by David Hewson
'Yeah, for all of us,' Clarke replied, looking at her. 'I can get to that stage myself, Miss Wagner. But where's the evidence?'
'There is no evidence,' Levine said, a touch sourly. 'First, it's clear that both planes suffered some kind of incident at altitude. Neither should have been at six thousand feet. Both lost contact at around thirty-three thousand feet, so we have to assume some dual incident affected them.'
'How far apart were they when they first reported trouble?' Helen asked.
'Ten miles,' Dave Barnside said, his eyes on Clarke. 'We have an Ops team going through the tapes now.'
'Could an explosion cover that kind of area?' Helen asked.
'Nothing you could get on board an airplane,' Barnside replied.
'It's inconceivable that both aircraft could have identical system failures at altitude,' said Helen. 'It must be an attack from the air or ground.'
Levine toyed with the papers in front of him. 'If it was from the air we would have picked it up on radar.'
'A stealth aircraft?' Clarke asked. 'We don't have a monopoly on that technology.'
Levine shrugged. 'No. The Chinese have stealth. And the Russians too. But if this was an attack in the air, the planes would have been destroyed when they were hit. They wouldn't have descended thirty thousand feet intact, as far as we can make out, before disintegrating. It doesn't make sense. And the same goes for some kind of ground-to-air attack.'
'Is anyone claiming responsibility?' Clarke asked.
Dan Fogerty pulled himself up in his chair. He looked just like he did on TV: a crumpled academic out of Georgetown, which was exactly what he once was. And the languid attitude and expressionless face hid, she guessed, a formidable intelligence.
'Someone always claims responsibility, Mr President. I hope you don't mind me calling you that. I don't see why any of us need wait on the formalities. You really have to bear in mind there will always be someone putting their hand up. Thanks to the Internet, they can do it for free just by E-mailing me these days. The news is only just starting to get out on the wires, of course, so the real lunatics are a little way off. Right now, we have three definitive claims. One is from some Libyan-based organization we've never heard of. One is from a Middle Eastern crew linked to Iraq. And the third is some bunch of ecoterrorists, not that we know much about them.'
'Anything there?' Clarke asked, impatience in his face.
'Nothing you can put your finger on, sir. The Libyans and the Iraqis make this kind of claim all the time. Partly to keep us on our toes, partly so that every time something big does happen they can put their hands in the air and say: We did it. The eco-group — I'm getting some data on them. I'm dubious, frankly.'
'Any particular reason for ruling them out?' Helen asked.
'The Libyans and the Iraqis have got the wherewithal to do something like this, Miss Wagner. I don't understand how a bunch of tree-huggers can hope to achieve the same. What's their means? You want my opinion? It must have been a bomb at altitude.'
Helen watched the way Levine and Barnside were shifting in their chairs, and wondered what was going through their heads.
'Bombs in two planes simultaneously, sir?' she asked.
Fogerty stared at her through owlish, tortoiseshell glasses.
'You have a better explanation, young lady?'
She smiled at him, thought that if someone else gave her the young lady routine she might go crazy, and said, 'Not right now, sir. These ecoterrorists: Did they give a name?'
'The Children of Gaia.'
'Ah,' she said, and nodded. 'Gaia. That's kind of a nature figure, I think.'
'Gaia, my dear,' Fogerty said, adopting his professor pose to the full, 'in Greek mythology was the Mother Earth, the daughter of Chaos, from which all creation sprang. There are modern beliefs — cults, if you would have them — which translate Gaia into meaning some kind of spirit of the earth within the universe, as if the planet itself was some kind of living entity in the solar system. Some think this spirit will rise to protect the earth from the damage we seem to be inflicting upon it. I think there are a good many quite respectable, if cranky, tree-huggers who follow this line, and doubtless a few crazies too. The crazies may well be capable of some such thing as Oklahoma. We all know that kind of act takes little in the way of organization and technology. Bringing down Air Force One over central Russia isn't something you can achieve with sacks of fertilizer and a homemade fuse.'
Helen listened in silence. For all his intellect, Fogerty clearly wasn't a man to waver from a fixed view of the situation.
Levine shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He needed a cigarette, she thought. It was written all over his sallow features.
'There is one other possibility,' Levine said. 'Which is why, in fact, I asked you here, Wagner.'
'Sir?' she said, thinking she could learn to hate this bastard a lot if he made a habit of leading her blind into heavyweight sessions like this.
'The sun thing, for chrissake. You read the papers, don't you?'
'Right'
Don't bluff, think fast, Helen counselled herself. That's what Belinda taught you.
'So,' Levine continued. 'You're the scientist. Can there be a link?'
Nice guy, she thought. Asking her to paraphrase an entire branch of astrophysics in a sentence, and one that people were only just beginning to understand in any case.
'It seems unlikely,' she said. 'It's no secret that we are about to be engulfed by a major solar storm. That happens every eleven years or so, and we usually experience some effects, such as the breakdown of power grids, the loss of telecommunications systems. We know the sunspot cycle is erratic right now. We know that the planetary alignment is disturbing it and altering a broad spectrum of solar radiation and other waveforms on the earth. None of this is new, though this time around their frequency and geographical spread are more diverse than anything we've seen before. That, I suspect, gives you your answer. If there was evidence that the force of the solar intrusions was increasing, and not just the frequency, then I think there is a possibility that the incident had its cause in some related activity. But we have no proof of that, or that airplanes have been affected by this kind of problem before.'
'No?' Fogerty asked, eyes wide behind his glasses. 'We still don't know what really brought down TWA 800. There's a whole host of unexplained plane crashes in the books.'
'But do they match up with the solar cycle, sir? I doubt it. Someone would have made the connection before. There's really no evidence that we are in for much else from this solar storm except some severe telecommunications disruption and an enhancing of the process of climate change, something we have been helping along ourselves in any case. I'm not saying it may not be painful, and it's a fact that disaster response teams around the world are on low alert. But it's not an intelligence issue, surely.'
'Really?' Levine grunted. 'Then how do you explain the fact that the Russian ground team that's there already reports the wreckage they've found is hot? Radioactive. I got them wiring back to us asking for safety equipment.'
Helen gritted her teeth.
'Since I was unaware of that fact until you mentioned it, sir, I can't explain it. When you pass me the file I will happily work on that information.'
'Makes more damn sense than Greek gods,' Barnside mumbled.
Tim Clarke looked at his watch. 'I want an hourly update on this. From all of you. If there is clear evidence of terrorist activity, I want to hear it from you people first, not CNN. And the same goes for any other theories. As far as the press is concerned, this is an inflight tragedy. Graeme, you go see the publicity people. I want the tone of this broadcast right. Let's focus on the loss of a President, not something we still can't put a finger on.'
'Sir,' Burnley said, and disappeared out the door.
Clarke looked at them all. 'You guys work together on this one. I know how you people like the odd border war now and then. This is bigger than all that. You understand me?'
&nb
sp; 'We both have clear-cut mandates, and we know where they're drawn, Mr President,' Fogerty said, smiling.
'Yeah, you make sure you do. And Miss Wagner?'
He was looking hard at her. She wondered what was going on in his mind.
'Sir?'
'Pursue every angle on this. Every one.'
Then the meeting was over. Clarke rose from the table, stared at each of them, and turned to leave.
'Mr President?' Fogerty said.
'Mr Fogerty?' Clarke replied at the door.
'I don't have the right words to say this, sir. To become President is an honour, probably the greatest any man can hope for. And to win that prize this way must be one of the oddest feelings on earth.'
'You can say that again, mister,' Clarke replied quietly.
'What I wanted to say was, you are the President now. There's nothing to qualify that. And I, along with everyone here, wish you well in the job. For all our sakes.'
'Thank you for that,' Clarke said, peering at him. 'I appreciate it.'
Then he was gone.
Five minutes later, outside in the corridor, on the way to the car lot, Fogerty smiled at Levine and said, 'You were pushing it in there, Ben. This guy's ex-Army. He likes to think you care. He also happens to be the President now. He deserves our respect.'
'Clinton appointed me,' Levine grunted. 'I'm just one more white Democratic appointee who gets his ass kicked out of the way once Clarke gets his feet under the table. You watch, we're in the same boat. Besides, this is just for show under the circumstances. A couple of hours from now he'll feel the weight of all that good old White House paper bearing down on him and sit back into the job. Shame, really. I'd hoped we'd have someone in that job who didn't shake when the wind started to blow a little hard. As for the respect thing, Dan, hell, you know as well as I do, no one deserves it. You earn it, that's all.'
Helen marched one pace behind the three men, staring at the wallpaper, wishing she wasn't hearing this.
'He'll make a good President,' Fogerty said. 'He'll earn your respect. Don't you worry. Not my politics, that's true. A hell of a way to get the job, though. Particularly if you're black.'
Fogerty stopped at the front desk and stared at them. 'I got someone else to see before I go, Ben. You heard what the man said on this. No range wars.'
Levine smiled and pulled out a pack of Winstons from his pocket, started to play with them, waiting for the moment he could light one outside. 'Cross my heart. And hope to die.'
'Yeah,' Fogerty said. 'You know, I miss Georgetown. It might be nice to be back.'
They watched him head off down a white-walled corridor.
'You did well in there, Wagner,' Levine said. 'I think he liked you.'
'I would have appreciated being told about the subject matter, sir. In particular the radiation.'
'Got to learn to duck and weave in this business. That right, Barnside?'
Barnside looked at her and smiled coldly. He was a big, fair-haired man, with the hard, strong physique of a football player, and no niceties at all. Barnside called it how he saw it, and if that meant he came across as charmless and aggressive, he really didn't give a damn. She could understand his rise through the Agency. He was smart, dedicated, and hard-working, with no private life that anyone got around to talking about. Just a bright provincial boy from Arizona who rose through the ranks.
'For what it's worth, Wagner,' Barnside said, 'I think that solar thing is a crock of shit. Not that I have your impeccable science background to prove it. You want my guess? Someone sneaked some nuclear device onto one of these planes. You wait and see. Occam's razor. Simple explanations. Bombs and bullets. It usually comes down to one or the other.'
'In that case,' she said, 'it's over to you boys in Operations, and S&T can go back to peering into test tubes.'
'Now, wouldn't that be peachy?' Barnside grunted.
CHAPTER 13
Time Past
La Finca, 1824 UTC
It was early on a beautiful evening in Mallorca and Michael Lieberman was slowly acquiring the idea that it was to be one of the strangest of his life. A few hours before, he'd been staring at the screen trying to make sense of the crazy solar activity figures that were coming down the line. Then the news flash came up on the monitor, intruded into everything without being asked, and suddenly it was as if this remote Spanish mansion were hooked into the feverish nervous system of the Washington machine. Phones rang, people looked devastated, and there was a fever in the air that said this was about more than just the news itself, somehow the happenings in the sky had intruded right into their lives.
He looked through the big glass window at the back of the room and stared at the giant illuminated LCD map of the world set on the main wall of the control centre. It was one of those neat ones that painted day and night on the relevant parts, moving with the path of the sun and its elevation in the sky. The universal time was marked in UTC — which he still liked to think of as Greenwich Mean Time — in the corner. You could almost see the summer solstice approaching. The high point of noon was reaching the East Coast of America. A huge curving sweep of daylight, shaped like a breast pointing downward, ran from the North Pole, now in permanent sun, down through the East Coast of North America, through the Caribbean, south past the tip of Tierra del Fuego, to the edge of the Antarctic, where the sun never rose at this time of the year.
This was that ever-moving object midday, where the sun was at its highest, casting its brightness on the greater part of the world. On either side sat, to the right, approaching night, and to the left, rising morning. Darkness was sweeping across Australia, all of Asia, and the south-eastern foot of Africa, fast approaching the farthest tip of the Mediterranean. On the West Coast of America it was ten AM. A fine time to be sitting on the beach in Half Moon Bay, he thought. At least it ought to be, if the sun hadn't been so damn strong of late that you wondered what it was doing to your skin as you sat there watching the slow, strong swell of the Pacific.
He walked out of the room, racking his head for some explanation. People didn't die like this, presidents in particular. The air was still full of heat outside. He walked over to the old stone wall that ran along the cliff edge, parked himself there, watched the motion of the waves, the way the gulls moved on the currents of wind blowing off the ocean. There was a shadow next to him and he wished he could have summoned up the courage to ask her to go somewhere else. Mo Sinclair sat down beside him, unasked, and tossed a pebble over the wall, watched it make a tiny white dot of surf in the clear blue water a couple of hundred feet below.
'You look like a man about to resume smoking after a hitherto acceptable absence,' she said.
He gave her a sickly grin. His head was spinning. He didn't feel up to this.
'It's like the Kennedy thing, I guess,' he replied eventually. T was too young for that. Just. But I know what they mean now. And I wish I was thinking about the other people more. It wasn't just Rollinson. There were hundreds of them.'
'I know,' she said.
'It gets you the same way?'
She nodded. 'He's the icon, Michael.' She shrugged. 'His death makes it all real to us.'
'Right.'
She watched the smart, troubled face gaze out into the blue emptiness of the sea and wondered why he seemed to take this so personally.
'There's more to all this, Mo. You understand that?'
'How can there be?'
He shook his head violently. 'There is more to this. These plane crashes. Why we're here. Some of this craziness I do get. The instability of the weather, we know where a lot of that is coming from. The solar cycle. The crap we're getting from the flares right now. But…'
He watched a shining white seabird dive down the face of the cliff and disappear beneath the waves, waited for it to re-emerge, and knew he could never predict the point at which it would break surface.
'But we don't know. Give them time.'
'Yeah,' he said, and flashed a look at her s
he didn't understand. 'We really are overloaded with that here now, aren't we?'
She felt it was time to change the subject. 'You weren't always doing this, were you, Michael? I remember you said something to Annie. About designing satellites or something?'
'Oh yes.' The bird reappeared on the surface, something silver and wriggling in its beak, and true to form it was nowhere near where he expected. 'You ever hear of SPS?'
'No.' She looked puzzled. 'Should I?'
'Probably not. You're a little young for that particular dream.'
He shuffled on the uncomfortable stone wall and wondered why he was digging out this particular sheaf of bad memories right then.
'I'm waiting,' she said.
'SPS stood — no, stands — for solar-powered satellite. Back in the seventies, when everyone thought that the oil would run out before long and we desperately needed some alternative to carbon-based fuels, it was quite the theoretical thing.'
Mo smiled. 'I've heard of solar power. I thought it didn't really work.'
'Not on earth. Too costly, too inefficient, although those things may change. What won't change is the weather. You get clouds, you lose the throughput. Plain fact.'
She looked at the perfect day.
'It would work just fine here.'
'Yeah, but here's not where you need all those millions of watts of electricity. Try Detroit. Or Osaka. Not so good.'
'So?'
'So you collect it with a satellite. You put something with huge collection wings into orbit, pick up the juice, beam it back to the earth in the form of microwaves, and close down all the nuclear power plants, stop burning carbon.'
'Wouldn't that be dangerous?'
'You mean, do we get the fiendish death ray from the sky? Not at all. All of this was provable in theory by the early seventies. Just theory, mind. It took a bright, inquiring, optimistic mind to turn that into some kind of fact, design the satellite itself, come up with some costings to get it into space.'
She placed a hand gently on his shoulder. 'This wouldn't, by any chance, happen to be you?'