Ark Storm (33 page)

Dan looked at her, a level gaze, and gave the slightest of shrugs. He said nothing, didn’t need to. That he could get in if he wanted to was evident.

“It’s been weird in the office this week. Seems to have gone quiet.”

“How so?” asked Dan. His editor’s voice echoed in his head.
Get the dirt on Falcon.…

“Oh, Atalanta’s quit bitching at me, she’s become a bit of a buddy, Barclay’s keeping his bruised head down, Peter Weiss has been working like a fiend, whistling away to himself, stuck in his own little world, getting paler by the day, Messenger is as quietly driven as always. Mandy came back to work on Wednesday claiming to have given up the booze.” Gwen shrugged. “No backgammon tournaments, no hissy fits. All’s quiet.”

“Let’s just hope it’s not the quiet before the storm,” mused Dan.

In Dan’s thin cotton shirt, Gwen gave an involuntary shiver.

“That is exactly what I think it is.”

Dan got up, stood before her. “Come on, Boudy, let’s go back to bed, shall we? We’ve still got a few hours before dawn.”

Gwen saw the intensity in his eyes. One thing she did know, he wanted her just as much as she did him. It was still a craving that never went away for either of them for more than a few hours. And for the next few hours, they would revel in it.

84

EARLY NOVEMBER

The leaves had fallen from the trees, save for a few shrunken stragglers. They lay like decaying corpses in the fields, in the valleys, blowing into streams engorged from the recent storms. The trees were bare and seemingly barren. For many, it would be their last summer. When the earth had turned another year’s rotation, there would be no visible traces of many thousands of them.

Around two and a half kilometers up in the sky, the Pineapple Express roared northward. The super-Niño in Peru had increased the evaporation of water at the equator, raising humidity levels, feeding the atmospheric river, which tapped into the water with a ruthless efficiency. This river in the skies, a band of moisture over 900 kilometers wide and 2000 kilometers long, was carrying more water than forty Mississippis. And it was racing through the skies toward the west coast of the United States at close to eighty kilometers per hour.

The storm system that traveled with it ate up the miles of sea that kept it from the shore. It almost seemed hungry to make landfall. It was accelerating; slowly, but determinedly, it was getting faster. Its circumference sucked up the warmth of the sea and just kept getting bigger. It wasn’t huge, not like Hurricane Floyd, which was bigger than the entire state of Florida, or Ivan, which at its peak was bigger than Texas, but it was big enough. It registered on the satellites that monitored the world’s weather. They could see it coming, but they had no idea how long it would last. A lashing of one day was very different to a biblical storm of forty days. The meteorologists were not shamans or seers. They could not say if the storm would make landfall at this stage. They could just say that a storm was heading their way: a big one.

And banked up behind the first storm system, separated by days, by a few thousand kilometers, there followed another storm, with its arsenal of winds and waves whipped up by a swirling low pressure. The sea raged and boiled, half fighting the winds that lashed it, half driving them on, until sea and wind merged in a mass of towering waves. They had done this before, here on this ocean, but not like this, at least not for a long, long time, before the record keepers began recording the power of the elements that surrounded them. It had been too long.

Since then, too many buildings had been built in ignorance; the architect-designed houses of wood that the wind, like the three wolves, would huff and puff and blow down, their beautiful plate glass windows gazing out at the ocean, mockingly, tauntingly, fatally inviting; all those grand houses on Seventeen Mile Drive, with their fine art; all the power and the glory that money could buy—all standing in storm tracks that had been long forgotten, long forsaken, until everything came together, possibly with this storm, possibly with the next one—the winds, the currents, the pressure differentials between the poles, the humidity in the skies, the myriad seemingly invisible factors that make up the weather—to create the perfect storm.

85

NATIONAL COUNTERTERRORISM CENTER, TYSON’S CORNER, VIRGINIA, MONDAY MORNING

They sat round the gleaming table, coffees and waters to hand. Canning held his mug like he was warming his hands over it. He held it to his lips, but took no sips. He really shouldn’t drink it. Not even one sip. His dyspepsia was getting worse. Like some kind of warning level, it had gone from code pink to code red. That meant zero coffee, so he just inhaled, wet his lips. Agents Del Russo and Peters flanked him, drinking their coffee with the carefree abandon of the untroubled, noted Canning with a scowl. Moira Zucker sipped a Diet Coke. Chris Furlong fiddled with a nicotine patch. Pauline Southward took neither coffee nor water. Ramrod straight, she sat with a small black box before her.

She turned to Canning.

“I have another Sheikh Ali intercept!” she announced, failing to keep down the excitement in her voice. “It’s in English this time.”

She hit a button. A disembodied voice filled the room, rich, smooth, languid.

“What have they found, the Pattern of Life team?”

“New person in her life. Perfect insurance policy.”

“Really? Who?”

“Her new lover. Daniel Soren Jacobsen.”

“And who exactly is Mr. Jacobsen? Someone powerful from what you imply.”

“Power sex. Out in the open. Whole world could have seen. I saw.”

“Really?

“At it the whole time. His place. Inside and out. All over.”

“He sounds like the perfect insurance policy. You see, our clever doctor is turning out to be quite invaluable. I would like to keep her alive if at all possible.”

“Yeah, well then what I would advise is that I work up an extraction plan for him.”

“Meaning?”

“Work out how we would kidnap him. The how, the where, and the where we would take him. Just in case she decides to go to the cops. We’d get warning of her plans from the bugs. We could move in, get him, keep her sweet. No need to kill her. Not yet anyway.”

The voices fell silent. Southward clicked off her machine.

Canning forgot his code red and rapidly drank his coffee, half of the cup in four quick gulps.

“So we have an unnamed party, acting on behalf of the Sheikh, surveilling someone, this ‘clever doctor,’ who knows something dangerous,” he summed up. “And we have a kidnap plan. Against one Daniel Soren Jacobsen.” He rubbed his hands over his bald head, mused.

“This is the first concrete proof that the Sheikh is more than the legit businessman he purports to be. Good job, Southward.” He threw the analyst a brief smile. Involuntarily, she let her formal demeanor crack and flashed him a big smile back.

“Let’s assume this is connected with the terror threat,” continued Canning.

“OK, Chief,” said Del Russo. “So we find out all we can on Daniel Soren Jacobsen, find out the identity of the clever doctor at the same time.”

“Let’s start with that,” agreed Canning.

“What, just watch him?” asked Southward.

“We can’t go in and protect him, warn him off,” replied Del Russo. “There’s too much at stake.”

“What, we throw him to the wolves?” demanded Southward.

Zucker pursed her lips, her disapproval patently directed at what she regarded as Southward’s undue squeamishness.

“Who is he anyway? Ol, go run his name,” said Canning.

*   *   *

Five minutes later, Peters came back into the room.

“Er, sir, I think you need to make the request.”

“Why? You too busy, Ol?” scowled Canning.

“I don’t have that level of access. The guy’s file is beyond Top Secret. He’s Special Access Program.”

“Shit, who is the guy?” murmured Canning. “Clear the room,” he instructed. He logged on, got access, read the file, whistled quietly. He logged out, called the team back in.

“You need to hear this, but your ears only, or I will personally see to it that your balls are removed.” He glowered at Furlong, Peters, and Del Russo, then turned to Southward and Zucker. “You too. Your balls are just as big as these guys’.”

“Yes, sir,” Southward nodded, concealing a smile.

Zucker, to Southward’s astonishment, gave Canning a wink.

Canning spoke slowly, in his low guttural voice.

“Guy’s a freakin’ hero. Awarded the Medal of Honor! Silver Star. Purple Heart. Afghanistan. Three tours of duty.” He fell silent. The rest he would not share. He looked out, beyond the gray skies of Virginia, saw instead the dusty valleys and craggy badlands thousands of miles away in the east. Where Daniel Jacobsen went in to the most extreme situations, targeting the most dangerous, most wanted individuals from the pack of cards. Kill or capture, it was called; sometimes it was both. One of the other side’s best makers of IEDs came to an unfortunate end. And there was more. A lot more. Jacobsen had saved probably tens of dozens of lives in Afghanistan.

Canning dragged his gaze back to the room. “Let’s just say, these guys go in to try and take him, they’ll end up dead.”

“Black Ops,” mused Southward.

“Doesn’t make him superman,” said Peters. “He might be the one who winds up dead and we’ll have just thrown one of our guys to the wolves,” he said, unconsciously echoing Southward. “We could warn him,” he added with a flash of defiance, locking eyes with Canning.

“Too much at stake,” said Canning, revealing the political ruthlessness that ran through his veins. He was ex-army, had risen to four-star general. His loyalty was no longer to the tribe but to the anonymous cruelty of the big picture and the exigencies it demanded.

He leaned forward, gave Peters a hard-eyed scowl, shared it round the room.

“If we extract Jacobsen, any chance we had of getting close to these fuckers and preempting a West Coast Nine-eleven gets blown out the window, so we say nothing, we do nothing.”

“Leave him to his fate,” said Peters, jaw clenched.

Canning eyed his team. “His fate’s in his own hands. I guess we’re gonna find out just how good Daniel Jacobsen really is.”

86

THE LAB, TUESDAY LUNCHTIME

At mid-altitude, almond-shaped altocumulus lenticularis clouds drifted across the sky in the lee of the coastal ranges like a squadron of UFOs. They were white at the top shading down to gray at lower levels. Packed with small droplets of rain, the clouds looked solid and had on many occasions been mistaken for alien spacecraft. They were a rare sighting, often believed by the ancients to be a portent of some kind.

Far below in the Carmel Valley, dead leaves blew across the sandy scrub, skittering like rattlesnakes. Gwen Boudain, alone in Falcon’s thirty-meter outside pool, did not hear them.

The weights dragged her down, as intended. Panic was near, always, but she sought the calm that had saved her life many times. She ran through the water, feet pushing off the tiled floor of the pool, fighting the weight, fighting the panic, pushing on. She couldn’t see much, just the cool, cruel, blue. She ran on, farther and farther, back and forth, back and forth until she felt her lungs would burst, then on, and on again. Only when the flecks of black started speckling her vision did she reach for the rail, drag herself out. She lay on her stomach on the tiles, gasping like a landed fish.

“What in holy hell are you doing?” asked a voice.

Gwen flipped over. Gabriel Messenger stood, hands on hips, eyeing her with a look of mystification.

Gwen waited until she could speak. It took half a minute.

“Training,” she replied, slipping out of her weight vest. “Trying to increase, or at least maintain my lung capacity.”

“Is that what big wave surfers do?”

“Some of them. You have to be able to survive a two- or sometimes three-wave holdown, several minutes without breathing, getting the shit kicked out of you in what feels like a giant washing machine from hell. Doing this stuff could save my life.”

Messenger nodded. “You ever come close?”

Gwen laughed. “More times than I care to remember.” She muscled back into her weight vest. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back in there.” She nodded to the pool.

“When you’re done here, please come to my office,” he intoned.

Gwen felt a flutter of fear.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Something specific?” asked Gwen. “You’re looking kinda intense there.”

Messenger laughed. “I am. We’re ready to kick off the next stage of Project Zeus. I want you in on it.”

Gwen nodded. She felt a roaring in her ears. The next stage … the calm before the storm was over.

“Winter waves’ll be coming soon,” said Messenger, softly, almost, thought Gwen, with a hint of menace. “Train hard, Gwen.”

Gwen closed her eyes for a moment. A vision came, the vision from her dream, of huge, relentless monsters, banking up, crashing down, holding her down, keeping her down.

“Give me half an hour,” she said. She breathed, long and slow and deep. She felt Messenger’s eyes on her as she slipped back into the pool. As she ran along the bottom once more, she could see his outline, distorted by the dancing water, just standing on the side, watching her.

87

Forty minutes later, Gwen knocked on Messenger’s door. She’d lingered longer than planned in the shower, warming up. Despite the exercise, she’d felt chilled when her pulse had slowed and her breathing had returned to normal.

“Come!” bellowed Messenger.

Gwen walked in, closed the door. Messenger was sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair. He had the quizzical expression he often wore when looking at her. Gwen had a fleeting but unpleasant sensation that he could peer into her brain. She frowned at him. This made him smile.