The Alarmists (9 page)

December 10, 2012, 9:54 A.M.

When Richards walked into the room, Brent could sense a different tone than he’d witnessed so far, even before the colonel opened his mouth. Maddy must have sensed it as well, because her face lost its smile.

“Problem, Colonel?” she asked.

Instead of answering, Richards tossed a few stapled pages on the table between the captain and the professor. Maddy reached for it, reorienting it so she could scan the text. In only a few moments she looked up, her eyes carrying either surprise or worry—Brent couldn’t tell which.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a threat update,” the colonel answered. “We get one daily.”

Brent reached for it, assuming that if he wasn’t supposed to read it, Maddy would break his hand. He read the first few lines, essentially bullet points of various hot spots around the globe. It went on for three pages, and if the first entries were an indication of things, then the overall state of the world was much more precarious than Brent thought. He looked up at the colonel.

“Since you get this every day, I’m assuming there’s something abnormal in this one?” he asked.

“The second entry,” Maddy said, reaching across the table and tapping the one in question.

Brent read the few lines with greater care than he had the first time through. “A tribal skirmish in Tablisi?”

“It’s in a part of Afghanistan that doesn’t see that sort of thing,” Maddy explained. “One of the more stable regions in the Middle East.”

Brent digested that but still failed to see the significance. “So the odds are low for something like this. But it’s Afghanistan—is this really that surprising?”

“In addition to being one of the cultural and economic beacons in the country,” Richards said, “Tablisi is also home to a large oil refinery.”

“And I’ll give you three guesses as to the only industrial casualty of this tribal skirmish,” Maddy finished.

It took precious few seconds for Brent to track with them.

“So this was designed to destroy the refinery,” he said.

“We don’t know that for certain, Dr. Michaels,” the colonel said.

“But your experience would indicate that it’s probable,” Brent pressed, to which Richards returned a nod.

And with that verification, Brent’s mind went somewhere else, engaged in a mental review of all the information he’d compiled from the paper work, from his talks with Maddy, and from his one off-base excursion with the team. He didn’t know how much time passed while he parsed these things; only that Richards and Madigan hadn’t moved when he emerged from it.

“Here’s the problem I’m running into,” Brent said. “Do I see a pattern? My answer is a definite maybe. But it’s only a maybe because I have a very hard time believing in global patterns. Because if this
is
one, it’s not a natural occurrence. No, this is organized by someone.” He paused, fixing the colonel with a look. “And that’s the part I have a problem with. There’s not a person in the world who carries this kind of influence. Not the president. Not Bill Gates. I don’t care how much money a person has, there are just too many factors involved for it to be possible.”

Richards took it all in, his lips pursed.

“If this was a smaller system—let’s say a university—how would you read the data?” the colonel asked.

“In that case, I’d say absolutely there’s some kind of organized system at work.”

“And the only thing that makes you doubt that is the expanded parameters of this system?”

Brent aimed a wry smile at the colonel. “It’s not that simple, Colonel. When you expand the parameters that much, you just can’t read the data the same way.”

“Why not?” Madigan asked.

She glanced at the wall on which a projector displayed the same global map the colonel had shown Brent on his first day. Except this map contained a number of new colors in its legend, as well as several symbols that seemed to demonstrate patterns which, mathematically speaking, were not random events.

“The scientific method is what it is, regardless of the size of the thing we’re studying, right?” the captain said.

One of the things Brent had come to appreciate about Maddy was the way she drilled a thing down to its most basic level.

“Yes and no,” he answered. “When you conduct an experiment, you must have a controlled environment, with all factors accounted for. That’s the only way you can accurately analyze a result. With something like this”—he pointed to the map—“there’s no way to catalog everything that might affect your outcome.”

“Come on, Brent,” she said. “Leave that sterile lab stuff back at the university. In the real world, science is messy. Sometimes you have to think with your gut.” She glanced at the colonel, perhaps to see if she’d overstepped her bounds, but Richards gave a nod as if agreeing with her assessment.

Brent raised his coffee cup and took a sip, his eyes back on the map. Because of the setting, and with two uniformed officers in the room with him, Brent thought this seemed more like a session on war strategy than it did an exploration of scientific data.

“Dr. Michaels,” Richards said, “before we called you, I had a feeling there was something going on that we needed to investigate. Even in a world as obviously self-destructive as this one, we recognized an abnormal upsurge in violent events—as if everyone in the world decided to lose their minds at precisely the same time.”

“Like the world is trucking toward crazy a good deal faster than normal?” Brent asked.

Next to the colonel, Madigan’s cheeks colored.

“That’s one way to look at it,” Richards agreed. He gestured to the map. “Now that I see what you’ve done here, how you’ve managed to take our reports and translate them into something like this, I’m more inclined to believe there’s something here that’s worth looking into.”

Brent took in and released a deep breath. But even as the exasperated breath left him, he felt a thought tickling the back corner of his brain. It wasn’t until he glanced back at the map that the thought started to take a more solid form. With the color-coding system Brent was using to distinguish the variables of each incident in the data set, the map held a variety of hues. Some, like the blue, had significant representation, while others, like the emerald green, hardly made an appearance. This was Brent’s way of weighing the probability of an incident occurring under known sociological conditions, the impact of the incident across a number of fronts, and other measurable elements. With each incident he analyzed, the more patterns he found. And the faster he interpreted the patterns, the faster he was back at the university sharing this new knowledge with impressionable minds, not to mention the bonuses of a fatter bank account and another notch on his résumé.

What bothered him, though, was something that began with the team’s visit to the ruined oil field. On few occasions could he remember having the chance at a tangible exploration of a data set. As a general rule, all he got to see were the facts and figures. Now, as he studied the map again, he saw that his experience in the Spraberry Trend was shifting his focus. Walking the oil field he’d asked all the pertinent questions—the ones specifically related to that one event. This approach differed not just in degree but in kind from the one he practiced in the office, and so he wondered if he was missing something important by looking at the
who
instead of the
why
.

“They’re nudges,” he said, more to himself than to Richards and Madigan. But when he looked up to see two sets of eyes asking the same question, he offered an explanation. “Sometimes you can get so wrapped up in looking at something that you never realize you’re not asking the right questions.”

“Meaning . . . ?” Madigan asked.

“The majority of what we see here are minor events,” Brent continued, referring to the map. “On a global level, most of these are insignificant, with little impact on anything beyond their geographical boundaries. In fact—” he paused to catch the colonel’s eye—“my guess is that if there’s someone or something behind this, they would be shocked to learn that anyone has even started putting any of the pieces together.”

Colonel Richards absorbed that and seemed to understand that Brent had just paid him and his team a compliment.

“So what are you getting at, Dr. Michaels?”

“Are you familiar with
curling
, Colonel?”

“The weight-lifting exercise or the Canadian sport?”

“The latter,” Brent said. “Once the first guy releases the stone, the other guy stays in front of it, brushing the ice, changing the speed and direction. It’s subtle—just slight alterations in angle and velocity. But if it’s done right, the stone will stop just where you want it to.”

“You’re saying there’s a defined endgame,” Richards said.

“Up to this point we’ve been looking at what might be causing all this,” Brent said. “Like they are symptoms of something else—something happening behind the scenes. And that’s left us open to the possibility that the cause or causes might be natural phenomena.”

He glanced at the map, his eyes landing on the single blue area along the Texas-New Mexico border.

“But what if these aren’t symptoms? What if these are the tools?”

The professor was gratified to see that neither Richards nor Madigan seemed ready to dismiss this new idea out of hand. Rather, both appeared thoughtful, even a bit intrigued.

“How do you propose we begin to look at the
why
rather than the
who
?” Richards asked.

Brent had been waiting for the question, because he had a good idea as to how to explore this new line of inquiry. “Colonel Richards, how do you feel about taking a field trip?”

—

In the midst of all that was swirling around in his mind, each thought clamoring for Canfield’s attention, the one thing he kept returning to was the sandwich. Even though his wife occupied a bed in the ICU just steps away, and Van Camp’s admin had left him two voice mails already that morning, and he’d received a message from the Shackleton team, and he could barely function because he hadn’t slept in more than forty-eight hours, he couldn’t get the sandwich out of his mind.

He’d arrived home last night and made a sandwich. He’d sat at the kitchen table with the sandwich and a glass of water, and relaxed. He couldn’t stop playing this small sequence of events over and over again in his mind. Without the sandwich, perhaps he would have gone upstairs ten minutes sooner. And those ten minutes might have made the difference between Phyllis needing to get her stomach pumped and then being released, or having a machine breathe for her.

Of course, Canfield knew how foolish such thoughts were. The sandwich did nothing but provide a convenient outlet for the guilt he didn’t know where to place. In the grand scheme of things, ten minutes meant nothing. She could just as easily have taken the pills when he left for the airport. The fact that she hadn’t, that she’d waited until he was on his way back home, was out of his control. He’d never been much good with guilt, and one of the things he’d learned from studying at the heels of Arthur Van Camp was that crisis mode was not the time to indulge an untested strategy.

The last few hours had reminded him how much he’d learned from the man. Anger was one of those things. He shook his head at the thought, because he’d often wanted Phyllis to show that kind of intense emotion. And now that it didn’t matter anymore, he suspected she would have welcomed something similar from him—something to show her that at least a form of passion still remained in their relationship.

Rising from the chair near his wife’s bed, he put his hand briefly on hers and then walked out of the room. He had all the information available about his wife’s condition: she was unlikely to emerge from this sleep, and even if she did, the brain damage was likely extensive. The doctor who’d spoken with him said his best guess was that she would have been without oxygen for anywhere between twelve and sixteen minutes when the ambulance arrived. He pushed the thought from his mind. They had his phone number if anything changed. He would accomplish little by sitting idle in a chair.

Canfield was on the phone before he made it to the elevator, ignoring the sign that prohibited cell phone use.

“Hello, Catherine,” he said, his voice holding an unusual iciness. “Please tell Mr. Van Camp that I’m on my way in. I know he’s not expecting to see me today, but there are some things I need to take care of.”

He abruptly ended the call, then reached out a hand to push the elevator’s down button. Recognizing the anger was the first step; the next came in deciding what to do with it.

December 11, 2012, 12:19 P.M.

At some point during this last connecting flight, Brent found himself wondering how a simple consult had turned into something much larger. When the question first arose, he didn’t have an answer. Now, with the plane taxiing to the terminal, and with the tans and whites of Mazar-e Sharif visible through the oval window, the question still lacked that answer.

Even so, he had to admit that he was enjoying himself. While he liked teaching, there was something about fieldwork that raised his energy level. It gave him the same feeling now that it did when he was the young sociology hotshot with a new journal article published nearly every month and more requests for consults than he could keep up with.

In fact, his last trip here, seventeen years ago, was for one of those consults—his first for the U.S. military. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, when tribal warlords fought with each other to fill the leadership gap, Brent had been hired to analyze the “temperature” of the country, as the general he was working for put it. This meant that the general wanted Brent to establish the odds of the country devolving into a protracted civil war or finding some lasting détente. At twenty-eight, Brent had thought it a jewel of an assignment, one that would open doors for him. Now, at forty-five, he understood the hubris involved in thinking that one could, in a few weeks, analyze the dizzying number of factors that had served to shape the alliances and relationships of this land for thousands of years. He’d finished the consult and turned in his report, and as luck would have it, some of what he’d predicted turned out to be true. But he—and perhaps only he—knew the guesswork infused in every line.

He couldn’t help but smile at the memory. Because if Colonel Richards was correct, then making sense out of the elements of his current project made Afghanistan look like a walk in the park.

When the professor shared his thoughts with Richards, the colonel had agreed that it deserved looking into. But he’d also rightly ascertained that sending the entire team to Afghanistan for what was, ostensibly, an interview was a waste of resources. Maddy had drawn the short straw once again, yet Brent had to admit that he wasn’t displeased by the arrangement. After all, there was something exhilarating about traveling to an exotic location with a lovely woman.

“So where are we meeting your guy?” Maddy asked him.

“Balkh,” Brent answered. “Hopefully Abby will have worked out the exact spot by now.”

“Abby?”

“An associate,” Brent explained, raising his phone to his ear.

“Hello, doll,” Abby said after the first ring.

“Here’s where you tell me you were able to arrange the meeting,” Brent said.

“Sure, because while my day job is to maintain office equilibrium—an office, I might remind you, that I’m increasingly the only one in—by night I organize clandestine meetings between hard-to-find foreigners and wayward university professors.”

Brent smiled. “I value your skills more than you realize.”

“In that case, I can tell you that one Oman Tzahibi will meet you at your favorite restaurant at three p.m. local time.”

“My favorite restaurant?”

“He said you’d know,” Abby said.

Brent, again, had to smile, because the fact that Oman expected him to remember the name of a restaurant he’d frequented for three weeks seventeen years ago spoke of one of those sociological differences he was paid handsomely to understand. The name of the place hung just on the verge of recollection. What he could recall, though, was how to get there.

“That’s perfect, Abby. Thanks.”

The plane had reached the terminal and Brent heard the sounds of the plane shutting down, of the stairs striking the side of the fuselage. And through the phone he heard what sounded like Abby’s perpetual typing.

“Excellent. I’ll go ahead and add this little gem to the already sterling performance appraisal that you’ll just have to put your signature on before sending it up the chain,” Abby said.

“You do remember that I can replace you in a heartbeat, right?” he said.

“Oh, sweetie, there are few women in the world who are as good at what they do as I am. Don’t you ever forget that.”

“Don’t I know it,” he agreed.

They spent the next few minutes talking shop, and when Brent hung up, he saw that Maddy had retrieved both of their carry-on bags.

“Is everything set?” she asked.

“As long as I don’t make a wrong turn.”

Ignoring her confused look, he took his luggage and started down the aisle. He and Maddy were the last passengers to exit the plane, a connection out of Tikrit that stretched the limits of what might be called a commercial airliner. It would have been easier to take the team’s private jet, but with no equipment to carry, and because a military plane often attracted the kind of attention that was best to avoid in this part of the world, they’d opted for commercial travel, complete with Maddy in civilian clothes. It was Brent’s first experience seeing her out of uniform, a sight that had made the long trip more enjoyable than it might have been.

He reached the doorway, the Afghan sun hitting him full in the face, and started down the steps. Immediately he felt a transformation of sorts occurring, as if each step brought back memories that he hadn’t pulled out for review in more than a decade. By the time he reached the tarmac he was smiling again, despite the cold that sent a shiver down his spine, even through the heavy coat he’d bought in Washington before boarding the plane. A northern Afghan winter was something a visitor felt with the entire body. The mountains that dominated much of the country’s interior rimmed Mazar-e Sharif to the south, and the winds funneling down from the peaks dropped the mountain iciness onto the city before picking up any last vestiges of warm air and carrying them across the plains toward Uzbekistan.

Standing next to him, Maddy didn’t even attempt to conceal the shivers.

“Have you been here before?” Brent asked as they hurried to the terminal building.

“Only in the summer,” she said, her chin tucked down into her jacket.

In less than ten minutes, Brent had arranged for a driver to take them to Balkh, and soon afterward the two Americans occupied the back seat of a Honda Accord and were leaving the provincial capital on the A76. Almost a suburb of Mazar-e Sharif, Balkh held the distinction of being one of the oldest cities in the known world. As Brent understood it, much of what would become the major civilizations in the Middle East found their ancestors born in this area. And as these civilizations grew and thrived, Balkh was a hub for the trade of goods and ideas. With such a history it seemed understandable that the complex sociology of the region eluded even the best minds in the field.

Maddy remained quiet during the fifteen-minute trip to the old city. Brent had briefed both her and Colonel Richards regarding what he expected to accomplish, and there was little to do besides let the thing play out. Brent couldn’t help but wonder how Oman might have changed since the last time he saw the man. He was a decade older than Brent, and the professor knew that a man balancing his own concerns amid powerful tribal leaders vying for leadership in a shattered country would have aged poorly. He thought it a miracle that Oman had survived at all.

“What are you really hoping to get from this guy?” Maddy asked, as if sensing his thoughts.

Before replying, Brent watched as Balkh’s ancient ruins came into view, a site that provided a lot of tourism dollars for the city.

“Like I told you, when I was here last I was working on sketching out a relationship tree between the various factions vying for political power. Part of doing that is talking to the right people. Oman was definitely included in that group. By the time I met him, he’d been working for various tribal leaders for more than a decade and, in the meantime, building his own little empire.”

He glanced over at Maddy. Seeing the puzzled look on her face and intuiting her question, he said, “You’re right. It’s unusual for someone playing powerful men against each other to survive long enough to see any profit from it.”

Brent paused and shook his head, remembering the man who had helped him better understand the relationship dynamics between tribal groups.

“The man with information will always be a step ahead of those without it,” he said.

And then they were in Balkh, the driver pulling off the A76 and onto a concrete road that would take them straight to the city center. Laid out much like Washington, with concentric circles passing through spoked streets, Balkh was a simple city to navigate, which was why Brent wasn’t concerned about finding the restaurant where he would meet Oman. Anyway, the meeting wasn’t for another two hours. Surely he could find the restaurant by then.

—

He chalked it up to his being a university professor. After all, weren’t most teachers at that level possessed of a self-confidence that bordered on narcissism? When the driver had let them out at the ruins of Masjid Sabz, Brent decided that Maddy needed to experience some of the more interesting things in the city. They’d started with the mosque, navigating through the ancient structure with its signature green dome. They’d moved on to Bala-Hesar and then one of the bazaars that showcased goods both local and from abroad. By the time they finished, only fifteen minutes remained for them to locate the restaurant. Maddy, who had assumed that Brent knew where he was going, did an admirable job holding back any biting comments.

They reached the restaurant only five minutes late, and Brent mentally kicked himself when he saw the name, Azeen’s, spelled out in English below the Dari Persian. When Brent and Maddy stepped through the door, the professor lost his vision to the restaurant’s dim interior. It took several seconds for his eyes to adjust, and when they did he found that Maddy had taken a half step past him and positioned herself in front of his right shoulder. While he appreciated her willingness to risk danger on his behalf, it irritated him that she thought he needed a bodyguard.

“I thought we were supposed to be keeping a low profile,” he whispered.

“We are,” she said over her shoulder, her eyes scanning the room.

“Then how come I feel like Whitney Houston to your Kevin Costner?”

Maddy didn’t respond, but Brent thought he saw the corner of her mouth turn up.

The restaurant was half full and to Brent’s eye held only locals. It took him a few passes but eventually he saw the man he’d come to meet sitting along the far wall, where the shadows fell most prominently. He doubted the choice of seats was accidental. He also noticed the additional members of the dining party—three men in local dress and with gun-shaped bulges that their long, baggy shirts couldn’t quite conceal. When his eyes locked with Oman’s, the other man smiled and waved him over.

The Afghan rose from the table as Brent approached, and when the professor drew near, Oman grasped both of Brent’s elbows and pulled him close, depositing a kiss on his cheek. “How are you, my friend?” Oman asked with genuine warmth.

“I’m well, Oman,” Brent replied. “Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice.”

The Afghan waved that off, his eyes moving from Brent to Maddy, then back to Brent. “I haven’t seen you in more than fifteen years, and now you pop up and say you need a favor. If our friendship wasn’t enough to convince me to listen, my curiosity alone would ensure my presence.”

When he finished, he looked at Maddy again. Brent understood what was going through the man’s mind. While Oman was more progressive than many of his contemporaries, there was still something in the Afghan mind-set that resented the idea of women on equal footing with men. Politeness would never allow Oman to express his displeasure with anything beyond his eyes, but the displeasure remained nonetheless.

“Oman, this is my associate, Dr. Amy Madigan,” Brent said. “She’s helping me out with a little project I’m working on.”

The Afghan let his eyes linger on Maddy for a few seconds while the captain stood silent under the scrutiny. Brent saw that she knew better than to offer her hand. Oman would have taken it, but then their meeting would have been brief.

“It is a pleasure,” Oman said, then motioned for the Americans to sit.

With everyone seated, including Oman’s three associates, who occupied the table adjacent to them, the Afghan offered both of them a wide smile before turning his focus to Brent.

“I have followed your career since we last ate together,” he said. “It is gratifying to see a friend doing so well.”

“Much of my success is due to the work I did here,” Brent said. “And you were very important to that work.”

Oman waved off the praise, though Brent could tell the man was pleased.

“I simply offered a few words. I am happy you found them helpful.”

It turned out that Oman had already ordered for everyone. A pair of waiters approached the table, placing heaping trays of lamb and
qabli pulao
between them, as well as the flatbread that Brent had grown fond of during his last stay.

“I don’t think I’ve eaten this since our last meal together,” Brent said. He offered Oman a grateful nod and served himself, knowing the Afghan would wait until he did so. Maddy served herself last, and while she demonstrated a knowledge for the way of things in the country, Brent could feel the heat rising next to him.