by HN Wake
“Yes,” Meredith responded. “That’s Mac Ambrose. She’s on my team.”
He exploded, “What? You fucking sent someone out to check up on Alghaba?”
“Yes, Nazir. That’s exactly what I did. That’s what the bank requires of me.”
“Let me pull my cheeks apart for your ass fucking, Meredith. Why would you do that?”
Very calmly, Meredith said, “Let me explain this to you in simple language. This bank has signed a number of international principles—including the Equator Principles—that set up a framework by which we assess environmental and social risks. In addition, two years ago, this bank spent an inordinate amount of time drafting a sustainability policy with accompanying guidelines. Our good folks in New York then spent another year getting input from various environmental and activists groups on said documents. When all the comments were incorporated, our Board signed off on them.
“What that means, Nazir, is that we look at any and all negative impact of our business on environmental and social factors. The Board, our investors, our clients—and the public—are watching that we stick by those policies.” She found a folder and opened it. “In fact, I have a question for you so I’m glad you called. It says here in the Alghaba file, that only five percent of Alghaba’s commercially managed forests have been certified with Forestry Stewardship Council Certification. The FSC. Only five percent!”
She let the number hang in the air.
He responded, “Alghaba has been certified by the certification body here in Malaysia.”
“From what I can gather, the Malaysian timber body is an industry shill. Most timber companies exporting out of Malaysia aren’t qualifying for FSC.”
“Who gives a shit about certification?”
“More people than you clearly understand. FSC lets consumers know their products were sourced properly. It also lets investors know the company at least considers sustainability issues. At a bare minimum. And Nazir, it lets our team know the company is trying. Again, the bare minimum. Alghaba isn’t even trying from what I can tell. Five percent?”
He seethed, “It took my team six months to put this deal together.”
“I could have warned you six months ago if you’d brought it to me as you were supposed to. I would have told you that timber and palm plantations are specifically listed in our policies. We must take extra precautions and do extra due diligence.”
Nazir bellowed, “Palm oil is the most widely used fucking vegetable oil in the world, and Malaysia is on track to increase their production by fifty-five percent over the next twenty five years. Timber makes up 3.7% of Malaysia’s GDP and 3.2% of its merchandise exports. Huge numbers. Huge! You cannot fucking hamstring me here on this deal. Word will get out and we’ll be cock-blocked from the entire industry.”
“Nazir, I am following Legion’s own risk guidelines. Maybe you should have been talking to Alghaba about their practices. Maybe you could have encouraged them to behave more sustainably. Maybe you could have reported to me that they had an improvement plan. As it is, we’ve got no idea how they operate in terms of environmental and social issues and we have to check them out.”
“By sending some fucking cunt up into the jungle to investigate?”
“Watch it, Nazir. Dial it back.”
“We’re talking a fifty million dollar fee, Meredith.”
“If Alghaba is clean, then you shall have your fee.”
“We, Meredith, we shall have our fee. The fees bankers bring in pay your salary.”
22
In the rainforest, Sarawak Province, Malaysia
At a distance, Mac and Johnson followed the young Penan in the red T-shirt and Azly further into the forest on a tight path. The wilting heat closed in on them. The ground was spongy, damp.
From behind her, Johnson snarled at her back. “Who are the two men in the photos?”
She had been expecting a variation of this question. “One of them was an American medical student. He was killed in Miri two weeks ago. The other was a friend of his that disappeared about the same time. I wanted to confirm they had been out here.”
It was difficult to carry the conversation as they hefted their boots over vines, trying to keep pace with the red T-shirt and Azly who moved nimbly along the narrow path.
A branch snapped as Johnson drew closer. “An American med student was murdered?”
“So it would seem.”
“Jesus.” His voice sounded astonished. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I wasn’t sure it was pertinent to our due diligence.”
“Are you kidding? You didn’t think a murder might be relevant?”
“I didn’t know they had been to this exact village. But now we do. So they must have been documenting the logging by Alghaba.”
“Uh. Hello?? You think Alghaba murdered somebody?”
Her walk was careful. Her legs were burning. “I didn’t say that.” But, yes, she thought. I think they had something to do with a murder, and I’m out here hiking through the jungle with you trying to prove that.
“But you think it.”
“We have no evidence of that. I’m here to sniff it out.”
They had settled into a slow, determined pace.
“How did you find out about them?” he asked.
“We use a number of contractors. One of our security firms found out about the death and the disappearance from a newspaper scan. I needed to check it off the list. I needed to look into the issue.”
“And? What have you determined?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“When will you know?”
She breathed in a few times before saying, “My job is to explore all the possible reputational risks that might plague a client or a deal.”
“Reputational risks?”
“Banks don’t like scandals. Their reputations are extremely important to them.”
“Yeah, I get that. But do you think Alghaba had something to do with what happened to them?”
“There’s no proof yet.” She swept the sweat off her face and spit out a nat.
He mimicked her, “There’s no proof yet?”
His mocking was getting under her skin. She didn’t like having to defend a bank’s unethical procedures. Her focus had to stay on finding Josh. “Just doing my job.”
“Will you report to your office what you found?”
“Of course.”
They plodded on, barely keeping up with Azly and the red t-shirt.
A few minutes later, Johnson asked, “So this murder may kill the deal—pun totally intended—with Alghaba?”
“I’m not the one that makes the decision.”
“But you’ll recommend it.”
Her frustration with him peaked. She needed to shut him up. She stopped, turned, and glared at him. “Johnson, I’ll report what I found back to the bankers.”
Johnson pulled up short and his look turned incredulous. “It’s not enough that there was a murder out here? Some kind of twisted cover up for what Alghaba is doing out here? Holy crap. What more do you need? Alghaba is totally, illegally ripping down this rainforest. Seriously, what more do you need?”
For the love of god, she was not here to defend banking. She was here to find a missing spy. Her annoyance with him finally exploded. “Let me explain something. Banks are not the police. Banks support capitalism. Banks support commerce. That’s all anyone has ever wanted from them. That’s what their shareholders want from them. That’s what the market wants from them. And now timber products and palm oil are what the market wants. If the Government of Malaysia is willing to sell their natural resources to the highest bidder, who are we to tell them they shouldn’t?”
“What?”
She snapped back. “If Malaysia wants to rape their natural resources, it’s technically theirs to do it to.”
He matched her anger. “With your money to help them do that.”
She turned and stomped down the path.
F
ive minutes later, he closed in on her. His voice had regained some semblance of calm. “But it’s not that simple. We’re talking complex institutions at work out here. Power corrupts. It needs oversight.”
“That’s the job of governments and international bodies.” Not a spy in search of another spy.
“Banks don’t have any responsibility?”
“That’s debatable.”
“Without capital from banks, Alghaba couldn’t expand.”
“Jesus Christ, Johnson, I said I will report back what I find.”
“Will you?”
Silence was her response.
He slowed, let the distance between them expand. “If the inner mind is not deluded,” he said, “the outer actions will not be wrong.”
“Aren’t Buddhists supposed to be humble?”
Thirty minutes later, his footfalls moved in closer to her back. “If something happened to those two, and it turns out Alghaba had something to do with their disappearance, you can recommend that they not go through with the deal? Right? It’s a reputational risk, right?”
“Yes, I can recommend that.” His persistence had worn her down. She was finally tired of defending the bank. With a sigh, she turned to him. “Johnson, let me be clear. I’m not here to save the rainforest. I’m not a hero. I’m here to observe. So far, I’ve met some disgruntled indigenous people—some very poor indigenous people I might add—who are justifiably angry. And we have uncovered an unexplained murder. That’s not exactly earth-shattering.” She turned back and carried on the path. “I’m not your hero.”
He articulated his final protest in a small, sorrowful voice. “Clearly Vivian, you are no hero.”
Her throat constricted as an image of red blood on white tile flashed across her mind. All their yelling paled in comparison to the painful truth: she was no hero and she knew it.
Up ahead, Azly and the red t-shirt rounded a bend.
The sky rumbled. What little sun that had earlier made it through the canopy, vanished, plunging the forest into near darkness. Around the bend, Azly was pulling out his poncho. Johnson and Mac followed suit.
The downpour began with a huge release of water like an overturned bucket on their heads. The drops hammered the waxy leaves of ferns. Cold water channeled down her hood, into her eyes, down her spine. Her muscles ached. Trapped under the poncho, her skin began to sheen with sweat.
Twenty minutes later, the deluge lightened to a trickle. Sporadic drops—the remnants—landed all around them. She pushed the hood back, but the pellets continued to hit, sending splashes into her eyes and forcing her to blink. She pushed the hood back over her forehead. The socks in her muddy boots squished with each step.
The rain had opened up flowers that sent slipstreams of scent across the light breeze. Sweet, fragrant odors permeated the walk. Up ahead, the foliage thinned and a ray of sun sliced through the green. A flawless blue sky appeared through an arched break in the foliage.
They stepped from the rainforest and into the sun.
And everything changed.
Part Three: Angle of Reflection
With a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera held inconspicuously at hip-height, Maier captured fleeting moments and turned them into something extraordinary.
- Rose Lichter-Marck
23
Outside Long Akah, Sarawak Province, Malaysia
A hard sun beat mercilessly on a monstrous three-mile-wide gash of brown, barren land littered with scorched, cadaverous stumps. A graveyard of timber tombstones stood witness to a brutal decimation. A necrotic dust floated on the dry air. Fragments of withered branches were scattered across the horizon like thousands of skeletal hands digging out from a parched earth.
Johnson leaned in and spoke quietly. “Better once to see than many times to hear.” He paused. “Now you’ve seen, firsthand, the signature footprint of your client.”
Unable to take in the carnage, he retreated a few steps toward the forest and retched, vomit splattering on the dry ground. Next to her, Azly blinked rapidly, holding back tears.
She felt—rather than smelled—a dense rancid stench hit the back of her throat. Just like the reek in the hot, sticky apartment in Jakarta. She shaded her eyes against the glare of the sun.
The gash, cutting a swath through the jungle, ran down the mountain for miles. In the distance, a mountain reached toward the blue sky. A ring of low hanging clouds circled its peak, as if sending a warning not to enter. After the confines of the rainforest, the open sky and the enormity of the plunder made her feel untethered, light headed, and overwhelmed.
A red T-shirt appeared beside her. “This is where I brought them.”
His voice snapped her back into the present. She pulled out the GPS handheld. “Did they take coordinates?”
He nodded.
Azly stood silently while Mac powered up the handheld and captured the coordinates.
The red T-shirt said, “Here. You will find that Alghaba is far outside its designated boundaries.”
“How do you know that?” she asked. She powered down the handheld, returned it to her bag, and retrieved her camera. She took photos of the devastation.
“Their permits are public information.” The young Penan gazed out over the gash. “Alghaba takes what it wants. They have no regard for anyone, for anything. In they end, they take the forest to make—what?—paper cups? When there are no more trees, what will they take?”
The consequences were unsettling. “It’s harrowing, gruesome,” she whispered.
“Do what you can.” He shook her hand, then he and Azly shared a brief clasp. He strode past a doubled-over Johnson and disappeared into the rainforest.
Without a word, Azly started walking along the side of the desolate gash, down the mountain. Johnson and Mac fell in line behind him, picking their way through overturned, dry clumps of dirt and dead branches.
Twenty minutes later, Azly slowed and said, “Borneo is one of two islands in the world where there are still orangutans. Sumatra in Indonesia is the other. In the last sixty years, we’ve lost more than fifty percent of their population. Orangutan have lost half their habitat in the last twenty years. There are only 60,000 orangutans still in the wild. I have heard people say they will be extinct by 2023—at the rate these companies are destroying.” He pointed toward the west, to the cloud ringed mountain. “That is the UNESCO Gunung Mulu National Park five miles from here. On its border is the Sarawak Orangutan Sanctuary. It is one of the few in Sarawak. It needs at least a one-mile buffer from this”—he indicated the gash—“in order for the orangutan to survive.”
He took off down the mountain again.
She and Johnson plodded in a single file line behind him. The tension between them was building. Johnson’s anger was palpable. But she didn’t speak because she was trying to adjust to this new reality. Alghaba was literally destroying the planet.
At one point, Azly stopped. When Mac and Johnson came along side, he stooped and picked up dry soil, crushing it and letting the lifeless dust drift out on the air. He nodded to the bedrock emerging from beneath the dirt. “It has only been two months since they cleared this area. Already there is erosion. When the rains come, this will be a landslide down to the river.” His tongue clicked his cheek. “They don't care about that. They don’t care about what they leave behind. They just want the trees today. Tomorrow doesn't matter.”
He started back down the road.
Johnson’s voice was low. “Are you getting closer to doing the right thing?”
Her mind was spinning. Josh and Dominick had documented the magnitude and illegality of Alghaba’s operations. It had gotten them in deep trouble. To find Josh, she had to pull this string—pursue this mystery--through to conclusion. Fortunately, that line of inquiry coincided with her Legion Bank cover.
But whatever the findings, this wasn’t just about Josh, the Agency or Legion Bank. This was about her role in the larger context of this carnage. This was about whether or not she was go
ing to be complicit.
Johnson’s sharp voice intruded on her thoughts. “Have you decided what you’re going to do”—he spit her name--“Vivian?”
In the distance, a lone carrion bird shrieked. Mac imagined the cry echoing from the mountain, making its way across the top of the rainforest, across Borneo, across the earth.
Yes, she thought. Yes, I have. I will make up for Jakarta. I will stop this butchery.
24
Langley, VA
It was super early—4 a.m.—and Joyce Terrell Tattle hadn’t been able to sleep. She had been having dreams of Hassan Talib, the bureaucrat in the commission in KL, on his plane back home. He had been in an aisle seat of a Malaysian Airlines plane. As the lights were dimmed for the first movie, he had been served by a stewardess in a slim, purple, printed sarong kebaya. He was uncomfortable in economy class despite the fact that there was an empty seat to his right. On the empty seat had been a super market bag bursting at the seams with Star Trek tribbles—orange and furry, pulsing and chirping. Talib had become accustomed to their movement and barely noticed them.
She pushed out of bed and put on the coffee kettle. She showered and poured herself a travel mug. Outside the street was dark and humid. Her Toyota started up on the first turn of the key. It was going to be a good day.
The commute was quick since the streets were empty; it had only taken her twenty minutes on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. She parked and hoofed across the half full parking lot in the dark, the sweat forming beads her brow.
The lobby was refreshingly cold. It was also quiet. As she crossed by the sixteen foot round granite seal with the eagle, the shield and the sixteen-point compass star, she thought, I’m gathering important intelligence today just like that compass star suggests.
Eighty-five percent.
At the turnstiles, she swiped through and carried on to the elevators. Down in the Hive, the overhead motion sensor lights flicked on as she crossed the floor, directly to the fax machine.