The Alarmists

by Don Hoesel

  “What did you go to college for?” he asked, catching her eyes at the moment their top lids touched the bottom. He kept his smile to himself as those lids snapped open, guilt as the motivator.

  “Premed chemistry,” Madigan said, rubbing her eyes with her palms.

  “So what made you join the army?”

  He asked the question as he scanned one of the team’s reports. After years spent reviewing documents, looking for patterns or for something that stood out from the pattern, he could do it on autopilot. It allowed him to listen to Amy Madigan talk herself to alertness.

  “Student loans.” She stifled another yawn, took a sip of lukewarm coffee, and said, “After a year I started to get worried about having to spend the rest of my life paying for my undergrad degree—especially when I knew medical school was coming.”

  He looked up from the papers and offered the weary captain a wry smile. “That’s what the National Guard is for, isn’t it?”

  She chuckled at that.

  “Don’t underestimate the power of a good recruiter,” she said.

  Brent shuffled the papers and then set them aside. He reached for his own coffee cup and took a fortifying drink.

  “But what made you stay? My guess is your four years was up a while ago. The army would have paid for your schooling and you could be working in a private lab anywhere in the world.”

  “First, thanks for the crack at my age.” When Brent gave her a confused look, she added, “My four years wasn’t up that long ago.” He offered a chastised look as Madigan leaned back in her chair, stretching her legs under the table. “I was about to leave. I’d been accepted to medical school and was ready to say good-bye to Uncle Sam.”

  “Then what?” Brent asked after she’d lapsed into silence.

  “Then I met Colonel Richards, and he offered me a spot on his team.” She paused and waved a tired hand in the air, taking in the room and perhaps the larger facility. “Well, you’ve seen this place.”

  “Some of it,” Brent said, thinking back on some of the things he’d witnessed in his short time in residence. “Yeah, I guess I can see why you chose to stay.”

  That acknowledgment elicited a smile from Madigan, but apparently she was too tired to pursue the conversation, so when she again lapsed into silence, Brent pressed on once more.

  “So has it been worth it?” he asked.

  “It’s rarely a good idea to entertain ‘what ifs.’ I believe I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

  Brent fancied himself a good observer of people; it was part of what allowed him to turn his sociology expertise into consulting positions. And so he noticed Amy Madigan’s hand move absently to the cross hanging from the chain around her neck—a symbol, and a gesture, that spoke of a religious upbringing carried through to adulthood. It was a bit of knowledge he would file away for a later occasion should such information prove valuable. He’d already committed a great deal to that particular mental file cabinet—such as the fact that Amy Madigan was more attractive than the average army officer.

  As if picking up on that thought, she said, “So is there a Mrs. Michaels?”

  She’d asked just as he’d taken another swallow of coffee, and while the question certainly dovetailed with his thoughts, he still found himself fighting to keep the coffee from going down the wrong pipe. What made the inquiry even more interesting was that she would have read his file—would have known he wasn’t married.

  “Nope,” he said, his eyes watering only slightly from the coffee. “There’s no Mrs. Michaels.”

  She offered a raised eyebrow in response. “That’s surprising at your age.”

  The comment pulled a laugh from the professor. “I really don’t think forty-five puts me past my prime,” he said, a bit more defensiveness in his voice than he’d intended. When he saw her smile, though, it made him not mind having been baited as much as he might have. “I guess I just haven’t had time to find the right woman.”

  “Too busy hopping around the globe doing consults?”

  “Variety makes the real job more palatable.”

  “You don’t like teaching?”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I love teaching.” When all that greeted him from Amy Madigan’s side of the table was silence, he said, “What other job lets me take a consult on a moment’s notice? Or go fishing whenever I want?”

  It was the type of response that often came across as charming, but rather than a lowering of Amy’s guard, Brent saw a clinical look take roost in her expression.

  “One of your consults was Admir Naheem, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes . . .” He paused before continuing but suspected that the fact that she’d asked the question meant she had the necessary security clearance to learn the details. “I’m sure you already pulled this from the file, but Naheem had spent almost a decade stirring tensions along the Nigerian border.”

  “How did you decide that he was responsible? I mean, the Nigerian border with Cameroon has been a hot spot for decades. What made you realize that Naheem was inciting violence along the border in order to build support for a seizure of the presidency? After all, it might have been just cyclical ethnic activity.”

  Brent returned a thoughtful nod before responding.

  “Granted, on the surface that’s what it looked like,” he said. “But part of what I do as a sociologist is to look at possible causal factors and then rule out the ones that don’t account for what I’m observing.”

  “And I’m guessing you have a good system for doing that?”

  Instead of answering her, Brent arranged some report pages into a folder, then lifted it from the table for her perusal. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that Africa accounts for almost half of your reports over the last two years.”

  She nodded.

  “And from what I can tell from reading over your older reports, it looks as though that number of events is a substantial escalation.”

  Another nod.

  “So my first impulse is to try to figure out what’s going on over there that would influence an area stretching from Egypt to South Africa. To do that, I start with looking at the obvious questions, things like economic factors, regional politics, any groups or individuals with the resources and reach to carry this type of influence.” He shrugged and added, “Even the weather.”

  Madigan’s eyebrows went up.

  “Western Africa accounts for more than half of the industrial farming on the continent. Now, let’s say there’s a dry spell that drastically reduces the region’s crop.” He let that hang there until he knew she’d picked up on his train of thought. “Whatever your trigger is, it has to either be something of comparable scale to the area it affects or—”

  “Or it has to be designed,” she finished.

  “Exactly,” Brent said.

  Madigan tipped her chair back and pondered his words for several moments, and when she looked back at the professor he could tell she had it.

  “And you couldn’t find anything obvious—anything natural—in Nigeria to account for the escalation in violence, so you suspected manufactured unrest,” she said.

  “It was the only thing that made sense at the time.” He tossed the folder on the table and yawned before continuing. “Once your vetting process leaves you with people as the probable cause, what I do becomes a mix of detective work and psychology. Meanwhile, you just hope you end up getting it right.”

  “Which you did with Naheem,” she offered.

  He returned a wry smile at the acknowledgment. “I got lucky on that one,” he confessed. “There were at least half a dozen military or political leaders who could have been responsible for it. Sometimes it just comes down to a feeling.”

  Again, Brent saw her processing what was essentially an admission that the man they’d flown in and were paying handsomely for a consult had admitted to guesswork as a viable mode of analysis.

  “And that’s your system?” she asked.

  “Pretty much. What I’m
feeling is that whatever this is—whatever your team has been tracking over the last few years—it’s big.” When her eyes narrowed at the ambiguousness of his answer, he said, “Remember, part of the system is calculating what can impact a large area. But you have to be careful not to have tunnel vision about the size of the area you’re investigating.”

  She didn’t answer, nor change her facial expression, so he continued. “In looking at these reports my initial impulse is to focus on Africa—to try and find that big thing sending ripples across the continent. But tunnel vision can be crippling.” This was one of those occasions when he felt like a professor absent a classroom. The difference in this case was that Amy Madigan seemed much more interested than his average student. “Let’s take it out of Africa. Your reports document increases in political, economic, and social unrest across Europe and Asia as well as the Western Hemisphere. If I take each one of those individually, I might be able to convince myself that the causes for each were local in origin. Taken as a whole, though—”

  “There’s something outside of the respective systems that’s influencing all of them,” she interrupted, continuing his thought for the second time in minutes.

  “The domestic issues alone are anomalous,” he said. “And so we’re talking about something working on a global scale.”

  “Which means it’s man-made,” Madigan ventured.

  Brent shook his head. “Not necessarily. Think about something like El Niño. That’s a natural occurrence that could conceivably be large enough to act as a catalyst for something with global ramifications.”

  That sent Madigan into a contemplative silence. When she emerged from it, she said, “But doesn’t El Niño mean that the science of sociology is little more than guesswork?”

  Brent chuckled and shook his head. “One of the misconceptions out there is that sociology is just psychology on a grand scale,” he said. “And while there’s an element of truth in that—I mean, I can’t count the number of theories that exist on the nature of crowd behavior—it’s a lot more than that. At its most basic level, sociology is the study of anything that impacts a particular people group on a large scale. It’s really as simple as that.”

  As he watched Amy Madigan take that in, he found himself pondering his own words. Because if he’d learned one thing over the last forty-plus years, it was that few things were that simple.

  —

  “I thought you said you’d be home for a while,” Phyllis said.

  She wasn’t angry; Canfield knew she didn’t get angry. Instead, her manner was all nervousness, an unsure flightiness that annoyed him. Even when she sat still she never seemed to hold her position for long, her body engaged in half starts that looked like spasms, as if she would decide to get up and then change her mind the moment she began to rise. Sometimes he’d found himself wanting to shout at her, to order her to sit still, but in their twenty years of marriage he’d never once raised his voice to her. At times, he wished she would get angry. He thought he might like that more than the long-suffering shell of a woman she’d become.

  “I thought I would be too,” he answered.

  He folded a shirt and stacked it on the rest of the clothes in his suitcase. With half of his life seemingly spent in the air, he could pack for a trip in under ten minutes. His plane left tomorrow morning for Kenya. He would make it to bed after Phyllis was asleep, and his car would pull onto the street before she awoke. It made things easier that way.

  In truth, leaving on another trip so soon irritated him too. The last two years had done much to damage a marriage already hurting beneath the cumulative effects of all the things that worked against any lengthy union. So much so that even with the project scheduled to conclude in less than a month, he suspected the damage was of the irreversible kind. A man could not spend the better part of two years estranged from his wife and come back to the status quo; nor could a man keep the kinds of secrets he’d been forced to keep from Phyllis without establishing a necessary distance. That distance, he knew, did not contribute to his wife’s mental well-being. He knew enough about depression to understand that he was not its cause, that it had a biological foundation. However, he also knew his frequent absences—his disengagement—did not provide an environment in which she could thrive.

  “Look,” he said with a sigh, “I’m sorry I have to leave again so soon. But it’s a short trip. I leave tomorrow and I’m back on Monday.”

  At that, the corner of her mouth went up in something like a grim smile. With a fluttering hand on her chest she sat on the bed next to his suitcase—watched as he added a last pair of pants, then as he found spots for socks and underwear.

  “How’s your ankle?” she asked.

  Canfield looked down at his Dolce and Gabbanas. He lifted his right foot off the floor and gave it a few rolls. “Feels fine,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

  In reality, the ankle hurt a great deal. It took more effort to keep the grimace from his face as he demonstrated the positive effects of his wife’s care than it had required to keep him from limping in front of his boss. The last thing he needed right now, though, was Phyllis seizing on an opportunity to demonstrate her usefulness.

  Soon afterward she left to see about dinner. Canfield continued packing and it didn’t occur to him for a while—until after the customary ten-minute exercise had turned into thirty—what, beyond the regular stresses of his job, was the true source of his disquiet. As he adjusted the items in the suitcase for the tenth time, it came to him that in regard to Project: Night House, little separated him from Dabir in terms of his usefulness after December 21. He wondered if his boss would consider him just another loose string to tie up once that fateful date passed.

  Canfield considered that for a time, until the smell of steak found its way to him from the kitchen. Then he shut and zipped the suitcase, filed this new line of thought away for future consideration, and went to help his wife finish fixing dinner. He was careful not to limp.

  December 6, 2012, 9:11 A.M.

  Brent thought that after forty-eight hours a person could make just about any place feel like home. However, in the case of his current job, he didn’t consider his temporary office a home so much as a refuge. Once one stepped into the hallway, anything could happen. While he didn’t have sufficient clearance to grant him access to every area under the investigative unit’s control, he’d walked into three different rooms in which things he couldn’t begin to understand were transpiring. And while the strange nature of this team and their interesting pursuits teased the researcher in him, he knew that going off task would keep him in Washington longer than necessary. Abby couldn’t arrange coverage for his classes forever.

  Brent had papers spread out over the desk, copies of the originals so he could mar them with his own notes or draw lines between different sheets. For the last couple of hours—after a handful of parameter-building questions to Captain Madigan—he’d bounced between the growing stacks of papers and a computer model with ever-increasing data.

  That left Madigan doing next to nothing. The part of Brent that loved to dive into a complex problem didn’t realize he’d shut her out until, after entering some numbers into a proprietary computer program, he glanced up to see her with her chair tilted back, eyes on the ceiling. He thought that if he gave her a few more minutes, she would either fall asleep or the chair would tip too far back for her to catch it.

  “You have time for a question?” he asked.

  “You’re kind of catching me at a bad time,” she answered without moving. “Lots going on over here. Really busy.”

  “We were talking about Ethiopia—about the satellite readings that drew you there.”

  She nodded. “Like I said, the disturbances we saw didn’t seem to have a seismic signature, which is why we went to investigate.”

  “And got shot at.”

  “And got shot at,” she confirmed.

  Brent leaned back, thinking.

  “What’s on your mind?” M
adigan asked.

  “How do you hear about most of the incidents you investigate? At least the ones you’ve included in the data set.”

  “We get some off the wires,” she answered, righting the chair. “Some we hear about on CNN or MSNBC. Some of them we don’t hear about until the colonel gets one tossed down the chain.” She paused for a moment. “Of course, the colonel has at least one friend just about anywhere you could name. So he might get a hint of something before it blows containment.”

  “Okay,” Brent said.

  “What?” Madigan asked.

  “I’m not really sure.” He shuffled the papers on the desk, his handwritten notes marking every page. After a few seconds he gestured to the laptop. “This computer program is designed to look for those patterns we talked about—those things that could account for changes across a wide region. To see things that someone might miss because the connecting pieces seem incidental.”

  “You do realize,” she said, “that with all the data you’re putting in there, we’re going to have to confiscate your computer once your consult is done, right?”

  The question stopped him cold. He hadn’t considered that understandably delicate issue. But to take his laptop? He tried to determine if Madigan was joking with him, but her face remained impassive. And so, because he could do nothing else, he chose to believe things would work themselves out.

  “What’s interesting,” he said, “is that well over ninety percent of the incidents your team has investigated have been covered by one media outlet or another.”

  Madigan seemed to parse that before saying, “You know there are only about five people in the world without a cell phone, right? And seeing as most of those phones have cameras, just about anything that goes on in the world winds up on the Internet. And from there it’s a quick walk down the hallway to a legitimate news outlet.”