J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Only we didn’t,” I say. “The database came back with the fake identity.”

“Which is why I had to disappear. There are people who can fiddle things like that, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them. You shouldn’t, either.”

“You’re talking about Tom Englewood? I’ve met him.”

Her smile hardens and she doesn’t reply.

“Again,” Bea says, “why do I feel like I’m the only one who’s not in the picture?”

I explain to her about my meeting with Englewood, watching Hilda’s face for any reaction. For context, I have to bring in Nesbitt’s shooting and the investigation that followed, along with the official denials and the conspiracy theories. Hilda sits through this placidly. When I start talking about the headless body in the park, she leans forward a bit. The pointing finger puts a frown on her face. Once I’ve traced the line between the finger and the stretch of road where Nesbitt was killed, her jaw is hanging open. I’ve got Hilda’s attention.

“On that same stretch,” I say, “on the same night I met with Englewood, Brandon Ford and the other men in those files of yours took a shot and me and ran me off the road. They were either trying to kidnap me or kill me, and I imagine either scenario would have ended up the same way.”

“In that case, you’re lucky to be here.”

“What Bea and I both want to know is, what’s going on?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“At the beginning.”

After 9/11, Hilda says, Andrew Nesbitt offered her good money and steady work if she would relocate to Texas, where he’d set up a private security company and started selling his services back to the government. He needed her particular skill set because one of his sidelines involved putting together a team of ex-military operators for contract work, men whose records were dubious enough to raise red flags on a background check. He was also keen to keep a low profile, and not just because secrecy came second nature to him. His presence in Houston would draw resentment from a much larger and longer-established rival, Tom Englewood’s firm, which had for years offered the benefit of his rich network of international contacts to the city’s oil oligarchs. The more successful Nesbitt was, the more pressure Englewood could be expected to exert. If the new company intended to operate under his nose, they would need to be discreet.

During his time spearheading U.S. efforts to suppress the drug growers and traffickers of Latin America, Nesbitt had done a lot of talent scouting in the pool of military and intelligence personnel. Having once observed the man who would become Brandon Ford whip a handful of Colombian conscripts into a ruthlessly efficient counterinsurgency squad, Nesbitt decided to build the new team around him.

Because he was paranoid by nature, Nesbitt also chose to limit his face-to-face exposure, instead using Hilda as the go-between. For convenience, she wove her own new identity and Brandon Ford’s together. No one on the outside would question constant contact between a mother and her son. Ford’s profession as a dealer in exotic firearms served a similar end. He could legally acquire whatever equipment was needed without raising undue suspicion. Plus, he enjoyed the work. The rest of the paramilitaries were fixed with similarly flexible occupations, jobs they could leave for weeks, even months at a time without making a ripple.

Hilda became their de facto den mother, organizing their living arrangements, seeing to their needs. She’d never married or had children, but when Brandon indulged his ill-fated relationship with Miranda Ford, fathering two kids whom he subsequently abandoned, she embraced the grandmotherly role.

“I was a better grandmother to those boys than he was ever a father,” she says, but with a smile that reveals real affection for her pseudo-son. I can only imagine the strange emotions at work in that chain of relation between the true and false parents.

Hilda’s feelings about Brandon became very conflicted. On the one hand, she grew fond enough of him to run interference with Nesbitt whenever there was friction between them. On the other, she resented the source of that friction, which was Brandon’s ambition. Where Nesbitt wanted him to operate in a clearly defined cell, he aspired to larger things. There was more opportunity, he told her, in the intelligence side of the company, building networks and selling the information gleaned in the form of reports and analyses. Nesbitt jealously guarded that aspect of the operation, however. The more Brandon pushed, the more suspicious his boss became.

“These arguments could be very awkward for me,” she says. “What I wanted was to keep everyone in our little family happy.”

Listening to her describe what sounds to me like a criminal organization or at the very least a mercenary one, I am struck by how normal it all seems to Hilda. For her, the nature of the work never changed, only the employer did-and even there, it was more a change in status than degree. She had worked for Nesbitt when he was government-sanctioned, and she continued after he went freelance. Not that different, I suppose, from a cop who retires only to hang out his shingle as a private investigator. Not that different apart from the secrecy and the lawbreaking, that is.

For Hilda’s “little family,” the status quo was disrupted not by conflict but by opportunity. Nesbitt was presented with a chance to bring down the competition, Englewood’s firm, and this led him to overreach.

“What kind of opportunity?” I ask.

“He never confided the details to me. What I gathered, though, was that someone had information to sell, and he wanted to be paid in services. If Nesbitt would do a certain job, he would get the information. What the job was, I never knew. Whatever it was, Andy kept me out of the loop and he kept Brandon out, too. The first effort failed, so he had to come up with Plan B, and that’s when we got involved.”

Plan B resulted in the creation of an intelligence network. Why this was necessary, or even relevant to the quid pro quo deal that inspired it, Hilda doesn’t know. But Nesbitt managed to place someone deep inside the Gulf Cartel, using Brandon as an occasional courier to collect reports. And what reports they were! The quality of this intelligence stunned them all, as did the appetite for it in government circles. Nesbitt’s insider mapped the internal workings of the cartels with so much precision it began to seem that no aspect of their operations was off-limits to him. Needless to say, his reports became a hot commodity.

Although he was the natural person to use, Brandon turned out to be a bad choice to use for courier. His first taste of intelligence work whetted his appetite. He started coming up with a host of new angles, insisting that Hilda pitch each one to “the Old Man” only to have them shot down. Selling weapons to the cartel and then selling intelligence about the transactions to law enforcement was Brandon’s big idea, one that he revived once Nesbitt was out of the picture.

“And now we come to the point,” she says. “Andy’s death.”

He was a victim of his sudden success. There was no way to keep what he was doing quiet once every decision maker in Federal drug enforcement was on the distribution list for his reports. With the exposure came increasing paranoia. Nesbitt brought new people into the organization. He took extra precautions when making contact with Hilda and discussed the possibility of cutting Brandon out of the loop entirely. He was preparing a new courier, he said, and taking measures to guarantee that his network wouldn’t get away from him.

“Why was he so concerned?” I ask.