He posted the message, refreshed the page to be certain it was visible, and then he turned off the tablet, took it into the restroom, cracked the screen against the toilet tank, and let it soak in the sink until any hope of saving the device was gone. He left it in the trash and returned to his booth.
“More coffee?” The waitress was a redhead with blue eyes. Eli smiled at her.
“Absolutely. It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think?”
“A gorgeous day. Hope you’ll get outside to enjoy it.”
“Oh, yes. Trust me, I intend to enjoy the day.”
When she was gone, he withdrew another tablet, powered it up, and went to a site called Sons of Freedom. There, under the identity of a forty-four-year-old gun expert and motorcycle mechanic named Joe Walden, he issued his next warning.
You all know I’ve got a connection who is BIG-TIME with military intel. I know I’ve got haters and doubters about that, but you’re about to see the proof, and it’s fucking scary if it’s true. Those army boys are scrambling today to shut down some sort of MAJOR towel-head action. I got the warning. If all of you who call me a liar and say I’m full of shit are right, then nothing will happen, and I’ll come back on here and admit it myself. But, boys? It’s going down tonight. Don’t know what, where, or when, but I got a feeling it’s going to be big-league shit, and I don’t mind telling you I’m fucking scared. I am sharing this so you all are prepared and because I love all you who are ready to fight for what is right. This shit is Islamic Jihad, ISIS or al-Qaeda or something just like them, and here’s what I’ve been told, by a guy who’d be in Leavenworth in ten minutes if anyone knew he’d whispered a word to me: When it goes down, our fucking joke of a president is going to say that it wasn’t anybody from the Middle East. He’ll say it was AMERICAN BOYS. That’s the truth. Or at least what I was told. Like I said, I’d rather be wrong than right, because if I’m right? Americans will be blamed for MUSLIM TERRORISTS. We are at fucking WAR then, you understand? So if something goes down tonight, and you hear it was anybody but the towel-heads, it’s time to wake up and DO SOMETHING. War is coming. It’s here. And I for one am not going down listening to a bunch of lies from pussy politicians who get backdoor deals from terrorist oil money. God bless you all.
Eli finished the note, read it again, and couldn’t keep the smile off his face. The language was just right. He’d seeded the clouds of fear on each side, and when the news broke, the clouds would burst.
“You are enjoying the day!”
The waitress was back, wearing a big dumb grin. “I can see your smile from all the way across the room, mister. Nice to see a happy face.”
“What’s not to be happy about?” Eli said as he pushed Send. “It’s a special day.”
50
Janell used the satellite radio, their desperate-measures-only means of communication, from where she was parked behind an abandoned barn nine miles north of Doug Oriel’s body. Eli answered quickly but his voice was soft and she wondered if Violet Novak was nearby. The thought of that trite, ignorant woman enraged her. She understood Eli’s double life intellectually, but not emotionally. She hoped that her existence with Doug had troubled him in the same way.
“I’m en route but delayed,” she said, and then she explained the situation in the simplest terms possible: Doug had threatened the cause; died for the cause. The rest was irrelevant.
He listened without interrupting. For a man of such power and command, he was always a patient listener. Today, though, the silence scared her. Not because she was afraid of him—theirs was a relationship that transcended fear, mocked fear—but because she knew the disappointment he was feeling.
“I was relying on his skill and his devices,” he said at last. “Counting on them.”
She winced. “I know. Do you think I don’t understand that? I’ve been apart from you for nine months to ensure that we would have him. If there had been another option, any other, I would have taken it. There wasn’t.”
The silence went on even longer this time, and then he said, “I’ve never liked my contingency. It’s been tried before, and without much success.”
“But you have it. We’ve got to try it now. We must.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Much pressure rides on the shoulders of my man Jay.”
“Will he perform?”
“He’s a motivated man.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Because there’s no certainty. But Jay is no different than any other recruit. When faced with his worst fears, he will discover he is capable of more than he realized.”
This was, of course, Eli’s entire worldview—and their earliest bond, dating back to their first conversation in Rotterdam, when they’d shared a dark amusement over a world that promised progress born from hope but acted, again and again, out of fear. It was not an untested theory, and the years had validated it repeatedly. Still, she was uneasy. She knew nothing of Jay Baldwin.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
“Sorrow rarely advances a cause,” he said. “Proper action, however, always will. So let’s look at the energy of this situation and determine how to mobilize it. There’s a way to capitalize. There always is.”
He explained the potential he saw, and as she listened to his instructions, she couldn’t keep herself from smiling. It was brilliant, so perfect that it felt as if it had to have been planned, and to know that he had made this adjustment so swiftly, turning crisis into opportunity, was the ultimate illustration of what separated him from the common man.
“What the morning calls for,” he said, “are as many Paul Revere riders as possible. They’ll be ignored today, but by tonight? By tomorrow? They’ll be forever remembered.”
“I understand. I’ll make sure the message goes out.”
“Good. Doug will serve his purpose, as you say.”
“Serve it better dead than alive. What about Markus Novak?”
“If he appears, he’ll be killed by Garland.”
Good news, but still she felt cheated. Novak belonged to her. Both Novaks, in fact.
“Everything is accelerated now,” he said. “I can’t delay. You know I would if that was possible, but at this point…we’d risk too much.”
“I understand,” she said, but a part of her died with the acceptance. All of their time apart had been predicated on this day together. “I wanted to be there for the morning. I tried everything to be there.”
His voice was tender when he spoke again, because he understood what it meant to her. “Dawn was trivial; dusk is critical. Join me then. We’ll watch the world go dark together, and then we’ll leave together.”
Together. The word made her flush with anticipation.
“Give me the location,” she said. “I won’t be delayed again.”
He told her which phone to power up and promised that GPS coordinates would be sent to it. From her current position, he estimated it would be most of a day’s drive.
“Can you be there by sundown without taking risks?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Approach from the south. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave.”
“Together,” she said.
“Together,” he echoed.
She shut her eyes. It had been years since she’d wept, but at that moment, she was close.
51
As Jay read the text message, the dread that had lived in the pit of his stomach since the day he’d come home to find Eli Pate sitting at his kitchen table bloomed into a cold wellspring that spread through his veins and filled his body.
This is the shutdown, he realized. The time has come.
He called his dispatcher and informed her that he was going to be out for the day, that he was feeling ill.
“You sure don’t sound good, Jay.”
He hadn’t been trying to fake any symptoms, but his voice couldn’t sound like that of a well man.
“No,” he said. “No,
I’m not doing too good at all.”
“Stay home and get healthy, then.”
“I’m working on it.”
He hung up. The sun had risen bright and brilliant and he watched it and thought that the storm that had blown in the day before he met Eli Pate, when he and Sabrina had counted the blinking lights, waiting to see if Jay would be called out, seemed a thousand years ago. A different man had left the house on the day of the storm, and that man would never be seen again.
Jay already understood that.
He walked into the garage and to the cabinet that held his barehanding equipment, relics of a lost life. He couldn’t climb anymore. That was what Pate didn’t understand. He’d picked the wrong guy. He’d picked a fraud. Jay hadn’t worked in the flash zone since Tim’s funeral.
The hot suit, or Faraday suit, allowed the lineman to contact the equipment directly, instead of having to use a properly charged pole or some other technique. The current would pass through the suit and continue down the lines with none of the deadly disruptions in voltage. When you came into contact, you’d carry a half a million volts all around your body. It was an experience unlike any other in the world, and Jay had always felt strangely spiritual during those times, the way others might in a temple.
That was before he’d climbed up to retrieve his brother-in-law’s corpse.
The suit—socks, trousers, jacket with hood, gloves—was made of a blend of flame-resistant Nomex and a microscopic stainless-steel fiber. In the 1830s, when Michael Faraday began the research that led to this suit, in a world that hadn’t yet seen a lightbulb, he determined that he could coat a room with metal foil and stand within it, unharmed, as the electricity flowed. Linemen who did barehanding work referred to putting on the suit as “becoming metal.” When Jay was encased in the suit, the voltage would pass through the steel mesh, meaning that Jay would energize to the same level as the lines.
He packed the suit in the backseat of the truck, then returned to the cabinet for his hot stick and the accessory bag, which was loaded with fuse pullers and wrench heads and shepherd’s hooks, all the things that had once been the tools of his trade. He packed the cutting stick too. Jay assumed that Pate intended him to go up there and cut a live line. It was a terrible plan. The system monitors would know the instant it happened, and a crew would be sent to fix it. That crew would work fast. Power wouldn’t be lost for long.
He took the hot stick, which was a long fiberglass pole filled with a special foam that allowed the lineman to reach out and contact the current. Distance was critical—the telescoping rod could elongate to ten feet, and Jay would want every bit of that. If you weren’t working from a bucket truck or a helicopter, something allowing a lineman to be safely energized without having a contact to the ground, you’d vaporize if you entered the flash zone.
The flash zone was actually an insulation zone. High-voltage lines were exposed, cooled by the air and wind, which meant that the air and wind also carried some current, always affected by humidity. The higher the voltage, the larger the flash zone could become. With lines at five hundred thousand volts, Jay would never get close before the current discovered him and decided to use his body as a convenient means of doing the only thing it cared about—returning to the earth. With lines at lower voltage, the Faraday suit would protect him, but at half a million?
They’d have to identify him by his boots.
He put the hot stick and tool bag in the truck and then paused to handle the Nomex and steel-mesh suit, thinking of all the times he’d worked in it while the current crawled over him like a swarm of insects. Dangerous, yes, but he’d worked with poise and confidence. Until the day he saw Tim’s face, or what had remained of it.
Jay dropped the suit, stumbled to the garage-floor drain, and vomited.
Eli Pate arrived two hours later, walking casually up the street from downtown Red Lodge. If he was concerned about watchers or a trap, he didn’t show it. He looked every bit as calm as he had when Jay found him at the kitchen table.
“How are you feeling, Jay?” he said when the door was open. “Calm, cool, and collected? I hope so. It’s a big day.”
“Do I get to see her?”
Eli Pate smiled warmly as he shook his head. “Not just yet. Now, we’ve got plenty of catching up to do, I know, but let’s stay in motion while we do it. You’ll drive, per the norm. I’m more of the shotgun type of guy, you know?”
Jay said, “What do you actually want? What in the hell do you think this is going to accomplish? You might take the power out. They’ll put it back on. And for what?”
Pate’s smile didn’t waver. “I’m the ultimate theorist, Jay. In a nation where people love to say that all they have to fear is fear itself, they have created quite fertile ground for terror. I’ll take the power out and they’ll put it back on, you say, simple as that. I’m not so sure I agree. When people are faced with events they can’t understand, they rush for a narrative that explains it. Rush right past the truth. When the lights go out? I’m interested in seeing what stories come out of the darkness, my friend.”
52
The engine sounds had come and gone again, but they hadn’t returned, and it did not take long before Lynn Deschaine began to muse on the possibility of escape.
“How is the fence electrified? There’s no way they have power lines out here. I don’t hear generators running.”
“A windmill. Violet is very proud of it.”
“You’re serious?”
Sabrina nodded. Her swollen nose prevented her from breathing except through her mouth, which left her throat dry and cracked, so even talking hurt.
“So if we stopped it from turning, we would cut off the power?”
Sabrina shook her head. “I doubt that. The windmill would feed batteries, I think. That way the current can be stored and controlled. Actually, that’s not right. The current is always alive. The only thing that can be stored is power.”
Lynn said, “Okay, I’ll confess—I’m stone-stupid when it comes to electricity. I bought another charger for my phone once before I realized I’d accidentally turned off the power strip the original was plugged into. If a fuse blows, I’m calling an electrician. Who would probably tell me it isn’t actually a fuse. This is the bad side of apartment living, I guess. I’ve always had the maintenance guys, right? I’ve never had to pause to learn. But there has to be another way to shut off the power to that fence without going right to the batteries or the circuit breaker or whatever.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sure there is. Did your husband ever talk about his work?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. He’s the guy who turns the power back on. So…why does it go off?”
“Jay does high-voltage repair. I don’t think it’s the same thing as this.”
“Here they’ve got a power source, and they’ve got current traveling through wires. Isn’t it basically a microcosm of what he does?”
Sabrina nodded slowly. It should be. Whether the power came from a nuclear plant or a windmill or a battery, the idea was the same—generation, transmission, distribution. Lynn’s question was a good one: Why does it go off?
“Weather, usually,” Sabrina said to herself.
“What?”
“I’m thinking of the causes of the outages. Weather. Limbs fall on lines, or trees knock them down completely, or there are what Jay calls the squirrel suicide bombers.”
“Pardon?”
“Rodents making contact with a live wire. They’ll get fried, and if the shock doesn’t blow them clear and they get stuck in the equipment, it creates a fault.”
“Why?”
“Because the system is set up to protect itself. Just like a fuse or a circuit breaker. If it encounters something that could create a larger problem, it shuts down. A breaker trips, a fuse blows, whatever. You ever notice how your lights blink sometimes before they go out completely?”
“Yes.”
“That
’s the system trying to clear the fault. It will try two times. If you get two hard blinks, the next one won’t be a blink. The next one is a shutdown, and it will be out for a while, because now they’ve got to send a crew out to fix it.”
She was remembering their first home together, a crappy rental in Billings, Jay explaining this as they lay in bed. That was the first time he’d talked about the squirrel suicide bombers, tickling her neck, making a stupid squirrel sound that had made her laugh.
Lynn said, “See? You do understand it.”
She supposed she did. At least the basics, at least a little more than most.
“So how do we create a fault that actually lasts?” Lynn asked. “One that doesn’t immediately come back on or that can be fixed by flipping a breaker?”
Rise the Dark Page 25
