Copyright 2001 by Morris Rosenthal
PDC was having a banner month. In addition to their regular route, they'd been picking up special jobs as fast as Abu could create the forms. Often times, the one shot removal jobs of asbestos or PCB's required no paperwork at all, since the substances had been unregulated when they were originally purchased decades before. The current owners who inherited the headache jumped at the opportunity to get rid of it with a minimum of fuss. The industrial asbestos abatement industry was driven by two basic scenarios. First, an industrial building was going to be up for sale, and the current ownership wanted the place cleaned out at the best price they could get. This way they controlled the cost themselves, rather ending up with a conditioned sales agreement or risking a lawsuit and an inflated bill from the eventual buyer. In the second case, union workers on the job site doing unrelated work often refuse to work in the presence of hazards. It was the second case that made for the most lucrative jobs, because of the speed factor. The customer was usually liable to pay the idled workmen until the workplace was certified as safe and the whole schedule would get thrown off.
These factors had combined to create for PDC a shortage of both manpower and storage space. Anthony Bovine had turned up at exactly the right time. He had worked a few summers in his oldest brother's construction business so was familiar with the minor demolition work that abatement largely consisted of. Since neither PDC nor any of it's employees were actually licensed, they originally only accepted those jobs where they could work in complete privacy, often at night. Anthony loved play acting, though, and got PDC to purchase a couple of 'space suits' and some used ventilation equipment. With a counterfeit license from Abu hung on a cord around his neck, he'd fake his way through impressive looking safety checks with a helper, then they would enter through the negative pressure airlock, into the sealed off area.
Once inside, they'd strip off the cumbersome suits, and scrape the asbestos insulation from the pipes, letting it fall to the floor. Then they'd sweep the stuff up and put it into the brightly colored garbage bags labeled, 'Danger: Hazardous Materials.' The final step was to vacuum the scraped areas and the floor with a regular shop vac that they wrapped in aluminum foil to give it a space age look. For protection, they wore regular work gloves, and throw-away paper filters over that covered the mouth and nose. One of Anthony's high school friends who he brought in to work with him had asked the Ant, "Why do we have to wear any mask at all if the stuff is as harmless as you say?"
"Asbestos makes me sneeze," Anthony replied.
Despite PDC's continuing selectivity in choosing work, Anthony found himself pulling down an extra thousand dollars a week cash for working less then twenty hours. What Anthony really wanted to do was to quit his guard job and become a full time phony asbestos abater, a job he had thoroughly mastered. O'Flahthery quickly talked him out of it, pointing out that PDC needed the Wilkins site for disposal, and that Anthony could pick up another five hundred a week just for opening the gate a few times.
PDC was also expanding their route pickup business, and had just landed a regular contract with a local paper company to take all of their used cleaning fluids from the printing and color mixing processes. The average weekly take was going to be $4500 for a single run with a truck. Abu had generated all of the necessary documentation for the scam, but during the pickup, Anthony noticed that the plant safety engineer barely glanced at it before signing off. He was under a lot of pressure to keep costs down, and was grateful that PDC had come along.
The contaminated drums of methanol and benzene ended up along side the transformers and the plastic bags of asbestos in Fourteen building. Anthony helped the new driver unload the barrels with a hand truck, heavy work at four hundred pounds apiece. O'Flahthery stood by watching and smoking a Kent, a habit he'd picked up behind the Iron Curtain, where they were practically a substitute for paper money. Half the agents he had run there demanded their pay in cigarettes, and the other half wanted Scotch whiskey, naughty underwear or quality condoms. It was pretty obvious that either they were all dealing on the black market or they were having one hell of a good time. Their demands forced the CIA into the role of a mid-sized European smuggling operation. The really big smugglers, of course, were the military regimes of the communist governments.
At first he'd wondered if the clean-cut fly boys who risked their lives making low altitude parachute drops behind the iron curtain knew what their cargo was. Then he'd found out, and he still had to chuckle to himself whenever he recalled the night he'd spent at an officers club on an air base in West Germany. They thought they were dropping automatic weapons and explosives to partisans, engaged in a secret war against their communist overlords. Most of the pilots were gung ho bible-belt types who drank sodas and looked uncomfortable when he cursed. If they had known what was in the canisters, they probably would have refused the duty on moral grounds. Funny world.
"With a fork, we could stack the drums," the kid said, breaking into the ex-spy's reverie, "I've seen barrels stacked three and four levels high in some places. Couldn't we lease one and just leave it here?"
O'Flahthery just shook his head. "You're not thinking," he said, assuming the manner of a teacher, something he really missed from his agency days. "Someone walks in here and sees a forklift, they'll know something's going on. Nobody abandons fork lifts, they're worth too much."
"They'll see the shit that we're dumping hear though, so what difference does it make?" Anthony objected.
"The other security guards ever come in here?" O'Flahthery prodded him.
"No, it's not part of the round."
"And are there any Wilkins employees left who'd know what's supposed to be in here?"
"Well, I guess not."
"So what does that tell you, Ant?"
Anthony stood silently reasoning for a moment. "They wouldn't know that the stuff wasn't always here. They'll just assume Wilkins left it." Anthony's face lit up with respect for his mentor. "Hell, it would probably take Wilkins in Georgia weeks to figure out that the stuff isn't theirs, if they can at that. You're a genius Mark," he piled it on.
"Let me explain something to you, Ant," O'Flahthery said, warming to his audience, "In the agency we called it 'plausible denial'. What it means is always be prepared to lie your ass off if you get caught. It's the opposite thing from propaganda though," he continued, talking to himself as much as to Anthony, "where the most outrageous lies do the most damage. Plausible denial means having some lies prepared that will bear some scrutiny."
"Just say, for example, some cops came breaking rushing through the door here." Anthony involuntarily tensed and swung his head towards the door. "What would you say?" O'Flahthery asked.
"I, that I, I wouldn't say anything, Mark. I'd wait until I talked to a lawyer."
"First of all kid, asking up front for your lawyer is as good as saying that you're guilty. Second, you'd probably tell them that you caught me in here." The ex-spy hit him with one of his best world weary looks. Anthony wilted.
"I wouldn't..," Anthony started, but O'Flahthery cut him off with a wave.
"I wouldn't blame you for turning on me if I left you up the creek like that, but the point is, something like that happens, you just follow my lead."
"What's that going to be."
O'Flahthery produced a card from his wallet. "Tom Peters, Independent Journalist," he read to Anthony. "If you call the phone number, you'll get an answering machine with a Tom Peters message. If you go to the address, you find Tom Peters on the mailbox. Tom Peters is a real environmental journalist, but he happens to be in Russia working on a documentary for PBS. He'll be there for another five months. Something about how Russian industry is polluting the hell out of Siberia. Peters is a name some people would recognize from his articles on the Exxon Valdez, but nobody would know what he looks like. "
"So you say your Tom Peters, what good does that do us."
O'Flahthery sighed. "I thought you were smartening up, kid. I'm here to investigate illegal dumping. You're cooperating. A minor infraction of your job duties, no doubt, but nothing that anyone would hold against you."
"But what about the truck?"
"We're taking samples to be analyzed at a lab. Sure, we're breaking the law, but reporters get away with that all the time. Now if we were here with a truck and a barrel fork," he stressed the 'and' heavily, "Now that would be a bit much to swallow."
"Why would you be taking whole barrels instead of just a little?" Anthony asked, unconvinced.
"Because we don't want to break the integrity of the seals without being in a controlled environment. Scary stuff," he put a mocking tremor in his voice, "Wouldn't want to look into one of these babies without the protection of a Ph.D." He went back to his normal voice. "It's not perfect, Ant, but it doesn't need to be. It's plausible."
"So you think that they'd just let us walk?" Anthony was skeptical.
"No way. We'd get taken in, all right, but just for questioning. By cooperating, they don't need to put you under arrest, and that means no fingerprints. I carry some notes that make it look like I've been investigating illegal dumping for a couple months, including some reports that I get from a lab on some of the stuff we take. Just for cover. I give you ten to one we walk out of there with a warning not to leave town."
"But where does that leave me? You could just take off, because they think you're this Tom Peters. I'm stuck holding the bag."
"You just stick to the story," O'Flahthery said, realizing that he said far to much. Getting out of practice, he told himself. The scam had just been going so smoothly that he was letting his guard down, bragging to a neophyte. "All cops are essentially egotists. They'll be happy to think I fooled you too, make them feel better about being taken in themselves."
Anthony was prepared to point out several flaws in this plan, but he kept his mouth shut. He assumed all along that it would be risky dealing with a veteran bad guy, but the existence of PDC as a real corporation had put some of his fears at rest. After all, legitimate businesses fight their wars with lawyers, not guns. All the same, he had made it a habit to always act a little stupid around O'Flahthery.
"Listen kid," O'Flahthery had been thinking, "You're not the only damn guard working here. How many different guards have been out here in the past year?"
"With the weekend guys, a whole bunch." He turned the question over in his mind, "I see what you're getting at, but I'd feel a lot better if I had someone I could point the finger at. A real smoking gun."
"I tell you what. You think about who would make a logical fall guy, and I'll see that we give him a little paper trail. Will that make you happy?"
"I'm already smiling," Anthony answered.
The driver came over to them and said "All set."
"Good job," O'Flahthery complimented him, surveying the neat row of drums, "You and Anthony can handle this run yourselves from here on. I'll give you a call at home in a couple days." He handed the guy an envelope, and walked to his own car. The two vehicles formed a darkened convoy, rolling slowly through the complex. Anthony jogged alongside the truck, then sprinted ahead the last twenty yards, to open the gate. O'Flahthery lowered his power window and said, "Call me tomorrow morning. We got another local job for you."
"Great, First thing" Ant replied happily, then closed the gate behind them. A fall guy, he was thinking, as he walked back to the main post. The weekend guys won't do, because there's two of them working at once. Nobody would believe it's the old man, he doesn't ever go further than the bathroom.
Eric.