Whitewash Read online

  It was crowded as usual, but they were already waiting for him in their corner booth. Abda slid in beside Khaled and said nothing. Qasim looked ridiculous in what Abda recognized as a designer T-shirt. He wanted to point at the embroidered emblem and reprimand his friend for wearing such a thing. But he knew this was what Qasim needed to do to fit in.

  The waitress named Rita brought him coffee and remembered the extra cream without him asking for it. She had served them many times. She believed they were students and had even helped Qasim with his make-believe American literature class. He still carried the thick book. It sat on top of a notebook in its usual place beside his coffee cup. Pieces of paper stuck out from the pages as if marking passages.

  Qasim played his role a bit too seriously, and sometimes Abda worried there would come a time when it was no longer a role. Was it possible Qasim would forget? Abda had always believed he needed to worry more about Khaled, the quiet intellect, whose eyes—never his voice—often challenged Abda’s dedication to doing everything and anything that was necessary. Abda knew Khaled thought himself better able to lead and more committed to their cause. But there could be only one man in charge and they could not afford the luxuries of jealousy, resentment or distrust. Khaled knew this and he would never put his own personal beliefs above or before the mission. This idea that an individual could come before his nation was a frivolous, selfish, Western concept. Abda hoped that Qasim also remembered this as he enjoyed wearing bright-colored clothes with ridiculous brand-name logos and even more ridiculous price tags.

  They ordered sandwiches and as soon as the waitress left them Abda brought out a calculus textbook from his backpack. From between the pages he slid the envelope with the now-broken wax seal. He carefully withdrew a single sheet of paper and unfolded it in the middle of the table. The three of them huddled around it as if it were some sacred text. Qasim took out a pen and opened his notebook, pretending to take notes, continuing to play out his charade as a student.

  The diagram had been sketched on plain white paper that looked unremarkable at first glance. In truth, when Abda first opened the envelope left on the backseat of his cab and found only this diagram with its odd penciled-in codes, he felt the air leave his lungs. He thought for certain he had been duped. That suddenly the transfer of information had stopped and in its place was some penciled hoax.

  Now as he watched his friends stare at the sketches on the paper he realized their confusion.

  He pointed to a rectangle drawn at the top. “The head table.” His finger slid down to several circles, tapping one at a time as he whispered, “The delegates from Europe, the representatives from American oil companies, members of Congress.”

  Abda saw their eyes go from confusion to realization to excitement as they, too, started to see the meaning of the codes.

  “The banquet?” Khaled said softly and Abda could see him restraining a smile.

  Abda took Qasim’s pen and circled several of the penciled-in codes of two to three letters, sometimes with a number.

  “It is not only every table arrangement, but every seat assignment,” he told them. “We now know exactly where our target will be seated.”

  17

  Saturday, June 10

  EchoEnergy

  “A tall latte with steamed milk instead of cream, and a shot of espresso. Anything else?”

  “No, that’s it,” Sabrina said, taking the coffee in one hand while handing the woman her Visa card with the other. The credit card provided her a detailed account of her monthly spending, so she used it constantly to appease her obsession with order and organization. Along with electronic BillPay she no longer found the need to ever carry cash.

  Sabrina had made this exchange every Saturday morning for almost a year with the small Asian woman who ran EchoEnergy’s Coffee Shack, and yet every Saturday the woman pretended both the order and Sabrina were new to her. Neither woman called the other by name despite their employee badges prominently displaying their names in bold letters alongside their mug shots. One woman clipped hers to the strap of her coffee-stained apron, the other to the lapel of her white lab coat, and that alone determined the difference, the boundaries between them. It hadn’t taken Sabrina long to understand the social hierarchy within the corporation.

  Quite honestly, the lack of familiarity didn’t bother Sabrina. She liked her privacy, even liked maintaining a level of anonymity, something she had gotten used to and had taken for granted living in Chicago. It wasn’t much different than being a professor and keeping a social distance from her students. Or at least that’s how Sabrina looked at it, despite thinking it a bit contradictory to EchoEnergy’s fundamental philosophy. The industrial park sprawled over 100 acres in the middle of nowhere and prided itself on the small-town atmosphere it had created, providing fitness, recreation and dining areas that made it look more like a miniresort than a manufacturing park. There was even a dry cleaner, bank branch and convenience shop that sold anything from a gallon of milk to Seminole T-shirts.

  CEO William Sidel often bragged that his 267 employees were one big happy family. Lansik had used his own version of that spiel during Sabrina’s job interview. Working in a small, communitylike setting had been the last thing Sabrina was interested in. She already had family members who had become strangers to her. She didn’t need more strangers pretending to be family.

  On Saturday mornings it should have been particularly difficult for Sabrina not to get to know the few who walked the halls of the West Park, which included the laboratories, offices and café. Even the plant ran with what they called a skeleton crew of only about two dozen over the weekend. But that’s when the class separation, the hierarchy, revealed itself. Anyone with a white lab coat stood out, almost detached from the rest of the company and unapproachable, getting a respected nod and courtesy “hello” but nothing more, as if everyone believed the scientists had much more important things to do. After all, it was the scientists’ mystery process that kept them employed. So all Sabrina had to do was slip on her white lab coat and suddenly she gained the privacy and anonymity she craved.

  Most of the time she loved Saturday mornings. She took refuge in the silence, the closed doors, the absence of phones ringing and computers humming. This morning she turned on all the lights in the lab and her office. The misty fog of sunrise had been pushed out by heavy bruise-colored clouds, swollen and bloated and threatening to burst at any moment. They rumbled overhead, sealing in the hot, steamy air.

  She noticed Dwight Lansik’s office door was still open, left ajar just as it had been the entire day before. She knocked before entering. They were usually the only two at work on Saturdays, he, of course, already here since he had been spending the nights. Out of curiosity Sabrina opened his closet door. There in the middle of the floor was his ratty duffel bag.

  This didn’t seem right.

  Okay, maybe he and his wife had suddenly reunited. He wouldn’t need to stay here anymore. But would he leave his personal items? She glanced over her shoulder and hesitated, then knelt beside the bag. She pulled back the main zipper. Everything looked to be in perfect order, folded and tucked. She opened one of the smaller side zippers to find a wallet and car keys. Now, that was strange.

  Sabrina left the duffel bag and moved to the one window in Dwight Lansik’s office. She stretched and twisted, but still couldn’t see the corner of the back parking lot, close to the river, the spot where all the plant crew migrated. She had walked out one evening with Lansik and when he headed in the opposite direction he had joked that his Crown Victoria looked much more impressive among the Chevys and Fords than in the West Park lot with all the Mercedeses, BMWs and Lexuses.

  She went back to the closet and grabbed the keys out of the duffel bag. Something definitely wasn’t right.

  18

  Washington, D.C.

  When Natalie Richards was a little girl she dreamed of being a black Emma Peel. She watched the popular TV show The Avengers faithfully and accord
ing to her momma she had even been able to mimic a pretty darn good British accent. It didn’t take long for the little girl, or by then a young woman, to realize there wasn’t any room in government intelligence or the Justice Department for a woman, let alone a black woman. Once in a while she wished her momma was still alive to see how far her little girl had come. Today was not one of those days. With the energy summit less than a week away there was still too much at risk.

  She stood in her office, looking out of the window. Thankfully, the building was quiet on Saturday, though not the outside. A crew with a jackhammer started ripping up a portion of the sidewalk down the street. But at least the phone remained silent and she’d take that jackhammer noise any day over the phone calls she’d dealt with all week.

  She glanced back at her desk, the notes and maps and diagrams spread alongside file folders and to-do lists all dealing with the energy summit. On the edge of her desk were folded copies of the Washington Post and the Times. She hadn’t bothered to read more than the headlines. She didn’t have the patience to wade through small-minded rantings about the energy summit’s expectations and obligations.

  The media had pushed this president to focus on foreign oil and the U.S. dependency. What they didn’t realize, what they didn’t care to understand was that foreign oil wasn’t just about oil. It was about continued relationships. It was about diplomacy and maintaining a level of friendship and influence in a region that spawned and harbored terrorists. How could anyone not understand that? It seemed so simple to Natalie Richards, but then she had grown up in a neighborhood where she had to deal with bullies every day of her teenage life.

  The last president understood and he even drew a line in the sand: “You’re either with us or against us.” Despite the jokes about “cowboy diplomacy” it had been absolutely necessary at the time. It had worked. In fact, it had worked so well that this current president thought he had the luxury of backing away, of relaxing and pretending things had changed. But things don’t change overnight. People don’t change.

  Natalie and her boss were a part of a group that believed the attitude of this current president threatened to demolish all that goodwill built up among those who had backed the United States. And he was doing it recklessly by taking away contracts and going back on age-old agreements. It wasn’t right and it would cost the country more lives in the long run. Thank God, Natalie’s boss recognized that and had the balls to do something about it. The difficult part, the unfair part, was not letting anyone know, especially when adversaries like Senator John Quincy Allen so blatantly and so vocally lobbied and promoted his pet project, EchoEnergy.

  Natalie had to put aside the file on EchoEnergy and now she flipped open her classified dossier on Allen. She hadn’t been able to find anything…yet. He hid it well, but if Natalie couldn’t find anything on William Sidel and EchoEnergy she was determined to find Allen’s Achilles’ heel. Every politician had one. Some were just more difficult to find than others. Allen came off as the protector of the common man’s rights and environmentalists’ advocate, yet it was rumored that he owned a resortlike mansion on South Beach where he intended to retire. He preached about the United States’s need to decrease its dependency on foreign oil, but then he voted against drilling in Alaska’s ANWR. He was called a maverick when he sided with Republicans, proposing an amendment to define marriage, yet Natalie had never once met the senator’s wife. Only in Washington, D.C., was it possible to get away with such contradictions.

  Natalie shook her head. Suddenly, she seemed to have the weight of the nation’s future piled somewhere on her desk. It could have been—no, it should have been—a very simple business deal, if only Dr. Dwight Lansik hadn’t changed his mind. Instead, she had to resort to plan B and damn it, she had enough to worry about without some sort of covert operation becoming part of her job.

  She smiled at that term covert operation. Perhaps in a way she had become a sort of twenty-first century black Emma Peel.

  19

  EchoEnergy

  Sabrina stood back and stared at the dirty white Crown Victoria. Thunder growled overhead, the clouds bloated and slow moving. The parking-lot lights blinked on as the sky continued to darken. There was no breeze, nothing to break up the thick, humid air. On the weekends there was no rumble of trucks, no hiss of hydraulics, only the distant hum that joined with the croaking of frogs from the river’s bank. She’d never noticed before how close this parking lot was to the river.

  She held up the electronic keypad attached to the keys. She knew it was Dwight Lansik’s car. Yet when she pushed Unlock she jumped at the sound of the doors unlocking.

  There could still be a logical reason for his disappearance. There could have been an emergency and someone could have picked him up. If he had left in a hurry that would certainly explain the car and the duffel bag. Whatever had happened wasn’t really any of her business.

  She checked inside the car, opening the driver’s door and glancing behind seats, not sure what she was looking for. Then she popped the trunk, walking slowly, almost hesitant to look inside. Did she really expect to see the body of her boss tied up and tossed back there? Thankfully, it was empty and she released a long sigh, not realizing that she had been holding her breath. Too many movies, she decided, blaming the storm clouds above for inducing her slasher-movie mentality. So her boss had played hooky. Maybe that’s all it was.

  Finally she locked the car and headed back to the lab. The rain might start any second and Sabrina had learned the hard way that thunderstorms in Florida weren’t anything like in the Midwest. Until she moved to Florida she had never seen rain come down so hard and for so long, drenching sheets of it, that would begin full force and so suddenly as if a huge water spigot had been opened.

  Sabrina glanced back at the car and this time caught a glimpse of the rolling river between the trees. William Sidel had chosen this property specifically so he could be on the Apalachicola River. The forest surrounded the park on three sides and the river created a natural border on the fourth side. A swatch had been cleared in the middle of nowhere so that the park was protected by a fortress of trees and water. Some had suggested Sidel simply wanted his company to be a part of the natural environment he loved and hoped to save. Others called him paranoid and accused him of isolating his manufacturing plant from scrutiny.

  A closer rumble of thunder made Sabrina quicken her pace. But in midstride she stopped. Whether it was only the weather or a hunch, something wasn’t right. She turned and headed to the plant instead of the lab.

  She found the door to Reactor #5 locked. Of course it was locked. Every door to every building was locked. The reactor wasn’t being used, and yet, standing on this side of the door, she could feel the vibration.

  Sabrina pulled out her security pass key card. Few employees had clearance for all the working areas of the plant. All the scientists and most of the engineers had full clearance. She slipped the card into the slot, but the electronic eye continued to blink red. She looked over her shoulder. Was it possible they had already restricted access? She tried again, this time slowly. The light flashed green for several seconds then finally the lock clicked. She yanked the door open before it flashed back to red.

  Sabrina had never been inside Reactor #5. It had been exactly what O’Hearn had said yesterday afternoon. It was offline for future use, for a process they weren’t prepared for, that they couldn’t afford. Sabrina entered slowly, taking careful steps. A huge transparent water tank, two stories tall, stood in the middle of the room. Steel ladders climbed up its sides and grated catwalks crossed over the open top. She recognized it as a flushing tank. There was a similar one in Reactor #3 that the flash-off from the depressurized feedstock spilled into, almost like the final rinse cycle of a washing machine. All of the nutrients and cooked oil were separated and pumped to other tanks, but the leftover water was forced into the flushing tank where it was cleaned up one last time before being released into the river.

 
; Sabrina could hear the pinging sound inside the reactor more clearly. There was no doubt that feedstock of some sort ran through the overhead pipes. She had been right when she thought the valve was open. The whirl of machinery vibrated all the way to the floor. Huge fans spun and buzzed, but the room radiated heat. And with all the activity, the flushing tank, the most important part of the process, the part that cleaned up the final mess, sat idle without a gurgle.

  20

  EchoEnergy

  Leon hated that the guy thought he could just add on another hit like some two-for-one deal.

  “But you’re already in Tallahassee. It’s not like you need to make another trip,” the guy said in a smug voice that grated on Leon’s nerves.

  He’d worked for mob bosses less presumptuous than this asshole. How’d he think this worked—Oh, by the way, while you’re still in town you mind killing one more person?

  It was bad enough that Leon had given in to the demand of no guns or knives. Christ! He should have charged extra for that alone. Didn’t these assholes realize it took some creativity to figure out how to off someone and make it look like an accident? He wasn’t a goddamn magician.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough, here he was again at this stinking guts factory. The place gave him the creeps. It wasn’t natural what they were doing. He didn’t care what anyone said. ’Course, someone else must think it’s not natural or Leon wouldn’t be back.

  Whatever was going on wasn’t up to Leon to figure out. He didn’t get paid to form opinions or make judgment calls. The reason why this two-bit chicken factory seemed to be cleaning house of their white-lab-coat staff wasn’t any of his business. That they chose to use his services rather than hand out pink slips with their last paychecks was actually good for Leon’s business. It’d be silly to question it. He just didn’t like the asshole’s attitude.