Going Dark(83)

“It’s buried.”

“I’m not talking about the pipeline, ass-face, I’m talking about the water runs through it.” Wally’s fingers flew across the keyboard for several moments, then he turned around and smiled at them, lifting a single finger over the keys. “And away we go.” He plunked his finger down. Stood up, walked through the open doors onto the porch. “Which way is it?”

Thorn pointed west.

Leslie came over and stood next to him, Flynn and Thorn drifting outside, everyone staring out at the hummock of slash pines and wild tamarinds and spice and mahogany.

“What’ve you done, Wally?”

“Hold on. It’ll take a minute. You got a 130-mile transmission line, water pressure at 250 pounds a square inch, pipe begins at thirty-six inches, narrows to twenty-four, then south of here goes to eighteen. Eight-hundred-horsepower electric motors suck it out of the ground and shoot it south. When there’s a power outage, they got two-thousand-horse diesels that kick in.

“Then two miles north of here you got a booster pump station, and another one down in Long Key, Marathon, Ramrod Key, they’re jacking up the pressure every thirty, forty miles. Got thousands of gallons a minute flowing inside that pipeline. A few million gallons every day sucked out of the ground.

“So it’s like this. Say the Key Largo booster station, just up the road, it keeps pumping its ass off, but south of here at the pump station in Long Key, they got a malfunction and have to shut down. Their power just switches off. Some kind of computer glitch. Software goes haywire. Their pumps quit.”

He turned around and gave them an impish grin. “Hey, something happens like that, where’s all that water go? Well, they got a half-assed safety system, shut-off valves every few miles to prevent backflow. And they got a com network, it sends a message up to the Key Largo pump station, warns it to shut down.

“But say some hacker, he overrides that com network, the Largo station keeps pumping water, pumping and pumping. Then that hacker tells the Key Largo station their fucking water pressure is dropping and they need their pumps to work harder. What do you get? Anybody want to guess?”

“You idiot,” Thorn said.

“Okay, no guesses. So the answer is, all that water pressure is building up in that twenty-four-inch pipe. Building, building. Then, hey, suddenly for no reason, the relief valve at this very mile marker opens wide, and badda bing. I’m tearing that relief valve a new asshole.”

“Wally. Undo it right now. Put it right.” Leslie was staring helplessly at the computer screen, the rolling lines of code.

“Too late.”

“We don’t need this,” she said. “This’ll bring heat. And for no reason.”

“Hey, is that it?” Wally pointed off at the tree line. “Yeah, I think we got ourselves a gusher.”

About a half mile away, a silver-blue geyser of water was shooting straight up, maybe a hundred feet into the blue afternoon sky. A fountain of pure aquifer water appearing in the middle of the native forest that separated Thorn’s property from the Overseas Highway.

“See,” Wally said. “That’s the kind of shit I do, ass-breath. That’s what I bring to the table.” Speaking to Flynn, then glancing at Thorn. “So lay the fuck off me, or I’ll blow your shit up, too. Don’t think I can’t.”

“Shut it down, Wally.”

“No can do. Has to be fixed by hand. Wrenches and shit.”

A car rolled into the drive. Nobody Thorn knew. A ten-year-old SUV with dark windows. It was covered in dust and the grill was badly dented as if the car had collided head-on with a telephone pole. An out-of-state license tag was mounted on the crushed bumper.

Cameron left the porch and trotted over to the car, stood by the driver’s door, and waited till it opened. Since Thorn had seen her last, her red hair had been cut pixie short. It blazed scarlet in the afternoon sunlight as she marched across the lawn, following Prince toward the house.

Same uniform as the day they’d spent together in Leslie’s boat, counting the croc population. Fatigue jacket, scruffy jeans, hiking boots. She cast her gaze around the premises, surveying the layout with an almost mathematical precision. Pretty eyes, but a misshapen mouth with awkwardly protruding teeth. Still, something about her was fierce. The fiery resolve of a field commander on the eve of battle.

“You stay here,” Leslie told the group. “This doesn’t concern you.”

She went down the steps and crossed the lawn, and the two women shared a stiff embrace, touched cheek to cheek. More ritual than personal.

Leslie spoke to Prince and he edged away, giving them privacy.