Free Pipeline by Peter Schechter Page A

always seemed a tad theoretical—conservation, sustainable development, water management. Yet the past weeks had shaken her to the core.
    She had felt woefully inadequate as lines of television and radio journalists had appeared at her office’s threshold seeking interviews. It had been hard to talk policy and regulatory standards when supermarkets were closed, banks were shut, and offices and schools were locked. Everyday life for California’s fifty-plus million citizens had been radically altered—over two thousand people had actually died—because of her country’s inability to face its energy addiction. She had labored to sound determined and relevant for journalists doing pieces on “the aftermath.” But for the first time in her life, hercrusade for the environment had seemed nearly immaterial when compared to Californians’ daily suffering.
    Blaise had needed a break badly; Germany was the perfect antidote. It felt like light-years away from the mess in her home state.
    And her trip could not have had a nobler purpose, thought Blaise as she gave the porter two euros for hailing a taxi. Few people merited this effort more than her best friend, Anne-Sophie Perlmutter, and Anne-Sophie’s magnificent father.
    Not even her own parents got this treatment.
    Anne-Sophie’s dad, Hermann Perlmutter, was about to celebrate his seventieth birthday, a date the elderly gentleman’s only daughter had begun planning long ago. In a well-organized conspiracy, Anne-Sophie had planned to secretly fly her family from their home in Russia to Germany for the celebration.
    Hermann’s wife had passed away just before his daughter left for high school at the age of fourteen. The surprise party was the least a daughter who lived so far away could do for her father.
    Anne-Sophie had told guests months ago to save the date. Blaise Ryan was just one of the invitees from the far-flung corners of Hermann Perlmutter’s life. The guest list was varied, reflecting the genial nature of a man whose entire existence revolved around his passionate love for his family, his job, his life, and a good soccer match. It included the waiter from his favorite neighborhood bar where, on Sundays, Hermann watched the games of his beloved Bayern München team. Hermann’s longtime boss, the recently retired, fifteen-year head of the taxation department of the German finance ministry would be there. So would friends from his university days who were still in daily contact a half century later.
    Many of Anne-Sophie’s friends—young people thirty or forty years his junior—had been touched at some point in their lives by Hermann’s interest and friendship. None more so than Blaise Ryan.
    Blaise had met Anne-Sophie in ninth grade at the Geneva International School, an elite international baccalaureate lakeside academy that accepted a select number of day students and even fewer, mostly ultra-rich, boarders.
    The third floor of the school’s old mansion had been the girls’ area, populated by a multitude of nationalities. The academy had boasted an unusual number of Turkish girls from Istanbul’s European neighborhoods. It had been hard to keep up with their daily changes of Versace, Gucci, Valentino, and Pucci outfits. Boys, on the other hand, had been corralled in a building on the far opposite side of campus—it was the headmistress’s outdated view that physical separation would hinder teenage sexual encounters.
    The males generally had been less ostentatious in their material exhibitionism than the girls. Somehow the guys, even the rich ones, had preferred old blue jeans and plain white T-shirts. Shehu Ali Kindabe, the Porsche-driving eighteen-year-old son of the sultan of Sokoto, Nigeria’s highest Islamic authority, had been the single exception to this rule.
    Blaise Ryan’s San Francisco–based parents had been the epitome of the successful high-technology couple. Her mother had been the senior corporate vice president at Tabernacle