Hannah had barely slipped into her seat and secured her belt when Fisher laid on the gas. And, just like that, they were in.
Holy toad-eating fucknuts,she thought.I can’t believe it was that easy.
Either she snorted her disbelief or Sam was reading her mind again. He reached over to pat her leg. “Most people believe whatever they’re seeing with their own two eyes and hearing with their own two ears.”
She lifted her hand to show how much it trembled. “I thought for sure I’d ruined things when I shook his hand. He had to have felt me shaking.”
“You did great,” Eliza assured her. “Hopefully convincing him to let us in was the hard part and fixing the flaw in their system will be a cakewalk by comparison.”
Hannah took in the different parts of the combined-cycle natural gas power plant as they drove down the length of the sprawling complex. The first thing she saw was the gas turbine. It was 300 tons of compressors and diffusers and combustion systems. Next came the generator, where the magic of converting mechanical energy to electrical energy happened. Then, there was the bus duct, which took the electricity from the generator to a transformer that was hooked up to the grid. And finally, the control room.
The latter didn’t look like much. Just a large metal building with parking out front and a single door in the center of its south face. Looking at its unassuming exterior, one would never know it housed all the high-tech equipment used to monitor and control every aspect of the power plant’s operation.
When she exited the car, she half expected to smell the rotten egg aroma associated with natural gas. But the only scents to tickle her nose were the slightly chemical smells of industrial lubricant and the burned-metal aroma of mechanical processes.
It was the gas companies supplying gas to residential homes and businesses who added a chemical called mercaptan to their product to ensure their customers could always tell if they had a gas leak. Natural gas in its true state, like what was used at the plant, was completely odorless.
“You got this,” Sam said when she swallowed audibly.
“Right.” She screwed up all her courage and pushed forward toward Gonzales, who stood by the door. She hoped her straight back and high head looked like confidence instead of an overcompensation for a rabbiting heart.
When she stepped inside the control room, she found it was just as she’d imagined. Filled with screens scrolling through various data sets, workstations with assorted control panels, and the unflattering florescent overhead lights that seemed standard to all industrial and institutional buildings.
There were three plant employees at various stations in the room. They didn’t attempt to hide their curiosity as their gazes traveled over the group of new arrivals. But Gonzales waved them away with a grim sounding, “I’ll fill y’all in later. Right now just watch your stations. Make sure we’re not seeing any anomalies.”
Turning to Hannah, he gestured wide with his arm. “If you’ll follow me, Ms. Violet. I’ll show you where you can access the system.”
Her borrowed shoes were a size too big and rubbed painfully on her injured pinky toe as she tailed the engineer to a workstation in the corner. He pulled out a rolling chair with worn upholstery and a squeaky wheel. Then indicated she should sit.
“Thank you.” She gratefully sank into the chair, taking the weight off her problematic foot. “Like I said outside, this shouldn’t take long.”
“Sure thing.” He bobbed his chin as she flexed her fingers and began the task of…saving Texas.
Within seconds, she was in the virtual world of algorithms, arrays, and functions, and the real world around her faded. She didn’t smell the coffee Gonzales poured into paper cups for Sam and the others. She didn’t hear the whispered words he spoke to his team as he went around explaining what was happening. And she didn’t see the way every head in the room kept turning her way, checking her progress.
Her entire focus was consumed by the characters on her screen. As her fingers flew across the keyboard, her breathing grew slow and steady. No more nerves. No more shaking hands. No more fluttering heart.
“There you are,” she muttered when she found the problem in the program and started patching it up with coded firewalls. Character by character, line by line she shored up the weakness until she’d assured herself there was nothing more she could do.
By the time she finished and pushed back from the keyboard, she wasn’t sure if five minutes or five hours had passed. But when she blinked and looked around, she saw Sam had made his way to her side.
He lifted an eyebrow, asking a question without uttering a word.
“It’s done.” She nodded. “The plant is safe.”
“Never doubted you for a minute.” He winked and offered a hand to help her rise.
She wondered if he caught her hesitation. Touching himhurt. Because there was no ignoring the fact that very soon now she’d probably be touching him for the last time. But eventually she muscled up her moxie and settled her fingers inside his.
“What now?” Gonzales asked once she was on her feet. She curled her fingers into a fist to hold onto the lingering sensation of Sam’s touch.
“Our work here is done,” Sam said simply. “So we’ll leave you toyourwork.”
“But what about the traitor? The person working for the Chinese?”
Hannah froze. Right. Because if they reallyhadbeen FBI, surely they’d have been eager to get their hands on the culprit.
Sam was better at subterfuge than she was—thank goodness. His answer was immediate. “We’ll send in a second team who’ll want to go through recent security footage and start interviewing the employees here. Our job today was simply to foil the plan to sabotage the grid.”
