But if he could use the deception to spend time with her for a few days or weeks, he saw no harm in it.
Did we mention he’s a bit of a cad?
“Now don’t forget, we’ll be gone for two weeks, so we’ll need for you to mail our mortgage payment and a couple of other bills on the first,” Hannah told him.
“Don’t worry, Hannah. I’ll take care of it.”
“And the paper boy will be by to collect on Saturday. His name is Timmy and he’s a really nice kid. There are thirty two dollars and a box of Girl Scout cookies on the glove table by the door. He loves girl scout cookies.”
“Don’t worry, Hannah. I’ll take care of it.”
“The garbage has to be put out by the street on Monday morning and the cans have to be taken back in by Monday evening. If they’re still out on Tuesday morning and the city comes around we’ll get a fine.
“Same thing on Thursday morning.”
“Don’t worry, Hannah. I’ll take care of it.”
“Both garbage cans are in the garage. They’re the green ones. The blue one is for recyclables. They come around every other Wednesday, which is Wednesday of next week.”
“Don’t worry, Hannah. I’ll take care of it.”
“The switch is bad on the washing machine. Tony was going to fix it before we left but the new switch went on back order.
“It still works. But you have to hold it down for a few seconds for it to start.”
“Okay. No problem, Hannah.”
“And please don’t eat on the couch. Last time it took me forever to get that spaghetti stain out and the crumbs cleaned up.”
“Okay. I won’t, I promise.”
“Do you want me to write all this down for you, Jeff?”
“No, Hannah.” He pointed to his forehead and said, “It’s all stored right here in my noggin.”
“Okay, good. Now, then. I saved the most important thing for last, so it would be freshest in your head and you’d be less likely to forget it. Are you ready?”
Jeff sighed and said, “Sure.”
“Okay. On the dining room table is an envelope addressed to the Alaska Land Act Application Center.”
“The what?”
“The Alaska Land Act Application Center. We already downloaded the forms and filled them out.
“They said they’re not accepting requests for the Alaska land yet, and will make an announcement on national TV when they’re ready.
“I need for you to keep an eye on the news and watch for that announcement, and then to go to the post office and mail our application as soon as they can accept it.
“We figured if we waited too long our application would get buried, so we want ours to be one of the first ones they get.”
“Don’t worry, Hannah. I’ll take care of it.”
Tony walked into the room, holding little Samson.
“The car’s all loaded, and guess who woke up and said he’s all ready to go see his Aunt Gwen?”
Hannah forgot everything she had left to tell Jeff and stole her baby from her husband’s arms.
She started talking baby talk to him.
“Well, hello, bittle bitsy baby. How are youuuuuuu?”
Jeff gently pushed them both toward the door.
“You guys get out of here. Start your vacation. I have beer to drink and a ball game to watch.”
They said their final goodbyes and walked out the door.
Ten minutes later Jeff was eating the paper boy’s Girl Scout cookies on the couch while he looked up Alyssa’s phone number.
“Hello, Alyssa. How you doin’ hon?
“It’s Jeff.
“Jeff, from lumber.
“Yeah, that Jeff. Hey, I was wondering if you wanted to come over to my house tomorrow for some dinner and so we can get to know each other.
“Of course I have my own house. Did you think I lived under a bridge or something?”
Chapter 25
It was raining in the area around Turbid Lake. A huge slow moving front was creeping through the area.
It wasn’t a heavy, drenching rainfall.
Rather, it was one of those rainfalls which came down slowly, soaking the area over several steady hours instead of dumping everything at once and causing flooding.
Something else it did: it prevented the forest from burning.
Lava was pouring out from seven different fissures now.
Most were on the hilly slopes in the area around Lake Turbid, and were slowly rolling into the lake.
The lake was covered by a heavy steam fog now, the result of the molten rock contacting the cool water.
Another phenomenon was occurring as well. The explosive interaction caused by superheated lava meeting cool water was sending lava bombs high into the air.
Most were basketball-sized or smaller, shooting hundreds of feet into the air, and then coming down harmlessly in the wet forest.
Were it not raining, such bombs might have started fires near and far.
But all they did on this particular day was create more steam as raindrops slowly cooled and hardened them.
The storm front hid all this activity from satellites which had been programmed to monitor the massive park twenty four seven.
Airplanes flew above the storm, but couldn’t see through it, and the National Geological Survey was therefore blind to what was going on on the ground.
They relied instead on their people in the park, using two way radios, to report what they saw and heard… and smelled.
A two man team three miles or so from Turbid Lake reported the faint smell of sulfur dioxide, which is produced naturally by volcanic activity and released in large amounts when lava contacts water.
The gas is toxic, but typically not fatal unless inhaled in large quantities.
From a distance it typically causes headaches and some confusion, but only a risk to those with existing respiratory problems.
It also has a very distinctive smell.
Something akin to a struck match crossed with a touch of vinegar.
It’s not a smell scientists would confuse with bison dung or rotten fish or any of a thousand other smells one finds in heavy woodlands.
The same team also reported hearing explosions in the distance.
They assumed the explosions came from lava bombs, but couldn’t see any and therefore couldn’t say for sure.
They reported their coordinates and said the explosions were coming from the west-northwest.
They were instructed to move closer.
“We need for you to pinpoint the activity so we can map it,” they were told.
Easy for them to say. They were sitting in cushioned desk chairs in an air conditioned mobile command post twenty four miles away.
The monitors did what they were told, and followed the sounds of the explosions.
They were about half a mile away when a steaming rock the size of a football came streaking across the sky in front of them and hit a pine tree forty feet above the ground.
It snapped the tree as though it were a twig, causing the top third to come crashing to the ground.
One man looked at the other. The look on their faces revealed they were thinking the same thought.
“If that hit us we’d be dead, and probably never would have seen it coming.”
They reported in again to provide their new coordinates, and to say they were turning back.
“We can’t go any further,” they said. “But we’ve confirmed a heavy concentration of SO-2 gas and lava bombs raining down in the area.”
“Any idea which body of water they’ve hit?”
“We’re guessing Turbid Lake, but it could be one of the streams emptying into it.
Normally such streams wouldn’t be deep enough to launch lava bombs.
But during a rainstorm all the streams were swollen.
“Ten-four, Team Foxtrot. Can you get any closer?”
“Negative. I’m afraid we may have come too far already. We’ve
both got splitting headaches and I’m starting to see double.”
“Ten-four. Egress immediately and let us know if you need assistance. Advise us of your present location every twenty minutes until you’re out of there.”
“Roger.”
In the command post a man in a suit placed a red push pin in a large map right next to Turbid Lake.
They’d given Team Foxtrot the impression they were onto a rather unique find.
They’d made a point to sound incredulous.
“Are you sure it’s SO-2? Could you be mistaking it for something else?”
Team Foxtrot hiked back out of the area thinking they’d discovered the only activity.
The last thing the command post needed was for their eyes and ears on the ground to start panicking and walking off the job in droves.
The fact was, each two man team in the area wasn’t in communication with the command post on a common frequency to cut down on clutter, as was told to the teams.
No, each team was on its own frequency to keep them from sharing information.
The man stepped back from the map to get an overview of what he was looking at.
What he was looking at were a total of eleven red push pins.
Besides the one he just added, there was similar activity just outside of Alta, on the Idaho-Wyoming border; south of Wilson, south of Shoshone Lake and on both sides of Jackson Lake.
He asked an aide, “What’s the current strength of our incoming radio signal in this weather?”
“We can confidently count on fifty miles, sir.”
“Tell the driver to get this thing ready to roll. I want to move to a position fifty miles south of our northernmost team.”
Chapter 26
Far away from Yellowstone, in a plush office in Washington, D.C., Walter Renniger’s phone had been ringing all morning.
Most of the calls came from fellow representatives. A few senators made their requisite calls as well.
They were all pretty much the same. Short and to the point, congratulating Congressman Renniger’s selection.
None of the callers was sincere, and most didn’t even pretend to be.
Truth was, any of them would have loved to be chosen chairman of the committee to oversee the Alaska project’s dispersal of funds.
But only one person could chair the brand new committee and manage the four hundred billion dollars Congress had voted to appropriate to it.
It just happened to be Renniger who got to the Speaker of the House first.
Speaker Johnson was hosting a back yard barbeque when Renniger called to see if he could drop by with some papers to review.
“For Christ’s sake, Walter,” Johnson told him. “It’s the weekend. We’re out of session. Can’t whatever it is wait for a few days?”
“These kinds of papers are the ones which can’t wait, Sid. They need to be attended to immediately.”
Speaker Johnson had been poked and prodded by several other members of congress in recent days.
But Renniger was apparently the first one to produce a tangible proposal.
He excused himself from his family for twenty minutes to retire to his den and met the honorable representative from the Great State of Oklahoma there.
They both knew why he’d come. They both knew what he wanted.
There was no point in pretense, no beating around the bush.
“Thought this might make your decision a little easier to make,” Renniger said as he handed the speaker a shoe box.
Johnson lifted a corner of the box and peeked inside.
There were ten bundles of hundred dollar bills stacked neatly inside.
Before he let go of the box, though, Renniger said, “Unless, of course, you’ve already made your decision in favor of someone else.”
“Oh no no,” Johnson assured him. “Fact is, I have made my decision, and I think you’ll make a fine chairman, Walter. Congratulations, by the way.”
The hundred thousand dollar bribe wasn’t a great amount of money for either man, since both were millionaires.
But Johnson was cash poor after recent stock market investments turned out not to be the guarantees he’d thought them to be.
And an extra hundred grand would fund the trip to Europe he’d been promising his wife.
For Renniger it would put him in the position of getting kickbacks by contractors competing to help Americans relocate. And to build new housing and apartment complexes all over the country for those displaced.
He’d already ensured that tucked into the funding bill was a provision to issue no-bid contracts and to bypass the safeguards typically put into place to prevent the government from being ripped off.
And the best part was nobody argued the provision. Not even those who considered themselves watchdogs of the nation’s purse strings.
It was nice being able to use “national emergency” as an excuse to fatten his own pocket.
And make no mistake about it.
The hundred grand he’d given to buy the chair on the new committee was nothing compared to what he’d recoup on his investment.
It was the way business had been done in Washington for generations.
As each new election came and went some of the faces changed, but it never took long for the newbies to fall into the same bad habits.
Most were already familiar with the process.
Those who were truly new, in that they expected a graft-free system, soon learned such a thing didn’t exist.
Learning how to work the system to their own benefit was part of the learning curve; part of the on-the-job training each new member goes through.
Most Americans don’t know or believe the system still works this way.
“Maybe back in the old days, but surely not now.”
Oh, most certainly, most definitely now. Now greater than ever before.
Such Americans are either naïve or wear blinders on purpose, because they’d like to believe our leaders are the honest and forthright citizens they pretend to be.
Many Americans swear that only the other party is corrupt; that their party works hard to stop such corruption.
They’re only fooling themselves, for both sides are equally crooked.
From his car, Renniger placed a call to an old friend.
“It’s a go. How about lunch?”
“Works for me. Know a place that’s safe?”
“Hooligan’s. On West Fifteenth. Half an hour?”
“I’ll be there.”
And he was. It was far too lucrative a deal for him to be a minute late.
They sat in a booth at the back of the restaurant, telling their waitress they liked their privacy. And to be sure, it wouldn’t do to have anyone overhear their conversation.
“Now remember,” Renniger told his friend.
“The bids can’t be in yours or your family members’ names. Friends of a cousin are okay. Just be sure they’re related to you in no way. No neighbors either. That makes it too easy for IG investigators.
“Let me know after you’ve submitted every bid so I can watch out for them. I’ll catch them as they come through the pipe and approve them.”
The two departed with a handshake and a couple of confident smiles.
They’d just made an arrangement that would make them each mega-rich.
Chapter 27
Renniger had a fine meal at Hooligan’s. It was a great restaurant which had served the best in fine dining in downtown D.C. for over forty years.
In that time it had hosted hundreds, maybe thousands, of clandestine meetings at which terms of various graft arrangements were made.
It not only served the best lasagna within ten miles.
Those in the know called it “kickback corner.”
But one great meal wasn’t enough for one day.
Not for Walter Renniger.
He didn’t pack three hundred pounds onto his six foot frame by eating only one meal a day.
From his car he pul
led out his phone and made three calls.
The first was to a friend at a construction conglomerate.
One of the biggest on the east coast and extending into Florida.
One which would be bidding on contracts to turn unused or abandoned military bases into mini-cities.
The Department of Defense, starting in the 1980s and extending into the early 2000s, downsized by closing over a hundred facilities across the nation.
A few were repurposed.
Most just turned into ghost towns.
Renniger now controlled the multi-billion pot of money which would be used to rebuild those facilities so Yellowstone evacuees could relocate there.
Once again, his buddy answered on the first ring.
He’d been expecting the call.
“Hey Sam.”
“Hello, Walt. You hungry?”
“Hell, you know me. I’m always hungry.”
“Pick a place and a time.”
“How about Martino’s at seven?”
“Great. See you there.”
Renniger’s second call was to another friend who ran a super PAC, or political action committee. They’d known each other for years and had worked together on some pretty shady deals to avoid campaign finance laws and other pesky regulations.
Renniger had let it be known he was thinking about retiring from congress.
Once the money was all gone, of course.
When he retired he’d need something to set himself up for life.
A seat on the board of his party’s largest and richest super PAC would do quite nicely.
“Hello Bill.”
“Hello, my good friend Walter. How have you been?”
“I couldn’t be better if there were two of me. But it’s been way too long since we got together for drinks. Are you free tonight?”
“I believe I can be, yes. When and where?”
“Martino’s. I’ll be finishing up dinner with another friend about nine. You can join me then.”
“I’ll be there with bells on.”
“No bells. You look ridiculous in bells. A suit is much more dignified.”
His third call was to his wife, Nancy.
“Hi honey. Guess what?”
Nancy didn’t have to guess. She’d been expecting the call and couldn’t contain her excitement.
The Yellowstone Event (Book 5): The Eruption Page 8
