The cottage belonged to Rex, his former brother-in-law, with whom Steve had kept in contact all these years since his younger sister Sally had grown to be such a grouching, sullen old bitch that Rex had finally had the good sense to divorce her. Rex’s knees had become too dodgy with age these days to allow him to negotiate the slope leading up to the cottage, so he very seldom used it any more and kept it on only as a financial investment. When Steve had called him up late that night at home in Preston, hiding his panic with a hastily made-up story about wanting to get away from it all for a while, Rex had said he could stay there as long as he wanted, gratis.
Good old Rex. He might be an awkward bugger at times, but Steve had raised a few glasses to him since that day.
Steve padded stiffly to the tiny bathroom. It was cold. He urinated, then peered in disapproval at the crumpled, white-bearded face in the mirror. He wasn’t getting any prettier, but who gave a toss? Then he wandered into the low-beamed living room, which was cold as well.
Better get used to it, old boy, he thought. Just in case you live long enough to be around when it all starts to kick off. One day, everyone was going to wish they had a good old-fashioned fire and lots of nice fossil fuels to keep themselves warm. The warmists were going to love it.
Once he’d got the wood burner in the living room going, Steve went to the kitchen to brew himself a pot of strong tea, then returned near the fire to drink it in the rocking chair by the window, idly scanning the sky in case he might spot an osprey or a goshawk or even, wonder of wonders, an eagle. There wasn’t an awful lot to do here except enjoy the absolute peace and quiet. The only things he missed from home were his workshop and his internet connection, the latter partly because he would have liked to keep up with his blog, and partly because even a prehistoric old fart like him had finally had to cave in and admit that the web was the best research resource going. How had they ever managed to cope back in the sixties, seventies and eighties?
Seeing nothing except a couple of buzzards, he let his thoughts wander. He wished he could phone Catalina Fuentes and find out if the poor girl was all right. He felt very protective towards her, and couldn’t bear to imagine the same dreadful thing happening to her as had befallen their colleagues. Dear God, what an awful bloody mess.
When he’d finished his tea he got up and wandered back into the kitchen, contemplating lunch. All these dark thoughts had depressed him a bit, and he decided he could do with a nice cold can of bitter, to wash down the rest of the corned beef hash left over from last night’s dinner. One thing about being a single guy, at least he could cook and fend for himself. Fried bread, bacon and eggs, even omelettes. Yup, he was a regular master chef.
But when he opened the fridge, he saw to his dismay that there was no beer left. Must’ve polished the last one off yesterday. Damn. He patted his belly. Maybe staying off the beer for a day or two wouldn’t be such a bad thing. But now the thought was in his head, it wouldn’t go away. He struggled with it for a while, but then human frailty got the better of him. The village shop was only a cycle ride away, and the exercise would give him an appetite.
He shoved another log on the wood burner to keep it ticking over in his absence, then locked the cottage and went outside into the chill. In the shed was the old mountain bike that Rex hadn’t used for years, which Steve had cleaned up and appropriated for his forays to the village shop, returning with carrier bags full of groceries and clanking beer tins dangling from the handlebars. He got his leg over the bike and pedalled off down the gravelly slope.
He’d explored most of the area during these past weeks, and knew his way around pretty well. As usual, he turned off the road to take a route along a bouncy, rocky lane that cut about half a mile off the normal route to the village. Drystone walls and tufty dead grass flanked its verges, and the rolling, craggy hills loomed up all around, breaking here and there for patches of golden autumnal woodland. There wasn’t a living soul in sight. It was glorious.
The only problem with the shortcut was the steep hill he had to negotiate about a mile from the cottage. As he approached, he pedalled harder to gain momentum and changed down a few gears. These newfangled bicycles seemed to have about a thousand of them. He fixed his gaze on the brow of the hill ahead, gritted his teeth and kept on pumping. By the time he was halfway up the incline, he was sweating and his heart was thundering away, but he was determined that today he’d reach the top without having to get off and push.
Not bad for an old crock, he thought, and grinned to himself.
Sensing the soft engine purr and tyre patter of a vehicle coming up behind him, he glanced back over his shoulder and saw the black Land Rover Freelander following him slowly along the path, spitting little stones out from under its chunky tyres. You didn’t meet a lot of traffic on these lanes. He tightened in closer to the verge to let the Land Rover pass, but it didn’t. He waved his arm to say, come on, overtake me.
Again, the vehicle stayed back, slowly keeping pace with him up the hill. He could dimly make out a pair of figures in the front seats.
The vehicle’s presence irritated Steve, because he didn’t like being watched while he puffed and panted and generally showed his age and condition. What was the matter with this guy? Worried about scratching his paintwork on the drystone wall? There was plenty of room on the narrow lane to overtake a bloody bicycle, for heaven’s sake.
That was when he was gripped by a sudden thought that made the bicycle wobble under him and turned the sweat on his brow to ice water. He twisted in the saddle to look again, panic rising now. The two figures seemed to look back at him, their faces obscured by the tint of the glass. Was there a third man with them in the vehicle, or was he just imagining it? He tried to pedal faster, but his legs were trembling and the muscles in his thighs seemed to have liquefied. His breath started wheezing. The brow of the hill suddenly seemed impossibly far away.
But the breach in the drystone wall was coming up on the left. Beyond it was a stand of trees, behind which stood a little stone bothy that Steve had often visited on his rambles. In his panic-stricken mind, the tumbledown old stone building suddenly seemed to him like an ideal refuge.
In a flurry of arms and legs he dismounted from the bike without stopping, letting it fall away under him and somehow managing to land on his feet without tripping over it and going flat on his face. The bike clattered to the ground in the path of the Land Rover and he heard it crunch to a halt as he bolted for the gap in the wall. His breath rasped shakily in his throat and his feet tore through the long grass. He thought he heard the sound of car doors opening, but he didn’t dare to look back. He stumbled onwards until he reached the trees, and only then did he throw another feverish glance over his shoulder.
Three men had got out of the Land Rover. All of them were looking straight at him. As one, they reached inside their coats and pulled out stubby black objects that he realised were guns.
Steve let out a groan of terror as he went on running. He had no idea how they’d found him. But they’d found him, all right.
He thought of Rex.
Rex was family.
Family were traceable.
Which meant he was traceable.
God, how could he have been so stupid?
Keep going! screamed the voice in his head. Keep running! He was certain he could hear the crackle of twigs behind him as the three men pursued him into the trees. A branch whipped across the side of his face, but he hardly felt it.
The bothy lurched closer with every step. He could see its craggy wall through the autumnal foliage. It had no windows, and a single oak door that was old and flaking, but thick and solid. If he could somehow wedge it shut from inside—
Steve burst out of the trees. Now he was just a few breathless paces from the door. It was slightly ajar. He reached a hand out in front of him to shove it open—
But his hand met only empty air when the door swung open before he got to it.
A man stepped out of the shadows
of the doorway to meet him. Tall, clean-shaven, wearing a long dark coat. Holding a gun.
‘Hallo, Steve,’ he said. And the gun came up to point at him.
All Steve Ellis could do then was close his eyes.
Chapter Forty-Seven
‘Don’t take my word for it,’ Catalina said to Ben and Raul. ‘Look at this.’ Returning to the computer, she clicked out of the graph they’d been looking at, and in a few deft moves brought up another.
‘Here we are.’ She stepped away from the screen to let them move closer.
The graph showed an exaggerated wavelike pattern of wild spikes that had been smoothed out into a single swooping up-and-down curve that stretched across a range of year dates starting in 1985 and ending at the present day, a little over thirty years. Ben immediately noticed that the line formed three distinct peaks, diminishing in size from left to right. The first covered the years 1985 to 1996 and was by far the tallest, surging all the way to the top of the graph. The middle peak covered the period from 1996 to 2007 and was far less pronounced, perhaps two-thirds of the height of the first. The third peak, for the years 2008 to the present, was much smaller again, no more than a third of the size of the first. Ben could clearly make out an eleven-year cycle in the pattern, but the overall trend was very obviously one of radical decrease. Decrease in what, he had no idea.
But he had a feeling Catalina was about to enlighten him.
‘This is a graph of sunspot numbers over the last three decades,’ she explained. ‘It’s based on my own research, but it’s virtually identical to what NASA have. You’d have to be blind not to see how the sunspots have declined dramatically during this period. Their numbers are falling through the floor. And now that you guys understand the connection between solar activity and climate, you should be able to tell what’s going on here, yes?’
‘You’re telling us we’re entering a new Solar Minimum,’ Raul said between gritted teeth.
Catalina shook her head. ‘I’m not telling you anything. This is not a matter of opinion. The scientific facts are more than able to speak for themselves. But you don’t have to study technical data to see what’s happening. All you have to do is look around you with open eyes. The truth is out there, if you’re prepared to find it.’
She turned towards the window and swept a slender arm westwards towards the horizon. ‘Look at North America, for instance,’ she said, gazing in that direction as if she had a commanding view for seven thousand miles from the top of the lighthouse, clear across the tail end of southern Europe and the whole of the Atlantic Ocean.
‘Nobody who’s lived through the last few winters in the USA would be hard to persuade that it’s getting colder, year on year. Minus two degrees Celsius in Pensacola, Florida, last January, for God’s sake. Land of emerald golf courses, palm trees and white-sand beaches. Cut up the Eastern Seaboard to Boston, and you’ve got the all-time snowfall recorded there in winter 2015. Meanwhile, waves froze solid off Cape Cod and mini-icebergs landed ashore. In the same winter, ice cover on the Great Lakes reached over eighty-eight percent higher than the previous year’s already high figure. In April, fifteen cargo freighters became icebound on Lake Superior and had to be rescued by icebreakers. That’s a main commercial shipping route between the US and Canada. Unheard of, so late in the year. And for the first time ever in modern history, that month it was possible to walk for fifty miles across Lake Huron in Ontario. And it’s not just North America. Sweden is having its coldest winters in over a century. Britain has recorded its lowest temperatures in a hundred and twenty years. All over the world, glacial ice fields have started to grow again, something that’s been confirmed by NASA. Glaciers are growing on Mont Blanc. Signs of the same happening on Ben Nevis in Scotland. The Brüggen Glacier in Chile continuing to thicken. Antarctic sea ice expanding to record levels, despite our being told the icecap had reached a melting point of no return …’
‘Those aren’t exactly warm countries you just mentioned,’ Raul said. ‘Now who’s cherry-picking the facts?’
‘You want warm countries? Fine. How about South Korea? A subtropical climate that in 2011 saw record-breaking snowfall way beyond anything that they’d experienced for a century or more. The following year, snow fell in all nine provinces of South Africa on the same day, for the first time ever. Snow hadn’t been seen in Pretoria since the sixties. Needless to say, that incident wasn’t reported in much of the global media. Then the next year after that, snow fell in Cairo for the first time in, guess how long?’
‘A century, I get it,’ Raul said grudgingly.
‘While in Lebanon, the army had to be called out to distribute emergency provisions and blankets to freezing Syrian refugees as snow covered much of the Middle East. Winter 2015 was even worse. Freezing temperatures, snow and ice from Turkey to Jordan. Blizzards in Jerusalem. Babies freezing to death in the Gaza Strip. You could go sledging in the Sahara, or build a snowman in the Libyan Desert.’
‘All right, all right,’ Raul said, holding up his hands in submission. ‘You made your point. So it might get a bit colder for a while. Is it really such a big issue?’
‘You only have to look at history to answer that. Human populations are alarmingly vulnerable to even small drops in temperature. It doesn’t take much to seriously disrupt the fragile order of a society that’s become heavily reliant on mild climates and has come to take them for granted. Even a few degrees’ difference will expose all the weaknesses of our civilisation.’
‘But you said yourself, these things are cyclical,’ Raul said. ‘It won’t last forever. Pretty soon things will come back round to the way they were before. No?’
Catalina shrugged. ‘Assuming we can rely on the cycles endlessly repeating themselves in the same old way, then maybe. Yes. But we can’t. It’s not that simple.’
Raul looked at her. ‘It’s not that simple?’
‘No, because that would require that all the factors in the equation remain constant, forever. And that’s simply not the case. There’s a problem. Quite a big problem, for us.’
‘What problem?’
‘The sun,’ Catalina said, pointing upwards. ‘Events are happening up there that we’ve never seen before. I believe that’s why we’re seeing this disturbing decline in the solar cycles.’
‘But you told us that it was normal for sunspot numbers to vary up and down,’ Raul said.
‘I know I did,’ Catalina replied, going back to the computer. ‘But that isn’t the whole picture. Let me show you another graph.’
‘Please, not another graph,’ Raul groaned.
‘Are you a moron?’ she asked him.
‘No,’ he said, stung.
‘Then you’ll understand it just fine. It’s really not that difficult. Now look.’ She clicked a few more times, then waved them closer to show what had come up onscreen. The scientific graph was labelled ‘Estimated Planetary K Index’. It was a black grid crisscrossed by broken white lines, with the last four days’ dates along the bottom and the numbers one to nine vertically up the left side. Unlike the others, instead of zigzags or waves this one had only a row of bright green bars, like stunted high-rise buildings in a line, some higher than others but none reaching higher than the number 2 mark on the vertical axis.
Like the others, it was incomprehensible to Ben.
Catalina quickly explained, ‘This is data compiled from the magnetometers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. I preferred to compile my own data, back in the days when I still had the facilities …’ She sighed. ‘But these folks are close enough to the mark to provide good working figures. Anyway, as you can see, this is very fresh data. Don’t worry too much about the readings, just look at these little green bars here. They should be way up the graph, but they’re down here.’ She shook her head, as if she was surveying the aftermath of some terrible disaster. ‘It’s been like this for a while now. We confirmed the findings with our ow
n Zeeman Effect research. That’s when you use a spectrometer to split up the spectral lines on the sun. The stronger the magnetic field, the wider the separation of the lines. All we could see were lines so close together they were almost touching.’
‘Wow, that made sense,’ Raul said.
‘And you’re saying all this is unusual?’ Ben asked Catalina.
Catalina gave Ben the same solemn look she’d given them before. ‘That would be something of an understatement. It’s unprecedented. And it’s very, very bad news.’
‘Elaborate,’ Ben said. He had the feeling that, after having led them through the logical process step by step, Catalina was finally ready to get to the nub of the matter.
‘Haven’t we elaborated enough already?’ Raul muttered.
Catalina ignored her brother. ‘Let me boil this down for you. We have two processes happening at once, closely interlinked. One, as I’ve explained, is that sunspot numbers are declining. Which could be normal, as Raul pointed out. The second, which this graph and other research consistently show, is that while the sunspots are becoming much fewer, they’re also becoming much weaker. Their average magnetic field strength is rapidly declining, by about fifty Gauss per year if you want to be specific about it. And with them, the entire magnetic field strength of the sun is dwindling. Which is definitely not something we’ve seen it do before, but is in keeping with its age. You see, our sun is a middle-aged star. Past its prime. It’s gradually becoming weaker, losing its power.’
‘Stars become senile now?’ Raul said, half grinning.
‘It’s perfectly natural,’ Catalina explained. ‘When a star like our sun gets older, just like a living organism it begins to experience physical changes. For one, it begins to rotate more slowly. Some scientists believe that rotation and activity might decrease with the square root of a star’s age, a theory I happen to agree with. If you think of it as a giant electromagnetic dynamo, you can imagine how a slowdown in its rotation would lead to a loss of energy. And when the process begins to happen, it can take a hold quite quickly. A lot of stars similar to our sun have suffered a significant loss of luminosity in just a few years. Tau Ceti and 54 Piscium are two examples of that happening.’