Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘Dr Arazon. I won’t say I’m pleased to meet you because I’m sure we’d both rather not be having this conversation.’

  ‘You got that right,’ she said quietly, traces of a Mexican accent in her few words.

  Larry wheeled his chair over to the other side of Zabriski’s desk and sat down facing her, but a few feet to one side so that it didn’t seem too confrontational.

  ‘So what can I do for you?’

  ‘I spent yesterday afternoon at the Coast Guard Marina,’ she said. ‘It was requested that someone from CalORI take a look over . . . things.’

  ‘That’s right. Thank you very much for doing that. I appreciate how difficult it must have been. And did you find there was anything unaccounted for?’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant.’ She took a sip from her coffee and nodded to herself. ‘What remains unaccounted for is what happened to my friends. I’ve seen the boat and I’ve read the preliminary draft of your report, and to be perfectly frank I don’t buy it.’

  Larry paused, breathing in for a second. Don’t bite back, you’ll learn nothing. ‘Let me just get my file on it,’ he said, and got up to retrieve it from his own desk. ‘Okay.’ He sat back down and uncapped a Biro. ‘So what exactly don’t you buy?’

  ‘The part where four trained professionals got into a submarine one morning and never came back.’ There was a fiery challenge in her tired eyes; Larry recognised that too. Deny the bad thing is true, argue for how it can’t be true, and maybe in the end it’ll turn out it wasn’t true. Except it never does.

  ‘Okay,’ he said again, nodding. ‘But Dr Arazon, I have to ask you this: given that the four trained professionals we’re talking about were your friends, is it that you don’t buy the story because you don’t believe it happened that way, or because it hurts to think that it did?’

  She looked away from him impatiently, swallowing. She’d probably thought she was all cried out before she came in here, but having to do this was unwrapping the bandages again.

  ‘I don’t buy it principally because it doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Well I can appreciate that it doesn’t make—’

  ‘You’re not hearing me, Sergeant. I’m not in here to blub and say, “Boo-hoc, my friends are dead it’s so unfair, why why why?” I’m saying it doesn’t make sense because all four crew would never go off in the sub at once. At least one person stays top-side during every dive. It’s basic safety procedure.’

  Larry nodded, looking away for a second from the relentless insistence of her eyes. ‘All right, I hear you now,’ he said. ‘And I understand what you’re telling me. Now, let me ask you not to take this wrong, and to try and see it from my position for a second. What you’re telling me is that it would be unsafe for all four crew members to take off in this sub at once. So as we’re left sitting here with no crew and no sub, from an investigative point of view, the information you’ve just given me would tend to support rather than contradict my conclusions.’

  Her eyes flashed again, but Larry resumed before she could respond. ‘I know how hurtful, even how insulting this sounds to you, to suggest that your colleagues would do something negligent like this, but we’ve got to accept the possibility that that’s what happened.’

  She had a bitter smile on her face. Larry suspected he wasn’t the first person who had failed to satisfy her need for a better explanation.

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ she told him. ‘That’s why I’ve waited to mention the log book.’

  ‘What about the log book?’

  ‘Ship’s log, written by Mitchell Kramer. Last entry untimed, undated. Just said they were taking the SM to the Slopes Of Stronghyli.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember now. What are you saying?’

  ‘There’s no such location. Stronghyli’s the geological name for a place in Europe that doesn’t exist any more. The biggest undersea feature near where the sub went missing is Fieberling Guyot.’

  ‘So why would he write the slopes of whatever?’

  ‘Not the slopes of whatever, Sergeant. The Slopes Of Stronghyli. With a capital O on the word “Of”. I’ve seen the entry.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Think of the initials.’

  He did.

  Oh shit.

  ‘Get it now?’

  Larry nodded, then exhaled slowly. Experience had taught him not to let such surprises intoxicate the detective in him.

  ‘Okay Doctor,’ he said. ‘This all sounds pretty weird and mysterious, I’ll grant you, but let’s try and keep our feet on the ground for a minute, huh? If the boat was in some kind of trouble, some kind of danger, why not put a call out on the radio? Why not shoot a flare? Why make your cry for help in a coded message? An SOS is supposed to be a scream, not a whisper.’

  ‘Depends on whether someone has their hand over your mouth at the time.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ he conceded. ‘But if you’re suggesting someone else was on board, well . . . You’ve seen the place yourself. We don’t have any evidence of a struggle having taken place, no breakages, no signs of blood. And the other thing we don’t have is a motive. Why would anyone wish your colleagues harm, and better yet, why would they go all the way out to the middle of the ocean to do them harm?’

  ‘No witnesses, for one thing,’ she snapped. ‘I don’t know, Sergeant, I thought motives and explanations were your department. I’ve only got questions, and I was hoping you’d be interested enough to look for more answers than are in your report.’

  ‘Oh, I’m interested,’ Larry assured her. ‘After what you’ve told me I’m gonna request a forensic sweep of the boat, see if anyone else was on board. I’m not here to brush this aside with the first plausible theory that comes along. But I can only take it as far as the evidence will let me, and so far there ain’t much of that. Unless there’s somethin’ else you’re holdin’ out on.’

  She looked back at him just a little too quickly. There it was, he thought. He could see there was something she wanted to tell him, but by the same instinct he suspected she wouldn’t. Not yet, leastways.

  She got up from her chair.

  ‘I’ve got to get back, Sergeant,’ she said, making for the door.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Dr Arazon. I’ll let you know if we find anything.’

  ‘Sure.’ She opened the door, then paused with her fingers around the handle. ‘Sergeant, if you really are interested, two words: Sandra Biscane. C-A-N-E.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘You’re the cop. Look it up.’

  Sandra Biscane. The name meant nothing to him, nor did he think it was supposed to. Maria Arazon was trying to draw him into something, playing her cards one at a time, and he’d bet that whatever this one turned out to be, it wouldn’t be the last. She had the fatigue and fragility of the bereaved, but she wasn’t simply looking for answers to console her for her loss. That lady knew something, but she wasn’t going to give it up until she figured he’d earned it.

  Larry took a seat at the computer terminal, placed his coffee next to the keyboard in front of the sign that expressly forbade doing so, and logged on to the database. Arazon hadn’t given him any pointers or any parameters, so he’d just have to feed in the name alone – no categories, no geographical locations, no connections – and sit back. Maybe even go for a walk. He settled on finishing his coffee and watching the little egg-timer icon empty out then up-end itself over and over in the centre of the monitor.

  The boat had been troubling him since his visit to the marina. At first he’d put it down to being spooked by the weirdness of it all, but even if Arazon hadn’t come along, he still wasn’t certain he’d have remained satisfied with his report as it stood. This Slopes Of Stronghyli thing didn’t have to mean everything Arazon might imagine it could mean, but he’d be surprised if it meant nothing at all. All down the years they taught you that when you hear hooves, you should look for horses, not zebras, but that didn’t mean that it never turned out to be a herd of
the black-and-white critters once in a while. Despite Rodriguez opining that even experienced sailors can screw up, there was still something left unsaid about this one. Especially now he knew that it was not the done thing for all four of them to go down in the sub at the same time.

  He arced his cup into the trash basket just as the screen flashed back into life.

  ‘Biscane, Sandra NOT FOUND,’ it read. ‘NEAREST MATCH? YES/NO.’

  ‘Shit,’ Larry muttered. He hit Y.

  The computer offered him a ‘Biscane, A’ and a ‘Biscane, Monica’. He hit the key to look up the former. The screen went blank then scrolled out its information.

  ‘Biscane, Alexandra.’ That’s my girl, Larry thought. ‘Homicide. San Bernadino. Reported: 7.7.98. Case file opened: 7:7:98. OPEN/PREVIOUS SCREEN.’

  He typed O.

  ‘No access to file. File classified by Federal Bureau of Investigation. PREVIOUS SCREEN/MAIN MENU.’

  He stared stubbornly at the screen as if it might be intimidated into changing its mind.

  Homicide. Classified. FBI.

  SOS.

  ‘What ain’t you tellin’ me, Dr Arazon?’

  The restroom’s triptych of mirrors confirmed Maria’s suspicions: she looked like shit. She didn’t want to think about what impression her crash-victim appearance must have made on the cop, but at least she felt sure of the impact her words had had. She splashed water on her face, like that was going to make a difference, and sighed at the wasted image gazing back at her. Too bad junkie chic went out. The most constructive thing she could do right now, she figured, was shut down her terminal and go home.

  She hadn’t been sleeping too well since the disappearance, but last night she’d barely got under at all. She had prepared herself for what she might feel when she saw the boat again: the feelings, the memories, the torments of a fevered imagination. Her greatest fears had been about what a thudding impact the experience would have on her delicate grieving process. She thought she was only dealing with loss. The logbook told her otherwise.

  Walking around the Gazes Also hadn’t quite been the ordeal she’d imagined. The Coast Guard had removed the dirty plates and cups from the galley for purposes of hygiene, so the Mary Celeste effect everyone had been talking about failed to register. The very orderliness that contributed to other people’s bafflement meant there was nothing to jar Maria’s sense of familiarity. She felt no auras of lost companions, no ‘atmosphere’ of imprinted human emotion. There was far more of that to be found at CalORI, probably because that was where she was more used to spending time with the four of them. It was, basically, an empty boat.

  The log, however, changed everything.

  It wasn’t just the initials, or the fact that the place specified could not have been their intended destination. There was more than that, she was sure. If Mitch had reason to leave a coded SOS, he could have made up any name – Sands Of Somewhere, Slopes Of Someplace else – but he said Stronghyli, which was like underlining the message several times. Admittedly, if this meant what she thought it meant, he might not have had the time or presence to be thinking too much about wider connotations, but he’d still have been aware of what that name referred to. Stronghyli was the geological name for pre-eruption Thera. It was also CalORI slang for a situation that was about to go disastrously wrong.

  The nauseous feeling in her gut that the phrase unleashed was not a reflex, more the lowering of a barrier, allowing an in-rush of fear and anger that had been backed up since last summer when Sandra was murdered.

  Maria had grown used to not thinking about it, knowing that the lack of answers only tugged at her wounds, and that unsolved homicides were not exactly a rarity here in the Southland. The fact that the FBI were all over the thing had heightened the mystery, but she soon garnered the impression it was the murderer they had a special interest in, not the victim. Even amid the current climate of hysterical paranoia, it hadn’t occurred to her to draw any link between Sandra’s death and whatever had happened on the Gazes Also. Then she had read those three little words.

  She could tell Freeman understood what they entailed. He was bound to resist accepting it straight away, but he would accept it soon enough.

  Someone else had been on that boat.

  Larry was fixing to clock off and head for home when his phone rang. He thought about ignoring it, as strictly speaking, he should have been out of there ten minutes ago, indeed would have been but for a long call from Conchita Nunez. She wasn’t requiring any form of assistance, just to unburden herself to someone of similar mind and thus avoid letting rip with a less-than-diplomatic outburst at the next act of stupidity she was faced with. There had been two more bomb calls since he left, but the trace hadn’t been up in time to get a location on them. Nunez had transferred the first guy to Tommy Andrews, who had been allocated bomb-hoaxer duty, but she recognised the second as the same loser from that morning, and took the call herself. The poor dumb shit thought he had been caught out by giving the wrong answer to Larry’s trigger question, and had confidently asserted straight off that he was using a bilateral transept detonator, which Larry had made up too.

  Further inconvenience had come in the form of a second paint-throwing incident, but this time hotel security had managed to catch the two culprits as they ran away. A brief interrogation revealed that they were both in the employ of ReelCo and that they had been under orders to splatter their executive superiors, who had been enviously observing the activity around CineCorp’s market office all morning.

  This little revelation led in turn to the forcible dispersal down on the beach of a group of demonstrators, who had for the previous hour been waving placards and chanting in denunciation of certain ‘sinful’ titles on the ProTel slate.

  Larry looked at the clock. Market business was closed for the day, and the unhappy-clappies would have packed up too. He figured it was safe to answer.

  ‘Hello, Sergeant Larry Freeman here.’

  ‘Good evening, Sergeant, this is Agent Peter Steel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’

  They always said that. Like you might be unfamiliar with the abbreviation, or like FBI could stand for more than one thing.

  ‘Good evening yourself. What can I do for you, Agent Steel?’

  ‘Sergeant Freeman, I understand you were attempting to access the computerised case files on Alexandra Biscane this afternoon. Is that correct?’

  ‘Shit, what you guys got, a hidden camera in this station?’

  ‘No sir, there’s a crossover trace on that file. If anyone looks it up, I get a message on my computer telling me who and where, so that I can do what I’m doing now, which is asking you why you’re interested in Professor Biscane.’

  ‘Oh, it’s Professor Biscane,’ Larry said. ‘Well at least I’m finding out something. Tell you what, why don’t you tell me why it’s classified and then I’ll tell you why I’m interested?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that, Sergeant.’

  ‘Well in that case—’

  ‘Not that way around, anyway,’ Steel interrupted. ‘I’m sorry about sounding like an asshole G-man, but I need to know why you’re interested first, and depending on your reason, I might be able to open up a little.’

  Larry sighed. A self-aware asshole G-man was a major step in the species’ evolution. It was therefore in his interest to assist the new breed’s survival.

  ‘I’m investigating the disappearances – probably safe to say deaths but we got no bodies and probably won’t never have, neither – of four scientists from a research vessel in the Pacific.’

  ‘Who were they? What did they do?’

  Larry reached for a folder on the desk in front of him, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his chin as he flipped through the leaves inside.

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said, ‘Mitchell Kramer, seismologist, Cody Williams, geologist, Grady Cooper, also a geologist, and Taylor Svenson, also a seismologist. All from the Californian Oceanographic Research Instit
ute, or CalORI for short. Boat was called the Gazes Also,and they vanished off it last week along with a miniature submarine.’

  ‘They vanished off it? You mean the ship didn’t go down or anything?’

  ‘No. The ship was a genuine latterday Mary Celeste. Found drifting, dinner plates in the sink, coffee cups and postprandial brandies still on the table. Only thing out of place was a conspicuous lack of personnel and the absence of their submersible vehicle, the Stella Maris. So far I’ve been working on the explanation that all the missing components fit together. Crew get in submarine, submarine takes its remit too far. However . . .’

  ‘What were they working on out there?’

  ‘Research, whatever that means. Taking samples, charting stuff. I don’t know. But they weren’t looking for oil, if that’s what you’re wondering about.’

  ‘And why were you looking up Biscane?’

  ‘Someone from CalORI mentioned her name. Someone who wasn’t convinced of my theory that these guys had an accident. I don’t know the connection, because right now I know nothing about Sandra Biscane. So you gonna throw something back my way, or do I just run along now?’

  Steel breathed in slowly on the other end of the line. ‘Alexandra – Sandra – Biscane was a professor at UCLA, specialising in ocean seismology. She was murdered in her home last summer, apparently having disturbed a burglar.’

  ‘But you didn’t buy that.’

  ‘No, we didn’t. We took over the investigation from Homicide in San Bernadino pretty much from the start.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This is classified information, Sergeant, so it goes no further than either end of this phone line, okay?’

  ‘You got it.’

  ‘Does the name Southland Militia mean anything to you?’

  Larry swallowed. He hadn’t heard of this particular pustule but he was familiar with the disease. Groups of extreme-right, paranoid, white-supremacist, Christian fundamentalist brain-donors with a gun obsession and the arsenal to feed it. Yet another cauldron of unstable hatred that had been simmering away throughout the Nineties and threatening to boil over the nearer we got to year zero.