Mitch Silver - The Bookworm

He sighed. “Unhealthy? Do I look unhealthy?”

The press corps gave up a few chuckles.

He continued, breezily: “Barbara, there’s a word for the people who want to relitigate the election. They’re called… losers.”

Now to get all wonky on her. “And yes, Barbara, I’m the first to admit we have problems at home. It cost a Fortune 500 company six percent more last year to provide health insurance for an employee’s family of four. Six percent in one year alone! Self-insured mom-and-pop places saw a seven percent hike. What’s that tell you? It tells me it isn’t the insurer gouging the public; it’s the underlying medical costs themselves that are causing the inflation, medical costs inflated by the so-called Affordable Care Act.

“Am I surprised my numbers are temporarily down? Not a bit. We inherited a lot of problems from the last administration. Even worse, we inherited a lot of myths. Like the one that says the rising healthcare cost curve has been bent down. It hasn’t. If we hadn’t trimmed Medicare and Medicaid, the cupboard wouldn’t just be bare. There wouldn’t be a cupboard.

“As for this trip, eighteen other leaders are flying in right now for this business meeting of the G20. It’s not a summit, but let’s face it: thanks to the resurgence in the price of oil, the Russian economy is doing better than ours. Maybe we can learn a few tricks from them. Simple as that.”

The questioning went on in that vein for another twenty-five minutes. The president looked out at the press corps, the doubting Thomases who, less than a year ago, were unanimous in their belief he could never be nominated, let alone elected. Now here he was, not just the first businessman to make it to the White House since Hoover, but the first ever with a billion bucks, and they were already writing off his re election. It was all he could do not to purse his lips and blow them all a raspberry.

In a few more days they’d get the news, a mackerel right across their collective kissers. It was going to be fun, watching them all change their tune, when the biggest oil strike in the history of the United States was announced right where the Democrats said they’d never drill—in the middle of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And all he had to do to make it happen was look a Russian guy in the eye and shake his hand.

Piece of cake.

Half a world behind the tail of Air Force One, Lara’s twin brother Lev drove his Jeep onto the Valdez test station lot. In late summer this close to the Arctic Circle, day didn’t break so much as bend—Lev could barely make out the difference between the two horizons, east and west.

His American colleague Craig always waited till the last second to begin his work week, so Lev would have the cinderblock facility to himself for a few minutes, which was how he liked it. He backed into the space reserved for “Len” Klimt, his adopted American moniker, and lit up a Winston. There was no smoking inside the enclosure, so this would be his last chance for a while.

Funny, the no-smoking thing, because standing outside the open-air test hut was no different from standing inside it, just on the other side of the fence. Overhead, the enormous pipeline blocked out the sky and most of the light as it traveled its final quarter-mile through the Custody Transfer Meters and into the field of holding tanks by the sea, the “tank farm.”

He stubbed out his butt and headed over to the padlocked gate, key in hand. Once inside, Lev walked beneath the mammoth “proving loop” conduit and, using the wrench that hung from a chain, he tapped on the elbow pipe that ran down from it to break up any air pockets. Placing a clean Pyrex beaker on the flat cement pedestal in front of him, he used both hands to turn the wheel that opened the giant gate-valve, but left the stopcock closed.

The oil contracts stipulated that automated meters would measure the crude in bulk, but the transfer wouldn’t be legal unless both the seller’s representative—Craig for the consortium of producers—and the purchasing agent—Lev, acting on behalf of the refiners, both international and domestic—were present. Since the buyer and seller were always the same, it was always only Craig and Lev doing the 9:00 A.M. manual test.

All of this was a formality, of course. The North Slope Crude that made its way into the Valdez Marine Terminal always had the same specific gravity on the American Petroleum Institute’s scale, a fact they would ascertain once again this morning.

The Ford Bronco drove onto the lot a solid two minutes ahead of the church bell that would ring matins on the other side of Valdez. Craig was way early.

Lev held the gate open for him, and the American did what he always did, high-fiving him with his huge football player’s paw. “Hey, thanks, ‘Lenny.’ Good weekend?”

The patter never changed. “You know it’s ‘Lev’ to you. And yes, I had a good weekend. You?”

“Totally awesome.” Craig, a bachelor with an apartment in the big, bad town of Anchorage, made the most of his weekends in ‘Sin City.’ At least he said he did.

Lev let the bear of a man do the honors, so Craig turned the small iron stopcock counterclockwise and they watched the crude begin to flow. After traveling the length of Alaska at less than four miles an hour, the oil that poured down into the glass beaker had lost much of the original 120ºF heat it had a week and a half ago.

They stood there side by side, watching it slowly climb up the millimeter markings incised in the beaker. But then Craig went off script. “You smell something?”

Lev’s nose wasn’t his strong suit. “No. You?”

“Yeah.” He walked toward the pipe that was disgorging the last of the oil and bent down, sniffing, before taking a hurried step back. “Damn, can’t you smell it?”

Lev leaned over the liter of crude oil and inhaled mightily, overcompensating for his poor sense of smell. He nearly gagged at the odor.

Despite his concern, Craig was bent over, laughing. “What, you don’t like rotten eggs?”

Ignoring the American, Lev stated the obvious. “It’s sour.”

“Tell me about it.” Craig was carrying the beaker inside to the lab, so he was getting it full force. “ Way sour. Wish I brought nose clips.”

The seller’s rep put the crude oil down on the test bench and fired up the spectrometer. He was thinking out loud. “Okay, a little sulfur I could understand, maybe they hit a pocket down there. But not enough so you could smell the stink a yard away at this end.” He looked over at Lev and grinned. “…so I could smell it a yard away. You’re getting off easy.”

Lev was already dropping his dual thermometer/hydrometer into the petroleum. He and Craig had had them made at the same time from the same supplier so no one could fudge the figures, not that either of them would. They were state-of-the-art instruments: beyond having the perfectly predictable 31.9 specific gravity of North Slope Crude incised in bold, the thing had Wi-Fi built in to send the results to any nearby computer.

Craig leaned in. “Temp looks good.”

“Agreed. But… crap, API’s falling short.” Lev squinted. “I make it two points under.”

“Me too. You got your laptop?”

“It’s in the truck.”

“Never mind.” Craig kept his iPad locked to the shelf that was right behind them. Lev had given one to Lara for their mutual birthday, and it had gone over so well he had bought one for Craig for his birthday, but the guy was old school and always carried around just a phone. He never turned the iPad off either, but left it charging all week between their tests, some random bit of folk wisdom about extending battery life he’d gleaned online from Popular Mechanics .