Deadly Waters (25 page)
Authors: Theodore Judson
5/12/09 07:22 EDT
Julia Valencia was toiling in her little garden when she heard the extraordinary airplanes flying high above her. She called for her husband and their four children to run outside and have a look at the unusual sight.
“Look, Gabriel,” she said, pointing up. “The great planes are flying in formation like geese!”
“They are in two Vs,” agreed her husband.
At fifteen thousand feet above the Colombian village the B2 bombers were making little sound and leaving no contrails behind them. Julia had needed her very keen hearing to have detected them when she did.
“Perhaps the leader of the Norteamericanos is flying south to visit us,” she suggested to Gabriel.
“One man needs so many machines?” he asked. “Look! They are dropping something!”
Julia imagined the dropped items might be food packages or some fabulous gifts for the children living within her small valley. She had heard the Norteamericanos were incredibly rich and were prone to making grand gestures like this. She was considering the power and generosity of the gringos when the green mountain to her east blossomed into flames as the incendiary bombs hit the ground. Her last thoughts and the last thoughts of her family were clouded in confusion as liquid fire swept over the valley floor and over the thatched roofs of her village.
The heavy bombing of designated targets in Colombia continued for twenty-five days and killed six thousand people, nearly every last one of them innocent peasants who had never made an ounce of cocaine or held a single AK-47. After the sorties ended, the President of the United States declared victory, and the guerilla warfare in Colombia itself continued with a new and awful fury.
5/14/09 10:01 PDT
“Did you get him some Scotch?” the suddenly less wealthy Darrin Benton asked his much reduced staff as they scrambled about the conference room in Darrincorp’s San Jose headquarters.
“What kind does he drink?” asked a flunky, arms filled with bottles. “We’ve got single malt, Johnnie Walker Red and Black, and Cutty Sark.”
“Get everything,” ordered Benton. “He’s got to want something we have. He has to. He just has to.”
He checked his reflection in the glass door. The part on the left-hand side of his head needed re-doing. Benton had to swear at another of his assistants to fetch him a comb.
“Am I supposed to get everything myself?” he screamed at the frightened surviving members of his personal staff. “What is this? A goddamned slave camp? You think you can buy and sell me? Would somebody tell me what time it is?”
“10:02,” said Vice President Ridley. “He’s two minutes late.”
”The arrogant prick!” said Benton, and clenched his small fists in anger.
*
John Taylor strolled past Benton’s ranks of security guards outside the Benton Building and into the elevator that would take him to the outer office adjoining the conference room where Darrin Benton was sweating out his rival’s arrival. Resplendent in a green linen suit, Alexander entering Persepolis might have been less triumphant in spirit than the middle-aged businessman strutting into the somber room dominated by the long table in its middle.
“Hey, Reinholt,” he called out, using Benton’s true first name, a name Benton had forbidden even his parents to use.
“Who’s Reinholt?” asked Vice President Ridley.
Benton gave his chief flunky a tooth-grinding look of unadulterated hatred. Every vein in Benton’s neck showed itself in purple relief as he struggled to control his rage.
“Why don’t you get a drink for Mr. Taylor, Dwight?” asked Benton.
“Shouldn’t the assistants…” began Ridley. Before he could ask, he realized that his boss was for some unknown reason turning red from anger. “Coming right up,” he said.
Taylor plopped himself down in the chair at the head of the long table, Benton’s customary place, which made the confused vice presidents scramble toward the other end of the table so that Benton had plenty of space to himself. Benton chose not to sit and stood straining against himself in the middle of his polished mahogany floor.
John Taylor put his feet on the long, walnut table, and leaned back in the chair, hands behind his head. Darrin Benton said nothing in protest. Taylor knew that in the nine days since the destruction of the dams, Benton’s new plant in Phoenix had been left without electricity, and production had come to a standstill. Insurance rates throughout the region had skyrocketed while stock in Darrincorp had headed south, with the rest of the tech companies listed on NASDAQ.
Taylor, being one of the few to buy short in Benton’s company, owned three million shares in Benton’s corporation, which was stock Benton needed back to avoid total collapse. Other setbacks had already stretched Darrin’s credit past the breaking point, and he was not in a position to object to anything Taylor did.
“Look, John,” said Benton, struggling to be pleasant, “Ridley has brought you a Scotch.”
“No, I’m cutting back,” said Taylor, waving the drink away. “And I prefer ‘Mr. Taylor,’ Reinholt.”
“He’s Reinholt!” exclaimed one of the veeps at the far end of the table. The surprised man saw Darrin Benton glaring at him and said no more on the subject.
“Yes, Mr. Taylor,” agreed Benton, and tried to smile through his rage and instead
created an odd, twisted expression on his face that was unsettling to behold. “Let’s get started then.” He turned away from Taylor to speak. “Lately our company has experienced some unexpected…”
“I’ll buy my family’s company back for a dollar,” said John Taylor.
Several seconds of dead silence intervened before anyone made a reply. The vice presidents bit their lips and fidgeted in their leather lined chairs, anticipating an explosion from Benton.
“We called you in here to discuss purchasing your Darrincorp stock,” said Benton
“I’ll sell you that for seventy million big ones,” remarked Taylor, casually examining the cuticles of his fingernails.
“We were prepared to offer you perhaps half that,” said Benton, still gamely making pleasant.
“Make it seventy-five million, and you’ve got a deal,” said Taylor.
“Do we have to be hostile to each other?” he asked aloud.
“Well, Reinhold, I don’t know if you have to,” said Taylor; “I sure feel like I have to. Here’s my dollar for Taylor Imports.” He tossed a single bill on the table. “Have your people call my people,” he added as he stood from his chair. “You better get this worked out with your bankers. What’s a little debt to a genius like you, huh? Give me a call when you get all the t’s crossed. You realize, I expect, that the price of my stock goes up five million every day we have to wait. Business expenses and personal anxiety and all that jazz. You know that new age legalese you high-tech jackasses enjoy spouting so much. You fill in the blanks, Reinholt. Be seeing you.”
He left the office on young legs while the Vice Presidents of Darrincorp huddled closer together in anticipation of the eruption they knew was coming. Taylor halted outside by the elevator to wait for the same event, and smiled broadly when he heard the anguished scream coming from within the office behind him.
“Bastards! All against me! I’ll tear you useless shits a new one! I’ll-”
Taylor heard no more of Benton’s outburst once the elevator door had closed.
Mondragon was awaiting him in a metallic grey Mercedes outside the Darrincorp headquarters. John Taylor’s eyes sparkled no less than the glass of champagne Erin had poured from the iced liter in the back seat.
“Now we’re not pouting any more, are we, John?” said Mondragon, and put his foot to the floor, causing the luxury sedan to leave rubber on the pristine concrete parking lot in front of the statue of Darrincorp’s founder and president.
Benton’s people did talk to Taylor’s the next day. By the end of working hours on Thursday the Fifteenth there were seventy-five million more dollars in Taylor’s bank account, and the majority of shares in Taylor Imports were again sitting in Taylor’s safety deposit box.
11/12/10 00:05 Arizona Standard Time
Bob Mathers sat at his home computer, as he had done nearly every night for the past fifteen months, checking lists of prisoners from Solano State Prison and searching for a connection between Wayland Zah and Charles Corello. Rebecca and his daughter Katie had gone to bed two hours before. His apartment was as silent as the Phoenix side street outside the apartment’s open balcony window.
Eighteen days after the terrorist attack on the dams, a group of children playing hide and seek around the abandoned stone house at the corner of Highway 191 in Bluff, Utah, found Wayland’s body inside the old house’s front door. At the time, given the thousands of other deaths in the area, no one other than Bob had taken much notice of the murder. The local sheriff decided, given Wayland’s record, his death was the result of a drug deal gone bad. Bob Mathers alone had been left to see to his late friend’s funeral.
The nation’s separate financial markets had each fallen at least a third during the spring and early summer of 2009. Stock indexes around the world had followed the American lead into the tank. As the world languished in recession, the public’s attention turned, for a few weeks, to the war in Colombia, where Air Force bombers had laid waste hundreds of acres of farmland and thousands of square miles of uninhabited jungle.
During the months after the United States had declared victory, the counter attack of the Colombian guerillas had been spectacularly vicious and spectacularly successful. By late 2010, the land controlled by the legally elected government in Bogota had been reduced to a small but well-fortified patch around the capital. It was to the good fortune of the government in Washington (and to the misfortune of the poor souls in Bogota) the American public had soon forgotten their military had ever been at war down there.
On June 10, 2010 a late-night comedian asked five people on the streets of Los Angeles what they thought of Colombia. Four said they did not know the name and the fifth asked if Colombia was not “the Spanish dude that, like, found the country.”
The American economy had meanwhile recovered and had experienced an astonishing surge of growth. The terrorist attack had necessitated new construction in the stricken areas and new investments in power plants, desalinization facilities on the west coast, in military spending, and in private security companies.
The insurance settlements alone had bankrupted some insurers, but the money that had shifted into the hands of lawyers and their clients had stimulated other sectors of the economy. By November of 2010, only the great southwest itself had not fully recovered from the disaster of May, 2009.
Hoover Dam was being rebuilt, as were the smaller dams south of it, although the process would take years before being completed. Environmental groups had delayed the replacement of Glen Canyon Dam and the three other destroyed dams farther north on the Colorado drainage. Page, Arizona, lost its reservoir and the precious tourism Lake Powell had brought. Crowds of curious outsiders had come to have a look at the destruction in the first weeks after the attack.
In the two years that followed, downtown Page had become a long row of boarded-up motels and restaurants, as outsiders lost interest in the town’s story. Many residents lost their livelihoods, as did Bob Mathers, whom 2010 found working as a security guard in a Phoenix office building.
To make up for drastic water shortages in the region’s largest cities, the federal government had laid pipelines to reservoirs as far east as New Mexico. Every location in that part of America, including the once prosperous Valley of the Sun, was experiencing water rationing so severe that new developments were out of the question for years to come.
Not everyone had suffered because of the disaster. Margaret Smythe had ridden her position as the head of the special task force to one of the Pentagon’s top five civilian positions. In the public’s eyes she had arrested the forty suspects quickly and the information her investigation had gleaned had helped the president take the proper actions against the South American terrorists. She did not suffer when the cases against the real Charles Corello and the real Vladimir Petrovski fell apart before they went to trial. That, the conventional wisdom deemed, was the fault of the Justice Department, which had foolishly pursued the two suspects when there was no evidence against them.
The media gave Margaret cover stories and puff ball interviews that made her seem smarter than she was, while the unlucky Attorney General got the media’s back of the hand for prosecuting innocent men when he could have been chasing after more Colombians.
The forty Colombians arrested in the aftermath of the 2009 attacks did not require much pursuing. They were tried as a group in a Los Angeles federal courtroom; the judge in charge allowed television cameras to broadcast the proceedings to the entire world. Not since some other televised Los Angeles trials did any legal proceedings create more coffee break conversations across the nation.
Individual members of the forty became famous for their eccentricities on the witness stand. Impersonators mimicked the way Claudio stuttered under stress. T-shirt vendors sold clothing bearing images of the pock marked Alfonso’s face, and any clothing articles with the terrorists’ images on them were especially popular among bikers, Oakland Raider fans, rap artists, and disaffected teenagers so alienated from society, rock stars no longer seemed sufficiently rebellious.
Though the government prosecutors never gave the jury any convincing evidence of who the mysterious Russian and German agents who trained the Colombians might have been, they did win a collective conviction. The sentence was death for all forty men. Subsequent appeals had brought delays, and November of 2010 found the Colombians alive and in an Indiana federal prison.
Vladimir Petrovski wrote yet another book, this one a meticulously researched and completely factual account of Soviet espionage during his active years in the KGB. The editor of his previous books said this volume was somehow uninteresting. As of late 2010 the manuscript was still searching for a publisher.
Charles Corello went back to his job at the halfway house. His name had seeped into the public consciousness during the Colombians’ trial, and for years afterwards people asked him if knew something about the conspiracy. Some got the notion that he really was involved in the bloody tragedy. Journalists hounded him for information. As he never had anything to tell them, there were those in the press who believed that his consistent denials proved his guilt. Two years after the disaster he still received late night death threats from people convinced he must have had something to do with the assaults on the dams.
Darrin Benton had struggled to right his company after the losses of 2009. He sold massive portions of Darrincorp’s assets and did repay the majority of his bank loans. Ironically, a younger and richer corporate shark staged a successful hostile takeover of his company and forced Benton into retirement at the age of forty-one, albeit as a multimillionaire.
The one unanswered question in the conspiracy was the identity of the men who trained and financed the forty Colombians. In the first year after the attack, there were thousands of newspaper and magazine articles and television programs that investigated this mystery. At different times everyone from the IRA to America’s militias were implicated. Journalists made the pilgrimage to the ruined base in Montecual so often the burned out metal buildings the jungle was reclaiming became as familiar as the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and Jim Jones’ Guyana village had been in other eras.
Bob Mathers gathered seven full scrap books of clippings these countless investigations generated. Oceans of ink and forests of trees were needed to put all these sundry theories into print. Millions of megawatts were spent broadcasting them to a rumor-hungry nation. Nothing definitive was ever proven. Any journalist worth his by-line could follow the leads into the Venezuelan rainforest and to the late Earnest Gusman. From there the trail did not merely go cold, it vanished into the mist.
The public grew tired of news stories that went to the same vague spot and no farther. By early 2010 they were more interested in reading and hearing about the recovering economy, the next chapter in Prince Henry’s television series, and a new phenomenon called bash dancing, which was an activity wherein a young man and woman butted heads until one of them collapsed unconscious on the floor.
Long after the various media lost interest in the story there remained investigative agencies within the federal government who were never satisfied with how the tale had ended. Old hands at the FBI and CIA whispered among themselves that there was something seriously amiss with the Colombian suspects. Neither the forty convicted men nor the late Earnest Gusman were anything to the drug lords or the Marxist guerrillas beyond the lowliest sort of bottom-feeding servants. And the suspects had none of the expertise needed to conduct the attacks on the dams. The more the federal agents looked at the men, the more the arrested men seemed to be petty crooks, and many of the convicted appeared to be desperate bunglers someone had terribly misused.
The agents also deduced that the leaders of the conspiracy had a greater familiarity with the United States than the Colombians could have ever dreamed. Whoever they were, the terrorist leaders had known how to purchase electrical parts from American stores, how to rent trucks and boats, and how to move about on back country roads.
No one wished to say anything that might embarrass the president after he had fought an apparently successful war in South America. The agents’ silence continued after the public lost interest in events that soon seemed historic. Always there remained inside the government a secret cadre of suspicious men who communicated their doubts only to each other and waited for something to break their way.
Among the few still pursuing the unknown leaders in 2010 was Bob Mathers, sitting at his computer night after night, trying to chase down an Internet clue that would aid his search. In recent months Bob had been searching for someone among the Solano prisoners who might have benefited from the catastrophe. Among the ex-cons he had found a reformed man who had become a famed radio evangelist and several successful businessmen.
No one among the hardened felons at that state prison during the time of Wayland Zah’s and Charles Corello’s tenure there were of the profile Bob sought. In that maximum security facility the inmates had been of three sorts: professional thugs, the impulsive or deviant who had done something foolish, and those addicted to drugs; none of them had the sophistication or the financial means to profit from a major terrorist attack.
Not until October the Seventeenth, an idle Sunday, did Bob look at some of the men at Boron, the federal prison Wayland Zah had been transferred to after doing time at Solano. All of the tax evaders, corporate embezzlers, confidence men, and organized criminals who had turned state’s evidence and had done time with Wayland in 1998 to 1999 had long since returned to their civilian lives, and were once again successful in their various ways.
Then, on November ttwelfth, he chanced upon the name of Erin Mondragon, a wealthy Californian convicted of tax evasion in the 1990s. A name search in a web search engine found that Mondragon had been mentioned recently in
Forbes
magazine, for upon his release from Boron, Mondragon had in the short space of twelve years become one of America’s five hundred billionaires.
The on-line magazine notice explained that Mondragon had not made his new fortune through agriculture, which had been his family’s business, but via insurance settlements on properties he had owned along the Colorado River and through investments in the market that had anticipated the market downturn in 2009.
Another webpage, one listed by the San Francisco
Chronicle
, displayed a photograph of this Erin Mondragon taken at a charity ball on New Year’s Eve 2009. The picture showed an olive complected middle-aged man less than six feet tall (even with lifts in his shoes) and slightly overweight, dressed in a tuxedo and dancing with a ravishing blonde woman half his age and a head taller than he. Bob expanded the photograph on his screen and sent it to his printer. On the hard copy the printer kicked out Bob drew with a felt-tip pen a black beard and moustache and looked into the face of the man he had met in a doughnut shop in Page, Arizona, four years before.
“Hello, Mr. Corello,” he said, and turned the computer off for the night.