Saving Cascadia

by John J. Nance

  The men were in motion below and she turned back, picking her way along the same perilous pathway to where Matt was sitting, holding his head, while Jaimie sat beside Karen Sams, holding her hand and talking to her. Davie’s body lay nearby. He hadn’t been breathing when they pulled him out.

  She knew she should feel something, looking at him lying there, his death a direct result of her party plans. But there was one more task to be accomplished, one that was roiling her stomach.

  As she’d stood on the edge of the open room, she could see the east end of the building where her parents’ suite had been, two stories up. The floors were now missing.

  “Okay, Jaimie, they’re coming. Matt? Karen? Hang on. I’ve got to go find my parents.”

  “Don’t leave us!” Jaimie managed.

  “I’ll be right back. I promise.”

  Before she could hear any more protests Lindy moved quickly through the debris of the alcove to the corridor and turned toward the east side. The suite had been at the end of a similar corridor two floors up, and the remains of the floors were now compressed and jumbled in front of her. She stood for a second considering the limited options and turned back in the opposite direction, moving steadily through less and less debris until she found a usable stairway. She climbed quickly to the fifth floor and emerged into the corridor, running down it until she reached the beginning of the collapse. There was nothing but black, rainy sky straight ahead where the corridor ended in a jagged hole, and looking down she could see the remains of the fifth floor pancaked onto the fourth and third. She could see a narrow pathway along one side, the result of an uneven collapse, and without hesitating she moved out onto the ledge, ignoring the jagged metal and angular masonry waiting below to impale her if she fell.

  The sound of a large helicopter grew overhead and a burst of wind from its rotor blades almost caused her to slip from the narrow walkway. A huge beam of light suddenly stabbed at the mess, probing around, finding her and remaining on her.

  She was paying no attention, but was grateful for the illumination. The entrance to her parents’ suite had been less than thirty feet ahead, and she could see in the helicopter’s light enough of a hole to wiggle in when she got there. Unlike the floors below, there was only a roof that could have fallen in on her mother and dad, and that, she concluded, had to be survivable.

  Ten feet from the entrance she had targeted, her right foot slipped on the wet ledge and Lindy felt her body sliding downward. Instinctively she jerked her legs up as she grabbed for something on the right, her hands grasping an exposed pipe which bent but held, leaving her dangling and kicking hard to get a foot back on the edge of the collapsed roof. There was a five-foot drop to a meat grinder of debris below and she could feel the pipe bending more, threatening to break. Her left foot caught the ledge and she began rotating her weight to that leg, pushing against the pipe, and finally regaining her balance.

  Lindy stood there a few seconds breathing hard, refusing to let herself look down as she gathered her strength to keep going. An earsplitting PA speaker suddenly blared from the helicopter overhead.

  “Stay where you are, Miss! We’ll lower a basket!”

  She looked up, shielding her eyes against the bright light, and shook her head no, pointing instead to the collapsed end of the building. She knew they wouldn’t understand, but it would keep them from coming after her long enough to reach the hole she’d spotted, and nothing was going to keep her from getting to her parents.

  The rescuers moving up the still-intact staircases on the east wing of the hotel were becoming a steady stream as Jennifer Lindstrom made her way down against the flow, unsure where to look next for her father. She paused on the second-floor landing to move out of the way while two firemen raced by carrying a Jaws of Life metal cutter. After they passed, she entered the hallway and returned to her room, recognizing the ring of her cell phone as she stepped into the alcove. Jennifer retrieved her purse and answered her phone just as the ringing stopped. She toggled up the number of the last call, her heart leaping at the sight of Sven Lindstrom’s cell number. She punched the appropriate button and pressed the phone to her ear, hoping.

  “Dad?”

  “Jen, is that you?”

  “Dad! Thank God, I thought you’d been in your room.”

  “No, I came down for a nightcap. I… wasn’t feeling so good.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the entrance to your room, looking for you. You had me terrified!”

  “Me too, about you, I mean. We must have passed somehow a few minutes ago. I’m almost to the lobby.”

  “Go back there and I’ll find you,” he said. “Thank God, Honey. I saw this room and I thought I’d lost you.”

  They disconnected and she descended the final flight and opened the door to find Doug trying to rush in, his eyes wild. He hesitated, trying to focus at close range, then shook his head to make sure what he saw wasn’t an illusion.

  “Jennifer!”

  A small wave of guilt swept over her that she hadn’t even thought about whether he was all right, or what room he was in—even though she already knew. The room with the two lovers had been in the west wing, where the building was still intact, and the thought brought back in agonizing detail the image of Doug and the young woman in bathrobes in the doorway.

  Doug took her by the shoulders and she permitted it without reaction.

  “Thank God you’re all right, Baby! I just found out where your room was.”

  “Is that right?” she said as flatly as she could manage, keeping her eyes away from his.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, cocking his head and trying to look her in the eye.

  “We’ll talk later.” Jennifer removed his hands from her shoulders and took Sven’s elbow, turning away. “Come on, Dad.”

  “Jennifer—”

  She turned and leveled an index finger at him. “I said later. I meant later.”

  Jennifer and Sven turned together, walking swiftly away, leaving Doug standing uncharacteristically speechless in the middle of the crowded lobby.

  Chapter 30

  MICK WALKER’S OFFICE, CASCADIA RESORT 11:15 P.M.

  Soaking wet again and aware she was of no practical use to the rescue effort, Diane moved away from Mick Walker’s impromptu emergency command post and reentered the lobby where the activity was just as frenetic. Her thoughts suddenly focused on the whereabouts of Robert Nelms. Wherever Doug Lam was, she’d already given him all her information, and unless something happened to him or the disk, the cat was effectively out of the bag. In the obvious confusion of the unfolding disaster all around her, thoughts about unknown operatives trying to chase her down now seemed trivial. Instead, she was feeling pangs of guilt about her disloyalties to Mick, and to her employer.

  Especially her employer.

  Somehow the sight of Robert Nelms sitting in a debris-filled corner of Mick Walker’s destroyed office had tugged at her sympathies. Maybe it was her maternal instinct, or just an image inconsistent with someone who could be a threat to her, but suddenly she needed to talk to him—even if it meant throwing caution to the wind.

  The lobby itself was largely undamaged except for overturned potted plants and a fine film of dust from the grinding action of the drywall. But the air of disaster was everywhere, with guests huddled under blankets, loud voices coming at her from all directions, the cold winds whipping through double doors that had been propped open, and even the sound of a heavy helicopter hovering somewhere overhead.

  She’d seen the gash in the ground where it snaked right through the foundation of the hotel. The break was at the point where the east wing joined the lobby, and it was no mystery that the activated fault had pulled the building in two. The lobby and west wing had enough residual strength to survive the fault’s sudden movement, but the hapless east wing—deprived of too much lateral support—couldn’t keep from collapsing.

  And it was her data that had been the starting point. The
question that everyone would ask, however, was whether the data had been hidden to help the client, or had there been an unheard-of level of incompetence in the bowels of Chadwick and Noble?

  Diane found the western stairwell and climbed back to the fifth floor, retracing the earlier path from the centrally located elevator shaft to Mick Walker’s west-end office. Windows had blown out throughout the western side of the hotel, but the basic floor structure had remained intact, even though the furnishings in most of the rooms had been tossed wildly about.

  Robert Nelms was roughly where they had left him, but standing now and looking out of the shattered glass wall facing south-southeast. Island fire and emergency vehicles along with a small crane could be seen around the collapsed eastern end of the hotel.

  “Mr. Nelms?” Diane said, her voice tentative.

  He turned his head, his eyes flaring slightly in recognition as his features softened.

  “Oh. Diane.” He turned back to the disastrous vista as she picked her way across the debris-laden floor to stand beside him.

  “There was nothing I could do down there,” she said.

  The wind was blowing savagely through the shattered glass of what had been a floor-to-ceiling window, and she shivered in its grip, wondering why he seemed unaffected.

  “What a tragedy,” he said. “Do we have any idea how many are hurt?”

  “No, sir. There are a lot of collapsed rooms, though. I… I think there will be at least some fatalities.”

  He nodded. “And we’ve always said that earthquakes don’t kill people, Diane. Collapsing buildings kill people. That’s where we were supposed to come in. Prevent it. You know?”

  “I know.”

  He glanced at her again. “You realize this could destroy Chadwick and Noble, don’t you?”

  She nodded, the lump in her throat growing larger. The firm had been wonderful to her. It was a shame it had to be this way.

  “I need to talk to you, sir,” she said.

  “Hmm,” he replied absently, his eyes on the rescue efforts, his hands clasped behind his back.

  Diane was shivering almost uncontrollably and he noticed and turned to put his arm around her, guiding her to the outer office, partially closing the damaged inner-office door behind them. He shoved a fallen painting off the couch and motioned to her to sit down as he sat on the far end, looking completely defeated.

  “What did you want to talk about?” he said, as if they had all the time in the world to kill in idle conversation.

  She took a deep breath, steeling her courage and forcing her eyes up to meet his.

  “Sir, do you recall that I led the team that gathered the final seismic structural data for this island?”

  He nodded. “Yes. You came in on budget and on time.”

  She nodded, wondering why, in the face of this disaster, that was in any way worth noting.

  “Well, after I came back to the office and turned in all my data, I asked for the report, and no one wanted to let me see it.”

  She saw one eyebrow rise slightly as Nelms leaned forward with what appeared to be considerable effort.

  “What do you mean, exactly, that they didn’t want you to see it? Who is ‘they’?”

  “My boss, Jerrod Schultz. I kept bugging him and finally buttonholed his boss, Mr. Wong, in the hallway one day…”

  “Yes, I know our hierarchy. Go on.”

  “And finally, about six months later, a copy of the report showed up on my desk.”

  “And, there was a problem with it?”

  “It seemed cursory and incomplete.” She explained in detail what she’d seen and not seen in the report. “I mentioned it to Jerry and he told me to drop it, that I was not to interfere in another department’s work quality and that it wasn’t my area anyway. He even sent me a memo to that effect later. I still have it.”

  Robert Nelms moved even closer to the edge of the couch now, listening intently as she described her forays into the brick wall of bureaucratic resistance to see her raw data again, then the off-the-books, independent effort that finally secured the raw data and her days and evenings working to decipher it.

  “You took it home, so to speak?”

  “Yes, sir, I admit I did. I was worried we’d put out a bad report, and no one was helping.”

  He took a deep breath. “And what did you conclude?”

  Diane looked him in the eye and told him about the sloping strata that confirmed Doug Lam’s suspicions, and the later revelation that the firm’s geologists had missed the fault. It was hardly a secret now that Cascadia Island had a fatal crack running through it, and when she had finished the recitation and told him of Doug Lam’s instant recognition of the surficial fault, Nelms leaned back heavily and shook his head.

  “I… know I should have come to you…”

  He turned his gaze back to her. “When did you know all this? When did you come to the conclusion the strata might support Lam’s theory?”

  “I didn’t know about the amplification thing. What I saw in the strata was a direct line between the island as a hot spot down to the so-called ‘Quiet Zone.’ That’s the part that scared me. I didn’t see the amplification issue, and I had no idea about the significance of what was the surface fault.”

  “Diane, please. Give me a date!”

  “Well… about a week ago. I sat there one evening and realized there was no other logical conclusion.”

  “All right. Only a week ago. Whom did you take this to?”

  She chewed her lip for a second without responding.

  “Did you approach Jerry Schultz about it?”

  “Yes and no. As I said, I had asked him if I could talk to him about the raw data I had developed regarding the Cascadia project, and he had asked why, and I fibbed and told him I had found some of the readings were still on my laptop and when I’d analyzed them, it was obvious the report we’d sent did not tell the full story. He dismissed it, laughed about it, and told me to stop worrying, that the resort was about to open and there were no problems, and it was way too late anyway. He said the chances of a major quake in the next hundred years was an acceptable risk and he directed me to erase immediately all of the data from my hard drive.”

  “And, you didn’t go higher? You didn’t tell Wong?”

  “No. I wasn’t sure what to do. I thought I’d tell my father, but then I chickened out.”

  “But you decided that running to Dr. Lam was appropriate?”

  “Not until someone wrecked my apartment looking for my laptop and the data.”

  He nodded. “And you suspected us.”

  She nodded.

  “Which is logical,” he added. “I would have suspected us, too.”

  “Really?”

  His eyes riveted hers. “Diane, I scrambled half the company back to the office earlier this evening to answer the question of why in hell we let Mick Walker build his convention center across a major surficial weakness. Wong has called me back several times, and I’ve talked to Schultz. They’re all saying that the formal report was top-quality and that the dataset that was filed with the report shows no surface faults whatsoever. They said the date of the original dataset bore your signature.”

  “Wait a minute! I don’t know what they’re looking at, but I have a verified copy of my data stored away, and the other one is in Dr. Lam’s possession. He took one look at it and showed me the fault, showed how it ran right under the convention center and under the eastern side of this hotel, and in fact through the middle of the island.”

  “I’m sure he did. But if the dataset you’re looking at and the dataset in our files are not the same, which one is correct?”

  Diane felt her heart rate increasing as she felt the onus suddenly shifting to her. Maybe, he was thinking, her data had been flawed, or perhaps the disk she’d grabbed from the vault had been the wrong one or had been somehow adulterated. The questions swirled through her head for less than a second before she realized the answer was already apparent
. She gestured toward the shattered end of the hotel.

  “Mr. Nelms, I think Mother Nature has just demonstrated which dataset is right. The one that I gave Dr. Lam. The one that shows evidence of a major surface fault.”

  Robert Nelms nodded slowly. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “What could they be looking at down there at headquarters?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I mean, we will find out, but I was looking for quick answers before the lawyers and the insurance companies start swarming.”

  “My data wasn’t wrong, Mr. Nelms, and there was only one dataset. Someone is… well, not correctly representing the situation.”

  “Lying, in other words?”

  “Your word, sir, not mine. I just know what I know.”

  He sighed and sat back. “Well, however it came to this—whether someone in our company purposely hid or changed the data or whether it was all a monstrous mistake, Walker has apparently wasted over a hundred million dollars in reliance on our fatally flawed advice.”

  “Will the firm’s insurance cover whatever happens?”

  He shrugged. “Not if it was purposeful. And the damages will undoubtedly be more than our coverage.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “I wish you’d come to me, but even if you had, as of a week ago, the place was already built.” He got to his feet then, stopping to take a breath before gesturing to the door. “Let’s get out of here, Diane.”

  She stood. “I’ll follow in a moment. I want to check to see if Dr. Lam is still out there.”

  Robert Nelms walked slowly out of the office toward the stairwell as Diane opened the door to the inner office, braving the blast of chilled air to cross to the broken window. She looked closely, but couldn’t make out Doug Lam’s form, and was working her way across the broken bric-a-brac on the floor when the spilled contents of a file cabinet caught her eye. There was a golden-edged certificate out in the open, obviously something of value to Mick Walker, and she pulled it clear as she looked for a plastic sleeve or something to protect it with.