Seb erupted, shoved John Rae against the wall. “I asked you a question, pal.”
John Rae regained his balance, stood back up. “Pal?” He straightened his jacket. “I don’t think we’re quite pals yet. But want some advice? Go home, sleep off your liquid lunch, come back later and apologize. Better still, call first.”
They stood there, glaring at each other. John Rae’s stare hardened.
Seb stood to one side.
“Right.” John Rae stepped around. A few moments later, he was bounding down the stairs.
“Who the fuck was that?” Seb said to Maggie.
“Someone who could have thrown you through that wall.” Maggie stormed over to the sofa, hauled the guitar case off the floor behind it. “Here. Take your damn guitar—that you still owe me for, by the way—and get the hell out of my apartment.”
Seb’s tone shifted down. “Maggs—I just want to know what’s going on.”
“This is what’s going on.” She threw the case on the floor in front of Seb, where it made more than a little racket. “Take your guitar, go pawn the damn thing and buy some more nose candy, I don’t care. But I want you both out of here—now.”
Seb blinked. “Hey, I’m sorry, chichi.”
“Take it.” She picked the guitar up by the neck. “Or out it goes.” She headed to the open window.
“OK!” Seb dashed over, caught up to Maggie, put his hand on her arm. “OK!” He took the guitar, gently, went back, picked up the case, put the guitar away. “I think you might need to calm down.”
Maggie folded her arms over her chest. “You’re still here.”
Seb stood, guitar cased, now in hand. “Where am I supposed to stay?”
“Why not ask the girl with the hot-pink lipstick?”
There was a pause. Seb looked down. “I’ll call you?” he said quietly.
“Where’s my key?”
“I lost it.”
She’d have to get the damn locks changed. “Just go, then.”
Seb nodded, turned, left.
When Maggie heard the front door finally slam downstairs, she shut the door to her apartment. Leaned against it. What was the matter with her taste in men? She needed to clear her head.
In the bedroom, she threw off her jeans and sweater and donned her turquoise split-side wet-look running shorts, pink ASICS, and a cropped sleeveless foil tank top. She tucked a twenty-dollar bill and her apartment key into the shoe wallet woven into the laces of her right shoe. No socks. Didn’t need them. The shoes had been through a recent marathon and were broken in just right, which meant they were about to fall apart. The right toe box was taped over with duct tape and the seams were pulling loose. Trail dust blackened the mesh. She remembered running through the Andes as a child, barefoot, and the feeling of the earth on her bare soles. She wished she’d had these when she ran through Quito a few days back, escaping the “accident” at the U.S. embassy.
Clasping her hair back in a ponytail, she tied her lucky Rockabilly red headband and headed down, taking the stairs three at a time.
Out on Valencia, the air was full of Spanish and the honking of traffic, although the telltale signs of gentrification were everywhere: high-end German cars parked next to beat-up jalopies, young hipsters waiting outside a new sushi restaurant that had opened last month, checking their smartphones, while an old Chicano selling oranges in string bags stood out in the middle of traffic. But if she closed her eyes for just a second, it was still the old Mission and she could almost be in Madrid, Buenos Aires, or Lima. She opened her eyes and broke into an easy stride. The savory tang of the taquería on the corner assailed her nose as she ran by.
Two hours later, dripping with sweat, Maggie reentered her apartment building on Valencia and jogged lazily upstairs to the third floor. She’d made it to Fort Funston, a former World War II gun emplacement on the cliffs, where hang-gliders hovered over the Pacific Ocean shining off a muted sun. Their freedom above the bluffs propelled Kacha and her cousin Tica to the forefront of Maggie’s thoughts, because, unlike those hang-gliders, Tica was the opposite of what they were—free.
Before heading for the shower, she squeezed half a dozen oranges and drank a third of the pulpy juice down, set the glass on the hardwood floor in the hallway, while she got her yoga mat out and did her stretches. Long runs could turn you into a musclebound geek if you weren’t careful. First Maggie did the splits, all the way down. Yes, she was still that flexible. She savored the long stretch and let her skeleton crack into it. Then she flipped over onto her back, legs all the way up, one ankle behind her head. Relaxed into that. Then the other, both ankles crossed behind her neck. The Yoganidrasana sleep pose. It felt good to let her entire body just release, as she stared at the Edwardian curlicues on the ceiling.
Drove Seb crazy, too.
Deep breaths and she unwound from her position, back on her feet.
Standing in the hallway now, guzzling more OJ, the 5x7 padded prepaid envelope on the stand stared her in the face. She’d forgotten all about it.
Setting her glass down she picked up the envelope, ripped it open. Peered inside. A blue flash drive. She retrieved it, checked the envelope again. No note. Just the drive.
She took it, along with her juice, to her office, which had an electronic keypad on the fire door that was molded to resemble wood. She typed in a ten-digit key code. The heavy-duty deadbolt gave an electronic whirr and the lock clicked open.
Maggie’s office was a seven-by-nine room with dark burgundy walls, a high white ceiling, and hardwood floors. With escalating rents, most San Franciscans would have been ecstatic to share this room with another person who bathed once a week. But Maggie chose to keep her large flat all to herself. Even with rent control, she paid a pretty penny. Her sanity thanked her. And the need for security sanctioned it.
Maggie’s ’puter lair was cooking with two machines chugging away under the desk lid mounted to the wall under a window that faced a dismal light well. Wires snaked here and there from a 650-watt power supply plugged into a battery backup. Router lights flashed blue and green. The one wall was adorned with handbills from her travels. Bullfights, which she wasn’t crazy about. Flamenco performances, which she was.
Her cave. Sanctuary. Some might question her need for so much computational power right where she slept, but if Hillary could get away with it, what not her?
There was a photo in a silver frame on her work surface: a black and white of Seb caressing his Les Paul—that Les Paul—looking like a lion onstage at El Rio, ripping out a solo. Maggie considered tossing it in the trash, but settled for turning it face down and shoving it back under the window next to a JavaScript manual. She pulled a wireless keyboard onto her lap, dialed into her server. Once she got past the two-stage authentication, she plugged the flash drive into a USB port in a standalone, non-networked machine. Her sanitizer box, used to shake out any suspicious files. She used two different virus checkers on the file before she examined the contents.
A single file: dita.mpeg. A movie. She opened the file with a movie viewer.
It began with outdoor footage in a jungle clearing. Parrots squawked in the distance as a group of men in hardhats stood around a white mechanical drill about ten feet tall. It was in motion, pumping up and down into the earth. The shakiness of the video and the distance of the group suggested that the scene was being filmed covertly.
A crude caption across the bottom of the video read: “Yasuni site 22A” and listed a date of approximately one month ago.
The engineers were primarily Anglo, with the red Commerce Oil globe emblems visible on their hardhats. The drill stopped and one man with a substantial paunch removed a three-foot long cylinder from the drill. The video cut to an engineer in blue plastic gloves laying the same metal tube on a field worktable. He opened the tube lengthwise to reveal a column of moist dirt a few inches thick.
“Let’s hope this one finally gets it.” A middle-aged man in a hard hat came into view, bending down to smel
l the soil sample. He stood back up, going out of view. “Petroleum city,” he said. “Don’t even bother testing it.”
“That bad, huh?” an off-camera voice said.
“Let me put it this way—don’t light a match.”
A few men laughed.
“We’ll have to move further on out to find a decent sample.”
“Guys—there is no further on out. This is as far as we can go. This was supposed to have been cleaned up.”
“Good luck with that,” another voice said, mimicking SpongeBob.
More laughter.
“Now what?”
Another voice spoke. “We’ve been here for three days,” the man who had been in the video said. “We’re out of time. We need to have that cleanup verification.”
“That’s why you have us contractors.” The video swerved to another man, in safety glasses and bushy white mustache, wearing a Commerce Oil hard hat. He grinned as he held up a ballpoint pen and clicked it. “You always have us to blame.”
“No big. By then you’ll be working on the Florim offshore well in Brazil. Making a grand a day.”
“Don’t forget expenses,” Ballpoint said. “And hazard pay. I might get a blister on my thumb from signing papers.”
Several men laughed.
A woman’s voice spoke. “So you’re just going to sign the verification that this site has been cleaned up anyway?” She was American, with an east coast accent, and she sounded young. Judging by the somewhat muffled sound, she was the one taking the secret video. Probably had a small digital camera with her, or even just a cell phone. The man with the mustache lost his smile and shook his head, as if she might be crazy. “Where the hell did we get her from? Of course we’re going to sign the clean-up verification.” He stormed out of camera shot.
The video turned to black.
Forging of oil clean-up verification by Commerce Oil, Maggie thought. Nothing new there. But this was actual video, unlike the note she’d received last year that had started Maggie off on the oil-worker-kickback investigation that led to the failed Quito op. And this had been shot in the actual Yasuni, a wilderness preserve where drilling wasn’t to have begun yet. She wondered if the woman speaking was the one who had sent her the two notes last year. The handwriting on the envelopes was the same. Maggie drank some orange juice as the video broke to footage of a group of natives in dense jungle. An older woman held up a glass of drinking water that was brown in color, like thin tea. She explained that though tainted with oil, it was the only water they had to drink. “We have no choice,” she said in Quechua. A beleaguered man with heavy bags under his eyes said all of his livestock had perished. Another young man said, in an empty voice, that his three daughters had died of cancer. The same young American woman asked them, in good Spanish: “So, even though Commerce Oil was fined over nine billion dollars in 1993 and were ordered to clean up this site then, nothing has been done?”
They all nodded silently.
Maggie put down her unfinished orange juice. It no longer tasted quite right.
The video broke again and Maggie started to see and hear Indians demonstrating in a section of jungle that had been clear-cut. Bright red earth exposed a tract of land between two thick sections of trees. A dirt road of some sort. A hundred or more natives waved signs to stop the proposed drilling in the Yasuni. They were shouting in Spanish and Quechua, some shaking their fists. Their dress ranged from pure jungle—simple skirts or speedos—to jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps. The camera pulled back to show the demonstrators blocking the path of a huge bright-yellow earthmoving machine with the word CATERPILLER emblazoned on its side. The video moved farther back still. More than a dozen soldiers waited with rifles, ready to enforce the progression of the giant bulldozer. It was clearly a standoff. Passions ran high.
The bulldozer roared. A blast of black smoke erupted from its upright stack. The machine clanked forward a few feet.
One young woman emerged from the crowd, throwing down her sign. She rushed up to the bulldozer and stood in front of its giant blade. The bulldozer ground to a halt. The girl was barefoot, wearing a light, billowy, native skirt and a colorful sleeveless top common in the hot Amazon. She had long glossy black hair and light skin. Maggie could make out the zigzag tribal tattoos under her eyes. She was about sixteen. A soldier in a cap, some kind of non-commissioned officer, came forward, waving a pistol, ordering the girl to move aside. She flinched at first, but stood her ground, arms straight by her side, mouth firm.
“Move or you will be arrested!” the sergeant bellowed.
The shouting of the crowd grew to the point where the camera microphone distorted, breaking up. Some called out the girl’s name, urging her to stay strong. Maggie’s heart pounded as she watched signs wave violently to and fro. Several other natives surged forward to join the young woman, standing alongside her now.
“Move!” the sergeant screamed, walking up and down the line of protesters. “Now!”
More natives joined the row of people, making it a double line.
The sergeant roared out orders. The soldiers readied weapons.
More protesters moved forward to join the line.
It was a complete impasse. The more the sergeant shouted, the more people joined the line. He became almost hysterical with anger, charging up and down the line of demonstrators. At one point, he turned, motioned for the soldiers to come forward. While the sergeant’s back was turned, a big man with a beard knocked his cap off with a swipe of his hand, to much cheering from the protesters.
The sergeant swung back around, raised his pistol calmly, shot the bearded man in the forehead.
The big man dropped like a puppet whose master had tired of holding his strings. Most of the crowd turned and ran, screaming.
Only the young girl remained, standing there, flexing her fists, eyes clenched shut, visibly shaking. The dead man lay not five feet away from her.
The sergeant holstered his pistol, composed now, walked up to the girl. He placed his hands on his hips. “Move aside,” he said.
The girl remained, trembling like a sick person.
More than a third of the demonstrators had dispersed. The rest had stopped shouting.
The sergeant turned to the soldiers. “Arrest her. And six more. Women. All ages. Quickly now.”
Another third of the protesters ran off at this point.
The soldiers handcuffed the girl and selected others from the dwindling crowd. They led them aside.
The road was now clear, save for the body of the big man.
The sergeant waved the bulldozer forward as if he were directing traffic.
The machine blasted into action, smoke blowing out of its stack, and clanked forward, the dead man grinding under a tread, twisting, his head turning, then disappearing completely under the metal track with a pop.
The video went black.
Three minutes and thirty-nine seconds.
Maggie’s heart punched in her chest.
The girl’s name they had called out: Tica. Kacha’s cousin.
Death in the Amazon, Maggie thought – brought to you by Commerce Oil.
For a moment, she wondered why the mysterious whistleblower didn’t simply post this damning evidence on YouTube, where a million eyes and ears could hopefully see and hear. But then she realized: The woman would reveal herself. She was obviously a Commerce Oil employee. She would be easy to identify should Commerce get hold of this video.
So she was trusting Maggie. Just as she’d had trusted her with the oil worker taking kickbacks last year. Maggie had been selected to see this video.
That made her even more responsible to be the one to take care of this.
-10-
After the images had settled, Maggie logged onto Iggy, the private messaging network she and a few choice cyber-contacts shared for confidential communication. She’d written Iggy with another student as part of her master’s thesis and it had proved secure enough that she was still using it herse
lf—not that anything was one hundred percent safe. But Iggy was below the radar, because few people knew about it, and she knew every line of code, knew there were no compromises or Easter eggs. She took a slug of pulpy OJ while the program fired up, a black rose spinning as a chat widow opened.
Right now she needed to follow up on Kacha’s cousin: Tica.
She typed a message to her old friend and co-conspirator: @Enzo99 hola - ayt?
No response. Maybe he wasn’t online. It was close to midnight in Paris. She drank the last of her juice and flipped on the old desk radio, set to KRZZ, the local Latin station. A syrupy bachata came on, sad-sweet music with a couple lamenting their failed love in island Spanish.
At the bottom of the chat window, a text finally appeared.
enzo99 is typing . . .
hola, yes, I’m here, and how r things in the sister city?
a little grimier than Paris I bet
mebbe . . .+ the big bad guitar player?
don’t ask
lol - that bad?
yep – I have a huge favor to ask
i thot s much
is it that obvious?
Well, i like a womn who nos what she wants – so what can I do 4 u?
looking for a young woman named Tica . . .
Maggie went on to fill Enzo in with what little she knew.
How much time do you think you need? she typed
well, i have smthing for u rite now
ur 2 gud
this news isn’t 2 gud tho’ for your friend south of the border
Maggie took a breath and typed. K, enzo, lay it on me dude
10.147.121.193
An IP address behind a firewall somewhere.
merci beaucoup, she typed, next time I’m in paree, dinner and drinks are on me.
promises, promises
no I mean it . . .
It took one and a half songs for Maggie to hack the firewall to the server at the IP address Enzo had given her. She fired up her TOR browser, anonymous as it got for web surfing. And was presented with a web page in Spanish and an ec domain: Ecuador.
Carcel de Mujeres. A women’s prison in Quito. She scanned the clickable links.
The Cain File Page 10
