“I hope so, since I am, too. It’s good that they’re out of the house. It’ll give us time to really dig into these papers.”
He leans over for a closer look at her notes. “What are these?”
“This is the research I did yesterday about the attack in Turkey. Now that we have the outline, I compared it to the reports on the 1991 attack.”
“How close is it?”
“Too close. The outline uses detailed, technical language to describe the chemical reaction that occurs when you add potassium cyanide salts to water. It reads like it’s lifted from a chemical analysis.”
She points to a section of the outline for The Payback describing potassium cyanide as a deliquescent and highly water soluble. The word ‘deliquescent’ is circled, and a handwritten definition is squeezed into the margin of the page. Next to the definition, Caleb’s written, “when dissolved in water, hydrolysis causes the release of poisonous hydrogen cyanide gas. Should the man wear a gas mask? Does it matter what the pH of the water is?”
He shakes his head. “He doesn’t know the first thing about this.”
“Can we talk about the fact that he’s writing a second book? Why didn’t he mention that last night?”
“Have you seen the outline for it?” He plucks it from the pile. “If anything The Takedown is more detailed. Paragraphs of specific technical details about pressure tolerances, valve override mechanisms, the physics of pipeline failure.”
“My eyes are glazing over,” she admits.
“His must have been, too. He crossed out several paragraphs of jargon and wrote a note that reads ‘follow these steps verbatim and bump up the tension through character development of the inside man.”
She grabs her notebook. “Wait, what are the steps?”
Connelly reads it to her:
Silence the Alarm: Technician jumpers the high-pressure alarm terminals on the SCADA board.
Disable the Physical Safety: Then he pins/locks the relief valves on top of the pipes, so they can’t open to vent the excess pressure.
Pack/Dead-head the Line: Next he closes the main gate valve at the Triple Junction. Downline compressors keep pushing gas into the pipe
Clean Get Away: Logs a “routine maintenance check” in his notebook and clocks out.
Alibi: He’s sitting at the bar nursing a beer when the explosion happens 90 minutes later.
She sits back. “Even I can follow that.”
He chuckles. “It’s definitely better than the stuff he crossed out.”
“There’s a section on the inside man, right?”
He flips the page and passes it across the table to her. She scans it. A technician at the station, Andy Mihalik, age 54, has gambling debts totaling $127,000. He’s approached at his regular bar and recruited.
She jots down the details. “So this attack is also completely analog.”
He gets a thoughtful look. “It reads like Cold War sabotage. Manual infiltration, human assets, exploiting mechanical vulnerabilities. It’s old-school tradecraft.”
She taps her pen on the notebook. “Someone gave Caleb another historical operation manual.”
“And if there is a real-life pipeline attack after The Takedown is published, it’ll have to be modernized. Technicians don’t walk around with notebooks checking levers and valves any more.”
“A cyberattack?” she guesses.
“Definitely.”
“The first thing we should do is try to figure out if a gas pipeline really was sabotaged back when you could bribe a technician at a bar.”
While he looks for the location of the station, she searches for pipeline explosions in news archives, LexisNexis, declassified government databases, and industry publications. She finds plenty of gas pipeline failures but none that match the steps Caleb followed to write the novel.
