by Ken Follett
She screamed again.
Her bedroom door shook as Bo tried to break it down.
The chest inched across the floor toward her. She hoped maybe the rug would halt its advance, but the chest just pushed the rug with its lions' paws.
Her bed shook so violently that she fell out.
The chest came within a few inches of her and stopped. The middle drawer came open like a wide mouth ready to swallow her. She screamed at the top of her voice.
The door shattered and Bo burst in.
Then the shaking stopped.
*
Thirty years later she could still feel the terror that had possessed her like a fit as the world fell apart around her. She had been frightened of closing the bedroom door for years afterward; and she was still scared of earthquakes. In California, feeling the ground move in a minor tremor was commonplace, but she had never really gotten used to it. And when she felt the earth shake, or saw television pictures of collapsed buildings, the dread that crept through her veins like a drug was not the fear of being crushed or burned, but the blind panic of a little girl whose world suddenly started to fall apart.
She was still on edge that evening as she walked into the sophisticated ambience of Masa's, wearing a black silk sheath and the row of pearls Don Riley had given her the Christmas they were living together.
Don ordered a white burgundy called Corton Charlemagne. He drank most of it: Judy loved the nutty taste, but she was not comfortable drinking alcohol when she had a semi-automatic pistol loaded with nine-millimeter ammunition tucked into her black patent evening purse.
She told Don that Brian Kincaid had accepted her apology and allowed her to withdraw her resignation.
"He had to," Don said. "Refusing would be tantamount to firing you. And it would look real bad for him if he lost one of his best people on his first day as acting SAC."
"Maybe you're right," Judy said, but she was thinking that it was easy for Don to be wise after the event.
"Sure I'm right."
"Remember, Brian is KMA." It stood for kiss my ass, and it meant the person had built up such a generous pension entitlement that he could retire comfortably at any time that suited him.
"Yeah, but he has his pride. Imagine where he explains to headquarters how come he had to let you go. 'She said "fuck" to me,' he says. Washington goes: 'So what are you, a priest? You never heard an agent say "fuck" before?' Uh-uh." Don shook his head. "Kincaid would seem like a wimp to refuse your apology."
"I guess so."
"Anyway, I'm real glad we may be working together again soon." He raised his glass. "Here's to many more brilliant prosecutions by the great team of Riley and Maddox."
She clinked glasses and took a sip of wine.
They talked over the case as they ate, recalling the mistakes they had made, the surprises they had sprung on the defense, the moments of tension and triumph.
When they were drinking coffee, Don said: "Do you miss me?"
Judy frowned. It would be cruel to say no, and anyway it was not true. But she did not want to give him false encouragement. "I miss some things," she said. "I like you when you're funny and smart." She also missed having a warm body beside her at night, but she was not going to tell him that.
He said: "I miss talking about my work, and hearing about yours."
"I guess I talk to Bo now."
"I miss him, too."
"He likes you. He thinks you're the ideal husband--"
"I am, I am!"
"--for someone in law enforcement."
Don shrugged. "I'll settle for that."
Judy grinned. "Maybe you and Bo should get married."
"Ho, ho." He paid the bill. "Judy, there's something I want to say."
"I'm listening."
"I think I'm ready to be a father."
For some reason that angered her. "So what am I supposed to do about it--shout hooray and open my legs?"
He was taken aback. "I mean.... well, I thought you wanted commitment."
"Commitment? Don, all I asked was that you refrain from shtupping your secretary, but you couldn't manage that!"
He looked mortified. "Okay, don't get mad. I'm just trying to tell you that I've changed."
"And now I'm supposed to come running back to you as if nothing had happened?"
"I guess I still don't understand you."
"You probably never will." His evident distress softened her. "Come on, I'll drive you home." When they were living together she had always been the after-dinner driver.
They left the restaurant in an awkward silence. In the car he said: "I thought we might at least talk about it." Don the lawyer, negotiating.
"We can talk." But how can I tell you that my heart is cold?
"What happened with Paula ... it was the worst mistake of my whole life."
She believed him. He was not drunk, just mellow enough to say what he felt. She sighed. She wanted him to be happy. She was fond of him, and she hated to see him in pain. It hurt her, too. Part of her wished she could give him what he wanted.
He said: "We had some good times together." He stroked her thigh through the silk dress.
She said: "If you feel me up while I'm driving, I'll throw you out of the car."
He knew she could do it. "Whatever you say." He took his hand away.
A moment later she wished she had not been so harsh. It was not such a bad thing, to have a man's hand on your thigh. Don was not the world's greatest lover--he was enthusiastic, but unimaginative. However, he was better than nothing, and nothing was what she had had since she'd left him.
Why don't I have a man? I don't want to grow old alone. Is there something wrong with me?
Hell, no.
A minute later she pulled up outside his building. "Thanks, Don," she said. "For a great prosecution and a great dinner."
He leaned over to kiss her. She offered her cheek, but he kissed her lips, and she did not want to make a big thing of it, so she let him. His kiss lingered until she broke away. Then he said: "Come in for a while. I'll make you a cappuccino."
The longing look in his eyes almost broke her will. How hard could it be? she asked herself. She could put her gun in his safe, drink a large, heartwarming brandy, and spend the night in the arms of a decent man who adored her. "No," she said firmly. "Good night."
He stared at her for a long moment, misery in his eyes. She looked back, embarrassed and sorry, but resolute.
"Good night," he said at last. He got out and closed the car door.
Judy pulled away. When she glanced in the rearview mirror she saw him standing on the sidewalk, his hand half-raised in a kind of wave. She ran a red light and turned a corner, then at last she felt alone again.
*
When she got home, Bo was watching Conan O'Brien and chuckling. "This guy breaks me up," he said. They watched his monologue until the commercial break, then Bo turned off the TV. "I solved a murder today," he said. "How about that?"
Judy knew he had several unsolved cases on his desk. "Which one?"
"The Telegraph Hill rape-murder."
"Who did it?"
"A guy who's already in jail. He was arrested a while back for harassing young girls in the park. I had a hunch about him and searched his apartment. He had a pair of police handcuffs like the ones found on the body, but he denied the murder, and I couldn't break him. Today I got his DNA test back from the lab. It matches the semen from the victim's body. I told him that and he confessed. Jackpot."
"Well done!" She kissed the top of his head.
"How about you?"
"Well, I still have a job, but it remains to be seen whether I have a career."
"You have a career, come on."
"I don't know. If I get demoted for putting the Foong brothers in jail, what will they do to me when I have a failure?"
"You've suffered a setback. It's just temporary. You'll get over it, I promise."
She smiled, remembering the time she had thought there wa
s nothing her father could not do. "Well, I didn't make much progress with my case."
"Last night you thought it was a bullshit assignment anyway."
"Today I'm not so sure. The linguistic analysis showed that these people are dangerous, whoever they are."
"But they can't trigger an earthquake."
"I don't know."
Bo raised his eyebrows. "You think it's possible?"
"I've spent most of today trying to find out. I spoke to three seismologists and got three different answers."
"Scientists are like that."
"What I really wanted was for them to tell me firmly it couldn't happen. But one said it was 'unlikely,' one said the possibility was 'vanishingly small,' and the third said it could be done with a nuclear bomb."
"Could these people--what are they called?"
"The Hammer of Eden."
"Could they have a nuclear device?"
"It's possible. They're smart, focused, serious. But then why would they talk about earthquakes? Why not just threaten us with their bomb?"
"Yeah," Bo said thoughtfully. "That would be just as terrifying and a lot more credible."
"But who can tell how these people's minds work?"
"What's your next step?"
"I have one more seismologist to see, a Michael Quercus. The others all say he's kind of a maverick, but he's the leading authority on what causes earthquakes."
She had already tried to interview Quercus. Late that afternoon she had rung his doorbell. He had told her, through the entry phone, to call for an appointment.
"Maybe you didn't hear me," she had said. "This is the FBI."
"Does that mean you don't have to make appointments?"
She had cursed under her breath. She was a law enforcement officer, not a damn replacement window salesperson. "It does, generally," she said into the intercom. "Most people feel our work is too important to wait."
"No, they don't," he replied. "Most people are scared of you, that's why they let you in without an appointment. Call me. I'm in the phone book."
"I'm here about a matter of public safety, Professor. I've been told you're an expert who can give me crucial information that will help in our work of protecting people. I'm sorry I didn't have the opportunity of calling for an appointment, but now that I'm here, I would really appreciate it if you would see me for a few minutes."
There was no reply, and she realized he had hung up at his end.
She had driven back to the office, fuming. She did not make appointments: agents rarely did. She preferred to catch people off-guard. Almost everyone she interviewed had something to hide. The less time they had to prepare, the more likely they were to make a revealing mistake. But Quercus was infuriatingly correct: she had no right to barge in on him.
Swallowing her pride, she had called him and made an appointment for tomorrow.
She decided not to tell Bo any of this. "What I really need," she said, "is someone to explain the science to me in such a way that I can make my own judgment about whether a terrorist could cause an earthquake."
"And you need to find these Hammer of Eden people and bust them for making threats. Any progress there?"
She shook her head. "I had someone interview everyone at the Green California Campaign. No one there matches the profile, none have any kind of criminal or subversive record; in fact, there's nothing suspicious about them at all."
Bo nodded. "It always was unlikely the perpetrators would have told the truth about who they were. Don't be discouraged. You've only been on the case a day and a half."
"True--but that leaves only two clear days to their deadline. And I have to go to Sacramento on Thursday to report to the governor's office."
"You'd better start early tomorrow." He got up off the couch.
They both went upstairs. Judy paused at her bedroom door. "Remember that earthquake, when I was six?"
He nodded. "It wasn't much, by California standards, but it scared you half to death."
Judy smiled. "I thought it was the end of the world."
"The shaking must have shifted the house a little, because your bedroom door jammed shut, and I nearly busted my shoulder breaking it down."
"I thought it was you that made the shaking stop. I believed that for years."
"Afterward you were scared of that damn chest of drawers that your mother liked so much. You wouldn't have it in the house."
"I thought it wanted to eat me."
"In the end I chopped it up for firewood." Suddenly Bo looked sad. "I wish I could have those years back, to live all over again."
She knew he was thinking of her mother. "Yeah," she said.
"Good night, kid."
"Night, Bo."
*
As she drove across the Bay Bridge on Wednesday morning, heading for Berkeley, Judy wondered what Michael Quercus looked like. His irritable manner suggested a peevish professor, stooped and shabby, peering irritably at the world through glasses that kept falling down his nose. Or he could be an academic fat cat in a pinstripe suit, charming to people who might donate money to the university, contemptuously indifferent to anyone who could not be of use to him.
She parked in the shade of a magnolia tree on Euclid Avenue. As she rang his bell she had a horrible feeling he might find another excuse to send her away; but when she gave her name there was a buzz and the door opened. She climbed two flights to his apartment. It was open. She walked in. The place was small and cheap: his business could not be making much money. She passed through a vestibule and found herself in his office-cum-living room.
He was sitting at his desk in khakis, tan walking boots, and a navy blue polo shirt. Michael Quercus was neither a peevish professor nor an academic fat cat, she saw immediately. He was a hunk: tall, fit, good-looking, with sexy hair, dark and curly. She quickly summed him up as one of those guys who were so big and handsome and confident, they thought they could do anything they liked.
He, too, was surprised. His eyes widened and he said: "Are you the FBI agent?"
She gave him a firm handshake. "Were you expecting someone else?"
He shrugged. "You don't look like Efrem Zimbalist, Junior."
Zimbalist was the actor who played Inspector Lewis Erskine in the long-running television show The FBI. Judy said mildly: "I've been an agent for ten years. Can you imagine how many people have already made that joke?"
To her surprise he grinned broadly. "Okay," he said. "You got me."
That's better.
She noticed a framed photo on his desk. It showed a pretty redhead with a child in her arms. People always liked to talk about their children. "Who's this?" she said.
"Nobody important. You want to get to the point?"
Forget friendly.
She took him at his word and asked her question right out. "I need to know if a terrorist group could trigger an earthquake."
"Have you had a threat?"
I'm supposed to be asking the questions. "You haven't heard? It's been talked about on the radio. Don't you listen to John Truth?"
He shook his head. "Is it serious?"
"That's what I need to establish."
"Okay. Well, the short answer is yes."
Judy felt a frisson of fear. Quercus seemed so sure. She had been hoping for the opposite answer. She said: "How could they do it?"
"Take a nuclear bomb, put it at the bottom of a deep mine shaft, and detonate it. That'll do the trick. But you probably want a more realistic scenario."
"Yeah. Imagine you wanted to trigger an earthquake."
"Oh, I could do it."
Judy wondered if he was just bragging. "Explain how."
"Okay." He reached down behind his desk and picked up a short plank of wood and a regular house brick. He obviously kept them there for this purpose. He put the plank on his desk and the brick on the plank. Then he lifted one end of the plank slowly until the brick slid down the slope onto the desk. "The brick slips when the gravity pulling it overcomes the fric
tion holding it still," he said. "Okay so far?"
"Sure."
"A fault such as the San Andreas is a place where two adjacent slabs of the earth's crust are moving in different directions. Imagine a pair of icebergs scraping past one another. They don't move smoothly: they get jammed. Then, when they're stuck, pressure builds up, slowly but surely, over the decades."
"So how does that lead to earthquakes?"
"Something happens to release all that stored-up energy." He lifted one end of the plank again. This time he stopped just before the brick began to slide. "Several sections of the San Andreas fault are like this--just about ready to slip, any decade now. Take this."
He handed Judy a clear plastic twelve-inch ruler.
"Now tap the plank sharply just in front of the brick."
She did so, and the brick began to slide.
Quercus grabbed it and stopped it. "When the plank is tilted, it takes only a little tap to make the brick move. And where the San Andreas is under tremendous pressure, a little nudge may be enough to unjam the slabs. Then they slip--and all that pent-up energy shakes the earth."
Quercus might be abrasive, but once he got onto his subject he was a pleasure to listen to. He was a clear thinker, and he explained himself easily, without condescending. Despite the ominous picture he was painting, Judy realized she was enjoying talking to him, and not just because he was so good-looking. "Is that what happens in most earthquakes?"
"I believe so, though some other seismologists might disagree. There are natural vibrations that resound through the earth's crust from time to time. Most earthquakes are probably triggered by the right vibration in the right place at the right time."
How am I going to explain all this to Mr. Honeymoon? He's going to want simple yes-no answers. "So how does that help our terrorists?"
"They need a ruler, and they need to know where to tap."
"What's the real-life equivalent of the ruler? A nuclear bomb?"
"They don't need anything so powerful. They have to send a shock wave through the earth's crust, that's all. If they know exactly where the fault is vulnerable, they might do it with a charge of dynamite, precisely placed."
"Anyone can get hold of dynamite if they really want to."
"The explosion would have to be underground. I guess drilling a shaft would be the challenge for a terrorist group."
Judy wondered if the blue-collar man imagined by Simon Sparrow was a drilling rig operator. Such men would surely need a special license. A quick check with the Department of Motor Vehicles might yield a list of all of them in California. There could not be many.