“So much for resting,” said Mr. Bones, arching an eyebrow.
“I’ll rest next week.”
“It’s Sunday, it is next week.” Mr. Bones dragged over a heavy hand-carved wooden chair, flopped into it, crossed his ankles, and laid his heels on the edge of the bed.
Howard waved a hand. “You know what I mean. The doctor said it was stress and exhaustion. Big surprise. Said all I needed was some rest … so I’m resting.”
“How are you feeling? No bullshit.”
The old man took off his reading glasses and tossed them onto the bed. He rubbed his eyes and sighed. After a moment he said, “I know this is what I wanted,” he said. “I know this is what I’ve worked my life for … but sometimes getting what you want is such a goddamn pain in the ass.” He cut a look at his friend. “No, don’t say it: It’s like a man complaining because he has to count every penny in a heap of treasure he found. This isn’t something that’s going to take me off the path. I’m not going to come to my senses and devote the rest of my life to charity and good works. I’m a monster, Bones, and I like being a monster.”
“But it’s still a pain in the ass to count all that treasure,” said Mr. Bones softly.
“It is. Am I weak for saying that?”
“You’re human. And I’ll bet every hero and every conqueror in history had these moments. Alexander the Great probably needed to hang out in his tent, get drunk, fart, read some trash scrolls.”
Howard nodded. “They should show that in the history books. Downtime of the rich and powerful.”
“We can fund a reality show,” said Bones, “Kicking Back with Kings.”
They laughed about it. Quietly, respecting the needs of the moment. And then they sat in companionable silence for a time, listening to the drifting music from the speakers mounted high in the corners of the room. A playlist of old blues. All covers of Willie Dixon tunes.
“We could bag it,” said Mr. Bones, and when Shelton looked at him in surprise, he continued, “We could. All of it. We could let the air show be just an air show. We’ll have everyone here to fly their planes and we’ll be affable hosts. We could let Yuina continue to do what she already thinks she’s doing. We could stop the cyber-attacks and let Ledger and the DMS dig their way out from under without any further interference from us, we could call off the Closers and tell Tull to go back to trying to be a person.”
“What about the Chinese? I can’t help feeling that they’re closer than we think.”
Mr. Bones shrugged. “We initiate the tapeworm and turn their project to junk, and let the rest of the world go back to the arms race they think they’ve been running since the Cold War ended. We could do all of that, Howard.”
They both nodded, thinking about it. It wasn’t the first time they’d had some version of this conversation. It wasn’t the tenth time.
Howard said, “What’s wrong, Bonesy? Nervous there at the wobbly end of the high dive?”
“Of course. No matter how many times we run the math, there’s still a chance this could all go flooey.”
“‘Flooey’?”
“Flooey,” agreed Mr. Bones. “There might be something we haven’t thought of, some X-factor that makes it all go wrong.”
“There isn’t.”
“That’s what we believe, Howard, but we can’t know everything. No one has ever done what we’re about to do.”
“That’s what makes being the first so much fun.”
“What if the joint chiefs and the DoD suits won’t be bullied? What if we lay it all out and give them our terms and they call our bluff?”
“We’re not bluffing,” said Howard.
“What if they force our hand?”
Howard Shelton lay back and stared at the ceiling for a few moments. “I said I wanted to get out of the fast lane for a few minutes, collect my wits, get my second wind. I never said that I wanted to lose the race.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “No fucking way.”
Chapter Forty
Over Maryland airspace
Sunday, October 20, 8:53 a.m.
My cell rang again. Church.
“Dr. Hu has watched the video,” he said, “and he’d like to share some thoughts.”
I thought that I probably didn’t want to hear anything else. The day was already sliding downhill, but I flipped open my tactical laptop and the screen showed Mr. Church with a Chinese-American man in his mid-thirties. William Hu was an awkward, ungainly man with an incredible brain filled with deep knowledge in a lot of areas of science. A genuine supergenius, which is why Church hired him. Church doesn’t employ many second-stringers.
When I first joined the DMS, Hu and I had failed to bond on an epic level. He regards me as a mouth-breathing semiliterate Neanderthal and I think he’s a heartless prick who would improve the world by stepping in front of a bullet train. Neither of us pull any muscles trying to play nice.
“Okay, Doc,” I said, “what’s your take?”
Hu wore an X-Men T-shirt—vintage Dave Cockrum—and thick glasses with bright red frames. He removed them and polished the lenses thoughtfully on his shirt. “The president looks doped,” he began. “Not drunk, nothing like that. He’s too rigid for sodium amytal or scopolamine. Maybe amphetamines of some kind, considering the way he kept running his sentences into one another. Could also be one of the compounds that Ukrainian guy, Keltov, was playing with a few years ago. Whatever it was, the president appears to be acting according to chemical coercion.”
“Could be more than that,” I said. “Some of his nervousness could be from the fact that he was abducted, and his captors could have threatened him.”
Hu gave a derisive snort. “No way. You can’t bully someone like him.”
“You can threaten anyone,” I said. “Especially if the threats aren’t directed at him. He’s a husband, a father.”
Hu shook his head. “I don’t buy it.”
“Says the man who lacks the compassion to reach for a fire extinguisher if his own family was on fire,” I said.
Hu ignored that. “I’m drawing a blank on the Majestic Black Book, whatever that is.”
Church did not yet elucidate. Nor did I.
“The rest of it’s pretty clear, though,” said Hu.
“Clear?” I asked, and he gave me a pitying look.
“Obvious to anyone with half a brain, sure. They showed a series of natural disasters and each time they cut to the president telling us that we have to find this book. Simple enough, find the book or bad things will happen.” He smiled at me. “You didn’t get that?”
“Yes, I got that,” I lied. “But you said it yourself, they were ‘natural’ disasters. How can you threaten someone with that? Last I heard Mother Nature wasn’t taking contract hits.”
Hu rolled his eyes, just like a thirteen-year-old girl having to explain an iPhone app to her Luddite maiden aunt. “That’s why they showed us the volcano.”
Church gave a small nod; apparently he was right there with Hu.
“What about the volcano?” I asked.
“Well,” said Hu smugly, “the short-bus version is that either we get this book or they’ll arrange a disaster for us. We have all sorts of toys that could simulate a natural disaster. Hence the movie footage at the end. Speaking of which, I don’t recognize—”
“The Day After Tomorrow,” I supplied.
“Oh. Right.” Hu looked annoyed that I’d known that. I didn’t mention that Bug had told me. “And before you ask, they used fake footage because we haven’t had a tsunami hit the U.S. yet. They wanted to drive home a point, make it personal.”
Though it galled me to admit it, he was right. That was exactly the message and I could see it now. “At the risk of getting a demerit from Professor Snootypants,” I said, “is it really possible to engineer a tsunami?”
“Sure,” said Hu. “An artificially induced earthquake could do it. Drop a nuke in a volcano, or detonate some underground device on a fault line. Maybe hit the exterior
wall with nonnuclear cruise missiles. Couple of bunker busters at the right spot might do it. But, artificially induced or not, that volcano could definitely do it. No question about it.”
“Why that particular volcano? Is it active?”
“It doesn’t need to be,” said Church.
Hu nodded. “Absolutely. That volcano, even cold, is a disaster waiting to happen.”
“How do you know? Did Bug find it for you?”
“No, I recognize it,” said Hu smugly. “It’s Isla de La Palma in the Canary Islands, and the volcano is Cumbre Vieja.”
“So?”
Hu traced the edge of the volcano with his forefinger. “See that ridge? It’s a known scientific fact,” he said, leaning on the word “known” as if everyone of even marginal intelligence was in on this, “that a failure of the western flank of Cumbre Vieja could cause a mega-tsunami.”
“What kind of ‘failure’?”
“Like I said, an eruption would do it,” said Hu, “but if you wanted to guarantee the right effect, then you’d need an application of explosive force at the right point so you’d break off the western half. We’re talking something like five hundred cubic kilometers of rock falling in a massive gravitational landslide and smashing down into the Atlantic Ocean. Local amplitude of the resulting wave would have to be about six hundred meters—two thousand feet for those who haven’t learned their conversion tables.”
“Bite me,” I said quietly.
“So there you are with a six-hundred-meter-tall wave going hell-bent across the ocean at—what?—a thousand klicks an hour. That’s—”
“Six hundred twenty-one miles per hour,” I cut in. “Like I said, bite me.”
He grinned. “That’s your basic mega-tsunami rolling outward from the drop point at the speed of a jet aircraft.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Likely damage?” asked Church.
“Shit,” said Hu. “You’d lose the whole African coast in the first hour. Southern England a couple of hours later. And then in five, six hours it would hit the eastern seaboard of North America. Mind you, by then it would have diminished to, say, thirty to sixty meters, but that’s more than enough to wipe out Boston, New York, maybe as far inland as Philadelphia … all the way down to Miami. Call it fifty million people wishing that evolution hadn’t taken away their gills.”
I gaped at him. “Are you fucking kidding me here?”
“No,” said Church. “He isn’t.”
“How do people not know about this?” I demanded, appalled.
“People do,” said Hu. “How do you not know about this? Don’t you ever watch Nat Geo?” He cocked his head to one side then snapped his fingers. “Actually, now that I think about it, this wouldn’t actually be the first mega-tsunami to hit America. There was one in Alaska. Lituya Bay, I think, back in 1958. Five-hundred-meter high wave stripped trees and soil from the opposite headland and swamped the entire bay.”
“How many people were killed?” I asked, aghast.
“Only two. It was nothing. Boring. Wrong location and time of year for anything interesting.”
“‘Interesting’?” I echoed.
Hu shrugged again, unabashed by his delight in the subject. “If our bad guys can knock down Cumbre Vieja then things would get really interesting really fast.”
He looked delighted at the prospect. I wondered how long I would have to punch him before I felt better. “So … who would do this?” I asked.
Hu shook his head. “I have no idea.”
We stared at the image on the screen. Seconds burned themselves to cinders around us as the strange implausibility of this warred with the terrible implications. Hu replayed the video and we watched the president with his glazed eyes and dead voice repeat his warnings over and over again.
There was a question that had to be asked. No one wanted to put it out there, so I did.
“Is this really going to happen if we don’t find that book?” I asked. “Guys … do we believe this?”
Church and Hu looked at the screen, at each other, then at me.
“What choice do we have?” said Hu.
“Oh,” said Church, “it gets worse.”
“‘Worse’?” I said. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m half a bad decision away from jumping out of the helicopter right now.”
Hu grinned at the prospect.
“A few minutes ago Linden Brierly sent me a series of photographs taken in the Rose Garden,” Church said. “The pictures are of something that Secret Service agents discovered on the lawn minutes after the president went missing. There are some additional details,” he said, “but right now I want you to look at the pictures and tell me what you think it is.”
Hu and I exchanged a look. It was clear he didn’t like this kind of lead-in any more than I did.
Church sent the picture to our screens. There were twelve photos, all from different angles and heights. After cycling through them, Church took the clearest one and expanded it to fill the screen.
“Brierly’s people took exact measurements,” said Church. “It is a little over three meters across.”
I was no whiz when it came to conspiracy theories or UFOs, let’s all agree on that, but even I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Clearly, so had Hu. I saw the expression on his face. This image twisted him into an entirely new mental state and all sorts of expressions warred on his features. Denial, anger, shock. Fear.
He said, “No fucking way.”
I was having a hard time with this myself. “Okay, I’m throwing a flag down on this play. Are you trying to tell me that there’s a goddamn crop circle on the White House lawn?”
“Apparently so,” said Church.
So, I said, “Okay, then tell me how in the hell it got there?”
“No one knows,” said Church, and he filled us in on how the circle was discovered.
Hu kept shaking his head in denial, but at the same time he leaned close and peered at the pattern. “Wait a damn minute … you said that this was a little over ten feet. Did they do an exact measurement?”
An enigmatic little smile curled the edges of Church’s mouth. “As a matter of fact,” he said softly, “I anticipated that question, Doctor. After seeing the image I requested that they take a new set of measurements. I asked them to be as precise as possible. It is ten feet and three point six eight inches across. Or, to put it another way, it is three point one four one five nine meters across.”
“Wait,” I said. “Why do I know that number? It sounds familiar.”
“It should,” said Hu, “if you ever stayed awake in math class. It’s the value of pi.”
Church nodded to the image. “Doctor … what does the pattern itself tell you?”
“It’s pi,” he said, his voice dull. “It’s all pi.”
“Be a bit more specific.”
“This is bullshit.”
“Doctor, I would appreciate a little focus here,” said Church mildly. “Please give us an analysis of the image.”
“Okay, okay, damn it,” snarled Hu. He began jabbing his fingers at different parts of the pattern. “This is basic math. Those radial lines corresponded to a grid dividing the circle into ten equal slices. The grooves in the circle spiral outward with orderly steps at various points. Each step occurs at particular angles, and the circle itself is divided into ten equal segments of thirty-six degrees each. If you start at the center, you can see that the first section is three segments wide; then there’s a step and underneath this step is a small circle. That’s the decimal point. The next section is one segment wide and then there’s another step. The next section is four segments wide, and so on until the final number encoded is three point one four one five nine two six five four. Pi.” He paused, then added, “Fuck me.”
“And how long after the president vanished did this appear?” I asked.
“Minutes,” said Church.
“Made by little floating lights,” I said. Just saying it. Putting that on th
e wall for us all to look at.
“Fuck me,” repeated Hu.
Chapter Forty-one
Private airfield
Near Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 9:34 a.m.
Tull brought the Mustang down out of a clear sky and landed on an empty runway in a deserted airfield. Except for Aldo seated beside him, the world could have been completely empty of people. There were no cars at the airport, no other planes taking off or landing. Only the Mustang. Tull taxied it toward the lee of the tiny airport’s main hangar.
Tull debated letting this all go. He could pull a gun on Aldo, force his friend off the plane, and then take off again. He had enough fuel to get to West Virginia or Pennsylvania, find a place to refuel and then vanish off the grid. Tull had enough identities prepared, accounts in a dozen names, safe houses and bolt-holes. Even some friends in low places who could help him get so far off the radar that even M3 couldn’t find him.
Would that do it? he wondered. If he cut all ties with the Project, with Majestic Three and the Closers and all of it, would that be enough to allow him to change who he was? Would it allow him to finally be human in every sense of the word? Most of him already was, maybe the rest was buried somewhere, like junk DNA waiting for the right trigger to activate it. If M3 was totally out of his life, would that give him a life?
And … what would that feel like?
Most of him yearned to find out, ached to know.
A smaller part of him cringed back from that thought. What if becoming fully human meant that his conscience would try to catch up on all of the sins he’d committed? He wondered if taking Aldo’s cue and confessing to a priest would really save him from the agony of feeling something about what he’d done.
What if he got away and then every time he closed his eyes he relived that last moment with Berenice? Even now, when he thought about the surprise and doubt and sudden horrible understanding in her eyes as she stared past the barrel of his pistol and into his eyes, there was some flicker of something deep in his mind. Was that a nascent conscience fearing to be born?
“Yo,” said Aldo, and Tull realized that it wasn’t the first time his friend had spoken. He blinked his eyes like a reptile and then he was back in the present moment.