“Blackpanel?” He drew back. “It was just an idea. I emailed that anonymously.”

Stratt rolled her eyes. “Do you really think email sent from a prison computer lab is anonymous?”

He looked away. “I’m not a computer guy. I’m an engineer.”

“I want to hear more about blackpanel,” she said. “And if I like what I hear, it could reduce your jail time. So start talking.”

He perked up. “Well… I mean… okay. What do you know about solar thermal power?”

Stratt looked at me.

“Uh,” I said. “It’s when you have a whole bunch of mirrors set up to reflect sunlight to the top of a tower. If you get a few hundred square meters of mirror focusing all that sunlight onto a single point, you can heat up water, make it boil, and run a turbine.”

I turned to Stratt. “But that’s not new. Heck, there’s a fully functional solar thermal power plant in Spain right now. If you want to know about it, talk to them.”

She silenced me with a hand motion. “And that’s what you were making for New Zealand?”

“Well,” he said. “It was funded by New Zealand. But the idea was to provide power for Africa.”

“Why would New Zealand pay a bunch of money to help Africa?” I asked.

“Because we’re nice,” Redell said.

“Wow,” I said. “I know New Zealand is pretty cool but—”

“And it was going to be a New Zealand–owned company that charged for the power,” Redell said.

“There it is.”

He leaned forward. “Africa needs infrastructure. To do that, they need power. And they have nine million square kilometers of uselessland that gets some of the most intense continuous sunlight on Earth. The Sahara Desert is just sitting there, waiting to give them everything they need. All we needed to do was build the damn power plants!”

He flopped back in his chair. “But every local government wanted a piece of the pie. Graft, bribes, payoffs, you name it. You think I embezzled a lot? Shit, that’s nothing compared to what I had to pay in bribes just to build a solar plant in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

“And then?” Stratt said.

He looked at his shoes. “We built a pilot plant—one square kilometer of mirror area. All of it focused on a large metal drum full of water on top of a tower. Boil the water, run a turbine, you know the drill. I had a crew checking the drum for leaks. When anyone’s in the tower, the mirrors are supposed to be angled away. But someone in the control room fired up the whole system when they thought they were starting a virtual test.”