Free The Grid by Harry Hunsicker Page B

dark.”
    She nodded.
    “Not to mention the juice from Black Valley has nowhere to go, and the plant doesn’t know until it’s too late because the phone lines are down.”
    “Right again,” she said. “The juice backs up, and a couple of million volts go the wrong way, frying everything they hit.”
    “How bad’s the damage at the plant itself?”
    “Don’t know yet. Worst case is Black Valley is offline for a month if the turbines are fried.”
    “What about the other plants, the ones that fed into this substation?”
    “They’re not so bad,” she said. “They’re down for a couple of days, tops.”
    I did some rough calculations in my head. Five hundred thousand homes with an average electrical bill of one hundred dollars per month. Say the wholesale value of the electricity was only fifty bucks. That was twenty-five million dollars in lost revenue from Black Valley alone.
    Whitney seemed to read my mind. “A lot of money, isn’t it?”
    “So how did they do it?”
    She held up a small plastic bag. A spent rifle cartridge was nestled at the bottom. With her other hand, she pointed to the horizon.
    About a hundred yards outside the perimeter of the substation was a low tree-lined ridge.
    “A sniper,” she said. “These transformers are not exactly a hard target to hit. Like shooting a cow on the other side of the field.”
    “It’s that easy?” I asked. “Half of Central Texas goes dark because of a couple of guys with rifles?”
    She nodded. “Guys who know what they’re doing, yeah.”
    “So who pulled the trigger?”
    “We’re spinning it as a couple of rednecks with deer rifles,” she said. “You know, Bubbas will be Bubbas.”
    I didn’t reply. I got the feeling that there was more to come vis-à-vis the Bubbas.
    “Long term that’s gonna be a hard sell,” she said.
    “How come?”
    “This is the part where I remind you of the paperwork you signed when you were a federal agent, the fine print regarding the penalties for releasing classified information.”
    “Duly noted.”
    She stared at the ridgeline.
    The trees rustled in the afternoon breeze. A cattle egret glided over the pasture, a flash of white in an otherwise empty sky.
    “The redneck angle won’t work for long,” she said. “Because we caught one.”
    I stopped looking at the ridge. Turned, stared at her.
    “A Chinese guy,” she said.
    I let out a long, slow breath.
    “He had a copy of the Koran in his pocket.”
    A Muslim extremist in the heartland. Middle America would never feel safe again.
    “Have you ID’d him yet?”
    She shook her head.
    “Who knows about this?”
    “Counting you? About ten people.”
    “Where is he?” I said. “Have you interrogated him yet?”
    “He’s at a military hospital.” Whitney headed back to the SUV. “He’s about to die.”

- CHAPTER SEVENTEEN -
    Sarah and her husband live in a thirteen-thousand-square-foot home on Strait Lane, a tree-lined street in North Dallas populated by the top end of the one percent—billionaires and bankers, captains of industry, people with good tans who play a lot of golf while living off trust funds.
    The home is a Spanish colonial, white stucco walls, long sweeping arches, a terra-cotta tile roof. Her brother, Elias, once likened the house to a high-end Mexican brothel but not as classy. Sarah’s husband had been unamused.
    An enormous living area dominates the first floor. The room is designed for entertaining, bracketed on either end by matching fireplaces big enough to hold a minivan. This section of the home is the main reason her husband purchased the monstrosity. “A good place to entertain prospective clients and business associates,” he’d said at the time.
    Sarah is in her bathroom in the master suite, a ground-floor wing on the opposite side of the house from the kitchen. She’s showered again, washing off the grime from the stolen Monte Carlo and any remaining traces from her encounter with the coked-up man in the