Wounded Earth (20 page)

He scooped up the ashes and the remains of the linings and put them in the trash compactor, along with a generous load of kitchen garbage. He pressed the start button and, finally, started to relax. Whatever the reason for the caper he had just pulled, he was fairly well satisfied that the cops would have a hard time tracing anything to him.

He began to think of the money he had earned so quickly and easily. He wasn't sure yet what to do with it, but maybe he would spend it on the house. He had been thinking about building a deck out back.

Thursday
morning broke in Richland, Washington, with a surreal half-light. Buzz couldn't shake the feeling that he was back in Vietnam. Nam had been a surreal place, all right, bombs and blood and destruction loosed on a tropical paradise. It was the Garden of Eden, completely overrun by snakes.

This was no garden he was standing in. This was Richland, an isolated spot on the high empty desert of eastern Washington. The Cascades were far to the west, but their rain shadow covered Richland. All the water that the air had managed to steal from the Pacific was dumped on the cool flanks of the Cascades. Nothing was left for the unfortunates on the other side of the mountains.

The dry hills around Richland were thinly covered with dun-colored grass. It was so sparse that the contours in the soil and rock beneath were clearly visible. The hills made Buzz think of huge animals sunning themselves, with their ribs showing through their light brown fur.

That image could be called surreal, he supposed, but the real reason for his sense of unreality was more directly tied to Vietnam. He was going to fly today, on a mission ordered by someone he didn't know, someone he suspected to be a lunatic. People would almost certainly die, people he had no argument with. He would most likely die himself. It felt just like Vietnam.

Buzz was slightly high, for the first time in fifteen years. As he remembered, marijuana made things so much easier. When he was high, the flame-throwers had been beautiful, all red and orange and burning yellow. The noises of groundfire and rocket launchers had been blunted. The pot had carried him up, higher than he was actually flying, far above the fighting, and he could look down at the danger as if it weren't even there.

It was strange that he had still needed drugs to get through the day, once he got back stateside. Pills had worked well. They got you out of bed when you couldn't do it for yourself. They put you to sleep when you needed to forget things.

Cocaine hadn't worked nearly so well, but that had been a good thing. One day he just decided that there was no point in being strung out, paranoid, and head over heels in debt. He had quit cocaine and, while he was at it, he had quit everything else.

Quitting hadn't been easy, but he'd made it because he loved flying. Random urine testing was coming into vogue, and he couldn't take the risk any longer. The drugs, the parties, the craziness had been so long ago.

He could hardly believe those days had come back to destroy him so completely.

The sun had cleared the hilltops. He wondered how the day would end.

* * *

Larabeth stood atop a levee overlooking an industrial canal. There was a crazy man calling her. He'd broken into her house. He'd left a dead thing in front of her door. She had no clue what he might do next. She could hide at home or she could go on about her life. She didn't care much for hiding, so here she was, taking care of her client and waiting for Guillaume to show up so they could play another round of cops-and-robbers.

The Mississippi River flowed past the canal's mouth and the New Orleans skyline rose in the distance. Behind her, the stacks, flares, and towers of Consolidated's flagship oil refinery reflected the sunrise. The silence was punctuated only by the explosive gasps of pressure relief valves and by thousands of lights.

Consolidated's plant was aging, as were most American manufacturing facilities, but it had been spared the neglect that many refineries suffered during the oil glut of the ‘Eighties. All the vessels and lines were neatly painted. Messy leaks were not tolerated. Flowers even bloomed in more visible areas of the refinery, although Larabeth always snickered at the thought of sprucing up smokestack industry by planting petunias.

Larabeth saw that Will Ellis, the facilities manager, was on his way to meet her. While she waited, she admired the sleekness of the plant. It looked alien, like a metal forest leaping from the ground. Taken out of context, ignoring the smoke plumes rising from its stacks and the hazardous wastes and the everpresent risk of an oil spill, the refinery could be seen as a twentieth-century work of art. She knew that was how Will saw it.

He ambled up, a hundred and sixty pounds of ebony man stretched over a six-foot frame. His long, loose strides gave the impression that his steel-toed boots were comfortable, but Larabeth knew different. She had been breaking hers in for five years with no success yet.

“This is not going to be a fun day, Will,” she said, adjusting her hardhat. It didn't fit right, either.

“It's starting out mighty pretty.” He gestured at the cloudless sky.

“I wish it were raining. Maybe that would dampen Guillaume's enthusiasm for his little spectacle.”

“Do you really think it's going to be that bad?”

“Based on everything I've heard, there will be a lot of TV people here, and not just local people. CNN, for sure.”

Will knitted his brows and said, “Why? We run a clean plant. Why don't they mess with the GPC plant, downriver? Everybody knows the shenanigans they pull.”

“Because it will make sensational TV. And because Guillaume thinks the end justifies the means. He thinks if he gets on TV, he can force a groundswell of people demanding that the river be cleaned up. If that happens, then the GPC plant and all the others will have to clean up their acts.”

Will spat into the canal. “Damndest thing I ever heard. Punishing the innocent to call attention to the guilty.”

“GPC dumps their waste at night. Way up their canal. Anybody that takes a sample and pays to have it analyzed can prove it, but I guarantee you that CNN won't give them coverage. There's nothing at GPC to photograph.”

She pointed down the levee at three large metal culverts pouring constantly into the canal below them. They were rusting and they protruded over the water at odd angles. What was worse, they were situated near the mouth of the canal, where the banks widened to form a small, man-made bay. Guillaume couldn't have designed a more photogenic venue for his “hullabaloo.”

Larabeth made a sweeping gesture, taking in the whole ugly scene. “Look at this mess, Will. Why didn't you do something about it when I told you to?”

Will shook his head. “I couldn't squeeze enough money out of management to do what you said.”

“But they'll pay for paint and petunias and marigolds?”

“Well, now, paint comes out of the maintenance budget. This place would rust down if it wasn't kept painted.” Will gave her a sidewise grin. “As for the petunias and marigolds, well, management has never actually made me account for the profit we take in on the Coke machines. We have eight hundred employees. Do you know how much we make on soda pop?”

Larabeth snickered in spite of herself. “Enough for a bunch of petunias and marigolds.”

“Yup. But it's peanuts compared to what it would take to move this discharge point. Management says they paid for the equipment to clean up our wastewater. They're not willing to cough up the money for cosmetic changes, too.”

“Well, they're going to pay for that decision today,” Larabeth said. She removed her hardhat, trying again to adjust it to fit her head.

Will stood up straight and intoned, “Please put that hat back on, ma'am. You are in violation of Consolidated's health and safety plan. Probably several subchapters of OSHA, too.”

Larabeth laughed, but she replaced her hardhat. There was no sense in violating a single regulation on a day when TV cameras could be lurking around any corner.

* * *

It was high noon. The sun was high, the humidity was higher, and Larabeth was sweltering in her hardhat and steel-toed boots. Guillaume was still nowhere to be seen. The Babykiller tapes festered in her pocket. Thanks to GAIA's overprotective goons, the FBI had lost fifteen valuable hours. She refused to think what Babykiller might have done with those same hours.

TV crews thronged the areas. Still photographers were perched on the steeply sloped levees, each trying to stake out a location that would guarantee them a good shot. One of them had already tumbled into the canal.

Her phone vibrated and she looked toward the rendezvous point. J.D. raised his hand and gave the signal. Guillaume and his entourage were on their way. She said, “Stay put, Will. I'm going to try one last time to head this thing off.”

Clapping a hand atop her hard hat to hold it on, she hustled down the river side of the levee.

* * *

“God. Damn." Agent Yancey had homesteaded a spot not forty feet from the McLeod woman where he could watch her every move without attracting attention. And now she was hoofing it away from the crowd just as fast as she could go. Exactly how was he going to keep her in view without giving his position away? Or without letting that Babykiller character see him, if he was around.

He stayed a few feet down the land side of the levee, letting just the top of his head peek over so he could see her. Intent on her own business, she never looked his way. Maybe Babykiller wasn't looking, either. Walking fast and trying to act casual, he followed her upriver and watched as she ran out a narrow spit of land yelling, “Guillaume! Guillaume!”

A god-awful-looking raft floated toward her and his hand moved to the holster under his windbreaker, but he recognized Langlois at the rudder. The Bureau considered the leader of GAIA to be half-nuts but, given his prompt delivery of Larabeth's tapes, he was not considered to be a security risk.

On second thought, half-nuts hardly described Langlois's get-up today. He was naked to the waist and, below that, he was draped in some kind of loincloth thing. His companions, a man and a woman who both looked to be in their twenties, had opted for more modest togas.

Yancey groaned. Dr. McLeod, the woman he had been assigned to protect, was precariously close to the mighty Mississippi River, frantically trying to attract the attention of three apparent lunatics, and he couldn't do anything about it without giving himself away. If anyone at the Bureau found out about this, his career would be over before it started.

On cue, Lefkoff came into sight, creeping downriver along the land side of the levee. Lefkoff met his eyes, pointed at the raft, and shrugged. He had asked Lefkoff to keep track of Guillaume Langlois. Lefkoff had been an agent for years, and here he was in the same pickle. Experience was evidently not everything.

The two highly trained G-men wrung their hands and watched as their quarries had a quick chat.

* * *

Guillaume shook his head at the sight of Larabeth standing by the water. The woman was hardheaded. She had scouted out the last possible spot to sidetrack Guillaume's plans before he and his crew came into camera range.

The river current made stopping his craft impossible, but he cared too much for Larabeth to go sweeping by without a word, so he threw the engine into reverse and slowed to a crawl.

She held out a small package and he reached for it. No luck. There was no way to steer the raft closer to the shore. He could see that she was apoplectic with frustration, but his friend Larabeth never gave up. She threw the package with an accurate underhand lob. He caught it.

There was no mistaking her firm nod. This package was her reason for wading into the mightiest river on the continent. When she launched into a tirade on his foolishness, he knew that it was a smokescreen for the benefit of his associates. Not that she didn't mean every word. Larabeth had always waxed eloquent on the subject of his foolishness.

“Don't do this,” she said. “My clients haven't broken the law. It isn't right make to make an example of them.”

“Your clients are insignificant cogs in a large wheel. If I can use them to call attention to real polluters, so be it.”

She pursed her lips with that familiar whistle of exasperation. He had heard it so many times before. His friend Larabeth was misguided, but she meant well and she accomplished things. They weren't working at cross-purposes. To his way of thinking, he and Larabeth were working in tandem to curb human excess and to save their world. On such a glorious day, he could make himself believe they would be ultimately successful.

“I can't believe you're saying that the end justifies the means,” she said. “I never thought I'd see your morals collapse so far.”

“Scold away, dear. If anyone could dissuade me, it would be you. I value your high opinion, but when billions of lives are at stake, the end does justify the means. I will sacrifice my personal ethics, if I must, to win this war.”

“Well, then, steer that thing slow. I've got to get back to my client, so I can protect him from your personal ethics.” She spread her empty hands in front of her. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Tolerate my frailties. And pray for my mission.” Guillaume put the motor in neutral and gunned it. “Hurry back to your client.” He tucked Larabeth's package under his seat as he watched her clamber back up the levee.