Whatever Lola Wants (18 page)

They thanked him as well, and left.

John mulled. A fool's sorry game to chance suit, his father that fool. John Cochon must not continue to play. Reduce the supply of the most dangerous patents, then quietly withdraw them. Beyond that, little but to wait for a hatchet to fall, which might not happen. Slow down those still in development, more tests, make sure unapproved drugs were safe before pushing them onto the country. He'd handle the lawyers.

So for a time, CochPharm prospered as never before. Careful release of new drugs, devolution of those with noxious potential. Because of non-public status, financial reports remained unpublished. The company reinvested heavily over those years, 1981, 1982.

The early call
from Massachusetts General woke Johnnie. His father had been brought to Emergency, then Intensive Care. When he arrived, the old man was unconscious, pale, dull as pewter, again the tubes and monitors. Johnnie took his cool hand. No response. Johnnie stayed for an hour. Joe Cochan died that afternoon.

That evening he called a meeting, the senior partners of CochPharm's law firm, his chief financial officer. “I am making some changes, gentlemen. CochPharm is for sale. Prepare the necessary documentation.” The attorneys appeared horrified. The
CFO
nodded sagely: fabulous move.

But the plan to sell, to the others a bold step—dangerous? certainly audacious—had ruled John Cochan's actions from the first. He mourned his father's genius and buried from sight his father's body just as he turned his back on the monuments, brick and cement, biological and chemical, of his father's life. The old man and all he had created were gone for good.

John Cochan had learned that a base in two countries has immeasurable value. CochPharm, its patents, and its research were sold to others. But the sites of operation remained, and Intraterra was born. In Sherbrooke, Quebec, Intraterra Canada Limited. And in Lexington, Massachusetts, Intraterra
US
, the head office, moved from Cambridge

So came the test of theory grown to necessity. More, to belief. He began slowly, small housing compounds, medium malls. But soon, with the accelerating speed of vision, a range of projects long imagined attained design, tracts of land were bought and construction began, the length of the continent then around the globe: shopping centers, residential complexes horizontal and vertical, underground malls, amusement worlds, covered stadia. In all, two dozen major colonies since 1984. Each project refined its predecessor, each achievement ever closer to perfecting his vision.

Four

Lola didn't come back for a couple of days. Just as well. I had to check in on Carney, get into his memories again, see where he'd been in the mid-eighties. And shape the narrative for Lola.

When she returned something seemed amiss: Her step less light? Her lovely eyes narrowed? I couldn't tell. She asked me to continue.

•

1. (1985)

In the end, at the
age of thirty-four in the summer of 1985, Carney did leave the Adair Company. He received Adair's blessing and founded Carney and Co. Its mandate, to combat disasters around the world, excluded oil-well fires; that market was cornered by Adair. Carney ran the company at first from his house in Somerville. He had bought out Marcie's share; part of an amicable divorce. Three years later he sold the house and bought a farm in central Vermont, another rehabilitation project to be worked on between disasters.

For the company, Carney had built a team of first-rate people: a couple of ex-colleagues who wanted new responsibilities, half a dozen of the eager young, and his old high school buddy Charlie Dart, who'd been knocking about for years in jobs requiring multiple skills. For the headquarters in Vermont he brought in a centralizing force, Mrs. Madeline Staunton, grandmotherly in appearance but steely and tenacious. From her multiply-wired office in the barn sixty yards from the farmhouse, she controlled the business, a spider at the web's center. By a simple phone line modem she could tap into her office from her home, fifteen minutes away.

Around the world preventable crises exploded into full disasters and Carney and Co. grew, tripling its manpower in four years. Then a tire fire nearby thrust Carney into local heroic visibility. Middle of a blizzard, middle of the night, middle of a dream about Jenn whom he'd met eight months before, the most full-time woman since Marcie. Eight months, but already the Marcie pattern, wanting commitment. The harsh buzz-toll of the telephone beside his bed sounded.

Mrs. Staunton said, “There's a mess in a place called Derbyville, central Massachusetts, a tire dump and it's on fire. Been burning thirty-four hours.”

“Asses.”

“Yep. And the storm's making it worse. They need you. Can you go?”

“Sure.” Two teams were out, both hip deep in devastation and anyway too far away to haul in. But he could pull together at least a preliminary team before the night was out. “Where the hell is Derbyville?”

“Fourteen miles north of Worcester.” She gave him directions, name of the mayor, the assistant mayor, and promised him faxes of background data in fifteen minutes.

The air was black and angry, the snow sharp sandgrains on his face. In the garage he patted the Jaguar's hood. Not much desire to subject it to the storm, yet he was glad to be out. He crossed the Connecticut River into New Hampshire, picked up Charlie Dart, and told him what little he knew about the mess.

They drove south. They knew each other's silences. But Charlie looked uncomfortable.

“You okay?”

“Mmm. You figure your Arizona trip's off?”

“Damn. Glad you said that.” He tapped out a number, the Arizona friend, on his cell phone, apologies for calling in the middle of the night, maybe he could come in January. The friend was sorry, he'd been looking forward to meeting Jennifer. Carney broke the connection.

Charlie said, “And how's Jenn doing?”

“Okay.”

Fifteen miles later: “And you and Jenn?”

“What?”

“How're the two of you doing?”

“Okay.”

“Look, Carney, it's none of my business so I'm making it my business. If you want to talk, I'm here.”

“Okay.”

“We can go fishing, some nice warm place. Or I'll take you on a toot.”

“Okay.”

“Or both.”

Twenty minutes down the road, Carney said, “She wants to get married. Have kids.”

Dart nodded. “With who?”

Carney shook his head.

“Okay. When we've got this blaze out we'll go on a toot. After New Year's.”

“Whenever.” Charlie's toots, a couple of days of booze, music, and the expensive delights of a crawl through some of the world's finest pleasure centers, tended to clear Carney's head for inventive solutions to ever new disaster puzzles.

Drifts of snow on the road slowed the drive. It took over three hours to reach the fire site. The gale had lapsed to gusts, the cloud ceiling had risen to nine hundred feet. Thick brown smoke boiled in the buffeted air, widening upward till it reached the dying storm. Up there it was driven eastward, had been for over a day, an innovative smog. One hundred and ten families had so far been evacuated.

In the Derbyville tire dump, next to a railroad siding and across from storage sheds, flame roared from two-thirds of the surface. Internal temperature had reached 1980 degrees Celsius, Mrs. Staunton's fax reported. For over thirty hours the ground had melted. Derbyville's mayor and Carney marched through mud. Both wore white heat-protection suits and masks. Over Carney's right shoulder hung a small backpack. He stood five inches taller than the mayor. They stopped, they stared up at the black smoke.

“Son of a bitch bastard,” said the mayor.

Eighty feet away, ebony-red flame drawn from red-orange flame rose from solid yellow flame bright as a sun. Underneath, hidden in flame, the tires. The fire chief suspected arson.

At the airport in Worcester a weather team monitored the fire. From Logan Airport in Boston they learned that storm-borne benzene and toluene had spread funnel-shaped, low down, over Leominster and Lowell, and from the Boston hub up over Durham and Portsmouth. Logan's computer-generated prediction showed a new wind pattern approaching from the west, a mid-afternoon front off Lake Ontario. It would disperse the clouds and bring a rise in temperature.

Bulldozers pared away a line of tires, denying the flames their edge of fuel. Firefighters trained to deal with buildings sprayed aimless chemical foam into the blaze, their all-terrain vehicles bringing them as close as heat allowed. One monster excavator lay sprawled on its side among tire debris, its steel charred and twisted by an explosion that had hospitalized three firefighters with second-degree burns.

At an emergency session, the mayor and his aldermen had conceded their firefighting team couldn't handle it. Now the mayor turned to Carney. “Okay, you've seen it.”

“Yep.”

“And how much?”

So goddamn predictable. No concern for the disaster they'd provoked. “It's a standard project. My costs, plus twenty-five percent.”

“And that would be …?”

“I'd figure $6 million. Maybe more.”

“Plus your share?”

“Carney and Co. gets paid first. It'll be in the contract.”

“Look, we can't afford to …”

“You can't afford not to, now.” Carney looked at the man's fat little face. You could pulverize it, Carney. Just knuckles, or the flat of your hands. He used his grimmest smile to stop himself. “Because it'll get a lot worse. Not to mention embarrassing. And much more expensive. Send your best man to the State House and your next best to the
EPA
, tell them to start begging right away. You left it too late. That was stupid.”

“Listen, I don't have to—to listen to this.”

Carney glared at him. “Go find yourself a quiet place to sit for the next couple of days.”

The mayor's eye caught, fifty feet away, a blast of smoke smothering an
ATV
and its two firefighters. They drove out, choking despite their masks. The mayor smeared gray sweat across his forehead. He started to walk away.

Carney grabbed him by an elbow and levered him forward. “Hold on. First come see what you've let happen.” He recognized the fear in the mayor's eyes.

Around the perimeter, firefighters had dug a two-foot trench through sandy soil to the clay below. Oil oozing out of the tire heap had caught here. From the ditch, plastic tubing fed the goo to a retaining pool. There bilge pumps chugged it into truck-drawn tanks. Carney clucked his tongue at the corner of his jaw. His contempt built. Cool off, Carney. “See those tires in there?”

“Yeah.”

“They're wire-mesh lined. Even piled high, air circulates. Without the mesh they'd collapse and the rubber could choke the flames. With all that air and space it's burning bright, and the storm's made it worse. The oil's draining into the ground under the tires.”

“The fire people say—”

“How much oil have they picked up?”

“Over sixty thousand gallons.” The mayor smiled.

“Given the size of the heap”—Carney's tongue clicked twice—“by now a tenth of your tires are burned. The ground under them, it's long melted. Figure a million and a half gallons of oil per million tires. You've got troubles, buddy. A lot of the oil's already reached the clay.”

“What makes you— You sure?”

“That's why you called me.”

“But can you—?”

“The clay and sand, it's killing you, it's guiding the oil down to underground water. But we can use it, make it work for us.” He wiped his forehead.

“Oh. Okay.” The mayor had no idea what he'd agreed to.

Carney inspected the railroad siding and its access. He took a drill from his case and bored out shallow sand and clay samplings. “Is water accessible at the storage sheds?”

“No, don't use water.” The mayor knew these things, it'd been explained to him by the fire chief: no water. Water just lowers the fire temperature, it's doing it right now in the storm, lowering it maybe a thousand degrees, then the tires only melt, melting makes the fire spread more and the oil drains into the ground quicker. The mayor had shaken his head in despair. Now he told Carney, “Water on the fire, hell that's the fastest way to pollute the water tables.”

Carney scowled. “Mud.” He took a cassette recorder from a hook on his belt and spoke into it for a couple of minutes. He took the cellular phone from his satchel, jacked the tape on, punched numbers, played it out. Then he talked directly: “And two derricks to thirty-nine meters. And some thirty-cc pipes and the nozzles, the eighteeners.”

The mayor's head shook. “It'll burn to the ground.”

Carney said, “After it's out we'll drill down and feed in a system of weeping drains.”

The mayor was ready to weep himself. For three years the Derbyville alderman had urged him to bring in the bond issue for tire shredders and pulverizers.

But $1.2 million was too much.

They'd get half of it back by selling the stuff for recycled heating oil.

Only after four years.

Now the bill would be who could say how many times as high.

Not near as much as letting the fire burn on. And however stupid the mayor and his governor were, they'd grasp that. Because Carney had long ago proven he could put out such fires and with the least collateral damage. Cheaper too for a town or corporation to pay his fee than for them to fight him with a lawsuit. In the last five years he'd gone into litigation three times, won three times.

The mayor asked, “What're you going to do?”

Carney squinted at him. “Go away, Mr. Mayor.”

Half past noon his team arrived at Worcester airport, nine men and four women. He was proud of his female colleagues. Women are rarely allowed into the world of disaster fighting, and if they make it they get harassed and put down.