After an eternity, he says, “Oh, maybe.”
Linda arches an eyebrow. “Perhaps a cup of coffee first, Caleb?”
“Or a nap,” Sasha suggests helpfully. “You could rest in one of the sick bays in the nurse’s office. It’s so quiet and dark down there.”
He’s tempted—it’s splashed all over his face. But he resists.
“No,” he says, his tone mournful. “I need to write now so I can give Emmaline a break when I get home.”
After he trudges to his carrel, Sasha tells Linda she needs to run an errand.
She speed walks down the hallway where the history and foreign language classrooms are located and raps on Connelly’s door, interrupting him in the middle of a lecture about The Prague Spring.
“Could I borrow you for a minute?”
He looks startled but recovers quickly. “Discuss this question in your small groups: Imagine that Czechoslovakia had successfully resisted the Soviet Union’s invasion. How do you think Dubcek’s Action Program reforms might have changed the trajectory of the Eastern Bloc?”
He joins her in the hallway, tense and poised for action. “What’s wrong? Are the kids okay?”
“Kids are fine. Caleb started writing The Takedown over the weekend,” she whisper-hisses. “It’s going so well, he’s already sent pages to his agent.
“Already?”
“We need to loop Hank back in. For all we know, someone will hit the Colonial Pipeline with a massive cyberattack three weeks after Caleb publishes this thing. And then we’ll be kicking ourselves.”
He nods. “Tonight.”
She should let him get back to the Prague Spring. He keeps looking over his shoulder at his classroom door.
“I’ll spend some time this afternoon pulling together what we have so we can make a coherent, persuasive argument.”
“Legal nerd,” he teases. Another glance at the door.
She waves him toward his classroom. “Go, get back to your class. Find out if the liberalization of Czechoslovakia would have changed history.”
He gives her a genuine smile. “It definitely would have.”
She waits until he turns to walk back into his room to call after him. “History nerd.”
Chapter Twenty
Caleb stares at the outline for The Takedown. His gut churns and his chest burns. He could pretend it’s the leftover Ethiopian takeout he ate standing up in the teacher’s lounge, but he knows that’s not the source of his queasiness.
The document is twenty-one single-spaced pages long. It reads more like an operations manual or a field report than a story framework.
He pages through the scene breakdowns. The antagonist identifies the vulnerable junction where three pipelines converge at a compressor station. He bribes a technician to disable the emergency shutdown system, lock down the pressure relief valves, and close the main gate valve. Apparently this results in a build-up of gas in the line, which stretches the pipe until it bursts with a massive explosion.
He frowns. At least, he thinks that’s what this technical jargon means. The first time he read through it between washing loads of baby clothes, he crossed out the original wall of text and made notes in the margin that hopes accurately translated the idea to English.
Just like the outline for The Payback, this thing is entirely too detailed. The specificity about pipeline engineering, compressor stations, the physics of pressure-induced failure, it all feels unnecessary for fiction.
Who writes like this? Who thinks like this?
A client who wants their vision executed exactly, he tells himself. There’s nothing sinister about thorough research.
But there is something sinister about a real-life attack. He can’t stop worrying that this will be a repeat of Turkey.
He’d better stop worrying. He’s already spent the first half of the advance retaining an architect and a general contractor to come up with a plan to replace the windows.
