CHAPTER 3
Baltic Boom
The Name Is Mobius. Mark Mobius.
As Jack Reaves, our skilled American pilot, smoothly brought the 13-seat Gulfstream IV jet in for a landing, I restlessly pressed a tiny brass button marked “TV” on the suede armrest beneath my window.
With a discreet whir, a mahogany-paneled TV set slid up from the dim recesses of a built-in cabinet, and began automatically displaying a computer-generated “air show” depicting the graphic image of a small aircraft—this aircraft—winging its way across a simulated slice of sea marked “Gulf of Finland.”
A digital readout indicating our altitude—rapidly decreasing—and time to destination—two minutes fifty-five seconds—had all five members of our Templeton Emerging Markets team poking around in the spaces surrounding their seats, scurrying to gather up their papers and books in preparation for making a quick getaway just as soon as our feet hit the tarmac.
Our flight, from Abu Dhabi (the money center of the United Arab Emirates) to Estonia on the Baltic Sea, hadn’t been all that grueling, from my point of view. I don’t usually suffer from jet lag, probably because I tend to be in such perpetual motion that my body doesn’t get enough time to reset its internal clock to a “home base” before being wrenched off into another time zone.
Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, was scheduled to be stop number one on our upcoming tour of the Baltic Republics. Within seconds, we would be landing in one of the very few countries I’d managed to miss ...
