Ark Storm (3 page)

“And when do you think this ARk Storm will hit?” asked Messenger.

“It’s September now. Could hit us this winter, or the next. I’m putting my money on one of the two. We’re not there yet at anything close to a hundred percent certainty. I reckon there’s another push that’s needed to bring on a full-scale ARk Storm, but weather variables are so volatile that the push could come in last minute, tip the balance.”

“And tell us, Dr. Boudain, why should we take you seriously? What do you have in the way of proofs?” asked Messenger, resting his chin on steepled hands.

Gwen held out a memory stick. “Take a look at this at your leisure. It gives my model’s predictions of the past four El Niños and compares them against the results. The last two Niños it actually predicted, in strength and duration, over eighteen months in advance. I just ran the numbers back for another two Niños to show how it would have predicted them too.”

Messenger paused a beat, took the memory stick, palmed it.

“Why didn’t it?” asked Weiss.

Gwen shrugged. “I was just a little girl then. My parents were working on perfecting the model at that time.”

“You mentioned you got started on this when you were eight?” asked Weiss, stroking his goatee.

“Way before,” said Gwen. “My parents moved from California to Peru when I was a year old in order to study El Niño. Kids and adults alike all knew straight off when a Niño was coming. The sea got warm. Intoxicatingly warm, where normally it’s cold. My friends and I piled in for hours … we had to be dragged out at meal times. I found it fascinating. Still do.”

“And now you wish to share this with us,” mused Messenger.

Gwen gave him a dazzling smile. “In return for a large investment.”

“Who has financed you to date?” asked Messenger.

“I have.”

“How, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Gwen shrugged. “It’s no secret. I made a decent bit of money from surfing endorsements, modeling, that sort of thing.”

“You’re a surfer?” asked Messenger, face opening with curiosity.

“I am.”

“Pro circuit?”

“Yep. But my thing was big waves.”

“How big?”

“Big enough to give you nightmares.”

Messenger grinned for the first time. It transformed the hard-planed face, revealed a kind of locked-down charisma.

“Is that why you stopped? I take it you did. You spoke in the past tense.”

Gwen blew out a breath. The question, the only question, she dreaded. For a second, as she blinked, the images spooled behind her closed lids: the red car hurtling off the road, rolling over and over, coming to a final stop, bursting into flames. Another car, real or imagined, driving victoriously from the scene. She stared across the table at Messenger, meeting and holding his gaze.

“No. I stopped because my parents were killed in a car crash in Peru, and I decided I needed to do something more meaningful with my life than pose in a bikini.” She swallowed, her mouth dry, longed for a glass of water.

Messenger nodded slowly, eyes somber. “Hence Oracle.”

“Hence Oracle,” she replied. She felt a spurt of gratitude toward Messenger. No sympathy. She hated sympathy.

“Why now?” Messenger asked.

Gwen leaned across the desk toward him, eyes narrowing.

“Because something out there is destroying my sensors and my buoys. My assistant reckons it’s giant waves, because the survivors are giving readings which are off the charts; because half of me is shit scared and the other half is electrified. Because something huge is coming and I need the money to predict it properly. The question you guys need to answer is, do you want to be part of it, do you want to anticipate it or just run for the hills when it hits?”

4

THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, MANHATTAN

Special Agent Ange Wilkie sat demurely in the gray skirt suit she wore in a doomed attempt to blend in and enjoyed the floorshow. Her new boss strode the conference room declaiming to his team, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows as if ready for a fight. With his musical, rich tenor voice and obvious passion he sounded like an old-style, hellfire preacher.

“To those of you who might be tempted to think that we have the insider traders running scared after our successful prosecution of Raj Rajaratnam and his merry band of tipsters, remember this: no amount of money is ever enough. Human greed has not gone away. Many of those in the corrupt networks of tipsters and traders are already supremely wealthy and privileged, with, you might think, little to gain and everything to lose by breaking the law.

“Raj the Rat was a billionaire. Still not enough for him,” thundered Commissioner Troy Bergers. He paused, leaned his muscled arms on the table, dropped his voice, eyed each of the ten people in the room in turn, made them all feel special. And meant it.

With his extravagantly broken nose and pugnacious manner, Bergers had a gladiatorial air and would not have looked out of place in the Coliseum in a leather skirt. Agent Wilkie pondered her boss. Preacher, fighter, Holy Warrior? She narrowly suppressed a giggle, glanced round to check—no one had noticed. They hadn’t. They only had eyes for Bergers.

It was obvious his team adored him. He was one of those rare people who, via some indefinable quality, made you feel safe. You felt damn lucky to have him on your side. There was integrity and honesty in his eyes, but also a determination to do the right thing, come what may.

But Ange had heard he could play the political game too, that he was wily and sly when he needed to be. Ange was thrilled to have been seconded onto his team. What Bergers didn’t fully realize yet was that he had acquired himself a fellow zealot. Ange tuned back in.

“To bring these people down,” Bergers declaimed, “we need to understand their mentality. We need to get under their skin. They combine greed with a sense of invulnerability. They are the elite. They are the privileged. No one can touch them. Or else they think they are the small, invisible cog who just happens to have access to price–sensitive information. Too small for anyone to bother with. And they want a taste of what the big guys have.”

Bergers was on a crusade, and looking round. Ange saw that everyone in the room joined him in it. A company of zealots, she mused. This was gonna be fun.

“But for all of them,” Bergers continued, “it’s not just about the money. It’s about winning the game, it’s about being the player left standing with the biggest pile of chips on the table. And make no mistake, insider trading is not an isolated aberration. We pick up unusual trading patterns preceding thirty percent of mergers and acquisition activity. It’s rife, people. It contaminates the financial system. It is my intention to eradicate it. Zero tolerance. It starts here. I have brought in two extra FBI agents from the New York and New Jersey field offices: Special Agent Wilkie and Special Agent Rodgers.”

Ange and her colleague, Pete Rodgers, smiled and raised hands in greeting.

The table smiled back at the tall, handsome woman whose crisp red bob and mischievous grin made her look much younger than her forty-four years, and her younger, wearier and barrel-like male colleague with pallid skin and deep dark rings under his eyes. His thick, dark hair with the premature streaks of gray at the temples earned him the nickname of
Rac
, short for
raccoon
, care of Agent Wilkie. Rodgers was thirty-three, but the birth six weeks ago of his and his wife’s first child and the sleepless nights that followed made him feel ninety.

“They are targeting Ronald Glass,” continued Bergers. “You might remember him from the Raja file. His name cropped up again and again, but we had no hard evidence on him. Special Agents Wilkie and Rodgers are here to change that. Judge Bustillo has approved a workplace wiretap—”

“Yay!” called out one listener. Handclaps rang out.

Bergers smiled, revealing predatory-white teeth. “And Special Agents Wilkie and Rodgers will have the enviable task of listening to his calls all day long.”

“Why’re we so keen on this one guy?” asked another of the team.

“Because I think the very well-connected and exceedingly ambitious Mr. Glass is part of a much bigger network. He’s a corrupt modern-day Samson. We bring him down, offer him twenty years inside or the opportunity to cooperate, we bring down the whole corrupt temple.”

Amen to that, thought Ange.

5

HURRICANE POINT HOUSE, CALIFORNIA

Hurricane Point House was built, totally illegally, without permit, but with love and passion and whatever materials came cheaply to hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century by two naturists wanting an escape from the world. They were shortly joined by a fellow traveler who built his own illegal house fifty yards away. Over a century of occupation had granted legal status to the houses, and Gwen Boudain and her elderly neighbor, Marilyn Shanahan, were the current happy incumbents and owners.

Both houses were to be found at the end of a private dirt track, a hundred feet back from the sea. Like most of the structures in Big Sur, they blended into its landscape. They were single story, spacious but not enormous, built of rugged wood and stone, weathered by the elements. A low, jutting roof soared out over large French windows that gave onto a deck of gray wood.

Below the houses, a hill of grass and scrub fell away fairly steeply to the sea. At the ocean’s edge the land was pared down by the force of millennia of crashing waves to bare black rocks which formed a low cliff, about ten feet high, keeping the sea at bay.

On a wild night Gwen would imagine the storm-driven waves leaping over the cliff, roaring up to the houses, sweeping them away into blue oblivion. It had never come close so far, but as she had just said in her meeting, the weather was getting wilder, and if the dreaded ARk storm ever did come, she and Marilyn would be on the front line.

To the right of the houses, the meeting between land and sea was gentler, with a wide, long beach sloping down to the waves. It was the view and this beach, effectively private, which had drawn the naturists and which Gwen loved with a passion.

Gwen’s golden Labrador, Leo, was waiting as she pulled up on her stony drive. Gwen had rescued Leo from the pound when he was just ten weeks old. He’d been hit by a car. The vets didn’t think he’d survive. He did, and for that as well as the glint of comradeship in his eye, Gwen had adopted him. He had repaid her with a loyalty that went beyond dogged.

“Hey, Boy, whaddya say to a run?”

Leo yelped his agreement, tail whirling like helicopter blades.

“OK, OK, give me a minute.”

Gwen pulled off her clothes, threw them on her bed, and changed with a sigh of relief into shorts and a tee.

Barefoot, shadowed by Leo, she walked out onto her deck, skipped down the steps, and broke into a run.

She followed the hill down to the beach, aimed for the harder sand of the seashore. She ran with her dog through the shallows, kicking up droplets of water. The sun beat warm on her shoulders, but a fresh onshore breeze cooled her. She ran off her tension, reveling in the feeling of movement as her body sped across the sand. Thirty minutes later, she turned and walked back, thoroughly purged and starving.

She quickly checked her neighbor’s house. Marilyn was away for a week’s visit to her sister in Sacramento, and Gwen was checking up on her house as they always did for each other.

Back in her own home, she took a quick shower, muttering darkly at the lukewarm trickle of water that seeped from the showerhead. Then she fed Leo and dug around in her freezer.

“Pepperoni pizza! Feast time, Leo.”

She popped it in the microwave and five minutes later sat down on her deck with a cold beer, feeding slices of pizza to herself and peeling off a few spare pepperoni circles for her dog. She stared out pensively across the sea. She imagined mile after mile of ocean stretching from here to the cauldron of the equator where something truly terrifying was brewing.

6

CARMEL, CALIFORNIA

Gwen tried not to check her e-mail every ten minutes. She ran, she swam, she longed to surf, but the next morning a flat sea set in, offering nothing but pretty views and wavelets she wouldn’t deign to ride. Her next best distraction, Dwayne, her Tae Kwon Do trainer, was on his cruise in Mexico teaching a boatload of seniors dirty fighting instead of putting her through her paces. After three days when she had heard nothing from Falcon Capital, she was in need of major distraction. The sea relented.

She woke to the roar of surf. She sat up in bed with a smile. Her bleached linen curtains wafted in a breeze carrying the smell of brine and white water. Naked, she wrapped herself in her Peruvian alpaca blanket and stepped out on deck. She gazed at the sea for a good five minutes. Surfable, she thought, eying the waves. Medium-sized and ragged, workable.

She fed Leo, grabbed an apple, and selected her board from her storeroom: a six-foot-two-inch swallowtail, right for the conditions. She secured it between the driver’s and passenger’s seats, sticking out over the backseats, and drove off. She could have surfed alone on the beach at Hurricane Point, but she didn’t want to push her luck twice in one week, and she needed to stock up on provisions in Carmel, so she headed for the little seaside town and some company.

She parked on Scenic Road, grabbed her board, and walked over to the path that snaked along above the sandy beach. A hundred yards away, powerful waves broke with a roar. A good fifteen-foot face and pumping. Just inches above them, rising and falling with the waves, flew a pelican patrol.

The sea was empty of casual swimmers, but a phalanx of wet-suited surfers rode the waves with varying degrees of fortune. There were plenty of people walking or just sitting on the beach, gazing out at the churning water.

For a good five minutes, Gwen studied the waves. She knew this beach well, had surfed it many times, but the sea always had her surprises, particularly for the unwary. Fools rush in, thought Gwen, watching a couple of muscled college boy dudes do just that.