$200 and a Cadillac

VI



Doctor Theodore Ross looked exactly like a scientist.

Victor watched him fidget in his chair as people filed into the conference room and waited for the meeting to begin. In his brown pants, white shirt, and yellow tie, with his hair gelled solidly in place and his glasses halfway down the bridge of his nose, Victor imagined that Ted Ross had been transported to Southern Petroleum from an early 60s high school science film as a result of some bizarre experiment gone awry. That they were there to talk about radiation made the image all the more appropriate. Victor smiled and gave Tom Crossly an elbow.

“What?” Tom turned and looked down at Victor’s elbow.

Victor whispered, “Check out this Ross guy.”

“What do you mean?”

Kevin Marshall, the Chief Operating Officer of Southern Petroleum, came in with three note-taking assistants before Victor could answer, and the room clamored to silence. Marshall took his seat at the head of the conference table, drummed his fingers on the table a couple of times, and watched the last few stragglers fumble with notepads and laptops and briefcases. When the room was completely quiet, Marshall looked over at the head of research and development and nodded. “We ready?”

The head of R&D stood up, looking nervous, like he never had to deal with people normally, let alone speak to an entire room full of them. “Uh, yes, thanks for coming everyone.”

Victor rolled his eyes and leaned over to whisper to Tom, “Like we’re doing this guy a favor.”

“As I’m sure you all know,” the head of R&D went on, “we believe we have a minor leak in one of our lines.” A projector threw an image on a screen representing Southern Petroleum’s various pipelines and collection points. It covered much of Southern California with an array of lines on the map radiating outward from the Long Beach refinery. The man stood in front of the map with a long pointer, the image from the projector covering his body. He pointed at the map with the pointer.

“Now we first noticed the problem at the collection point here, just outside of Rancho Cucamonga. This center represents the intersection of three lines: the Coachella line, which starts in Indio; the Bakersfield line; and the Monarch line, which starts in Nickelback. Now each of these lines is responsible for transporting the oil from the various independent oil wells in the surrounding area down to the Rancho Cucamonga point, where it all goes into a larger line and makes its way down to Long Beach to the refinery here.” He traced the routes with the pointer, showing the flow of oil, like tributaries dumping into a larger river.

Then he said, “The folks in Rancho Cucamonga have calculated that they’re losing roughly twelve to twenty thousand gallons a day, and have been for nearly two weeks. This figure is determined by adding up the gallons input at the beginning of each of the three lines and subtracting out the number of gallons that arrive at the Rancho Cucamonga facility.”

The projector switched off and the head of R&D collapsed the pointer into a one-foot rod. He cleared his throat and continued, glancing at Marshall to gauge how it was going. “Now, we’ve had some planes fly over the routes that these lines run, looking for spots on the ground that could be a leak, but so far nothing obvious has come up. This could be attributable to a number of factors. Often the pipe is buried deep enough that a leak wouldn’t necessarily reveal itself on the surface, at least not right away. In many places, development has crowded over the pipeline such that the surface is obscured completely, and in other areas, such as around Bakersfield and Nickelback, the flatness of the terrain and the absence of landmarks makes it difficult to ascertain from the air exactly where the lines run.”

Marshall cleared his throat and all of the heads at the table turned simultaneously to look at him. “Now,” he cut in, “I’ve spoken to legal about this and, just among the people in this room, we’re in some serious shit here. They’ve told us to stop sending oil through the lines until we figure out where the leak is. The last thing we want to do is poison some groundwater and end up in a major lawsuit. Of course, as of today we’re still sending oil through, the way oil prices have recovered, we can’t afford not to. We’ve already cut all the corners we can and laid as many people off as we can, and our stock is still near its fifty-two week low. So as of now, we’re still pumping oil. But damn it, we’ve got to find that leak before we have a leak around here and the story finds its way into the newspapers.”

Everyone around the table nodded and took notes and mumbled to each other about how finding the leak sounded like a really good idea. Victor smirked and shook his head. He’d heard the same kinds of ridiculous speeches at the Bureau—now look, boys, what we really need to do is bring the crime rate down!—brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Victor had seen a million Kevin Marshalls and they were all the same: officials talking endlessly about nothing at all, making careers out of pointing out the obvious. It was the Victor Joneses of the world, the guys in the trenches, the guys putting it on the line who got shit done. But it was the hot, blathering winds flowing out of guys like Kevin Marshall that people paid attention to.

As usual, there was more, and Marshall went on. “I want everyone in this room to know that we’re doing everything we can to find it. That’s the story I want everyone to communicate. If someone asks about a leak, we need to make it clear that we have not yet confirmed that there is a leak, but we’re doing everything we can to ensure the safety of the community.” He slapped his hand on the table for emphasis and then looked up at the head of R&D. “Tony, you had an idea?”

“Uh, well, it wasn’t actually my idea, sir, it was Doctor Ross who came up with it.” Tony tapped Ted Ross on the shoulder and smiled sheepishly. Marshall was giving him a look that said, you poor son of a bitch, that’s why you’ll always be stuck in middle management, you’re too damned honest to steal other people’s ideas.

Ted Ross stood up as Tony sat down. He scratched behind his neck and spoke slowly. “Yeah, uh, one of the things we thought about doing was placing radioactive isotopes into the delivery stream and tracking the migration of the radiation until we isolated the affected area.”

The room was silent. Eyes blinked on blank faces. Ted Ross looked around the table and wasn’t sure what to say next. He couldn’t say it any clearer than that. In the awkward silence, Victor suddenly felt sorry for the guy and cut in. “What he’s saying is they can put radiation in the oil and then measure the radiation in the ground along the pipeline and, wherever you find a buildup of radiation, you’ve probably found the leak.”

“So what, we’re talking about pouring nuclear waste through our pipes?” Marshall laughed. “That sounds nuts to me.”

Ted Ross shook his head slightly. “Uh, actually, we’re talking about miniscule trace amounts of stable radioactive material, just enough to really stand out from background radiation so you can distinguish the oil from everything else below the surface.” There was silence again. “It’s perfectly safe. It doesn’t harm the oil or anything else. Once the small amount that comes in from these three lines is mixed with other oil at the refinery and processed, the radiation level will not be noticeably different from background radiation.”

Victor could tell the silence in the room was irritating Ross. But Ross continued, “Look, when all of the independent wells out there in Indio, Nickelback, and Bakersfield pump their oil out of the ground and bring it to the collection points, there’s already radiation in it. Everything has radiation in it. If you turned a Geiger counter on in this room, it would pick up radiation. We’re talking about adding a small amount to it so that it has just a little more than normal, that way, wherever we find an increase in the radiation level along the line, we’ll know that’s where an excess of oil has stockpiled and that’s where the leak is.”

Marshall hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t the kind of man who liked to defer to people on things he didn’t understand. But Ted Ross looked like a guy who knew what he was talking about. Finally, Marshall said, “Well, as long as you can assure me it’s safe. I can’t imagine the news stories if something like this got out—radioactive oil contaminating the groundwater—or some such nonsense.”

Marshall leaned into the table and rested his elbows on it. He looked around at the faces and paused until they were all staring back at him. After a few seconds of shaking his head, he said, “Well, if this is safe, then I guess go ahead and do it. Do we need to hire somebody to do something like this?”

“No sir,” Ted Ross responded, “we can do it in-house.”

Marshall pushed himself back from the table and stood. “Well, Doctor Ross,” Marshall grinned, “I hope you like the desert, cuz I want your ass out there tonight.”