“And what if it doesn’t?” a woman from EPA asked.
Alex shrugged. “Then we try something else.” He turned at the sound of a scuffle outside the auditorium entrance.
A bearded black man wearing an oil-smeared raincoat pushed his way past two security guards, slapping their hands away. “I passed through your metal detector and I’m not carrying any weapons!” he shouted, as if intending to make the audience hear every word. “Let me in!”
On stage, Branson stiffened. The guards tightened near her.
Alex thought he recognized the intruder from one of the news clips he had been watching obsessively since the day after the spill. Harris. Jackson Harris, the man leading the volunteers on Angel Island. In one hand Harris carried a large plastic garbage bag; stains of crude oil covered his boots and pants. His nostrils flared as he marched to the stage. One of Branson’s guards unsnapped his holster.
Harris stepped to the bureaucrats’ table, casting his gaze across city council members, designees from the Coast Guard, the Petroleum Industry Response Organization, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and the EPA. Then he reached inside his garbage sack.
The representatives shrank back, as if Harris was going to pull out an Uzi. Instead, he lifted a dripping black mass that might once have had feathers. As he held it in his hand, the shape sprawled out, letting long wings loll down. Thick oil spattered the table, staining the stacked reports.
Harris let the bird drop on the wooden table. A pelican. Its long, rapier beak gaped, as the bird slowly drew its dangling wing back toward its body. It was still alive, but not for long.
“What is this!” An outraged councilman from Sausolito slid his chair back.
“This is what’s really going down out there, man. This bird is one of thousands,” Harris said. “If you’d get off your fat political asses and get your hands dirty, you might understand why we’re so worked up!” He raised his voice to a shout directed at all of them. “Stop fucking around and do something!”
He turned toward Alex hiding behind the podium. “You’re not talking any germ warfare or genetic-engineering shit are you, Mr. Big Oil Company?”
Alex barely shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “These are natural bacteria.” Though not exactly naturally occurring bacteria, he left unfinished.
Harris turned to the audience. “Oilstar got us into this mess, and we can sue their asses later—but right now, if they got a solution, how can you not try it?” He crossed his arms over his slicker. “I’ll do it myself, right now, if Oilstar gives me some of their magic oil-eating shit. You red-tape lovers can arrest me, but at least something’ll get done!”
Branson returned to the podium. Alex stepped aside to yield the microphone. The Oilstar CEO seemed determined to show some progress, as if that would be enough to quench the outrage directed against her.
“Thank you, sir, but it’s our responsibility,” Branson said. “I appreciate the urgency of your concern—we have been forgetting the real effects of this disaster.” She took a deep breath. “Oilstar will take the risk… and accept the legal consequences. On my authority, Oilstar will deploy the Prometheus option, using our helicopters, our pilots, our equipment. And we will do it at the earliest possible moment.”
Branson frowned at the dying pelican on the table and at the representatives. “If we encounter any interference from the government in trying to clean up this mess, I personally guarantee you will find the biggest lawsuit in California history right in your lap.” Accompanied by her guards, Emma Branson walked with self-assured dignity off the stage and out the rear exit.
Before attention could return to him, Alex climbed down from the stage. Mitch clapped him on the back. “We got it!”
Alex felt the world growing fuzzy. Branson had set the wheels in motion, but he had fooled her as thoroughly as everyone else. He closed his eyes to shut out the hubbub in the room— but he was left with only the emptiness inside him.
It’ll never happen again. That was certain.
Chapter 12
Oilman Todd Severyn crushed a blob of dried seagull-dropping under his work boot, then paced up and down the Oilstar pier that extended into the deep channel in the north Bay. Tankers such as the Zoroaster would hook up to transfer pipes and offload cargo into storage tanks that dotted the hills around the refinery.
The early morning was calm, perfect flying weather. The fog seemed to dissolve in front of Todd’s eyes, but he could smell the sour stench of oil on the water long before he could see it.
The Oilstar corporate helicopter, specially outfitted for spraying a fertilizer solution swarming with the Prometheus microbe, waited on the weathered dock. The copter pilot sat in her seat with legs dangling out of the cockpit. She looked bored behind mirrored sunglasses; she was getting paid by the hour, even on the ground.
Todd had orders to spray the oil-eating microbe this morning—but if the darned state inspector didn’t arrive before the court injunction did, they’d all be hung out to dry. Probably attending a seance or checking the stars to see if the karma is right, Todd thought. Prissy California sprout-eaters!
The “suits” were locked in a push-and-shove legal battle over the Prometheus bug. Oilstar insisted on using an observer from the state office of Environmental Policy and Inspection; the EPI in turn had retained a microbiology expert from Stanford University. Getting EPI approval for the fiasco seemed like covering their butt with a postage stamp, but Todd wasn’t paid to make Oilstar’s decisions—just to implement them.
At the land end of the long pier, Dr. Alex Kramer sat inside a metal control shack, which now served as a field command post for the spraying operation. The scientist didn’t talk much; with his glasses, neat gray beard, and thinning gray hair, Alex reminded Todd of his father back at the ranch.
Todd looked at his wristwatch again and ambled back to the helicopter. His down vest and new jeans felt hot and stiff and uncomfortable. “Jeez, I wish we could get this show on the road!”
Oilstar had leaked false locations for the spraying operations, which would temporarily fool the reporters, environmental nuts, and regulatory agencies—but they would soon figure it out. Todd wanted to be long gone before then. Never ask permission, as his dad always said; easier to apologize later.
Sometimes he wished he had never left Wyoming, where he could see snow-capped mountains in the distance, blue sky overhead; where he could drive a pickup down endless dirt roads and not see another person for days. He could have made a decent living running his parents’ ranch, but he had chosen to go into petroleum engineering instead.
His work for Oilstar took him places no sane person wanted to go: the wasteland of Kuwait, its featureless sand broken only by smoking fires and war wreckage; the cold North Sea, with biting winds and battleship-gray clouds, the ocean whipped into a rabid froth; or the jungles of Indonesia, with bugs the size of rats and humidity thicker than the oil pumped out of the ground.
For some reason the skewed oddness of California bothered him more than any of those places. At first Todd thought his leg was being pulled when somebody told him to wait until the “phase of the Moon” was right for spraying Kramer’s microbes. Todd talked around in circles until he finally discovered the official simply meant that the tide needed to be in. What a bunch of wackos.
It made no sense that Branson would thumb her nose at the law by going ahead with the Prometheus spraying… and then force Todd to wait for a single inspector and some Stanford observer. Why couldn’t they just spray Kramer’s little buggies and be done with it? Why make things worse by further delay? People had no common sense in the granola land of “fruits, nuts, and flakes.”