The Blue Death

by Joan Brady

  Helen burst out laughing. ‘You just ram your way through anything that’s in your path, don’t you, Jimmy?’

  ‘Nonsense, Helen,’ Becky said. ‘He has no authority. He can’t go around making decisions until there’s been a public vote.’

  The pause that followed was uncomfortable. Mr Yetman finished his last bite of apple and cleared his throat. ‘I’m afraid you haven’t quite understood the position.’ His voice carried the authority of the City Council lawyer that he was. ‘The ballot is weeks away. You see, if the Mayor waited for the vote, and if the vote were to go against him, then he wouldn’t be able to negotiate a contract without presenting the details to the public for their—’

  ‘It’s hilarious,’ Helen interrupted, laughing again. ‘Grandma, he’s trumped you. Your prized public vote is going to come after the fact. It can’t affect the outcome one way or the other. Brilliant, Jimmy. Absolutely brilliant. I didn’t know you had it in you. Can you really do this all on your own? Don’t you even have to have the Council behind you?’

  ‘I’ve scheduled a special meeting to approve it a week from Thursday,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Becky looked around the table at the faces of people she’d known for years – people she’d ruled for years. ‘You knew about this? All of you?’ She turned to Jimmy. ‘With whom is this contract?’

  ‘Nobody Russian, Becky. That ought to please you. It’s a nice local company down the road.’

  ‘Are you talking about UCAI? No, no, Jimmy. Not even you can do that. You represent them. It’s a conflict of interest. Plain and simple.’

  Jimmy had to fight to keep the pleasure out of his voice. ‘It will certainly be in your interest to attend the meeting, Becky. I have every confidence that the vote will go my way, but who can say? A council can be as fickle as an electorate. At any rate, we can—’

  ‘Don’t you try to tell me what to do, Jimmy Zemanski. You can’t even assure me you’ll redraft my will yourself. What made you seek out a shark like UCAI to play games with? They’re out of your league. This can’t be legal. It simply cannot be.’

  ‘Can’t it?’ said Jimmy. ‘Who says so? It’s certainly not illegal. Ask Yetman here. Constitutional law is his specialty.’

  21

  SPRINGFIELD: The next morning

  As soon as Becky got home from Jimmy’s party, she called Morris Kline, the person who knew most about Springfield’s water, the man who’d refused her invitations to lunch and the utility director who’d damned privatization as a ‘criminal waste of public money’. She asked him to coffee the following morning. This time he accepted.

  Lillian showed him into the room that had been Hugh Freyl’s study. Technology for the blind used to dominate here. Now that Hugh was dead, no trace of him or his blindness remained. The room itself gave Becky a sense of him; she’d made it into her own study, but any personal mementoes – especially of his affliction – were just too painful. An ancient print of a samurai hung to one side of her, a small red lacquer cabinet stood on the desk in front of her. Morris sat opposite, as starched and stiff in his suit as he’d been when she first saw him at the Avenging Angel. They made small talk about the beauty of Freyl House and blistering weather outside until Lillian brought in a tray with a coffee pot, cups, brownies and little napkins.

  ‘This morning’s paper tells me you’re suddenly not Director of the Springfield Light and Power any more,’ Becky said, pouring out the coffee as Lillian left.

  ‘I was fired.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry to hear it.’ Nobody thought Jimmy would keep him on after that surprise support of the opposition at the Council meeting. ‘The Journal-Register also said something about your leaving for “personal reasons”. Were there any? I do hope not.’

  Morris shook his head. Jimmy had appointed him less than a year ago. Before that, he’d spent twenty years in Snohomish, Indiana, and risen to become director of the public utility there. The job was fine. He enjoyed it, but an unstable wife had alienated his family, then many of his friends; the acrimonious divorce that followed shook him badly. When Jimmy offered him the Springfield utility, he’d been eager to go, perhaps too eager.

  ‘I’m unlucky in love,’ he said to Becky. It was the face of a Boy Scout, but an unexpected, self-deprecating humour deepened the creases around his mouth and eyes. ‘I thought I was coming here to marry a job.’

  Becky nodded. ‘Not many people turn down an invitation to lunch with me, especially people new to town.’

  ‘I turned down two.’

  ‘I found that interesting, Mr Kline.’

  ‘The last thing I wanted was to offend you, Mrs Freyl.’

  ‘I know that now,’ she said. ‘Cream? Sugar?’ She watched him add both to his coffee, picked up her own cup, took a sip. ‘Few people impress me either, Mr Kline. After your declaration at the Avenging Angel, I understood that you hadn’t wanted to compromise what you were about to say then or your ability to continue as an independent voice afterwards.’ She took another sip of coffee. ‘I doubt I’ve ever run across anybody in public office who’s both courageous and honest. The honest ones never last. How did they put up with you in Indiana?’

  The creases around his mouth and eyes deepened again. ‘They never tried to make a deal with UCAI.’

  The humour reminded Becky of her son Hugh. So did the courage and the suffering for principles. But good men are so irritating. To a pragmatist like her, the Hughs and Morrises of the world were Don Quixotes on crusade, too wrapped up in the cause to hear the warning shots. She suspected that Morris had trusted people in Indiana when he shouldn’t have. He’d doubtless told the truth when he should have lied. She had great faith in lies. How could society work for ten minutes without them? Or a government for five?

  ‘Brownie?’ she said, offering the platter to him. ‘Lillian makes the best brownies outside Atlanta, Mr Kline. Napkin? Did Jimmy give you any reason for firing you? Beyond disloyalty, of course.’

  Morris took a brownie, bit into it. ‘He said that the pollution of the town’s water happened on my watch. That is true, Mrs Freyl. I can’t deny it. But he says it means that I failed to keep the utility up to my predecessor’s standards. That is not true. I raised my predecessor’s standards. The utility never functioned as economically or as efficiently as it did under my directive. I can’t tell you how profoundly that contamination incident shocked me.’ He looked away, then down at his brownie, then back at her. ‘Twenty-five years of service to public utilities, Mrs Freyl, and there’s never been a hint of a contamination incident. Never!’

  He went on to explain that the reasons for the problem would emerge only after a detailed study of data log, flow rates, pressure in pipes and pumps from the control room as well as records at the treatment plant, individual pumping stations, monitored junctions, households affected. ‘My team and I began gathering evidence at once, and we worked until well past midnight that first day. I arrived early the next morning—’ He broke off, frowned. ‘The data was gone, Mrs Freyl. Just disappeared. All of it: files, disks, printouts, hard drives. I called Jimmy at once.’

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Jimmy had said to him. ‘That terrorist-proof business. Know what I mean?’ Morris had no idea what he was talking about. ‘The new control room is covered by the Patriot Act,’ Jimmy went on. ‘You know, Non-Disclosure Agreements and all that. You and your team were supposed to sign. I just plain forgot. I’ll have them ready tomorrow, then maybe a couple of days to get them cleared through the National Security Agency.’

  Becky set down her cup. ‘He said that?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘The National Security Agency? Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m absolutely sure. I was as taken aback as you are.’

  The National Security Agency is the most secret of America’s secret organizations, so much more secretive than the CIA and the FBI that the only way the rest of the world can guess the scale of its operations is by the eighteen thousand parking spaces around the big
gest of its known installations, its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Just how many other installations there are spotted around the country, nobody knows. Literally nobody. This is America’s Gestapo, Uncle Sam’s very own Stasi, whose employees joke that the letters NSA stand for ‘No Such Agency’ and ‘Never Say Anything’.

  ‘What can the man be playing at?’ Becky said to Morris.

  ‘I don’t understand it any more than you do, Mrs Freyl.’

  While Jimmy had shuffled Non-Disclosure Agreements, Morris got on with collating samples of the contaminated water, taking them over to the lab himself. There hadn’t been any need to explain how urgent the analysis was, but when he called to find out the results, the technician said they’d all been sent directly to the Mayor. Morris called Jimmy at once. Again Jimmy apologized, then told him that the lab also needed to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements.

  ‘I found that very strange,’ Morris said to Becky. ‘Suppose it was sewage as the Council claimed at the public meeting. I have a duty to the public to investigate. Sewage is dangerous. It makes people sick. Because we had no lab results, we began checking hospitals. If it had been sewage, hospitals would reflect it: an increase in gastroenteritis, skin rashes, eye infections, respiratory infections. But there were fewer patients than usual. I reported my findings to Jimmy right away.’

  ‘That’s when he fired you.’

  ‘He said he needed somebody with higher security clearance.’

  Becky shook her head in wonder. ‘Why on earth would you go to him with what you’d found?’

  ‘It was my duty, Mrs Freyl.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, more tartly than she’d intended. What was a reasonable person to do with these Don Quixotes? Had they no sense at all? ‘Did he mention signing the contract with UCAI?’

  ‘I didn’t know anything about it until I talked to you last night.’

  Becky looked away, played with the buttons on her wheelchair, looked back. ‘You know what happened to contaminate the water that day, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, er, there was so much data. I’m afraid we hadn’t even begun to skim the surface.’

  ‘But you know.’

  He looked down at his brownie again. ‘There were . anomalies that make some sense to me, but I cannot make out why power failures affected just the control room or how they caused the corruption of so much data. Perhaps Jimmy’s NSA clearance makes sense – I couldn’t really say – but if it does, why clear lab staff after they’d tested the samples, not before? How can he say there’d been sewage in the water and take no measures to ensure the public’s safety? For that reason if no other, it should have been a relief to find out that sewage was unlikely. Why grow angry about it?’

  ‘Jimmy has no scruples, Mr Kline. I wouldn’t put it past him to sabotage a city’s water supply just to win a vote.’ The thought had occurred to her at the Avenging Angel as she listened to Jimmy’s supporters. The surprise – to her – was that she hadn’t thought of it earlier. ‘You’ll be willing to tell the public at least some of what you’ve told me?’

  ‘They still own the facility. They have a right to know whatever I do.’

  ‘There’s the Non-Disclosure Agreement, Mr Kline.’

  ‘Surely owners have a right to know what goes on in their business.’

  Morris finished his coffee and his brownie while he and Becky discussed his speech at the Council meeting to come. ‘You know,’ he said as he was about to leave, ‘it’s such a pity Dr Gonzaga isn’t back yet. I’m sure she’d have something relevant to add.’

  Becky pursed her lips. ‘She’s the person who warned me that Jimmy planned to sell the utility.’

  He nodded. ‘That may well have been related to some results she’d run across.’

  ‘Really? Contamination results? That lab work of yours is only a few days old. She warned me months ago, and I haven’t heard from her since. The English are very lazy,’ Becky grumbled. ‘She’s been gone since June. No American takes vacations that long.’

  ‘I can’t see the connection either,’ Morris said, ‘but I’m sure it’s there. I gather she’d been doing some fieldwork shortly before she left. What she found upset her. She told me her results amounted to “incontrovertible evidence”, then wouldn’t say more, not even what they were evidence of – except that she might get in trouble because of them.’ Becky was about to ask what kind of ‘trouble’, but the consternation on Morris’s face stopped her. ‘She said they’d already caused a break between her and Jimmy.’ Morris frowned. ‘I’m not adept at spotting relationships, Mrs Freyl. I hadn’t known there was a connection to break.’

  ‘Nor had I,’ Becky said. ‘Nor had I.’

  As soon as Morris left, Becky emailed the Coalition. The subject line: ‘ATTN: Emergency meeting’. More than thirty people gathered at her house the following evening to draw up plans for a demonstration that the town wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Jimmy’s venue for the vote on his contract with UCAI? The Old Capitol of course. The Coalition would guarantee that not even such a grand building could accommodate the crowds.

  Ten days wasn’t enough to pull together all they wanted, but Jimmy’s weakness was his Council aldermen. Elected members on every council in America worry about winning the next time around; none of Jimmy’s could fail to sense the abrupt shift that Morris Kline had brought about in the mood of the voters. The drama of the meeting at the Avenging Angel had erased the drama of water pollution in their minds. Ten days was enough to demonstrate the huge opposition to selling off Springfield’s water. It was also enough to make sure that Jimmy’s behind-shut-doors contract with UCAI came off reeking of corruption.

  When Morris got up and told people how he came to get fired, every member of the Mayor’s Council would have to think hard before voting with him.

  22

  KNOX COUNTY, ILLINOIS: The next afternoon

  The Warden looked up at the man in front of him.

  ‘Prisoner 19753. Sir!’ Little Andy said, eyes straight ahead, focusing on nothing. ‘You asked to see me. Sir!’

  How could a man like Carl Johannsen have ended up as warden of South Hams State Correctional Facility? The prison was a shit hole. Its warden, a dollop of shit clinging to the prison’s ass. Sole requirement? A high school diploma. Carl Johannsen had been Director of Consolidated Agricultural, Inc, a small Springfield company doing research into fertilizers and pesticides: two secretaries, a staff of ten, a Rolex watch and a single malt in the liquor cabinet at home. He’d inherited the business from his father, lost it to UCAI. Now this: red eyes from cheap Scotch, pouchy cheeks, too much Viagra and too little success even with its help. He sat in a captain’s chair that had once commanded the QE2. That was good. His desk was highly polished. That was good too. Air conditioning throughout the Warden’s quarters ensured that nobody should sweat, and yet sweat ran down his face so freely it stung his eyes. Half of it was righteous indignation; the other half, abject terror.

  ‘You got a name, prisoner?’ he shouted at Andy.

  ‘Andrew Draper.’

  ‘Fuck me. All I see is a nigger with a number. We got computer trouble.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It won’t work.’

  ‘What seems to be the matter, sir?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know? The hard drive’s in the outer office. Ratty will go with you.’ Ratty was the Warden’s private secretary.

  ‘You want me to . ’ Andy shrugged towards the outer office where the Warden’s desktop computer stood.

  ‘Christ Almighty, boy, fix the goddamned thing.’

  It was all Andy could do to keep from laughing out loud. He’d been put in prison for hacking into university financial records and transferring federal funds to a local whorehouse. Only somebody with macaroni for a head would let him loose on the prison computer system. But then everybody said Johannsen was stupid. Everybody knew he’d never been near a prison until six months ago, fallout from one of the small companies that UCAI gobbled up b
efore breakfast, an executive who’d probably never deigned to use a computer.

  Too bad. For him anyhow. Once Andy was inside that system, the man belonged to him.

  A metal table supported the computer in the outer office. Andy sat and Ratty hovered, a meek, mild, senior citizen who’d killed his own brother forty years ago. Nobody knew why. He didn’t either. His nickname was easy to spot though: an upper lip that quivered in jerks like a rat sniffing out cheese for breakfast.

  ‘I am afraid I have no grasp of these machines,’ he said to Andy.

  ‘Before your time, huh?’

  Ratty nodded. ‘The Warden tried to turn it on this morning. It made a beep, then the screen went black. Quite frightening really.’

  Andy hadn’t been all that brilliant with computers himself. He’d learned a little only because his girlfriend had dared him to hack into the university’s system; the kick he’d got out of doing it came as a surprise. His present – and growing – expertise was down to Quack. He’d been deeply moved when he realized that the medic was arranging with gang bosses to bring in computer texts, much as David had done with medical books a generation before. Some of Andy’s old buoyancy was making a cautious return. Maybe even a bit of hope for the future. Independent experts who specialize in computer crime are in great demand. The FBI, CIA, practically any state agency: Andy could tell them how it worked, and he didn’t have all that long to serve. Good behaviour would get him out even faster. By that time, he’d be top of the game.

  He sat down in front of the Warden’s PC, switched it on, got as far as the beep, pressed a function key. The screen lit up in safe mode.

  ‘Genius!’ Ratty cried.

  Andy flashed him a smile. ‘I’m afraid it’ll keep crashing unless I fix what’s making it happen.’

  It’s way too easy to bypass username and password on a computer system as long as it’s possible to press that function key. Johannsen didn’t even notice it happening. He hovered nervously as Andy scanned through the machine’s contents: programs, document files, email connection, Internet connection, anti-virus. It didn’t take long for Andy to see why the Warden had called him and not UCAI’s very efficient IT team.