The Money Is Green (22 page)

“I remember,” she said, looking confused.

“Well, our world got turned upside-down in 2008. The recession hit, money dried up, my business almost stopped cold, and the income drastically declined. I had to lay off my entire staff and tried my best to keep the doors open, but it was in vain. We ran out of money, and the bank took our boat and eventually the house.”

He tapped a finger on the table nervously. “I would have felt worse if I were the only one going through this, but anyone who was in the construction industry like I was went through the same thing.”

“I was with you, Dad, remember? What are you trying to tell me?”

“What I’m trying to tell you is not having money and moving into an apartment was hard for your mother. She was used to our other lifestyle and blamed everything on me. When she met her current boyfriend, she was in a vulnerable, emotional state, and it seemed he could give her what I couldn’t, so she moved out and left with him.”

He paused for a moment as a woman with two infants in a double stroller passed them by. “I’m not the one who had an affair, Crystal. I’m not the one who wanted the divorce. I did everything I could to keep our marriage intact, but she wanted out and filed for divorce.” He paused for a second. “I want you to get that. You mother moved out and filed for divorce.”

Crystal stuck out her chin defiantly. “You’re lying!” she yelled. “You kicked mom out so you could have sex with Janine. Don’t try to rewrite history, Dad!”

“Stop yelling,” her dad hissed. “I am not lying and Janine had nothing to do with our divorce. Here’s a question I want you to ponder: When did we move into the apartment? I’ll answer that for you. It was when you were finishing the sixth grade almost four years ago.” He stopped and took a sip of water. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I remember,” she answered firmly. “I had to transfer schools in the middle of the year. That sucked.”

“I’m sure it did,” he said. “But do you also remember that summer when you were getting ready to go into the eighth grade? Your mom told you that she was going to take a trip back east to get her head right.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, your mother’s head-clearing trip was to go live in North Dakota with another man. That man was Dave, her current boyfriend.
Three months after she left, she served me with divorce papers, and our divorce was finalized by the time you were out of school for the summer.”

Crystal stared at him, clenching her teeth.

He continued. “I met Janine at a charity party the following May. It’s not even close. You have to quit letting you mother convince you she’s a victim. She’s made her own bed and she needs to sleep in it.”

Crystal’s cheeks grew flushed. “Okay, if Mom really is the cause of all this, then why won’t you buy me an airline ticket and let me go stay with her? It’s because you’re too cheap, that’s why. You’re probably saving money for your honeymoon in Hawaii.”

Her dad threw his hands in the air in exasperation. “Crystal, what the hell are you talking about? The reason I didn’t send you to North Dakota is because Dave doesn’t want to deal with children, and in his mind, you’re a child. Your mother told me not to send you there because he didn’t want you to come and stay with them.”

“I am not a child!” she said, her voice rising in anger. “Mom told me she wanted me to come, that she misses being with me. You keep telling me that Mom doesn’t want me flying to North Dakota. Why would she not want me to visit her?”

Her dad shook his head. “Why would I lie to you, Crystal? I have no plans on getting married or going on a honeymoon. I don’t have time for a vacation in Hawaii. I have more than enough money to send you to North Dakota if your mom wanted you to come.”

Crystal sat at the table and seethed. “I still don’t believe you, Dad,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “Mom has told me what happened, and she has told me I’m free to visit her anytime. She wouldn’t lie to me.” She stood up abruptly. “I need to get home. I’ve got an English paper I need to finish. It’s due in the morning.”

As they drove home in silence, Crystal pulled out her phone and texted Steve.
How is it going with your new license?

A few seconds later he replied.
Sweet!

She typed back,
Next Fri is last day of school. You ready for our trip?

I’m more than ready
, came the reply.
Tell me what time and we’ll meet and blow this town
.

Crystal sat back in her seat and smiled. She looked over at her dad, who was squeezing the steering wheel with an intense look on his face. I’ll show you, Dad. When I surprise Mom next week by showing up on her doorstep, I’ll prove you’re wrong. I know she wants to see me, but if you’re telling the truth, I’ll soon find out. She turned and stared out the window, watching the traffic pass by their car. This is going to be a trip that I will never forget!

T
WENTY
-N
INE

T
he inside of the van was covered wall to wall with television monitors, each one focused on different sections of the airport hangar a hundred yards away. Three men in dark clothing sat silently watching the monitors, once in a while pointing something out to each other. Their main focus was a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft parked in front of the hangar, its large nose tilted up to expose the main body of the aircraft. The airplane was so huge it almost dwarfed the hangar, and troop trucks could easily drive in or out of it.

A Chinese flag was painted on its tail, and two soldiers with Chinese military insignia on their uniforms stood guard on each side of the entrance to the aircraft. Three forklifts drove from the plane to the hangar and back again, each time carrying a pallet of solar panels packed in open wooden boxes to be stored in the hangar.

The tallest of the three men pointed to the monitor in the center of the van. “That should be the last of the solar panels,” he said in a monotone voice. “They should start packing the guns in the panel crates and reload fairly soon.”

“How long do you think it will take to load the cargo up?” the man to his left asked.

“About the same as the last load, about six or seven hours,” the first man answered. “It’s almost ten o’clock. They’ll want to be finished before daylight. Keep an eye on things. I’m going to get some rest for a few hours. Wake me up if anything changes.”

“You got it.”

♦

The cellphone sitting on the kitchen counter rang incessantly. The first time, Jason let it go to voicemail. The second time, he rose up from the chair in the living room, lowering the volume on the TV. Who’s calling me at 10:30 on a Tuesday night? He hit the green button. “Hello?”

“Mr. Ballard?” the male voice asked.

“Yes, this is Jason Ballard. Who’s this?”

“Mr. Ballard, this is Benny Teller. I apologize for calling you so late but I wasn’t sure what to do or who to call. I’m the foreman at the Reno hangar where we’re storing the Soltech solar panels for the Copper Mountain job. I got to my shift and there are some people here emptying the panels out of their shipping crates and then storing some other stuff in it.” He waited for a second.

“I’m listening, Benny, keep going,” Jason said, his eyebrows furrowed. What is going on over there? They shouldn’t be uncrating those solar panels.

“Well, anyway, I went over to ask the guys what they were doing and they told me to get lost. One of them showed me some kind of military ID. I think you should come over here and take a look at this. Something doesn’t seem right.”

Jason looked down at his watch. I could use one of the corporate jets and be there in an hour and a half. “Hold on a second, Benny.” He walked to Crystal’s bedroom and quietly stuck his head in to check on her. She’s sound asleep, he thought. I’ll leave her a note and alert Janine in case there’s an emergency. I can be back here in about five
and a half hours and she’ll never know I was gone. Seeing Crystal’s cellphone on her nightstand, he picked it up and programed Janine’s cell number in it, adding the numbers 911 to the end of Janine’s name that he added to the contact list. I’ll let her know in the note that if something happens to contact Janine first.

He shut the bedroom door and stepped back into the living room. Talking softly he said, “Okay, Benny. I’ll be there in a couple of hours. Keep an eye on things.”

Thirty minutes later he was resting in the beige leather tuck-and-roll seat of Soltech’s Cessna Citation jet as it lifted off the San Jose International Airport’s runway on its way to Nevada. He thumbed through a
Sports Illustrated
he had brought with him, but his mind wasn’t on pampered athletes. Somebody’s about to get an ass chewing, he thought. I never authorized the uncrating of the solar panels. We’ve got a month or so before they’ll be needed at Copper Mountain. That project’s just getting underway. It’s going to be months before all the wiring, underground inverters, and odd work will be done, before we can even place one solar panel. He stared out the window into the darkness. Would Mei have authorized this work? If so, why? Uncrated, those panels can easily be damaged. This makes no sense.

After the plane landed at Stead Air Force Base, Jason came up to the cockpit and directed the pilots to where the Soltech hangar was located. It was lit up from huge floodlights in front of the hangar and from the lights hanging from the ceiling on the inside. He instructed to have the pilots taxi the jet a hundred yards away from the C-47, which was still parked in front of the hangar, its nose still in the open position. Once the jet stopped, Jason scurried down the stairs and walked up to the massive hangar, keeping to the shadows. He could hear the sound of a vehicle inside the hangar, so he opened the main door on the side of the building and cautiously peeked inside.

Stacks of Soltech solar panels, with small fillers between each panel, rose from the floor of the hangar to the ceiling on the far wall.
Opposite the panels were the wooden crates the panels, ten to a crate, had been shipped in. A young Chinese man with a dirty baseball cap over his head and earphones in his ears operated a forklift, which lifted up two wooden boxes from the stack. The man then backed up the forklift and headed toward the C-47 on the tarmac. He passed two sentries guarding the entry of the plane. Two other young men, also Chinese, were smoking cigarettes and laughing at the far end of the hangar, their backs to Jason.

The noise from the forklift echoed around the hangar, and the exhaust covered Jason in a gray smoke. None of them—the forklift driver, the men smoking, or the sentries—had seen Jason, so he slowly walked over to the stack of wooden crates.

He checked over his shoulder and, seeing no one was paying attention to him, reached down and slid open the lid of the crate sitting on the top.

His eyes widened and his heart started racing. Holy crap! he thought. There has to be a hundred assault rifles in here. He reached down to touch one just to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He wasn’t. Stepping back, he looked up at the stack that towered eighteen feet above him and whistled softly. This is not some small potato operation.

Men’s voices shouting and cursing made him turn to his left. He saw the two men smoking the cigarettes running toward him, screaming at him in what he assumed was Chinese. They skidded to a stop in front of him and pushed him backward, all the time screaming and yelling. One of the sentries, hearing the commotion, came racing over, his rifle up at his shoulder ready to shoot.

Jason held his hands up and shouted, “Hold on! Hold on! I’m with Soltech! I’m the president of the company!”

The men were still yelling excitedly and gesturing wildly with their hands. Jason’s heart was doing double time as he stared down the sentry’s rifle aimed at his forehead. He was sweating profusely. A thought came to his head and he yelled out to the sentry, “Madam
Chen! Madam Chen!” The guard looked at him with a puzzled expression. The other men stopped their yelling and looked at him.

Jason slowly reached back to his back pocket with his left hand, keeping the right in the air. The men started chattering excitedly and gestured for him to raise his arms. Jason pulled out his cellphone and yelled again, “Madam Chen!” The sentry slowly lowered his gun as Jason opened the phone. He tapped his contact list and pulled up a name on the screen. He showed them Madam Chen’s name and pointed to himself. “I’m with Madam Chen!”

The forklift came roaring around the corner and pulled to a stop in front of the group, and the driver shut the engine off and jumped out. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you doing here? This area is off limits to anyone who doesn’t have the correct credentials.”

“I’m—I’m Jason Ballard,” he stammered as he lowered his arms. “I’m the President of Soltech, which is owned by Madam Mei Chen.” He pointed to the stack of solar panels in the corner of the building. “Those are my panels.”

The driver turned to look at the panels then said something in Chinese to the other three men. They nodded as if they understood. He turned to Jason and pointed at the entrance of the hangar. “I’m sorry about the confusion, Mr. Ballard, but this is a restricted area. You’re going to have to leave.”

“Where’s Benny Teller, the warehouse superintendent?” Jason asked as he lowered his hands and his breathing returned to normal. “I was supposed to meet him here.” He turned and scanned the hangar to see if there was anyone else around. Does Mei know about this? he thought. Someone high up has to have authorized this. What the hell is going on?

“I don’t know who Benny Teller is,” the driver answered, his jaw set and his tone firm. “There was some skinny guy snooping around here earlier but we ran him off. You need to leave, sir. Now! These are orders form Madam Chen.”

Jason saw the intensity on his face and decided he’d better do as he was told. “Okay, I’ll leave. But I want to know what’s going on here and who authorized this.”

“Take it up with Madam Chen,” the driver said, sneering. “Now, get out of here!”

Jason headed out of the hangar, walking a wide arc towards the C-47. Checking behind him, he heard the forklift fire up and watched the other men head back into the hangar. After he made it past the entrance, he turned left, away from the spotlights. He ducked under a wing and walked around to the tail section of the plane, examining its exterior. Even though it was dark, he recognized the logo of the government of China on the tail.