The Alarmists (4 page)

“Whoa. Sorry about that, Colonel,” the man said. He looked past Richards to see Brent’s eyes fixed on the jar in his hands. Glancing down at it, he said, “Almost lost the little beauty.”

Richards stepped back to let the man pass, and Brent watched as he handed the jar to the woman, who then mounted a small stepladder to place it next to an identical jar on the room’s highest shelf.

The professor turned to the colonel. “Okay, what was that?”

“What was what?” the colonel said.

“That
,
”
Brent said, pointing to the jar on the shelf. “With the eyes?”

“Ah, that.” After a pause, the colonel added, “How about we just agree you didn’t see that, okay?”

Brent stared at Richards for a moment. “Classified?” he said.

“Classified.”

“The eyeballs are classified. . . .”

The colonel nodded. “That’s right, Professor. The eyeballs are classified.” He stopped then and turned to face Brent. “But you didn’t see any eyeballs, did you?”

The professor shook his head. “Nope.”

Richards started off again, but Brent tossed a question after him.

“Are there any other body parts I should be on the lookout for?”

When less than twenty steps later their trip ended in a nondescript conference room, complete with a rectangular table, ten chairs, a laptop, and a ceiling-mounted projector, Brent almost felt cheated, his expectations growing with each new strange thing he’d witnessed on the way. Nonetheless, he took a seat in the chair the colonel indicated and waited for his host to join him at the table.

Once in the chair, positioned in front of the laptop, Colonel Richards tapped a single key and the projector sprang to life, casting the image of a large world map on the wall, color-coded to correspond with a legend displayed in the map’s corner. What he noticed right off, though, was that the colors were confined to landmasses, and that they crossed both national and continental lines.

Brent shifted his attention to the legend, looking for anything that would help him decipher the nature of the map. He found that the only piece of information matching any particular color was a number. The numbers followed a straight count from one to ten; number one went with the color black and number ten with red. Each of the remaining numbers was given a color, and while Brent was no expert in this sort of thing, he suspected the black/one combo was the desired state of things, whereas the red/ten combo signified something extremely problematic—with varying degrees of undesirability in between.

“What am I looking at, Colonel?” he asked.

“Consider it our version of a Poincaré map,” the colonel said.

Armed with that information, Brent looked at the projection again. Now that he understood more about the map’s meaning, it seemed strange that the colonel and his team could plot Chaos Theory so neatly like this.

“I’m going to need a list of your initial conditions,” Brent said. “And your topological mixing progression, if you have one. Plus the actual Poincaré data.”

“Of course.”

“Since all of your measures are land-based, can I assume you’re using the Ricker model?”

The colonel nodded. “While we’re not measuring population growth, we thought Ricker most closely matched what we’re doing.”

Brent studied the map once more. After a few moments, he said, “So what exactly are you doing, Colonel?”

Colonel Richards didn’t answer right away, and when Brent pulled his eyes away from the map to glance at the man, he found Richards staring at the projection. Finally the colonel spoke.

“Tracking the breakdown of civilization, Dr. Michaels,” he said.

December 4, 2012, 4:40 P.M.

From his spot in a small depression atop the escarpment, Canfield looked out over the oil field, a land as flat as any he’d ever seen. He could see them only because he knew they were there—the men in his employ crossing the quarter mile of brown grass separating the Hickson Petroleum field from Canfield’s elevated position. Hickson Petroleum was but one of the many oil companies that leased space to drill in the Southwest’s Spraberry Trend. Yet it was the one with the lightest security, which made it perfect for this operation.

Canfield stifled a yawn. He was in desperate need of sleep, but after the complications at Afar, he’d decided to give this one his personal oversight. He’d done a decent job explaining Ethiopia to his boss, though he doubted the man would accept two failings in a row—a belief strengthened by the tone of their last meeting.

“What happened at Afar, Alan?” Mr. Van Camp had asked him.

At the question Canfield had sunk back into his chair and drew in a deep breath. When he expelled it he shook his head.

“No one knew our government had anyone operating in the area,” Canfield said. “Our liaison with the ONLF thought they were a research team.”

He shook his head again.

“What have you heard out of Washington?”

Behind Canfield—who only a few days ago had shared a drink with a mercenary who knew him by the name of Standish—a series of monitors flashed a continuous stream of news feeds. Van Camp looked past Canfield, taking in the events captured by countless cameras, many of them owned by him.

“There’s little coming out of the Beltway,” Van Camp said.

“I imagine they’ll keep it quiet until they know what they’re dealing with.”

It was the sort of statement that didn’t require a response. Instead, Van Camp said, “Have you been able to find out anything about the military unit that surprised your mercenary?”

“Not as much as I’d like to know,” Canfield answered honestly. “From what I’ve been able to gather, they’re a small unit called the NIIU, led by a colonel named Jameson Richards.”

“And the acronym stands for . . .”

“Non-Standard Incident Investigative Unit,” Canfield said. He shrugged his shoulders. “My contacts weren’t able to give me much about what that means except that most of their reports are protected by Level 5 security. And apparently they have a science facility in the Pentagon.”

Van Camp seemed to ponder that, his eyes never leaving Canfield.

“I imagine all we can do at this point is try to determine why they were at Afar,” he said. “Although in all likelihood it was an unfortunate coincidence.”

Canfield had thought the same thing but was pleased that his boss had come to the same conclusion without much prompting. Diverting resources to study a small army unit would pull those resources away from where they were most needed; and they were already racing the clock to complete the work at Shackleton. He was grateful, then, when Van Camp switched topics.

“Four dead?” the man asked.

“According to Dabir, yes,” Canfield said.

“And you’re certain they were killed, not captured?”

“Dabir was certain.” Canfield offered a grim smile. “He would have put a bullet in any of them himself had there been any doubt.” He paused a moment before adding, “But in the heat of battle, who knows?”

“Who indeed?” Van Camp said.

It was that sort of question that caused a shiver to run up Canfield’s spine, because it signified a potential lack of faith in Canfield’s ability to accomplish the tasks assigned him. And causing Arthur Van Camp to doubt one’s effectiveness was seldom a winning corporate advancement strategy. Hence his presence on a rock in Texas.

Canfield raised a pair of binoculars and watched his team of three men—dressed like the oil workers teeming over the rigs and drilling platforms—slip through a gate that an exchange of funds had assured would be temporarily unguarded. Once inside, the men set off in different directions, each with a mission to accomplish. As Canfield watched, he marveled at the lack of security. Apparently the thought of domestic terrorism had yet to take hold in the collective psyche of this region. He spotted the single guard walking the north line, but Canfield’s men were by now well away from the gate.

With the binoculars, Canfield followed one of the men as he strolled over to one of the newest production trees. The man bent down as if to inspect the valve, yet Canfield knew he would be pulling the packs of C-4 from the riggers bag he carried, securing the explosives beneath the weld line. The process took less than twenty seconds, after which the man was heading toward the main gate. Thirty yards away, another man finished his identical task and started for the same exit.

Canfield watched him for a few moments longer before moving to locate the team leader, the one tackling the most difficult target—the drilling rig surrounded by almost a dozen men. The man had donned a pair of goggles and found a spot on the periphery of the activity. The rig was active, with the drill bit pulverizing the subsurface rock, the pieces then pulled to the surface by the cycling drilling fluid. In preparation for this operation, Canfield had studied the rig, noting the difficulty of accessing any vulnerable areas within joints secured under the topdrive. In order to blow the well, they had to find a way through the casing at ground level or locate a spot above the action.

Moments later, the C-4 attached to the production trees blew, with a noise sufficient to dwarf the sound of the drill and sending the ground rolling beneath the entirety of the field.

It took a few long seconds before the Hickson employees around the unfinished well moved, but once they started, and once they saw the flames and black smoke rising from the two obliterated production trees, they took off toward the conflagrations.

Canfield, though, kept his eyes on the team leader, a former army officer turned corporate mercenary. The man waited while the drill operator brought the unit to a lumbering stop and then hurried down the small ladder to follow his co-workers. A few seconds later, when the operative started to climb, Canfield lost sight of him. It seemed like forever before he spotted him again, descending and walking away from the rig.

Canfield’s mistake was watching the drill rig a second too long. The flash, magnified through the binoculars, nearly blinded him. But what really shocked him was the power of the blast—sufficient to set the escarpment in motion a quarter mile from the site. His first thought was to wonder if any of his operatives had survived a blast considerably more powerful than he’d anticipated. But even with the possibility of casualties, he couldn’t help but smile. He’d wanted this one to be memorable—to perhaps make up for the failure at Afar. In that he’d succeeded.

After watching a few moments longer, he made his way back to the truck parked on the other side of the rock, started the engine, and pointed the vehicle toward Hobbs, New Mexico.

December 5, 2012, 8:25 A.M.

They’d housed Brent Michaels in a temporary office, and true to his word, Colonel Richards had supplied the professor with all the data he could have wanted. Even better, he’d supplied Brent with someone to help him sift through the voluminous information.

Captain Amy Madigan, a petite blonde with piercing eyes and an easy smile, sat at Brent’s left shoulder as he flipped through a stack of reports—all on U.S. Army letterhead, all signed and dated by Colonel Richards. In the few minutes during which he’d scanned the contents, Brent determined that the bulk of the reports detailed missions undertaken by the team over the last two years, mostly investigative jaunts to the world’s far-flung places. What, exactly, they were investigating wasn’t clear, but from what Brent could gather, few of the mission reports provided anything he would have called actionable data. In fact, most of them ended with a single phrase that the professor was starting to suspect was a motto for this team:
Information inconclusive
.

“So let me make sure I understand,” Brent said. “The colonel wants me to investigate a perceived increase in worldwide sociological entropy and determine if there are any measurable factors behind it. Does that about sum it up?”

Amy Madigan tipped her chair back and seemed to give careful consideration to the professor’s analysis.

“Well,” she said, “if by ‘sociological entropy’ you mean why the world seems to be trucking toward crazy a little faster than normal, then yes, that’s exactly what the colonel wants you to figure out.”

That pulled a smile from Brent, though one tempered by the nature of his assignment.

“You do realize that trying to predict the future state of even a closed deterministic system is close to mathematically impossible,” he said. “Even for a mathematician, which I’m not.” He shook his head. “Trying to do so with the entire population of the planet is absurd.”

As soon as he said it he realized how it sounded, but if Madigan was taken aback by a visiting professor insulting her work, as well as the work of her colleagues, she didn’t show it.

“Of course it is,” she agreed. “But remember, we’re not asking you to project the model forward. We want you to track it in reverse—find the thing that set all this off.”

“That’s assuming there is one thing,” Brent said. “Have you considered the probability that what you’re investigating is just a series of random events, with nothing tying them together?”

“We have,” Madigan said, “but we’re pretty sure that’s not the case.”

“And what makes you so sure?” Brent asked, even as he mentally kicked himself for jeopardizing the promise of a substantial paycheck.

“Because that’s what we do” was the captain’s response.

Brent chuckled and pushed the stack of papers away. “I’m still not entirely sure
what
you do.”

Madigan answered Brent’s laugh with one of her own.

“That’s okay,” she said. “Half the time I don’t know what we do either.”

When Brent didn’t answer, she let her chair fall back to the floor, resting an elbow on the desk. The shift in position revealed that she was wearing a chain, a small cross almost hidden beneath her uniform shirt.

“We have several labs down here,” she said. “In one of them there’s a car.”

“What kind of car?”

“An Infiniti. A J30. 1995.”

Brent frowned, unimpressed.

“The reason the car’s here is because when it’s parked on Seventh Avenue in Tacoma, right in front of the True Value, it won’t start.” At the professor’s puzzled look she said, “You see, it will start anywhere else. In fact, if you push it a few feet up so that it’s parked in front of the doughnut shop next to the hardware store, it fires right up.”

Brent didn’t say anything right away, for he was uncertain of the point.

“It’s not just coincidence?” he finally asked.

“We’ve tested it. We’ve flown or driven that car all over the country, and every time we turn the key, it starts. But if we take it back to Tacoma and park it in front of the True Value, it’s as dead as a doornail.”

“Have you considered that it might be the spot as opposed to the car?”

“Of course we have. We’ve parked more than a hundred cars in the same spot and all of them started up just fine.” She paused. “Well, except for the Mazda 626. It took us fifteen minutes to figure out it was out of gas.”

“Maybe it’s just Infinitis that are affected?”

“Uh-uh,” Madigan said. “We’ve tried. Same model, same year. In fact, we even found one with the same mileage.”

Brent nodded as if he understood what this was about.

“You see, Dr. Michaels, it’s not the car and it’s not the spot. But for some reason when you bring those two elements together, you have something unexpected.” She reached across the desk and tapped the stack of papers. “We’re the ones who bring the right things together, Professor.
That’s
what we do.”

Brent leaned back in his chair and considered that. In a way, Amy Madigan’s explanation made sense. After all, when he looked at the mission reports, they resembled nothing so much as an accumulation of puzzle pieces to be assembled later.

“Tell me about Ethiopia,” he said. “That was your last outing, right?”

Madigan nodded.

“What sent you out there in the first place?” Brent asked.

His experience working with military personnel had acclimated him to the normal reticence most of them had about revealing nonessential data. Madigan exhibited that now; he could see her batting the question around in her mind. Brent, however, seldom asked a nonessential question.

“A few of our satellites picked up some unusual readings along the Afar Rift,” she said. “Like pre-quake seismic activity.”

“I’m not as up on my geology as I’d like to be,” he said, “but isn’t that the spot where the ground ripped open? You know, all the shaking, the lava?”

“That’s right.”

“So aren’t unusual readings kind of par for the course?”

She smiled and said, “Yes, but these readings seemed too regular to have been caused by natural forces.”

“So that means . . .”

“That means they might have been man-made,” she finished. At Brent’s doubtful look, she added, “If you knew anything about the rift, you’d know that the forces that caused it operate miles beneath the surface. And while they might seem random, if you watch it long enough, if you gather boatloads of data over the course of years, you can come close to figuring out what it’s going to do next.”

“And these readings?” Brent asked after a moment.

“Too shallow to be connected to tectonic plate movement. And too regularly timed to be natural occurrences.”

Brent had been honest in his initial admission: his expertise fell woefully short in the earth sciences. He had to take his cues, then, from Madigan, who exhibited no doubt regarding her conclusions.

“And now that you’ve been out there to investigate?” it occurred to him to ask.

“The readings have stopped,” she answered.

Brent could follow her line of reasoning. Why would the phenomenon have ceased were it not something that could be controlled?

“Who would be responsible for something like that?” he asked.

Madigan leaned back in her chair, tipping it back again on two legs, and fixed the professor with a smile. “Dr. Michaels, that’s why you’re here.”

—

Canfield allowed himself to indulge the slight limp caused by his egress from the hill that overlooked the obliterated oil field. He’d turned his ankle on the way back to the truck, stepping in a hole that he should have seen. He chalked it up to the weariness caused by business on three continents in four days—but he suspected Van Camp would simply see it as weakness.

While outside of the man’s purview, he could let something like human frailty show itself. In front of his boss, though, he would have to walk a steady path to the man’s desk, regardless of the pain.

His wife was another matter entirely. So rarely did he hurt himself that his wife’s reaction had redefined “over the top.” She wanted him off his feet so she could apply the ministrations a doting mate enjoyed affording. In fact, he thought Phyllis rather enjoyed his misfortune, as it fed her wont to fix things. That trait explained why he often returned home after one of his many trips to find that his house had become a refuge for some injured animal, or a motel for any one of their traveling neighbors’ pets. It was a trait he didn’t discourage; he knew the loneliness his job had imposed on her.

What he wouldn’t do was to seek sympathy from his boss. Before he entered Van Camp’s office, he braced himself against the pain and placed his full weight on his ankle. Van Camp trusted him to have a firm handle on each and every element of Project: Night House, and part of ensuring a continuation of that confidence was the unflappable persona Canfield exhibited. Like most men overseeing large corporations, Van Camp maintained a miserly grip on trust.

Van Camp, pen in hand, looked up as Canfield entered, and before he’d made it halfway across the room, Canfield knew he was about to be asked to undertake something distasteful. He could read as much on his boss’s face: a manufactured reluctance accompanying a paternal smile—an expression that, in itself, was all theater.

Checking the sigh that threatened to emerge, Canfield took the seat across from the man who ran a global empire that few in the world could rival.

Van Camp set the pen on the papers spread out in front of him. “I apologize, Alan,” he said. “I’d intended to give you a few days to rest from your recent spate of trips, but I fear I’m going to have to ask you to jump back into things immediately.”

“I understand,” Canfield said with a nod.

Rather than continue, Van Camp pushed back from the desk and stepped over to the bar. He filled two highball glasses with bourbon and then returned, placing one of the drinks in front of Canfield. Despite the frequency of Canfield’s presence in this office, Van Camp had never before shared a drink with him.

“Alan, I’ve been giving some thought to what we discussed when you returned from Africa,” Van Camp said.

Canfield reached for the drink and sampled a bit of the expensive bourbon.

“I think it’s time to end our operation in Ethiopia,” Van Camp went on.

What kept Canfield from showing surprise was that he’d considered this a possibility. His boss was, like most successful businessmen, more cautious in his business approach than the general public suspected. Success did not come from embracing risk but from minimizing it. What he didn’t know, however, was which project Van Camp wished to see ended.

They’d suspended—Canfield had thought temporarily—the work with the rift now that their machinations had attracted the attention of the American military. Coaxing an earthquake from an already unstable region wasn’t all that difficult. Causing the earthquake to occur on a specific date and time, however, was much more complex. Such a thing required a great deal of planning and work, and so Canfield had assumed a temporary nature to the suspension—at least until Van Camp’s considerable resources could make the necessary heads turn away. In Canfield’s estimation, Project: Night House required success at Afar, considering the difficulty of ensuring the same level of success at Shackleton.

There was also the possibility that Van Camp meant the work of Dabir’s team. In fact, he hoped for that—a desire that colored his response.

“While I don’t necessarily disagree with you,” Canfield said as the burn in his throat eased, “Dabir has proven himself to be a valuable asset. After Night House is finished, I thought perhaps we’d keep him on the payroll.”

Van Camp took a drink and followed it with a slow headshake. “What would he do for us that would mitigate the risk he presents?”

Canfield didn’t answer. Instead, he took another sip of the bourbon and found his eyes moving to the only item on Van Camp’s desk that could be called decorative.

He didn’t know anything about Van Camp’s personal history with the onyx carving—if it had been a gift, how long it had been in his possession, or if it held any sentimental value. His knowledge of the piece centered upon it having granted Project: Night House its name. The
Akbal
, the English translation of which had become the project moniker, was one of twenty symbols identifying Mayan calendar days. The carving showed what looked like a narrow mountain rising in the distance, with tree branches in the foreground. To Canfield it looked like a child’s drawing, although he thought he understood the intent of the Maya. Commonly used symbols had to be easy to reproduce; anything intricate would have increased what, in today’s terms, would have been called production time. That was a problem, and a solution, Canfield could appreciate. Something he could leverage in dealing with Dabir, who was a man he’d grown to, if not like, at least respect over the last few years. It made it easier that Dabir’s team was but one of more than a dozen positioned at hot spots around the globe.

“I’ll take care of it then,” he said after a time.

The only acknowledgment from Van Camp was a repositioning of the man’s eyes to the monitors that played out their scenes behind Canfield. For all Van Camp’s aloofness, Canfield knew the man respected the intricacies of the various moving parts that would secure his success. Truth be told, he likely knew each of those parts—and their many variables—better than Canfield himself.