Deep Time

by Rob Sangster

  Renatus snorted softly. “He’s not interested in DNA sequencing. This is my own scientific work for my own reasons. He’s paying for it, but when I solve one remaining problem for him he’ll become the richest man on Earth.”

  Jack knew what that problem was and that no one else had been able to solve it.

  You better do it fast because I’m going to try to put Chaos out of business.

  Leaving Building 3, Gano said, “Might as well take a look-see at the lodge while we’re here, right?”

  Renatus nodded curtly. “Remember that curiosity killed the cat.”

  The lodge had the creepy feel of a haunted house with rooms full of bulky Adirondack-inspired furniture under covers. A large roll-top desk in the den was furry with dust. The kitchen, large enough to prepare meals for dozens of guests, appeared barely used. One small bedroom off the kitchen had probably been a housekeeper’s quarters. Its spartan furnishings included a bed, chair, wardrobe, desk, and a chalkboard covered with large, scrawled numbers. A second bedroom, also downstairs, was larger, with an adjoining bathroom. They walked quickly through the empty rooms upstairs. Other than being creepy, there was nothing unusual.

  Petros Barbas would not stay in this place for even one night.

  Back at the entrance, Jack stopped the procession out the door and turned to Renatus. “You’ve made a big commitment to DNA sequencing at a time when you have other priorities. Do you mind telling me why?” He was aware of the irony since he was making such a hash of dealing with conflicting priorities himself.

  “I’m a scientist indulging my obsession. I work here in obscurity, because I don’t need input from anyone, and I detest being interrupted. I have a great deal of work to do before I return to Chaos, so it’s time for you to leave. Please don’t mistake my civility for hospitality. You are not welcome here. My robot has face recognition capability and will kill you.” He walked back into Building 3 and closed the door behind him.

  “That was a cheery send-off,” Gano said. “I doubt he was bluffing about face recognition, so I hope he neutered that robot until we get out of here.”

  The road was steep, so the walk back down took only a few minutes.

  “I respect that guy,” Gano said as they climbed into the Zodiac, “for accomplishing so much despite that weird frozen face.”

  “I noticed that his left arm didn’t swing freely,” Jack said. “That wasn’t true a couple of weeks ago. He’s getting worse.”

  After Jack started the engine and was cautiously backing out of the inlet, Gano said, “Despite the robot gunslinger, tank-thing, DNA sequencing, and haunted house—and no Barbas—I doubt you got what you came here for.”

  “Absolutely not. I thought we’d find files, schematics, technology, something I could use to stop Barbas. Instead, we found out nothing except that Renatus has an obsession with DNA that has nothing to do with the Chaos Project.”

  “So I guess we can forget about Ironbound.”

  “Not yet. I’m pretty sure that Dr. Renatus Roux just played us for fools.”

  Chapter 25

  July 26

  7:00 p.m.

  Astoria

  “LOOK ALIVE, LINDBERGH,” Gano said. “I’m about to make a right turn and follow the Columbia River west. That should put us over Barbas’s processing plant pretty quick. From there, it’s less than ten minutes to Astoria.”

  “There it is.” Jack pointed ahead to the left.

  The site was a barren rectangle clear-cut into a dense pine forest. One long side was bounded by the river, and all of it was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence with light towers. It made him think of a prison. Most of the big structures looked like leftovers from the original plant, but there were several new buildings, a couple of them belching columns of oily black smoke. An aged cargo ship was being unloaded by cranes at the wharf. The grounds were alive with workmen, forklifts, dump trucks, and open-bed trucks with six-foot-high tires.

  Three vehicles that looked like armored trucks were backed up to cargo bays at one of the buildings.

  “Want to go around again?” Gano asked.

  “No point in spooking the workmen.”

  Then he noticed that downriver from the wharf the water was stained by a thick stream of coffee-colored runoff from the plant.

  “Look at that. Underwater discharge pipes.” As they flew over, he saw something ominous. The discharge was laced with streaks of green and greasy red. “Barbas is dumping chemicals. The stuff they use to process minerals is toxic. That’s what he wanted me to defend.”

  Suddenly, the Cessna was in the midst of a madly swirling cloud of small birds. A few thudded into the windscreen. Some flew into the propellers and became a mist of blood and feathers. Then they were through the cloud.

  “Good God,” Gano shouted. “Look dead ahead.”

  A wall of water raced up the Columbia, ten feet higher than the river ahead of it. The leading edge was ugly, full of river-bottom muck. The roiling surface behind the summit carried several cars, the nose of an RV pointing skyward, two sailboats on their sides.

  Jack knew instantly what it was. “Tidal wave.”

  “Like the one that hit Japan?”

  “Not even close. That was over a hundred feet high, caused by one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history.”

  “From all the crap in the water, this baby must have beaten up on Astoria.”

  As they got closer to town, Jack saw devastation at the three commercial piers. Dock lines had been ripped loose, setting ships helplessly adrift. A tour boat was pinned against its pier, listing to port, terrified passengers probably still aboard.

  The marina and boat yard had taken major hits. All the boats tied up to floating piers had been torn loose and sucked upstream. Two big motor yachts floated upside down, keels like shark fins. A long rack of kayaks and sailboats in their cradles were scrambled together next to the clubhouse. Several commercial fishing boats in the mooring basin were half-swamped and foundering.

  The Oregon half of the span that connected Astoria to Megler, Washington, was a high cantilevered truss bridge that looked unharmed. Jack pointed to the much lower flat stretch of bridge to the north covered with seaweed and mud. “Drivers caught on that half of the bridge probably never saw it coming.”

  “This ain’t Katrina,” Gano said, “or Tornado Alley, but these folks have taken a pounding they won’t forget.”

  Gano pressed his headset to his ear and said, “Tower, this is Cessna Skylane 3550. You folks open for business?” He listened and said, “Skylane here. Runway 2 west. Wilco. Coming in.” Off mike he said, “They’re hysterical at the Hysteria airport.”

  WHEN JACK WALKED into the Bridgewater Tavern it had the feeling of a refugee camp. Some people, clean and dry, must have watched the wall of water from high ground. Others, wet to the knees, saw or heard it coming and fled. The rest were mud-smeared, sopping wet, and thoroughly shaken. They’d seen it up close.

  The place was in an uproar, with everyone telling his or her story and shedding tears over losses. Jack noticed rum on many tables, bottles of it. That was a powerful message.

  The bartender looked shell-shocked until he saw Gano in his fancy cowboy outfit. Then his eyes narrowed, and he scowled. Gano glared back at him with his look that said he just didn’t give a damn one way or the other if he had to make something happen by force.

  Molly McCoy was not in sight. “She must be pretty upset,” Jack said. “Maybe she’s in her office. Let’s ease on out and find the back door.”

  An open door around the corner led into a short hall. At its end a wood sign read “Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.”

  Jack had been gaming through how he’d approach Molly, the reason they’d come. He had to persuade her to help him.

  He knocked. No response. He knocked agai
n. Nothing, so he opened the door slowly. Molly, behind her desk on the phone, waved them in without taking time to focus on who they were.

  “What you need to do, Chief,” she said, “is run your butt over here right now and get some facts. There are more than a hundred people here who know who’s missing, what’s flooded, and everything else you’re supposed to be working on.” She slammed the handset down and looked at them. “What!” Focusing on them, she opened her mouth and her eyes widened, but she didn’t get up or offer her hand. She gave a half-wave that meant they could sit if they really wanted to. Her auburn hair, gathered loosely behind her neck, framed her somber expression.

  Gano spoke up. “I’m Gano LeMoyne and this is—”

  “Jack Strider. I remember you both . . . very well. The pipefitter you, uh, met last time you were in my place still hasn’t straightened up all the way.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I was trying to—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “We had business up north,” Gano said. “Just flew in. We saw the tidal wave right after it passed through town.”

  “I just heard on the radio,” she said, “that the Tsunami Warning Center reported an earthquake, epicenter a couple of hundred miles off shore. They say that’s what started the tsunami. All I know is that that wave was the biggest anyone here has ever seen. At first we thought it was a rogue wave, but it kept coming. Everyone was screaming and running for higher ground. This joint is packed with guys trying to drink their courage back.”

  “You have a lot more to worry about,” Jack said. “Think what would be left if a tsunami the size of the one that killed nineteen thousand Japanese hit Astoria. It would go all the way upriver to the Hanford Nuclear Project and uncover all those barrels of plutonium waste buried right next to the river.”

  “That couldn’t happen,” she said with no conviction.

  “I’ll give it to you straight. The epicenter of the quake will turn out to be very close to Barbas’s platform. An experiment he’s conducting was the cause of the quake and the tidal wave. His next experiment could generate a much larger tsunami.”

  “Nobody can cause an earthquake,” she scoffed. “Not even Barbas.”

  He told her about methane hydrate and destabilization. Her pale skin turned ashen. He could tell she didn’t want to accept it, so he kept spelling it out.

  She leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “I don’t want to believe he’d do that. When Petros Barbas first showed up, we thought of him as a savior. When I was growing up, this town was wonderful. I went away to college and stayed to teach at Oregon State. When my father got sick, I didn’t mind coming back. I thought it would be a good sabbatical, but the town had changed. The economy had fallen apart. We had panhandlers for the first time in our history. More than fifty people lined up to apply for a minimum wage job at Custard King. A mother who lost her job at the last cannery abandoned her infant at the library.” She wiped away a tear.

  “Then Barbas came, spending money and talking big. He hired a lot of people and stopped the slow slide. Things were looking up for a while. Then the ones who were hired got envious of the ones who were paid more. The ones who didn’t get jobs resented everyone who did. In hard times, we all used to work together. Now it’s dog-eat-dog. Everyone’s mean. People don’t trust each other. There’s a lot of drunkenness, not the Saturday night kind, the every night kind. And more violence. The littlest thing sets people at each other’s throats. In public we all say Barbas is a great man, but that’s because we’re afraid to be honest.”

  “The way you weren’t honest about your feelings about him the night we met,” Jack said.

  “Yeah, for the same reason those guys were about to pound on you two. So what was your reason for lying to me about being some kind of grocers? You hadn’t been gone ten minutes before I decided that was BS and I’d never see you again.”

  “Barbas again,” Jack said. “I had to find out more about him and didn’t think anyone would answer questions just to satisfy my curiosity. Forgive me?”

  “Now that I know what’s going on, I guess so. The stress here has gotten unbelievable. Working around the clock at the mill upriver. Swearing oaths of secrecy. Mandatory six-month shifts on that platform. There’s no more family life. No one just hangs out anymore. And there’s no way to get off the treadmill.”

  “There is a way,” Jack said.

  “There isn’t. You have no idea.”

  He glanced at Gano. He was about to put their lives in her hands. “You okay with this, Gano?”

  He nodded. “I trust her.”

  “Molly, to break through Barbas’s secrecy I need specific information from aboard the platform, which, by the way, Barbas calls Chaos.”

  She looked skeptical. “You think you can get workers on the platform to spy on Barbas?”

  “If I don’t find out what he’s about to do, and stop him, Astoria is very likely to get slammed by a much worse tsunami. That one wouldn’t just take out the waterfront. It would destroy the entire town and maybe everything else along the Oregon and Washington coasts hundreds of miles in either direction. I can’t get local people to do anything, but you can.” He saw she was about to speak, so he held up his hand to stop her from making an impulsive reply. He had to be sure she realized that it could get very rough. “If Barbas catches you setting up a spy network, he’ll retaliate.”

  Her expression was grim. “What do you want from me?”

  He listed the information he needed and the kinds of jobs people who might know it would have. He watched her face, hoping she was attaching individual names to those jobs.

  When they’d walked into her office, she’d been badly rattled by the damage but was in fighting-back mode. Now she was overwhelmed by the specter of a monster tsunami and the fact that Barbas could cause it. He couldn’t predict what she’d do. Why would she think two men she didn’t know, who had lied to her at their first meeting, could stop the all-powerful Barbas?

  “This is the most important decision of your life. Consider the people who depend on your answer. Think it over. I’ll call you from San Francisco.”

  Gano offered to stay with her, even insisted.

  The sparkle had gone out of her eyes. No more smile. She looked weary. “Right now, that’s a bad idea on every level I can think of.”

  SMOKE FROM MULTIPLE fires stung his eyes as he and Gano walked along a street with small warehouses on both sides on their way to the Hotel Elliott. He planned to find a ride there to shuttle them back to the airport. The street was deserted.

  A black Ford F-150 pickup rumbled up from behind them, slowly passed them, and pulled over fifty yards ahead at an angle to the curb. Two men jumped from the cargo bed on opposite sides and stood by the rear bumper. The guy on Jack’s right wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. He held a two-foot iron pipe in his right hand, making no effort to conceal it. The one on Jack’s left had a heavy-boned face and badly mended nose. He wore grease-stained coveralls over a blue shirt. He lifted a tool Jack had seen around Astoria, a lumberjack’s “hookaroon” for grabbing logs. It was a hickory pole about two and a half feet long with a steel spike set at right angles at the end. One well-aimed blow from that spike would be fatal. Coveralls held it at waist level as he glanced back at the driver’s window, clearly waiting for a signal to get it on.

  The driver’s door opened. A tall man with a ginger mustache and wearing a leather bomber jacket swung out. He had an elongated skull, and his small, close-set eyes radiated malice. The left hand he rested on the roof of the truck’s cab held a silver switch-blade. Jack heard the snick as it opened and locked into place.

  The fourth man emerged from the passenger’s side. It was the bartender from the Bridgewater Tavern. With a lot of muscle backing him, he looked cocky and mean.

  “Great service,” Gano said lo
udly. “The airport shuttle has come to pick us up here.” Then, very softly to Jack, “I guess you remember I’m not carrying my heat with me this trip.”

  “You boys should never have come back,” the bartender said, curling his lip.

  Jack saw that these guys weren’t yahoos who’d staggered out of a bar to harass a couple of out-of-towners. They were dead serious, and they’d brought weapons to do serious harm.

  “Look, fellas,” he called to them, “we’re on our way to the airport. Get back in the truck and tell everyone you ran us out of town. Nobody gets hurt.”

  “You’re from the big city, and your pal with the smart mouth looks like a dude ranch cowboy. Somebody is going to get hurt,” the driver snarled, “and it’s going to be you turds.”

  Gano looked at Jack and muttered, “Doesn’t look like Barbas’s You’re-Not-Welcome Wagon is going away.”

  “I’ll handle this, Gano.” He looked at the bartender. “Let it go, guys.”

  “You are one big candy ass, mister,” the driver said. “It’s going to be a pleasure busting you up.”

  Jack knew more conversation was pointless, except for any that might give him an advantage.

  “No need,” Jack said, addressing the driver and starting in his direction. “To show we have no hard feelings, I’ll kick in a hundred bucks. That’s a lot of booze. Have we got a deal?” He took out the money and held it in front of him. As he neared the back of the pickup, Coveralls raised his hookaroon a few inches and hesitated. Jack ignored him, appearing to focus on the driver. “Tell you what,” he said, “I’ll make it two hundred.”

  In the next second Jack’s right leg coiled up toward his chest, then lashed out sideways in a stomp-kick, driving the sole of his shoe into Coveralls’s knee. The crackle of the joint disintegrating was terrible to hear. The man screamed and went down, curled over to grab what was left of his knee. Jack took one step forward and kicked him under the jaw, snapping his head back. As he crashed backward like a slaughtered steer, Jack grabbed the hookaroon off the pavement.