For the Trees

by Brett Baker

  “Johnny, I think you need to get back home. That place is driving you mad. Get some distance from the situation.”

  “I don’t need distance,” Johnny said. “It’s just a question. If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there. Fine. I’m relieved. I told them you were fine.”

  “Them? Who’s them?”

  “Migsy and Whit. Justine and I had dinner at Whit’s last night and Migsy was there. She asked why you left in such a hurry, and I explained you had things to do. She thought you seemed distant while you were here and Whit agreed.”

  “I probably was distant,” I said. “My mom and dad were just murdered. Maybe that’s why my mind was elsewhere instead of fully engaged in whatever conversation was taking place at the moment.”

  “That’s what I told them,” Johnny said. “But Migsy kept asking about it. Justine told her to back off, but you know how she is.”

  “Well at least Justine believes in me.”

  “It’s not about believing in you, Mia. It’s making sure you’re all right. I think you know that you can come to me if you’re in trouble, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of that sometimes.”

  “Consider me reminded,” I said. “You’re lucky Justine didn’t kill Migsy, you know. She looked ready to strangle her at the lunch.”

  “It didn’t get any better last night. Migsy kept harping about you being distant and leaving in such a hurry, and Whit’s constantly throwing out all of these different bizarre theories about what might have happened to mom and dad, so it didn’t take much for Migsy to combine the two topics into one. Justine told both of them they were being ridiculous, and when they wouldn’t shut up about it she said, ‘I hope I die before I get old and my brain stops working, too!’ She was pissed.”

  “So your wife defends me, but you just go along with what they say?”

  “I’m not going along with anything,” Johnny said. “We’re at the end of the line here. We’re past the end of the line. There’s nowhere else to go with any of this. I know I didn’t have anything to do with it, so I just figured I’d ask you about it.”

  “Well you can stop asking,” I said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it either.”

  Johnny apologized for asking the question and promised not to spend too much time around Migsy or Whit, lest they corrupt his thinking any further. He’d made progress in wrapping up my parents’ affairs, and planned to head home in a couple of days. We talked about meeting back at the house in a month or two to begin the process of moving everything out and selling it.

  I hung up and realized that after we sold the house we’d never have to return to Eutaw again. And judging by the way that place and the people living there almost warped my brother’s mind, I couldn’t have been more thankful.

  35

  Chapter 35

  No sooner had I hung up the phone with Johnny than it rang again. I expected him to be on the other end, so I answered, “What am I guilty of now?”

  “Nothing that I know of,” came the response. It took me a few seconds, but I realized the voice belonged to Davis.

  “Davis, I’m sorry. I thought you were my brother.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Although with The Summit, anything is possible, I suppose.”

  “I’m surprised they don’t try to get us when we’re born. Like the KGB.”

  “If they could find a way to do it they probably would.”

  “It’s not like any of us have kids anyway. That would entail having a life outside of this damn organization, and I haven’t found a way to do that yet. Something that my brother just reminded me of.”

  “You’re better off,” Davis said. “You try to have a life and work for The Summit and your spouse will end up hiring someone to kill you.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Courtesy of Mount,” Davis said. “The job in Pigeon Forge, the one where he killed an agent on the balcony? The agent’s wife hired him. Said he seemed too secretive. She thought he had another life with someone else.”

  “Golly fuck! Did he have another life?”

  “Just with The Summit as far as I know. I suppose we could do a little digging, but it doesn’t matter at this point. He’s dead. But the good news is that Mount didn’t know he was an agent, and he doesn’t seem to know The Summit exists at all.”

  “Finally, some good news!” I said. “I guess we can all relax a little then. One fewer person out there trying to kill us.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m sure I’m right at the top of his hit list with the last twelve hours we’ve spent together. Although I don’t think anyone’s going to have to worry about Mount. He’s not going to be in a position to do any more hits.”

  “So it went well?” I asked.

  “I’m not dead,” Davis said. “That means it wasn’t a complete failure.”

  “I guess so. Anything that ends in unintended death can usually be classified a failure. What else did you get from him?”

  “Well, as you can imagine, he wasn’t very talkative at first. I had to convince him to talk. But as soon as I showed him that he only had two choices—talking or death—he made the right choice. He admitted that he did Chamberlain.”

  “We didn’t have much doubt about that, did we?”

  “I didn’t, but it’s nice to get confirmation.”

  “And did you find out who hired him?” I asked. I felt my pulse race and I pounded on the steering wheel with impossible anticipation. If Davis had an answer to that question then it might begin to reveal the entire situation. If Mount didn’t answer the question then I didn’t know where to go from there. I suddenly felt a bit of empathy for the detectives in Eutaw.

  “Guy by the name of Logan,” Davis said. “Tucson, Arizona.”

  “Lloyd Logan?” I asked. The name was familiar to me right away. “The miner?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s him. Mount mentioned he was a miner. Lives on some huge ranch outside of Tucson. No animals around though. That really pissed Mount off.”

  “Oh fuck, Lloyd Logan. That’s not surprising at all. He’s a world class criminal. No one ever gets anything to stick to him, but if you’re poor and vulnerable, and in a third world country you’ve got no worse enemy than Lloyd Logan.”

  “You know him or you know of him?” Davis asked.

  “No, I know him,” I said. “I worked on him a couple of years ago. We got pulled into a human trafficking case in which people were being kidnapped from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk and sent to work in uranium mines in Kazakhstan.”

  “Logan employed slave labor?” Davis asked.

  “No, he didn’t use them. A rival did. Mostly homeless men, or runaway teenagers, or some poor sap who just had too much to drink and passed out in a park or an alleyway or something. Some hoodlums would throw them in the back of a van, cart them away. Logan found out about it, confronted the guy who owned the rival mine, and almost got killed. We stumbled into it when the mom of one of the guys who was kidnapped went up to an agent of ours in a park in St. Petersburg and asked for help.”

  “How’d she know we would help?”

  “She didn’t. It’s not like our agent’s standing there with identification from The Summit. Pure coincidence. Thousands of people on the street she could have asked for help and she happens to find an American who works for a secret organization, just happens to speak Russian, and can solve just about any problem she throws at him. She says her son is missing. Our guy assumes it’s just going to be a local crime case or maybe a runaway or something. Figures he’ll spend an afternoon on it, ask some questions, find the kid and make the old Russian woman happy. By the time he figures out what’s actually involved it’s too late to turn back.”

  “So more than one agent worked on it?”

  “There were at least half a dozen that I knew of, including me. Our guy asks some questions, finds out that there’s a gang of local guys who are doing the kidnapping in St. Petersburg. He finds them, follows them
and eventually ends up in a huge warehouse on the banks of Volga River in Volgograd. Almost gets captured by some security goons there, but ends up killing five guys and makes his getaway. Calls Polestar to tell them what’s going down and request reinforcements. I’d just finished a mission so they sent me. I land in Volgograd three days after that mother went to our agent in St. Petersburg, exit the airport, and walk right into a conversation between Lloyd Logan and a Russian official in English, and the first word I hear is slave. So obviously I stick around and within half an hour I’m talking to Lloyd Logan about the uranium mining industry in Kazakhstan. I spent the next three months with him. Talking everyday, meeting people, sitting in on deals he was doing, watching him bribe officials. And the entire time he never asked me why I was in Volgograd. We moved to Kazakhstan, he never asked me why I followed him.”

  “Are you kidding?” Davis said. “He meets another American there and never thinks to say, ‘What are you doing here?’”

  “Not once,” I said. “Too busy talking about himself. Trying to make me his concubine. If I had a dollar for every time he tried something inappropriate with me I’d be a millionaire, just like him.”

  “So if he was such a bad guy why didn’t you take him down? Don’t tell me he succeeded in making you his concubine.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I don’t have the time or the inclination to be anyone’s concubine. We didn’t take him down because he wasn’t the focus. We needed him to help us understand the uranium mining industry. He wasn’t using slave labor, he wasn’t killing anyone then, and he fed information to us, so we left him alone for the most part. We broke up the kidnapping ring. Man, you should have been there for that. On the day that blew up I worked with another agent who killed thirty-two people in one day. Can you imagine? Thirty-two people. One of the craziest encounters I’ve ever witnessed. No one from the company’s leadership survived. Everyone from the lowest management position all the way up to the CEO tried to save the company because they were all so entrenched in this slave labor bullshit that any spotlight from the outside risked sending them to prison. So when we showed up they threw everything they had at us, and when it was over we still had our six or seven agents and they had four-dozen dead executives and managers. We didn’t want to get local government or law enforcement involved so we brought in our own guys and sold the mine off piece-by-piece. Netted close to a hundred million for The Summit. The Kazakh government found out about it eventually and came for their cut of the action, which we gave them. They were just happy to have the old leadership out of there because they’d attracted teams from Human Rights Watch and other organizations to the country to investigate the mine.”

  “Then what happened with Logan?” Davis asked.

  “Nothing. End of mission. I left Kazakhstan, came back to the states and started another mission. I thought I was done with Logan, and I couldn’t have been happier about that. And then you fuck it all up and bring him back.”

  “I didn’t bring him back. Mount brought him back. Chamberlain brought him back.”

  “And I brought him back,” I said.

  “You? What do you have to do with it?”

  “It had to be Logan who gave my name to Green.”

  “Is Logan involved in forestry?” Davis asked. “Why does he think you can stop the bill?”

  “It’s not about forestry,” I said. I decided to pull off to the side of the road to continue my conversation with Davis. The full gravity of the situation had just begun to hit me.

  “What’s it about?” Davis asked. “Money? That’s what it all comes down to isn’t it?”

  “It’s worse than that,” I said. “It’s literally life and death. The science hasn’t been done yet, and Logan will refute it when it is done, but simple observation says that it’s life and death.”

  Davis sighed and grunted. “Mia, you’re being too fucking vague. What are you talking about? Stop speaking in code.”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “This needs to go to Polestar. I should have disclosed it when I left Kazakhstan, but I thought we might need Logan’s help in the future so I wanted to keep him in our pocket. You don’t want to know.”

  “You can’t say something like that and then not tell me. I worked on Mount for you and without that you wouldn’t even know Logan was behind this. The Summit’s own guidelines encourage agents to share information with each other when they’re working on the same mission. We may not have started on the same mission, but we’re getting to the point where we can’t separate your mission from my mission.”

  “I’m not on a mission,” I said. “This is my decommission month, remember?”

  Davis laughed. “That’s right. You sure know how to relax. But seriously, what the fuck is going on?”

  “If I tell you about this, then they’ll want to restrain you, too. I suspect Green doesn’t know. If he knew and he still introduced the bill he’d be risking his career. He’d never recover. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet that Logan and I are the only people outside of Kazakhstan that know about this.”

  “Hit me,” Davis said. “I’ll take my chances and the curiosity is killing me.”

  “All right. You asked for it. Logan started building his fortune in copper mines. He got lucky early on, bought a couple of deposits that bigger corporations overlooked and they paid off for him. Huge. But he didn’t start to really amass wealth until he went international, and when he went international he transitioned into uranium. It’s not a bad move because the uranium market by definition is rather shady. Terrorist organizations, corrupt governments, dirty money. All the legit players and countries try to keep a handle on things, and they do for the most part, but corrupt little crumbs break loose and keep the shady characters thriving. Logan begins operations in Namibia, northern India, and eventually Kazakhstan. Money starts flowing. So he’s established in copper in the U.S., and in uranium internationally. The next logical step is to try to get in on the uranium action in the U.S. But the environmentalists are all over uranium in the U.S. It destroys the land and, of course, there’s the whole health risk of exposing people to uranium. It’s stigmatized like almost no other mineral or element, and for good reason. Uranium is still mined, but no new mine has opened in decades.”

  “Logan wants to open a new mine?” Davis guessed.

  “Not quite so simple,” I said. “He realizes that there’s no way that a new traditional uranium mine would ever be approved in the U.S. So he’s been trying new technologies in Kazakhstan for years in the hopes that he’ll figure out a safe, palatable way to do it. And they’re on to something over there. A new process called in-situ leaching appears to be the best method. It’s sort of like fracking for natural gas. They pump a solution into the ground, dissolve the ore into the solution and then pump the solution back up and retrieve the ore. It works, and it’s safe, so everybody’s happy.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Davis asked. “Logan’s just worried about combining fracking and uranium in the U.S.? He’s right to be worried, I think. Difficult to find two more unpopular words in the English language than fracking and uranium. Freaks me out just thinking about it.”

  “He’s not worried about that. He knows that the right combination of supporters and politicians willing to vote against their constituents’ interests can make anything happen. If he can convince the public that in-situ leaching is safer than a regular uranium mine, and remind them that we need uranium, and convince them that he’s saving lives by not exposing workers to radiation, then he can make the in-situ mine happen.”

  “So what’s stopping him?”

  “In-situ leaching requires a special solution because the minerals and elements have to be permeable to the liquids used. It’s not like you can just pump water down there and bring it back up filled with uranium. Not quite that easy. But they found a solution that works, and it doesn’t seep out of the mine, so it seems safe. Logan gets his uranium, the land is left undisturbed, the drinking wa
ter and soil isn’t contaminated, so it seems everybody gets what they want. Win-win-win. Except Logan’s a smart guy and he has smart people working for him. And one of these smart people developed a new solution that extracts more uranium. The commonly-used solution leaves behind some uranium. But this new solution has a thinner viscosity, so it extracts more of the ore, and brings it to the surface. Good news for Logan because it means more money for him, and he’s the only one who knows about it. Bad news for him because the thinner viscosity means that it doesn’t just seep into the ore, but it seems through the ore, into fissures and cracks. It’s tougher to control.”

  “Contamination,” Davis said.

  “Exactly. They send this solution into the ground, some of it soaks up the ore and they pump it back up. But most of it, about ninety percent of what they poured into the mine, stays down there. Only it doesn’t stay where they pumped it. It finds its way into the water supply almost immediately, and over time it gradually contaminates surrounding land. And radioactive contamination manifests itself very quickly. So within just a few years we’ll see signs of it, but by that time it’ll be too late. The damage will be done.”

  “And Logan will have already made his money.”

  “That’s right. Most of which he will have hidden away in some foreign country because he knows trouble is coming.”

  “Well, why not just use the safe method,” Davis asked.

  “Greed. Why take a little when you can have a lot?”

  “Why bother having a lot if you have to hide it away?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s the part that I don’t understand. He knows what this method does. He knows what the contamination does. We’ve seen it at his facilities in Kazakhstan and Namibia. He can get away with that stuff there, but if he contaminates water and land here, and there are visible signs of that contamination, it’ll be ruinous for him. Why not try to run an honest operation?”