The real Diane snuggled a bit deeper into the coach seat, her ticket already in the conductor’s possession. She’d holed up silently in Debbie’s apartment all day Friday, deeply startled when she turned on the TV in the evening to find her picture all over the media and her parents horribly stressed on camera. She’d never considered the possibility the police might get involved, or that anyone would think she’d been the victim of foul play. She’d almost dialed her family’s home directly, before realizing the traps the police would set for a supposed kidnapper.
Earlier in the day she’d carefully burned a duplicate CD of her files and prepared the FedEx package for her father, then intending to walk out in front of God and everyone to drop it off, never suspecting half the state was searching for her. Instead, she’d dropped it in the FedEx box in the dead of the night before boarding the train.
The thought of Don Brevin starring in a low-speed chase and being very publicly arrested was amusing. The rat deserved it, although he’d soon be off the hook—if they hadn’t already released him based on her phone call. She had to laugh at the thought that the whole thing would end up helping his pathetic career and boosting his bad-boy image. She was always attracted to losers like Don. Something about them made her go slightly insane, like a cat obeying an insatiable desire to climb to the top of a tree it couldn’t hope to climb down.
Over and over again.
But Don was lucky, she thought. He hadn’t done anything so bad as to trigger her primal instincts for revenge. Anyone who did, she had long since decided, would pay a terrible price. And that included anyone who hurt Debbie, or Ralph Lacombe.
The train was north of Sacramento now, the windows showing only the deep black of nighttime farmland dotted by occasional rain showers. It was cold in the coach car and she pulled her jacket back on and snuggled against the sidewall forcing her mind back to the problem at hand.
After sending the e-mail to Doug Lam once more, the reply she’d been waiting for had finally come around midday Friday. It was a hesitant response which claimed her original address had been too garbled, and the overall tone was suspicion. She couldn’t blame the man for that. Lam had taken enough grief for the paper he’d published, and there were plenty of crackpots out there claiming to have proof for everything from extraterrestrial visitation to antigravity devices.
But she’d dangled something irresistible in front of him, and, as she’d expected, he’d taken the bait and provided a phone number in Seattle, undoubtedly hopeful that the corroborating research she was promising would really help.
He has no idea, she mused.
She thought about the explanation she’d sent him detailing the growing worries she’d claimed to have over the hurried way the Cascadia Island seismic engineering research had been handled. Those worries, she’d written, had been eating at her for over two years, and they had finally sparked a dangerous midnight run on the company’s project files just a few weeks ago. It was, she knew, a firing offense to monkey with the deep data files of the firm without proper authorization. But as she had stated it to Lam, “…it was a necessary chance to take, especially since I was originally responsible for supervising the team that gathered the seismic refraction data on Mick Walker’s island at his specific and urgent request.”
She told him how shocked she’d been to find that the firm’s formal evaluation of the data had resulted in a clean bill of health for the island’s geology even though she had studied seismology enough to recognize the signature of a major fault, a bombshell of a rift running through the middle of it they had somehow missed.
But there had seemed to be more. She wasn’t trained in seismology, but she had read his controversial professional paper on the concept of naturally amplified resonant vibrations acting as earthquake triggers. She went back to a copy of the raw data and tried to look deep below the island. There were, she found, strange aspects of the rock formations over the subduction zone, just as he had predicted, aspects an engineering evaluation wouldn’t normally be concerned about. The graphs and waveforms suggested some very strange things about the way the miles of rock beneath Cascadia Island were put together.
She had set the hook well, she thought. “Dr. Lam, I may have the actual seismic reflective proof that the rock strata beneath Cascadia Island can focus and even amplify any physical impacts on the surface which produce compression waves, just as you said. If my interpretation is correct, then, in a phrase, you were right.”
The lights of a small town flashed by the window of the train, the muffled sound of grade-crossing bells passing and falling in pitch as the darkness returned, broken only by distant farm lights. She was hungry all of a sudden, but too deep in thought to do anything about it.
When the truth of what she knew was in the company’s files was exposed, the firm would appear at best negligent, and at worst, engaged in a cover-up to save their client. Those who cared would think that Chadwick and Noble had simply been too pressed for time to do the deeper analysis correctly and had been sloppy in discounting Lam’s theory. After all, most experts would never read into the situation what she was seeing. But once they reprocessed the data, all hell would break loose.
The shock of discovering that someone was willing to wreck her apartment to find what she possessed had altered the whole equation. But who was responsible? It was more than an unexpected complication, it was deeply worrisome, and she had to assume they were trying to find her. She’d tried to think through and anticipate all possible reactions, but this one had caught her off guard. If the firm was trying to intimidate her to silence, they were far too late. But if tearing her place apart was supposed to be a warning to be careful, it had been effective. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine someone killing an out-of-control female engineer if there was a billion dollars to be saved. After all, accidents happened, women disappeared with depressing regularity, and even murder could be made to look like suicide.
Every creepy movie she’d watched had been haunting her for the past twenty-four hours, and even someone as innocuous as a young soldier who’d briefly sat beside her on the train was suspect.
Diane pulled a blanket up around her, partially hiding her face like a child raising the bedsheets against monsters. There wasn’t time to be scared. She had to concentrate on planning the next move.
SEATTLE
Jennifer awoke with her heart racing, slow to recall she had driven the short distance to her condo and collapsed into a deep sleep following the Stevens Pass pickup and the visit to Olympic Hospital.
She rubbed her eyes and searched for the clock, expecting to see six or seven A.M.
Two-thirty?
She’d been out less than ninety minutes, but there was no point in trying to go back to sleep when she felt so suddenly wide awake, and all she could think of was Doug.
A quick call to the lab confirmed that he and Sanjay were still there.
“Is there a big earthquake somewhere, Sanjay?”
“Let’s just say we’re monitoring some things that concern us,” he explained, caution clearly draping his words.
“Don’t tell him I’m coming over, but I’m coming over with food.”
Bok Choy Takeout was a twenty-four-hour operation and was on the way to the university. Devoid of aesthetics, trees, or even a decent sign out front, it had always been one of her favorite places—though she’d never quite learned how to communicate with the woman who owned it. Thirty years in Seattle and the immigrant Chinese woman’s thick accent was still all but indecipherable. Jennifer drove the short distance to the Chinatown shop, double-parking as she ordered a small feast and waited for the stuffed sacks to be slid over the stainless steel counter. Mrs. Wong was home, the young girl behind the counter told her in perfect American. “Grandmother’s been sick lately.”
“Well, please tell her that Jennifer from Olympic Hospital said hello. She’ll probably remember me. Tell her I hope she’s feeling better soon.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t get in here much anymore. I miss your grandma.”
The girl brightened. “Yeah, she’s really cool, but I can’t understand her half the time.”
“You don’t speak Mandarin at home?”
“I don’t speak Chinese at all, and my parentals are bummed about that. But, hey, I’m from Seattle, right?”
It took less than ten minutes to drive to the seismology lab. The collection of fragrant white sacks was attracting attention as she found Doug in urgent conversation and slipped a free arm through his, marveling at the way he flashed the smile that always melted her without missing a beat in the discussion. Sanjay nodded and smiled at Jennifer, his eyes on the sacks of food.
“Dude, your lady’s brought a feast.”
“She sure has,” Doug said. “Thanks, Jennifer.”
“So, Doug… you going to eat that all by yourself?” the postdoc added.
“No, he’s not,” she said. “He’s going to share. Dig in.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Honey.” He resumed his discussions and she began setting the small boxes of food on the top of an adjacent table.
Typical, she thought. She could show up at his side unexpectedly at any time and get an equally pleased and casual response. His endless acceptance of just about any change of mind she might have was slightly irritating and comforting at the same time, and a skill she couldn’t emulate herself.
She finished laying out the food and faded into the background of the lab, watching him, studying the intensity of his concentration on the various tasks at hand, amused at the way he’d tried to make his crisp business suit look more university-casual with his loosened tie. There hadn’t been a flicker when she touched his arm. No awareness that this night had been a difficult watershed, a turning point.
I’ll never understand men and compartmentalization, Jennifer thought. How do they do it?
And yet she did understand it. Somewhere inside, she knew she, too, was a master at it.
An alarm of some sort suddenly blared through the room from the far end of the seismograph drum array. Doug got up and moved toward the protesting instrument as a long, significant shudder rippled beneath their feet, rattling the equipment racks and most of the people in the room.
“Uh, oh,” Sanjay uttered, his hand wrapped around the edge of a metal rack.
Doug’s eyes were wide with genuine shock as he turned to look for her.
“That was a big compression wave,” he said. “Everyone brace yourselves!”
Chapter 9
NORTHWEST COAST 3:02 A.M.
The first tremor began twenty-six kilometers beneath the ocean floor slightly more than thirty miles from the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula. It was little more than a small shift of lightless rock, heated to temperatures of nearly five hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but the shock waves headed off in all directions, the primary compressive wave, or “P wave,” traveling predictably faster than the side-to-side motion of the train of secondary “S waves” that followed. In magnitude terms it was minor, but the waves coursed through the rock and mud beneath Puget Sound from west to east and flashed underneath Seattle, dissipating slowly as they crossed the Cascade Mountains and wiggled the seismometer needles a bit above a magnitude 5.0.
Under the forest of office buildings in Seattle and the thousands of homes and lesser structures to the east, the ground shifted, undulating a tiny distance to one side and back as the surface waves passed.
QUAALATCH, WASHINGTON
The former leader of the Quaalatch Nation Tribal Council took the fresh cup of tea she’d poured and moved back to her tiny kitchen table in the predawn darkness shrouding the ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula.
The lights and the pounding noises from across the channel were riveting her attention again, as they did even in sleep. Better to sit and sip her tea and think quietly than toss and turn. She knew how to meditate, and the terrible things that had been done to the small Quaalatch island labeled Cascadia had prompted much introspection in the last two years. But four days ago her meditation had produced a vision as clear and certain as the crash of the surf and the morning coastal fog, an omen of deliverance, and the hour was drawing close.
There were very few of her tribe left now, too few to be counted together as anything but an also-ran in the list of sovereign nations of American Indians. Marta Cartwright herself was seventy-eight and very tired of the way the earth was losing its battle. To the north, the Makah and the Ozette nations were stable, if not thriving, and in Lapush, just to the south, the Quilieutes were maintaining themselves in a stable poverty more typical of the plains nations.
But her people—the Quaalatch—were down to four hundred souls, and her own direct lineage down to one disappointing grandson named Lester.
Marta had been forced to take her Anglo name by those who had tried to assimilate her tribe in the thirties, and all attempts to change it back had led to naught. Social security numbers, medical entitlements, and just about everything else in the web of American life required her artificial Anglo name, and one day she had simply stopped fighting that battle. She would be Marta, but her heart would always be Quaalatch.
She squeezed some more lemon into her teacup and pictured her archrival, Sara Tulalin. Marta wondered if Sara had any idea what she’d done in leasing the island to Mick Walker. It was one thing to take over leadership of her people and their traditions, and quite another to contaminate their meager land holdings with something as crass and disgusting as a casino.
The enemy knew Marta well. The builders who had eagerly dug and plowed and reshaped Cascadia Island—utterly destroying it as a bird sanctuary—had been unable to resist raising their middle finger to their former adversary in the form of the hated searchlight that revolved all through the winter night. She watched patiently as it flashed arrogant confirmation of its presence in her face every fifteen seconds, aimed maliciously and squarely, she was sure, at her seaside window.
She thought of Mick Walker as a devil, as much as her traditional beliefs would accommodate the concept Christians considered to be the devil. She didn’t hate Walker, but he was clearly her enemy, a man who had not hesitated to bankroll her political defeat when she, as the matriarchal leader of her people, refused to lease him their island and befoul their heritage. Walker had dangled money before her people and brought in dour men who had built successful native casinos elsewhere. They promised gambling riches and a renaissance for the Quaalatch for nothing more than the price of their souls. Hopelessly seduced, they had giddily sold out, throwing their longtime matriarch out of office and, as was their tradition, choosing another woman, Sara, who could not wait to cash in.
But Marta’s vision confirmed that Walker would find her defeat a Pyrrhic victory. That sustained her. Her vision showed clearly that sooner or later everything he had erected on the raped remains of her tribal land would be swept away.
The Quaalatch oral history told of the periodic times of cleansing when the people would be forced to take to their canoes for many months while the sea reclaimed and restored their lands. Those were accounts of the great earthquakes which hit at long intervals over the thousands of years her people had lived here, accounts it had taken modern scientists decades to confirm.
And now it was coming again, the time of cleansing. The opening round of tremors minutes before in the cold, dark night had been as welcome as fresh water to a refugee in the desert. The strange shuddering had prompted her to rise, and she sat now with great patience in her ringside seat waiting for the moment of renewal. It did not matter that the great tidal wave that would sweep Walker from the island would engulf her, too, only seconds later. The last moments of life would be sweet indeed, and her people—those that survived—would be renewed.
She recalled the old lodge owner named Harry Truman who had refused to leave the land and his home on the flanks of Mount St. Helens as the mountain prepared to explode in 1980. For a non-native, he had shown extraordinary unders
tanding, she thought, letting the mountain sweep him and his land into history as one, his honor intact.
She would be proud to go like Mr. Truman.
The searchlight was slapping at her through a layer of fog now and periodically disappearing for minutes. In those brief periods when it was invisible, she could experience again, briefly, what the sea had looked like outside her window for so many tranquil years before. Then the light would reappear, pulsing indistinctly at first, then restored to its intrusive flash.
She got up and poured another cup of tea, doubling the lemon this time before resuming her post. It was beginning.
Soon the light would stop forever.
10 MILES SOUTHEAST OF FORKS, WASHINGTON
There was a sudden vibration in the steering column.
State Trooper Gavin Quintin muttered to himself and began slowing to stop on the shoulder as he turned on his blue and red Visibar lights. Something was very wrong with his patrol car.
It was pitch dark and foggy. He checked his rearview mirrors for oncoming trucks as he moved his hand to the door release. Not many logging trucks screamed down the Olympic Peninsula’s Highway 101 anymore—certainly not as many as twenty years ago when he first put on the uniform—but they could still appear out of nowhere, careening like stampeding buffalo around a blind curve.
But tonight there were no headlights bearing down on him from either direction. He was alone on a ghostly black ribbon of road snaking through a moonless forest and trying to figure out why his cruiser had been jumping around on the road so severely. It hadn’t felt exactly like a flat, more like all four tires had gone somewhat square.
Saving Cascadia Page 8
