50
Janell used the satellite radio, their desperate-measures-only means of communication, from where she was parked behind an abandoned barn nine miles north of Doug Oriel’s body. Eli answered quickly but his voice was soft and she wondered if Violet Novak was nearby. The thought of that trite, ignorant woman enraged her. She understood Eli’s double life intellectually, but not emotionally. She hoped that her existence with Doug had troubled him in the same way.
“I’m en route but delayed,” she said, and then she explained the situation in the simplest terms possible: Doug had threatened the cause; died for the cause. The rest was irrelevant.
He listened without interrupting. For a man of such power and command, he was always a patient listener. Today, though, the silence scared her. Not because she was afraid of him-theirs was a relationship that transcended fear, mocked fear-but because she knew the disappointment he was feeling.
“I was relying on his skill and his devices,” he said at last. “Counting on them.”
She winced. “I know. Do you think I don’t understand that? I’ve been apart from you for nine months to ensure that we would have him. If there had been another option, any other, I would have taken it. There wasn’t.”
The silence went on even longer this time, and then he said, “I’ve never liked my contingency. It’s been tried before, and without much success.”
“But you have it. We’ve got to try it now. We must.”
“Yes.” He sighed. “Much pressure rides on the shoulders of my man Jay.”
“Will he perform?”
“He’s a motivated man.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Because there’s no certainty. But Jay is no different than any other recruit. When faced with his worst fears, he will discover he is capable of more than he realized.”
This was, of course, Eli’s entire worldview-and their earliest bond, dating back to their first conversation in Rotterdam, when they’d shared a dark amusement over a world that promised progress born from hope but acted, again and again, out of fear. It was not an untested theory, and the years had validated it repeatedly. Still, she was uneasy. She knew nothing of Jay Baldwin.
“I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
“Sorrow rarely advances a cause,” he said. “Proper action, however, always will. So let’s look at the energy of this situation and determine how to mobilize it. There’s a way to capitalize. There always is.”
He explained the potential he saw, and as she listened to his instructions, she couldn’t keep herself from smiling. It was brilliant, so perfect that it felt as if it had to have been planned, and to know that he had made this adjustment so swiftly, turning crisis into opportunity, was the ultimate illustration of what separated him from the common man.
“What the morning calls for,” he said, “are as many Paul Revere riders as possible. They’ll be ignored today, but by tonight? By tomorrow? They’ll be forever remembered.”
“I understand. I’ll make sure the message goes out.”
“Good. Doug will serve his purpose, as you say.”
“Serve it better dead than alive. What about Markus Novak?”
“If he appears, he’ll be killed by Garland.”
Good news, but still she felt cheated. Novak belonged to her. Both Novaks, in fact.
“Everything is accelerated now,” he said. “I can’t delay. You know I would if that was possible, but at this point…we’d risk too much.”
“I understand,” she said, but a part of her died with the acceptance. All of their time apart had been predicated on this day together. “I wanted to be there for the morning. I tried everything to be there.”
His voice was tender when he spoke again, because he understood what it meant to her. “Dawn was trivial; dusk is critical. Join me then. We’ll watch the world go dark together, and then we’ll leave together.”
Together. The word made her flush with anticipation.
“Give me the location,” she said. “I won’t be delayed again.”
He told her which phone to power up and promised that GPS coordinates would be sent to it. From her current position, he estimated it would be most of a day’s drive.
“Can you be there by sundown without taking risks?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Approach from the south. You’ll see me. We’ll watch the train go through, and then we’ll leave.”
“Together,” she said.
“Together,” he echoed.
She shut her eyes. It had been years since she’d wept, but at that moment, she was close.
51
As Jay read the text message, the dread that had lived in the pit of his stomach since the day he’d come home to find Eli Pate sitting at his kitchen table bloomed into a cold wellspring that spread through his veins and filled his body.
This is the shutdown, he realized. The time has come.
He called his dispatcher and informed her that he was going to be out for the day, that he was feeling ill.
“You sure don’t sound good, Jay.”
He hadn’t been trying to fake any symptoms, but his voice couldn’t sound like that of a well man.
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not doing too good at all.”
“Stay home and get healthy, then.”
“I’m working on it.”
He hung up. The sun had risen bright and brilliant and he watched it and thought that the storm that had blown in the day before he met Eli Pate, when he and Sabrina had counted the blinking lights, waiting to see if Jay would be called out, seemed a thousand years ago. A different man had left the house on the day of the storm, and that man would never be seen again.
Jay already understood that.
He walked into the garage and to the cabinet that held his barehanding equipment, relics of a lost life. He couldn’t climb anymore. That was what Pate didn’t understand. He’d picked the wrong guy. He’d picked a fraud. Jay hadn’t worked in the flash zone since Tim’s funeral.
The hot suit, or Faraday suit, allowed the lineman to contact the equipment directly, instead of having to use a properly charged pole or some other technique. The current would pass through the suit and continue down the lines with none of the deadly disruptions in voltage. When you came into contact, you’d carry a half a million volts all around your body. It was an experience unlike any other in the world, and Jay had always felt strangely spiritual during those times, the way others might in a temple.
That was before he’d climbed up to retrieve his brother-in-law’s corpse.
The suit-socks, trousers, jacket with hood, gloves-was made of a blend of flame-resistant Nomex and a microscopic stainless-steel fiber. In the 1830s, when Michael Faraday began the research that led to this suit, in a world that hadn’t yet seen a lightbulb, he determined that he could coat a room with metal foil and stand within it, unharmed, as the electricity flowed. Linemen who did barehanding work referred to putting on the suit as “becoming metal.” When Jay was encased in the suit, the voltage would pass through the steel mesh, meaning that Jay would energize to the same level as the lines.
He packed the suit in the backseat of the truck, then returned to the cabinet for his hot stick and the accessory bag, which was loaded with fuse pullers and wrench heads and shepherd’s hooks, all the things that had once been the tools of his trade. He packed the cutting stick too. Jay assumed that Pate intended him to go up there and cut a live line. It was a terrible plan. The system monitors would know the instant it happened, and a crew would be sent to fix it. That crew would work fast. Power wouldn’t be lost for long.
He took the hot stick, which was a long fiberglass pole filled with a special foam that allowed the lineman to reach out and contact the current. Distance was critical-the telescoping rod could elongate to ten feet, and Jay would want every bit of that. If you weren’t working from a bucket truck or a helicopter, something allowing a lineman to be safely energized without having a contact to the ground, you’d vaporize if you entered the flash zone.