The Burning Wire (13 page)

Chapter 19

AS AMELIA SACHS
followed Charlie Sommers to his office on the other side of the Burn in Algonquin Consolidated, she was aware that the heat was rising along the complicated route he was taking. And the rumble filling the halls was getting louder with every step.

She was totally lost. Up stairways, down stairways. As she followed him she sent and received several text messages on her BlackBerry but as they moved lower and lower she had to concentrate on where she was walking; the hallways became increasingly visitor-hostile. Cell reception finally turned to dust and she put her phone away.

The temperature rose higher.

Sommers stopped at a thick door, beside which were a rack of hard hats.

"You worried about your hair?" he asked, his voice rising, since the rumbling from the other side of the door was very loud now.

"I don't want to lose it," she called back. "But otherwise, no."

"Just getting mussed a bit. This is the shortest way to my office."

"Shorter's better. I'm in a hurry." She grabbed a hat and squashed it onto her head.

"Ready?"

"I guess. What's through there exactly?"

Sommers thought for a moment and said, "Hell." And nodded her forward.

She recalled the seared polka-dot wounds that covered Luis Martin. Her breath was coming fast and she realized that her hand, moving toward the door handle, had slowed. She gripped and pulled the heavy steel portal open.

Yep, hell. Fire, sulfur, the whole scene.

The temperature in the room was overwhelming. Well over a hundred degrees and Sachs felt not only a painful prickle on her skin but a curious lessening of the pain in her joints as the heat deadened her arthritis.

The hour was late--it was close to eight p.m.--but there was a full staff at work in the Burn. The hunger for electricity might ebb and flow throughout the day but never ceased completely.

The dim space, easily two hundred feet high, was filled with scaffolding and hundreds of pieces of equipment. The centerpiece was a series of massive light green machines. The largest of them was long with a rounded top, like a huge Quonset hut, from which many pipes and ducts and wires sprouted.

"That's MOM," Sommers called, pointing to it. "
M-O-M.
Midwest Operating Machinery, Gary, Indiana. They built her in the 1960s." This was all shouted with some reverence. Sommers added that she was the biggest of the five electrical generators here in the Queens complex. He continued, explaining that when first installed, MOM was the biggest electrical generator in the country. In addition to the other electrical generators--they were only numbered, without names--were four units that provided superheated steam to the New York City area.

Amelia Sachs was indeed captivated by the massive machinery. She found her step slowing as she gazed at the huge components and tried to figure out the parts. Fascinating what the human mind could put together, what human hands could build.

"Those're the boilers." He pointed to what seemed to Sachs to be a separate building within a building. They must've been ten or twelve stories tall. "They produce steam, over three thousand pounds per square inch." He drew a breath. "It goes into two turbines, a high-pressure and a low-pressure one." He pointed to part of MOM. "Then into the generator. She's got a continuous output--thirty-four thousand amps, eighteen thousand volts, but it's stepped up once it gets outside for transport to over three hundred thousand."

Despite the squashing heat, she felt a shiver, hearing those figures and flashing on the memory of Luis Martin, his skin punctured by hot metal raindrops.

Sommers added with some pride, it seemed to Sachs, that the output of the entire Queens facility--MOM plus several other turbines--was close to 2,500 megawatts. About 25 percent of the city's entire usage.

He pointed to a series of other tanks. "That's where the steam is condensed to water and pumped back to the boilers. Starts all over again." Proudly he continued, shouting, "She's got three hundred and sixty miles of tubes and pipes, a million feet of cable."

But then, despite her fascination and the massive scale, Sachs found herself gigged in the belly by her claustrophobia. The noise was relentless, the heat.

Sommers seemed to understand. "Come on." He gestured her to follow and in five minutes they were out the other door and hanging up their hats. Sachs was breathing deeply. The corridor, while still warm, was blessedly cool after her minutes in hell.

"It gets to you, doesn't it?"

"Does."

"You all right?"

She diverted a tickling stream of sweat and nodded. He offered her a paper towel from a roll kept there for mopping faces and necks, it seemed, and she dried off.

"Come on this way."

He led her down more corridors and into another building. More stairs and finally they arrived at his office. She stifled a laugh at the clutter. The place was filled with computers and instruments she couldn't recognize, hundreds of bits of equipment and tools, wires, electronic components, keyboards, metal and plastic and wood items in every shape and color.

And junk food. Tons of junk food. Chips and pretzels and soda, Ding Dongs and Twinkies. And Hostess powdered sugar doughnuts, which explained the dandruff on his clothes.

"Sorry. It's the way we work in Special Projects," he said, shoveling aside computer printouts from an office chair for her to sit in. "Well, the way I work, at least."

"What exactly do you do?"

He explained, somewhat abashedly, that he was an inventor. "I know, sounds either very nineteenth century or very infomercial. But that's what I do. And I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I do for a living exactly what I wanted to when I was a kid and building dynamos, motors, lightbulbs--"

"You made your own lightbulbs?"

"Only set fire to my bedroom twice. Well, three times, but we only had to call the fire department twice."

She looked at a picture of Edison on the wall.

"My hero," Sommers said. "Fascinating man."

"Andi Jessen had something about him on her wall too. A photo of the grid."

"It's Thomas Alva's original signature. . . . But Jessen's more Samuel Insull, I'd say."

"Who?"

"Edison was the scientist. Insull was a businessman. He headed Consolidated Edison and created the first big monopolistic power utility. Electrified the Chicago trolley system, practically gave away the first electrical appliances--like irons--to get people addicted to electricity. He was a genius. But he ended up disgraced. This sound familiar? He was way overleveraged and when the Depression came, the company went under and hundreds of thousands of shareholders lost everything. Little like Enron. You want to know some trivia: The accounting firm Arthur Andersen was involved with both Insull and Enron.

"But me? I leave the business to other people. I just make things. Ninety-nine percent amounts to nothing. But . . . well, I've got twenty-eight patents in my name and I've created nearly ninety processes or products in Algonquin's. Some people sit in front of the TV or play video games for fun. I . . . well, invent things." He pointed to a large cardboard box, brimming with squares and rectangles of paper. "That's the Napkin File."

"The what?"

"I'm out at Starbucks or a deli and I get an idea. I jot it down on a napkin and come back here to draw it up properly. But I save the original, toss it in there."

"So if there's ever a museum about you there'll be a Napkin Room."

"It has occurred to me." Sommers was blushing, from forehead to ample chin.

"What exactly do you invent?"

"I guess my expertise is the opposite of what Edison did. He wanted people to use electricity. I want people not to."

"Does your boss know that's your goal?"

He laughed. "Maybe I should say I want people to use it more efficiently. I'm Algonquin's negawatt maven. That's 'nega' with an
n.
"

"Never heard about that."

"A lot of people haven't, which is too bad. It came from a brilliant scientist and environmentalist, Amory Lovins. The theory is to create incentives to
reduce
demand and use electricity more efficiently, rather than trying to build new power plants to increase supply. Your typical power station wastes nearly half of the heat generated--right up the smokestack. Half! Think about that. But we've got a series of thermal collectors on the stacks and cooling towers here. At Algonquin we lose only twenty-seven percent.

"I've been coming up with ideas for portable nuclear generators--on barges, so they can be moved around from region to region." He leaned forward, eyes sparkling again. "And the big new challenge: storing electricity. It's not like food. You can't make it and put it on the shelf for a month. You use it or lose it--instantly. I'm creating new ways to store it. Flywheels, air pressure systems, new battery technology . . .

"Oh, and lately I've been spending half my time traveling around the country linking up small alternative and renewable companies, so they can get onto the major grids like the Northeastern Interconnection--that's ours--and sell juice to
us,
rather than us selling to small communities."

"I thought Andi Jessen wasn't very supportive of renewables and alternative energy."

"No, but she's not crazy either. It's the wave of the future. I think we just disagree about when that future's going to arrive. I think sooner." A whimsical smile. "Of course, you did notice that her office is the size of my entire department, and it's on the ninth floor with a view of Manhattan. . . . I'm in the basement." His face grew solemn. "Now, what can I do to help?"

Sachs said, "I have a list of people at Algonquin who might've been behind the attack this morning."

"Somebody here?" He appeared dismayed.

"It's looking that way. Or at least they were working with the perp. Now, he's probably a man, though he could be working with a woman. He or she had access to the computer codes that let them get into grid control software. He kept shutting down substations so that the electricity was rerouted into the substation on Fifty-Seventh Street. And he reset the circuit breakers higher than they should have been."

"So that's how it happened." His face was troubled. "The computers. I wondered. I didn't know the details."

"Some of them will have alibis--
we'll
take care of checking that out. But I need you to give me some idea of who'd have the ability to reroute the electricity and rig the arc flash."

Sommers seemed amused. "I'm flattered. I didn't know Andi even knew much about what happens down here." Then the cherubic look was gone, replaced by a wry smile. "Am I a suspect?"

She'd spotted his name when Jessen had first mentioned him. She held his eye. "You're on the list."

"Hm. You're sure you want to trust me?"

"You were on conference call from ten-thirty until nearly noon today, when the attack happened, and you were out of town during the window when the perp could have gotten the computer codes. The key data shows you didn't log into the safe file room at any other time."

Sommers was lifting an eyebrow.

She tapped her BlackBerry. "That's what I was texting about on the way here. I had somebody in the NYPD check you out. So you're clean."

She supposed she sounded apologetic for not trusting him. But Sommers said, his eyes sparkling, "Thomas Edison would have approved."

"What do you mean?"

"He said a genius is just a talented person who does his homework."

Chapter 20

AMELIA SACHS DIDN'T
want to show Sommers the list itself; he might know some of the employees and be inclined to dismiss the possibility of their being suspects, or, on the other hand, he might call her attention to somebody simply because he thought they were otherwise suspicious.

She didn't explain her reluctance but said simply she just wanted a profile of somebody who could have arranged the attack and used the computer.

He opened a bag of Doritos, offered Sachs some. She declined and he chomped down a handful. Sommers didn't seem like an inventor. He seemed more like a middle-aged advertising copywriter, with his tousled hair and slightly untucked blue-and-white-striped shirt. Bit of a belly. His glasses were stylish, though Sachs suspected that on the frames were the words "Made in" preceding some Asian Rim country. Only up close could you see the wrinkles near his eyes and mouth.

He washed the food down with soda and said, "First, rerouting the juice to get it to the substation on Fifty-seventh Street? That'll narrow things down. Not everybody who works here could do it. Not many people could at all, in fact. They'd need to know SCADA. That's our Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition program. It runs on Unix computers. He'd also probably have to know EMP--energy management programs. Ours is Enertrol. It's Unix-based too. Unix is a pretty complicated operating system. It's used in the big Internet routers. It's not like Windows or Apple. You couldn't just look up online how to do it. You'd need somebody who'd studied SCADA and EMP, taken courses in it or, at the very least, apprenticed in a control room for six months, a year."

Sachs jotted notes, then asked, "And about the arc flash. Who'd know about rigging that?"

"Tell me how he did it exactly."

Sachs explained about the cable and the bus bar.

He asked, "It was aimed out the window? Like a gun?"

She nodded.

Sommers went silent for a moment. He focused elsewhere. "That could've killed dozens of people. . . . And the burns. Terrible."

"Who could do it?" Sachs persisted.

Sommers was looking off again, which he did a lot, she'd noticed. After a moment: "I know you're asking about Algonquin employees. But you ought to know that arc flashes are the first thing that all electricians learn about. Whether they're working as licensed tradesmen, in construction, for manufacturing companies, the army or navy . . . any field at all, as long as they're around electrical service lines with enough juice for arcs to be a problem, they'll learn the rules."

"So you mean that anybody who knows how to
avoid
arcs or prevent them knows how to create them."

"Exactly."

Another note in her quick handwriting. Then she looked up. "But let's just talk for the moment about employees."

"Okay, who here could rig something like that? There'd be live wire work involved, so it'd have to be somebody who is or has been a licensed master electrician in private contracting or been a lineman or a troubleman for a utility."

"A what? Troubleman?"

Sommers laughed. "Great job title, hm? Those're supervisors who arrange for the repairs when a line goes down or there's a short circuit or other problem. And remember that a lot of the senior people here have risen through the ranks. Just because they do energy brokerage now and sit behind a desk doesn't mean they can't rewire a three-phase service panel in their sleep."

"And make an arc flash gun."

"Exactly. So you should be looking for somebody with computer training in Unix control and energy management programs. And somebody with a career as a lineman or troubleman or in the contracting trades. Military too. Army, navy and air force produce a lot of electricians."

"Appreciate this."

A knocking on the door frame intruded. A young woman stood there with a large Redweld expanding envelope in her arms. "Ms. Jessen said you wanted these? From Human Resources?"

Sachs took the resumes and employee files and thanked the woman.

Sommers had dessert, a Hostess cupcake. Then its twin. He sipped more soda. "Want to say something."

She lifted an eyebrow.

"Can I give you a lecture?"

"Lecture?"

"Safety lecture."

"I don't have much time."

"It'll be quick. But it's important. I was just thinking, you're at a big disadvantage, going after this . . . what'd you call him?"

"We say 'perp.' For 'Perpetrator.' "

" 'Perp' sounds sexier. Say you're going after your usual perp. Bank robbers, hitmen . . . You know that they might have a gun or knife. You're used to that. You know how to protect yourself. You've got procedures on how to handle them. But electricity as a weapon or a booby trap . . . whole different ball game. The thing about juice? It's invisible. And it's all over the place. I mean, everywhere."

She was recalling the bits of hot metal. The horrid round holes in Luis Martin's tan skin.

Sachs had a scent memory of the scorch at the crime scene. She shivered in disgust.

Sommers gestured toward a sign on his wall.

REMEMBER NATIONAL FIRE PROTECTION
ASSOCIATION GUIDELINE 70.
READ IT, LEARN IT.
NFPA 70 CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE!

She felt an urgency to get on with the case but she also wanted to hear what he had to say. "I don't have much time, but please, go ahead."

"First, you have to know how dangerous electricity is. And that means knowing about amperage, or current. You know what that is?"

"I . . ." Sachs had thought she did, until she realized she couldn't define it. "No."

"Let's compare an electric circuit to a plumbing system: water pumped through pipes. Water pressure is created by the pump, which moves a certain amount of water through the pipes at a certain speed. It moves more or less easily depending on the width and condition of the pipes.

"Now, in an
electrical
system, it's the same thing. Except you have electrons instead of water, wires or some conductive material instead of pipes and a generator or battery instead of the pump. The pressure pushing the electrons is the voltage. The amount of electrons moving through the wire is the amps, or current. The resistance--called ohms--is determined by the width and nature of the wires or whatever the electrons're flowing through."

So far, so good. "That makes sense. Never heard it put that way before."

"Now we're talking about
amps.
Remember: the amount of moving electrons."

"Good."

"How much amperage does it take to kill you? At a hundred milliamps of AC current, your heart will fibrillate and you'll die. That's one
tenth
of one amp. Your typical Rite Aid hair dryer pulls ten amps."

"Ten?" Sachs whispered.

"Yes, ma'am. A hair dryer. Ten amps, which, by the way, is all you need for an electric chair."

As if she weren't uneasy enough.

He continued, "Electricity is like Frankenstein's monster--who was animated with lightning, by the way. It's stupid and it's brilliant. Stupid because once it's created it wants to do only one thing: Get back to the ground. Brilliant because it instinctively knows the best way to do that. It always takes the path of least resistance. You can grab on to a hundred-thousand-volt line but if it's easier for the electricity to get back through the wire, you're perfectly safe. If
you're
the best conductor to the ground . . ." His pointed nod explained the consequences.

"Now, for your lesson. My three rules for dealing with juice: First, avoid it if at all possible. This guy is going to know you're after him and he might be rigging traps with live lines. Stay away from metal--handrails, doors and doorknobs, uncarpeted flooring, appliances, machinery. Wet basements, standing water. Have you ever seen transformers and switchgear on the street?"

"No."

"Yes, you have. But you're not aware of them because our city fathers hide and disguise them. The working parts of transformers're scary and ugly. In the city, they're underground or in innocuous buildings or neutral-painted enclosures. You could be standing right next to a transformer taking in thirteen thousand volts and not know it. So keep an eye out for anything that says Algonquin on it. And stay away if you can.

"Now, you have to remember that even if you
think
you're avoiding it, you could still be in danger. There's something called 'islanding.' "

"Islanding?"

"Say the grid is down in some part of town, like happened today. You think all the circuits're dead, right? Of
course
you're safe. Well, maybe and maybe not. Andi Jessen would like Algonquin to be the only game in town, but we're not. Power nowadays is supplied through what's called distributed generation, where smaller energy producers pump juice into our grid. Islanding would happen when the Algonquin supply is offline but some smaller source is still supplying juice to the grid--an island of electricity in the void.

"Then there's backfeed. You cut the breakers on a line and go to work. But the
low
-voltage lines downstream may start feeding juice
back
into the transformer--"

Sachs understood. "And the transformer steps it back
up.
"

"Exactly. And the line you thought was dead is alive. Really alive."

"With enough juice to hurt you."

"Oh, yeah. And then there's induction. Even if you're sure you shut off the circuits--it's completely dead, and there's no islanding or backfeed possible--the wire you're working on can
still
become charged again with deadly voltage if there's another live wire nearby. That's because of induction. The current in one wire can energize another, even a dead one, if it's close enough.

"So, rule one: Avoid the juice. What's rule two? If you can't avoid it, protect yourself against it. Wear PPE, personal protective equipment. Rubber boots and gloves and not those sissy little ones they wear on that
CSI
TV show. Thick, industrial, rubber work gloves. Use insulated tools or, even better, a hot stick. They're fiberglass, like hockey sticks, with tools attached to the end. We use them for working live lines.

"Protect yourself," he repeated. "Remember the path-of-least-resistance rule. Human skin is a pretty poor conductor if it's dry. If it's wet, especially with sweat, because of the salt, resistance drops dramatically. And if you've got a wound or a burn, skin becomes a
great
conductor. Dry leather soles of your shoes are fairly good insulators. Wet leather's like skin--especially if you're standing on a conductive surface like damp ground or a basement floor. Puddles of water? Uh-oh.

"So, if you have to touch something that could be live--say, opening a metal door--make sure you're dry and wearing insulated shoes or boots. Use a hot stick or an insulated tool if you can and use only one hand--your right since it's slightly farther from the heart--and keep your other hand in your pocket so you don't touch anything accidentally and complete a circuit. Watch where you put your feet.

"You've seen birds sitting on uninsulated high-tension wires? They don't wear PPE. How can they roost on a piece of metal carrying a hundred thousand volts? Why don't we have roast pigeons falling from the skies?"

"They don't touch the other wire."

"Exactly. As long as they don't touch a return or the tower, they're fine. They have the same charge as the wire, but there's no current--no amps--going through them. You've got to be like that bird on the wire."

Which, to Sachs, made her sound pretty damn fragile.

"Take off all metal before you work with juice. Jewelry especially. Pure silver is the best conductor on earth. Copper and aluminum are at the top too. Gold isn't far behind. At the other end are the dielectrics--insulators. Glass and Teflon, then ceramic, plastics, rubber, wood. Bad conductors. Standing on something like that, even a thin piece, could mean the difference between life and death.

"That's rule number two, protection." Sommers continued, "Finally, rule three: If you can't avoid juice and can't protect yourself against it, cut its head off. All circuits, big or small, have a way to shut them down. They all have switches, they all have breakers or fuses. You can stop the juice instantly by flipping the switch or the breaker off, or removing a fuse. And you don't even need to know where the breaker is to pop it. What happens if you stick two pieces of wire into the holes in a household outlet and touch the ends?"

"The circuit breaker pops."

"Exactly. You can do the same thing with any circuit. But remember rule number two. Protect yourself when you do that. Because at bigger voltages touching the two wires will produce one hell of a spark and it could be an arc flash."