“To beg me to fly over and console you?”
“Ha. Dream on, Dr. Quake. Here’s the thing. I’ve got three nights on this instrument here—the Isaac Newton Telescope—and tonight’s my second night. Last night was a total loss, and tonight’s the same damn thing, all over again. I spend an hour getting the telescope lined up on the patch of sky I’m searching, and then bam, something jolts the telescope and ruins my photo.”
“A wayward seagull? A drunken Spaniard? A drunken you?”
“Very funny. No, it’s vibrations. The telescope engineer swears it’s not in the machinery. He says it’s seismic.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised. That whole island chain is young and active. Full of volcanoes and fault lines. Wouldn’t take much in the way of moving and shaking to cause a serious seismic shitstorm.” In the background, O’Malley heard the clatter of computer keys. “Hmm. Hmm.”
“What does ‘hmm’ mean?” O’Malley said. “Is that like when the doctor says ‘uh-oh’?”
“It means ‘hmm.’ You say it’s happened, like, in the past few hours?”
“Like, in the past ten minutes. Like, ninety minutes before that. And ninety minutes before that.”
“Hmm.”
“Stop saying that and tell me what you’re seeing.”
“So, I’m looking at the GSN now . . .”
O’Malley smiled, pleased that she remembered. The GSN was the Global Seismographic Network, a web of sensors all over the world.
“Is there a station on La Palma?”
“Not on La Palma,” he said, “but close. On Tenerife, eighty miles east.”
“And you see data from the past few hours?”
“I can see data from the past few seconds. It’s real-time monitoring. Uploaded automatically from every seismic station. When did you say these jolts happened?”
“The last one was, let’s see . . . seven minutes ago. The one before that, ninety-five minutes ago. The one before that—”
“Can’t you be specific, O’Malley?”
“Sorry, yeah, I can pin it down more exactly,” she began. “The photos are time-stamped. The latest exposure started—”
“Kidding, kidding. Okay, here’s what I’m seeing. Nothing.”
“In what sense do you mean ‘nothing’?”
“In the sense of ‘zero, zip, nada.’ Nothing’s happening, Megan.”
“David, the telescope trembled like a wino with the shakes. Something’s definitely happening. A lot of somethings—almost all my images are ruined.”
“Well then, there you go. It’s your equipment that’s the problem. With a capital P that rhymes with T that stands for scope.”
“But it’s not. I talked to Iñigo, the engineer; he swears it’s not the mechanism. Iñigo says the earth shakes sometimes.”
“Clearly this Iñigo is an intuitive seismological genius. Why’d you bother calling me, when you’ve got Iñigo?”
“Don’t be a dick, David.”
“I’m not being a dick. I’m just telling you: nothing’s happening. Nothing seismic. Nothing big enough to register, anyhow. Could be very localized. Road construction. Dumpsters being thrown to the ground by garbage trucks.”
“In the middle of the night? At an observatory? Where people tiptoe around in the dark in their socks?”
“What can I tell you, Megan? Either something’s wrong with the telescope, or somebody’s not tiptoeing.”
Three hours and a dozen ruined photographs later, Iñigo came into the control room. “So, everything is good tonight?”
“No,” she said bleakly, pointing at the thumbnails of the ruined photos. “Everything is not good. Everything is shitty. I’m going to contact the Astronomical Institute—the island’s governor, too—and ask them to investigate and fix this.”
He looked shocked—or was it angry?—so she hastened to assure him. “Look, I’m not blaming you, but my whole trip has been wasted. If this happens to other astronomers, the observatory’s reputation will be ruined.”
Iñigo offered a conciliatory smile. “I’m very sorry for the problem,” he said. “Is very bad luck for you. But please don’t let the whole trip go to waste. I have a bottle of wine in my apartment. Let’s go drink some wine, eat some grapes and cheese, listen to music. Dance a little. You seem like a good dancer, Megan. You like to dance, yes?” He cocked his head, still smiling.
She shook her head. “No. I mean, yes, I do, but I . . . Iñigo, I can’t go there. I’m too upset.” She waved her hand at the control console and the ruined images. “You say the telescope’s not the problem. My ex-husband—a seismologist—says the seismology’s not the problem.”
Iñigo’s eyebrows shot up. “You have called him about this?”
“Yes. He says there’s no seismic activity on the island. So if it’s not a seismic problem or a mechanical problem, then what the fuck is it? And why do men keep treating me like I’m stupid?”
Iñigo sighed. “I don’t think you’re stupid, Megan. I think you’re very smart. And I think—no, I promise—that tonight is the last night you will have this problem.”
With that, he held up both hands—a cease-fire signal—and backed away, leaving O’Malley to wonder what the hell that was supposed to mean, and why she felt such a volatile mixture of lust and caution in his presence.
She watched dawn break on a monitor in the telescope control room. The stars faded as the sky lightened, imperceptibly at first, then distinctly. “Oh God,” she groaned. She had stayed at the telescope all night—a slow learner, a glutton for punishment—hoping against hope to collect at least a few images. A total waste, she thought again as she scrolled through the ruined photos. Maybe she should have taken Iñigo up on the hookup offer—at least she’d have had the brief but pleasant consolation of getting laid.
Tonight would be her final chance to salvage something—anything—from the telescope. Or from Iñigo. He had fled the scene after her curt rejection, though, so perhaps Iñigo was not on offer for tonight.
She trudged back to the Residencia—fortunately the walk was downhill, but unfortunately the morning was cold and windy—and staggered into the lobby. Inside, she nearly collided with a startled Japanese man who was wheeling an enormous suitcase toward the door. She mumbled an apology and turned toward the hallway that led to her room. “Good morning, Doctora,” called Antonio from behind the counter.
Christ, is he on duty 24/7? she wondered. “Good morning, Antonio,” she managed.
“A good night of observing?”
“A terrible night,” she said.
“No! Oh, Doctora, this makes me very sad.”
“Me, too, Antonio. Maybe tonight will be better.”
He frowned, then shook his head sorrowfully. “I am afraid not,” he said. “You have not heard?”
“Heard what?”
“The weather. Tonight, the wind is muy fuerte. Very strong. Eighty kilometers per hour.” O’Malley did the conversion: fifty miles an hour. “Are you sure?”
“Gusts—that is the word, I think?—gusts of one hundred kilometers per hour! Tonight, the telescopes cannot operate. The domes must remain closed.”
O’Malley wanted to scream. She wanted to sob. She wanted to get the bloody hell out of La Palma. Right now. Actually, she wanted never to have come to La Palma in the first place, but given that undoing the past wasn’t an option, cutting her losses and getting out as soon as possible seemed the best she could manage. “Antonio, is anyone going into town today? To Santa Cruz?”
“Santa Cruz?”
“Yes. I need to leave.”
He squinted at her, puzzled, then looked down and consulted the papers on his desk. “But, no, Doctora, you are staying until tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I need to leave now. Please. Anyone?”
He frowned, then shrugged and consulted the schedule again. “The only one is Shinji Yamamoto. But he just left.”
When he heard the bang, Shinji Yamamoto naturally as
sumed that he had backed into something—another car? a light pole?—but when he cast an alarmed look in the rearview mirror, he saw not a crumpled fender or a bent pole; he saw a crazy woman frantically pounding the trunk of his car with both hands.
Before he could put the transmission in “Drive” and make his getaway, the woman ran to his window. “Please,” she said. “I need a ride to Santa Cruz.” He stared. “Santa Cruz,” she repeated, clasping her hands in a pleading gesture. “Please.”
Measured against the yardstick of O’Malley’s Japanese, Shinji Yamamoto’s English was good. But measured against the two hours it took to descend the mountain and reach the airport in Santa Cruz—a destination O’Malley communicated by pantomiming an airplane in flight—his command of the language was sadly lacking. They shared five awkward minutes of halting conversation: “Which telescope?” “Isaac Newton.” “Ah, Isaac Newton! Very famous astronomer. You look for comet?” “No, Planet Nine.” “Ah, you look Planet Nine! Very good! I study red shift.”
“Red shift—oh yes, that’s very interesting.” O’Malley had a sudden thought. “Did you have any problem with the telescope?”
“Problem? What problem?”
“Did your telescope shake? Move?” His brow furrowed, so O’Malley resorted again to gestures. She held up both hands, her fingers curled around an imaginary spyglass, and then shook her hands rapidly. “My telescope,” she said. “Also yours?”
“Ah,” he said, nodding. “Yes, sometimes. But for me, small problem. Most data, very good. I don’t use bad data. But only small amount.”
“You are very lucky,” O’Malley said. “All of my data—all my photographs—are bad. I can’t use.”
“Oh, that is very shame.” He looked genuinely sorry.
Very shame indeed, O’Malley thought bitterly. Then: Iñigo was right—it’s not the scope; it’s the island. Then: But David swears it’s not the island. Is he lying, or just incompetent? Then: Fuck my life.
Their shared vocabulary and cross-cultural interests exhausted, she and Shinji lapsed into silence, and soon O’Malley slumped against her door and napped, sleeping by fits and starts amid the road’s careening curves and Shinji’s jerky braking. Finally, the ride smoothed out, and she began sinking into a deeper sleep. That was when Shinji shook her awake. “Airport,” he said.
CHAPTER 4
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
Dawtry emerged from the glass atrium into a courtyard containing a garden, well tended, though its grass and trees were already dressed for winter.
He had been invited to Langley to give a presentation; that, at least, was the pretext. The unspoken agenda, though, was that he was here to audition for a spot as the FBI’s liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency—a possibility he found both exciting and intimidating.
“You might find this interesting,” said Dawtry’s host, Jim Vreeland, detouring to a large copper sculpture at one corner of the garden. Perhaps eight feet tall by a dozen feet long, affixed at one end to an upright log of stone or petrified wood, the sculpture resembled a metallic flag waving in some unseen breeze. An inscribed, encrypted flag: the entire piece was covered—no, was pierced all the way through—with capital letters, hundreds or even thousands of them, seemingly chosen and arranged in utterly random order, with no spaces or punctuation between them.
“So this is Kryptos,” Dawtry said.
“This is Kryptos,” said Vreeland. “My daily dose of humility.”
Dawtry chuckled. The sculpture was the most famous unsolved cipher on earth, and it probably drove Vreeland nuts to see it every time he crossed the courtyard. Vreeland currently ran the CIA’s counterterrorism section, but for years before that, he’d headed cryptography. Vreeland and dozens of other CIA code breakers had long struggled to decode the message carved into the piece. The sculpture was an homage, a challenge, and possibly also a taunt to the spy agency that had commissioned it. “Hang on,” Dawtry said. “I think I’ve got it. It says, ‘What the hell took you so long?’”
“So you Feebies really are smarter than we are,” said Vreeland. He smiled as he said it, but Dawtry thought he sensed an edge to the joke.
He led Dawtry across the courtyard, through a low, arched concourse that resembled an airline terminal, and then outside again. They approached what appeared to be an immense igloo, fitted with glass doors on one side. The Bubble, thought Dawtry. Holy cow—I’m talking in the Bubble.
He had expected to be speaking in a conference room, briefing a handful of intelligence analysts—a dozen, tops. Instead, here he was in the main, iconic auditorium at CIA Headquarters. Vreeland led him through the glass doors and into the Bubble. Heads turned—many, many heads: every one of the four hundred seats was taken, and more people ringed the perimeter, slouching against the curved walls.
They were there, hundreds of CIA spies and analysts, to hear him talk about his own career in spying, of sorts: a series of FBI stings, directed by Dawtry, which had foiled more than a dozen terrorist plots on US soil during the previous five years. The plots ranged from relatively modest plans to shoot up military recruiting centers to ambitious efforts to destroy large, important targets, including JFK International Airport, the Sears Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Times Square, and even the US Capitol. The key to stopping them had been undercover agents who had gotten close to the would-be terrorists, in many cases infiltrating groups and providing disabled assault rifles and fake explosives.
Dawtry ended his presentation with a montage of images that reminded the CIA analysts of things they already knew but probably wouldn’t mind knowing he knew—images illustrating the urgent stakes, the high-value targets, and the powerful ideologies in play: The collapsing World Trade Center towers. The smoldering Pentagon. Osama bin Laden. The White House. Nuclear power plants. The Golden Gate Bridge. Masked ISIS fighters waving guns and swords. “Although we have not—so far—seen another attack as deadly as 9/11,” he concluded, “no one knows better than this roomful of people that these are perilous times. As perilous as any we’ve ever faced, with enemies as elusive and insidious as any we’ve ever fought.” He paused for effect. “Intelligence is the front line in the battle to protect America. Thank you for fighting the good fight.”
Dawtry nodded and stepped back from the podium, and the agents—the aloof, brainy agents and analysts for whom he’d just auditioned—responded with enthusiastic applause.
Whew, he thought. I’m not dead yet.
But the presentation, he knew, was the easy part of the audition. He suspected that the next step, his actual job interview with Vreeland and a handful of higher-ups, might be more akin to a round of waterboarding.
CHAPTER 5
Santa Cruz de la Palma Airport
Day three
“I’m very sorry,” the lovely young ticket agent told O’Malley. “We have seats on the eight a.m. flight tomorrow morning, but no seats available today.”
O’Malley groaned. What had she been thinking? Why hadn’t she called? If I’d called, I’d’ve missed my ride, she reminded herself. Then: So? Fat lot of good the ride did you. If you’d missed the ride, you might be getting laid tonight. Dumb-ass. “Is there another airline that could take me to Tenerife? Or Madrid?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Is there any other way to get off the island?”
“Well,” the woman said, “there’s a ferry to Tenerife. But it only runs once a day, and unfortunately you’ve just missed it.”
“Thank you,” O’Malley mumbled and walked away. Get used to disappointment, she thought bitterly—a line of Princess Bride dialogue she often quoted, though usually as a good-natured joke.
It was 10:00 a.m., and she had twenty-four hours to kill. Might as well kill it by playing tourist, she decided. She headed for the terminal’s exit, walked out, and caught a cab. “Al centro, por favor,” she told the driver. He nodded and headed briskly for town. As she settled back into the leather, O’Malley felt fa
tigued and frustrated, but she felt something else, too, something unfamiliar: she felt unencumbered—by luggage, by appointments or deadlines, by expectations of productivity or accomplishment. When the taxi entered the city center, she drank in the sights. Santa Cruz had an old-world ambience: narrow, mazy streets flanked by stuccoed buildings in tropical hues of white, blue, salmon, and gold. Some of them featured balconies supported by stout, dark beams—beams that might have been carved in the days of Christopher Columbus and Sir Francis Drake and Henry the Navigator.
The car stopped at a crosswalk where the road intersected a pedestrian street thronging with tourists. “Here,” she said. “Aquí, aquí.” The meter read 15.50. O’Malley opened her wallet, snatched out a crisp twenty-euro note, and thrust it at the driver. “Gracias, señor,” she said, springing from the car and closing the door just as the light changed.
She headed down the pedestrian street lined with boutiques and bars, and spotted—actually, smelled first, then spotted—a coffee shop set in an ancient courtyard lush with palm trees and flowering bushes. She knocked back a double espresso and a savory pastry and, thus fortified, sallied forth to explore. This was not the region of the cosmos she had traveled to La Palma to explore, but at the moment, it was the one she was able to explore. The streets were narrow and mazy; O’Malley was careful to check the names of street signs, which were embedded in the walls of buildings at each corner. She smiled at one street name in particular, which she translated as “Virgin of the Light.” Beats “Seventeenth Street” by a mile, she thought.
A zig and a zag beyond Virgin of the Light Street, a weathered stone plaque caught her eye. Beneath an image of a royal crown and a string of Roman numerals—MDCCCLXXXI, which O’Malley translated as 1881—were the words REAL SOCIEDAD COSMOLÓGICA. I’ll be damned, O’Malley thought. Out of all the gin joints in all the world, I stumble onto the one devoted to the origin and nature of the cosmos. A carved scene depicted Saint George slaying a dragon. The dragon of ignorance, perhaps? Beside the plaque was an ornate wooden door—an open wooden door—and O’Malley felt the urge to step inside and see if any vestige of the Royal Cosmological Society remained.
Wave of Terror Page 4
