“Uh huh?” Bette asked, almost absentmindedly, as she continued to look more closely at some of the numbers in one of the papers.  She sat down in the chair she’d been sitting on earlier, spreading the papers out on the table.  This prompted Tycho to resume sitting on the chair he’d been sitting on earlier, also.

“And, I think that man I warned you about will be there,” he added, speaking carefully, as he knew this would surely grab Bette’s attention.

It did.

She set down the papers she’d been looking at to peer at him, eyes narrowed.

“Does he know you?” she asked.  Quickly adding, “Are there any events scheduled where you and he will get to interact?”

Tycho shook his head from side to side.  “I don’t know him personally, no.  But I saw his yacht’s name in an email organizers sent earlier today that listed confirmed participants.”

“Are you confirmed to go?”

He nodded his head.

Bette licked her lips, shut her eyes, rested her elbows on the armrests and sat back, her hands forming a steeple on which she could rest her forehead on.

After a few minutes she asked quietly, “Okay, what can you tell me about him?”

“He broke ranks with a core group in the executive committee of the international gold collective, which is the most influential group in the gold market today, after what sounded to be a serious disagreement.  The executive committee is a small group, and there are a few members who are the so called “first among equals” who ultimately decide policy, which the executive committee ultimately adopts, and which the international gold collective follows, more often than not.”

“Until he broke ranks, he was one of the members of that core group.”

“Have there been times wherein the collective did not follow the dictates of the executive committee?” Bette asked, her eyes open now, and observing Tycho closely again.

“In the hundred years or so of its existence, I believe there were a few times, early on, when there were a few recalcitrant Australians who had been invited to join the collective, but who wanted to buck the decisions made at that time.  And then later on, there were also a few big miners whose fields were based in South Africa who also tried to do their own thing.  But all those incidents eventually resulted in those trying to do something else, “coming back to the fold,” so to speak.”