by David Hearne
“A lady asked me to give it to you,” the girl yelled back, “Do you like it?”
“Yes!” she instinctively replied as she felt her stomach churn as the secret service agents helped her up the steps to the campaign bus.
Once the door to the bus closed, Ira looked at her quizzically, “What in the hell was going on out there?” Katherine looked at him and Pamela standing next to him and replied, “I don’t know. I thought I saw someone I knew for a second, but I am not sure who I thought it was, and then that note, that was there with the coin. I dreamed about it early this morning.”
Ira glanced at her questionably then reached out to hug her. “Katherine, I want you to go to bed now. Get some rest. This has been a very hard day. Hot sun. Tons of pressure on you. No wonder you feel confused and see some simple coincidence a supernatural event.”
Katherine pushed away from him and glared up at him. “This was not my imagination. I am not going to bed yet. I need to do some research, eat and then go to bed maybe.” She sighed heavily, “ Don’t doubt me. I need your support.”
Ira stood there wordlessly looking at Katherine. Only the sound of the motor broke the silence. No one said anything, and Katherine turned around and strode back to her desk where the Hulagu coin sat.
That night, before she went to sleep, she gave instructions to a guard to wake her at 4 am, if she was not already awake. She had read numerous studies on the web about dream recall. Some people have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and pass between them easier. These people have excellent dream recall. Even better is the group of people who go back to sleep after they are awoken in the morning. These dreams experienced during this period are recalled even more vividly. If dreams are truly triggered by events and experiences, Katherine wondered if she was sharing Zoe’s experiences and seeing them in her dreams. Or was it more like Zoe had the ability to dream within Katherine’s consciousness when she was in a dream state? The constant hum of the tires and the mild sway of the bus soon lulled Katherine to sleep.
A secret service agent holding a cup of steaming coffee hesitantly touched Katherine’s shoulder and softly said, “Senator, it is 4 am, time to get up. I have a cup of coffee here.”
Katherine peered at him between squinted eyes and said, “Thank you. Just give me a minute. I am awake.” The guard placed the coffee on the nightstand and left the bedroom. Katherine quizzed her mind, but this morning there was nothing. She laid back down and tried to fall asleep again, but it didn’t work. Soon it was 6 a.m., and she really did have to get up and start her daily ritual.
Katherine read her email as she sipped her coffee. No one brought up yesterday’s events, and that pleased her. Pamela on the other side of the desk reading her email suddenly glanced over to Katherine. “Do you have an official piece of email from the Senate Sergeant of Arms?”
Katherine looked back through her in-box and exclaimed. “Yes, I do.” When she opened it, the message read, “We will be calling you this morning at 8 a.m. Please take our call. Your humbled colleagues.”
Pamela said, “This did come from the Senate, I’m sure it was not really from the Senate Sergeant of Arms, but someone had access to his email. We need to take this call. Let the Secret Service set up a trace on the incoming calls and see who these fans might be?”
The clock’s hands slowly moved as if time was about to grind to a halt, then suddenly a phone rang. It was Ira’s cell phone. Secret Service agents hustled around attaching a tap to it and putting it on a powered speaker device.
Katherine said, “Hello!”
A raspy voice greeted Katherine over the phone’s speaker. “Good Morning, Katherine! It is so nice of you to take our call. My colleagues and I were concerned that your scheduling and security issues might prevent this little chat.” Another voice as equally as raspy interjected, “Katherine, we are five here and the call is untraceable, so we intend to be quite candid with you. I hope you will take what we say seriously and understand that we are very concerned about the noise you have been making about some of our most loyal supporters and your future.”
“Who would these supporters be?” Katherine asked, her controlled voice neutral.
“Senator, I think you know that we cannot divulge names in this conversation. So let’s not waste each other’s time with such foolish questions,” one of the voices replied. “It was so unfortunate about Mr. Payne. Our condolences, but it is somewhat understandable since you have attacked so many patriotic and influential citizens.”
Katherine interjected, “Mr. Payne’s murder was our 9/11, and we will not rest till those who are responsible are punished.”
“Of course, that is admirable of you Katherine’” taunted one of the voices. “But let’s talk about some particular issues, so we can make things easier and safer for everyone. We need you to cease your negative rhetoric about Big Oil and start talking about a long term phasing in of alternative energy. This will give these pillars of our economy time to make the transition without the terrible financial loss your current actions promise.”
“But that would mean we would have to provide military support for Saudi Arabia, Iraq and continue to buy oil from countries like Iran and Venezuela who would like to see us annihilated.” Katherine shot back.
“That is true, but if we radically decrease the oil we buy from these countries, they will either raise our prices or cease selling to us altogether. In either case our industries and economy will starve the same way a piglet does without its momma. In fact, Katherine, an upset momma pig will eat its young, and that is not much different than what we face with these countries selling us oil. We have to continue to buy their oil, plain and simple.”
The deep gravely voice broke in again, “Katherine, you think you are some sort of a savior with all kinds of solutions for what some call our oil addiction. But look at your own state and all the dimwitted assholes with trucks, four wheelers and SUVs. What have you done there in Texas? Your own goddamn state produces more pollution than the next three combined. It’s your own constituents that have perpetuated this problem, if you want to call it a problem.”
Another voice blared from the speaker, “What I think my colleague is trying to make you understand, is that we all keep abreast of the energy situation and as bad as you portray it – it is what most of us find most beneficial to those of us who actually make things happen in this country. Katherine, you know in Rome the peasants could go to the Coliseum and watch the killings for free. You know why the Roman senate did that? That is just a rhetorical question… They did it to keep the peasants content.”
“Today we use TV to keep our masses content and occupied. They are so busy following who is fucking whom that they don’t have time or the inclination to question what really is happening around them. They are like sheep. Make up a law and they will follow it without question. Have some pathetic celebrity speak for us, and we got half the country thinking it’s a revelation from God. Don’t be naïve, Katherine, we make laws and make things happen for those who count, and those who make sure we get elected. The old ‘support your constituents shit’ is just crap for the naive. We need to keep the peasants happy, but just a few crumbs does it, and you can dictate to them what happy is. Do you understand, Katherine?”
“Yes, I understand you,” Katherine replied, “It also makes me ashamed that I am one of you, if in fact you are Senators. And you are right, I am naïve. I never thought I would have colleagues who would be as despicable as you seem to be.”
“Oh my, Katherine, how can you run a country if you’ve got your head in the sand and don’t understand how things really operate?”
“Hell, that is not having your head in the sand,” another voice broke in, “That’s having your head up your ass.” A chorus of laughter joined him.
Ira slammed his hand on the desk and blurted out, “That’s it. We are not going to listen to anymore insults. If you have something to say – say it, or we are going to hang up!”
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The laughter subsided and someone ventured, “Well, you are right. We have things to attend to, so let’s get on with what we contacted you for. We want you to change your rhetoric about Big Oil. You will receive some informational material about oil’s future, and you should study it well and quote from it for now on. We need to get this all turned around, Katherine, or we are going to lose control of some very angry citizens who see you unfortunately as the enemy. These are individuals who are bad luck to those who won’t be their friend. It just seems that bad things start to happen to those people who cross them. They get sad and commit suicide, don’t pay attention and have accidents – bad things like that. Katherine, you don’t want to live like this. Hell, you riding around in that big old bus, you never know when you might expose yourself to one of those random bullets from some crazy redneck hunters, and all kinds of road hazards. But that is the kind of powerful bad luck, we are talking about. Bad luck that even happens to other family members. If I had a sweet little daughter like your Lyndsey, I sure would be more careful who I pissed off.”
“You bastards,” Katherine shouted at the phone. She heard a few chuckles at her outburst and then someone said, “We will call you again, Katherine. Bye!” The phone went dead.
* * * *
The Secret Service was able to trace the call to a home in Oakland California where the occupants were on vacation. There in Oakland, two Secret Service Agents listened to the approaching fire engines while they sat in their car facing the house as flames devoured it.
And Katherine knew that even if evidence was there, enough money had been paid to enough people that nothing would ever come of the investigation.
The next few days Katherine was consumed by a whirlwind of campaign stops at electric co-ops, town hall meetings, green energy groups, solar battery companies, tax reformers and the like. Every morning the same old ritual was repeated, eating a continental breakfast while reading the glut of emails consisting of praise, campaign pledges, and the usual diet of hate mail. And every morning as the miles sped by, Pamela, Katherine and Ira would work at composing responses for questions expected at their next campaign stop. For Katherine the day started even earlier, she would get up at 4 am and then try to go back to sleep, in an attempt to experience another dream of an event that she would live. But her dream theory appeared flawed since no new dream brought her visions of her twin’s actions.
About eleven am on a Wednesday the daily humdrum was replaced with the excitement of visiting her eccentric old friend, Dick Montgomery, a pioneer biodiesel entrepreneur. Ira had developed the friendship in college and the relationship with Montgomery had endured ever since. He had a reputation as a hard man to work with, but Katherine always respected his logic and ability to get things done. Dick Montgomery was tall with that Marlboro man look, minus the cigarette dangling from his lips. He had always fascinated Katherine because he was that type of individual who could teach himself anything.
*****
As the doors of the campaign bus opened, the sounds of classical music mixed with the drone of the crowd met Katherine’s ears. She smiled as Dick Montgomery strutted up to her, and she instinctively embraced him. It had been months, since she had last visited with him and there was much to discuss. “Well, I am delighted that you found my endeavor here interesting enough for you to visit me in this official way. We are one of the leading biodiesel production centers in the country, at least from the standpoint of making it from algae.”
Montgomery gestured to the large covered containers behind him. “What we grow in these vats is the most serious contender to Big Oil’s hold on the economy.”
“Well, I have been briefed quite a bit about biodiesel made from algae from Professor Bob Briggs, but this is the first time I’ve visited a facility that actually produces it.” Senator Laforge said.
Handing Katherine a brochure, Montgomery said, “Let me give you a few numbers about biodiesel and what is currently happening with it. It is all there in that pamphlet, but I want to emphasis some of them personally. There is a lot of hype about biodiesel, but the government has approached it in a way that tells me they want it to fail miserably.”
“Why do you say that?” Pamela pressed Mr. Montgomery.
“Because we would need to produce 140 billion gallons of biodiesel to replace all petroleum-based transportation fuel in the U.S. The problem is we would need about three billion acres of fertile cropland to produce that amount with soybeans, but we only have 434 million acres of cropland in the entire country. So no way will that work. You only get 40 gallons of biodiesel out of an acre of soybeans a year, but biodiesel produced from algae gives you between ten to fifteen thousand gallons per year per acre. And you don’t need to use cropland. The barren dessert or some rocky terrain are just as effective when biodiesel is produced from algae.”
“Why aren’t we using algae to produce biodiesel?” Katherine asked loud enough for the press to hear the question.
“I think members of the government for their own selfish reasons promote solutions that they know will fail so Big Oil will continue to back them for reelection.” Montgomery said, “Or you have a Senate and House full of incompetents. Perhaps a bit of both. The sad thing is people are dying because of their incompetence and misuse of their office. They are not serving the interest of the people of this country, but only their own greedy desires.”
“I understand your frustration, and I hope I will have some success in changing the way we do business,” Katherine said, “Certainly we should remove government subsidies that help the most profitable companies make even more profit.”
“Senator, if we could just get congress out of Big Oil’s pockets, we could replace all petroleum transportation fuels with biodiesel from algae at a cost of $308 billion, which is less than we will spend on blowing up Iraq in a couple years of war.”
Katherine asked, “How much land would it take to create enough algae farms to produce 140 billion gallons of biodiesel?”
“At current yields, Senator, we believe we need a total of fifteen thousand square miles. These farms would be spread across the country in locations like the Salton Sea in the Sonoran desert. The wonderful thing about this solution to our energy needs is that the land we need for these algae farms doesn’t compete with farmland used to grow food crops. We have at least 400 thousand square miles of desert spread across our country. And we have marshlands and many other acceptable sites that could be set aside to build algae farms. So the 15,000 square miles needed is easy to find in areas that do not interfere with other uses,” Mr. Montgomery responded.
Katherine looked at the massive bubble topped transparent vats that spread out before her. She watched a mechanical skimmer in the vat closest to her slowly move through the greenish goop. The slimy globs of green coat the skimmer and leave behind an eddy of greenish opaque liquid that will quickly grow new algae. Things that looked like transparent bags of pea soup hung from hundreds of racks. Her stare did not go unnoticed.
“Those are two different ways to grow the algae. There are other ways, but these are the two, we are experimenting the most with. This Senator, is our country’s energy future. That is if we can get a foot hole in the diesel market, before Big Oil drives diesel prices so high that consumers stop buying diesel vehicles.”
“Do you thing that is a possibility?” Katherine asked.
“If you are asking me about the threat to destroy the diesel market, the answer is yes. Ever since the possibility of diesel being a replacement for gasoline, diesel prices suddenly shot up above the price of gas and stayed there. Big Oil is trying to prevent the distribution of biodiesel in their company’s pumps. They are trying to buy out anyone making biodiesel and then closing the operation. They do not want it to succeed, period.”
Montgomery took a frustrated breath, and released it noisily.
“Algae frightens them because it not only provides a way to cheaply produce biodiesel, but its starches can be used to create et
hanol. The protein refuse from the algae becomes high-grade food for livestock. We are talking about the most common plants on earth that just happen to voraciously consume CO2 like a pig eating slop from a trough. That means it isn’t only a source to produce various fuels, but also a way to mitigate our CO2 problem. Power Plants using coal can feed their carbon dioxide exhaust into these algae nurseries, which devour it and hasten their growth. Besides feeding the algae, it reduces the carbon dioxide emissions by about eighty percent.”
“Some other companies have set up algae farms that clean the coal’s emissions and produce additional fuel for the power plant. This makes it even more cost effective. The coal industry view us as friends. For the coal industry, this has become a profitable way of handling their emission problems.”
Montgomery gestured expressively, “But there is friction. Right now biofuels are getting a bad reputation because the industry is using food crops to produce biodiesel. Corn prices are shooting up along with soybean products. Like I said before, I feel this is a concerted attempt to destroy the public faith in Biodiesel and ethanol.”
“Senator, my company has arrived at a historical moment where we have the potential to make a contribution to society that most of us only dream about. This is the most natural solution to our energy crisis where a miniscule plant captures light and turns it into energy by photosynthesis.”
After an intense tour around the algae farm, they rode their golf carts back to the front gate of the facility to answer questions from supporters and the press. An office trailer was set up near the gate with a deck facing the crowd. The deck was covered with political signs, banners, balloons and a podium. As Katherine’s Secret Service agents helped her up the stairs of the platform, Mr. Montgomery smiled at her and said, “I hope you can take a moment to welcome my son, Jack, back from Iraq.”
