After committing the pattern to memory, she began scrolling backward, day by day: “T minus one,” she said as she clicked backward to the prior day. She called off the numbers for each day: “T minus two. T minus three . . .” The patterns varied, but only slightly, from day to day, and by the time she had scrolled through an entire month’s worth of plots, O’Malley was back to questioning her sanity, or at least her methodology. She was looking for something, but she didn’t know what, so how on earth would she recognize it if she found it?
“Christ, O’Malley, pay attention,” she scolded herself. Somehow, in trying to scroll farther backward, to begin looking at the prior month’s data, she had accidentally returned to her starting position, day “T,” the day of her hike. She recognized that day’s three plots as easily as she’d have recognized the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and Orion in the night sky. “Once more with feeling,” she said. “T minus thirty.” She clicked on the calendar icon, and the screen refreshed.
The hairs on her arms and neck stood up, as if an electric current were passing through her body. She stared at the date she had entered—it was indeed “T minus thirty”—and then stared at the three waveforms on the screen. They were identical—absolutely, utterly 100 percent identical—to the waveforms from the day she had been shaken awake. Just to be sure, she opened another window on her computer screen and called up the day of her hike. Her eyes darted back and forth from one to the other. The correspondence was perfect. Her pulse racing and her adrenaline surging, O’Malley called up the plots for day T−1, November 13, and in the other window, day T−31, October 14. “Jesus God,” she whispered. These, too, mirrored one another exactly, squiggle for squiggle. Her cursor now moving faster and faster, she scrolled back, in parallel, through a second month’s worth of data, and by the time she finished, she knew, beyond any shred of doubt, that the archive had been altered. Somehow, someone had gone into the database and pasted in fake readings for the Canary Islands’ seismic station—at least two months’ worth of copied data, pasted in. But why? The answer was both obvious and troubling: to conceal whatever seismic events were actually occurring.
But it was when she Googled “La Palma earthquake” that the rabbit hole turned truly deep and dark, a new shaft opening beneath her feet like a trapdoor into a bottomless pit. The top hit on the list had an odd, ominous title: “La Palma Mega Tsunami.” The next hit included an even more explicit summary: “Scientists warn of massive tidal wave from Canary Island volcano.” She clicked on the link. The article was written by a British science writer. Its opening made O’Malley gasp:
A wave higher than Nelson’s Column and travelling faster than a jet aircraft will devastate the eastern seaboard of America and inundate much of southern Britain, say scientists who have analysed the effects of a future volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands. A massive slab of rock twice the volume of the Isle of Man would break away from the island of La Palma and smash into the Atlantic Ocean to cause a tsunami—a monster wave—bigger than any recorded.
The story, which appeared in several British newspapers in 2001, cited an article in a respected seismology journal. O’Malley clicked on a link to the article and found herself reading a scholarly piece filled with maps and tables. Scanning rapidly, she read that the scientists’ computer modeling predicted that the wave could be up to 100 meters high—330 feet—when it hit the nearby coast of Africa. Even after traveling all the way across the Atlantic, the scientists said it could still strike America with a height of 50 meters, or 165 feet.
The articles were slightly misleading in one detail: strictly speaking, the tidal wave wouldn’t be caused by a volcanic eruption but by a massive landslide—a slide that could be triggered by an eruption. La Palma’s volcanic ridge, running north to south—the very ridge O’Malley herself had hiked on just two days before—formed the island’s rocky backbone. According to the scientists quoted in the article, a long, deep fault line bisected that ridge. If an eruption or earthquake should cause the fault to fail suddenly and catastrophically, an immense portion of the island—“twice the volume of the Isle of Man,” as the journalist put it—could slide swiftly into the sea, triggering a tsunami of unprecedented height and destructiveness. The wave would spread like a ripple from a stone tossed into a pond—only in this case, the stone could be the size of two hundred thousand Great Pyramids, and the ripple could be higher than Niagara Falls. And according to the scientists, it wasn’t a question of whether the event would happen; the only question was when.
O’Malley clicked on link after link related to “La Palma Mega Tsunami,” and clicked on those links’ secondary links, and those links’ links. She read dozens of the articles, mainstream and scientific. Some articles vehemently denounced the theory as far-fetched and alarmist; others, though, considered it plausible or at least possible. As she thought about La Palma’s seismic and volcanic instability, she grasped why David had initially said the word “shitstorm,” even though he’d later tried to unsay it, or at least downplay it.
Then came the video: a computer animation made by the tsunami modelers to show how the disaster could unfold. O’Malley watched it with a combination of scientific detachment and morbid horror. The video was no Hollywood special-effects spectacle; the video was simply a color-coded animation, not unlike weather radar images of a storm’s movement and intensity. In this case, though, the storm was the wave—the tsunami—radiating outward from the island of La Palma. The animation used different colors to represent different heights, graphing predicted “runup heights” at various points where the wave would strike coastlines. As the animation played, O’Malley found herself mesmerized by the blooming colors: Yellow. Orange. Red. Crimson—no, carmine. Fuchsia. Violet. Blue. It was as if some exotic, rainbow-hued flower were unfurling in the waters of the Atlantic. A corpse flower, she thought abruptly. When it blooms, we die.
She replayed the video again and again, hitting the “Pause” button to study the wave’s height at major cities. The Canaries themselves, being closest, were hardest hit, of course, with runup heights of four hundred meters or more—a wave as high as the Empire State Building. For cities and towns along the islands’ coastlines, destruction would be swift and total. What was it A. Samler Brown had written about the bursting of the cochineal bubble? “Retribution was swift, sudden, and terrible”? Something like that. According to the animation’s model, the northwest coast of Africa would be hit by a wave potentially as high as the Brooklyn Bridge. Spain and Portugal, forty to sixty meters, perhaps the height of a fifteen- to twenty-story building. France and the UK, twenty or thirty meters high—up to a hundred feet. “North America gets ~30 m runup,” read the caption on a freeze-frame image in the animation. “A bit less to the south and a bit more to the north.”
O’Malley read that line aloud—“a bit less to the south, a bit more to the north”—stunned by its offhandedness about the prospective devastation.
The Bahamas, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico would be hit by 100 to 130 feet of runup, while the Lesser Antilles—the Virgin Islands, Antigua, Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, and other specks she couldn’t name—might get 160 feet. Brazil’s northern coast would be slammed by a runup of up to 125 feet.
The wave’s impact, explained a website created by one of the scientists modeling the disaster, would be similar to that of the 2011 tsunami that had devastated Japan, with one key difference: a La Palma mega tsunami could affect one hundred times more coastline. “On the bright side,” the scientist offered, “there is no evidence that this will happen anytime soon . . . and with the odds of a collapse at just a few percent each century . . . don’t rush to sell your seaside condominium.” This final pearl of real estate wisdom was juxtaposed on a photoshopped image of a hundred-foot wave smashing into Florida’s Space Coast. The incongruity—the upbeat, chummy advice superimposed on the bleak image—drew a bark of outraged, appalled laughter from O’Malley.
Eventually she broke free from obsessively watc
hing the animated disaster and—a scientist herself, after all—moved on to gathering contextual data. She took terse, elliptical notes from a Wikipedia article on tsunamis: “Before 1900, only 44 recorded tsunamis,” she wrote, after counting down the list. “Since 1900, another 38.” A moment later, “Deadliest modern tsunami was 2004 Indian Ocean wave. Initial surge 108 ft. Killed 230,000!” When she read the entry about the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, she noted, “Wave 133 feet high when it hit village of Miyako!”
Eventually her Google searching and link clicking brought her to a lengthy piece in the New Yorker, a source to which she assigned greater credibility than many of the sensational publications trumpeting disaster. The story—titled “The Really Big One”—opened with a remarkable vignette: A group of seismologists, attending an earthquake conference in Japan in 2011, felt their hotel begin to shake. They rushed outside, some of them timing the duration of the event on their digital watches. The shaking lasted for nearly five minutes—a marathon, as earthquakes go, and therefore a sign that it was a big, bad one. But the Japan earthquake described in that opening vignette wasn’t the “really big one” mentioned in the title. The really big one was an earthquake and tsunami that seismologists were predicting could strike America’s Pacific coast in the near future. The quake’s epicenter would not be the well-known and notorious San Andreas Fault; rather, it would occur in a lesser known but potentially far deadlier place called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a seven-hundred-mile offshore fault running from Northern California all the way past Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island.
During the next fifty years, the New Yorker story explained, the Cascadia Subduction Zone had a one-in-three chance of producing a major quake—a magnitude 8 or even magnitude 9 monster—followed swiftly by a tsunami anywhere from twenty to one hundred feet high. That tsunami, the article said, could devastate coastal cities throughout the Pacific Northwest. “FEMA projects that thirteen thousand people will die,” the article went on, “and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people.” She reread the passage again; surely she had misread it? No: thirteen thousand people dead, one million people displaced. “Our operating assumption,” a FEMA official was quoted as saying, “is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.”
O’Malley felt stunned by the article’s revelations. Tsunamis were things that happened in distant, perilous parts of the world, weren’t they? Japan. Indonesia. Thailand. Madagascar. But Washington? Oregon, for chrissakes? Her mind wandered back to a bicycle trip she’d taken the summer after her freshman year of college. She had pedaled from Portland to Astoria and then down the entire Oregon coast. Mentally she ticked off the towns she’d visited, wondering how hard they’d be hit.
Astoria? The waterfront’s a goner, but some of the town’s on a hill. Run for high ground. Seaside, that pretty little beach town? Kiss it goodbye. Cannon Beach, ditto—only safe place would be on top of Haystack Rock, but you’d have to be a world-class rock climber to scale it.
She raced farther down US 101, the coast highway, ticking off the doomed towns: Manzanita, Tillamook, Rockaway Beach, Lincoln City, Newport. And those were just in Oregon; she didn’t even know the names of all the places in Northern California, Washington, and British Columbia that would be swept away.
O’Malley felt not just stunned but stupid, too. Why had she never heard of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, with its one-in-three chance of devastating seven hundred miles of coastline, its potential to kill thirteen thousand people and displace a million more? She also felt betrayed, she realized. Why wasn’t the government doing more to prepare people in the Pacific Northwest to survive? She sent a text to David: Cascadia subduction zone—how come nobody’s talking about this or prepping? Madness!
Then the realization hit her: The potential loss of thirteen thousand lives from a quake and tsunami in the Northwest was minor—practically trivial—compared to what could happen if the worst-case version of a La Palma tsunami hit America’s Eastern Seaboard. How many Americans lived in low-lying coastal cities and towns along the Atlantic coast—twenty million? Fifty million? Good God, it was probably closer to a hundred million. What was FEMA doing to watch and prepare for that potential clusterfuck? She shot another text to David: La Palma mega tsunami—WTF? Why the hell didn’t you mention that to me?
A moment later, her phone buzzed—a sound like an angry cicada that had gotten trapped on its back—delivering David’s response: Didn’t mention b/c I knew you’d freak out. As you’re clearly doing. STOP PICKING AT IT.
She fired right back: STOP PATRONIZING ME.
She returned to the video animation, the beautiful bloom of disaster unfurling from La Palma and blossoming across the ocean to New England, New York, the mid-Atlantic coast, poor doomed Florida. And then another realization hit her. Swamped her. Damned near drowned her in dread: The ripple-shot explosions on La Palma—the ones someone had altered the GSN data to hide—had nothing to do with visitor-center construction or highway work. No, the ripple-shot explosions that had wrecked her astronomical observations had everything to do with this: with a landslide and a mega tsunami. Someone—some monster—was actively trying to tip the seismic scales on La Palma. Trying to trigger a massive landslide and unleash a gargantuan wave that could kill millions upon millions of people. Were the recurring explosions enough to do it? Or—she shuddered at the thought—were there more things, bigger things, in the works, too?
She felt a wave of fear—a tsunami of terror—crash into her, churn her, reduce her to blind, instinctual panic. Dammit, O’Malley, think, she ordered herself. Breathe and think and do something. But what?
Eventually she typed a web address—FBI.gov—and explored pages labeled “What We Investigate,” “Submit a Tip,” and, intriguingly, “Weapons of Mass Destruction.” But the FBI’s focus seemed to be on domestic crime and terrorism attacks “originating within the United States,” and its definition of “weapons of mass destruction” included nothing remotely resembling earthquakes and tsunamis.
Her hands shaking, O’Malley typed another Google search: “Central Intelligence Agency.” “The work of a nation, the center of intelligence,” read a slogan at the top of the home page. To the right of the slogan she saw a button labeled “Report Threats.”
“If this ain’t a threat, I’d hate to see one,” she muttered.
She clicked the button, and a box of text appeared on the screen. Beneath two paragraphs of text about the agency’s commitment to combating terrorism was another button labeled “To Contact the Central Intelligence Agency Click Here.”
O’Malley took a deep breath—and then another, and then another.
And then she clicked.
CHAPTER 7
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Dawtry flashed a nervous smile at the seven men seated equidistantly around the mahogany conference table. “Thanks, Jim,” he said after Vreeland had made brief introductions all around. Five of the seven had been at Dawtry’s talk in the Bubble a few days before, and he took that as a hopeful sign, given that the talk had seemed to go well. But today the stakes were higher; today was his for-real, formal interview for the post as FBI liaison to the CIA. Vreeland had told him, sort of, not to worry, though the man’s choice of words—“The job is yours to lose”—had seemed odd in the moment, and had been gnawing at Dawtry’s confidence ever since.
“I’m honored to be here,” he began, “and I’m excited by the idea of working directly with you and your colleagues.” Several of his listeners gave slight nods—acknowledgment, or perhaps even slight encouragement? “So, since we’ve all got clearances, I’d love to hear your candid thoughts on the big-picture challenges and threats on the horizon. Jim?” He looked first to Vreeland, seated at the opposite end of the table.
Vreeland paused before speaking. “Actually, we had something different in mind,” he said. “We hear ourselves talk all the time. We’d much rath
er hear you. We’ve just been reading some of your internal memos about counterterrorism, and we’re eager to hear more of your thoughts. See if we’re on the same page.” He smiled, and the smile’s thinness—as thin as a blade—sent a chill down Dawtry’s spine.
Shit, he thought. Which memos? Is something I wrote about the CIA about to bite me in the ass? He felt a sudden trickle of sweat under his arms. Was it possible they’d gotten their hands on the “CIA blind spots” memo he’d sent his boss, by way of explaining why he’d like to serve as the Bureau’s interagency liaison? If so, they’d be furious. Please, God, no, he prayed. “Yes, of course,” he said, hoping his voice didn’t betray his rising anxiety. If he was lucky, they were simply reacting to some lesser faux pas. Perhaps he had merely overstepped by not hanging back and letting Vreeland launch the discussion. “Where would you like me to start?”
“Wherever you like. What do you see as—how did you put it?—the big-picture challenges and threats on the horizon?”
Smooth move, Chip, Dawtry thought. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. He cleared his throat, then forced another smile. “Well, obviously, you guys are the experts, so I might be out of my depth here, but I’ve been thinking about history lately.” The CIA traditionally recruited from Ivy League schools and their secret societies—Skull and Bones, Quill and Dagger, Scroll and Key—and Dawtry hoped that this tradition might translate into a former history major or two at the table, liberal arts guys who would understand and appreciate a bit of historical contextualizing. “What was it Churchill said? ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’? I’ve been wondering if we’ve failed to learn from some important events in recent history.”
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