Page 80 of Harrison Hyde and the Runaway Bride

“Winding up here might not be such a bad thing, son.” The older man’s use of the wordsonmade Harrison’s skin crawl. “I’m Jimbo Beckett.”

“Charmed, I’m sure.” His sarcasm went right over the old man’s head, and he went on as if Harrison hadn’t spoken.

“I’ve been fighting this battle for the better part of five years, now.”

“Attacking windmills.”

“Among other things.” He sounded defensive.

Harrison told himself not to antagonize the guy. The only weapon he had here was his mind. He had to outsmart him, outthink him. Insulting him would not further that goal. Carrie had said he needed to give the crazy billionaire a reason to keep him alive. But her way wouldn’t fool the man for long.

“You can’t stop progress, though,” Harrison said. “There are hundreds of scientists working on renewables. There are five teams right behind mine, working on the same technology. You stopping my team only delayed the inevitable by a few months. It’s the way of the future. And it’s a good way. Try to imagine it— limitless clean energy that doesn’t destroy the environment.”

“Limitless energy means I go broke. My wells shut down; my refineries sit idle. My businesses employ upwards of ten-thousand good people, young fella. What aretheysupposed to do?”

“There will be plenty of jobs in clean energy. They won’t go away; they’ll just shift from fossil fuels to renewables.

“Bah—”

“Sir, the warming alone is?—”

“Lies. All lies.”

Harrison lowered his head, realizing the notion of saving mankind wasn’t going to be an effective approach with the oil baron.

“Carrie works for me,” Beckett said. “She tell you that?”

“She mentioned it, yes.”

“She says the job is too much for one person.”

“What job is that?” He made himself sound interested.

“Keeping abreast of what’s coming down the pipeline so I can try to steer it another way.”

“Sabotage it, you mean,” Harrison said.

Beckett shrugged. “Whatever it takes. But again, she says it’s too big a job for one person.”

“It’s too big a job for one hundred people. The tech is coming like a hurricane over a freakishly hot ocean.”

The older man waved his hands. “I told her you wouldn’t listen. But she made me promise to try.” Then he opened the door, and said, “Thing One, git in here. Bring your sidearm and a roll of that plastic from the storeroom.”

A bolt of sheer self-preservation shot up Harrison’s spine and emerged from his lips unplanned. “What you really need is a way to make fossil fuels harmless.”

One of the big guys was right outside the door with a gun in his hand. It had a silencer on the end, like in the movies. Every part of Harrison’s body went cold. He thought how devastatedhis father would be if he died. And Lily. He thought of Maria, and that he hadn’t even said the words he’d been stubbornly refusing to let himself say, or even think.

Beckett held up a hand to stop the guy with the gun then closed the door and turned.

“Say more.”

He couldn’t say more, there was no such thing, and there wasn’t enough crude oil in the ground to last much longer anyway.

Sure, but he doesn’t know that. And if you told him that, he wouldn’t believe you.

That had been his mother’s voice whispering through his mind. For the first time, he wondered if it might be more than just his brain creating it based on memories and data.

“It’s… just something I’ve been working on,” he said, making it up as he went along. “The notion is, instead ofreplacingfossil fuels, we… take out the harmful parts.”

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