The modern history of weather modification had begun in the 1940s when researchers at General Electric in New York discovered that silver-iodide smoke transformed cloud droplets to ice, a process that could lead to rain formation. By the late 1940s, the Soviet Union, Britain, and the United States were all experimenting with cloud seeding projects. In one infamous incident from August of 1952, a British cloud-seeding experiment over the town of Lynmouth, England, supposedly caused wild flash flooding that killed thirty-five people. During the more hubristic 1960s, the United States launched Project Popeye, a military weather modification operation used in Vietnam and Laos. The US military also oversaw Project Stormfury, which sprayed silver iodide into the sky to weaken hurricanes. The program claimed several modest successes, including Hurricane Debbie in 1969. But many scientists were skeptical, calling the experiments inconclusive, arguing that it was impossible to isolate the effects of cloud seeding from other natural processes acting on hurricanes.
Weather modification research had, for a time, been part of the Cold War, like the space race and the nuclear arms and chemical/biological weapons races. But the United States seemed to lose interest in the late 1970s. In 1977, a United Nations treaty banned the use of weather modification for military purposes.
Research continued, though, in other countries, particularly China and the Soviet Union. Blaine found several dozen accounts in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere of weather modification programs in China, Russia and the private sector over the last two decades, but little in the United States.
Why had the US lost interest? Blaine wondered. A cynic might say failure of imagination, she supposed. But there was also the question of priorities, as the President and Secretary DeVries had said. After Stormfury, the United States had decided to spend time trying to first understand hurricanes rather than stop them.
Blaine finally shut down her computer, still bothered by what the President had said, and what he hadn’t said. What Blaine needed was a sounding board outside the circle to answer some hypothetical questions that were nagging her.
It was 11:14.
She decided to try her friend Dr. Rubin Sanchez at his office, leaving a message for him to call. She knew he wouldn’t get it until the morning. Sanchez was a former professor at Columbia’s Earth Institute and a onetime assistant director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies; he now worked for a private research lab near Baltimore. He was one of the scientists who’d brought global warming to the world’s attention, testifying to Congress often on climate issues. But he had become increasingly eccentric of late, in both his pronouncements and his appearance, growing an unruly white beard and wearing his shoulder-length hair in a ponytail. Detractors called him Professor Rubin Santa Claus.
Blaine felt a little funny calling him, as if doing so were a species of disloyalty. She lay in bed and thought about it, and about all that had happened that day. She should have been tired, but wasn’t. She lay awake for several hours, and her thoughts became like paths through a thick woods that somehow always returned to the same clearing, and the same thought. It was already Monday in Western Europe.
TWELVE
Monday, October 3, 7:23 A.M.
RONALD REAGAN NATIONAL AIRPORT is located on 733 acres of land in Arlington, Virginia, just over the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. It serves about five thousand passengers each day. Charles Mallory was one of the first of those five thousand on Monday morning. He felt a pleasant surge as he stepped out of the terminal building after arriving on a JetBlue flight. It was eleven degrees warmer in Washington than it had been in Maine and the sky was painted a crisp, hard blue that reminded him of the past. Early football season weather.
Mallory claimed his rental car at the National counter, where he was also handed a sealed, letter-sized envelope that had been left for him. He opened it before pulling out of the parking garage.
It was a series of letters printed in twelve point on a single sheet of paper: RFCROFAUTLFOATHRHOOORUCCG. A message that he knew was from his brother. Typical Jon. He was in some sort of trouble, Mallory suspected, although he couldn’t yet imagine what it might be. His brother saw things that others didn’t see; he saw stories where Mallory might just see information.
He drove the Ford Taurus along the G.W. Parkway beside the Potomac, catching glimpses of all of the famous landmarks: Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Kennedy Center, Watergate. The hotel was on the river in Maryland, an eighteen-story, two-thousand-room monstrosity with a giant glass atrium. Chaplin had made the arrangements; instructions about his next hotel would be in the room.
Mallory liked large, anonymous hotels where he could disappear and think for hours at a time. He intended to use this one as his base for a couple of days, as Chaplin made plans for him to meet with his brother.
As he walked to the check-in counter, he noticed that some sort of IT conference had taken over much of the hotel. A Tessitura conference.
Upstairs, he unpacked in less than two minutes, then sat in an armchair and looked at the message again:
RFCROFAUTLFOATHRHOOORUCCG
The first part, he knew. RFC identified the code: “Rail Fence Cipher.” The second R meant “reverse.” As in “reverse order.” It was a simple system they’d worked out as kids. In recent decades, Charles and Jon Mallory had been distant acquaintances, kept separate by their very different careers and temperaments. But several years ago, in a remote part of Africa, Jon had saved his life, and they’d connected in ways they never had before. If he was in some sort of trouble now, or ever, Mallory would do whatever he could to help.
He stared at the letters and reversed their order in his mind. So, instead of OFAUTLFOATHRHOOORWCCG, the actual cipher became those letters in reverse order:
GCCWROOOHRHTAOFLTUAFO
Mallory worked out the rail fence cipher grid on a sheet of paper, plugging in the letters left to right.
Three levels:
Then, reading diagonally, again left to right, the message became: GO TO CHURCH AT WA FOR FOLO.
He tore the sheet of paper into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.
There was a gym on the first floor of the hotel, and Mallory went down for twenty minutes of upper body weights followed by twenty on the treadmill. Afterward, feeling pleasantly tired, he walked out to the poolside atrium restaurant for an early lunch. He took his club sandwich and fruit juice to the only empty table he saw, surveying the computer people as he ate. A slow song by ABBA played fuzzily on the PA.
GO TO CHURCH AT WA FOR FOLO.
After several minutes, a pony-tailed woman in her thirties showed up with a cup of beer. She stood beside him, as if at attention, smiling as he looked up.
“Did I lose my spot?”
“I don’t know. Did you?”
She nodded to a pair of sunglasses on one of the other chairs.
“Oh,” he said. “Discreet, but valid. Sorry. Didn’t realize anyone was sitting here.”
Mallory gathered his plate and cup. But the woman touched his wrist.
“No, please. Stay right there. It’s all right,” she said, her voice conspiratorially husky.
He glanced again. A slender, nice-looking woman, dressed in khaki slacks and a loose gray T-shirt. She had intelligent blue eyes, he saw, and a slight but interesting smile.
They both sat.
“So. Are you part of the conference?”
“Me? Not really,” he said.
She sipped her beer, glancing at the pool activity.
“You?”
She exaggerated a shrug. “Guilty.”
“Somehow you don’t strike me as the geek type.”
“Oh. Thank you,” she said, grinning as if he had said it with great irony. “You know what it is. Ninety-nine percent of geeks give the rest of us a bad name.”
Now Mallory smiled.
“No, my company sends me to these things,” she went on. Sipped. “I’m a tech. In addit
ion to doing these seminars, we’re expected to network a little. That’s the part I’m not so keen about. I’m really not much of a mixer.”
“No? Me neither.” He could tell the woman wanted a conversation, and he wasn’t in the mood.
“I mean, you’re expected to sort of play a role, right? Be the rep for your company and all that kind of crap. I can’t do it. I mean, I can, right? If I wanted to. But that’s the point: I don’t want to.” She sipped again. When she lowered the cup, a trace of foam rimmed her upper lip. “I prefer to just be myself. You know?”
“I do.” Mallory nodded. “Which is a good thing, because, as they say, all the others are taken.”
It took her a moment, but when she got it, she laughed, a big, happy laugh, showing a surprising alignment of teeth. The reason for her tight smile, maybe.
Mallory looked across the pool and saw a man with The Economist. It suddenly reminded him of a different magazine.
WA.
Weekly American.
CHURCH.
Roger Church, the magazine’s editor.
“What?” the woman asked.
“Nothing. I was just remembering something.”
Mallory stood. For a moment, her face sank, then she managed to restore the tight, interesting smile.
“Are you leaving?”
“I’m sorry. I need to make a call.”
“My name’s Gwen, by the way.” She reached to shake his hand.
“Fernando.”
“Really?”
He shrugged.
“Well. If you’d like to have a drink or something later, Fernando, I’ll probably just be hanging in the lounge.”
“I’ll look for you.”
THIRTEEN
MALLORY DROVE BACK ALONG the George Washington Parkway and across Memorial Bridge into the city. Snaked through the late morning traffic and found a public parking garage near the State Department in Foggy Bottom. He walked seven blocks to the Weekly American offices, skirting the campus of George Washington University, which was busy with students. It was a brisk day, sixty degrees. Bright cloud towers hung in the sky; rain was coming.
Jon had been a contributing editor to the Weekly American for more than ten years, turning out news features and profiles from around the world. His editor, Roger Church, was once considered among Britain’s top investigative reporters. For most of the past decade, he had run the Weekly American in Washington, giving it, despite its moniker, an international following.
A bas relief map of the world covered much of one lobby wall. There was also a ceiling-tall trophy case and poster-size blowups of past magazine covers.
“To see Roger Church, please,” Mallory said to the receptionist.
“Do you have an appointment?”
Exactly the question he had expected.
“I don’t.”
She crinkled her face. “And your name?”
He told her.
“And this is in reference to …?”
“It’s not in reference to anything.”
“Okay.” He gazed at a magazine cover showing Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin at a joint press conference. 1998. Another, more recent one: Vladimir Putin with Barack Obama, sharing a Russian breakfast.
The receptionist buzzed Church. Minutes later, a tall, thin man with a mop of silvery hair strode into the lobby and extended his hand. His tie was loosened several inches, his shirt sleeves turned up unevenly.
“Well, well,” he said. “A mystery come to life.”
“A pleasure.”
“Likewise. Please. Come on back.” Church dipped his head graciously and led Mallory into the corridor, taking loping, long-legged steps, past a series of small offices to his own large, immaculate corner space. He closed the door and nodded at the burgundy leather chair in front of his desk. Mallory took in the view—office buildings, the State Department, the tip of the Washington Monument.
“Been expecting you,” Church said.
“Sorry I took so long.”
“Have a seat. Here, let me get something for you.”
Church had the restless energy of a twenty-five-year-old and the weathered, lined face of an old man, just as his brother had once described him. When Mallory finally sat, Church crouched down behind his desk. Mallory leaned forward to see what he was doing: opening his wall safe.
He extracted a nine-by-twelve envelope, closed the safe, and passed it over the desktop.
“For you.”
“From my brother.”
He nodded and sat, resting his right thumb and forefinger on the handle of his steaming coffee cup.
“Where is Jon?” Mallory asked. “Do you know?”
“No idea. He told me he was going to disappear for a while. He has, evidently.” He nodded at the envelope. “Have a look.”
Mallory opened it. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a typed, numbered list of names. Nothing else. He studied it: seven names, none of whom he recognized.
1. Steven Loomis
2. Dr. Susan Beaumont
3. Deborah Piper
4. David Worth
5. Michael Dunlopen
6. Dr. Frank Johnson
7. Dr. Atul Pradhan
Beneath the list, written in blue ink, were the initials DKW. Mallory recognized the handwriting as his brother’s.
“Who are they?”
Church touched his coffee cup handle. “At least four of the people on the list are dead.”
“The other three?”
“Unknown.”
“So …? What ties them together?”
“Don’t know. I’ve run a couple hours of data searches. Checked with police agencies. Four were scientists involved in weather research. That’s the closest I’ve found to any sort of link. But the projects they worked on had no apparent connection. All in different parts of the country. Number five was a newspaper reporter. He’s one of the confirmed dead.”
“What happened?”
“Shot. A remote wooded region of Alaska.”
“Unsolved?”
“Unsolved.”
“And the others?”
“Susan Beaumont was murdered in a motel room near Caspar, Wyoming. Dr. Atul Pradhan died in the tsunami in the Bay of Bengal.”
“Last week?”
“Yes. September twenty-fifth.”
“What about this weather research? What specifically were they working on?”
“Very different arenas, as I say. Steven Loomis, to start at the top, was involved with the Defense Department from the 1960s through the 1970s. He worked for a time on Project Stormfury.”
“The hurricane mitigation project,” Mallory said. “Now largely discredited.”
“Yes. About ten years ago, he signed on as a consultant for a private industry weather mapping project in California. He also worked for a company called Energy and Atmospheric Research Systems, or EARS, which was a big government contractor for a while.”
Mallory nodded. He knew a little about them.
“Dr. Beaumont was a forensic meteorologist. She was a researcher at MIT. Frank Johnson was a physicist who created weather tracking computer models. Died of a heart attack, apparently. No connection between the two, though. At least none that I’ve been able to find. Deborah Piper, I’m not sure. Not much on her yet.”
Mallory glanced at the names. “And their paths never crossed? None of the seven?”
“Not that I’ve been able to determine.”
“Who were the other confirmed dead?”
“The confirmed dead are numbers two, five, six, and seven.”
He glanced at the four names. “And the three disappearances. Any signs of violence?”
“In one case, yes. Number four. There were signs of a struggle at his home,” Church said. “In three of the deaths, interestingly, DNA was found at the scene which was not that of the victim and could not otherwise be identified. Not spouses or anyone else who was considered a possible suspect.”
“And not part
of the FBI’s DNA database.”
“Exactly.”
“Any connection among those DNA samples? Indicating it could have been the same person?”
Church pressed his lips together, showing the faintest trace of a smile. “I actually planted that idea with one of the detectives. Said I’d received an anonymous tip that the cases might be connected.”
“And?”
“He followed up. The DNA doesn’t match. In one case, it belonged to a woman.”
Mallory was forming an idea.
“It’s possible, of course, that they’re not related,” Church added. “That this is some kind of elaborate ruse. Or a mistake.”
Mallory glanced at the paper again. “And these initials at the bottom?”
DKW.
Church sighed. “She’s the one your brother was talking with for his story. Dr. Keri Westlake. Based in College Park. Now officially a missing person.”
“She’s the one who gave him this list?”
“Evidently. I wish I had asked him more, in a way. He was very reluctant to discuss any of this with me. It was very dangerous information, he said. Which is probably true. But he seemed quite determined that you get this list. He said he had tried to reach you for several days. Unsuccessfully. Almost a week, I think.”
“Yes, I know.” Mallory looked away.
“He said if anyone could figure this out, you could.”
“Well. He sometimes overestimates me.” Mallory read through the names again, feeling guilty that it had taken him so long to pick up the messages, wondering: Was Jon in the same situation their father had been in—pursued for what he knew? Had something happened to him?
“Why was he talking with this Dr. Westlake, anyway?”
“He’d been doing preliminary research for a story on the geo-engineering industry. He didn’t talk a lot about it, although he did tell me something quite interesting. He said, ‘She answered a question I didn’t ask.’ ”
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