The Grid

by Harry Hunsicker

  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. “The
y 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.”

  - CHAPTER SEVENTEEN -

  Sarah and her husband live in a thirteen-thousand-square-foot home on Strait Lane, a tree-lined street in North Dallas populated by the top end of the one percent—billionaires and bankers, captains of industry, people with good tans who play a lot of golf while living off trust funds.

  The home is a Spanish colonial, white stucco walls, long sweeping arches, a terra-cotta tile roof. Her brother, Elias, once likened the house to a high-end Mexican brothel but not as classy. Sarah’s husband had been unamused.

  An enormous living area dominates the first floor. The room is designed for entertaining, bracketed on either end by matching fireplaces big enough to hold a minivan. This section of the home is the main reason her husband purchased the monstrosity. “A good place to entertain prospective clients and business associates,” he’d said at the time.

  Sarah is in her bathroom in the master suite, a ground-floor wing on the opposite side of the house from the kitchen. She’s showered again, washing off the grime from the stolen Monte Carlo and any remaining traces from her encounter with the coked-up man in the motel.

  Dylan had still been asleep when she left the hospital forty-five minutes earlier. Sarah wanted to be there when the girl woke up, but she needed to change. The clothes are a link, however small, to the dead man.

  Her bathroom looks like a Persian disco, ridiculous even by the gaudy standards of North Dallas, decorated with gold leaf and green marble and curtains made from burgundy silk. Her husband’s idea of what would please her.

  Sarah stands in front of the mirror, naked, the only moment all day she’s had to be still. Her skin is damp, face flushed from the heat of the shower.

  The body reflected back at her is lean and taut, the skin unblemished except for the large bruise on her arm from where the dyke hit her with the tire iron. Her appearance—her beauty—is soothing in ways she doesn’t understand.

  She tries to envision all the men who’ve gazed upon her nakedness. She can’t. Faces and places drift away, half remembered, gone from her mind like a swirl of smoke.

  In their stead, an image of the sheriff at the motel appears. Her mind’s eye lingers over the line of his jaw, the flatness of his belly.

  She blinks and he goes away, too, leaving her alone, as always.

  In the mirror, for an instant, she sees her mother. The swell of her hips, the slender valley between her breasts.

  What would her mother say now if she could see how her only daughter’s life had evolved?

  Sarah turns away, combs her wet hair.

  Her mother, who longed for nothing more than a good game of bridge and a perfectly decorated tree at Christmas, had died when Sarah was sixteen. Valium and chardonnay hadn’t mixed well with a sexually conflicted husband and an overbearing father-in-law.

  The thought of the old man makes his presence loom over the steamy air. His raspy voice is in her ear: What are you gonna do now, girl?

  Sarah says the words out loud: “Dylan. I’m going to take care of my daughter. She’s my priority.”

  That’s all that matters. Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone.

  In response, an invisible hand presses on the back of her head, forcing her to look at the crumpled rain poncho lying on the floor next to a sweat-stained Dallas Cowboys ball cap.

  What about that? her grandfather says. What are you gonna do when they come looking for whoever was wearing those clothes?

  Sarah wraps herself in a robe and rushes from the bathroom, the grotesque furnishings and the steam too much.

  You messed up today. Left stuff behind they can use to find you. The old man’s voice is
loud in her skull. I raised you better than that, didn’t I?

  Sarah’s phone is on the desk on the other side of the suite, by the fireplace.

  “You didn’t raise me,” she says to the empty room, her voice shrill. “I raised myself.”

  She marches across the thick carpet, grabs the device, googles “Waco News.”

  In her head, the old man cackles, a cruel sound she’s heard often.

  She knows what’s coming next. The truth. Cold steel on a winter’s day, a wedge of metal that burns and cuts at the same time.

  Sarah, darlin’, you and me, we’re cut from the same cloth, the voice says. Ain’t that a pisser, you being a girl and all?

  She leans against the desk for a moment, dizzy. Then she continues scrolling through the links on her phone.

  News about the power outage dominates. Seven counties affected, a hundred thousand people still without electricity, authorities frantically trying to piece together what happened.

  Normally, Sarah would have spent some time reading these stories.

  That many counties just don’t go dark, not in Texas, which has one of the most robust electrical grids in North America—a tidbit she’s picked up from the people who manage her investment accounts.

  She continues clicking until she finds a story about a murdered man discovered at a motel on the interstate. The words ricochet inside her skull.

  DEPUTY MURDERED. POLICE SEARCH FOR WOMAN IN COWBOYS CAP.

  She devours the story, every word, searching for hidden meaning in each phrase.

  Shot in the chest with a large-caliber handgun. A decorated law-enforcement officer, husband, father of three. The Texas Rangers are handling the investigation under the supervision of the sheriff of Peterson County, Jonathan Cantrell. The only lead thus far is a woman aged thirty to forty, wearing oversized sunglasses and a ball cap, seen leaving the hotel.

  The phone slips from her fingers.

  She’s killed a cop.

  No place is safe. They’ll scour every inch between the Rio Grande and the Red River looking for her.