The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

“I think that a likely prediction,” Thyssen agreed. “Plane leaves as soon as we get to the airport. We will take the 707, and the medical team.”

  “Right,” Brian nodded and waved a finger around the room. “What about the others?”

  “Andromeda—you can go to bed. Lorna, you’re with me so you better hit the black coffee.”

  “Oh goody,” Lorna breathed sleepily. “Where are we going, boss?”

  “Rome with the others, then on to Geneva and Brussels and anywhere else we have to go to talk to the top brass and get Felicity, Kevin and Brian the co-operation they need. And you promote the cause all the way.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Joe and Chrissie—you make your way home in your own time...”

  “I want to go to Italy,” Chrissie said adamantly.

  For the first time in Felicity’s memory, Thyssen hesitated. He looked at diminutive French-Vietnamese girl thoughtfully for a long moment, and eventually she continued. “The dying and the injured will need my ministrations.” To which Thyssen offered a dubious look. “Anyway,” Chrissie added with a faint smile. “You’ll need me. I speak Italian.”

  Thyssen was floored. Felicity could see it took everything he had to restrain himself, but somehow he managed to cave in. You could see this wasn’t something that happened to him every day. “All right. But remember, once this gets underway, the paperwork will be piling up in Melbourne.”

  “Direct it to my office,” Joe Solomon said. “I’ll take care of it until Christine is back in harness.”

  Joe Solomon co-operating? Felicity could hardly believe her ears by then.

  “Thanks, Joe,” Thyssen said with breath-taking sincerity.

  “I’ll just hang in here a couple of days and make my own way home,” Joe added quietly. “And I can organise the control group back to base if you want to get to Italy immediately, Brian.”

  It was just too much. Thyssen, unresisted, was at a loss. The glance he exchanged with Felicity said so plainly.

  “Good on yer, mate,” Brian said in vague disbelief.

  They were a team, working together as harmonious as any team could, and even the man who had moulded them was astonished. And so it continued as they flew into the disaster zone. There was Jami at her shoulder, making sure she understood the proportions of the disaster; there was Kevin poised to back up her every whim; there was Brian, harried and uncertain, ensuring their every transportation need was met.

  They flew over the impact zone, a burned and blackened region and charred chunks of stone and rubble and naked tree trunks, still smouldering and burning freely in places. Jami had a map on which the circle was drawn and they flew that circle, noting the roads and villages and emergency bases.

  “How the hell are we going to do this?” Wagner wondered.

  “We just start where we land and work our way around the circle,” Felicity told them. “And hope we find them all within the eight days.”

  They bounced the cracked and debris-strewn roads in a land rover, amid frantic Italians. It was total chaos, the emergency services seemed as disorganised as the victims and each little region seemed to have its own entirely different way of going about the evacuations. And no one wanted to understand anything they said. They would have been a total loss had Chrissie not been with them to interpret everything.

  And then help arrived. The Red Cross moved in and immediately began to prepare lists of names of the victims, and NATO troops, mainly French and American, came to secure the region. From afar, Thyssen and Lorna had been doing their bit too. On the fourth day after the disaster, she was summoned to this meeting in Naples. A British diplomat named Sanderson was there to advise her on protocol and explain.

  “They have all been advised of Project Earthshaker, and received instructions to co-operate and now they want you to tell them what to do.”

  Good old Harley, Felicity smiled.

  So she stood before the table in the opulent marbled room. Before her, the heads of the most powerful organisations and all of them were there to hear her, mere Felicity Campbell, GP, from lowly New Zealand. Now Felicity Earthshaker. She cleared her throat and found it unnecessary. She was calm and clear, despite sleep deprivation, and it was all in her head and ready to flow.

  “Gentlemen,” she said resonantly. “This is what must be done...”

  *

  There aren’t a lot of parks in a vertical city like Hong Kong where real estate is fabulously costly, and therefore not a lot of park benches. This one was really in the forecourt of a skyscraper owned by an oil company, but there was grass, there were trees, and a fine view of the harbour. Away to his right was the ferry terminal and a bustle of activity to occupy his mind while he waited—the sky was grey but it was warm and the office workers were all about, eating their lunches from bags. The British had gone and the Chinese came but you still sat on the grass and had lunch with your girlfriend. Absolutely everyone he could see—several thousand people he supposed—wore western dress—suits and ties, mini skirts and high heels—the regimental uniform of the world’s most numerous army, the forces of commerce.

  Joe Solomon did not have his lunch in a plastic bag and brought his own equivalent of a park bench anyway—plainly this Mr. Cornelius didn’t know everything. He parked his wheelchair beside the bench, making a personal annex, and waited for the secret rendezvous to occur. His knowledge of such matters was entirely gleaned from Ian Fleming and John Le Carre. They were meeting in a public place, out in the open where they couldn’t be overheard, in a noisy place where they could not be bugged; if Cornelius turned up in a trench coat all the clichés would be in place.

  Fortunately, it was not so. He proved to be a craggy beanpole of a man, in a creased blue suit, bent at the middle, a week’s grey stubble on his chin. In fact, he looked rather more like the park bench was his living room. Joe had dumped his briefcase on the seat to keep a place for him and the young couple who had sat there while he waited now moved on at the convenient time. John Cornelius advanced and if the wheelchair was a surprise, he did not let it show.

  “Mr. Solomon, is it?”

  “I guess you must be Mr. Cornelius.”

  “Please, call me John.” Joe doubted that he ever would.

  The briefcase was moved to the frame attached to the wheelchair which was its customary position and Cornelius suffered to bend his long frame and seat himself. Joe could see he had a bad back and probably piles. He was at least sixty, his face heavily lined, and what was once a fine crop of white hair now thinning.

  “Ah,” Cornelius breathed. “Nice to get out. It’s a lovely view from here, don’t you think?”

  “Nice to get out of where?” Joe asked. He suspected it might have been a cave or a soft spot under a bridge somewhere.

  “Oh, the hotel and all that. I don’t get out as much as I would like, and I haven’t seen Hong Kong since the handover.”

  “So where do you usually live?” Joe asked. Had this man really come to Hong Kong, just to see him? No. The location had not been known when the meeting was originally proposed.

  “Where the work takes me.”

  “What work?”

  “A book. I’m writing a book. Research, you know.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Oh, the old agency days. All I know really.”

  “But you don’t work for the CIA now.”

  “Heavens no. Fully retired. Ten years now.”

  Joe Solomon let that sink in. It certainly fitted the facts well enough, but it didn’t explain anything.

  “Look,” Joe said. “I have to ask you a few questions before I decide whether I want to talk to you or not.”

  “Oh, indeed. Ask away. I have no secrets. Well, not any more.”

  “Just exactly what is your interest in this?”

  “Personal. Private. But I can help. Let me explain.”

  “If you would.”

  “I was data analysis, as most agency men are. Office work. Computers. H
ardly ever left Langley. Just a clerk, really. But, well, freedom of information, you know. Decided to write a book about the interesting things that came across my desk over the years, and I realised that I had never been to most of the places I was talking about. So I travel, and I write, filling in the gaps, so to speak. And Thyssen was one of the very interesting things that came across my desk.”

  “I should imagine.”

  “I doubt you do. He was one of ours, you see.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “No, really. Think about it. A rabble rouser like him—student activist, Greenpeace, all that environmental lobbying. Made waves everywhere he went. Yet the Chair of Geology at a prestigious university was open to him, as was every door in Washington. Limitless funds for his pet project. To an outlaw? I don’t think so. No. It’s because he was undercover all the way, and now all those favours he is owed for invaluable service to the agency and various presidential executives are to be repaid. You see?”

  “Are you speculating or do you know?”

  “His inside reports on the Green movement came to me for years.”

  Joe hated it. It was ridiculous. This man was ridiculous. He wanted to just go away and ignore all this. Here was an Iago, pouring poison in his ear. Unless, of course, there was proof.

  “You can prove this, of course.”

  “Of course,” and he reached into his inner jacket pocket and extracted a creased and folded sheet of paper. He handed it over and Joe opened it. It was on CIA stationery. It was stamped TOP SECRET. It was signed Harley Thyssen. Joe read enough to give him the drift. Poison.

  “You see,” Cornelius was saying. “That it places the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour on the appropriate future date. Information for which the French were most thankful.”

  Joe folded the document and handed it back. Back in his office in Perth, he could have faked such a document in Photoshop in about ten minutes. But perhaps the best plan was to go with the flow.

  “There’s more, I hope.”

  “Of course. I can get you all the proof you need.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what you have to say instead,” Joe decided. “And we’ll deal with proving it later.”

  “Watch out for Thyssen. He has a hidden agenda. That’s all I have to tell you.”

  Joe considered it. It was spoken with adequate sincerity, there was no doubt about that, but this man just did not add up. He seemed only vaguely outlined, as if he was unsure himself of just exactly why they were sitting there, having this conversation, about this man Thyssen.

  “Look, Mr. Cornelius...”

  “Oh, John, please.”

  “Okay, John. Look. I’m a lawyer. I spend my life looking for people’s hidden agendas, even when they don’t have one. It’s a reflex these days. I assume it automatically. Understand?”

  “Of course...”

  “Thyssen is plainly a dangerous man. He’s dangerous if he’s a bad guy with a hidden agenda, but even if that isn’t so, if he’s a good guy with only honourable intentions, he still remains very dangerous. To everyone. To the whole bloody planet.”

  “I hear that.”

  “So unless you can be specific. Unless you can provide precise information and back it up with proof, there is no point to this discussion. Indeed, it amounts, as it stands, to no more than gossip.”

  Cornelius, positively scolded, could not have looked more dismayed. “Obviously, such matters are classified.”

  “Obviously…” Joe murmured. Inwardly, he was surprised to feel a sense of relief. More sure of his ground now, he decided on a different tack. “When did you meet him?”

  “I never did. I told you. I just sat in an office and read reports.”

  “Which, themselves, might have been faked.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. But I see you are unwilling to believe me. That too doesn’t surprise me. Many people have reported a reluctance to distrust Thyssen. He has that effect on people. They get mesmerised by him. I would, truly, love to meet him one day.”

  “Give me proof and I’ll believe.”

  Cornelius was nodding and surveying the scene. “You are the proof, Joe. Living proof. They ran some sort of test and it went wrong somehow. And Thyssen has the task of measuring its effects. The Shastri Effect, you see.”

  “But no proof.”

  Cornelius slapped his knees and began the laborious task of rising from the seat. “We’ll met again, Joe. Talk again. Perhaps by then your faith will be dented somewhat. I see that you are wisely skeptical. For the moment, that is enough.”

  “Yes, I think it is,” Joe Solomon said.

  He watched Cornelius until the man had shuffled completely out of sight. While he did he measured every part of his consciousness. He felt like his pocket had been picked only when he checked there was nothing missing. Only, of course, there had to be. He realised that he must have lost something that he never knew he had.

  *

  When the nurse summoned her to the telephone and said the call was from New Zealand, Felicity had to run through the dark stone corridors to the far side of the ancient building they had been given, a former convent converted into a hospital sometime around the Second World War. There had been few improvements since then, but it was a satisfactory base, even if it had little chance of accepting all of the sleepers, and no hope of accommodating all of their equipment. But it was an improvement over where they had started last week, in bivouac tents in the open.

  “I’m sorry,” Wendell said. “You must be very busy.”

  He was referring to the length of time it had taken her to reach the telephone and perhaps the fact that she was out of breath when she got there.

  “We have time,” she said, still gasping. “The project will pay our telephone bill.”

  “I wasn’t concerned about that...” Wendell said testily.

  Emotional matters on the telephone were always so vulnerable to misinterpretation.

  “Is there anything wrong?” she asked desperately.

  “No, no,” Wendell grovelled. “We saw you on television. The girls wanted...”

  “But everyone is okay?”

  “Melissa has a slight cold and I’m suffering from an ingrown toenail. How about you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You looked exhausted.”

  “I’m always fine when I’m exhausted. You know that.”

  “Megan wants to speak first.”

  “Put her on.”

  “Hullo mummy. We saw you on the telly.”

  They had been invaded by CNN and less conspicuously by other world media. Surprisingly, they had been helpful rather than a hindrance. In a scene of widespread chaos when information was desperately needed, there were few better sources than news camera crews. They had picked up at least a dozen sleepers that everyone else had missed because of prying eyes that seemed to see more clearly through a viewfinder than they did in reality.

  “Yes. They interviewed me yesterday.”

  “Were you at the beach?”

  She had to think. Beach? No. They were nowhere near the sea. But the interview had been in the open, in a barren yellow landscape, on a hot day with the wind in her hair and she was burned so very brown by the sun. Yes, she could understand beach.

  “No, dear. I’m in Italy. It’s a place where the sun shines a lot.”

  In fact she was having to raise her voice, because of the rain pelting on the roof.

  “Are you going to be home for my birthday?”

  Oh shit! The fifteenth, but what was today’s date? Day Six was all that would come to mind. The hit was the 20th. Three weeks away...

  “Oh yes. How could I miss something like that?”

  “Daddy said there’s lots of people to make better and you might not be able to.”

  “I’ll be there, love. I promise.”

  “Okay mummy.”

  Without the slightest doubt about such a promise.

  There was a pause and Melissa
was next, her voice muffled by her cold.

  “Hi mum. Is it dangerous there?”

  “Not at all.”

  “They showed all these volcanoes erupting and earthquakes and fires and floods. Isn’t that where you are?”

  The rain that was falling was black with ash. The pillars of cloud from both Vesuvius and Stromboli could be seen in the distance on clear days.

  “Not quite. Anyway, the volcanoes have quietened and the tremors stopped days ago. It’s perfectly safe.”

  Yesterday a flash flood carried away a village further up the valley when a temporary dam formed by a landslide gave way. The day before, a stationary truck suddenly disappeared underground as the earth adjusted to the impact of the fissures. A nurse had been electrocuted by the inadequate wiring, and another infected when bitten by a rat in the main ward. All perfectly safe.

  “They said you were going to raise all these zombies from the dead.”

  “Oh my god, did they?”

  “Yes. Just like in Stephen King.”

  “Nothing like that, dear. The patients are in a coma, and are expected to regain consciousness soon. That’s all.”

  “Will they be zombies but?”

  “No. They will be perfectly normal, once they wake up.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “I don’t. I just know, from prior experience of these cases, that it will probably happen. We actually don’t know much about the condition at all.”

  But the telephone was being handed to Gavin.

  “It looks like we’re going to make the finals.”

  “Oh well done.”

  “They start in September...”

  “How have you been playing?”

  “Won best afield three times this season and you missed all of them.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “And now you won’t be here for the finals.”

  “Maybe not the semis, but I’ll be there for the grand final, I promise you.”

  “If we make it.”

  “Well, you just better make it, hadn’t you.”

  “Did you see the volcanoes erupt?”

  “No. That happened before I got here. And they are miles away from where I am.”