Ground Truth

by Rob Sangster

  She clicked back on the line. “I’m here. Look, my company would have to buy or lease trucks, then hire drivers and laborers. I’d have to build a cover story and produce a reasonable flow of revenue for the company. So exactly what are you offering?”

  “I’ll be paying you directly and in cash. You make whatever deal you want with your company or none at all.”

  She ran her tongue along her upper lip. Tax-free income would enable her to leave the company before one of its covert operations landed her in jail. But making a deal with the devil also meant a high risk of being incinerated.

  “That’s fine, but the risks are high, so I have two conditions. First, make me a dollar offer, and I’ll accept or reject it. No second chance. Next, give me all the details of how your plan works.”

  “The deal is fifty thousand dollars for every truck that leaves your site fully loaded for the destination I set. Expect a minimum of one million dollars a month. Your second request is out of the question.” Before she could object, he said, “Now I have two requirements of my own. This agreement will be verbal only, and we deal solely with each other.”

  The amount of money took her breath away. At those numbers, she didn’t care where he disposed of the stuff or how much he raked off for himself. She didn’t answer right away even though she knew he’d just bought her.

  Finally, she announced, “You have a deal, partner.”

  “We’re in business together, not partners. By the way, people who think they’re indispensable are always wrong, and it costs them. Don’t make that mistake. I’ll call you in a few days with a timetable and the specs for the trucks.” He broke the connection.

  From the yellow pad, she tore off two pages of notes she’d made during the conversation and slipped them into the bottom drawer. She reached across her desk and picked up an eight-inch tall pyramid-shaped wedge of black basalt she’d found while kayaking through the Grand Canyon. Holding an object over two billion years old had always calmed her. This time, however, it couldn’t offset the wave of anxiety that swept over her.

  Chapter 8

  June 3

  10:50 a.m.

  OUTSIDE HEIDI’S office window, a Land Rover with a swivel-mounted M-60 cannon rolled along an asphalt strip that wound like a black anaconda across the wasteland.

  She remembered the afternoon several years ago when two men had come to her former office. Before they’d sat down at her conference table, the older man, who’d introduced himself as Callahan, started the kind of full body scan she endured often. When his gaze dropped from her green eyes and curly auburn hair to linger on her chest she said, “What else may I do for you gentlemen?”

  “Dr. Klein,” the other man, named Lee, had said, “we represent the Board of Directors of a certain company whose CEO skied off a cliff. Dead at the bottom. We’re here to offer you a job as our new CEO. We’ll double your present salary to start, and if you’ve met our objectives at the end of the first year, you can expect further increases.”

  Guessing it had been a trap set up by her boss, wanting to see if she’d bite, she’d decided that if a few blunt questions didn’t expose the hoax, she’d show them the door.

  “Why me? And what’s the name of your company?”

  “We know you’ve been very successful managing top secret projects,” Lee had said. “But despite that, you’re underpaid, excluded from the inner circle, and your boss doesn’t give you credit for your good work. Do we have that about right?”

  They damn sure had. “You forgot to mention what your company does.”

  “You’re familiar with ‘gray companies’ that do billions of dollars of business with the government,” Callahan had told her, “the kind of business that never becomes public.”

  “I also know,” she’d replied, “that gray companies operate at the edge of the law, sometimes over the edge. I’m not interested in prison.”

  “As our CEO, we’ll see to it that you are untouchable.”

  “Think about our offer in principle,” Callahan had said. “I’ll call you at four on Friday. If you’re interested, we’ll fly you out for a look at our headquarters. If you decide not to come on board, this conversation never happened. By the way, our deceased CEO never used his real name when he traveled, including ski trips.”

  He’d been clever. He’d anticipated she’d research accidental deaths at ski resorts to find out whether their story was true.

  The big money, a new challenge, and getting credit for her work had been powerful incentives. But it would be a one-way trip. The ego of her present boss would never let him take her back.

  A week later she’d boarded the company’s Gulfstream G450 with its luxurious stateroom, exercise bike wired to the Internet, and burled maple everywhere. After three hours flying west, they’d passed above brown mountains where horizontal yellow bands rose and fell like waves. The Gulfstream had dropped altitude fast and landed like a whisper on a private airstrip in the high desert. A man wearing a camouflage uniform loaded her suitcase into a Lexus SUV left running so the air-conditioning could combat the fierce heat.

  On the other side of a rock-strewn ridge stood a very unimpressive cluster of office buildings, a dozen warehouses, and a line of eighteen-wheel trailer trucks.

  It turned out that the reality was quite different. The five adobe-style office buildings, designed to blend into the landscape, were state-of-the-art inside. Top-secret assignments took place underground in a fortified, four-level complex whose boundaries extended far beyond the offices on the surface. Yellow sulfur lights hung from gooseneck poles. An electrified razor-wire fence, twice the height of a man, guarded the company’s 18,000 acres.

  The environment was foreign to her, but the salary had been too good to pass up.

  NOW, HAVING MASTERED the job of ruling her desert kingdom, she was bored. Socially, she felt locked up in a high-tech nunnery. Her senses were starved. She was long overdue for some excitement. Suddenly, this unexpected telephone call had dropped a combination of both a golden goose—and a lifeline—in her lap. She couldn’t resist the money or the risk, but had a lurking feeling she was going to regret it.

  Chapter 9

  June 4

  9:45 a.m.

  AT NINE FORTY-FIVE Sunday morning, San Francisco’s city center was eerily empty. Instead of sidewalks crowded with well-dressed businessmen and women, the few people in sight looked like tourists wandering in search of a Starbucks-and-New-York-Times fix.

  Jack turned off Fremont into the underground parking garage at 333 Market Street. He easily located the prime parking spaces bearing signs with “Sinclair & Simms, LLC” in gold letters.

  “May I help you, sir?” The guard at the Shorenstein Security desk in the wall-to-wall marble lobby asked softly. The words were civil, but came across as a challenge.

  “Jack Strider. Here to see Mr. Sinclair. Sinclair & Simms.”

  The guard nodded toward the bank of elevators. “Number three is waiting for you.”

  As soon as he stepped in, the door closed, and the car began to rise. When the door slid open on the 54th floor, he was inside the S & S office. It was even grander than he’d expected: a foyer the size of a tennis court, polished black marble, antique Persian rugs, and acres of etched glass. The leather smelled like its color—butterscotch. The paintings were worthy of hanging in the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.

  This firm was a newcomer by San Francisco standards, so this display was to persuade prospective clients that the firm had been in business since the Gold Rush.

  He glanced at his watch. It read ten a.m. exactly.

  From a broad hallway to Jack’s left, Justin Sinclair strode into sight wearing gray trousers, a white turtleneck, and a Whitbread International Race windbreaker. His bright blue eyes, deep set beneath shaggy brows, white hair worn in a ruff like a male lio
n, and craggy features gave him a remarkable resemblance to the late Charlton Heston. He’d been quoted as saying the comparison should run in the other direction. He had to be about 6’4” because they stood eye to eye.

  “Good to meet you, Jack.” As his right hand stretched forward to shake, his left hand gripped Jack’s right wrist, a smooth move Jack associated with many politicians. “Sam told me all about you.”

  Jack heard the slight emphasis on the word “all.”

  “Good to meet you too, sir.”

  “Thanks for coming in on a Sunday morning. I’d be playing golf, but I have to prepare for an important negotiation first thing tomorrow. That’s life in the private sector. Not like the university.”

  Sinclair led him down a corridor whose carpet was so thick it felt like a wrestling mat underfoot. Photographs of a pantheon of business tycoons, politicians and dictators lined the walls. Justin Sinclair was in every one.

  “We call this a ‘love me’ wall, Jack. We like reminders of the old days.” He dismissed it with a backhanded wave.

  They turned into an immense corner office. Straight ahead, a commanding view across San Francisco Bay seemed to stretch north to the wine country and east to the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

  Every vertical surface that was not floor-to-ceiling glass was covered with plaques, images, and mementoes. A series of photos mounted in a row showed Justin Sinclair in the Oval Office being smiled at by three successive presidents. In others, he was delivering an address to the UN General Assembly and relaxing in the late Chief Justice Renquist’s private office. Jack noticed that the photos were at least ten years old, some much older. It looked as if Sinclair’s life in the spotlight had stopped when his term as Secretary of State ended.

  Some men covered walls with the heads of beasts they’d killed. Sinclair’s trophies were the heads of fellow humans. Jack suddenly understood that he was standing inside a trophy case. Prospective clients ushered into this sanctum couldn’t miss Sinclair’s message that he was a man of power and influence.

  At Sinclair’s gesture, they settled into a pair of overstuffed chairs, but instead of talking business, Sinclair began to reminisce, pointing out items around the room that represented high points in his career. “I’ve had a lot of good fortune in my life, but the crown jewel was my term at State. We were handed a God-awful mess. Pulling America back together wasn’t easy. I can’t count how many problems we took care of that would have scared the hell out of the public if we’d ever let them break the surface.”

  “The old Soviet Union was still quite a threat then,” Jack said.

  “A walk in the park compared to the Middle East. If I hadn’t held the Israelis back, they’d have bombed Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and that would have dragged us into a war for sure. We stopped that, and the public never knew. Think about that goddamned Kissinger stealing the Nobel Peace Prize in ’73 without even getting a damned peace. They gave it to him because he talked as if he were Moses and knew things nobody else could understand. Everybody knows I earned the Nobel I never got.” He leaned over and jammed his cigar into the ashtray so hard the wrapper burst.

  Obviously, Kissinger’s ghostly presence had shattered Sinclair’s amiable mood, because he abruptly shifted his attention to the point of the meeting.

  “Look here, Jack, I understand you’ve left Stanford Law and want a job here. Do I have that right?”

  “Your firm has a fine reputation and—”

  “Yes, yes, we both know that. You’re here because Sam Butler asked me to talk with you. Thing is, I’m not a sentimental man. We don’t have a bunch of school kids here who think the professor is the source of all knowledge. We swim with sharks, and I’m a hell of a lot tougher to work for than some bureaucratic Dean. Frankly, I don’t know whether you can cut it. Plus you’re carrying a lot of baggage. I know you understand my position.”

  Although Jack retained his outward expression of calm, he was confused. What was going on? Butler had told him an offer was a sure thing, that Sinclair & Simms would feel lucky to get him. Now it sounded as if Sinclair was leading up to a brush-off.

  “But,” Sinclair went on, “I need to fill a gap in our international corporate division. In other words, you’ve got the job.”

  That was more like it. “What kind of gap are you looking to fill?”

  “Two of your specialties, environmental law and water law. When the New York Times rants about companies polluting the planet, they’re often talking about our clients. So we can use your strong reputation for environmental, shall we say, sensitivity. You’ll be front and center whenever one of our clients gets hauled up before the Environmental Protection Agency, state attorneys general, that sort of thing.”

  That was a slow pitch over the center of the plate, even though his way of dealing with clients’ environmental violations might not be what Sinclair was used to. “I can handle—”

  “In the area of water law,” Sinclair interrupted, “I see an increasing load of major conflicts coming up. I want to be ready.”

  “Exactly right. Before long, water will be the hottest commodity in the world. The first water wars have already started between nations, cities and states, farmers and manufacturers, and the rest, over who owns water rights. Everyone will be suing everyone for destroying water resources.”

  “Exactly. My goal is to be ready to represent our clients. Damn!” He pointed at the Bay. “Look at that schooner out near Alcatraz, flying like a bat out of hell.” He looked back at Jack. “Where was I? Oh yes, so that’s what you can expect. On the big ones, you’ll report directly to me. Understood?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He hadn’t known what to expect from Sinclair, but he certainly wasn’t getting much respect. Still, he reminded himself, signing on with Sinclair & Simms was the best move he had right now. The California Supreme Court would still be an option when the vacancy came up.

  “That’s it then. I’ll put the word out that I’m your godfather, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you succeed. One warning, and hear me well on this. If something comes up later that makes you a liability to the firm, I’ll have to cut you loose. It’s just business. Capisce?”

  Oh, yeah, he got the message. “Nothing else will come up, Mr. Secretary.”

  “I wish I were still ‘Mr. Secretary.’” He looked out the window. “Those were good days. People don’t talk about patriotism anymore, not fashionable I guess. But I’m the biggest flag-waving patriot you’ll ever meet. I’ve always done what’s best for my country.”

  Sinclair picked up an envelope and handed it to him. “This contains the terms of your employment. Your salary is triple what it was at the law school. You come in as a partner, but on probation until I see how you do.”

  They shook hands, ending the meeting. Jack walked down the long hall alone.

  Probation? Sinclair had treated him like he’d just passed the Bar exam yesterday. Instead of a leisurely conversation with the famous politician and superstar lawyer, he’d gotten a monologue and disrespectful dismissal. He should have tossed the envelope on the desk and salvaged his pride. But Sinclair was a big name, and S & S was the only ticket he had to the big show. Somehow, he’d make it pay off. He’d be damned if he’d let Peck destroy his Supreme Court dream.

  Number three elevator waited, door open.

  BACK ON THE Stanford campus, Jack walked into Dean Thompson’s office and dropped his letter of resignation on the desk. He didn’t sit, and Thompson didn’t stand. Thompson scanned the letter and looked up. He had to be worried that Jack was going to tear into him. As soon as he sensed that wasn’t Jack’s intention, he relaxed. If he was embarrassed by having denied Jack the chairmanship of the department, he concealed it behind a grave look on his smooth, round face. He thanked Jack for his service to the law school and started a blatantly insincere attempt to
get him to reconsider leaving. He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw the dark expression on Jack’s face.

  The meeting lasted less than three minutes, and even that was too long for Jack.

  When he left his office for the last time at the end of the week, the halls were empty. Everyone was in the city or the wine country or at the beach. Without a single person to say ‘good-bye’ to, he left the only professional home he’d ever known. He didn’t feel as if a new dawn was breaking. He felt more like there were black clouds overhead, that a thunder and lightning storm was about to cut loose.

  Chapter 10

  June 12

  10:00 a.m.

  IT WAS JACK’S sixth day at Sinclair & Simms. He was working in an office full of expensive furniture and no personality, like a place kept for lawyers visiting from out-of-town. He’d hung the obligatory diplomas and certificates and added his three-foot-square Cibachrome print of Simba, but had done nothing more to make this place his own.

  Peck had committed suicide less than two weeks ago, and thoughts about that traumatic experience sometimes prevented Jack from keeping his head in the game. When that happened, he shook his head and concentrated on the work in front of him. At the moment, he was drafting a licensing agreement for NorCal Power to import tidal turbine technology from a firm in Holland when the phone rang.

  “It’s District Attorney Calder, sir,” his temporary secretary said.

  “Please put him on.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Strider. I’d like you to meet me at the Park Pacifica Riding Academy in Hillsborough at five o’clock today. It’s important.”

  “Of course, but why at a riding academy?”

  “I bought a show horse for my daughter, and I’ve never seen her ride him. She’s training this afternoon, so I can kill two birds with one shot. See you there.”