“I believe you. And I’m not from the CIA. Really. But I was there today—that’s where I saw him. Benny and I both had . . . imperfect experiences at Langley this afternoon.”
“You don’t look crazy.”
He smiled. “Are you supposed to say that? Are you even allowed to say that?”
“Mister, I run a group home for people with mental illness. If anybody’s allowed to say it, it’s me. I know crazy. And you ain’t crazy.”
He shrugged. “Tell that to the guys at the Agency.” The woman had folded her arms, hugging herself, and Dawtry noticed her starting to shiver. “I’m Chip Dawtry, by the way. And you’re freezing. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to drag you out in the cold. Would it be possible for me to see him?”
“Why? You want to ask him questions about the conspiracy?” He shook his head. “If you get him agitated, Mr. Dawtry, it’s not helpful—not for him, not for the other residents, and certainly not for me.”
“I don’t want to get him agitated. I don’t want to ask him questions.”
“Then what do you want?”
Dawtry shrugged. He held out his hands, empty and upturned. “I don’t know, exactly. I imagine it’s not easy being him—getting turned away and made fun of. I guess I just want to be, I don’t know, a decent human being to him. Play checkers, talk bikes, whatever.”
She gave him the gimlet eye. “So you want to be Benny’s friend, is that it? You’re gonna come over and spread some happiness every Friday now, help make up for his screwed-up brain and his lousy life? Or is this just a one-night stand to make you feel better about something?”
Dawtry blinked, stung. “I . . . you know what? You’re right. I hadn’t thought about it that way. Good night, ma’am. Sorry to bother you.” He spun on his heel and trotted down the steps.
“Chess,” she called after him.
He stopped, looked over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”
“Not checkers, chess. Do you play?”
He blinked. “Well, I used to. But it’s been a while.”
“Come inside. But take off that tie. And do something to your hair.”
“What’s wrong with my hair?”
“Nothing. That’s what’s wrong with it. Makes you look like a federal agent.”
Dawtry laughed. “I am a federal agent.” He reached up with both hands and rubbed his head. He felt the gel let go, felt the neatly combed strands part company. “Better?”
“Not much, but it’s a start. Come on in.”
“Benny?” Three men were in the living room watching the Weather Channel, where an attractive young woman was gesturing at a cold front. None of the men reacted. “Excuse me, Benny.” One of them—the oldest, who looked to be an old fifty or a young sixty—tore his gaze from the screen and looked toward the doorway. “Benny,” said Margaret—she had told Dawtry her name after inviting him in—“could you come here, please?”
Benny looked from Margaret to Dawtry, then back at Margaret, then got off the sofa and came to the doorway. Margaret beckoned them into the hall. “Benny, this is Chip.”
“Hi, Benny.” Dawtry extended a hand, which Benny ignored, so after an awkward moment, he withdrew it and gave a no problem sort of shrug.
“Benny, Chip plays chess.” She paused to let that sink in. “I know you’ve missed playing chess since Marcus left. Would you like to play chess with Chip?”
Benny looked at him, his face neutral.
“No pressure,” Dawtry said. “Totally up to you. I should warn you I’m pretty rusty. But I used to be decent. My friends in Chess Club called me Kamikaze Chip. If you’re interested in a match, I’ll try to keep up.”
Benny glanced back at the TV, as if deciding between the chess-playing stranger and the cute weathergirl. Then he looked at Dawtry again. “Okay.” He turned and headed across the entry hall, through another doorway, and flipped on a light. This room, the building’s other front room, was lined with bookshelves; in the center sat a square wooden table, surrounded by four wingback armchairs.
Dawtry shot a questioning glance at Margaret. She raised one eyebrow and one shoulder. “Be careful what you wish for,” she said sotto voce, then—louder—“Benny, the chess set is on the top shelf. No, the far end. The other side of Scrabble.”
Benny found the chess set and slid it from the shelf. Even from the doorway, Dawtry felt a pang of nostalgia. It was exactly the kind of set Richard had given him for Christmas the year Dawtry had turned twelve and fallen in love with the game. The board was a shallow wooden box, hinged along one side and folded in half like a tall book, its “covers” inlaid with veneer squares of birch and walnut, light and dark. Benny brought the board to the table and then sat down, unlatched the metal clasp, and folded back the top half of the board. The hollow, felt-lined interior was filled with the chessmen. Benny began removing the pieces in order of rank, alternating between white and black, segregating them into the two armies: white king, black king; white queen, black queen; and so on, methodically down the hierarchy. Dawtry slid into the opposite seat and began scooping out pawns.
“You can have white,” Benny said. “Since you haven’t played in a while.”
“Thanks,” said Dawtry. It was a courtesy—white got first move, a strategic advantage. “Probably won’t make any difference, though.”
He was right. It didn’t affect the outcome.
“Checkmate,” Benny said. Again.
Benny had beaten him three times straight. The first match had taken barely ten minutes, the board still full of pieces. The second match took twice as long, and cost each of them quite a few men, though Dawtry’s losses—including both bishops, a rook, and his queen—were worse than Benny’s, which tended to be smaller, strategic sacrifices. The third match, however, was hard fought, the board gradually emptying; for a few promising moments midgame, Dawtry even managed to put Benny on the defensive, but then he’d made a mistake, and Benny had regained control.
Dawtry took a breath and blew it out. “Man, that was a good one.” He checked his watch: nine o’clock. “I should go. I’m beat, in more ways than one.” He stood up. “That was great, Benny. Thanks.” He reached across the table. Benny gave him an odd, lingering look, then took his hand and shook it.
“I recognize you, you know.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I saw you leaving the CIA today. You almost ran over me.”
Dawtry paused. Should he deny it? No. Tell the truth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to. You almost T-boned me.”
To Dawtry’s surprise, Benny laughed. “Yeah. I was trying to.”
“You were trying to? Why?”
“I dunno. Just mad, I guess. They never listen to me. It’s frustrating.”
“They didn’t listen to me, either, Benny. It is frustrating.”
Benny smiled. “I could tell you weren’t one of them.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “I just could. You’re FBI, right?”
Dawtry gave a sheepish laugh. “That obvious, huh?”
Benny nodded. “You’d be pretty good at chess, if you played more often.”
“You mean like more than once a decade?”
“Yeah. It comes back pretty quick. You nearly had me that last match. You’ve got a good head for strategy.”
Dawtry smiled. “I learned a lot from my big brother. We played all the time when I was a kid. I miss playing with him.”
“I’m sorry,” Benny said, as if he had somehow intuited the details of Richard’s death. “Your main problem is you overthink things. You’d’ve won if you hadn’t second-guessed yourself. You should trust your instincts more.”
True that, Dawtry thought, and not just in chess.
Benny hesitated, looking self-conscious for the first time all evening. “You can come back and play again sometime.” He looked away.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. If you want to.” Benny looked him in the eye again. “No pressure. But why the hell not? I could teach you s
ome things.”
“No shoptalk? Just chess?”
“Just chess.”
Much to his surprise, Dawtry felt a slow smile spreading across his face. “Sure, Benny. Why the hell not?”
CHAPTER 8
Baltimore
O’Malley poured the last of the scotch into her glass and took a long pull. Then she muttered, “Oh, fuck it,” and dialed the number she had managed to find via Google. She counted eight rings, thinking, Christ, don’t the Brits believe in voicemail? She was about to hang up when she heard a groggy, plummy, pissed-off voice say, “Yes? Who the devil is this?”
“Oh,” she said, bolting upright in surprise. “Dr. Boyd? I thought for sure I’d get your voicemail.”
“No such luck, I’m afraid,” said the man. “What you’ve gotten is me out of bed. It’s midnight here, you know.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really I am.”
“Yes, well, that makes two of us,” he said. “You sound American, and you have an American phone number. Are you calling me from the States, or are you having a midnight stroll here in London?”
“I’m in Baltimore, Maryland. I apologize for disturbing you. My name is Megan O’Malley. I’m an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, and I’m calling because I’ve just read your paper about La Palma.”
“Oh good God. Well, thank you, Professor O’Malley,” said Boyd drily. “I’ll look forward to reading your work soon—and awakening you to let you know. Do tell me when to call so as to be certain of rousing you.”
“Look, I’m really sorry, but I’m also very worried, Dr. Boyd. I was just on La Palma—at the observatory—and there’s a lot of seismic activity on the island. Some of it small, some of it strong. I think bad things are happening.”
She heard a sigh from clear across the Atlantic. “Ms. O’Malley, I appreciate your concern, but I make a point of checking the Global Seismographic Network on a daily basis. I assure you there is not a lot of seismic activity happening on La Palma. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get back to sleep, if I’m able.”
Before O’Malley could respond, the line went dead. “Shit,” she said. She punched the “Call” button again. This time it was answered on the fourth ring.
“Professor O’Malley,” Boyd said, his voice icy. “Do not call me again or I will contact your department chair.”
“Wait,” she said—no, shouted. “The GSN data—it’s bogus. The readings are supposedly uploaded in real time from the seismic stations, but the numbers are fake. Cut and pasted. The network’s been hacked.” Boyd groaned. “It’s true,” she said. “The seismograms have been altered to hide the quakes.”
“Good night, goodbye, and good luck with your psychiatric issues.” The line went dead again.
“Fuck,” O’Malley said. “Fuck fuck fuck.” She slammed her palm on the table so hard that her glass lifted off by a quarter of an inch, launching a small geyser of scotch that spattered her sweater and jeans. “Goddammit,” she muttered, though there was no heat to the curse this time. She felt defeated, deflated, and decidedly depressed. “TGIF. These geologists are fuckheads.”
She knocked back the rest of the drink—two fingers in one long pull—and took the empty bottle out the kitchen door toward the recycle bin on the back stairs. Standing on the darkened porch in the twilight, she leaned forward so she could see a narrow band of sky bounded by the porch roof and the treetops. She caught a glimpse of Orion, the hunter, the three bright stars of his belt angling downward. She moved this way and that, trying to make out the rest of the constellation—his shield, his club, his dog—but suddenly she was blinded by a dazzling light: a police helicopter zoomed overhead, its searchlight pointing directly into her eyes. “Ow, son of a bitch,” she said.
She considered hurling the scotch bottle toward the chopper to vent her frustration: sending the container spinning, then listening for the smash when it hit. The back porch was forty feet off the ground. Distance equals one-half acceleration times time squared, she boozily prompted herself—a high school physics formula she still used with some regularity. So it’ll hit in one point five seconds, maybe one point six. Ignoring the effect of air resistance. Which is negligible, since it’s not a swallow.
She hefted the bottle, gave a dry-run snap of the wrist. She could clean up the glass tomorrow, in the daylight, if she woke up feeling guilty about it. O’Malley drew back her arm and aimed for a gap in the trees behind the parking lot.
A noise, loud and unexpected and nearby, caused her to freeze, the bottle cocked behind her ear. It sounded as if someone had stumbled and fallen on the wooden staircase a flight or two below her. “Hello?” she called. Silence. She hurried inside and locked the door, weaving slightly from the liquor. Her heart pounding, she almost failed to notice the ringing of her phone.
CHAPTER 9
Washington, DC
Dawtry half hiked, half crawled up the embankment from Rock Creek, his pride stinging as much as his palms and his left knee did.
After two sleepless nights, most of which he had spent replaying his CIA debacle, Dawtry had pulled up his socks, laced up his running shoes, and headed for a Sunday trail run in Rock Creek Park. It was his favorite route, a ten-mile loop that took him all the way to the northern end of the park and back. Heading north, he always chose the high ground: the Western Ridge Trail, thick with towering oaks, tulip poplars, and hemlocks. Returning south, he followed Rock Creek, imagining himself gliding home effortlessly, fluidly, as if the stream itself were bearing him down toward the Potomac.
But instead of flowing and gliding, this time Dawtry had stumbled and tumbled. Two miles into the ten, he caught a toe on a root and face-planted, hard. His palms and knee took the brunt of the fall, leaving behind three patches of bloody skin on the rocky ground.
It took him an hour to limp back to his starting point, and another five minutes to climb the steep makeshift path to the back of his building. He hobbled into the parking garage and pressed the elevator’s call button, then—just as the doors opened—he remembered that in his car’s glove box was a first-aid kit containing a cold pack, disinfectant, and, most helpfully, lidocaine spray. After fishing his key fob out of his zippered pocket, he unlocked the vehicle and opened the passenger door.
A fat manila envelope fell from the car and tumbled to the concrete, a sharp corner nicking the raw patch on his knee on its way down. “Oww.” Dawtry stared at the envelope, briefly puzzled, then remembered: the crazy astrologer had left it with the guard at the CIA, and the guard had tossed it at Dawtry. “Great, thanks,” Dawtry said, his sarcasm directed in equal parts at the crazy lady, the smirking guard, and the envelope itself. Bending down—no easy task, given how his knee was seizing up—he picked up the envelope and tucked it beneath an arm, then retrieved the first-aid kit from the glove box. He locked the car, limped to the elevator, and headed upstairs.
His first move, once inside, was to toss the fat envelope into the recycle bin. His second was to start the bathwater—he craved the lidocaine, but he wanted to soak for a few minutes first. His third move was to pour himself a double shot of tequila and wash down three ibuprofen caplets with a big swig. “Wowzer,” he muttered, his whole body shuddering from the burn of the liquor. Move number four was to peer guiltily into the recycle bin and then retrieve the manila envelope—not because he was curious but because he was still, at heart, a Boy Scout. There might be things in the envelope that wouldn’t recycle well: Glossy paper. Binder clips. Anthrax powder.
He didn’t actually think a Hillary-voting, Prius-driving peacenik was likely to be spreading anthrax; still, when he opened the envelope’s metal clasp and peered in, his threat sensors automatically switched on. Instead of reaching inside to retrieve the contents, he held the envelope over the kitchen table and angled it so that the sheaf of papers would slide out without being touched.
Dawtry had no idea what he’d been expecting to see, but he damn sure hadn’t expected to see a piece of Johns Ho
pkins University letterhead. The paper was crisp and expensive—hell, it probably contained more linen fibers than all of Dawtry’s shirts put together—and the university’s name was printed in big blue letters beneath a fancy coat-of-arms-looking shield. Below the university’s name, in smaller blue letters, was “Krieger School of Arts & Sciences,” and below that—smaller yet, but still legible and impressive—“Department of Physics & Astronomy.”
Physics? Astronomy? That wasn’t what the guard had said. “Age of Aquarius and all that shit” was what the guy had said. Dawtry glanced at the signature: Megan P. O’Malley, PhD, Assistant Professor of Astronomy. Maybe she really was a wacko—professors surely weren’t immune to mental illness—but the letter didn’t look like a loony’s handiwork; it certainly hadn’t been assembled from words and letters scissored from magazines.
He began to read. Except for the handwritten signature at the bottom, it was formatted as a memo:
To: Central Intelligence Agency
From: Prof. Megan O’Malley, PhD, Johns Hopkins University
Subject: Geoterrorism—A Potentially Catastrophic Threat Targeting US Eastern Seaboard
Recently, during astronomical observations in the Canary Islands—Spanish territory off the coast of Morocco—I became aware of frequent seismic activity on the island of La Palma. This seismic activity was manifested in vibrations sufficiently strong to jar the telescope I was using (the Isaac Newton Telescope) and distort the astronomical photographs I was taking (please see Attachments 1–4, time exposures affected by the abrupt telescope movement).
Upon further investigation, including discussions with a Berkeley seismologist, I learned that the vibrations I observed—which were brief, discrete, and uniform pulses—were almost certainly anthropogenic, or man-made: the seismic signature of “ripple-shot” blasting (see Attachment 5, a seismograph recorded near a highway construction project where ripple shots were used to blast through a mountainside). Natural seismic activity, by contrast, is characterized by gradual, irregular, and sustained vibrations (Attachments 6–8, seismograms from recent earthquakes in Oklahoma).
Wave of Terror Page 9
