Black Oil, Red Blood

Chapter 24



We seemed to be in the clear and had all relaxed a little bit. Cameron flipped on the radio and surfed around for a news station. “Let’s hope nothing’s happening,” he said.

“Like what?” Nash asked.

Cameron glanced back at him. “Did you not just see Miles release that virus?”

“It’s not possible that something would have happened this quickly, is it?” Nash asked.

“Oh, it’s possible,” Cameron said. “The oil market is so volatile that if even one part of one refinery goes down for just a few minutes, the price of oil jumps up immediately. I’ve seen it jump six cents in a matter of minutes just because the Kettle PetroPlex refinery had a small malfunction that didn’t take long to fix. I fixed it, in fact. It was a computer glitch.”

“Six cents doesn’t seem like a lot,” Miles said.

“We are not talking about a change of six cents right now,” Cameron said. “We are talking orders of magnitude beyond that. We are talking change in the order of magnitude similar to that computer glitch that dropped the stock market by a trillion dollars.”

Nash was fishing Lucy off of Miles’ lap so he could pet her. She seemed to be warming up to him a little. She licked his hand tentatively. “But this is good for consumers, right? For the little guy? Gas will be cheaper now, right? PetroPlex gas, anyway? And since the virus is out, your original program won’t work. Right?”

“Yes, but as I mentioned earlier, there are other things PetroPlex can do to combat the price drop.”

“Like what?” I wanted to know.

“Like orchestrate a refinery failure, or worse, create a catastrophic explosion. Every time there’s a refinery outage or an explosion, the price of oil goes back up and stays there until the problem is fixed. The reason it works this way is that American refineries run at 97% capacity. That means that when something goes wrong, there’s not enough supply to meet demand. So the price jumps.”

Cameron surfed past a station that was talking about PetroPlex.

“Wait!” I said. “Go back.”

Cameron did. The radio DJ was reporting a twenty percent drop in gasoline prices and a market loss of 3000 points. And according to him, the numbers were steadily continuing to fall.

And then, there was more breaking news. “Wait,” the DJ said. I’m now being told that an explosion rocked PetroPlex’s largest oil refinery in Kettle, Texas, just moments ago. There are pictures coming in from eyewitnesses on the scene, but no official news media is on site yet. Our news copters are en route as we speak, and we hope to bring you more information shortly.”

Nash, Miles, and I all exchanged stunned glances. “No,” I said. “They wouldn’t. It has to be a coincidence.”

Only Cameron didn’t seem shocked. He abruptly pulled the car over, fished out a laptop and opened it up. Then he popped in a mobile wireless card and waited for everything to come online. Miles and I watched silently while Nash nervously scanned our surroundings.

At first, all we saw was a white cursor on a black screen. Cameron began furiously typing a string of commands that looked like gibberish to me. Then before I knew it, he had pulled up a string of emails between PetroPlex executives. The word “explosion” was highlighted at various points in various messages. I inspected the dates and timestamps on all these emails. They were all real time.

“Hey, I know those names,” I said. “Gerald Fitz—that’s PetroPlex’s regional president. He works out of the Kettle office. And Frederick Lewis—that’s his VP of Quality Control. I deposed him last year.”

“Fitz,” Miles said. “Isn’t that the guy who practically shut down the Dairy Queen a few months ago because the kitchen boy didn’t put the right amount of candy in his daughter’s Blizzard?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Cameron said. Cameron screwed up his face and glared at all of us, preparing to do his best Fitz impression. “You call that a Blizzard?” he barked in a sandpapery voice. “Get out of my way, and I’ll show you how to make a Blizzard!”

“Hey, that’s pretty good!” I said. “You totally have him down! If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were him!”

Cameron shrugged and turned back to his computer screen. “Yeah, I used to do community theater.”

I raised my eyebrows. This guy was full of surprises. Definitely not your run of the mill nerd.

Cameron executed another series of commands that appeared to bring up a string of emails all sent between the time Miles accidentally released the virus and the time of the explosion. One email in particular caught Cameron’s eye, and he opened it full screen. It was from Gerald Fitz, and it was damning.

It was sent to Frederick Lewis and simply said, “Virus active. Light the fuse.”

Wow. Cameron really was good. Perhaps it was possible we actually could accomplish something with a computer geek on our side.

“We need a plan,” Nash said.

“We need the tapes,” Cameron said.

We all looked at each other. There was only one place to go, and that was, unfortunately, straight back to Kettle.