Jake and Kevin were still engaging in a controlled argument about blasting what remained of the storm.
“Guys, give it a rest,” Kate said, nudging Jake’s arm and indicating with her head that he should look where she was looking.
Someone had uplinked to a Department of Defense satellite that had been trained on New York City’s Financial District. In silent, stunned awe the people on board the Clinton absorbed the devastation that lay where the center of the world’s finances had pulsed so vibrantly only days ago. Skyscrapers rose out of waters that would not recede for days. It took a moment for Kate to recognize an enormous swath of surging water as the former site of the World Trade Center. And then her eyes were drawn to the top of the screen, where an arm bearing a torch rose above the churning surface of the Hudson River.
“Mother of God,” Kate breathed as the images finally became too blurred from her tears. She felt the warm weight of Jake’s arm come to rest on her shoulder, as he pulled her in tight.
“It’s the last time, Kate,” he whispered into her hair, and she couldn’t tell if his voice was shaking, too. “It’s the last time anyone will ever have to see that or live through it. We won.”
CHAPTER 48
Undefeated by the drones, Simone had been the perfect example of a storm of Olympian proportions poised to reassert the dominance of Nature over Man—until the bolt of icy fire pierced her heart, shattering her meticulous, organized structure. Convective towers stopped their dizzying, spinning climb in the face of the force of the atmospheric change.
Chaos erupted.
The upward spiral of warm, wet air stuttered and collapsed as its fuel disappeared. The inner rain bands, massively tall walls of frenzied, spinning clouds, froze in place and shattered, their myriad minute droplets exponentially increasing in size, expanding in a time span that was barely measurable to become pellets of brittle ice. They fell to the roiling, now-gelid sea, which subsumed them.
Without the pulsing dual forces of life and death behind them, the winds in the outer bands began to slow, losing their fearsome coherence. The sun, no longer invisible except to the core, reasserted its supremacy and began to coax the world back to equilibrium.
EPILOGUE
May 12, 2008, 2:35 P.M., Midtown, New York City
With a start, Kate pushed herself away from the window frame and dragged her eyes away from the view.
What’s left of it.
She walked back to the large table in the center of the otherwise empty conference room and picked up a short stack of files before her gaze wandered back to the windows. The late-spring sky was dirty gray, to match her mood.
She was on the twenty-second floor of an unremarkable Midtown high-rise, facing south, toward what had been the financial district. After Simone’s floodwaters had receded and the sludge and immediate debris had been hauled away, wide-scale demolition had begun. The buildings that hadn’t come down had been imprisoned in exoskeletons of scaffolding and, by Christmas, cranes had replaced office towers on the horizon.
My city.
There was no pride in the thought, just anger and a bleak emptiness. She closed her eyes for a moment and then firmly turned her back to the windows.
Tourists and television pundits—most of whom wouldn’t know Fifth Avenue from Flatbush Avenue—had taken to saying smugly that Midtown was the new downtown, and every time she heard it she wanted to strangle someone. The real tragedy was that it was true. It was the middle of May, and the southern tip of Manhattan was as much of a ghost town as it had been just after the storm ten months earlier. Many residents and corporate tenants had fled; few had returned.
The rest of the country—the world—had been aghast at the extent of the damage. President Benson himself had come up as soon as the water started to recede. A much-reproduced photograph showed him standing alone on the ruins of Liberty Island, his face in his hands, his head and shoulders bowed with the raw eloquence of grief, and beyond, the Lady on her side, her face lapped by a muddy, toxic Hudson.
So many people had been devastated, so many cities and towns along the Eastern Seaboard had been decimated by the storm that New York City was pretty much on its own, left to itself to bury its dead and clean up its streets. Stunned locals had assured each other that when the funerals ended, when the mud was gone, life would come back. The neighborhoods, the businesses, the crowds; the attitude and the spark. All of it had to return; this was New York, after all. But it hadn’t happened. Neither the native bluster with its quintessential cocky shrug, nor the will to rebuild, had reappeared. The city remained debilitated, its residents dazed and hollow.
Kate had been one of the lucky ones. She’d been locked out of her apartment building for weeks after the storm while the co-op board discussed whether to tear it down, but her status as a key government witness had guaranteed her a hotel room uptown, meals, and money for incidental expenses, which was good because she’d had nowhere else to go. Her parents’ house was gone; Gerritsen Beach was once again the mud flat it had been a few hundred years earlier. Her parents had reconsidered Arizona.
Work was gone, too. Coriolis was in its death throes, and Wall Street itself was no longer much of an icon or a destination. Depleted by two catastrophes in six years, most of the banks and investment houses had permanently relocated. It hardly mattered to Kate at this point. While some called her a patriot, the Street considered her a pariah. When her name was mentioned at all, it was as a curse.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been kept busy since the storm. The first few months after Simone had been spent in endless interviews with government lawyers and, later, in depositions to which she was summoned by attorneys representing a panoply of interests, ranging from her former company to the White House. In her free time, she’d gone to funerals.
Finally, when most of that was over, she’d been offered a job.
A job. One. And she’d taken it.
“Hey. I’ve been looking for you for twenty minutes.”
Kate’s head snapped up at the sound of Jake’s voice. “You’re here already?”
“Obviously. And what do you mean ‘already’? I’ve been here for an hour.”
She grimaced. “Sorry.”
He shrugged with a grin. “Working for the Agency means never having to say you’re sorry. Are you ready?”
She forced a smile. “Just let me put away these folders and I’m all set.”
“Are you excited?”
It wasn’t necessary to meet his eyes. “No.”
“Nervous?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Now she looked up. “I’m not so sure I like being used as shock therapy,” she murmured as she walked past him toward the corridor that led to her cubicle in the Central Intelligence Agency’s New York City field office. She’d been with the Agency for three months. It still seemed unreal.
No. Surreal.
“That guy killed a hell of a lot of people, Kate, and nearly killed you and me. Just because he’s—”
“I know. I know, Jake. Carter Thompson is a maniac. But he’s also an old man who suffered a massive stroke. He’s gone from being a self-proclaimed master of the universe to being a vegetable. I’m allowed to have some pity for him. It’s called being human,” she snapped.
He slipped his hand around her upper arm and brought her to a halt. “He’s a criminal, Kate. A mass murderer who can barely communicate and won’t cooperate.”
“He killed a good friend of mine with his bare hands, Jake. I haven’t forgotten that. I never will. But why should he cooperate? What can anyone do to him? They’ve been grilling him for months. If he doesn’t want to blink his eyes in answer to a question, he closes them and falls asleep. What’s the government going to do, throw him in jail for contempt? He’s already there. His body is his jail.”
Jake’s eyes were just as hot as she knew hers were. “He responds when he hears your name mentioned. That’s why we’re going out there.”
Ten minutes later, raincoat over her arm, computer bag slung over her shoulder, pull-along suitcase parked next to her feet, Kate leaned in the doorway of the conference room, waiting for Jake to turn around and notice her. When he ended the call and looked up at her, the look on his face was a curious combination of relief and irritation. There was the shadow of a smile behind it, though, which made her frown.
“What’s up?”
“Carter’s dead.”
For a moment all Kate could do was blink at him. She’d absorbed so many deaths in the past few months that she couldn’t feel any emotion. Her first thought was that now she wouldn’t have to leave town.
“What happened?” She walked into the room, dropped her coat over the back of a chair, and set her computer bag on the table.
“About an hour ago, his wife went in to see him. She whipped out a pair of scissors she’d concealed somehow and started cutting every tube she could reach. She only managed to slice up a few before they responded, but I guess as someone tackled her she went for a wire and—” He winced. “She got far enough through the insulation to hit some current.”
Kate blinked again. “So she’s dead? And he’s dead?”
“Toast. Literally. An FBI agent and a nurse were injured pretty badly, too.”
They were both quiet for a minute, staring past each other.
“I thought that place was guarded more heavily than the gates of Hell. How did she get in there with scissors?” Kate asked, then immediately held up her hands. “Don’t answer that, even if you can. I don’t care. He’s dead.”
A minute passed, then Jake cleared his throat. “What now?”
Kate hesitated. “Is our trip canceled?”
“Yes.”
Their eyes met. “Then how about lunch?” she replied slowly.
“It’ll have to be take-out.”
They both froze as the too-familiar voice came from just beyond the room’s open door. A moment later, the young, unsmiling face of Tom Taylor appeared. Neither she nor Jake uttered a word as Tom walked in and closed the door behind him.
Looking from one to the other, his eyes were as expressionless as ever. “What? It’s been months and you’re not glad to see me?”
“Got it in one.” Kate tried to force a smile and failed.
Ignoring her comment, Tom set his computer bag on the table, sat down, and slid out his laptop. “Have a seat. The topic is eco-terrorism, specifically pollution. More specifically, the deliberate toxification of the oceans, genetic mutation of certain species. What I need from you two is a crash course on thermohaline convection.” He glanced up at Kate. “I’ll pick up the tab for lunch. I suggest we don’t order sushi.”
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
EPILOGUE
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