by Ed Kovacs
What didn’t make sense was the Jefferson brothers’ code on the desk blotter. Every Saturday night there were notations for late-night appointments with TDF, a freight-forwarding company. Cargo came in during off hours on a regular basis. One would almost think they were up to something.
I viewed the GL, SF-X-02 user’s manual DVD from the weapon’s case. I understood the code to mean: Grenade Launcher, Shoulder-Fired-Experimental. Zero-two probably meant second generation. The video guide was useful and chock-full of helpful information, demonstrated by a man in fatigues with no insignia, but speaking American English. I’d been right about the HE rounds for the gun—they would take down a small house.
A few hours after he’d left, Kendall called with an update.
“The green container has left the yard?” I asked, surprised.
“Ten minutes back. Soon’s they open this mornin’ start loading all kinds of rusty-assed pallets into it. Truck came from TDF Shipping and took it away.”
“What’s the location now?”
“Look like they headed to the port. I’m ’bout two minutes behind.”
“You won’t be able to enter the port. You can park somewhere on Tchoupitoulas. I already have the container number, but did you get the truck’s license plate?”
“I’ll text it.”
“Good work, Kendall.”
I called Honey but her cell went straight to voicemail. Damn, she was in court and had her phone turned off. I knew that outbound containers sometimes would sit at the port but sometimes they got put right on a cargo ship. Honey could probably get the container stopped claiming it contained evidence related to Breaux’s murder investigation, but all I had was a piece of paper from the chief authorizing me to assist Honey. I doubted I could even gain entrance to the port, much less intercept a shipment, with only the chief’s letter in my pocket.
So I called Harding on my encrypted cell and got her on a secure line. I gave her the CliffsNotes about the weapons from Scrap Brothers now heading to the port.
She actually said, “Whew.”
“You told me before you were unofficially ordered off the investigation and that you didn’t have a smoking gun. Is this the kind of hard proof you’re looking for?”
“Do you own a nice suit?” she asked.
“A suit?” I wasn’t really a suit kind of guy, but I always kept some handy for funerals. I hadn’t attended Bobby Perdue’s service figuring the family wouldn’t its son’s killer to attend.
“Yes, a suit,” she said. “Like a business suit, nothing flashy, preferably in dark blue, gray—”
“Black okay?”
“Fine. I’ll pick you up in thirty minutes.”
Twenty-five minutes later I was riding in a silver Crown Vic Interceptor with Harding as we hotfooted it to the port. We’d learned the container was getting fast-tracked right onto a Chinese freighter. One call to Customs and Border Protection stopped that, and another call to Chief Carl Ritzman of the Harbor Police resulted in a cordon of officers securing the train-car-sized steel box.
“You haven’t explained why you wanted me to come with you,” I said, after she put her cell phone away.
“You’re familiar with the container and what’s inside.”
That sounded lame; she didn’t need me for that. “We can’t tip off to anybody that I’ve been in that container.”
“We won’t.”
I felt less and less comfortable about doing this with her, but I was damn well intent on busting this case wide open. Plus, I was never one to shy away from being on the front lines of stirring up some trouble.
“Why the suit?” I asked.
“Don’t represent yourself as being with the Bureau or some other federal agency, but if they assume that, I wouldn’t mind.”
As I wrestled with that one, we cruised past the Walmart on Tchoupitoulas where Kendall sat parked.
“Has Gunderson signed off on this?” Special Agent-in-Charge Gunderson was Harding’s supervisor and ran the New Orleans FBI office. He knew me, but I wasn’t sure that he was a fan.
“So far.”
Harding turned into the Felicity Street entrance to the Port of New Orleans. We signed in at the big guard shack on the Clarence Henry Truckway, drove under the trestle of cameras and other kinds of sensing equipment, and in a minute and a half pulled into TDF Shipping’s staging yard on the Jackson Avenue Wharf, where the green container, still sitting on the roll-off truck, was surrounded by Harbor Police.
Harding and I got out of the car and she flashed her badge announcing, “FBI,” to all concerned.
A green-uniformed CBP agent approached and stuck out his hand. “Terry Blanchard. I’m the inspector who oversees the inspection of outbound cargo.”
“I’m Harding, that’s Saint James. We have reason to believe there might be some contraband in this container.”
Blanchard looked uncomfortable. He stepped in closer to us and spoke softly so no one else could hear.
“Did I get something wrong? Has there been a change in plans?”
To our credit, Harding and I managed to keep our poker faces intact. U.S. Customs was in on this? I could only imagine what kind of maelstrom we were about to be thrown into.
“There’s been a mistake,” I said, quickly, before Harding had a chance to speak.
“Okay. So you what, want this one scanned?”
“Right,” said Harding, going along. “How does that work?”
“I can have the VACIS truck come right here, and scan the container for contraband.”
“Let’s do that,” said Harding.
While Blanchard made a call, Harding and I spoke quietly as I fired up a cigarillo.
“Change in plans? What do you make of that?” she asked me.
“You’re not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. I think our only play is to balls this through and see how the dust settles. I say we sweat Blanchard before the muckety-mucks get here and screw the lid down tight. Which might happen pretty quick.”
“You’re joking? You think CBP is in on arms smuggling? Blanchard has to have gone bad and he’s on the take.”
“From guys posing as FBI? He assumed we were in on whatever he’s up to.”
“Maybe there’s a rogue FBI agent in town,” she said.
Blanchard finished his call and Harding waved him over.
“VACIS truck will be here in a couple of minutes.”
“Who was it told you not to check this container?” I asked.
Blanchard looked like the wheels were spinning inside his head. “Why are you asking me this?”
“Because J. Edgar Hoover is dead and I got Terry Blanchard standing here instead. Now answer the question.”
“Look, I’ve done everything you guys asked.”
“Who asked?” Harding barked.
“The FBI! I know what FBI identification looks like.”
“You got names?”
“Maybe.”
“Let me guess what they ‘asked’ you. To look the other way, make sure certain containers don’t get any attention on their way out of the country,” I said.
“You’re acting like you don’t know about this.”
“You might be in some trouble, Blanchard. Just answer the questions,” said Harding.
“Trouble! You think I wanted to do any of this? An FBI badge is great, but I wanted proof these guys were for real, so they showed me copies of my personnel file, my military two-zero-one file, results of lie detector tests I took when I was with Border Patrol. If they’re not FBI, how they gonna get all that?”
“You weren’t suspicious?”
“My job is to be suspicious. But I also know when to obey orders and keep my mouth shut.”
“Okay, look. The rules have changed. From now on, every container you’re not supposed to check, we need to know about it,” I said.
Blanchard shook his head. “I want to go to my superiors about this. My union rep. You’re trying to put me in the middle of something.”
“You’re already in the middle,” I said, without a note of sympathy. “You got in the middle when you agreed to do some shady business without written authorization or orders from your chain of command. You don’t take orders from somebody just because they have a copy of your two-zero-one file.”
Blanchard looked ready to have a meltdown.
“Play ball with me.” Harding instinctively slipped into the good cop role. “I’ll keep you out of the fallout; you’ll keep your career.”
“You’re putting me in deeper!”
“Buddy,” I said, “you’re in so far over your head already, you have no idea. Now what’s it going to be? You want to get cuffed right now, or you want to fix what you screwed up?”
Blanchard blinked, and then his eyes darted around the huge fenced-in lot. He wet his lips, then softly said, “What do I have to do?”
“How often do these shipments come through?”
“All the time. At least five or ten every week. From different shippers to different destinations.”
I surreptitiously handed Blanchard a sterile cell phone that I kept handy for working witnesses in all kinds of investigations. “This phone is only to be used to call me and vice versa. Use the auto redial—mine’s the only number in it. You will keep me informed. Always call from outdoors. Keep turning around in case you’re being watched.”
An all-white ten-wheeler that at first blush resembled a mobile crane pulled up and parked. VACIS stood for Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System, and was a mobile gamma ray imagining system. Using a high-energy X-ray source the unit can penetrate more than a foot of steel. Harding and Blanchard entered the boxy control room behind the cab as the L-shaped boom arm swung out and deployed perpendicular to the truck, creating what looked like a large door frame. Before I could finish another cigarillo, the TDF Shipping roll-off truck started up and slowly drove through the “frame” alongside the VACIS truck, then stopped.
Harding and Blanchard emerged from the truck’s control room.
“Get it unloaded. We have an irregularity in the container,” announced Harding as she made a beeline toward me.
Blanchard shouted some commands and the TDF roll-off truck deposited the green cargo container on the concrete. Then he started making a series of cell calls out of earshot.
“I got a call from Gunderson while I was in the control room,” whispered Harding. “Some FBI CI-3 agent from D.C. was bent out of shape, asking what the hell we thought we were doing and telling us to cease and desist.”
“Gunderson order you to back off?”
“Exactly the opposite. Gunderson’s close to retirement and he knows where plenty of bodies are buried—dirty little Bureau secrets. He told the guy to send his order in writing. That’s not going to happen.”
“But Gunderson will get notified through his chain of command to back off?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that Blanchard wasn’t lying. Somebody in the FBI wants these containers to leave unnoticed.”
“It’s going to be interesting to see who shows up here or who makes themselves known in the next hour or so, Agent Harding.”
She nodded tensely.
We looked over to see a forklift arrive along with more CBP vehicles and Chief Ritzman’s souped-up Harbor Police unit.
“Let the show begin,” I said.
Within seconds, pallets of scrap started getting hauled out of the container and placed on the concrete. A very tall CBP agent carrying a Samsung tablet computer approached us.
“Doug Simms, Senior Special Agent, Office of Investigations, U.S. Customs.”
“Harding and Saint James,” said Harding, keeping up the charade, for whatever reason, that I was there in an official capacity. She didn’t bother with showing Simms any ID.
“So we got some goodies in this container here, Agent Harding?”
“According to your fancy machine we do.”
“Just so you know, if we find any military goods, I’m going to have to open up a National Security Investigation.”
“Good.”
“How does it work here, Agent Simms, with outgoing cargo getting checked?” I asked.
“All out-going containers get scanned for radiation as soon as the trucks pull into the port. In terms of image scanning or spot checks, the focus is on what’s coming in. For out-going cargo, we’ll consider the manifest, where the cargo is heading. We pay more attention to shipments that aren’t regularly sent. But we don’t check every out-going container. We’re just not able to. A bad guess might be that sixty percent of what leaves gets checked.”
“What do your records say about this container?”
Simms checked his tablet computer. “Scrap metal heading to Shenzhen, China. Frequent shipper. Nothing unusual about this at all.”
Harding looked over at the container where the forklift pivoted with the weapons cases resting on its tines.
“Those cases,” she said, “sure look unusual to me.”
CHAPTER NINE
Harding used the lock combination I’d given her earlier to open the cases with the cipher locks. Doug Simms stood at a loss for words as he gazed at the weaponry. He began madly taking photos with a big Nikon digital camera to document the scene, and then made a quick call to a higher-up. From his reaction, I didn’t take him to be part of the smuggling scheme.
Chief Ritzman walked up and got a look at the goods. “Damn. I need to call HAZ MAT in on this, and maybe the bomb squad.”
“Do what you need to do, Chief,” I said.
I casually looked around and spotted the shrink-wrapped pallet with the single sheet of material held safely in a frame. It had been on its way to China so it didn’t take a genius to connect the dots. Del Breaux had sold it out the backdoor at Michoud for $2.5 million in cash to the Chinese. How it tied in to the weapons, I could only speculate. But Danny Doakes and Peter Danforth’s fear of the power of “them” was starting to make more sense.
As the chief made his calls, a black stretch limo stopped at the police cordon. A lanky gentleman in a bone-colored linen suit and an open necked shirt got out of the limo. A buzz cut masked the fact that his hair had gone silver and his hawkish eyes narrowed as he scanned the scene. “Chief Ritzman, Clayton Brandt!” the man called out, an unmistakable command authority infusing his deep voice.
Hearing the name startled me, and I drilled him with my eyes, soaking up every detail. If Peter Danforth were to be believed, I was about to meet a ruthless killer.
Chief Ritzman gestured for an officer to allow Brandt to approach.
“Well look who’s here,” said Harding, whispering to me.
“The Big Fix is about to be put in,” I said. “How long has it been since you first called to stop the container from being loaded onto that Chinese freighter?”
“About two hours.”
“Terry Blanchard must have given someone a heads-up as soon as you called to stop the shipment. Let me guess: Brandt was one of the people you were investigating along with Breaux, right?”
“That would be a big ten-four.”
“Cocktails on me if you’ll share later.”
“My associate, Mister Tan Chu, is mortified that the laborer in the scrap yard commingled the two shipments,” said Clayton Brandt. I didn’t know if Brandt had ever practiced law, but if he had, he was the kind of cagey fox you wished you could afford if your ass ever got put into a sling.
We all stood in a circle in the TDF Shipping yard: Harding and myself, Customs Inspector Terry Blanchard, Chief Ritzman, Clayton Brandt, Senior Special Agent Doug Simms, and a couple of port honchos who had shown up. HAZ MAT vehicles had startled to arrive and I noticed the limo’s chauffeur now stood smoking outside the car: it was an Asian guy, unusual for New Orleans.
“As Customs and Border Protection is well aware, Mister Chu has a long history of buying scrap metal from the area and shipping it to his smelter in China. There should have only been scrap in the container, obviously. Mister Chu
readily admits that he legally purchased the weapons and ammunition in those cases for export. I have copies of the receipts right here.”
Brandt distributed copies to Harding, Simms, and anyone else who wanted one.
“China is an embargoed country, according to the State Department. It’s illegal to ship weapons there from the United States,” said Harding. “Right, Simms?”
“ITAR, International Traffic in Arms Regulations rules are fairly complex, but generally, you’re correct,” said Doug Simms.
“Yes, absolutely,” said Brandt. “These weapons were bound for Peru, and would have gone out in a container tomorrow—I believe Customs will have a record of that scheduled outgoing shipment in your logs—if the worker hadn’t made this egregious error.”
Simms worked his tablet computer to check Brandt’s contention. “Yes, I see the bill of lading for a scheduled shipment to Peru.”
“That is ludicrous to say the weapons would have gone to Peru. They didn’t. They were a hundred yards from going onto a Chinese ship bound for China.” Harding was getting worked up, which only made her sexier to me.
“I also have here copies of a signed and notarized affidavit from Leroy and James Jefferson, owners of Scrap Brothers, attesting to our contention that the weapons were mistakenly included in the shipment of scrap as a result of miscommunication between them and their employee, Herbert Rondell.” Brandt distributed more copies.
“Mister Chu is ultimately responsible—”
“Mister Chu could have legally shipped these weapons to China if he wanted to, Agent Harding,” interrupted Brandt.
“What?”
“Congress passed a very specific law, a little-known waiver for the Space Station Freedom program. The law allows embargoed technology to be shipped from the United States to countries that participated in the building of the space station. China was a participant in that program.” Brandt was handing out more paper than a guy hyping a pizza-delivery joint.
This time I reached for a handout. I wanted a closer look at the silver ring Brandt wore on his right hand which looked like some kind of class ring with a pale blue stone in the center. I caught a quick look, confirming my suspicions.