Not the End of the World

by Christopher Brookmyre

  ‘That’s like the Michigan Militia, right?’ he said, trying not to enunciate the concern and revulsion he was feeling. ‘They go running around the woods with assault weapons at the weekend, training for when they have to fend off an invasion by the UN. That it?’

  ‘Right. But these guys are from southern California – LA, Orange County, San Diego – and they go running around the desert rather than the woods. And yeah, they’re training for something, but we’re concerned it might be something a little more soon and a little less imaginary than an invasion by the UN. The FBI’s been monitoring all the militias pretty closely since Waco, obviously not closely enough, given Oklahoma City. Our intelligence suggests the Southland Militia are gearing up for a major outing. They’re stockpiling weapons, recruiting new bodies. Trouble is, we have no idea what’s on the agenda.

  ‘To cut to the chase, we’ve had several members of the Militia’s high-rank inner circle under surveillance, and last July our agents witnessed one of them enter Biscane’s condo the evening of the murder.’

  ‘So you figure he did it. And this is the part where you tell me you didn’t bust him, right?’

  Steel paused. ‘That is correct. Our agents didn’t know why the guy was there, so they just watched him leave and followed him as per instructions. Physical evidence was negligible. He left no prints – we guessed surgical gloves. He killed Professor Biscane with a single stab-wound to the chest using one of her own kitchen knives. Left it sticking in her – plausible interrupted-burglary spur-of-the-moment scenario. To complete the effect he opened a few drawers, emptied her pocketbook of cash and even unplugged the VCR and left it on the kitchen floor like he was making off with it when she woke up and found him.’

  ‘But you had witnesses – Federal officers, in fact. So why didn’t you bust him?’

  ‘We still intend to, don’t worry. But we held back because we didn’t know what he – and by extension the Southland Militia – wanted with Biscane, far less why they wanted her dead. It was the first real lead we had on what they might be up to.’

  ‘And if you pulled him straight in you figured they’d circle the wagons.’

  ‘Exactly. We wanted them to think they’d gotten away with it.’

  ‘So why did theykill her?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘We still don’t know,’ Steel admitted. ‘That’s why there’s a crossover trace on the file – to alert me to anything new connected to her death or to her personally. Which brings us back to you and your missing scientists. You said you were given Biscane’s name by someone who didn’t think they’d had an accident. Who was that?’

  ‘Dr Maria Arazon.’

  ‘Iremember the name. Another seismologist. Friend of Biscane. Guess it’s understandable she thinks foul play. What do you think, Sergeant?’

  ‘I’m thinking nothing I’d like to be quoted on yet, Agent Steel. Not until I’ve seen the forensics report. I’ve seen the boat, though. There’s plenty weird about it but nothing suspicious. Except that the – I’d guess you’d call him the captain-wrote what Arazon believes to be a coded SOS message in the log’s final entry. It said they were all taking their submarine to a place called the Slopes Of Stronghyli, which doesn’t exist any more, apparently.’

  ‘Slopes Of Stronghyli. SOS. Why would he write that?’

  ‘Beats the shit out of me. Arazon thinks it was the only way to signal something was wrong, presumably under duress, but I figure there’s gotta be a few explanations further up the plausibility table than that.’

  ‘Sure,’ Steel agreed. ‘Sure. But do you think it’s possible, I don’t know, maybe they saw something they weren’t supposed to? They’re way out in the Pacific – a drug exchange, gun-running?’

  ‘All of these things are possible, Agent Steel. But a man could go crazy counting up all the things that are possible. Here’s as much as I know for sure. I’ve got four scientists missing presumed dead, and an understandably emotional colleague of theirs gives me the name of a fifth scientist, who it turns out is dead too. But as right now the only connection is that your victim and two of my MPDs were seismologists – and as the emotional colleague who connected them is a seismologist too – I’ll wait till I know more before I go reading too much into it.’

  He got CalORI through Information and convinced the lab technician still on duty to surrender Arazon’s home number.

  ‘Sergeant Freeman, what can I do for you?’ she asked, trying too hard to sound surprised that he was calling.

  ‘Well, you can start by telling me whether you knew I’d end up with the FBI on my tail when I looked up that name you gave me, Doctor.’

  ‘Was it Agent Steel?’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘He came to interview me after Sandra’s murder. It didn’t take much intuition to work out she wasn’t just a random victim if the FBI were involved.’

  ‘And because she wasn’t a random victim, later on, when some more associates of yours disappear, you think that ain’t a random event either?’

  ‘In the space of six months? It’s a bit of a coincidence.’

  ‘This whole world’s just full of coincidences, Dr Arazon, believe me, and they’ll lead you a crazy dance if you let them. Tell me this: can you connect the victims of these two incidents through anything more than a shared academic field?’

  She sighed irritably. ‘No, Sergeant, right now I can’t.’

  ‘Me neither. So to graduate from coincidence to conspiracy, we’d need at least one more link.’

  ‘Well you won’t find one if you’re not prepared to look.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be looking, Dr Arazon, and I’ll be looking hard. But you gotta understand this: I do needles in haystacks, I don’t do wild-goose chases. So anyway, why did Peter Steel come see you back then?’

  He heard her swallow, sigh, try to still her frustrations.

  ‘I was a friend and one-time academic colleague,’ she told him. ‘Steel was looking to build up some background on Sandra, what her work was about, who her contacts were.’

  ‘Trying to figure out possible reasons why she was killed.’

  ‘I guess so. What’d he tell you?’

  ‘Everything and nothing, which is consistent with the FBI. Just when you think they’re getting expansive, that’s usually the sign that they’re keeping the good shit back. He says they still don’t know why she was murdered. I believe him on that. He was scrubbing in the dirt for leads. That’s why he chased me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Arazon, wryly unconvinced. ‘He tell you about her computer?’

  ‘No, what about it?’

  ‘Sandra’s sister Beth was what you’d call executor of her estate. She passed Sandra’s books, papers, folders – and her Apple Mac – on to her department colleagues at UCLA for them to salvage what they could of her work. But when they hooked up the machine, the hard disk had been cleaned out.’

  ‘Erased?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Not exactly. The system software was still installed, and there were a few basic applications on board, but whatever else had been on there was gone. Plus she had a SyQuest drive in the apartment but no SyQuest cartridges, suggesting they’d been removed – possibly by her killer.’

  ‘So what should have been on this Mac?’

  ‘Plenty. She did everything on her computer. Sandra and I went through college together, and we shared a lot of interests, but that was where we seriously diverged. I mean, I use computers, in fact I couldn’t exist without them, but I didn’t share her enthusiasm for how you actually program the things. I like to come along when the technical part’s done, just press the right buttons and get the results. Sandra liked to take the programs apart like they were the engine on her car. Whenever she started talking about it, I’d just be lost. Stuff was way over my head.

  ‘Obviously I didn’t follow the number-crunching side, but I do remember her big hobby-horse was constructing 3-D seismological models, you know, for trying to project what
would happen along this faultline if that crustal plate moved in such-and-such a direction. Hardly explosive material, I know. So there must have been other stuff on her files that somebody was either interested in or worried about.’

  ‘Certainly sounds like it,’ Larry observed. ‘But now it’s gone and so’s she. When did you last speak to her?’

  ‘Around May of last year, on the telephone. She was taking a sabbatical for the spring semester to work on a personal project.’

  ‘And apart from computers, what was Professor Biscane’s particular area of interest?’

  ‘Tidal waves.’

  From: Jerry Blake

  Date: 3 March 1999 01:21

  To: marazon@calori.com

  Cc:

  Subject: The Money Shot!

  Hey Maria!

  Had you teased and on tenterhooks with all this foreplay, huh? Well, now I’m finally delivering the juicy bit – as far as a seismologist like you is concerned. Finally, a first-hand (oh really? – we’ll let the journals argue about that) account of the big one. Sorry this has taken so long after me whetting your appetite. Rather predictably, it’s been politics that’s slowed things down. We’ve got workable translations of the whole lot now, but with different people handling different aspects of each fragment, you inevitably generate a degree of territorial cliqueyness. I haven’t even seen all the texts myself yet, and there’s one small fragment that Helen Schwarz and Bruno Calvi have been sufficiently cagey about for no-one else to have had a look.

  Mind you, I should count my blessings – this project has been the essence of harmony and haste compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls fiasco. The only thing anyone really learned from those was that if you make a find that might shed light on biblical history, don’t hand it over to Catholic academics! Almost forty years on and the truth of those things is still buried as deep as if Qumran had never been found.

  Jerry

  blakej@past.participle.com

  Extract: (Site GY /scroll G /fragments 4,5 inc.)

  We struggled to the shelter of an outcrop, our arms about one another as we climbed, and drank from a gourd to clear our mouths and throats of the acrid blackness. The winds seemed to clear the air of ash and then cast it forth again in alternate gusts, but as all of it issued from the north some relief was to be found behind barriers of rock.

  As the air stilled itself awhile, I chose that moment to stand atop the rocks and look back down the hillside, upon the sea, upon the harbours, upon Knossos, from which we had fled.

  I stared long at the familiar shape of the Daidalaion, and when I gazed back at the sea I saw the impossible: the waters were withdrawing. In the port, boats were left helplessly on their sides, stranded on banks of drying sand like gasping fish as the sea retreated from the land. Beyond the bay the remains of lost vessels were exposed, nestled amid great plains of rocks and reeds, the sea-bed’s secret terrain revealed for the first time. It did not look so different from the hillside I viewed it from.

  Then from the north there came a sound of thunder, growing, deepening, approaching, and when I looked there I saw the waters climb and swell. There was a wave, a single impulse the width of the entire horizon, travelling forth at a thousand times the speed of the swiftest ship.

  And as it drew nearer it piled higher. It rose and rose as it sped towards the land, a wall of water higher than our mightiest cliffs and wider than all Kaftor, still growing as it charged.

  The wave was at least a hundred times the height of the tallest man when it devoured the last shallows of our retreated sea, and from the mountain I could see what bulk of water rampaged behind its livid face.

  Just as the waters had retreated to uncover the lands beneath the sea, now they retaliated, claiming Kaftor’s coasts and beyond in covetous recompense. The wave engulfed all in its path, swallowing Knossos in an instant, and plunged on inland, its height diminishing but its momentum and its endless volume still driving it relentlessly forward.

  I watched as the waters uncovered poor Knossos, sacked by a force greater than a thousand armies. Only that which was hewn of stone remained even as testament to the destruction. I looked tearfully upon the Daidalaion, our temple, still standing in proud defiance, and thought of Asturis my beloved sister, of noble Ankham, and of all who had surely perished.

  But to my growing alarm the waters did not end their retreat at the harbour. Again they drew back from the coast, beyond the shoals and sandbanks. Again a sound like thunder hailed from the north.

  Again a single wave spanned the horizon.

  nine

  Strictly speaking, you couldn’t call it love at first sight, as Steff had seen Madeleine Witherson on television before meeting her face to face. But then maybe TV didn’t count, and maybe in-the-flesh was the only true, ‘fishell first sight. Steff sincerely hoped so. His reminiscences might not seem quite so soft-focus and dreamy if he had to admit that his first glimpse of the woman with whom he’d become besotted was of her being shagged doggy-style by some bloke with a catastrophic Michael Bolton mane while she simultaneously blew a second hairspray ad at the other end.

  At least, that’s what he’d assumed was going on: the hotel’s in-house pay-per-view adult movies had suffered the vigorous attentions of a censor’s scissors to render them soft-core, and this had lent the film a certain New Wave ambiguity. Steff estimated that if the male duo’s barber had shown half as much enthusiasm, they’d both look like Ed Harris. In fact, he thought it was a pity the coiffeur’s and censor’s roles hadn’t been reversed: all right, you’d lose the Greek-god look, but at least there’d be some honest humping on view.

  Steff was baffled as to whose sensibilities the PPV company were attempting to protect. Maybe they’d had letters from irate businessmen, saying that they had paid their money and pressed the button in good faith, expecting wanking material that observed certain standards of taste and respectability, then were horrified to be presented with programming that was no more than pornography. He thought of what Jo said about businessmen in hotel rooms wanting to watch dirty movies without thinking they’re the kind of guy who watches dirty movies in hotel rooms.

  Steff was less troubled by such duality: he was inclined to fire off a sharp note because he didn’t normally like his filth quite as clean.

  Actually, that was a lie. Steff was troubled by plenty of duality over his decision to press the SpanVision button and watch Babylon Blue. For a start he was carrying the standard confused-lefty baggage about ‘the exploitation of wimmin’ as well as concern as to whether he should be putting in an advance order for a big raincoat. And topping it all off was a generous helping of the sexual turmoil that comes free with every Catholic upbringing. Nonetheless, he justified watching the movie on the time-served rationale that, as it featured Maddy Witherson, it counted as research. But the main factor influencing his decision was that he had woken up at five again, and there was, in the immortal words of the Sex Pistols, fuck-all else to do.

  He’d been in hotel rooms with pay-per-view systems before: for more than the price of any cinema ticket you could watch a slightly out-of-focus, shakily pan-and-scanned four-month-old movie. Still, it was amazing what a bargain this could seem like at twenty past five in the morning. Unfortunately the Armada’s PPV selections were all in the ‘adult’ category, with Babylon Blue the only heterosexual option on offer, and that was probably only for the curiosity value surrounding the star being a senator’s daughter. As it turned out, Steff might as well have plumped for one of the gay features, as the ‘softening’ of Babylon Blue had meant the majority of the footage was of hairy male arses bobbing up and down, wobbling male buttocks having been deemed less likely to shock and corrupt the viewer than the sheer horror of labia.

  From what was left of the flick, Steff could deduce that Maddy Witherson was not exactly a megastar of the famous West Coast porn scene. He was able to recognise which of the girls she was because it was her face that adorned the card atop the TV set, advertising details of
the available features, but on-screen she was listed well down the opening credits, and not by her own name, either. Her alias, or nom de shag, was Katy Koxx, as was also explained on the glossy card, and it didn’t grace the screen until Lotte Luv, Felia Cumming and Randy Steed had been flashed up in larger lettering. The discovery of Katy Koxx’s true identity, and more significantly her father’s identity, had evidently happened after Babylon Blue hit the shelves down at the local Whacking Emporium.

  Each time a new female appeared in the movie, Steff checked to see if it was her by looking up again at the small thumbnail of Maddy’s face on the card, sixth in a row that also included Boystown IV, Pump Action VII and, rather entertainingly, a feature entitled Postman Pat’s Backdoor Deliveries. The film had run for more than half an hour before she appeared, and when she undressed Steff decided that the card would be more helpful if it informed you not that Maddy Witherson was ‘(a.k.a. Katy Koxx)’ but ‘(the one with her own tits)’. Few of her co-stars looked entirely biodegradable.

  She was small and skinny, with blonde strands curling half-way down her back in a hairstyle that looked suspiciously too big for her head. At one point she straddled one of the Bolton Brothers, facing the camera, the screen framing her from head to navel. She was moving up and down, eyes closed, accompanied by moaning noises that just had to be dubbed. No woman really made noises like that. Farm animals didn’t even make noises like that. She seemed, like all the girls in the feature, to be doing an impression of what men thought a woman should look like while having sex; movement, gestures, facial expression. Hollywood-style dramatic humping. Then for a second, Steff noticed, she giggled. Just a tiny laugh and a smile, a bashful bite of the lip, before the ‘serious shagging face’ came back on. That was when Steff understood that even though she was having sex on-camera, she was still playing a part.