Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure (9 page)

“But I do have a question for you. What can you tell me about Buell?” I ignore his complaint. “I mean, what do you know about his background?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what’s he into? People like him aren’t wealthy because they’re good people. They all have things in their past.” I can feel the congestion building in my nose from the latent cigarette smoke. I sniff and wipe my nose with the back of my hand. I turn around and look out the rear window. Nobody is following us.

“I thought you worked for the Governor.”

“And?” We’re not getting off to a productive start.

“And,” he says, “I would think you would know your opponent’s baggage.”

“I know spin,” I admit as I check the passenger side rear view mirror. “I don’t necessarily know the truth. Remember, everything I know comes from politicians. How trustworthy can that information be? I want to know what
you
know.”

I don’t want to tell him I’m increasingly aware I’ve been played somehow. I am not some trusted confidant for the Governor; I’m a tool. For a confident twenty-something with the ego I have, it’s not an easy self-admission to make.

“Fair enough,” he spins the steering wheel to the left. “Well, we know he’s into energy. He’s always worked hand in hand with fuel exploration companies and end-user energy providers. Kind of a collusion to keep everybody happy.”

“How’s that?”

“He invested heavily in exploitive energy. His companies backed mountaintop removal coal projects in Appalachia, and tar sands exploration in South Texas and in Western Canada, both really nasty ways to get energy out of the earth. Environmentalists hated him. They protested him and his shell companies. He made a lot of money.”

“And?”

“And he suddenly pulls out of everything. Almost overnight he gets out of the earth-raping business and becomes eco-friendly.”

“Why?” I knew he’d switched sides, so to speak, but never heard a rational reason why.

“The conventional wisdom is that he set his sights on public office. Since the days of ‘Drill Baby Drill’ ended with the 2010 BP Macondo spill in the Gulf, Buell knew he needed to be a kinder, gentler energy magnate.”

“What’s the
unconventional
wisdom?” I sniffle again. My throat is starting to feel scratchy. Damn smoke.

“He figured out he could get richer by conserving energy as opposed to harvesting it.” “What do you mean?” We’re driving next to a light rail train and heading north toward the edge of downtown. I duck as the train moves alongside us. Townsend probably notices my nervousness but doesn’t comment.

“I’ve been working on stories about Buell for a long time now,” he continues. “About two years ago he moved the vast majority of his holdings into a small Texas company called Nanergetix,” Townsend slows the SUV and parallel parks in front of a large white building, a restaurant called Spaghetti Warehouse. “Nanergetix is heavily involved in vanguard, energy-related nanotechnology. Some people think they’ve discovered an additive that triples the efficiency of fossil fuels. I’ve been working on this stuff for months, but I can’t get any of it nailed down.”

“If that were true then it would piss off the oil companies and make the price of gasoline, oil, natural gas, and coal drop like a rock, right?”

“Exactly.” Townsend puts the SUV in park and pulls the keys from the ignition. “And it would make Buell very, very wealthy.”

“He’s already rich.”

“You shouldn’t be that naïve, Jackson.” He looks at me as though I am an idiot. “People like Buell can’t ever have enough money. They can’t ever have enough power.”

“I still don’t get what that has to do with me or Ripley or Ripley’s son.” I unbuckle my seatbelt and turn in my seat to face the suddenly condescending reporter. He must be a liberal. Most reporters are and don’t even know they’re liberals. They think of themselves as open-minded and fair.

“Well, I am not sure there
is
a connec—” he stops mid-sentence. His eyes widen and he smiles broadly. His teeth are perfectly straight and too white for a smoker. He’s liberal, condescending
and
vain. Perfect for television news. Just when I think it was a bad idea to connect with George Townsend, he changes my mind.

“I get it,” he says. “Nanotechnology.”

I don’t get it. “Nanotechnology?”

“Ripley’s son works at Rice University in the nano lab…the lab where they conduct more nanotechnology research than anywhere else in the world.”

***

The restaurant is empty except for Townsend and me. We’re sitting at a small corner table with two glasses of water and a basket of bread between us. I have my back to the wall so I can see everybody who comes and goes.

“We’re going to Rice to talk to Ripley’s son?” I ask. My hands are clasped in front of me on the table. I’m leaning on my elbows.

Townsend takes a piece of bread from the basket and stuffs half of it into his mouth. T.V. people eat too fast. It comes from downing lunch in a live truck between interviews or at a desk between phone calls.

“Yes,” he says, “as soon as you tell me why you think you’re caught up in the middle of whatever this is.” He chased the mouthful of bread with a swig of water.

“Okay,” I relent. It’s time for me to share what I think I know. “It’s because of the iPods.”

Townsend, his mouth full of another wad of bread, looks puzzled. Of course he is. I’m burying the lead.

“Over the past six months, I’ve traveled the world delivering iPods.” I take a sip of water, slip a cube of ice between my teeth, and chew as I continue to tell him about what I’ve done on behalf of the Governor. I can feel my hand trembling almost imperceptibly when I put the glass back on the table. Townsend doesn’t see it.

“What was on the iPods?’ He’s entranced, as though I’m telling him the plot of some fictional political thriller.

“I don’t know,” I lie. Sort of. Despite what I’ve been telling myself, I do have a hint what was on those iPods...

***

My trip to Anchorage was the last one on the Governor’s agenda. Like the other trips, it was short. When I landed at the Ted Stevens International Airport, I caught a cab to Elderberry Park. It was short ride along the shore of Cook Inlet. In the distance I could see Mt. McKinley and Mt. Foraker. It was beautiful. The sky was crayon blue and cloudless.

“That’s it,” the cabbie said as he pulled over on M Street in front of a brown and yellow wooden house in the center of the park. “That’s the Anderson house.”

I thanked him, gave him the fare, and got out of the cab. I stood on the sidewalk with my bags for a moment to stretch my right knee and to look at the Oscar Anderson House, a historic landmark built by one of the city’s first settlers. The exterior of the house was yellow on its main floor. It was painted brown on both the top floor and on the exterior of the basement that extends above ground. There was a tall evergreen nestled against the left side of the house and an American flag flying on the right. I walked slowly up the cobblestone ramp to the small brown front door, a bag slung over each shoulder.

My instructions were to take the guided tour of the home. At some point during the 45-minute history lesson, my contact would find me.

I was standing on a large rug, admiring the red brick fireplace, when “Mary Brown” approached me and asked me what music I had downloaded on my iPod. Apparently, that was the cryptic, cloak and dagger clue to who she was and what she wanted.

“A little bit of everything,” I answered. She nodded toward the front door and led me out of the house.

Once I clumsily slugged my bags down the hall and through the narrow front door, I saw her standing at the end of the cobblestone ramp. She was in a button down chambray shirt with dark denim jeans and a heavy brown blazer. She had her jeans tucked into knee high brown suede boots. Her blonde hair was cut short like the 1970s ice skater, Dorothy Hamill. She was attractive if a little harsh. Her features were angular, her nose long and thin.

“Let’s take a walk in the park,” she suggested and continued to walk ahead of me. I shifted the bags on my shoulders. She turned around and saw me struggling but didn’t seem to care. She walked past a swing set and stepped on a hike/bike path that ran along the water.

After a couple of minutes on the path, she came to a small garden dotted with boulders. Brown stopped at one of them and sat, placing her palms flat on the rock and inching herself up onto it. She crossed her boots and folded her arms, waiting for me to catch up. I could imagine myself running along the path, getting in a couple of miles along the coast. What a view.

I finally caught up to her and lay down my bags on the ground next to the rock.

“This is called Hannah Cove Garden,” she said. “It’s a memorial to children who died young.” She looked out onto the water and toward the Alaska Mountain range in the distance.

I followed her gaze. I didn’t follow her point.

“Let’s get to it,” she said, abruptly shifting gears and pulling her focus from the mountains and back to me. “You have something for me.” She was direct. No small talk with her as there was with almost everyone else I’d met and handed iPods.

I reached to unzip my bag and pull out the device. “What’s the code?” The codes were always different, and I never knew what they were until the contact gave them to me.

“Spindletop,” she said.

“I don’t follow,” I said. The iPod’s UNLOCK screen showed the options were numbers only. Four digits.

“The date the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop started producing. As a Texan you should know this.” Her lips curled into a wormy, toothless grin. I didn’t like her.

I wracked my brain, trying to find the date among the files of useless information I’d stored in there. The date Tupac was shot: 09/09. The date Billy Corrigan announced the breakup of Smashing Pumpkins: 05/23. The fall of the Berlin Wall: 11/09. The date my parents died: 12/24.

Spindletop: I couldn’t remember it.

“I can’t remember that,” I begrudgingly admitted. “What is it?”

“January tenth,” she frowned. “It’s all about Texas you know.”

I’d missed the $100 question on
Who
Wants
To
Be
A
Millionaire
?

I punched 0110 onto the screen’s keypad and the device unlocked. I passed it to her and she flipped it over, running her thumb along the back of the device.

She began to slide down to the rock to stand, and she lost her balance. The iPod slipped from her hand, off the rock, and landed at my feet.

I held out my left hand to help her stand up and bent over to pick up the iPod with my right. It was lying face up on the ground. On the screen, it read:

CAYMAN BANK OF INTERCONTINENTAL COMMERCE

There was an account number, a bank transit code, and two sets of long numbers I assume were some other sort of bank codes. I punched the home button on the bottom of the iPod and handed it back to Ms. Brown before she could see what I’d inadvertently noticed.

She took it from me, brushed off her jeans, and returned to the bike path to walk south along the water. I took that as my clue to head back to the airport.

While waiting at the gate for my plane, I pulled out my netbook to dig a little more. I thought about what the woman had said about how everything was about Texas. If the code for her iPod was a significant date, maybe the other codes had been too.

Against what the Governor had instructed, I’d kept a list of the codes in a file on my computer. I opened the document and added 0110 to the list.

I looked at the previous seven numbers.

0302. That was the code for London. I opened a web browser, and after agreeing to the rules for the airport’s free Wi-Fi, I entered “Texas History, March 2” into a search engine.

Nine million results popped up instantly. The first:
March
2
,
1836
–
The
date
Texas
declared
its
independence
from
Mexico
.

I type December 19 Texas into the search box. 1219 was the code in Venezuela. I have to scan through a few of the seven million hits before I find the significance.
December
19
,
1836
-
The
boundary
of
Texas
established
.

I entered five more sets of numbers, each of them relevant to either Texas’ rights as a Republic or significant dates in the history of Texas’ role in energy production.

It was certainly clever. Did it mean something more? Why was there bank account information on the iPod? I’d heard Cayman accounts were hard to trace and easier to hide than Swiss accounts since a government crackdown in 2009.

There was something much greater at play here. Contrary to the Governor’s wink of a promise, I was beginning to believe there was nothing legal about whatever it was he was perpetrating.

Until I was drugged, tortured, stalked, and nearly killed, I never thought it was much more than needlessly covert political favors exchanging hands.

I never considered my life was at stake.

***

Sitting across from Townsend, I spill my guts. Over the next half hour, between bites of buttered farfalle, I tell him about the trips, the iPods, my kidnapping, the torture, and Bobby’s murder. He puts his phone on the table between us to record the conversation. I’m okay with it.

By the time I’ve told him everything, except for the Cayman bank information, he’s staring at me slack jawed. I’m not sure why, of all things, I choose to leave out the bank. I guess I’m better off playing dumb. It’s not a rational choice. I’m having trouble maintaining any sense of rationality. I think Townsend can sense it.

“I’m not sure what to say,” he finally spits out. “I mean, I don’t think anyone, let alone a cynical reporter, would believe anything you’ve told me. It’s so ridiculously fantastic, I can’t help but trust everything you’ve said.”

To our right, there’s a loud crash and I instinctively duck under the table. My knees bang painfully onto the black and white tile flooring. I can feel the pulse quickening in my neck and chest.