The roadway’s impact launched a geyser a hundred feet high and more than a mile long, stretching from Staten Island all the way to Brooklyn. As the spray subsided, Dawtry saw a fifty-foot wave hurtling toward the old fort. “Damn you,” he said, cursing not the messenger of doom who had foretold the collapse, nor the wave that was about to kill him—he surely deserved death—but cursing himself, in the final instant before the wave’s impact.
But there was no impact. Dawtry saw the wave rear above him. He saw the wave begin to crash down upon him. But he felt nothing.
He staggered forward, having instinctively leaned to brace against an impact that did not come. He would have tumbled right off the parapet if a strong hand hadn’t gripped his arm and dragged him upright.
Dazed and disoriented, Dawtry ripped off the goggles and stared wildly around him, gaping in disbelief: gaping at the calm, sparkling water of the Narrows; gaping at the crisp shadows of lofty girders and taut cables above him; gaping at the graceful bridge soaring—still soaring!—high overhead, rumbling with the footfalls of tens of thousands of runners and joggers. “What the fuck is going on? Can you please tell me what’s real here? ’Cause I sure as hell don’t know.” It was as if he’d been transplanted into the sci-fi movie Vanilla Sky, the boundaries between virtual reality and actual reality and nightmare utterly erased.
The guy was grinning like a Cheshire cat now, but the grin faded slightly when Dawtry raised his weapon. “Who are you?” demanded Dawtry. “You’re not FBI.”
The guy’s hands were up, his fingers spread in a stay cool sort of gesture. “You’re right, I’m not FBI. I’m DOD.”
“Defense? What branch?”
“Duh. DARPA, ’course.”
Something finally clicked in Dawtry’s rational brain, which was beginning to reboot. DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—was the Pentagon’s geek squad. The military’s science lab. The multibillion-dollar R & D department of the mightiest fighting force on the planet. Walton/Dalton nodded at the look of recognition in Dawtry’s eyes. “We’re the only ones with the know-how and the computing power to do this.”
“By ‘this’ . . .” Dawtry waved his goggle-clutching hand in a vague gesture that took in the bridge, the AR headset, and his own very confused self.
“By ‘this’ I mean a computer simulation that takes multichannel, real-time inputs—video input of what you’re seeing, three-D sensors that track your position and movements and your directional gaze—and then modifies the display and the audio track, superimposing computer-generated images and sound. All within a fraction of a second.”
Dawtry felt himself playing multiple games of catch-up. His heart was still pounding, he remained disoriented, and he felt furious and humiliated that he’d failed to see the explosives—or, rather, the “explosives”—girdling the suspension cables. He channeled his turbulent feelings at the DARPA guy, whose name he still couldn’t quite recall. “And what dimwit had the bright idea of using this high-tech shit for some sort of sadistic prank, anyhow?”
Dalton or Walton—no, Carlton (why the hell couldn’t Dawtry remember Carlton?)—flashed him another grin. “You did, Special Agent Dawtry. Not the specific scenario, of course—I’ll take some credit for that. Seeing that suspension bridge demolition on YouTube really did inspire me. But the basic concept? Using AR goggles to piggyback a simulated mass-casualty attack on a real-world event? Lifted straight from a memo you sent to your director last year.”
“Son of a bitch,” Dawtry said, suddenly remembering.
“Your director liked the idea. Reached out to DARPA, asked us to implement it. So who better to be the first guinea pig than you?”
Dawtry winced. “Me and my big mouth. I guess it’s back to Buffalo for me now, since I flunked my own damn test.”
Carlton shook his head. “It wasn’t you on trial here, man. It was the technology—the training methodology you suggested. Judging by your reaction—our telemetry says your heart rate shot up to one sixty, and your blood pressure to two twenty over one ten—I’d say the experiment was a home run. A lot more convincing and intense than I expected, frankly.” After a moment, with a sly grin, he added, “DARPA and the Bureau weren’t the only ones watching this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The CIA asked for a feed, too, though their interest is a bit more personal. Or should I say personnel.”
“I’m not following you.”
“You didn’t hear it from me, but rumor has it the Agency’s looking for a new FBI liaison.”
Dawtry frowned, but he also felt a buzz of excitement. “But what about Coutant? He’s been our Langley interface for years.”
Carlton shrugged. “Maybe he’s retiring. Or maybe they just want fresh blood. And maybe you’re it.”
Dawtry’s hmm was casual and ambiguous. But if people at the CIA were tracking his heart rate and blood pressure at this moment, the numbers would have sent a decidedly unmixed message about his reaction to the prospect of having his finger on the pulse of America’s domestic and global counterterrorism efforts: Hell, yeah!
CHAPTER 3
Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos
Day two
The Residencia, where visiting astronomers stayed on La Palma, was a long, low structure of concrete and glass. The building included a kitchen that served three meals a day, as well as administrative offices and a small library that was stocked with a Babel of books and three computers. O’Malley was working at one of the computers; more accurately, she was attempting to work, or pretending to work, but what she was actually doing was stewing.
She was stewing at the computer for two reasons. Reason Number One was the loss of her own computer, a loss she had felt keenly all day long. Reason Number Two was the crap weather that had blanketed the island in order to make her life a living hell. Outside, the sun had just gone down; she knew this because she knew, to the second, what time the sun set on La Palma today: at 17:37:28 UTC, Greenwich Mean Time (which astronomers around the world used), or at 18:37:28—just after 6:30 p.m.—local time. But despite the westward-facing windows lining the wall of the narrow Residencia, and despite her obsessive staring out those windows, O’Malley had not actually witnessed the setting of the sun. All she had witnessed was a steady deepening of the gloom inside the dense fog shrouding the mountain. Fog, she realized, was a relative term in this case: down at sea level, the island’s coastline might well be in the clear; even now, some of the locals might be looking up, watching the clouds scudding thousands of feet overhead. But from where O’Malley stood—or, rather, sat and stewed—the clouds obscured and obfuscated and enveloped.
Her foggy funk was interrupted by the speakerphone on the desk beside her. “Doctora O’Malley? You are there?” She recognized the voice as that of Antonio, the receptionist in the lobby of the Residencia.
She picked up the handset. “Hello? Yes, this is O’Malley. Antonio?”
“Doctora, Iñigo calls to ask if you come to the telescope soon?”
“Why? What for? There’s nothing to see—we’re completely in the clouds.”
“Wait just one moment, please.” O’Malley heard a click, then silence. After a pause, she heard another click. “Excuse me, Doctora. Iñigo says the liquid nitrogen in the camera needs to be replenished. Did you forget this?”
Damn, she thought. “No,” she said—a small lie. She checked her watch; she had nearly an hour until the coolant had to be replenished to protect the camera. Hold your horses, Iñigo, she thought. “Please tell him I’m coming.” She hung up the phone and scurried to her room for the borrowed coat. She would definitely need it; the windchill was already edging toward freezing. Sixty seconds later, she jogged through the lobby.
“Doctora!” Antonio called to her from behind the counter. He held up a set of keys and jingled them. “You are forgetting the keys. The observatory car.”
“I think I’ll walk.”
“But it’s cold,
and your telescope is two kilometers away!”
“That’s okay—I need the exercise. If Iñigo calls again, tell him I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” And with that, she waved and blew through the double set of glass doors and out into the fog. The clouds. The suspended aqueous aerosol that was a galaxy-size pain in her astronomical ass. She jogged, partly to hurry, partly to generate heat, partly to vent frustration.
Five minutes later, she was regretting her rashness in turning down the car; ten minutes later, she was gasping for breath, her heart pounding from the exertion of running. Man, she thought, they aren’t kidding when they say the air’s thin at seven thousand feet. You could go down in history as the first astronomer to die at the Roque de los Muchachos. Then she felt a stab of shame at her insensitivity, recalling the German scientist who had fallen to his death from MAGIC-II.
The road to the Isaac Newton Telescope wound upward past MAGIC, and although she couldn’t see it through the fog, she could hear it again, the wind—or the ghost of the dead German—moaning in the taut steel cables.
O’Malley paused to listen and to catch her breath. The air was thick with water vapor, but it remained thin on oxygen—20 percent thinner than the air back home in Baltimore, she knew. When she resumed moving, it was at a walk, not a run. Why take chances, with the altitude or the route? The two-lane road ended at the rim of the caldera, and in the pea-soup fog it would be easy to miss the turnoff to the telescope and stumble off the edge.
Half an hour after dashing out of the Residencia, O’Malley arrived at the INT building, which was barely visible in the dark and the mist. She entered by the basement door, then trudged up the metal staircase to the third floor, where the telescope was.
The interior of the dome was dark and cold. The darkness was to preserve the night vision of the astronomers. The cold was simply an occupational hazard: the metal dome was uninsulated, so the telescope would adjust to the outdoor air temperature, minimizing distortion from thermal air currents. Even in summer, the nighttime temperatures at this altitude dropped into the fifties or forties; in winter, it could go well below zero.
By the faint glow of the red work lights, O’Malley located the dewar of liquid nitrogen—a short, squat tank the size of a wastepaper basket, mounted on wheels—and rolled it from the edge of the dome onto the telescope floor. As she approached the base of the instrument, she was surprised to see a figure huddled there. “Hello?” she called.
“Ah, Meh-ghan, you are here,” said Iñigo. “I was getting worried.”
“It took me longer than I thought. Sorry. I forgot I wasn’t running on flat ground. At sea level.”
“No problem. I am glad to see you.”
O’Malley peered more closely into the gloom and saw another short, fat tank of liquid nitrogen. “Iñigo, why are you refilling the coolant? Didn’t Antonio tell you I was coming?”
His white teeth flashed, and O’Malley felt her night vision—or was it her clearheadedness?—diminish a bit. “Well, I was here, with nothing to do. And I didn’t want your work to be delayed.”
“What work? We’re totally socked in. Unless you’re a meteorological magician, there’s no work for me to do.”
He looked thoughtful. “For you,” he said, “I will try to make magic. Come with me.” He held out a hand; after a moment’s hesitation, she took it. His hand was large and strong, and warmer than she had expected. He led her to a doorway that was tucked into the low, curving wall that supported the dome. SALIDA DE EMERGENCIA, read a faintly glowing red sign: EMERGENCY EXIT. Iñigo paused, his free hand on the crash bar. “First,” he said, “you must close your eyes.”
“Close my eyes? Why?”
“Because a security light comes on for a moment when I open the door.”
“Got it.” O’Malley squeezed her eyes shut tight. Human eyes took half an hour to adapt fully to night, and a stray flash of light would reset her eyes to their daytime setting, requiring another thirty minutes to resensitize to the darkness. Remarkable, really: at night, the human eye was a million times more sensitive to light than in bright sunlight. Remarkable, too, she realized, how much more sensitive her fingers were when her eyes were closed. “Okay,” she managed to say. “My eyes are closed.”
She heard a thunk and a rasp as Iñigo pushed the crash bar and opened the door, then felt a tug on her hand. “It’s safe,” he said. “The floor is smooth. Come with me.”
“Can I open my eyes now?”
“Not yet. Almost.”
She let him lead her, stepping gingerly. He stopped, then guided her hand to a cold metal railing, which she gripped, first with one hand, then with the other. “Okay. Now you can open your eyes.”
When she did, she gasped, releasing the railing and bringing both hands to her mouth. “My God, it’s incredible!” She was standing upon a sea of clouds whose wispy tops swirled and eddied around her very ankles. Overhead, the Milky Way arched from horizon to horizon; below, the clouds glowed by the light of the stars. O’Malley felt her throat tighten and her eyes brim with tears. To find herself poised here, exactly on the surface of the clouds, even the roof hidden from view, astonished her. “Incredible,” she whispered. “It’s like I’m standing on the sky. So beautiful.”
“Yes,” Iñigo said. “Muy bonita. Very beautiful.” His voice was close, his lips almost touching her ear, and she realized that he was not looking at the clouds; he was looking at her.
Uh-oh, she thought, her knees going weak. Girlfriend, get a grip. She reached for the railing to steady herself; in her mind’s eye, she pictured herself tumbling forward and spinning downward through the clouds, just as her car had done.
“Would you like to dance on the sky?” he murmured, swaying his body against hers. O’Malley felt his breath on her neck, then felt his lips grazing her neck, kissing her neck. She drew in another breath and released the railing with one hand, turning toward him. As she did, she heard alarms shrieking in her head. She batted them away, closing her eyes and parting her lips. His face came closer. His lips brushed hers and—
“Iñigo, wait,” she said. “Stop. Something’s wrong!” The alarms were not shrieking inside her head; the alarms were shrieking inside the telescope dome. “What’s that alarm?”
He blinked, as if awakening, and his gaze shifted to the open door. “Mierda,” he swore. “The smoke detector. I left something cooking in the kitchen.” He turned back toward her with a smile. “It’s okay, I’m sure. I’ll go see about it in a minute.” He leaned in again, trying to take up where they’d left off.
But the spell was broken. O’Malley turned away and headed toward the open door, toward the looming telescope, toward coolheaded professionalism and her search for Planet Nine. “I should get to work,” she called over her shoulder, hoping her voice was steadier than her knees. “And you should go put out the fire in the kitchen.”
“Mierda,” he said again.
She paused in the doorway and turned back toward him. “But thank you for fixing the weather. And for helping me walk on the sky.”
Unbelievable, O’Malley thought. Un. Fucking. Believable. She stared at the latest photo. Like the others, it was worthless: the stars, which should have dotted the image with crisp, steady pinpoints, instead traced jagged, spiky tracks across the sky—a thousand tiny bolts of lightning, zigzagging in unison. Worthless. Utterly worthless.
She checked the clock above the console: half past midnight, La Palma time. In Baltimore it would be five hours earlier—seven thirty—and California was three time zones west of that. Four thirty, Berkeley time. Perfect.
She found the telephone on the console—Antonio had shown her how to dial international calls, which, luckily, were a courtesy the observatory extended to visiting astronomers. She punched in the US prefix and then a number she’d known by heart for a decade. After three rings, the call was answered. “Hola,” said a man’s voice. “Laboratorio de sismología.” The voice was right, but the language was wrong, and the accent was
even more wrong: a cartoon caricature of Spanish, with a topspin of Southern-boy redneck. O’Malley cringed and pulled the handset away from her ear briefly before responding.
“David, is that you?”
“O’Malley? Is that you?”
“Why the hell are you answering the phone in that atrocious Spanish?”
“Why the hell are you calling from Spain? I saw ‘Spain’ on the caller ID, so I thought I’d hablo in a friendly manner.”
“Never. Do it. Again. You’ll cause an international incident. I’m in the Canary Islands. Spanish, but not in Spain. Somewhere off the coast of Morocco.”
“Sounds exotic. Like a line from a movie script. ‘Meanwhile, somewhere off the coast of Morocco . . .’ You on vacay?”
“Work. There’s a big observatory complex here. I’m looking for Planet Nine.”
“We already have Planet Nine, Megan. It’s called Pluto.”
“Not anymore.”
“It’s gone? Or it’s no longer called Pluto?”
“Neither. It’s no longer called a planet. It got demoted. Pluto’s now classed as a dwarf planet.”
“That seems politically incorrect,” he said. “Insensitive, too. You’re looking for a bigger, better planet to take its place?”
“Yep. Way bigger. Way out there, a long ways past Pluto.”
“If you’re the one who finds it, you get to name it, right? Isn’t that how it works in astronomy?”
“Theoretically. But I’m not gonna be the one to find it.”
“But if you do, you’ll name it after me, right?”
“Sure. I’ll call it ‘My Favorite Ex-Husband.’ Catchy, huh?” It was an old joke between them. O’Malley liked the term’s versatile ambiguity: David was her only ex-husband, she still liked him, and she was glad to be out of their brief, almost comically bad marriage—a union that had seemed like a good idea for one drunken night in Las Vegas. Most of the time, she said the term with fondness; only occasionally did a note of sarcasm sneak in. “But as I say, the way it’s going, I’ve got no chance of finding it. Which is why I’m calling you.”
Wave of Terror Page 3