CHAPTER EIGHT
LIVING ROOM
VICKI’S CONDO
CAMBRIDGE
NEXT DAY
THE STUDENTS WERE EXCITED. Three of them gathered around Vicki’s living room and dug into the newly delivered Neapolitan pizza. The top of her coffee table was made of a four-foot long slab of wood, recovered from a southern pine tree. That provided plenty of room for the pizza, cans of Coke, A & W root beer, plates and napkins.
The room had brick walls and 15 foot knotty pine beamed ceilings. It was the end unit of a conversion from a warehouse built in 1899 to condominiums in the 1990s. Vicki’s couch and armchairs were upholstered in faded lime green and teal blue chenille. She had painted her wooden chairs and tables, some with exotic designs overlying a violet base. Two walls held Brazilian wood-cut prints. Another wall had huge windows looking over a small vegetable garden. There was a plant in a large oval pot below one of the windows. Its sprawling vines were covered with passion fruit flowers. The vines had been trained around a loop of wires to climb up a wooden pole with a grow light above it. A fourth wall had floor to ceiling bookcases with a rolling ladder attached to reach the upper shelves. There was a wood pellet stove in a corner backed on both sides and below by slate tiles, many of them broken pieces that had been carefully cemented together. One of the book shelves held a photo of Vicki and a handsome man with shoulder length dark hair standing next to a tent surrounded by forest. He had his arm around her back.
“I’m so glad you contacted me,” Vicki said. “Although I can’t imagine how you came up with my unlisted phone number. I’ve worked hard to protect it.”
“That would be Diego. He has a supercomputer implanted in his brain,” Leroy said.
Diego shrugged. “Piece of cake.”
Vicki picked up a slice of pizza. “Okay, everyone, I love the idea you’ve come up with. Here’s the plan so far. We’ll gather on the front steps to the Green Building with this second banner that I’ve made up, this time with poles at both ends and one in the center so that you’ll be able to carry it. I’ll give it to you now so you’ll have it on hand at the right moment.”
Leroy was surprised.
“You made the banner?”
“I’m pretty handy,” she said.
Sally finished her pizza. “We should be able to get some others to help hold it.”
“What time are we doing this?” Diego asked.
“I think five p.m. would be good,” Vicki suggested.
“Great. That way we’ll catch a lot of rush hour traffic heading west on Mass Ave,” Leroy said.
“Right.” Vicki nodded. “I’ve invited the same people from NBC who met us in Waltham to cover us again, so we should make the local evening news. Please don’t tell anyone about it. If word gets out, MIT officials are likely to thwart us.”
“I could block everyone’s access to the internet,” Diego offered.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you should know we’ll keep it under wraps,” Leroy objected.
“Speaking of the internet, here’s something strange I stumbled on yesterday even though I should have caught it a long time ago,” Diego added. “Several U.S. gas pipelines were hit after a cyber-attack targeted a third-party supplier. They don’t know why.” He started to work on his third piece of pizza.
“I think it was back when I was in West Virginia,” Vicki said. “So, I missed it too.”
Leroy was only on his second slice. “That’s scary when you consider that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI warned us that the Kremlin has been targeting our critical infrastructure for quite a while. Hopefully they don’t plan to blow anything up.”
“I’m not sure that we can do anything with it, but it’s worth bearing in mind. Although we could point out that wind turbines and solar panels wouldn’t be good targets for the Russians or terrorists,” Vicki said.
“Did you know that even though FERC has allowed work to proceed on the Mountain Valley Pipeline, there have still been people protesting?” Diego asked. “That was something else I found online.”
“What’s FERC?” Sally asked.
“The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It’s an independent agency that regulates transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil. It reviews proposals to build natural gas pipelines,” he explained.
“Yes, I knew,” Vicki said.
Sally took a sip of root beer. “Gosh, some of this is complicated!”
“Then your tree sit might have been worthwhile no matter how hard it was, if in the end construction isn’t completed,” Leroy said.
“Hopefully.” Vicki put her piece of pizza down and picked up a cardboard carton that was on the floor next to the coffee table. She used her table knife to slit the tape holding it closed. “Here you go. Help yourselves to these t-shirts if you’d like. I had them made up in various sizes for the occasion.” She held up a white shirt that had RENEWABLE ENERGY and below that NOT MORE PIPELINES printed in bright red across the front. The trio gathered around and selected shirts in appropriate sizes.
“Any questions?”
“Is there a chance we’ll be arrested?” Leroy asked? He didn’t tell her he had a student visa from Haiti and didn’t want to risk having a problem with the police.
“I can’t see how,” Vicki said. “They might tell us to move in which case we will do exactly that. I’d guess MIT won’t be happy about it, but I can’t imagine that they’ll suspend you. There have been plenty of student protests about one thing or another. We’re good to go?”
The decision was unanimous. “Yes!”
When the trio left, Vicki went over and looked at the photograph on the bookshelf. She still remembered a conversation with Garon almost word for word.
They were snuggled up together in a sleeping bag, deep in the forest. He had said, “Someday you might go home and knowing you, there will be some battle you’ll want to fight.”
“Now that you’ve finally won me over, I’m never leaving you.”
“But if you do, you might remember that your country is the world’s largest natural gas producer, and you’re scheduled to account for over half the oil and gas produced globally by 2025.”
“So?”
“The infrastructure transporting and using gas is problematic. You have over 300,000 miles of large transmission pipelines shipping natural gas around the country and two million more miles of smaller, low-pressure pipelines delivering it to homes and businesses.”
“Why do you know so much about this?”
“You forget I studied at Penn in Philly. Gas leaks and pipeline failures are a worldwide problem. Methane leakage in Pennsylvania alone from drilling has been up to 1000 times EPA estimates.”
“I don’t care. I’m still not leaving.”
He was persistent. “The oil and gas industry is the largest source of industrial methane emissions. That dumps a lot of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Your own Boston has over 3000 pipeline leaks. It’s not enough to save the Amazon. You can remember me by tackling gas.”