Read Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) for Free Online Page B

the small gatehouse and surrounded our car. Harry Belafonte sang “Day-O” through the distorted speakers of a boom box beside the door. I couldn’t help but notice the guards carried guns, canisters of what appeared to be pepper spray, and knockout batons. Holy cripes, were they expecting an invasion of the body snatchers?
    “Nick, are we in trouble?” I asked.
    “Huh?” he asked. “Oh, you mean the guards?”
    “Uh, yeah. I mean the armed guards swarming our vehicle like paratroopers.”
    “No, this is normal.”
    “I don’t think this is very normal.” Maybe in Iraq or Russia it was normal, but last I checked, St. Marcos was a territory of the United States of America.
    “Normal for them. They get a lot of threats. Some of it’s post-9/11 hysteria, but Petro-Mex is a weird hybrid. They’re here in the U.S., so they attract terrorists who oppose the U.S., but they are also Mexican, and that means Mexican politics comes up. They have problems with crazy locals occasionally, too. And they’ve had attacks in Mexico by the drug cartels, which lean on them pretty heavily for payola in their territories. It’s so bad they have a humongous standing reward for information leading to the apprehension of anyone involved in terrorist plots against them.”
    “What do drugs have to do with oil?” I asked.
    “It’s a geographic relationship. The cartels in Mexico operate regionally. Their reach extends far beyond drugs, although drugs are their focus. I pulled up an article about a couple of attacks on Petro-Mex in Mexico by the Chihuahua cartel. It’s in the orange folder in my briefcase. You should read it.”
    While the guards continued to sweat us, or conduct the slowest ID check of all time, I pulled out the article and skimmed. The Chihuahua cartel had hit three Petro-Mex sites in north central Mexico this year. The cartel, run by a former Mexican federal agent named Ramón Riojas, claimed that Petro-Mex owed them a percentage on oil production in their region, and that Petro-Mex had refused to pay. The government had done nothing, and the article suggested it was powerless against the cartels. They sounded like mafia to me.
    Now Petro-Mex was building a pipeline through the same area. The article quoted an “impeccable source” as saying that the cartel had promised a strike on Petro-Mex if it didn’t comply with their demands for payment on production and the pipeline. But Petro-Mex was stalling, because to do so would embarrass them internationally and hurt them financially. The author listed some of Petro-Mex’s global operations, including the refinery on St. Marcos, and opined that the cartel would target operations in the countries that could put the most pressure on Petro-Mex if an attack occurred on their soil.
    It sounded to me like the Chihuahuas’ bite would hurt worse than their bark. I put the article back into Nick’s briefcase and looked out the window at a holstered gun with a brown hand resting atop it.
    “I think I just peed my pants a little,” I said.
    “Toughen up, old girl. I think we’ve landed a dream client. Think of the long-term potential for Stingray here.”
    Old girl? Before I could smack my business partner around, the guards motioned us through the gate and over a speed bump that resembled a small brick wall.
    “Shit!” Most of the coffee from the mug in my hand splashed onto my lap. Lukewarm coffee with loads of sugar-free hazelnut Coffee-mate in it (the pouring kind, not the clumpy powder kind). Another reason to be thankful for the brown Bod-a-Bing pants, which would camouflage the spill while smelling like coffee for the next hour, and reek hideously of spoiled milk after that. This would give me incentive to end the meeting before my pants turned into a pumpkin and the Petro-Mex folks discovered a stinky Cinderella in their midst. A Cinderella fast asleep with her head on their conference room table because she hadn’t had enough coffee after a late night