by Ray Hammond
‘Will you allow us to film here?’ she asked. ‘I’d very much like to interview you in this setting.’
‘Let’s talk about that over dinner,’ Negromonte had proposed. ‘I presume you’ll be able to stay over. If not, the helicopter can fly you back to London in an hour.’
In the mirrored dining room they had dined on wild salmon and venison from the estate’s own deer park. As they ate, Negromonte asked Perdy about the other weather-management companies she intended to cover in her documentary, questioning her about her own attitude to climate control. Then he asked if his public relations people could have sight of her film before it was broadcast.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Perdy firmly. ‘That’s not BBC policy.’
Now, as they strolled under the ancient cedar trees, Perdy returned to the request she had made earlier.
‘I really would like to film you here, against this backdrop.’ She turned to wave towards the grand house behind them. ‘It would be an elegant counterpoint to all the high-tech space imagery.’
It was a perfectly clear night, the stars ablaze in the country sky, while the moon, three-quarters full, gallantly added its own natural reflection to their soft glow.
‘I’m not sure that would be a good idea,’ said her host at last, turning to gaze down into her eyes. ‘I’ll have to talk to my media people. They just might think all this is a little over the top for your programme.’
Perdy heard a ping and Negromonte lifted a communicator to his ear.
He listened carefully, then said, ‘Excellent, well done. Give me two minutes at level two, then rejoin the main network.’
He flipped the communicator shut and returned it to his pocket. There was a pre-emptive smile hovering around his lips, as if he was about to tell her a joke.
Perdy waited to see what he was going to say, then he lifted his right hand and snapped his thumb and forefinger together.
Suddenly the entire park was bathed in bright sunlight. Perdy instinctively shut her eyes tight against the glare, but gradually reopened them, looking about her, as they adjusted to an eerie nocturnal daylight.
‘Our space station repairs are now finished and we’re back on line,’ said Negromonte. ‘This is their way of letting me know.’
From nearby, Perdy heard a bird start to sing in the treetops. Then it was joined by another, and suddenly all of the birds nesting in the great trees around them woke to the false dawn.
As suddenly as it had arrived, the sunlight was switched off again. Now it seemed even darker than it had before.
Perdy felt her host moving closer. ‘You’re not cold?’ he asked.
She shook her head, then felt Negromonte’s arms slip round her shoulders. He was bending his head as if for a kiss.
‘No!’ said Perdy firmly, turning away. ‘Let’s keep our relationship on a strictly professional footing.’
Chapter Eight
As no airline offered direct flights between San Francisco and the Santa Barbara peninsula, Michael Fairfax chose to drive the 300 miles south to Lompoc. He was on his way to visit the state penitentiary in which the Los Angeles Police Department was holding his one-time girlfriend – a woman now accused of belonging to a PFO terrorist cell.
When he had taken her call he had wondered at first if this might be a hoax, but as soon as he heard her throaty voice he was left in no doubt. He hadn’t seen Carole Gonzaga for over fifteen years, not since they had been students together on the same UCLA campus, but her vibrant personality had reached out to him once again over the networks, instantly familiar.
‘I need your help, Mike,’ she told him huskily. ‘Not as a lawyer, but as a friend – if you can still think of me in that way.’
He explained that what she needed above all else was a criminal-law attorney to represent her, but during this one permitted phone call she had begged him to visit her. ‘I have no one else I can trust and there’s something very important I have to tell you.’
Because this trip was not directly connected with the firm’s business, Michael had taken two days of his annual vacation entitlement to drive down Route One – the old scenic highway that wound its way sinuously along the Pacific coastline.
He was pleased to have an excuse to get out of the office; informing the hulk community that there was going to be a delay in bringing their case before the international court had been both difficult and humiliating. When he had originally secured their agreement of representation, he had promised his clients an initial hearing within three months of his appointment. He felt instinctively that their simmering anger could not be contained for much longer.
Michael drove on through Big Sur, Monterey, Carmel and Grover Beach – all in beautiful late-spring sunshine just as scheduled, now that the local weather-management services were back on line – and then on through the agricultural flower fields of Lompoc, thousands of acres that, thanks to climate control, were now filled year round with magnificent outdoor blooms.
Skirting the Brandenburg US Air Force base, he soon identified the ugly state penitentiary fences as they loomed over the surrounding flower fields.
Shortly before four-thirty p.m. he was shown into a shabby interview room in the outer ring of low buildings. Almost as a matter of routine he laid a DigiPad on the small table as if about to record an interview with a client.
The door opened and two overweight female prison guards entered, escorting a woman prisoner, manacled at her hands and feet, between them. She was wearing an orange all-in-one prison-issue suit.
As Carole lifted her head, Michael found it hard to conceal his surprise. He doubted that he would now have recognized her if they’d passed on the street. Her dark hair was close-cropped and her large-featured, theatrical face that had once captivated him now looked deeply shadowed and haunted. She looked so much older than he remembered.
He nodded to her – the usual curt greeting of a lawyer to a client in restraints – then asked the warders to remove her manacles for the duration of the interview.
Without replying, one of the guards removed Carole’s wrist cuffs, but pointedly left her leg irons in place.
‘It’s OK, Mike,’ said Carole. That throaty voice again – the only thing about her that seemed unchanged.
The female guards stepped back to stand either side of the door, and Carole shot him an urgent look of request.
‘Outside, please,’ he told them.
They glanced at each other and then reluctantly turned and left the room. Michael saw that one of them remained stationed on the other side of the door, watching them through the wire-reinforced observation window.
Carole Gonzaga stooped and began peering under the table top. Then she picked up a metal-framed chair and examined it.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Michael.
‘I’m a terrorist,’ she hissed, as she continued her searching. ‘Don’t you understand, they listen in wherever I go.’
‘But anything they recorded covertly between us would be totally inadmissible as evidence,’ protested Michael. ‘They couldn’t use any of it.’
‘That’s not what I’m worried about.’
He had wondered how she would be, what he could say to her after all these years: Hi, Carole, great to see you again. How are things?
But he hadn’t expected to find the haunted, anxious creature who was now shuffling along each wall in turn, apparently expecting to find hidden microphones.
Michael sat down at the interview table and pointedly turned off the recording function in his DigiPad.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked firmly.
Carole was now by the door, examining the architrave. For a moment he wondered if she was mentally ill. Then she shuffled back to her chair, sat down and leaned her head fully forward, across the table. Instinctively, Michael did the same.
‘Put some music on, loud,’ she said, nodding at his DigiPad.
As a busy lawyer, he didn’t usually bother to carry much music around with
him, but he located something that he thought might be sufficiently loud, touched Play and turned the volume up. The beat filled the room.
‘OK,’ Carole said quietly, still leaning forward over the table so that their heads were almost touching. ‘You’ll have to remember everything I’m going to tell you. You must get in contact with Professor Robert Fivetrees at Berkeley – Department of Planetary Geophysics. He’s discovered there’s something seriously damaging the Earth’s magnetic field, but our wonderful government has slapped an NSO – a National Secrecy Order – on his work. He can’t publish his findings or even talk about them.’
Michael was listening carefully, though what she was saying sounded like wild eco-activist paranoia – or something worse. He stared intently at her, their eyes only inches apart. But he detected no madness there, only a steely determination.
‘He gave us the information secretly,’ hissed the prisoner. ‘Fivetrees says climate management is seriously disrupting the magnetic poles. We tried to get the media interested, but they think we’re just freaky extremists. The professor needs to find a legal way to get his research published – maybe somewhere abroad. Will you meet him – see if you can help him? He’s really nervous now – because of his connection with us. But he’ll talk to you if you tell him I sent you – if you tell him about our time together.’
Michael straightened up and his former lover slowly did the same. Her wide dark-eyed gaze held his, seeming all the more intense because of her cropped hair. She nodded once, as if to reinforce her request.
‘And that’s it?’ he asked in a normal voice.
‘That’s it,’ Carole confirmed.
‘But you will still need a criminal lawyer to prepare your case – to see if you can get bail.’
‘I don’t want bail,’ she told him, ‘and I’ll be representing myself I intend to make a statement from the witness box and tell the world in open court – where they can’t stop me – what our government is covering up.’
*
‘Commander on the bridge!’
‘Commander on the bridge!’ repeated the watch lieutenant, coming to attention. Then he staggered forwards and fell hard into the commander’s arms, just as the senior officer stepped into the ship’s high-tech control centre. All of the other six members of the watch were now clinging to pieces of equipment or grabbing at handles to stop themselves being thrown across the sloping floor.
Lt Commander Buckler R. Jarvis, captain of the USS Vincent, already knew he currently had the worst naval posting of all – not just the worst posting in the US Navy, but the worst posting in any of the world’s navies. Steaming in circles in an attempt to corral the hulk platforms and their millions of environmental refugees within these wild Antarctic seas was a humiliating duty just on its own, but the uncontrolled weather of these extreme latitudes made the task so miserable that each ship spent only three months on ‘hulk station duties’ before being relieved.
‘Well, what is it?’ Jarvis demanded as he heaved the young watch lieutenant back onto his feet and fought his way over to the captain’s chair. It was three-twenty a.m. local time and he had been summoned out of a deep sleep by his Executive Officer.
As Jarvis had hurriedly pulled on his uniform he had wondered if this bad weather was causing problems for the rest of the fleet; although the nuclear-powered Vincent could ride out almost any storm, the Force Nine gale that they were currently experiencing could cause serious problems for the smaller escorts.
Even the mighty aircraft carrier now reared like a frightened horse as she crested a giant wave and, not for the first time, the commander understood the wisdom of the hulk people in lashing their many ships together to form a single platform. It was a raft so large that it could float across the giant undulations of the oceans like a leaf on the surface of a flood.
‘We’re getting strange radar signals, sir,’ yelled the Exec over the noise of the howling gale outside. ‘From the far side of the hulk platform. It looks like some of their ships are coming adrift.’
Lt Commander Jarvis nodded for the signal to be fed to his own screen, then gazed at the jagged image which shimmered in front of him.
‘We’re also getting a lot of false images and interference from the bigger waves,’ shouted the Exec. ‘Some of those blips might just be water.’
The commander studied the picture again. It did seem as if scores of ships had broken away from the main platform, but it was impossible to be sure.
The carrier rose up once more, and everybody on the bridge braced themselves for the mighty crash that would follow. It was a wicked night for anybody to be out on the open seas.
‘Satellite imagery?’ asked the commander.
The Exec shook his head. ‘Total cloud cover, sir.’
‘Can we put up a recon drone?’ he asked, already guessing the answer.
‘Can’t launch in this, sir. We’ll have to wait until it gets below Force Three.’
The commander nodded. The ship was therefore almost blind. He leaned forward to examine the radar image again. The far side of the hulk platform was over sixty nautical miles south of the task force’s current position. In this weather it would take them ten or eleven hours to steam all the way round the platform to see precisely what was going on.
‘It looks like part of the platform is breaking up,’ Jarvis said to his Executive Officer. ‘Those breakaway blips are far too big to be single ships.’
‘Unless they’re very big wave series,’ observed the Exec.
‘What’s the met forecast?’
The Exec had a printout ready. ‘This is expected to last for another forty-eight hours at least, sir.’
The commander nodded. With another two days and nights of this pounding, and if the hulk platform was really breaking up, there wouldn’t be much left of any ships caught on their own without engine power.
‘Send a signal to Pearl Harbor,’ ordered the commander: ‘“Ships appear to be separating from hulk platform.” Send them a copy of our radar data files – perhaps they’ll be able to get more out of them.’
‘Sir, message coming in from HMS Portsmouth,’ shouted the watch lieutenant. ‘One of her engines is overheating and they’ll have to shut it down for repairs.’
That settled it. The Vincent would now have to nursemaid the little British destroyer through the rest of this storm, maintaining station close enough to evacuate her crew if she got into further trouble. The hulk people would just have to look out for themselves.
‘Send to Portsmouth, “Coming to your assistance immediately.”’ The commander glanced at his Exec, who had already tapped the new heading into the navigation system.
‘Fifteen minutes, sir,’ he said.
‘And: “Be with you oh-four-twenty-five,”’ said the commander, finishing his dictation.
‘Ready on the new heading, twenty-one degrees south-south-east,’ said the Exec. ‘Shall I inform the other captains, then come about and proceed at three-quarters speed?’
‘Make it so,’ said the commander, stepping down from his chair. ‘You have the helm.’
*
Emilia Knight lived alone in an isolated house on a high bluff overlooking an inlet called Muir Beach. The small bay was on Marin County’s Pacific coast, fifteen miles north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and she rented the property from her predecessor at Geohazard, an older male colleague who had accepted a two-year posting to the company’s seismic monitoring centre in Tokyo.
The ‘beach’ below her house was small and shingly, set back deep inside the cove. Despite year-round weather management the Pacific could still be quite wild on this exposed coast. But Emilia loved the location and she appreciated the fact that before buying the house her Geohazard co-worker had made a thorough check of the building’s earthquake-resistant foundations.
The redwood dwelling was on two levels, with a small garden to the south, while to the west – the ocean side – there was a large ‘sunset deck’ and the obligator
y Californian hot tub.
Three days after she’d learned that she’d inadvertently been handling virtually pure plutonium, Emilia lounged on her deck on a Saturday evening, watching the sun go down. It had turned the sky into a vast sheet of ruby and gold carnival glass.
She had taken to carrying a pocket Geiger counter wherever she went, but although she checked the level of radioactivity on her body at least twice a day, the readings were now close to normal.
‘Hello? Em?’ The man’s voice sounded behind her, from within the house, and she started before realizing that it was only Steve Bardini. ‘Anyone at home?’
‘Here,’ she called and after a few moments her assistant and former boyfriend stepped out onto the deck.
‘I did ring the doorbell,’ he explained apologetically, and she realized that he still retained her access and entry codes. She would have to reprogram her locks and security system.
But she was pleased to see him this evening. They had not met nor had a chance to talk since she had been so abruptly reassigned. Emilia had set all of her communications systems to just take messages while she absorbed the news and weighed up what she had been told.
‘Hi, Steve. Grab a beer,’ she greeted him, shielding her eyes against the low sun.
He fetched a bottle from the kitchen and came to sit beside her. Outside of the office there was still a slight awkwardness about their recently recategorized relationship.
‘How’ve you been?’ he asked.
‘Two-point-one,’ said Emilia, smiling. ‘And falling.’
‘Oh, great. I was worried because I heard you’d been transferred out of Risk Assessment.’
She wondered how much she could tell him.
‘They’re transferring me to night shifts for a while,’ Steve added sheepishly. ‘I guess it’s because we screwed up on Mount Māriota.’
Emilia merely nodded and stared into the sunset.
