Pipeline (2 page)

“I need you to take the next hour or so to read everything on the Internet. Check out the
L.A. Times
,
New York Times
,
Wall Street Journal
,
San Francisco Chronicle
. AP, Reuters. Everybody. I want to know what is being said. They probably have more information
than we do,” ordered Tolberg in a surefire staccato. “Be back here at four
A.M.
because we’re getting on a conference call with Bob Mieirs and Cyrus Moravian,” he said, referring respectively to the secretary of energy and the governor of California.

Shortly before 4:00
A.M.
, Ruiz entered Tolberg’s office for the second time. An oversize mug of coffee was in his hand. He sat down on the other side of the large walnut desk filled with piles of paper and silver-framed pictures. All the arrayed items created a disconcerting barrier effect between the desk’s two sides.

Tony winced when he saw that some of his coffee had sloshed out of the mug and onto Tolberg’s worktable. A small line of black droplets was heading straight for one of the larger paper piles.

Ruiz didn’t have a napkin. He prayed that Tolberg couldn’t see over the desk’s obstructions.

Ruiz briefed the chief of staff on the news reports. They all told the same story, though the
L.A. Times
also had a source quoted on background that the governor was flying to Los Angeles. Tony quickly came to his conclusion.

“The gist of the coverage, Senator, is that Los Angeles has been one-hundred-percent dark since about eight-thirty
P.M.,
their time. And the sense is that the electricity crisis is escalating. As you know, California gets its juice mostly from hydroelectric power and natural gas–fired generating plants. Some of the outlets have quotes from energy experts pointing to a sudden, acute, natural gas shortage. Others say that the dry spring in California has exhausted nearly all of the state’s hydropower.”

“Somebody above my pay grade has got to give you an opinion on the validity of those arguments, Senator. But one thing I sure can tell you about is the political part. There is an absolute information vacuum. Nobody knows what is happening because nobody is talking to the press. The governor, the mayor, and the utility are all battened down. They aren’t saying it yet, but the sense I get is that the press feels they were lied to in the past twenty-four hours.”

Isaiah J. Tolberg’s hands covered his eyes in an exhausted gri
mace. Cyrus Moravian, California’s governor, was an old friend. The Senator and Governor Moravian had been political allies for nearly twenty years. They had served on a number of blue-ribbon panels together. They were golf partners. Their wives were close.

“Why the hell didn’t Cyrus warn me? I can’t believe he didn’t know this could happen. What in God’s name is going on out there?”

Mary Jane Pfeiffer, the Senator’s twenty-year secretary, knocked quietly on the closed door. Tony always suspected that she must practice her North Carolina accent when she went home at night. It just wasn’t possible to talk that way naturally.

“Senator, it’s four
A.M.
I’ve got the conference call parked. Now, y’all need something before you start? I reckon that at this hour of the morning, I’d recommend some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk.”

A glass of milk? Tony thought she was kidding. This was the hour for either a stiff Scotch or more coffee. To his shock, the sexagenarian White House chief of staff was a taker for the milk and cookies.

“As always, Mary Jane, your suggestions are wise. I’d like that very much.”

The Senator reached toward the phone and punched a button.

“Good morning. Isaiah Tolberg here. I’m accompanied by Tony Ruiz. Who is on the line?”

As the secretary of energy and the governor of California identified themselves over the speakerphone, Ruiz noticed that Mary Jane Pfeiffer had quietly slipped back in with the Senator’s snack. On her way out, she let her hand fall below the Senator’s line of sight and slipped Tony a couple of sheets of paper towel. Looking at his slopped coffee oozing across the desk, he accepted with a sheepish grin.

“It’s four
A.M.
here and if you don’t mind, I’m going to dispense with the usual niceties this morning. Cyrus, would you kindly tell us what the hell is going on in your state?”

That introduction was pretty short and severe for Tolberg. No thank yous or pleases.

Anybody who knew Isaiah J. Tolberg would know that the mouse had just roared. The White House chief of staff was an extremely frustrated man.

“Isaiah, I know it’s an ungodly hour. I appreciate you’re being there for us.” The voice was that of Cyrus Moravian.

“I wish I could tell you to go to bed. But I don’t have good news. As you know, we’ve got a total blackout in Los Angeles. I’m headed down there right after this call.”

Tony Ruiz nodded at his boss. The
L.A. Times
had the story right. The fact that the governor was flying to California’s biggest city in the middle of the night was not good. It could only mean the situation was not under control.

Tolberg interrupted the governor. “Does that mean that the statements by the mayor and WEPCO over the past twenty-four hours were false? These aren’t just a few rolling neighborhood blackouts?”

“Senator”—the governor was now more formal—“as best I can see it, those declarations were—umm—premature.”

Isaiah J. Tolberg’s brow furrowed. He waited for the governor to continue.

“I’m afraid that we’re being hit by a ‘perfect storm.’ It hardly rained in the West this winter; hydroelectric power stations are producing one-tenth of their normal capacity. And the blistering heat blasting the whole western part of the United States has come way earlier than expected. They’re burning more natural gas than they’ve got. Senator, the power companies are scrambling, but they don’t have any juice to supply.”

“So you’re telling me that this will last for days?” asked Tolberg.

“No, Senator, it’s worse than that. This will now spread to the rest of the state.”

Tony Ruiz looked at Isaiah J. Tolberg, aghast. California was going black.

It took a full fifteen seconds before Tolberg could pull himself together to ask a question. It was to Bob Mieirs, the secretary of energy.

“Bob, what can we do to help the governor?”

“I’m looking into options, Senator. But there are no easy answers. As the governor said, California’s energy comes from hydroelectric production and natural gas generators. Right now, they don’t have enough of either.”

Nobody said anything, so the energy secretary went on.

“You see, natural gas is increasingly seen as the future, the new energy currency. Gas is used in the United States for many things, but mainly for electricity production. Half of U.S. homes are heated with gas. It represents about thirty percent of the total energy consumption in the United States. But though I don’t have the statistics in front of me, I’ll bet that in California it’s double that. As you know, in the late 1990s, California began to phase out oil-or coal-fired electricity plants because of their effect on the environment. Natural gas is cleaner—it emits thirty-five percent of the greenhouse gases of oil and half the carbon dioxide of coal.”

“Can we divert energy from the grids east of the Mississippi to the west? Or can we pipe excess gas from somewhere else in the country to California?” Tony Ruiz’s questions injected themselves into the phone lines.

“I wish it were so simple,” came Mieirs’s tired answer. “I can give you long technical explanations, but the basic point is the same. Electricity needs in the rest of the world and in the United States are exploding. We don’t produce enough natural gas to supply our own needs, so we have to import. Utility companies are outbidding each other for juice. There is no quick fix.”

“Bottom line, gentlemen. This will take some time.”

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 15, 10:30 P.M.
CALIFORNIA STATE PRISON, SACRAMENTO

California Department of Corrections supervising officers Pete Studley and Robby Henderson were in the executive suites of Facility GP IV watching television coverage of spreading incidents of looting in Los Angeles. The total outage in Southern California was now over twenty-four hours old.

Munching on one of the kitchen’s prized double-bacon cheese-burgers, Robby Henderson threw a glance Pete’s way.

“So far, these incidents of violence are all centered in poor neighborhoods. But middle-class folks are soon gonna start breaking store windows to feed their families. When that starts happening, the shit will have officially hit the fan.”

The executive suite’s elegant name was an inside joke among the institution’s corrections officers. It was the nerve center of General Population Facility Four—GP IV, for short—the largest of ten separate housing facilities on the sprawling two-hundred-acre campus of the California State Prison, Sacramento. On basic metal desks, the executive suites contained banks of closed-circuit televisions that monitored nearly every inch of the building. Three chairs—their arms’ outer edges gnawed by years of being slammed into the metal desks—were arrayed haphazardly in the cramped room.

The correctional facility’s modernistic smooth gray cement walls housed about three thousand inmates, nearly a thousand more bodies than its architects had originally envisioned. The prison was a level-four institution. It contained men of terrible violence—murderers, predators, gang members, transfer prisoners considered too much “trouble” at lesser penal institutions.

Approximately one-third of the prison’s inmate population was serving life sentences. Over a thousand of the men had committed
at least one murder. Almost all of them had committed assault with a deadly weapon. Sacramento State, as inmates called their “home,” was the end of the line for the worst of the worst.

Unlike most other prisons in the United States, Sacramento State did not have granite walls. Instead, it bragged of a death-wire electric fence, embedded between two fifteen-foot-high chain-link fences, which administered a five-thousand-volt lethal dose to even the slightest touch. Nobody had ever escaped.

Pete Studley was a twenty-year-plus veteran, part of the original cadre of corrections officers who had been on staff at the prison’s inauguration in 1986. The Sacramento native was appreciated by his colleagues for his unusual combination of clear leadership and good-natured humor. Divorced for over a decade, Pete had volunteered for the night shift five years ago once his second child had gone off to college. This made him the night duty senior officer.

When Robby Henderson was assigned to the prison’s moonlight duty eighteen months ago, Pete’s first words had been crystal clear.

“There are twenty-six officers guarding one thousand six hundred and seven inmates on the overnight at GP IV. With those odds, we do things by the book. The schedule is God, Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha all rolled into one. I don’t care if you are eating, shitting, or talking to your dying mother on the telephone; there are specific times for lockdown, lights out, assessment walks, and general inspections of the arms closet, radio units, and the television monitors. Miss a single moment—by even a minute—of my schedule and you’re out. Other than that, we’ll have a blast here.”

In the last year and a half, Pete Studley and Robby Henderson had become close. Henderson’s wavy blond hair, surfer-boy build, and aw-shucks demeanor were deceptive. In over twenty years in California’s correctional force, Pete had never worked with anyone who had a work ethic that came even remotely close to Robby’s.

“It’s ten thirty, Pete. I’ll do the check.” Robby Henderson laid down his half-eaten meal and reached over to grab the microphone.
He had to lay it back down instantly when he realized that his fingers were still oozing with the mayonnaise that had dripped off his bacon burger. Tightly coiled wires snapped the mike back across the table.

Robby Henderson grinned sheepishly at Pete as he wiped the white gluey liquid off the transmitter.

“What a slob,” muttered Studley, feigning a grimace of disgust.

“Hall One, radio check,” Rob Henderson now dictated into the newly wiped microphone.

“Hall One, all quiet.” The response came quickly.

“Hall Two, radio check,” Robby droned on.

And so it went, sixteen times. Four floors, four halls.

The sixteenth all-clear signal was from Tom Rivers, fourth floor, north hall.

“Boss, bio break please,” came Tom’s voice over the radio.

Robby looked over at Pete, who shrugged, again pretending good-natured frustration.

“Tom Rivers’s gravestone will say: ‘This man pissed an awful lot.’”

“Okay, Tom, we’ll reserve your favorite urinal for you,” Robby cracked over the microphone. He could well imagine his fifteen hall officers snickering at the comment.

Minutes later Tom Rivers’s smiling face appeared next to the executive suite’s glass-enclosed walls. He waved as he went down the hallway to the officers’ bathrooms.

“Get Snyder and Robinson to do the munitions inspection, Robby,” Pete Studley ordered. “They haven’t done it in a couple of weeks. Gotta remind them what a weapon feels like.”

Robby had already started on the second half of his bacon burger and once again his hands were infused with dripping mayonnaise. This time he cleaned them before grabbing the microphone.

“George, Robby here. Will you guys do the arms closet today?”

No answer.

“George, this is the executive suite. Come in, please.”

Silence again.

Pete Studley now leaned forward, his polished boots firmly on the ground. George Snyder knew the drill. On Pete Studley’s watch, even a few seconds’ delay was an officer’s death knell.

“Get Robinson,” Studley ordered.

Robby Henderson was about to open his mouth when he realized that the green light of the communications equipment was off. Three years ago, all internal communications equipment in California’s prison system had been placed on fully separate electrical circuits. The idea was to ensure that communications were always on a fail-safe backup system.