The Grid (7 page)

- CHAPTER FIFTEEN -

Dylan’s hospital room is really a suite, a large living area plus a bedroom, two baths, and a small kitchenette.

Everything is tastefully decorated like at a nice, midlevel hotel.

Not the Ritz, but not that place outside of Waco where Sarah had arranged to meet RockyRoad.

Two people are milling about in the sitting area when Sarah storms in.

Dylan’s nanny, a Hispanic woman in her fifties named Rosa. And the head of Sarah’s home security team, a lanky ex-Marine in his early thirties.

The Marine, good-looking in a muscle-car kind of way, oozes masculinity and confidence. He is a distraction, and Sarah can’t have any of those at the moment. So she marches over to him and says, “Get out. Now.”

The Marine gives her a slow stare. He nods once and leaves.

Sarah strides into the bedroom, Rosa trailing in her wake.

Dylan is asleep, IV in her arm, dark hair sprayed across the pillow.

She appears tiny, a wisp of flesh, matchstick bones. Pale skin, tendrils of blue veins visible under the surface of her cheeks. Beneath the bedcovers, one leg appears larger than the other, swaddled in a bandage or a brace.

“W-what happened?” Sarah’s breath catches in her throat.

The pain she feels looking at her offspring’s injury surprises her. The mother-child bond exists between the two but in a curious, nonemotional way.

“She’s asleep now,” the nanny says.

“I can see that. But what happened to her?”

“They gave her a sedative. She was in pain.”

“Rosa.” Sarah grasps the older woman’s arm. “Tell me why my daughter is in the hospital.”

“The playroom upstairs.” Rosa pulls free. “She fell.”

The lump in Sarah’s throat grows larger. She sits by the bed, takes Dylan’s hand in her own. The child’s flesh is cool, muscles slack.

“She was playing with that horse.” The nanny’s voice lowers. “You know how she is.”

“That horse”
is an enormous stuffed toy, a life-sized Shetland pony. The toy’s place of honor is at the top of the stairs, standing guard over all who try to enter Miss Dylan’s domain.

“She was trying to ride him,” Rosa says. “I told her to get off.”

Sarah stares at her daughter, and the memories of trying to get pregnant wash over her.

The fertility specialists, so many tests and procedures. Invasive and painful, humiliating. Endless efforts to make her body function like it should. Like a woman’s.

Sarah’s skin grows cold, her vision tunnels. “The doctors. What have they said?”

“I called your husband.” Rosa crosses her arms.

The nanny is passive-aggressive in a way that borders on insubordinate. She does not answer directly. She prefers to shift the topic toward an area of her own choosing or respond with a question that she deems more appropriate.

Sarah turns toward the woman, her skin hot now, her breathing shallow.

Rosa takes a step back. “When I couldn’t reach you. What else was I supposed to do?”

The older woman has a point, though one that will never be admitted.

Sarah’s schedule is full. She doesn’t devote the time to Dylan that she should.

Shopping, planning sessions for the next charity ball—long, boozy lunches with women she can barely stand. Then there are her extracurricular activities: the horndogs, a time-intensive series of events that require a lot of planning to be carried out successfully.

“He is coming back from New York,” Rosa says. “He was very busy, he told me. But he is coming.”

Her husband is an empire builder much like her grandfather, only his tools are legal briefs and leveraged buyouts, not sawed-off shotguns and hit men imported from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.

He is always busy, Sarah thinks, always on the move. His position demands long hours, dinners with investment bankers, breakfasts with lawyers. But precious little time for his family.

“He is a good man.” Rosa juts her chin out. “He will be here.”

The nanny’s message is clear. You should be a better wife.

Sarah’s relationship with her husband is complicated at best, little more than a marriage of convenience at this point, a veneer of respectability so that both of them can lead their separate lives.

She’d loved him at one time, attracted to his drive and ambition, the very characteristics that forced them apart now.

Dylan stirs in her sleep.

“Her leg,” Rosa says. “It’s fractured in three places.” A pause. “I am sorry.”

Sarah pulls out her phone, scrolls through the contacts, looking for the name of the hospital’s CEO, a man she knows from the country club.

“They mentioned something about surgery,” Rosa says. “That’s what I heard.”

Sarah looks up from the phone. “Surgery? On a four-year-old?”

Rosa trembles in the corner. Before she can respond, the door to the suite swings open and three people enter.

Two are medical professionals, wearing scrubs and lab coats. A nurse and a man in his late forties, the latter with a stethoscope hanging around his neck. The third is the CEO of the hospital, a heavyset man in his fifties, wearing an Armani suit.

The man in the lab coat is a doctor, the head of pediatric orthopedics. While the nurse checks Dylan’s vital signs, the doctor and the CEO usher Sarah into the living area, where the three of them sit around a coffee table like they’re at somebody’s house waiting for drinks to be served.

The orthopedist’s words run together—anesthetic protocols for young children, damage to the growth plates, rehab options.

Sarah sits very still, trying to maintain her composure, to process it all.

The CEO assures her that everything that can be done will be done to see that little Dylan has the best care available. Sarah can practically see the dollar signs floating over his head.

Sarah nods and asks questions where appropriate, seething on the inside. Her daughter, her flesh, should not have to undergo this assault. She is too young, too innocent.

The desire to crawl into the bed with Dylan and hold her is overwhelming. After a moment, however, another desire surpasses that urge—the craving to get online and set up an anonymous meeting, something closer to home this time.

Right now, that would be like a cup of water in the desert.

The physician drones on, and Sarah wonders why neither man has so much as looked askance at her clothes, the ratty raincoat and the Dallas Cowboys ball cap.

It’s because I am rich,
she thinks.
Rich and powerful. And the regular rules don’t apply.

She begins to weep.

- CHAPTER SIXTEEN -

Our convoy left the damaged telco station and drove the few hundred yards back to the power plant itself, a facility called the Black Valley Generating Station.

Two guards wearing Sudamento uniforms waved us through the gate. The guards had pistols on their hips but gave the appearance of hourly security personnel the world over: pudgy and tired-looking, a mite slow in the thinking department. I imagined they were very effective at checking credentials and not much else.

We parked by a low brick building that served as the main office for the plant, several hundred yards in front of the two towers and their smokestacks.

Price and Whitney exited their vehicles, took up position at the front of my car, waiting.

I got out as well, and the enormity of the place became apparent. Everywhere you looked, there were power lines and storage tanks and about a billion miles of metal piping, everything clustered around the two towers.

Whitney pointed her index finger at me like a gun. “Cantrell, you and me are gonna take a ride. Price, you stay here.”

Price shook his head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I need to explain to Jon—”

Whitney aimed the gun finger at him. “I’m not asking. I’m telling.”

Price said, “Oh, c’mon, Whit. Seriously?”

“Round up those personnel files I asked for.” She pointed to the office. “We’ll be back in a little while.”

Trying not to laugh, I shrugged at Price, waved good-bye, and followed Whitney Holbrook to one of the black Suburbans. She got behind the wheel; I hopped into the passenger side. The doors slammed shut, and it was just the two of us. Her security team stayed behind.

“How come you’re so mean to Price?” I asked. “Did he give you chlamydia or something?”

She cranked the AC to high. “Your file doesn’t adequately communicate how big of an ass-munch you are.”

“Don’t take anything he does personally,” I said. “Price is the master of the hump-and-dump. If there were an Olympic slutbag team, he’d be captain.”

“For the record, I am not sleeping with Price Anderson.” Whitney pointed the SUV down a gravel road that cut across the site and headed toward the rear of the property.

“Not sleeping with him
now
?”

“Why do you care who I’m bumping uglies with, Cantrell?” Her fingers were white on the steering wheel. “You looking to hook up? Maybe brag to all your friends about how you nailed a Southie?”

I didn’t reply.

“I thought you had a wife and a kid at home.” She slapped her forehead. “Oh, that’s right. Your old lady hit the road right after the baby was born. Went off the reservation, total radio silence.”

“We weren’t married. That should be in my records, too.”

She slowed to drive through an open gate. “And you’re not even sure the kid is yours, are you?”

I didn’t take the bait. A tiny current of anger pulsated in my stomach, quickly squelched.

The child was mine. The color of her eyes, the shape of her mouth. No DNA test was needed.

Two months after the birth of our daughter, Piper had disappeared with the infant. The stress of the pregnancy and the hormonal cocktail flowing through her veins had exacerbated her normal state of mind—a base level of paranoia, which manifested itself in a burning desire to remain hidden from view.

I had no idea where she was. I searched for her when time permitted, using the resources available to a county sheriff. But my efforts to date were futile, as Piper was a master at staying out of sight. She knew how to reach me, though, and I felt fairly certain she’d return in due time. Fairly.

I missed my daughter, though, missed her more than words could express.

No one spoke for a few hundred yards.

Then: “Sorry,” Whitney said. “The life of a cop isn’t very good for relationships, is it?”

More silence. We passed a series of ball-shaped storage tanks about twenty feet in diameter, and then several massive mounds of coal, each as tall as a two-story house.

“The actual attack occurred at a substation just outside the plant,” she said. “Whoever was responsible knew exactly what to hit.”

“You mean like taking out the telco boxes?” I said.

“That, and more.” She stopped at the rear gate.

“How big is Black Valley?” I asked. “Electricity-wise.”

“Both boilers going, the plant generates fourteen hundred megawatts, enough to power about a half-million homes.”

“That’s a lot of juice,” I said. “Considering I saw only two security guards.”

“A single plant is not that important to the grid. Sudamento has nineteen more in Texas alone. Plus the other providers. All of whom are feeding into the grid.”

She picked up a remote control from the console, clicked a button. The gate swung open.

“You take one plant out,” she said, “even a big one, and the others pick up the slack.”

“So why did half of Central Texas go dark today?”

The gate led to a dirt road that cut through a pasture that was not part of Black Valley, outside the chain-link fence. A series of high-voltage transmission lines ran on a parallel course with the dirt road, leaving the plant.

Whitney drove through the gate. In the distance, another facility appeared.

This one was smaller, maybe an acre, white gravel surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence.

“That’s a substation,” Whitney said. “Electricity from several different plants goes there and is increased to seventy-two hundred volts so it can be transmitted for a long distance.”

The substation had no buildings for use by humans, just rows and rows of metal structures, beige, each about the size of refrigerators, and an equal number or more of gray canisters. The canisters looked like two smooth fifty-five-gallon drums stacked on each other. Ceramic insulators and large-gauge wires sprouted from everything.

I sniffed as a foul odor filled the interior of the SUV.

“Five plants total send their juice here,” she said. “Then the power is dispersed to population centers.”

The smell got worse, the acrid stench of a house fire, things that weren’t meant to be burned. Combusted insulation, scorched metal, burnt plastic. Noxious, poisonous smelling.

“Those are transformers.” Whitney pointed to the gray canisters. “They increase the voltage. There’s another series of substations at the end of the line that steps the volts back down so the power is useable.”

On one side of the substation, about a half-dozen utility trucks were parked. Men in hard hats and work boots scurried around one of the larger transformers. The trucks all had the Sudamento logo on their doors.

“If a substation goes down,” she said, “especially one like this where several streams meet, then you cut the power to a lot of people.”

I got out of the Suburban, walked to the edge of the fence, ignoring the heat. Whitney followed.

The gravel around the transformers closest to the edge of the property line was stained a dark brown. The stench of burnt chemicals was overpowering.

“The transformers are oil-cooled,” she said. “That’s what you’re smelling.”

“So what exactly happened?”

“They knew which ones to take out—the units that serviced the entire substation.”

“Just like the telco boxes,” I said. “Destroy the right transformers and everything downstream goes dark.”

She nodded.

“Not to mention the juice from Black Valley has nowhere to go, and the plant doesn’t know until it’s too late because the phone lines are down.”

“Right again,” she said. “The juice backs up, and a couple of million volts go the wrong way, frying everything they hit.”

“How bad’s the damage at the plant itself?”

“Don’t know yet. Worst case is Black Valley is offline for a month if the turbines are fried.”

“What about the other plants, the ones that fed into this substation?”

“They’re not so bad,” she said. “They’re down for a couple of days, tops.”

I did some rough calculations in my head. Five hundred thousand homes with an average electrical bill of one hundred dollars per month. Say the wholesale value of the electricity was only fifty bucks. That was twenty-five million dollars in lost revenue from Black Valley alone.

Whitney seemed to read my mind. “A lot of money, isn’t it?”

“So how did they do it?”

She held up a small plastic bag. A spent rifle cartridge was nestled at the bottom. With her other hand, she pointed to the horizon.

About a hundred yards outside the perimeter of the substation was a low tree-lined ridge.

“A sniper,” she said. “These transformers are not exactly a hard target to hit. Like shooting a cow on the other side of the field.”

“It’s that easy?” I asked. “Half of Central Texas goes dark because of a couple of guys with rifles?”

She nodded. “Guys who know what they’re doing, yeah.”

“So who pulled the trigger?”

“We’re spinning it as a couple of rednecks with deer rifles,” she said. “You know, Bubbas will be Bubbas.”

I didn’t reply. I got the feeling that there was more to come vis-à-vis the Bubbas.

“Long term that’s gonna be a hard sell,” she said.

“How come?”

“This is the part where I remind you of the paperwork you signed when you were a federal agent, the fine print regarding the penalties for releasing classified information.”

“Duly noted.”

She stared at the ridgeline.

The trees rustled in the afternoon breeze. A cattle egret glided over the pasture, a flash of white in an otherwise empty sky.

“The redneck angle won’t work for long,” she said. “Because we caught one.”

I stopped looking at the ridge. Turned, stared at her.

“A Chinese guy,” she said.

I let out a long, slow breath.

“He had a copy of the Koran in his pocket.”

A Muslim extremist in the heartland. Middle America would never feel safe again.

“Have you ID’d him yet?”

She shook her head.

“Who knows about this?”

“Counting you? About ten people.”

“Where is he?” I said. “Have you interrogated him yet?”

“He’s at a military hospital.” Whitney headed back to the SUV. “He’s about to die.”