After twenty minutes or so, she had built a mental image of the company in her mind. They stayed under the radar for the first few hundred years. Then Auroch got into steel manufacturing in 1915, on the eve of World War I, putting it in a position to profit from massive arms production.
She started digging into the company’s more recent history. Auroch was one of the world’s major polluters, joining a group of ninety responsible for two-thirds of the globe’s greenhouse gas emissions. Auroch operations had been responsible for hundreds of deaths, from landslides, explosions, poisonous emissions — even an earthquake triggered by its fracking techniques. All lethal. All summed up as ‘accidents.’
A news clip caught her attention. It was an account of a mine accident in Africa that killed more than a hundred miners. An explosion had occurred in a poorly ventilated gold mine. Auroch claimed that the mine was owned by the subsidiary of a subsidiary, thus it bore no responsibility. The corrupt government investigators agreed.
Molly got a lump in her throat. A similar mine explosion had killed her favorite uncle back in West Virginia. Uncle Gowdy had left a wife and six kids behind. His mine was cited with hundreds of safety violations but the owners pulled strings and spread bribes. Like the case in Africa, no one was called into account. Her family tried to help her aunt and cousins. They would bake fried chicken, make cold potato salad and toss a few coins their way when they had any, but they couldn’t erase the grief and misery.
Her curiosity now stirred, she looked up the company her uncle had worked for at the time of his death. It had gone out of business decades ago, its assets acquired by other companies which in turn went bankrupt or sold out. There was still coal in the ground, attracting the attention of a large corporation that started huge strip copper mining operations, devastating the once-beautiful countryside and polluting the air and water. The mines no longer worked, but the scars they inflicted remained.
Molly was on a roll. Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Images flashed onto the screen. Government records. Company reports. News clips. Legal filings. She hacked into data banks when necessary, her photographic memory categorizing the details. She had a funny habit of blinking when she sunk her teeth into something that excited her. By the time she reached the end of her search, her eyes were fluttering so hard behind the circular eyeglass frames that she could hardly see. What made her stop was a footnote in a government investigation of Uncle Gowdy’s accident.
The real owners of the mine had been hidden under layers of corporate insulation. But in the small print of the national mine safety board she found what she was looking for. The corporate owner of the mine was Auroch Industries. She set her jaw. This had just become personal.
She went back to the Auroch website and looked up the company officers. The corporation was privately held. The CEO and President was Viktor Salazar, the man Hawkins had asked her to investigate. She gazed at the photograph of the olive-skinned man with the bullet head and beetling brow. She’d been asked to dig up dirt on Salazar, but she wasn’t going to stop there. She was going to wipe the phony smile off his ugly face.
Molly kept digging. Minutes after she began, she read a news story out of Cadiz, saying that Auroch Industries had donated money toward the establishment of a foundation to explore alternatives to fossil fuel. The news seemed at odds with what she had learned about the company and its leader. She read more and discovered she wasn’t the only one who had expressed disbelief. Several environmentalists were quoted, including one who referred to Auroch as a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ She looked up the name of the environmental organization and discovered their headquarters was in Portland, Oregon. She called the telephone number listed. The recorded message said that the phone was no longer in use and forwarded her to the number for a law firm. Molly always had a direct manner, so when the phone was answered, she told the receptionist that she wanted to talk to the environmentalist about Viktor Salazar.
A woman came on the phone, said the organization was defunct, and asked why she had called.
“I’m from West Virginia,” she said. “My name is Molly Sutherland. My favorite uncle was killed in a mine accident that shouldn’t have happened. Auroch Industries was the owner of the mine. I want to get to Viktor Salazar.”
“Do you want to sue him?”
“No,” Molly said. She had darker reasons in mind. “I just want to find out more about him. I saw that the organization is in Portland. I live in Bend.”
“Hold on, Ms. Sutherland. I’ll see what I can do.”
A few minutes later the lawyer came back on the phone.
“I can set up a meeting with someone who is knowledgeable about Mr. Salazar. Can you come to Portland?”
Molly had a flashback of her Uncle Gowdy strumming his guitar and singing on the front porch of his house.
She didn’t hesitate. “How about tomorrow morning?”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Salazar didn’t know who had put two Priors out of commission on Crete but he could have jumped for joy when he heard the news. The assassins who did the bidding of the Way would have to be eliminated if he were to carry out his plan, and that could have been a problem. One never knew where they were. They didn’t even have real names, except for the four cardinal directions.
With only two Priors remaining of the monastic order that had once protected the Maze, Lily found it necessary to call on Salazar to back up their mission to Santorini, where they would retrieve the translating device, kidnap Kalliste and kill Hawkins. He had said he would get right on it, speaking in the same subservient tone that the Salazar family had used with its masters since they had established their unholy alliance centuries before, but he could barely keep himself from gloating.
Salazar was determined to end that arrangement and, to do so, had secretly been building his power base. He had to be extremely careful, especially around Lily who had the ear of the High Priestess. Any hint that he was forming a private army to counter the Priors and the mercenaries who protected the priestess would have brought quick retribution from the Maze. He’d characterized the group of bodyguards he’d gathered around him as his personal security staff, the type needed to protect the CEO of a major corporation.
Lily reluctantly allowed Salazar to bring his men into the plan after he pointed out that a kidnapping in a crowded neighborhood would be tricky. Hawkins was a former Navy SEAL and had already eluded two attempts to kill him. Just using the Priors would put them at risk. Sunglasses covered their strange eyes, and the Greek fishermen’s caps hid their brightly-colored scalps, but not their wolfish features. The collarless Greek shirts they had bought in Thera added color to their otherwise funereal outfits. The result was slightly grotesque, and there was still something repellant and menacing about their appearance that would be imprinted in the memory of anyone who encountered them.
Salazar’s team had arrived separately. Some sharp-eyed taverna waiter or shop owner would remember the hard-faced men, with physiques like gorillas, wandering suspiciously around the narrow streets and alleys. Their polo shirts and shorts only emphasized their muscular arms and legs. But he had recruited the most elite of his mercenaries for this mission. They would be in and out before anyone put things together.
As he walked along under the hot Greek sun he reveled at the opportunity to unleash his more violent instincts. His career had come full circle. Here he was again managing a team of killers. Salazar had worked his way up the family criminal organization ladder as an enforcer and enjoyed the killing and maiming that went with the job.