Disclaimer and beta thanks in Part 1.

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Chapter 9
Monday, November 21, 2005
9:30 A.M.
Offices of Carter and Eppes

The outer door of the office swung open, and Alan looked up from his desk in the adjacent room. He and Stan had decided they didn't need an office assistant; hopefully, when their business got going, they'd need the help, but for now they just made sure each of their desks had a direct line of sight to the reception area. He saw two people enter: a tall, slender man with dirty blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a short, slight woman with frizzy red hair. "Hi! Are you Tim and Ellen Basso?" he called out.

"Yes, we are," she answered, looking through the doorway at him. "Are you Stan?"

"No, I'm Alan," he said, standing up and moving around his desk towards the doorway. "Alan Eppes," he said, reaching out to shake their hands. "It's a pleasure to meet you."

"And you," Tim said, his handshake firm. He looked like a typical California surfer type, except better-dressed in khakis and a navy polo shirt. But the Birkenstocks were a dead giveaway. "We're grateful for the work that you've done for us."

"Well, I'm grateful for having the opportunity," Alan replied. "We're a fairly new business here." He could hear Stan in his head, telling him he was making them sound like idiots. "That is, we have years of experience between us, but in the public sector."

"And that's what we hired you for," Ellen said brightly, hitching her black leather purse up higher on her shoulder. In contrast to Tim, she was dressed in an ivory pantsuit with a stylish red-and-black scarf around her neck. They were probably in their mid-thirties, he guessed, though they seemed to have a fair amount of money between them, given her outfit, his work for them, and the Jaguar he had seen pull into the parking lot. "We just hope it's paid off!"

"Right." Alan rubbed his hands together. "Why don't you step into our conference room over here, where I've got our results laid out. Would either of you like a cup of coffee?"

They both refused the coffee, but followed him into the smallest room in the office. It was barely large enough for the rectangular table and six folding chairs, but it served its purpose. Alan had laid out a geologic map of the area, along with the data he had dug out of his own files, and the printouts that Charlie had made for him. Charlie's laptop sat on one corner of the table, displaying the same lattice diagram that he had showed Alan in his office. He had offered to come along to explain his results, but Alan had decided it would be better if he presented the findings himself. These were his first major clients, after all, and it wouldn't do to have them think that he had simply farmed out the work to someone else.

'That is what you did, Alan,' he could almost hear Margaret saying in a teasing tone of voice.

They all took seats around the table, and he spent a few minutes explaining the basic chemistry of perchlorate. He'd learned these details several years back when the problem had first arisen up at JPL, since he wanted to be sure that the city was being treated fairly by NASA. It had taken a little digging through his old files, and a few hours staring at the notes that at first he couldn't believe were written in his own hand, since they seemed to make no sense. But he'd struggled with it, and eventually he had remembered the details of oxidation and isotope ratios, at least enough to be able to explain the situation to the Bossos.

"Now, for what you wanted to know." He tapped the screen of the laptop. "This program models the plume, which is what we call the contaminant as it works its way through the ground. The plume obviously starts at JPL, and based on the available data, this is the path that it would take." He traced a line with his finger on the map, from the location of the laboratory at the foot of the mountains, down the arroyo a distance of a mile or so. "Basically, this analysis confirms NASA's results. Not only is there no possibility of this perchlorate leak making it down to the L.A. River, but they were right to only shut off the two wells that they did."

Tim and Ellen exchanged a glance. Then Tim turned towards him and said, "That's good news, Mr. Eppes. Sometimes it's hard to trust the government when it comes to a situation like this, but it would appear that they're actually doing the right thing."

"Shocking, isn't it," Alan said with a knowing look.

Ellen smiled. "That is good news. But we're also concerned that since there's already been two incidents, there might be more. Were you able to determine how much of the pollutant would be necessary in order for the L.A. River to become contaminated?"

"Yes, we were." Alan typed a short command, and the view on the laptop screen changed. It showed a much larger plume, extending all the way to the bottom of the screen. "This is the result of running the model backwards. You probably don't want to hear all the gory details, but the short story is, there's really nothing to worry about."

"How so?" Tim asked, studying the screen intently.

"Well, based on the state standard of what's a safe level of perchlorate in the drinking water, which is already a very high standard compared to the federal level, you would need this much of the stuff coming out of JPL." He tapped a figure on the screen with his pen. "They don't have that much of it. NASA has been shipping it to other locations or destroying it since it's become a health problem, and there simply isn't enough of the material on site to work its way into the aquifer and on down to the river." He leaned back in his chair, satisfied. He'd been so pleased when Charlie had come up with that result. Not only was it not as great a health risk as some other substances, but there was literally no way that it could get into the drinking water supply of the city of Los Angeles.

His clients exchanged another glance. "You're sure about that?" Ellen asked.

He gave a single nod. "I stand by this analysis one hundred percent."

She took a long breath. "Okay, that's good."

They seemed much more reserved than he had expected. Shouldn't somebody representing the River Protectors be happy that the river was protected?

Ellen went on, "But perchlorate isn't the only potential pollutant from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, right? They must have all sorts of chemicals up there. Would they come in high enough quantities that the plume would get downstream?"

Ah, so that was it. He'd been ready for that question, ever since Larry asked it of him when they were playing chess the other day. He hoped he didn't sound like he was weaseling when he answered, "Well, yes, there are a lot of potential contaminants, just as there are in any scientific facility. But NASA has paid stricter attention to their environmental management ever since these leaks," and he gestured at the map.

"That's nice to hear, Mr. Eppes, but we're interested in the basic facts." Tim leaned forward, forearms on the tabletop. "Are there other chemicals that could get into the system?"

"Sure." That was the easy answer. Being more specific was harder. "There's two ways: either a larger amount of a substance than there is of the perchlorate, or a substance that moves through the soil differently."

Ellen nodded thoughtfully. "Something that can travel farther through the ground, right."

"What kind of substance would that be?" Tim asked.

Just then, the phone in Alan's office rang. "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to excuse me for a moment," he said, getting to his feet. 'One of the problems with being such a small operation,' he thought as he crossed the lobby to his office and hurried to pick up the phone before it went to voicemail. "Carter and Eppes," he said when he picked it up.

"Hey, Dad, it's me."

"Oh, hi, Don. Listen, I'm in the middle of a meeting right now, so I'm going to have to make this short."

"Yeah, well…we finished tracing the remaining phone calls from our third suspect, the one who got away, and I'm at the home address of someone who was on that list. We haven't been able to find them yet, but we're at their house now and we're turning up some interesting information. The thing is," and Don paused for a moment. "The thing is, according to the datebook on their desk, they're supposed to meet with you today."

"What? But the only people I'm scheduled to see today are—" he broke off, not sure how far his voice carried through the suite of rooms. "Can you be a little more specific, Don?"

"Tim and Ellen Basso."

He closed his eyes. This could not be happening. "Hold on, all right?"

He laid the phone down and took a deep breath. Then he walked to the door of the conference room, stuck his head inside and said, "This'll just take a minute, folks. Go ahead and have a cup of coffee while you're waiting." Without waiting for a reply, he went back to his office and carefully shut the door. Then he picked up the phone, and said in a low voice, "Don?"

"Yeah, I'm here. What is it?"

"They're here right now," he said even more quietly. "They're here to hear the results of my, well, of Charlie's analysis. And you're telling me they're in league with—" he couldn't even bring himself to say the world. How could his clients be working with terrorists?

He heard Don let out a breath. "Well, we don't know that for sure, but we are going to need to talk to them. So can you make sure they don't leave until David and Colby get there? They're fifteen minutes away."

"You want me to stall them? How do I do that? What if they—" he broke off. 'What if they became violent,' he thought. 'What if these people are not at all what they appear to be?'

"You'll be fine. Just give them more details about whatever it is you're talking about. Look, Dad, we ran a quick background check on them, and they don't appear to be dangerous. But we also can't find anything that explains why this guy would have called them."

"Maybe it was a wrong number," he said, knowing how weak it sounded.

"Yeah, maybe." Don's tone of voice said he was unconvinced, too. "You'd better go keep an eye on them, okay?"

"Sure. Fifteen minutes, you said?"

"That's right. Hang in there; you'll be fine."

Alan hung up the phone and took a deep breath. This was ridiculous. Those nice young people in there were concerned with maintaining public health and environmental safety, not with harming it.

'You don't know that,' he suddenly thought, a chill running down his spine. 'You don't know that at all.'

He opened the office door and was both relieved and unhappy to see the Bassos still sitting in the conference room. Ellen was closing up her cell phone, and Tim was perusing the geologic map spread out over the table. "Sorry about that," he said as he entered and took his seat again. "I told you we're a small operation," he said lightly.

"That's quite all right, Mr. Eppes," Tim said. "We were just looking over the results of your analysis a little more closely."

'I'll just bet you were,' he thought, then stifled the thought before it showed on his face. "So what other questions I can help you with?"

"Well, you were telling us about the potential for other chemicals to get into the water supply, either because they're in higher quantities, or they have different characteristics."

"Right, right, I was." He paused to rub his hands together and said to himself, 'I'm sure not going to tell you all the details now.' "For the most part, we're very fortunate. Most chemicals aren't as water-soluble as perchlorate, so they wouldn't be as easily absorbed into the groundwater. Which means that most substances only pose a danger if they come in larger quantities."

"So what might those be?" Tim leaned his forearms on the table. When Alan hesitated, he smiled and went on, "We just want to know all the facts. Like I said before, we don't have a high level of trust in the government having told the public all there is to know about the potential hazards."

He spread his hands apart. "There's never been any hint of any contamination problems from JPL other than the perchlorate."

"And there never were any hints before that stuff was detected in the groundwater, was there?"

Alan took a deep breath. "No, that's true. All right, there was jet fuel dumped in the ground back in the 40s and 50s when the facility was first opened. There have also been—" he broke off as he pulled a file folder towards him and started looking through it, as slowly as he could. "To quote the EPA, there are 'waste solvents, solid rocket fuel propellants, cooling tower chemicals, sulfuric acid, freon, mercury, and chemical laboratory wastes' stored at the Jet Propulsion Lab."

He looked up to see Tim's wide eyes. "All that stuff is in the groundwater?"

"No, no," he hurried on, "those are all the different types of chemicals that are produced and stored on the site. They're all stored under strict protocols, and as far as we know, none of them are in the groundwater."

"What if they were?" Ellen asked quietly. "The jet fuel, say. How much of that would it take to get into the system?"

He thought for a moment. If he simply told them he didn't have the answers to their questions, they would leave, before the FBI got there. So maybe he should give them his best guess as an answer to their questions. On the other hand, on the off chance they actually were involved in some kind of illicit activity, he didn't want to provide them with any information that could be harmful later on. Maybe if he made up something instead? But if they were legitimate, then he would end up looking like an idiot, and so would Carter and Eppes.

He realized he was taking too long to come up with an answer when he saw them exchange glances with each other. "Okay," he hurried to say, "I don't know the answer to that. I can run this model again for a different substance, but it takes a little while to do. If there's anything else besides jet fuel that you're curious about, let me know, and I'll add that to the list."

Tim leaned back in his chair. "Basically, we want to know what it would take for some contamination from JPL to make it down to the L.A. River, and into the groundwater that becomes part of the drinking water supply for the city. Whatever the chemical might be, that's up to you to figure out."

Alan looked at him, the cautious businessman in him coming to the fore. "You realize you're asking me to repeat this process for dozens of other chemicals, and that it might take several days of work to do that."

The Bassos looked at each other again, and it was Ellen who said, "Yes, we understand that will increase the hours you bill to us. We just want to make sure, that's all."

'To make sure of what?' Alan wanted to ask, but bit his tongue. Instead he said, "Okay, then I'll get to it and get back to you in a few days. Is there anything else I can tell you right now?"

They shook their heads, and Alan went on, "So tell me a little about your organization. I understand it's a fairly small operation?"

"That's right," Ellen answered. "It's actually just the two of us and some friends who agreed that the existing organizations aren't doing enough to really protect the Los Angeles River."

Tim leaned forward again. "See, there's the Friends of the L.A. River, but they work a little too closely with the system to get enough done, as far as we're concerned. They clean up the trash along the riverbanks, and they talk about restoration projects, but in the end, they don't do anything to take care of the sources of the problems."

"Like what?" Alan asked, a small alarm bell going off in his head. He wondered if the words would have triggered his uneasiness if he didn't already know that these two were under suspicion.

"Like what we're talking about here," he replied, gesturing towards the map spread across the table. "It's one thing to clean up something after the fact, it's another to keep it from becoming contaminated in the first place. We just want to make sure that anyone who might be causing environmental problems is properly dealt with."

Before Alan could reply to that statement, there was a knock at the outer door. "Excuse me again," he said, hoping as he hurried to the door that it was the reinforcements he'd been awaiting.

"Mr. Eppes?" David Sinclair was standing on the other side of the door, with Colby behind him. Both had their badges out and had blank expressions, although David gave him a slight wink as he said, "We're with the FBI. May we come in?"

Alan was momentarily confused, then realized they didn't want the Bassos to know of his connection to the Bureau. "Yes, of course. What can I do for you?"

"We're looking for a couple who we think you might have seen today. Tim and Ellen Basso?"

They heard the scrape of chairs from the other room, and Colby quickly asked, "Any other exits?"

"Not from that room," Alan replied. Then he stepped back against the wall and watched as his son's colleagues went into the conference room, identified themselves, and asked the couple to please come with them. Tim sounded indignant, Ellen more cooperative. He noticed as the four came back out that his two clients weren't handcuffed, which relieved him a bit. "What's going on here, gentlemen?" he asked, not just for the sake of appearances but to try to get a little more information than what Don had provided him.

But he was disappointed. "We just need to ask a few questions with regards to an ongoing investigation," David replied. "Granger, why don't you take them in, and I'll stay here and talk to Mr. Eppes."

The three left the office, and Alan sank down into the chair in the foyer. When the other agent closed the office door, Alan said, "Now, David, can you please tell me what is going on?"