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CHAOS THEORY
Graham Masterton
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First world edition published in Great Britain 2007 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey SM1 1DF.
First world edition published in the USA 2007 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS INC of
595 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
Copyright © 2007 by Graham Masterton.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Masterton, Graham.
Chaos theory
1. Stunt performers – Fiction 2. Cuneiform inscriptions –
Fiction 3. Suspense fiction
I. Title
823.9’14[F]
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-120-0 (epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6536-6 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-023-5 (paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
‘Small changes in initial conditions produce large changes in the long-term outcome.’
Edward Lorenz
‘Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored!’
Alexander Pope
One
The late-afternoon sun was already nibbling at the summit of the Rock and Richard Bullman’s temper was starting to fray.
‘We’re going again!’ his sharp British voice crackled in Noah’s ear. ‘And this time make sure that you don’t catch up with him so bloody soon! I want to see much more of that carving across his wake! More spray! More of that bouncing up and down! More bloody drama, for Christ’s sake!’
Noah gave him a wave of acknowledgement and brought the Yamaha jet ski around in a wide, lazy circle. Sitting behind him, Silja leaned forward and said, ‘What is it? He wants another take?’
‘He wants more bloody drama.’
‘What?’ she said, in her stilted Finnish accent. ‘I thought it was bloody action he was wanting, not bloody drama! Maybe we should do this in bloody Shakespearean costume! Oh, well . . . mita vittua.’
They returned to their first position, close to a fluorescent orange buoy that was anchored thirty-five yards off the beach. Noah throttled back the four-cylinder engine to a low, sulky burbling, with occasional blips. Then he took a pack of Marlboro out of his shirt pocket, lit two of them, and passed one back to Silja.
‘You ever work with Vittorio Gallinari?’ he asked her.
‘Gallinari? No. But I was told that he is very finickety.’
‘Finickety? Gallinari made me throw myself out of a semi seventeen times over, in one afternoon. Didn’t like the way I rolled along the blacktop. “Why you flap-a you arms and you legs so much? You look like turkey!”’
Silja laughed. This was only their second week shooting in Gibraltar but Noah had already decided that he liked her. What was even more important, he trusted her, too. She was 5’ 11” tall, broad-shouldered and long-legged, although the long black wig she was wearing to double for Rayleigh Martin didn’t really suit her watery Scandinavian complexion. She was very feminine, but she was as strong as most men he had ever worked with, and her ‘air-sense’ was almost miraculous. And she liked off-colour jokes.
Noah would have been the first to admit that he was too old and battered for her. He had celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday last Tuesday, while Silja was only twenty-four. At least he was taller than she was – a rangy, loose-limbed man with an iron-grey buzz cut and iron-grey eyes and a weathered, angular face. He didn’t have to wear a wig for this part: he was stunting for Lee Kellogg, who was just as grey as he was.
He leaned forward on the jet ski’s handlebars and relaxed. It was late afternoon, but the temperature was still in the high seventies, and the sea was purple. Behind them, the Rock was growing increasingly dark, a massive fang of prehistoric limestone over four hundred metres high. Five or six seagulls bobbed on the swell close beside them, as if they had accepted the jet ski as a surrogate parent.
Off to their right, two hundred yards along the greyish sands of the Eastern Beach, a long black Fountain powerboat was moored to the end of the jetty. Three mechanics were working on it, and now and again its engines would start up, then helplessly cough like two old smokers having an argument, and fall silent again. This was the express cruiser in which the evil genius Karl Mordant was supposed to be trying to escape from secret agent Jack Brand and his feisty assistant Morning Glory.
‘More bloody drama,’ Silja repeated, contemptuously, tossing her cigarette butt into the sea. ‘To jet-ski or not to jet-ski, that is the bloody question!’
‘Maybe you could stand up two or three seconds earlier,’ Noah suggested. ‘You could spread out your arms, too, like a bareback rider. That would be dramatic.’
‘Oh, sure. Especially if I fell top-over-bottom into the ocean.’
‘I could gun the engine a bit more, just as you get up on to your feet. Bring the nose up, too, so that you can steady yourself against my back.’
‘OK. If you want to try it, I’m game. The worst thing I could do is splat into the side of the powerboat at eighty kilometres an hour. Eat out your heart, Wile E. Coyote.’
They waited with the supreme patience of people who spend most of their working lives waiting. They smoked another cigarette. Every now and then, a plane would take off from Gibraltar’s single landing strip, only two hundred yards to their left, and rise up, sparkling, into the late-afternoon sky. Jack Brand and his feisty assistant Morning Glory were supposed to have pursued Karl Mordant by dropping out of the rear doors of a twin-engined transport plane, just as it lifted off over the ocean, riding astride their jet ski as if it were a flying horse.
Noah hadn’t bothered to protest that – in reality – the water was so shallow that both of them would have been killed, or at least broken most of their bones. He was a stuntman, not a script editor.
The powerboat’s engines had been silent for a long time now and Richard Bullman eventually stalked to the end of the jetty to find out what was wrong. Noah clearly heard the word ‘bloody’ at least twenty-five times.
‘I don’t know why he doesn’t call it a day,’ said Silja.
‘Forecast says hazy cloud tomo
rrow. Besides, we have to be in Agadir by Friday afternoon.’
Suddenly, the powerboat’s engines bellowed into life. Richard Bullman stalked back along the jetty and climbed back into his crane. In his pink T-shirt and his flappy white shorts, he looked like a very cross toddler.
‘Marker!’ he shouted. ‘And – action!’
The two actors playing Karl Mordant and his bodyguard Drillbit came sprinting along the jetty, pursued by plain-clothes police. The police were firing their pistols, but Drillbit turned around and sprayed them with an Uzi. Three of them staggered and cartwheeled into the water.
Mordant and Drillbit clambered into the powerboat and cut the mooring lines. With a masculine scream, the powerboat leaped away from the jetty and headed out to sea, immediately followed by two more powerboats, both carrying camera crews.
Noah revved up the jet ski and waited for his signal. When it came, he let out the throttle and the jet ski surged forward, its hull bumping and blurting on the water. It felt as though they were speeding along a cobbled street on a motorcycle with no tyres.
They quickly caught up with the powerboat’s wake – two deep furrows of white foam. This time, Noah slewed the jet ski violently from side to side, criss-crossing from one furrow to the other, so that they were hurled up into the air and slapped back down again. His spine was jolted again and again, and as they came closer to the stern of the powerboat, the water was churning so ferociously that the jet ski almost nosedived under the surface.
Through the spray, he could see Karl Mordant gripping the rail around the sun deck, scowling and gesticulating at them, and Drillbit pointing his machine pistol at them, two-handed. A cameraman with a hand-held Arriflex was dodging between them.
The jet ski and the powerboat were making too much noise for Noah to be able to hear the gunfire, but he could see snatches of smoke being carried away by the wind. He ducked his head from side to side as if he were trying to avoid bullets.
Drillbit had to reload, and this was Noah’s signal to push the jet ski right up to the powerboat’s stern. He twisted the throttle as far as it would go, and the jet ski surged forward, its nose rearing up like Jaws.
Silja climbed to her feet, holding on to Noah’s shoulders until she found her balance. He could feel her knees against his back, and he could see by her shadow that she was spreading her arms wide, so he gunned the jet ski again. It collided with the powerboat just as Silja sprang up on to his shoulders and performed a forward somersault in mid-air.
She landed exactly where she was supposed to land, in the middle of the sun deck, but Noah had given her far too much momentum. She helter-skeltered across the powerboat, colliding with the cameraman. Both of them rolled over the portside railing and splashed into the sea.
‘Cut!’ screamed Richard Bullman, right in Noah’s ear. ‘Cut-cut-cut-bloody-cut! What the bloody hell was that all about?’
The powerboat’s engines died, and Noah circled around it to help Silja and the cameraman out of the sea. Silja was doing a slow backstroke and laughing, but the cameraman was frantically doggy-paddling around in circles. ‘My camera! Dropped my camera!’
Silja climbed up on to the jet ski, and reached down to take the cameraman’s hand. But he kept on thrashing around, peering into the water for any sign of his Arriflex. The sea was shallow here, and very clear, but the Arriflex was grey and white, and wouldn’t have been easy to see.
‘Noah, what’s going on?’ asked Richard Bullman.
‘Sorry, Richard. I kind of misjudged my speed.’
‘You’re not bloody joking. Get back to your first position and we’ll see if we can try it one more time, before we lose the light altogether.’
‘We have a slight problem here, Richard. Mac’s dropped the Arri.’
‘Shit. Is it damaged?’
‘I’m not sure. He’s dropped it into the ocean.’
There was a lengthy pause. Noah imagined that Richard Bullman was probably finding it difficult to speak. The sun was already half-eclipsed by the Rock, and it was obvious that they weren’t going to be able to shoot this scene again – not today, and not tomorrow, if the weather forecast was accurate. They might even have to come back again, after they had finished filming in Morocco.
The next voice that Noah heard was Kevin Langan’s. Kevin was the production manager. He sounded dry and unemotional, as if he were reading out a list of technical specifications, but then he always spoke like that, even when he was furious.
‘Noah . . . you’ll find a marker buoy on board the cruiser. Underneath the seats on the sun deck, third locker on the starboard side. Take it out and mark your position.’
‘OK, then what?’
‘Tomorrow morning, first light, you put on your scuba gear and you go down and you find that camera for us.’
‘It ain’t going to be easy, Kevin. There’s a whole lot of weed down there.’
‘I don’t care, Noah. You’re going to find it. If you don’t find it, I shall be quite unhappy.’
Noah knew what that meant. Several cameramen and technicians who had made Kevin Langan ‘quite unhappy’ hadn’t worked again for years.
‘I’m hearing you, Kevin. Over and out.’
Two
They were out on the Alboran Sea at first light the next morning, in a small diving-launch which smelled strongly of sardines and diesel oil. As predicted, the cloud was high and hazy, and there was scarcely any wind.
Noah had a hangover like a head-on car crash. Last night the crew had all gone to La Bayuca for a long and noisy dinner, and he had drunk two bottles of Rioja too many, which meant a total of four.
Silja said, ‘You don’t have to do this, if you’re not up to it. I can do it.’
Noah blew out cigarette smoke and shook his head. ‘No. It was my fault, so I have to do it. Kevin will never let me forget it, otherwise.’
The boat’s owner nudged up to the marker buoy and cut the engine. ‘You ready, mate?’
‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
He stood up. He was wearing bright green shorts with palm trees and parrots on them, which he had bought last year in Honolulu, when he was filming Hurricane Force. His body was stringy and muscular and tanned to a light oak colour, with scars and welts all across his chest and a Seabees tattoo on his upper arm – a cartoon bee in a Navy cap, flying through the air with a power drill and a collection of wrenches.
He checked his regulator, fitted his mask over his face, and then tipped himself backward into the sea.
Even though it was only mid-September, the water was surprisingly cold. Summer had been a long time coming this year, and the Mediterranean had never warmed up to its usual temperature. Noah twisted around and gave a strong kick which took him vertically downward.
He swam through a glittering school of rainbow sardines. The ocean here was less than eighteen metres deep, and he could see the bottom clearly. Most of it was covered with seaweed, which undulated like pale green hair. This was the mutant seaweed caulerpa taxifolia – originally bred for aquaria in Monaco – but which had now choked up thousands of acres of the Mediterranean seabed.
He saw something shining through the weeds, and swam towards it. It was one of dozens of empty wine bottles, which must have been thrown overboard from somebody’s party, as well as countless broken dinner plates. Greeks, probably, having a crockery-smashing session. But no sign of Mac’s Arriflex.
Using the marker-buoy anchor as his central point, Noah swam around in wider and wider circles. He would have enjoyed this, if his head hadn’t been hammering so hard. He had learned to dive when he was in the Gulf, with the Seabees, and he had become one of their best underwater fitters. His specialty used to be wet underwater welding – repairing the plates of bomb-damaged boats without having to tow them into dry dock.
Ahead of him lay a weed-filled depression, almost seventy metres wide. Noah swam over the edge of it, and there, amongst a tangle of nets and lines, he glimpsed the crescent-shaped gleam of a camera lens
. He reached down, found the camera’s handle, and hefted it up. He hoped to God that Mac’s footage was still intact. The Arriflex and its accessories were worth upwards of $70,000, but the images on the film inside were worth a hundred times that.
He half-swam, half-jumped his way back towards the marker-buoy anchor, as if he were walking on the moon. Up above him he could see the hull of the fishing boat and the diamond-shaped patterns of the waves.
He crossed over a wide stretch of bare sand where divers had obviously been clearing away the caulerpa taxifolia with suction pumps. It was a losing battle: as fast as the divers sucked it up, the weed grew back again, far more rapidly than any native variety.
Noah found himself bounding in slow motion through a wide scattering of assorted debris – bits and pieces of wreckage and jetsam that must have been sucked out of the sand along with the weed, but which had sunk back down to the seabed.
He saw the aluminium armrest of an old-fashioned aircraft seat. Beside it lay the empty frame of a suitcase, with a handle and even a luggage tag, but no sides. There was a man’s lace-up shoe, once black probably, but now greyish-green. An enamel mug, rusted in half; an umbrella; a tangle of fishing-nets; and a whole variety of blocks and tackles that looked as if they had been used for hauling up sails.
He had almost reached the weed again when he saw a binocular case half-buried in the sand. It was canvas, bleached white by the sea, but there was a chance that the binoculars inside might have survived. Noah had lost an expensive pair of Nikon Premier binoculars when he was filming two months ago in Montreal, and he hadn’t had the chance to replace them yet. He swam over and picked the case up.
It didn’t seem heavy enough to contain binoculars, but when he gave it a shake he could hear something rattling inside it – something that weighed six or seven ounces at least. He tried to open it, but the catch was far too corroded, so he looped its straps around his belt.
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