Epilogue
Sergeant Dobbs had been first on the scene to the Cavanaugh place, along with his damn fool partner who was banging one of these Vaughan bitches.
Damn it, they had stumbled their way like a bull in a china shop, wrecked everything. He knew that with Cavanaugh dead, the chances of getting his hands on a cut from the Rock of Rhodesia would be somewhere in the region of slim and none. Six months he’d been working on a way to get that diamond, risked his career on the chance Cavanaugh said he could deliver on. He should have known better than to trust a lawyer. He thought he’d grind his teeth to powder when they pulled the door to that shed open to reveal Joe’s body. The further revelation that Joe had gone so far off the deep end to murder Marcos Rubera and, according to the statement from the Vaughan sisters, his own father merely cemented in Dobbs’ mind that he had made a critical error of judgment.
A month had passed, the Rock had not surfaced. To trump it all, the business run by Terry’s girlfriend and her sisters was by all accounts booming to the point of people turning to them instead of the local police for help with minor crimes. This in itself didn’t bother Dobbs; after all, the less work he had to put in running round after the morons of Savannah, the more time he had to plot revenge against the girls who had wrecked his plan for escape. He should be in Bora Bora or Aruba by now. It was small reward, knowing that at least he would get to make the Vaughan sisters’ lives a living hell if he couldn’t be rich beyond his wildest dreams. Besides, you never could tell, maybe the Rock would turn up, and Dobbs would be poised to scoop it up.
Dobbs sat reading the newspaper in the patrol car, occasionally glancing over the top of the paper to check on the progress Terry was making toward purchasing the Tuesday morning coffees and donuts. He was still three customers back in the line; the idiot refused to use cop privilege to cut in line like a normal police officer. Dobbs sighed heavily, his heavy gut lifting and sagging back down. The paper had a picture of the Vaughan sisters on the front page, with the headline; “Savannah Investigators Bust Alligator Poaching Ring.” Ridiculous. It was fluff pieces, barely even crimes to Dobbs’ experienced mind. But the press lapped it up, partly due to those mulatto girls being good looking women, he was sure. Dobbs was tempted to screw the paper up and throw it out the window, but instead he folded it neatly, and placed it on the back seat.
Terry soon returned, and passed Dobbs his coffee. Dobbs took it in silence, brooding on the future.
***
The squirrels in Madeline Frome’s garden were busy, especially since Madeline had left for a retirement village and put the property up for sale.
The removal of the annoying elderly human was forgotten by the squirrels within a week as they explored and rampaged through the attic of the old house, getting into a short and brutal turf war with a few rats. The squirrels were ultimately victorious, and went back to collecting nuts from the end of summer bounty. One of the family of gray furred, bushy tailed rodents had collected a tidy pile of nuts that he had stored at the base of the large tree he lived in at the center of the rapidly overgrowing lawns. He had arranged them there as part of a relay from the trees in the garden next door. He had already fought a skirmish with his sister over the pile, despite the nuts all going into the communal stores. Just because they were family, didn’t mean this squirrel did not know that these nuts were his alone. In his small forepaws, he gripped a nut, transferred it to his jaws and prepared to climb the sturdy tree. In seconds he was twenty feet in the air (not that he would have referred to it as feet, being a rodent and not aware of human measurements) and there was the hole to the pantry. The pantry was a naturally formed crevasse in the wood that sank into the very core of the plant, completely hidden from view by all who were not a squirrel in just the right place. He pushed the nut into the hole, and followed it with his head, pushing it into the narrow hole. He liked watching the nuts fall, bouncing onto the growing pile that was being created from their labor. Long ago in the lifetime of a squirrel, he had found a strange nut at the base of the tree, inside a strange, useless human enclosure. He had watched the elderly human that used to live inside the house totter out one day and bury it, right beneath his paws, and it had been an easy task to dig up the hole. It had taken him some time to figure it out, but eventually the squirrel had managed to open the hinged box, and get to the nut inside. It was evidently resistant to his teeth, but perhaps the old human had buried it so that the shell might weaken over time. In any case, it glittered in the afternoon sun, and the squirrel decided it was far too fine for one of those noisy, aggressive primates to have. He took it to the pantry, and stored it with the other nuts.
He liked seeing the faint glint of it as he loaded nuts on top, one by one, day after day. Today was the last time he would see it, until the stores were emptied over winter. The last nut fell into the pantry, bounced once, twice, and came to rest neatly over the last gap in the food store through which the last glint of the Rock of Rhodesia could be seen. The squirrel looked a little disappointingly at the place where the glittering had once been, and then left to resume gathering. Soon, he had forgotten all about it.
The End
Also available:
The Rig
by Steve Rollins
(read on for a sample)
Chapter One
The project was conceived the moment that surveyors suspected the presence of an oil field off the coast of California.
A massive oil rig was to be placed thirty-three miles off the island of San Clemente. The US government would foot the bill for it and in a great public-private partnership with Chevron they would begin mining the field, if they could strike oil.
But then the environmentalists of California got involved and protested against the rig, which, they said, would be a great risk to marine wildlife in Southern California, not to mention how much a spill would affect their beautiful coastline. The project was delayed as the senators and the president tried to salvage the situation from the Hollywood celebrities and the Silicon Valley billionaires.
In the end it was one of those same Silicon Valley billionaires who saved the project. He proposed that the drilling platform be a completely self-reliant city. The place would be a testing ground for the technology that could be used to rebuild all cities if global warming wiped them out.
Most people in the media, and consequently across the general public, suddenly thought the project was one of the greatest ever devised by any member of the human race. And it would not be attempted if it were not for William Portis.
Portis was the inventor of a major PC operating system and he was worth billions. For a while he had stepped back from his company and focused on philanthropy. He spent a lot of money on charity work and, together with his wife, Chloe, he was a major campaigner for better education, vaccinations for children and controlling climate change. But as his company had expanded into the smartphone market and that of wearable technology, he had stepped back into it. Immediately his worth and his influence grew again.
And there were few people outside of William Portis, who could have gotten that project going. His connections with the high and mighty, built through his many charitable works helped a great deal. His economic might did the rest. He easily won over one of the big voices of the campaign against the project through sheer economic power. Senator Jacobs of California was in need of money, and so were many of his projects.
A few million dollars changed hands and Portis bought a large stake in the prison system across the US. Jacobs had needed a reform and an investment and Portis had been only too happy to do it. Running the US prisons was a big money spinner anyway. Jacobs had managed to bully most of the opposing senators and congressmen into finally supporting the building of the rig. He was the most loyal supporter of Portis’s project and he would stand or fall by it. Neither knew which it would eventually be.
***
For three years, the ports and shipyards north of San Diego were a hive of activity as t
he various parts of the rig were built.
Other parts were built by companies near Seattle and gradually parts of the rig were floated south. After three years, ‘The City’ was assembled off the coast of San Clemente and floated to the place where the drilling would begin.
It was a massive structure, complete with a Walmart, movies and a theater. One leg of the beast contained hydroponic gardens; another housed the labs where scientists brought in from the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands could grow artificial meat. The remaining legs of the great platform contained the laboratories and work floors of the Chevron engineers and the scientists and analysts who would be doing the test drills and the eventual mining of the field. The platform on top held the residential areas, the offices of the companies and the people involved and of course, all the shops, and recreational areas. In the end these also included an Arena Football stadium, and several sports grounds and swimming pools.
There was a glorious opening, with speeches by the tech billionaire, Senator Jacobs and the president. The president joined Portis in switching on the platform’s systems and the place began buzzing into life. They had a grand dinner where the manager was presented, a man called Berry Stryker. Stryker had an impressive resume as a manager. He had worked for Portis’s own company and had been on the board of directors of several large oil companies. He might have been a lawyer, but he was well-qualified to run ‘The City’.
A year after the platform was installed, it was fully manned and fully inhabited, but it was again the source of controversy. The wind and solar power that was meant to be powering the platform seemed insufficient, and the network was not connected properly, forcing the platform to rely on oil and gas supplies from the mainland for its energy supply. In a reminder of the failure of the German Energiewende, the US government and the Californian government were facing a storm of criticism. They managed to hush most of it up, but anyone who paid any attention to ‘The City’ or to the supply ships that came from the San Diego ports knew the failure of the project. It suddenly became imperative that they strike oil.
Chapter Two
“I tell you, he’s perfect,” the man in the cheap black suit told the man at the desk next to his.
“I don’t know,” the man said, staring at his computer screen. “He’s got no priors, no experience with any of it and he has no links at all.”
“He’s been protesting this project ever since the first day. Look at his Facebook posts on it too. He seems a bit angry about the energy supply being fucked as well.”
The second man looked over the file on the screen. There were many things in there he did not like.
Yes, the man from the file was angry with the project, and his name was good. But he just did not fit the profile. For a start, he was not a Muslim. His father had been, but his mother was not, and he himself was a declared agnostic. He was clever and well educated, well mannered, calm, no criminal record. There was no history of mental illness, not even a hint of instability around the death of his parents that had been in an automobile accident. It just was not the way they normally were. Even his face was handsome. He looked Middle Eastern, but there was nothing by his appearance to suggest he might derail or do something like what they wanted him to do.
“He just doesn’t fit the profile,” the second man sighed and rubbed his hands over his face. “This whole thing is a nightmare anyway. I don’t get why they wanted to do this.”
“You know why,” the first man said as he took a sip of his lukewarm latte. “Besides, we have orders. More than my job’s worth to disobey direct orders.”
His partner just shook his head and stared at the screen again.
“Well, I don’t see we have anyone else either. If you’re sure, we’ll just go for it.”
Both men walked out of the office and down into the coffee shop where they bought some fresh coffees. They stepped into a black car and drove to the campus of San Diego State University. Outside the grounds they just sat and waited in their car. They waited for their target to appear and then got out of their seats.
***
Akhmed was tired when he left the university.
It had been a long day. The professor who supervised his thesis was not pleased with his progress. He studied meteorology and had spent the past year gathering data to support his thesis that the level of the oceans was in fact rising. But his professor had poked holes in his research within seconds. He could not believe it, but it had been so easy for the man to completely destroy his thesis that he found himself in serious doubt about his project. He had spent his whole afternoon working through the mountains of data he had gathered and trying to find out what could be salvaged from a year’s worth of work.
His morning had not been great either. He had been one of the speakers at a rally on the campus, protesting the enormous oil rig off San Clemente. He had urged the students to stop the tankers that brought oil and gas to the rig from leaving port. But the rally had been broken up by the campus police. He had not understood why. The rally had been peaceful and quiet, but for some reason it seemed to be against university policy now to protest against that rig.
He walked straight to the coffee shop across the street from the campus to get some coffee. He rarely drank coffee, but his brain and eyes craved the caffeine. He ordered a large cappuccino from the barista and he waited for the drink in a zombie-like trance. He barely noticed the red-headed barista trying to flirt with him. She had been attracted to his dark Egyptian face for a long time and liked how enthusiastic he could be about problems that faced the world and helping to solve them. But most of all, she liked his sharp features and his keen brown eyes.
“Here you go,” the barista said, smiling brightly at him.
“Thanks,” Akhmed muttered.
He wanted to grab his drink and turn away, but just then the barista decided she had the courage she needed to ask him. She pulled the cup away from him.
“You know, I see you here a few times a week and I always often wonder what your name is.”
Akhmed looked at her, slightly disbelieving. His mind was quite far away from something like this. It was far away from normal life.
“Um, Akhmed,” he said quietly.
The girl pushed the coffee towards him.
“I’m Helen. Maybe you should ask me out sometime? Because I’d like to go out with you.”
Akhmed nodded and took his coffee.
“Pleasure, Helen.”
He began walking away, but then his distracted mind came back to reality and he suddenly realized what she had said. When he turned back to her, she had begun cleaning the espresso machine.
“Um, Helen. Would you want to go out with me sometime?”
She looked back at him and smiled.
“Tomorrow here at seven? We can go for drinks?”
“Sure.”
He winked at her and walked out. Suddenly his headache was gone and his mood turned sunny again.
The tap of the finger on his shoulder shook him. It shocked him awake and made him jump violently.
“Fuck!” he swore, turning around.
Behind him was a blond man in a badly fitted suit. The man was sunburned and wore dark sunglasses. By his shoulder stood a dark man, also in a suit and wearing sunglasses. This man looked dark, Middle Eastern or Mediterranean perhaps.
“Mr. Akhmed Hussain Abbasi?” the blond man asked, his tone very neutral.
Akhmed nodded.
“Yes?” He tried to look through the sunglasses and discern a trace of emotion in the man’s eyes. But the eyes were completely hidden. “Who are you?”
“My name is Smith, John Smith,” the suit said, handing him a business card. “This is my associate, Mr. Garcia. We have something we would like to discuss with you.”
***
Half a year later, Akhmed came back from Helen’s place in a brooding mood.
He had been seeing her for a while now and they were happy together. They had even begun to talk abou
t moving in together. But there was a big problem. The problem was Akhmed’s sour mood swings. He had become so bothered about ‘The City’ that he couldn’t seem to get it off his mind. He felt he had to do something.
In the weeks after getting his degree, he had taken to being even more miserable. There had been a ceremony for the graduation, but he had been stopped from attending. Security had thrown him out the moment he walked in. They had said he was a known troublemaker and would probably seize the opportunity to protest ‘The City’ again. It was then he noticed the signs in the room bearing the logo of the software company owned by the billionaire who had started the project and suddenly it made sense to him why his protests had been stopped.
He had become enraged at that. He was angry with them, and angry with the world. Helen had comforted him and taken him to bed and taken the rest of his worries away. But in the morning, as he left her place to get some clean clothes from his own apartment, his mood had settled in again.
He was convinced the whole affair had been as the men had told him. The Silicon Valley billionaire had the university and some parts of the government in his back pocket. There was no way anyone would ever come out and say the project was a failure. The only thing they cared about was striking oil and making money. There was no consideration for the environment or the lives of the people around the coast. It had made him angry. Angry enough to want to do something about the very existence of the platform.
From his wallet, he withdrew Mr. Smith’s business card and called the number on it without hesitation.
Somewhere else in America, a simple cell phone began to ring.
“Hello,” the man answered sleepily. “Mr. Smith?” the voice on the other end asked.
“Who’s this?”
“It’s Akhmed Abbasi. We met about half a year ago? You mentioned you might know a way of dealing with that massive oil rig off San Clemente?”
The Evil That Men Do Page 9