by Don Hoesel
“So let me make sure I understand,” Brent said. “The colonel wants me to investigate a perceived increase in worldwide sociological entropy and determine if there are any measurable factors behind it. Does that about sum it up?”
Amy Madigan tipped her chair back and seemed to give careful consideration to the professor’s analysis.
“Well,” she said, “if by ‘sociological entropy’ you mean why the world seems to be trucking toward crazy a little faster than normal, then yes, that’s exactly what the colonel wants you to figure out.”
That pulled a smile from Brent, though one tempered by the nature of his assignment.
“You do realize that trying to predict the future state of even a closed deterministic system is close to mathematically impossible,” he said. “Even for a mathematician, which I’m not.” He shook his head. “Trying to do so with the entire population of the planet is absurd.”
As soon as he said it he realized how it sounded, but if Madigan was taken aback by a visiting professor insulting her work, as well as the work of her colleagues, she didn’t show it.
“Of course it is,” she agreed. “But remember, we’re not asking you to project the model forward. We want you to track it in reverse—find the thing that set all this off.”
“That’s assuming there is one thing,” Brent said. “Have you considered the probability that what you’re investigating is just a series of random events, with nothing tying them together?”
“We have,” Madigan said, “but we’re pretty sure that’s not the case.”
“And what makes you so sure?” Brent asked, even as he mentally kicked himself for jeopardizing the promise of a substantial paycheck.
“Because that’s what we do” was the captain’s response.
Brent chuckled and pushed the stack of papers away. “I’m still not entirely sure what you do.”
Madigan answered Brent’s laugh with one of her own.
“That’s okay,” she said. “Half the time I don’t know what we do either.”
When Brent didn’t answer, she let her chair fall back to the floor, resting an elbow on the desk. The shift in position revealed that she was wearing a chain, a small cross almost hidden beneath her uniform shirt.
“We have several labs down here,” she said. “In one of them there’s a car.”
“What kind of car?”
“An Infiniti. A J30. 1995.”
Brent frowned, unimpressed.
“The reason the car’s here is because when it’s parked on Seventh Avenue in Tacoma, right in front of the True Value, it won’t start.” At the professor’s puzzled look she said, “You see, it will start anywhere else. In fact, if you push it a few feet up so that it’s parked in front of the doughnut shop next to the hardware store, it fires right up.”
Brent didn’t say anything right away, for he was uncertain of the point.
“It’s not just coincidence?” he finally asked.
“We’ve tested it. We’ve flown or driven that car all over the country, and every time we turn the key, it starts. But if we take it back to Tacoma and park it in front of the True Value, it’s as dead as a doornail.”
“Have you considered that it might be the spot as opposed to the car?”
“Of course we have. We’ve parked more than a hundred cars in the same spot and all of them started up just fine.” She paused. “Well, except for the Mazda 626. It took us fifteen minutes to figure out it was out of gas.”
“Maybe it’s just Infinitis that are affected?”
“Uh-uh,” Madigan said. “We’ve tried. Same model, same year. In fact, we even found one with the same mileage.”
Brent nodded as if he understood what this was about.
“You see, Dr. Michaels, it’s not the car and it’s not the spot. But for some reason when you bring those two elements together, you have something unexpected.” She reached across the desk and tapped the stack of papers. “We’re the ones who bring the right things together, Professor. That’s what we do.”
Brent leaned back in his chair and considered that. In a way, Amy Madigan’s explanation made sense. After all, when he looked at the mission reports, they resembled nothing so much as an accumulation of puzzle pieces to be assembled later.
“Tell me about Ethiopia,” he said. “That was your last outing, right?”
Madigan nodded.
“What sent you out there in the first place?” Brent asked.
His experience working with military personnel had acclimated him to the normal reticence most of them had about revealing nonessential data. Madigan exhibited that now; he could see her batting the question around in her mind. Brent, however, seldom asked a nonessential question.
“A few of our satellites picked up some unusual readings along the Afar Rift,” she said. “Like pre-quake seismic activity.”
“I’m not as up on my geology as I’d like to be,” he said, “but isn’t that the spot where the ground ripped open? You know, all the shaking, the lava?”
“That’s right.”
“So aren’t unusual readings kind of par for the course?”
She smiled and said, “Yes, but these readings seemed too regular to have been caused by natural forces.”
“So that means . . .”
“That means they might have been man-made,” she finished. At Brent’s doubtful look, she added, “If you knew anything about the rift, you’d know that the forces that caused it operate miles beneath the surface. And while they might seem random, if you watch it long enough, if you gather boatloads of data over the course of years, you can come close to figuring out what it’s going to do next.”
“And these readings?” Brent asked after a moment.
“Too shallow to be connected to tectonic plate movement. And too regularly timed to be natural occurrences.”
Brent had been honest in his initial admission: his expertise fell woefully short in the earth sciences. He had to take his cues, then, from Madigan, who exhibited no doubt regarding her conclusions.
“And now that you’ve been out there to investigate?” it occurred to him to ask.
“The readings have stopped,” she answered.
Brent could follow her line of reasoning. Why would the phenomenon have ceased were it not something that could be controlled?
“Who would be responsible for something like that?” he asked.
Madigan leaned back in her chair, tipping it back again on two legs, and fixed the professor with a smile. “Dr. Michaels, that’s why you’re here.”
—
Canfield allowed himself to indulge the slight limp caused by his egress from the hill that overlooked the obliterated oil field. He’d turned his ankle on the way back to the truck, stepping in a hole that he should have seen. He chalked it up to the weariness caused by business on three continents in four days—but he suspected Van Camp would simply see it as weakness.
While outside of the man’s purview, he could let something like human frailty show itself. In front of his boss, though, he would have to walk a steady path to the man’s desk, regardless of the pain.
His wife was another matter entirely. So rarely did he hurt himself that his wife’s reaction had redefined “over the top.” She wanted him off his feet so she could apply the ministrations a doting mate enjoyed affording. In fact, he thought Phyllis rather enjoyed his misfortune, as it fed her wont to fix things. That trait explained why he often returned home after one of his many trips to find that his house had become a refuge for some injured animal, or a motel for any one of their traveling neighbors’ pets. It was a trait he didn’t discourage; he knew the loneliness his job had imposed on her.
What he wouldn’t do was to seek sympathy from his boss. Before he entered Van Camp’s office, he braced himself against the pain and placed his full weight on his ankle. Van Camp trusted him to have a firm handle on each and every element of Project: Night House, and part of ensuring a continuation of that confidence was the
unflappable persona Canfield exhibited. Like most men overseeing large corporations, Van Camp maintained a miserly grip on trust.
Van Camp, pen in hand, looked up as Canfield entered, and before he’d made it halfway across the room, Canfield knew he was about to be asked to undertake something distasteful. He could read as much on his boss’s face: a manufactured reluctance accompanying a paternal smile—an expression that, in itself, was all theater.
Checking the sigh that threatened to emerge, Canfield took the seat across from the man who ran a global empire that few in the world could rival.
Van Camp set the pen on the papers spread out in front of him. “I apologize, Alan,” he said. “I’d intended to give you a few days to rest from your recent spate of trips, but I fear I’m going to have to ask you to jump back into things immediately.”
“I understand,” Canfield said with a nod.
Rather than continue, Van Camp pushed back from the desk and stepped over to the bar. He filled two highball glasses with bourbon and then returned, placing one of the drinks in front of Canfield. Despite the frequency of Canfield’s presence in this office, Van Camp had never before shared a drink with him.
“Alan, I’ve been giving some thought to what we discussed when you returned from Africa,” Van Camp said.
Canfield reached for the drink and sampled a bit of the expensive bourbon.
“I think it’s time to end our operation in Ethiopia,” Van Camp went on.
What kept Canfield from showing surprise was that he’d considered this a possibility. His boss was, like most successful businessmen, more cautious in his business approach than the general public suspected. Success did not come from embracing risk but from minimizing it. What he didn’t know, however, was which project Van Camp wished to see ended.
They’d suspended—Canfield had thought temporarily—the work with the rift now that their machinations had attracted the attention of the American military. Coaxing an earthquake from an already unstable region wasn’t all that difficult. Causing the earthquake to occur on a specific date and time, however, was much more complex. Such a thing required a great deal of planning and work, and so Canfield had assumed a temporary nature to the suspension—at least until Van Camp’s considerable resources could make the necessary heads turn away. In Canfield’s estimation, Project: Night House required success at Afar, considering the difficulty of ensuring the same level of success at Shackleton.
There was also the possibility that Van Camp meant the work of Dabir’s team. In fact, he hoped for that—a desire that colored his response.
“While I don’t necessarily disagree with you,” Canfield said as the burn in his throat eased, “Dabir has proven himself to be a valuable asset. After Night House is finished, I thought perhaps we’d keep him on the payroll.”
Van Camp took a drink and followed it with a slow headshake. “What would he do for us that would mitigate the risk he presents?”
Canfield didn’t answer. Instead, he took another sip of the bourbon and found his eyes moving to the only item on Van Camp’s desk that could be called decorative.
He didn’t know anything about Van Camp’s personal history with the onyx carving—if it had been a gift, how long it had been in his possession, or if it held any sentimental value. His knowledge of the piece centered upon it having granted Project: Night House its name. The Akbal, the English translation of which had become the project moniker, was one of twenty symbols identifying Mayan calendar days. The carving showed what looked like a narrow mountain rising in the distance, with tree branches in the foreground. To Canfield it looked like a child’s drawing, although he thought he understood the intent of the Maya. Commonly used symbols had to be easy to reproduce; anything intricate would have increased what, in today’s terms, would have been called production time. That was a problem, and a solution, Canfield could appreciate. Something he could leverage in dealing with Dabir, who was a man he’d grown to, if not like, at least respect over the last few years. It made it easier that Dabir’s team was but one of more than a dozen positioned at hot spots around the globe.
“I’ll take care of it then,” he said after a time.
The only acknowledgment from Van Camp was a repositioning of the man’s eyes to the monitors that played out their scenes behind Canfield. For all Van Camp’s aloofness, Canfield knew the man respected the intricacies of the various moving parts that would secure his success. Truth be told, he likely knew each of those parts—and their many variables—better than Canfield himself.
“What will you do about the team investigating Afar?” he asked, for the dual purposes of displaying the depth of his own detachment and because he honestly wanted to know.
Van Camp did not respond for several moments. In fact, such was the length of the man’s silence that Canfield began to wonder if his boss had heard the question. He was about to repeat it when, with a refocusing of attention that pulled his eyes from the monitors, Van Camp caught him up.
“We watch them, Alan,” Van Camp said. “We watch them and see if Afar was an accident, or luck. If it was luck, then we have nothing to worry about.”
“And if it wasn’t luck?” Canfield asked.
He’d worked for Arthur Van Camp for almost a decade—long enough to have been privy to most of the man’s moods. It was a familiarity that made the ice that overtook the man’s face so surprising.
“Then we may need to escalate things,” Van Camp said.
With the finality intimated by such a statement, Canfield rose to leave. He didn’t bother finishing the bourbon.
—
December 5, 2012, 4:50 P.M.
Dabir held on to the handgrip as the jeep bounced over the rocky terrain. The driver kept the sunlight behind them as well as he could, but the nature of the land forced the convoy of jeeps and the Toyotas driven by the Rashaida to tack in profile to the sun more than Dabir would have liked. Still, he knew the land would flatten out as they came out of the foothills and as they approached the border near Omhajer. If he’d timed it correctly, they would be upon the small farming community just as the sun went down. The farmers would never know death was coming until the first bullets were fired.
Dabir was ambivalent about what he was about to do, yet he had entertained and fought down that sentiment often enough over the last few years to not allow those doubts to affect him. When he’d first met Standish, the westerner had been candid about the results he expected for his money, although it had taken several months for Dabir to take his attacks beyond legitimate military and strategic targets. After the first massacre—the first time he brought his forces to bear against a group of people, a collection of nomadic families whose only crime was to make themselves available for such an action—Dabir had prayed for several hours, begging Allah’s forgiveness. That remorse, however, had not stopped him from carrying out similar massacres against countless targets. Nor would it stop him tonight.
To supplement his ranks against his recent losses, he’d hired the Rashaida, who came with their own weapons and their own vehicles. There were six of them, in two Toyotas, which was the vehicle of choice for these industrious nomads, and Dabir would likely have them killed after the conclusion of this business. Mr. Standish was quite particular about witnesses.
Back in 2000, Eritrea and Ethiopia signed a sheet of paper that concluded a bitter war. Now, more than a decade later, Dabir thanked the tribal memory that carried the injustices of that war into the present day, which would make an attack by his forces subsume into the minor transgressions committed by both sides. A decade was not long enough for the peoples occupying each side of the disputed border to forget the injustices inflicted by the other.
An attack against Eritrean traders would be looked upon as an act of the Ethiopian military, regardless of the lack of evidence. And for sowing the seeds of the subsequent unrest, Dabir would be handsomely compensated.
It was warmer than it had been in Afar; a line of sweat trickled down the
back of Dabir’s neck despite the wind stirring through the jeep. He knew that, next to him, the driver also felt the heat, as did the two men in the back, but all of these men had grown up in this place; the heat was something to be considered and then forgotten. Like killing. Done and then forgotten.
Rahm spoke a single, unnecessary word to let Dabir know they were emerging from the foothills, but Dabir had known exactly where they were, knew they would head due north for another mile before turning west, the sun rendering them almost invisible against the topography of the land behind them. In less than an hour, more than two dozen people—women and children among them—would be dead and Dabir and his men would vanish like ghosts. A day later, and more than a hundred miles away, a half-dozen bodies—the Rashaida who now aided him—would be dumped into a hole in the scrubland, where in all likelihood they would spend a thousand years rotting without anyone knowing they were there.
Dabir and his men were ghosts—in many ways like Mr. Standish himself, who disappeared like vapor every time he left Addis. Had Dabir truly believed in spirits he would have thought that Standish fit the bill. It was a skill that Dabir envied, and one that caused him to expend whatever resources he had in order to track the man, for he knew that eventually Standish would consider the mercenary’s usefulness expired. On that day, Dabir would find himself dumped into a hole in the desert too.
It was for that eventuality that he planned. And the reason he smiled, despite the blood that would be on his hands soon enough, was that for the first time Standish’s trail had not utterly vanished with him.
December 5, 2012, 7:43 P.M.
Brent had been at it for hours, going through more than a hundred case files and plotting the interesting bits over the Poincaré map developed by Richards’s team, although the legend by which to interpret his work was to be found only in his head. It was an arrangement that vexed his army handler, as it left her little to do beyond answer his questions—which had grown less frequent over the last few hours—and try to stifle the yawns that came in inverse proportion to the professor’s queries. Brent had to respect, though, that she had not once hinted that maybe they should call it a night.