"It's like this," Phil explained. "Before I came here, I used to hire myself out as a... security contractor, you might say. A few months back, I was hired by a Chrysler executive who was suspicious of one of his employees. He had me track the guy's every move and see exactly what he was up to. Turns out that the guy was intentionally sulfur-contaminating his batches."
"Excuse me?" Grissom raised an eyebrow.
"The alloys that go into cars' engine blocks and frames and such," Phil explained, "are very complex combinations of metals and non-metallic composites that result from years of metallurgical research and require careful composition and frequent testing in metallurgical labs. This particular employee was being paid by Toyota to contaminate the batches of alloys that were made in his plant with sulfur dioxide, making the metals brittle under temperature changes and less resistant to corrosion. Then the guy tampered with the test samples so the contamination wouldn't show up."
"Why would he do a thing like that?" Charlene asked.
"It's simple," Phil said. "Weaknesses and corrosion in the metal would take a while to show up - after a lot of cars had come off the line and been sold. Somewhere along the line, a customer would notice the problem and complain to their dealer, who would take it up with their distributor, and the problem would go up the line all the way to the top. Chrysler would trace the source of the problem to the plant where the sulfur contamination had taken place, and then they would have to issue a recall of all vehicles made here, shut down the plant, and examine all the tooling for defects. It would cripple that particular plant and cause a lag in production for Chrysler, giving the competition a chance to undercut their prices."
"Chrysler would take a hit," Priest said.
Phil nodded. "Fortunately, I caught the guy and managed to stop the sulfur contamination from spreading throughout the plant. I saved Chrysler a lot of money and caught a saboteur that had been doing damage undercover for quite a while. There was only one catch."
"The executive had hired you secretly," Grissom said.
Phil smiled. "How'd you guess that?"
"Call it intuition," the mercenary said.
Phil shrugged. "Anyway, the guy knew I was expecting some serious kickback, so he told me about his pet project and how I might be able to benefit from it."
The crane finished lowering the last of eight shipping containers to the pier behind the four of them.
"For the last few years," Phil explained, "Chrysler had been trying to break into the market for law-enforcement vehicles. The problem was that all the major police departments in the US and Canada had standing contracts with either Ford or GM, who have historically dominated that segment of the market. So this executive's idea was to develop vehicles for the higher echelons of law-enforcement and the intelligence community."
Charlene's eyes widened. "FBI? CIA?"
Phil nodded. "He took off-the-shelf parts and existing vehicles and heavily customized them, adding quite a bit to them. But once that was done, he still couldn't find any buyers. So now he had these expensive, super-specialized, and completely unsellable vehicles taking up space on the factory floor. And when most of our infrastructure went down the tubes in the hurricane, I called the guy up and offered to take some of them off his hands. He didn't even hesitate to fax me the necessary documents." Phil grinned. "So now we have some more stylish transportation around the island."
Grissom looked at the eight containers. "Eight cars?"
"Four cars," Phil corrected. "Four Dodge Intrepid Interceptor models. And two Durango Special Purpose models. And my car."
"Your car?" Grissom asked curiously.
"You'll see it," Phil said.
"And what's in the eighth container?" Charlene asked.
"I'll show you," Phil said quietly, "when we're all away from prying eyes." He handed Charlene and Grissom crowbars. "Let's get these cars to the motor pool and get them secured. Seven cars. First trip we take the Intrepids. Second trip Griss and Charley get the Durangos, I get my car, Priest gets the last container in on a truck, and we can unload it when he gets to the building." He started tossing them sets of keys.
