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4.
Several Years Ago—Lee Collwood VI was 35 years old and sweating about his inherited corporation in the desert of Southern California.
Lee sat in his corner office overlooking the unchanging desert as he awaited the arrival of his unlikely new business partner. Anaconda Chemical, founded and successfully nurtured by generations of his forebears, had missed a few vital turns on Lee's watch and was tens of millions of dollars in debt, with the spiral deepening month by month. In plain English, not enough money was coming in, and tons of money was leaking out from myriad holes. Loosening the collar around his prickling neck, he thought: Today is the day I will stop the slide and get the ship back on an even keel.
He was a tall, lean man with very dark glossy hair and a naturally pink cheeks. He generally wore dark suits that he had especially tailored in ultra-conservative Santa Barbara County, where he had a 7,000 square foot mansion with horseshoe driveway and white-pillared porch, on five acres near a country club he partially owned, not far from the former Reagan Ranch. For three or four days each week, he spent the day at work in the family's main industrial plant. He owned a Lear Jet that took off from Santa Barbara Airport and landed on Anaconda's company airstrip. This airstrp was built and maintained by the U.S. Air Force for contractual reasons involving the Department of Defense, because Anaconda Chemical not only made substances that went boom, but in recent decades had become heavily involved in pharmaceuticals and silicon-based computer parts. The Air Force had recently sent notice of intent to pull the plug. It was like that on all fronts.
Lee awaited a special box of papers, being driven from San Diego to his plant by a young man and his father. They were the Robertsons, and right now they seemed about the only saving grace in Anaconda's dismal looking future.
* * * *
Neither James Robertson, 50, nor his father James, 80, smiled much on this trip. Etta Robertson, the elder James' wife and the younger James' beloved mother, had recently died after a long illness. Etta's cancer had left a pile of debts, and her two surviving men were doing what they must to at least save the house in Point Loma. The father had retired from the FBI toward the turn of the century, and had spent some more years in Civil Service. The younger man was balding and heavy, with thin frizzy white hair around a sun-burned, salmon-colored pate. The father was lean, with folded-putty skin that suggested he didn't go outdoors much anymore. His teeth were large and yellow, what he had left of them. He had wisps of thin white hair. Both men dressed alike: business shirt open at the neck; no tie or jacket; good suit pants; comfortable loafers that looked scuffed and about two years past their usable prime.
The younger man had a degree in Liberal Arts, and did peripheral engineering work—technical writing, web design—when he could find a temporary gig at one of San Diego's midsize firms. James Jr. drove, while James Sr. fussed with a map that kept fluttering in the hot wind entering the car. The air conditioning didn't work too well, and there hadn't been time or money to get it repaired—a fact the two regretted now as they crossed the desert. The old man, who was now also dying of cancer, and wanted to leave something to his son, got a distant look in his eyes and reminisced about his days in China and Burma, where his had been one of the O.S.S. units cleaning up after the Japanese withdrawal.
James Jr. was a quiet man, and he listened patiently. It was the Japanese documents that Collwood wanted so badly, and was willing to pay good money for.
"There she be," James Sr. said, waving a bony hand at the distant, bluish shadows of Anaconda Chemical buildings on the horizon. "Almost there now. Wonder how much he'll offer."
"Depends on how excited he gets about what you have."
"You know," James Sr. said, making a strained face with haunted eyes, "I've been losing sleep over doing this. You know what's in those papers, and I can promise you whatever this man wants them for so badly, he is up to no good."
The plant and offices of Anaconda Chemicals sprawl across the Southern California desert beween Brawley and the Salton Sea. This is a region known as the Imperial Valley, which borders on Mexico to the south, San Diego County to the west, and Arizona to the east. The region contains some of the hottest, most arid terrain on earth.
North lies the Salton Sea, former salt flat into which Colorado River water accidentally flowed in 1905 to create a lake that has been choking on salt and chemicals ever since—despite its better years as a fishing spot and tourist attraction. Its fathoms are said to contain more than one bomber or fighter plane from nearby military installations over the generations.
A few dozen miles east, in San Diego County, lies the Anza-Borrego Desert, another place where you can fry an egg on the sidewalks of Borrego Springs at five o'clock on a July afternoon. You could probably bake a loaf of bread in your car trunk, though nobody is known to have tried it. And the desert is littered with the bleached bones of men and animals.
In this atmosphere, the patriarch of the Collwoods and founder of Anaconda, Lee Collwood, thought it would be good to join or sunder massive amounts of earthly chemicals for great profit, in privacy far from civilization. It wasn't until the later 20th Century that Uncle Sam actually built any major freeways in Anaconda's neighborhood.
The plant is of World War II vintage, with a sawtooth roof of many symmetrically angled skylights. Because of the various products made here, some of them used in war, the plant has always had a top U.S. Government security rating. It is surrounded by high, electric fencing. Its perimeter is patrolled by armed guards with dogs, riding air conditioned hummvees. The plant has dozens of buildings large and small, spread over hundreds of acres of varied terrain, so that horseback and aircraft patrols are also necessary. The buildings are of a consistently mayonnaise yellow painted over stucco or wood, as distinct from the sandy, gravelly terrain with its mix of vegetation.
It is the kind of landscape in which tumbleweed rolls over wind-carved dunes, and the air has a kind of tense, overheated hum that overlays a graveyard silence. In spots where there is water close to the surface, perhaps in a dip, some stunted manzanita oak might ply its twisting branches and sparse leaves, enough to offer cover to small birds warbling with joy. This is a place where you might see a sidewinder cruise by at high speed, sampling the air with its forked tongue while its body undulates like a coil in perpetual motion. You might see a roadrunner or a fox or even a Mexican wolf. You might see the U.S. Border Patrol (La Migra) drive by in their cream color and green SUVs with thick-knuckled thread tires, and moments later see a group of illegals (men, women, children) breaking for cover to cross a road and disappear among the sage and cactus, perhaps never to be seen again until their decaying remains are found a year or a century later. Except for the whine of La Migra vehicle's transmission, or the distant hum of a spotter plane, or the warbling of that bird, or the caw of a larger bird of prey or a flock of vultures, it all happens under a blanket of silence. This is where the Collwoods have cooked up their business schemes the way the chemists in their laboratories try new assays in boundlessly many combinations.
* * * *
Lee Collwood VI had already taken calls this from two ex-wives demanding money, and threatening he'd be denied visitation with his two sons and two daughters. He could only stall them while he got his lawyers to file renegotiation papers for the alimony. Lee's hands were tied. He was low on cash and he had to be extremely careful about liquidating assets, for fear of tipping off the investors. The people whom he had talked into sinking money into this company were expecting big results, but the two big cancer drugs had both come up very short in in-house tests, and Lee was stalling about giving the Food and Drug Administration samples. He knew the clock would be ticking all the louder, and once he handed the FDA his best samples, there was no way left to cook the books. His goose would be cooked in thirty to ninety days. He could appeal and claim they'd botched the tests, but it was a fool's game. Lee Collwood knew he didn't have the talent of his forefathers who had built this empire, but he had their shrewd maneuver capability, and a burning desire to win at all costs.
He had the Robertsons figured. He knew the two men sitting before him were desperate for money, and he wasn't too concerned about the amount they needed. He wasn't interested in dickering—just in getting what he knew would be the key to his future. "What did you bring me?" he asked brusquely, while ordering a silver tea service and ginger snap cookies.
Secretly, he pressed a button that caused a digital recording system to make audio and video files of the transaction, just in case things ever wound up in court. Lee had let his own father's lawyers train him well. One could never be too careful, when playing with dynamite like this.
The spacious, luxurious office with its plate glass windows overlooking desert vistas began to fill with faint aromas of sugar, vanilla, and almond. "I have the papers I told you about," the father said. The old man reached into his inner pocket and took out an envelope that looked as if he'd held it a lot, maybe sweated into its wrinkled paper. Lee sensed that the old man and his son had misgivings about how the explosive information they were handing over might be used. Lee was used to this feeling in people. They sensed, somehow, that he wasn't being sincere with them. Screw them—these two were a pair of cheap, trashy opportunists without a pot to piss in. He was from America's equivalent of royal stock. Let them sweat, and hand over their secrets, and walk out with a few thousand bucks to mend their tattered and tawdry little lives. Lee caught himself before he might radiate contempt at the two.
"Excellent," Lee said. He stirred his tea and said: "So you flew with Chennault's Flying Tigers before the war, and later on the U.S. Army Air Force Himalayan airlift into China, and after the war you came into possession of Major Karasawa's notes...?"
"You studied my report well," the old man said, trembling as he clutched the manila envelope to his chest with both arms as if protecting it. Lee watched in surprise—almost afraid that the old man might change his mind as he sat there with wide eyes behind lenses glittering in the harsh desert sunlight that filtered laser-like through the blinds and into the air conditioned office. But the old man's mouth opened in a yammering wail and he rocked violently with the baby-like envelope in his arms: "Please, Mr. Colwood, promise me. Swear to me, your oath as a gentleman, that you will keep this information, you and the Government, never to make an offensive weapon, but to study it and to make sure no other country can ever duplicate what Karasawa's people found in the jungle."
This was easy. "Sure," Lee said, smiling. The old man slumped in relief and passed the envelope across the desk to Lee, while the younger man looked mistrustful and unhappy. Lee swept a gold pen into his hands and signed a check for tens of thousands of dollars with a flourish. "You have my promise as a gentleman, and this should make things easier for you."
As the father and son walked slowly to the door, Lee said cheerfully with all the faithly nectar he could summon: "You've done the right thing, Mr. Robertson, for yourself, for your family, for the United States of America." He thought about rising and adding: "God bless these United States," but decided not to. It would be over the top.
He sat back and breathed a huge sigh after the door closed and the two men disappeared from his life, leaving him this thing on his desk, this envelope that he leaned over and was almost afraid to open, so radioactive did it seem, so vastly dangerous and crazy like that atomic bomb project back in the 1940s. It was a Pandora's Box, he knew, and he hesitated with both hands held over the envelope in the chill twilight of his empty office. Then he remembered he had no choice. He must save his company and his own integrity and cash flow, not to mention his reputation. Zestfully, he tore open the crinkled manila paper to expose the aging and brittle papers inside.
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