“Listen, if you’re determined to go, let me drive you. Certainly there’s something I can do to help in there too.”
An hour later, Cardinal Bruce and Bishop Tom were on the Hutchinson River Parkway and getting close. They could see smoke up ahead in the car lights. This side of the freeway was empty; the other side, jammed.
WHOOSH!
Someone in the lane next to us going the opposite direction? “Can you believe — ?” the Cardinal started.
BAM!
Their heads knocked back against the headrests. The car twisted on an icy patch. Someone had hit their rear bumper!
By some miracle O’Day cut the wheels into the skid and got the car straightened out again.
The two clerics tried to see who had hit them — O’Day in the rearview, O’Shaughnessy twisting in his seat — as a second SLAM! — a much harder one this time — took them completely out of control. Spinning them around, right across all four lanes — straight at the guardrail.
They were wearing their seat belts, snuggly fastened, and when the rear bumper hit going backwards, the airbags went off just like they were supposed to.
“Are you okay?” Bishop Tom coughed to his mentor in a voice muffled by airbag plastic.
Before O’Shaughnessy could answer, the doors were wrenched open.
“Ahhh — somebody to help us,” mumbled the Cardinal.
Still disoriented by the shock of the collision it was a total surprise when something stabbed him in the neck. It was a thing he would not remember later.
Judy’s Missing Visitors
From the kitchen door back of the house, Everon followed the winding concrete walkway in the moonlight. A decent breeze was blowing. Good, he thought. We’ll need it.
Even so, the blades of a dozen huge wind turbines whipping overhead couldn’t produce as much power as the panels did during the day. At night they ran half the line off a giant bank of batteries, sometimes even a diesel generator. The night crew was necessarily smaller.
Not tonight.
Forty yards out from the east side of the runway, the flat-topped red-brick building began, running hundreds of feet into the distance. Wide flood beams chased darkness from its outside walls. A sign along the top of the building’s corner in tall dark-green letters said:
Everon caught a “Yip! Yip!” A dark shape wiggled its butt. He reached down to pet the Australian shepherd. Everyone loved Happy, Two-State’s shop dog. Happy followed Everon inside.
The small dimly lit reception area was empty. But in the brightly lit offices behind, Everon saw the slim, auburn-haired woman in her fifties peering into a desktop monitor. Her tired eyes shot to him as he walked over.
“Ohh, E!”
“Thanks for staying so late, Jude! I should have married you ten years ago.”
“Yes, you should have, but Jed got me first.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Franklin told me — I feel horrible about Cynthia and Steve.”
He gave her a brief nod. “I’d like to kill somebody. But I don’t know who.” He forced the terrible feeling down and away. “Couldn’t get out here any sooner. We brought a bunch of people back with us. Getting them settled, then the President was on. Did you lose anyone, Judy?”
She shook her head. “Fortunately I don’t know anybody in New York or Virginia Beach. Some of our line people weren’t so lucky.”
Everon let out a blast of air. “So what’s going on?”
“That ridiculous speech of Wall’s,” she began. “Shutting down the nuclear power plants seem strange to you, E?”
“Hell yes. But I was asking about our system.”
“Oh — uh — 2 p.m. output was 88 percent. Nick’s handling some adjustments. He and Right want to talk with you about demand shortages caused by the domino effect across the country.”
“Hmm. And the new panel line?”
“A few issues, Right says he’s got it under control.”
Everon frowned. “Where is Right?”
“Out by the laminators. But look, E, we have to do something about our cash problem quick. The bank isn’t clearing our checks.”
“What!”
“They say the whole interbank system is down. It’s caused by the East Coast banks. Our guy says they’re worried they’re going to be stuck holding a bunch of uncleared wire transfers. They have too much risk. I told him we’ve got payroll in three days!”
“Well, I’ve got some cash stashed in my office safe. We should make it through this week.”
“That’ll help but they better get it sorted out after that or we’re in trouble.”
Having actual cash available to pay employees or suppliers in an emergency had always been a long-term policy of his stepfather at the mine. Everon had learned to follow the same policy in his own company.
“Don’t worry about it, Jude. Let me go talk to Nick and Right. Call up any of our day people who’ll come in tonight. Tell them to see Right. Then go home. I’ll see you tomorrow early. We’re starting the new line.”
“Tonight?”
“Have to.”
“Okay,” she said hesitantly, shaking her head. “Glad you’re back, boss. Really sorry about Cyn.” She moved to pick up the phone. “Oh! Those two guys out front have been waiting half an hour.”
“What two guys?”
“In reception. Aren’t they?”
He followed her up front. “They said it was urgent!” She said. “They said they weren’t going anywhere until — ”
The reception area was empty. “That’s odd.”
She pushed through the front door. Stuck her head outside.
“Their car’s still here — I think. That white Taurus. The only one I didn’t recognize last time I went out for a smoke.” An habitual near chain smoker, Judy knew Everon didn’t like it and stubbornly took every opportunity to remind him. “I think they’ve got something to do with one of our casino customers.”
Everon gave her a smile. “Probably wanted to take a look around while they waited. Just like all our other looky-loos. I’ll handle it.”
He took the hallway through double doors sporting a sign in bold green letters: PRODUCTION.
The Line
As he made his way between two huge rolls of plastic, two voices argued in Everon’s head: Hunt’s counting on you — you have to go — you gave your word — thousands of people have no power!
And: How the hell did I let Hunt talk me into this?
He slid a hand along the side of the elevated metal boxes.
The right side was quiet but his left hand picked up a familiar vibration. That line was running.
He passed a window in one of the boxes and glanced in at the continuous web of plastic sheet feeding into the deposition chamber.
The panel lines were long elevated tubes, a series of bolted-together four-foot-square box sections. The tubes reached out into the distance, half a football field long. Down the alley in between, Judy’s two visitors were not in sight.
What the hell am I doing, traipsing back to Pennsylvania? When the new line’s ready to go?
He quickly pulled his hand away as his fingertips became hot. There was no window into this chamber. Inside at 400 degrees Celsius, the high-temperature plastic was coated with a thin layer of metal only a third the thickness of a red blood cell — what Everon and his two confidants called the secret chicken recipe. He’d applied for no patents. Only two other living people completely understood the chemical beam part of the secret they’d never shared with anybody.
Much of what he’d accomplished owed a lot to his family. The raw material was leftover zinc and other waste bought and processed from the family’s gypsum mine. And the process of building the company had begun only when his mother, Seane, gave him his father’s notebook.
In a hobby shack, a tiny R&D lab he’d built right here on his stepfather’s land, Everon hired a physical chemist he’d met fifteen years earlier flying helicopters out to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexic
o. Four years of intense experimentation. This system — and the secret chicken recipe — was the result.
As he walked, he trailed the flat of a hand along the metal side of the box tunnel on his right. Still cold. But ready to start! Dammit, Everon swallowed. You’re not backing out on your word! You’ve got to go back there! Hunt’s counting on you! You’ll just have to move things up!
A quarter of Two-State’s profits he still put back into R&D, to make the panels more efficient: this year they’d reached 24 percent — best in the market — for every 1,000 watts of sunlight that hit the earth, the panels pumped out 240 watts of electricity. And the existing line was way faster these days too. Nine years ago they’d produced only twelve thousand panels. This year Everon hoped to reach a million!
Each year they cut production costs, and each year he dropped his selling price. No one outside Everon’s inner core knew that producing a single solar panel now cost less than a car’s oil change.
And tonight Two-State Solar would have two lines!
Dammit!
He walked by another window, where the machines covered the metalized plastic with its protective top layer.
Flying back East is a crackpot idea. Fill Hunt’s big Gulfstream — who knows what shape its in after all that turbulence — with some of our best guys? Fly them all to Pennsylvania? For how long? How am I supposed to keep things here going like that? And where the hell am I going to pull the people?
Though they were making a ton of money on the panels they sold, soon he wouldn’t sell them at all. Two-State was now its own best customer.
They’d begun three years ago, running the factory’s lights as they transferred more panels into their own solar farm out back. Pretty soon they’d been able to power the electric forklift chargers. Then the motors that drove the line belts. Eventually even the tunnel’s deposition furnace was run off power the solar farm generated.
Whatever electricity was left over he sold to four big casinos on the Vegas strip, and a few old personal friends.
A couple years after they’d got the first line running, Right Deters, his shop foreman, began to worry they were putting all their panels in one basket. Everon looked toward Arizona and bought a bunch of desert southeast of Phoenix at a ridiculous price. He began sending panels to a second solar farm down there. What power they made in Arizona they sold directly onto the U.S. electric grid.
Everon changed the company name from Spring Valley Solar to Two-State. Nobody but Right and his chief engineer Nick Zavel knew the new name was actually a play on words related to the secret chicken recipe.
Two years later they began erecting the big wind units so they could produce power at night. Now a third of their power came from the wind turbines. If only we could find a decent battery somewhere.
He brushed fingers along the silent boxes on his right. Ready to roll!
But the pain came back. He could see Cynthia getting into that cab when she left him at Kennedy. Imagine her arriving at their apartment on Lexington. Kissing Melissa. Getting into bed with Steve. Flames blasting through their apartment . . . Who the fuck could have set off a thing like this? If only . . . if only you could have taken them on the jet with you!
Everon couldn’t think about it.
Unless he set it aside, for now, he wouldn’t be able to function. Tomorrow morning, Cynthia’s funeral will have to be enough. He could hear loud voices up ahead. He walked faster. Something’s wrong!
The sounds of anger grew louder. Arguing?
One of the voices belonged to Right. He broke into a run.
Yelling? Right never yells at anybody!
Exiting the machine, the blade chopped strips of holographic color into four-foot rectangles of nearly finished panels. The robotic arm welded on wiring harnesses. And angry voices, shouting off to the left somewhere! Another arm stacking panels onto pallets. The conveyor belt moving pallets into shipping. Another voice still louder — someone yelling at Right!
Everon ran full out.
Irrational Power
Everon ran out from between the stacks of solar panels to find Nick Zavel and Right Deters faced off against a stout guy with a bulbous, twisted mass of red-veined nose, and a man who wore a brown suit as if his entire body had been pressed in a cleaner’s steamer. No chest. No butt. Just brown fabric that hung straight down, completely flat from shoulders to the exposed tips of his shoes.
Right had a trickle of blood at the left corner of his mouth.
“What’s going on here?” the soft voice, Everon’s only hint of anger. A few of the night-shift guys were gathering. The factory’s night security guard appeared to be missing. “Where’s Charlie?” Everon asked.
“Are you Student?” the fat man answered back. His hand reached into the pocket of his shiny black jacket, pulled out a short-barreled revolver and held it down along his right side.
His thin associate put out a restraining hand. “No need for that, Manny.”
“We’ll see.” Fat Manny slid the gun out of sight around back of his leg but didn’t put it away.
Brown Suit slid a document from a manila folder. “Mr. Student? We’ll be needing your signature on this.” The thin man was very smooth — perhaps because he was so still. Almost as if he didn’t breathe. He held out a single white sheet of paper and a pen.
Everon glanced at the blood in the corner of Right’s mouth. “Who hit my plant manager?”
“He was mouthing off,” Manny tossed back, twitching the revolver.
“Right? Mouthing off?” Everon threw a doubtful frown in Right’s direction. Right’s saggy hound dog eyes stared back. Right would be sixty this year — not exactly a paragon of fitness, his slouchy posture and slight paunch, his excessively cautious nature, were about as offensive as a bowl of cherry Jell-O. Right Deters was the mildest man Everon had ever known.
Right said, “I was just trying to explain that we couldn’t halt anything until I talked to you, that we have to maintain constant temperatures on the stainless steel deposition chambers, E.”
“See, there he goes again,” Manny said, becoming irritated. “Talking down to us.”
Everon, in his own way, was pretty good at reading people and situations, almost as good as Franklin . . . Right may be the one with the bloody lip, but the big guy with the gun looks more nervous than anybody.
More of Everon’s night crew filtered into the area.
“Based on a letta received from you,” Brown Suit said in a smooth r-less Boston accent, “the transmission company has informed some of the casinos they have to reduce their electricity usage.”
Everon gritted his teeth and studied the man. “So you represent these casino customers of mine?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Everon huffed doubtfully.
“You ain’t cuttin’ nothin’,” the fat man said.
“We’ve already got some of our exterior light banks shut off,” Brown Suit explained. “And too many of our slot machines shut off as it is. The casino business is surging. Gamblers are coming in from all over the country. President Wall’s nuke shutdown thing isn’t helping, but the local power company is saying they have to cut us back,” he waved a hand at the factory. “Ultimately because of you.”
Like the two guys Everon had brought back on the plane who planned to stay in Las Vegas, apparently the bomb made gambling even more attractive. Why not? It’s the end of the world, why not go out with a bang? What better place than Vegas?
Now he understood. Three thousand miles away, this is being caused by Hunt’s company and the other East-Coast generators that are down. One big domino effect. Short on power, East Coast goes after Midwest who pass the shortage onward — ’til it hits us. Las Vegas hasn’t got what it needs, so the casinos send out these guys.
“Our power cutback is only for sixty days,” Everon said. “That’s how long it will take us to assemble, erect and connect enough additional panels, and to put up new wind turbines to produce the
electricity we require to power the new line. Once we’ve made up the deficit, we’ll have even more power available for you.”
Brown Suit suddenly wasn’t still or smooth anymore — his brown trousers began to rock below the knees. His shoulders dodged around in tiny circles. “You expect us to turn off lights? The slot machines —”
“Unless you can find another source, some other power producer willing to sell what you need, or until the casinos can put up their own solar panels somewhere, if they can buy some. Bottom line, it’s in our contract.”
“See —” Fat Manny started.
Brown Suit interrupted, “Just like you, the main power company’s production’s booked out a year in advance.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Or I would be, if your goon hadn’t hit my factory manager in the mouth.”
Fat Manny’s gun hand tightened.
“This is simply not acceptable,” Brown Suit said.
“Just shut down those ovens or whatever they are,” the fat man said. “Until this juice thing is over with.”
“And how about next month when you want even more juice?” Everon asked. “Without the lines running I can’t build any more panels. Our power output would be frozen right where it is now.”
Before Everon could react, the fat man reached over and slapped a palm against the big red EMERGENCY button on the end of the production line. A crunching sound echoed from somewhere. A screeching sound pierced the air, cutting through the vast building. The robotic arms froze in place, the main belt skidded to a halt.
“Shit!” Nick said. “Emergency shutdown! That’s going to cost us hours! Dozens of damaged panels we’ll have to pull, cleaning out the machines —”
“Well, now I guess we got power to spare!” grinned Manny.
Every worker looked in shock at the thug. Even Brown Suit was surprised. “Real smart!” Everon said.
“So what!” Manny shot back. “You won’t be needin’ ’em for a while.”
Search For Reason (State Of Reason Mystery, Book 2) Page 5
