Investigating still further, I discovered that a geologic fault line exists on La Palma, and that an earthquake could cause this fault line to slip catastrophically, triggering a massive landslide and—as a consequence—unleashing an immense tsunami. This tsunami, which could strike America’s eastern seaboard with potential wave “runup” heights of up to 100 feet, could endanger millions of people (Attachment 9, Boyd et al., “The La Palma Cumbre Vieja: Modeling a Potential Mega Tsunami,” Journal of Seismology).
Last but not least—most disturbing of all, in fact: In seeking to understand the extent and magnitude of anthropogenic seismic activity on La Palma, I have discovered that the Global Seismographic Network (GSN) database appears to have been altered, with data sets replicated multiple times, by copying and pasting, in what appears to be an attempt to mask explosions and seismic activity. The inference of the altered data seems clear: the clandestine explosions appear to be intended to trigger—and to weaponize—a catastrophic geologic event.
As a scientist, I am compelled to seek rational explanations for observed phenomena. As an American citizen, I am terrified by the explanation that best fits the facts. I encourage you—I implore you—to investigate and take whatever action is needed to protect countless American lives from the dangers posed by these clandestine actions on La Palma.
I would appreciate the opportunity to review my research and findings in more detail with the appropriate person(s) at your agency.
Yours truly,
Megan O’Malley, PhD
Dawtry had been standing up when he began reading. As soon as he read the subject line, he rolled his eyes, but he kept reading. At some point, he must have sat down, for when he finished reading, he found himself in a chair, his left elbow leaning on the table, his head propped on his thumb and fingers. The letter had been paper-clipped to the stack of attachments. Dawtry unclipped it, set it to one side, and began rereading, this time scanning each attachment as it was referenced in the letter.
Soon his heart was pounding, and he felt himself sweating profusely, in a way that had nothing to do with the swig of tequila he had knocked back before opening the envelope.
As he reread, he sought the loopiness in the letter, the madness in the memo, but he could not discern any. It was possible—it seemed unlikely, but it was certainly possible—that the woman had faked the photographs and seismograms and even the scientific journal article. But if she’d faked them, she’d done a damned good job of it.
A business card had been tucked under the paper clip. Dawtry now inspected it. Professor O’Malley’s campus address and Hopkins phone number were printed on the card in neat, small type. Her cell number had been added in pen. He reached for his phone and was preparing to dial when the phone buzzed in his hand. Startled, he dropped it. The phone clattered to the table, where it continued to buzz and twitch. “Calvert Woodley,” read the display—the name of Dawtry’s condo building. Why on earth was the building’s management calling him on a Sunday afternoon? Was he behind on his monthly maintenance dues? He didn’t think so, but it didn’t matter—not compared with what he was dealing with. Dawtry rejected the call and began dialing Professor O’Malley’s number. He would call her office first, as a matter of protocol, then—when he got her voicemail, as he surely would on a Sunday—he’d phone her cell.
He was halfway through the number when his phone buzzed again. “Calvert Woodley.”
“Christ,” he muttered, but this time he took the call. “Hello,” he snapped.
“Mr. Dawtry?”
“Yes. Who’s this?”
“It’s Rick Stone, the building engineer.”
“The building engineer?” The man might as well have said he was the Russian tsar. “What’s going on?”
“You’re in 2A, right?”
“Yes, why? Is there some problem? Is the building on fire or something?”
“Uh, no. The problem isn’t fire. It’s water. Have you noticed any sort of problem with your plumbing—a leaking toilet? Your dishwasher? Reason I ask is the woman in 1A—Mrs. Harbison? She called to say that water is pouring through her bathroom ceiling.”
The bathtub! He’d completely forgotten that the bathtub taps were wide-open. To make matters worse, the tub’s overflow drain was sealed with duct tape, which Dawtry had put there so the tub could be filled all the way to the rim. Above the rim, he realized with a sinking feeling.
An hour later—an hour spent mopping and toweling up water, removing and hiding the soggy and incriminating duct tape, groveling to his neighbor and the building engineer—Dawtry finally got back to phoning O’Malley. The office number rolled to voicemail, as he’d expected. “Professor O’Malley, my name is Christopher Dawtry,” he said. “I’m calling because I’m very interested in the information packet you delivered Friday afternoon.” He thought it best not to be specific in the message, in case the message were intercepted; she would surely know what “information packet” he meant. “I’ll try your cell, too. Please call me at my office or on my cell at your earliest opportunity.” He gave both his numbers, then repeated his name, then repeated both numbers.
Next, he dialed her cell, hoping for better luck. “Hi, this is Megan,” she said cheerily.
“Professor O’Malley,” he began eagerly, but immediately he was interrupted: “I’m sorry I missed your call. Leave your name and number, and I’ll call you back.”
“Crap,” he muttered. Disappointed, he left the same message he had left on her office voicemail, then disconnected and glared at the phone, as if the device itself were to blame for his inability to reach her.
He looked out the kitchen window. To his surprise he saw that it was late afternoon, nearly sundown; the trees out back were already shadowed by the building, with the exception of one lone oak. It towered over the north end of Calvert Street bridge, its limbs stripped bare, its crooked branches reaching skyward like tortured fingers supplicating a pale, empty sky.
Dawtry glanced down at the papers spread across the kitchen table. What was it Benny had said after their third chess game? “Trust your instincts”? “Don’t second-guess yourself”? If he’d trusted his instincts the morning of the New York City Marathon, he wouldn’t have made the wrong call—wouldn’t have given the all-clear signal when he’d felt a sense of doubt. Ultimately, given that the bridge collapse was just a simulation, his second-guessing hadn’t done any harm, except to his ego. Still, he couldn’t help thinking, What if it’d been the real deal?
Dawtry stacked the papers neatly, slid them back into the envelope, and fastened the clasp. Then he opened his laptop and searched for Megan O’Malley’s home address.
Without taking time to shower, he changed, trading his running clothes for his work uniform—a starched white shirt, a gray suit and tie, and a shoulder holster with his nine-millimeter Glock—and headed out the door toward the parking garage, toward Baltimore, and toward Megan O’Malley.
He recognized her building from the street view that Google Maps had offered. The building looked respectable—elegant, even, in a faded, past-its-prime sort of way—and its proximity to the Johns Hopkins campus seemed a further argument for Professor O’Malley’s sanity, or at least the pragmatic common sense of keeping her commute minimal. He turned off Roland Avenue and into the narrow driveway, parking beside a small NO PARKING sign that had been jammed into the grass beside an irresistibly wide patch of asphalt.
Three walls of apartments flanked a center courtyard, with a doorway and a stairwell in each wall. According to the address Dawtry had found, she lived in 3A. He went to the nearest door and entered. At the base of the stairs were three mailboxes: 1C, 2C, and 3C. Dawtry crossed the courtyard and entered the opposite stairwell, where he found 1A, 2A, and 3A. “O’Malley,” said a handwritten label on 3A. He smiled and started up the stairs, then thought better of it. He went back outside to the courtyard and looked up. The bank of windows on the top floor was dark, at least on this side. He walked out to the street; from
there, he could see a balcony and, deeply set beneath the overhanging roof, more windows, also dark.
Damn, he thought. He crossed the yard, past the corner of the building, and checked the windows on the south side. No joy. He picked his way through the narrow side yard, using his phone as a flashlight, and emerged, brushing stray twigs and leaves from his hair, into a small parking lot behind the building. He glanced at the handful of cars—two rusting Hondas, a silver Mazda, and a red BMW, but no peacemongering Prius.
Three wooden staircases zigzagged up the back of the building, echoing—in exposed and flammable symmetry—the three enclosed stairwells at the front. Dawtry took the one that served the A units, treading softly and hoping he wouldn’t cause a 9-1-1 call or catch a bullet. When he reached the third-floor landing, he felt a jolt of dread. He found himself looking at a dark, chaotic scene through a doorway that stood wide-open, its frame splintered by a crowbar or a powerful kick. Even by the dim light from Roland Avenue, some of which filtered through the apartment’s front windows and across the books and papers strewn across the living room floor, it was instantly clear:
Megan O’Malley’s apartment had been ransacked.
Dawtry’s boss, Acting Assistant Director Andrew Christenberry, was not a happy man. In fact, Christenberry could have cheered up by an order of magnitude and still have fallen short of being a happy man. “What the hell are you doing, Dawtry?” he barked after Dawtry had summarized the situation and conveyed his concerns.
“Well, at the moment, I’m standing on the balcony of Professor O’Malley’s apartment. I’ve taken a quick look around—enough to see that it’s been tossed—but I don’t want to disturb the scene before the forensic guys get here.”
“What forensic guys?”
“Our forensic guys. That’s why I called you, sir—to request authorization for an evidence team.”
“I’ll ask you again. What are you doing?”
“I’m not sure I understand your question, sir.”
“Clearly not. Two days ago you destroyed a decade’s worth of constructive engagement between the Bureau and the CIA—do you know that they’re considering abolishing the liaison position altogether, thanks to the way you insulted them? And now you’re chasing bogeymen dreamed up by some crazy astrologer?”
“Astronomer.”
“What?”
“She’s an astronomer, sir. An actual scientist. With a PhD.”
“So the hell what? Half the academics I know are fruitcakes, and the fancier the pedigree, the nuttier the professor. Our job is law enforcement, not psychiatric services or home security.”
“I’m not trying to play social worker or rent-a-cop, sir. I’m just asking for authorization to bring in a forensic team to Professor O’Malley’s apartment.”
“Hell, no, you can’t bring in a forensic team,” Christenberry snapped. “We have no jurisdiction, no investigation, and no reason to start one. You don’t even know if a crime has been committed. Maybe breaking and entering, maybe burglary, but maybe not—maybe this woman just flipped out after she got the cold shoulder from the CIA, or just had a fight with her boyfriend, and threw some shit around to blow off steam. For all you know, she’s gone to Vegas for the weekend, or she’s at her boyfriend’s having fabulous makeup sex. Or maybe she’s checked in to a psych ward. We don’t know, and we don’t need to know. Not our problem. Not our business.”
“With all due respect, sir, I think it is our business, or could be. The back door was forced, and the files have been ransacked. It wasn’t a burglary—there’s a fancy bicycle sitting here, worth a couple thousand bucks, minimum.”
“Nobody ever said burglars were geniuses.”
“Sir, if she’s right, we’re talking about a matter of urgent national security. A plot to launch a mass-casualty attack on a scale that’s unprecedented. Unimaginable, almost.”
“Jesus, Dawtry, do you have any idea how crazy you sound?” Dawtry heard a heavy sigh, and when Christenberry resumed speaking, his voice was softer. “Chip, I know it sucks—it’ll always suck—but your brother’s gone. You can’t bring him back by spinning out disaster scenarios and obsessing on how to stop them.”
“Obsessing?” Had Vreeland planted that word—that dismissal—in Christenberry’s mind? “Sir, I know it’s a stretch,” Dawtry persisted, “but I’ve read Professor O’Malley’s report carefully, and she makes a credible case, at least for considering the possibility. The tsunami theory she cites is controversial, but the geologist who did the modeling is legit.”
“How do you know that? Do you have a geology doctorate I don’t know about?”
“No, sir, I don’t. But he’s got a lot of publications, and the journal that published the modeling is reputable. I haven’t had a chance to look into the seismic data O’Malley says has been hacked, but I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Sir?”
“First thing tomorrow, you’ll hand me a report—a very detailed report—about the errors in judgment you showed at Langley on Friday. You’ll also draft, for my review and approval, a letter to Jim Vreeland apologizing for your unprofessional behavior and your egregious misunderstanding of national security priorities. Is that clear?”
Dawtry grimaced. “And should I also write, five hundred times, ‘I will not think for myself without permission’?” That was what he wanted to say, at any rate. But what he actually said was “Yes, sir. Very clear.”
“And Dawtry? Drop this—let it go—and get the fuck out of that woman’s apartment before you get arrested. Or shot.”
“Yes, sir.”
Christenberry hung up. “Well, shit,” Dawtry said. He heaved a long sigh, then headed through the balcony door and into the living room. He resisted, once more, the urge to flip on the lights; if someone was watching the apartment, Dawtry didn’t want to be seen. And his boss certainly didn’t want him to be seen.
But he didn’t—couldn’t—resist the urge to look around, given that there was no risk of complicating the work of a forensic team. He switched on his phone’s flashlight, cupping one hand around the end of the phone to narrow the beam and shield it from view. The living room was big and sparely furnished: A futon, which served as a sofa. A ladder-back rocking chair, its rockers long and steeply curved, for serious rocking. A long, narrow table nested beneath the front windows, its glossy red surface bare except for a printer and a wireless router. The table was supported by two file cabinets whose drawers were open and empty, the contents—mostly manuscripts and article reprints and letters and large, glossy photographs of the night sky—strewn across the floor. His eye was caught by a newspaper page, and Dawtry knelt to examine it. The story, which covered most of the page, had run in the Baltimore Sun’s features section three years before. It was headlined “Starstruck”; the subhead read “Planet-hunting Hopkins astronomer caught astronomy bug from Baltimore’s street-corner astronomer.” The story was accompanied by a large color photograph. At the center stood a fat blue telescope on an aluminum tripod. HAV-A-LOOK, urged a sign taped to the stubby tube. On one side stood a white-bearded man wearing glasses, a blue beret, and a proud smile. On the other side, looking up from the telescope’s eyepiece, was a woman identified by the caption as “Astronomy professor Megan O’Malley.”
The CIA guard had gotten O’Malley’s profession wrong, but he’d gotten two other details right: she was indeed well dressed, and she was quite good-looking. Her eyes looked lively and intelligent, with no sign of madness in them. Not as of three years ago, anyhow.
From his kneeling position, Dawtry noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Tucked beneath the red desktop, between the file cabinets and shoved back against the radiator that was ticking with heat, were two wire-mesh wastebaskets. He took a pen from his pocket, hooked the rim of one, and slid it toward him. It contained an assortment of discarded tissues, chewing gum packages, protein bar wrappers, and other detritus that seemed uninteresting and uninform
ative.
The second basket appeared to be dedicated to recyclable paper. Through the mesh, he made out mountains of mail—catalogs, fundraising letters, sales circulars. On top of the mountain was a wadded-up Post-it note. After a moment’s hesitation, Dawtry picked it up and unwadded it. It contained a cryptic notation, 80YD, followed by a long string of numbers, fifteen in all—too many to be a MasterCard number, too few to be an American Express number. As for 80YD, it looked like an airline ticket confirmation code or some secret cipher, and Dawtry had never been good at cracking codes, even ones far simpler than the CIA’s Kryptos puzzle.
Then it hit him and he laughed. The string of numbers—which began with 01144—was an international long-distance number for someone in the United Kingdom. Someone whose name was not 80YD, but BOYD. “Boyd. Charles Boyd,” he intoned in his best Sean Connery James Bond voice.
Dawtry counted eight rings. He was on the point of giving up when he heard a plummy, pissed-off voice say, “Why does every person in the American colonies feel compelled to call me at bloody midnight?”
“Hello, is this Charles Boyd? The geologist?”
“Who’s calling?” He didn’t say he was Boyd, but he didn’t say he wasn’t. A good sign.
“My name is Dawtry. Chip Dawtry. I work for the US government. I’m a special agent with the FBI—that’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“I know what the FBI is,” the man snapped. “Why is the FBI calling me—and why at midnight?”
“I’m calling to ask about your La Palma tsunami modeling. This is Professor Boyd, isn’t it?”
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