Solstice

by David Hewson

  'I can give you some background, Mr President,' Barnside said, and hit the presentation panel. Two photos came on the video screen: one of a smiling, attractive woman in her thirties, with long black hair and a pale, intelligent face. The other was of Charley Pascal, as they now recognized her from the recording of her conversation with La Finca. It was possible — just — to believe these were the same woman, but they had to use their imaginations. Something had happened to this woman over the intervening years, something more devastating than mere age.

  'Charlotte Pascal,' Barnside said, looking at the screen. 'Age thirty-nine. Born Bordeaux, France, been working in the US on a green card since 1983. Came to California to study at the Lone Wolf Observatory, then got a job directly with the Sundog Project. She left Sundog twelve months ago. She had full security clearance inside the project, so as far as we can tell there's nothing she doesn't know about how it works. She had an apartment in the Bay Area. We got some people checking out various leads. Seems she hung on to the apartment, even though she hasn't been using it. Presumably she's had some contacts with Gaia going back a long time. These people must have some kind of base. Maybe she just visited part-time, then moved in when she felt she had enough to quit Sundog.'

  'Why does she look so different in the two photos?' Burnley asked.

  'She's sick, physically sick, it's obvious,' Helen said immediately.

  Barnside glowered at her. 'The first is her original passport picture. The second is from her brief appearance on the Net this evening. We made some inquiries. It appears that a year or so before Pascal left Sundog she was diagnosed with some form of incurable brain cancer, anaplastic astrocytoma.'

  He'd no sooner said the words than Helen Wagner was keying at her palmtop computer.

  'I guess that didn't help with the instability,' Barnside continued.

  'You can't make assumptions like that,' Helen said quietly. 'There are some nasty symptoms — nausea, fainting, the gradual loss of the use of your limbs — but you can't assume that someone with brain cancer is, per se, irrational. Or incurable.'

  'Well, thank you,' Barnside muttered. 'The incurable part comes from her ex-physician, by the way.'

  'Where the hell is she?' Clarke asked.

  Barnside grimaced. 'Immigration shows she left the US back in January and returned at the end of March. No record of her departure since then, so we think she's still here.'

  'So when did she start talking to these Gaia people?' Clarke asked.

  'The Children of Gaia. That's the name they use. We don't know,' Barnside answered. 'We only really started monitoring minor cults a couple of years ago, so we had some catching up to do there.'

  'Scalable terrorism.' Clarke stared at the CIA and FBI teams assembled side by side at the table. 'Guess you guys took a while coming round to understanding that option.'

  'In the beginning, sir,' Barnside replied, 'this wasn't terrorism. The Children of Gaia seemed to have a few people in at the start who were loosely connected with Heaven's Gate in San Diego, the cult that committed suicide over the Hale-Bopp comet. I guess you'd call them fellow travellers. Heaven's Gate swallowed the assumption that Hale-Bopp hid a spacecraft, and the cult members could rendezvous with that by killing themselves, moving from one plane of consciousness to another. The Gaia people didn't go for this space thing. They were loosely associated with a covert ecoterrorist alliance known as Siegfried. This linked various groups — people raiding animal research establishments, targeting the meat trade, the chemical companies, anything to do with hunting.'

  'Like Dan said. Tree-huggers.' Levine nodded. 'Militant anti-abortionists and the like.'

  'That's not quite correct, sir,' Helen intervened. 'From what I understand, I think you'll find these people get nowhere near the abortion debate. To them, man — at least modern man — is the enemy species. We despoil the planet. We interfere with nature. The idea of abortion is probably neither here nor there to them. They take what they think of as a broader view of the issue.'

  'Maybe,' Barnside said. 'But let's stick to what we do know. You're talking serious computer geek territory here. They use the Net to communicate and recruit new members. To them, what they read on the Net is real, and the New York Times is pure fiction. They are separated from most everything we regard as normal life. And as far as we can work out, Pascal is now their leader, maybe has been for some time.'

  'This woman designed part of Sundog?' Fogerty asked.

  'A big part,' Schulz said from the screen. 'Charley knows this project inside out. She was one of the brightest people we had and she was there right from the beginning, when it was still, on the surface, a solar energy project. She worked on everything, from programming right down to the design of the hardware. We didn't change anything significantly. She knows how we work. If she has the keys, she can do what she likes right up until the moment we take them back.'

  'And the people with her?' Clarke wondered.

  Barnside shrugged. 'Our guess is thirty, forty at the most, and we're real short on detail. Probably living together now in some kind of commune. We lose track of them after a property in San Diego they vacated around the time Pascal left Sundog.'

  Clarke stared across the table and they watched, waited for him to speak. There, at least, Helen thought, he had won a kind of victory. He had the authority, had stamped it on the gathering through his own physical presence, not the badge of office.

  'Will someone tell me what kind of people they are? Can we deal with them?'

  Helen was there first. 'Smart people. With no lives. No family. From what we know, we think there's ex-programmers from Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, IBM, Netscape… We're not slouches in this area, Mr President. We can match them. Given time.'

  'Time. Let's leave that to one side for now, Miss Wagner. What do they want?' Clarke's voice echoed in the silent room.

  Fogerty rifled through the papers in front of him. 'In a word, sir,' he said, ' "prepare".'

  'What the hell does that mean?' Clarke asked heatedly.

  Fogerty shook his head. 'That's all it says on the E-mail we got after Air Force One was lost, Mr President. That's all she said when she made that call to La Finca. We've heard nothing since.'

  Levine rapped his hand lightly on the table. 'We need intelligence for this. More than anything.'

  'Wagner?' Clarke asked, and he could feel the ripple of resentment in the room.

  'We need intelligence, sir,' she agreed. 'But we need understanding too. Maybe if we can find out what drives them, that might help.'

  'So what do you think?'

  'I'm not a psychologist, Mr President. But if you want a guess… consider Pascal's condition. She's dying. She's surrounded by people who are probably willing to die for her too. And none of them mind. Their own lives — and by extension those of everyone else — are unimportant. That doesn't mean they're out to be mass murderers — '

  'She shot down Air Force One, for chrissake,' Barnside grumbled.

  'But not without reason, surely. We need to understand their view of the world and what they think it's becoming. My guess is they see themselves as agents, of Gaia, if you like. Of the earth. Of some moving force in nature. If you feel you're unimportant yourself, maybe the entire human race becomes unimportant. And what matters is something bigger. The planet. The universe, maybe. Perhaps they're looking to return us all to some kind of state of grace. It's as fundamental as that.'

  Fogerty smiled at her from across the table. It felt distinctly odd. 'If you're right,' he said, 'then surely it's obvious what they want. Not the end of the world. The beginning of it. Eden. A return to the garden before it was spoiled, before we bit into the apple.'

  'There were just two people in Eden, Dan,' Levine said quietly.

  'Well, maybe you'd need more than that,' Fogerty added. 'A few more.'

  'It's not possible,' Helen said. 'She could cause a lot of damage. She could kill a lot of people, take down networks, destroy financial markets, maybe… hell, c
reate chaos for a while in any case. If you add in the extra energy we're going to see at the zenith, then maybe there is the power inside Sundog to destroy entire cities, I guess. But we'd still be back after a while. We wouldn't forget how to make the internal combustion engine, how to organize the fabric of society.'

  The room went quiet, and that made her feel cold.

  'Are we all so sure?' Fogerty asked. 'Imagine walking out of this building into a world with no jobs or electricity, no money, no transportation, no workable form of government. Would it all go back to normal just because someone, three months down the road, found the on switch at the power company? Not necessarily. From her point of view, perhaps civilization — what we think of as civilization, at any rate — is a thin veneer on the mob, and the more we take that veneer for granted, the easier it is to bring the walls tumbling down when it disappears. Just look at Rwanda. Look at Albania, any number of former Eastern Bloc states. As I reminded you all once before, Gaia is the daughter of Chaos. And it's from Chaos that everything springs anew. That's the real threat, Mr President. What comes after. She's betting that it pays to burn your house down now and again, because what gets built in its place has to be better than anything that went before.'

  'Won't get that far,' Barnside said quickly. 'We can stop these people.'

  'How?' Tim Clarke asked, and the question almost sounded rhetorical.

  Barnside glanced at the monitor. 'You secure at that end, Bevan?'

  The thin pale face nodded.

  'I would appreciate it if this is kept out of any briefing beyond this room, sir. We have someone inside,' Barnside said, staring at Helen Wagner, daring her to intervene. 'We've had someone there for a while.'

  'Then why the hell don't we know where they are?' Clarke asked.

  'No contact, sir. Maybe it's too dangerous, or impossible. I don't know. But once this thing starts to move further, we'll have news. Mark my word.'

  'You'd better be right,' Clarke said, shaking his head. 'You people keep me posted on the hour and when anything significant develops. And let's tailor this for the press as much as possible. As far as the public's concerned this is just one big worldwide computer crash. Let them write to Bill Gates, for all I care. That's all. And Wagner? Find out what makes these people tick. Find someone who can explain that to me.'

  Inside La Finca, Irwin Schulz watched Ellis Bevan mop his brow, watched Mo Sinclair following the video link at her workstation, unseen by the camera on top of the main monitor. He wondered how soon he could wake the deeply slumbering Michael Lieberman. Then he put that thought to one side, caught Helen Wagner's attention on the monitor, and said, 'This isn't enough. We need to talk to NASA and activate that Shuttle idea. We need to talk to them right now.'

  CHAPTER 18

  Potrero

  San Francisco, 2034 UTC

  Ravel meandered over the crest of the Potrero hill like a thin strand of hair straggling across the top of a bald head. At the summit, it almost didn't make it. The road came up from the direction of the city, turned into a dead end for cars, then narrowed into a jagged footpath through low trees and scrub, set on a good sixty-degree drop, until the terrain became a little less vertical farther down and the street returned. In the confined, pedestrian part the houses were timbered and individual, some tiny, some low, sprawling mansions. Vernon Sixsmith couldn't, for the life of him, work out what kind of neighbourhood this was. Whether these ramshackle timber boxes, some big enough to accommodate an entire commune in the wild old days, would fetch upward of a half a million dollars on account of their cuteness, or this was just a piece of Potrero that got passed by in the gentrification process and was left to go ragged at the edges all on its own.

  The SWAT squad arrived first and hung around at the dead end of the street, out of sight, just watching the house, waiting for orders. The penetrating afternoon heat made their armoured vests feel like dead weights, caused the sweat to work up beneath the black uniforms, sit, greasy and constant, on the skin. An advance surveillance team of two, posing as Pacific Bell linesmen, had started working on the telegraph pole one house down from where Charley Pascal and maybe the rest of the Children too were now living. They were wired and live, and any moment now Vernon Sixsmith hoped to hear from them. Even from here he could see the gear they were using: a directional audio amplifier that would pick up any sound in the house, even the creaking of bedsprings (and they'd heard that one often enough). Plus a wireless tap on the line that could detect a single ring and, with a touch of luck, the number on the other end.

  Sixsmith screwed his eyes shut, tried to squeeze away the constant headache, and picked up a pair of binoculars from the back seat of the car. He took a few steps, stopped to look at the sky: pale, cloudless blue, nothing in it but the yellow fire of the sun and the faint, distant trails of airliners painted high in the atmosphere. One thing he liked about San Francisco was the temperate weather. That was why, he thought, they got a touch fewer crazies than LA. Normally it was just a little too chilly to get really worked up about things. But something seemed to have changed these past few months. The year had begun with some of the worst floods Northern California had ever experienced. A week or two later the heat wave began. Constant dryness, constant sun. The sort of weather that might never end.

  He shook his head, then concealed himself in the shade of a dusty oleander bush and looked at the house. It was single-storey, painted a pale pastel shade of green, with ragged roof tiles in need of some attention. The window frames were white flecked with brown where the wood was showing through. The front garden was a mess of overlong grass and discarded household goods: an old freezer, the remains of a washing machine, a cheap, off-white sideboard that had cracked at the seams and now mouldered in the deep grass like a corpse getting flyblown. All in all, this was a nice road, Sixsmith thought. The neighbours must have loved having Charley Pascal move in.

  Correction: Charley Pascal and her cat. The Colourpoint Shorthair was still bugging him. He felt sure that if he closed his eyes he'd see its face — ET with a touch of fur — staring straight up at him, straight into his head, and saying, all feline aggression and spark: Yeah?

  The earpiece crackled and he watched the phony linesman's mouth moving, down the road. 'We got activity,' the surveillance man said. 'Someone's playing music'

  'You hear how many of them are in there? Which room?'

  The distant head moved. 'The music's too loud to make out anything much else. It's in the right-hand front room. That's all.'

  Sixsmith swore quietly to himself and was aware of the way Jimenez was smiling thinly at him, saying: This is your call, partner, your decision. The handbook asked for proof there was someone in the house before the SWAT people could wade in. Otherwise the suspect just might be around the corner shopping for groceries when they pulled out the mallets and handguns. He might watch from the end of the street, laugh dryly, and be gone with the wind.

  But the handbook didn't really say what to do when there was nothing but music in a house that looked as dead as a corpse.

  'Wait,' Sixsmith said. 'Tell me the moment it sounds like someone is changing the music or you see movement'

  Jimenez looked blankly down toward his feet and let out a long sigh. Sixsmith stared down the street, at the house. It was really grubby. Which was strange. Houses normally took on the characteristics of the people who owned them, in one way or another. The Sunnyvale apartment was neat, clean, and impersonal. This place looked like it was the home of someone who was making a statement: I am dropping out of this place, I don't care what it looks like, I don't give a shit what you think.

  The earpiece crackled again. 'Phone call. Front room left.'

  Jimenez smiled, didn't look at him, and took out his handgun.

  'Patch the call through to me,' Sixsmith said, and ignored the low curse that Jimenez threw at the pavement. It was a French voice, nice, female, sounding pleasant. This could be someone talking to her mother or her best friend. It was all
so calm, so anodyne, so everyday. This was the elusive Charlotte Pascal talking about shopping, about going out, someone at the other end of the line hardly getting in a word, just coming in with the occasional, 'Really? You don't say?'

  Sixsmith listened for close to twenty seconds, cut the line, nodded to Jimenez, and said, 'Let's go, front room left.' Then watched the team work their way down the hill, Jimenez by his side. These guys were specialists. You left the initial stuff to them. And inside a minute it was done. The front door of the house was through, the front windows too. Hooded men were inside — no shooting, Sixsmith thought, that was good anyway. By the time the pair of them had walked down the hill and were standing at the front gate, the SWAT team leader was back outside, hood off, right glove off too, blood pouring from his wrist.

  'Cut myself on the fucking window,' the man said, glowering at the wound. 'This isn't me. Too fucking hot to think out here. Stitches, I guess.'

  'So?' Jimenez asked, cutting the sentence off as quickly as he could manage.

  The man shrugged. 'The phone call was a tape. Left on repeat, cycling 'round and 'round. Like the CD player. Some clever stuff hooked into the PC. Just to make the place look occupied.'

  'Shit,' Sixsmith said, and thought: This woman is so on the ball.

  They walked inside. It wasn't as grubby as Sixsmith expected. In a way, it looked as if it had hardly been occupied. There was a mattress on the floor of the main room, a low coffee table with the CD player on it. Sheryl Crow was coming out of it a little less loudly now that one of the SWAT team (who was a fan) had turned it down, not completely off. In the corner was a desk with a PC and a phone connected to it. The computer was on: A geometric screensaver bounced slowly from corner to corner like a Ping-Pong ball moving through sludge.

  A thin young SWAT guy with ginger hair came in, smiling, trying to be helpful, and said, 'Nothing in the mailbox except junk circulars. Not a piece of mail in the house as far as I can see. No clothes in the drawers. No pictures. Nothing personal at all.'