The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  “Without saying what it was.”

  “Right.”

  Mallory watched Church, the way he nervously fidgeted with his sleeves. “Why geo-engineering?”

  “Not sure.” He shrugged. “I just know it interested him. He thought geo-engineering was going to be a major growth industry eventually, and he wanted to explore how legitimate it really was. How viable it will be.”

  “Thinks.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Thinks, not thought.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  Church’s long hairless arm reached for his coffee cup, then he seemed to change his mind and pulled his hand back. “It’s a controversial subject, of course,” he said, exhaling audibly. “The viability of the industry is really down to whether or not you accept the premise of quote unquote climate change, or global warming. We talked about that a few times.”

  “And?”

  “He said that if you accept the premise of global warming, then there are really only two options for how you deal with it: you reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which, of course, is what everyone talks about. Or else you mitigate the effects of those emissions.”

  “Through geo-engineering.”

  “Yes. For the first option to really work—to reverse the effects of climate change—would require reducing carbon emissions by eighty percent. Which isn’t feasible.” Church tugged at his left sleeve. “Did you know that Exxon Mobil has spent thirty million dollars over the past decade to discredit the idea of man-made global warming?”

  “Okay,” Mallory said. “So, option one, cut the CO2 by eighty percent, isn’t going to happen, you’re saying.”

  “Not likely, no. It’s messy and it’s political. Mitigating the climate, on the other hand, isn’t. It just isn’t taken very seriously yet.”

  “I don’t follow politics much anymore,” Mallory said. “Tell me about it. How does it work?”

  “Well.” Mallory waited while Church deliberately sipped his coffee, his eyes blinking rapidly. “The idea that gets the most currency these days is you pump sulfur into the upper atmosphere to create a sun shield. It actually wouldn’t take much. Block one to two percent of the sunlight and you’ve offset the doubling of the CO2 levels.” He smiled, his face becoming an old man’s. “It sounds a little kooky, I suppose. But at the same time, there’s something very American about that idea, isn’t there?”

  “You mean that we can solve our problems through innovative science rather than through conservation.”

  “Exactly, yes. American ingenuity.” They shared a look. “That’s what your brother thought. From our few conversations on the subject, I think he believed there was something inevitable about the geo-engineering industry.”

  “Believes.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because when you get down to it, the costs of geo-engineering would be relatively trivial compared to the costs of cutting carbon. Not to mention the practicalities of it.”

  Mallory looked again at the names. “And so, while he was doing preliminary research for this story, he came to talk with Dr. Westlake. And she gave him this list. Telling him that these seven people were somehow connected.”

  “That’s right. By something I haven’t yet discovered.”

  “And who’s this most recent name? Number seven?”

  “Dr. Atul Pradhan? A well-respected climate scientist. Originally from India. Died in the tsunami of September twenty-fifth, as I said. He was sent to Bangladesh as a consultant by a California-based firm, supposedly.”

  “Why?”

  “Studying the effects of climate change on nomadic populations on the char islands, evidently. He was quite outspoken on issues of climate control.”

  Mallory waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, he asked, “And how about Dr. Westlake? What happened to her?”

  “Unknown. She told a colleague at the university that she was going out running Friday afternoon on the C & O canal and never returned. Her car’s still missing. She was reported as a missing person by her estranged husband three nights ago.”

  “Has it made the news yet?”

  “No. I expect it will any time.” He smiled ambiguously, his face fissuring into a grid of lines.

  Mallory said, “Have you shown this list to the police?”

  “Not yet.” Church looked away. “Jon did. As I say, at this point I don’t know that the list really means anything.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Wait.” Church moved his fingers on the handle of the coffee cup. “If there are connections I’m not seeing, it may eventually become a story.”

  “Can I call you if I think of anything?”

  “Please. Any time.” Church pulled a business card from the top drawer of his desk. Scribbled a number on the back. “That’s my home. I’m a night owl. Call up until midnight if you want.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Mallory pulled a blank business card from his pocket and wrote out the number to one of his disposable cells.

  He stood. The two men shook hands and Church walked him back through the lobby. The receptionist glanced up and smiled this time. Mallory winked. He walked outside and stared for a while at the sky, which was darkening with stratus clouds.

  HE HAD BROUGHT five disposable cell phones with him in his gym bag. One of them vibrated as he drove away from Foggy Bottom. He recognized the caller ID: it was Joseph Chaplin. Good. If Mallory didn’t return the call, it meant he was agreeing to meet Chaplin in St. Louis, per his message the night before.

  “St. Louis” was a reference to the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum on the National Mall, where Charles Lindbergh’s forty-five-foot-wide “Spirit of St. Louis” single-engine plane—the plane he’d flown solo from New York to Paris in 1927—hung from the ceiling above the entrance lobby.

  Mallory found Chaplin on the second floor, studying a placard in front of the Wright Brothers’ flyer in an adjacent gallery. He was dressed in a dark, tailored pin-stripe suit, a purple kerchief puffed out of his pocket. Not particularly inconspicuous, but in keeping with Chaplin’s new Washington persona. Chaplin loved Washington and made a point of exploring its wealth of history and culture on an almost daily basis. Seeing his eyes turn and recognition light his familiar face—the sculpted features and hard, sincere set of his mouth—gave Mallory a sense that, for a brief moment at least, all was right with the world.

  “Greetings,” Chaplin said in his lilting African accent, without looking at him.

  “Greetings.”

  “Your brother, you’ll be pleased to know, is fine.” He was pretending to read the placard about the Wright Brothers.

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I’ve got him, yes.”

  Mallory felt a rush of relief.

  “I had to make an executive decision. As you Americans like to say.”

  Chaplin moved to another exhibition, this one showing a diagram of the Wright Brothers’ plan for “Wing-Warping.” Mallory went with him. “What sort of decision?”

  “To assist him. He had been trying to reach you, as you know. Failing that, he seemed determined to disappear. I attempted to talk to him about that, but he had made up his mind. He only wanted to speak with you. Unfortunately, your brother is not as adept at disappearing as you are.”

  “No.”

  “Not many people are.”

  “So you made an executive decision and assisted him.”

  “Affirmative. I don’t know that he fully understands the nature of his adversary.”

  “Probably not,” Mallory said. “Do you?”

  “Not entirely. Better, perhaps, than he does.”

  He handed Mallory an envelope, and turned to study the next exhibition. Mallory pulled out a blurry glossy photo of a Range Rover, parked on a residential street. Another of a bearded man wearing a flak jacket, a ball cap and blue jeans, standing in what seemed to be a parking garage.

  “Th
at’s the fellow who was staking out his apartment,” Chaplin said. “He was there this morning when he left. And at the Metro stop waiting for him to return to his car. Your brother was planning to drive away from the parking garage and disappear. He probably wouldn’t have made it.”

  Mallory studied the photos, then slipped them back in the envelope.

  “What happened?”

  “We lost him, unfortunately.” Chaplin sighed. “You understand, of course, I don’t do this sort of work any more. I have a very small staff these days, and I’m not set up for it. Otherwise, we might have attempted to stop him.”

  “I understand, and will compensate you very well, Joseph. Thank you,” Mallory said. He felt a chill of apprehension, thinking how close the bearded man in the photo had probably come to killing his brother.

  After buying Mallory’s consulting firm, Chaplin had let most of the staff go and shifted the emphasis from intelligence contracting to data mining. He ran the company now out of a two-room office in Georgetown, although the heart of the business was a Maryland warehouse computer cluster. In the old days, sleuthing involved lots of what was often called “shoe leather” work. Now, it was largely about computing power.

  “No idea who this man is?”

  “Not really. Clearly, he’s disguised. Something of an escape artist, too.”

  “What about the license plate?”

  “It’s an expired tag with a current registration sticker. The tag was registered to a Virginia man who died three years ago.”

  Chaplin walked toward the railing and gazed down at John Glenn’s Mercury Friendship 7 capsule. Mallory stood several yards away, looking toward the Lindbergh plane. “But my brother is safe,” he said.

  “He is fine, yes. And he’d like to see you.”

  “I’d like to see him.” Mallory reached into his pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper, folded in quarters. “In the meantime, I have something for you to check for me.”

  “Okay.”

  Mallory turned, did a quick scan of the gallery, and handed Chaplin the list of seven names. He then summarized in four sentences what Church had told him. “I need you to find out everything you can about those seven people. In particular, what ties them together.”

  “Where does this come from?”

  “It’s from a woman named Dr. Keri Westlake. University of Maryland. She’s the eighth name on the list. The initials at the bottom.”

  “Okay.” Chaplin re-folded the paper and pushed it into a trouser pocket.

  “How soon before I can talk with my brother?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Okay.” Good, Mallory thought.

  “As I say, this is not the sort of thing I do anymore. But considering the circumstances …”

  He was walking toward the planetarium now. Mallory watched the crowds of tourists and school groups as he walked just behind Chaplin.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  He nodded toward the Albert Einstein Theater. “I have 12:45 tickets for this.”

  “Oh.” Mallory looked up at the planetarium time board. “Okay. So what do I do?”

  They stopped as Chaplin pulled out his ticket. “You just need to be at the bus shelter on Connecticut and Teagarden at 6:17 this evening. Okay? A car will pull to the curb and pick you up. A white car. A Honda.”

  FOURTEEN

  DR. JAMES Wu SAT before a row of computer monitors in the Data Visualization Center at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, watching the infrared, color-enhanced spirals of Tropical Storm Alexander as he waited for Chief of Staff Gabriel Herring, who was already seven minutes late. Normally, Herring was easygoing and punctual. But he did not handle stress well, and there had been plenty of that in the Oval Office these past few days—for reasons Dr. Wu did not understand.

  Suddenly, the President seemed to be on high alert over the weather, of all things. In his sixteen months as presidential science adviser, Wu had never known him to show more than a passing interest in science of any sort, let alone the weather.

  The night before, Dr. Wu had informed the Oval Office about two anomalies in the development of Tropical Storm Alexander off the Cape Verde Islands. Today, he was seeing what he thought might be a third. But this one he wasn’t ready to talk about. Not yet.

  Dr. Wu was considered one of the pioneering scientists in the field of tropical storm methodology. Twenty years earlier, he had co-created a program for forecasting hurricanes and cyclones that was now widely used around the world. Dr. Wu was a prudent man with two daughters in college and a vibrant, attractive wife who taught meteorology at the University of Chicago. Although he stood barely five feet tall, Dr. Wu had become a looming figure in the world of climate science, by virtue of his almost surreally calm manner and his ability to explain complicated weather issues clearly and in layman’s terms. Dr. Wu had been adopted by the media as a voice of reason and reliable information, whenever a major hurricane threatened.

  His fascination with storms could be traced to a single event from childhood. In 1960, at the age of five, Wu had witnessed firsthand the fury of Hurricane Donna when it tore apart his family’s home and left their Miami neighborhood a pile of rubble. Donna had instilled in him a reverence for the power of nature, not just to destroy what mankind had built but also to reduce men and women to primitive versions of themselves. He’d returned to South Florida after Andrew in 1992 and seen it all over again: people thrust for weeks into a world without electricity or air conditioning, queuing up for limited rations of food and water, relieving themselves in the open.

  Dr. Wu’s parents had immigrated to the United States shortly before he was born and his family still ran the same corner grocery in North Miami Beach. His brothers and sisters had all stayed close to home, working at the store. But he had been driven by something else, something intangible, an urge to learn and better understand the natural world. He had made the weather his life’s work, leaving Florida to study meteorology at the University of Chicago, and geophysical science at the University of Colorado, where he had met Alison, his wife. Over the past three decades, Dr. Wu had flown into the eyes of more than two hundred hurricanes and written three books and countless articles on the subject. The weather had been his own peculiar route to the heart of the American Dream.

  Dr. Wu used to believe that one day the terrible destruction wrought by events such as Donna and Andrew might be preventable. But he had grown more skeptical and practical as he had aged, avoiding personal stands on controversial subjects in the increasingly political realm of weather and climate science. In his current job, he preferred to accommodate the President rather than to draw attention to himself.

  The shift at the Oval Office over the past week, though, had left him baffled, and he suspected that he was not being told the whole story. He felt it again now as Gabriel Herring finally strode into the room, a strange tilt of urgency in his face.

  “Dr. Wu,” he said. “Sorry, I’ve been with the President.” Dr. Wu nodded graciously. 12:46. Twenty-one minutes late.

  “I’m told you’ve picked up something unusual that we should be aware of? Two anomalies?”

  “Yes.” In fact, the system known as Alexander was behaving in ways that no computer models would have predicted for a Cape Verde storm. “Please,” he said. “Let me show you.”

  Dr. Wu led him to one of the computer stations; three monitors were set up side by side. He pointed to the first, at the color-enhanced swirls of Alexander, which was churning away from the Cape Verde Islands into open sea. Herring stood behind him, his hands on his hips, looking. “These images come from a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES,” Dr. Wu explained. “This is Alexander, approximately twenty-five minutes ago. An infrared, color-enhanced image. Infrared images, as you know, record invisible radiation emitted directly by cloud tops, land surfaces, or ocean surfaces.”

  “Okay. So what do the colors indicate?”

  “Heat. The warmer an object is, the
more intensely it emits radiation.” He pointed to the rows of numbers on the middle monitor.

  Wu’s steadiness only seemed to annoy Herring. “And so why do you call this unusual?”

  “Well. There are two characteristics of this storm that strike me as anomalies. Let me show you this larger image, to give this some perspective.”

  He hit several keys, calling another image up onto a four-foot wall monitor. It showed the cloud tops of the storm. “This was taken from the International Space Station. As you can see, the cloud cover now stretches across more than three hundred miles and is steadily expanding.”

  “Uh huh. Okay,” Herring said. “And what does that mean?”

  Dr. Wu smiled, patiently. “That’s your first anomaly.”

  “The size.”

  “That is correct, the size. Frankly, I have never seen a North Atlantic storm system so large at this early stage of its development.”

  Herring, watching the screen, crossed his arms.

  “Now, let me take you below the cloud cover, if I may.” Dr. Wu switched the monitor image. A different view of colored bands. “These are taken from NASA’s QuikScat and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellites. They carry microwave sensors that can in effect ‘see’ through the clouds and give us a better sense of conditions inside the storm—rainfall, wind, water temperature. A few years ago, we didn’t have the technology to do this.”

  “All right, so what are we looking at?”

  Dr. Wu felt a reciprocal impatience with Herring. I should be talking directly to the President about this, he thought. Surely my message will only become garbled in translation.

  But he managed to smile, forcing the feeling to pass. Emotions were like storm systems, he sometimes thought; if you fed them, they only grew worse.

  “This image, as you can see, gives us a snapshot of the speed and direction of ocean surface winds—”

  “You said two anomalies.”

  “That is correct, two anomalies. The first is the size, as we just discussed. And now, I am showing you the second one: water temperature,” Dr. Wu said, maintaining his calm demeanor. “A hurricane is a little like a steam engine, you see. Heat is what drives a hurricane and the spinning motion is what keeps that heat in the center of the storm.”