Category 7

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  “No one’s looking for a nursemaid. They’re looking for a short Brit with an old helicopter and a lot of cash.”

  He turned to face her. “Do you need a lift home, or shall I just leave you here?”

  Her look was stony as she rose to her feet. “My next flight is my last. I want to be paid in advance.”

  With the briefest of nods, he turned back to the beach and the sky.

  CHAPTER 24

  Monday, July 16, 7:00 A.M., McLean, Virginia

  “Tell me again why you think this stuff is interesting?”

  Not quite suppressing his exasperation, Jake Baxter looked at Paul Turk, his running partner. They’d joined the CIA at the same time, gone through part of their training together, and still went running three times a week before work. Paul wasn’t a meteorologist or even a scientist, but he was a smart guy. As an analyst in the Crime and Narcotics Center, he knew all about watching trends develop, so why this conversation was giving him such trouble could only be attributed to one of two things as far as Jake was concerned. Paul was playing stupid for the hell of it or, more likely, his mind was on the blonde he’d gone out with last night.

  Jake kept his grin to himself and increased his speed slightly just in case the reason for his buddy’s dementia wasn’t the blonde. “It’s interesting because these climate patterns are like clockwork. They’re almost like tides or ocean currents or—” He shrugged. “They’re just consistent. For decades they’ve been predictable, and then for no reason there’s an anomaly.”

  “Yeah, but you’re talking about weather,” Paul replied, breathing harder as he tried to match Jake’s longer stride. “You might as well be talking about the stock market. It’s a chaotic system to begin with. ‘Prediction’ is just a nice word for educated guesswork, right?”

  It was Paul’s usual argument, designed to annoy.

  As if analyzing the movements of South American drug lords is an exact science. “It’s chaotic but not entirely random, which makes it predictable. Certain conditions that include specific sets of variables will produce specific results.” Jake glanced at him. “We’re about one-third of the way through the North Atlantic hurricane season, okay? We know it’s going to be a real active one, but it hasn’t kicked into high gear yet and probably won’t for another month. El Niño has been only moderately strong and, until recently, we had a stationary high-pressure ridge—”

  “Hey, I’m not stupid, okay? I know El Niño happens in the Pacific,” Paul snapped.

  Jake increased his stride again. “Yes, it is a Pacific phenomenon,” he replied with patronizing patience. “But a strong El Niño creates wind shear in the upper atmosphere, which affects Atlantic weather. And if there’s not a lot of wind shear over the Atlantic, the storms that blow off the western coast of Africa every few days all summer long have nothing to prevent them from turning into something big. There’s also been some really strange weather in western Africa lately, which, for reasons I’m not going to bother explaining, isn’t going to help us any.”

  “Would you quit speeding up?” Paul gasped.

  Grinning in response to his friend’s glare, Jake pulled up the front of his favorite, grungy Marine Corps T-shirt and wiped the sweat from his face without breaking stride. “Suck it up, pal. You’re starting to look middle-aged.”

  “That’s because I am middle-aged. I’m thirty-nine and don’t expect to surpass the average life expectancy, which is seventy-eight. But, God damn it, if you don’t slow down, I might not live past today’s first cup of coffee.”

  With a laugh, Jake shortened his stride. “Happy now?”

  “Bastard. I still don’t get where you think this research of yours is going,” Paul said on an exhale. “After Katrina hit, all you gurus were saying we were in a new cycle of strong storms for the next twenty years or something. But last year was a bust and so far this year is, too.”

  “It’s all relative. Compared to recent history, this hurricane season will probably be pretty average, which means busy by fifty-year standards. Don’t forget that we’re not even halfway through the season and on the verge of the busiest part of it and we’ve already had nineteen named storms. Granted, only six have even hit hurricane speeds and most of them disintegrated before they got anywhere near land. Simone could be the turning point.”

  “If it ever moves. It’s just parked there and it may die there.”

  Everyone’s an expert. Jake swallowed his exasperation. “It’s already moving. But there are four and a half months left of the hurricane season and since it’s been so busy already, even if it hasn’t been destructive, I think we’ll have at least nine or ten more named storms and that five or six of them will reach hurricane speeds. Two of them will hit the U.S. as Category 1 or 2 storms. Three of them will escalate beyond that. Maybe one will become a Category 4.”

  “You’re full of shit,” Paul wheezed. “You can’t predict that.”

  “I just did.”

  “What’s Simone right now?”

  “A Category 2.”

  “What’s that one going to do?”

  Depends on who’s driving. He shrugged. “Depends on what she does. If she decides to take a ride on the Gulf Stream, we could be in trouble.”

  “We? As in those poor suckers down on the Gulf Coast, or us? Isn’t the East Coast due for the big one?” Paul asked as sarcastically as he could between pants. “That’s been all over the news since Katrina.”

  “The East Coast is due for a big one. Overdue, in fact. But I’m taking about probability, not possibility.” Jake stopped running as they reached the last workout area on the circuit and began his pull-ups without further comment. He watched with satisfaction as Paul, older by a few years, shorter by a few inches, and heavier by more than a few pounds, stood bent over with his hands on his thighs, catching his breath. When finished, Jake stepped aside to let Paul have his chance, but as he expected, Paul waved dismissively at the equipment and they started back on the track that wound through the wooded grounds of the CIA’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

  Easily resuming their argument and their pace, Jake glanced at his buddy. “Fifty bucks says I’m not full of shit. We’ll talk again on November thirtieth when the season ends. But the patterns I was talking about, the ones I’m seeing rupture, aren’t as big as something like the hurricane season. They’re smaller regional patterns. Like the Santa Ana winds, or the Southeast Asian monsoons that for no statistically valid reason just malfunction.”

  “They’re not machines.”

  “They might as well be; that’s how predictable and consistent some of them are. But, okay, what about this one?” Jake argued as they emerged from the woods and began the last stretch of track that led to the buildings. “A few months ago in an otherwise easy spring, there was a rainstorm in a fairly barren part of Minnesota. Hardly anything there but cropland. It was a low storm, localized and moving fairly slow. The upper air was smooth. There was nothing to indicate it would be anything other than a basic spring rainstorm. Then, for no reason that any equipment could predict ahead of time or explain afterward, the storm cell became superheated and shot up to forty thousand feet. Hundreds of acres of crops were destroyed with hail and flooding. Three tornadoes spun out of it and destroyed buildings. Six people working in the fields were injured. And then it hit a stable air mass and just dissipated. It lasted maybe twenty minutes. It was incredible.”

  “It wasn’t incredible. It was Nature, Jake. Look, even people can spontaneously combust, okay? It doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened. Obviously there was some condition that you missed that sparked the storm.”

  Jake glanced at him. “Don’t be a moron. People don’t spontaneously combust. That’s an urban legend. And I checked and rechecked all the land and atmospheric conditions recorded before, during, and after that storm. There is no logical explanation for what happened.” He shook his head and looked straight ahead. “There was a catastrophic rainstorm at the edge of Death Valley a few
days ago. You had to have heard about it. It caused a flash flood. The ground is so hard packed in that region that it was as if the rain was falling on concrete. A group of college kids who were camping nearby died.” He shook his head, anger churning in him as he thought about it. “I’m still collecting data on that one. The bottom line is that I’ve come across enough scattered events like these lately that I think the topic bears looking into.”

  “Wait a minute. There’s no logical explanation? What the hell does that mean? Are you trying to link it to global warming or butterfly migrations? Rogue Nikola Tesla fanatics? The wrath of God? Look at what’s happening to those guys on the boat who said there was a plane that flew into Simone right before it got big. They’re getting hammered in the papers. They look like wing nuts. You might want to figure out what you want your answer to be before you start walking that plank, buddy,” Paul wheezed as they slowed to a walk outside the doors leading to the gym and locker room.

  Jake shot him a dirty look but didn’t reply. He couldn’t. Paul was right. Jake didn’t know what answer he wanted. But he knew which one he was hoping to avoid.

  CHAPTER 25

  Monday, July 16, 11:40 A.M., Midtown, New York City

  Richard had finally gotten around to starting to read Kate’s paper, and he wasn’t far into it when he realized there was no need to finish it. What she had hoped would be construed as nothing more than a hint was way more than a hint. It was the next best thing to an assertion. Or an accusation.

  He laid aside the small sheaf of papers and stared unseeing at the multi-hued blur of weather maps glowing on the computer screen in front of him, the weight of the knowledge pressing against his chest, an awful roaring in his head.

  The sudden, inexplicable escalations, the frenzied turbulence of the air—the storms were pinpoint strikes, exactly what he and Carter had talked about during long hours spent waiting for computers to generate the models they hypothesized.

  Carter had said more than once that if he was given the opportunity to leave a legacy in this world, that’s what it would be: custom-made weather, but not to be used as a weapon. He’d turn a sword into a plowshare, he’d said. He’d help save the world and reverse the brutalities humans had wreaked upon her.

  Richard put his head into his shaking hands and willed the burn in his gut to stop.

  If the Agency wasn’t behind those storms, it could only be Carter. And the Agency wouldn’t use American soil as its test bed. It wouldn’t sacrifice unsuspecting Americans in its pursuits, not when there were so many other places on earth, like the airspace over the oceans, that it could use freely or with relative impunity.

  There was a quick rap of knuckles on his office door, followed by the voice of his assistant producer. “You’re due in makeup, Richard.”

  He pulled himself out of his desk chair and took a few quick breaths as he tried to focus on what he needed to do.

  His last broadcast of the day began in twenty minutes. After that he’d have plenty of time to figure out what to do. And he knew he’d need it.

  Monday, July 16, 1:30 P.M., McLean, Virginia

  Jake Baxter stared into the middle distance, not seeing the medium blue fabric of his cubicle walls, not hearing the muted tumult of voices and tapping fingers and ignored telephones. The five flat-screen monitors on his desk formed a parabola of glowing, shifting color around him.

  Thirty-six and nine.

  He was up to thirty-six weather events within nine years that met the task force criterion of being anomalous for their locality, but he was no closer to seeing a critical pattern emerge from the data. That’s not to say he didn’t think one was there. He knew there was. He just didn’t know what it looked like.

  The events spanned the globe, and three of them hadn’t even been on the list he’d been given. He’d stumbled across them himself, investigated them, and decided they were worthy of additional consideration. There were eight rain events, two of which were thunderstorms that had spawned several tornadoes each. There were also thirteen cyclonic windstorms of varying intensity and nine heat bursts. No obvious common denominator existed among them. The surface temperatures at the commencement of the storms had varied by almost sixty degrees, and other conditions had varied just as widely. There was no common topological or landscape feature, natural or otherwise, among them. There were no similarities in duration and no solar- or lunar-cycle correlations.

  From the perspective of having been created or escalated due to human intervention, there still didn’t seem to be much of a pattern among the storms other than that the frequency of occurrence had increased somewhat within the last three years. An increase in tests would be expected if a government was getting closer to reaching its goal, so that didn’t count for as much as something else might, like location or temporality. But none of the escalations had occurred near major cities, critical supply centers, or commercial transportation routes, and none had happened on or near the dates of any major local or international event or anniversary.

  Jake leaned back with his hands meshed behind his head and stared at the maps and charts he’d plotted. The storms had occurred in twelve countries on four continents and over three oceans. When he pulled out the few events that were truly off the charts in terms of their erratic characteristics—Hurricanes Mitch, Ivan, and Wilma—a few broad similarities emerged for the rest of them. All were relatively localized, of relatively short duration, and had caused light to moderate damage to surrounding areas, which had ranged from virtually uninhabited locales in the Third World to small American cities. The storms had happened in every month of the year, over the course of the nine years, and they’d happened at all different times of the day.

  He closed his eyes and tried to see what he wasn’t seeing with his eyes open.

  Look into the gaps. The answers are frequently in the gaps in the data.

  It was a statement he never thought he’d hear again, even in his head, yet the voice was so clear, so clipped and British and annoying as hell, that Jake’s eyes popped open and his breath caught for a split second—until his consciousness convinced his imagination that Professor Rutherford Blake wasn’t actually standing there, glaring at him.

  Nope, the cube, the monitors, the background hum of intelligence collection at its finest—everything was as it should be.

  I might as well look at the gaps.

  He arranged all of the spreadsheets on his monitors so he could see them simultaneously, then let out an annoyed breath. “How am I supposed to find the fucking gaps?” he muttered.

  Every parameter had been correlated with every other one. There were no gaps. He’d cross-checked everything. There were a few charts with lines that resembled one another, but the data points were unrelated, making the visual similarities nothing more than random noise.

  Weather is a chaotic system, random by its very nature. That had been Professor Blake’s favorite statement. He’d intoned it constantly, like a priest giving a benediction.

  Jake stood up and headed for the small kitchenette near the edge of the cube farm. He needed a Coke and he needed it now. Low blood sugar was the only reason that he could possibly be revisiting classes with Professor Blake. Either that or it was sheer denial that he had the best equipment in the world at his fingertips and access to every existing archive of weather data and he was still as clueless as he’d been that first year in college. His blood needed sugar as much as his brain needed answers.

  The brain absorbs chaos and sorts it. That’s why people always tell you to “sleep on it.”

  Jake stopped short. Which professor had said that?

  Definitely not Blake. He’d never have used a cliché to explain something. He had been one of the good ones. At least one of the few who hadn’t made such an issue over the state of his term papers. And he’d written a letter of recommendation, too. Jake could picture him. Sporting a long ponytail and a shaggy beard, he’d been an aging hippie with a pipe and a Saab and a wife who didn’t mind a b
unch of undergrads hanging around their house trying to sound intellectual. She’d actually fed them, so, like stray dogs, they’d kept coming back.

  Jake stopped in front of the machine, stuck the quarters into the slot, and, annoyed at himself for getting off track, punched the button for a Coke Classic a little harder than he had to. The reminiscences could wait for another day. Right now he needed a dose of reality as much as he needed a dose of the real thing: real caffeine, real sugar, real clues. Too bad answers didn’t come in a flip-top can.

  CHAPTER 26

  The waters that edged the fringe of small islands were warmer than what the storm had been feasting upon, and their seduction proved irresistible. Simone moved in a long, elegant arc toward the most easterly islands of the Bahamas chain; their inhabitants began to feel her effects well in advance of her arrival.

  Dropping air pressure lent a curious euphoria to the preparations as windows were boarded up and outdoor objects secured. Land-bound wildlife took to their lairs and nests as birds fled, coasting along the strengthening wind swells. Domestic animals cowered or panicked, their instincts dulled, their caretakers attending to more important things.

  The rains had begun early in the day, and the wild, duney beaches were already deeply gashed in places by runoff from the island’s interior and flattened in others by the heavy surf from the sea. Sea grasses prostrated themselves before the shrieking wind, and palms swayed dizzyingly, some losing their balance and, thus, their footing. Newly freed to skid or fly, the trees careened aimlessly along the land without respect for larger, denser, or more secure features. Glass doors and stray dogs were no match for the impaling power of their momentum.