by Ray Hammond
Michael glanced from face to face, weighing up the remaining level of commitment among the firm’s senior partners.
‘Public opinion will be the final jury in this matter,’ he told them. ‘It was public opinion that forced the politicians to set up the new civil justice court to try such cases. The question is, are we now going to fail to bring these offending corporations to justice? Are we going to leave it to some other law firm that is braver than we are?’
‘Your hulk people are already seriously upsetting public opinion,’ snapped Levinson. ‘Look at their recent attack on that Antarctic research colony – all the scientists’ supplies were stolen.’
‘I’m assured that my own clients weren’t responsible for that. I’ve warned them not to do anything rash, no matter how desperate they feel.’
The partners exchanged glances, and then everyone was gazing towards Saul Levinson. Finally, with a sigh, the senior partner shook his oppugnant head.
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ he said, ‘this is just too big. If you want to pick off a small part of your claim and make it into a stand-alone case, I’ll support you. Otherwise I must say no to a full-scale class action. You’d be risking the very future of this firm – a practice that’s taken over a century to build up.’
‘I have to agree with Saul,’ added Marjory Hinterscoombe – too quickly, as if rehearsed. ‘The financial risk would be far too great for us.’
Now Michael felt a distinct sense of alarm. This was not how partners’ meetings normally went. Any contentious issue was usually resolved well ahead of time, in pre-emptive discussions held prior to the official meetings, in corridor canvassing, in private deals made beside water-coolers, or in discreet negotiations conducted in quiet restaurants. He had thought that approval for his case was a done deal.
‘I’m not prepared to walk away from this,’ Michael heard himself saying. ‘And I’m not prepared to scale it down into a minor case that will achieve nothing effective for most of those people who have lost their homes and their livelihoods.’
Levinson’s dark gaze bored into the younger lawyer’s as if he wished to silence him completely. ‘I’m truly sorry, Michael,’ he growled, as if that were his last word. ‘It’s just too soon to know how this new international court will interpret the law. We should wait a while until it resolves a few cases,’ He closed the lid of his textpad with determined finality.
Michael picked up the remote control that he had been using earlier for his presentation and aimed it again at the large 3-D screen.
The lights in the boardroom dimmed and the display was once more filled with views of the hulk platform, images which Michael himself had captured during his research trip. The partners watched the vast mass of rusty metal floating on the ocean, then the picture cut to show hundreds of silent, rag-swathed people standing in a wind-lashed silence on the heaving deck of an elderly oil tanker.
Michael allowed the video to continue running until the camera went below decks, into the darkness of the hulk’s interior. He froze the image on the rows of bodies lying below deck, then he brought the room lights back on.
‘This injustice is not something that I’m prepared to give up on easily,’ he said quietly. ‘If I have to, I’ll take my case to Beauchamp, Seifert and Co.’
As he spoke he knew that he was potentially delivering his resignation, something he had never anticipated having to do. The Brussels-based legal firm he had just mentioned was the largest of all litigators in the environmental and ecological field, and it had already filed three major cases to be heard before the newly established court.
‘I don’t think they would be frightened of it,’ he added, hearing the words leaving his mouth but wholly unable to take them back.
‘You may resign if you so choose,’ said Levinson angrily. ‘But the case stays here. The intellectual property belongs to our firm.’
*
‘We are absolutely surrounded, sir,’ insisted Louise Waller. The Chairwoman of the Pitcairn Island Council clutched her nightgown tighter around her throat as she gazed out of her open bedroom window, the telephone clamped to her ear.
‘Surrounded?’ barked Sir Hugo Poole, Britain’s High Commissioner to New Zealand.
Although it was seven-fifteen a.m. with a winter dawn just breaking in the South Central Pacific, the day was four hours younger in Auckland and the HC had been woken up by the night duty officer to take this urgent call.
‘How the devil can you be surrounded?’
‘I’m looking out of my window now, sir,’ replied Miss Waller, who doubled as the mayor of Adamstown, the tiny island’s only village. ‘The ships have formed a circle that stretches all round the coast, as far as I can see.’
‘How many damn ships?’ demanded the High Commissioner testily.
Miss Waller had completed a rapid count while she had been waiting for him to be roused.
‘I can see twenty-eight at least, but the convoy runs around the island on both sides. And they’re big ships too, old oil tankers and freighters, although some of them have what look like guns or missile systems mounted on deck.’
‘What are they actually doing at present?’ demanded Poole.
She raised her binoculars and focused on the activity at the island’s extensive oil storage depot.
‘One of the tankers has moored beside the oiling jetty. I think they intend to take on fuel.’
Miss Waller moved her binoculars back to focus on the ships in the bay.
‘Now they’ve launched two inflatables,’ she reported. ‘There’s a party coming ashore, and it looks as if they’re well armed.’
‘Right, I’ll get on to London. You go down and talk to them,’ ordered Poole. ‘Don’t take any unnecessary risks, you hear me?’
‘Yes, sir,’ agreed the spokeswoman of one of the world’s most remote communities.
*
Michael Fairfax was still in a state of shock when he arrived back at his office on the sixty-third floor of the Embarcadero Space Needle. His executive assistant, Serena Jones, was waiting for him in the doorway with an air of anticipation. He knew she was expecting to hear when their massive legal action would be launched.
But he didn’t want to discuss the case with her. He hadn’t yet worked out why he had been ambushed in the partners’ meeting. He didn’t yet know whether he was going to swallow his pride and stay on with the firm, or whether he had already gone too far in talking himself out of his lucrative partnership. Either way, he knew that he would soon have to call his new clients in the Southern Ocean and advise them that their case was temporarily on hold. After everything he had promised them.
‘Just give me a little while, Serena, would you?’ he asked absently.
He was about to close his office door when she said, ‘There’s a call on line two, Mike. A woman – says she must speak with you very urgently.’
‘I’m not taking any calls this afternoon,’ said Michael, giving a firm shake of his head. ‘Just say I’m in conference.’
‘The caller is the woman the FBI picked up in Los Angeles – the alleged member of the PFO cell who bombed the ERGIA space station. She’s calling from a state penitentiary.’
The attorney stared at his assistant as if she had gone mad. After three years of working for him, it now seemed as if she had learned nothing.
‘You know I don’t do any criminal work,’ he snapped. ‘Put it through to Alison Zeffirelli or Mitch Tonks in Public Justice – they’ll handle it.’
He moved again to close his door, but Serena stretched out a hand to stop him. She glanced over her shoulder to check if they were being observed by any staff in the outer office, then stepped inside.
‘She claims she’s an ex-girlfriend of yours and you’re the only lawyer she can trust,’ Serena hissed in a semi-whisper. ‘Apparently you were at college together. Her name is Carole Gonzaga.’
Michael felt rooted to the spot: Carole Gonzaga, the first major love of his adult life; the wild-child ar
ts student who had helped him break away from his archly conservative upbringing; the woman he had once loved with a burning youthful passion but who had eventually broken his heart.
But how could Carole Gonzaga be caught up with eco-terrorists?
‘Well?’ asked Serena, as her boss stood silently staring into space. When he didn’t respond, she insisted, ‘Mike, will you take this call or not?’
‘Put it through,’ he said, nodding curtly.
Chapter Seven
They hadn’t even allowed Dr Emilia Knight to visit her own home, let alone catch a connecting flight on to Italy, where an army of volcanologists was already gathering on the flanks of Mount Vesuvius.
As soon as she had cleared Immigration at San Francisco airport, Emilia was met by Gloria Fernandez, Geohazard’s head of human resources. The brusque HR woman handed her details for a reservation on a domestic flight leaving ninety minutes later, and Emilia had suddenly found herself bound for San Diego, 500 miles further south.
On arrival she was collected by a female naval ensign and driven directly to the US Navy Medical Center.
Internal radiation sickness cannot be treated: there is no cure for damaged bone marrow, lymph glands or blood cells. Emilia had made herself an instant expert on this condition, long before she arrived at one of the few American medical facilities equipped to diagnose and treat the effects of human exposure to radioactivity.
For two days, as the hospital’s lone civilian patient, she was subjected to a series of painful and intrusive tests that forced her to acknowledge parts of her body that she had hardly known existed before. Tissue samples were taken from her skin, muscles, liver, spleen, kidneys, and even bone marrow.
In brief respites between these repeated physical invasions she lay in her private room fielding hundreds of work-related and personal e-mails, while privately testing her body and her moods against the short checklist of key symptoms that she had memorized.
‘I’ve got no radiation sores, and I don’t feel any unusual weakness,’ Emilia informed the doctors with more assurance than she actually felt. ‘I haven’t vomited and I’ve still got my appetite.’
The naval medics nodded, said little, then annotated their electronic charts before arranging for yet further tests.
Three days after she had first been admitted to the hospital an older male doctor whom she hadn’t encountered before came to visit her.
‘Miss Knight,’ he began, ‘I’m Dr Bowman. I’m the consultant in charge of this unit.’
Emilia stiffened and sat more upright in her hospital day-chair.
‘You’ve put my decontamination team through a very useful drill, but I’m pleased to say that we don’t think you have suffered any serious long-term damage from your radiation exposure.’
Emilia let out a sigh that could have propelled a racing yacht.
‘Whatever it was you picked up on that mountainside was certainly very nasty, but your suit stopped most of the rads from getting into your body. You’ve had what we call a Grade Five Exposure.’
Something in his tone started her worrying again. ‘Grade Five?’ she asked.
‘Light occupational,’ the consultant said. ‘The sort of exposure we see in nuclear workers when there’s been a small leak. Nothing to worry about, really.’
‘So there will be no ill effects?’ asked Emilia.
The doctor started a grimace, which turned into a smile. ‘We can’t quite say that, Miss Knight,’ he admitted. ‘We need to monitor over a longer period the samples of your bone marrow that we’ve taken. But you’re fit enough to get back to work – providing you don’t start collecting any more radioactive rocks.’
‘So what would be the effects?’ persisted Emilia.
‘Exposure to radioactivity usually damages blood-forming tissue to some extent,’ Bowman explained. ‘There is a corresponding reduction in the supply of blood cells and platelets, and this increases the tendency to bleed – something you might notice, for example, if you suffered some other injury. It also reduces the body’s defence against infection.’
‘You mean I’m more likely to catch things?’ asked Emilia.
The doctor twisted his neck as if his shirt collar was too tight. ‘Not to any noticeable degree,’ he said. ‘But we’ll need to do regular follow-up checks – say every three months.’
*
In the true spirit of artistic altruism, Capability Brown created grand English gardens, parks and vistas that he knew he himself would never live to see revealed in their mature glory.
Perdita Curtis stood on the balustraded south terrace of Langland Park in Lincolnshire and gazed out with pleasure along a central avenue of mature elms that had been planted almost 300 years before she was born.
In the foreground lay a formal Victorian water garden complete with rectangular ponds, classical fountains, topiary hedges, gravel paths and so many pale statues it looked like a well-kept cemetery. In the far distance, perhaps two miles away at the end of the broad avenue of trees, Perdy could just make out the glint of a lake.
It was a warm and sunny morning in early June, a perfect English summer’s day, with just a few puffball white clouds decorating a Wedgwood-blue sky.
Perdy wasn’t particularly awed by her gracious surroundings – she was a confident woman, at home no matter how high the ceiling or how exalted the company – but she was intensely curious. If she could get permission to film Negromonte in this palatial setting, it would give her documentary some much-needed attractive imagery to offset the many space shots and computer-generated graphics that would be required to show her audience how climate management actually worked. It would also guarantee that her documentary reached the largest possible audience.
‘Miss Curtis?’
Perdy turned to see Bob Johnson, her ERGIA public relations escort for the day, emerging from the interior of the great Georgian house. Earlier he had accompanied her up from London in one of the company’s helicopters.
‘Mr Negromonte is out flying,’ he apologized, ‘but he left a message asking me to . . .’
The PR man’s words tailed off as he shielded his eyes against the sun and pointed into the distance. ‘I think that’s him now.’
Perdy turned, following Johnson’s gaze out along the avenue of elms. At first she couldn’t see what he was indicating. Then she noticed a black speck low down on the skyline.
As it rapidly grew bigger, she could see that it was an antique warplane – a single-wing, propeller-driven fighter – that was being flown towards them between the avenue of trees, as if it were intending to attack the house.
‘Spitfire Mark Four,’ explained Johnson in her ear. ‘Over one hundred years old. It’s his new toy.’
With a bellowing roar Negromonte increased the aircraft’s power and headed straight for them as they stood on the terrace. At the last moment he lifted the aircraft’s nose and, in a slowly executed victory roll, shot over their heads and up over the multiple roofs of the great house.
Perdy flinched under a powerful down draught of warm air. She heard all the casements rattle in the façade behind her as the throbbing note of the Spitfire engine pounded at them, then began to recede.
She turned to see the PR man’s reaction. He simply shrugged, as if to say, What can you do with him?
*
The roaring tsunami reared even higher as it came within a hundred metres of the shoreline. It was impossible to make out either end of the giant wave.
As it hit the beach, the wall of water rose still higher, then rushed on inland, the ground shaking under its massive weight as it engulfed the low sea wall, rolled across a dual carriageway and smashed broadside into a densely populated commercial district.
In every street people were milling about wildly, some seeking refuge in buildings, some running away from buildings, some lying face down in terror, others crouching behind walls. But the torrent of water washed them all away with an earth-shaking roar that seemed to continue for a cruelly lo
ng time after the limbs of its human victims had ceased to thrash helplessly.
Dr Emilia Knight propelled her viewing chair around the holo-pit, to take up a position right behind the seething mass of water she had created. Pausing the simulation, she gazed down on the wreckage that the tsunami had caused along her virtual model of the Hawaiian coastline, then shook her head sadly. ‘What if we gave the population a twenty-minute warning instead?’ she asked Steve Bardini.
He tapped the figures into his workstation, and the revised data was instantly displayed on the information overlay in front of the now-frozen image in the holo-pit. 1,627 fatalities, 6,300 homeless. Damage estimated at $14.67 billion.
‘A bit better, but still awful,’ Emilia murmured. ‘Let’s go back and run the underwater quake again – this time make it Magnitude Four.’
They were modelling the deep-sea data that Valerie Cummings had forwarded from the US Navy Research Vessel Orlando. Her ocean-temperature readings had suggested fresh seismic activity beneath the Pacific seabed, prompting Emilia and Steve to spend the whole morning gathering additional ambient data from Geohazard’s deep-sea pressure detectors, coastal tide gauges, and tsunameters.
It was Dr Knight’s first day back at work after her hospitalization, and she was now feeling fully recovered. But this new data from the Pacific floor was truly alarming. The simulation they had created showed that a major undersea quake might allow the Hawaiians only a three-hour warning of an approaching tsunami. If the event was Magnitude Five or above, their model suggested that over 20,000 people would lose their lives, and the island would be plunged underwater for a distance of up to three miles inland from the northern coast.
‘Shouldn’t we at least be issuing a preliminary alert?’ Steve asked as he keyed the new instructions into their modelling system.
Emilia sat back in her viewing chair and considered carefully. Exactly when to issue alerts was always a tricky decision. If you warned a community too early before an event, or when nothing actually happened, they would cease to believe in warnings altogether – which always proved disastrous in the long run. If you delayed issuing a warning too long, the population living in the danger zone didn’t have sufficient time to get themselves clear.
