Free Pipeline by Peter Schechter

compressor stations in his district—the cybernetic distances translated to the geographical reality of one station every seventy or so kilometers.
    His mind paused one last moment to marvel at the sophistication of a modern energy system. In the past, each pumping station had to be manned by a duty clerk who manually turned the pumps’ engines on and off. These employees no longer existed. Nor did the valves to turn off the flow of oil through the pipeline. All those things belonged to yesterday’s technology, as old as black-and-white movies. Today the gas was controlled by his computer. There were no valves to turn, no switches to flick.
    He clicked on the first box and a dialogue box jumped onto the screen. He had two choices—to run a systems analysis on the pump or to shut it down. He chose the second. Daniel Vladimirovich Uggin did the same operation for the remaining two pumping stations.
    All that was left now in the Urengoy-Ushgorod pipeline was the remaining gas in the twenty-three kilometers from the last pumping station to the Ukrainian border. It wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.
    Daniel Uggin wiped the sweat from his forehead with a tissue. He knew that something big had just happened. Something really important. But at that moment, in the reflected light of his computer screen, there was no way he could have known that this December afternoon would become marked forever as his life’s inflection point.
    After this day, everything would change. His life, his work, and his marriage.

GERMANY
    FRANKFURT
JULY 14, 5:55 P.M.
THE HOTEL HESSISCHER HOF
    Nearly naked, Blaise Ryan looked at her reflection in the antique mirror above her room’s commode. Almost unwittingly, her eyes roved just left of the mirror and were caught dead center by the stern stare emanating from Princess Karolina von Hessen’s two-hundred-year-old portrait. The princess’s pale, serious face and small beady eyes looked down at the suite’s temporary occupant in stern disapproval.
    For an instant, Blaise thought of throwing her lacy black shawl over the gilded gold frame of the painting, but then decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Blaise pulled her red hair back in a tight ponytail. She allowed just a couple of front strands to swivel diagonally across her gray eyes.
    Notwithstanding Princess Karolina’s aloof gaze, Blaise always liked her occasional visits to the Hotel Hessischer Hof. She loved the hotel’s serious worldliness and its Biedermeier furnishings, most of which were still owned by the family of the princes of Hesse. “I’llteach you how to do ‘sexy,’ Princess,” Blaise muttered as she purposefully left the breast-level closure on her starched white shirt unbuttoned. The shirt was a favorite. Somehow its cotton managed to expand and contract with each curve of her still-lithe thirty-six-year-old body.
    Satisfied with what she was seeing in the mirror, Blaise looked around and winced at the hurricanelike situation of the bedroom. But this was no time to tidy up; it was 6:00 P.M. when she walked down the hallway toward the elevator. It would be up to the efficient German housekeepers to return some order to the suite during the evening’s turn-down service.
    She was glad to have gotten out of California’s electricity mayhem. The blackouts were over—for now. But Blaise was particularly grateful to get away from the unrelenting headlines and hurling accusations that had become steady fare in the crisis’s aftermath. Throughout the twenty days of full or partial blackouts, she had worked on two or three hours of sleep a night.
    As the vice president of communications for the World Environmental Trust, California’s moment of pain had been a unique opportunity to advocate for a new energy policy—for once people would be listening. Her job had always been polemical; she was more than accustomed to fighting politicians and energy companies. Blaise’s fights had never lacked urgency, but they had