The Filter Trap (9 page)

Chapter 8

The climb up Telegraph Hill felt longer with every step. They all kept one eye on the clock as the next flyover time approached. By the time they reached the old stone steps leading through the park to Coit Tower, they had forty minutes left to find the doctor and send up the flare.

Under strange starlight they reached the oversize statue of Columbus at the base of the tower. Despite the waves and water stealing his formerly outstretched right arm, he still towered in a show of resolute strength.

“I hope Christopher here is a metaphor for our fate,” Allan said.

“I’ll keep my arms, thanks,” LARS elbowed Allan.

“I mean, like this statue, we have lost much but we’ll weather this storm.”

Lee turned. “You suppose Doctor Tarmor was here already when the waves hit?”

“Hope so,” SIMI answered. “Elsewise she’d be floatin’ down there.”

They looked to the east into the bay. Cruise ships moored for the holiday rested on the steep slopes below Telegraph Hill. The wharf lay in flooded ruin. A gigantic white boat, hardly short enough to fit under the Golden Gate, lay in two pieces. The longer back end anchored in the Levi’s corporate building. The front, still almost as tall as the hill it leaned on, tipped straight up, echoing the Transamerica Pyramid to the south. The empty swimming pool in the elongated triangular bow peaked up from beyond the trees surrounding Coit Tower.

“Think Doc hid in there?” SIMI asked, noticing trees felled by the waves making a natural bridge to the empty swimming pool in the bow.

Allan noticed bodies down in the mud at the base of the hill surrounding the ship. “I hope not.”

“Probably employees on the ship before the wave hit,” SIMI noted. “Cruises usually come back and dock for maintenance before the holidays. Would have been mostly empty last night.”

“Not that anywhere in the city was safe when the waves hit,” LARS added.

“Hopefully this hill was,” Nana whispered before yelling for Tarmor in his southern twanged accent.

Lee stopped the group. “If she’s on the boat it’ll take a lot longer to find her, so let’s scour the hill first and meet back here. Everyone with a firearm should split and cover the hill quicker. I want to make this next pick-up.”

Bereft of a firearm, Allan looked at her quizzically.

“Just stay here under Mr. Columbus. You’ll see trouble coming,” Lee said. “Or Tarmor climbing out of the boat.”

Allan wiggled his jaw, not entirely convinced of his safety, but glad they weren’t attempting the tightrope walk across the trees to the cruise ship. “Isn’t your mandate to bring back
two
PhDs?” he reminded Lee.

She took out a small flare gun and tossed it at Dr. Sands. “Don’t hurt yourself, tough guy.”

“This isn’t the one from the Humvee.”

“I did more than make phone calls from that USPP building. Keep it until I get back. If you need it, you’ll only get one shot, so be careful.”

As Lee and the bubbas spread out around the tower, Allan sat on the northern edge of the parking lot and looked past the bow of the cruise ship to the engorged bay. With most trees washed away, a panorama of the city didn’t require a visit to the top of the tower. His eyes followed the still-standing Golden Gate Bridge away from the city, lit only by flares and fires held by desperate refugees. Some wanted into the city and some wanted out. The Army’s tight barricade created a wall of angry and frustrated survivors pooling near the southern end.

To his right, Allan saw most of Oakland holed up on the hill in the disaster. Bonfires littered Berkeley, but Sather Tower still stood tall, a shimmering spire amid pockets of darkness and orange glow.

Unlike the rampant gas fires or traveling house fires in the city, the bonfires on campus, barely twinkles from this far away, had to be better curated. Allan knew the sirens in the city might have given the few students on campus during the holidays enough warning to seek higher ground. At first he thought he saw fires further up the hill, then he realized they were too far, above the diffusion of the others in the fog.

Helicopters darted over campus, but it was impossible to tell if they were delivering or retrieving survivors as they dipped through the mist, firelight splintering off their rotors. With all the empty dorms on Christmas break the campus would make an ideal staging area. The empty cafeterias and restaurants would surely have food in refrigerators, still cool in the winter chill despite the electricity being off. The only food on Telegraph Hill was bags of chips in the Tower souvenir stand. If the military intelligence on Jill’s location was wrong, Allan bet they’d find her over there on the campus familiar to both of them.

Turning southeast, he saw the Bay Bridge had stragglers too: tiny blinking lights hovering over the water like lost fireflies in the fog. They were probably trying to reunite with family inside the city, otherwise it would be foolish to come here. Maybe it was foolish either way. Allan hadn’t felt safe for one moment since he jumped out of the helicopter over the Presidio.

Under cover of night, most of the suffering and devastation to the bay area lay unseen. Despite all this, what he couldn’t see as he scanned the bay intrigued Allan more. No reflection came from the cragged rocks and concrete walls of the old penitentiary. The tiny island which housed a prison for decades had vanished. Had the darkness of night let the island slip into the fog unknown, or had the entire rock returned to the water?

With no electric lines connecting it to the mainland, Alcatraz converted to solar power long ago. If nowhere else in the city, the little island should be a bright light in the dark, but it remained silent. The prison, sitting only half as far from the old water level as his perch on Telegraph Hill, appeared to be wiped off the map. Allan hoped they’d find Jill and leave before the Sun came up again, not ready to face the collapse of the eastern side of the city that Alcatraz’s absence portended.

A white, wet paw seeking warmth in his lap disrupted Allen’s concentration.

“Hello there.” Allan didn’t mind this oddly comforting little survivor. The cat purred for a minute, then looked up at him, reflecting the foreign starlight in its wide eyes.

“Where’s your owner, huh?”

As it settled in his lap, something jingled. Allan ran his hands through the wet fur to a collar with a tag. “Gandalf Tarmor.”

“Holy shit!” he reflexively uttered. “Guys!”

No response came from the Air Force pilots inspecting the hillside.

“Well, Gandalf, your momma’s gotta be here somewhere. Can you show me?”

Allan put the cat gently on the ground and studied the flare gun for a moment, a little black pistol nearly invisible under a moonless sky.

Allan looked at the cat with hope. It looked back with all the emotion of a barn owl.

Part of Allan found the humor. ‘Maybe she told the cat about me. I might be the last person she’d want to see right now. Well, too bad, this is bigger than bruised hearts and egos, the whole planet is suffering.’

Of course he knew he was projecting. His relationship with Dr. Tarmor and its fallout was older than the cat, not that it could have understood anyway. Nobody on this mission seemed to understand Allan’s knowledge of Jill was more intimate than academic, and he preferred it that way.

Allan clapped his hands and lurched his foot at the cat, trying a more direct approach to suss out its owner. The cat darted off.

Allan nearly tripped over his own feet trying to keep up. Those big eyes could undoubtedly see better in the dark, and there were plenty of obstacles. They headed over the concrete rim of the parking lot and down through the tree stumps and debris. It was a stroke of luck that Jill Tarmor preferred Gandalf
the White
over a darker inhabitant of Middle Earth. Allan would have lost track of the animal entirely if its fur reflected any less light than the dirt it scrambled over.

They came to concrete again on the north side of the walking path underneath the tower. Nearly a foot of mud slushed in spots, but it remained flatter to walk on than the ravaged flanks of the steep hillside. Allan recognized the area. Years ago he’d played a small part in
The Jejune Institute
.

How odd to be back in one of the primary spots, the locus of the alternate reality game, playing a part in a stranger reality. Part of
Jejune
had focused on dioramas placed in the large concrete alcoves that lined the footpaths under the tower. The cat slowed in the thick mud, plodding past the alcoves further up the path. Allan wished he was only looking for game clues again, fearing this treasure hunt might end with a dead body.

A rhythmic noise emanated from one of the alcoves sealed by plywood and a thick curl of mud laid against it by the monstrous waves. The tapping, erratic enough to suggest intelligence, could also be a trapped raccoon or squirrel. If the mud pile wasn’t enough discouragement, a tree had fallen backwards against the plywood, cracking it with a hole just large enough for a cat to climb out of, or
—
as Gandalf demonstrated
—
into. The knocking stopped.

“Tarmor?” Allan said, banging on the plywood. “Jill?”

“Help!” a weak voice replied.

Intense pulling and wobbly kicks brought Allan face-to-face with Doctor Jill Tarmor, alive and conscious, but with a fractured wrist.

“Allan? What?”

“I’m here to rescue you, what happened?”

Jill appeared dazed for a moment, struggling to process if her rescue only happened in her imagination, a machination of her exhausted brain, trapped and hallucinating in the alcove.

“I tried to hold the plywood in place when the tsunami came, but the force of it pushed the plywood so hard it snapped the bone in my arm at the weakest point. I held onto the pipe in the alcove behind my back with the other arm, otherwise I’d be sucked back out when the wave released.”

Allan delicately helped her out of the alcove. “That release left a pile of mud and a fallen tree to glue you in. I’m glad we found you when we did.”

“So am I.” She relaxed for the first time. “Saved by the one man in the world with the least reason to.”

“This time you can thank me right now, rather than waiting a decade to acknowledge my help.”

“Ouch!” she said and started to pull her hand back. “I deserve that, I suppose. Allan, I’ve been wanting to apologize for forever. Now I can thank you at the same time. I’m extremely touched that you came looking for me. You’re my hero.” She clutched tight at his arm with her good hand.

Allan chuckled and pulled back. “I didn’t come looking for you because I’m still in love with you, Jill. Your narcissism hasn’t aged a day.”

“Sounds like something you wanted to say for ten years. So why are you here then? Nobody else cares that much about me, I assure you that. My colleagues at the Arecibo would probably pop open champagne if they heard I didn’t survive this.”

“Lonely at the top?” Allan muttered.

“I put my career first, so what? You got your trophy wife, you should be thanking me.”

Allan let go of her arm for good. “I don’t even know if they’re alive, and here I am four hundred miles away talking to you, of all people.”

Jill rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Sorry, I hope they’re alright. I’m jealous, okay? For years it’s just been me and Gandalf here.”

The ragtag cat purred at its name and pranced through the mud up the hill ahead.

“You always did like older men.”

“I don’t think I have enough strength to laugh, Allan.” She stopped. “You know I don’t believe in coincidences. How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. The president did.”

“The president? And they called you up too. Oh Jesus, then this is it?”

“It’s
something
. That’s all we know.”

“How did you know to come up here, Doc?” Nana’s southern accent startled both of them.

“This is one of the Air Force pilots I came with,” Allan explained.

“Call me Nana.”

Jill turned to face Nana as he caught up to them. “Short for?”

“Yup, Banana’s my call sign.”

“Well, well. I
must
be dreaming.”

Allan sighed. “Don’t get too excited, it has nothing to do with what’s in his pants.”

“Oh, how would
you
know?” Jill asked.

“I like
this
doc,” Nana chuckled.

“How do you feel about older women?” Jill replied.

“Forget it, just answer his question, how did you get up here?”

She stopped walking and glared at him. “Oh lord, Allan, don’t be jealous. It was a joke.” She turned to Nana. “I couldn’t handle a young firecracker like you anyway, no offense.”

“None taken, ma’am.” Nana smiled, white teeth gleaming in the dark. “Maybe Doc Sands is right: we
should
get back to business. We got a ride to catch.” He motioned for her to continue walking up the hill.

Jill was more than happy to tell them her ordeal after being stuck in that alcove for hours imagining nobody would ever know what she’d gone through, or care.