The Big One

by Harrison Arnston

  The Big One

  * * *

  Harrison Arnston

  AN [ e - reads ] BOOK

  New York, NY

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, scanning or any information storage retrieval system, without explicit permission in writing from the Author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locals or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1990 by Harrison Arnston

  First e-reads publication 2002

  www.e-reads.com

  ISBN 0-7592-6566-6

  Other works by Harrison Arnston

  also available in e-reads editions

  * * *

  ACT OF PASSION

  For my sister Margaret Landry, an author in her own right, and my brother Donald. Both have encouraged me from the beginning. For that, I thank them and express my love. To my brother Len — who thought I was nuts — I love you anyway. And a special thank you to Don Rhoades.

  Author’s Note

  * * *

  On October 17, 1989, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale struck the San Francisco Bay area, causing considerable death and destruction. Most experts agree that this earthquake was not the much-feared Big One.

  No one knows exactly when the Big One will strike, where it will strike, or how strong it will be. They are sure of only one thing — it will come.

  Table of Contents

  * * *

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  * * *

  Two cars, one closely following the other, parked at a promontory adjacent to a tight curve in the snake-like road that wound its way through the Santa Cruz mountain range. The spot was less than forty miles south of the venerable city of San Francisco, less than ten miles west of the parvenu affluence of Silicon Valley. The air was clear and crisp, the reflected light from the moon casting a soft, yellow glow over the heavily wooded area.

  The drivers of both cars exited their vehicles, leaving the engines running. For a moment, the two men, tall, muscular, dressed in almost identical business suits, looked around and listened, saying nothing. All was quiet, save for the sound of crickets and the occasional owl. Satisfied, the driver of the first car said, “Okay, I’ll take care of him. You get the gas.”

  As his companion removed two plastic gas cans from the trunk of one car, the man opened the door to the first car and struggled to transfer a lifeless form slumped in the passenger’s seat to a position behind the steering wheel. It took some effort, as the car, a Nissan 280Z, was a low-slung sports car, and the body of the man was heavy and difficult to move.

  Finally, after much grunting and cursing, it was done.

  The hands of the dead man were placed upon the steering wheel and the seat belt was snapped into position.

  Before proceeding further with their task, both men stood motionless. Once again, they scanned the surrounding area and listened for the sound of any approaching vehicle. From the promontory, which jutted out over a deep ravine, the men could see anything coming up the road within five hundred yards in either direction.

  There was nothing.

  Quickly, they went back to work. While one of them poured fuel over the exterior of the 280Z, the other doused the interior. Then, the gas cap was removed and a long, thin wick was inserted into the neck of the gas tank. The other end of the wick was carefully wrapped around the doorpost.

  As one man took the now-empty fuel cans back to the other car, his partner removed a book of matches from his pocket. Holding the matches in one hand, he reached in with the other and shifted the automatic transmission lever into “drive.”

  As the car began to inch forward, he lit two matches, flung them through the open window, and ran toward the parked car as the moving vehicle burst into flames. In seconds, the car carrying the dead man rolled over the edge. It rattled down the side of the ravine, smashing violently against the rocks until finally settling upside down at the bottom, still aflame, with two of its tires spinning crookedly.

  A dull thud reverberated through the ravine as the gas tank exploded, sending fresh flames shooting twenty feet in the air.

  For a moment, the men stood at the edge of the ravine and stared into the flames. One of them grinned and gave a little wave. “Bye, Tommy,” he said. Then, he slapped his companion on the shoulder. “We better get the hell out of here.”

  “Right.”

  The two got into the parked car. As they drove away from the scene of their handiwork, the flames from the wreck cast an eerie glow on the leaves of the bushes bordering the gorge. Leaves that rustled gently in the breeze, as though in counterpoint to the violence that had just visited this place.

  One

  * * *

  They both noticed the noise first. Ted Kowalczyk looked up from the insurance policy in his hands to his secretary, who stopped explaining the details of the claim and locked eyes with Ted.

  It was as though someone were throwing pebbles at the window, even though that was impossible, since the office was on the fifteenth floor of the Los Angeles high-rise. Then, the sound changed from a light crackling to a deep rumble. Ted and Shirley looked at the window.

  The building was swaying.

  An earthquake!

  “Quick!” Ted yelled. “Go stand in the doorway!”

  Shirley ran to the doorway and braced herself. Ted squeezed his massive frame beneath the desk.

  The noise intensified. Ted could feel the floor vibrating. The desk seemed to be bouncing up and down. He gritted his teeth as he felt the building continue to move. If this was a bad one, the really big one, hiding under a desk or bracing oneself in a doorway wouldn’t make much difference.

  It wasn’t Ted’s first experience with an earthquake, and no doubt, it wouldn’t be his last. To live in California was to live with the knowledge that an earthquake could strike at any time. Usually, at least with the moderate ones, they lasted for only a few seconds. But those seconds could be terrifying. The earth trembled, walls shook, dust flew, and there was the sound of things falling from shelves and crashing to the floor. For those inside the tall buildings, there were additional concerns, as the buildings had a tendency to sway. It was a feature that was engineered into the structures by architects who claimed
it helped relieve the stress on the buildings.

  The quake had lasted ten seconds so far. In other parts of the city, supermarket aisles became cluttered with all manner of bottles and cans, lighting fixtures swayed, and some storefront windows shattered. Outdoors, a few highways developed small cracks in the road surface, rivers temporarily overflowed their banks, and freeway drivers wondered if their tires had suddenly gone flat.

  In the residential areas, swimming pools came alive and water slopped over onto lawns and patios. Tall trees swayed back and forth as though caught in some unseen wind.

  And almost everywhere, ears were assailed by a combination of creaks and groans as walls tried to pull away from studs and heavy beams writhed. The air itself seemed to generate a low rumble that struck fear in the hearts of even the bravest souls.

  And as they sought shelter in a doorway, or under a table, or simply fell to the ground, those experiencing the quake would notice a slight uneasiness in their stomachs and become aware of an almost subliminal message creeping along their nervous systems, trying to find its way to their brains. The message was one that repeated itself every time an earthquake struck — more a question than anything else. It was probably the only time that the entire population of a large area was thinking exactly the same thing at the same time.

  “Is this the big one?” they would ask themselves. The Big One. The quake that the scientists had been predicting for years. The quake that would, as the jokes went, make most Californians instant owners of waterfront property.

  The question resounded in Ted’s mind as the quake continued.

  For a few seconds more, the intensity increased; the shaking became more serious, almost violent.

  And then it stopped.

  Small puffs of dust filtered down from the acoustic ceiling in Ted’s office in the Metro Trust building, just one of a new forest of high-rise buildings located in downtown Los Angeles. On the far wall, a drinking glass that had been teetering on the edge of a shelf lost its balance and fell to the ground. The sound of it smashing into a hundred fragments was all the more shocking now that the quake had stopped.

  Ted crawled out from underneath the desk and walked gingerly around his office, checking the minor damage, his confidence slightly shaken. But he knew that in a couple of days, he’d forget all about it.

  Until the next one.

  This one wasn’t all that big, as earthquakes went. A 5.3 on the Richter scale, they would say later. At least the early reports marked it as being a 5.3. Still later, they would upgrade it, or downgrade it, depending on how you wanted to look at it, to a 5.4. Nothing unusual there. The magnitude reports of earthquakes were often changed once additional data was received and calibrated. But it was enough to rattle windows and make tall buildings sway gently. And drive a small nail into the wall of confidence that Californians try to build around their conscious fear of earthquakes.

  Ted, like most people fortunate enough to live in California, accepted earthquakes as something to be lived with. It was a fatalistic attitude that seemed to serve him well until … the earth began to move and the ground behaved more like a slightly choppy sea than immobile clay.

  In Los Angeles, there were minor earthquakes several times a year, but they were usually so small that no one was even aware they’d occurred. But every so often, maybe once every other year, an earthquake big enough to be felt shook things up.

  Ted stood in the center of the office and stared out the window. Luckily, it was still in one piece. From his vantage point, one hundred and fifty feet above the ground, nothing seemed amiss. Traffic continued to wind its tortuous way along the two freeways visible from the window. No buildings lay in ruins. No fires glowed.

  A white-faced Shirley Baker stood in the doorway, one hand firmly gripping the frame, the other covering her mouth. The attractive brunette looked as though she expected another quake to occur any second. “Did you feel that?” she asked, the words muffled by her hand, the terror making her voice quaver.

  It was a silly question, the kind of question people ask when they aren’t thinking clearly. When they’re gripped tightly by fear that comes from something they know they can’t control.

  Ted turned and faced her, smiling understandingly. “Yeah, I sure did,” he said. “Musta been at least a six. The building shook pretty good.”

  The hand covering her mouth dropped slowly to her side, the arm hanging limply. She let out a deep sigh and said, “I don’t know if I can take this, Ted. I really don’t.”

  Seeing how truly frightened she was, Ted walked over and put an arm around her. “You’ll get used to them, Shirley,” he said, with as much conviction as he could muster. As a former FBI agent, he’d been trained to deal with fear, to handle crisis situations. This was far from a crisis situation, and yet he could feel a certain emptiness in his own gut. Earthquakes did that to people. At least for a few hours, they did.

  “I’ve lived in L.A. almost all my life,” he said, “and it’s just something that happens from time to time.” He pointed to the window. “Look, I’ll bet half the people out there weren’t even aware there was a quake.”

  He started to walk her back to her office. She was still shaky, her face pale, her breathing coming in short bursts. “One time,” he continued, a smile on his face as he covered one of her small, cold hands with his own big, paw-like hand, “I was playing golf at Riviera with some honchos from Chicago. There were four of us, two to a cart. We were driving along and both carts started vibrating. We stopped and the four of us got out and started looking at both carts, figuring the wheels were coming off. Can you imagine? Four grown men actually thinking that two golf carts had decided to come apart at the same time?

  “Well … it wasn’t too long before I realized what had happened. By the time we got back to the clubhouse, it was confirmed. We’d just had an earthquake. I think that one was a 4.9. No big deal.”

  She looked at him with disbelieving eyes. “You told me that story the last time, Ted. You also said I’d get used to them. But I haven’t. They still scare the devil out of me. My heart’s pounding so hard I can hardly breathe.”

  “I told you that story before?”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “Oh.”

  Ted started to say something but stopped when the foyer started filling up with people from other offices on the floor, all wanting to compare notes.

  For the next half-hour, the quake was topic “A” in the building. Then, as always, people drifted back to their offices to pick up where they left off.

  The next day, things seemed back to normal. In Los Angeles, damage had been slight, no one had been seriously hurt, and everyone seemed to want it forgotten. There were reports that some small aftershocks had rumbled throughout the area during the preceding twenty-four hours, but they measured less than 3 and nobody had really felt them.

  Ted’s morning mail was usually heavy with claims that had to be checked out. Most were legitimate but some, especially the disability ones, required extensive investigation.

  This morning’s mail was no exception, except for the parcel addressed to Ted and marked Personal and Confidential. It had been mailed from Menlo Park four days earlier and the return address was that of Tommy Wilson, an old college buddy Ted had kept in touch with over the years, albeit loosely.

  What made the package especially interesting for Ted was the fact that Tommy was a well-respected seismologist. The last time they’d talked to each other had been two years ago, not long after Tommy’s divorce. Coming, as it had, on the heels of a moderate earthquake only made the package all the more interesting.

  Ted tore off the brown wrapper, covered with a colorful array of stamps, and looked at what Tommy had sent him. There were two items. An official report of some sort, sealed in opaque, blue plastic, and a covering letter. The letter read:

  Dear Ted:

  Please don’t look at the enclosed until you call me. If I’m all right, I’ll tell you what I want done next. I
f I’m not all right, I want you to open the package. I realize how strange this must seem, but I don’t know what else to do.

  I would have put this on overnight delivery, but I just haven’t got the time. I slapped enough stamps on it so they’ll be sure to deliver it.

  Again, I apologize for sounding like a complete idiot, but when I have the chance to talk to you, I’ll be able to explain. I know I can count on you.

  Other than list his office and home telephone numbers, that was it. Cryptic as hell. Especially when you considered the fact that Tommy wasn’t a mysterious kind of guy. He was a very serious scientist whose work was his life.

  Ted turned the sealed report over in his hands, then set it on the desk. He picked up the phone and called Tommy’s home number. There was no answer.

  No surprise there. Tommy was hardly ever home. He almost lived at his lab, obsessed as he was with learning more and more about the very thing that had shaken them all up the day before, earthquakes. His dedication to his work had been the critical factor in the termination of a seemingly solid twelve-year marriage.