The Cain File (13 page)

“Let’s hope this one finally gets it.” A middle-aged man in a hard hat came into view, bending down to smell 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.

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 herself—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.

lista de presos.
Prisoner List.

Further authentication was required. Monchy and Alexandria sang about their love flying away by the time Maggie confirmed that SQL injection was not blocked at
Carcel de Mujeres.

Amateurs. So trusting. Yet they lock people up.

She built an https URL in the command line, added a default SQL admin userid and password, hit
enter
, and was taken directly to a “secure” page of confidential prisoners. She sorted them by date.

The first was a middle-aged Afro-Brazilian woman with a face like a bag of rocks. Certainly not Kacha’s cousin.

The second was a thirty-something light-skinned Mestiza with cropped hair and thick glasses. Her occupation was listed as teacher. Too old.

The next was a pretty soft-skinned Indian teenage girl. Long silky black hair. Eyes intense, a deer frozen in the headlights of incarceration. Her real name wasn’t listed, but it didn’t matter. She had the zigzag tattoos on her cheeks the girl in the video had. She was the same girl. She was simply given the name of Yasuni1.

Tica Tuanama.

Maggie scrolled down. Mixed in amongst the hard faces were prisoners Yasuni2 through Yasuni7. All Indian women, some old, some young, many with Kichwa tattoos on their faces. Maggie bet all the money she had in the bank and more that they were the other six women arrested with Tica.

She scrolled back up to Yasuni1.

Next to her id was a blue asterisk, which Maggie clicked.

Emergencia médica
.
It was dated four days ago, a day before Kacha helped Maggie escape Quito.

She sat back while Bianca Alejandra Feliz sang about needing to turn over a new leaf in her life. Her heart was thumping in her ears. She called John Rae.

“Imagine my surprise.” It was clear he wasn’t unhappy at all to hear from her.

“Can I change my mind about dinner?”

“It’s a woman’s prerogative.”

“Like sushi?”

“See, that’s good,” he said. “Some people would assume a Texan would eat steak. But you’re moving away from that stereotype.”

“Does that mean you like sushi?”

“Uncooked fish? Are you serious?”

“Pick me up at eight,” she said. “I know a place where the meat is bloody.”

“I hope you’re talking about the steak,” he said and clicked off.

Maggie shook off the image of the Caterpillar rolling over the dead man, and a poor Yasuni Indian girl in a prison and her “medical emergency,” then navigated her browser to Balou.com, where she created a free email address: JenniferLopezFan86.

She typed in the email address Kacha had given her in Quito. In the subject line, she wrote: Jennifer Lopez-
¡
Qué Bárbara
!

Then she searched the net for Jennifer Lopez fan sites and quickly cut and paste a blurb promoting the artist into a makeshift email newsletter. It looked like junk mail, spam. Kacha would respond, per their agreement, giving her the coded contact info they’d agreed upon in Quito. Maggie sent the email. And checked her watch.

In the bathroom, she finally stepped out of her sweaty running gear and took a shower. A Long. Hot. Shower. Afterwards, she climbed into a fluffy white robe and dried her hair with a towel. Her limbs were warm and relaxed from the long run. She put on some Segovia and sat in the leather chair she and Seb had violated scant hours before and dug out an Acorn report she was supposed to be working on. Get that BS out of the way.

She studied the numbers until fresh fog streaked by the bay window and the incessant traffic on Valencia grew more incessant with frenetic San Francisco rush hour.

Then a
ping
from
down the hall pulled her out of the report, although it didn’t take much to make her put Acorn down. An alert from her ’puter lair. A second ding followed the first. She set her green-and-white printout on the floor and padded down the hall.