‘Ben, it’s disgusting to chain-smoke like that.’
‘I lost my Zippo.’
Roberta rolled her eyes, closed the file and scrolled further down the list. ‘There’s so much stuff. Wait, this looks interesting.’ She clicked open a document file labelled ‘TUNGUSKA’.
‘The Tunguska incident?’ Ben said as the document came on screen. It appeared to be a page scanned from a science journal from some years ago. Grainy monochrome images showed a desolate landscape ravaged by destruction, a giant crater surrounded by countless fallen trees.
Roberta’s gaze flicked rapidly down the page. ‘Okay, I know a little bit about this, so I’ll summarize. June 1908, Tunguska, Siberia. The largest meteorite or comet impact on or near Earth in recorded history. Conservative estimates equated the destructive power of the incident to around ten to fifteen megatons of TNT. That’s a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atom bomb. Two thousand square kilometres of forest and eighty million trees wiped out. No significant human casualties, due to the remoteness of the location.’
‘Why would Claudine have stored information about a comet collision?’ Ben said. ‘These things hit us naturally every so often, don’t they?’
‘Except that this one didn’t hit us at all,’ Roberta replied. ‘The weird thing about it was, even though it’s classed as an impact event, no actual impact happened. There’s no crater, no meteorite fragments, no physical evidence of a collision. To this day, the cause of the explosion is unknown. An official mystery. The best most scientists can suggest is that the object burst above the Earth’s surface, and the destruction was caused by the shockwave.’
‘I’m sure that’s very fascinating, but what’s it got to do with Tesla?’
‘It might have a lot to do with him. Some people believe he caused it.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘It’s all here,’ Roberta said, scrolling down. ‘Yup, here we are. “It was speculated at the time that Tesla might have used the Wardenclyffe Tower to deliver a charge of energy big enough to bring about that kind of effect”.’
‘The Wardenclyffe Tower?’
‘It was a specially-built laboratory,’ she explained, ‘housed inside a giant tower on Long Island, sixty-five miles from New York City, funded by J.P. Morgan, the founder of US Steel and one of Tesla’s biggest private sponsors. It was built between 1901 and 1902, kind of like a giant steel mushroom hundreds of feet tall, and was meant to be a revolutionary new wireless telecommunications transmitter. Secretly, Tesla planned it as a precursor to his death ray machine. He called it his “Peace Ray”, and allegedly claimed that it could project an electrical shield that would make America invincible to attack, while throwing out beams of incredible power right across the world.’
‘Hmm. Right.’
‘I know how it sounds, but it’s as simple as bringing down a building using small vibrations,’ Roberta explained. ‘The difference between an electrical current that can be used to run a small household appliance and one that can be used as a weapon of mass destruction is just a question of timing. The same amount of energy it takes to run a 240-volt appliance for an hour, delivered in a millionth of a second, would blow it to bits. Now imagine a transmitter generating 100 million volts of pressure and currents of 100 billion watts, resonating at a radio frequency of 2 megahertz. That means the amount of energy released in one cycle of its oscillation would equate to 10 megatons’ worth of destructive energy. In effect, you’ve got the power of a nuclear warhead delivered by radio signal, at the speed of light, allowing the sender to instantly vaporise any location in the world at the touch of a button.’
It sounded too horribly convincing for Ben to go on acting sceptical. ‘Forget Hitler,’ he said. ‘This Tesla’s got to be the most dangerous lunatic who ever lived.’
‘Funny, that’s what the Wardenclyffe financiers thought too, when they found out what he was up to. Before he knew it, the cash got pulled out from under him and the tower was closed down. But there are some who say even that wasn’t enough to kill the project, not if Tesla had anything to do with it. It’s been claimed he was still secretly experimenting with it as late as 1908.’
Ben went on blazing through the text of the article. Most of the technical data meant nothing to him, but he caught the upshot: at the time of the Tunguska event, Tesla, in a state of desperation over losing the precious funding for his Wardenclyffe Tower, was reported to have been attempting to direct energy beams at the Arctic Circle in order to catch the attention of Admiral Robert Peary, the polar explorer and expedition leader who had set out in July 1908 to become the first man to reach the North Pole. Months earlier, Tesla had contacted the influential Peary to ask him to take note of any unusual phenomena he noticed on his expedition.
But if Tesla had been hoping to gain some publicity for his little toy, the experiment went badly awry when he overshot his target and the beam hit the Siberian tundra by mistake, laying waste to a gigantic tract of it. Thanks to the remoteness of the location, the turmoil of the 1917 Russian revolution and the civil war that followed it, the sheer extent of the damage had gone unreported until 1927.
‘But surely there’s no real evidence for any of this?’ Ben said.
Roberta gave a dry smile. ‘When is there ever?’ She closed the file and immediately opened the one directly beneath it that had caught her eye, titled ‘TUNGUSKA 2’ followed by several question marks.
The file was a scan of a small news report from a recent edition of a science periodical. ‘Wow, this is strange,’ she said. ‘Listen. “In March a team of archaeologists, led by Dr Hermann Murke of Bonn University to search for lost ancient Hindu temples across the mountainous regions of Kazakhstan and Mongolia, stumbled on a wide and hitherto unreported area of extreme devastation that has left scientists baffled. The nature of the damage appears to resemble that caused by the still-unexplained Siberian Tunguska incident of 1908, but on an even greater scale. Early reports suggest that an asteroid-like object may have struck the remote location, although these findings are disputed by leading astronomers and other scholars”.’
‘Can’t blame Tesla for that one,’ Ben said.
‘I guess not. So what’s it doing on here? Good question.’ She heaved a sigh, closed the file and moved on down the list. ‘There are a bunch of image files here below. Let’s take a look.’
Roberta started clicking open one image after another.
‘Now this is getting a little weird,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
They were pictures of disaster zones. One after another: the same thing. Shattered buildings and collapsed bridges and streets filled with tangled wreckage. People wandering forlorn among the levelled ruins of their homes. Homeless children playing in the dust. Survivors being pulled out of the ground.
‘Earthquakes,’ Roberta muttered. ‘But why? Claudine wasn’t a seismologist, or a geologist, or anything like that.’
‘She didn’t just take these images off the web,’ Ben said, thinking back to the immigration stamps he’d seen on the passport in Claudine’s apartment. ‘She travelled there in person and photographed these sites herself. But why? And what’s the connection with her Tesla research?’
‘That’s another good question,’ Roberta said, looking perplexed.
The image she had onscreen was a panoramic shot of a city that had been utterly devastated by an earthquake, once-grand buildings reduced to a barren field of rubble with a few miserable-looking people sifting about for anything they could retrieve from the destruction. ‘It’s terrible,’ Roberta said, then paused, peering more closely. She pointed. ‘Look at the architecture, or what’s left of it. And the people. Looks like somewhere in Central or South America.’
‘There was a South American visa stamp on her passport,’ Ben said. ‘Republic of Taráca.’
‘Sounds familiar,’ Roberta said, trying to remember. ‘Yeah, that’s right. There was a huge earthquake there some time back, wasn’t there? It was a
ll over the news for a few days.’
‘But what was she doing there?’
‘Beats me.’
‘There’s one last image file below,’ Ben said. ‘It might tell us more.’
Roberta opened it up and they both stared at it, hoping for illumination. None came. The photo was of a house, or what had once been a house, in some leafy countryside setting surrounded by sunlit oak trees. All but one of the house’s stone walls had fallen in, and the roof was collapsed. ‘Where’s this?’ Roberta said.
‘France,’ Ben said. ‘Possibly Belgium.’ He pointed out the remaining window. ‘You can tell from the shutters. My old place in Normandy had ones just the same.’
‘It can’t be earthquake damage,’ Roberta said. ‘Look how all the trees are still standing. And when was there ever a bad quake in this part of Europe?’
‘Never. Either the house fell down with age, or …’
‘Or?’
‘Or maybe, just maybe, someone was out playing with their Tesla toys.’
‘Claudine?’
Ben shrugged. ‘Who else?’
‘I wish there was more,’ Roberta said in frustration. ‘All we can do is keep trawling through and hope we learn something.’ She closed the picture file and clicked on the next one down. The document opened up to reveal a whole mass of technical data analysing the steady build-up in intensity and destructiveness of earthquakes during recent years; there were charts and graphs of Richter scale readings, maps and aerial photos. ‘Christ, more seismology stuff,’ she groaned. ‘I just don’t get it.’
They ploughed on, both exhausted but too mesmerised to tear themselves away. The more they read, the more bafflingly diverse the material seemed to be. ‘Either it’s just a load of random stuff she loaded onto the drive purely for somewhere to store it—’ Ben began.
‘Or something else links it all together,’ Roberta finished for him. ‘Believe me, Claudine wasn’t the kind of person who did things randomly. There has to be a common factor. And that’s what I’m scared of. This goes way further than I’d imagined it might.’ She drew away from the screen and rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this. My eyes are burning.’
‘Keep going,’ Ben urged her.
‘It gets weirder,’ she said. ‘Look at this one. Studies in predictive animal behaviour?’
For no clear reason, Claudine had collated a variety of veterinary psychology studies focusing on the unexplained phenomenon of how animals, either wild or in captivity, seemed to be able to tell when a major storm or a natural disaster was impending: dogs barking, birds fleeing their nests, zoo animals becoming distressed. Claudine’s own report on the findings was included in the document. ‘“Typically, studies have shown that the behaviour of animal subjects can help predict the event some two hours or more in advance”,’ Roberta read aloud. ‘“Analysis of the data shows how consistent this phenomenon is”.’ She snorted impatiently. ‘That’s just great, Claudine, but what the hell does it mean?’
‘There’s a video clip embedded there,’ Ben said.
As the low-definition video began to run, Roberta expanded it to full screen view. The footage had been filmed somewhere rural, arid and hot. ‘Spain?’ she speculated.
‘Maybe. Or it could be Latin America again.’
As they watched, an unsteady camcorder shot panned over a dusty-looking herd of equines milling nervously behind a makeshift barricade. ‘Why was Claudine filming horses?’ Roberta said.
‘They’re mules,’ Ben said.
‘Of course. That explains everything,’ she muttered.
The video’s background showed obvious signs of earthquake damage: a wooded hillside partially slipped away, crumbled limestone buildings shimmering in the heat haze, a truck half-buried under rubble, a gang of labourers gamely sweltering under the sun trying to clear up the mess. As Ben and Roberta went on watching, the camera wavered momentarily to one side and the figure of a woman came into view for just a second: slim, dark, early thirties, in a loose top and shorts. ‘That’s her,’ Roberta said sadly. ‘That’s Claudine. I wonder who was working the camera?’
Next, a burly guy appeared and Claudine’s voice introduced him off-camera in French-accented English as Señor Diego Sanchez, owner-operator of the Santa Catarina Mule Sanctuary six miles outside the city of San Vicente.
‘I’m sure I’ve heard of that city before, but I can’t remember what country it’s in,’ Roberta said. Ben didn’t reply and went on watching as an interview began in which Claudine quizzed Sanchez in her halting English about the behaviour of the animals in the lead-up to the recent earthquake. Sanchez described how, when the area had been hit by a smaller quake back in 1996, the animals had warned them a good two hours in advance by their nervous agitation. This time around, there had been no warning.
‘It took them as much by surprise as it did us,’ Sanchez said with a sigh as he looked across at his wrecked buildings. ‘It was like they lost their, you know, their sixth sense. They just didn’t know it was coming.’
There the clip ended.
‘So what was that all about?’ Ben said.
They’d been staring hard at the computer screen for nearly two hours. ‘God, I need to sleep,’ Roberta said, leaning away from the screen and covering her eyes with her hands. ‘I haven’t stopped since I left Ottawa.’
‘One more,’ Ben said. He was determined to try to make more sense of the puzzle before he took a break.
‘I can’t, Ben. I can’t think or see straight, and none of this is making sense to me.’ She stood up wearily, walked to the armchair and slouched heavily in it.
Taking over the computer from her, Ben clicked on a final file and found that it was full of saved emails. There were several dozen of them, without exception between Claudine and someone calling themselves ‘D’ who was using the kind of webmail account favoured by people who wanted to remain anonymous. The correspondence had taken place within the last eight months.
‘Think you might want to see this,’ he said to Roberta.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Message received May 29, 23.57:
Claudine
I’m sorry we fought. Plse listen 2 me. 2 dangerous 4 U 2 go on with this work. Seriously advise you quit NOW, before it’s 2 late.
D
Message sent May 30, 08.03:
Hi,
I already told you I can’t quit when we’ve already uncovered so much. If you want to stop, fine. But not me.
Claudine
Message received May 30, 10.48:
Claudine,
Begging you. Remember what happened 2 Guardini and Shelton. Same will happen 2 all of us eventually, if we’re not careful. THEY KNOW who we are. NOWHERE is safe.
D
Message sent May 30, 11.06:
Hi,
I don’t like you talking that way. Come to Paris. We’ll find someplace safe, where they can’t find us and we can go on working together like before. We can beat them. We can expose them forever. Just have to keep trying.
Claudine
Message received May 31, 04.16:
Repeat. NOWHERE is safe. U cant beat them. They have total power. But U can still get out. Quit now. Go back 2 Ur old life and dont breathe a word 2 anyone of what U know. Have 2 promise me. Last chance.
D
Message sent May 31, 07.02:
I told you when we first met that I could never stop what I’m doing, and I meant what I said. This is too big and important, I thought you knew that. People need to hear the truth. And one day they will, and the whole thing will be made to end. Don’t you understand? This IS my life now. Stop trying to talk me out of it, it won’t work.
Claudine
Message received June 1, 18.37:
Sorry 2 hear that. Wish i could change ur mind.
Cant talk now
B safe
D
‘D,’ Roberta said, returning to peer at the computer screen. She was wide awake aga
in and had read through the entire correspondence bolt upright. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘D for Daniel,’ Ben said. ‘The guy she posted the letter to. Sounds as if they were heavily involved in this together.’ He jumped up, went over to where he’d dumped his leather jacket and took the paper from his pocket that he’d written the details on earlier that night. It was crumpled and dirty but the name ‘Daniel Lund’ and the address near Jäkkwik in Sweden were still legible.
‘So now’s when we have to try and get in contact with him,’ she said. ‘He clearly knows what it’s all about.’
‘And how do you propose to do that?’
‘We have his email address, don’t we?’
Ben shook his head. ‘Read the guy’s messages. He’s either a paranoid nut or he’s genuinely in the same kind of danger as Claudine was, which is a distinct possibility.’
‘Or he’s dead,’ Roberta conceded.
‘Which we also need to consider. Whichever it is, I don’t think he’s going to reply to us. Assuming he’s still living and breathing at this point, the moment our message hits his inbox he’ll bolt like a scared rabbit and we’ll never find him again.’
‘Then what do we do?’
Ben looked at his watch. Sunrise wasn’t that far away, and his head was spinning with tiredness. ‘We try and get a few hours’ sleep. Then we get some more hot coffee and some food in us. Then we go to Sweden. If he’s alive, we’ll find him. If he’s not, at least we’ll know.’
She smiled. ‘You make it sound so simple.’
‘I’m a simple kind of guy,’ he said, but didn’t smile back.
The first time Ben had ever brought Roberta back to the hallowed privacy of his safehouse, in the brusque and unsympathetic manner that had marked the beginning of their acquaintance, he’d made her sleep on the living room floor while he took the sole bedroom. This time round, the bundle of blankets on the rug would be for him.
‘Damn it,’ she said, rooting around in her travel holdall. ‘I was in such a rush leaving home, I forgot to pack my pyjamas.’