by Kirk Russell
‘You look like you’re ready to hike into the woods.’
‘I don’t want to forget where I’m coming from.’
‘The question is, do you know where you are right now?’
‘I do, and if I didn’t think this had a chance of working I wouldn’t be here.’
Marquez knew Gutierrez had read his file and knew the circumstances of how he’d left the DEA. He probably wondered if he was bringing in trouble. But he was also onboard with bringing him in and was curious about the bighorn poaching. His questions about that now proved he’d read the Fish and Game file Marquez had copied for Desault. Gutierrez asked questions and then in the same quick manner he’d ended the phone conversation earlier, he said, ‘OK, let’s get this done,’ as in let’s get you sworn in.
‘Let’s wait,’ Marquez said. ‘There may be a complication. I got a call from my daughter on the way here. She may have a lead on the condo fire in Arizona yesterday.’
Desault looked stunned and Gutierrez surprised, though immediately right on it.
‘What does she know?’
‘She overheard a conversation in a hotel, her ex-boyfriend talking to somebody. She put it together last night and called me as I was on my way here this morning. She’s not involved in any way. This is just something she overheard and I’ll bring her in today, but if it’s real and it sounds like it might be, who knows where it could go.’
Desault frowned and Gutierrez got it. Gutierrez saw Maria as a person of interest now and saw what Marquez saw, the Bureau embarrassed as the media discovered her father was on an FBI task force.
‘You believe we should talk to your daughter first?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, but listen to me, I’m saying my daughter is coming forward with something she overheard and was worried enough about to call me. My daughter broke up with this Jack Gant weeks ago. She’s not a link to him anymore. She’s not involved in any plot.’
‘We appreciate her coming forward.’
‘I want to be there when she’s questioned.’
Gutierrez said nothing and Desault stepped in now and revealed what Gutierrez might not have.
‘We’re already looking for Jack Gant. We’ve got an agent named Jane Hosfleter who heads the ecoterrorism squad. She brought up Gant’s name this morning. They’re looking at a Bay Area angle on the Arizona fire. Hosfleter will want to talk to your daughter as soon as you can get her here. Do you want to call Maria, right now, and you and I can go pick her up?’
‘I’ll get Maria here.’
It turned out Hosfleter wasn’t going to be back in the Field Office until mid afternoon and Maria wasn’t at work. Marquez left a message on her cell phone, told her he’d done what she and he agreed earlier. ‘Call me as soon as you get this.’
He hung up and Desault said, ‘OK, well, we’re waiting anyway so let’s go get lunch. I was going to take you to lunch.’
They walked to a Japanese restaurant Desault liked. It was cool and dark inside and there were slender tall aquariums with tropical fish. They took seats at the bar where CNN played on a big flat screen above them. Anderson Cooper was in Iraq talking about aging military equipment. An old Sherpa plane used for ferrying men and materials in Iraq showed on the screen and Desault read the caption aloud, Workhorse of the Desert.
‘I once flew into a drug bust in one of those,’ Marquez said. ‘We busted the pilot and cut a deal with him to pretend he was still bringing in the load.’
The report went on about the aging fleet of C-23 Sherpas, the complex procurement process, and the need to revamp after five years of war. Cooper returned to a final shot of the Sherpa and said, ‘No other aircraft in the Iraq war has carried more.’
CNN switched to the Arizona condo fire and footage of the fire line showed. A reporter questioned a tree ecologist about what he thought the prolonged drought had done to Arizona trees, and then they cut to an FBI spokesman out of the Phoenix office who appealed to the public for help. An aerial view from a helicopter looked down on the remains of the condos and the burned cottonwoods along the canyon floor, and as the obligatory shot of a plane dropping fire retardant appeared on the screen Marquez and Desault ordered lunch.
Desault ate a bowl of donburi, explaining that he liked the chicken and egg version they did here. ‘At home my wife badgers me about my cholesterol, but here I sneak eggs. Man, I love eggs.’ When Desault finished eating he pushed the empty donburi bowl away and said, ‘Here, I’ve got something for you.’
He pulled out Marquez’s new creds, badge, and passport. Marquez checked out the maroon passport that back when Marquez was a Fed agent had been called a redback. He picked it up and then the black wallet holding the creds. The feel, the shape, the weight was still very familiar.
‘A couple of details about traveling that you need to know, John. When you get there you go straight to the airline counter and get your tickets. You won’t have a gun, so there’s no issue there, but you’ve got to wait through security like everyone else. When the transportation security guys see your badge they’ll wave you through. Since 9/11 more of these flights have Federal Air Marshals or FAMs onboard, and if you don’t meet them or other law enforcement officers ahead of time, hold your boarding pass and creds like this.’
Desault held the cred and boarding pass together so you could make out both.
‘Don’t wave it, but hold it so that if there’s a FAM seated already or another LEO, they should acknowledge you. But good chance you’ll be the only one on the plane.
‘You’ll fly business class. You’ll always be seated forward. That way you can sacrifice your life when the time comes. You need the leg room anyway. You’ve got a knee, right?’
‘Yeah, but it doesn’t bother me much.’
‘It has to, because I wrote that you can’t ever fly coach because of the knee.’
Marquez smiled and Desault’s phone rang. Desault scooped up the creds and the passport and said, ‘I hope to turn these over to you later today.’ He pointed at the TV. ‘I’ve got to take this outside where I can hear.’
Marquez paid for lunch and walked out into the sunlight. He watched Desault on the phone and waited. After Desault hung up, he said, ‘That was Jane Hosfleter, the agent I told you about who runs the ecoterrorism squad. She and another agent were at your stepdaughter’s workplace half an hour ago. Hosfleter wants a call from you right now. Let me give you her number.’
‘Tell Hosfleter I’ll bring her in by three, and that I won’t be calling her.’
Marquez started to say more, but instead turned and walked away.
FORTY-THREE
After Maria chained her bike to a rack near the Ferry Building they walked south along the Embarcadero waterfront toward the ballpark. Wind carried fog and the fog stripped the brightness from the afternoon.
‘They’re already on to Gant, Maria. There’s an agent named Jane Hosfleter who heads an ecoterrorism squad out of the Field Office here. She’s been looking locally for Gant after getting a tip he was planning an arson fire that would dwarf anything the Earth Liberation Front has ever done.’
‘Did they come looking for me because they think I’m involved?’
‘You’re going to meet this Agent Hosfleter and you can ask her what she thinks.’
Maria was shocked that Hosfleter and another agent had visited where she worked. She was shocked and Marquez was angry.
‘Dad, you know there’s nothing wrong with 1+1Earth. You know that, right? There are two million members. Every time someone new joins that’s one more and eventually the goal is to have everybody, so one earth, one voice. It might sound dorky, but it’s about people working toward sustainability.’
‘Sure, but right now let’s stay on Gant. Tell me everything you can before we go to the FBI.’
‘OK, we went to Los Angeles for the weekend and it was supposed to be our big getaway, except that we got in a bad fight right after we got there Friday night. The next morning I went out to get us coffee and fo
rgot my money, so went back for it. But the truth is I forgot it on purpose because I was jealous. Jack said he had to make some business calls and asked me to get us coffee and something to eat, but I thought that was because he wanted to call a woman named Lisa who lives in LA. I was starting to suspect things. I probably knew it was over between us, but I couldn’t accept it yet, so I faked the thing about forgetting my money because I wanted to catch him talking to her.’
She folded her arms.
‘This is a little embarrassing.’
‘I understand, but it’s human, Maria, and everyone at the table will get it.’
Maria looked out at the water. She looked worried and still shaken that the FBI showed up where she worked.
‘Jack travels a lot and I think he was hooking up with this Lisa whenever he was in LA. Anyway, when I went back to the hotel room to get money I came in quietly. He was on the phone. He was in the bathroom and pretty quickly I figured out that it was Ben Marsten, the founder of 1+1Earth. I could tell from the words he used. It’s a kind of a shorthand way they talk to each other. Jack was talking about a condo project in a canyon in Arizona. He called it Wonder. He talked about being “at Wonder” four days ago, and that made total sense because he disappeared the week before and I couldn’t get a hold of him. It was how our Friday night fight started. He wouldn’t tell me where he’d been. On the phone to Marsten he said things like, the grade in the canyon is perfect and the wind funnels through there, so if the wind is blowing hard nothing will stop it. So last night when I was watching TV news and heard the name of the condominium complex it was obvious.’
‘And what did you think that morning?’
‘That they were just talking about something they thought shouldn’t have been built and predicting what was going to happen to it. I’ve heard them sit around and do that before. Anyway, I could tell the call was going to end, so I freed the hotel door and let it shut, and then called his name like I’d just come back for my money. He didn’t come out of the bathroom right away. Maybe he wondered if I overheard him. Maybe he realized I was already in the room and was debating what to do. But I didn’t wait for him to come out and see my face. I left and got the lattes, and when I came back he said, “Let’s just go home.”’
‘Like that?’
‘Yes, like that, let’s go home, as in forget about the rest of the weekend and everything else.’
‘So he probably knew, right?’
‘Yeah, Dad, he probably knew, and there’s something else he said another time that I’ve thought about this morning. Remember how you used to take me up to the delta on the sturgeon stuff?’
‘Sure.’
‘I wanted to show Jack how beautiful it can be there. He borrowed a boat and we motored around looking for an island to picnic on. This was in June and it was windy like this today and we didn’t end up stopping anywhere, but we went past this one with a rotting dock and he said that it was Ben’s island.’
‘Ben Marsten?’
‘Yes, and I asked why would Ben have an island in the delta and he looked at me and said, so we can change things. I thought he meant organic farming or something, but when I asked him he said no, it was a big idea. But he wouldn’t tell me what the idea was and that was sort of weird and when I asked him again on the ride home he got angry. In this real authoritarian voice, like a command or some way of talking he learned when he was in the military, he said, forget that I said anything and don’t ask me again. Then he got all moody. Should I tell the FBI about the island?’
‘Tell them everything and they’ll sort out what’s useful.’
She turned and brushed hair back from her face.
‘OK, let’s go, Dad, I’m ready. I’ll leave my bike here. Let’s just go in your truck.’
FORTY-FOUR
Now Maria was in an interview room sitting across from Jane Hosfleter and two other agents. Hosfleter had blonde hair cut short and a Nordic cast to her cheekbones and nose. She had fair skin, blue eyes, and a take-charge confidence. Marquez was in the room despite her objections. She glanced his way occasionally, her eyes dead to him, her tone with Maria varying. She was a good interrogator. She came on hard, turned soft, backed away, and came in another direction. The agent sitting alongside her said nothing and didn’t need to. It was Hosfleter’s show and Hosfleter moved the conversation from the W Hotel in Westwood and Maria’s relationship with Jack Gant to politics and civil disobedience, as if she was just shuffling cards and not really even engaged yet. She kept reassuring Maria, but Maria like her mom was a born skeptic.
‘I’m not going to bait you, Maria, or try to trick you. And I’m not questioning anything you’ve told us. You saw the fire on TV last night and everything clicked. I get it. But what I want to do now is ask some questions about your views to see if we can learn something about him. Is that OK?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘All right, here’s a question, would you say global warming is the biggest threat facing our country?’
‘It might be.’
‘Bigger than terrorism?’
‘Is that a serious question?’
‘Yes.’
Maria put on a perplexed face and said, ‘Global warming will affect the whole earth.’
‘Then why aren’t we dealing with it?’
‘Because it’ll mean we have to change how we live. It could affect our lifestyles.’
‘And we’re too selfish to do that?’
‘Maybe.’
Hosfleter nodded as though something had just been revealed to her that made a great deal of sense. She paused before saying slowly, ‘You believe global warming has to be dealt with. There’s no choice. So is anything we do to stop it from happening justified as long as it doesn’t hurt people?’
‘I thought you weren’t going to bait me.’
‘Maria, I’m not trying to bait you. I’m just thinking this through. I’m sorry.’
‘Why don’t we talk about Jack Gant? That’s why I’m here.’
‘I really want to know what you think we the people should do about global warming. It doesn’t have to be a long answer.’
‘OK, we should vote out those who pretend the science isn’t in yet, so they can drive their big SUVs and justify what they’re doing to their children. And then elect some realists. How’s that for an answer? I like realists. I like people who make things happen.’
‘Jack Gant may believe burning down a controversial condominium project is making things happen.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Well, here’s another way of looking at it. What do we do when a rich developer, who doesn’t care about anything but making himself money, builds a condo project in a canyon with a fragile ecosystem in an area already running out of water anyway? I guess I’m asking if there are circumstances where setting a fire and burning a project is justified because it protects the earth?’
‘OK, but I’m not in favor of setting arson fires.’
‘You were Jack Gant’s girlfriend. What did he see in you? What did you have in common? I’m trying to get at how he thinks. I’m not saying he influenced you. I’m trying to better see him through you. Does that make sense?’
‘Not at all.’
The agent alongside Hosfleter chuckled and Hosfleter turned and glared at Marquez. She was looking at Marquez when she asked, ‘What would he do if he knew you were here?’
‘I don’t think I want to know.’
‘Does that mean you believe he’s capable of violence?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I assume you know he was a Navy Seal and highly trained.’
‘He didn’t like to talk about it.’
‘But you knew?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know he was in the first wave that went to Afghanistan? He was part of the hunt for Bin Laden at Tora Bora. He re-upped and after that he quit. His senior officers said he became disillusioned. He didn’t believe we should have gone into Iraq.
Have I said anything you don’t already know?’
‘I didn’t know any of that. The times I asked he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t like to talk about his past.’
‘Did he like to talk about the US government? How would you characterize his feelings toward the US government?’
‘Angry.’
‘Maria, we have information that leads us to believe he set the fire in Arizona. Did he ever talk to you about stopping developers by burning their projects?’
‘No.’
‘You need to be really sure about that. If it came out later that you knew something more, you could get charged. And I don’t mean taking part in a plot, I mean knowing of its existence and not coming forward.’
‘I’ve told you everything I know.’
Hosfleter tapped her pencil lightly on the table. She took time to choose her next words.
‘We all send conscious and unconscious signals. We do it all the time. We’re very social creatures at heart. That Jack said what he did to you about the island says to me that he felt he could confide in you. He may have communicated other plans consciously or unconsciously, and this is where I need you to really dig down and try to remember everything he said, or confided to you. But, I want to say first that I agree with you about global warming. It is our worst problem and the Arizona condominiums were very controversial because people felt they weren’t environmentally responsible. There were lawsuits and many people today may be secretly thinking it’s good that they burned. You might be thinking that. Your stepfather might. But the Arizona fire is probably sending up more gasses that cause global warming than the condos would have in a thousand years. You know, twenty per cent of the gasses contributing to global warming come from fires, clearing land, and forest fires.’
She leaned forward. She stopped lecturing and spoke as if Maria was the only other person in the room.
‘I admire you for coming forward. If all I had was an overheard conversation and an offhand comment made on a boat, I don’t know if I would put myself through this.’