John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

Valens took a deep draught, then tried to ask it gently. It wouldn’t do him any good to show anything. ‘So is this about him?’

The question seemed to surprise her. ‘No. Nothing about that really.’

He waited.

She looked out over his shoulder, absently bringing the water bottle to her lips. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately, Al. And also a lot of research.’

‘OK.’

She brushed some hair away from her face. ‘You know, ever since Damon got me to start questioning my assumptions on my work on the petroleum side, looking in different directions as he’d say, it’s realty been… I guess you’d say an education.’

Valens nodded.

‘Which is funny, given that I’m considered an expert on all of these issues.’

A shrug and an attempt to smile. ‘Well, you saw the light, that’s all.’

But she shook her head . ‘I don’t know what I saw really. I think, other than just being so hurt that I’d been misled by people I trusted and mad at myself for being so stupid – I mean. Al, I am not stupid – anything else, OK, just not stupid.’

‘No,’ Valens said, trying to keep it light, ‘we could go with not stupid!

But the levity went by her. Impatiently, she brushed her hair away again. ‘But even more, other than that, Damon got me back to why I started doing all this… my work, I mean… in the first place!

‘Which was?’

She stopped. ‘This will sound stupid.’

Valens shook his head. ‘No, we’ve agreed we’re not going with stupid. So why’d you start working in the first place?’

‘I wanted to do good! She let out a breath in a whoosh. ’OK, there. I’ve said it.‘

‘OK.’ Big deal, he thought. ‘So you wanted to do good?’

‘And I did, too. I did what I set out to do, with MTBE. Do you know how great that stuff works cleaning up the air, Al? It cuts toxic emissions down to almost nothing. You go out to Pasadena now in August and you can see the mountains. Or even out there.’ She pointed to the window. ‘You can see it! It has made the world cleaner, do you realize that? Do you see what an incredible achievement that was?’

Now she was all wound up and had to stand to walk off some of it. Over to the balcony doors, pulling them open, letting in a blast of cool air. It seemed to calm her after a moment, and she turned around to face him again.

‘Anyway, in spite of its bad press now, the point is that it really worked, and I was part of it, a big part of it. The EPA loved it, everybody loved it. Can you understand how invested I was in it? How when the complaints started to appear, I didn’t want to look? I couldn’t look.’

‘Anybody could understand that,’ Al said, although he wasn’t sure that he could. ‘That was natural.’

‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘It was so natural.’ Sighing, she came back to the chair across from him and sat in it, their knees almost touching. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘then I saw it, what I was doing, because of Damon.’

‘And you did right.’

‘Well, as far as it went.’

Valens cocked his head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean I guess I was angry. I’d been made to look like a fool and I didn’t want it to happen again. I realized that Damon was starting to look like he was pushing for ethanol, even if he wasn’t really doing it directly, and I wasn’t positive he wanted to go in that direction, either.’

For Valens, this was the worst possible news. His candidate wasn’t a scientist – he didn’t need to know the details. All he needed to know was that MTBE polluted the groundwater and ethanol didn’t. Therefore ethanol was better. But he couldn’t show his concern. Instead, he stalled for a minute with his beer, then smiled. ‘Well, Bree, as you say, he’s never made ethanol part of his platform.’

‘Except it’s there. You know it is, Al.’

‘And is that so bad?’

‘Well, it’s not a great fuel. It’s expensive to make, it’s not as efficient…’

He had to cut her off. ‘But it’s no danger in groundwater, and does make gas burn cleaner, right?’

Bree grimaced, hesitated.

‘What? Tell me.’

‘We don’t need either of them. The whole additive industry is basically just one giant, greedy scam. The oil companies, as we know, are making billions on MTBE. But that’s not all. Have you ever heard of SKO, the farming conglomerate?’

Valens felt his head go light. ‘Of course.’

‘Well, it’s making zillions, too, in subsidies for ethanol. They can’t make the stuff profitably, but somehow they’ve convinced the government that it’s in the national interest that we keep making it.’

‘ Maybe it is. Maybe -’

But she cut him off. ‘No. No, it’s not, Al. Listen to this. Did you know that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than the stuff generates as a fuel?’

‘I don’t think so, Bree. How is that possible?’

‘Tractor fuel, cost of shipment, storage, refining, like that.’

Well…‘

‘Well nothing. And since it has less fuel energy than gas, it guarantees worse gas mileage, which affects everybody who drives. Plus,’ she continued, having worked herself into a high dudgeon, ‘do you realize that every dollar of SKO’s ethanol profits costs the American taxpayer thirty dollars? And I’m leaving out all the science here. This is just the crappy business stuff. It’s just awful.’

Valens had no response to any of this. He didn’t know if any of it was true or not, and didn’t care, but it was clear that she had come to believe it and might take her message to Damon. That was the issue. That s what he had to deflect.

He kept his voice under control. ‘But Bree, almost all businesses -’

‘But Damon isn’t involved with almost all businesses. He’s involved with this one. And this ethanol thing isn’t even the worst of it.’

He waited, hardly daring to breathe. What could be worse than what she’d already come to? ‘So what is?’ he asked.

She leaned forward, and her zealot’s eyes locked into his. ‘We don’t need either of them.’

‘Either of what?’

‘Either MTBE or ethanol, or any other gas additives for that matter. The EPA has mandated them, but the whole thing is a scam. The whole thing, do you realize that?’ Her voice went up several decibels with her outrage.

‘ I .. . I’m afraid I don’t understand,’ he managed to stammer .

‘No, no. I know you don’t. How could you? Nobody does. Wait a minute.’

Suddenly she was up, nearly running, disappearing into a hallway across the kitchen area. In another moment, she reappeared carrying a large handful of papers. ‘Look,’ she began without preamble . ‘I don’t expect you to understand the science,’ she said, ‘but let me try to explain some of this.’

He listened for what seemed an eternity as she went over the salient points of the report she’d been working on for the past month or six weeks. It contained a great deal of data – graphs, equations, analyses of comparisons in burn rates, emissions, efficiencies of gasoline – and gradually even Al Valens began to see what Bree had assembled.

Culled from patent applications, lawsuit transcripts, internal memos, executive summaries, and expert testimony of dozens of combustion engineers, Bree s report detailed a startling truth – that the oil companies had discovered a way to formulate gasoline so that it burned cleanly without the addition of oxygenates, without any additives at all. ‘So you see, Al, it’s what I was telling you. The whole additive question is a scam. Damon’s got to be made aware of this. I’ve got to tell him.’