by Don Hoesel
“How long’s it been?” Ragsdale asked.
“Eight years,” Canfield said.
Even that long ago it had been hard for Canfield to reconcile his old college friend with the man he’d become. At Duke, Ragsdale’s ambitions included law school and, perhaps later, politics. Against that background, the man’s work as a guide, poacher, and sometime mercenary was difficult to process. Still, it was obvious this life suited him.
“Are you still toting tourists around?” Canfield asked.
“That and leading a safari every once in a while.”
And poaching, Canfield knew. In Kenya, it was difficult to spit without it landing on a game preserve. Making a two-hundred-mile circle out from Garissa would capture more than half a dozen of them. His friend Ragsdale earned a good living taking protected game and sending it over the border to Somalia.
“Why are you here, Alan?” Ragsdale asked. “Not that I’m not grateful for the free room. But I imagine this isn’t just a social call.”
“No, it isn’t,” Canfield said.
He understood that what he was about to ask of his old friend was a risk. Van Camp Enterprises had teams to take care of this sort of thing. But those teams seldom operated in this part of the world, and a team from the States was more difficult to get in and out without someone noticing. This operation required something of a local touch.
“How do you feel about Ethiopia this time of year?” he asked.
December 6, 2012, 8:45 P.M.
By the time Colonel Richards extended the invitation to dinner, he, Brent, and Madigan were the only ones left in the Pentagon’s subbasement. After they’d arrived back in Washington, the rest of the team had gone home. But Brent had wanted to press on, with Madigan’s social life—if she had one—a casualty of his desire to finish the consult and head back to his own little part of Texas.
The colonel kept a modest home in Arlington, on Twelfth Street North, just minutes from his office. He shared the four-bedroom home with a woman who could have been a middle-aged angel for the warm smile she’d bestowed on Brent when he stepped through the door, as well as for the sumptuous dinner that was served him.
From what he could gather, having the colonel home this early was an uncommon occurrence, and for some reason she seemed to think that Brent had something to do with it. And as he assumed that was why she’d gone to the trouble to make ribs, he wasn’t going to dissuade her of that notion.
“This certainly beats the burger I probably would have grabbed on the way back to the hotel,” he said to his hosts. He loaded a section of ribs onto his plate and then reached for the mashed potatoes and corn. Emily, sitting at the opposite side of the table, smiled.
“Emily might just be the best cook in Virginia,” Richards said, which might have been the most personable thing Brent had heard him say over the last few days.
“What do you mean might ?” Emily needled.
Brent sampled the ribs. “Your wife’s right,” he said. “What do you mean might ?”
Nodding, Richards said, “Point conceded.”
While pouring the wine, Emily asked with a knowing smile, “So tell me, Brent, what’s it like working with Jameson’s team?”
“It’s . . . interesting. Definitely a different environment than I’m used to.”
“You’re only saying that because of the eyeballs,” Richards remarked.
“Those might have been the tipping point, sure.”
“The eyeballs?” Emily asked.
“Something Rawlings is working on,” the colonel explained.
“Ah,” Emily said. “That makes sense.”
The lighthearted talk continued throughout dinner. Then, as Emily began clearing the table, Richards leaned back in his chair, released a sigh that spoke of contentment, and said, “So how’s your research progressing, Dr. Michaels?”
Brent, who was still getting used to the idea of the colonel engaging in easy conversation, reached for his wineglass and took a sip of the cabernet. After setting the glass down, he replied, “Slowly, Colonel. While it’s easy to find minor connections between most of the events you’ve included in the data set, it’s difficult to know if those connections are meaningful. Even the trip we made today. Although portions of it look as if they track with the rest of your mission reports, everything could be little more than conjecture.”
“Well, that’s always a possibility. It wouldn’t be the first time one of our theories turned out to be unfounded.”
Brent’s eyebrows went up a little. “Wait a minute. Maddy said you were convinced there’s something to this.”
“I am. But none of this is an exact science.” He frowned then. “Maddy?”
Brent didn’t realize the reason for the colonel’s reaction right away, and when he did he found himself hoping that he hadn’t gotten the captain in any trouble.
“After sitting at the same table for three days, I got tired of calling her Captain,” he said. It wasn’t until the colonel’s lip curled into what passed for a smile that Brent knew he and Maddy hadn’t broken some item of military protocol.
Richards stood and gestured for Brent to follow him. He led Brent into the family room, where the colonel settled onto the couch. Brent took the chair near the fireplace, where a flame burned low over blackened wood. The colonel thumbed the remote, and the large wall-mounted television came to life.
“Background noise,” Richards explained. “Unless I’m reading a book in here, I have to have the TV on.”
Richards set the remote down but didn’t continue the conversation that had started in the dining room. Brent, though, felt compelled to chase the topic to its conclusion.
“Colonel, as much as I appreciate your offering me this job, I have to tell you that I can’t remember a research project where I’ve felt less confident about a deliverable than I do about this one.” He leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. “A project like this should take years to complete, and that’s if it’s possible at all. And I’m not certain it is.” He thought that if he was going to anger the military, it would be best to do so on the front end, before expectations got too high.
But instead of anger, Brent’s statement pulled a sigh from the colonel.
“Dr. Michaels, that’s exactly why you got the job. Most of the other academics we considered would have taken the money and, if they couldn’t find anything, they would have made up something. After looking at your profile, I figured you were the sort of man who would give it to me straight.”
“Only because I’m afraid you’d shoot me if I lied to you.”
His response produced a chuckle from Richards, but then Brent saw the man’s eyes move past him, drawn by the television.
“What do you think of this 2012 business?” he asked.
Brent shifted his position until he faced the TV. On the screen a news anchor delivered his teleprompter-supplied oration while beside him a large monitor showed footage of an ancient temple in South America. Richards grabbed the remote and raised the volume.
“. . . exactly what will happen on December twenty-first, 2012, but that isn’t stopping a lot of people from preparing as if it’s going to be the end of the world.”
The picture cut to a reporter at a discount store, putting a microphone in the face of a man standing in line.
“You just don’t know,” the man said. “Probably nothing is gonna happen, but with all the stuff goin’ on in the world right now, man, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, you just don’t know.”
The picture cut back to the anchor.
“Researchers who study the Maya, though, do think they know. And they say that the only thing they’re expecting will happen on December twenty-first—” he paused, aimed a smile at the camera—“is that it will be cold here in Washington.”
With a shake of his head, Richards hit the mute button. “With all the things people have to worry about today, you’d think they would be smarter than to waste their time on this kind of nonsen
se.”
Brent looked from the TV to the colonel, and it took Richards a few seconds to catch the bemused smile on his guest’s face.
“What?”
“I just think it’s ironic,” Brent said. “You traipse all over the globe investigating things most people don’t believe in and yet you dismiss this other thing out of hand. I would think the 2012 phenomenon would be right up your alley.”
That pulled a smirk from the colonel. “Dr. Michaels, we started investigating 2012 a decade ago,” Richards confided. “It took us a week to see that there’s nothing there. The Maya created a calendar that runs out next month. If the ancient Maya were still around today, do you know what they’d do? They’d start the calendar all over.”
Brent thought he’d finished, but then the colonel said, “People have always bought into doomsday scenarios, and this one has the added benefit of being based on something that’s actually true. The Mayan Long Count calendar really does end this month. And what makes this one even more virulent is that the pervasiveness of the media allows these nut jobs to talk to each other.”
It was the first time in their brief association that Brent had witnessed the colonel getting worked up about something.
“Yet I imagine with the length of time you’ve been at this job, you’ve seen a thing or two that doesn’t have a ready explanation, am I right, Colonel?”
Richards nodded. “You’ve heard us talk about our allegiance to the scientific method. Well, believe every word of it. It’s the only solid launching point for what we do.” He glanced at the television, then back at Brent. “But I’ve seen too much to close the door to the possibility of supernatural causes for certain phenomena.”
Brent was a bit surprised: a career military man who accepted the idea that science might not explain all?
“So I suppose you brought in the man of reason on this one in order to balance out your man-of-faith tendencies?”
The colonel laughed. “A man’s made up of both, Dr. Michaels,” Richards said once the laughter had eased. “And while I might have a few more doors opened to some of the less scientific methods of inquiry, I can assure you that nothing trumps the science.”
“Which doesn’t rule out the possibility that these people”—Brent gestured to the television—“are right about the world ending in two weeks. Personally, I don’t believe it, but can a reluctant man of faith completely rule out the possibility?”
Instead of a return to laughter—or even a smile—Richards’s face turned serious. “Putting faith in foolishness makes one a fool.” He glanced once again at the television. “All this sort of thing does is stir up needless panic. And that’s the last thing we need right now, knowing the kind of thing we’re investigating.”
Emily, carrying a tray with coffee, cream, and sugar, chose that moment to join the men. After setting the tray on the coffee table, she took a seat on the couch next to her husband. She placed a hand on his knee.
“Do you need decaf tonight, sweetie?” she asked the colonel. Then she winked at Brent, who returned something approximating a smile.
—
Arthur Van Camp believed that opportunity found its greatest fulfillment in chaos. He preached that truth to his senior executives, forcing it down the ranks as a kind of secret vision statement. And he demanded that all the members of his staff understood and practiced this truth: the man who kept his head while everyone around him panicked was the man who won. As a result, he considered himself something of an expert on chaos. He could see it coming long before others sensed it; he could get inside it, study it, learn its patterns, and determine how to leverage it for his own gain. Perhaps it was this intimacy with the unpredictable that caused him to keep his office in an order bordering on the clinically obsessive.
He owned three properties in Atlanta, all in Buckhead. He’d paid $25 million for the sprawling estate he seldom visited anymore. He didn’t need nine bedrooms or sixteen fireplaces. Since his wife died he’d been spending the majority of his time in the penthouse suite of the Ashbury. All four of Ashbury’s penthouses belonged to him and had long ago been made one unit. At ten thousand square feet, it was still much more space than he required, yet he couldn’t argue with the view.
The penthouse office was spare in its design, its furnishings consisting of a desk, a single chair in addition to the one belonging to the desk, and a narrow bookshelf holding the more rare and expensive volumes of his considerable collection. A fireplace had been built in the east wall, where even now a fire was burning. Two paintings hung on the wine-colored walls: a Matisse on the north wall and a much less valuable landscape above the fireplace. The latter, painted by his wife before she fell ill, was the one his eyes went to most often.
At the desk, Van Camp scrolled through a spreadsheet showing the financials for the month, each of the industries that made up his business empire neatly arranged under its own tab by his accounting team. He paid the men and women who compiled these reports a great deal of money, to ensure both accuracy and loyalty, and because he hired only the best for what he considered to be a critical function in support of his business interests. And it was because he knew that his employees were the best corporate financial team ever assembled under a single umbrella that he wondered if any of them had attained a sufficiently global view to find the patterns in the figures—how a trend across one of his many business lines affected, or was reflected in, the trends of the other lines. If that were to happen—if one of his employees came to him and demonstrated an understanding of the bigger picture—Van Camp didn’t know if he would give that person a substantial raise or have him killed. He leaned toward the first option while retaining the right to exercise the second.
He finished with the spreadsheet and leaned back in the leather chair, feeling his muscles argue against the more relaxed position. The numbers he’d reviewed reinforced what he’d already known: the plan he’d set into motion years ago was, almost miraculously, coming down the home stretch in much the fashion he’d designed. While he seldom touted his own skills—his business savvy—he recognized the magnitude of what he’d accomplished, even as he understood how precarious the whole thing was, for any one of a hundred factors could shift beyond optimum and ruin the entire thing. Were that to happen, he didn’t know if any of the exit strategies he’d devised would serve to protect him from the fallout, nor was he convinced that this mattered.
He was eight when he heard the Sunday school lesson that would play a major role in setting the course for his life, though he wasn’t aware of it at the time. Even at that young age, Van Camp had held an appreciation for money—a respect enhanced by the financial state of his own family, which saw him showing up for Sunday school attired in the hand-me-downs of some of his wealthier classmates. And so when his teacher commented about King Solomon’s great wealth—that he’d been the richest man in the world—a seed fell in fertile soil.
He’d studied the calculations: how much money Solomon might have had were he Van Camp’s contemporary, and while the sum seemed astronomical, it was not impossible. A part of him understood the foolishness of risking an empire rivaled by few men for a chance at realizing the fulfillment of a silly childhood wish, of attaining a wealth even greater than Solomon’s. But silly childish wish or not, he knew it was this very goal that had burned in his blood for decades, which had informed his education and lurked in the background of every decision he’d ever made. To deny it now, even though it could cost him everything, would be a kind of betrayal.
And his interest in non-maintainable systems—the entropic nature of free economics—was the key. While his wife had lived, his ambitions had been tempered by her influence; then, he was content to slow-grow his wealth, although the childhood promise remained as ever. However, with her declining health forcing him to come to grips with what life would be like without her, his focus on exploitative strategies shifted. Instead of taking advantage of the opportunities the system produced, he pondered manipulating the
system to produce what he desired. In essence, fashioning chaos. The idea was to manipulate chaos and receive a greater payoff rather than wait for chaos to arrive and then prosper from it.
The picture his wife had painted, the one hanging above the mantel, might have argued otherwise, but this night he avoided looking at it.
December 8, 2012, 10:33 P.M.
After a mission—whether one assigned to him by Standish or one he’d selected himself—Dabir would spend a good portion of the next several days in prayer. Allah was a god who brooked little disobedience, and the Koran was a difficult text. Weren’t there competing theories regarding several important theological points, all espoused by men a great deal smarter than he? If these learned scholars could debate among themselves, how could a simple man like him make sense of all that the book seemed to require?
So in Dabir’s opinion, it was all about interpretation. The Koran provided a guideline for the faithful, a blueprint regarding how to live. The thing about blueprints, though, was that they could be altered as needed. This thought steeled Dabir for his next assignment from Standish, which seemed a simple thing—much less dangerous than he’d expected. In fact, it was similar to one of the smaller excursions Dabir might have assigned himself just to keep his spoon in the pot: a research team from South Africa, a three-person crew conducting tests along the Afar Depression. Standish had even supplied exact coordinates.
Dabir was unsure about taking part in another mission in this area so soon after the ill-fated venture against the American military unit. However, he knew the lack of policing in this region made the assignment safe enough. Few people would even know about the previous attack, and among the ones who did, few would care beyond the fact that the altercation had not produced bodies to be pilfered or left any cargo behind. The Americans would not have left anything in the desert.
Because of the small scale of the night’s activities, Dabir had brought with him only three men, some of those who had accompanied him from the beginning, and whose work he knew well enough that he need not doubt they would do as instructed.