“Been here before?” he asked.
“No, first time, what about you?”
“Last few months, nice place to meet people.” Another lie, but they came easily in a place like this.
“Music’s a little loud,” she said.
“Well, other places it’s a lot worse. You live close?”
“Three blocks north. Got a little studio apartment, subleasing it. Rent control in the building. My stuff gets here in another week.”
“So, you’re not really moved in yet?”
“Right.”
“Well, welcome to New York . . . ?”
“Anne Pretloe.”
“Kirk Maclean.” They shook hands, and he held hers a little longer than necessary so that she’d get a feel for his skin, a necessary precondition to casual affection, which he needed to generate. In another few minutes, they were dancing, which mainly meant bumping into people in the dark. He was turning on the charm, and she was smiling up at his six-foot height. Under other circumstances, this could have developed into something, Kirk thought. But not tonight.
The bar closed after two in the morning, and he walked her out. She was quite drunk now from a total of seven drinks barely diluted by bar peanuts and pretzel nuggets. He’d carefully nursed his three, and eaten a lot of peanuts. “So,” he asked out on the sidewalk, “let me drive you, okay?”
“It’s only three blocks.”
“Annie, it’s late, and this is New York; okay? You need to learn where you can go and where you can’t. Come on,” he concluded, pulling her hand and leading her around the corner. His BMW was parked halfway to Broadway. He gallantly held the door open, shut it behind her, then walked around to get in himself.
“You must do okay,” Anne Pretloe noted, surveying the car.
“Yeah, well, lots of people like to dodge taxes, y’know?” He started the car and moved out onto the cross street, actually in the wrong direction, though she was a little too much in her cups to appreciate that. He turned left on Broadway and spotted the blue van, parked in a quiet spot. Half a block away, he flashed his lights, whereupon he slowed the car, and pushed the button to lower both the driver-side and passenger windows.
“Hey,” he said, “I know this guy.”
“Huh?” Pretloe replied, somewhat confused about where they were and where they were going. It was too late for her to do much in any case.
“Yo, Kirk,” the man in coveralls said, leaning down to the open passenger window.
“Hey, buddy,” Maclean replied, giving a thumbs-up.
The man in coveralls leaned in and produced a small aerosol can from his sleeve. Then he depressed the red plastic button and gave Anne Pretloe a blast of ether right in the face. Her eyes popped open for a second of shock and surprise. She turned to look at Kirk for a long lingering second or so, and then her body went slack.
“Be careful with the drugs, man, she’s got a lot of booze in her.”
“No problem.” The man banged the side of the truck and another man appeared. This one looked up and down the street for a police car, then helped open the passenger door, lifted Anne Pretloe, and carried her limp form through the rear door of the van, where she joined another young woman picked up by another company employee earlier that night. With that, Maclean drove off, letting the night air blow the stink of the ether out of the car as he headed right, onto the West Side Highway and north to the George Washington Bridge. Okay, that made two he’d bagged, and the others should have gotten a total of six more by now. Another three, and they could end this most dangerous part of the operation.
CHAPTER 11
INFRASTRUCTURE
The lawyer made the call, and unsurprisingly found that it developed into a luncheon in a restaurant where a man of forty or so asked a few simple questions, then left before the dessert cart was wheeled up to the table. That ended his involvement with whatever would happen. He paid the check with cash and walked back to his office haunted by the question—what had he done, what might he have started? The answer for both, he told himself forcefully, was that he didn’t know. It was the intellectual equivalent of a shower after a sweaty day’s work, and though ultimately not as satisfying, he was a lawyer, and accustomed to the vicissitudes of life.
His interlocutor left the restaurant and caught the Métro, changing trains three times before settling on the one that ran near his home, close to a park known for the prostitutes who stood about, peddling their multivalued wares for passersby in automobiles. If there were anywhere an indictment of the capitalist system, it was here, he thought, though the tradition went further back than the onset of the current economic system. The women had all the gaiety of serial killers, as they stood there in their abbreviated clothing made to be removed as rapidly as possible, so as to save time. He turned away, and headed to his flat, where, with luck, others would be waiting for him. And luck, it turned out, was with him. One of his guests had even made coffee.
“This is where it has to stop,” Carol Brightling said, even though she knew it wouldn’t.
“Sure, doc,” her guest said, sipping OEOB coffee. “But how the hell do you sell it to him?”
The map was spread on her coffee table: East of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay was a piece of tundra, over a thousand square miles of it, and geologists for British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield—the two companies that had largely exploited the Alaskan North Slope, built the pipeline, and therefore helped cause the Exxon Valdez disaster—had made their public pronouncement. This oil-field, called AARM, was at least double the size of the North Slope. The report, still semiclassified in the industrial sense, had come to the White House a week earlier, with confirming data from the United States Geological Survey, a federal agency tasked to the same sort of work, along with the opinion of the geologists that the field extended farther east, across the Canadian border—and exactly how far it extended they could only guess, because the Canadians had not yet begun their survey. The conclusion of the executive summary posited the possibility that the entire field could rival the one in Saudi Arabia, although it was far harder to transport oil from it—except for the fact, the report went on, that the Trans-Alaska pipeline had already been built, and the new fields would only need a few hundred miles of extension on the existing pipeline, which, the summary concluded arrogantly, had produced a negligible environmental impact.
“Except for that damned tanker incident,” Dr. Brightling observed into her morning coffee. Which had killed thousands of innocent wild birds and hundreds of sea otters, and had sullied several hundred square miles of pristine seacoast.
“This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can’t allow the oil companies to go in there!”
“I know, Kevin,” the President’s Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod—
“The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost—there’s nothing more delicate on the face of the planet,” the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. “We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children—we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don’t care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place.”
“Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn’t force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally.”
“That’s horseshit, and you know it, Carol.” Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful la
nd on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself—and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn’t want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn’t reflect on the fact that he’d flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn’t know and didn’t care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President’s Science Advisor did understand, and that she did work in the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.
“Carol, I want you to walk across the street, go into the Oval Office, and tell him what has to be done.”
“Kevin, it’s not that easy.”
“Why the hell not? He’s not that much of a dunce, is he?”
“He occasionally has a different point of view, and the oil companies are being very clever about this. Look at their proposal,” she said, tapping the report on the table. “They promise to indemnify the entire operation, to put up a billion-dollar bond in case something goes wrong—for God’s sake, Kevin, they even offer to let the Sierra Club be on the council to oversee their environmental protection programs!”
“And be outnumbered there by their own cronies! Be damned if they’ll co-opt us that way!” Mayflower snarled. “I won’t let anyone from my office be a part of this rape, and that’s final!”
“And if you say that out loud, the oil companies will call you an extremist, and marginalize the whole environmental movement—and you can’t afford to let that happen, Kevin!”
“The hell I can’t. You have to stand and fight for something, Carol. Here is where we stand and fight. We let those polluting bastards drill oil in Prudhoe Bay, but that’s it!”
“What will the rest of your board say about this?” Dr. Brightling asked.
“They’ll goddamned well say what I goddamned tell them to say!”
“No, Kevin, they won’t.” Carol leaned back and rubbed her eyes. She’d read the entire report the previous night, and the sad truth was that the oil companies had gotten pretty damned smart about dealing with environmental issues. It was plain business sense. The Exxon Valdez had cost them a ton of money, in addition to the bad public relations. Three pages had been devoted to the changes in tanker safety procedures. Now, ships leaving the huge oil terminal at Valdez, Alaska, were escorted by tugs all the way to the open sea. A total of twenty pollution-control vessels were on constant standby, with a further number in reserve. The navigation systems on every tanker had been upgraded to beyond what nuclear submarines carried; the navigation officers were compelled to test their skills on simulators every six months. It was all hugely expensive, but far less so than another serious spill. A series of commercials proclaimed all of these facts on television—worst of all, the high-end intellectual cable/satellite channels, History, Learning, Discovery, and A&E, for whom the oil companies were also sponsoring new shows on wildlife in the Arctic, never touched upon what the companies did, but there were plenty of pictures of caribou and other animals traversing under the elevated portions of the pipeline. They were getting their message out very skillfully indeed, even to members of the Sierra Club’s board, Brightling thought.
What they didn’t say, and what both she and Mayflower knew, was that once the oil was safely out of the ground, safely transported through the monster pipeline, safely conveyed over the sea by the newly double-hulled supertankers, then it just became more air pollution, out the tailpipes of cars and trucks and the smokestacks of electric-power stations. So it really was all a joke, and that joke included Kevin’s bitching about hurting the permafrost. At most, what would be seriously damaged? Ten or twenty acres, probably, and the oil companies would make more commercials about how they cleaned that up, as though the polluting end-use of the oil was not an issue at all!
Because to the ignorant Joe Sixpack, sitting there in front of his TV, watching football games, it wasn’t an issue, was it? There were a hundred or so million motor vehicles in the United States, and a larger number across the world, and they all polluted the air, and that was the real issue. How did one stop that from poisoning the planet?
Well, there were ways, weren’t there? she reflected.
“Kevin, I’ll do my best,” she promised. “I will advise the President not to support this bill.”
The bill was S-1768, submitted and sponsored by both Alaskan senators, whom the oil companies had bought long before, which would authorize the Department of the Interior to auction off the drilling rights into the AAMP area. The money involved would be huge, both for the federal government and for the state of Alaska. Even the Native American tribes up there would look the other way. The money they got from the oil would buy them lots of snowmobiles with which to chase and shoot the caribou, and motorboats to fish and kill the odd whale, which was part of their racial and cultural heritage. Snowmobiles weren’t needed in the modern age of plastic-wrapped USDA Choice Iowa beef, but the Native Americans clung to the end-result of their traditions, if not the traditional methods. It was a depressing truth that even these people had set aside their history and their very gods in homage to a new age of mechanistic worship to oil and its products. Both the Alaskan senators would bring down tribal elders to testify in favor of S-1768, and they would be listened to, since who more than Native Americans knew what it was like to live in harmony with nature? Only today they did it with Ski-Do snowmobiles, Johnson outboard motors, and Winchester hunting rifles. . . . She sighed at the madness of it all.
“Will he listen?” Mayflower asked, getting back to business. Even environmentalists had to live in the real world of politics.
“Honest answer? Probably not,” Carol Brightling admitted quietly.
“You know,” Kevin observed in a low voice. “There are times when I understand John Wilkes Booth.”
“Kevin, I didn’t hear that, and you didn’t say it. Not here. Not in this building.”
“Damn it, Carol, you know how I feel. And you know I’m right. How the hell are we supposed to protect the planet if the idiots who run the world don’t give a fuck about the world we live on?”
“What are you going to say? That Homo sapiens is a parasitic species that hurts the earth and the ecosystem? That we don’t belong here?”
“A lot of us don’t, and that’s a fact.”
“Maybe so, but what do you do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Mayflower had to admit.
Some of us know, Carol Brightling thought, looking up into his sad eyes. But are you ready for that one, Kevin? She thought he was, but recruitment was always a troublesome step, even for true believers like Kevin Mayflower. . . .
Construction was about ninety percent complete. There were twenty whole sections around the site, twenty one-square-mile blocks of land, mainly flat, a slight roll to it, with a four-lane paved road leading north to Interstate 70, which was still covered with trucks heading in and out. The last two miles of the highway were set up without a median strip, the rebarred concrete paving a full thirty inches deep, as though it had been built to land airplanes on, the construction superintendent had observed, big ones, even. The road led into an equally sturdy and massively wide parking lot. He didn’t care enough about it, though, to mention it at his country club in Salina.
The buildings were fairly pedestrian, except for their environmental-control systems, which were so st
ate-of-the-art that the Navy could have used them on nuclear submarines. It was all part of the company’s leading-edge posture on its systems, the chairman had told him on his last visit. They had a tradition of doing everything ahead of everyone else, and besides, the nature of their work required careful attention to every little squiggly detail. You didn’t make vaccines in the open. But even the worker housing and offices had the same systems, the super thought, and that was odd, to say the least. Every building had a basement—it was a sensible thing to build here in tornado country, but few ever bothered with it, partly out of sloth, and partly from the fact that the ground was not all that easy to dig here, the famous Kansas hardpan whose top was scratched to grow wheat. That was the other interesting part. They’d continue to farm most of the area. The winter wheat was already in, and two miles away was the farm-operations center, down its own over-wide two-lane road, outfitted with the newest and best farm equipment he’d ever seen, even in an area where growing wheat was essentially an art form.
Three hundred million dollars, total, was going into this project. The buildings were huge—you could convert them to living space for five or six thousand people, the super thought. The office building had classrooms for continuing education. The site had its own power plant, along with a huge fuel-tank farm, whose tanks were semiburied in deference to local weather conditions, and connected by their own pipeline to a filling point just off I-70 at Kanopolis. Despite the local lake, there were no fewer than ten twelve-inch artesian wells drilled well down into—and past—the Cherokee Aquifer that local farmers used to water their fields. Hell, that was enough water to supply a small city. But the company was footing the bill, and he was getting his usual percentage of the total job cost to bring it in on time, with a substantial bonus for coming in early, which he was determined to earn. It had been twenty-five months to this point, with two more to go. And he’d make it, the super thought, and he’d get that bonus, after which he’d take the family to Disney World for two weeks of Mickey and golf on the wonderful courses there, which he needed in order to get his game back in shape after two years of seven-day weeks.