The Grid (6 page)

- CHAPTER TWELVE -

Price Anderson and two other people were in the waiting area of my office.

One, a burly guy about six and a half feet tall with a buzz cut, was obviously with Price. His suit was not as expensive as Price’s, but it was better than what you’d get at the Men’s Wearhouse closeout sale. He was in his late twenties and should have been wearing a sign that said
E
X–
S
PECIAL
F
ORCES
.

Across the room was a woman, a government employee if I had to guess.

She wore a navy skirt and matching blazer. She was in her late thirties, pretty in an L.L.Bean kind of way. Straight, shoulder-length brown hair, parted on one side. Minimal makeup, no jewelry except for one of those wristbands that sync with your phone to keep track of how many steps you walk in a day.

She was leaning on the receptionist desk and talking on her cell when I walked in. She hung up and said, “You must be Cantrell.”

I nodded. “That’s me.
Sheriff
Cantrell.”

Her accent was East Coast, Boston or somewhere nearby. Elongated vowels, a clipped inflection.

“So . . .
Sheriff
.” She fanned herself with one hand. “Is it always as hot as Satan’s butthole around here?”

Price sighed and stared at the floor, an embarrassed expression on his face.

“Who the hell are you?” I said. “Ted Kennedy’s love child?”

The woman glared at Price Anderson. “You didn’t fill him in, did you?”

“Fill me in on what?” I asked.

Price looked at his associate, the ex–Special Forces guy. “Wait for me in the car.”

Special Forces stood. His jacket shifted, revealing a semiautomatic pistol on his hip.

“You got a carry permit for that?” I said.

“Don’t be a dick, Jon. We don’t have time.” Price snapped his fingers at the man. “Go.”

Special Forces left the room, hardly making a sound as he opened and shut the door.

Price pointed to the woman. “This is Whitney Holbrook. She’s the chief investigator for FERC.”

I didn’t speak.

Whitney shook her head. “What’s the matter, Sheriff? Is it so hard for you to believe that a woman could be a chief investigator?”

Price rolled his eyes but didn’t reply.

I let the silence drag on for a moment. Then I said, “I was wondering what FERC stood for. Not how a ballbuster like you got to be chief investigator.”

Price chuckled until Whitney cast a withering look his way. He said, “FERC is an acronym for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They’re the outfit that investigates power outages of a suspicious nature.”

“Score one for the local guy.” Whitney Holbrook wagged her finger at me. “We also interface with Homeland Security when there’s evidence of an attack on the grid.”

“Interface,” I said. “Why can’t you people just speak English?”

Price said, “Don’t stir the pot, okay, Jon?”

Whitney held up her cell. “Homeland. That’s who I was on the phone with. The undersecretary . . . Office of National Protection.”

She spoke the last few words very deliberately, as if they possessed some intrinsic importance. There was a gleam in her eyes peculiar to government types, the infatuation with titles and positions and the proximity to power.

“Look, the county will do whatever it can to help with the outages.” I glanced at my watch. “But right now I’ve got an active murder investigation to take care of.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Whitney shook her head.

“What?” I looked at her and then Price. “I’m not following.”

“He’s still a county sheriff, Whit. He’s got a job to do. Responsibilities. You understand the concept.”

“You know what really pisses me off?” I said. “When people talk about me like I’m not even there.”

“Don’t be so sensitive, Sheriff.” Whitney pointed to the door. “We’re gonna take a little ride and explain to you about your new job.”

- CHAPTER THIRTEEN -

Sarah parks the stolen Monte Carlo beside a 7-Eleven. The convenience store is across the street from Baptist Memorial in an old section of Dallas near Fair Park, the central part of the city.

Both she and her brother, Elias, had been born at this hospital. Sarah tries to envision the day of her birth, what it was like to be truly innocent, if only for a moment.

She rubs the bruised spot on her bicep from where Cleo had hit her with the tire iron. She hopes that old bull dyke is dead.

A flash of worry enters her mind, concern for the naked girl she’d cut loose. She wishes she could have done more. But life demands you make hard choices. At least this way the girl had a chance at surviving.

Sarah wipes down the inside of the car, then tosses the rag on the pavement and dashes across the street to the main entrance of the hospital.

The handbag with the Python hangs on one shoulder. She’s still wearing the oversized raincoat and Dallas Cowboys ball cap.

Her four-year-old daughter, Dylan—her only child—is at the hospital.

The nanny had called right as Sarah was stealing the Monte Carlo, leaving a frantic, garbled message—people talking in the background, intercoms blaring. Sarah had tried to return the call, but her efforts went straight to voice mail.

The hospital’s foyer is marble and polished wood, a large open area decorated with oil paintings of past administrators.

The receptionist watches her stride across the room. An armed security guard stands to one side of the large check-in counter.

Sarah stops, breathless.

The receptionist says, “May I help you?” Her tone sounds accusatory, anything but helpful.

Sarah realizes how she looks and that she’s not at the emergency entrance. This part of the hospital is for the well dressed and the well insured.

She tells herself to be calm, to resist the urge to scream at this person who is looking askance at her. She takes a deep breath and says, “I need to see my daughter. She was checked in this afternoon.”

The receptionist raises one eyebrow.

Sarah says Dylan’s full name.

The eyebrow lowers halfway. The receptionist taps on a keyboard, squints at a screen, and then looks at Sarah.

“Yes, I see her information.” The woman’s tone is deferential. “And you would be . . .”

“I’m her mother.” Sarah says her real name.

The security guard stands up straighter. The receptionist gulps, jumps from her seat. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t recognize you.”

“My daughter,” Sarah says. “Where is she?”

The receptionist motions to the guard. “Please, ma’am. Let us escort you to her room.”

The extreme deference, which normally makes her teeth gnash, is comforting today.

The guard hustles around the desk, keys jiggling, and does a little half bow. He points to a hallway.

Sarah knew, of course, that would be the location of her daughter’s room.

A weird twist of fate. Karma enjoying an inside joke.

She nods gratefully and follows the guard toward a large entryway on the far side of the foyer, a different wing of the hospital.

Looming over the entryway is a bronze sign commemorating the philanthropist responsible for the wing’s construction.

Sarah feels a twinge at the base of her spine as she walks under her grandfather’s name.

The purse hangs heavy on her shoulder, pulled down by the Python, the old man’s gun.

- CHAPTER FOURTEEN -

The power plant sat on the far eastern edge of Peterson County.

The facility was surrounded by a lake on one side and a whole bunch of nothing everywhere else. Pastures dotted with mesquite trees, dried-up stock tanks, rusted windmills.

I drove alone in my squad car, the middle vehicle in a convoy of five. Two black government Suburbans behind me, another matching SUV directly in front, Price and his man driving the Navigator as the lead.

Since it was my county, I normally would have been in the lead, but with the feds, it’s usually best to let them think they’re in charge.

The plant looked like something from a science-fiction movie, a massive complex centered around two towers, each ten or twelve stories tall. Pipes and conduit encapsulated the towers like an exoskeleton, a silvery spray of high-voltage transmission lines spewing out of the bottom of each.

We didn’t stop at the plant.

Instead Price led us to a crossroads about a quarter mile away, the intersection of two farm-to-market highways.

Three of the four corners were open land, sandy soil baking in the afternoon sun, and were crisscrossed by dry creeks and tangles of what had once been barbwire fencing.

On the fourth corner was a small square tract about the size of a basketball court, covered in white gravel. In the middle sat a metal building on a concrete slab. The building was a little bigger than an average-sized walk-in closet, and the logo for the local telephone provider was emblazoned on the doors.

Price parked on the shoulder, and the rest of the convoy stopped in sequence behind him. He got out and removed his jacket, then tossed it in the backseat. He motioned to me to follow him.

I opened the door to the squad car, stepped outside.

August in Central Texas. Not a cloud in the sky.

The heat smothered like a warm, moist blanket, clouding your mind, pressing down on your limbs.

I began to sweat immediately.

Behind my vehicle, the passenger door of one of the Suburbans opened and Whitney Holbrook exited. She took off her blazer, too, and together we crunched across the gravel to where Price was standing by the shed. Whitney wobbled on her heels as she walked over the uneven surface.

About halfway to the metal building, she stopped for a moment to remove a pebble from her shoe.

“Need a hand?” I asked.

She glared at me, face red, sweat trickling down her brow. She didn’t speak.

I shrugged and continued.

She followed right behind me.

After about five yards she lost her footing and stumbled forward.

I caught her elbow, kept her from face-planting in the gravel.

“Thanks.” She wiped perspiration from her forehead with the back of one hand.

“This time of year, it’s a little warmer here than on the Cape, isn’t it?”

“You know Boston?” she said.

“Been there a time or two.”

“I’m a Southie. The Cape’s for rich kids.” She paused. “You a rich kid, Cantrell?”

Before I could reply, Price shouted at us: “Let’s go, ladies. It’s hot as two camels fucking in a sauna out here.”

Whitney and I continued trudging across the gravel to the metal shed. We arrived a few seconds later, and Price flung open the doors of the building.

The interior was filled with circuit banks, row after row of tiny connectors with thin, multicolored wires feeding into each side. On one wall of the shed, various boxes had been mounted, each with network cabling and larger-gauge wires running in and out.

One of the circuit boards, on the far right, was blackened, like it had been burned. Insulation had melted, wiring curled.

“What’s this got to do with the outage at the power plant?” I asked.

Price said, “You know anything about how phone lines work?”

I didn’t reply.

“Get to the point, will ya.” Whitney picked another pebble from her shoe.

“I told you not to wear heels.” Price stared at her legs.

Whitney’s eyes formed slits. She opened and closed her mouth several times but didn’t speak. I wondered if Price had told her not to wear heels this morning when they were getting dressed together.

“Maybe you two could stop with the foreplay,” I said, “and tell me why we drove out here to look at a junction box?”

Whitney and Price glared at each other. After a moment, Price turned to me and said, “You see any houses nearby? Anywhere that would need this much bandwidth?”

I shook my head.

Whitney pointed to the metal building. “The technical term for this is an ‘SAI.’”

“A whatsit?” I looked at both of them.

“A serving area interface,” Price said. “It’s an access point to the telecommunications network. A junction box is the thing on your house.”

I nodded, understanding all of a sudden. “This is the main line into the power plant.”

Price smiled. “See, Whit. I told you he was a smart cookie.”

I knelt beside the burned section. “What happened here?”

“An incendiary device, very small, remote controlled.” Whitney leaned over my shoulder. “Took out the phone lines to the plant. Not much louder than a car door slamming.”

“The FBI has a forensics teams on the way,” Price said. “We’ll know more later today about the specific explosive used and all that.”

I looked up. “They cut the lines to the plant so your people couldn’t call 911?”

Blowing the plant’s communications had nothing to do with shutting off the flow of power. I assumed Price and Whitney would get to that in due course.

He shook his head. “They cut communication so the substation couldn’t interface with the rest of Sudamento’s facilities.”

I turned to Whitney.

“Think of the electrical grid as one big organism,” she said. “Lots of tentacles going everywhere.”

“Okay.” I closed my eyes, envisioning Whitney Holbrook with snakes coming out of her head.

“When one tentacle gets sick,” she said, “it tells the others, so that they can take up the slack.”

“So they can generate more power.” I opened my eyes.

Price nodded. “If the other tentacles don’t know about the sick one, then they can’t gear up to throw more juice.”

“Which leads to a brownout,” Whitney said.

“And this is the choke point for all the data?” I stood, brushed dust from my knees. “The only way information can get in or out?”

Across the road a large panel van stopped and several men in white overalls got out. The FBI crime-scene people had arrived.

“Redundancy is the name of the game,” Whitney said. “There’re two more boxes just like this one on the other side of the plant.”

“Both of them have been sabotaged,” Price said. “Same MO.”

“Somebody who knows their business,” I said. “They’re jacking with the tentacles, aren’t they?”

“Bingo.” Price nodded.

I stared at the horizon. Heat waves shimmered on the two-lane highway.

Price shut the doors. “Imagine a coordinated attack like this, only on a larger scale.”

“Communication lines are cut at the same time as the grid is attacked,” I said. “Pick the right spots, and you could take out a state or two.”

Price nodded. “Not to mention that if the damage to the generators is severe enough, you’re looking at weeks if not months before power is restored.”

“That leads to a bit of unpleasantness we call ‘societal breakdown,’” Whitney said. “Homeland Security runs models of various scenarios. None of them are pretty.”

“Who do you like for it?” I asked.

Neither replied.

“Domestic or foreign?” I said.

Silence.

“Let’s check out the power plant and the substation.” Price pointed in the direction we’d just come. “They actually attacked a substation, but the damage rippled back to the plant itself. You need to see for yourself what happened.”

Whitney said, “It’s a simple question, Price.”

He ignored her, spoke to me. “We can talk about that someplace other than here on hell’s back forty.”

“Let’s talk about it now,” Whitney said. “I’m starting to like the heat.”

Sweat poured down her face.

“It’s not that simple,” he said. “We both know that.”

Whitney shook her head and trudged back toward her vehicle. About halfway to the road, she tripped again. There was no one to help her this time, so she fell to the gravel, landing on her hands and knees.