Out of Time

by David Klass

  “That’s why you should move to Texas,” the affable clerk told him.

  At a secondhand clothing store in a tough neighborhood of northeast Dallas, Green Man picked up some heavy-duty cotton work dungarees and several black T-shirts. He tried them on in the store’s tiny dressing room, and when he glanced in the mirror, he looked less like a traveling businessman and more like a roughneck who might be heading out to the oil fields looking for work.

  His hotel in Dallas was less than a mile from Dealey Plaza, and after checking in, Green Man strolled through the early evening to the famous intersection of Elm and Houston. The Sixth Floor Museum was still open, but he had seen its exhibits several years earlier, and they had been almost physically painful for him to view. Instead, he found an empty bench near the famous grassy knoll and sat down as the shadows lengthened. He imagined Kennedy’s motorcade turning at the Book Depository and driving up Elm Street toward the bench where he now sat. The route had been published in the Dallas newspapers to ensure a good crowd, and Lee Harvey Oswald was in his sniper’s nest on the sixth floor of the depository, with a clear shot of the intersection below.

  JFK was a hero of Green Man’s—he admired what Kennedy had done with the space program and the Peace Corps, and he liked to believe that that was a moment when America had been headed in the right direction. If Kennedy had not been shot, would he and his brother have embraced the civil rights movement and pulled America out of Vietnam? And with all their smarts and openness to science and new ideas, would they have heeded the warning first sounded by Charles David Keeling in the early 1960s from the Mauna Loa Observatory that carbon dioxide levels were rising dangerously according to the Keeling Curve, and humans were responsible?

  It was a moment in time when a prescient leader might have studied the research, peered into the future, and glimpsed a looming danger. A highly credible scientist had sounded a specific alarm based on hard facts, and had it been taken seriously, there would have been decades in which to act sensibly and the world wouldn’t be in the precarious plight it was in now. But Oswald had fired three shots, killing the president, and the chance had been lost. If one man had pulled a trigger and changed history for the worse, sinking America into gloom and causing the world to miss a clear chance, could not another man change history for the better, save America from its worst demons, and give the world a last-minute reprieve?

  Green Man sat on the bench, surrounded by the signs and pergolas of the plaza that had been painstakingly restored to look exactly the way it had on November 22, 1963. It was a place redolent with an almost tangible sense of how fragile fate and destiny were and how one individual with the boldness to act and the ingenuity to do it in a way no one could foresee or prevent could change the course of human history. Green Man drank it in the way a vampire feeds on blood and left feeling almost heady with the certainty that he really could do this enormous thing.

  He walked back to his hotel in darkness, took two pills, and tried to sleep, but he only drifted for a few hours and woke up with a nervous, buzzing energy. It was always like this when he was about to scout a target—his eagerness grew steadily through the early-morning hours till he couldn’t wait in the small and silent room any longer. He checked out of the hotel at sunrise and headed west on I-20, and it felt odd and exposed to be driving a rented Jeep without tinted windows on a major interstate, but it was also a little thrilling.

  West Texas was flat and brown, depressing to him even at sunrise. He tried to concentrate on his mission—in a few weeks he would be driving back in this same direction in his van with enough explosives to turn a massive oil field into a hell on earth. What would he need to set it on fire, and what would be the best way to slip in and get out? The only thing he already knew for sure was the time of day when he would strike. After studying worrying new numbers from satellites about the spike in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the rapid melting of the Antarctic ice sheet, the radical environmental group in Sweden had turned their Östersund doomsday clock forward dramatically, signifying that the earth was approaching its final midnight. Taking his cue one last time from the doomsday clock, Green Man would hit the oil field at the stroke of midnight.

  He stopped in Midland and ate lunch in a Mexican dive in the shadow of a towering office building. This was Bush family territory—the quintessential boom-and-bust oil city. The downtown area had a few tall buildings that had been built in the boom of the early 1980s, before the ensuing bust had halted construction. The half-dozen aging tall office buildings seemed to mock the ambitions of this self-styled Tall City that had once dreamed of being another Dallas or Houston.

  From Midland it was a short hop to Odessa and then two hours to the Permian Basin city of Pecos. Oil pumpjacks began popping up in strange places—nodding donkeys, as they were called locally—moving back and forth over the roofs of houses, bobbing next to highways, pumping oil in school playgrounds, desecrating churchyards, and breaking the monotony of farm fields. The small towns along the way looked to be poor and struggling, but beneath them was liquid gold.

  Twenty minutes west of Pecos, Green Man arrived in Baines, a formerly obscure speck on the map that now found itself at the epicenter of the world’s biggest hydraulic shale boom. Baines was also the closest town to the massive Hanson Oil Field, which Green Man had come to figure out how to destroy. He parked and walked the dusty streets, the wide brim of his boonie hat keeping the blazing sun off while he took in the vibe of what felt like an uneasy pairing of a sleepy West Texas hamlet with an endless, roaring, cash-infused frat party.

  There were quiet back streets of neatly kept low-income homes, a tiny school, a Family Dollar store, and a small Baptist church with a sign that warned: “If You Park in This Church Parking Lot You’re Gonna Get Baptized.” But the traffic through town was heavy and increasing steadily, and they weren’t small cars with people coming to get baptized. They were pickups and company buses as roughnecks and roustabouts got off ten-, twelve-, and fourteen-hour shifts at the oil fields and flooded into Baines looking for hot barbecue and cold beers.

  Restaurants and bars on the main drag advertised Texas brisket and Bud, and three gentlemen’s clubs hinted at a lot more. A trailer on Main Street offered haircuts for thirty dollars, far above what a town like this would normally support. An upscale tattoo parlor a few doors down was doing a brisk business. Everyone Green Man saw on the streets was male except for a few young women in bright outfits and short skirts, standing on corners or heading into bars in groups of two or three. His throat was dry, and he wanted very much to go into one of those air-conditioned bars and order a burger and a beer, but security was tight in boomtowns, they might have cameras at the door, and old habits died hard.

  So Green Man stayed in the shadows and watched the workers, taking in details of what they wore and how they talked and acted. He was close enough to hear the thud of their work boots and to see their dark sunburns. If he set an oil field on fire with flowback, harmful gases would be released that some of these men would inhale. They might asphyxiate on the spot or suffer terrible health problems for years to come. They were tough men, but they weren’t evil and didn’t mean to destroy the environment. They were just taking the best jobs they could find, and Green Man bore them no malice. He felt the weight of what he would soon do to them, and before turning back to his Jeep, he prayed to God that once again his end goal justified the damage he did to innocents along the way.

  He had seen oil fields before, but nothing like the Hanson spread, which soon rose out of the arid landscape like a metallic Oz. It was a gleaming city of enormous storage tanks and serpentine pipelines and thousands of drilling rigs with diesel engines driving toxic fracking liquid deep beneath the earth to bust up shale. Workers dotted the rigs, trucks drove back and forth carrying supplies in and oil out, and security was tight. The wire fence that surrounded the field was thirty feet high, and atop it gleamed coils of razor wire. Green Ma
n glimpsed a sentry tower and didn’t even slow down in his Jeep as he drove around the perimeter.

  He followed the road that skirted the field and headed north to the spot where the Kildeer River flowed in under the fence. He was gratified to see that there were no special precautions or guard stations there. He turned off onto a dirt road that ran alongside the river and drove a mile upstream, out of visual sight of the oil field, and parked on the black, gravelly bank.

  Green Man kicked off his shoes and waded into the river. It was thirty feet wide and surprisingly cold. He dove beneath the surface, enjoying the jolt of cold, and kept his eyes open. It wasn’t deep, but in its central channel he was more than four feet beneath the surface, which would certainly suffice. Even in daylight, it would be difficult to spot a diver dressed in a black rubber suit that matched the basalt of the riverbed. At midnight, he would be invisible.

  He climbed out of the river, and within ten minutes the Texas afternoon sun had dried him off. He had spotted a butte several miles away from the Hanson field. Green Man headed for it, bouncing on dirt roads and cutting across flat stretches of gravel and sand, keeping more than a mile from the perimeter fence. A stand of oak trees stood at the bottom of the butte, and he left his Jeep among them and climbed to the flat mesa-like top, looking down on the Hanson field. From this vantage point, he could see the layout clearly, and the glittering Kildeer, which flowed under the fence at the north end, bisected the field, and flowed out the south side.

  He fished the Apache binoculars out of his pocket and raised them. Sector by sector he examined the field that he had already memorized from published maps. His magnified view moved slowly over the bulbous oil and gas storage tanks connected by webs of piping, the seemingly endless rows of tall fracking rigs with work crews swarming over them, the flat storage buildings for sand and chemicals, to the metal flowback tanks that stood off by themselves, near the river. They were forty feet tall, cylindrical, and painted a lime-green color, and they were clustered side by side. Each tank was connected to a vent so that gas broken off from the fluid could be combusted by a flare.

  He would swim in from the north end and stay submerged in the river for a half mile to the flowback tanks. It would be best to go in on a moonless night, but the oil field would still be lit up with machine lights and flares. When he climbed out, the night shadows of the flowback tanks would shield him. They were heavy metal, but their vents—designed to dispose of harmful gases—made them vulnerable, and their proximity to one another was a fatal flaw. If one tank blew, the one next to it would also blow. If five blew, all fifty would blow. If fifty blew, the Hanson field would be destroyed—hopefully without the oil and gas tanks far away on the opposite side catching fire and further poisoning the atmosphere.

  Green Man ate a ham sandwich in his Jeep, and as evening fell, the thousand gas flares in the field below—visible but not particularly dramatic in bright daylight—began to dance against the gathering darkness. He had seen what he needed to see and he could have left, but he still lingered at the butte. It was a calculated risk—every minute he stayed risked exposure—but he very much wanted to see the field in pitch darkness, the way it would look when he came back to destroy it.

  THIRTY

  “How’s your boss doing?” Dr. Ronningen asked. She was thirty, stunning, and formidable—nearly six feet tall and an improbably beautiful and forceful combination of Norwegian and Israeli. “I liked old Brennan very much,” she said. “He’s a real original. I was sorry to hear he was ailing.”

  “It was just an arrhythmia, and they gave him a pacemaker,” Tom explained. “It was scary when it happened, but he should be fine. He has to watch his diet and he can’t overwork, both of which are probably pure hell for him.”

  “Yeah, I bet he really hates that,” she said, grinning as she scrolled through the six summaries of Green Man’s attacks. She was able to keep up steady small talk while reading at great speed. Tom noticed that she didn’t take notes, but perhaps she didn’t need to. She had a rock star reputation—a Rhodes scholar who had published widely, lectured internationally, won several major engineering awards, and was a full professor at thirty.

  “I think he misses working twenty-hour days more than the Guinness,” Tom told her, “but that’s a tough call. I just hope he follows some of the doctors’ orders.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that,” she said as she finished skimming the summary of the destruction of the Boon Dam. “These breakdowns of the specific skills he used in each attack are thorough and will be very useful. Who prepared them?”

  “That would be me,” Tom admitted. He had spent a lot of time in academia and had never seen an office this big, especially for such a young professor. It was more lab than office—a dozen engineers could work here without crowding one another.

  “Well done,” she said. “But why do we need to look at the letters he sent after each attack and his manifesto?”

  “In each letter he details some specifics about the methods he used. And in his manifesto his evaluations of the different threats to the earth and how they link together reveal a lot about the organic way he thinks about different branches of science. And also I think it’s important that we hear his voice.”

  “You do, do you? It seems to me like a waste of time.” She decided not to argue. “Fine, it’s not that much more reading. I’m ready to jump in, and I warn you, I don’t believe in sleep or even taking long meal breaks. Especially because I understand we’re facing a time element.”

  “Yeah, we need to full-court press this. I’m fine with all-nighters, so I can stay with you as long as we need.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said almost competitively. “Javad should be here at any minute. Let’s start with the attack on Boon and work our way backward, because the engineering needed to build the drone and take down the dam was especially distinctive. And the homemade torpedo he used to sink the yacht was also pretty special and will tell us a lot.”

  “Who is Javad, and what does he do?” Tom asked.

  “Computer modeling. He’ll convert my engineering assessments into a data profile that can be searched—”

  “I can do the computer modeling myself,” Tom told her.

  “I’m sure you can.” Her polite but slightly dismissive smile was one she gave grad students who weren’t quite up to snuff. “No offense, but Javad is very good at this.”

  “None taken, but so am I.”

  She studied him. “What exactly do you do for the FBI?”

  “Whatever they want these days. But my degree is in computer engineering, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “And where did you train?”

  “Caltech.”

  “Who with?”

  “Dr. Boyer and Dr. Iwasaki were my two main faculty mentors.”

  Her brilliant black eyes widened slightly. “You studied with Kenji?”

  “I never called him that.”

  She pulled out a cell phone. It was three hours earlier in Los Angeles. She rapidly searched through her contacts, hit a contact number, and pressed it to her ear. He heard her say, “Kenji, Lise. No, I’m afraid Ernst and I won’t make it to Davos this year. Listen, I’m here with one of your former students. He says he works for the FBI now. No, really. His name is Tom Smith, and he says that . . . ,” and she walked away holding the phone to her ear.

  Tom watched her circle the lab. She was in constant motion and always multitasking, checking this reading and adjusting that dial while she talked. She returned to Tom and said, “Thanks, Kenji. Yes, I’ll tell him.” She hung up. “You apparently made a strong impression. He says hello and that I won’t be needing Javad.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “It’s especially good for Javad, because he has a new baby, and sleep is precious for him. Let me give him the good news.”

  A Middle Eastern man carrying a
computer case had hurried into the lab, and she walked over quickly to intercept him and spoke to him for a few seconds. He nodded and immediately headed back out, and she returned to Tom and sat down next to him. “So your name really is Tom Smith? I thought that was some kind of bad FBI cover.”

  “No, I was born with that.”

  She cocked her head to study Tom quizzically, and her long black hair, which hung down almost to her hips, swished to one side. “Just so I know who and what I’m dealing with, why the FBI, with your level of training?”

  He gave her his stock answer. “I went into the family business.”

  “And what exactly is your family business?”

  “Catching bad guys,” he told her with a sheepish grin.

  The smile she gave him back was no longer dismissive but warm and even slightly playful, and it lit up her face. “Good,” she said. “Then let’s see if we can catch one. It’s pretty clear we’re looking for a highly trained mechanical engineer with significant interdisciplinary skills and an unusually wide range of professional experience. I’d bet he did at least graduate-level study in a world-class program and then probably worked in several affiliated fields, which should make him fairly identifiable. . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly my premise,” Tom agreed excitedly, beginning to take notes on his computer. “As you suggest, let’s start with Boon. The targeting had a very small margin of error. The way he got it right, do you think he’d need to have worked professionally as a structural engineer?”

  “Not necessarily,” she said, “but the way he used hydrostatic pressure shows a deep understanding of structural analysis and especially in calculating stresses and displacements. I’ll get back to that, and we’ll drill down into the math he’d need. If he built the drone himself—and it was capable of carrying that heavy a payload—it’s tempting to say he has a background in aeronautics, but I think avionics is an even better bet, because training in avionic engineering might also help to explain that homemade torpedo. . . .”