Deadly Waters (15 page)

XXXVII

11/21/07 14:31 Eastern Standard Time

Margaret Smythe needed to get to Alexandria, Virginia, and Ronald Goodman’s home for the Thanksgiving Day holiday, and she certainly needed to be out of her DoD office and on the Beltway headed south. The last thing she needed was a letter from someone in the California Department of Corrections calling her attention to a peculiar incident that had happened in Utah last summer, as if anything that happened in Utah mattered. She opened the envelope and read:

“
From the Office of Howard Freeport, Director of Ongoing Investigations, California Department of Corrections

“Dear Ms. Smythe:

“I regret bothering you in the course of your important government work, but recently I have discovered a perplexing case involving people claiming to be former inmates in the California Department of Corrections and the security at two large dams in the Southwest. I was directed to you as the Department of Defense’s leading expert on dam security, and I thought you should be notified of these incidents. I attempted to contact you via telephone and e-mail. I have thus far been unable to reach you.

Charles Corello, a thirty-six year old resident of Fresno was once a gang member and inmate at Solano State Prison. He was a model prisoner during his five year sentence and has since become an outstanding counselor and parole officer within the very system that once imprisoned him.

Someone we know not to be Mr. Corello has hired some Colombian aliens to dump, of all things, oil drums into Strawberry Reservoir in Utah, and into Lake Powell
in Arizona. Both of these peculiar incidents took place near the dams, the latter dumping near Glen Canyon Dam is of course near one of the nation’s largest facilities.

I do not wish to sound alarmist; we are only weeks from the horrible attack in the Middle East, and I would not add to the terrorist hysteria that has gripped the media in recent days. It seems to me that someone of your authority should be aware that someone is playing this peculiar game close to our vital dams.

As you can see from the attached records I have sent you, three of the men arrested in the Utah incident have serious criminal records. One man, Javiar Mancota, not only has served a prison sentence in this country; he is known to have once been a minor henchman in the hire of the late Colombian drug lord Pablo Escabar.

As for the incident in Arizona, which was brought to my attention by Robert Mathers, a deputy sheriff in Coconino County—

Margaret put the letter down. So, that redneck asshole on the phone is behind this! she thought, and she had to consider that perhaps this Mr. Freeport was the protégé of someone important and that notion alone caused her to read some more.

“Deputy Mathers,”
the letter read, “
has shown that the person claiming to be Charles Corello has been in contact with a party claiming to be Vladimir Petrovski, the celebrated Soviet defector, currently living in the FBI’s witness protection system. Both of these men, undoubtedly imposters, have been-”

“Enough,” said Margaret. Russian Cold War defectors, she thought. Ex-cons from California and Colombia. This makes no sense to me, and I don’t want it to.

The problem, she decided, was that Mr. Freeport could not be dismissed as one dismissed a deputy sheriff from No Where, Arizona. She had her secretary do a quick computer search and learned that Mr. Freeport was a cousin of the Majority Whip in the California Assembly and thus was not someone she needed as an enemy. Margaret made the strategic decision to postpone her holiday for a couple hours in order to answer the gentleman. In spite of time and her need to get on the road, she composed a long, unctuous letter to the California official.

“Dear Mr. Freeport,”
she wrote,
“in response to your letter regarding Charles Corello and the Colombians engaged in suspicious activities in the American west: be assured I have already been working in co-ordination with the FBI and the Interior Department on this unusual series of occurrences. As I write this, teams of investigators are fanning out across the Southwest and into Latin America, trying to get to the bottom of this mystery. The President himself has been informed through the National Security Council.”

This would have been news to everyone other than Margaret. She further informed Mr. Freeport that:

“Interpol will be kept up to speed on the situation and that the Joint Chiefs of Staff will discuss possible reactions to Colombian terrorism at their next scheduled meeting on the Monday after the Thanksgiving Day holidays.

We at the DoD will do everything within our powers to secure the safety of America’s vital major dams. Laboring side by side with diligent state officials such as you, we shall uncover any plot that might exist and punish any would-be terrorists we find.”

She signed the letter,

“Warmest regards,

Margaret Smythe, Undersecretary of Defense for Domestic Terrorism.”

“P.S.”
she added,
“you were unable to telephone or email me due to new security systems being installed in our offices. I hope writing me did not inconvenience you.”

That ought to hold the sons of bitches for a while, she thought as she whetted an envelope with a small sponge. She was especially proud of the bit about the repairs to the security systems, as she considered that a great improvement on telling Mr. Freeport she had an unlisted number that was given out to no one.

She mailed the letter at once and phoned an agent she knew in the FBI and told him the DoD would owe his agency a favor if he would send someone out to Utah and Arizona to question some people in regards to these bizarre dumping incidents.

“He doesn’t have to find anything,” she told the FBI man. “He does have to make a report that has his signature on it. I’ll see to it that the interested parties each get a copy. Don’t forget to let your supervisors in on the project. This’ll be good for them, too.”

Margaret herself wrote a preliminary report for Senator Hasket that night on her laptop, while Ronald Goodman lay beside her asleep in his childhood bedroom.

“Gibraltar may crumble; the Rockies may tumble,” she told herself as she wrote, “but my ass is covered, no matter what.”

XXXVIII

12/6/07 10:50 Eastern Standard Time

Vladimir Petrovski did not comprehend why the young man had come to his Camden, New Jersey, home and was asking questions about California and big dams in the far west. The young fellow said he was from the American government’s famous Federal Bureau of Investigation. Vladimir had worked for certain investigative services himself, back when he was a rising star in the Soviet hierarchy, and he knew what an inquisitor should look like. This frail boy fresh from college with his wire rim glasses and clean white shirt did not look like he could intimidate a child into telling the truth.

Back home there had been KGB and State Militia who could butt down doors with their foreheads and toss a suspect around a prison cell the way hyenas toss about the last dirty scrap of meat. This skinny chap looked as though he should be decorating rooms for artistically inclined rich women. Petrovski had served the fellow tea, and the young agent had asked for a saucer. Then for a napkin.

“A napkeen?” Petrovski had asked, aghast at the depths American decadence had reached. Back in Russia a member of the secret police would have eaten off the floor if he had to.

“Yes, you know,” said the FBI agent, making some vague gesticulations with the fingers of his right hand by way of an explanation, “to wipe my mouth.”

The only tidy KGB men Petrovski had known were the ones who spread sand on the interrogation room to sop up the blood. He found the agent a sheet of paper towel, which the young man held disapprovingly between his thumb and index finger, but then the young man had been disapproving of everything in Petrovski’s grimy little apartment.

“Do you know of a man named Corello?” the agent asked him.

“Is that a South American name?” asked Vladimir, who thought his visitor was looking into his old spy career.

“No, Mexican.”

“We had no contacts with Mexicans. The Mexican City embassy thought they had made a great coup when a single American tourist dropped by to tell them a wild story.”

“Corello is American,” said the FBI agent.

“But you said…”

“Mexican-American,” said the agent.

Mr. Petrovski had lived an isolated life in the United States and was unfamiliar with the American use of hyphenated nationalities. He thought the FBI man was speaking of someone holding a dual citizenship.

“Then he is someone, perhaps, you are wishing to question?” asked the Russian.

“We have already,” said the agent.

“I know nothing of such a man,” Petrovski told the investigator.

“What do you know about dams?” the thin young man asked him, leaning over his tea cup to catch every word.

“They are a mild English expression of anger, slightly worse than ‘darns,’ not as bad as ‘motherf—‘”

“I mean the big concrete structures that hold back rivers,” explained the agent.

“They make artificial lakes,” said Petrovski, hoping that might satisfy the stranger.

“Yes, they surely do,” said the young man. “What about dams in the Southwest: Arizona, Utah. etc.”

He leaned further forward. Vladimir, taking this for some strange American conversational gesture he did not understand, leaned a little forward in response.

“They undoubtedly also hold water,” he said. “Listen, my young friend, are you interested in cooking? I am writing, at the present day, a cookbook concerning Russian food. Do you care for Russian food?”

“You people make beet soup,” answered the young man. “Back to dams--tell me, Mr. Petrovski, do you know any Colombians?”

“You mean the small place that grows the coffee?” asked Vladimir. “I see it on television--Juan Valdez, he and his donkey, they grow the richest coffee in the world.”

“Yes,” said the agent, setting aside his saucer and flicking on the small tape recorder in his breast pocket. “That would be the country.”

“They say Juan Valdez is really Geraldo Rivera in a funny hat,” commented Vladimir. “This, I personally have the gravest doubts of.”

The agent nodded.

“What do you need to hear?” asked Petrovski, that being the question he always asked important men in his homeland.

“Was there ever a conspiracy involving Colombian drug dealers, rogue Soviet agents, and Charles Corello?” asked the agent, now leaning so far forward he could have kissed Vladimir.

Petrovski inhaled a roomful of air. Back home he had learned that when one has to tell a lie the best policy is to tell as large a lie as one could.

“There was a plan, many years ago, a secret plan to destroy all the dams in America,” began Vladimir.

“Yes...” said the FBI man, rising from his chair a few inches and forcing Petrovski to lean back.

“KGB has long had relations with Colombian drug dealers.”

“Which ones? The Calle Cartel or the one in Medellin?”

“Both,” said Vladimir, albeit he had never heard of either group until that moment.

The young FBI man took the recorder from his pocket while Vladimir Petrovski laid out an entirely fanciful plot that included secret Swiss bank accounts and late night meetings in the Kremlin.

“Of course, these plans were never implemented,” concluded Petrovski. “There was so much dissenting opinion.”

“What about the dams?” the FBI agent pressed him.

“Oh, blew them up, as you say. The dams in Arizona, Colorado, Visconsin…”

“Wisconsin isn’t in the Southwest,” said the agent.

“So you may instruct me,” said Vladimir. “You may have noticed, I am an old man, I have many errant thoughts.”

The FBI man believed everything, even the more preposterous parts of Vladimir’s story. He needed but one more question to compose the sort of report that would bring him a promotion to field director. “Who was to blow up the dams, Mr. Petrovski?”

Vladimir had not followed his story as closely as the agent had, and rather than say something that might contradict what he had said already he answered with a rhetorical, “Who do you think?”

The FBI man whispered in Vladimir’s ear in an intimate manner that took the old Russian aback, “Colombian narco-terrorists?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Vladimir, uncertain of what exactly a “narco-terrorist” was. “That is it exactly.”

“Bingo,” declared the FBI man and snapped his fingers.

That night, long after the FBI agent had left him, Vladimir began composing in his head a novel he would write after he had finished the cookbook. He thought he would tell the story of a dashing former KGB operative who saves his adopted country by foiling a plot hatched among the drug lords of South America. The hero of the book would be a handsome, gray-haired but still virile gentleman named Petrov, Vladimir Petrov. This Kevin Costner fellow, thought Vladimir as he stood at his bathroom mirror and ran a hand through his thick gray hair, would be perfect for the role when the book was made into a movie.