Everything was not fine. Holbrook Precision Components was carrying a hundred and eighty million dollars in debt it could not repay. It had lost two of its biggest automotive contracts. And there was something else. Something buried, literally, under the oldest of the company's two factories, the original plant in Hamilton, on Fairfield Road, where Carter's grandfather had built his first real building in 1958.
For forty years, from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, the Hamilton plant had used an industrial solvent called trichloroethylene to clean grease and oil off machined metal parts. Everybody had used it, back then. Nobody had known how dangerous it was. And for forty years, small amounts of it had leaked out of old storage tanks and degreasing pits and drained into the soil beneath the plant, slowly, steadily, a few gallons at a time, down through the clay and the gravel and into the groundwater below.
Eighteen months ago, an environmental consulting firm that Carter had hired as part of a routine refinancing had drilled test wells around the Hamilton plant. They had found trichloroethylene in the groundwater at levels more than forty times the federal safety limit. Worse, they had found that the plume of contaminated water had spread beyond the plant's property line, under Fairfield Road, and under a neighborhood of small, modest houses on the other side, a neighborhood called Lindenwald, where some of the older homes still drew their drinking water from private wells.
The consultants had written a report. Ninety-four pages, with maps and charts and an appendix of laboratory results. It was called a Phase II Environmental Site Assessment. Its conclusion recommended immediate notification of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, immediate testing of all private wells within a half-mile radius, and a remediation program that the consultants estimated would cost between sixty and ninety million dollars over fifteen years.
Carter Holbrook had read the report in his office one Friday evening eighteen months ago. Then he had locked it in his desk drawer. Then he had called the consulting firm's managing partner and told him, in a pleasant, reasonable voice, that the company would handle the notification internally, and that the report was confidential, and that he would be very grateful if the firm did not discuss it with anyone. And then he had quietly sent a company lawyer to Lindenwald, to knock on the doors of the eleven houses closest to the plant that still used private wells, and offer each family five thousand dollars to install a free water filtration system and sign a document releasing the company from any future claims. The lawyer had not mentioned trichloroethylene. He had called it "a precautionary water-quality upgrade." Nine of the eleven families had signed.
Carter had not notified the Ohio EPA.
He told himself he would. Eventually. After the refinancing. After the Michigan acquisition was sorted out. After the company was back on its feet. And then, four months ago, a solution had appeared, so perfect that he could hardly believe it.
Kanazawa Seiki was one of the oldest and most respected precision manufacturing companies in Japan. It had been founded in 1919 in the city of Kanazawa, on the west coast of Honshu, and it made components for Japanese automakers and medical device companies and the Japanese bullet train. It wanted to expand into North America. And it had offered to buy a fifty-one percent controlling stake in Holbrook Precision Components for three hundred and forty million dollars.
It was enough to pay off every dollar of the company's debt, with eighty million left over. It was enough to save the company. It was enough to make Carter Holbrook, personally, very rich. And once Kanazawa Seiki owned a controlling share, the environmental liability under the Hamilton plant would be, in large part, Kanazawa Seiki's problem.
The deal had been negotiated for four months. The Japanese company's lawyers and accountants had spent weeks going through Holbrook's records in a secure online data room, page by page, document by document. Carter had made very sure that the Phase II Environmental Site Assessment was not in the data room. In its place was an older, far more limited environmental report from 2009, which had tested only the soil and only on the plant property and had found nothing alarming. The Japanese lawyers had asked, twice, whether any more recent environmental testing had been done. Carter's general counsel had answered, twice, carefully, that the company was not aware of any material environmental liabilities that had not been disclosed.
The final purchase agreement was to be signed the following morning at ten o'clock, in a conference room at a law firm downtown. Tonight was the celebration dinner. The chairman of Kanazawa Seiki himself, Hiroshi Nakamura, sixty-eight years old, had flown in from Tokyo for the signing, along with the company's head of international legal affairs, a quiet, sharp-eyed woman in her fifties named Emiko Tanaka, and a young executive from the North American expansion team named Ryo Mori, who spoke the best English of the three and had served as their informal interpreter throughout the negotiations.
Carter had chosen Vault 1887 because it was the best restaurant in Cincinnati, and because it had been written up in the New York Times, and because its owner was Japanese, and he thought that the Japanese would like that. He had ordered the eleven-thousand-dollar Musigny because it was the most expensive red wine on the list. He did not particularly like Burgundy. He preferred big, heavy California Cabernets that tasted like vanilla and smoke. But Mr. Nakamura, he had been told by his assistant, was a serious wine collector, and Carter wanted him to see the price on the bottle.