How long Peter Evans stared at the carpet he did not know. The arm of the chair pressing against his chest impeded his breathing, but it was becoming more difficult to breathe in any case. Images from his life flashed into consciousnessthe basement where he played with his first computer, the blue bicycle that was stolen the same day he got it, the boxed corsage for his senior prom date, standing up in Professor Whitson's con law class, his legs shaking, while old Whitson took him apart "Peter? Hel-lo? Peter?" and terrorized him, they were all terrorized by Whitson, and the dinner that was the final interview for his LA job, where he spilled soup all over his shirt and the partners pretended not to notice, and "Peter? Peter! What are you doing there? Peter? Get up, Peter."
He felt hands on his shoulders, burning hot hands, and with a grunt he was hauled back into sitting position. "There, that's better." Janis peered at him, her face inches from his. "What's the matter with you? What did you take? Talk to me."
But he could not talk. He could not move at all. She was wearing a leotard top and jeans and sandals. If she moved to one side, she was out of his field of view.
"Peter?" A puzzled tone. "I think something is really wrong. Have you been doing ecstasy? Did you have a stroke? You're too young for a stroke. But it could happen, I guess. Especially with your diet. I told you no more than sixty-five grams of fat a day. If you were a vegetarian you would never have a stroke. Why don't you answer me?"
She touched his jaw, a questioning look on her face. Evans was feeling distinctly lightheaded because he could hardly breathe anymore. It was as if he had a twenty-ton stone on his chest. Even though he was sitting up, the great stone weighed on him.
He thought, Call the hospital!
"I don't know what to do, Peter," she said. "I just wanted to talk to you tonight, and now you're like this. I mean, I guess it's a bad time. But it's kind of scary, too. I have to be honest. I wish you would answer me. Can you answer me?"
Call the hospital!
"Maybe you'll hate me for this, but I don't know what you took that makes you this way, so I'm going to call 911 and get an ambulance. I'm really sorry and I don't want to get you into trouble, but this is freaking me out, Peter."
She went out of his field of view but he heard her picking up the phone on the table next to his chair. He thought, Good. Hurry.
She said, "Something is wrong with your phone."
Oh Jesus.
She stepped back into his field of view. "Your phone is not working, did you know that?"
Use your cell phone.
"Do you have your cell phone? I left mine in the car."
Go get it.
"Maybe one of the other phones in your apartment is working. You need to call your service provider, Peter. It's not safe to be without phoneswhat's this? Somebody tore the phone out of the wall? Have we been having a fit of pique?"
Knocking on the door. It sounded like the front door. "Hell-lo? Anybody here? Hello? Peter?" A woman's voice. He couldn't see who it was.
He heard Janis say, "Who are you?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm Janis. I'm Peter's friend."
"I'm Sarah. I work with Peter."
"You're tall."
"Where is Peter?" Sarah said.
"He's over there," Janis said. "Something's wrong with him."
Evans could see none of this, because he could not move his eyes. And now he saw the first gray spots that signaled the impending loss of consciousness. It took every ounce of energy he possessed to move his chest and fill his lungs the tiniest bit.
"Peter?" Sarah said.
She moved into his field of view. She looked at him.
"Are you paralyzed?" she said.
Yes! Call the hospital!
"He's sweating," Sarah said. "Cold sweats."
"He was that way when I found him," Janis said. She turned to Sarah. "What are you doing here anyway? How well do you know Peter?"
"Did you call an ambulance?" Sarah said.
"No, because my phone is in my car, and"
"I'll do it."
Sarah flipped open her cell phone. It was the last thing Evans remembered.
It was late. The house was dark all around him. Nicholas Drake was sitting at his desk in his home in Brentwood, near Santa Monica. He was precisely 2.9 miles from the beach (he had recently measured it in his car), so he felt secure there. It was a good thing, too, because NERF had bought this house for him only one year before. There had been some discussion about that, because they had also bought him a townhouse in Georgetown. But Drake had pointed out that he needed a residence on the West Coast in which to entertain celebrities and important contributors.
California was, after all, the most environmentally conscious state in the nation. It had been the first to pass anti-smoking laws, almost ten years before New York or any other Eastern state did. And even when a Federal Court overturned the EPA on the issue of secondhand smoke in 1998, saying that the EPA had violated its own rules of evidence and banned a substance they had failed to prove caused any harm at allthe Federal Judge was from a tobacco state, obviouslyeven then, California did not budge. The anti-smoking laws stayed. In fact, Santa Monica was about to ban all smoking outdoors, even at the beach! Now that was progress!
It was easy here.
But as for getting major funds amp;well, that was another matter. There were some rich people in the entertainment industry who could be counted on, but for the real money in Californiathe investment bankers, portfolio managers, CEOs, real estate, trust funders, people with five hundred million to a couple billion, serious moneywell, those people weren't so easy. Those people inhabited a different California. Those people belonged to golf courses that didn't allow actors to join. The big money was in the hands of pioneers and tech entrepreneurs, and they were very smart and very tough. A lot of them knew their science. Christ, a lot of them were scientists.
Which was why they presented such a challenge to Drake, if he wanted that bonus for making his numbers for the year. He was staring at the screen, thinking it was time for a Scotch, when a new window opened and the cursor blinked:
SCORPIO_L: Can you talk?
Speaking of dimwits, he thought. He typed:
Yes I can.
Drake shifted in his seat, adjusting the light over his desk so it would illuminate his face. He looked at the camera lens mounted just above his screen.
The window opened up. He saw Ted Bradley, sitting at his desk in his house in the San Fernando Valley.
"Well?"
"It was just as you said," Bradley said. "Evans has gone over to the dark side."
"And?"
"He was with that girl, Jennifer, who works on the lawsuit amp;"
"Jennifer Haynes?"
"Yeah. She's a wise-ass bitch."
Drake said nothing. He was listening to the sound of the voice. Bradley had been drinking again. He said, "Ted, we've talked about this before. Not everybody likes it when you come on to them."
"Yeah, they do. I mean, mostly they do."
"Ted, this is not the impression we want to make."
"Well, she insulted me."
"All right. So Jennifer Haynes was there amp;"
"She's a stooge for big oil and coal. Gotta be."
"And who else was there?"
"Sarah Jones."
"Uh-huh. She flew up to see the body?"
"I don't know why she was there. She was with a guy named Kenner, a real asshole. Another know-it-all."
"Describe him."
"Forties, dark, kind of butch. Looks military to me."
"Uh-huh. Anyone else?"
"No."
"Nobody foreign? No other people?"
"No, just the ones I described."
"Would you say that Peter Evans knew Kenner?"
"Yeah. Pretty well, I would say."
"So, it was your impression they were working together?"
"Yes. I would say very much together."
"All right, Ted," Drake said. "I like your instincts here." He watched as Bradley preened on the monitor. "I think you may be on to something. Evans could prove a problem to us."
"I'll say."
"He's been one of our trusted attorneys. Why, he was in my office just the other day, getting an assignment from me. If he's turned on us, he could do damage."
"Damn turncoat," Ted said. "He's another Bennett Arnold."
"I want you to stick close to him for the next week or so."
"My pleasure."
"Hang out with him, stay by his side. Buddy-buddy. You know."
"I got you, Nick. I'll be on him like glue."
"I'm sure he'll be at the opening of the conference later this morning," Drake said. And he thought, Or then again, he might not make it.
Kenner said, "I must say, it was an excellent choice. Hapalochlaena fasciata, the most deadly of the three species of blue-ringed octopus. So named because when it is threatened it changes color and produces bright blue rings on its skin. It's found everywhere in the coastal waters of Australia. The animal is very tiny, the bite is small and almost undetectable, and envenomation is often deadly. There is no antivenom. And a bite's not likely to be quickly recognized at a hospital in Los Angeles. Really, a masterful choice."* Evans, who was lying in the emergency room at UCLA with a respirator on his face, just stared. He was still unable to speak. But he was no longer so frightened. Janis had gone home in a huff, mentioning something about teaching an early class. Sarah was sitting by his bed, rubbing his hand gently and looking beautiful. "Where would they have gotten one?"
"I imagine they have several," Kenner said. "They're delicate, and don't live very long anyway. But they are captured in fairly large numbers because the Aussies are trying to make an antivenin. You probably know the Australians lead the world in deadly poisonous animals. The most poisonous snake, the most poisonous mollusk, the most poisonous fishall from Australia or found there."
Evans thought, Great.
"But now of course UCLA has seen three cases. They're on it."
"Yes, we are," an intern said, coming into the room. He checked Evans's IV and his respirator. He said, "We have your preliminary blood work. It's a tetrodotoxin, like the others. You should be up and around in about three more hours. Lucky guy." He smiled winningly at Sarah, then walked out again.
"Anyway, I'm glad you're all right," Kenner said. "It would have been embarrassing to lose you."
Evans thought, What is he talking about? He was increasingly able to use his eye muscles, and he glanced over at Sarah. But she just smiled.
"Oh yes," Kenner said. "I need you alive, Peter. At least for a while."
Sitting in a corner of the room on his cell phone, Sanjong said, "Okay, we have some action."
Kenner said, "Is it where we thought?"
"Yes."
"What happened?"
"We just got the receipt notice. They rented an aircraft last month. A C-57 transport."
"Whew," Kenner said.
"What does that mean?" Sarah said.
"Big aircraft. They probably need it to spray."
She looked puzzled. "Spray?"
Sanjong said, "It's pretty clear they're going to disseminate AOB, ammonia-oxidizing bacteria, in large quantities. And perhaps some hydrophilic nanoparticles as well."
"To do what?"
"Control the path of a storm," Kenner said. "There's some evidence that disseminated AOB at altitude can shift a hurricane or cyclone track. Hydrophilic nanoparticles potentiate the effect. At least in theory. I don't know if it's been tried on a large system."
"They're going to control a hurricane?"
"They're going to try."
"Maybe not," Sanjong said. "Tokyo says some recent cellular and Internet traffic suggests that the project may be canceled."
"Then they don't have the initial conditions?"
"Looks like they don't, no."
Evans coughed. "Oh good," Kenner said. "You're coming around." He patted his arm. "Just rest now, Peter. Try and sleep if you can. Because, as you know, today is the big day."
"The big day?" Sarah said.
"The conference begins in about five and a half hours," Kenner said. He stood to go, then turned back to Evans. "I'm going to have Sanjong stay with you the rest of the night," he said. "I think you'll be all right here, but they've already made one attempt on your life, and I don't want them to try another."
Sanjong smiled and sat on the chair beside the bed, a stack of magazines beside him. He opened the latest issue of Time magazine. The cover story was "Climate Change Doomsday Ahead." He also had Newsweek: "Abrupt Climate ChangeA New Scandal for the Administration?" And The Economist: "Climate Change Rears Its Ugly Head." And Paris-Match: "Climat: Le Nouveau Pйril Amйricain."
Sanjong smiled cheerfully. "Just rest now," he said.
Evans closed his eyes.
At nine o'clock that morning, the invited attendees to the conference were milling around on the floor, not taking their seats. Evans was standing near the entrance, drinking coffee. He felt incredibly tired, but he was all right. He'd been a little shaky in his legs earlier, but that had passed.
The delegates were clearly academic types, many dressed casually in a manner to suggest an outdoorsy lifestylekhakis and L.L.Bean shirts, hiking boots, Patagonia vests. "It looks like a lumberjack convention, doesn't it?" Jennifer said, standing beside Evans. "You'd never know these guys spend most of their time in front of computer monitors."
"Is that true?" Evans said.
"A lot of them, yes."
"And the hiking shoes?"
She shrugged. "The rugged look is in, at the moment."
At the podium, Nicholas Drake tapped the microphone. "Good morning, everyone," he said. "We will begin in ten minutes." Then he stepped away, and huddled with Henley.
"Waiting for the TV cameras," Jennifer said. "They had some electrical problems this morning. Crews are still setting up."
"So, of course, everything waits for television."
At the entrance to the convention hall, there was a commotion and shouting. Evans looked over and saw an elderly man in a tweed coat and tie struggling with two security guards. "But I have been invited!" he said. "I am supposed to be here."
"Sorry, sir," the guards were saying, "your name is not on the sheet."
"But, I tell you, I have been invited!"
"Oh boy," Jennifer said, shaking her head.
"Who's that?"
"That is Professor Norman Hoffman. Ever heard of him?"
"No, why?"
"The ecology of thought? He's a famous sociologist, or should I say a notorious one. Extremely critical of environmental beliefs. A bit of a mad dog. We had him over to the war room to ask him his views. That was a mistake. The guy never shuts up. He talks a mile a minute and goes off on tangentsin every directionand you can't turn him off. It's like a TV set that changes channels every few seconds, and there's no remote."
"No wonder they don't want him here."
"Oh yes, he would cause trouble. He already is."
Over by the entrance, the old man was struggling with the security guards. "Let go of me! How dare you! I was invited! By George Morton himself. He and I are personal friends. George Morton invited me!"
The mention of George Morton sparked something. Evans went over to the old man.
Jennifer said, "You'll be sor-ry amp;"
He shrugged. "Excuse me," he said, coming up to the guards. "I'm Mr. Morton's attorney. Can I help you?"
The old man writhed in the grip of the guards. "I'm Professor Norman Hoffman and George Morton invited me!" Up close, Evans saw that the old man was messily shaven, unkempt, his hair wild. "Why do you think I would come to this horrible convocation? For one reason only: George asked me to. He wanted my impression of it. Although I could have told him weeks ago: There are no surprises to be had here, I can assure you. It will unfold with all the stately ceremony of any cheap funeral."
Evans was thinking Jennifer had been right to warn him about this guy. He said politely, "Do you have a ticket, sir?"
"No, I don't have a ticket. I don't need a ticket. What don't you understand, young man? I am Professor Norman Hoffman and I am a personal friend of George Morton's. Anyway," he said, "they took my ticket."
"Who did?"
"One of those guards."
Evans said to the guards, "Did you take his ticket?"
"He didn't have a ticket."
"Do you have a stub?" Evans said to Hoffman.
"No, damn it, I do not have a stub. I do not need a stub. I do not need any of this, frankly."
"I'm sorry, Professor, but"
"However, I managed to hold on to this." He gave Evans the torn corner of a ticket. It was a genuine ticket.
"Where is the rest?"
"I told you, they took it."
A guard standing to one side beckoned to Evans. Evans went over to him. The guard turned his cupped hand, revealing the rest of the ticket in his palm. "I'm sorry, sir," he said, "but Mr. Drake gave specific orders this gentleman was not to be allowed in."
"But he has a ticket," Evans said.
"Perhaps you'd like to take it up with Mr. Drake."
By now, a television crew had wandered over, drawn by the commotion. Hoffman immediately played to the cameras, struggling anew.
"Don't bother with Drake!" Hoffman yelled to Evans. "Drake won't let truth into these proceedings!" He turned to the camera. "Nicholas Drake is an immoral fraud, and these proceedings are a travesty to the poor of the world. I bear witness to the dying children of Africa and Asia! Breathing their last because of conferences like this! Fearmongers! Immoral fearmongers!" He struggled maniacally. His eyes were wild. There was spittle on his lips. He certainly appeared crazy, and the cameras switched off; the crews turned away, seemingly embarrassed. At once, Hoffman stopped his struggle. "Never mind. I've said my piece. No one is interested, as usual." He turned to his guards. "You can let me go. I have had enough of this chicanery. I cannot bear to be here another minute. Let me go!"
Evans said, "Let him go."
The guards released Hoffman. He immediately dashed into the center of the room, where a crew was now interviewing Ted Bradley. Hoffman stepped in front of Bradley and said, "This man is a pimp! He is an eco-pimp for a corrupt establishment that makes its living by spreading false fears! Don't you understand? False fears are a plague, a modern plague!"
Then the guards were on Hoffman again, dragging him bodily out of the hall. He didn't struggle this time. He just went limp, his heels scraping on the ground as he was carried out. All he said was, "Be careful, I have a bad back. You hurt me and I'll sue you for assault."
They set him outside on the curb, dusted him off, released him.
"Have a good day, sir."
"I intend to. My days are numbered."
Evans hung back with Jennifer, watching Hoffman. "I won't say I told you," Jennifer said.
"Just who is he, anyway?"
"He's a professor emeritus at USC. He was one of the first people to study in a rigorous statistical fashion the media and its effect on society. He's quite interesting, but as you see he has developed, uh, strong opinions."
"You think Morton really invited him here?"
"Peter, I need your help," a voice said. Evans turned and saw Drake striding toward him.
"What is it?"
"That nut," Drake said, nodding to Hoffman, "is probably going to go straight to the police and claim he was assaulted. We don't need that this morning. Go talk to him. See if you can calm him down."
Cautiously, Evans said, "I don't know what I can do amp;"
"Get him to explain his nutty theories," Drake said. "That'll keep him busy for hours."
"But then I'll miss the conf"
"We don't need you here. We need you there. With the cuckoo."
There was a large crowd outside the conference center. The overflow was watching the proceedings on a big TV screen, with subtitles running underneath the speaker. Evans pushed through the gathering. "I know why you are following me," Hoffman said, when he saw Evans. "And it won't work."
"Professor"
"You're the bright young poseur Nick Drake sent to put me off my purpose."
"Not at all, sir."
"Yes, you are. Don't lie to me. I don't like to be lied to."
"All right," Evans said, "it's true. I was sent by Drake."
Hoffman stopped. He seemed startled by the honesty. "I knew it. And what did he tell you to do?"
"Stop you from going to the police."
"All right then, you've succeeded. Go and tell him, I am not going to the police."
"It looks like you are."
"Oh. It looks like I am. You're one of those people who care what it looks like."
"No, sir, but you"
"I don't care what it looks like. I care what is. Do you have any idea what is?"
"I'm not sure I follow you."
"What is your line of work?"
"I'm a lawyer."
"I should have known. Everybody is a lawyer these days. Extrapolating the statistical growth of the legal profession, by the year 2035 every single person in the United States will be a lawyer, including newborn infants. They will be born lawyers. What do you suppose it will be like to live in such a society?"
"Professor," Evans said, "you made some interesting comments in the hall"
"Interesting? I accused them of flagrant immorality, and you call that interesting?"
"I'm sorry," Evans said, trying to move the discussion toward Hoffman's views. "You didn't explain why you think"
"I do not think anything, young man. I know. That is the purpose of my researchto know things, not to surmise them. Not to theorize. Not to hypothesize. But to know from direct research in the field. It's a lost art in academia these days, young manyou are not that youngwhat is your name, anyway?"
"Peter Evans."
"And you work for Drake, Mr. Evans?"
"No, for George Morton."
"Well, why didn't you say so!" Hoffman said. "George Morton was a great, great man. Come along, Mr. Evans, and I will buy you some coffee and we can talk. Do you know what I do?"
"I'm afraid I don't, sir."
"I study the ecology of thought," Hoffman said. "And how it has led to a State of Fear."
They were sitting on a bench across the street from the conference hall, just beyond the milling crowds near the entrance. It was a busy scene, but Hoffman ignored everything around him. He spoke rapidly, with great animation, moving his hands so wildly that he often slapped Evans in the chest, but he never seemed to notice.
"Ten years ago, I began with fashion and slang," he said, "the latter being of course a kind of verbal fashion. I wanted to know the determinants of change in fashion and speech. What I quickly found is that there are no identifiable determinants. Fashions change for arbitrary reasons and although there are regularitiescycles, periodicities, and correlationsthese are merely descriptive, not explanatory. Are you following me?"
"I think so," Evans said.
"In any case, I realized that these periodicities and correlations could be regarded as systems in themselves. Or if you will, ecosystems. I tested that hypothesis and found it heuristically valuable. Just as there is an ecology of the natural world, in the forests and mountains and oceans, so too there is an ecology of the man-made world of mental abstractions, ideas, and thought. That is what I have studied."
"I see."
"Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see."
"I understand, Professor, but why"
"Why do ideas fall out of favor, you are wondering?" Hoffman said. He was talking to himself. "The answer is simplythey do. In fashion, as in natural ecology, there are disruptions. Sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. Accidental, haphazard, unexpected, abrupt change. That is what the world shows us on every side."
"Professor amp;"
"But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example. In the 1970s, it gains popularity from the work of Sperry at Caltech, who studies a specific group of brain-surgery patients. His findings have no broader meaning beyond these patients. Sperry denies any broader meaning. By 1980, it is clear that the left and right brain notion is just wrongthe two sides of the brain do not work separately in a healthy person. But in the popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades after scientists have set it aside."
"Yes, all very interesting"
"Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called the balance of nature.' If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice. "However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance, and that means"
"Professor," Evans said, "I'd like to ask you"
"That means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway."
"But George Morton amp;"
"Yes, yes, you wonder what I discussed with George Morton. I am coming to that. We are not off topic. Because of course, Morton wanted to know about environmental ideas. And particularly the idea of environmental crisis."
"What did you tell him?"
"If you study the media, as my graduate students and I do, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networksNBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking." He paused.
"What did you find?" Evans said, taking his cue.
"There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example, during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed."
"In what way?"
"These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic."
"Why should it have changed in 1989?"
"Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year."
Hoffman fell silent again, looking at Evans in a significant way. Very pleased with himself.
Evans said, "I'm sorry, Professor. I don't get it."
"Neither did we. At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn't. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West."
Another silence. Another pleased look.
"I'm sorry," Evans said finally. "I was thirteen years old then, and amp;" He shrugged. "I don't see where you are leading."
"I am leading to the notion of social control, Peter. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the roador the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear."
"Fear," Evans said.
"Exactly. For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it."
Evans frowned. "You're saying that environmental crises took the place of the Cold War?"
"That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post9/11 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually."
He shifted on the concrete bench, turning away from the crowds.
"Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can't even seegerms, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusiona global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear. Amazing.
"How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nationsFrance, Germany, Japan, the USin fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?"
Evans said nothing. He knew it wasn't necessary.
"Well, I shall tell you how," he said. "In the old daysbefore your time, Petercitizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the populationunder the guise of promoting safety."
"Safety is important."
"Please. Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all. For instance, consider silicon breast implants."
Evans sighed, shaking his head. "Breast implants?"
"Yes. You will recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile news stories, high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings. The manufacturer, Dow Corning, was hounded out of the business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers.
"Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease. But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. I'm telling you, this is the way modern society worksby the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear amp;."
"Because we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press."
"That is the classic PLM answer. That's how they stay in business," Hoffman said. "But think. If it is not all right to falsely shout Fire!' in a crowded theater, why is it all right to shout Cancer!' in the pages of The New Yorker? When that statement is not true? We've spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phony power-line cancer claim.* So what?' you say. I can see it in your face. You're thinking, we're rich, we can afford it. It's only twenty-five billion dollars. But the fact is that twenty-five billion dollars is more than the total GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined. Half the world's population lives on two dollars a day. So that twenty-five billion would be enough to support thirty-four million people for a year. Or we could have helped all the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Instead, we piss it away on a fantasy published by a magazine whose readers take it very seriously. Trust it. It is a stupendous waste of money. In another world, it would be a criminal waste. One could easily imagine another Nuremberg trialthis time for the relentless squandering of Western wealth on trivialitiesand complete with pictures of the dead babies in Africa and Asia that result."
He hardly paused for breath. "At the very least, we are talking about a moral outrage. Thus we can expect our religious leaders and our great humanitarian figures to cry out against this waste and the needless deaths around the world that result. But do any religious leaders speak out? No. Quite the contrary, they join the chorus. They promote What Would Jesus Drive?' As if they have forgotten that what Jesus would drive is the false prophets and fearmongers out of the temple."
He was getting quite heated now.
"We are talking about a situation that is profoundly immoral. It is disgusting, if truth be told. The PLM callously ignores the plight of the poorest and most desperate human beings on our planet in order to keep fat politicians in office, rich news anchors on the air, and conniving lawyers in Mercedes-Benz convertibles. Oh, and university professors in Volvos. Let's not forget them."
"How's that?" Evans said. "What does this have to do with university professors?"
"Well, that's another discussion."
"Is there a short version?" Evans said.
"Not really. That's why headlines aren't news, Peter. But I will try to be succinct," he said. "The point is this: the world has changed in the last fifty years. We now live in the knowledge society, the information society, whatever you want to call it. And it has had enormous impact on our universities.
"Fifty years ago, if you wanted to lead what was then called the life of the mind,' meaning to be an intellectual, to live by your wits, you had to work in a university. The society at large had no place for you. A few newspaper reporters, a few magazine journalists could be considered as living by their wits, but that was about it. Universities attracted those who willingly gave up worldly goods to live a cloistered intellectual life, teaching timeless values to the younger generation. Intellectual work was the exclusive province of the university.
"But today, whole sectors of society live the life of the mind. Our entire economy is based on intellectual work, now. Thirty-six percent of workers are knowledge workers. That's more than are employed in manufacturing. And when professors decided they would no longer teach young people, but leave that task to their graduate students who knew much less than they did and spoke English poorlywhen that happened, the universities were thrown into crisis. What good were they anymore? They had lost their exclusive hold on the life of the mind. They no longer taught the young. Only so many theoretical texts on the semiotics of Foucault could be published in any single year. What was to become of our universities? What relevance did they have in the modern era?"
He stood up, as if energized by this question. Then abruptly, he sat down again.
"What happened," he continued, "is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can't say. Thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.
"The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created thatso far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I'm telling you."
He broke off and pointed down the walkway. "Who is this fellow pushing toward us through the crowd? He looks oddly familiar."
Evans said, "That's Ted Bradley, the actor."
"Where have I seen him?"
"He plays the president on television."
"Oh yes. Him."
Ted came to a halt in front of them, panting. "Peter," he said, "I've been looking everywhere for you. Is your cell phone on?"
"No, because"
"Sarah has been trying to reach you. She says it's important. We have to leave town right away. And bring your passport."
Evans said, "We? What does this have to do with you?"
"I'm coming with you," Ted said.
As they started to walk away, Hoffman clutched at Evans's sleeve, holding him back. He had a new thought. "We haven't talked about involution," he said.
"Professor"
"It is the next step in the development of nation-states. Indeed it is already happening. You must see the irony. After all, twenty-five billion dollars and ten years later the same rich elitists who were terrified of power-line cancer are buying magnets to strap to their ankles or put on their mattressesimported Japanese magnets are the best, the most expensivein order to enjoy the healthful effects of magnetic fields. The same magnetic fieldsonly now they can't get enough of them!"
"Professor," Evans said, "I have to go."
"Why don't these people just lie back against a TV screen? Snuggle up to a kitchen appliance? All the things that terrified them before."
"We'll talk later," Evans said, pulling his arm away.
"They even sell magnets in the health magazines! Healthy living through magnetic fields! Insanity! No one remembers even a few years ago! George Orwell. No memory!"
"Who is that guy?" Bradley said, as they headed off. "He seems a little wound up, doesn't he?"
"The record of catastrophe is contained within the ice cores," the speaker said, droning on at the podium. He was Russian and spoke with a heavy accent. "These ice cores from Greenland show that, in the last one hundred thousand years, there have been four abrupt climate change events. Some have occurred very quickly, in a few years. While the mechanisms by which these events occurred are still being studied, they demonstrate that there can be trigger' effects in climate, whereby small changesincluding man-made changescan produce catastrophically large effects. We have seen a foretaste of such effects in recent days with the calving of the world's largest iceberg, and the terrible loss of life from the flash flood in the American Southwest. And it is no difficulty to predict we will see more"
He paused, as Drake hurried up onto the stage, whispered in his ear, then stepped down again, looking at his watch.
"Uh, I must beg the forgiveness of you," the speaker said. "I seem to have brought up an outdated version of my remarks. Word processors! That was a part from an old talk from 2001. What I wanted to say was that the calving of the iceberg in 2001larger than many American statesand the dangerously unseasonal weather around the world, including the sunny Southwest, portends further climate instability. It is just beginning."
Sarah Jones, standing in the back, was talking with Ann Garner, the wife of a prominent Hollywood lawyer and a major contributor to NERF. Ann was emphatic as always, and talking nonstop.
"I'll tell you what I heard," Ann was saying. "I heard there is an industry-sponsored campaign to discredit NGOs. Industry is afraid of the growing power of the environmental movement and they are desperate, desperate to stop it. We have had our modest successes in recent years, and it is driving them crazy, and"
"I'm sorry," Sarah said. "Just a minute, Ann." She turned to look at the Russian speaker at the podium. What did he say? she thought.
She walked quickly to the press table, where reporters were lined up with their laptops open. They were getting real-time transcripts of the conference.
She looked over the shoulder of Ben Lopez, the reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Ben didn't mind; he had been after her for months.
"Hi ya, sweet thing."
"Hi, Ben. Mind if I look at something?"
She touched the mouse, scrolling up the screen.
"Sure, be my guest. Nice perfume."
She read:
CAN BE TRIGGER EFFECTS IN CLIMATE, WHEREBY SMALL CHANGES INCLUDING MAN-MADE CHANGES CAN PRODUCE CATASTROPHICALLY LARGE EFFECTS. WE HAVE HAD A FORETASTE OF SUCH EFFECTS IN RECENT DAYS WITH THE CALVING OF THE WORLD'S LARGEST ICEBERG AND THE TERRIBLE LOSS OF LIFE FROM THE FLASH FLOOD IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST. AND IT IS NO DIFFICULTY TO PREDICT WE WILL SEE MORE While she watched, the text changed, the strikeout disappearing, and replaced with new text:
CAN BE TRIGGER EFFECTS IN CLIMATE, WHEREBY SMALL CHANGES INCLUDING MAN-MADE CHANGES CAN PRODUCE CATASTROPHICALLY LARGE EFFECTS. WE HAVE HAD A FORETASTE OF SUCH EFFECTS WITH LARGE EFFECTS. WE HAVE HAD A FORETASTE OF SUCH EFFECTS WITH THE CALVING OF THE ICEBERG IN 2001 LARGER THAN MANY AMERICAN STATES AND THE DANGEROUSLY UNSEASONAL WEATHER AROUND THE WORLD INCLUDING THE SUNNY SOUTHWEST PORTENDS FURTHER CLIMATE INSTABILITY "Holy shit," she said.
"Something wrong?" Ben said.
"Did you see what he said?"
"Yeah. Poor guy. Probably has jet lag to beat hell. And obviously, he's struggling with English amp;"
The original remarks were gone. The record was corrected. But there was no doubt about it: the Russian had known in advance about the iceberg and the flash flood. It was written into his speech. And somebody had forgotten to tell him, when he got off the plane, that it never happened.
He knew in advance.
But now the record was corrected, the remarks stricken. She glanced at the video camera in the back, recording the proceedings. No doubt the remarks would disappear from the video record as well.
The son of a bitch knew in advance.
"Hey," Ben said, "I don't know what you're so upset about. Clue me in, will you?"
"Later," she said. "I promise." She patted his shoulder, and went back to Ann.
"So," Ann said, "what we are facing is an industry-promoted campaign, well orchestrated, well financed, pervasive and ultra right-wing, that is intent on destroying the environmental movement that stands in its way."
After what she had just seen, Sarah was in no mood to put up with this blather. "Ann," she said. "Did it ever cross your mind you might be paranoid?"
"No. Anyway, even paranoids have enemies."
"How many industry executives serve on the NERF board right now?" Sarah said.
"Uh, not that many."
Sarah knew that there were thirty board members, of whom twelve were industry figures. This was the case with all modern environmental groups. They had all had industry representatives over the last twenty years.
"Did you ask your corporate board members about this secret industry campaign?"
"No," she said. She was looking at Sarah oddly.
"Do you think," Sarah said, "that it is possible that NGOs like NERF could be the ones who are engaged in a secret campaign?"
"What are you talking about?" Ann said, stiffening. "Sarah. We're the good guys."
"Are we?"
"Yes. We are," Ann said. "What's going on with you, Sarah?"
In the parking lot outside the convention hall, Sanjong Thapa sat in the car with his laptop on his knees. He had easily hacked the WiFi network used by the journalists and was receiving the conference transcript, which was instantaneously saved. He had done it that way because he was afraid he might be discovered and locked out at any moment, but now it meant that he had the complete transcript, including the revisions. Kenner, he thought, was going to love this.
On another screen, Sanjong was monitoring the satellite images from the western Atlantic, off the coast of Florida. A large high-pressure mass was beginning to rotate, forming the ragged beginnings of a hurricane. Clearly an event was scheduled around a hurricane, but for some reason it had been abandoned.
And now he was tracking other investigative leads. In particular, Kenner was concerned about a small research submarine known as DOEV/2, and the tender ship AV Scorpio. That submarine and its tender ship had been leased by CanuCo, a natural gas corporation based in Calgary, to conduct research in the South Pacific, looking for undersea gas deposits. The tender had sailed to Port Moresby, New Guinea, some two months before, and had subsequently left that harbor and had been spotted near Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands.
Nothing of great interest there, until it became known that CanuCo was not a registered Canadian corporation, and that it had no assets other than a website and web address. The owner of the site was CanuCo Leasing Corp, another nonexistent company. The lease payments had been made from a Cayman Island account and paid in euros. The name of the account was Seismic Services, also in Calgary, and sharing the same postal address as CanuCo.
They were obviously the same entity. And it was Seismic Services that had originally attempted to lease a submarine. And presumably had later caused the death of Nat Damon in Vancouver.
Now there were agencies in Washington searching satellite maps, trying to find the AV Scorpio, somewhere in the Solomon Island chain. But the Solomons had scattered cloud cover, and the satellite passes had not yet revealed the ship's location.
That in itself was worrisome. It suggested that the ship had already hidden itself in some way, perhaps by going into a covered dock.
Somewhere in the South Pacific.
And it was a big ocean.
Equally worrisome was the fact that the tender had sailed first to Vancouver, where it had taken on thirty tons of "industrial equipment," in five-ton cartons. The Canadian government had thought the company was illegally transporting automobiles in the cartons, so they opened one. The customs officers instead found some complex equipment that they listed as "diesel generators."
Generators!
Sanjong didn't know what was in those cartons, but he was sure they weren't diesel generators. Because you didn't have to go to Vancouver to get a bunch of generators. So it was worrisome "Hey! You!"
He looked up and saw two security guards walking across the parking lot toward his car. Obviously his WiFi hack had been detected. It was time to go. He turned the key in the ignition and drove away, waving cheerfully to the security guards as he passed them.
"Sarah? What's going on? You're just staring into space."
"Nothing, Ann." Sarah shook her head. "Just thinking."
"About what? And what do you mean about my being paranoid?" Ann put her hand on Sarah's arm. "Really. I'm a little concerned about you."
Sarah thought, And I'm concerned about you.
In truth, it was Sarah who was feeling a distinct paranoid chill. She looked around the room, and her eyes met Drake's. He was staring at her, studying her from across the room. For how long? Had he seen her quick dash to the reporters' desk? Had he deduced the meaning of it? Did he know she knew?
"Sarah," Ann said, shaking her arm.
"Listen," Sarah said. "I'm really sorry, but I have to go."
"Sarah. I'm worried about you."
"I'll be fine." She started to leave the room.
"I'll just come with you," Ann said, falling into step with her.
"I'd rather you didn't."
"I'm concerned for your welfare."
"I think I need to be alone for a while," Sarah said.
"Is that any way to treat a friend?" Ann said. "I insist, darling. You need a little mothering, I can see that. And I'm here for you."
Sarah sighed.
Nicholas Drake watched as Sarah left the room. Ann was sticking with her, just as he had asked. Ann was dedicated and tenacious. Sarah would be no match for her, unless she elected to turn and literally run. But if she did that amp;well, they would have to take stronger action. These were critical times, and sometimes strong action was essential. Just as in wartime.
But Drake suspected dire action would not prove necessary. True, Kenner had managed to disrupt the first two events, but only because ELF was a bunch of amateurs. Their brand of do-it-yourself schoolboy spontaneity was unsuited to the demands of modern media. Drake had said that to Henley a dozen times. Henley shrugged it off; he was concerned about deniability. Well, NERF could certainly deny they knew these clowns. What a bunch of fuckups!
But this last event was different. It had been planned far more carefullyit had to beand it was in professional hands. Kenner would never be able to disrupt it. He could not even get there in time, Drake thought. And between Ted Bradley and Ann, Drake had lots of eyes and ears on that team as they progressed. And just to be sure, he had other surprises in store for Kenner as well.
He flipped open his phone and dialed Henley. "We've got them covered," he said.
"Good."
"Where are you?"
"I am about to deliver the news to V.," Henley said. "I am pulling up to his house now."
Through binoculars, Kenner watched as the silver Porsche convertible pulled into the driveway of the beach house. A tall, dark man in a blue golf shirt and tan slacks got out. He wore a baseball cap and dark glasses, but Kenner recognized him at once as Henley, the head of PR for NERF.
That closed the circle, he thought. He put the binoculars down on the fence and paused to consider the implications.
"Do you know who he is, sir?" the young FBI agent said, standing by his side. He was just a kid, no more than twenty-five.
"Yes," Kenner said. "I know who he is."
They were standing on the cliffs of Santa Monica, overlooking the beach and the ocean. The beach here was several hundred yards wide, from the shore to the bike path. Then a line of houses, packed close together along the coast highway. Then six lanes of roaring traffic.
Even though they abutted the highway, the houses were phenomenally expensivetwenty or thirty million dollars each, it was said, and perhaps much more. They were inhabited by some of the wealthiest people in California.
Henley was putting up the cloth top on his Porsche. He moved in a precise, almost fussy way. Then he went to the gate and buzzed it. The house he was entering was ultra-modern, curving shapes of glass. It glistened like a jewel in the morning sun.
Henley went inside. The gate closed behind him.
"But you don't care about people entering the house," the FBI agent said.
"That's right," Kenner said. "I don't."
"You don't want a list, or a record of who"
"No."
"But it might prove"
"No," Kenner said. The kid was trying to be helpful, but it was annoying. "I don't care about any of that. I just want to know when they all leave."
"Like, if they go on vacation or something?"
"Yes," Kenner said.
"What if they leave a maid behind?"
"They won't," Kenner said.
"Actually, sir, I'm pretty sure they will. These guys always leave somebody to watch the house."
"No," Kenner said. "This house will clear out. Everybody will go."
The kid frowned. "Whose house is it, anyway?"
"It belongs to a man named V. Allen Willy," Kenner said. He might as well tell him. "He's a philanthropist."
"Uh-huh. What is he, mixed up in the mob or something?"
"You might say," Kenner said. "Sort of a protection racket."
"It figures," the kid said. "Nobody makes that much money without a story behind it, you know what I mean?"
Kenner said he did. In fact, V. Allen Willy's story was as typically American as Horatio Alger's. Al Willy had started a chain of inexpensive clothing stores, taking clothes sewn in Third-World sweatshops and selling them in Western cities for thirty times the cost. After ten years, he sold his company for $400 million. Soon after, he became (by his own definition) a radical socialist, a crusader for a sustainable world, and an advocate for environmental justice.
The exploitations he had found so profitable he now attacked with the money he had made from them. He was fiery and righteous, and with the V. added to his name, memorable too. However, his attacks often led companies to pull out of their Third World factories, which were then taken over by Chinese corporations that paid local workers even less than before. Thus, by any sensible account, V. Allen Willy was exploiting workers twiceonce to make his fortune, and a second time to assuage his guilty conscience at their expense. He was a strikingly handsome man and not stupid, just an egotistical and impractical do-gooder. Currently, he was said to be writing a book on the precautionary principle.
He had also started the V. Allen Willy Foundation, which supported the cause of environmental justice through dozens of organizations, including NERF. And he was important enough to rate a personal visit from Henley himself.
"So he's a rich environmentalist?" the FBI kid said.
"That's right," Kenner said.
The kid nodded. "Okay," he said. "But I still don't get it. What makes you think a rich guy would leave his house empty?"
"I can't tell you that," Kenner said. "But he will. And I want to know the minute it happens." He handed the agent a card. "Call this number."
The kid looked at the card. "That's it?"
"That's it," Kenner said.
"And when is this going to happen?"
"Soon," Kenner said.
His phone buzzed. He flipped it open. It was a text message from Sanjong. THEY FOUND AV SCORPIO.
"I have to go," Kenner said.
"Nonsense," Ted Bradley said, sitting back in the passenger seat as Evans drove to Van Nuys. "You can't have all the fun, Pietro. I know you've been going on these secret excursions for the last week. I'm coming, too."
"You can't come, Ted," Evans said. "They won't allow it."
"Let me worry about that, okay?" he said, grinning.
Evans thought: What's going on? Bradley was staying so close, he was practically holding his hand. He refused to leave him alone.
Evans's cell phone rang. It was Sarah.
"Where are you?" she said.
"Almost to the airport. I have Ted with me."
"Uh-huh," she said, in the vague tone that meant she couldn't talk. "Well, we just got to the airport, and there seems to be a problem."
"What kind of a problem?"
"Legal," she said.
"What does that mean?" Evans said. But even as he spoke, he was turning off the road toward the gate leading to the runway, and he could see for himself.
Herb Lowenstein was standing there with eight security guards. And it looked like they were sealing the doors to Morton's jet.
Evans went through the gate and got out of the car. "What's going on, Herb?"
"The aircraft is being sealed," Herb said, "as required by law."
"What law?"
"George Morton's estate is now in probate, in case you've forgotten, and the contents of said estate, including all bank accounts and real property, must be sealed pending federal evaluation and assessing of death taxes. This aircraft will remain sealed until the conclusion of that evaluation. Six to nine months from now."
At that moment, Kenner pulled up in a town car. He introduced himself, shook hands with Lowenstein. "So it's a matter of probate," he said.
"That's right," Lowenstein said.
Kenner said, "I'm surprised to hear you say that."
"Why? George Morton is deceased."
"Is he? I hadn't heard."
"They found his body yesterday. Evans and Bradley went up and made the identification."
"And the medical examiner concurred?"
Lowenstein hesitated fractionally. "I presume so."
"You presume? Surely you've received documentation from the medical examiner to that effect. The autopsy was performed last night."
"I presumeI believe that we have the documentation."
"May I see it?"
"I believe it is at the office."
Kenner said, "May I see it?"
"That would merely cause unnecessary delay of my work here." Lowenstein turned to Evans. "Did you or did you not make a positive identification of Morton's body?"
"I did," Evans said.
"And you, Ted?"
"Yeah," Bradley said. "I did. It was him, all right. It was George. Poor guy."
Kenner said to Lowenstein, "I'd still like to see the medical examiner's notification."
Lowenstein snorted. "You have no basis for such a request, and I formally deny it. I am the senior attorney in charge of the estate. I am his designated executor, and I have already told you that my office has the documentation in hand."
"I heard you," Kenner said. "But I seem to remember that to falsely declare probate is fraud. That could be quite serious for an officer of the court such as you."
"Look," Lowenstein said, "I don't know what your game is"
"I merely want to see the document," Kenner said calmly. "There's a fax machine in the flight office, right there." He pointed to the building, near the airplane. "You can have the document sent over in a few seconds and resolve this matter without difficulty. Or, barring that, you can call the medical examiner's office in San Francisco and confirm that they have, in fact, made a positive identification."
"But we are in the presence of two eyewitnesses who"
"These are the days of DNA testing," Kenner said, looking at his watch. "I recommend that you make the calls." He turned to the security officers. "You can open the aircraft."
The security officers looked nonplussed. "Mr. Lowenstein?"
"Just a minute, just a goddamned minute," Lowenstein said, and stalked off toward the office, putting his cell phone to his ear as he went.
"Open the plane," Kenner said. He flipped open his wallet and showed the guards his badge.
"Yes, sir," they said.
Another car pulled up, and Sarah got out with Ann Garner. Ann said, "What's the fuss?"
"Just a little misunderstanding," Kenner said. He introduced himself to her.
"I know who you are," she said, with barely concealed hostility.
"I thought you might," Kenner said, smiling.
"And I have to say," she continued, "it's guys like yousmart and unscrupulous and immoralwho have made our environment the polluted mess that it now is. So let's just get that on the table right away. I don't like you, Mr. Kenner. I don't like you personally, and I don't like what you do in the world, and I don't like anything you stand for."
"Interesting," Kenner said. "Perhaps some day you and I could have a detailed and specific conversation about exactly what is wrong with our environment, and exactly who is responsible for making it a polluted mess."
"Whenever you want," she said, angrily.
"Good. You have legal training?"
"No."
"Scientific training?"
"No."
"What is your background?"
"I worked as a documentary film producer. Before I quit to raise my family."
"Ah."
"But I am very dedicated to the environment, and I have been all my life," she said. "I read everything. I read the Science' section of the New York Times every Tuesday cover to cover, of course The New Yorker, and the New York Review. I am extremely well informed."
"Well then," Kenner said, "I look forward to our conversation."
The pilots were driving up to the gate; they waited while it opened. "I think we can leave in a few minutes," Kenner said. He turned to Evans. "Why don't you confirm that that is all right with Mr. Lowenstein."
"Okay," Evans said, and headed toward the flight office.
"Just so you know," Ann said, "we're going with you. I am, and so is Ted."
"That will be delightful," Kenner said.
Inside the flight office, Evans found Lowenstein hunched over a phone in the back room reserved for pilots. "But I'm telling you, the guy isn't going for it, he wants documentation," Lowenstein said. And then after a pause, "Look, Nick, I'm not going to lose my license over this one. The guy's got a law degree from Harvard."
Evans knocked on the door. "Everything okay for us to leave?"
"Just a minute," Lowenstein said into the phone. He put his hand over the receiver. "You're going to leave now?"
"That's right. Unless you have the document amp;"
"It seems there is some confusion about the exact status of Morton's estate."
"Then we're going, Herb."
"Okay, okay."
He turned back to the phone. "They're leaving, Nick," he said. "You want to stop them, do it yourself."
In the cabin, everyone was sitting down. Kenner went around passing out sheets of paper. "What's this?" Bradley said, with a glance to Ann.
"It's a release," Kenner said.
Ann was reading aloud, "¬ liable in the event of death, serious bodily injury, disability, dismemberment'dismemberment?"
"That's right," Kenner said. "You need to understand that where we are going is extremely dangerous. I strongly advise both of you not to come. But if you insist on ignoring my advice, you need to sign that."
"Where are we going?" Bradley said.
"I can't tell you that until the plane is in the air."
"Why is it dangerous?"
"Do you have a problem signing the form?" Kenner said.
"No. Hell." Bradley scrawled his signature.
"Ann?"
Ann hesitated, bit her lip, and signed.
The pilot closed the doors. The engines whined as they taxied up the runway. The flight attendant asked what they would like to drink.
"Puligny-Montrachet," Evans said.
Ann said, "Where are we going?"
"To an island off the coast of New Guinea."
"Why?"
"There is a problem," Kenner said, "that has to be dealt with."
"You want to be any more specific?"
"Not right now."
The plane rose above the cloud layer in Los Angeles, and turned west, over the Pacific.
Sarah felt relieved when Jennifer Haynes went to the front of the cabin to take a nap, falling instantly asleep. But she found it awkward to have Ann and Ted onboard. Conversation in the cabin was stilted; Kenner was not saying much. Ted was drinking heavily. He said to Ann, "Just so you know, Mr. Kenner doesn't believe in anything that normal people believe in. Not even global warming. Or Kyoto."
"Of course he doesn't believe in Kyoto," Ann said. "He's an industry hit man. Representing coal and oil interests."
Kenner said nothing. He just handed her his card.
"Institute for Risk Analysis," Ann read aloud. "That's a new one. I'll add it to the list of phony right-wing fronts."
Kenner said nothing.
"Because it's all disinformation," Ann said. "The studies, the press releases, the flyers, websites, the organized campaigns, the big-money smears. Let me tell you, industry was thrilled when the US didn't sign Kyoto."
Kenner rubbed his chin, and said nothing.
Ann said, "We're the world's largest polluter, and our government doesn't give a damn."
Kenner smiled blandly.
"So now the United States is an international pariah, isolated from the rest of the world and justifiably despised because we failed to sign the Kyoto Protocol to attack a global problem."
She continued to goad him in this way, and finally, it seemed, he had had enough. "Tell me about Kyoto, Ann," he said. "Why should we have signed it?"
"Why? Because we have a moral obligation to join the rest of the civilized world in reducing carbon emissions to below 1990 levels."
"What effect would that treaty have?"
"The whole world knows that. It would reduce global temperatures in the year 2100."
"By how much?"
"I don't know what you're driving at."
"Don't you? The answer is well known. The effect of Kyoto would be to reduce warming by.04 degrees Celsius in the year 2100. Four hundredths of a degree. Do you dispute that outcome?"
"I certainly do. Four what? Hundredths of a degree? That's ridiculous."
"So you don't believe that would be the effect of the Kyoto Protocol?"
"Well, maybe because the United States didn't sign it"
"No, that would be the effect if we did sign it. Four hundredths of a degree."
"No," she said, shaking her head. "I don't believe that's true."
"The figure has been published a number of times in scientific journals. I can give you the references."* Raising his glass, Bradley said to Ann, "This guy is real big on references."
"As opposed to rhetoric," Kenner said, nodding. "Yes. I am."
Bradley belched. "Four hundredths of a degree? In a hundred years? What a bunch of bullshit."
"One could say so."
"I just did," Bradley said.
"But Kyoto's a first step," Ann said, "that's the point. Because if you believe in the precautionary principle, as I do"
"I didn't think the purpose of Kyoto was to take a first step," Kenner said. "I thought the purpose was to reduce global warming."
"Well, it is."
"Then why make a treaty that won't accomplish that? That won't, in effect, do anything at all?"
"It's a first step, as I said."
"Tell me: do you think it's possible to reduce carbon dioxide?"
"Of course. There are a host of alternative energy sources just waiting to be adopted. Wind power, solar, waste, geothermal"
"Tom Wigley and a panel of seventeen scientists and engineers from around the world made a careful study and concluded it is not possible. Their paper was published in Science. They said there is no known technology capable of reducing carbon emissions, or even holding them to levels many times higher than today. They conclude that wind, solar, and even nuclear power will not be sufficient to solve the problem. They say totally new and undiscovered technology is required."* "That's crazy," Ann said. "Amory Lovins laid it all out twenty years ago. Wind and solar, conservation, energy efficiency. There's no problem."
"Apparently there is. Lovins predicted that thirty-five percent of US power would come from alternative energy by the year 2000. The actual figure turned out to be six percent."
"Not enough subsidies."
"No country in the world produces thirty-five percent renewable energy, Ann."
"But countries like Japan do much better than we do."
Kenner said, "Japan is five percent renewable. Germany is five percent. England two percent."
"Denmark."
"Eight percent."
"Well," she said, "it just means we have more work to do."
"No question about that. Wind farms chop birds to pieces, so they might not be so popular. But solar panels would work. Silent, efficient amp;"
"Solar is great," she said.
"Yes," Kenner said. "And all we need is about twenty-seven thousand square kilometers of panels to do the job. Just cover the state of Massachusetts with solar panels and we'd be done. Of course by 2050 our energy needs will triple, so maybe New York would be a better choice."
"Or Texas. Nobody I know cares about Texas," Ann said.
"Well, there you are," Kenner said. "Cover ten percent of Texas, and you're in business. Although," he added, "Texans would probably prefer to cover Los Angeles first."
"You're making a joke."
"Not at all. Let's settle on Nevada. It's all desert anyway. But I'm curious to hear about your personal experience with alternative energy. What about you yourself, Ann? Have you adopted alternative sources?"
"Yes. I have solar heating for my swimming pool. The maid drives a hybrid."
"What do you drive?"
"Well, I need a bigger car for the kids."
"How big?"
"Well, I drive an SUV. Sometimes."
"What about your residence? You have solar panels for your electricity?"
"Well, I had consultants come to the house. Only, Jerrymy husbandsays it's too expensive to install. But I'm working on him."
"And your appliances amp;"
"Every single one is Energystar. Every one."
"That's good. And how large is your family?"
"I have two boys. Seven and nine."
"Wonderful. How big is your house?"
"I don't know exactly."
"How many square feet?"
She hesitated.
"Ah hell, tell him, Ann," Bradley said. "She has a huge fucking house. Must be ten, fifteen thousand square feet. Absolutely beautiful. And the grounds! Got to be an acre, acre and a half. Sprinklers going day and night. And such gorgeous landscapingshe has fund-raisers there all the time. Always wonderful events."
Kenner looked at her.
"Twelve thousand," Ann said. "Square feet."
"For four people?" Kenner said.
"Well, my mother-in-law lives with us, sometimes. And of course the maid in the back."
"And do you have a second home?" Kenner said.
"Shit, she's got two," Bradley said. "Got a fabulous place in Aspen, and a great house in Maine as well."
"That we inherited," Ann said. "My husband"
"And that apartment in London," Bradley said, "is that yours or your husband's company or what?"
"The company."
Kenner said, "How about travel? You use private jets?"
"Well, I mean we don't own one, but we catch rides, whatever. We go when people are going anyway. We fill the plane up. Which is a good thing."
"Of course," Kenner said. "But I must admit I'm a little confused about the philosophy"
"Hey," she said, suddenly angry. "I live in a milieu where I have to keep up a certain standard. It's necessary for my husband's business, andanyway, where do you live?"
"I have an apartment in Cambridge."
"How big?"
"Nine hundred square feet. I do not own a car. I fly coach."
"I don't believe you," she said.
"I think you'd better," Bradley said. "This guy knows what he's"
"Shut up, Ted," Ann said. "You're drunk."
"Not yet, I'm not," he said, looking wounded.
"I'm not judging you, Ann," Kenner said quietly. "I know you're a dedicated advocate. I'm just trying to figure out what your real position is on the environment."
"My position is human beings are heating the planet and poisoning the planet and we have a moral obligation to the biosphereto all the plants and animals that are being destroyed, and to the unborn generations of human beingsto keep these catastrophic changes from taking place." She sat back, nodding her head.
"So our moral obligation is to othersother plants, animals, and other people."
"Exactly."
"We need to do what is in their interest?"
"What is in the interest of all of us."
"Conceivably their interest is not the same as ours. Conflict of interest is the usual case."
"Every creature has a right to live on the planet."
"Surely you don't believe that," Kenner said.
"I do. I'm not speciesist. Every living creature."
"Even the malaria parasite?"
"Well, it is part of nature."
"Then do you oppose the elimination of polio and smallpox? They were part of nature, too."
"Well, I would have to say it's part of the arrogant pattern of mankind, changing the world to suit his purposes. A testosterone-driven impulse, not shared by women"
"You didn't answer me," Kenner said. "Do you oppose the elimination of polio and smallpox?"
"You're playing with words."
"Hardly. Is changing the world to suit one's purposes unnatural?"
"Of course. It is interfering with nature."
"Ever seen a termite mound? A beaver dam? Those creatures change the environment dramatically, affecting many other creatures. Are they interfering with nature?"
"The world is not in danger," she said, "from termite mounds."
"Arguably it is. The total weight of termites exceeds the total weight of all the humans in the world. A thousand times greater, in fact. Do you know how much methane termites produce? And methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide."
"I can't continue this," Ann said. "You enjoy arguing. I don't. I just want to make the world a better place. I'm going to go read a magazine now." She went to the front of the plane and sat down, her back to Kenner.
Sarah stayed where she was. "Her intentions are good," she said.
"And her information is bad," Kenner said. "A prescription for disaster."
Ted Bradley roused himself. He had watched the debate between Kenner and Ann. He liked Ann. He was pretty sure he had gone to bed with her; when he was drinking, he sometimes couldn't remember, but he had a vaguely fond memory of Ann, and he assumed that was the reason for it.
"I think you're being harsh," Bradley said, in his presidential tone. "Why should you call someone like Ann a prescription for disaster?' She cares very much about these issues. She has devoted her life to them, really. She cares."
"So what?" Kenner said. "Caring is irrelevant. Desire to do good is irrelevant. All that counts is knowledge and results. She doesn't have the knowledgeand, worse, she doesn't know it. Human beings don't know how to do the things she believes ought to be done."
"Like what?"
"Like managing the environment. We don't know how to do that."
"What are you talking about?" Bradley said, throwing his hands in the air. "This is nonsense. Of course we can manage the environment."
"Really? Do you know anything about the history of Yellowstone Park? The first national park?"
"I've been there."
"That's not what I asked."
"Could you just get to the point?" Bradley said. "It's pretty late for Q-and-A, Professor. You know what I mean?"
"All right, then," Kenner said. "I'll tell you."
Yellowstone Park, he explained, was the first wilderness to be set aside as a natural preserve anywhere in the world. The region around the Yellowstone River in Wyoming had long been recognized for its wondrous scenic beauty. Lewis and Clark sang its praises. Artists like Bierstadt and Moran painted it. And the new Northern Pacific Railroad wanted a scenic attraction to draw tourists west. So in 1872, in part because of railroad pressure, President Ulysses Grant set aside two million acres and created Yellowstone National Park.
There was only one problem, unacknowledged then and later. No one had any experience trying to preserve wilderness. There had never been any need to do it before. And it was assumed to be much easier than it proved to be.
When Theodore Roosevelt visited the park in 1903, he saw a landscape teeming with game. There were thousands of elk, buffalo, black bear, deer, mountain lions, grizzlies, coyotes, wolves, and bighorn sheep. By that time there were rules in place to keep things as they were. Soon after that, the Park Service was formed, a new bureaucracy whose sole job was to maintain the park in its original condition.
Yet within ten years, the teeming landscape that Roosevelt saw was gone forever. And the reason for this was the park managerscharged with keeping the park in pristine conditionhad taken a series of steps that they thought were in the best interest of preserving the park and its animals. But they were wrong.
"Well," Bradley said, "our knowledge has increased with time amp;"
"No, it hasn't," Kenner said. "That's my point. It's a perpetual claim that we know more today, and it's not borne out by what actually happened."
Which was this: the early park managers mistakenly believed that elk were about to become extinct. So they tried to increase the elk herds within the park by eliminating predators. To that end, they shot and poisoned all the wolves in the park. And they prohibited Indians from hunting in the park, though Yellowstone was a traditional hunting ground.
Protected, the elk herds exploded, and ate so much of certain trees and grasses that the ecology of the area began to change. The elk ate the trees that the beavers used to make dams, so the beavers vanished. That was when the managers discovered beavers were vital to the overall water management of the region.
When the beavers disappeared, the meadows dried up; the trout and otter vanished; soil erosion increased; and the park ecology changed even further.
By the 1920s it had become abundantly clear there were too many elk, so the rangers began to shoot them by the thousands. But the change in plant ecology seemed to be permanent; the old mix of trees and grasses did not return.
It also became increasingly clear that the Indian hunters of old had exerted a valuable ecological influence on the park lands by keeping down the numbers of elk, moose, and bison. This belated recognition came as part of a more general understanding that native Americans had strongly shaped the "untouched wilderness" that the first white men sawor thought they were seeingwhen they first arrived in the New World. The "untouched wilderness" was nothing of the sort. Human beings on the North American continent had exerted a huge influence on the environment for thousands of yearsburning plains grasses, modifying forests, thinning specific animal populations, and hunting others to extinction.
In retrospect, the rule forbidding Indians from hunting was seen as a mistake. But it was just one of many mistakes that continued to be made in an unbroken stream by park managers. Grizzlies were protected, then killed off. Wolves were killed off, then brought back. Animal research involving field study and radio collars was halted, then resumed after certain species were declared endangered. A policy of fire prevention was instituted, with no understanding of the regenerative effects of fire. When the policy was finally reversed, thousands of acres burned so hotly that the ground was sterilized, and the forests did not grow back without reseeding. Rainbow trout were introduced in the 1970s, soon killing off the native cutthroat species.
And on and on.
And on.
"So what you have," Kenner said, "is a history of ignorant, incompetent, and disastrously intrusive intervention, followed by attempts to repair the intervention, followed by attempts to repair the damage caused by the repairs, as dramatic as any oil spill or toxic dump. Except in this case there is no evil corporation or fossil fuel economy to blame. This disaster was caused by environmentalists charged with protecting the wilderness, who made one dreadful mistake after anotherand, along the way, proved how little they understood the environment they intended to protect."
"This is absurd," Bradley said. "To preserve a wilderness, you just preserve it. You leave it alone and let the balance of nature take over. That's all that is required."
"Absolutely wrong," Kenner said. "Passive protectionleaving things alonedoesn't preserve the status quo in a wilderness, any more than it does in your backyard. The world is alive, Ted. Things are constantly in flux. Species are winning, losing, rising, falling, taking over, being pushed back. Merely setting aside wilderness doesn't freeze it in its present state, any more than locking your children in a room will prevent them from growing up. Ours is a changing world, and if you want to preserve a piece of land in a particular state, you have to decide what that state is, and then actively, even aggressively, manage it."
"But you said we don't know how to do that."
"Correct. We don't. Because any action you take causes change in the environment, Ted. And any change hurts some plant or animal. It's inevitable. Preserving old-growth forest to help the spotted owl means Kirtland's warbler and other species are deprived of the new-growth forest they prefer. There is no free lunch."
"But"
"No buts, Ted. Name an action that had only positive consequences."
"Okay, I will. Banning CFCs for the ozone layer."
"That harmed Third World people by eliminating cheap refrigerants so that their food spoiled more often and more of them died of food poisoning."
"But the ozone layer is more important"
"Perhaps to you. They might disagree. But we're talking about whether you can take an action that does not have harmful consequences."
"Okay. Solar panels. Water recycling systems for houses."
"Enables people to put houses in remote wilderness areas where formerly they could not because of lack of water and power. Invades wilderness and thus endangers species that were previously unmolested."
"Banning DDT."
"Arguably the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century. DDT was the best agent against mosquitoes, and despite the rhetoric there was nothing anywhere near as good or as safe. Since the ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. All together, the ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths.* Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler, Ted. And the environmental movement pushed hard for it."
"But DDT was a carcinogen."
"No, it wasn't. And everybody knew it at the time of the ban."
"It was unsafe."
"Actually, it was so safe you could eat it. People did just that for two years, in one experiment.* After the ban, it was replaced by parathion, which is really unsafe. More than a hundred farm workers died in the months after the DDT ban, because they were unaccustomed to handling really toxic pesticides."
"We disagree about all this."
"Only because you lack the relevant facts, or are unwilling to face up to the consequences of the actions of organizations you support. Banning DDT will someday be seen as a scandalous blunder."
"DDT was never banned."
"You're right. Countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn't get foreign aid." Kenner shook his head. "But the unarguable point, based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban, Ted. Once again, there can be no action without harm."
A long silence followed. Ted shifted in his seat, started to speak, then closed his mouth again. Finally he said, "Okay. Fine." He adopted his most lofty, presidential manner. "You have persuaded me. I grant you the point. So?"
"So the real question with any environmental action is, do the benefits outweigh the harm? Because there is always harm."
"Okay, okay. So?"
"When do you hear any environmental group speak that way? Never. They're all absolutists. They go before judges arguing that regulations should be imposed with no consideration of costs at all.! The requirement that regulations show a cost-benefit was imposed on them by the courts after a period of wretched excess. Environmentalists screamed bloody murder about cost-benefit requirements and they're still screaming. They don't want people to know how much their forays into regulation actually cost society and the world. The most egregious example was the benzene regulations in the late 1980s that were so expensive for so little benefit that they ended up costing twenty billion dollars for every year of life saved.* Do you agree with that regulation?"
"Well, when you put it in those terms, no."
"What other terms are there, Ted, besides the truth? Twenty billion dollars to save one year of life. That was the cost of the regulation. Should you support organizations that push for such wasteful regulation?"
"No."
"The lead benzene lobbying group in Congress was NERF. Are you going to resign from its board?"
"Of course not."
Kenner just nodded slowly. "And there we have it."
Sanjong was pointing to the computer screen, and Kenner came over, sliding into the seat next to him. The screen showed an aerial image of a tropical island, heavily forested, and a broad curving bay of blue water. The photo seemed to be taken from a low-flying airplane. Around the bay were four weathered wood shacks.
"Those are new," Sanjong said. "They went up in the last twenty-four hours."
"They look old."
"Yes, but they're not. Close inspection suggests that they are artificial. They may be made out of plastic instead of wood. The largest one appears to be a residence, and the other three house equipment."
"What kind of equipment?" Kenner said.
"Nothing has been visible in the photographs. The equipment was probably offloaded at night. But I went back and got a decent description from Hong Kong customs. The equipment consists of three hypersonic cavitation generators. Mounted in carbon matrix resonant impact assembly frames."
"Hypersonic cavitation equipment is for sale?"
"They got it. I don't know how."
Kenner and Sanjong were huddled together, speaking in low tones. Evans drifted over, leaned in close. "What's a hypersonic whatever-it-is?" he said quietly.
"Cavitation generator," Kenner said. "It's a high-energy acoustic device the size of a small truck that produces a radially symmetric cavitation field."
Evans looked blank.
"Cavitation," Sanjong explained, "refers to the formation of bubbles in a substance. When you boil water, that's cavitation. You can boil water with sound, too, but in this case the generators are designed to induce cavitation fields in a solid."
Evans said, "What solid?"
"The earth," Kenner said.
"I don't get it," Evans said. "They're going to make bubbles in the ground, like boiling water?"
"Something like that, yes."
"Why?"
They were interrupted by the arrival of Ann Garner. "Is this a boys-only meeting?" she said. "Or can anyone sit in?"
"Of course," Sanjong said, tapping the keyboard. The screen showed a dense array of graphs. "We were just reviewing the carbon dioxide levels of ice cores taken from Vostok and from North GRIP in Greenland."
"You guys can't keep me in the dark forever, you know," Ann said. "Sooner or later we will land this plane. And then I'm going to find out what you're really up to."
"That's true," Kenner said.
"Why not tell me now?"
Kenner just shook his head.
The pilot clicked the radio. "Check your seat belts, please," he said. "Prepare for landing in Honolulu."
Ann said, "Honolulu!"
"Where did you think we were going?"
"I thought"
And then she broke off.
Sarah thought: She knows where we are going.
While they refueled at Honolulu, a customs inspector came onboard and asked to see their passports. He seemed amused by the presence of Ted Bradley, whom he referred to as "Mr. President"; Bradley in turn was pleased by the attention from a man in uniform.
After the customs officer checked their passports, he said to the group, "Your destination is filed as Gareda in the Solomon Islands. I just want to make sure you're aware of the travel advisory for Gareda. Most embassies have warned visitors against going there in view of the current conditions."
"What current conditions?" Ann said.
"There are rebels active on the island. There have been a number of murders. The Australian army went in last year and captured most of the rebels, but not all. There have been three murders in the last week, including two foreigners. One of the corpses was, uh, mutilated. And the head was taken."
"What?"
"The head was taken. Not while he was alive."
Ann turned to Kenner. "That's where we are going? Gareda?"
Kenner nodded slowly.
"What do you mean, the head was taken?"
"Presumably, it was for the skull."
"The skull," she repeated. "So amp;you're talking about head-hunters amp;"
Kenner nodded.
"I'm getting off this plane," she said, and gathering up her hand bag, walked down the stairs.
Jennifer was just waking up. "What's her problem?"
"She doesn't like good-byes," Sanjong said.
Ted Bradley was stroking his chin in what he imagined was a thoughtful manner. He said, "A foreigner had his head cut off?"
"Apparently, it was worse than that," the customs officer said.
"Jesus. What's worse than that?" Bradley said, laughing.
The customs officer said, "The situation on the ground is not entirely clear. The reports are conflicting."
Bradley stopped laughing. "No. Seriously: I want to know. What's worse than beheading?"
There was a brief silence.
"They ate him," Sanjong said.
Bradley rocked back in his chair. "They ate him?"
The customs officer nodded. "Parts of him," he said. "At least, that's the report."
"Holy shit," Bradley said. "Which parts? Never mind, I don't want to know. Jesus Christ. They ate the guy."
Kenner looked at him. "You don't have to go, Ted," he said. "You can leave, too."
"I have to admit, I'm thinking about it," he said, in his judicious, presidential tone. "Getting eaten is not a distinguished end to a career. Think of any of the greats. Think of Elviseaten. John Lennoneaten. I mean, it's not how we want to be remembered." He fell silent, lowering his chin to his chest, sunk deep in thought, then raising it again. It was a gesture he'd done a hundred times on television. "But, no," he said finally. "I'll accept the danger. If you're going, I'm going."
"We're going," Kenner said.
It was nine hours flight time to Kontag Airport in Gareda. The cabin was dark; most of them slept. Kenner as usual stayed awake, sitting in the back with Sanjong, talking quietly.
Peter Evans woke up about four hours into the flight. His toes still burned from the Antarctic episode and his back was very sore from his being bounced around in the flash flood. But the pain in his toes reminded him that he was supposed to check them daily, to see if they were becoming infected. He got up and went to the back of the plane, where Kenner was sitting. He pulled off his socks and inspected his toes.
"Sniff 'em," Kenner said.
"What?"
"Smell them. You have any gangrene, you'll smell it first. They hurt?"
"Burn. Mostly just at night."
Kenner nodded. "You'll be all right. I think you'll keep them all."
Evans sat back, thinking how strange it was to have a conversation about losing his toes. Somehow it made his back hurt more. He went into the bathroom at the back of the plane and rummaged through the drawers looking for painkillers. All they had was Advil, so he took that, then came back.
"That was a clever story you arranged in Honolulu," he said. "Too bad it didn't work on Ted."
Kenner just stared.
"It's not a story," Sanjong said. "There were three murders yesterday."
"Oh. And they ate somebody?"
"That was the report."
"Oh," Evans said.
Going forward into the dark cabin, Evans saw Sarah sitting up. She whispered, "Can't sleep?"
"No. A little achy. You?"
"Yeah. Toes hurt. From the frostbite."
"Me, too."
She nodded toward the galley. "Any food back there?"
"I think so."
She got up, headed back. He trailed after her. She said, "The tops of my ears hurt, too."
"Mine are okay," he said.
She rummaged around, found some cold pasta. She held a plate out to him. He shook his head. She spooned out a plate for herself and began to eat. "So, how long have you known Jennifer?"
"I don't really know her," he said. "I just met her recently, at the law office."
"Why is she coming with us?"
"I think she knows Kenner."
"She does," Kenner said, from his chair.
"How?"
"She's my niece."
"Really?" Sarah said. "How long has she been your nienever mind. I'm sorry. It's late."
"She's my sister's kid. Her parents died in a plane crash when she was eleven."
"Oh."
"She's been on her own a lot."
"Oh."
Evans looked at Sarah and thought once again that it was a kind of trick, how she could get up from sleeping and appear beautiful, and perfect. And she had on that perfume that had driven him quietly crazy from the moment he first smelled it.
"Well," Sarah said. "She seems very nice."
"I don't, uh, there's nothing amp;"
"It's fine," she said. "You don't have to pretend with me, Peter."
"I'm not pretending," he said, leaning slightly closer, smelling her perfume.
"Yes, you are." She moved away from him, and sat down opposite Kenner. "What happens when we get to Gareda?" she said.
The thing about her, Evans thought, was that she had the most chilling ability to instantly behave as if he did not exist. Right now she was not looking at him; she was focusing all her attention on Kenner, talking with apparent concentration to Kenner and behaving as if no one else were there.
Was that supposed to be provocative? he thought. Was that supposed to be a turn-on, to get him excited and start the chase? Because it didn't make him feel that way at all. It pissed him off.
He wanted to slap his hand down on the counter, make a big noise, and say, "Hel-lo! Earth to Sarah!" Or something like that.
But somehow he thought that that would make things worse. He could imagine her annoyed glance. You're such a baby. Something like that. It made him long for somebody uncomplicated, the way Janis was uncomplicated. Just a great body and a voice you could tune out. That was exactly what he needed now.
He gave a long sigh.
She heard it, glanced up at him, and then patted the seat beside her. "Come sit here, Peter," she said, "and join the conversation." And she gave him a big, dazzling smile.
He thought: I am very confused.
"This is Resolution Bay," Sanjong said, holding out his computer screen. It showed the bay, then zoomed back to show a map of the entire island. "It's on the northeast side of the island. The airport is on the west coast. It's about twenty-five miles away."
The island of Gareda looked like a big avocado immersed in the water, with jagged edges along the shore. "There is a mountain spine running along the center of the island," Sanjong said. "In places, it's three thousand feet high. The jungle in the interior of the island is very dense, essentially impenetrable, unless you follow the roads or one of the footpaths through the jungle. But we can't make our way cross country."
"So we take a road," Sarah said.
"Maybe," Sanjong said. "But the rebels are known to be in this area here" he circled the center of the island with his finger "and they have split up in two or possibly three groups. Their exact locations are not known. They have taken over this small village here, Pavutu, near the north coast. That seems to be their headquarters. And they presumably have roadblocks up, and probably patrols on the jungle paths."
"Then how do we get to Resolution Bay?"
Kenner said, "By helicopter, if we can. I've arranged for one, but this is not the most reliable part of the world. If we can't do that, we'll head out by car. See how far we can get. But at this point we just don't know how we're going to do it."
Evans said, "And when we get to Resolution Bay?"
"There are four new structures on the beach. We have to take them down and dismantle the machinery inside. Make them inoperable. We also have to find their submarine tender and dismantle the submarine."
"What submarine?" Sarah said.
"They leased a small two-man research sub. It's been in the region for the last two weeks."
"Doing what?"
"We're pretty sure we know now. The whole Solomon Island chain of more than nine hundred islands is located within a very active geological part of the world in terms of plate tectonics. The Solomons are a part of the world where plates crunch together. That's why they have many volcanoes there, and so many earthquakes. It's a very unstable region. The Pacific Plate collides and slides under the Oldowan Java Plateau. The result is the Solomon Trench, a huge undersea feature that curves in an arc all along the northern side of the island chain. It's very deep, between two thousand and six thousand feet. The trench is just north of Resolution Bay, too."
"So it's an active geological region with a deep trench," Evans said. "I still don't see the game."
"Lot of undersea volcanoes, lot of slope debris, and therefore the potential for landslides," Kenner said.
"Landslides." Evans rubbed his eyes. It was late.
"Undersea landslides," Kenner said.
Sarah said, "They're trying to cause an undersea landslide?"
"We think so. Somewhere along the slope of the Solomon Trench. Probably at the five-hundred- to one-thousand-foot depth."
Evans said, "And what would that do? An undersea landslide?"
Kenner said to Sanjong, "Show them the big map." Sanjong brought up a map of the entire Pacific basin, from Siberia to Chile, Australia to Alaska.
"Okay," Kenner said. "Now draw a straight line out from Resolution Bay and see where it takes you."
"California!"
"Right. In about eleven hours."
Evans frowned. "An undersea landslide amp;"
"Displaces an enormous volume of water very quickly. That is the most common way a tsunami is formed. Once propagated, the wave front will travel right across the Pacific at five hundred miles an hour."
"Holy shit," Evans said. "How big a wave are we talking?"
"Actually, it's a series, what's called a wave train. The undersea landslide in Alaska in 1952 generated a wave forty-seven feet high. But the height of this one is impossible to anticipate because wave height is a function of the shoreline it hits. In parts of California it could be up to sixty feet high. A six-story building."
"Oh boy," Sarah said.
"And how much time do we have before they do this?" Evans said.
"The conference runs two more days. The wave will take a day to cross the Pacific. So amp;"
"We have one day."
"At most, yes. One day to land, make our way to Resolution Bay, and stop them."
"Stop who?" Ted Bradley said, yawning and coming back toward them. "Je-sus! Do I have a headache or what! How about a little hair of the dog?" He paused, stared at the group, looking from face to face. "Hey, what's going on here? You guys look like I interrupted a funeral."
Three hours later, the sun came up and the plane began its descent. Now it was flying low, passing over green forested islands fringed in an unearthly pale blue. They saw few roads and few towns, mostly small villages.
Ted Bradley looked out the window. "Isn't it beautiful?" he said. "Truly unspoiled paradise. This is what is vanishing in our world."
Seated opposite him, Kenner said nothing. He, too, was staring out the window.
"Don't you think the problem," Bradley said, "is that we have lost contact with nature?"
"No," Kenner said. "I think the problem is I don't see many roads."
"Don't you think," Bradley said, "that's because it's the white man, not the natives, who wants to conquer nature, to beat it into submission?"
"No, I don't think that."
"I do," Bradley said. "I find that people who live closer to the earth, in their villages, surrounded by nature, that those people have a natural ecological sense and a feeling for the fitness of it all."
"Spent a lot of time in villages, Ted?" Kenner said.
"As a matter of fact, yes. I shot a picture in Zimbabwe and another one in Botswana. I know what I am talking about."
"Uh-huh. You stayed in villages all that time?"
"No, I stayed in hotels. I had to, for insurance. But I had a lot of experiences in villages. There is no question that village life is best and ecologically soundest. Frankly, I think everyone in the world should live that way. And certainly, we should not be encouraging village people to industrialize. That's the problem."
"I see. So you want to stay in a hotel, but you want everybody else to stay in a village."
"No, you're not hearing"
"Where do you live now, Ted?" Kenner said.
"Sherman Oaks."
"Is that a village?"
"No. Well, it's a sort of a village, I suppose you could say amp;But I have to be in LA for my work," Bradley said. "I don't have a choice."
"Ted, have you ever stayed in a Third-World village? Even for one night?"
Bradley shifted in his seat. "As I said before, I spent a lot of time in the villages while we were shooting. I know what I'm talking about."
"If village life is so great, why do you think people want to leave?"
"They shouldn't leave. That's my point."
"You know better than they do?" Kenner said.
Bradley paused, then blurted: "Well, frankly, if you must know, yes. I do know better. I have the benefit of education and broader experience. And I know firsthand the dangers of industrial society and how it is making the whole world sick. So, yes, I think I do know what is best for them. Certainly I know what is ecologically best for the planet."
"I have a problem," Kenner said, "with other people deciding what is in my best interest when they don't live where I do, when they don't know the local conditions or the local problems I face, when they don't even live in the same country as I do, but they still feelin some far-off Western city, at a desk in some glass skyscraper in Brussels or Berlin or New Yorkthey still feel that they know the solution to all my problems and how I should live my life. I have a problem with that."
"What's your problem?" Bradley said. "I mean, look: You don't seriously believe everybody on the planet should do whatever they want, do you? That would be terrible. These people need help and guidance."
"And you're the one to give it? To these people?'"
"Okay, so it's not politically correct to talk this way. But do you want all these people to have the same horrific, wasteful living standard that we do in America and, to a lesser extent, Europe?"
"I don't see you giving it up."
"No," Ted said, "but I conserve where I can. I recycle. I support a carbon-neutral lifestyle. The point is, if all these other people industrialize, it will add a terrible, terrible burden of global pollution to the planet. That should not happen."
"I got mine, but you can't have yours?"
"It's a question of facing realities," Bradley said.
"Your realities. Not theirs."
At that point, Sanjong beckoned to Kenner. "Excuse me," Kenner said, and got up.
"Walk away if you want," Bradley said, "but you know I speak truth!" He gestured to the flight attendant and held up his glass. "Just one more, sweetie. One more for the road."
Sanjong said, "The helicopter's not there yet."
"What's the matter?"
"It was coming over from another island. They've closed the air space because they're worried the rebels have surface-to-air missiles."
Kenner frowned. "How long until we land?"
"Ten minutes."
"Keep your fingers crossed."
Abandoned, Ted Bradley slid to the other side of the plane, to sit with Peter Evans. "Isn't it gorgeous?" he said. "Look at that water. Crystalline and pure. Look at the depth of that blue. Look at those beautiful villages, in the heart of nature."
Evans was staring out the window but saw only poverty. The villages were clusters of corrugated tin shacks, the roads red mud ruts. The people looked poorly dressed and moved slowly. There was a depressing, disconsolate feeling about them. He imagined sickness, disease, infant death amp; "Gorgeous," Bradley said. "Pristine! I can't wait to get down there. This is as good as a vacation! Did anyone here know the Solomons were so beautiful?"
From the front, Jennifer said, "Inhabited by headhunters, for most of history."
"Yes, well, that's all in the past," Bradley said. "If it ever existed at all. I mean, all that talk about cannibalism. Everybody knows it is not true. I read a book by some professor.* There never were any cannibals, anywhere in the world. It's all a big myth. Another example of the way the white man demonizes people of color. When Columbus came to the West Indies, he thought they told him there were cannibals there, but it wasn't true. I forget the details. There are no cannibals anywhere. Just a myth. Why are you staring at me that way?"
Evans turned. Bradley was talking to Sanjong, who was indeed staring.
"Well?" Bradley said. "You're giving me a look. Okay, buddy boy. Does that mean you disagree with me?"
"You're truly a fool," Sanjong said, in an astonished voice. "Have you ever been to Sumatra?"
"Can't say that I have."
"New Guinea?"
"No. Always wanted to go, buy some tribal art. Great stuff."
"Borneo?"
"No, but I always wanted to go there, too. That Sultan What's his name, he did a great job remodeling the Dorchester in London"
"Well," Sanjong said, "if you go to Borneo you will see the Dyak longhouses where they still display the skulls of the people they killed."
"Oh, that's just tourist-attraction stuff."
"In New Guinea, they had a disease called kuru, transmitted by eating the brains of their enemies."
"That's not true."
"Gajdusek won a Nobel Prize for it. They were eating brains, all right."
"But that was a long time ago."
"Sixties. Seventies."
"You guys just like to tell scare stories," Bradley said, "at the expense of the indigenous people of the world. Come on, face the facts, human beings are not cannibals."* Sanjong blinked. He looked at Kenner. Kenner shrugged.
"Absolutely beautiful down there," Bradley said, looking out the window. "And it looks like we're going to land."