“Des Moines, Iowa. Ever been there?”
“No, local boy,” the man replied, lying. He’d been born in Los Angeles thirty years before. “I’m an accountant with Peat Marwick.” That was a lie, too.
But a singles bar was a place for lies, as everyone knew. The woman was twenty-three or so, just out of secretarial school, brown hair and eyes, and needed to lose about fifteen pounds, though she was attractive enough if you liked them short. The three drinks she’d already consumed to show that she was a burgeoning Big Apple sophisticate had her pretty mellow.
“Been here before?” he asked.
“No, first time, what about you?”
“Last few months, nice place to meet people.” Another lie, but they came easily in a place like this.
“Music’s a little loud,” she said.
“Well, other places it’s a lot worse. You live close?”
“Three blocks north. Got a little studio apartment, subleasing it. Rent control in the building. My stuff gets here in another week.”
“So, you’re not really moved in yet?”
“Right.”
“Well, welcome to New York . . . ?”
“Anne Pretloe.”
“Kirk Maclean.” They shook hands, and he held hers a little longer than necessary so that she’d get a feel for his skin, a necessary precondition to casual affection, which he needed to generate. In another few minutes, they were dancing, which mainly meant bumping into people in the dark. He was turning on the charm, and she was smiling up at his six-foot height. Under other circumstances, this could have developed into something, Kirk thought. But not tonight.
The bar closed after two in the morning, and he walked her out. She was quite drunk now from a total of seven drinks barely diluted by bar peanuts and pretzel nuggets. He’d carefully nursed his three, and eaten a lot of peanuts. “So,” he asked out on the sidewalk, “let me drive you, okay?”
“It’s only three blocks.”
“Annie, it’s late, and this is New York, okay? You need to learn where you can go and where you can’t. Come on,” he concluded, pulling her hand and leading her around the corner. His BMW was parked halfway to Broadway. He gallantly held the door open, shut it behind her, then walked around to get in himself.
“You must do okay,” Anne Pretloe noted, surveying the car.
“Yeah, well, lots of people like to dodge taxes, y’know?” He started the car and moved out onto the cross street, actually in the wrong direction, though she was a little too much in her cups to appreciate that. He turned left on Broadway and spotted the blue van, parked in a quiet spot. Half a block away, he flashed his lights, whereupon he slowed the car, and pushed the button to lower both the driver-side and passenger windows.
“Hey,” he said, “I know this guy.”
“Huh?” Pretloe replied, somewhat confused about where they were and where they were going. It was too late for her to do much in any case.”Yo, Kirk,” the man in coveralls said, leaning down to the open passenger window.
“Hey, buddy,” Maclean replied, giving a thumbs-up.
The man in coveralls leaned in and produced a small aerosol can from his sleeve. Then he depressed the red plastic button and gave Anne Predoe a blast of ether right in the face. Her eyes popped open for a second of shock and surprise. She turned to look at Kirk for a long lingering second or so, and then her body went slack.
“Be careful with the drugs, man, she’s got a lot of booze in her.”
“No problem.” The man banged the side of the truck and another man appeared. This one looked up and down the street for a police car, then helped open the passenger door, lifted Anne Pretloe, and carried her limp form through the rear door of the van, where she joined another young woman picked up by another company employee earlier that night. With that, Maclean drove off, letting the night air blow the stink of the ether out of the car as he headed right, onto the West Side Highway and north to the George Washington Bridge. Okay, that made two he’d bagged, and the others should have gotten a total of six more by now. Another three, and they could end this most dangerous part of the operation.
CHAPTER 11
INFRASTRUCTURE
The lawyer made the call, and unsurprisingly found that it developed into a luncheon in a restaurant where a man of forty or so asked a few simple questions, then left before the dessert cart was wheeled up to the table. That ended his involvement with whatever would happen. He paid the check with cash and walked back to his office haunted by the question-what had he done, what might he have started? The answer for both, he told himself forcefully, was that he didn’t know. It was the intellectual equivalent of a shower after a sweaty day’s work, and though ultimately not as satisfying, he was a lawyer, and accustomed to the vicissitudes of life.
His interlocutor left the restaurant and caught the Metro, changing trains three times before settling on the one that ran near his home, close to a park known for the prostitutes who stood about, peddling their multivalued wares for passersby in automobiles. If there were anywhere an indictment of the capitalist system, it was here, he thought, though the tradition went further back than the onset of the current economic system. The women had all the gaiety of serial killers, as they stood there in their abbreviated clothing made to be removed as rapidly as possible, so as to save time. He turned away, and headed to his flat, where, with luck, others would be waiting for him. And luck, it turned out, was with him. One of his guests had even made coffee.
“This is where it has to stop,” Carol Brightling said, even though she knew it wouldn’t.
“Sure, doc,” her guest said, sipping OEOB coffee. “But how the hell do you sell it to him?”
The map was spread on her coffee table: East of Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay was a piece of tundra, over a thousand square miles of it, and geologists for British Petroleum and Atlantic Richfield – the two companies that had largely exploited the Alaskan North Slope, built the pipeline, and therefore helped cause the Exxon Valdez disaster-had made their public pronouncement. This oilfield, called AARM, was at least double the size of the North Slope. The report, still semi classified in the industrial sense, had come to the White House a week earlier, with confirming data from the United States Geological Survey, a federal agency tasked to the same sort of work, along with the opinion of the geologists that the field extended farther east, across the Canadian border-and exactly how far it extended they could only guess, because the Canadians had not yet begun their survey. The conclusion of the executive summary posited the possibility that the entire field could rival the one in Saudi Arabia, although it was far harder to transport oil from it-except for the fact, the report went on, that the Trans-Alaska pipeline had already been built, and the new fields would only need a few hundred miles of extension on the existing pipeline, which, the summary concluded arrogantly, had produced a negligible environmental impact.
“Except for that damned tanker incident,” Dr. Brightling observed into her morning coffee. Which had killed thousands of innocent wild birds and hundreds of sea otters, and had sullied several hundred square miles of pristine seacoast.
“This will be a catastrophe if Congress lets it go forward. My God, Carol, the caribou, the birds, all the predators. There are polar bears there, and browns, and barren-ground grizzly, and this environment is as delicate as a newborn infant. We can’t allow the oil companies to go in there!”
“I know, Kevin,” the President’s Science Advisor responded, with an emphatic nod
“The damage might never be repaired. The permafrost-there’s nothing more delicate on the face of the planet,” the president of the Sierra Club said, with further, repetitive emphasis. “We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our children-we owe it to the planet. This bill has to be killed! I don’t care what it takes, this bill must die! You must convince the President to withdraw any semblance of support for it. We cannot allow this environmental rape to take place.”
“Kevin, we have to be smart about how we do this. The President sees this as a balance-of-payments issue. Domestic oil doesn’t force us to spend our money buying oil from other countries. Worse, he believes the oil companies when they say they drill and transport the oil without doing great environmental damage, and that they can fix what damage they do accidentally. ”
“That’s horseshit, and you know it, Carol.” Kevin Mayflower spat out his contempt for the oil companies. Their goddamned pipeline is a bleeding scar on the face of Alaska, an ugly, jagged steel line crossing the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, an affront to Nature Herself and what for? So that people could drive motor vehicles, which further polluted the planet merely because lazy people didn’t want to walk to work or ride bicycles or horses. (Mayflower didn’t reflect on the fact that he’d flown to Washington to deliver his plea instead of riding one of his Appaloosa horses across the country, and that his rented car had been parked on West Executive Drive.) Everything the oil companies touched, they ruined, he thought. They made it dirty. They sullied the very earth itself, removing what they thought of as a precious resource here, there, and everywhere, whether it was oil or coal, gashing the earth, or poking holes into it, sometimes spilling their liquid treasure because they didn’t know and didn’t care about the sanctity of the planet, which belonged to everyone, and which needed proper stewardship. The stewardship, of course, required proper guidance, and that was the job of the Sierra Club and similar groups, to tell the people how important the earth was, and how they must respect and treat it. The good news was that the President’s Science Advisor did understand, and that she did workin the White House Compound, and did have access to the President.