by Ben Bova
THIRTY-NINE
THE UNDERWATER EARTHQUAKE lasted only seventy-two seconds. Some of its impact on the sea above was absorbed by the soft mud of the seabed sediments. Still, a tremendous jolt of energy was imparted to the water. Monitoring satellite sensors detected a deep swell in the Gulf of Mexico , a spreading ring of waves like the ripples caused by dropping a pebble in a pond. But these waves contained megatons of energy. They were not high, so far away from land where the water was more than two miles deep. But they were spreading in all directions, racing across the face of the Gulf, and steepening as they ran toward the shallower waters of the coast. The satellite automatically sent its data to the ground stations beneath its flight track. None of the automated equipment was programmed to recognize a tsunami. There had never been a tidal wave in the Gulf of Mexico within the history of the satellite monitoring system. No alarm bells rang. No human observer shouted out a warning. The data were entered in the monitoring system’s computer files, where they would be analyzed someday. While the tsunami silently, relentlessly surged toward shore. Don Marcello Arcangelico found himself on the horns of a delicate dilemma. On the one hand, it was his policy never to allow himself to be physically connected with a crime of any sort. Other people committed the acts that he deemed necessary while he sat safely in his home, surrounded by witnesses. He had never been charged by the police with so much as a misdemeanor. On the other hand, he felt that he had to see this man Randolph with his own eyes. Gaetano was ambitious enough to cut his own deal with the big shots in the GEC.Randolph had to be silenced and the Scanwell woman neutralized. And Gaetano kept firmly in hand. Don Marcello could not rest easily on any of those counts until he saw Randolph with his own eyes. Trust did not come easily, not when the whole world was at stake. This was no time for a slip up, no time to let Gaetano think that the old man was getting careless. So he commanded Gaetano to bring Randolph to his home in Reggio. There was little risk that Randolph would ever identify him as being involved in Scanwell’s abduction.Randolph would be dead within hours. About an hour after the floatplane took off Dan whispered to Malik, “We’re not heading for Sardinia .” “Are you certain?” Pointing at the placid sea and puffy cumulus clouds outside their circular window, Dan said, “The sun rises in the east and it’s ahead of us on our left.Sardinia is a little west of south from where the yacht was anchored. If we were heading that way the sun would be almost behind us.” Malik unbuckled his safety strap and made his way forward to the flight deck, hunched over because of the plane’s low ceiling. He spoke briefly with the two pilots and then returned to his seat. “Well?” “They told me to mind my own business.” Dan shook his head. “It’s not Sardinia .” “What can we do?” “Get some sleep,” said Dan, cranking his chair back. He closed his eyes, but he was far too restless to sleep. He felt a sullen fatigue sapping at his strength. Maybe I really have radiation sickness, Dan thought. I feel like a squeezed-out dishrag. And that damned earplug hurts. He knew there was a plane full of Yamagata paramilitary following them at an extreme distance, guided by mini-satellites that Nobo had launched specifically to monitor the region. But what good is all this if they don’t take either one of us to where Jane is? Gaetano had left the castle immediately after dinner. Up in her room, Jane heard a car crunching on the gravel driveway that circled the castle’s inner courtyard. Going to the window, she saw a flash of headlights against the main gate, and then the car was heading down the switchbacks of the road cut into the cliff’s face. Someone knocked at her door. From the barred window Jane called out, “Who is it?” “Me,” came a muffled voice. “Kim.” She let out a pent-up breath, suddenly aware that she was alone in a castle full of armed men, except for Kimberly. “Come in,” she called. The bolt slid back and the door creaked open. Jane caught a glimpse of the young man guarding the door, his dark face solemn as Kimberly stepped into the room. She was still in the glittering blue sheath she had worn at dinner. “Wow! They gave you the biggest bedroom in the place.” “I suppose they did,” said Jane. “But no TV.” Jane had not noticed until Kimberly mentioned it. “I think Rafe would rather I didn’t see any of the news broadcasts,” she said flatly. “There’s nothing much on anyway,” said Kim, moving slowly through the room, touching the sturdy old bureau, the faded mirror atop it, the massive hand-tooled armoire, the dusty tasseled spread across the canopied bed. “You’re lonely,” Jane said. “Kind of.” “Are you really Rafes fiancée? Has he proposed marriage to you?” Kimberly laughed brittlely. “Marriage? Not for me! I’m never going to marry Rafe or any other man.” “Then...?” “Oh, he was kind of fun for a while. But I get the feeling he’s just using me to make my sister sore.” “He’s not a decent man.” Kimberly shrugged. “Who is?” Jane went to the couch, sat down and patted the cushion beside her. “Come here and tell me about yourself. And your sister.” Luther Clay took his family to Biloxi for the weekend. As head of Louisiana ’s environmental protection agency, Clay had phoned his opposite number in Mississippi to make certain that the beach at Biloxi was reasonably clean of oil and the Gulf water was all right for swimming. His daughter had whined and complained all through the long, sweltering Friday-night drive. She wanted to be with her boyfriend, not stuck with her medieval parents. But as soon as they hit the beach early Saturday morning she found that there were plenty of guys there who were quickly attracted to her. Clay fretted about the amount of skin she was exposing in her bikini. Even black skin was no protection these days. But his wife told him that it was better than her spending the weekend with that white trash she thought she was in love with. It was a hazy, cloudy day. The sun seemed pale and too weak to harm anyone despite the warnings about skin cancer. The tide seemed to be out farther than Clay had ever seen it before. Tides around the Gulf were never that big to begin with, but this morning it seemed as if the water had just picked up and walked away. Wet gray sand stretched out for what looked like a mile or more. Clay stood staring at the uncovered beach, the tiniest hint of a worrisome thought nagging at the back of his mind. He saw his daughter laughing and horsing around with a bunch of boys, some of them white. Then he noticed something really odd. Far out on the horizon the sea seemed to rise up. Like a wall of water, just lifting up, its top edge as straight as the horizon itself. Clay thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He had never seen a tidal wave before. “So you are Dan Randolph,” said Don Marcello. Dan looked down at the corpulent old man in the wheelchair. There was a smell of corruption about him, a stink of fear in the way the other men in the room walked on tiptoe and spoke in whispers. Even Gaetano seemed subdued in this darkened, dusty, closed-in chamber with its heavy ancient furniture and its lone feeble lamp casting more shadow than light. It was high noon outside, but in this room there was no sunlight, no time. Like a gambling casino, thought Dan. He and Malik had indeed been strip-searched and walked through an X-ray metal detector identical to the type used at airports. Now they stood in the gloomy study of Don Marcello’s dreary house, under the scrutiny of the balding old man and a roomful of guards. “You know who I am,” Dan said, standing before the wheelchair. “Who are you?” Don Marcello waggled a fat beringed finger. “That is not important,” he said in heavily accented English. Dan noticed that his rings dug deeply into the flesh of his fingers; the old man had been wearing them for many years. “We were supposed to see Mrs. Scanwell,” said Malik, standing beside Dan. “Where is she?” “You will see her,” Don Marcello replied. “Mr. Randolph will not.” A bolt of fear sizzled through Dan. I should have known better. They’re too smart to take me to the same place they’ve taken her. “Then it’s no deal,” he said sharply. “If I don’t see her with my own eyes, the deal is off.” Don Marcello’s mouth dropped open for a moment, then he threw his head back and laughed, laughed so hard his eyes squeezed shut and tears ran down his baggy cheeks, laughed until he began coughing and sputtering. One of the silent men standing in the shadows behind the wheelchair came up and handed him an inhalator. Hacking and coughing, the old man s
tuck the nozzle in his mouth and pressed the plastic plunger. Maybe he’ll choke to death, Dan thought. “They didn’t tell me you are a comedian,” said Don Marcello, once he got his breath under control again. “The deal was that I see Mrs. Scanwell and make certain that she’s safely on her way back to Paris ,” Dan insisted. “You’re in no position to make any demands,” Don Marcello replied. Pointing to Malik, “This one will see the woman and take her back to Paris . You stay here.” “No,” said Malik. “What?” It seemed to be a word that Don Marcello did not often hear. “We have honored our commitment. You must honor yours. Randolp his entitled to see Mrs. Scanwell. You pledged that he would. You must honor that pledge.” “Honor? You talk to me about honor?” Malik leaned down slightly to put his face closer to the old man’s. “You cannot keep the woman silent if she fears that Randolph has been murdered. Unless she sees him, she will not cooperate with you.” Don Marcello glared up at him. Malik turned to Gaetano. “You know Jane, Rafaelo. Am I speaking the truth about her?” “Yes,” said Gaetano reluctantly. “She is in love with Randolph . If she thinks we’ve killed him—well, we’ll have to kill her too.” “So?” “And you will have to kill me also,” Malik said. “I will not stand idly by if you murder Jane Scanwell.” Dan’s eyes flicked from one of them to the other as he thought, Malik doesn’t mind them knocking me off, but he’s sticking his neck out for Jane. “How will the world react to the death of two members of the Global Economic Council?” Malik asked. “One of them its new chairman.” Gaetano shifted uneasily on his feet. Don Marcello stared at Malik, one hand stroking his chins. “There are limits to what you can get away with,” Malik went on. “Murdering two GEC representatives will bring down the full power of the international community upon your heads. And you know it.” Dan was silently urging, don’t tell him we’re being tracked, for Chrissakes! Don’t blow it! Don Marcello finally replied, “You will cooperate with us if we satisfy the woman?” With a glance at Dan, Malik allowed a tiny smile to creep across his lips. “Naturally. What do I care if you kill this American? He’s been nothing but a thorn in my flesh for years. But Jane Scanwell is another matter. Let her see Randolph . Then I will take her back to Paris . What happens to this Yankee afterward is of no concern to me.” He sounds as if he means it, Dan thought. Aloud, he said, “Jane won’t go along with you if she realizes I’m dead.” “She will not realize it,” Gaetano said. “We will make a few tapes of your voice and then use a synthesizer to send her telephone messages every few weeks.” “You’ll need my cooperation to make those tapes.” Gaetano snickered. “You’ll cooperate. First you will scream a lot, but soon enough you’ll do whatever we tell you to.”
FORTY
THE WALL OF water that drowned Biloxi hit the inlet to Lake Pontchartrain less than half an hour later. It surged through the inlet, steepening and speeding up in its narrow confines, smashing everything in its path—boats, wharves, locks, bridges—and surged into the broad lake like an invading army searching for plunder. The concrete bridge carrying Interstate Highway I0 was inundated, cars, trucks, buses swept away into the churning muddy waters. The central span of the bridge collapsed, never designed to stand up to latitudinal stresses of such force. Within minutes the expanding wave surged over the north-south causeway that spanned the lake and smashed against the concrete levee that protected the city of New Orleans and its suburban communities. Whole sections of the levee were gouged away; rotting concrete and rusting steel reinforcements that should have been re placed years earlier simply tore loose under the tidal wave’s enormous pressure. Millions of tons of water poured through. The city’s pumping stations were overwhelmed before they could even start up. A frothing smashing wave of dirty gray water rushed through the streets, knocking down poles and highway bridges, collapsing buildings, tossing automobiles and diesel trucks and city buses like flotsam. Over the unstoppable roar of the water came the screams of a million people and more as they were drowned or crushed by the raging water. Downhill toward the river the water raced, carrying half the city with it. Electrical wires snapped and fizzed, sewer lines literally exploded with overpressure. Basin Street,Rampart Street ,Bourbon Street disappeared beneath the raging floodwaters. At Duncan Plaza the water smashed through the doors and windows of the City Hall and other government buildings in an unstoppable torrent, tearing away desks, file cabinets, bookcases, people. The mayor found herself stranded on the roof of the City Hall, clinging to a useless radio antenna. She sobbed hysterically as she looked out on what had been a city. There was nothing to see except the ghosts of buildings sticking out of the surging filthy water. The water itself was thick with debris and the floating bodies of the dead. The same twin-engine floatplane took Dan, Malik and Gaetano westward through the late afternoon toward Sardinia . They were totally unaware of the disaster that had struck the Gulf shore and New Orleans . Dan leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. That old man is the boss of these hoodlums, whoever he is. Then Dan grinned sardonically. They were bargaining over my life, Malik and the old man. Deciding when they would kill me. Not if. When. He wondered where the Yamagata plane was. They can’t have stayed aloft all this time. They must have had to put down somewhere and refuel. Have they picked us up again? Inadvertently he reached toward his ear, where the biochip transceiver was lodged, but pulled his hand away when he remembered that Gaetano was sitting behind him. They haven’t detected it so far, he thought. But if I activate it now to give Nobo’s people a signal to home on, would the pilots up in the cockpit be able to detect it on their instruments? He glanced over at Malik, sitting tensely in his seat. Not yet, Dan decided. The plan is that we don’t activate the chips until we see Jane. Then the Yamagata team can attack. If they’re still close enough to get the signal. No matter what happened, Jane would be safe. Malik’s playing a dangerous game, tightrope-walking between Gaetano and his own interests. But he wants Jane safe almost as much as I do. At least he says he does. Dan tried to sleep. But no matter how exhausted he felt, no matter how weak and old he felt, sleep would not come. I’m scared, he realized. For the first time in my life I’m really scared. These guys are going to kill me. Or try to. I’ll be okay once the action starts, he told himself. It’s this damned waiting, just sitting here with nothing to do but think and wait and worry. Eventually he drifted into a troubled sleep, dreaming of formless monsters and hovering faces that shifted before he could truly recognize who they were. As they drove slowly up the switchback road cut into the cliff’s face, Dan craned his neck for a view of the castle. It loomed up at the top of the cliff, dark gray crenellated stone walls outlined against the bright blue Sardinian sky. It’s not all that big, Dan thought. But those walls look plenty thick. He felt sick in the pit of his stomach. Whether from fear or radiation or just the fact that he had not eaten anything in almost a full day, he could not tell. Maybe they plan to starve me to death, he thought. Didn’t one of the Roman emperors do that to somebody? Walled him up in a cell beneath the Senate building and let him starve to death? He searched the cloudless sky for a trace of a contrail, some evidence that the Yamagata plane was near. Nothing. The sky was a flawless bowl of blue, unmarred by any planes whatsoever. As their car trundled over the warped wooden boards of the castle’s moat bridge, Dan saw that there were six men standing at the main gate. They were in shirtsleeves, dark lean men with stubble on their faces and short-barreled shotguns slung over their shoulders. Rabbit guns. Luperia. The kind that armies all over the world had adopted for close-in killing. Another half-dozen armed men were sitting around the sunny inner courtyard. One of them trotted alongside the car as it slowed to a stop. The driver clicked the door locks and the shotgun-armed man pulled Dan’s door open. Ducking through, Dan stretched tiredly and felt his spine and tendons pop. He let the late-aftemoon sun soak into his bones. It felt good, although his legs seemed wobbly. Must be the gravity, he told himself. Looking up at the fitted stone walls around the courtyard, he saw a face in one of the narrow barred windows. Jane. Dan’s stomach did
a flip. He grinned foolishly and waved to her. Jane’s face disappeared from the window and another took its place, a red-haired young woman who looked enough like Kate... Dan remembered Kate’s sister. So she’s here too. Wonder if Kate’s really going to join the party. Gaetano came around the car with a smarmy smile on his face. “You see? I spoke the truth, eh? There she is, waiting for you.” As Malik pulled himself out of the car, an older man, dressed in a dead black suit, stepped out of the doorway and beckoned to Gaetano. He went to the man, who looked to Dan like a butler or some sort of house servant. The man spoke briefly to Gaetano. “What do you suppose he is saying?” Malik asked, sounding slightly nervous. Dan barely heard him through the earplug. “Telling him what’s on the menu for dinner,” Dan said, shifting to put Malik on the side of his good ear. Malik huffed. “Us, most likely.” “Us,” Dan agreed. “I have more good news for you,” Gaetano said. “An old friend of yours has come all the way from the Moon to be with us. She should arrive here in a few minutes.” Kate Williams, sure enough. Dan wondered why she would leave Alphonsus, then remembered that she wanted more than anything else to protect her sister. “We will wait here for her to arrive,” Gaetano said. “Her car is halfway up the cliff already.” “I want to see Jane,” said Dan. “You can wait a few minutes. Then we can have a big, happy reunion, all of us together.” They also serve who stand and wait, Dan said to himself. Matik looked more apprehensive than ever. The seriousness of this pickle is just starting to sink in to him. We could all get ourselves killed. Dan strolled slowly away from the car, across the sunlit courtyard, noticing that at least two of the guys with shotguns watched him with beady eyes, hands on their weapons. If Gaetano knows that Kate’s car is halfway up the cliff, maybe he’s got guards posted along the road. Or maybe Kate just phoned him from the car to let him know she’s almost here. He enjoyed the warmth of the sun through his woolen shirt. He felt perspiration trickling down his ribs. Bake the bad stuff out of me, he said to the sun. Boil away the fear. Make me strong again. He heard the boards of the bridge thudding, and an executive limousine swung through the gate, crunching across the gravel of the courtyard. It stopped behind the car that Dan had come in. A strapping big chauffeur hopped out and opened the door for Kate. Dan stared at the chauffeur. There was no mistaking his size or his rough red beard, even in an ill-fitting suit of livery and a cap that was almost comically too small for him. How in the hell did Big George get into this game?