The Green Trap (12 page)

The buzzer sounded again. Probably the cops, Cochrane thought. Or some pizza delivery kid who's got the apartment number wrong. Reluctantly he went to the intercom by his front door.

“Yes?”

“Paul, it's me.”

Sandoval's voice!

“Where are you?” he asked, and immediately realized it was a stupid question.

“Down here in the lobby. Would you let me in?”

“Sure!” He leaned on the button that unlocked the building's entrance door, then rushed out into the corridor toward the elevators, impatient as a kid at Christmas.

The elevator pinged, the doors slid open, and there she stood, wearing the same sleeveless frock she'd worn when he'd driven her to the airport.

For an instant he didn't know what to say, what to do. And then she was in his arms and he was kissing her and holding her body pressed tightly against his own. A door opened down the hallway and an elderly woman walked hesitantly toward them, smiled as she pressed the elevator button. Cochrane took Sandoval's shoulder bag and walked her back to his apartment, his arm around her slender waist.

As soon as he shut the front door he kissed her again, longer, deeper.

“I thought—” he started to say.

“I know,” she said, her green eyes locked on his. “I couldn't do it, Paul. I just couldn't. I had to come back to you.”

He was breathless with the wonder of it.

“Tulius was very slick,” she said, taking her bag back from him. “He told me a little about your brother's work, but it didn't amount to much. He hinted pretty strongly that he knew more, but it was tied up in the company's proprietary rights and he couldn't talk about it. Then he invited me to dinner. He knew what I was after, and I knew what he was after. It might have worked out. But I left him at his office and took the next plane back here.”

“To me.”

“To you.”

Cochrane felt like baying at the moon.

I
n the morning Cochrane told Sandoval about Mike's note and the key to the safe-deposit box.

“But he didn't say which bank it's from?” she asked, sitting across the kitchen's tiny fold-down table from him.

Cochrane spooned up a mound of bran flakes, dripping milk. With a shake of his head, “That's just like Mike. Typical.”

“He forgot to tell you.”

“Either that or he's playing head games with me. I can just hear him:
You're so smart, Paulie, let's see you figure this one out!”

Sandoval looked thoughtful. “Or maybe he thinks you already know.”

“How the hell should I know? There must be a thousand banks within a five-minute drive of his house.”

“His wife?”

Cochrane shook his head even harder. “He didn't want Irene to know
about it. He was going to leave her. Whatever's in the bank box was supposed to be his insurance, his stash.”

“But you don't know which bank it could be in.” She looks disappointed, Cochrane thought. Disappointed in me.

“I even went through his trip reports, to see where he'd been traveling. Figured he might have opened an account in one of those cities.”

“And?”

“Nothing popped out at me. He didn't seem to go to any particular city on a regular basis, except maybe Cambridge, MIT.”

“Massachusetts,” she said, lifting a white Steward Observatory mug to her lips. She had brewed tea for herself; Cochrane was drinking coffee out of a maroon and gold Boston College mug.

“Massachusetts,” he confirmed. “Land of the bean and the cod. Where Mike and I were born and grew….” Cochrane's voice faded into thoughtful silence.

“What is it?” Sandoval asked.

Slamming his mug down on the flimsy table hard enough to slosh coffee out of it, Cochrane said, “I bet I know which bank he used! I'm sure of it!”

By midafternoon they were on a Delta jetliner, heading for Boston's Logan Airport.

 

L
ionel Gould interrupted a meeting with a group of bankers from Lebanon to take Kensington's call. He excused himself from the conference room and went to his office next door. Sitting heavily in his high-backed swivel chair, he fiddled with the keyboard on his desk until Kensington's dark-jowled face appeared on the plasma screen mounted on the walnut wall paneling.

“Boston, you say?” Gould said, making no effort to hide his surprise.

“Two tickets to Boston. First class,” said Kensington, nodding tightly.

“Boston,” Gould mused.

A grudging smile crept across Kensington's face. “That Sandoval is something else. She got Delta to bump two confirmed first-class fares back to coach.”

Gould rubbed a stubby-fingered hand across his fleshy chin. “She can be very persuasive, true enough.”

“So you want me to go to Boston, track 'em?”

“I suppose so,” Gould said uncertainly. “How quickly can you get there?”

“Can I use the Citation? I could land at Logan before their flight comes in.”

“Very well,” said Gould. “I'll phone the airport.”

 

I
t was sunset by the time their flight landed at Logan Airport. Sandoval rented a Subaru Outback Sport wagon, a glittering metallic aqua blue, the only car available at Dollar Rent A Car.

“Couldn't you at least get a different color?” Cochrane complained as he slid in behind the wheel. “This thing looks like it ought to be at a baby shower.”

“Beggars can't be choosers,” Sandoval replied. “I got a good rate for this. And it's got four-wheel drive.”

“Just what we need for driving in Boston,” Cochrane muttered as he put the car in gear. But he smiled at her as he said it.

He didn't go into Boston proper, of course. Cochrane remembered the route over the Tobin Bridge (which he still remembered from childhood as the Mystic River Bridge) and out the back way through Chelsea and Everett to Route 60 and finally Arlington, where he'd grown up. But it was all changed. In the gathering darkness he hardly recognized any of the old familiar landmarks, and the bridge was clogged with trucks and semis, all bleating their horns as they snarled through the unforgiving traffic.

Then it started to rain.

Cochrane was sweating by the time they reached the familiar intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Pleasant Street. Squinting through the sloshing windshield wipers, he saw the bank, just as he remembered it from the days when his family lived a few blocks away, down Pleasant Street. But the sign on its front said Cambridge Savings Bank. Cochrane remembered it as something else, Shawmut maybe. It was a long time ago, he told himself. You've been over at Amherst for years. A lot has changed in the old neighborhood. Little local banks get bought out by the big guys.

“There it is,” he said as they waited for the Mass Av traffic light to change. “That's where Mike and I started our first savings accounts, when we were kids.”

“It's closed,” said Sandoval.

“Well, yeah, this time of the evening.”

The light turned green and he nosed the car across the avenue, down Pleasant Street, past Lakeview and the house he'd grown up in. He felt a
brief tug of curiosity, or maybe nostalgia for his childhood. It was never that wonderful, he told himself. It's nothing to feel sappy over. He drove past the street without slowing down.

While he turned onto Route 2 and headed toward Cambridge, Sandoval phoned for a hotel room.

“Is the Radisson decent?” she asked, one hand covering the phone.

“Used to be,” said Cochrane. “It's right on the Charles River. Nice view.”

It was too dark and rainy a night to enjoy the view. Cochrane closed the heavy drapes across their window and climbed into bed beside Sandoval. She turned out the light.

“Tell me something,” he said in the darkness.

“What?”

“Where do you get the money for all this—airlines, hotels, car rentals?”

She was silent for a moment. “You don't really want to know.”

“Yes, I do,” he said earnestly, turning toward her. “I have to know if we're going to have any kind of a future together.”

Again she hesitated. At last, “I found out in high school that I could get boys to jump through hoops if I wanted them to. But I was more interested in getting someplace, learning, making something of myself. I didn't want to end up a druggie, or a whore.”

“Where'd you grow up?”

“Right here in Boston. Not the best part of town, though. Brighton.”

“Brighton?”

She pulled in a sighing breath. “Crappy old Brighton. I got a scholarship. I was going to be an anthropologist. The new Margaret Mead.”

“Really?”

“Except I got married and quit school. Then the bastard dumped me for a bigger bustline.”

“You've got a terrific bustline.”

“He didn't think so. Or maybe he was intimidated because I was brighter than he was. Anyway, there I was, broke and alone in goddamned Denver, Colorado.”

“Denver?”

“He was a petroleum geologist.”

“Oh.”

“And… well, one thing led to another and I wound up doing industrial espionage. I found out that I was good at it.”

Cochrane thought she had jumped across a lot of territory. Just as well, he told himself. I don't need to know all the shitty details.

He turned over onto his back and tried to fall asleep. But all the shitty details filled his mind with images he wished he could erase.

Ask most Americans about their energy concerns, and you're likely to get an earful about gasoline prices. Ask Nate Lewis, and you'll hear about terawatts. Lewis, a chemist at the California Institute of Technology, is on a mission to get policy makers to face the need for sources of clean energy. He points out that humans today collectively consume the equivalent of a steady 13 terawatts (TW)—that's 13 trillion watts—of power. Eighty-five percent of that comes from fossil fuels that belch carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Now, with CO
₂
levels at their highest point in 125,000 years, our planet is in the middle of a global experiment.

To slow the buildup of those gases, people will have to replace most, if not all, of those 13 TW with carbon-free energy sources. And that's the easy part. Thanks to global population growth and economic development, most energy experts predict we will need somewhere around an additional 30 TW by 2050. Coming up with that power in a way that doesn't trigger catastrophic changes in earth's climate, Lewis says, “is unarguably the greatest technological challenge this country will face in the next fifty years.”

Clearly, there are no easy answers. But one question Lewis and plenty of other high-profile scientists are asking is whether it's time to launch a major research initiative on solar energy. In April, Lewis and
physicist George Crabtree of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois cochaired a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) workshop designed to explore the emerging potential for basic research in solar energy, from novel photovoltaics to systems for using sunlight to generate chemical fuels. Last week, the pair released their report.

The report outlines research priorities for improving solar power. It doesn't say how much money is needed to reach those goals, but DOE officials have floated funding numbers of about $50 million a year. That's up from the $10 million to $15 million a year now being spent on basic solar energy research. But given the scale of the challenge in transforming the energy landscape, other researchers and politicians are calling for more money.

It's too early to say whether the money or the political support will fall in line. But it is clear that support for a renewed push for solar energy research is building among scientists. Last month, Lewis previewed his upcoming report for members of DOE's Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC). Despite a painfully lean budget outlook at DOE, support for a solar research program “is nearly unanimous,” says Samuel Stupp, BESAC member and chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

Why? Terawatts. Even if a cheap, abundant, carbon-free energy source were to appear overnight, Lewis and others point out, it would still be a Herculean task to install the new systems fast enough just to keep up with rising energy demand—let alone to replace oil, natural gas and coal. Generating 10 TW of energy—about one-third of the projected new demand by 2050—would require 10,000 nuclear power plants, each capable of churning out a gigawatt of power, enough to light a small city. “That means opening one nuclear reactor every other day for the next fifty years,” Lewis says. Mind you, there hasn't been a new nuclear plant built in the United States since 1973, and concerns about high up-front capital costs, waste disposal, corporate liability, nuclear proliferation and terrorism make it unlikely that will change in any meaningful way soon.

So what is the world to do? Right now the solution
is clear. The United States is currently opening natural gas plants at the rate of one every 3.5 days. A stroll through Beijing makes it clear that China is pursuing coal just as fast. Fossil fuel use shows no signs of slowing.

Hand-wringing geologists have been warning for years that worldwide oil production is likely to peak sometime between now and 2040, driving oil prices through the roof. The critical issue for climate, however, is not when production of fossil fuel peaks, but its global capacity. At the 1998 level of energy use, there is still at least an estimated half century's worth of oil available, two centuries of natural gas, and a whopping two millennia worth of coal. The upshot is that we will run into serious climate problems long before we run out of fossil fuels.

What's left? Solar. Photovoltaic panels currently turn sunlight into three gigawatts of electricity. The business is growing at 40 percent a year and is already a $7.5 billion industry. But impressive as that is, that's still a drop in the bucket of humanity's total energy use. “You have to use a logarithmic scale to see it” graphed next to fossil fuels, Lewis says.