The Cain File (8 page)

“
Hola
,” Maggie said. “What’s all that racket? Sounds like goats.”

“Goats it is, pretty one.” He shoveled more beans into his mouth, standing back to drip sauce on the gravel, missing his dusty toes.

“My
mami
and I raised a goat or two. Taking them to market, are you?”

“I am indeed.”

“And where might that be?”

“Tarapoto.”

“Peru.”

“The very same.” He licked the back of his spoon.

Maggie got out her wad of money, peeled off enough twenty dollar bills to make him lose interest in his beans, then added a couple more, folded the stack in half, and strolled on over, giving him a sly grin.

“I’m looking to go to Tarapoto myself,” she said.

Just outside Hurango, inside Peru, past the border stop, the truck pulled over and Maggie climbed out of the back. Reeking of goat, she brushed herself off, clambered back up into the cab, the old driver grinning at her moxie. As suspected, the border guards hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in inspecting goats. She rolled the window down and the warm, moist, jungle air rushed in as the driver ground the rig up to cruising speed, which meant tolerable kidney jarring. The driver flipped on the radio, found a lively
cumbia
, bouncing accordion and Latin horns over thick African rhythms. It was an old one, played at all the weddings and family gatherings, about taking life as it comes. He started thumping the wheel in time and singing in a raspy voice and Maggie joined him on the second verse.

¡Oye!
Abre tus ojos. . .

They didn’t sound half bad singing together.

In Tarapoto, Maggie scrabbled down from the cab, shifting her bag up on her shoulder. She tilted her fedora back and waved goodbye to her chatty driver.

At a
Movistar
shop, she bought a new mobile and a SIM card. She had the clerk, a bookish boy with a serious frown, unlock the phone and replace the card.

Anonymous. For a little while anyway.

She rented a room in a cheap hotel, on the second floor, fired up the clattering laptop. Still some battery left. She emailed Ed the phone number. Another GPS ping alert popped up. She hit DENY, powered down. Who—or what—was trying to sniff her out?

She took a badly needed shower, propping the phone up on the gurgling toilet tank so she could hear it in case it rang. By the time she was toweling off, it did.

“Did you order a pizza?” She had the receiver cradled to her neck as she pulled on undies.

“Is your husband home?” Ed said.
Safe to talk?

“Nope.”
Yes, it was
.

“How’s your trip?”

“A few miles from home.”
Still a ways.
“But I’m in the neighborhood.”
She was in Peru.

“When you get there, call.”
Call the embassy when you arrive.
Ed hung up. He kept the call short, even though she was supposedly in the clear.

She thought about that nagging GPS ping again. Who? Or what? Human or digital? Even if it was a bot, a program, behind every automatic crawler was a person. Ed?
No.
If she couldn’t trust Ed, she couldn’t trust anyone. How about any one of those creatures at that so-called party?

She ran a brush through her wet hair and finished getting dressed. Then she put her new jacket on, hat, got her laptop in a bag, checked out, walked down to the main drag. A line of beat-up taxis waited in front of a cinema. She strolled up and down and found the friendliest face.

“Yes, missy?” He was a wiry-looking guy with a bit of a stoop. But he had a nice, dilapidated smile.

“Do you know the way to Lima?” Maggie said.

“Lima? You mean the capital?
That
Lima?”

“Is there another one I don’t know about?”

“No, but it’s a good twelve hours. And that’s without stopping.”

“Will five hundred U.S. dollars get me there in ten?” It was over a month’s salary in this country.

He cracked a wide grin, made lopsided by a missing tooth. “Only if you wear your seatbelt, missy.” The cabbie came around with alacrity and opened the door for her. “Only if you wear your seatbelt.”

As the sun rose next morning, the taxi whirred up Avenida Encalada, a stark wide street below the hills in Lima that resembled an office park, its only saving grace being the tall palms swaying in the median of the road. The early light flattened on the U.S. Embassy, big and blunt, the size of a factory, with small square windows and topped with cement. She was finally here. Her driver was happy to get the seemingly never-ending stream of twenty-dollar bills. As soon as Maggie got out of the cab with her shoulder bag, the tall embassy door opened and a lean man in suit and sunglasses came jogging out, talking into a Bluetooth clipped to his ear.

“And what prompted the investigation in the first place?”

Maggie took a deep breath and considered her response as she looked around the SCIF—Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility—a lead-lined conference room in the Agency’s San Francisco headquarters on Golden Gate Avenue. Two of the Agency higher-ups, flown in from D.C., sat at the far end of the long, polished, conference table, along with several local Agency executives. A woman with heavily sprayed hair, wearing a red polyester pantsuit that fit better ten pounds ago, typed meeting notes into a laptop. As if to complete the post mortem on the failed Quito operation, the more prominent U.S. presidents stared down impassively at Maggie from the walls in the despondency of fluorescent light.

The man asking the question was Robert Houseman, deputy director of West Coast Operations, even though he was based in D.C. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, and dark blue striped tie, along with a severe glower. His distrust of the fledgling Forensic Accounting team Ed had forged was no secret; he saw it as a threat to his control. He brushed his thinning brown comb-over into place.

Sitting next to Maggie was Ed, her boss, gulping from a twenty-ounce Starbucks cup. A brown splash already decorated his blue shirt, first thing in the morning. His wide yellow tie was loosened down his substantial neck and his brown-bear beard needed trimming. He looked like an unmade bed. But behind Ed’s horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharp and focused.

And he was the only one taking Maggie’s side.

Straightening the mandarin collar of her royal-blue suit jacket, which matched her nail polish, Maggie said, “As I detailed in my initial report—over a year ago—I discovered suspicious payments into an offshore account belonging to a foreman at one of Five Fortunes’s exploration sites in northern Ecuador.”

Houseman frowned. “And why were you focusing on the bank account of an employee of a foreign oil company in the first place?”

“Because that employee was getting kickbacks from an American corporation,” Maggie said. “Five Fortunes received those funds directly from Commerce Oil, an American . . .”

“Everyone knows what Commerce Oil is, Agent de la Cruz.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you on some kind of crusade? Against Commerce Oil?”

Maggie glanced over at Ed. On the phone, before she’d left her apartment in the Mission this morning, Ed had instructed her to keep her comments to one of two options: yes or no.

“I work on the accounting side,” she said. “I’m not concerned with what an American company actually does—until it breaks the law.” She looked around the room at the impassive faces.

The next to speak was Eric Walder, director of the clandestine Field Operations, a slender man with frizzy hair. His face was cradled in one hand propped up on the arm of his swivel chair. He’d been taking everything in with half-lidded eyes. “Two men were killed,” he said in a New York accent. “Two of our people wounded.”

Maggie thought of Achic, out of the hospital now, thank God. John Rae had yet to surface. Two people had been killed: one guard and the mysterious driver Maggie had encountered. “I’m aware of that. One of the deaths was related to the fact that I was almost killed myself.” She was still coming to terms with that.

“Yes, you were. And none of it was warranted.”

Maggie folded her hands in front of her on the conference table and made a conscious decision to control her words. She was furious. But she was lucky to be alive. She’d spent the last three days getting back from South America. She was exhausted and her body hurt. “It was deemed justified when I first submitted my report, showing Five Fortunes, a Chinese company, to be a front for Commerce Oil and that political manipulation was taking place in Ecuador. The operation was approved by the Agency. Signed off, funded, and Field Ops-supported. And it wasn’t until the very last minute at the meeting with Beltran, Velox, and Li that I found out Ecuador’s National Vice Squad had been compromised. It looked like we were going to simply give away two million dollars. I just couldn’t see doing that. And I still haven’t been given an explanation—”

“An explanation? You’re an employee of the Agency. You follow orders. And your orders were to continue with the transfer.”

Ed was next to speak: “Sir, under the circumstances, it made sense for Agent de la Cruz to stall the transaction, as it was clear that Minister Beltran had gained prior knowledge of the sting and manipulated the police. His men drew weapons on our agents.”

Walder stared at Ed. “It was your responsibility to make sure your agent did as she was told.”

There was a pause. “Yes, sir,” Ed said.

Maggie cleared her throat. “I take full responsibility for . . .”

Walder held his free hand up to silence Maggie, but maintained his lazy lean position, head in hand. A taut hush stifled the air in the windowless room. “This is not the first time you’ve disobeyed orders, is it, Agent de la Cruz?”

She cleared her throat. “No, sir.”

“You went over your director’s head when you filed that report.”

Did she? Yes. “A prominent American corporation breaking the law in an international setting? I have a duty to stop that.”

Director Walder smirked. “Where did you get your information that started the original investigation? On the kickbacks going to the foreman at Five Fortunes?”

“Through an anonymous tip,” she said.

“One of the one-eight-hundred numbers?”

“No, it wasn’t through one of the whistleblower numbers.”

“Who then?”

“I can’t say.”

“You certainly will if you’re subpoenaed.”

“I can’t, because I don’t know. It was anonymous.”

“An email?”

“No. That I could trace easily enough. Snail mail. A note. Two notes actually. They came a few days apart.”

“Really?” Walder said. “And where did you get these two notes?”

“Delivered to my apartment in San Francisco. They arrived several days apart in USPS postage-paid envelopes—the kind you buy at the post office. The first one contained a yellow Post-It with a single word: Ecuador.”

The woman with helmet hair typed that into her computer.

“It’s all in my report,” Maggie said to her. “Central Records.”

The woman blushed as she continued to type.

“And the second note?” Walder asked, giving an impatient sigh.

“Just five words, which, on their own, read as pure gibberish, until I realized they were encrypted using the word in the first note—Ecuador—as a cipher text to encode them.”

“A
what
text?” Walder said, clearly annoyed.

“A cipher text—basic plaintext encryption. The code word is used to shift the standard alphabet and form substitutions.

“The five words boiled down to two names: ‘Ryan Morris’ and ‘Five Fortunes Petroleum.’ I started researching—in my own time at first. That’s when I found that Ryan Morris, a foreman with Five Fortunes Petroleum on a site in northern Ecuador—clever how the whistleblower used the actual cipher word itself as an additional clue—had over eighty thousand in his checking account. His paychecks were building up. That’s a classic sign he’s getting funded somewhere else. I put a trace on his activity—authorized—and it turned out Morris was getting a lot of cash dumped into an offshore account. A lot. It was coming from a payroll company contracted out by Commerce Oil. Morris and half his team were getting paid to forge oil-contamination reports, make them look clean, so they could acquire drilling rights in the Amazon. What’s more, Ryan Morris worked for Commerce Oil at one time. It kept leading back to Commerce Oil.”

Walder nodded, while Helmet Hair typed. “And you still have these anonymous notes? Evidence to support your case?”

“In the files—Central Records. The case number is C39A4001A.”

Walder smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Any idea who could have sent these notes?”

“A disgruntled former employee? The foreman’s ex-wife? A jealous co-worker?” Maggie’s eyes met Walder’s. “A concerned citizen who has it in for Commerce Oil? Take your pick.”

“Well, it’s still sounding like you have it in for Commerce Oil yourself.”

“If I have it in for anyone, it’s for American companies that think they can cheat the system—and the American taxpayer. I don’t care what their name is—just how they do business. That’s why I took this job. That’s why you pay me—I hope.”

Ed kicked her shin gently.

“That will be enough of that,” Deputy Director Houseman said. “Our job is not to police the environment, or U.S. companies—”

Director Walder interrupted again. “Let me make something clear—and this comes from the top. There will be no more witch-hunt missions like this in the future. This was a simple sting that turned into a bloodbath—one that we now own and must explain—to the Ecuadorian government. I’m spearheading an investigation into why this operation was ever approved in the first place. Commerce Oil, the supplier of much of the world’s energy and a major employer in this country, if not the world, being hounded by an intelligence agency?”

Maggie looked at Houseman, then Walder. “Our transfer was meant to look like a donation to Beltran’s Amazon Wildlife Restoration Fund. It all looked good. I set it up myself. But Beltran knew it was a sting. Shouldn’t we be asking
how
? Along with
who
was the contact who picked me up? Shouldn’t we be asking
why
that happened?”