Cartel Fire

by Tom Riggs

  Munro was quiet for a minute.

  “Jack?” said Rudd. “What are you thinking? I hate it when you do this.”

  “I’m thinking,” said Munro eventually, “that I have another theory, but I need to find out a couple of things.”

  “Care to share it?”

  “Not yet, it’s not fully formed. On the way down I arranged to meet with the NGO that Richard worked for in Brazil. Society for the Protection of the Rainforest or something.”

  “Rainforest Protection International, they’re based near Waterloo Station.”

  “That’s them. There’s a girl still working there who Anna mentioned. Anna says that she was with Richard when he went up the Amazon.”

  “That could be useful, but what shall I do? If you’re not going to share your theory, I might as well go down the pub.”

  “Don’t do that Charles, it’s too early anyway. Speak to your man in Jersey. Those two trusts that Richard was a beneficiary of…”

  “They won’t give me an amount, no way.”

  “We don’t need an amount, just ask them if there are any historic issues surrounding any of the trusts.”

  “Historic issues? Like what.”

  “Just use those words. See what they say.”

  “Ok, will do…and don’t you think it’s time we spoke to Lipakos senior? If my theory is anywhere near right, he might know something. Maybe Richard told him about the drug smuggling.”

  “Maybe, but let’s leave him out of it for the moment. Sarah Stanfield is our client, not Constantine Lipakos. But we should probably give her a brief update though. Have you heard from her?”

  “No,” said Rudd, “I’ve tried calling her several times, but there’s no answer on any of her numbers.”

  “Keep trying Charlie, keep trying.” And with that Munro left. He grabbed a coat on the way out, a thigh length brown cashmere overcoat. He needed it. The English winter was not agreeing with him.

  Munro walked out of his office and back onto Canon Street. He knew that it would probably be quicker to get to the NGO’s office in Waterloo by underground. It would also be more ecological, friendlier to the environment. But as Munro walked out onto Canon Street and saw his Landrover, a rare gap in the cloud cover allowed the low winter sun to glint off of its high alloys. It would be quicker and more environmentally friendly to take the underground, but it would be a lot less fun. And Munro hated tunnels, hated being underground for too long. So he took the Landrover. He climbed into its cabin and put it into first, pulling out hard and sharp. He quickly climbed through the gears as he tore through the City of London, going past St Paul’s Cathedral. The joy of having a Landrover in London was that most other cars backed away from you. In central London most of the cars were high value BMWs and Mercedes, or taxis edging slowly through the traffic. No-one wanted to risk a bump from a mud splattered four-wheel drive. When they saw a large, fast and beat up Landrover approaching, they tended to move out of the way.

  Twenty minutes later, and Munro had crossed the river and was approaching the wasteland surrounding Waterloo Station. Large grey council estates, empty warehouses, pigeons and lots of pigeon faeces. Munro thought how lucky it was that the Eurostar terminal had been moved north of the river to St Pancras. Waterloo had hardly been a welcoming sight for visitors to London. Using his sat nav, he negotiated the ramps and one ways that surrounded the station. The NGO’s offices were tucked away on a dead end street of dirty yellow brick warehouses, just behind the taxi ramp leading to one of the station exits. At least the rent must be cheap, he thought. Leaves more money to save the rainforest with. Munro parked outside the building. All brick on the ground floor, a legacy of the time when it had been used for freight storage in a time when freight was still moved by train. Munro rang a buzzer marked ‘Rainforest Protection International’ and waited. Nothing happened at first and so he rung again. This time the door catch released. He pushed it open and went up the stairs. So much for security.

  The dark inner stairs were threadbare and barely lit. Munro went up them slowly. He turned the first corner to see a lady of about fifty waiting for him at the top. She was dressed smartly in a long skirt and a brightly coloured ethnic shirt. Her face thin but hard. Her hands were on her hips; Munro immediately classed her as unfriendly.

  “Can I help you?” she said to Munro as he came into her view.

  Munro was on a narrow staircase, in a position of weakness, and felt oddly intimidated. He smiled and put up his hand.

  “Jack Munro madam, I did call ahead.”

  “Oh, the investigator, yes,” she replied not shaking his hand. “Gaby is in here.” And with that she turned and walked through a door that led off the staircase. Munro followed her into a large, bright open plan office. It was still slightly scruffy, the carpet was still threadbare and the windows were smudged. But there was a pleasant air of intensity and purpose in the room. Munro counted eight people sitting at various desks, tapping away at computers or reading thick reports. Strewn around the room were large advertising cut-outs showing shots of the rainforest taken from the sky and indigenous people walking through the jungle.

  “Nice place you have here,” said Munro smiling. “What exactly is it that you do?”

  “We’re called Rainforest Protection International, RPI. We essentially work with the UN to implement the UNDP PEI, although our ultimate aim is to achieve goal seven of the MDGs.”

  “That’s excellent,” replied Munro smiling, “I’m a SWM who WLTM SF with GSOH.”

  “What, Mr Munro?”

  “Single White Male, Would Like To Meet Single Female with Good Sense of...” His smile fell when he saw her face.

  “That was a joke,” he said quickly.

  She looked at Munro with undisguised contempt.

  “Mr Munro, I’m letting you talk to Gaby out of respect for Richard’s family. I only knew the boy briefly but he did some good work for us in Brazil. He wrote a very interesting report on sustainable forestry.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” said Munro, trying to be sincere.

  “It may not be of interest to a man in your line of work sir, but some of us are trying to do some good.” She looked at Munro with clear blue eyes and then turned away. “Good, here comes Gaby. You have twenty minutes, then she has to get on with her work, we’re very busy here.” And with that she walked off. Munro turned to see a girl of about twenty-five walking up to him smiling. She was everything her boss was not, friendly and apple cheeked.

  “Hello,” she said holding out her hand, “I’m Gaby, you must be the private investigator.”

  “Jack Munro, pleased to meet you.” Munro shook her hand and looked her in the eyes. She was attractive, and smiled at him through her eyes.

  “Let’s go and talk in the meeting room,” she said leading Munro to a walled off corner of the room.

  “I don’t think your boss likes me,” Munro said to her conspiratorially as they walked across the office, negotiating their way through desks and advertising cut-outs.

  “Oh, don’t mind Jane,” replied Gaby, “We had a look on your website when you called earlier. She thinks you’re a mercenary, and she thinks mercenaries are the root of all evil. Are you a mercenary Mr Munro?”

  “No, of course not,” replied Munro as they went into the meeting room, “although my business does have some shady characters working in it.” He then proceeded to tell her an anecdote about a man he and Rudd knew in another firm. He was caught in the Cayman Islands pretending to be an MI6 agent in order to get some confidential bank records. He was now doing six years in a Cayman prison a long way from the beach.

  “All very cloak and dagger,” said Gaby, her eyes lighting up as they both sat down. “Here we spend most of our time researching and writing reports, not nearly as exciting, but it’s important stuff. We’re doing one at the moment on logging in Indonesia. They’re cutting down hundreds of acres a day to make room for palm plantations. The world’s hunger for palm oil is destroying s
ome of our last completely virgin habitats.”

  Munro smiled. She and Jane were like so many NGO workers he had come across in various parts of Africa and Asia. The young idealist, usually from a well-off background, still believing their micro-finance initiative will make a difference in a country where half of all the tax revenue goes straight into the president’s offshore bank account. And the hard-bitten veteran of the NGO world, their ideals dashed but still believing they can make also a difference, despite everything they do being mired in acronyms. Munro admired them both. In their own way, they were trying to do what he had been trying to do in the army. Make bad places better. The only way they differed was in their method.

  “But enough of that,” she said, her eyes suddenly sombre, “you’re here to talk about Richard aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so,” replied Munro, “as I said on the phone, his mother asked us to look into his death. I can’t really go into much detail about it, but I wondered if you’d mind talking a bit about the time you two spent together in Brazil.”

  “Sure,” replied Gaby. “We only overlapped by a month out there. Richard was doing a three-month placement, and I came to take his place. We always try to have someone out there. He started off in this office, but it wasn’t really for him. He wasn’t being paid, so he could kind of do what he wanted. As I said, Jane always likes to have someone from England on the ground in the Brazil office. I think she jumped at the chance of having some free labour out there, plus Richard seemed to know his stuff when it came to the environment.”

  “What were you both doing out there?”

  “We have an office in Manaus, which is the biggest city in the Amazon. We employ about six local people and get them to monitor rates of deforestation. We use the data we collect to feed into our reports, which in turn are used by lots of people like the UN to lobby the Brazilian government to do more to stop the deforestation. Mine and Richard’s job out there was to collate the data and put it into a readable format. It was actually quite boring. I didn’t mind it so much; I did Economics at university, so I’m used to data entry stuff. But Richard found it frustrating being in the office all day, he wanted to get out there.”

  Munro took out a pen as if to make some notes, but instead put it on the bare table.

  “I’ve spoken to Anna Neuberg, did you meet her?”

  “Anna? Yes briefly, a Canadian girl right? She arrived just before I left, was on some boat trip that sounded like a nightmare.”

  “That’s right,” said Munro leaning in. Gaby arched her back and stretched up, pushing out her chest. She was definitely attractive.

  “Do you mind me asking you, Gaby, did you and Richard ever have any sort of relationship?”

  Gaby paused in shock. “Me and Richard? Are you joking? Richard was gay, Mr Munro, surely as an investigator you knew that?”

  Munro leaned back. “I thought he was, I just wanted to confirm it.”

  “Well I can definitely confirm that,” she said. “We shared a flat for two weeks in Manaus. Trust me, he was gay. Not that I can see that it makes any difference,” she continued slightly defensively. “I think that’s why he liked Brazil, they’re pretty relaxed about that sort of thing.”

  “Indeed,” said Munro. “I spoke to Anna, Gaby, and she mentioned that before she arrived, she thought that you and Richard had taken a trip up the river. Is that right? Can you tell me about that?”

  “Yeah, she’s right. As I said, Richard was getting pretty frustrated inputting data. By the time I arrived, he was desperate to go and see what he called the ‘real Amazon’. His father owns a big chunk of land upriver that he was turning into a bio-reserve, and Richard really wanted to head up there. I was a bit dubious at first, it was a long way from Manaus and its not always that safe upriver. You’ve got drug smugglers, illegal loggers, illegal miners, not too many police. I was worried about being a European girl deep in the Amazon, but Richard persuaded me, said it would be the trip of a lifetime. He arranged it all and paid for it all, although I don’t think he spent much, the boat was pretty simple and all we brought to eat was rice and beans.”

  “So was it the trip of a lifetime?”

  “It was amazing for the first few days, like some primordial paradise. As we got further upriver form Manaus, you suddenly start seeing virgin rainforest. That’s what we’re all about here, but you rarely actually see it. Partly because there’s not much of it left. So to actually see it in the flesh, so to speak, is incredible. We camped by the side of the river, and it was actually quite comfortable. We would wake up in the mornings to a totally empty river, amazing flocks of birds flying above the canopy. One morning we actually saw a Jaguar come down to the river to have a drink. Do you know how rare it is to see that? It was absolutely amazing.” Gaby was silent for a moment, lost in the memory.

  “Did you go up the Japura river?” asked Munro, as casually as he could. “Anna said that Richard had mentioned it.”

  “I was just getting to that,” she said, coming out of her thoughts quickly.

  “As I said, the trip started off as paradise. But everything changed when we went up the Japura.”

  39

  Gaby took a sip from a bottle of water before continuing.

  “Everything had been so perfect. We had been motoring in the day, and stopping at about six, just before it got dark. We passed little villages of indigenous people and went through some pretty rough frontier-type settlements. But we had never felt in any danger. The guides who Rich had hired were local guys, one of them was from the Kayapo, so they knew the region really well. Every afternoon they would catch us some river fish and barbeque it up that evening.”

  “But then you went up the Japura?” persisted Munro.

  Gaby paused and sighed.

  “But then we went up the Japura. At first it was fine, much like the part of the Amazon that we had been going down. Villages, a few small mining outposts but mainly virgin, untouched rainforest. It wasn’t until the end of our first day going up the Japura that our guides began to notice something was wrong. As I said, normally they would catch some river fish to cook in the evening. But that day, they hadn’t been able to catch anything. Eventually, just before sunset, they caught a small catfish, but it was so obviously diseased that we couldn’t eat it. So we just had rice and beans that night. By then we were a good twenty miles up the Japura, and I thought we should be turning back anyway. We were a long way from Manaus and I had a flight to catch home in less than two weeks. But Richard was insistent. We were just coming into land that was, on paper, owned by his father. He really wanted to see it.”

  “Why do you say on paper?” asked Munro.

  “Because that’s all it ever really is in that part of the world,” she replied. “Rich people buy up big chunks of the Amazon to protect it, but the land is so isolated that they never really go there. Maybe they’ll fly over it once in a while. Meanwhile, the people who were there before, the indigenous people and the illegal loggers and miners, they continue to do exactly as they had before. The only real change is that the Brazilian government has a bit more money in its pocket.”

  “That’s very cynical of you Gaby,” Munro smiled to show her that he did not altogether mean it. But Gaby did not smile back, she was deadly serious.

  “It’s not cynical Mr Munro, it’s the truth. Richard’s dad had never even visited his land. According to Richard he bought it sight unseen, as a PR stunt, and to make a bit of money on a resale in a few years. He had banned logging, but how are you going to stop people cutting down your trees from an office in Greece or wherever he lives?”

  “Ok,” said Munro sitting up, keen to turn her attention back to the story, “so you were twenty miles up the Japura, and you started noticing that the fish were diseased.”

  “That’s right, and those that were still alive were close to death. But things really started to change the next morning. Richard had persuaded me to go on for one more day, just go a few miles further up
stream. He was paying for the trip, so what could I say? We set off early that morning and came to the village at about nine.”

  “What village?” said Munro.

  “It was an indigenous village, the Yuruti people I think. We stopped there to pick up some supplies…”Gaby stopped, took a deep breath and another sip of water. Munro could tell he was getting close.

  “What did you see in the village Gaby?”

  She sighed and took another deep breath, before continuing slowly.

  “We knew something was wrong as soon as we came into dock on the little wooden pier. Normally when you arrive at an indigenous village you’re met by gangs of screaming kids, all jumping around asking you for a pen, or just pleased to see you. But when we arrived at this place, there was nothing. No one came to meet us. Not a soul. If it hadn’t been for the smoke coming from a few of the huts, we would have thought the place was empty. So we began looking around. It was your typical indigenous settlement that you get in that part of the world. A few hectares of cleared jungle, some huts built around a long house, and a couple of wooden piers with canoes tied up to them. Maybe sixty or seventy people living there - living off the land, fishing the river. A pretty simple existence.

  “But this place was different…there was an air of sickness about it, an air of death. We walked around, calling out, but at first no-one came out of the huts. We saw movement inside, but they weren’t coming out. It was clear they were absolutely terrified of us.” She paused again, before going on slowly. “Eventually one of the guides went up to the long house, that’s their sort of community hall, and went in. He came out a few minutes later as white as a sheet. He told us we had to leave, and we had to leave now. He kept saying that the town had the sickness, and that we had to leave. I got really scared, because I thought maybe there had been a plague outbreak there or something. I wanted to go but Richard wouldn’t leave. We stood around arguing for a bit and the first guide went and waited on the boat. But eventually me Richard and the other guide went up to the longhouse and went in.”