Ground Truth (7 page)

“Edward would raise hell if he had proof that Montana is, shall we say, cutting corners. Arthur’s the realist. He understands that people who do business in Mexico get crap on their boots.”

“If Montana tries to bribe his way out of this, Arthur may get crap on more than his boots. I mean fines, being shut down, even prison.”

“We’ll keep that from happening.”

“But if they’re doing serious harm, we have a duty to advise them to stop.”

“Arthur’s not paying us to lecture him on morality.”

“The stuff Palmer Industries processes is deadly. We’re obligated to—”

“We’re obligated only to advise the client when asked.”

Jack sucked in a breath.
Dead end. Time to change the subject.

“Edward distrusted Montana even before these citations. Do you know why?”

“That bonus deal rankles him so he watches the financial statements like a hawk. Profits are so much higher than projected that he believes Montana must be cutting expenses way below budget.”

“If that’s what the government citations are about, then we—”

“That’s enough. You’re not this firm’s chaplain.” He moved behind his desk, ending the meeting.

JACK WALKED SLOWLY down the corridor from Sinclair’s office. This time, the politicians’ Wall of Fame barely registered on him.

When he reached his office, he dropped into his chair. He was in a field full of land mines and needed some kind of edge—and fast. He’d talk with one of the other lawyers who had dealt with Palmer. The lawyer whose name showed up most often in the files had left the firm, but there were others. One was Debra Vanderberg. He’d seen her name in the Palmer files, handling some zoning matter. She’d been a student in two of his classes, riparian rights and, his toughest one, advanced international economics. He’d found her insightful and accurate. And very attractive, but hadn’t been willing to cross the barrier between professor and student. When he’d seen her in the S & S hall a few days earlier, he’d wanted to stop, but was so pressed by preparing for Mexico he only waved. Thinking about her made him smile.

The career reversal between them now was dramatic. His career had the upward momentum of a soggy sparkler, while she was referred to as the firm’s wonder child. Still, she was the perfect person to talk with about Palmer.

He tapped Debra’s number into the interoffice phone.

The line was busy.

Another bad omen.

Chapter 13

June 16

7:00 p.m.

“I’M SORRY SIR, we’re fully booked tonight,” said the woman who answered the phone at Boulevard restaurant. “Would you like to make a dinner reservation for next Thursday?”

Not wanting to look for someplace else, Jack tested the firm’s clout. “I’m a partner at Sinclair & Simms. Would you mind checking again?”

Without missing a beat, she replied, “Actually, if seven o’clock is okay we have a very nice corner table. And your name, sir?”

“Jack Strider. Dinner for two. Thanks.”

He’d finally gotten through to Debra and, on the spur of the moment, decided to invite her to dinner. He needed to get out of the office.

When he and Debra entered the restaurant, the hostess called him by name twice as she led them to the big money table. The sommelier arrived and handed him the wine list in a black Moroccan leather folder, as if entrusting an heirloom. Jack made his selection without a glance at the right hand column.

Debra had seemed a little distant in the car, responding rather than initiating conversation. Still, as he looked at her across the table he was glad he’d kept calling until he reached her. Not only was she a brilliant lawyer, but she was familiar with the Palmer files, a good sounding board for his predicament. With her fine features, dark eyes, long silky black hair and tall, athletic figure, she was also the most beautiful woman in the room.

As soon as the ritual of sampling the white Bordeaux was finished, Jack raised his glass.

“Thanks for joining me on such short notice.”

“My pleasure, but I’m puzzled. Except for a fly-by the other afternoon, I haven’t seen you since law school. So this must be a business meeting—but Boulevard is not exactly a conference room. So what’s up?”

“It
is
business, but I’d like to hold off on that and talk about something more pleasant first. Like about your personal background.”

That was clumsy. He’d just asked the equivalent of what her zodiac sign was.

“You mean my family?”

He nodded.

She sipped her wine and gave him an amused expression. “Okay. My mother was Balinese, a painter. Father, an anesthesiologist. He’s Dutch, the reason I’m tall. We lived in Amsterdam until he brought the family to San Francisco. Mother wanted me to be a dancer, but at sixteen I switched from ballet lessons to tai chi and karate. That about sums up my childhood.”

“How did you wind up in law school?”

“In Holland, the law is almost sacred. In the U.S.—oh, don’t get me started. Anyway, in high school I wrote a paper called ‘Balancing the Scales of Justice.’ I thought being a lawyer would help me do that. So that was my first step toward Stanford Law.”

“Is your dream coming true at S & S?”

Her quick frown said she didn’t like his comment, but she blew it off. “Of course not. This isn’t a lifetime gig. After graduation, despite my scholarships, I owed $70,000 in loans. S & S offered me a lot of money, so I’m using this firm to get what I need. Sort of like you. There must be some reason you chose this sausage factory.”

“Sore subject right now,” he said.

The bantering expression left her face. Her dark eyes looked steadily at him. “Fair enough, but can we talk about the gorilla in the room?” She sipped her Bordeaux without breaking eye contact. “You lost your father a couple of weeks ago. Now there’s all that awful stuff about him in the
Chronicle
. Are you okay?”

His defenses rose like a shield. “Our relationship was complex, but, yeah, the way he died will be raw for me for a long time. And stories in the paper pretty much knocked the wind out of me. At least my friends on the faculty have been very supportive.”

He wouldn’t tell her about the call from the wife of a man who was infected with HIV by a girl Peck had smuggled in. Or the message left by Anita asking questions he could never answer.

“Of course your colleagues are supportive,” she said. “They know who you really are. But there is one guy who isn’t a fan. My secretary overheard Stan Simms in the elevator talking to another senior partner. It seems Simms has a real hard on, his words, about getting you out of the firm. He said the bad publicity about your father makes the firm look sleazy. Simms is a real bastard.”

Fortunately, Simms’ opinion of him was irrelevant. But if he didn’t hit a home run in Mexico City, he could be out of the fast track law business for good. “Sinclair hired me, so I don’t have to worry about Simms.”

“Good. Now satisfy my curiosity about something else. I heard you spent half the afternoon with guys who make their living sending poison and jobs to Mexico. That surprised me. At Stanford, you had a reputation as an environmental white knight. Has something changed?”

“No, but it’s true that Sinclair and I met with the Palmers.”

“That must have been fun.”

“Let’s just say I didn’t see eye to eye with Arthur Palmer. By the end of the meeting, I sort of had my tail caught in a ringer.”

“I love a good tail-in-a-ringer story.”

“This stays between the two of us.”

“Done.”

Since she’d already made clear how she felt about Palmer Industries, he told her about the toxic waste violations, Arthur Palmer’s orders to keep away from Montana, and Sinclair’s
laissez faire
attitude.

“I said we have a duty to advise the client not to break the law, especially when what they’re doing may wind up poisoning some unknown number of people.”

“What did our fearless leader say?”

“He pushed back, told me to leave it alone.”

“We never know what to expect from him, except that he loves dealmaking and feeding his ego. Oh, and he detests one of his predecessors, Henry Kissinger. It’s about the Nobel Prize.”

“The morning I met him he seemed upset that Kissinger had won.”

“More than upset, but let’s go back to your situation. Here’s a hypothetical. If your client told you he planned to murder the mayor, would you intervene?”

“What city?” He smiled. “Just kidding.”

“If you’re right about Palmer poisoning people, it sounds damn serious.”

A server arrived to refill the wine glasses and recommend the Lobster Martinique. He then contemplated the ceiling as he awaited their decisions.

After they ordered, Jack said, “Of course, it’s serious, but Arthur Palmer is only worried that the Mexican government may shut down his plant.”

“Let me guess. Sinclair wants to use your pro-environment track record to improve the odds for Palmer, and to hell with your principles.”

“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 Juarez, 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.