The Leviathan Effect

by James Lilliefors

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know what happened before Rorbach was killed?” she said again, her voice rising. “To me?” His face went through a subtle transformation, his brow creasing. “He abducted and sexually assaulted me. He beat me and intended to kill me. The only reason he didn’t, I think, is because he wanted to assault me more later.”

  The President’s frown deepened. “Cate, what are you talking about?”

  Blaine reached into her purse and took out the list. The seven names. Now nine.

  “I just want to show you this. I think this is why he did what he did to me.”

  She unfolded the sheet of paper and set it in front of the President. The original seven names, followed by Drs. Westlake and Sanchez.

  The President seemed to study it carefully. Then he pushed it back toward her. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Does it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to tell you?”

  “All right.”

  He leaned back in his chair and listened as she told him about Leviathan, and about the nine people who had been killed or disappeared because of what they knew. It was a story that began more than a decade earlier with intelligence reports about storm mitigation research in Russia and China. A story that encompassed the email threats and “natural” disasters. A story which had apparently ended several hours ago in the woods of Rock Creek Park, when Rorbach was killed.

  The President watched attentively as she spoke. When she finished, he lifted the sheet of paper again, studied the names and set it down.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s a dramatic story, Cate.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s a lot for me to process right now.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re telling me this as we’re heading into what my scientists are saying may be the worst natural disaster in our nation’s history.”

  “Yes. I know that, sir.”

  “At this moment, with all due respect—and I do respect you a great deal, Cate, you know that. But at this moment, why should I care about what sounds to me like a serious police matter?”

  “It’s not a police matter, sir. And the reason you should care is because there’s nothing we can do about the storm anymore except get out of its way. And also because this may be the only time we have to get Easton.”

  The President’s thoughts were elsewhere, with another chess game in his head. “ ‘Get’ him?”

  “Yes. Easton doesn’t know what we know,” Blaine said. “He may not even know that I’m still alive. We probably have an advantage right now because of that. Once he knows, he might flee.”

  “Flee?”

  “Flee.”

  She stared at the President until he was really with her again, angry, disliking him all of a sudden. “He might,” he said. “Although, as you know, no planes are flying right now, Cate.”

  “They’re still flying out of Boston. And Chicago. And as soon as this thing passes, God willing, they’ll be flying out of Washington again. He may be waiting it out.”

  “Cate, it’s not important,” he said, and then seemed to check himself. “I mean, in the context of everything else. Can you let it go until we get past this thing?”

  Blaine took a deep breath. “No,” she said. She stood and looked outside at the South Lawn.

  “I’m sorry, Cate. I don’t mean to seem insensitive. I’m very sorry about what happened. Okay?” He waited for her to turn. “So. What are you suggesting?” he said, more softly.

  “Send Easton a very specific message. Tell him the mitigation is working. Make it seem like it’s a meeting of the inner circle.”

  “And then?”

  “Bring him in.”

  The President looked past her. “For what?”

  “I think you could start with a charge of vandalism,” Blaine said. “Deliberately corrupting government-owned SME-PED electronic devices. From there you could go right up to espionage and murder.”

  “No,” he said, barely audible. “No, I have one little problem with that scenario, Cate. And I guess I might as well tell you what it is.” The President’s eyes narrowed. He regarded Blaine for a long time before he said anything. “We can’t do it that way, Cate. I’m sorry. Not at this point.”

  “Why? Why can’t you do it that way?”

  He shook his head and averted his eyes. Blaine sat again, flushed with anger. Waiting. Come on, talk to me. What’s really going on here?

  “You told me yourself you were building a case,” she said.

  “Yes. I did.” She watched him as he looked at the backs of his fingers, struggling with what he was going to tell her. “We have been building a case, Cate, but I didn’t say it was against Easton.”

  “Against whom?”

  “We’ve been building a case against Rorbach. And Zorn. It seems as if you’ve accelerated it considerably.”

  “But Easton was pulling Rorbach’s strings. He’s the one who brought him in to the Leviathan Project. He’s the reason these nine people were killed.” She felt her heart racing, felt herself starting to lose control. What the hell was really going on here?

  “We don’t know that, Cate. And it’s going to be impossible to prove.”

  “Yes, we do know it.”

  “No. We can’t do it that way, Cate.” A steely look came in his eyes. “Do you know what distinguishes this country from every other country on the planet, Cate? It’s our capacity to imagine—and then to use what we imagine to create new technologies. Other countries have occasionally taken what we’ve created and done it better. But it starts with us. What’s going on across the street right now could change the nature of science. And it could change history.”

  “What does that have to do with anything we’re talking about?”

  “The case is against Rorbach, Cate. And Zorn.”

  “No. It’s against Easton.”

  He looked away again, his mouth flattening. Blaine felt her eyes misting with anger. “As I said, I have a problem with that scenario, Cate, and I guess I’m going to have to tell you what it is.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

  “I told you that we know about Volkov because we have a source. An informant.”

  “Yes. You did.”

  She watched him, leaning forward. Her heart racing again.

  “Easton is our source on this.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. He’s the informant.”

  1:18 P.M.

  Stray bands of Alexander’s western edge were already cutting savage dents into the Chesapeake Bay, with wind gusts topping seventy miles an hour, tearing off tree limbs and breaking apart billboards, scattering debris across the Eastern Shore roadways. In dozens of low-lying areas, storm surge had flooded farm fields and rural roads. Three of the five lanes of the two Chesapeake Bay bridge spans were open to westbound traffic only and another, reversible lane, had been reserved for emergency vehicles.

  Mallory listened on the radio as he inched through the rolling country back to the Pike Motel. Several miles away, he began to hear a deep rumbling sound, as if the earth were shaking from giant trucks. But there were no other vehicles out in the storm. He turned off the radio and slowed to a stop, thinking it might be his car. He watched the beating rain, thinking. He was startled out of his thoughts by a spectacular display of lightning over the waterlogged farm fields—what seemed like hundreds of tentacles of light shooting down from the clouds.

  He drove on and came at last to the motel parking lot. He turned off the engine and waited. Felt the rumbling again as if it were inside the car. A strange, deep, continuous thunder. He looked at the sky above the motel sign, saw the silent lightning flashes jumping from cloud to cloud, dozens of them. Hundreds. He closed his eyes, and the lightning’s afterglows seemed to linger, becoming shapes inside his retina. When he looked again, the shapes were still there—giant stick figures walking across the flooded farmland. Mallory g
athered his groceries and ran through the rain, up to the motel’s third floor, feeling the phone vibrating in his pocket as he went.

  THE LAST OF the three thirty-six-foot-long Predator B-003 UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, punctured the western eye wall of Hurricane Alexander at 220 miles per hour shortly after 2 P.M. eastern time. Once it reached the eye, the plane dropped its cargo into the storm, a thousand gallons of synthetic bacteria.

  The plane then reversed course, beginning the return flight to its base in central California. But the plane, which was designed to stay aloft for thirty-six hours, did not make it back through the western eye wall. As with the previous two Predator B-003s, each of which carried a $5 million price tag, the third drone became ensnared in a furious net of wind and lightning, which pulled it from its programmed course like a giant, electrified Venus fly trap, and brought it down into a turbulent sea.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  2:08 P.M.

  “FOURTH SERIES OF PULSES has been activated.”

  Dr. Clayton stood hunched over the row of computer monitors in his rumpled clothes. A headset fed information into his ears, a stream of data from the private satellite operation in California.

  His eyes were perpetually intent—although he seemed, to Dr. Wu, disconnected from reality. Unaware of the others in the room or of the carnage that had already been inflicted in the Carolinas. A man who had spent too much time staring into computer models.

  Dr. Wu stood behind him, beside Gabriel Herring, the President’s chief of staff, trying to fend off feelings of impatience and anger. Both he and Herring, Wu noticed, had their arms crossed in exactly the same manner, right hand cradling left bicep. Dr. Wu self-consciously uncrossed his arms and let them dangle at his sides.

  “Some variance now in central pressure,” Dr. Clayton announced, moments later, his eyes still on the monitor.

  Herring frowned at Dr. Wu, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Wu had not, in fact, detected any changes over the past ninety minutes that were anything but routine. The storm, despite the series of solar laser “pulses” that had been fired into its eye wall, seemed to Dr. Wu nearly unchanged, still churning toward the mid-Atlantic coast on a deadly, uncompromising track.

  He felt uneasy and a little dishonest being there, surprised that the President had sanctioned this. Dr. Wu did not share Clayton’s optimism. Couldn’t share it, even though he would have loved to have found a way to prevent what was coming. But the available data simply did not warrant optimism at this point. Dr. Wu believed in science, and he believed in numbers. The science did not in any way validate what Clayton, or the President, thought possible. But Dr. Wu also found himself fighting a darker emotion roiling inside of him. Beyond the issue of realistic outcomes, he resented the steadiness and unwarranted self-assurance of Dr. Clayton. Wu knew that these efforts would almost certainly fail; but another part of him also wanted them to fail. Wanted the sort of speculative science that Dr. Clayton had advocated and become known for to be dealt a knockout blow. Dr. Wu harbored a basic difference with Clayton, which reflected nothing so much as a difference in how their minds worked; he carefully and realistically weighed the available data, and did not draw attention to himself by wagering on outcomes that were scientifically unlikely or impossible. It was a fundamental difference.

  Dr. Wu turned toward the window, noticing that the drifting clouds had all but turned the sky black.

  “Eerie, isn’t it?” said Herring. “Looks like it’s nine o’clock at night.”

  “UAV cargo delivered,” Clayton announced, typing something on one of the keyboards, his back to them, his legs bent as if he were a runner waiting for the starter pistol to sound. Then he sighed heavily and cussed.

  “What is it?” said Herring.

  “Contact with third plane lost.”

  “Lost,” said Dr. Wu, snapping back to the present.

  “That’s three drones lost?” said Gabriel Herring.

  “Contact lost,” said Dr. Clayton. “May just be malfunctioning.”

  Dr. Wu felt a chill up his back, recalling his friend David Quinn, who had perished with his crew in the belly of Alexander three days ago. Heard his final words again: Not sure what we’re seeing … faces … figures … Not getting out of this. He thought about his wife Alison and his youngest daughter Melinda, who were driving west through the rain, probably nearing Ohio by now, if they hadn’t already arrived. Thought of the possibility that he would be caught here. No, he had to get out. He couldn’t let this monster defeat him. Dr. Wu told himself to focus, to study the satellite images as the storm continued to send its sentinels ahead of it, as if to deliver the dire warnings about what was really coming.

  “How long now?”

  Clayton seem not to have heard.

  “How long?” Dr. Wu said again.

  “The lasers? Close to an hour and a half.”

  No. Dr. Wu glanced at the clock and saw that it had actually been an hour and forty-three minutes. Funny the way some people fudged the facts unnecessarily when their expectations were raised, as if molding them around what they desired rather than around the truth.

  There were several inconsequential changes in the new series of readings from the National Hurricane Center, he noticed. Signifying nothing.

  Feeling dizzy, Dr. Wu excused himself and took the marble stairway down to the first floor, his footsteps echoing in the ornate, cavernous stairwell, his breathing accelerated. He stepped outside under an awning, breathing the cold air and gazing toward the National Mall. He listened to the pounding of the rain, the sweep of the wind. The rain-swollen air carried a burning scent now, it seemed, like sulfur or cordite. Suddenly, then, a series of bright lights exploded in the sky to the south, startling him. Lightning. Highly charged webs of electricity, shooting haphazardly above the darkness like short circuits. Dr. Wu stared, his eyes transfixed. And then the light began to do funny things—the afterglows forming strange and twisted images inside his eyelids; images that, improbably, grew more defined as he closed his eyes. Giant figures were running mischievously across the lawn. Insanity. James Wu wasn’t sure, then, if his eyes were even opened or closed, if what he was seeing was in the sky or his imagination. He turned toward the Washington Monument and a spontaneous fountain of light seemed to catch fire in the dark clouds overhead, their undersides burning, the sky becoming a dull orange and then black. This time, in the afterglow, he saw the outlines of a face coalescing in the clouds, its features sharpening for several moments, becoming increasingly lifelike. He closed his eyes, but the face was still there, even clearer. The face of David Quinn. Smart, steady. A brilliant man. But his expression wasn’t smart right now, it was terrified. Dr. Wu opened his eyes and he became blinded by the show of light igniting the clouds in all directions; he stumbled away, grasping for something to hold onto, realizing that he could no longer see.

  2:29 P.M.

  Charles Mallory dumped his groceries on the table in Room 321. There were about a dozen cars in the lot now, more than the day before. The motel Chaplin had found for him was near Parrs Spring, the highest elevation in the county, about eight hundred feet above sea level. Not the safest place on the Eastern Seaboard but far from the worst.

  He checked his phone and saw that the last caller had been Blaine. She answered his return call on the second ring.

  “Where are you?”

  “On my way,” she said. “I’ve got to get some things from my apartment and then I’m leaving.”

  Good. He listened to the rain for several beats. “Anything more?”

  “No.” He heard her take a deep breath. “I’m really worried. They’re going to send a state trooper out to the place where his girlfriend’s family lives. On the Shore.”

  “We’ll find him.”

  “I’m also just feeling kind of sick. I think it’s a delayed reaction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To Rorbach. I can’t believe he got away with it for so long. Right out in the open.” />
  “Don’t think about that.”

  “I know.”

  “Be careful,” he said. “Everything will be okay.”

  Blaine sighed. “Thanks.”

  Mallory opened a quart bottle of Diet Coke and a bag of Cheetos and he turned on the television. The storm was playing on nearly every channel, it seemed, although there was also a John Wayne movie on one and a baseball game on another. At the top of the hour, he clicked on one of the news channels and watched. The NWS alert Blaine had told him was coming had arrived.

  A natural disaster of “unprecedented” proportions. That’s the word this hour from the National Weather Service, which has just issued an alarming new alert, as Hurricane Alexander continues to bear down on the East Coast.

  The news cast cut to FEMA Director Shauna Brewster who was sitting stone-faced in her office as rain cascaded against the windows behind her.

  On a scale of one to ten, this is a fifteen. There is no precedent for this. The message we want to convey is that if you are within one hundred miles of the coast, you need to leave. And you need to do it now. We are estimating that only about half of the homes in coastal counties have been evacuated, despite mandatory orders issued last night and this morning.

  Earlier in the day, President Hall gave a similar warning, as he left a meeting at FEMA headquarters in Washington.

  The scene shifted to the President, wearing a dark blue slicker, standing under an awning against the rain. Just behind him, his eyes dazed, was the President’s chief of staff, Gabriel Herring.

  The time for deliberation has passed. Everyone needs to get to safety now.

  Already the outer bands of Alexander have caused massive flooding and substantial damage to homes and businesses up and down the coast. And there are multiple reports of freak lightning storms throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service has just issued a new alert: A powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength is roaring toward the Atlantic coast. Most of the coastal region, in at least six states, is expected to be uninhabitable for weeks or possibly months.