“This doesn’t make sense,” she mutters.
He looks up from his tablet, where he’s been cross-referencing geographic locations mentioned in the outline against maps of gas pipelines. “What doesn’t?”
“There’s no record of an attack that matches these facts.” She gestures at the screen. “But it’s too real. It has to have happened.”
He sets the tablet down on the table. His jaw tightens.
“What?” Sasha.
“If an explosion exposed infrastructure vulnerability at critical junctures, it could have been covered up. Buried.”
“How?”
“The government would classify it. Call it a matter of national security. Which, to be honest, it may well have been. And if this all happened back before records went digital, expunging the public record was child’s play.”
She stares at him trying to make sense of this. “But how would they cover up an explosion like that? In the outline, it creates a crater, it’s visible from space. People die.”
“They’d blame it on an earthquake.”
“You answered that awfully fast.”
He gives her a look she knows only too well.
“Right. You could tell me, but then you’d have to kill me.”
He grins. “And neither of us would want that. In other news, I’m confident the pipeline in the book is the Colonial Pipeline, which delivers gas all along the East Coast.”
“That tracks. The station has to be in the northeast somewhere based on the descriptions of the environments, the character names. My money’s on New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania.”
“That feels right.”
He stands and stretches. “Want me to make some coffee?”
“That’s not a real question, is it?”
He laughs.
Then, before he heads to the kitchen, he tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I like this. Working with you.”
“I like it, too.” She’s grinning like an idiot.
Pull yourself together, McCandless.
She fires up a new search, this one for Colonial Pipeline Northeast earthquake damage. The result comes back immediately.
“I found it!” she shouts. But she’s no match for the whirr of the coffee grinder.
She runs to the kitchen. “Leo, I found it.” Her pulse is thrumming.
He turns from the machine. “Did you just call me by my actual name? You must be excited.”
He hits the button to start the brew cycle and then leans against the counter, waiting.
“It happened in 1992. In southeastern Pennsylvania. And you were right, they attributed it to an earthquake. Four people died when the explosion threw off a fireball that hit a single-family home. They were all asleep.”
A shadow crosses his face and his gray eyes darken.
She goes on, “In the aftermath of this so-called natural disaster, there was Congressional testimony about the need to harden the country’s critical infrastructure. One of the witnesses, a technician named—wait for it, Mikhail Andrewski—suggested it could have been the result of Russian sabotage. But that idea was quickly dismissed by government seismologists who testified at great length about a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, rare for the area, and the effect it had.”
