Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  “No, Jennifer. I… I’m sorry.”

  There was more he wanted to say and she could feel it. His vulnerability was an untraveled road, and she was stunned by the unexpected gift. But his unspoken words were stuck somewhere between his heart and his pride, and she settled for that much for now, wondering what it would have been like to have been hugged that way as a child. Somewhere inside, she felt the warmth of compassion leaking in around the dam of her previous anger.

  And then the moment passed and she pulled away gently, unconsciously patting his arm, suddenly worried about the damage she might have done to him.

  “Dad, we need to get some rest.”

  He nodded, without speaking, as he opened the door to the car and waited for her to get in.

  PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA

  “You’re sure that’s a direct cellular number?”

  Ralph Lacombe checked that he’d copied the relayed phone number correctly before ending the call with the California governor’s protocol officer. The comprehensive listing of the hotline numbers for every governor in the nation was at the man’s fingertips, and a state senator with Lacombe’s seniority and clout could get any one of them.

  He paused before dialing the number, going over the latest information relayed from his ex-CIA friend. Undoubtedly Diane was on a mission regarding the seismic dangers to Mick Walker’s island, and equally certain was the fact that someone from Chadwick and Noble was chasing after her to prevent her from handing over to Mick, and perhaps Washington’s governor, some sort of work product from her firm. The conclusion might have been bizarre for others, but it was entirely consistent with his daughter’s crusading nature. The FedEx package had arrived, and he’d opened it and viewed the contents of the CD, recognizing enough to know that it was seismic data somehow related to their old friend Walker’s project. So that was her quest, he decided. The firm had suppressed the data, and she was going to reveal it.

  He punched in the number, listening to it ring before a Washington state trooper answered and listened suspiciously to his request.

  “You want to speak to Governor O’Brien?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Well, sir, he’s giving a speech in a few minutes. Can I take a message?”

  “Yes. Tell him Senator Ralph Lacombe called. Tell him my daughter is apparently headed to Cascadia Island to give him some very important information. If she arrives, it would be a personal favor to me if he’d give her a few minutes of his time.”

  He left a number with an invitation to call and ended the connection. O’Brien was an old acquaintance, but a skirt-chasing, narcissistic fool. Even if he listened, that wasn’t enough.

  Ralph picked up the phone and dialed Mick Walker’s direct number.

  Chapter 25

  CASCADIA CASINO BALLROOM 8:40 p.m.

  The governor of Washington was obviously not going to listen to anything Doug Lam had to say.

  Doug stood for a second calculating the futility of running after him and still appalled that he’d lied about Menlo Park issuing the alert. The alert was obviously the key to getting O’Brien’s cooperation, but even that news hadn’t impressed him.

  Or perhaps the governor just refused to reverse course in public. The way he’d acted meant he considered Doug Lam an enemy.

  Doug’s stomach was making obscene noises and he decided to eat something of the food on the table while deciding what to do next.

  The mood in the large hall was anything but the gala atmosphere Mick Walker had intended. Only half the expected crowd was on hand, most of them worried by the continuous earth tremors and the growing rumors about some sort of problem with the ferry carrying friends and acquaintances expected for the weekend. Colorful pictures that few were watching were flashing on a large screen, professional shots carefully taken of the Cascadia project’s most impressive features. How many of the guests, Doug wondered, were aware that the sparkling white marble front of the convention hall as shown on the screen was no longer even standing?

  He found a place at one of the tables where an entrée was waiting and ate quickly. The others at the table were engaged in conversation and made no introductions. He opted to be anonymous and antisocial.

  The young woman who slipped into the empty place next to him did so without fanfare, and he hardly noticed her at first. She waved away a waiter who tried to fill the void in front of her with a salad and sat staring at him.

  Doug looked around, recording a mane of auburn hair framing the soft contours of a lovely face.

  “Hello,” he said, extending his right hand as the orchestra raised the volume with an upbeat piece designed to entice people to a dance floor no one was using.

  “Hi,” she said, her eyes on his for only an instant. She was looking around the room as if afraid a jealous husband might be watching for any hint of contact with the opposite sex. But then she took his hand with surprising aggressiveness.

  “I’m, ah, Doug Lam,” he said, thoroughly off balance and unsure whether to withdraw his hand. The contact was becoming intimate and embarrassing.

  “Yes, I know,” she replied, dropping her eyes to the table.

  “And you are?” he tried.

  “Ah… Mary. Mary Willis.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mary. Is everything all right?”

  “Can we talk somewhere private?”

  “Sure. What’s wrong?”

  “I sent you an e-mail. About seismic data?”

  Doug felt his eyebrows go up in surprise. “That’s you?”

  She nodded. “There are some empty meeting rooms off the main corridor.”

  “Lead the way.”

  She got up quickly and he followed, replaying the e-mail in his memory and trying not to be mindful of her shapely form as she led him out into the main foyer and into a side room. She closed and locked the door behind them before sitting across from him at the diminutive boardroom table.

  “First, my name is not Mary.”

  “I gathered that.”

  She nodded, a shallow reflective smile on her face as her eyes darted around the room before landing on his. “Let me get to the point. We’re in a lot of danger just sitting here.”

  Doug smiled and cocked his head. “What… kind of danger?”

  “Seismic.”

  “Oh.”

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “Not important. Yes, clearly we’re in seismic danger. I’ve been trying for a long time to tell everyone just that. Did you see what happened to the convention center?”

  “I heard. That’s the surface fault I told you about.”

  “Your note said you had information that validated my research. What data could possibly do that? It was only a theory, and a roundly dismissed one, at that.”

  She nodded. “I’m an engineer, not a seismologist, Doctor, but what I understood you to be saying in your paper is that there are three spots along the Cascadia Subduction Zone that you feel are like fulcrums, sensitive areas where any substantial impacts on the surface might be transmitted intact as they move down in the rock strata, and that such jolts might be enough to set off, or trigger, a great earthquake.”

  “Well, that’s a colorful and somewhat cursory way of describing it, but essentially that’s right. It was a trigger theory.”

  “So, those spots—and we’re sitting on one of them—are like the business end of a mousetrap, where you put the cheese. Twang it hard enough, and all hell breaks loose? Please explain it to me before I tell you the rest of my story.”

  “All right. Simply put, I studied years of seismographs and began to see a pattern. I thought there was enough evidence in the way seismic energy reflects through this area—and those other two locales—to make me think there was a direct line of transmission between the surface and the locked area of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, what I call the ‘Quilieute Quiet Zone.’ That would mean that any construction activity on those spots, especially pile driving or dynamite explosions to excava
te rock, would be dangerous. Almost no one in the geophysical community agreed with me, of course, as you kind of pointed out. My colleagues thought I’d slipped a cog, and the industrial side accused me of making it all up just to oppose their destruction of a perfectly good bird sanctuary… a sanctuary, by the way, that wasn’t here three hundred years ago because it was below sea level, as it will be again.”

  “I don’t think you made it up.” She pulled out the CD and held it up. “I think your theory was a stroke of genius.”

  “Who are you, exactly?”

  “Diane Lacombe. I was the project engineer from Chadwick and Noble who came here two years ago to do the last-chance structural geologic and seismic evaluation of the island, a study demanded specifically by the developer, Mick Walker. We worked hard and fast and I transmitted all the data to San Francisco and went home after a week of thumping the island with an oil-field truck we had ferried over. Another team prepared the report, and for the longest time I couldn’t get a copy. I even have a copy of a memo written by my boss, Jerry Schultz, telling me to stop asking. I thought that was strange. And when I finally wheedled it out of them almost eight months later, I have to tell you I was aghast. It was almost cursory… alarming in its lack of depth. Like it had been rushed out to fit a predetermined conclusion. So, I started trying to get my hands on the core data in order to be sure we, as a firm, hadn’t screwed up the evaluation. I was worried that we might have failed to find something that Mick—Mick Walker—needed to know about before committing these incredible sums.”

  “But, you were told to sit down and shut up, right?”

  She studied his eyes for several moments before answering.

  “Yes. How’d you know?”

  He shrugged. “I’m familiar with the standard operating approach to bad news within most large organizations. Shut up and drink your Kool-Aid.”

  “Well, they clearly didn’t want me spending time on it. Exactly why, I don’t know.”

  “But you didn’t obey, did you?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, I did for a while, since it was my supervisor and then one of the partners who told me essentially to butt out. But it kept bugging me, even after construction started, and it seriously worried me that Walker, who’s a longtime friend of my father and my family, might have been misled by my firm’s sloppiness. So I kept on probing around until I secured the original data tapes we’d made of all the impact echoes. And I started redoing the whole evaluation, which is what led to my e-mailing you. I mean, by the time I found what I’ve found, this resort was already built, but I figured that only an eminent seismologist could stand a chance of convincing anyone what to do.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following this, and I’m anything but eminent.”

  “Doctor, do you have a laptop here?”

  “Of course. But back in my room.”

  “With a DVD drive?”

  He nodded.

  “Then, let me show you, rather than just tell you.”

  “The suspense is killing me, Miss Lacombe.”

  “Diane, please.”

  “Can you at least tell me the bottom line, Diane?”

  She was already on her feet. “I’d prefer we go get to your laptop. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  She unlocked the door and cracked it open, carefully surveying the foyer before stepping out with Doug following. They were halfway across the courtyard between the casino and the hotel when a downburst of pelting rain found them, soaking them both as they sprinted for the hotel entrance. Doug’s shoes were squishing as they got off the elevator and entered his room.

  He got towels for both of them from the bathroom and toweled his hair down before opening the laptop. Diane Lacombe sat beside him at the desk and pulled out the CD.

  “The bottom line, Doctor, is this. Our data showed sloping rock strata that clearly can transmit seismic energy from the surface of this island to the Benioff Zone, just as you postulated in your paper.”

  “Which area?”

  “The one you labeled ‘the Quilieute Quiet Zone,’ the one, according to your paper, that could be the most dangerously locked and brittle trigger area in the entire subduction zone, somewhere around a depth of twenty-five kilometers, and essentially aligned with this island.”

  “In other words, when Walker began building here…”

  She was nodding solemnly. “That’s right. When he started building, blasting, and banging, they were sending seismic waves squarely into the mousetrap’s release button.”

  Doug took a deep breath and shook his head. “I know you’re aware of these big tremors, but are you aware of the current swarm of Benioff Zone earthquakes we’ve been having?”

  She nodded. “I am now. But not until I got off the train in Portland.”

  “Excuse me, the train?”

  “Someone wanted this CD bad enough to wreck my apartment in San Francisco looking for it. When I figured that out, I ran to find you. The train was the most anonymous way.”

  “Someone was chasing you? Do you have any idea who, or why?”

  “No. Well… that’s not entirely true. I have suspicions I don’t want to discuss yet.”

  She put the disk in the slot and triggered the appropriate buttons, waiting for the drive to spin up before working through a series of commands, then turned the computer screen around for him to see.

  “My dad is a state senator and a lawyer. He’s always used a Latin phrase that means, ‘Let the thing speak for itself.’ ”

  “Res ipsa loquitur?”

  She nodded. “This diagram should make its own point.”

  A three-dimensional representation of the entire subduction zone—a cross-section presented as if a gargantuan block had been neatly sliced from the continent carrying the entirety of the Puget Sound region on its top, its sides showing the inner structure of the earth down to fifty kilometers—now revolved on the screen. She worked more keystrokes and the picture zoomed in toward Cascadia Island at the top, with the locked portion of the Benioff Zone clearly marked below. Suddenly, the picture zoomed in further, overlaying the data she had developed and showing a corrugated series of sloping lines leading from the Cascadia Island area through the crustal rock and terminating at the twenty-one-kilometer level.

  “So what do you think of that?” she asked, her expression still grim, her voice tight and contained.

  “My God, this is real data?”

  “Yes. Not just the reflected data from distant quakes I suspect you used, but the type of oil-field exploration data designed to reveal the different layers.”

  He whistled to himself, a low and intense sound. “You see it, too, don’t you?” he asked at last.

  “I… see vertical, diving strata. Am I missing more?”

  Doug was nodding excitedly. “Yes! I’ve never seen real images of anything like this. See how the layers form a conduit that gets smaller and more concentrated as the depth increases?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suggested such a thing might be proven someday, but this is amazing.”

  Doug put his finger on the screen just below the island and traced the lines downward to their termination point.

  “Notice how the strata converge toward the bottom? At the top it may cover fifty square miles. At the bottom, perhaps one. That’s what I called a static amplification formation, a diving, converging series of faults or breaks which compress and significantly increase—amplify—the intensity or, at the very least, the amplitude of any vibrations from the surface. It’s like when a shallowing ocean bottom along a coastline will increase the amplitude of an inbound tsunami wave until the resulting wave that hits the shore is gigantic. This can take a vibration and increase its impact down below.”

  “You mean, like using a magnifying glass to concentrate sunlight and roast ants?”

  “Similar concept. But that would be concentration, and what I’m seeing in your data is amplification.”

  “But your theory was only about r
esonant motion, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded, his enthusiasm growing. “Resonant amplified vibrations. That was one part. The idea that man-made seismic waves from surface impacts of a pile driver might just match in frequency the range at which the rock in the trigger area vibrates, increasing the vibrations like a struck gong. The more waves sent down, the greater the resonant vibration, until the rock loosens itself up and the trigger gets pulled on the main earthquake. And once the process starts, there’s no calling it back. That’s what happened when so many downtown buildings shook themselves apart in Mexico City in the great quake of 1985.”

  “Good grief. Amplification?”

  “Yes! This is amazing!”

  “So, where those waves come out down around twenty-one kilometers, that happens to be the weakest part of the locked subduction zone?”

  Doug sighed and sat back. “That’s where the guesswork comes in. Where is the trigger? How fragile is it? You know, does it take one more straw to break the camel’s back, or a million tons? And right now, as we sit here talking theory, Walker may have unlocked that trigger and we’re just waiting for a slow fuse to burn down to the dynamite.”

  “It’s strange that a hundred nuclear bombs going off down there might not cause it to break. Yet, with this structural amplifier in the rock, it could take very little.” Diane paused. “Are they still blasting around here?” she asked. “Even now?”

  “No. The damage is done. If they’ve unlocked it, the genie is out of the bottle.”

  Diane stood and paced toward the balcony in thought as Doug looked more closely at the screen.

  “Hold it.”

  “What?” she asked, turning back.

  “I see the surface fault you described.”

  Doug reached for a stack of promotional brochures on the new facilities. He yanked open the largest of the site maps and turned it back and forth until it was aligned with the diagrams on the screen, placing the point of his pen on the collapsed convention center and marking left and right in a line that passed through both the hotel and casino.

  “Dear God, he built all the main facilities right across it! A major surficial fault. How did you guys miss it?”