Tropical Convergence (45 page)

What would Dar do? Kerry took a breath. Dar would just yell louder, until the walls shook. But she couldn't do that--it wasn't really her style. "Barry, you have a contract with us to provide diversity. You didn't. Are all those other companies paying you top dollar for that kind of insurance?"

He stared at her.

"We pay you to make sure." Kerry inhaled and upped the volume just a little. "MAKE SURE that we never go down. NEVER. Not 99 percent, not 99.5 percent, not 99.9 percent. 100 percent, Barry. I can't afford any less, and you god damn well know it."

"Yes, I know, but..."

"Barry." Kerry leaned forward. "What is your guarantee worth if all you can tell me is too bad, take a number?"

"You can't just hook this stuff up to a generator," he replied, after a long hesitation. "It just doesn't work like that. You can't fathom the complexity of this stuff, and I..."

Kerry walked right around his desk and grabbed him by the shirtfront, shocking them both. "I can't fathom it? I can't fathom it? Who in the hell do you think you're talking to, the operations vice president of Publix? Jesus Christ, Barry! I've got more complex technology sitting in my living room than you have in this place!"

His eyes widened. "Hey, now listen. Let go of me!"

Kerry did, but she didn't step back. Dar's words were ringing in her head like sea-bells and it was all she could do not to just keep shaking the man until he gave in to her. "Barry, use your head. Get me off your back. Just do it."

"I can't."

"You can," Kerry insisted.

"Kerry, for the sake of god, I can't. It'll be my job!"

Kerry leaned over him, wishing she had Dar's presence. "You will." She nailed him with a look right in the eyes. "Or it'll be your job any way. I swear it."

Would he believe her? Kerry forced herself to hold her gaze steady and cold, offering him no compromise. Her guts were clenching inside, and she only hoped it wasn't showing.

He straightened up and took a breath to answer, only to release it partially as his shoulders slumped. "Kerry, it's not that easy. C'mon now. You can't just plug in one of those things to a damn generator. What if it blows the boards? Then what?"

Ah. Kerry felt the success, like that momentary give in a tug of war when you knew your team was about to break the grunting muddy stalemate, and start to move in the right direction. "Then you hand me a bill," she agreed readily. "I'll take responsibility for the decision."

He leaned forward. "You know how much money you're talking about?"

"Yes, I do." She tilted her head just a little, and gentled her expression. "C'mon, Barry. Get rid of me. You know I have to do it."

Barry relaxed in defeat. "What the hell." He lifted both hands off his chair arms and let them drop. "I'm screwed anyway. I was the dumb bastard who forgot to schedule the maintenance on that freaking backup system."

Kerry felt sweat roll down the back of her neck, and she spared a moment of tired sympathy for him. "Thanks, Barry. Let me get my guys rolling on this." She hesitated. "You got anyone else that's as big a pain in the ass as I am? I can see if we have enough power to share some."

He shook his head after a second. "I wouldn't know where to even start."

"Okay." Kerry turned and headed for the door, already reaching for her cell phone. She keyed the radio button on it. "Mark?"

"Yeah?" a slightly apprehensive voice answered.

"Go," Kerry instructed, now at last wiping the sweat off her face with one hand. "Pull the truck around back. No sense in giving the news people something else to shoot." She looked around for the emergency exit, spotting it on the back of one wall in the gloom. It was hot and very stuffy inside the central office, and eerily empty of workers.

No sense, she had to agree. Why pay for techs to stand around and look at non-functional equipment? With a deep sigh, she hit the door release and opened it, finding some mild relief in the cooler evening air that brushed against her.

Finding a broken piece of punch down block handy, she blocked the door open with it and leaned against the back wall of the building, waiting for Mark and her crew to arrive. She kicked a bit of slate with one toe, glad she'd taken the time to change into jeans and a short sleeved shirt before coming.

Even that was too hot, but anything else risked compromising her ability to project her authority in a serious way, and Kerry wasn't that stupid. She let her eyes close for a minute, the stress of the long day weighing on her heavily.

Then the rumbling of the approaching motor jogged her into straightening up. She brushed off the fatigue and walked to meet Mark as he pulled up close to the building in the rented panel truck, putting the back of the vehicle next to the emergency door.

"Hey, boss." Mark looked as ratty as Kerry felt. He opened the door and jumped out, circling the truck to open the back and let four other techs out into the muggy night air. "Sorry about the ride, guys."

"Shit." One of them rubbed his head. "Oh." He winced, spotting Kerry. "Sorry, ma'am."

"Shit about covers it," Kerry responded. "Okay." She peered into the truck. "Six. Good."

"All they had," Mark explained. "These are the big ones. Most of the small ones were gone already. You know how people are. Lucky we're halfway through the season."

"Right." Kerry studied the machines. "How many to run the one switch inside, Mark?"

"Lemme check." Mark scooted inside the building, pulling out his flashlight as he ducked inside the door. "Holy crap, it's steaming in here!" He poked his head back out. "Hey...I'm not sure we can run those things even if we do juice 'em up. They'll overheat."

Shit. Kerry thumped against the truck, a sense of sick horror coming over her. "Find out what they'll need," she told Mark, to give her a moment to think.

Idiot. Of course they need cooling. She blinked a droplet of sweat from her eyes. Why hadn't she thought of that? Kerry let her head rest against the metal wall. Maybe she'd gotten too used to letting Dar do her thinking for her?

A draft of cool air blew into her face, and she looked inside the truck, sticking her hand into the dark bay. She stepped back and looked at the side, spotting the boast of an air conditioned truck bed. "You got a flashlight?" she asked the tech nearest her.

"Um...sure." The curly-haired tech handed it over.

Kerry turned it on and flashed it over the interior of the truck, spotting the large air conditioning unit near the ceiling. "Okay." She saw Mark emerge. "What's the deal?"

He shrugged. "We can do it with one of these suckers." He indicated the generators. "No problem, but it won't stay up more than ten minutes, boss. I..." He hesitated. "I shoulda thought of that."

"Why? Even they didn't." Kerry exhaled, pointing inside. "At least, they never mentioned it. So maybe they figured we'd figure out a way around that, too."

"Yeah." Mark frowned.

"So we'll have to. Listen." Kerry pushed away from the truck. "Here's the plan. Mark--set these four up and get them going. Figure out what we need to connect them all in series, but use one at a time so we can keep them running longer. When one runs out of gas we switch to the second, but we can't drop any power."

"Uh..."

"When you figure out what you'll need for that, surge boxes or whatever, call me at Home Depot. I'll be there buying air conditioning duct and duct tape so we can run the truck all night and pipe some air in there." She pointed. "Okay? Thanks. Call me."

She turned and headed for her car, knowing she'd left slack jawed employees behind her. Reaching her Lexus, she popped the door locks and hopped inside, starting up the SUV and closing the door as the air conditioning promptly bathed her in a very welcome chill.

Would Mark figure that all out? Kerry wondered. If they didn't find a way to keep things going, it'd be useless. Dropping the lines every couple hours while they refilled the diesel just wasn't going to cut it. "One thing at a time, Ker." She reminded herself, putting the car in gear with a determined expression. "What was that Dar once said? Mouthful at a time and you can eat an entire whale, tail and all?"

She turned the car onto the road carefully, since the signals were out along with everything else. The power outage had been so severe the power company hadn't even been able to project a fix for it. Too much damage had been done to too much of the infrastructure when a freak collapse of a transfer station had sent power back the wrong way up the lines into the grid.

So, she had to come through here. They had to come through. There wasn't any choice--the pressure was building and she'd started getting more and more calls from their clients frustrated with lack of, or slowness of, service to their vital resources.

As if in cosmic synchronicity with that, her cell phone rang. Kerry fumbled it out and flipped it open, keeping her eyes on the road. "Kerry Stuart."

"Kerry, it's Eleanor."

Kerry exhaled silently. "What's up?" she asked. "I'm a little tied up at the moment."

"Yeah, me too," Eleanor replied. "Listen, aside from everyone that comes through here calling Jose every name in the book, I've got that damn CNN reporter here. Someone told him our customers were up in arms."

"Is he aware there's a power outage?" Kerry said, dodging a car stopped in the roadway. "One that isn't ILS's fault?"

"Sure," she said. "But his point is, we made a big deal about service. So now that there's a problem, where's our service? We charge a premium to make sure customers don't go down, so..."

Kerry sighed. "That's exactly the point I just made to our Bellsouth manager here," she said. "We pay a premium to make sure our customers don't go down. But the fact is, they screwed up, and we're down, so now I'm out here headed to Home Depot to find a way to fix it."

Eleanor sighed. "So I guess you can't talk to him?"

"Not right now," Kerry said. "When I get back to the office, I can."

"Okay," Eleanor sounded mollified. "Hope you have a good story for him. Ker. This guy's a skeptic."

"Yeah. Okay," Kerry muttered. "Talk to you later." She hung up the phone, and shook her head. "Jesus."

A clog of traffic at an intersection forced her to stop, and she rested her forearms on her steering wheel as the crowd sorted itself out. A queasy roll of her stomach reminded her she hadn't stopped to have dinner, and though the last thing she felt like doing was eating she knew she was asking for trouble if she didn't.

She already had a stress headache. With a sigh, she let the brake up a little and crept forward, one hand fishing in her utility well until she found a bit of cellophane. Pulling the power bar out, she used her teeth to rip it open, and took a bite without taking her eyes off the road.

It wasn't satisfying, but it was banana nut, and it took the edge off. Kerry chewed at it as she got through the dark intersection, only having to honk four or five times to keep other cars from plowing into her SUV's dark blue sides. "Bah...bah...hey! You jerk! Watch it!"

A Mustang squirted past her in a blare of horns.

Kerry felt her heart hammering in her chest as she got past the intersection, heading toward the nearby hardware store. She got into the parking lot without further incident and headed into the store, regretfully trading the cool leather interior of her car for the heat outside.

The Home Depot was also running on generators, and it was clammy inside. Kerry found it hard to breathe, between the sawdust and the smell of generator oil, but she continued on, glancing down the aisles until she found the central air supply row. She paused in front of the compressed ducting and paused, realizing suddenly she had no idea how much to get.

"Jesus." Kerry slapped herself on the side of the head, unable to believe the stupidity of not measuring the distance first. "I should have had Dar just come back. I can't handle this."

But Dar wasn't there, so after a moment of mentally kicking herself Kerry leaned against the steel shelving and closed her eyes, trying to picture the unfamiliar confines of the telephone building. "Okay." She sighed. "How many Dar's can fit with arms outstretched between the truck and the switch, Kerry. C'mon. Think."

Dar was the easiest thing she could picture, and she knew her partner's outstretched arms were just over six feet across. Mentally, she positioned that tall, lanky frame, imagining her at the truck, then at the door, then inside, then across the aisle and around the corner, just Dar after Dar after Dar, until she was smiling and she had her answer. "Mm...ten Dar's. Lucky me."

With seventy-five feet of ducting to be safe, and four rolls of tape, Kerry loaded up her wagon and then checked her cell phone. It was stubbornly silent, so she pushed the cart over to the electrical section, and started browsing the different devices herself.

What would she need? The urge to call Dar and ask almost overtook her, but Kerry firmly closed her hand away from her cell phone and concentrated on the big boxes lining the shelves. Cables? They had those. Diesel? Mark had stopped for that too. Kerry's eyes roamed over the choices until it fell on a dust-covered box on the bottom shelf labeled GAC Load Control Systems, a lonely looking item, one of its kind.

Crouching down, she tugged the box forward, releasing a cloud of ancient dust that nearly bowled her over. Stifling a sneeze, she peered at the lettering on the box, trying to make the technical terms fit concepts she was already familiar with. "Hm. Load balancing between two or more generators." She let her hands rest on the box. "Well, I guess that's what we're doing." With a grunt, she lifted the item and put it on the cart with the rest, going to the front and hauling the flatbed after in a sweaty, dusty pony-like fashion. She was standing at the counter handing over her credit card when three or four men rushed in, dashing past the entrance and heading for the same aisle she just came out of.

Kerry turned back to the cashier as she was presented with a slip to sign, giving the exhausted looking clerk behind the desk an understanding smile. "Long day."

"Honey, you ain't kidding." The woman handed her card back.