Black Oil, Red Blood

Chapter 23



Cameron cut our ropes off and led us to his car, a Toyota Prius hybrid.

“Thought I had this place pretty well protected,” he said. “I wiped the address out of most of the commercial and government databases. How’d you get it?”

“FBI,” Nash answered.

A strange look passed across Cameron’s face.

“What?” I asked.

“Oh nothing,” Cameron said. “You just shouldn’t have been able to get it from them. But what’s done is done.”

Nash looked suspicious. “How come you didn’t pick up your phone when we called?”

“What number did you have?” Cameron asked.

Nash told him.

“I got rid of that number last week. Have to keep things fresh, you know.”

“Who the heck are you,” I asked, “and why is everyone out to get you?”

“I’m a computer programmer,” he said. “I used to work for PetroPlex. I’ll tell you everything, but first we’ve got to get out of here.”

A computer programmer who was also a crack shot with a gun? I supposed it was possible. This was Texas, after all. Still, I was a little spooked. He had killed those guys a little too cleanly—a little too easily—for your average white-collar Joe. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Cameron grinned. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

My stomach dropped.

Seeing the pallor in my face, Cameron said quickly, “I’m kidding! I’m kidding! Calm down.”

Nash scowled. “Is that some kind of computer geek humor? Knock it off!”

Undaunted, Cameron started whistling a tune. He sure was cheerful for a guy with some very bad dudes after him. His easy slouch and old beat up jeans made him come off like a dude who was comfortable in his skin, no matter the circumstances. If a bunch of dead assassins on his property didn’t get to him, I was guessing that not much would. But why would he be so nonchalant about it all? Did he kill people every day? Was it a smart move to actually get in the car with him?

He opened the car door for me. I eyed Nash, and Nash nodded. He seemed to be okay with Cameron. I supposed Cameron did save our lives after all, but why? If I didn’t get in the car, I guess I’d never know, so I slid into shotgun while the guys settled down in the back.

“What about the, um, bodies?” I asked. “Are we just going to leave them for people to find? Couldn’t that be. . . bad for you?”

“Did you notice the neighborhood?” Cameron said. “Three or four bodies aren’t going to seem that out of place. The police will assume gang violence and close the case without a lot of investigation.”

“But you just. . . shot them. Just like that,” I said.

“It’s amazing what you can learn to do in the name of self-preservation,” Cameron said.

I wasn’t so sure. I felt certain I’d be having nightmares about all the bodies that had piled up around me today for years to come.

“So you don’t stay here much then?” Nash asked.

“I’m staying at a hotel downtown.” Cameron put the car in gear and pulled away. “Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.”

“So why do you have this place at all?” Miles asked.

“The virus is hidden on a jump drive disguised as a wrench,” Cameron said. “What better place to hide a wrench than at an old car garage in a neighborhood with virtually no computers? Even if anybody found the place, they’d never find the virus.”

The virus again. What on earth? “How come everyone seems to assume I know what this virus is? I mean, if it’s on a jump drive, I assume it’s a computer virus and not your common cold variety, but seriously. What is this about?”

“First, let’s get where we’re going,” Cameron said.

It didn’t take us long to get downtown. Cameron had a suite at the Adolphus, a hotel so swanky it had a one-point-two million dollar Steinway Art Case piano in the lobby and a five star restaurant on the first floor. He led us into a room with soft gray carpet, elaborately-framed mirrors, shiny black polished modern furniture, and richly-textured drapes. The place was littered with computers and networking equipment, making the already modern décor look downright space age.

Miles let out a low whistle. “Computer programmers make this kind of money? Honey, I picked the wrong profession.”

Cameron grinned. “Nah. My friend’s the manager. He’s been letting me crash.”

“Nice,” I said. I eyed the doors that led to the bedroom. I was tired and willing to bet this suite had one heck of a bed.

Forcing myself to wrest my attention away from the prospect of rest, I said, “So. About the virus.”

“The virus,” Cameron said, “is my personal insurance policy against PetroPlex.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Yeah. You know. Against the plot to manipulate the energy market.”

“The what?” How come everyone assumed I knew so much information I didn’t?

“Schaeffer didn’t tell you? He said he was going to ask you for advice.”

“If he was, he didn’t get to it before somebody else got to him.”

Cameron sighed. “Yeah, that’s a real shame. If I’d been able to get the tapes from him in time, we might have been able to prevent all this.”

Tapes? What tapes? More stuff I didn’t know about. Unbelievable! This time I didn’t even bother to say anything. I just gave Cameron a look.

He interpreted it correctly. “You don’t know about the tapes either? Sheesh, what do you know?”

I felt kind of offended. I am smart. I know a lot of stuff. Only lately, it’s just that I didn’t seem to know the right stuff. “We know that PetroPlex owns the Mayor of Kettle, the Police Chief, and at least one of the judges in town, but we don’t know how or why.”

“Hmmm,” Cameron said. “That’s news to me. The only conspiracies I know about are global. Tell me more.”

Global? Oh, was that all? Good grief.

Nash, Miles, and I filled Cameron in on the events of the last forty-eight hours.

“Well,” Cameron said, “I think it’s pretty safe to say that PetroPlex bought all your town officials in order to get to Schaeffer. It’s your bad luck that you picked him of all people as your expert, because now you’re involved. And it seems to me that everyone, including me, is assuming you know more than you actually do. That’s bad for you. Very bad.”

I felt exasperated by the sheer weight of everything I didn’t know but should. “Why? Why is it bad? What is this about? If somebody’s out to get me, I feel like I at least deserve to know why.”

Cameron settled into a sleek gray chair and interlaced his fingers. “Well, Schaeffer and I were working together to assemble evidence against PetroPlex. It was kind of funny how I met him. He was always nosing around the perimeters of the refinery taking air samples. The higher-ups kept trying to figure out a way to get rid of him, but he always stayed on public land, so there wasn’t a lot they could do.

“At the time, a lot of people at PetroPlex, myself included, were suffering from chronic headaches and congestion. Watching Schaeffer snoop around made me start to wonder if maybe there was something in the air that PetroPlex wasn’t warning employees about. So I decided one day that I’d take my lunch break and go downstairs and talk to him.”

“And he talked to you?” I asked.

Cameron nodded.

I was surprised, knowing how reserved, academic, and secretive Schaeffer had been. On the other hand, Cameron didn’t come off as a threatening kind of guy. His cheerful manner and ease of conversation did a lot to put people at ease—which was saying something, considering that we’d just met over the barrel of a gun. Even in this short time, my reservations about him seemed to be melting away.

“We struck up a conversation,” Cameron continued, “and Schaeffer told me all about the dangers of benzene, toluene, and other chemicals that the refinery emitted every day. When I went back to my office, I decided I’d do a little cyber-snooping myself, just to see if I could find any evidence that the higher ups knew this stuff was floating around. Sure enough, I discovered that PetroPlex was willfully cutting corners and sacrificing safety for the sake of cutting costs and boosting profit margins.”

“And how’d you feel about that?” I asked.

“Well, I was mad, of course,” Cameron said, looking anything but. “I mean, here was this big company poisoning an entire community, and nobody seemed to know about it, or care. I decided I was going to do a large-scale media release that sent all our evidence digitally to all media outlets. I contacted Schaeffer to see if he wanted to pool his information with mine. He said yes, but urged me to wait until he had a complete set of data. He wanted the data to be as damning as possible before releasing it. He had a personal vendetta against PetroPlex because his father, who spent his life working at the Kettle refinery, died of benzene-induced cancer.”

I was flabbergasted. “He never told me that,” I said.

Cameron shrugged, as though it had been the most natural thing in the world for someone like Schaeffer to share his family secrets with him. “Anyway, at about that time, the refinery VP came to me and asked me to write a computer program that would disrupt trading on the energy market and artificially increase the price of oil. He said it was to be used only in the event of a financial emergency—but I knew better because I had been monitoring internal communications.”

Whoa. That was more big news, to say the least. “So you didn’t do it, right?” “Yeah, I did it, but only because I needed to buy time. I was getting a lot of inside information while working there, and the veep made it clear that I would get fired if I didn’t do it.

“Anyway, while I was writing the program, I also wrote a virus designed to counteract the program. By the time I was done with both, Schaeffer and I had gathered just about all the evidence we needed. When I turned the program over to PetroPlex, I made my escape. Then I threatened to release the virus if they used my program or came after me at all. The virus manipulates the market so that the price of oil drops dramatically, and it also makes it impossible for the original program I wrote to work. See this laptop right here?” Cameron pointed to a laptop on the end table. “It’s ready to go right now. All I have to do is hit ‘enter’ and the thing is loose.”

“I thought it was hidden on a jump drive in a wrench,” Nash said.

“That’s the backup,” Cameron explained. “The virus wouldn’t be much good with the safety off now, would it? I have to be ready to launch at a moment’s notice. But if something happened to me, Schaeffer knew where to find the backup.”

“Let me get this straight,” Miles said. “You’re just sitting around with the trigger cocked, right out here in the open?”

Cameron nodded. “Moment’s notice, like I said.”

Miles stood and walked toward Cameron’s laptop for a better look.

“Easy now,” Cameron said. “Too close, and you have no idea what you’d be unleashing.”

Miles backed off, but tripped over the laptop cord in the process.

Cameron’s computer went crashing to the ground, along with the desk lamp, which landed on the “Enter” key and set off a shrill alarm.

Miles and Cameron both swore simultaneously.

“What did I do?” Miles said, backing himself all the way up against the opposite wall, as far from the offending machine as possible. “Can you undo it?”

For the first time since I’d met him, Cameron seemed perturbed. I couldn’t believe he could so calmly shoot two guys in cold blood but freak out at the press of a mere button. And yet there it was, happening right in front of me.

“No, I can’t undo it!” he said. “Once a virus is loose, it’s loose!”

“Whatsamatter with you?” Miles said. “Leaving a thing like that out in the open! It’s not my fault! I take no responsibility.”

Cameron ignored him. He was rushing around the room, shutting laptops and dismantling wires. “Get your stuff! We have to get out of here!”

“Why?” Nash asked.

Cameron didn’t give him a second glance. “Because PetroPlex will be able to trace the originating IP address of the virus to this location, and when they do, we don’t want to be here, believe me. You’ve already been treated to the hospitality of their private security team once. You want to go there again?”

I knew I sure didn’t.

“Everybody grab a computer and get to the car!” Cameron said.

Everybody grabbed a machine except for me. I grabbed Lucy instead, and we raced down to the parking garage and piled back into Cameron’s Prius.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Cameron said. “Away. Out of town.”

“What happens now?” Miles wanted to know.

“You don’t want to know. The markets crash. The price of gasoline drops.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Miles asked. “Let’s fill ’er up!”

“It’s good up to a point,” Cameron said. “PetroPlex will probably do something desperate to try to recover and prevent bankruptcy. I didn’t intend to use this virus unless PetroPlex released my original program. The virus was designed to counteract the effects of the original program, not to destroy a functioning market.”

“Bankruptcy?” Nash asked. He sounded skeptical.

“I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what this thing will do. The financial markets are a very delicate balancing act that isn’t that hard to disrupt.”

Cameron peeled out of the parking garage. He drove fast—a little too fast. The buildings of downtown Dallas whipped past us.

“Dude!” Miles said. “Pedestrian!”

Cameron swerved around an idiot who was standing in the middle of Elm Street on the X that marked the spot where JFK had been assassinated. “Moron,” he said, before pulling onto the freeway.

I was worried he was going to attract unwanted attention. I had an uneasy feeling in my chest.

“Slow it down some,” I said. But it wasn’t just Cameron’s speed that was bothering me. All this stuff about the financial markets didn’t make any sense. “If it’s so easy to manipulate the energy market, how come someone hasn’t done it already?”

“Who says they haven’t?” Cameron asked. “Remember when the stock market lost a trillion dollars in a matter of minutes in May 2010 because of a computer glitch?”

I didn’t, as I had long since pulled all the money I had in the stock market out and converted it to cash. And spent it. On Ramen. Ugh.

“I remember,” Nash said.

“How is that possible?” Miles said. “I don’t understand the financial markets.”

Cameron eased his foot off the gas pedal some. “If you did, you’d be rich. If everybody knew what the people on Wall Street know, the country would look a whole lot different than it does today, I suspect.”

“But you get it, right?” Miles asked. “Otherwise you couldn’t have written the program.”

“I know enough to be dangerous,” Cameron said. “The energy market is a little different than the stock market. It works kind of like this. Oil is a commodity, right? So it’s not traded on the stock market. It’s historically been traded on the NYMEX, the New York Mercantile Exchange, which is the market where businesses buy and sell energy, metals and other commodities that people use every day. Trading is fast and furious. About a thousand transactions take place every minute. But when it comes to oil, the traders are not buying and selling actual oil. They are buying and selling contracts called futures contracts, which are agreements to accept delivery of oil in the future at a price set in the present.”

“That sounds simple enough,” Miles said.

I glanced at Nash. He was uneasily scanning the horizon, presumably looking for pursuers, cops, or anyone else we wanted to steer clear of.

Cameron glanced back at Miles. “It’s not too complicated. It’s basically just a bet on the future price of oil. Where it gets complicated is when all these other traders, called speculators, jump in. They’re not interested in the actual oil. They’re only interested in making bets on other people’s bets. There are so many of them that less than one percent of crude oil and gasoline physically changes hands as a result of the buying and selling of all these contracts. The speculators could care less about the actual oil. They’re just interested in betting on which direction the market will go. They buy the futures contracts intending to sell them before the actual oil gets delivered. They hope that if they bet right, they can cash out on the deal. Buy low, sell high. See?”

“I guess,” Miles said.

“Theoretically,” Cameron continued, “speculators are good for the market because they inject a lot of dough into it. A lot of cash keeps the market healthy. The problem is, excessive speculation can really inflate the price of oil. So if I release a program that makes it look like a lot of speculation is happening, the market would react and the price of oil would go up.”

“Is that what your virus did?” I asked.

Cameron nodded. “Kind of. Only in reverse.”

“All right,” Nash said. “But the NYMEX is regulated by the government. Eventually they’ll find the source of the computer program, you’ll go to jail, and the market would correct itself. You’re not worried about that at all?”

“Well, if the program were released on the NYMEX, that’s probably true,” Cameron said. “But remember, I said that oil futures contracts have historically been traded on the NYMEX. These days, fewer and fewer of them are actually traded there.”

“What?” I asked. “Where else would they be traded? Not on the stock market.”

“Cop,” Nash said, pointing out a red and blue on the horizon.

“I’m slowing down,” Cameron said. “Anyway, Chloe, you’re right. They wouldn’t be traded on the stock market, because that’s regulated too. Think about this for a minute. Let’s say you’re one of the richest corporations in the world, and you feel like trading futures contracts on the NYMEX is good for your industry. But let’s say you wanted a little more control over the trades without having to worry about a whole lot of regulation and government oversight. What would you do?”

“Establish a private market that isn’t government-regulated,” I said. “But that would require an act of Congress. It would be virtually impossible to pull off.”

“Maybe for most people,” Cameron said. “But not for Big Oil. Big Oil has deep pockets. George W. Bush has received more money in campaign contributions than any other political candidate in history. It got him the presidency, and some people have argued that in exchange, he went to war on Big Oil’s behalf. According to certain other sources, the number two and three recipients of the most money paid in campaign contributions by Big Oil are Texas’s very own senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Senator Phil Graham.”

“So you’re saying Hutchison and Graham were bought?” I asked.

“Absolutely not. I’m just saying that it’s naïve to think campaign contributions don’t in some way inform the decisions politicians make—either directly or indirectly. Politicians naturally want to represent the interests of their constituents, especially if those constituents are in a position to help put them and keep them in office.”

Behind me, Nash swore.

I caught a glimpse of red and blue flashing lights in Cameron’s rear-view mirror. “I thought you slowed down!”

“I did!” Cameron said. “I’m not speeding!”

“What are we going to do?” I bit my lip. I didn’t see how Nash could orchestrate some major getaway this time—not on a heavily populated freeway in broad daylight.

“Wait a minute,” Nash said. “Don’t panic.”

Cameron’s knuckles were white from gripping the wheel.

“Keep your speed steady,” Nash said.

Cameron did.

Behind us, the cop car edged closer, then peeled around us and went after somebody else.

We all let out a collective exhale.

“I hate that!” Miles said.

He wasn’t the only one.

“Yeah, that was close.” Cameron relaxed his grip on the steering wheel a little. “Where were we? Oh yeah, senators and campaign funds. With that in mind, consider that in the year 2000, Phil Graham introduced a little law now referred to as “the Enron Loophole” into the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was signed into law by President Clinton.”

“What’s Enron got to do with the commodities exchange?” Nash wanted to know. “Or with oil, for that matter? Enron was not even an oil company.”

“Hold your horses,” Cameron said. “I’m about to tell you. The Enron Loophole is what made it possible for large corporations to establish private commodities exchanges.”

“And trade any way they want without interference from government regulators!” Miles said triumphantly.

“Yep,” Cameron said. “So today, thanks to the Enron Loophole, we have the Intercontinental Exchange, also known as the ICE—a private commodities trading market. Today, more oil futures contracts are traded on the ICE than are traded on the NYMEX.”

“I’ve never even heard of the ICE,” Nash said.

“And don’t you think that’s the way Big Oil wants it?” Cameron asked.

Wow. The enormity of what PetroPlex was involved in and able to pull off overwhelmed even me. I knew all about oil’s toxicity and how many people it killed on a yearly basis. I knew about increased cancer rates and the rise of asthma. I knew about birth defects and minor spills, and major ones. But this? The creation and manipulation of completely private, totally unregulated energy markets? This was bigger than I’d ever even imagined.

Of course in a post Gulf-Oil Disaster environment, the whole world knew that oil was capable of ruining whole sections of the planet and killing not just wildlife, but people too. Even though I made a living railing against Big Oil, I had always kind of viewed oil as a necessary evil.

But in light of what I’d just learned, now Big Oil struck me as an evil more black than oil itself. The sheer size and money involved made them not only too big to fail, but too big to control. Instead, they were controlling us. They weren’t just driving our economy and trying to influence government policy. They were controlling it. They were blatantly throwing money at political candidates who favored the policies they wanted and then sitting back and hoping for favors in return, thus corrupting—and potentially destroying—our whole system of democracy.

In light of those facts, all of a sudden it made sense to me why certain Texas political leaders were so strongly against government regulation. The party line was all about not letting government control invade private lives—but it was nothing but fear manipulation, all designed to distract the public and cause them to be blind to the real threat—the corporations whose vast amounts of money allowed them to pull the government’s strings with the finesse of the most experienced puppeteers. Small government is one thing. But a government that’s too small to control big business and protect its citizens is another. The implications for the future seemed ominous.

Cameron was thinking the same thing. “Yeah, we’re on the run out of town now, but when you think about where this could lead and what it could mean for the country and the world, it kind of makes you want to pack up and head for the moon. Remember Enron? This loophole allowed Enron to create its own online energy futures exchange, which they did. Then from 2000-2002, their traders manipulated the energy markets and artificially inflated the price of energy on the West Coast. Since this whole exchange was unregulated, nobody knew what was going on until there were rolling blackouts, energy bills no one could afford to pay, school and business shutdowns, and deaths from heat exposure. Thousands of people lost their jobs, California’s two largest utility companies declared bankruptcy, and the state lost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, Enron got rich at everyone else’s expense.”

“We have to do something,” I said. “Can you imagine what would happen if trading on the ICE created the same situation, only this time with gasoline? People wouldn’t be able to get to work. Businesses would shut down. Food wouldn’t get delivered to grocery stores. There would be panic in the streets. Riots. Violence. Injuries.”

“Right,” Cameron said. “And no gas means no ambulances to take people to hospitals. And even if people still somehow managed to get there, it wouldn’t be a safe environment. The hospitals wouldn’t be able to get new sterile supplies, since many of those supplies are made out of plastic, which is made from crude oil. They wouldn’t have the equipment they need to treat injuries. So people would be dying in the hospitals, starving on the streets, and shooting each other for gas or food. We are talking complete and total chaos and devastation caused by the unchecked greed of a few privileged people.”

I groaned. “But what can we do to prevent this? Like you said, here we are on the run, with no resources and no plan. We are totally powerless!”

“We are not totally powerless,” Cameron said. “We can collect evidence against them and release it to the press. We can make the public aware that there are flaws in the system that need to be corrected. We can demand campaign finance reform and push for stricter lobbyist controls. Nothing will ever change if the public doesn’t rise up and take control of these core issues. Nothing else can guarantee the integrity of the system. That’s why Schaeffer’s and my press release was so important.”

“Only now Schaeffer is dead,” Nash said.

“Yeah,” Cameron said, “which is a major problem for us because he was about to take delivery on a series of recorded conversations between PetroPlex executives that proved they were about to manipulate the markets and defraud the American people. Schaeffer had a connection with some inside guy at the Kettle refinery—a mole—I don’t know who. The problem is, the recordings were all on analog audio tape from an old handheld recorder and weren’t digital, so he couldn’t email them to me. I sent him a cassette-to-digital converter, but he didn’t know how to operate it, and neither did his inside guy, so he was going to ask you to show him how.”

“Me?” I said, surprised.

“Yeah,” Cameron said. “Apparently, he trusted you. But since you don’t seem to know anything about the tapes, I guess he didn’t get around to asking you yet.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “Do you know where the tapes are?”

“Nope,” Cameron said sheepishly. “I was kind of hoping you did, though.”

Crap. I hadn’t the first clue where the tapes were, obviously, and said so.

“Schaeffer may have gotten his hands on them before he died, or he may not have,” Cameron said. “I don’t know when the delivery was scheduled to take place. Without the tapes, I can’t really prove the plot to manipulate the markets. I’ve hacked into the system and have been monitoring executive emails, but so far, no one has been stupid enough to put anything explicit in writing. They’ve been much more careful covering up evidence about the energy market plot than they ever were about safety violations.”

That made sense. After all, the fines for safety violations were so negligible that they constituted a mere slap on the wrist. A global plot to manipulate the energy market and artificially drive up gasoline prices was a whole different ballpark, however.

I considered the implications of these missing tapes and what they meant for my case so far—or the shreds that were left of it. Apparently, it wasn’t necessarily the paper files PetroPlex had been after. They could have been after something else entirely—namely, these tapes. Maybe they were worried about a transcript of the tapes? Or maybe they thought the tapes would be in the same place as the paper files.

So at last I knew what PetroPlex had been after and why my expert was dead. The question now was, what to do about it?