The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  “How did she put it, exactly?”

  “Pardon?”

  “How did she put it? Dr. Westlake.”

  “She said I should share this with someone who can do something about it. ‘Maybe you can pass this to your brother.’ ”

  Charles Mallory thought about that, trying to make sense of it. He couldn’t. “And what about the other thing?” he said. “The answer to the question you didn’t ask.”

  Jon leaned forward again and clasped his hands. He took a deliberate breath. “Okay,” he said. “This was practically the last thing she told me. That each of the people on this list had learned something. Through their work. Something he or she had found disturbing.”

  “Okay.”

  “And each of them … had begun to ask questions about it. And what they were asking questions about was, in effect, the same thing.”

  “Really.”

  Jon nodded.

  “Even though their careers and their lives didn’t seem to intersect.”

  “Right. That’s what she said. I can’t tell you how she came to that conclusion, exactly. But she obviously believes it. That each of them had become suspicious about something. Someone, actually.”

  “Someone.”

  “Yes. Someone who has been working very quietly for a number of years, apparently, consolidating research firms, R&D, doing it under various names, different foundations, corporations, and front groups. So that it wasn’t clear who it was or what exactly was happening. There was an intricate effort, in other words, to conceal patterns.”

  “But these seven people somehow saw those patterns.”

  “Yes, right.”

  “And threatened to expose them.”

  “Or had the ability to do so. That was the implication.”

  “Okay. And? This person didn’t want to be exposed because—why? There’s something illegal about what he was doing?”

  “Presumably.”

  Charlie ran through the seven names again in his head, and the sketchy details he had learned about each. “So she knows about this person, without knowing who he is.”

  Jon cleared his throat and sat forward. “No,” he said, “she does.”

  “She does. But she didn’t have a chance to tell you.”

  Jon’s dark eyes moistened. There was something in his face that Charlie had never seen before. “No, that’s the thing,” he said. “She did tell me.”

  “Oh.” Charlie tilted his head, looking at his brother with incredulity. “So you know who this person is.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I called you. That’s why I needed to disappear.”

  TWENTY

  CHARLIE SAW THE FLUSH of fear and urgency in Jon’s face.

  With privileged knowledge comes heightened responsibility. Words their father had said to him days before he died. Words that had failed to save his life.

  “She told you? You know his name.”

  “Yes. I know his name.”

  Charlie waited. “Okay.”

  Jon took a breath. His eyes widened and moved quickly around the room, from the doorway to the television to the drapes. Then he said, “His name is Vladimir Volkov.”

  “Okay.” The name meant nothing to Charlie. “Who is he?”

  “I have only a sketchy background. He’s a second-generation Russian oligarch, supposedly. A mysterious billionaire who made his fortune in oil and banking during the 1990s. Operating largely through intermediaries and shell companies. For years, he’s been investing in climate and weather research.” Jon paused. “He learns that someone is developing computer simulation models that might result in better weather tracking, or that a patent has been issued for an artificial rain process, then he learns all he can about it. If it’s viable and it’s for sale, he buys it. If not, he starts his own company and tries to produce the same results.”

  “Volkov.”

  “Vladimir Volkov.”

  “Spell it.”

  Jon did. “There’s one man in particular who does much of Volkov’s bidding in the United States, supposedly. His name is Victor Zorn. Mr. Zorn. He’s an investor and a venture capitalist.”

  Mallory made a mental note of both names. “And Dr. Westlake told you all of this? Where did she get the names?”

  “I think it came to her from someone on the list. I don’t know who, although, from what she said, I think it might have been the last person.”

  “Dr. Atul Pradhan.”

  “Yes.”

  “This Victor Zorn,” Charlie said. “He’s American?”

  “Yes. Based in California. Also very low profile and secretive. Dr. Westlake had been trying to learn more about Victor Zorn. She had attempted to contact him.”

  “Okay.” Charlie nodded. “And what’s wrong with someone doing what he’s doing?”

  “Pardon?”

  “I mean, buying up companies, supporting R&D. If he didn’t want to be so private about it, wouldn’t Time magazine put him on their cover and call him a visionary?”

  “Well, there’s the list, for one thing. The chain.”

  “Dr. Westlake thinks Volkov is responsible for those disappearances?”

  “Yes. And she was also told that his business is not all necessarily above board. Supposedly, he has used intimidation tactics and industrial espionage to close some of his deals.” Jon sat forward, glanced at the door.

  “And what kind of person is she? I mean, does she think LBJ was in on the Kennedy assassination, for example?”

  Jon showed his first real smile. “No. No, I’ve known a few conspiracy nuts over the years. She’s not like that. But she’s genuinely afraid. I think she received a threat just before she gave me this list.”

  Charlie thought about that. “Okay. And what else did she say about him?”

  “Volkov? She said that he is a very brilliant man who tends to get what he wants. He’s ahead of the game because no one else is playing at the level he is. Or even able to recognize it.”

  “But somehow these seven people did?”

  “Or some part of it. That’s what she thinks. I don’t know. I haven’t been able to figure out what it might be.”

  “Why didn’t Dr. Westlake tell anybody else about this?”

  “She did. Including police.”

  “Okay.” Charlie absently chomped on a carrot, thinking. “So, if something happened to these people, it’s because they became a threat to Volkov’s operation. Or because they threatened to draw attention to it.”

  “Presumably.” Jon watched his brother as if expecting him to solve a difficult puzzle for him.

  “And what else does Dr. Westlake know about Volkov? Where does he live, for instance?”

  Jon shrugged. “He has a home in Russia, but supposedly lives there only a few weeks, or months, of the year. Only when the weather is pleasant. She thinks he has a very cultured exterior, but is quite ruthless underneath. Also, he supposedly carries some weight at the Kremlin.”

  “With the government.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Mmm, no. Not really.”

  Charlie nodded. “Well, it’s a big story, isn’t it? Maybe we can work on it together.”

  Jon nodded, lifted his eyebrows. I’ll do whatever I can to help, Charlie thought. But, more importantly, to keep Jon safe.

  “Let Chaplin provide security for you. You can reach me through him. But just lie low for a while. Okay?” He stood and pressed Chaplin’s number on his cell phone, letting it ring once. “You’ve handled this in the right way,” Charlie added.

  Jon shruged and nodded.

  “You been okay, otherwise?”

  “Until this, fine.”

  “Good,” he said. “How’s Melanie?”

  “Oh.”

  Charlie smiled. He reached to shake his brother’s hand. “Take care,” he said. He turned and glanced around the room, taking in the newspapers, the vegetables, Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains on the television. Two knocks on the do
or broke the slightly awkward silence.

  Chaplin began to accompany Charlie back to the stairway. Mallory stopped.

  “I’ll be okay,” he said. “Look out for my brother. Stay with him. And please find out all you can on these two names.” He handed him a card. He had written on it Vladimir Volkov and Victor Zorn. “I need it ASAP.”

  Chaplin frowned at the card.

  “All right?”

  “Yes. But I’d advise against you going back outside yourself without any cover,” he said, reverting to the formal business tone he used with clients. “We have arranged a ride for you.”

  Mallory smiled. He shook Chaplin’s hand and walked to the elevator. Took it down to the lobby, without looking back, and walked out into the blustery Washington night until he found a taxi cab.

  11:24 P.M.

  The 14-ton freighter ship MS Kassel plowed through the churning North Atlantic sea at a steady 18 knots. The ocean had been rough for the first four days of their nine-day crossing, with ten-foot waves and miles of white water, but the winds had died down over the past twenty-four hours and the journey ahead promised to be much smoother. The 705-foot-long German ship was more than halfway across its ocean passage now, with a final destination of Savannah, Georgia. On board was a cargo of 780 forty-foot shipping containers, filled with industrial machinery, steel, furniture and Fiat automobiles. It was still well ahead of Tropical Storm Alexander, the monster storm that seemed to be chasing it from afar.

  Dieter Gerhard had captained this ship for eleven years; before that, he had crossed the ocean hundreds of times on various other freighters. Life on the water had become the norm for Dieter and the sea now felt like his home; the roots he’d planted on land had all been pulled up long ago—his marriage dissolved, his children gone. It was at times like this, alone in the pilothouse late at night, with the seemingly infinite expanse of ocean surrounding him, its swells reflecting the muted lights from the sky and moon, that he felt alive, connected to the wild, sublime elemental realities that most people never experienced—or could understand.

  He stepped onto the deck for several minutes wearing his yellow raincoat, under the shelter of the pilothouse overhang, and smoked a Davidoff cigarette, watching the water. Looking out at the rain slanting in the moonlight. Thinking about nothing in particular. Being here was empowering and humbling, both at the same time: the constant motion, the subtle shifts, the sheer size—70 percent of Earth was covered by ocean, going as deep as seven miles below the sea’s surface. This distance they were traveling now—from Germany to Savannah—was more than double the distance across the United States. Those were the kinds of spaces that humbled Dieter and gave him perspective, that made most of what people thought and worried about seem trivial. They had become his version of religion.

  Dieter was back in the pilothouse making a routine check of GPS coordinates when he happened to glance up and saw something that shouldn’t have been there—what looked at first to be a giant white mountain rising up out of the ocean.

  But it couldn’t be.

  No. Of course not. There was no land around for hundreds of miles. And certainly no icebergs this far south.

  But there it was. To the starboard side of the ship’s bow. What the hell is it?

  He flicked on the rows of deck lights and squinted through the glass, stunned by what he saw. It was a giant wave of water, rising up out of what had been a relatively calm night sea. No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. He had seen freak waves over the years, clashing systems of deep ocean currents and sudden mighty winds. But he had never heard of a rogue wave this large.

  He lifted his radio and accessed the marine band channel, then the marine VHF radio frequency. “Mayday, Mayday. This is MS Kassel,” he shouted, speaking in German, and then gave his coordinates. He knew he was in serious danger; that his ship was going to be severely damaged by this. Part of him even knew it wasn’t going to survive. Dieter was still speaking into the radio when the wave came over the Kassel broadside, blowing out the windows of the pilothouse, and then collapsing over the deck, splitting the ship into the trough of another wave as if it were a toy.

  IN WASHINGTON, DR. Wu was thinking about his wife, Alison, and their two daughters—Kim, who had just begun her senior year of college at Princeton, and Melinda, who was a sophomore at the University of Maryland—when he received an electronic alert that two more distress calls had been picked up in the North Atlantic Sea, one from air traffic control frequencies, the other from the Coast Guard. Dr. Wu added them to the four from the day before, knowing what it was. The third anomaly.

  Rogue waves—giant, spontaneous ocean waves that sprang up out of the deep seas, reaching heights topping a hundred feet—were once thought to be nothing more than legends related by wily sea captains, akin to reports of sea serpents. But they were now widely accepted as real, even if their origins were not well understood.

  Over the past twenty years, about two hundred super cargo ships had been lost at sea, some of them to freak waves. Now, in just the past day—since Tropical Storm Alexander had formed in the North Atlantic Sea—there had been six reports of cargo ships lost in the deep ocean.

  Dr. Wu typed a subject line on his handheld monitor: THIRD ANOMALY. He began to address his note to Gabriel Herring but then thought better of it, remembering his promise to himself. Instead, he called Herring. This time, he wanted to brief the President personally. But more importantly, he wanted to ask the President what was really going on.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tuesday, October 4, 7:01 A.M.

  CATHERINE BLAINE UNLOCKED HER fourth-story office in a nondescript building on K Street downtown. She twisted open the blinds a crack, then sat at her desk and glanced through the morning’s Washington Post, seeing that the tornadoes in France were at the bottom of page one. She flipped through the “A” section. Found a story on page fourteen about the Cape Verde storm: MONSTER STORM FORMS IN ATLANTIC.

  Nine minutes later, she walked down the stairway and came out in the lower level of the parking garage, where Jamie Griffith had left a rental car for her. A silver Ford Focus. The keys were underneath the mat.

  She was playing hide and seek again with the Secret Service, but on occasions like this it felt justified. The issue was freedom, she had decided. The need to find information on her own. She drove to the Beltway, then took 95 north toward Baltimore, getting off in the suburb of Towson, following the directions she’d printed out for the Environmental Physics Research Laboratories, where Dr. Sanchez worked.

  At this hour, there were only three other cars in the lot of the single-story, beige-brick building. She recognized one of them—a beat-up old brown Toyota Corolla that looked as if it hadn’t been washed for a year. Blaine smiled to herself as she walked to the entrance, wondering if she should write “Wash Me” with her finger on the back window.

  It was two minutes after 8 A.M. and the office didn’t open for another hour, so Blaine banged on the front doors until she saw him coming, walking with his intense and slightly prissy swagger. He was wearing a loose-fitting dashiki and flip-flops.

  “My god. How’d you get loose?” he said, holding the door for her. He poked his head outside and looked one direction then the other. “I mean, where’s your entourage? Bodyguards and all that?”

  “Gave them the slip.”

  “Goodness,” he said, and engulfed her in a hug. “Come on back. Please. Your questions have got me thinking. Tea?”

  “Sure.” His office was large but impossibly cluttered, with tottering piles of books and magazines, precariously balanced boxes, scattered folders, and a variety of antique musical instruments. Among his many interests, Dr. Sanchez collected antique string instruments, many of which he had learned to play. Charts, memos, emails, and newspaper clippings were tacked on the wood-paneled walls, most of them yellowed, along with maps of various sizes and locales. Three computer monitors were lined up on a work station and a much larger monitor stood on a table bes
ide it.

  “I’ve been working on your questions since five thirty. I have to say, they interest me a great deal.”

  Blaine smiled. Dr. Sanchez was still one of the smartest weather scientists anywhere, although he didn’t do politics too well. He was in some ways the opposite of Dr. Wu, who had a skill for sounding reasonable and for saying the right thing. Dr. Sanchez had worked for NASA, NOAA, and Lawrence Livermore labs, and, for one year, had been a professor of atmospheric science at Columbia’s Earth Institute. But he didn’t get along well with other people, and each job had involved some degree of confrontation with his employers and co-workers. As he grew older, Sanchez seemed to divide people into two categories—those he liked and those he didn’t like. Blaine was one of the privileged few who still resided in the former category.

  “Have a seat. Just clear that off there,” he said, flapping a hand at the sofa. For a moment his head jerked to the side, as if he were trying to shake water from his ear. It was a tic he had, which occurred every few minutes.

  Blaine set down her briefcase, and pushed aside papers and a crusty old beach towel, clearing a spot to sit. Sanchez poured them each green tea in plastic tea cups and then sat on a creaky wooden swivel chair and kicked off his flip flops.

  “Science begins with questions, yes?” he said, smiling. His personal appearance—full beard, long white hair tied back in a ponytail—and surprising childlike enthusiasms only seemed to accentuate his eccentricity. “And you’ve asked some interesting ones.”

  “All hypothetical, of course.”

  “Of course, of course.” He winked. “And when we’re finished, I’d like to tell you something hypothetical, a theory that may or may not be relevant to what you’re asking me.”

  Blaine sipped her tea as he walked to the computer station and sat.