eric staring holes into my head.
"Fine, yes," I said with frustration. "Of course, I understand." I understood well and good what it meant to deal with supes and just how serious their threats could be. I had the scars to prove it. Many scars to prove it. Scars upon scars, in fact.
"We were informed last week that there was a theft at the credit union." Sigrid flipped open the slim file that was waiting on the desk before her and handed me an A4 photo, printed on high gloss paper. "This is the vault," she explained.
The vault's thick reinforced door was wide open and inside the room was a metal barred cell, not unlike a prison cell. In the image, the barred sliding door was wide open. Within the cell lay an empty wooden crate and nothing else. "It's empty," I said, foreboding crawling up my arms like a fog seeking to envelop me.
"Yes. Five million dollars empty. Stolen. And we are the ones tasked with recovering it."
Christ on a cracker.