The Siege

by Stephen White

  I was wondering if Alan had closed his mouth yet.

  Deirdre said, “How are you, Sam Purdy?”

  “Better than some,” I said. “What about you?”

  “Is the weather always this nice here?” she asked.

  “More often than you’d think,” I said.

  “Damn pretty,” she said.

  “Shhh,” I said. “Don’t tell.”

  Whatever Deirdre and I were doing together while we strolled the Downtown Mall in Boulder, we were apparently easing into it.

  We jaywalked 11th and crossed onto the herringboned path of the Mall. I was very aware she was leading me somewhere. I suspected the destination wasn’t made of bricks.

  I said, “This an official visit? I’ll admit I’m thrilled to see you, Deirdre. Everything ended so abruptly, but . . .”

  She squeezed my hand. “I have a question,” she said.

  “You know, I do, too,” I said. I surprised myself with my eagerness to ask it.

  “You go first,” she said in a way that felt generous. With no lives hanging in the balance, I found myself liking her even more than I had that morning at breakfast in New Haven.

  I said, “At the very end, when you were texting me, you seemed to know that all the destruction was going to stop. How did you know?”

  We walked halfway to Broadway before she answered. She looked up at me. “I didn’t know anything. Okay? I’m not in covert ops, Sam. I’m an analyst. I believe that during a crisis, a good analyst has to be willing to get off the fence. What you saw was me jumping off the fence. What you got from me was my . . . take—my best shot at the truth. That day my conclusion wasn’t”—she paused—“a slam dunk. Not even close.”

  She was dissing one of her old bosses. Take that, George Tenet.

  “Okay” was what I said to Dee.

  In the months since Forty-three moved back to Texas, but prior to the siege, I’d been having the hardest time burying my instinct to give him and his incompetent friends the benefit of the doubt. After the siege, though, I’d discovered that my residual impulse to defend politicians of all stripes had dissipated considerably.

  She said, “The library situation is what made me suspicious. If what the unsubs wanted was to go out in a blaze of destructive glory, they would have taken out the library when they had the chance. The country was watching. The RPG was in place. They had a prominent hostage next to the weapon. The moment the helicopter took off from the roof of Beinecke, the guy still inside could have fired off two quick rounds at the library. Would have taken fifteen, maybe twenty seconds. And they still had other hostages—both in the tomb and in the helicopter—to keep us from retaliating with overwhelming force. They didn’t need to wait.”

  For a moment, I thought she was done. She wasn’t.

  “I knew when they didn’t fire on the library that, whatever they were up to, it wasn’t just about casualties and destruction. To me, the hesitation meant they had a bigger plan that I wasn’t seeing, or that they had a point to make. The bigger plan option? I couldn’t make that work. Didn’t make sense to me. The moment one of them exited the protection of the tomb, they had to know we could overwhelm that person with superior force. So . . . I concluded they wanted to make a point. I just happened to see the wedding dress on a monitor in the command vehicle. It hit me right then that maybe they wanted us to make their point for them.”

  “Us?”

  “Us as a country. They wanted us to cross some final line. To misread the clues. To overreact to what they were doing. Had done.” She squeezed my hand again. “When I saw the wedding dress that hostage was wearing, that’s when all the pieces came together for me. The suicide bomb, the sniper, the IED, the throat slashing. I’d been thinking all along that the siege was about Iraq, some sick retaliatory reenactment of all the damage that had been done to the civilians in Iraq during the war. But the wedding dress said Afghanistan to me. There was dried blood on the dress. I saw it as a symbol of one of the weddings we mistakenly bombed there. I made the connection with the thousand-pound bomb. I felt certain then. I jumped off the fence.

  “I also knew that the girl wearing that dress would become the signature photographic image of the end of the siege.”

  “You were right about that,” I said. Photograhs of Jane Calderón exiting the tomb wearing the wedding dress and the hijab were on the covers of the next issues of Time and Newsweek. It became one of the iconic images of the siege at Book & Snake.

  “I concluded that the terrorists wanted us to duplicate our mistake at the wedding in Afghanistan right there in New Haven, but this time do it in front of the world.”

  She was making sense.

  She paused. “When it turned out that there was a jet waiting at the airport, I knew it would push all our Nine/eleven buttons. The terrorists knew that, too. I think the unsubs expected us to overreact to that, of course. To blow up that jet. Either during takeoff, or just after. They knew we’d have fighters above them, waiting. Ready.

  “So . . . that’s how I knew, Sam. Or thought I knew.”

  “Huh,” I said. I would chew on it some more during breaks from studying reflexology. “Your turn, Deirdre. What’s your question?”

  She smiled at me first. She waited for me to look at her face. She wanted to make sure I saw her smile before she started.

  “I’ve been tasked with compiling an inventory of what strategic information the siege parents might have revealed to keep their children alive. It’s been difficult. By and large, the parents remain . . . recalcitrant witnesses. But we have responsibilities—we have mitigation efforts . . . to prepare, and to enforce.”

  “Tough job,” I said.

  “Yes, it is. I’m here to see you because of the Calderóns.”

  “Okay.” I had never mentioned the Calderóns to Deirdre or Poe. That she had connected those dots was no surprise at all. The government had been in possession of my cell phone for those twenty-four hours I spent in Virginia. Though, if there had ever been a warrant issued for it, it was from some court that didn’t make its records public. Let’s just say I hadn’t been offered a copy for my scrapbook.

  We took two more steps before Deirdre spoke again.

  “Canary Islands,” she said next. She allowed that to sink in before she added, “La Palma. Cumbre Vieja.”

  Her Spanish accent was comfortable. Practiced. She was someone who would know whether it was cerveza más or más cerveza.

  I wasn’t going to lie to Deirdre. It’s not who I am. If she’d solved for x, she’d solved for x. “So how did you get there?” I asked.

  “Just did what he would have done once he discovered he had the Calderóns’ daughter as a hostage. I searched the public record. Looked for vulnerability I could exploit. Information I could use.” She stopped walking, let go of my hand, and reached into her shoulder bag. She pulled out a magazine.

  Actually, it was a journal.

  “Geophysical Research,” she said.

  I nodded. It might have been a good place for me to tell a white lie. But I just nodded.

  “Dr. Ann Summers Calderón has a letter in here. This issue. It’s about Cumbre Vieja. You know anything about that?”

  “It’s a volcano,” I said, not really answering her question.

  “Yes, it’s a volcano. Her letter is about how much raw force it would take to cause a huge chunk of the west side of La Palma—that’s the island the volcano is on—to slide into the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a long, complicated letter. For a scientist, she writes well. Have you read it?”

  I gestured at the journal. I said, “You know, with the economy the way it is, I had to let my subscription expire. I was only reading it for the pictures, anyway.”

  She smiled. “That’s a no?”

  “That’s a no.”

  “How about I summarize it for you? Dr. Calderón offers her support for the prevailing scientific contention that the most likely scenario for the geologic future of La Palma is that the volcano
will remain intermittently active and that volcanic activity will cause the island to grow both larger and higher over time. Bottom line? La Palma has a high probability of staying intact for the next several thousand years, at least.”

  “That’s nice to hear,” I said. I was waiting for a “but.”

  The “but” would include the words “landslide” and “tsunami.”

  “Dr. Calderón discusses some recent controversy regarding the odds of a possible catastrophic landslide on La Palma. She concludes, as have others, that any future major landslide would require a confluence of events that are highly improbable. There would need to be a major increase in groundwater on the island, something that would first require a sustained, unexpected alteration in the regional climate. That’s a big, big if.

  “During any period of heightened volcanic activity, magma rising within the volcano would, of course, increase pressure along the fault. After a prolonged rainy period, the rising magma would also heat the additional groundwater, and the internal geological pressure within La Palma would rise exponentially as a result.

  “That combination—pressure from fresh magma and drastically increased underground water pressure and temperature—could put tremendous stress on the existing fault network at the island’s ridgeline. And, who knows? Eventually . . . Craaack. Landslide.”

  I didn’t respond.

  She said, “For the record, Sam? Although there is plenty of controversy about this as well, if a major eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano did trigger a landslide along the primary ridge fault on La Palma, it could, theoretically, cause a tidal wave of astonishing proportions. Some argue it would be an immense tidal push, a phenomenon that scientists call a mega-tsunami. Krakatoa? We might be talking that kind of wave. The mega-tsunami from La Palma would head west, sweeping the Atlantic before it impacted the eastern seaboard of North America. It would cross the Atlantic within hours. The tidal surge would be measured in tens of meters. Atlantic islands from Canada to the Caribbean would be decimated. Damage estimates along the coast of the United States and Canada? A thousand Katrinas. There would be neither time nor resources to evacuate major coastal population centers. Worst-case casualty estimates range from a million or two to as high as thirty million. Thirty million. Imagine that.”

  I looked at Deirdre for about three seconds. It was all I could tolerate.

  “Poe said you mentioned something about that number in one of your talks with him. Thirty million. Casualties. Familiar?”

  I said, “Yeah. It’s familiar.” Like I said, if Deirdre had solved for x . . .

  “Volcano experts—are they called ‘volcanologists’ or am I making that up?—and earthquake scientists seem to agree that the island may indeed cleave at some point in the future. Way off in the future, Sam. Five thousand years. Ten.”

  “Didn’t know that,” I said. It was true. I didn’t know that.

  “Dr. Calderón doesn’t dispute that contention.

  “But her letter addresses a side controversy that’s been raging for most of a decade in the popular media about whether the sheer force necessary to trigger the landslide could, alternatively, be precipitated by man. Unlike some of her colleagues, who completely disregard the possibility, Dr. Calderón argues that a nuclear device of a specific size, placed in one certain location that is currently accessible within an existing cave network that runs along the primary ridge fault, might—might, under just the right circumstances—be able to generate sufficient force to trigger the aforementioned landslide. She presents a mathematical argument to support her conclusion. Truth is, the math is way over my head.”

  “I’m sure it would be over mine, too,” I said.

  In my mathematically challenged head, I was traveling back in time. I was outside that Indian restaurant in New Haven, smelling the aromas of naan and curry. I was on the plaza near Morse College and Stiles College, listening to Ann Calderón describe the potential devastation of a landslide on La Palma.

  The awful potential consequences of what she would have to reveal in order to save her daughter.

  Dee said, “In her letter in the journal, Dr. Calderón doesn’t identify the specific location within the mountain—precisely where in the cave network along the fault she believes a nuclear explosion would be most likely to precipitate the catastrophic landslide. I’ve been in touch with the journal editors. They tell me that her letter originally included that information, but that they asked her to excise it. For security reasons. In a post-Nine/eleven world. She agreed to their suggestion.”

  I was looking at my feet. Deirdre was looking in my eyes. I could feel the burn.

  From the corner of my eye, I could see her tilt her head to try to hook my gaze. I didn’t let it work.

  She took my hand once more. We reversed course and started walking west. Back toward the setting sun, toward Centro, and toward Alan, sitting bewildered at the bar, trying to save us seats.

  Alan wouldn’t be happy with me. People in Boulder tend to lose their high-altitude cool when they catch someone trying to save seats at a popular bar during happy hour on a perfect Friday evening.

  Deirdre put her arm around me for a few steps. “Dr. Calderón concludes her letter with her estimate of the statistical odds that the confluence of events—geologic and meteorologic—could ever come together so that a perfectly sized, perfectly situated, and perfectly timed nuclear explosion would be able to trigger a sudden, catastrophic landslide on La Palma.

  “Want to make a guess about the number?”

  Ann had used a number with me. I tried that one. “One in ten million,” I said.

  She laced her fingers in mine. “Don’t lose any sleep about the Canary Islands, Sam. Even if she did give it up to the assholes, it’s a long, long, long, long shot. Of all my worries after the siege, this one is near the bottom of the list.”

  Wow.

  Ann Calderón hadn’t trusted me.

  The story she had told me about La Palma and Cumbre Vieja and mega-tsunamis had nothing to do with the ammunition that the unsubs wanted from her in trade for Jane Calderón’s safety. Ann had sold me the Canary Islands tale so that she wouldn’t have to tell me what the hostage takers really wanted from the Calderóns in exchange for Jane’s safety.

  I’d fallen for it like a rube.

  Sometime on the Friday of the crisis, Ann had learned that what the unsubs wanted from her in exchange for Jane’s safety was temporary custody of her son and access to the Calderóns’ Gulfstream 200. But Ann didn’t want me to know that. She was afraid that I might end up divulging the information to someone who might be in a position to betray both her children.

  Ann Calderón treated me exactly like a hostage negotiator is treated by his or her superior officer. Ann never entrusted me with information that she didn’t think I needed to know.

  It was hard for me to admit, but it had turned out that Ann’s caution was warranted, and that her judgment about me was correct. The reality was that, with motives as pure as a father’s love, I had indeed tipped off the feds—first Poe, and then Deirdre—about the scope of the purported dangers of Cumbre Vieja. If I had known in advance about the unsubs’ escape plans with the Gulfstream 200, I might well have revealed that information to Poe and Deirdre, too.

  The consequences of that betrayal might have been catastrophic.

  Was I angry that Ann had deceived me?

  No. I felt chastened.

  Deirdre had gotten what she wanted from me—confirmation about the La Palma story. Did she realize how well I’d been played over the siege weekend by Ann Calderón? I couldn’t tell. I doubted I would ever know the answer to that question.

  If I had to guess, I would guess that Deirdre did recognize the residue of Ann’s finesse moves with me, and that part of the motivation for her trip to Boulder was to let me off the hook. Gently. I thought it kind of her.

  She said, “If Poe or I can ever do anything for you, Sam, we’ll be there. You need to know that.”

&nbs
p; “Thank you,” I said.

  We walked another half a block. I said, “How is Poe, Deirdre? Is he doing okay?”

  She was ready for my question. “Poe’s a survivor, Sam. Kind of like you, but . . . well . . . more damaged. What happened in New Haven has given him a lifetime of fresh investigations. He’s invigorated. He has dragons to slay. Real dragons that he knows are breathing real fire. He’s interviewing to bring a couple of new agents on board his little posse.”

  I glanced at Deirdre’s belly. “What about you, Deirdre? How are you?”

  She smiled and placed her right hand on her still-flat abdomen. “Poe said you knew.” She made a puzzled face. “Still can’t figure out how you do that. I’d known for only a day or two. I did the first pregnancy test on the Friday of the siege. I didn’t really believe it, you know? So I peed on another stick in the lavatory of the Amtrak train on my way to New Haven the evening before I met you. You’re dead-rabbit good, Sam Purdy.”

  I tipped an imaginary cap to her.

  Dead-rabbit good. I liked the sound of it.

  “I’ve gained a couple of pounds. Can you tell?” She raised her left hand and waggled her naked ring finger. “Lost some weight, too.”

  I touched her naked finger. “It’s good?” I asked, in my best Alan Gregory therapy voice.

  “It’s good,” she said.

  She suddenly smiled, and waved at something in the distance. I looked down the Mall. On the other side of Broadway I saw Poe wearing his Yale hoodie and a pair of aviator shades. He looked a little like the Unabomber. He was near the hot dog cart, a big smile on his face. The sun had set behind him. A halo of striated oranges and pinks framed the Front Range.

  I waved.

  Deirdre said, “He insisted on hanging back while we talked so he could check for surveillance. You know, just in case.”

  “SSG?” I said. I still wasn’t convinced they existed. “They’re real?”

  “They are,” she said. She reached up and touched my neck with tenderness that took me by surprise. “His latest obsession. Poe needs his obsessions.”