The Rivers Run Dry (12 page)

From this plateau, I could see the town of North Bend below. Train tracks curved through lush fields, houses gathered on narrow country roads that wandered like river tributaries. The small town had a peaceful appearance, like a Christmas village waiting for its first snow.

“Nice place, huh?” Jack said.

I nodded.

“That's why the nut jobs want to blow it up.” He finished chewing, ran the tip of his tongue over his white teeth, and told me that several weeks ago a hiker was coming down the trail at dusk just as some men were starting to climb up.

“It's almost dark,” he said, “and these guys are hiking up the trail from the bottom. Weird enough, but it gets weirder. They walked in twos, each pair spaced about ten minutes apart. The hiker coming down sees one set, then another, and another.”

They wore synthetic slacks and collared shirts buttoned high, he said, and the soles of their street shoes slipped on the steep path. They carried large aluminum-frame packs, the weight of which caused them to lean forward like men moving pianos, sweating profusely.

“Pay attention to this last detail, Harmon. It's important. They were all Middle Eastern. Every single one of them.”

He waited for my response. I reached down, pouring more water into Madame's bowl. “What's this got to do with me, Jack?”

“The hiker gets to the parking lot. No cars. Not one. The bus doesn't run out here. Are you catching my drift?”

“I'm not playing twenty questions with you, Jack. Tell me what you need.”

“Shoulder-launched missiles dismantle into small pieces that fit in backpacks. The summit of this mountain puts a shooter one mile closer to air traffic. If this still isn't rattling your brain, think about the flight pattern from New York or DC into Sea-Tac. It crosses right over North Bend. Taking down a commercial jet from here is like picking off ducks at the penny arcade. Imagine how many extra virgins they get for wiping out the infidels.”

I closed my water bottle, placing it in my pack. “What do you need from me?”

“I want a lynchpin for this case. I want evidence linking the suspects to this summit, just like that geologist did with bin Laden. They say you're a smart girl. Figure it out.”

Forty minutes later I reached the summit of Mount Si, a desolate cone of metamorphic rock, wind-stripped and ice-sheared. Jack stood beside a haystack-shaped precipice, the village below looking distant as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

“Over here,” he said.

I walked across the loose gray rocks to the haystack formation then kneeled for a closer look. The rocks' sharp edges dug into my knee. This was tortured earth, rock that had been heated, cooled, sheared, and fractured, all before it was exposed to summit weather. Geologists would label this stuff
mélange
—the French word for
mixture
—because it contained everything from pale markers of marine sediment to dense volcanic crystals. And it was friable, eroded by the elements. I took several samples, placing them in an evidence bag.

“This too,” Jack said.

I walked over. On the ground near his feet, scraps of what appeared to be an old fire huddled in the jagged rocks, the twigs as wiry as pipe tobacco. I kneeled again, collecting pieces, wondering if this fire was just somebody's bad attempt at a romantic moment. As I was collecting the pieces, Madame came around my side, licking my hand. I gently pushed her away.

But she came around the other side. Again, she licked my hand.

“Is that dog going to contaminate my evidence?” Jack asked.

“Go on, girl,” I said.

But Madame would not quit.

She pushed her snout under my forearm, raising her head, flicking my hand off the rocks.

“Madame, stop it!” My voice was harsh and she ran away, her claws scrabbling across the loose stones. I watched her turn behind the haystack outcropping. She started barking.

“Here's what I'm having trouble with,” Jack said. “You're on assignment and you bring a clairvoyant, and you bring the dog—”

“I didn't bring the clairvoyant. And the dog won't hurt anything.”

I marked the evidence bag, placing it inside my pack, then stood. Madame was still barking from behind the rock, a sound that the wind captured and threw off the side of the mountain.

“What's her problem?” Jack said, seething.

I walked across the stones, around the haystack, and found Madame at the summit's lone tree. It had spindly limbs, the lopsided appearance of a divining rod, a shape cultivated by wind and rain and snow.

“Madame, quiet,” I said.

But she continued to bark. I saw a small bird, its dark talons clutching one of the tree's emaciated branches.

“Madame, hush.”

At the sound of my voice, the bird tilted its head, the lidless eyes like polished ebony. It did not fly away as I approached. Its charcoal gray feathers were camouflage among the rocks. At the breast, the feathers turned white as fog.

“That's a Camp Robber.” Jack came up behind me. “Just a stupid gray jay but they'll steal a sandwich out of your hand.”

I stepped closer. The bird tilted its head again, black eyes clicking over the scene. Something cracked under my feet, the bird flew away.

“I might've guessed,” Jack said, “you'd be the first person to scare one of those birds.”

I glanced down, trying to see what I'd stepped on. The fragments gathered between the rocks, a sandy detritus produced by erosion. But when I kneeled down, I could see plastic pieces, their concave fractures forming along unnatural planes. I picked up a piece. Madame licked my wrist again.

“You better say something nice about my dog.” I held out the plastic fragments.

He leaned down, placing his large hands on his knees. I collected pieces of burnt plastic and dented shell casings, and when I lifted a pile of rocks behind the haystack that were gathered in a mound that defied gravity and erosion, I found a black plastic bag. The corners were sealed with duct tape. I cut it open with a pen knife and held it out for Jack to inspect.

He tapped his fingers against the granules, rubbing the substance between his fingertips before touching it to the tip of his tongue.

“Gunpowder,” he said.

I looked at Madame. She wagged her tail.

“She's a search dog,” he said. “Why didn't you say so?”

chapter nine

D
ry volcanic basalt drawled all the way across eastern Washington and on Monday morning I drove across it on Interstate 90, headed for the forensic geologist in Spokane. I carried with me the torn piece of fabric and the soil samples from Cougar Mountain, along with Jack's evidence for counterterrorism from Mount Si.

Although the highway ran straight as string across the desert, I could feel the road lifting and lowering, the rise so gentle, the descent so quiet that most people probably missed it. But those subtle shifts marked an earth-shaking scientific controversy, one that crystallized my views about science and man, and how we pursue the truth.

For most of the twentieth century, geologists assumed gradual erosion over millions of years created the landscape of eastern Washington. The relatively flat desert is interrupted by dramatic canyons, or what the locals call coulees. The most famous one was sealed with rebar and concrete, then filled with water—the Grand Coulee Dam. These channels extended for miles and stretched hundreds of feet across.

Only one geologist disagreed with the theory of gradual erosion. His name was J Harlan Bretz, an individualist who rejected punctuation with his first initial. Bretz held a PhD in geology from the University of Chicago and spent years studying eastern Washington. In 1929 he concluded that the coulees could only have been formed by a catastrophic flood because the sides were almost perpendicular and the bottoms were wide and flat, not narrow winding channels produced by slow trickling water. Bretz thought the flood came quickly and carved the solid basalt within days, maybe even hours.

By all accounts, Bretz was not a professing Christian—he never mentioned Noah—but every scientist in the world suddenly characterized him as a crackpot, heaping peer-reviewed abuse on his flood theory. But decades later, when aerial photographs were taken of the area, engineers noticed how the solid land rippled. The waves in the rock couldn't be seen from the ground, but from the sky the evidence was obvious. A lot of water crossed the Columbia Plateau, all at once. When the engineers calculated the hydraulics necessary to cut several hundred feet through solid rock, one solid estimate was a million cubic feet of water—per second. Water that could toss forty-foot boulders like Ping-Pong balls.

Bretz's evidence, it turned out, was impeccable, and geologists started putting the pieces of the puzzle together. A massive glacier once blanketed what is now western Montana, but the glacier had melted suddenly—nobody knew why—and now they realized where all that melt went. It was as if a giant bucket had been tipped on its side, a flood bursting across the Columbia Plateau, cutting basalt like a buzz saw.

And it happened in hours. Not millions of years.

J Harlan Bretz was ninety-six years old when he was awarded the Penrose Medal, geology's highest honor, and now as I stared out my windshield, watching sagebrush tumble across a desert with no evidence of moisture, I was reminded of the crucial characteristic linking my science work in the lab to my work as an agent in the field. Preconceived notions were not my friend; they were my avowed enemy; they blinded me to the truth. Six days had passed since anybody had seen Courtney VanAlstyne, and I no longer discounted any theory about what happened to her, including her parents' idea that she could have been kidnapped.

At the exit for Eastern Washington University, I drove past an empty football stadium, circled behind it, and parked outside a corrugated steel building. Inside, I offered my ID to the guard at the front desk and walked under exposed air ducts that ran along the ceiling. Beside the door marked Microanalysis Unit, a tall man with a black moustache waited. He wore cowboy boots and offered his right hand. It was the size of a baseball mitt.

“Howdy, I'm Peter Rosser,” he said. “How ya doin'?”

The lab was filled with the natural weapons of enemy-occupied territory: samples of minerals, tree barks, leaves, seeds, pollen, animal pelts, paw prints, and a series of ropes that hung from the ceiling made of cotton and hemp.

“Nice lab,” I said.

“When your state gets to tax Microsoft and Starbucks, you wind up with a surplus on the books.” He grinned. “For a while, at least.”

We walked toward the back of the lab, passing a stainless steel table with a car door propped against sawhorses. The door was riddled with bullet holes, and plastic straws had been shoved through the holes to show ballistic angles of entry and exit. Behind the door, a crash test dummy sat on a vinyl bench seat wearing a beanie.

“Let's see what ya got.” Rosser threw me a raft of paper.

I signed the custody and release forms, telling him which samples were urgent. He opened each bag, marked the contents and case numbers, then poured each sample into a separate stack of sieves before locking the canisters together. They looked like brass wedding cakes. Opening a door under his desk, he slipped the first stack into the shaker, then flipped the switch. He turned to me.

“Eric Duncan says you're a forensic geologist.”

“I was. I went to Quantico, now I'm a special agent.”

“You're still a rock head.” He grinned. “Most people gawk at the ropes. I saw you rubbernecking the minerals.”

“Guilty.”

“Why'd you leave the lab?” he asked.

“There were good days, when I couldn't believe they paid me to look at rocks all day.” I hesitated.

“But?”

“But the stories behind the rocks got to me. I decided to help find some happy endings.”

“So how's that working?” He tugged on the end of his moustache.

Before I could answer, the sifter beeped and Rosser turned, opening the door. He took out the canister, replacing it with another, turning the machine on again. He was lost to the puzzle before him, no longer needing a reply. I waited as he carried the soil to a picture window on the north side of the room, writing down corresponding colors and textures, before extracting one sample and placing it on a glass slide. He slipped it under the Polarizing Light Microscope. Since the scope was attached to his computer monitor, I could see the minerals forming a reverse view of the night sky, black stars sparkling against a white background. Rosser wrote down the details.

When he finished, he carried the torn fabric into a small back room. It was filled with peculiar sounds—whirs and squeals of refrigerators working overtime—and he cut a small piece from the cloth and placed it on a stub of carbon adhesive no wider than a pencil eraser. When he slid it into the Scanning Electron Microscope, the Gateway monitor jumped to life. A colored bar graph, the X-ray analysis, showed various chemical elements divided into relative ratios. The chemicals were S, Fe, and As.

“Sulfur, iron, arsenic,” Rosser said. “Hey, check out that arsenic ratio. You got longitude and latitude for this stuff?”

“No, but I can show you the quadrant on the map. I was on Cougar Mountain.”

Back at his desk, he pushed aside blood splatter samples turning brown from oxidation, and opened a map drawer, pulling out the Issaquah Quadrangle. He ran his finger down the right side, where the text explained the rock formations.

“Yep, what I thought.” He looked up. “Bituminous coal, which accounts for the high sulfur content. And a trace of arsenic.”

“Trace,” I repeated. “That wasn't what I saw on the X-ray. The arsenic ratio was pretty high.”

“You see the problem already. There's enough arsenic on that fabric to poison a Clydesdale. The stuff on Cougar Mountain usually isn't that potent.”