by Ray Hammond
‘The Court of Justice in The Hague might be able to help you,’ one of his new Brussels-based partners reminded him. ‘They’re very alert to nation states trying to interfere with testimony. We could ask them for a writ of witness protection – one that would include you.’
For the moment, however, Michael knew that he must be completely frank with his two scientific witnesses. He would tell both Robert Fivetrees and Emilia Knight of the government’s mistaken assumptions about them and the stern warnings he had been given. As their attorney, he would have to counsel them that further legal investigation was going to be necessary before they could consider giving evidence on any topic covered by National Secrecy Agreements.
From his parents’ home he rang Professor Fivetrees’s personal number and left a message suggesting that they should meet up again when he got back to the Bay Area. He said he would call the professor on his arrival, to make further arrangements.
But the lawyer discovered that he had a strong and urgent desire to speak to Emilia Knight in person. He left two messages on Emilia’s personal phone, but she did not return either call. He then tried the number she had given him for her house, but that too went unanswered.
Two days after arriving back in Sausolito he rang Geohazard Laboratories. On his first call he got only Emilia’s voicemail, then again on his second and third attempt.
Eventually he rang the company switchboard. When he had explained his problem, the woman operator put him through to the Seismic Risk Assessment Centre.
‘She’s out of the office,’ another female voice informed him. Michael explained that he was Dr Knight’s attorney, that he had already tried her personal numbers, and that he needed to speak with his client urgently.
‘All we’ve been told is that she is away for reasons of ill health,’ said the woman.
*
As Felicity Campion, one of Geohazard’s student interns, put down the phone on Michael Fairfax, a light, shrilling alarm began to sound in the Oakland monitoring centre. It was quickly muted and Carlos Robredo, Geohazard’s duty officer of the day, rapidly began retasking the Pacific satellites and sea-level sensors to gather more data.
‘Steve, there’s a build-up of tremors on the sea floor a thousand miles north-east of Hawaii,’ he said into a phone as he worked.
Three minutes later, Steve Bardini entered the monitoring centre. He had now been appointed to stand in as Risk Assessment Officer for Dr Knight, while she was on sick leave.
He glanced up at the monitors and the spinning numerals that were constantly refreshing the data as new information arrived from under-water sensors and seabed strain gauges.
‘It’s a very big build-up – and over a long distance,’ he mused, partly to himself and partly to the others on the shift. ‘Over six hundred miles.’
Steve stepped forward to one of the control positions, pulled out a chair, and began extracting and transferring historical data that he intended to run in the Simulation Theater.
‘I’m going to run this as a sim and see what we get,’ he told Carlos Robredo. ‘In the meantime, we’d better put out a general alert now. Make it a two-thousand-mile radius – all shipping, all islands.’
*
Although he was now back at his home in Sausalito, Michael Fairfax was still not having much luck in reaching anybody with whom he needed to talk. Until very recently, such mundane matters as reaching clients on the phone had been handled by his executive assistant Serena Jones.
That thought made him shake his head, and he put his phone back down on the kitchen table. Serena was yet another of the dead – another one whose face and manner remained still painfully fresh in his memory. To suddenly lose a score or more of people with whom you have shared your life was an extreme wrench, one so severe that barely an hour went past without Michael having to stop whatever he was doing and rest his mind for a few minutes, just to recover his composure.
He had continued trying to reach Robert Fivetrees at Berkeley. Once again he was getting only voicemail and message services. Unlike Geohazard Laboratories, the university seemed to have no humans prepared to pick up a phone and answer a straight inquiry. But then, Michael rationalized to himself, who could know how many staff members the university had lost? Nothing was normal any longer in this part of the world – and nor would it be so for a very long time to come.
Rising from his makeshift desk, he walked through the house and out into the front yard. On either side he could hear the sound of householders and their families working busily to bring their properties back up to fully habitable level. Even though two months had now passed since the quake, there were still no professional builders or household tradesmen available anywhere in the entire bay region. They were all employed on priority local-government projects, getting hospitals, schools and other public services working again.
Michael gazed across the bay towards the city once again – he had taken to sitting here regularly in the evenings, watching the ferries busily commuting all around San Francisco Island, as the old downtown area was now being called.
He wondered if Bob Fivetrees too might have received a heavy-handed visit from government agents. That might explain the scientist’s silence, and his apparent absence from his university department.
Then Michael was struck by a tremendous sense of guilt; he certainly wasn’t functioning properly. He had completely forgotten about Carol Gonzaga. Even though she had insisted that she intended to represent herself in court, Michael had urged the appointment of an attorney to advise her. So, in the end, she had agreed to his suggestion that his colleague Mitch Tonks, a criminal attorney with Gravitz, Lee and Kraus, should take on her case.
The next day, when Michael had arrived back at his office in the Embarcadero Space Needle, the first thing he had done was to drop by Mitch’s office.
‘Yes!’ The young attorney had punched his fist into the air when Michael had mock-innocently asked whether he might care to represent one of the notorious PFO members accused of bombing the ERGIA Space Station.
‘Yes!’ Mitch had relished the opportunity, knowing that, whatever its outcome, the public exposure during such a high-profile trial would catapult him up the unofficial rankings of State-Appointed Defenders.
Only Mitch Tonks was now yet another of the dead. He had been in his car crossing the southbound upper carriageway of the Bay Bridge when that entire section had dropped 400 feet into the water below.
Were it not for a fluke, the circumstances of his death would not yet have been known – he would merely be one of the many thousands still missing following the earthquake. It was believed that over 300 cars had been crossing the Bay Bridge at the time of its collapse, and the Navy had not so far begun diving to clear the wreckage and recover bodies. As a consequence, the bay was now so polluted with rotting corpses that its water had been declared a health hazard.
But Mitch had been talking to his wife at exactly 6.02 a.m. that day. Being a conscientious young criminal attorney, he had got into the habit of rising quietly at 5.15 a.m. on weekday mornings so he could arrive at his office an hour later. It was his habit to ring his wife at six a.m., acting as her alarm clock, to tell her that he loved her and to wish her well in her day’s work restoring valuable old paintings for an Oakland art gallery.
‘THE BRIDGE IS GOING!’ he had yelled to her over the phone that morning. Then she had heard only his screams.
Michael had so far failed to let Carole Gonzaga know what had happened to her defence attorney. And, he realized, no one else from Gravitz, Lee and Kraus could have done so either. He returned to his kitchen, found the number and dialled Lompoc State Penitentiary.
‘Can you bring Carole Gonzaga to the telephone, please – that’s inmate number Y5091621?’ he requested, after he had been transferred to the maximum-security wing. ‘This is a call from her attorney’s office.’
The female guard who answered the phone had kept him waiting for several minutes.
‘Who a
re you, again?’ she asked when she came back on the line.
‘Counsellor Michael Fairfax,’ he told her, ‘from Gravitz, Lee and Kraus, her representative attorneys. Would you like digital authentication?’
He glanced at his communicator and thumbed up his digital ident ready for transmission.
‘You should already have been told,’ grumbled the prison guard. ‘Gonzaga committed suicide last week. She hanged herself in her cell.’
*
Steve Bardini was slouched in the motorized viewing chair that circled the holo-pit in the Simulation Theater. He was sunk in very deep thought. He had run six different simulations based on data from the Central Pacific seabed, but even his least ferocious set of parameters still unleashed a tsunami that would have devastating effects on the Hawaiian Islands.
The information coming in from sea-floor sensors clearly indicated that a major seismic event would soon occur just north of the Hawaiian Ridge, a 1,500-mile-long underwater mountain chain to the north-east of the main island group. Steve had run back through the last three months of data, and had matched the new seismic tremors with measurements transmitted to Geohazard by Valerie Cummings from the oceanographic Navy vessel RV Orlando three months previously.
Now all that he and the Geohazard team needed to decide was whether the underwater event building up near Hawaii would produce an earthquake or an eruption, then what magnitude it was likely to be, and when it was most likely to occur.
Steve had watched his former girlfriend carry out this type of calculation a hundred times before, and he only wished that Emilia were here now to do it once again.
The day after he had witnessed her being stretchered from her home, he had made enquiries in the Human Resources office about the whereabouts of his boss. He had been at pains to keep his enquiry casual – the last thing he wanted to admit was that he had been hanging around her house yet again.
‘Doctor Knight’s gone back into hospital,’ Gloria Fernandez had told him breezily. ‘It’s just a routine follow-up – after the dangerous stuff she was handling on that mountain.’
Eight out of the last ten seismic events in the Hawaiian Ridge area had been volcanic, but this one had the look and feel of a quake. There were no long period events, the seismic swarms were shudders not bumps and, although no tectonic plates abutted in the Central Pacific, Steve knew that the instability was rooted in the old crustal fault-line that had first thrown up the underwater ridge over half a billion years ago.
He thrust himself out of his chair, his decision made. The San Francisco earthquake had made all Geohazard staff less caring about the risk of false alarms. He would issue a Grade Three earthquake alert and a tsunami warning. His best calculations were that the heave would come late afternoon tomorrow, local time, and that it would measure between six and seven-point-five.
As he arrived back in the Risk Assessment control centre, Steve found Carlos Robredo and Felicity Campion standing and staring up at a wall-screen. The MSN news channel showed an image of a large convoy of ships. Steve studied the screen caption.
HULK-PEOPLE CONVOY HEADS FOR CALIFORNIA
‘Whereabouts are those ships?’ Steve demanded.
Robredo merely shrugged.
‘They’re halfway between Hawaii and Los Angeles,’ Felicity informed Steve.
He gazed up at the screen. Despite their large size, some of the old vessels seemed to be riding very low in the water – others were even being towed.
‘We’re going to issue a Level Three earthquake and tsunami warning to the Hawaiian region,’ Steve announced, lowering himself into the duty officer’s command chair.
Carlos Robredo and the intern noted the seriousness in his voice, and they quickly took up their own positions at the command console.
Steve Bardini dictated the warning that he had decided upon, including a likely timing for the quake and its probable range of severity. Then he considered various possibilities for a few additional moments. He knew that out in the open sea a tsunami posed little threat to shipping – it merely passed under any ship’s hull like an enormous ripple. It was only as it approached land that the wave was forced higher by the upwardly shelving seabed, causing it to rear up to become the towering monster so beloved of disaster-film makers. That was what the word ‘tsunami’ literally meant – ‘harbour wave’.
But those old tankers and freighters looked very low in the water and therefore very vulnerable.
‘Broadcast a warning to all shipping in the central and north-eastern Pacific,’ Steve told Robredo. ‘Use all commercial and emergency frequencies, and repeat every hour on the hour until we have more information.’
*
Michael Fairfax sat at his kitchen table, trying to make sense of the events of the last few days. He was becoming a deeply worried man.
After three days of attempting to phone, e-mail and text Professor Robert Fivetrees, he had still received no response, no acknowledgement, no word from the man’s departmental colleagues. But now he knew why.
Shortly after lunchtime, Michael had decided to drive over to the Berkeley Campus and find the Department of Planetary Geophysics and Bob Fivetrees for himself. He suspected that the professor had entertained second thoughts about testifying, either because he too had received a tough warning from government agents or because the emotional shock of the earthquake was now receding.
Gas had proved to be the lawyer’s first problem. Car fuel was still rationed all around the Bay Area and Michael waited in line for almost an hour before being allowed to buy just six litres of hydrogen from the little filling station at Sausalito Marina. Even then it had cost twice the normal price.
He didn’t arrive on the Berkeley Campus until after five p.m. and, having some knowledge of academic lifestyles, he was concerned that Fivetrees and his staff might already have left for the day.
Campus security directed him towards the low glass building housing the various disciplines grouped under ‘Geophysics’. After parking in an almost empty lot, he walked into an atrium filled with rock samples mounted in glass display cases.
A man at the reception desk asked him whom he had come to visit, then paused and scratched his head.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing, ‘the Planetary people are all at the far end of that corridor. Go ask down there.’
Michael did as he was directed and found a room in which a middle-aged woman was packing books into a cardboard box.
‘This Professor Fivetrees’s office?’
‘Well, it was. Who wants to know?’
Twenty minutes later Michael was back in his car and heading home to Sausalito. As people tend to do when they have just learned about a fatal road accident, he was driving more carefully than usual.
The professor had been killed while driving his Jaguar early last Sunday morning. ‘No, nobody else was involved,’ Fivetrees’s former secretary had told him, once Michael had satisfied her that he had been her boss’s legal adviser. ‘He was a bit of a madcap – he loved to drive that old car of his as fast as it would go. They say he just ran out of road – but he died instantly, the officer told me. He wouldn’t have known anything about it.’
Now Michael checked the time by his old kitchen clock: 8.50 p.m. He reached across the kitchen table, picked up his phone and tried Emilia Knight’s home number again. If she really was on sick leave, why wasn’t she answering? Once more, he got only her message system.
It took him just over twenty minutes to drive westwards across Marin County, braking hard as Highway 1 made its sharp right turn out of Green Gulch Valley and entered Muir Woods. It was now dark, and in his headlights Michael picked out the Pelican Pub where it stood beside the left-hand turnoff to Muir Beach. He knew the inlet well – he had often brought girlfriends here during his courting days. There was a nature reserve just to the south of the little bay, with a quiet parking area overlooking the surf.
Michael drove carefully along the gently rising, tree-lined dirt road that led out ont
o the wooded promontory. At the very end of the track he saw a turning circle, and a gate displaying the numeral 9. That must be it.
The house was in darkness and Michael glanced at his watch: 9.42 p.m. Not too late to be calling – unless Emilia was so unwell that she was already in bed asleep.
He rang the door chimes and waited. He rang again and then, on instinct, he tried the handle. The door opened. He stepped inside, into the gloom.
He was about to call out, then realized that if Emilia was sleeping he might wake her. He turned to reach for a light switch.
Suddenly Michael was knocked to the floor from behind. As his head was yanked upwards by his hair, he was aware of a forearm, hard as an iron bar, being rammed against his Adam’s apple.
Panicked, he rolled sideways, kicking out hard with his legs. He heard a cry, then a fist smashed into the side of his head. Adrenalin took him over completely, and he rolled once more before tensing into a crouch.
Just as he was straightening up, a dark figure ran into him, head down, knocking him flat on his back. As a fist cracked into his jawbone, Michael jabbed his damaged fingers up hard into one of his assailant’s eyes. He heard a screech of pain and the figure lurched backwards. With a heave, the lawyer staggered to his feet.
Michael made out a table lamp silhouetted against a window. Flicking on the switch, he saw that his attacker – a man of about thirty, casually dressed, but smart – was down on one knee with both hands clamped over his left eye.
‘I’m a lawyer,’ shouted Michael, still gasping for breath, one hand stretched out defensively in front of him. ‘I’m here to visit Doctor Knight.’
An instant transformation seemed to come over his adversary. His shoulders dropped and he shook his head. After a few seconds he slowly stood upright. He removed his hands from his injured eye and blinked experimentally.
Michael’s shoulders heaved as he gulped down lungfuls of oxygen.
‘Shit, I’m sorry,’ said his attacker. ‘Those gloves – I thought you were another looter . . .’ He tailed off. ‘Are you the one Emilia told me about? The lawyer who was asking her to give evidence over in Europe?’