Ground Truth

by Rob Sangster

  “That’s about it.”

  “Even if you agreed, how much can you do from here?”

  “Actually, I’ll be on site in Mexico City.”

  “Wow! The office scuttlebutt let me down. We wondered where Sinclair intended to fit you into the firm. In fact, I thought we might be working together. How soon will you be back?”

  “Could be a while.” She didn’t need to know he was being exiled, that his future was opaque.

  A team of servers swooped in, laid out their dinners, and withdrew.

  “Okay,” she said. “While I’m digesting that bit of news, let’s go back to a lawyer’s duty in this situation.”

  Over Lobster Martinique, they talked about legal ethics, finding themselves in complete agreement. Their intense conversation about the law was a reminder of what a fine mind she had. She blew past irrelevant arguments, made sense of apparently contradictory points of view, and, damn it, she was so drop dead gorgeous he found it hard to concentrate.

  “I don’t see how you’re going to defend what the Palmers are doing in Juarez.”

  “For one thing, I don’t know yet what they’re actually doing. Second, if they’re guilty, I’ll use pressure from the Mexican government to make them stop.”

  “Why not get Sinclair to have someone else in the firm handle it? He has plenty of guns on staff who wouldn’t blink at helping a client serve poison cocktails to the neighbors.” She gazed at him over the rim of her glass.

  He tried to imagine how she must have seen him in law school—always in control of himself and the classroom, reasonable, analytical, easygoing, and sometimes humorous. And he’d said all the right things about protecting the environment. Now she might see him as selling out, letting Sinclair use him to bail out a ruthless client. He didn’t like that.

  “Look, you admit to using S & S to get what you need. The fact is, my father’s acid rain burned me badly. Cut my options. So I have to represent Palmer, and I intend to succeed in Mexico.”

  She blinked several times, absorbing his serious tone. “And if you don’t?”

  He wasn’t going there. “I will. And I’ve promised myself to pull it off without getting a scratch on my ethics.”

  She swirled the contents of her wineglass and turned away. “I made a promise to myself too. Not to bring up a certain topic tonight. But I just can’t let it go.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. A bad sign.

  “It’s something you did to me, and I’ve never gotten over it.” She drained the wine, took a deep breath, then reached under her seat and came up with her purse.

  “No, I’ve changed my mind again. I don’t want to talk about it. Thanks for dinner. I’ll catch a cab.”

  Before he could say a word, she was gone.

  He had to wonder, was a day coming when things didn’t get worse?

  Chapter 14

  June 17

  2:00 p.m.

  “FERNANDO! THE binoculars. Quick.” Heidi Klein jumped up from the chaise longue and pointed to Banderas Bay and the Pacific Ocean. “They’re back. This time they’re hunting.”

  A pod of killer whales cruised by, working together to corral a colony of seals. This must be the same pod she’d seen playing a few hours earlier—spyhopping and flipper-slapping. They were amusing then. Now their 30-foot torpedo shapes with erect six-foot dorsal fins looked ominous as they moved in for a meal of seal.

  Fernando rushed to her side with the binoculars. She caught his sideways glance and remembered she was topless. Well, what the hell. She could do whatever she wanted here. When she lost the pod in the sunlight glinting off the blue water, she eased back onto the chaise lounge.

  Fernando set a fresh piña colada on the small table next to her and backed away. As she reached for the drink, her gaze stopped again on the copy of Architectural Digest lying on the table. There it was, Ranchero Casacaditas, her dream house pictured on the glossy cover. Arches, deeply inset windows, vaulted ceilings, gourmet kitchen, gym, open-air spa, and a thirty-meter infinity pool that seemed to flow over the edge of the cliff into the Pacific. A hedonist’s paradise. She looked back over her shoulder at the actual house in the photographs. It might soon be hers, including the Wellington jet boat at the wharf. Renting the estate for five days had been one of her best decisions.

  The French owners were asking five million U.S. Only the guarantee of the income from her new venture would make purchasing this paradise possible.

  She reached for the cell phone and called the warehouse foreman she’d hired to supervise her new business. Pleased by the information he gave her, her next call was to the Christie’s International real estate agent who represented the sellers of Ranchero Casacaditas. After some serious negotiating on her part, the owners accepted her offer so long as she made a down payment of $300,000 before close of business and put $500,000, all of it nonrefundable, in escrow within seven days. She arranged that all paperwork would show Heureux Ltd, a Bahamian corporation, as the buyer. One more call and the $300,000 was wired to the Christie’s International account. She had done it.

  She sent Fernando for the $300 bottle of Dom Perignon ’90 she’d bought to celebrate the deal. After he removed the cork, she gave him a nod of dismissal, and he returned to the house—her house. She watched the mist of bubbles against the darker ocean backdrop, closed her eyes and took a long sip. Then she impulsively drained the flute. There’s fifty bucks down my throat. She drank again, this time to her courage at committing to $800,000 out-of-pocket. She needed to make her next call before she lost her edge.

  She entered her business associate’s private cell phone number. No answer. Then she remembered there was a code. Call three times. Three different numbers of rings. By the time she called and disconnected three times she was thoroughly annoyed. When he finally answered, she ignored his greeting.

  “How about coming up with a code that doesn’t waste half the afternoon before you pick up? Besides, you must have caller ID, so you know it’s me.”

  “Caller ID only tells me a call is coming from a certain phone. The code tells me whether it’s you who is calling. It’s a small price for what you’re getting out of this.” Having brushed off her complaint, he went on. “I take it the trucks have arrived.”

  “I just talked with my supervisor. The first three are there, stored in our Number 4 cargo building.”

  The delay was long enough that she wondered whether he’d heard her. Then he said in a tight voice, “They’re transferring the loads on those trucks without you?”

  “Calm down. I ordered my people never to touch those trucks without me present. I’ll be back there in three hours.” She would never tell him about buying the estate. The less he knew about her private life, the better. “Now, what about the cargo manifests?”

  “The cargo containers are locked. Each incoming driver will hand you a sealed envelope with the manifest inside. Give them to your lead driver for the convoy. He must not open the package unless required to do so en route.”

  He’s keeping the contents secret from me. She could make an issue of it, but if this deal blew up now, the purchase of Ranchero Casacaditas, and her $300,000 down payment, went with it. It didn’t matter anyway, because he could fake the manifests, knowing she was unlikely to open the hazardous waste containers to check. She let it go.

  “Why would anyone require the driver to open the manifest en route?” she asked.

  “Your drivers will cross the U.S. border into Mexico. There’s a remote possibility they’ll have to hand over the cargo manifest.”

  Mexico? That knocked her off stride. Then the implications began to sink in. “My drivers aren’t licensed for Mexico. My trucks aren’t insured there.”

  “I’ll send you instructions on how to handle the insurance, and your men will drive only to a location outside Ciudad J
uarez, just a few miles across the border. They’ll be wined and dined for a night and then make the turnaround trip the next afternoon. Very simple.”

  It wasn’t simple at all. Red flags whipped in her mind. If the trucks were offloading in Juarez they could return right away. So why the overnight layover? It had to mean the trucks were continuing on to somewhere else with different drivers.

  “Where does the cargo go when it leaves Juarez?”

  “You don’t need to know.”

  Then she saw what he’d done. The clever bastard had set up a double disconnect. The drivers who brought hazardous waste from around the country would assume her company was its final destination. They would unload and then head back to where they’d come from. The original shippers wouldn’t know their cargo would then be loaded into her trucks and sent to another destination. First disconnect. Once her drivers got off in Juarez and holed up in some cathouse, neither they nor she would know the final destination. Second disconnect. Only he knew the whole route.

  She chuckled. There was so much money in this deal for her that she didn’t care what he did with the stuff so long as it didn’t burn her.

  “You’re right. I don’t need to know. Let’s go back to crossing the border. We’re shipping hazardous waste into a foreign country. Won’t my trucks get hung up by Customs or security?”

  “Legally, they can’t touch them. I can explain, but I doubt you really care about the details.”

  He was such a condescending skunk. He used to pull her forward when they shook hands to throw her off balance, and then step inside her personal space to intimidate her. Well, his little tricks no longer worked.

  “I do care. Spell it out.”

  “A California company wanted to open a hazardous waste treatment and disposal site in central Mexico. Local government hacks refused permission, so a World Bank court ordered Mexico to pay seventeen million for lost profits. They said NAFTA and WTO regulations trump local and national laws.”

  “I can’t believe Congress agreed to that kind of ‘super law.’”

  “That provision slipped through because NAFTA legislation was complicated, and many big-business lobbyists pushed their own pieces of it. When they catch onto the implications of these rulings for America, you’ll see a backlash even from the free-trade-at-any-cost crowd. The rulings mean Mexico can’t use some crackpot local environmental laws to stop our shipments. And something else. I’m happy to dump this crap in Mexico. They’ve been whining for decades about the bad things Uncle Sam has done to them. Hell, they wouldn’t even have a damned economy if the U.S. didn’t keep propping up their sorry peso. They owe us.”

  “Right. I’ll just have my drivers carry a copy of the World Bank court transcript.”

  “Kill the sarcasm. Tomorrow I’ll tell you what border crossing they’ll use—and I mean only that one. The guards will be expecting them and wave them through.”

  “You mean you’re going to—”

  “I mean what I said.”

  “But the border got much tighter after 9/11.”

  “Still no problem. These trucks are going into Mexico. The so-called tightening, which is a joke anyway, focuses on traffic coming out of Mexico into the U.S. Also, our cargo won’t attract suspicion because we’re hiding it in plain sight. Your trucks will be marked with the “Danger” logo, and the manifests clearly state that the cargo is hazardous. Guards will stay as far away as they can.”

  He had an answer for everything, as he always had. In this case, that was reassuring.

  “Got it. As soon as I’m back, we’ll switch the containers to our trucks. That just leaves one little detail. Your payment to me.”

  Some detail. That was the money she was counting on to fund the $500,000 due to the escrow in seven days.

  “It always gets down to money. Well, I’m not paying you for the first load. I’ve had a lot of front-end expenses and, to be candid, this is a test to be sure you can handle your part.”

  “A test? Screw you! I run an international company just fine, so I can certainly handle this pissant business. And you need me to make this work.” The son-of-a-bitch was trying to run over her again. She resented that almost as much as him withholding the money.

  “You want to pull out now?” His voice was steely cold. “Just say so, and I’ll have those trucks out of there before you’re back.”

  She’d made the classic blunder, spending the money before it was in the bank. The $300,000 she’d already paid would be lost if she couldn’t come up with the next $500,000. Now she’d have to get a bridge loan to do that. And she could never handle the mortgage payments without this deal.

  She could hardly make herself say the words: “I’m in.”

  And, she said to herself, I have a long memory. That made her feel a little better until she remembered, so does he.

  Chapter 15

  June 20

  9:15 a.m.

  JACK’S TAXI RIDE to SFO was uneventful except for the uncomfortable feeling of being ridden out of town on a rail. He checked in at a computer terminal and passed through security.

  “Hey, compadre, did you think I’d let you go without saying adios?”

  The question came from a woman wearing a gray business suit. Her black hair flowed from beneath a floppy red sombrero with yellow fringe around its perimeter that concealed her face. But he recognized Debra’s voice, and his sour mood evaporated.

  “You’re on this flight?” He couldn’t believe it.

  “No such luck,” Debra said.

  “Then how did you get all the way to this gate?”

  “The Airport Authority is one of my clients. I have more than enough pull to get a gate pass.” She gave him a firm handshake, then laughed. “Oh, what the hell.”

  She dropped the sombrero on the floor, wrapped her arms around him, stretched up on her toes and kissed him soundly.

  Wow! That caught him by surprise. He was eager to continue, but she stepped back, head cocked a little.

  “I came bearing an apology,” she said. “At dinner, I let some of my old stuff about you jump up and bite me. I shouldn’t have walked out. I’m sorry about that.”

  He was still off balance, so all he could manage was, “What ‘old stuff’ are you talking about?”

  She smiled, shook her head. “We don’t have time to go into that now. Listen, while you’re exploring Aztec ruins and drinking margaritas, think of me working my tail off in the salt mine.”

  She scooped up the sombrero, walked briskly away, and waved without looking back.

  As the 747 lifted heavily into a slow southbound arc a short time later, he looked through the window into the night sky. The morning after Debra walked out on him at Boulevard, he’d gone to her office to find out why. Her assistant said she’d just left for a trial in Miami. Not wanting to deal with it by phone, his question had remained unanswered. It still was, but the effort she’d made to meet him at SFO lifted his spirits. And made him sorry he was leaving.

  He signaled to the flight attendant. “Scotch, single malt please.” He slipped out his MP3 player and listened to the melodious voice of the teacher refreshing his rusty Spanish.

  3:15 p.m.

  A mid-afternoon haze shrouded Mexico City—a bad omen for getting a fresh start. After his luggage was X-rayed to check for guns, he quickly wheeled it through immigration, customs and security. Unlike their American counterparts, Mexican officials seemed only mildly interested in what entered their country.

  He had less than an hour before his four o’clock meeting with Fidelio Ramos, managing partner of the local S & S office. Given the traffic, he had to go straight to the meeting. Confronted by a dozen shouting taxi drivers, he chose a man wearing a San Francisco Giants cap. The moment the driver spotted a tiny opening in traffic, he swung his old Buick Century
full speed into the six-lane destruction derby. Looking out the cab window, Jack already missed the steep hills and sea breezes of San Francisco.

  When the taxi jolted to a stop, double-parked at a busy corner in the central business district, a chorus of horns blared from behind. Jack stepped onto a sidewalk crowded with well-dressed men and women trying to maneuver around beggars and street musicians.

  Three young girls closed around him holding up watercolors for sale. Their shirts were worn; their bare feet black with street grime. He’d read there were thousands like them around the city trying to earn a few pesos on the streets.

  “Señor Americano.” The youngest held a painting high over her head. “Compra de mí. Buy from me.”

  About a foot square, the painting was a Spanish galleon drawn with the sparse lines of Picasso. The price on the small tag was cheap, but he didn’t want a painting at any price. He pulled out his wallet, took out thirty pesos, less than three dollars, and replaced the wallet. Keeping his luggage in front of him so it wouldn’t disappear, he handed her the money as a gift. She threw her arms around his waist and the others crowded in, laughing and clapping.

  He grabbed his bags and set off toward the skyscraper in mid-block. It was show time.

  On the thirty-eighth floor, the elevator door opened into the firm’s private reception area. Beyond a discreet fountain in the center of the room, the receptionist sat inside a semicircular counter of clear glass. Behind her, spotlights focused on two-foot-tall words in raised brass letters. “SINCLAIR & SIMMS.”

  Designers had spent a fortune to recreate the affluence of the home office, but the result had neither the elegance of San Francisco nor the soul of Mexico.

  “Good morning, I’m Jack Strider. Señor Ramos is expecting me.” He reached to get a business card from his wallet. It wasn’t there. He checked all his pockets. His wallet was gone.

  The young woman watched impassively and then called Ramos. A portly man with a Pancho Villa mustache immediately strode into the reception area.