Chapter 1: A Straightforward Assignment

The dispatcher had a driver at her window and a shipment that did not exist.

“It says released,” she told him, turning the screen so he could see it. “Dock Three, Wednesday, oh-two-fourteen. Loaded and gone.”

“Then somebody else has it,” the driver said. “Because I was parked on Three until four in the morning and nobody put anything in my box.”

Robert Johnson stood eight feet behind him with a visitor badge clipped to his jacket and tried to look as though he’d heard this kind of argument before. Around them Merek Shipping’s port warehouse went on working. A forklift backed out of an aisle with its alarm chirping. Somebody’s radio asked twice for a door number. Beyond the dispatch office the dock doors stood in a long row, some open to the white glare of the Long Beach morning, trailers nosed against them like animals at a trough.

“Mr. Johnson. Ms. Lawford.” The man who came out of the side office was in his fifties and had the gray look of someone who’d been taking calls since before dawn. “Jonathan Green. I manage this building, for the moment.” He was carrying three folders and he gave them to Rita Lawford, who passed them to Robert without opening them.