She felt a cold sweat ripple over her skin. “Help!” She turned and tried to scream. But nothing came out. No one was there to console her. Why? Why had this happened?
The worst part was the silence. The lack of answers. There was not even a wind anymore, just stagnant air that was beginning to smell like death. Louise walked on into the shredded valley, trying to scream. Listening for a human sound but hearing only the silence. Imagining that she was the last person left alive on Earth.
SEVENTEEN
CATHERINE BLAINE FELT NUMB as she pulled through the White House gates near Fifteenth Street and parked in one of the VIP spaces. She checked in at the security booth, and was escorted inside by a Secret Service officer and through the French doors into the Cabinet Room. Name plates for each of the Cabinet members were on the backs of the chairs. The President’s chair, centered on the east side of the table, stood two inches taller than those of the Cabinet secretaries. Outside, a light rain blurred the Rose Garden.
Blaine felt the weight of history as she took her seat at the large mahogany table that dominated the room, a gift from President Nixon in 1970, beneath three pendant lights. This was the room where President Kennedy had deliberated about the Bay of Pigs. Where the Bush 43 Cabinet had convened the day after 9/11.
And now they had their crisis.
The “circle” shared a sober silence before the President signaled the start with a sigh. “This is clearly the event we were warned about,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information in yet. But Harold will first share what we do know.”
DeVries recited the grim details. A series of three deadly tornadoes had ripped through the Picardy region of France, near the border with Belgium. “We’re still receiving damage assessments and there are some contradictory reports. The latest number we have is eighty-nine confirmed fatalities. That number will certainly go up.” DeVries glanced at Blaine with his dark sober eyes. “The deadliest tornado in French history occurred in 1845, killing approximately one hundred. The reports we are getting from the ground in Picardy are putting this disaster at probably two to three times that, with a huge loss of property.”
Blaine was thinking something else, though. Something she’d thought earlier.
“The words ‘Western Europe’,” she said, to fill the silence. “That’s a little odd, isn’t it? It’s a geographical area, but not often used in that context; it also has a political connotation, from the Cold War, doesn’t it? Eastern Europe. Western Europe.”
DeVries nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought of that. Good observation.”
“Needless to say, we will be offering our aid to them,” the President said, switching subjects. “I’ve already talked with the French president and we are issuing a joint statement later this afternoon.”
Blaine sensed the underlying frustration in his tone. There was a routine to this now and a sense of helplessness. She had to find out more on her own. This was a president who thought big, and she suddenly sensed that he might even have a parallel agenda that he wasn’t sharing.
Clark Easton was uncharacteristically quiet, his arms on the table. Several times he glanced at Blaine.
“Looking at patterns,” DeVries said, “two of the three follow-up messages came within twenty-four hours of the events.”
“So we’ll be back here again in a few hours,” Blaine said.
“Probably. And I hope we’ll have a clearer direction then,” said the President. “Any thoughts? Questions?”
There was a deadly silence in the room. Even the rain seemed to go quiet.
“Okay. Two additional items, then,” President Hall said. “We’ve had a report from the Janus Task Force that I’d like to share with you. The Vice President just brought this to my attention. They’ve picked up some additional electronic surveillance linking Janus to Chinese intelligence. As recently as last week. I don’t know if that will help us much, but I just want everyone to be up to speed. We’ll all receive briefings on it this afternoon. There’s a feeling that we may be closing in on him, anyway.”
Blaine saw DeVries lower his eyes and shake his head, as if momentarily disgusted. Easton rubbed the palms of his hands together.
“And secondly, as you know, we’ve got a storm out there in the North Atlantic right now that we need to be watching very closely. This thing’s come out of nowhere and is developing in ways we haven’t seen before.”
Blaine watched the President as he relayed the news that Dr. Wu had shared with the Oval Office earlier about Tropical Storm Alexander, feeling a shared tension.
Two anomalies.
And then it was over and they stood to return to their lives. Until the next message. The next meeting.
As they were leaving the Cabinet Room, DeVries caught her eye. Blaine lingered for a moment beside her chair, timing it so they would be at the doorway together.
“Talk for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Come on up. I’m heading to my office.”
THE AFTERNOON AIR had turned crisp and the leaves were falling in the Virginia suburbs. Charles Mallory felt the delicious autumn breeze through the screen of his third-story hotel room as he ran Internet searches on the seven names, fighting off a nostalgic urge to daydream—growing up nearby, playing football every autumn; the way that life used to narrow down to a single, clear objective each fall as the team got better and the season’s end grew more tangible.
He had, in fact, found two more connections among the seven names, although they were not necessarily important ones. Two of the seven had worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government organization that studied hurricanes, and both had been involved in a computer analysis operation known as Project Cloudcover, though in different parts of the country.
The reason that this particularly interested Mallory was that he knew a former CIA analyst who had also been involved in Cloudcover—a woman named Patricia Hanratty. Whether she would talk with him was a different matter. But Mallory found a number for her and left a message.
Then he closed up his computer and walked out into the afternoon breeze, so that he could meet his ride at the Connecticut Avenue bus shelter at 6:17, to take him to his brother.
EIGHTEEN
HAROLD DEVRIES LED BLAINE through the steel and concrete tunnel from the White House back into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Originally known as the State, War, and Navy Building, the EEOB was one of Washington’s most historic buildings, a stunning example of French Second Empire architecture, which had taken seventeen years to build. Not everyone had been taken by its ornamental façade, though. Harry Truman called it “the greatest monstrosity in America.”
They walked up the granite stairs to the intelligence director’s satellite office on the second floor. The marble echoed with their footfalls as they approached his office down an empty hallway. The cavernous space felt a little eerie to Blaine.
DeVries was in his early fifties now but retained the alert expression of a much younger man, as if life were a puzzle that he was perpetually on the verge of solving.
“Pardon the mess,” he said, closing his office door. “I’m not used to conducting meetings here. Try to make yourself at home.”
Blaine looked around and smiled. It was a functional office. Small, cluttered, only slightly larger than the one she’d been given on the fourth floor. Computer, phone, file cabinets, boxes. Nothing like his high-tech office at Liberty Crossing. She sat in the old leather armchair.
“So.” DeVries leaned back in his swivel chair behind the desk and watched her. “I take it you’re on board now.”
“You can still read me pretty well, can’t you?”
“I guess I can. I didn’t completely believe it at first, either. I don’t know that any of us did. I think we’re hard-wired to think there has to be some other explanation. Coincidence. Hoax.”
Blaine nodded. “I’m sorry I questioned the intelligence earlier. I didn’t mean to put yo
u on the spot.”
“No, no offense, Cate.” He chuckled. “Believe me, I’ve envisioned the headlines. ‘Eighty billion dollar intelligence community misses global threat.’ ‘Massive intelligence blunder cited.’ I’m cognizant that it ultimately comes back on me.”
“What do you think?”
“What do I think?”
“Yeah. What do you really think it is?”
He made a face, and swiveled to one side. “I don’t know, Cate,” he said, his voice softening. “I’ve been around and around about that. I think we’re engaged in a new sort of warfare. But I hate to speculate beyond that. I think it’s what the President said earlier. If someone cared about weather science as much as the United States did about sending a man to the moon in the 1960s, and they had the funding and the smarts, and I suppose the ruthlessness, they could probably make this happen.”
“Someone?”
He shrugged. “A country.”
“China?”
“Maybe. Or a sophisticated business consortium of some kind, maybe connected with the Chinese government.” He frowned at her. “You said yesterday it’s theoretically possible. It could happen.”
“If the funding were there, yes, it probably could. Although not all scientists would agree.”
He let his gaze linger ambiguously. It reminded Blaine of how he used to flirt with her, years before. And how sometimes she had responded, always pulling back before it led anywhere. DeVries and his wife Faye had been married for twenty-seven years and as far as she knew it was a good marriage, with two grown children, a son and daughter, both of whom were Washington attorneys.
“And we really don’t have the ingenuity to figure this out?” she said. “I mean, how they’re doing it.” She flashed again to the grainy images she had just seen of the mutilated corpses strewn across the French countryside and felt sick.
“We’re working on it around the clock, Cate. With each event, there have been physical clues. Changes in air pressure, changes in the atmosphere, physical alterations in the sky. But we haven’t been able to isolate a location or locations yet.”
“Is it Janus?”
“I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no.”
Blaine turned her eyes away, feeling frustrated. “And you’re comfortable that we’re handling this right?”
“I think we have an obligation to be as thorough as we can,” he said. “But also to be united. To follow the President’s lead.”
“It doesn’t bother you that we’re keeping it so reined in, before this small group?”
He was frowning as if he didn’t understand. “No, that’s how you handle a crisis, Cate. You don’t do it out in the open.” He showed his cagey smile, but it seemed misplaced this time, as if he were being disingenuous. “Let’s wait for the next message. I have a feeling we’ll be getting something else tomorrow. Be patient. Go along with it, Cate. Don’t question too much unless it’s necessary.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
As she walked to the stairway, Blaine thought about the system she was a part of, reminding herself that it operated as it did for a reason—that decades of wisdom and trial and error had gone into its making. So why did it seem so flawed and inefficient at times? She’d been at odds with her father over that question. “Rules exist for a reason,” he used to tell her. “Individual commitment to a group effort is what makes society work.” Maybe. She still sometimes wondered about that.
The early evening sky was thick with dark rainclouds, the cool air breezing up. Blaine added the numbers again as she walked along West Executive Drive to her car in the light rain, and came up with 3,700. The approximate number of people who had died in the “unnatural” disasters since the email warnings began.
NINETEEN
A WHITE HONDA PULLED to the curb in front of the Connecticut Avenue bus shelter, its emergency lights blinking as it slowed to a stop. Charles Mallory stepped forward and opened the back door. He slid inside. The driver was a man Mallory didn’t recognize.
Two switches followed, both deep inside parking garages in the city, before he came to a third garage beneath a Howard Johnson’s hotel downtown, where Mallory stepped out of the back seat of a gray Camry and saw Joseph Chaplin standing by the stairwell. He wore an all-black suit and tie, and looked like an undertaker.
“Greetings,” Chaplin said.
“Greetings.”
The set-up was the kind Chaplin had arranged countless times. It assumed there were watchers. And maybe watchers watching the watchers. It was designed to find the watchers and also to elude them, although Mallory didn’t think anyone was following him in Washington. Not yet.
Chaplin entered the stairwell first, leading him to a room on the third floor. He knocked twice. Then inserted a key card. He held the door open, as Charlie stepped in. The door closed, Chaplin still in the hall.
Charlie saw his brother walk toward him across the unlit room, wearing old jeans and an oversized Georgetown sweat shirt. He reached out to shake, tentatively at first, then more firmly. Jon’s hair was much longer than he remembered.
People who saw Jon and Charles together were often surprised to learn that they were brothers. Mallory was taller, blond, fair-skinned and sharper featured, with slate-blue eyes. Jon’s eyes and hair were dark. He lacked the agile movements and physical dexterity of his older brother, possessing a slight awkwardness of manner that had actually worked to his advantage sometimes as a reporter. They seemed the products of two different families, if not nationalities.
The Mallorys had been opposites in their trades, as well. Jon was an outsider, a keeper of stories, who used journalism as his passport into the realm of international issues. Charlie had been on the inside for years, working as a government intelligence operative before starting his own contracting business and, eventually, retiring. Only rarely had the two crossed paths in recent years.
“So,” Charlie said. “How has my man Chaplin been treating you?”
Jon shrugged.
“Okay?”
“Other than kidnapping me from a crowded street corner, I have no complaints.”
Charlie smiled. “He says it was for your own good, though.”
Jon clucked his tongue.
“Anyway, he apologized, right?”
“He did.”
Charlie sat on the easy chair by the desk and took in the room: king-size bed with duvet covers, bedside tables, wall mirror, tan cloth sofa, chest of drawers. The drapes were drawn. A laptop was open on the bed, newspaper sections strewn on the floor, a medium-sized suitcase beside the bed, unzipped. On the chest were several magazines, paperbacks by Michael Connelly and John LeCarre, and his beat-up old Complete Shakespeare from college. Casablanca played silently on the television. Chaplin had set out a silver tray with bottles of water and orange juice on the desk, along with a plate of cheeses and vegetables. Typical Chaplin.
“So,” Charlie said, seeing the wariness in his brother’s face. “How have you been, anyway?”
“Me? Good.”
“Good.”
“You? You look good.”
“Thanks. Early retirement was treating me well.”
Jon frowned.
“I meant it sort of ironically,” Charlie added.
“Oh.”
Jon coughed, standing stiffly. “So? I mean, have you been able to figure any of this out?”
“Not much. Please. Have a seat,” Charlie said, indicating the sofa. He reached over for a carrot, ate it in two bites.
Jon finally sat, and leaned back. Then, as if reconsidering, he hunched forward. “You talked with Church.”
“I did. He gave me your list. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about this story. About what Dr. Westlake told you.”
Jon nodded. When he didn’t say anything else, Charlie said, “How did all this come about? How do you know about this list? How do you know Dr. Westlake?”
“I don’t know her. I mean—I interviewed her. We emai
led back and forth a few times.” Jon looked at him sideways and, for a moment, Charlie saw their mother’s dark eyes gazing back at him. “Our common interest was geo-engineering. She was concerned about a certain research project based in California that was happening under the radar, so to speak. She reached out to me, actually, telling me this. I was supposed to meet with her last Friday.”
“But she went missing.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
Charlie held out the vegetable tray for his brother, who shook his head. “She answered a question you didn’t ask.”
“Right.”
“We’ve gone through the list you left,” Charlie said. “Chaplin and I ran some data searches on the names, as you probably have. Church did, too. There are a few loose connections we’re following up on. But, unfortunately, there’s no clear intersection among them yet. No sense that their paths ever crossed.”
“I know.”
“But Dr. Westlake thought that there was something tying these people together.”
“Yes. She knew there was,” Jon said.
“Okay.”
“It’s just that it’s very difficult to prove.”
“All right.” Charlie ate another carrot, waiting for Jon to say more. “And she considered herself the last name on the list.”
“Yes.” Jon leaned back again. “When she went missing, I realized I was probably part of this list, too. If Dr. Westlake was number eight, I was number nine.”
“Because of what she told you.”
“Right.” There was another silence. “Also, she suggested I contact you.”
“She did?”
“Yes.”
That was odd. Charles Mallory had never met Dr. Keri Westlake. Had never even heard of her until the day before. His brother watched him, reminding Charlie of how he used to occasionally stare when they were kids; when he’d done something wrong and expected his older brother to help him fix it.
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