Pipeline (6 page)

“Daniel Vladimirovich,” Piotr spat out, spinning away from the window. “This is bigger than you. Just do what you’re told.”

Daniel’s expression of shocked surprise must have made an impression on Piotr Rudzhin because he suddenly stopped his chastising scold. Rudzhin knew Daniel well. Uggin never thought about politics; he was a mechanical idealist. Daniel’s engineering mind loved machines and calculations. If Daniel was having doubts about Zhironovsky’s orders, it could only have been because Daniel had not understood the deeply patriotic reasoning behind the chairman’s commands.

Piotr’s expression changed. A bulb lit up in his mind. Actually, what had crossed Rudzhin’s brain was less a thought than the realization of an opportunity. Daniel’s friend smiled. The more Piotr considered the notion, the better he liked it.

Right then and there, Piotr Rudzhin had made a lightning-fast decision to recruit his old schoolmate. He knew Daniel Uggin was a patriot, the son of a decorated general, the grandson of a Russian hero. Russia ran through Daniel’s blood. It had taken only a
few seconds for Piotr Rudzhin to become convinced that some well-delivered patriotic words and a few hints of economic enticement would be enough to convince Daniel to join him in Moscow’s cause.

He pointed to a chair.

“Daniel, let’s talk about this for a moment,” Rudzhin said quietly, his tone now gentle and mentoring. “Try to think bigger. You must understand that many of us in Moscow are seriously concerned about our country. Think back. In the past fifteen years, we have lost fourteen republics that were previously part of our nation. It takes time to rebuild. And meanwhile, relations with the West are getting tense. They say our television news programs are government controlled. They whine that our elections are not democratic enough. They don’t want us in the World Trade Organization. They don’t like how we handle Chechen terrorists who murder our children.”

Rudzhin stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. It smoldered on.

“They complain, pretending to be disinterested bystanders to our domestic issues. But just how innocent are they? The British harbor our criminal oligarchs and refuse to extradite them. The Americans refuse to buy our gas or oil unless we allow their companies to participate in the exploration—their vice president says we use oil and gas as ‘tools of blackmail and intimidation.’ Perhaps they don’t care to remember that they are far less subtle—after all, the Americans blackmail and intimidate with their military, their guns, and their precision-guided bombs.”

He had more to say.

“It’s not only the Americans and the British, though. The French are so afraid of energy dependence on Russia that they are willing to coddle the Arabs in Algeria—the same Arabs who are eating them from the inside, like a cancer. The Germans complain that our cheaper gas is supporting governments that abuse human rights, like our friends in Belarus.

“Don’t they use their banks, their companies, and their armies
to leverage their interests? We have resources too, Daniel Vladimirovich. We have riches. What is wrong with using our assets to make friends, do business, and protect our interests?”

Daniel Uggin had never seen his friend like this. He had listened to Piotr’s speeches on road improvements, his pet issue while a member of the local parliament. But this was the first time Daniel had ever heard Piotr Rudzhin speak like a national politician. He was impressed.

“Think about it, old friend.” Rudzhin was going on. “Americans can invade Iraq. France sends troops to the Ivory Coast. Germans have military combatants in Kosovo. Sure, we are one hundred and forty-one million Russians. But many of our citizens are still poor and uneducated. We need people like you to help us. Work with us; tomorrow, after you turn your valves off, let’s talk about other things you and I can do together. Like old times, eh?”

Daniel was intrigued. But he had questions.

“Should we be responsible for freezing the Ukrainians and slowing down the economy of western Europe? How smart is that? Won’t we just push all of them to go elsewhere for their gas in the future?”

Rudzhin laughed and slapped his friend on the knees. The spark in Rudzhin’s eyes had returned.

“I’m going to tell you something in confidence. Nobody will let it go that far. It’s just a warning. It’s a little spitball from across the border to remind friends that sometimes they become too impolite. It’s a way to ask them—tell them—to settle down and play nice. It will be over soon.”

Piotr Rudzhin stood up and smiled broadly. He played with Daniel’s hair on the way to the door. Rudzhin could see that Daniel was interested.

They embraced each other again in the doorway. “Call me tomorrow, Daniel,” Rudzhin whispered in his ear.

Daniel Vladimirovich Uggin shuffled back to his car. He felt
better. Piotr had made him understand the broader context. And somehow, the mere fact that Piotr was at his side provided Daniel with a balm of reassurance.

At 4:30
P.M.
, he opened his office door to tell Svetlana not to pass through any calls. Jerking his mouse forward to cajole his computer to life, Daniel logged back on to the managers’ site of the Volga intranet. He once again checked the metering for pressure on the Urengoy-Ushgorod pipeline. The gas was running a full 85 percent below normal levels.

Daniel Uggin took one deep breath. Only one. He looked for and found the three boxes on his computer, interspersed at ten-centimeter distances along the pipeline’s image. These represented pumping and 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 im
portant. 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.

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’ll
teach 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 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, her
crusade 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 acad
emy 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 Technologies; her father, the CFO of Star Microsystems. A lot of intelligence and passion had blossomed in the household, but there was precious little time for parenting. As soon as eleven-year-old Blaise developed an affinity for choir, her parents had jumped to enroll her as a boarder in London’s School for Artistically Gifted Children. Blaise had sung for three years, had become tired of the repetitiously rote chorale instruction, and had petitioned her parents to transfer her to a regular international school. As London’s international school had no slots, Blaise had ended up in Geneva.

Blaise glanced over at the taxi driver’s license and noted more than four
c
’s in his unpronounceable Eastern European name. She thanked the Lord that the taxi driver’s Croatian or Slovenian ancestry impeded any conversation in English. The quiet gave her time to lean back in the seat and remember the first time she’d met her German roommate, Anne-Sophie. She had gotten on her tiptoes to
give Anne-Sophie her first formal European peck on each cheek. Blaise had considered Anne-Sophie a strange combination: the body of a lanky basketball player and a face like a porcelain doll. The two girls had shared a room for three years. During that time, a friendship was born that would be tested by time, distance, and events. The sisterhood of the Geneva International School was glue that still bonded them impressively years later.

Anne-Sophie had always been different from most of the other students at school. She had been far more serious about her studies. From the beginning, Anne-Sophie had felt a responsibility to prove her worth to her classmates, teachers, and, most important, to the school’s administration, which had accorded her one of the few available scholarships. Anne-Sophie was from a middle-class German family—her father a senior civil service tax inspector with Germany’s Ministry of Finance—and had been unable to afford the upscale tuition costs of the Geneva boarding school.

As a result, Anne-Sophie had bonded with few students. Blaise had been one of the exceptions. The charm of the Californian’s giddy brilliance and restless idealism had been impossible to resist. The two girls—one rational and studious, the other instinctive and irrepressible—became inseparable friends.

With Blaise’s home so far away, there had been no way for her to return to the United States over short school breaks. Anne-Sophie had invited Blaise to come home with her to Frankfurt for the first long weekend in late October. That trip would prove to be the first of many visits to Hermann Perlmutter’s home. Blaise had seemed to gravitate toward confidences with her best friend’s rational and patient father over the ins and outs of her own mother and father’s schizophrenic parental presence.

Treating him almost as a surrogate father, Blaise had ended up confiding in Hermann on a range of subjects: school, careers, drugs, and men. Blaise had confessed years later to a speechless Anne-Sophie that she had sought her father’s confidential counsel on a suspected pregnancy that later turned out to be a false alarm.

Hermann had never told his own daughter about that conversation.

Blaise noted the taxi’s crossing of the Main River and immediately began to pay attention. She recognized the surroundings. Warmth stirred inside as the taxi drove through Sachsenhausen, Anne-Sophie’s neighborhood. Blaise remembered Anne-Sophie’s stories about how much she had loved growing up in the old quarter. The neighborhood had been perfect for kids. It was a mix of elegant town houses and parks on the riverbank with lots of cafés and boutiques on the elegant Schweizer Strasse.

Blaise felt a strange but serene sense of coming home as the taxi pulled to a halt in front of the flowered garden of the Perlmutters’ small home—after all, it had been years since Blaise last walked into the house.

Anne-Sophie had married Daniel Uggin and moved to Russia a decade ago. The two girlfriends had deftly used Blaise’s myriad business trips to see each other with some regularity. Blaise had even taken Hermann out over the years to a couple of elegant, boozy dinners on a number of her trips to Frankfurt. But she had never actually been back to the Perlmutters’ Frankfurt home.

Blaise let the warm feeling sink in as she paid the driver’s fare. But the quiet introspection came to a quick, crashing halt as she heard Hermann Perlmutter’s booming voice from the doorway.

“My California girl is here. So now we can really start drinking!”

The taxi drove away just as the Perlmutter clan came pouring out the door. She could see Anne-Sophie’s tall blond silhouette bounding down the stairs. Hermann, slightly taller than his daughter, was next and nearly as fast. Now seventy, he had lost none of his athletic looks. Katarina, age nine, and Giorgi, age six, were right behind them. Blaise felt arms pulling her into embraces, and her ears filled with the sounds of kisses that landed on and missed her cheeks in equal numbers as she was swooped from daughter to father.

“Wait, wait. I’m not the one being celebrated here. This is embarrassing,” protested Blaise. Hermann and Anne-Sophie just laughed. Both knew that Blaise Ryan was never embarrassed by any sort of attention.

Finally, arm in arm, the three started back to the house. Daniel Uggin, Anne-Sophie’s handsome, dark, Russian husband was in front of the door. It had been ten years—at the wedding—since Blaise had last seen him. But in the past months, Daniel had been the subject of many long, late-night phone calls and worried e-mails between the two high school friends.

Blaise took a long look at Daniel. He seemed older, more serious.

“Nice to see you, Blaise.” Daniel Uggin’s smile was perfunctory. Distant. Then again, how could he not feel like an outsider in this lovefest?

She made a mental note to sit next to him at dinner.

The meal was wonderful. Anne-Sophie had arrived only the previous day, but that had been enough time to put together a sumptuous five-course feast crowned by Hermann’s favorite warm desert, a chocolate soufflé with a Grand Marnier vanilla sauce. Bottles of champagne were followed by bottles of wine, which were followed, in turn, by bottles of schnapps. Each one of the twenty guests made more than one toast to Hermann’s health and life. Blaise soon lost count of the raised glasses and wasn’t about to be left behind. Jet lag had no effect on Blaise Ryan. At the table, she told dramatic stories about her environmental wars, asked impudent questions, and teased relentlessly to the delight of the guests at the supper table.

Seated next to Daniel throughout the dinner, Blaise had used the punctuation of the meal’s laughter and toasts to launch furtive glances in the direction of Anne-Sophie’s husband. He seemed unusually somber. Rarely smiling, Daniel was a man physically present but mentally absent. His distance and disengagement were palpable, even toward his wife.

That wasn’t how Blaise remembered him. At Anne-Sophie’s
wedding, Daniel Uggin had been the personification of warmth, especially with Anne-Sophie. Throughout the ceremony and the wedding’s long dinner, his hand had never left hers. His eyes had never wandered far before returning to her reassuring twinkle.

Prior to arriving in Germany, Anne-Sophie had given Blaise warning of her husband’s unusual behavior—defined by Anne-Sophie in one of her e-mails as a sudden and utter disinterest in anything other than his work. Seeing Daniel’s removed soul in real life shocked Blaise.

Uggin’s removed comportment was the only black mark on an otherwise perfect evening. This had been a night to celebrate Hermann; one look at his beaming face told Blaise that it had been a success. Few men deserved all this admiration more than this one, she thought.

After midnight, the guests slowly started fading away. When the last person walked out the door, Anne-Sophie sent her father upstairs with a kiss. She invited Blaise and Daniel to join her in the living room—as far away from the dirty dishes as possible—for a small glass of kirsch, a cherry firewater designed to melt away the toxic repercussions of a long dinner. Initially, the conversation was easy and light.