Chapter 15 - light and sweet

Walker had now relegated himself to sitting on the floor behind Dr. Johns’ desk with his head resting against the top right drawer. He was just starting to doze off when a sudden burst of noise roused him and caused him to inadvertently bang his head off the drawer. As if suspended in time, he remained motionless, listening for any reaction from Karson to the bang. Hearing nothing, he gazed around the corner of the desk, rubbing his head.

What he saw though appeared to be very interesting. Karson’s back was to Walker, but he appeared to be holding a sheet of paper, and shaking. Suddenly, Karson pulled what looked like a small mp3 player out of pocket and moved directly in front of his laptop. When Karson reached behind the computer, Walker realized it had not been a mp3 player, but a memory stick. He had one himself in his pocket right now. He used to keep all updated files on it and assumed Karson must have done the same.

Walker knew that whatever had suddenly gotten Karson all wet with excitement was now being transferred onto the memory key. Sure enough, one minute later it had been. The small key was then slipped into Karson’s right left pocket of his jeans and the used beakers and flasks were quickly rinsed out.

The last thing Walker saw was Karson dashing out the door with the sheet of paper in his hand, partially wrapped around a flask containing something. This time however, Karson remembered to lock the door behind him.

After listening one more time to the sound of footsteps briskly moving down the hall and away from his position, Walker reached up to the top of the desk and hauled himself up. Giving his legs a quick stretch, he wondered what had gotten Karson’s panties all in a bunch.

Giving a quick look around, two test tubes were in a nearby sink that looked like they had been rinsed out, but a few white bubbles indicated that Karson had used some bleach, and not just water. Looking over at the laptop, Walker noticed that something was off. Something just didn’t feel right. The screen was on and the monitor hadn’t shut off, so the password protect feature hadn’t kicked in yet. That in itself was strange, that Karson would leave his computer in that state, but that wasn’t it either.

One small window was still open, but it wasn’t a folder window. It was a message window.

“What the fuck?”

‘All Contents Have Been Successfully Deleted.’ Why the hell had Karson deleted all of his files?

Shaking his head in wonderment, Walker gave the work area another once over. Settling his eyes on the machine next to the computer, Walker’s eyebrows slipped upwards. He reached out the computer’s keyboard and tapped out a few keys. Sure enough, there it was. Karson had accidentally set the printer to make two copies. And one of them was sitting two feet to his right in the printer basket.

Walker straightened up and leaned over to pick up the second printout. Bringing it to his face, his eyes scanned over the data. It was a breakdown of what must have been in the flask that Karson carried out of here. At the bottom of the page was a general summary of the petroleum chemical breakdown.
It took about five seconds. “Holy fucking hell. He did it.” What had caught Walker’s eye was the sulfur content.

It read out at 0.4%.

Karson had not only successfully separated the oil from the sand and turn it into a lighter viscous oil, but had managed to change it into its original underground crude form. He had managed to change the heavy viscous Alberta biticum into light, sweet crude oil. Oil that was equivalent to the kind found in the Middle East.