The Alarmists

by Don Hoesel

  Brent smiled even as he shook his head. “Believe me, this is a pretty high number. You have to factor in that some of the things you and your team have researched barely have even local significance, much less national or worldwide. Which is why I asked how you decide what to investigate. If you’re pulling your list from existing news sources, then the number would be skewed high.”

  “But if a lot of these incidents come to our attention via other sources, then your number needs another causal factor?”

  “My thought exactly,” he said. “So what do you think the percentage is?”

  Madigan frowned as she considered the question.

  “If I had to make a guess,” she ventured, “I’d say at least forty percent of our workload—or at least the stuff we thought was connected enough to include in the data set—comes from either internal referral or through one of the colonel’s contacts.”

  “And if you tack on an additional, let’s say, twenty percent of leads that came in outside of any news outlets but that were big enough stories to get there anyway, you still have a lot of stuff that didn’t deserve coverage but got it anyway.”

  “Which means?” she prodded.

  “I have no idea,” Brent said with a shrug. “Just thought it was interesting.”

  His response produced a smile from Madigan. “We say that around here a lot.”

  “From what I’ve seen already,” he said with a chuckle, “I believe it.”

  A silence fell over the room as Brent’s eyes returned to the computer screen.

  “I’m still finding this all a bit weird,” he said. “Yet there doesn’t seem to be anything about it that I would describe as paranormal. It’s all percentages and connections.”

  “And the rest of it isn’t?”

  “Well, I suppose you’re in a better position to know that,” Brent said. “But cars that won’t start when they’re parked in front of a hardware store? Strange things floating around in jars? I heard Rawlings say that your team investigated a haunting at a base in New Mexico last year—and the results were inconclusive? Doesn’t sound like legit science, Captain.”

  “I defy anyone to define legit science,” Madigan said. “Believe it or not, Dr. Michaels, almost everything we investigate ends up having a rational, scientific explanation.”

  “And the stuff that doesn’t?”

  “That’s the fun stuff,” she answered with a grin, one that was impossible for him to keep from mirroring.

  “How do you reconcile the ‘fun stuff’ with your belief in God?” he asked, pointing to the tiny cross that hung from a chain around her neck. “Aren’t you supposed to reject anything that seems to have a paranormal connection?”

  Madigan sighed, shifting in her chair. “There’s a lot to unpack there, Professor. First, you keep using the word paranormal. Just because we can’t explain something right now doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the supernatural. Yes, we investigate some strange things, but weren’t most things that we now accept as legitimate science once looked upon as maybe something just short of magic?”

  He conceded the point with a nod, yet she wasn’t finished.

  “I’ve been with this team for five years, and in all that time I haven’t seen anything—not one thing—that I don’t think can be explained. Eventually.”

  “What about the others?” he asked. “Do any of them approach things from the other perspective?”

  “A few,” she said. “Rawlings more than the others. Of course, he’s convinced he has latent telekinetic abilities, so I’m not sure I’d put much faith in his opinion.”

  “What about Richards?”

  “The colonel?” Madigan said. “I think with the colonel it depends on the day.”

  “And what kind of day do you think I’m having today?” came the man’s voice from the doorway.

  Brent saw Madigan’s eyes widen but also witnessed a hint of a smile.

  “That depends, Colonel,” she said, “on whether or not you’ve seen what Addison has going on in the lab right now.”

  The colonel opened his mouth to respond, but instead he turned on his heel and started off in the direction of the lab. Brent thought he caught a look of worry on the man’s face before he disappeared.

  —

  When Colonel Richards had popped into Brent’s office, and before Madigan’s warning had sent the man hurrying to check on Addison, he’d intended to let the professor know that as luck would have it, Brent would have the chance to witness the team at work in the field. Even more important was the possibility that the thing requiring investigation would soon be included in the team’s data set.

  As a general rule, explosions and fires at a Texas oil field—even those bearing the hallmarks of domestic terrorism—did not attract NIIU attention. Such an event lacked the strangeness—and there was no better term—associated with most of the team’s assignments. But the investigative unit had come to understand that within the province of this investigation, seemingly normal events seemed poised to gather up into some abnormal whole.

  They’d taken a plane to Lamesa, then loaded into two black SUVs for the trip across the scrubland. Brent had been impressed with the C-250, which came complete with a small room outfitted as a field forensics lab. It added yet another layer to his increasingly complicated understanding of this team: soldiers, ghost hunters, scientists, and cops. And at this point, he had no idea which role they embraced most.

  The SUV in which he sat was trailing the other one, and Brent wondered how the driver could see through the cloud of dust kicked up by the lead vehicle. Still, even if they’d gone off the narrow asphalt road that cut through the flat terrain, the professor knew that little but grassland stretched out for miles in any direction, which made him feel relatively safe. Colonel Richards occupied the front passenger seat, with Rawlings behind the wheel. Sitting next to Brent in the middle seat was Madigan, whom Brent decided had been assigned to him. The third seat, as well as the space behind it, was filled with a variety of equipment, most of which the professor couldn’t have hazarded a guess as to its purpose. The only piece of info he knew for sure was that the large spiky thing that Rawlings had wrestled into the back amid a stream of curses was named Spike.

  They’d been driving for perhaps a half hour and Brent was about to engage Madigan in conversation, if only to break the military-style silence, when the dust cleared enough for him to spot their destination.

  According to the briefing he’d listened to on the plane, Hickson Petroleum was a small oil field among the giants spreading their claims over the Trend, where more than ten billion recoverable barrels of oil waited beneath a surface spanning twenty-five hundred square miles. In fact, it was one of the smaller companies with a claim to drilling rights, which to Brent made it an odd choice as a terrorist target.

  Soon they’d passed through the security checkpoint at the main gate—a checkpoint that included Homeland Security personnel—and were exiting the vehicle. When Brent stepped from the air-conditioned cab, the outside air felt more like Houston than Washington, only more arid, as if the brown grass of the Llano Estacado had sucked all the moisture from the air. But any attention he might have given the climate vanished when his eyes found the husk of melted, blackened metal that rose like a sore from the scarred earth. Had he not known what it had been, he doubted he could have posited a guess that came close. Now it looked like some avant-garde sculpture, or a Greek column that some giant had hurled in a fit of rage.

  “My guess is the fire burned somewhere near two thousand degrees,” Rawlings said. Brent hadn’t heard the man come up beside him.

  “That’s nothing,” Petros remarked. “Remember that Russian submarine that went down in the Bering Strait in 2004? The fire in the engine room reached twelve thousand degrees.” The man studied the disfigured oil rig, impressive in its own right. “Talk about a difficult body recovery,” he said, and it took Brent a while to figure out that he was still talking about the doomed Russian
sub.

  Despite the fact that Brent had been with this unit for three days, it occurred to him that he knew little about anyone besides Madigan and Richards. Most of what he’d gleaned about the others had come from the mission reports, which vacillated in detail depending on who wrote them. Still, what he’d witnessed firsthand seemed to verify his impressions from the reports—namely that Petros was the team’s facts man, and Rawlings was the guy who believed that if he did this job long enough, he’d finally find something interesting. A thrill seeker. A man who had witnessed things that would sate the adventuresome appetites of most men but who himself remained dissatisfied. Of the two, Brent couldn’t figure out with whom he connected most.

  Brent moved away from the men, his feet kicking up dust as he made his way closer to the drill rig. The fire must have been impressive; he could imagine the thick black smoke it must have produced, the confusion it caused for the men trying to find safe passage to the gate, the ones searching for friends who were close by when it exploded.

  An occurrence like this one still bothered him despite everything he’d learned about tribal behavior. For regardless of societal advances over the last several thousand years—advances which had established rules of law and the recognition of individual rights—humans could still revert to actions indistinguishable from mob rule or predator behavior. Under normal circumstances it would have been an academic exercise, but in the face of mangled metal that was once an oil rig, theory became something else entirely.

  Behind him, the team separated and began to perform their tasks, leaving Brent to wander around an enormous fenced-in area. Other than the ruined oil rig, his eyes found other areas that appeared to have been targeted and he studied these for a while. He had little to offer here, suspecting Colonel Richards had included him so that he, an outsider, could get a feel for how the team worked, as well as the methods they employed. Meanwhile, he would attempt to use that knowledge to try to develop a working theory about something he wasn’t sure he believed.

  But he found that the twisted metal and reminders of lives lost mostly served to depress him, so he turned his attention to a spot just past the gate, to the only place in sight that not only offered a break from the carnage but also a respite from flatness.

  Hickson Petroleum was practically in the shadow of the escarpment—the line of rock, red dirt, and weather-savaged greenery that separated the Llano Estacado from the more habitable areas to the west. The escarpment reminded Brent of what he loved about Texas, namely a topography that spoke of both independence and loneliness. His focus stayed there for a while as the team spread out over the oil field and as Colonel Richards, standing only yards away, spoke with someone from Homeland Security, and while Spike remained in its place in the back of the SUV that had ferried it from the airport.

  He couldn’t have pinpointed the exact moment the thought began rolling around in his head. One minute he was taking in the scenery, and the next thing he knew, an idea beyond his field had made itself known. And once he realized it, he came close to dismissing the notion, for criminology wasn’t his area of expertise. His province was group dynamics. Or in those cases in which he practiced at the individual level, it was to examine how an individual could be influenced by larger factors. But was the idea he’d been pondering that far removed from sociological theory?

  Sociology was the study of human behavior as influenced by any number of causal factors. In that respect, was it far removed from behavioral analysis? Even so, it took the passage of several minutes before he could put voice to what had arranged itself in his mind.

  “This was more about creating a panic than about doing any real damage,” Brent said. Standing there by himself, and with the others engaged in whatever it was they were doing, he had no idea if anyone heard him, and yet he’d spoken the words more for himself than for anyone else.

  He didn’t turn but he could almost feel Colonel Richards break away from the Homeland Security agent, and in a moment the man was next to him.

  “What makes you say that, Dr. Michaels?” he asked.

  Brent didn’t answer right away. He took a deep breath, allowing the dry air to fill his lungs, his eyes playing over the escarpment.

  “If I’m a terrorist, I’m going after as big a bang as I can for my trouble,” Brent said. “Instead, they pick the target closest to a convenient escape route. Not only that, they choose a target that would produce the least damage even if they’d succeeded in blowing the entire thing.” He paused, hands on hips, looking out across the oil field.

  Colonel Richards followed Brent’s gaze, the two men surveying the escarpment. After a time the colonel said, “As far as I can tell, that’s the only chance whoever was behind this had to get out of here unseen. Doesn’t that make this the only possible target for a terrorist action?”

  Brent considered that. After all, he’d already admitted to himself that he was out of his element. He could posit theories for anything requiring an analysis of group dynamics, but generally the FBI would fly in to develop a behavioral profile. Still, even in the face of the colonel’s question, the thought would not subside.

  “Even with the escarpment, the risk of pulling off something like this in a wide open area is far too high to go for something small scale.” Brent didn’t say anything else for half a minute, and Richards didn’t press him. “A terrorist action, domestic or otherwise,” he said, turning to meet the colonel’s eyes, “almost always has an ideological purpose.” He gestured to the ruined oil rig. “Nothing about this speaks to that. This was about adding weight to a message already delivered—a tweak of an established agenda. An agenda hinted at in Africa, Western Europe, Russia, Venezuela, South Korea, and a dozen other places your team has been over the last two years.”

  Colonel Richards took a half step back. “So what are you telling me, Dr. Michaels?”

  Brent could sense the dual nature of the inquiry. On one hand, the colonel was enjoying having brought the professor there to see this event that would be added to an already extensive data stream. On the other hand, the question was genuine. The problem was that Brent had no idea what he was telling the career military man. In his estimation, only one force existed that was capable of extending its influence as far as this one seemed to spread, and it was the very government the colonel worked for.

  Finally, Brent shook his head. “All I know, Colonel, is that if I look at everything you’ve given me and conclude that it’s all related, then you have to be ready to accept whatever findings I come up with.” He didn’t vocalize his belief in the possible involvement of the U.S. government. He’d let the colonel do that heavy lifting himself. And when he looked at Richards, he found nothing that hinted at an established ideology. In fact, when the colonel answered him, what Brent found was a complete absence of judgment.

  “Dr. Michaels, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, that’s precisely what we do.”

  —

  December 6, 2012, 10:05 P.M.

  Despite all the travel required of him over the last few years, two things never ceased to amaze Canfield. The first was that he could be just about anywhere in the world in twenty-four hours. The second, and almost diametrically opposed to that, was that there were certain portions of the world that required a significant act of will to reach.

  Garissa was one such place. One of the larger cities in the North Eastern Province of Kenya, Garissa had a large enough population to make the presence of a single westerner unworthy of notice but not large enough to warrant any decent roads leading to it. He’d landed in Wajir, opting for a smaller airport—one restricted to prop planes—than a landing in Nairobi would have provided. From Wajir, he’d hired a local to take him the 198 miles south to Garissa. He’d traveled the route once before, perhaps eight years earlier, and this most recent trip proved much less eventful than the previous one, when flash floods had turned the dirt road into a mud pit that caught and held tires. This time a small herd of hirola with a collective reluc
tance to relinquish the road proved the only obstacle.

  Garissa was an odd blend of industrialism and decay, beauty and squalor. In certain parts, the houses were freshly painted, colorful awnings shaded the doorways to shops doing brisk business, and construction crews raised office buildings and hotels. In other spots, though, the buckling infrastructure common to the continent was evident: packed-earth streets littered with trash; whole neighborhoods of decrepit structures with rusting metal awnings propped up by pipes and wooden poles; merchants leading donkeys pulling two-wheeled carts, navigating their way around mud holes, large rocks, and debris.

  Canfield, who had visited dozens of cities just like it, hardly noticed anymore. He was there for business and would be gone from the place in an hour. One thing that pleased him, however, was that this particular piece of business involved an old friend.

  “It’s nice to see you, Matt,” Canfield said.

  He leaned against a small writing table in the other man’s hotel room—a room Canfield had paid for—enjoying the air-conditioning after a long ride through the arid land, the lowered windows of the truck the only ventilation.

  “You too, Alan,” Matt Ragsdale said.

  It was hard to guess the man’s age by looking at him. A lean, rugged-looking body spoke of someone in his midthirties, while a lined, weathered face suggested a man approaching fifty. Canfield, who was forty-two, and who knew that Matt Ragsdale had graduated from Duke a year ahead of him, understood that two decades on this continent bore responsibility for the inability to pinpoint his age. This place chiseled the fat from the bone, but exacted a price for such work.

  Ragsdale sat on the room’s single bed, a green duffel bag at his feet. He’d opened it before Canfield had arrived. Amid the jumble of items in the bag lay a handgun.