“Explain,” Stark said. “Fast.”
“There’s a highway tunnel through the ridge. The road from Santa Cruz to the west coast. To Los Llanos.”
She heard Stark barking orders at Jacobson to find the highway and zoom in on the tunnel. “Got it. We’ll take it from here.”
“Wait,” she said, suddenly remembering a detail. “There are two tunnels, not one. One tunnel each way.”
“Got it. Thank you, Doctor. Signing off—”
“No,” she shouted. “Listen. The tunnels aren’t side by side. The eastbound tunnel’s newer and bigger than the westbound. Longer. Deeper underground. That’s the one they’ll use—to get as close to the base of the fault as they can.”
“And, Captain,” Dawtry said. “If they can, they’ll dynamite both ends first, to seal the tunnel before the nuke goes off. They’ll want to contain the explosion, make sure the force goes up through the rock instead of just shooting out both ends. The marines have got to get there before that tunnel closes.”
The radio went silent, and O’Malley wondered if she or Dawtry had offended the captain, or if perhaps her battery had gone dead. She shot a look at Dawtry. “He’s gone to a different frequency,” he told her, as if he’d read the question in her mind.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where? What are you talking about?”
“Outside.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer; she was already running—sprinting into the hallway and toward the ravaged front of the building.
“Megan! Wait—it’s not safe!” He tore after her, but she had a head start, and his injured leg slowed him down.
She took a scrambling shortcut up the hillside, then turned onto the road that snaked toward the rim of the caldera. Despite the altitude she was running hard, running on pure adrenaline. When she reached the precipice where Dawtry had sent the pickup cartwheeling into the abyss, she stopped. Leaning forward in a gasping half crouch, her hands on her knees, she scanned the ridge to the south of them, her gaze darting from the steep, wooded flank to the sloping farmland below.
Dawtry reached her two minutes later, his breath ragged and punctuated by grunts of pain, his wheezing stance mirroring hers. “Damnation, Megan, what the hell?”
“Hush,” she said. “Help me watch.”
She pointed. Miles away and far below them, a pair of dots angled toward the western flank of the mountainside. They might have been birds—gulls or ravens surfing the currents of wind coming off the ocean and curling up the mountainside. But O’Malley and Dawtry both knew that they were not birds—not gulls or ravens, at any rate—but Ospreys.
“Hurry,” she prayed aloud, standing upright and shading her eyes with her hands. “Please, please hurry.” Dawtry stood and shaded his eyes, too.
The dots settled to the ground, disappearing from view. A moment later, a fireball erupted from the spot where they’d landed. O’Malley gasped and reached for Dawtry’s hand. “Oh God,” she said. A plume of black smoke roiled skyward.
“Not good,” Dawtry said. Forty seconds later, they heard the rumble of the explosion.
“But that wasn’t the nuke, was it? Please tell me that wasn’t the nuke.”
“It wasn’t the nuke,” he said. “That’s fuel burning. I think one of the Ospreys crashed. Or got hit by a Stinger or something. Looks bad for the troops on board.”
“So there’s fighting.”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“Which means the nuke is there.”
He nodded gravely.
“They have to stop it, Chip. They have to.”
“I know. I know. They will.” He moved behind her and wrapped his arms around her. They stood motionless, rooted to the ground, silent except for their breathing, which had settled, and their hearts, which had not.
Suddenly O’Malley stiffened. “No,” she whispered. “Please, God, no.”
“What?” said Dawtry. Then: “Oh shit.”
The ground was shuddering beneath their feet.
CHAPTER 23
“Please, God, no,” O’Malley repeated. Her prayer was not answered. Indeed, the shaking continued and intensified. She freed one of her arms from Dawtry’s embrace and crossed herself. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women,” she prayed, for the second time in the past hour. For the second time in decades.
“Megan, we have to get out of here,” Dawtry said, but she paid no attention. “Megan, come on, we gotta go.”
“Go where, Chip? And why?” Her gaze locked on the island’s volcanic backbone. She stared, mesmerized and trembling—quaking as if she were an extension of the island itself.
Dawtry gave up trying to pull her away; he held her close and felt his own body begin to shudder as well, though he could not have said if it was from fear or empathy or simply in response to the vibrations from the ground and the woman.
And then they saw it. It was almost invisible at first, the merest hint of a shadow, but then it darkened and widened into a distinct line—a crack in the rock—and then the mountainside lurched visibly and a fissure opened, clearly visible even from eight miles away. O’Malley gasped. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “All those people. So many people. Why didn’t we warn them, Chip? Why? We didn’t even give them a chance.”
The fissure widened, and the mountain’s flank began dropping—twenty feet, fifty feet, a hundred—and O’Malley’s broken sobs gave way to a rising, keening wail.
And then the mountainside lurched again—this time, to a halt. “Look! Megan, look—it’s stopped!” Dawtry squeezed her tighter, and she reached up with both her hands, pressing them onto his. Beneath their feet, the ground steadied and gradually stilled. They continued to stare, as if their eyes alone were holding the mountainside in place.
She risked a breath. “Look,” she said. “It’s not the whole fault block that moved. Only half, maybe less. And it only slid a little.” She gave his hands a squeeze. “Oh my God, Chip—maybe it’s okay after all.”
As if to mock her words, as if to punish her for her pride, the quaking began again. “No no no,” she moaned.
“It’s not as strong,” he said. “Maybe it’s just an aftershock.”
“But an aftershock might be enough to finish the job.”
As they watched, the mountainside jerked again, slid again, and O’Malley gasped again. “Stop it,” she said fiercely—and it did.
And so it went, in fits and starts, in stillness and in aftershocks, for what seemed an eternity. In reality, it was no more than ten minutes.
And ten minutes was enough: enough to allow the mountainside to ease—to lurch, rather than to plunge—into the ocean, leaving behind a raw, sharp cliff, five miles long and nearly a mile high. O’Malley fought to conjure up a mental map of the island. How many farms, how many towns—God, how many people—had vanished into the water? Finally, the image crystallized in her mind, and she gasped with relief: miraculously, the slide had claimed one of the island’s emptiest stretches of coastline.
Even more miraculously, the slide had created whirlpools and eddies and waves—waves that might overrun seawalls, wash out a few beachfront highways, smash the windows of foolishly placed condos in Florida—but there would be no apocalyptic wall of water. Not today. Maybe not ever, now that the ticking geologic time bomb had been defused, or, rather, made to fizzle.
Suddenly the wind picked up; it grew stronger and stronger, buffeting them—deafening them—and an Osprey landed on the road behind them.
The rear ramp dropped open, and the marine sergeant stood in the doorway, beckoning to them. “Ma’am! Sir! Let’s go—search and rescue time!”
They scrambled to their feet and ran to the Osprey, grateful for the chance to look for survivors.
Grateful to know that there would be survivors.
Millions upon millions of survivors, most of whom would never know what they had survived.
EPILOGUE
The Washington Post ran the story on the front page, but below the lead article about the president’s latest feud with his critics. “US, Russia Launch Joint Quake-Relief Effort,” trumpeted the headline. “Get a load of this,” Dawtry said, flashing the headline at her.
O’Malley looked up from the latte she was sipping and gave a snort of disgust.
Dawtry began reading the story aloud.
In a rare gesture of solidarity, Washington and Moscow have announced a cooperative earthquake-relief effort on the island of La Palma, which suffered a major earthquake two days ago. The temblor, magnitude 7.5, caused a landslide that destroyed several rural villages. Early reports indicate that as many as 50 people were killed, with dozens still missing. Initial search-and-rescue efforts were led by US sailors and marines from the USS Wasp, which was dispatched from the Mediterranean immediately after reports of the disaster. The Russian navy’s lone aircraft carrier, en route from Russia to Syria, will join the Wasp as a “full and friendly partner” in the effort, Moscow announced. A White House source described the joint operation as “a prime example of improved relations” between the US and Russia.
Dawtry tossed the paper onto the table. “Can you believe it?”
“Sadly, I can,” she said.
Two older men were seated near them in the sunny, soaring atrium, at chairs that faced each other across a glass-topped coffee table. Between the men was a wooden chess board, its black and white armies decimated and in disarray. One of the men was wearing a navy-blue beret; the other sported a helmet covered in tinfoil. “Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear,” advised the man in the helmet.
The man in the beret nodded sagely. “Good advice, Benny. Who said that—Benjamin Franklin?”
O’Malley laughed. “Herman, you should spend less time stargazing and more time listening to tunes. Marvin Gaye said that.” O’Malley stood up and began singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” in a low voice, right there in the vast lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency. Her feet started a jive step that started out low-key, then got steadily more sassy, her arms and hips joining the party. When she reached the end of the chorus, two pairs of hands behind her began clapping in slow synchrony. O’Malley spun, carmine-faced, to see CIA Section Head Jim Vreeland and FBI Assistant Director Andrew Christenberry—freshly promoted from Acting Assistant Secretary—behind her, watching and smiling.
“Bravo, Dr. O’Malley,” said Vreeland, far less snarkily than she would have expected, given what she’d heard about him from Dawtry. “Sorry to keep you folks waiting. These interagency operations do involve a bit of red tape.”
“I’m shocked, shocked,” O’Malley said.
“Shall we?” Vreeland led them out of the atrium and through the garden that housed the Kryptos sculpture. “Someday,” he said, nodding at the encrypted message, “after you’ve found Planet Nine, perhaps you’ll take a crack at solving our signature puzzle.”
“It’s not that hard,” said Benny. Vreeland stopped and turned to look at the silver-helmeted visitor. “I could tell you what it says, but you wouldn’t believe me. You guys think I’m crazy.”
“Don’t tell ’em, Benny,” said Dawtry. “Make ’em work for it.”
“Don’t tell them, Benny,” echoed Christenberry. “They’ll have nothing to live for once their Great Mystery is solved.”
“Very amusing,” Vreeland said. He led them through the glass doors of the Bubble and into the auditorium, which was filled to capacity, just as it had been the one other time Dawtry had been inside it. This time, Dawtry was not there to audition for a posting to Langley. This time, he was there, as was O’Malley, to receive the CIA’s Intelligence Medal of Merit and the FBI’s Medal for Meritorious Achievement. They were the first people—the only people—to be awarded both medals. Not that anyone aside from Agency and Bureau personnel would ever know, beyond Benny and Herman, the quirky surrogate family members they’d been allowed to invite. The CIA medal was jokingly referred to as a “jockstrap medal,” because recipients were required to keep it a secret.
But the medals were beside the point, they both knew. The point—the reward—was what they’d done on La Palma, not what anybody in DC or Langley decided to say about it afterward.
The accomplishment, not the ceremony, was what O’Malley meant when she said, “Thank you. I’m so very proud of this. So very grateful. What a remarkable and unexpected honor.”
And O’Malley, not the assembled throng, was who Dawtry meant when he said, “I am so very honored to be in such heroic and distinguished company here today.”
Two hours later, sitting in the coffee shop just down the block from his condo, Dawtry looked up from another newspaper—this one DC’s alternative weekly. “Hey, Star Lady.”
“Yeah?”
“I know you think astrology’s a load of crap, but I say there’s actually something to it.”
“And you’re saying this why?”
He waved the paper at her. “Because my horoscope totally kicks ass.”
She snorted. “No kidding? You actually check your horoscope? Because . . . ?”
“Because it’s right next to the ‘Savage Love’ column, which is full of good sex tips.”
She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “I hope you got some.”
“I haven’t gotten any lately.”
“I meant tips, not sex. But tell me about your horoscope. Summarize, please.”
“Why summarize when I can quote? It was so good I memorized it.” She raised her eyebrows—a challenge—and picked up the paper that he slid across the table. Lifting an index finger, he struck a pose and recited, his tone dramatic. “The world is once again falling deeply in love with you,” he intoned. “Let’s hope that on this occasion—unlike what happened the last two times—you will accept its adoration in the spirit in which it’s given.” He paused, lowered his finger, and confided, in an aside, “Here comes the really swell part.” He resumed the pose and the recitation: “Let’s hope that if the world offers you the moon, the dawn, and the breeze, you won’t reject these gifts and say that what you really wanted was a comet, the sunset, and a pie in the sky. There would be nothing sadder than to see the world suffer yet another case of unrequited love.” He leaned toward her. “Pretty great, huh?”
“Pretty great,” she agreed.
“It’s slightly off the mark, though.”
“How so?”
“The world seems to be offering me the moon, a comet, and a pie in the sky.”
She laughed. “Hey, G-Man.”
“Yes, miss?”
“Just for the record, I never said astrology’s a load of crap.” She, too, leaned forward. She kissed him, then pulled away, slightly breathless. “And, G-Man?”
“I’m right here, miss.”
“About that pie in the sky.” She stood up and turned toward the door. “You feeling hungry?”
“Oh yes, miss.” He scrambled to his feet to follow. “Oh my, yes.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my literary agent, Giles Anderson, I’m grateful for the Job-like patience with my long delay in turning this idea into a book . . . and, once there was a book, for finding it a good home at Thomas & Mercer.
My acquisition editors at Thomas & Mercer—JoVon Sotak and Jessica Tribble—were also remarkably patient. Equally important, they were enthusiastic and encouraging, and I’m extremely grateful. In addition, Jessica offered many helpful suggestions on the first draft.
Development editor Caitlin Alexander did a masterful job of guiding the manuscript through successive revisions. Caitlin understood and liked the characters, and she appreciated the way the story unfolded; she also asked incisive, probing questions and suggested countless ways to tighten and strengthen the tale. And copyeditor Paul Zablocki read the manuscript closely, attentively, and respectfully, appreciating its various charms, correcting its sundry lapses, and polishing the whole to a higher sheen.
On t
he island of La Palma, location scout Conny Spelbrink of Active Connect offered a wealth of knowledge and (not surprisingly) connections. Local guide Wim Coen was a gracious, adventurous, and good-humored conductor to off-the-beaten-track places, as well as a skilled driver on steep, slippery volcanic sand. The director of the observatory complex, Juan Carlos Pérez Arencibia, was most gracious in allowing me to visit, as were the staff astronomers who allowed me to spend a fascinating evening at the world’s (currently) largest optical telescope—a titan compared with the more modest one I allowed Megan O’Malley to use. Last but not least, Sheila Crosby’s book A Breathtaking Window on the Universe—a fact-filled guide to La Palma’s observatory complex, written by an astronomer—was a valuable reference for supplementing what I learned during my on-site visit and Internet research.
I owe a special thanks to one of the scientists who first called attention to the possibility that the flank of the Cumbre Vieja could collapse and unleash a devastating mega tsunami. Dr. Simon Day, of the Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College, London, was remarkably gracious, good-humored, and helpful in responding to a novelist’s many, many questions. Motivated by a desire to increase public awareness, seismic monitoring, and emergency preparedness, Dr. Day offered countless insights and suggestions, which helped make the book’s scientific underpinnings more accurate—and its nefarious plot more plausible. For the things I got right, I warmly thank him; for the things I managed to get wrong, I sincerely apologize.
As ever, I offer my heartfelt thanks to friends and family. The intrepid Colleen Baird accompanied me on my first research trip to La Palma in 2007; no doubt she is astonished to see it finally in print. JJ Rochelle was steadfastly encouraging but never a nag. And Dennis and Judy McCarthy kept faith in the project long after they could be forgiven for having given it up for dead. As for my family—Jane McPherson and our diverse and sundry offspring, Ben, Anna, Nathaniel, and Ursula—you are my bedrock, solid and unshakable. Much love to you all.
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