Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(141)
He would retreat from her, but there is nowhere to go. “Get out,” he says and zips himself up and swipes at the air and covers his face with a trembling hand. “Leave me!”
Once he heard a story from a man who worked in a bullet factory. He guessed that over the past ten years he had plated millions of hollow-points. Brass strips punched into primers. One hundred and eighty-five grains. Nickel-plated, copper-plated. All day long he stood at the press and every evening he watched the news and saw how some cop in Arkansas got shot in a routine traffic stop, some sister in New Jersey got a round through the eye when her brother was fooling around with a handgun swiped from a nightstand. He pulls a lever in a factory in Billings and two months and three thousand miles away somebody loses their life. One thing leads to another.
There are so many examples of this. You take a left instead of a right turn and miss a head-on collision that would have left you brain damaged for life. You tease a friend about his shaky hand and it shames him into going to a doctor who discovers a brain tumor just before it metastasizes. You decide to drop by the grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine and reach for a bottle of Shiraz at the same time as a woman with a switchblade smile who will bear you two children before running off with a bartender named Sasa. Think too hard about it and you never want to leave your house. The way one decision can domino through the rest of your life.
A plane packed with C-4 comes spiraling out of the sky. And then?
The Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power generated at the Hanford nuclear site and thirty-one federal dams, goes offline. Its service territory covers all of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and western Montana, as well as small contiguous portions of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and eastern Montana. BPA’s wholesale customers include public utilities, public utility districts, municipal districts, public cooperatives, some investor-owned utilities, and a few large industries such as aluminum companies. In addition to the transmission network within the Northwest, BPA operates large interregional transmission lines that connect to Canada, California, and the Southwest. Widespread brownouts and blackouts follow the explosion—followed by the collapse of the western grid. And then? What happens when the power goes out? When radiation spikes and the Pacific Northwest empties in a matter of days?
The loss of Boeing and Precision Castparts brings the airline industry to a halt.
The loss of Intel’s largest fabrication center, where most of the world’s computer chips are produced and designed, results in a major disruption in the computer and chip market.
Costco collapses. And other companies nearly follow suit, with their heads cut off—Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Microsoft, Starbucks, Cray Computers, Amazon, Safeco and PEMCO, Nordstrom, REI, Alaska Airlines, MSNBC, Nintendo, T-Mobile, Eddie Bauer, Expedia, Greenbrier, and Daimler Trucks.
Seattle’s port, and Portland’s to a smaller degree, brings in many of the products shipped to the U.S. from Asia, a capacity that cannot be covered by other harbors.
Even Facebook is affected, with one of its major data centers in Prineville shut down in an instant.
All of which causes panic and panic causes the collapse of the stock market and the collapse of the stock market triggers a worldwide depression, so that when January 20 comes and Chase is sworn into office in the middle of a blizzard, he knows he has been sentenced to carry the blame. He has virtually no public or congressional support. Partisan disagreements have twice created threats of partial government shutdowns and nearly caused a historic governmental default on their debt.
It is too much to bear.
After the women gather their clothes, after they whisper harshly at each other to hurry, after the door clicks closed, he leaps from his chair. He knocks the lamp from the table, sweeps the briefings to the floor. Before the snowstorm of paper can settle, he marches over to the portraits of Roosevelt and Jackson, ripping them from their hooks, hurling them across the room, one of them striking an antique globe that gashes the canvas. He chucks a pillow, drags the duvet off the bed, and feels sickened by the smell of perfume that lingers here like some contamination. He tears the curtains from their rods and moonlight spills through the windows and makes the suite the color of underwater. He punches the wall and curses at the pain and tucks his hand into his armpit and staggers into the bathroom and snatches a bottle of Volpexx from the cabinet and twists off its top as if breaking the neck of a bird.
The bathroom is windowless, a marble cell. He observes his shadowy image in the mirror. He appears a phantom. He has been close to death before, but it always felt like something that could be avoided, something that gave off an almost repellant force. Now the opposite seems true, as if it were an inevitability, a dark mouth drawing him in.
One thing leads to another. Cause and effect. If one person’s choice to pack a plane with C-4 could open up a crater that the entire nation has collapsed into, then maybe he could make a choice too, one that might be similarly impactful. The choice to heal. He imagines something beginning here, in this moment, that would spread outward and affect everyone.
He breathes heavily when he stands over the toilet and shakes the bottle empty and flushes, knowing that if he waits another moment he might end up dipping his head into the bowl and palming to his mouth the pills already dissolving there.
He hears a knock. There is always a knock. That is the problem with this place. He can never be alone. Even here, on the second story, his residence, someone is always posted in the hall, always watching, always asking if he needs something, as if he were infirm or a child with a lost expression. He prefers Camp David.