The Green Trap (21 page)

Spinning his swivel chair gleefully in a complete circle, Gould thought, And once the Calvin Research Center belongs to the Gould Trust, we will be the owners of any and all patentable inventions they make. I'll have this hydrogen fuel discovery locked up tight, in my own hands. No matter how Tulius or anyone else feels about it.

I
t was late afternoon when Sandoval returned. Cochrane had spent the day wandering through the museum, looking at the Manets and Vermeers and Degas without really seeing them. His mind was on what Fiona had told him about Sandoval.

She's a high-class hooker, he told himself as he walked slowly through the sun-filled courtyard, past a life-sized statue of some Greek goddess. Industrial espionage is a fancy name for it, but what she does is screw guys to get information out of them that she sells to her customers. Nothing but a whore working wholesale instead of retail.

And yet. And yet. Fiona says she's interested in me, not the money. Yeah. Right. Ten million bucks doesn't mean anything to her. Sure.

He returned to the residence and wearily climbed the narrow stairs to the bedroom level. Then he heard the front door, downstairs, open and close. He raced down the stairs, eager as a schoolboy. Sandoval smiled to
see him. She was wearing a beige trousered suit that he hadn't seen before, and had a large leather tote bag slung over one shoulder.

“Where've you been all day?” he heard himself ask, accusation sharp in his tone.

“Shopping,” Sandoval replied.

She brushed past him and started up the stairs. Cochrane followed her.

“All day? Shopping?”

Over her shoulder Sandoval said, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.”

“On Fiona's credit card?”

She reached the top of the stairs and went to their bedroom. Tossing the tote bag onto her bed, she turned to face him, still smiling.

“Paul, I spent most of the day shopping in the best stores in town. Then I went to Filene's basement and bought this suit, on sale, fifty percent off.”

“Somebody could've seen you,” he said, his emotions jumbled within him. “If Kensington's looking for us…”

She put both hands on his shoulders. “Who's going to pick me out of the crowds in the department stores, Paul? I was safer there than I am here.”

“Still,” he mumbled.

“You were worried about me?”

He nodded, not able to tell her that he was worried she had shacked up with some guy to earn them some cash.

“You're sweet.” Sandoval gave him a peck on the lips. Then she turned to the tote bag on the bed and pulled out a paper bag labeled
FILENE
'
S
; in it was a dress Cochrane recognized. She must have worn that when she went out this morning, he thought.

“Have you decided what we should do?” Sandoval asked as she hung the dress in the massive mahogany dresser that loomed in the corner of the bedroom. Cochrane had been surprised, the night before, that the piece had no TV set inside it.

“Decided?” He sat on his bed, shoulders slumping. “No. I haven't even thought much about it. I spent the day wandering through the museum.”

“It's wonderful, isn't it? Did Fee tell you about the Rembrandt?”

“She told me it was stolen once. And you got it back.”

Sandoval didn't bat an eye. “I was working here then. I was barely out of my teens.”

He nodded glumly.

She came over and sat on the bed beside him. “Fee told you a lot more, didn't she?”

“Some,” he admitted.

“So you know about me. What I do.”

“Yeah.”

“Does it make a difference to you?”

He tried not to say it, but he couldn't. “Of course it makes a difference! How could it not make a difference?”

Strangely Sandoval smiled again. “That's good, Paul. You'd be a really insensitive jerk if it didn't.”

He stared at her, searching for words, searching his own emotions. At last he asked, “So where do we go from here, Elena?”

“Where do you want to go?”

He grasped her and pulled her to him. “I don't know, but I know that wherever it is I want you to be with me. Wherever. I want you.”

She melted into his arms and murmured, “That's what I want, too, Paul. Wherever you want to go, I want to go there with you.”

 

B
y the time they got out of bed it was deep twilight outside. Sandoval showered first, then Cochrane did.

“Wear your suit,” she called to him through the shower's frosted glass door. “We're taking Fee to dinner.”

The restaurant was down in a cellar beneath one of the posh shops on Boylston Street. Tiny, intimate, and French. The maitre d' practically brushed the floor with his forehead when Fiona swept in, regal in a voluminous floor-length dress of dark blue with silver threads.

“Madame Neal!” he exclaimed. “So wonderful to have you with us again.”

Fiona took it all with the good grace of a noblewoman accustomed to such deference. The maitre d' led them to the biggest booth in the little restaurant. As soon as the three of them were seated, a pert waitress in a black short-skirted uniform brought a bottle of sherry and three aperitif glasses.

“Amontillado,” Fiona said as the waitress poured. “I've been a sucker for it ever since I first read Edgar Allan Poe.”

Cochrane sipped at the wine and felt it warming its way down his innards. The menu was mostly in French, but he followed Fiona's lead. And Sandoval's: she showed no hesitation in ordering what turned out to be frog's legs. Cochrane, like Fiona, had a small but beautifully prepared steak.

“Since I'm not the perfect hostess,” Fiona began, once their entrees had been served, “I'll ask outright: how long do you two plan to stay with me?”

Sandoval glanced at Cochrane and said nothing. He mumbled, “A couple more days, if that's all right with you.”

Fiona nodded. “From what Ellie tells me, you need some friends in high places.”

“We've got enough enemies in high places,” Sandoval said, almost lightly.

“I know Lionel Gould,” Fiona said. “Charity affairs, social circles. He puts on a good front, but Gould Energy Corporation is his baby. He'll do whatever he can to suppress your brother's work, Paul.”

“Who won't?” Cochrane rejoined. “The energy companies, the oil combines, the automobile corporations—it's all one big global club.”

“And their reach goes right up to the top levels of government,” Sandoval added.

“So what do you want to do?” Fiona asked. “Surrender to Gould and hope he'll stick to the deal he offered?”

Cochrane shook his head. “We'll have a fatal accident before his check clears the bank.”

Fiona nodded, agreeing. “So, like I said, you need friends in high places.”

“You know any?”

“Maybe. The senior senator from Maine is an old friend of mine. Wanted to marry me, donkey's years ago.”

“Senator Bardarson?” Sandoval asked.

“Ian Bardarson,” said Fiona. “He's a maverick up there on the Hill, but he's got a whale of a lot of seniority.”

“He's the ranking minority member of the Senate Energy Committee,” Sandoval pointed out.

“And if the elections in November go the right way,” Fiona said, “he'll become the committee's chairman.”

Every few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of three-gallon pails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-year-old philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she's trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls.

Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corndog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 40-gallon reactor that he built himself for about $800. The processed oil can be used even when his car's engine is cold, at a cost of about 70 cents a gallon. Parks, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family's two cars.

Kantor and Parks are willing to go the extra mile to reduce their dependence on petroleum and cut down on pollution. But these days environmentalists are not the only ones banking on biodiesel, as diesel-engine fuel made from vegetable oil is known. Entrepreneurs and soybean farmers are creating a new biodiesel industry, with some 300 retail biodiesel pumps nationwide so far. Commercial production of biodiesel grew 25 percent in 2004, making it the fastest-growing alternative fuel in the United States.
Even the singer Willie Nelson recently started a company to market the fuel at truck stops.

The greening of the diesel engine is a return to its roots. Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who in 1892 invented the engine that bears his name, boasted that it ran on peanut and castor oil. “Motive power can be produced by the agricultural transformation of the heat of the Sun,” he said. The inventor foresaw a future of virtually unlimited renewable energy from plants, but the idea slipped into obscurity because petroleum was so much cheaper than vegetable oil.

A century later, customers for commercial biodiesel include the U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Army, the Forest Service, the city of Denver and numerous private truck fleets. Almost all use blends of 20 percent biodiesel mixed with standard petroleum diesel. The mixture helps federal and state agencies comply with a 2000 executive order by President Clinton mandating less petroleum consumption. Minnesota recently became the first state to require that all diesel fuel sold there be 2 percent biodiesel. Daimler-Chrysler's 2003 diesel Jeep Liberty comes off the production line with its tank filled with a 5 percent biodiesel mixture.

The major obstacle to wider use is price. Pure biodiesel sells for $2.50 to $3 a gallon, about 50 cents to $1 more than petrodiesel. To spur biodiesel's use, some European nations levy no taxes on it, and in October 2004, President Bush signed into law a 50 cent to $1 credit to fuel manufacturers for every gallon of biodiesel blended into petrodiesel.

Diesel engines differ from gasoline engines in their use of high pressure rather than a spark plug to ignite the fuel and drive the pistons. Diesel engines can run on fuel that is heavier than gasoline, making it possible to substitute filtered waste grease for petroleum. Both used and virgin vegetable oil contain glycerine—a syrupy liquid used in hand lotions. It burns well in a hot engine, as in Etta Kantor's retrofitted diesel, but clogs a cold one. Removing the glycerine yields biodiesel, which is suitable for even a cold engine.

Skeptics have questioned whether it takes more fossil fuel to produce biodiesel—to fertilize crops, transport them and process them for their oil—than
the resulting biodiesel replaces. But Jim Duffield, an agricultural economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), says the “few lone voices” who still make the point have not kept up with improvements in agriculture and biodiesel knowledge. Indeed, a study by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy in 1998 and another in 2002 for the French government show that soybeans and canola oil yield three to four times more energy than is needed to make the fuel. (Similar skepticism has dogged ethanol, a corn-based fuel mixed with gasoline to create gasohol. But USDA and other studies show that today's ethanol provides up to 30 percent more energy than it takes to make it.)

Another benefit of burning biodiesel is cleaner air. Compared with fossil fuels, it emits less carbon monoxide and other hydrocarbons, as well as sulfur compounds related to acid rain. Pure biodiesel also substantially reduces overall emission of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to climate change, because the plants from which the oil was extracted absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide while they were growing. A bus running on pure biodiesel would emit 32 percent less particulate matter, which has been implicated in the dramatic increase in asthma cases in cities. The only air pollution downside of pure biodiesel, according to the 1998 U.S. study, is a slight increase of smog-inducing nitrogen oxides.

The inspiration for the do-it-yourself biodiesel movement came from Joshua Tickell, 29, of Baton Rouge. While studying in Germany in 1996, he was astonished to see a farmer using canola oil to run his tractor. Back in the States, Tickell used his last student loan check to help buy a 1986 diesel Winnebago. He painted sunflowers on his “Veggie Van” and, for two years beginning in 1997, toured the country, towing a simple reactor that turned restaurant oil into biodiesel. In 2000, he coauthored what would become the biodiesel bible,
From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank.
“My goal is very simply to make OPEC obsolete,” he says.

Vegetable power also appeals to 50-year-old Marty Borruso, a chemist and partner in Environmental Alternatives in New York City, who insists he's no “environmental crazy.” He produces biodiesel for a generator that makes electricity and hot water
for an 87-family apartment house. He also sells the fuel to a tow truck fleet and anyone who comes to a pump he operates next to his production facility in Staten Island. In a 7,000-gallon reactor, Borruso processes out-of-date virgin vegetable oils, which he buys at a steep discount, and free grease from a fried chicken emporium. But he spurns grease from a seafood restaurant. “It smells like calamari,” he says. “I love calamari, but I don't know if I want to drive it.”

On average, fast-food restaurants in any major U.S. city generate about 22 pounds of waste grease each year per city resident, according to a 1998 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The National Biodiesel Board, a trade group in Jefferson City, Missouri, estimates that more than 2.5 billion pounds of waste cooking grease are available annually—enough to make 100 million gallons of biodiesel.