Out of Time

by David Klass

  When it came to keeping records, libraries were dinosaurs. Many of them used computerized systems and had digitalized their collections, but they preserved their old card catalogs and let visiting scholars browse in the stacks. It was possible to come to a library and access a great amount of material oneself, read it, and put it back on the shelves with no permanent data record that it had ever been looked at.

  He now sat in the splendid Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress with books and medical journals on fracking piled in front of him on a small reading desk. Studying intently around him—beneath the towering dome and glittering marble columns—were scholars from all over the world, leafing through obscure volumes and tapping away on laptops as they took notes. Green Man opened the first book and felt like an eager grad student sitting down to start researching his final thesis. This would be his last strike, and he was aware that he was starting to research and write his parting message to the world, so he wanted to get it exactly right.

  He had followed this same process on his previous six strikes, and he knew his reading would grow progressively narrower as he began to laser in on a specific target and create a method for destroying it. He already knew a great deal about fracking, so today’s reading was mostly background research. But he still took it extremely seriously because it was linked to the solemn act of passing judgment, and the stakes in this attack couldn’t possibly be higher.

  If he decided to move forward with this seventh strike, he would be taking on an industry that was among the richest and most powerful in the world and was also quintessentially American. He would be calling its newest and most profitable techniques into question and challenging its cutting-edge security, which was already on high alert and fully integrated with the national manhunt for him. He also knew he could not strike without killing innocent workers who had labored long and hard in the sweltering Texas oil fields in order to feed their families.

  Before starting, Green Man clasped his hands in silent prayer and looked up from his books to the coffered dome more than one hundred feet above. Decorating it was a century-old mural of the Evolution of Civilization, which showed twelve winged figures illustrating the civilizations thought to have contributed the most to world progress. The twelve started with ancient Egypt and ended with America, the cocky new kid on the block. America was depicted as an engineer, seated next to an electric dynamo, to emphasize how the incipient power’s contributions to engineering and technology at the turn of the twentieth century had transformed the world.

  And that was where Green Man started his background research, in America’s brash and vibrant 1870s and 1880s, when the country had been bursting with keen and eager—not to mention greedy—engineers and great tinkerers who had created a series of dazzling inventions that seemed like miracles. There had been Bell and his phone, Glidden and his barbed wire, and Edison and his lightbulb and phonograph.

  But there was one challenge that was in every way even deeper—pools of oil that were liquid gold and had collected for millions of years far beneath the earth’s surface. The first wells had been drilled in northern Pennsylvania in the 1880s. The drill holes went straight down and tapped into small pools, and the profits were modest. The men who drilled them knew there was much more oil and gas in the rock layers around those vertical holes, but how could it be unlocked?

  Edward Roberts, a Civil War veteran who had seen the effects of Confederate rounds going off in narrow canals at the Battle of Fredericksburg, came up with the idea of sending explosives into the depths of the earth to fracture the rock layers and free nearby oil so it could be sucked to the surface. He got the first patent for an exploding torpedo that could be dropped deep into the earth, and fracking was born.

  Generations of engineers had improved Roberts’s methods, seeking the right combinations of explosives to shake more oil free. In 1949, the company Halliburton had hit on the idea of abandoning explosives and instead pumping liquids at high pressure deep into the earth to crack the rock and liberate the buried treasures of oil and gas. This new “hydraulic” fracking process was used with some success, but its very small profits made it too expensive.

  By the 1970s and 1980s, there was a feeling that the once-great American oil and gas industry had peaked, and more and more oil was imported from overseas. Then things had taken a wild turn. In the 1990s, the American oil and gas industry had roared back to life with two innovations that allowed America’s vast shale formations to be tapped.

  First, horizontal drilling allowed engineers to drill straight down and then “turn” the well parallel to the surface so that it could run through great shale deposits. Second, the fluids used in hydraulic fracking became more sophisticated as it was found that the right mixture of water, sand, and highly toxic chemicals could unlock shale formations. Oil production once again boomed across America, and the Permian Basin on the border of Texas and New Mexico became the second-most productive oil field in the world, behind only the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. But America’s sudden return to being a world leader in oil production had come at a wildly destructive price to the environment, and this was what he had come to judge.

  The more Green Man read, the more troubled he became about this deal with the devil that had generated billions of dollars for a resurgent industry but done untold damage to the rock layers, the water supply, and the atmosphere. He read about the increasing number of earthquakes near fracking fields in Kansas and Oklahoma, in places that had previously been nearly earthquake-free. He studied the statistical links between fracking and a variety of severe health problems, from birth defects in Pennsylvania to elevated rates of breast cancer in Texas. For every study there was a counterstudy, for every argument against fracking, the industry put forward its own statistics or proposed “new safety practices” that would “solve” the problems.

  The scientists and lobbyists who spun these counterarguments were handsomely paid. The ones Green Man hated the most were the handful who had once been environmentalists but had sold their souls and were now well-paid apologists for the booming oil and gas industry. He felt there was a special circle of hell for those turncoats.

  As day turned to dusk and visiting scholars around him departed, Green Man homed in on the two threats he feared the most, because they would be nearly impossible to reverse: danger to the water table and danger to the atmosphere. He knew what a precious resource water would soon become—in the next few decades, millions of people would die and wars would be fought as reserves dwindled.

  More than a hundred new wells were being fracked in the United States every day, and the hydraulic fracking process required between one and five million gallons of water for each well. What were the long-term effects of drilling through and beneath water tables and fracking beneath lakes and aquifers, towns and cities, and even the pristine Arctic Sea? No matter what safeguards were installed, could engineers really control the toxic brew needed to bust apart rocks when that liquid leached away deep beneath the earth or bubbled up to the surface as flowback?

  It was that flowback—that ever-changing cocktail of destructive chemicals used in hydraulic fracking—that Green Man began to consider as not just a part of the problem but a potential weapon. In most of his attacks—as at the Boon Dam—he had used intrinsic weaknesses in the target itself to bring about great destruction. Flowback was stored near oil fields in tanks and ponds. It was often flammable and combustible as volatile compounds accumulated. It was a bomb waiting to be used.

  Last and most worrying, he considered the damage fracking was doing to the atmosphere and its potential to make climate change irreversible. Vast quantities of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas thirty times more dangerous to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide—were spewed into the atmosphere by the fracking process.

  But even if that could be cut down, there was a danger that was greater and more insidious. Ironically, oil and natural gas were so-called “cleaner
” fossil fuels because they were less harmful to the atmosphere than coal. The industry touted them as “bridge fuels” that would forge a necessary link from “dirty fuels” like coal to “clean fuels” like solar and wind. But Green Man felt this was a very dangerous premise—a tempting half measure that might doom the earth. It was a bridge to nowhere—climate change was too dire; there were only a few years left to make a radical change and cease using all carbon-burning fuels or the world would be out of time. The world had to see the grave danger, and fracking had to be stopped right now.

  Green Man finished his reading and felt both the weight of having made a great decision and also the certainty that it had to be done. It would be a fitting final strike, the right way for him to go out, warning the world one last time of a serious threat. He left some of the books on active reserve for the next day and put the rest of them away so there was no record of what he had read. When he left the great library, a light rain was turning into a strong shower, and without an umbrella he let it wash over him. Thunder rolled, and lightning flashed above the capital.

  The Library of Congress had an unmatched collection, but Green Man always came to this city before an attack for another reason. The men and women who ran the country were here. Though it terrified him to be so close to the people who were chasing him, it also energized him to walk near enough to the White House to see the columned portico of the northern facade, with its American flag flying on top. A president he abhorred slept here soundly while Green Man lay awake night after night, worrying about being caught but also about the fate of the world.

  He ate dinner alone and returned to his hotel. He called Sharon and spoke to the kids, took a hot bath and a pill, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep well, so close to his enemies. When the feelings of dread came over him, he lay back in his bed and tried to take refuge in something hopeful. There was a fantasy he sometimes indulged in that was for him the environmental equivalent of John Lennon’s song “Imagine.”

  Lying awake hour after hour in his dark hotel room, Green Man imagined an Earth a hundred years in the future, when humanity had successfully navigated past the current crisis. As dangers had mounted and the point of no return had been reached, people worldwide had realized the gravity of the threat and forced their governments and key industries to change their behavior. In his fantasy, a sudden groundswell of furious popular activism had, at the last second, saved the planet.

  Greenhouse gases had been drastically cut back, and global warming was halted. Human population was controlled and drinking water rationed and protected. The overfishing and bottom trawling that had devastated the oceans were ended, and the fish stocks and coral reefs had rebounded. Pods of whales swam through plastic-free oceans, and polar bears hunted seals on great sheets of sea ice.

  Green Man pictured smogless cities and pristine countryside with bountiful crops as free from genetic tampering as the fields of ancient Greece. Parents passed on to their children an appreciation for this beautiful world they had saved but also a sense of how fragile it was and how close they had come to destroying it. It was a future world run by responsible human caretakers who treasured their planet and had—at the last second—found the wisdom to protect and restore it.

  But for this to happen, humanity would have to come to its senses very, very soon. People had to be shown that they could act to change things, even if it required tremendous personal sacrifices and risks. The wise but cautious masses needed someone to personify this risk-taking—someone who took on the greatest challenges, acted decisively no matter what the arguments were for moderation, and pointed the way forward to bold individual activism.

  Was it crazy, or was it in fact the only way forward? Had he been chosen for this, or was he mad? Green Man had asked himself these questions thousands of times, and he had no sure answers, but he felt the truth in his heart. A city of policy makers slept around him, but Green Man got out of bed before dawn and walked the dark streets of the capital, seething with a sense of purpose and destiny.

  TWENTY

  There was no day or night in the war room. Dwight rubbed his eyes and tried to concentrate. He had never seen anything like this vast hangar filled with screens and high-tech gadgets and the best experts and investigators in the country. He was awed to be there with them and more than a little frightened to realize that somehow, improbably, he was the center of their attention.

  A small crowd watched him from a distance. The two agents who had met him in Destry, Tom and Earl, seemed to always be there, Tom smiling encouragingly and Earl watching with his weathered poker face. They were joined by an ever-changing group—a tall, young African American, a short Asian woman, and a giant older man who lumbered over and introduced himself simply as Jim Brennan, handed him a business card, and said, “Thanks for helping us out. If you need anything here, from strong coffee to six hours of bad sleep on a hard cot, call Jim Brennan, night or day.”

  Dwight began by working with a young female police sketch artist, except that she didn’t really sketch at all. She skillfully manipulated images on her computer screen to get a closer and closer approximation of the face he’d seen when he’d peered up through the window of the van. He had not seen the eyes or forehead, but he’d seen the neck, and the jaw covered in stubble, and the chiseled cheekbones. In response to her questions, he was able to describe the mouth that had spoken back to him, the thickness of the lips, the even teeth, and the slant of the aquiline nose that disappeared into the shadow of the cap visor. Slowly, incrementally, the image on her screen began to match the lower half of the face he had seen a week ago.

  Then had come an automotive expert with a faint European accent who sat him down in front of a giant screen and showed him images of different black vans for hour after hour. The images were presented in exactly the way he had seen the van in Destry, first from the rear as he had followed it in his police cruiser and then closer up and unfolding toward the front as he had walked up from behind. The expert had pointed out slight design differences from model to model. After viewing the images and considering those differences, Dwight had been able to eliminate twelve van models and put five in a ranked pool of “possibles” and “more likelys.”

  Now they had actually driven the van he considered most likely—a decade-old black GMC Savana—into the hangar. A tall agent with a strong resemblance to the motorist sat in the driver seat, wearing a black cap pulled down low over his eyes. Dwight, feeling self-conscious, sat on a stool so that he was looking up at the man through the half-open tinted window. They both had computer tablets on which the lines that he could remember from the traffic stop were typed out, with “Dwight” and the “Motorist” speaking by turn, as if it were dialogue in a scripted play.

  They were sweeping over this script again and again, and Dwight was surprised to find that, using this playacting technique, he started to recall more words and phrases than he thought possible. A bookish-looking female agent who could have been a high school drama coach guided them with prompts and questions and constantly revised the master script on her tablet as Dwight filled in gaps and tweaked words. An older man stood next to her and occasionally stepped forward to ask Dwight the nuances of exactly how a particular word had been pronounced, repeating it two or three different ways and nodding at Dwight’s responses.

  “So you told him there’s not much to see on Route 55, and then you asked him what exactly he was looking at, and he said he was an artist?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And he liked the color of the hills?”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  “Try saying it.”

  Dwight looked up through the van’s window and wet his lips. He tried to sound casual. “Not much to see on Route 55. What exactly are you looking at around here?”

  The agent playing the motorist glanced at his tablet and replied, “I’m an artist. I like the color of the hills.”

 
Dwight thought for a second and then told the female agent, “I don’t think it was ‘artist.’ I think the word he used was ‘painter.’”

  “How sure are you of that?”

  “Definitely ‘painter.’”

  She typed “painter” on her master script, and it instantly replaced “artist” on Dwight’s tablet and on the version on a large screen that the dozen agents were watching twenty feet away.

  Brennan leaned close to Tom. “So Green Man’s a painter? Or maybe he’s just a liar with a talent for being very specific.”

  “He was asked an unexpected question. The best liars work from the truth,” Tom said. “He mentioned the color of the hills, and I’ve been on that road, and I sort of believe the whole thing. We’re looking for an engineer who paints.”

  “Green Man da Vinci?” Grant suggested in his gently mocking tone.

  “Right idea, but he may not paint that well,” Tom said, ignoring the ambitious agent’s skepticism. They all watched Dwight squint down at his tablet and rub his eyes. “You should let him take a break and get some sleep,” Tom told Brennan. “If he woke up in Destry at the crack of dawn, he’s been awake for nearly forty hours straight.”

  “It’s not like he’s going to sleep for eight hours and wake up with a better memory,” Grant pointed out. “A week has passed. Any delay, any significant time break, will just make the memories fade more. If there are real memories.”

  Brennan hesitated and studied the obviously exhausted young policeman. “After they get through the script reading, we’ll break for five hours. Before he goes to sleep, we should mention to our young policeman the possibility of hypnosis.” Brennan paused and looked from face to face, and cautioned them: “The idea of hypnosis scares people, and he’s got to do this willingly, so let me be the one to tell him about it.”