The third car had burned. Its windows had shattered from the heat, and the interior had been reduced to blackened seat springs and sooty floor pans and door panels. Miraculously, the hood latch still worked, but when Pérez touched the voltmeter’s leads to the battery posts, the needle remained at zero. Frowning, he scraped the tops of the posts with the leads and tried again. Again, the needle declined to move. He scowled, then looked at O’Malley and shook his head.
She grimaced, then nodded toward the remaining cars on the lot. “Más? More?”
Again he shook his head. “Eso es todo. That is all.” He waved a hand toward the other mangled carcasses and flipped his fingers upward dismissively. “No good.”
O’Malley sighed. Was there another junkyard anywhere nearby? Más junkyardes—would that be anywhere near correct, or at least halfway comprehensible? If she couldn’t scavenge another battery, could Boyd work with data from only two seismometers? Two wouldn’t be as precise as three, but might two suffice, in a pinch? She held up a finger to put Pérez on pause, then fished out her phone and called Boyd.
The call rolled immediately to his voicemail. As she began mentally composing a message—urgent but not hysterical, that was the balance she hoped to strike—a horn blared just beyond the junkyard gate. A moment later the gate slid open and a tow truck entered. It was hauling an answer to prayer: a freshly totaled Fiat, the radiator still spewing steam. As the wreck eased to a stop directly in front of them, steam wafted out of the engine compartment and into the sunlight, surrounding the dearly departed like a halo.
The workers at Señor Pérez’s junkyard did not share O’Malley’s sense of urgency; on the contrary, judging by the glacial pace at which they extracted the batteries from the wrecks, they seemed to feel obliged to counter O’Malley’s urgency, so as to keep the universe in balance. By the time she paid the bill and drove south along the coast, back toward Santa Cruz, the sun had already dropped behind the massive flank of the Taburiente volcano, and darkness was falling.
On the bright side, by the time she returned to Santa Cruz, and to the San Telmo, the package of seismometers had arrived. She lugged the box downstairs and tore into it. The seismometers were, as Boyd had promised, very compact—cylinders roughly twice the size of a coffee can, with a carrying handle built into the top—but heavy, fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. The voltage step-down converters, which were needed to keep the car batteries from frying the seismometers’ circuits, were not much bigger than a pack of gum. The combination of massive batteries and low-power demands would keep the instruments running for several months—not quite as long as solar panels or the electricity grid, but plenty of time for O’Malley and Boyd to see if the GSN data was still being hacked. And plenty of time to triangulate explosions and seismic activity, if they were still occurring.
O’Malley was impatient to hit the road and place the instruments, but given the remote, rugged locations she and Boyd had agreed on—the southern tip of the island, the northwest coast, and the northeast coast—she knew it would be foolhardy to attempt the task at night.
To make the hours until dawn pass more quickly, O’Malley popped a sleeping pill—she always traveled with a few Ambien, mainly to help her sleep on overseas flights or red-eyes. Twenty minutes later, she felt herself spiraling downward into a deep and dreamless sleep.
She woke at six: well before daylight, but not too early to load up and take the coast road southward, down toward the tip of the island.
She retrieved the car and double-parked in front of the hotel, her flashers asking permission or forgiveness or simply ninety seconds of patience. Hurrying inside, she dashed down the stairs and then lumbered back up, fifty pounds of boxed gear stacked like Christmas presents in her arms.
She loaded the boxes into the car, switched off the flashers, and made her getaway without delaying a single car. Half a block later she turned downhill, zigzagged down to the harbor and the coast road, and turned south.
If she had been a minute slower at the hotel—if she had paused to pee, or had walked down the three flights of stairs rather than having sprinted—she would have emerged from the door just as a black Audi had pulled up and double-parked, and two men got out and approached the hotel’s entrance.
“Grove of trees, my ass,” O’Malley muttered. The countryside outside Fuencaliente, the island’s southernmost town, was practically devoid of individual trees, let alone the “dense grove” where Boyd had suggested she hide the seismometer. The contrast between the lush, heavily forested northern end of the island and the scrubby, desertlike south was striking. Up north, the slopes were steep and cut by deep, jungly gorges, like the mountains of Peru; here, the terrain was more like southern California’s: variations on tan and brown, punctuated by green, flat-lobed cacti. She delighted in the cacti, not simply (or even mainly) because they brightened the monochrome landscape but also because they reminded her of A. Samler Brown’s engaging account of the island’s cochineal boom-and-bust cycle a century and a half before. If she hadn’t been on a mission, she would have stopped to inspect the underside of the cactus pads in search of tiny crimson beetles.
On the western side of Fuencaliente—just as she was starting to despair of finding a place to put the seismometer—she saw it: beside the road, practically in the road, was an outcropping of stone, which had been hollowed out and fashioned into a religious shrine. On the slope above the shrine was a clump of pine trees, four in number, stunted and twisted but better than any other trees she’d seen in an hour. “Any port in a storm,” she said. “Thank you, Jesus.” She parked on the shoulder just beyond the shrine and got out. After checking to be sure no cars were coming from either direction, she opened the back of the SUV—she had requested a four-wheel-drive vehicle this time, knowing she might be on dirt roads. She set a battery and a seismometer on the ground, tucked a voltage regulator in a pocket, and closed the hatch.
Back at the junkyard, Señor Pérez had rigged a makeshift carrying strap for each battery, a sling made from multiple wrappings of duct tape. O’Malley picked up the seismometer with her left hand and hoisted the battery with her right, grunting slightly with the effort. It was a load, especially uphill on rocky ground, but luckily the trees weren’t far off the road.
She placed the battery and seismometer on a scrap of level ground between the trees. Kneeling beside them, her face low, she was pleased to see that the curve of the hillside and the jumble of rocks concealed the rig completely from the view of passing motorists. She had tucked the setup instructions for the instrument into a back pocket of her jeans, and she took them out now and reread them. The procedure was blessedly straightforward: She clipped the leads of the voltage regulator to the posts of the battery, then connected the leads of the seismometer to the regulator. Next, she pressed and held the instrument’s power button until the digital display came on. Once it did, the instrument itself led her through a menu of options, including the “call home” setting.
It was only then that she remembered Boyd’s admonition. She pulled out her cell phone and checked for a signal. Three bars: plenty. She entered the number Boyd had given her for the data calls, then pressed “Test.” The display pulsed for an agonizing minute, then announced “Connection Successful.” O’Malley blinked in surprise, double-checked the readout to make sure she hadn’t imagined it, then rocked back onto her heels. “Hell, yeah,” she crowed. “Thank you, Jesus!” Her face opened into a broad, cheek-stretching smile. “One down, two to go.” At this rate, she’d be done by lunchtime.
Her self-congratulation had been a bit premature, she discovered at site number two. As the SUV did a bump-and-grind routine on a rocky jeep road, jouncing toward the remote northwest park Boyd had suggested, O’Malley checked her cell phone obsessively. The Brit had said that a signal might be spotty in this area, but as it turned out, Boyd had a gift for understatement: spotty would have been a major upgrade. Whenever the road approached trees, the signal vanished, possibly because th
e trees tended to favor low spots where moisture would collect. And whenever a lone bar of signal flickered onto her display—invariably on a high, exposed patch of rock—trees and other sources of concealment were nowhere to be found.
O’Malley spent an hour fruitlessly seeking a signal in the coastal park before conceding defeat. She backtracked to the highway, then back toward the village of Puntagordo, glancing at her phone between jolts of the vehicle. As she approached the town, she got a solid, steady signal bar, then two. When a third bar appeared, she cheered up. Now she faced a different problem, though: how to conceal the instrument amid the houses, barns, and sheds peppering the hillside.
She had already passed the house before its details registered on her conscious mind. It had been a house, once upon a time, but now it was a ruin. The stone walls were still standing, for the most part, but the roof had collapsed completely, so long ago that trees had taken up residence inside the house, their tops now higher than the walls. Rusting iron bars covered the door opening, as if to protect the trees from burglars. There was no guarantee, of course, that the ruin would remain undisturbed—for all she knew, a salvage crew might show up tomorrow morning to recycle the stones for another structure—but she didn’t have time to be choosy. The perfect spot? No, she concluded as she turned around and parked nearby. But the good-enough spot.
The vegetation was thick, and O’Malley had to force her way along the wall, branches clawing at her jeans and jacket. When she came to a window opening—the glass in shards, the framing long since rotted—she heaved the battery over the sill and leaned down, letting her feet rise off the ground and using her body as a counterweight as she lowered the heavy object. Then she repeated the maneuver with the seismometer before clambering up, over, and down.
The floor was strewn with dead leaves and branches. She cleared a spot for the rig and ran through the setup routine, this time without needing to consult the instructions. When the test transmission went through, O’Malley skipped the smug “Hell, yeah” and went straight to “Thank you, Jesus.” This time it came out sounding more weary than triumphant.
When she got back to the SUV, she checked her reflection in the glass of a window. She looked dirty and bedraggled—and she wished she felt as good as she looked. “Two down, one to go,” she muttered as she started the engine, put the SUV into gear, and eased out the clutch. “Third time’s the charm.”
CHAPTER 11
As he stepped off the plane into La Palma’s soft afternoon sun, Special Agent Chip Dawtry was a man with a dilemma. Actually, he was a man with three dilemmas.
Dilemma #1 was Megan O’Malley, who was somewhere on the island—but where? He had tried phoning and emailing her at various points during his journey, to no avail. He had also tried repeatedly to reach her at the Hotel San Telmo, where Boyd had said she was staying. She never answered the phone in her room, and when Dawtry called back and quizzed the German-sounding guy at the front desk, he came up empty-handed. The guy said he hadn’t seen her at breakfast, or at all today, for that matter. He added something that made Dawtry’s blood run cold. “She is very popular, Ms. O’Malley. Two other men are very eager to find her.” Dawtry asked for details, but the German was vague. Men in their thirties, dark hair, dark beards, very tan. Driving an Audi—he did remember that much. “A good German car,” the desk clerk had added. Crap, thought Dawtry. I’ve got to find her before they do. He had no indication who “they” might be—jihadists of some stripe, he assumed, possibly al-Qaeda—but if they were intent on triggering a mass-fatality disaster and suspected O’Malley was onto them, they would surely not hesitate to capture or kill her.
Dilemma #2 was Boyd. Like O’Malley, the geologist seemed to be missing in action. Dawtry’s calls and emails to Boyd, too, had gone unanswered. They’d had the one conversation—the one that had prompted Dawtry’s impulsive dash to the airport—but no contact since. Dawtry might have suspected there was a problem with his phone if not for a mountain of evidence to the contrary: a flurry of calls and emails from Dilemma #3.
Dilemma #3 was Acting Assistant Director Christenberry, who would certainly fire Dawtry as soon as he realized the full measure of Dawtry’s insubordination.
Christenberry’s messages had begun reasonably enough: Waiting for your draft report, read the first subject line. Also your draft letter of apology to Vreeland, read the second. Why the delay in getting these to me? read the third. Where ARE you? demanded the fourth.
Upon landing in Madrid, Dawtry had sent a brief, vague response:
Had to leave on short notice for urgent personal matter. Sorry not to give you a heads-up.
En route from Madrid to Tenerife, he had received several more queries, which began with What sort of urgent personal matter? and Are you okay? but then swiftly spiraled up, alternating between cold fury and thermonuclear rage.
Dawtry did not reply. For one thing, nothing he could say would make matters better, only worse. For another, he’d had to sprint, literally, to catch the puddle jumper to La Palma. The doors of the shuttle bus were closing as he dashed into the gate area, waving frantically, barely managing to catch the eye of the driver.
He spent the thirty-minute hop from Tenerife to La Palma composing and then trashing a series of emails to Christenberry. Their tone ranged between sheepish apology and abject groveling. Finally, he settled on a vague nine-word message:
Sorry to be out of touch. Will explain soonest.
He saved it in his “Drafts” folder, for sending upon his arrival in La Palma. It wouldn’t solve the Christenberry Dilemma; it would merely postpone the reckoning—a reckoning that was likely to end his career. But until he knew more, postponing was the best he could do.
As the plane descended, he surveyed the island, whose roughly triangular shape he had already committed to memory from his study of the map. From the tapered southern tip it rose, gradually at first and then more sharply, the slope pocked with volcanic craters and cones. A high ridge formed the island’s north-south spine, and with each mile to the north, the flanks of the ridge grew steeper, wilder, and greener—more vertiginous, beauteous, and dangerous.
The twin-engine plane turned parallel to the ridgeline and dropped, slewing in a wicked crosswind. As a former military pilot, Dawtry knew that crosswinds could be tricky, especially in the vicinity of changing terrain. Fortunately, these pilots flew this approach multiple times a day. Hell, Dawtry told himself, they can probably nail this landing in their sleep. The wings rocked and wagged as the plane neared the ground, causing him to clench the armrests, but the plane leveled just before touching down. It was only when he exhaled that he realized he’d been holding his breath.
The plane trundled to a stop beside La Palma’s small terminal, and Dawtry switched on his phone, gritted his teeth, and prepared to hit “Send.” But before he had a chance, his screen flashed with an incoming email alert. The message’s sender was identified as [email protected]. Update—urgent, the subject line read. His pulse quickening, Dawtry opened the message. Just out of hospital, the message read.
Severe septic shock—emergency surgery to remove a sponge left in abdomen by inept surgeon. O’Malley is placing three seismometers at locations on attached map. Has already placed sensor #1. Data uploading. Three explosions and two quakes recorded since noon today, mag 2.7 and 3.2, originating due north of town of Fuencaliente. Sensors 2 & 3 should pinpoint location shortly, if seismic activity continues. Meanwhile, GSN shows ZERO activity. Data is being masked in real time! V. sophisticated—and v. worrisome!
Dawtry read the message three times. Then he forwarded it to Acting Assistant Director Christenberry, with a brief note of intro:
See below from Prof. Charles Boyd, British seismologist. Fire me if you want or need to—I realize I’ve disobeyed an order, and I’m acting totally on my own—but I am on La Palma, looking for Prof. O’Malley. Have strong reason to believe she is in imminent danger. More soon.
He hit “Send,” then ca
lled up the La Palma map Boyd had sent, with pins marking the three locations where she was placing seismometers. She wouldn’t be at the first location, obviously, but was she en route to the second, or already heading to the third?
He zoomed in, checking the roads, then surveyed the afternoon sky. It was three thirty, and already the November sun was dropping toward the island’s ridgeline. A highway tunnel seemed to cut directly through the island’s north-south ridgeline, which he estimated meant he could reach the west coast in an hour, but from there it appeared to be another half hour, maybe twice that, up a hairpin highway to the second seismometer location. He might—might—make it there before dark, but if he didn’t happen to catch her there, he had absolutely no hope of reaching the third location before dark. Dawtry was a good driver at high speed—he’d had pursuit training at the Academy—but the only rental car option available was a Toyota Yaris, not a Formula One racer. “Shit,” he said. Fucking scientists. When the hell are they going to quit stalling and invent the damned transporter beam?
CHAPTER 12
The road from Puntagordo climbed steeply, corkscrewing up the northwest flank of the shattered volcano. After a few miles it brought O’Malley to a Y, and to an unexpected choice. To the left, the road leveled out—as level as roads could get on the north end of the island—and wound across the flank toward Barlovento, where she planned to place the third monitor. To the right, the road snaked upward to the Roque de los Muchachos. To the observatory complex on the caldera’s rim.
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