Thirst for Justice Page 9

  Re: Contamination of Seattle Water Supply

  The main water supply of the City of Seattle has been contaminated by a highly toxic industrial chemical called perchloroethylene, also referred to as perc or PCE. Exposure to PCE can cause respiratory problems, liver damage, kidney damage, birth defects, and cancer.

  Michael couldn’t believe that he was actually doing this. But he’d already taken the big steps, and now he was compelled to continue. Deep down, beneath the fear and the nagging doubts, he still thought he was doing the right thing. The third email was the most important in terms of attaining his ultimate objective, which was saving lives, not sowing panic.

  To: president@whitehouse.gov

  Re: The Contamination of the City of Seattle’s Water Supply

  The Chester Morse Reservoir, the main water supply for the four million residents of Seattle, has been deliberately contaminated with the industrial chemical perchloroethylene. The level of contamination was carefully calculated to avoid reaching concentrations that could cause either acute or chronic health effects from consuming the water. In other words, there is no danger to human health.

  However, this event is a warning. The next action to contaminate the drinking water of a major American city will result in significant mortality and morbidity, unless the following commitments are made and implemented:

  The Government of the United States must announce, within the next forty-eight hours, the creation of a major new initiative to combat poverty in Africa’s poorest nations. Key elements of this new initiative should focus on ensuring access to clean water, educating girls, and preventing or treating the diseases that cause the unnecessary deaths of millions of children under the age of five each year.

  The Government of the United States must publicly allocate $25 billion in additional funds over and above existing foreign aid and debt relief programs, each year for the next four years, for a total of $100 billion. The money must be targeted exclusively to alleviating poverty and disease in Africa.

  If these actions are announced, we will take no further steps and we will never publicly connect the contamination of water supplies with the $100 billion African initiative.

  Michael hit send. There. He had done it. The infusion of $100 billion over the next four years into a war on global poverty could change the course of human history. It would be like a Marshall Plan for African countries. Millions of children’s lives could be saved, changing their fate, improving the prospects for their families, communities and countries. The accelerated progress in combating poverty and disease would provide a powerful antidote to the wretched conditions producing legions of desperate terrorists who believe they have nothing to lose. The outlay of $100 billion would provide a much-needed boost for America’s flagging reputation. And the cost, in relative terms, would be minimal. One hundred billion dollars was a big number to most people but a small number in the U.S. budget. Michael fervently hoped that they wouldn’t call his bluff. He would never be capable of following through on the threat that he’d made.

  Michael had four minutes left before his time at the computer terminal expired. He suppressed an urge to drop a quick note to Maria. Instead, he signed off early. He stood, took one last look around, and saw that a short, stout woman was standing several paces away, peering at him intently through thick-lensed, black-framed glasses. Michael felt his heart accelerate and his breathing turn shallow as he pushed back the chair. She was walking directly toward him. He stood, rooted to the spot, unable to move. She stopped, close enough to reach out and touch him. She couldn’t possibly be police, thought Michael, but she could be a librarian.

  “All done, sir?” she asked.

  “Yes. All done.” Michael repeated her words, thrusting his hands deep into his pant pockets to stop their shaking.

  “Thanks.” She pulled the chair back further so that she could step past Michael to take her turn at the computer. She was just another library user.

  Part II

  The Deadline

  Chapter 15

  Nancy Bradshaw, a communications assistant with the Seattle Metropolitan Water Utility, was nursing a decaf chai latte, trying to make it last the morning. Before the internet came along, she answered phones, opened mail, and typed a few letters each day. Now she also had to deal with hundreds of emails, trying to weed out spam, viruses, and lunatics. The latest was from some kooks calling themselves “End Poverty Now” who claimed to have poisoned the Seattle water supply.

  Yeah right, she thought. There were one or two of these every month. The protocol was that Nancy would forward the email to her boss, Communications Manager Alistair Gryzbowski, and make contact by telephone as well, so that the threat didn’t fall into a virtual black hole. Big Al would follow the rigorous, paranoid process put in place post–9/11. There were three thick binders on the shelf behind Nancy detailing the new procedure for responding to terrorist threats. She’d skimmed the first one, but it was full of acronyms, tech talk, and Byzantine diagrams. Boring, she’d thought, and left it to gather dust. She dialed Big Al’s extension.

  It rang three times. Big Al never answered quickly. It was how he asserted his importance. “Alistair Gryzbowski, communications manager.”

  “Yo, Big Al.”

  “Nancy.” She could hear the distaste that Al felt toward all of his subordinates.

  “Got another nutjob for ya. Says they dumped poison in the rez.”

  “The rez?”

  Duh. “The Chester Morse Reservoir.” You know, where our water comes from.

  “Did the threat arrive via fax, email, or telephone?”

  “Email.”

  “Please forward it to me immediately.”

  “Done.”

  Nancy hung up and groaned as her phone rang before she’d even placed the handset back on the charger.

  “Seattle Water, Nancy Bradshaw speaking. How can I help you?”

  “Hello, Nancy, it’s Ariel Santana calling from CNN. We have a report that the City of Seattle’s water supply has been contaminated. Can you confirm this for us?”

  Whoa, thought Nancy. That was fast. Apply the protocol. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to speak to my supervisor. Would you like me to transfer you now?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “One moment.” Nancy smiled at the thought of blindsiding Big Al with a call from CNN.

  “Alistair Gryzbowski, communications manager.”

  “Me again.”

  “What is it now?”

  “Ms. Ariel Santana from CNN on line three.”

  “CNN?”

  “Apparently our whack jobs have been busy spreading the word about their little prank.”

  “Hell’s bells.” Big Al looked out his window. As a communications grad, he’d always wanted to be on CNN. It would blow his wife’s mind. Maybe get her off his back about his stalled career path. He shook his head. The public would panic if CNN ran a “poisoned water” story without a calming response from the utility. Despite his yearning for fame, Big Al knew that he had to kick it upstairs. This was out of his league. “Get her name and phone number and tell her someone will call her back in a few minutes.”

  “Okey-doke,” said Nancy. She cut the line to Big Al and picked up the extension where Ariel was listening to the soporific classical music inflicted upon callers on hold.

  “Hello, Ms. Santana, it’s Nancy again. Mr. Gryzbowski is tied up in a meeting right now but someone should be able to call you back in a few minutes.”

  “Nancy, have you heard anything about the Chester Morse Reservoir being poisoned?” Ariel was well aware that the story couldn’t run without some kind of confirmation from the authorities. However, even an unofficial source, like Nancy, would suffice, so she was appealing to Nancy’s sense of sisterhood, giving her a chance to bypass The Man.

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that report.” Nancy qu
oted the words from the cheat sheet she kept on her desk by the phone. Sisterhood or not, she needed this job.

  “All right. Let your boss know that the story will run as an unconfirmed breaking news report at the top of the hour if he doesn’t call me back.”

  Ariel gave Nancy her cellphone number and hung up. Standard empty threat. Worked often enough to warrant trying it again. Ariel tapped her fingernails on the wall of her cubicle in CNN’s Seattle office. She knew that the likelihood of the email from endpovertynow being accurate was next to nothing. But journalism was like a lottery. Every day she chased the wildest leads, the longest odds, hoping for a break. And then she’d have to fight off the buzzards, senior reporters with no qualms about scavenging stories and stealing the glory from the up-and-comers like her who did all the legwork.

  She picked up her phone and dialed. “Hey Jim, Ariel here. I may need a camera crew and a van sometime in the next half-hour or so.” Jim Dunlop was the van man, the dispatcher who controlled CNN’s camera crews in Seattle.

  “Headed for?”

  “The Chester Morse Reservoir.”

  “A floater?”

  “No, nothing like that. Just another wild goose chase. Don’t hold your breath.” Ariel played it down, worried that Jim was tipping off the senior guys whenever she called in with a hot story.

  “All right. I’ll see if I can line something up for you.”

  Ariel had already sent an email to endpovertynow@hotmail.com asking them to contact her immediately. Now she started frantically Googling the phrase. No website, no Twitter feed, no Facebook page, no Instagram account. Nothing at all on social media. What the hell? A nonexistent group claiming to have carried out a terrorist attack?

  At the Seattle Metropolitan Water Authority, Big Al was working the phones, implementing the protocol for alleged water contamination events. He called the engineering department, asking them to switch the water supply on a precautionary basis so that Seattle residents would receive all their drinking water from the Tolt River Reservoir. He phoned the water quality testing lab, informing them of the need for urgent sampling and analysis. He called the Seattle Police Department, notifying them of the threat and the possibility that it had been carried out. He called the Washington State Department of Health, putting them on notice that there was a potential problem with Seattle’s drinking water.

  Finally, Big Al called the regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency, the lead federal agency in protecting American water supplies from physical, chemical, and biological attacks.

  The investigative wheels were in motion while Michael slept fitfully on a crowded airplane high above sub-Saharan Africa.

  Chapter 16

  The White House, Department of Homeland Security, Pentagon, National Security Agency, FBI, CIA, and other government agencies have to filter through hundreds of threats, demands, pleas, conspiracy theories, false accusations, false confessions, and other deluded ravings daily. These missives come from all over the world. Letters, phone calls, faxes, emails, tweets, blogs, even homemade video recordings. Each federal agency has employees, usually receptionists or similar frontline staff, specifically assigned to monitor the “nut lines” and “c-mail”—emails from crazies, cranks, and crackpots. Some of the communications are anonymous but the majority of correspondents feel no inhibitions about signing their real names, guaranteeing their immediate addition to no-fly lists, watch lists, and various federal law enforcement databases.

  If the initial recipient of an incoming communication feels there is even a shred of plausibility in the threat, then it is routed to the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit and relayed to the Department of Homeland Security. It triggers an immediate credibility assessment—under federal supervision but conducted by local law enforcement authorities. If the threat is deemed viable, then several federal agencies leap swiftly into action. Only in the rarest of cases, if there is solid information, an imminent situation, and a genuine threat to national security, does it result in a presidential briefing.

  Because of this, there was no immediate response to the email sent to the White House by endpovertynow@hotmail.com. The email just sat in an inbox, unread, waiting.

  Although the events in Seattle were not yet on the radar screen at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Big Al’s phone calls set off a ripple effect of communication up the bureaucratic chain of command at the Environmental Protection Agency. Cassie Harden-Hernandez was its head. Democrats had attacked her appointment two years before, labeling her an industry flack and a token woman. At the same time, there was a firestorm of opposition among the Republican old boys. As far as they were concerned, Cassie had three strikes against her—female, Hispanic, and a self-described environmentalist. In fact, Cassie wasn’t Hispanic, despite her appearance and her hyphenated last name. Despite the initial uproar, Cassie had gradually earned grudging bipartisan respect for being tough but fair.

  She was constantly swamped. Yesterday, Sunday, she’d worked from dawn until dusk catching up on the tsunami of paperwork so that the week could start with a clean slate. The days when weekends were for hiking and skiing were a fond memory, ended by her promotion to America’s top environmental cop. Happily married, she’d heard the groundless rumors on Capitol Hill that she was romantically involved with the president and had slept her way to the top. She also knew that her nickname, probably propagated by the same slimy sources, was Hard-on Hernandez. These insults made Cassie even more determined to do her job with unimpeachable integrity.

  Her cellphone chimed. Abdullah Ali, her executive assistant, and the only person Cassie knew who worked longer hours than she did, was on the line. If he was calling her while out on a falafel-hunting mission, then it had to be important. She sighed audibly and answered. “Hi Abby.”

  “Cassie, sorry to bother you.”

  “It’s okay, what’s up?”

  “Bad news. CNN is reporting a possible chemical attack on Seattle’s drinking water. The local utility just notified our regional office about receiving an email indicating that perchloroethylene has been dumped into Chester Morse Reservoir.”

  “Any confirmation?”

  “Not yet. The utility has taken water samples, and their lab is running tests as we speak.”

  “I want those test results ASAP, and I want a copy of the email sent to the utility.”

  “I’ll text you if I hear anything before I get back to the office.”

  Cassie switched on the flatscreen TV in her office that was permanently tuned to CNN. After a few minutes of international news coverage, the news anchor mentioned that they would be going to Seattle for a live update on a breaking story. An attractive young reporter stood in front of a forested backdrop.

  “CNN has obtained an unconfirmed report that the main source of Seattle’s drinking water, the Chester Morse Reservoir, has been intentionally contaminated with a hazardous chemical called perchloroethylene, or PCE. CNN is seeking confirmation and further details from local and federal authorities, who have thus far refused to comment.”

  Cassie exhaled loudly. The possibility of an attack on a major American city’s water supply was something she’d been briefed on during her first week on the job. The day after being sworn in, she’d read almost a dozen black binders filled with terse memos on everything from the disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park to flame retardants in women’s breastmilk. A planet in crisis. Pretty bleak reading material. She tried not to worry about attacks on America’s drinking water but it was one of many potential disasters that gave her nightmares.

  Ten minutes later Abby was back with two falafel pitas, his with extra hot sauce. He tucked a cloth napkin between his neck and shirt to protect his silk tie from dripping tahini. Abby was a natty dresser partial to tailored suits that fit his slender build.

  Cassie wolfed down her food, then paced around, thinking about how to respond if the threat was confirmed.
She set her phone to buzz for incoming emails and placed it in the front pocket of her pantsuit. Unfortunately, she was getting so many emails that it felt like a vibrator. She put the setting back on silent and sat down at her desk. It would be hard to concentrate on other problems until the claim of an attack was validated or debunked.

  After two long hours, an email arrived from the Seattle Metropolitan Water Utility with a header that shouted CONFIDENTIAL TEST RESULTS. The body of the email simply read Please see attachment. Cassie hit download and the PDF popped open on her screen. She scrolled down past a useless cover page. The second page explained the abbreviations, units, and measurement techniques involved in chemical testing of municipal water supplies. More scrolling down. On the third page, the magic numbers appeared. The tests confirmed the presence of significant levels of perchloroethylene in the Chester Morse Reservoir. One sample showed 6 parts per billion (ppb), while one showed 10 ppb and another 11 ppb. All three exceeded the EPA’s maximum acceptable levels for safe drinking water, and there was no effective way to remove the perc from the reservoir or filter it out at the water treatment facility.

  “Holy shit.” This wasn’t an empty threat. For an American public permanently on edge about terrorist attacks, stress levels were about to jack into the stratosphere.

  “So CNN’s right?” Abby asked.

  “Sure looks like it. Tests on three separate samples confirm perchloroethylene contamination.”

  “Stormy waters ahead.” Abby reveled in bad puns.

  “Yup. This could turn into a real interagency cockfight. FBI, CIA, DHS, they’re all going to want a piece of this. I need you to call CNN, track down that reporter, and find out everything she knows.”

  “On it. Cassie, I’m not a chemist. How poisonous is this stuff?”

  “PCE is highly toxic, but there are two pieces of good news, to use that phrase loosely. The first is that those levels of perc aren’t going to kill anybody in the short term. They’re too low.”