by Rob Sangster
He was about to break the connection when he heard, “What’s up, Mr. Justice Jack? You headin’ back down here to Copper Canyon, maybe for some high-flying target practice out the airplane window like that Sarah Palin woman? If you do, bring that fireball partner of yours along, you hear?”
The syrupy sound of Gano LeMoyne’s voice always reminded Jack of a New Orleans pool hustler.
“I’ll tell Debra what you said.” He wasn’t about to tell Gano that Debra had stormed out with smoke shooting out of her ears. “Gano, there’s an emergency, so I’ll get right to why I called. A Greenpeace ship has disappeared somewhere off the Oregon coast.” He repeated what Hank Thompson had told him, but left Katie out. It hurt too much to repeat that part. “If we don’t find the ship or the crew fast . . . well, we just have to.”
“That’s some damn mystery, son. So I suppose you want me to crank up my ol’ Cessna Skylane turbo-banger and fly those wave tips like some drunk crop duster. Well, I’m afraid that’s not in the cards. Lookin’ for poor souls lost at sea just ain’t my kind of gig. Here’s the thing, you got this picture of me stoned and bored, feet up on the railing of this rickety ol’ hotel of mine in Divisadero, right?”
That was exactly how he pictured Gano—lanky, tan, bold mustache, cowboy hat shading his eyes as he stared across Copper Canyon, some kind of firearm within reach, willing to work on either side of the law.
“Fact is,” Gano went on, “there are a lot of fine ladies down here, within arm’s reach you might say, and well-heeled clients who pay for my services in cash. Comprende?”
He had to have Gano, so he had to tell him the rest, “My goddaughter Katie is in that crew. She could be in a lifeboat or a life jacket. I need your help. You’re the only—”
“Why are you still talking? I’ll be airborne in an hour. With my extra tank, I have a range of fifteen hundred miles. All I need are the search coordinates.”
He gave Gano the contact information for Greenpeace.
“I hate to sound mercenary at a time like this,” Gano said, “but the motto on my business card reads, ‘If the money’s right, I’ll get it done.’ These Greenpeace folks are always raising funds from rich whale huggers and the like, so they must be loaded. No sweat them financing this excitement, right?”
“Damn it, Gano, it’s a non-profit, not that you’d know what that is. If they don’t have enough, I’ll make up the rest.”
“I’m pulling my stuff together as we speak.”
“Good man.” He hung up.
Gano was unpredictable, hot-headed, and far too quick to draw and shoot. But when Jack had needed someone to protect his back in the past, even step out front, Gano had been rock solid. If Katie and the crew of Aleutian could be found, Gano would do it.
He called Hank to give him a status report, but was routed to his voice mail.
He had a few minutes before the van would show up, so he got out of his sweaty climbing clothes and turned on the shower. The water was tepid and the pressure low, but he came out feeling better. He pulled on a navy blue shirt and faded Levi’s, ran a comb through his black hair, and stuffed his clothes and climbing gear into his duffel bag.
Plate of nachos and cold bottle of Moza Bock beer in hand, he sat on a small verandah to wait for the van. Staring across a clearing into a dense stand of cedars, he remembered how he’d thought this evening would end. He’d planned to find a park guard who didn’t mind taking a few quetzales to break the rules and let a crazy gringo and his lady back into the park. He and Debra would climb the steep wood ladders attached to the side of Temple IV, the tallest structure in all of pre-Columbian America. They’d sleep up there so they could watch the glorious sun rise together. He’d thought it would be pretty romantic.
He’d met Debra when she was a student in one of his advanced seminars. From the moment she’d walked in, her beauty had filled the space. He’d learned later that her Balinese mother had provided the genes that gave her high cheekbones, golden coloring, and long, glossy black hair. Her eyes were slightly almond shaped, tilting up infinitesimally at the outer corners. But it wasn’t how her eyes looked that reached him. It was how her eyes looked at him. Her height of five feet nine had been inherited from her Dutch father. There was something in her enigmatic smile, composed demeanor, and the tilt of her head that made him sure that in her childhood she’d been admired, even adored. By the end of the third class session, it was also clear she was the smartest student in the room.
He’d been a professor long enough to know better than to give in to his strong temptation to get to know her on a personal level. That had changed when they’d been thrown together in Mexico three years ago. She’d been sent to spy on him, but soon joined him in a battle that involved nuclear waste and contamination of an aquifer that millions depended on. Afterward, romance had bloomed.
His cell phone signaled a call. Hank. He delivered the news that Google GeoEye and Gano would be on the job and would report back.
“That means a lot,” Hank said, but his voice was as glum as it had been earlier.
“Hank, ships as big as Aleutian just don’t suddenly disappear, so what could have happened? If there had been a tsunami or violent weather, you would have mentioned it, right?
“Of course.”
“If Nikita Maru had been catching up, Aleutian would have picked her up on radar miles away. Even if she had started to sink, Aleutian wouldn’t have gone down instantly. Same for a collision with some other vessel.”
“We heard nothing.”
“Pirates?”
“Not in the northeast Pacific. Besides, the whaling ship would have been a much better target for ransom.”
“Terrorists?”
“No one has claimed responsibility. In any of those situations, Aleutian would have fired out a distress call. Whatever happened, they had no time to call for help.”
Jack agreed to stay in touch and clicked off. He took a swig of the Moza Bock. It tasted sour. He couldn’t make himself bite into the congealed nachos.
The tension on the cliff face followed by the horrible news about Katie and Aleutian had drained him, but something nagged deep in his brain. He, Hank, and everyone else were approaching this in a rational way. What if the answer wasn’t rational or was beyond their experience? He’d read for years about strange phenomena at sea, but had given the stories no credibility because they usually pointed fingers at aliens or Greek gods. But maybe something really weird was going on in that part of the Pacific Ocean.
Chapter 3
July 8
8:00 a.m.
San Francisco, California
DEBRA VANDERBERG strode through the front door of Strider & Vanderberg and down the hall toward her office. As she passed the desk of Jack’s assistant, Mei, she saw the surprised look on her face. Mei obviously wasn’t expecting her back from Guatemala ahead of schedule. No doubt Mei wanted an explanation, but, seeing Debra’s expression, she immediately looked back at her computer.
After closing her door behind her, Debra bent her knees slightly and delivered a side snap kick to her office bookcase. Then another, and a third, fourth, and fifth. Light and lightning-fast—she didn’t intend to destroy anything, just vent some of her frustration boiling inside. She’d calmed down a little since storming out of the Tikal Inn and flying back to San Francisco, but her sleep had been fitful. Points she wished she had made kept flashing through her mind. They’d argued about business decisions once in a while, but this was the first time a disagreement had been left unresolved.
She would have gone to Tikal simply because Jack had made his commitment to Zalman and needed her as a climbing partner, but she’d jumped at the chance for a romantic trip together. She’d been stressed about the firm’s financial condition but thought she could suppress it until they got back. That hadn’t worked.
She�
��d thought Jack would call while she was waiting in the Guatemala City airport for the onward flight. She wanted him to beseech, plead, or whatever, to get her to come back to Tikal. But he hadn’t called, so neither had she.
He could have admitted she was right to be worried that their firm was plunging into the red. Instead, he’d been self-righteous and lectured her on the importance of practicing public interest law as though she’d had some mysterious lapse of conscience.
She knew his passion for helping people came from his core. That had been a powerful magnet that had drawn her to him in the first place. Not nearly so attractive was that she sometimes had to be a portal into the real world for him. How could he ignore the fact that their offices had gotten so crowded that two lawyers had to work at desks set up in a hallway, or that others had to scurry to vacate the conference room when it was needed for a client meeting? And what about the guy who sometimes took his laptop and sat in a chair at the end of the wharf just to get some quiet?
Damn it! He had no right. He was the one who had so overextended himself that he’d fallen badly behind schedule on their lawsuit against Armstrong Air Force Base.
There was a discreet knock on her door, then again louder. She was about to tell the knocker to come back later when the door opened halfway. Her paralegal’s head poked in. Seeing her face, his eyes widened, and he withdrew without a word and closed the door quickly.
She looked out a window in the direction of the stone building on the next pier but didn’t see it. She resented having to keep bringing up the business side of their practice. It made her sound like she was obsessed with money. She didn’t deserve that. She wasn’t a student in Jack’s law school class anymore, and she wasn’t his bookkeeper. She was a named partner in the firm.
She couldn’t resist a small smile, remembering the law seminar she’d taken from him at Stanford. It had drawn the cream of the third-year crop and each of them wanted to show how smart he or she was. They often did that by challenging Jack, throwing a complicated legal conundrum or obscure case at him. He handled them with ease and always kept his cool. On the rare occasions he was bested, he would smile and offer a nod of approval. He liked to give examples of lawyers who showed high ethical standards in tough situations, but usually balanced that with a small joke or something self-deprecating. Within a week, everyone talked about him as the kind of lawyer they wanted to be. For her, it hadn’t hurt that he was ruggedly handsome, athletic, six feet four, and seemed to enjoy engaging her in debates. He’d kept a distance because he was a professor, but she’d wished the situation had been different.
After clerking for a 9th Circuit court judge for a year, she’d joined Sinclair & Simms, a high-powered San Francisco law firm, and immersed herself in the law and The City.
At the time she took his seminar in law school, Jack had been a rising star with an unlimited future. That had changed dramatically several years later after his father, a prominent San Francisco judge, was involved in a nasty scandal and committed suicide. Jack had no knowledge of what his father had been doing, but his name had been tarnished by association. When the dean pressured him out of the law school, he’d joined Sinclair & Simms as a partner. Because the scandal kept making headlines, Stan Simms had demanded that Jack be fired. Instead, Justin Sinclair, the firm’s managing partner, had exiled Jack to work in the firm’s Mexico City office.
A couple of months later, Sinclair had become furious about Jack’s investigation of one of the firm’s clients and sent her to Mexico City to spy on him. She’d quickly realized that, unless Jack could stop him, the firm’s client was about to cause catastrophes on both sides of the border. She’d dumped her sure-thing partnership at Sinclair & Simms, thrown in with Jack, and, fighting side-by-side with him, had stopped the bad guys.
Her reminiscence was interrupted by buzzing that meant her assistant was trying to reach her. She noticed three lights flashing—indicating calls on hold—and, for the first time, the stack of memos and notes that had piled up during the brief trip to Guatemala that had left her exhausted, all for nothing. To hell with them all. They’ll have to wait.
She and Jack had returned to the U.S. from Mexico wrapped up in a high-energy, loving relationship, and he had asked her to be his partner in his new public interest law firm. She’d thought marriage was coming up, but it hadn’t turned out that way. They still spent most of their private time together, but neither one of them had even made a move toward living together.
He was far different now from the man she’d met in his classroom. Some of that was the result of the drama that followed the death of his father, and part of it came from his battles in Mexico. The ivory-tower intellectual had transformed into a man who’d had his boots in the dust and learned the meaning of “ground truth.” He’d also dumped the life goal of serving on the U.S. Supreme Court drilled into him by his father and replaced it with his own. She’d been attracted to him in law school, but she loved the man he’d grown to be—well, most of the time.
She picked up the notes and rifled through them without paying attention.
She wanted two big things to happen. They had to win the Armstrong case, and they had to bring the firm back from the edge of the financial cliff. But that wasn’t enough. She needed back the intense relationship they’d had. Their blowup at Tikal had made her understand that she was caught in a bargain with the Devil. To win the lawsuit and save the firm, she’d been behaving like a grumpy accountant. It wouldn’t be long before that drove Jack away. If that happened, well, that was a world she didn’t want to think about.
Her paralegal knocked and entered, looking determined to say his piece. “I just had a call that two people representing the plaintiffs in the Armstrong lawsuit will be here at three thirty to meet with you and Mr. Strider. The guy who called seemed pretty upset. It’s not on your calendar, so I thought I’d better mention it. You do have that time slot free.”
“Jack is still out of the country, so I’ll handle those clients by myself.” They were forcing a meeting, and that meant they were stressed. She understood, and her heart was with them, but it was going to be a tough meeting.
Chapter 4
July 9
3:30 p.m.
San Francisco
“THE FARE IS thirty dollars, Mac, plus the extra ten you promised if I beat fifteen minutes from SFO. Got you here in fourteen minutes flat.” The cabbie reached out for the cash.
Jack paid and stood for a minute, duffel bag at his side, looking down Pier 9 toward his office. He’d barely survived the stupidest climbing blunder he’d ever made, including dangling from a rope while a half-dozen buzzards patrolled his back. Much worse, Katie was missing, and he’d have to give that news to Debra. It would break her heart. Despite his weariness, he had to go inside.
Good afternoon, sir,” Mei said. “It’s a good thing you called from the airport. Ms. Vanderberg has been sitting with the representatives of the Armstrong plaintiffs group waiting for you for quite a while.”
“Don’t tell them I’m here yet. I need a couple of minutes to get my head straight.” He went into his office and closed the door. He’d already heard that many of the plaintiffs, suffering from the stress of severe health troubles, were losing faith in the legal process. Some, out of money for health care, were close to despair. There had already been two suicides.
As he saw it, his job was to give them hope. That would be hard because he also owed them absolute honesty. Even if he were at the top of his game, which he certainly wasn’t right now, it would be a rough meeting.
The plaintiffs were a group known as Victims of Armstrong, thirty fearful and angry men and women. Dozens more would join them later. They were active duty military and civilian employees of Armstrong Air Force Base. Along with family members and retirees, they all lived in the area of the base. Most were sick, some were dying, and others represented those already dea
d.
Before he took the case, he’d had no idea that Armstrong was such a massive military presence. The eleven thousand men and women in uniform and four thousand civilians who worked there handled more passenger and cargo traffic than any other military terminal in America. He and Debra quickly realized there were two types of culprits. Most obvious were the mammoth military cargo planes—the C-5 Galaxy, C-17A Globemaster, and KC-10 Extender—that generated thousands of tons of toxic emissions around-the-clock, as well as daily dumps of oil and jet fuel. In his mind, the greater culprits were the series of commanding officers who had a duty not to harm people on and around the base. Instead, they’d ignored the damage so they could protect their careers and keep from sending waves up the chain of command. He looked forward to making them defend that behavior in a court room.
Thinking about all those who had suffered made his emotional temperature rise. He looked at a desk drawer by his knee where he’d tacked a list of their names.
He’d memorized the list of appalling health problems around the base: bleeding disorders, cancer, dementia, depression, diabetes, GI troubles, heart attacks, high blood pressure, kidney failure, miscarriages, Parkinson’s disease—it went on. Some of the cases were so rare they baffled the docs.
He suddenly felt a touch of claustrophobia. Compared to the wide-open spaces he’d just left, his office felt stuffy and dark. He stood and raised the blinds Mei had lowered. He opened the door onto the deck outside his second-floor office. A few deep breaths and the familiar sounds of the waterfront made him feel a little better.
