Chapter 14 The Current and the Truth #2
She did the documents first, because Simone had told her to and because Simone was right.
The change orders. Bantay Serbisyo Solutions, registered October 2020, three directors, one of them the undersecretary’s wife’s brother.
Four hundred and eleven thousand pesos. Stations 11, 14 and 18.
Start delay nine minutes to ninety. Override threshold raised four hundred millimeters, which she explained twice, slowly, holding her good hand up at the height of a step.
The escrow ledger. Forty-two million dollars in eleven tranches through Singapore, Cyprus and Vanuatu, into eleven accounts. She read four of the account holder names and stopped, because Simone had said four was enough and seventeen was a lawsuit.
The risk register. Row one hundred and fourteen.
Residual risk: accepted. And then Doctor Dieter Wolffe, on camera, filthy, in a bent pair of glasses, in a wooden boat under a tarpaulin because Mang Rey had refused point blank to bring him back inside the building, saying his own name and his own title and the date he had signed it and declining, twice, to be let off it.
Then the substation. Then the gensets. Then the muster sheet taped to a wall at ten o’clock at night.
She did all of it in Tagalog, and repeated the numbers in English, because the numbers were going to travel further than she was.
At about the twentieth minute somebody in the comments asked the question the whole country was asking, and Tess put it up on the laptop where Mina could see it, and Mina stopped and answered it.
“Somebody is asking why we are doing it this way,” she said. “Why a livestream at one in the morning and not a case. Bakit hindi na lang arestuhin.”
She looked into the lens.
“Because there is nobody to arrest them, po. I want to be honest with you about that, because it is the most important thing I am going to say tonight and it is the part nobody puts on television.” She held up her good hand.
“The people I work with have legal standing in countries that are party to a treaty called the Rome Statute. We left that treaty in 2019. So in this country, tonight, we are private citizens with very good cameras, and everything I have just shown you would be argued about for four years by lawyers before anybody looked at it, and the barangay would be gone in nine days.”
The rain went on the roof.
“So no. There is no arrest tonight. There is you.” Mina Hermosa said it flatly. “That is the entire plan and I am not going to dress it up. Nine million of you are awake, and the reason I have spent four days getting to this room is that a broadcast is the only jurisdiction we have left.”
And at forty minutes past one, Mina Hermosa said, “Sandali lang po,” and looked off camera, and Simone’s voice came through on a laptop speaker from a shipping container four kilometers away and said, “It is charged. It is queued. Mina, it is six hours long and the part you want is at two minutes seven.”
“Play it.”
Eleven million people heard rain on the roof of a pickup truck.
That was the first thing. Twelve seconds of rain on a cab roof and the sound of a channel, and somewhere under it a man breathing, and then a voice, close to the microphone because the phone was on the dashboard, saying in Tagalog:
I am recording this conversation under section nine point four. It is the fourteenth. It is two thirty in the morning. Please state your names and your works order.
Then another voice, further away, flat: Put that away.
I can’t do that, sir.
And then the thing that stopped the country.
Engineer. Sign the hold. Go home. You have been on since six.
I have been on since six, that is correct. A pause on the recording, and in it, the rain. How do you know what time I came on?
Nobody answered him.
The recording ran another forty seconds. There was the sound of a cabinet hinge. There was a man’s voice saying hoy, that is a locked panel, and then fourteen footsteps on wet concrete, going away from the truck at a run.
Then there was nothing on the recording but weather, for six hours and six minutes, until the battery died.
Mina let it run for a long time after the footsteps stopped.
She let it run through the sound of the channel changing its note as the water came up, and through the automated diversion alarm from a kilometer upstream at twenty-one minutes past four in the morning, which sounded eleven times and then stopped, having done everything it was designed to do.
Then she came back on camera.
“His name was Benigno Santos,” she said.
“He was forty-seven years old. He was a maintenance engineer with the Department of Public Works and Highways and he had been on the Manggahan Floodway for fifteen years. He has two daughters. Trina is nineteen and she is studying civil engineering at PUP, and Bea is fourteen.”
She stopped and got it back.
“There is a photograph of them clipped to the sun visor of his truck,” Mina said. “It is still there. The truck is still at Sluice Gate 4, where he left it on Tuesday morning, and nobody has moved it, and I want somebody from the Department to explain on Monday why nobody has moved it.”
The rain went on the roof of a plant control room in Tondo.
“Everything you have seen tonight is paper,” she said.
“It is change orders and account numbers and a row in a spreadsheet. I have been doing this for six years and I will tell you honestly that paper is how these things are actually done and paper is how they are actually proven, and please, po, do not let anybody tell you the documents are boring.”
She looked into the lens.
“But I did not want to end on paper. Because the man who said no was not a document. He was an engineer at two thirty in the morning who was told to do a thing that would drown a city, and he had a wife and two daughters and a truck with a dent in the tailgate, and he said, I can’t do that, sir, and then he set his phone down on the dashboard so he would have both hands free. ”
Out past the building, on the black water, thirty-one boats were still holding a line.
“Hindi ito ang ulan,” said Mina Hermosa, at eight minutes to two in the morning, to eleven million people. “It was not the rain.”
The livestream did four things in ninety minutes and Mina saw none of them, because she was sitting on a floor with her back against a rack.
Tess, from her kitchen in Marikina, watched all four.
At one twenty-two the show’s channels passed a million concurrent and the network’s overnight desk called Tess directly, and Tess, who had been a floor manager for nineteen years and had never once been asked her opinion about anything, told the overnight editor to take the feed unaltered or not at all, and the overnight editor took it unaltered.
At one forty the first foreign wire picked it up off the ledger numbers, because the account names were in English and the numbers did not need translating.
At two thirteen, a woman in Cabanatuan who had once screamed at Mina Hermosa through a phone on a rooftop in Poblacion posted a forty-second clip of the Santos recording with three words over it, and it went further in six hours than anything Mina had done in five years.
And at some point in the middle of it, in a barangay hall two kilometers away that was now empty and had water on its ninth step, nobody at all was watching, because every single person who lived there was up on the port road under a tarpaulin, and the phones they were watching it on had been charged that afternoon off a generator that a man from Georgia had rewired onto a single gauge and labelled in marker.
They came for Hansel Brand at half past three.
Not the police. There would be police, eventually, and there would be a great deal of argument in three jurisdictions about who had the right to any of it, and that argument would take eleven months and Mina would give evidence in it twice.
What came at half past three was a lawyer.
He arrived by boat, in a suit, with an umbrella that was useless, and he had been retained by DeepKite Therapeutics AG of Heidelberg at two o’clock in the morning by a board that had been woken up one by one starting at one thirty-eight, and his instructions were to inform Mr. Brand that he had been suspended pending an internal investigation, that the company would not be indemnifying him, and that he should not make any statement.
Hansel listened to all of it sitting on a step with his wrists taped, in the rain.
“Who moved it?” he said.
“Sir?”
“The board. Who moved the resolution.” Hansel looked up. “It would have been Ostermann. Was it Ostermann?”
“Sir, I am not able to.”
“It was Ostermann,” said Hansel Brand, and laughed, and put his head back against the wall.
Mina came out onto the step at about four, because she had decided somewhere around three that she was going to do this once and never again.
She sat down on the wet concrete beside him with her arm across her body.
“I have one question,” she said, “and then I am going to go and sleep for a week.”
“You have earned one.”
“The girl in Rotterdam.” Mina looked out at the water. “Nineteen. Glioblastoma. Marine biology. Her mother sends you a photograph at Christmas.”
Hansel Brand was quiet.
“Is she real?”
“Her name is Fenna,” he said. “She is real. Everything I said in that hall was true, Ms. Hermosa, which is the part I do not think you have properly understood about me and which I have given up trying to explain.” He shifted against the wall.
“There is no version of this where I was lying about her.”
“I know,” Mina said.
“You know?”