Alfred pursed his lips. With a thirty-room mansion to care for, he almost always had better things to do than play guessing games. But the terms “second-rate” and “by-products” pointed him in a particular direction. “Someone puts the byproducts into animal feed and people get sick?”
“The Connection’s too crafty for that. In his deals—especially his American deals—everybody seems to come out ahead.” He tapped the screen again. Now it showed a series of invoices. “Our reincorporated syrup-maker is concerned about the environment. It adds an extra step to its end-processing to concentrate toxins, extract them, seal them in fifty-gallon barrels which they ship to a brand-new company up in North Carolina, where skilled jobs are even more precious and people will welcome a hazardous-materials recycler with open arms.”
Another tap, another screen—a list of chemicals by common name, scientific name, and formula. One of the formulas was blinking. Alfred saw a (CN) notation in the middle of it.
“That’s cyanide, isn’t it?” he asked soberly.
“Five barrels a month, extracted from apricot sludge in Florida. You can’t recycle it, but you can sell it—and so they do. Here’s a standing order for all our apricot residue. It’s supposed to go to a chemical conglomerate in the unified Germany. I could find where the barrels get hoisted into a ship’s hold, but, by the records, they never come off. Three or four tramp freighters show up regularly in Shreveport, Louisiana, to take on cargo. It seems safe to assume that they are empty when they arrive in Shreveport, but there’s no sign that they’ve ever been off-loaded anywhere in the past two years.”