Chapter 4 The Rain Begins to Bite #3
“You have been at that table since eleven o’clock last night,” Hal said.
“You have not been to bed. You sent every person who works for you out of the city at eight in the morning and told them it was the storm, and then you stood at that window and looked west for eight minutes, which is not where the storm is, because I checked, the storm is northeast.” He nodded at the printouts.
“There is a stack of engineering paper on your dining table with a government seal on the header. I have not read it. I want you to know I have not read it, because I have been standing next to it for four hours and I could have.”
“Hal.”
“And on that television just now there was a man in a nice shirt saying every pump in the city is running.” He tipped his head toward the dark screen. “And you put your fork down.”
The rain went across the glass.
“So that is my question for today,” Hal said. “And it is not the one you think, so let me be careful with it, because I only get the one.”
Mina waited.
“I am not asking you what you do,” he said.
“I have worked out that you do something and I have worked out that you are extremely good at it and I have decided, on my own, without being asked, that I do not need the org chart.” He put both hands flat on the counter.
“What I am asking is: what is on the table?”
“Hal.”
“Because you have been looking at it like a man looks at an X-ray, mi reina, and I have watched you carry it around this apartment all morning, and I am not going to sit here and eat rice while you carry it by yourself.” He shrugged, one shoulder.
“That is all. That is the whole question. What is on the table?”
And Mina Hermosa, who had lied for a living for thirteen years, who had lied to reporters and producers and network executives and to a man in a corridor with a mark coming up on his neck, who had lied to her own mother about where she was going at nineteen, stood in her kitchen with the rain coming sideways at the glass, and found that she could not do it, not to this one, not with Malabon on the screen behind her.
Mina looked at him for a long moment.
Then she walked around the island, and past him, and over to the dining table, and picked up the top five pages of the parameter tables and brought them back and put them down in front of him.
“Sit,” she said.
He sat.
“That is Pumping Station 14,” Mina said.
“It is at the end of a road in Barangay Isla Puting Bato in Tondo, which is about nine kilometers from where you are sitting, and about four hundred people live within a hundred meters of it, and yesterday afternoon I read a letter on national television from a woman on that road whose house flooded eleven times last year.”
Hal looked at the page. He turned it ninety degrees, which she did not understand until she realized he was reading the column headers.
“This is a controller config,” he said.
“You know what this is?”
“Baby, I run four hundred refrigeration units across nine facilities. I do not know this system. I know this kind of paper.” He ran a finger down a column. “These are setpoints.”
“Yes.”
“And this column is what they were, and this column is what somebody changed them to.” He was quiet for a second. “In January.”
“In January.”
“Okay.” Hal sat back. “Explain the pump to me like I am a man who moves chicken.”
And Mina, standing in her own kitchen at eleven in the morning on the second day of a typhoon, explained the pump to him.
She explained the nine minutes and the ninety minutes.
She explained what an override was for and why it existed and what four hundred millimeters looks like when it is the step up into a house rather than a number in a table.
She explained the alarms, and where they had been sent, and what it means when a machine reports that it is well.
Hal listened to all of it without moving.
When she finished he sat forward again and put one finger on the change order date, and said the thing she had been sitting alone with since twenty past four in the morning, in about nine words, in the flat voice of a man reading a manifest.
“They did this in January,” he said. “There was no storm in January.”
“No.”
“So they did not do it for this one.”
“No,” Mina said. “They did it and then they waited.”
Hal looked at the paper for a while.
“Mi reina,” he said. “Who is they?”
She was three words into the answer when the power went out.
Not a flicker. The whole tower, all at once: the television, the range hood, the refrigerator, the two hundred small sounds a building makes that you never hear until they stop. The rain came up loud in the dark.
And then, four seconds later, the emergency lighting did not come on.
Mina stood absolutely still.
Because BGC does not lose power. Because this building had two diesel generators in a bunker under the parking levels and a service contract that she had read, and because emergency lighting in a residential tower in this country is on a battery circuit that does not care about the grid at all, and because there is no weather in the world that takes out a battery circuit.
Somebody had done that.
“Hal,” she said, in a voice he had never heard.
“Yeah.”
“Go and stand behind the kitchen island. Right now. Do not go near the windows and do not go near the elevator.”
To his enormous credit, he did not ask why.