San Francisco, California Thursday evening, November 24th
Twice now on the way back from dinner Diane Lacombe had
aborted the process of lighting a stale cigarette. She'd
been dredging them from the depths of her purse -- her
emergency stash buried just in case she had to fall off
the wagon some night -- but once again she tossed the
unlit cigarette into a street-corner trash can, pushing
back her mane of auburn hair with an unsteady hand.
Relaxing right now was an apparently useless quest, and
the need to rummage for yet another cigarette was rising.
She calculated the number of blocks back to her Mission
District apartment and dug in her purse for an emergency
package of chewing gum instead. Too much agony with
nicotine patches to blow it all now.
The Tonga Room had been fun, and all the more so since it
was one of her dad's favorites, set amid the elegance of
the grand old Fairmont Hotel. Some of her best childhood
memories centered around lush, elegant dinners with her
parents, the princess daughter scrubbed and dressed up and
feminine, demonstrating impeccable manners and basking in
family privilege and tradition. But this evening's visit
to that world had felt like a hologram. She could see it,
but she couldn't actuallytouch the old warmth of those
moments, though nothing in the hotel had changed. Since
she'd left for college, the childhood years were now only
glimpsed through a murky lens, as if they belonged to
someone else. It was an awful feeling she was determined
to change.
A neighborhood tavern she'd frequented over the years was
just ahead and she decided to duck in for their usually
pathetic attempt at an espresso. She took the tiny cup to
a dark corner like an addict, placing her laptop case by
her feet where she could keep an eye on it.
Not for the first time she felt around in her coat pocket
for the reassuring shape of the CD that she'd intended to
hand to her father at dinner. Just the thought of
committing that act was the source of her jangled nerves.
It might as well have been a small nuclear device, she
thought. It would have killed him just as surely. What had
she been thinking?
Diane knew that California State Senator Ralph Lacombe had
wondered through coffee and dessert why his beautiful,
educated, twenty-seven-year-old daughter was so jumpy and
distracted. Fit and distinguished in his late fifties with
a large trademark smile, his full head of dark hair
belying his age, the senior Lacombe had sat in patient,
paternal puzzlement waiting, Diane supposed, for the
explanation which never came. All the normal subjects they
had once shared in open father-daughter communication
seemed flat and forced -- the 49ers, the latest political
betrayals in Sacramento, the plans for a summer Lacombe
family reunion in the wake of her mother's surrender to
cancer -- and nothing had reduced her jittery demeanor or
ended her constant denials that anything was wrong. There
she sat, elegant in a reasonably conservative, calf-length
little black dress, smiling at him and lying her head off
by saying none of the things that needed to be voiced. He
knew his daughter was fibbing by omission, and she knew
that he knew, but they played the game anyway, more like
two strangers being courteous than familial confidants.
And all the while the CD had been burning a hole in her
heart. The last thing she wanted was to make him a
casualty of what she had to do.
How would he have reacted if she'd been foolhardy enough
to hand it over? Would the most ethical man on earth fall
to the level of ordinary mortal before her very eyes?
And how could he not?
How would the conversation have gone? she wondered. Oh,
here, Dad, just a little hard seismic evidence that the
critics were right after all about your old friend Mick
Walker's Cascadia Island project, which means that not
only is Mick going to be ruined, but my engineering firm
may end up like Enron's accountants, and, oh, by the way,
you'll probably be publicly accused of misusing your
political influence on behalf of Walker for promoting his
resort.
Was there any way a loving daughter or anyone else could
expect Ralph Lacombe to say, "Sure, Honey, you go on and
do what you have to. Blow the whistle. Destroy
everything." Not even her father was that brave. Or
foolish.
He would end up asking her not to pull the trigger, and
she wouldn't be able to stand his plea or her denial.
No. It was going to be far easier to deal with the damage
after the fact, even if that method was cowardly.
The island was always a time bomb, Dad, she thought. Pity
poor old Mick didn't know it in time.
What she'd found in the seismic test data meant that
Cascadia Island off the Washington coast was too dangerous
an outcropping to support any human habitation or
facilities, and especially not a resort hotel and
convention center. There was a massive split down the
middle, a hidden fault line so profoundly active that
Walker's resort would end up pulled in two with any
substantial earthquake. And that same data, she knew,
would also be seized upon by a certain scientist in
Seattle as validation of his discredited hypothesis about
the entire island being some sort of sensitive seismic
trigger. According to the paper he'd published, Cascadia
Island's small, rocky mass was supposedly resting on the
geological equivalent of a hair-trigger detonator
connected to a massive fault zone deep within the Cascadia
Subduction Zone. Other seismologists had loudly rejected
Dr. Lam's ideas, but he continued to insist that any
significant vibrations from that island could set off a
chain reaction of amplified resonant vibrations and
trigger a great earthquake equal to or greater than the
monster that tore through Alaska in 1964.
No one disputed the fact that the Cascadia Subduction Zone
was one of the world's most dangerous tectonic faults. But
the idea that the pile drivers and explosives used to
build Mick Walker's world-class resort could uncork three
hundred years of unrelieved tectonic strain was just too
far out to be real.
Diane sipped the last of the extremely bitter espresso and
smiled to herself. Dr. Lam's "Theory of Resonant
Amplification" was utter nonsense. If subterranean nuclear
explosions were insufficient to trigger major earthquakes,
a little construction activity on a coastal island had no
chance of doing it. Maybe the rocks below did amplify any
compression waves from a pile driver or rock blasting, but
such impacts were ridiculously puny against the massive
forces of nature.
Nevertheless, she was very glad for Dr. Lam and his
theory. He was exactly the man she needed for the dirty
work of blowing the whistle on the hidden fault her firm
had apparently missed long before construction began.
Diane felt her heart accelerating. The last thing she
needed was more caffeine, but if she had to have an
addiction, coffee was fairly benign, especially after
wrestling nicotine to the mat.
She stood to go. I'm outta here.
She picked up her laptop case, paid the tab, and left
quickly, setting a course for her flat and trying to
retain just enough situational awareness to avoid becoming
a hood ornament on various passing trucks.
There were millions of dollars at stake. Maybe even a
hundred million of Mick Walker's dollars. And God knew how
much she was about to damage Chadwick and Noble, the globe-
girdling, prestigious firm that had reached down from the
heavens of architectural engineering to pluck her from the
newly graduated masses. She felt another brief and distant
echo of guilt over that. The chairman, Robert Nelms, was a
straight shooter, or so she'd always believed. But how
could he do anything but suppress, cover up, deny, and
hide when he discovered what the real data said?
She recalled her first meeting with Robert Nelms so
clearly. She, the Stanford graduate student shown into the
elaborately decorated corner office. He, a man whose girth
made him look like an amalgam of Charles Laughton, Raymond
Burr, and Marlon Brando in his later years. The effect had
been instant intimidation heaped on a towering platter of
insecurity, even though Nelms couldn't have been nicer,
rising with surprising ease and polished courtliness to
take her hand and welcome her. It was clearly an
interview, as she had hoped, but he made it pleasant,
impressing her with the easy way he wore the mantle of
power of the managing partner of such an august firm --
not to mention his own impressive professional history as
a brilliant engineer. She had left the office not only
aching to work for Chadwick and Noble, but wanting to work
for and please Robert Nelms in particular. The memory
still made her feel good, eliciting an unbidden smile that
quickly faded as she returned to the reality of what she
was doing.
What she was doing was disloyal in the extreme, and she
professed to hate disloyalty. But her mission was
righteous, and if it meant she had to repay the kindnesses
they'd shown her with disloyalty, so be it.
Feeling guilty about impacting Robert Nelms was one thing,
but the potential effect on Jerry Schultz was entirely
another.
The memory of her first serious professional interaction
with Schultz, her new supervisor, was all too clear. She'd
sought help with a problem involving an extremely
important construction project in the Philippines and was
flabbergasted to realize that he was either a poor
engineer or a poorer manager with no grasp of details he
should have known. It was clearly on her shoulders alone,
and the only elements of her work he did seem interested
in were the signatures and other means of tracking who
might be responsible for mistakes. Schultz was all about
covering his own tail. He was a raging incompetent, she'd
told a close friend. A dangerous incompetent with
delusions of adequacy.
Somehow she'd transcended Schultz during her first year
and had become a guardian of the stellar reputation of
Chadwick and Noble. She'd been loath to accept the reality
that the firm had grown too big to maintain its quality or
even its integrity, and she'd resisted the conclusion that
the managers cared only about preserving their careers and
paychecks.
Finally, however, those realities became unavoidable, and
in the Cascadia Island fiasco, the properly constituted
managers of Chadwick and Noble had wanted to hear no
criticism of their prior decisions.
They had been so pathetically predictable! Once the firm
had anointed the island as buildable, the managers were
arrogantly certain that not even God would dare to second-
guess their decision.
She'd had no authority to push it any further, nor any
desire to do so. After all, she was an engineer, not a
seismologist. That gave her an ironclad out when the truth
finally exploded into the public arena. How could anyone
have expected a mere engineer to know what seismic data
revealed? Especially since she wasn't even supposed to see
the data. Even if she had known, who was she to say the
data was right, the Chadwick and Noble cognoscenti were
wrong, and Cascadia Island was doomed?
But the data was right and the island was indeed doomed.
She wondered if an answer from Dr. Lam would be waiting
for her on her computer. The anonymous e-mail she'd
carefully worded and sent contained a way for him to
answer through an intermediate e-mail address that would
prevent her having to reveal her name -- a bit of
necessary cat and mouse to focus his interest without
leading to her doorstep. But she could only check that
intermediate site once a day, and she'd been doing so
every night without results. Eventually he would have to
respond, since he was sure to realize that what she was
offering would be a vindication of his own discounted,
discredited theory.
There would need to be a face-to-face meeting, she
figured, to actually hand over the disk. But Dr. Lam could
be expected to quickly trumpet the results to the
geophysical world. She was sure of that. As sure as she
was that if the name Diane Lacombe wasn't involved in the
publicity storm that would undoubtedly envelop Chadwick
and Noble, Senator Ralph Lacombe couldn't be drawn in
either.
That was very important. It was not going to be pretty.
Walker may still survive, she thought. He's worth hundreds
of millions.
Diane's right hand closed around the doorknob to her
apartment as her left hand approached with the key, but
the door was neither latched nor closed, and for a moment
she stood in confusion, wondering if she'd left it that
way hours ago.
No way! I always check it.
Maybe the manager was inside.
But he's not supposed to...
Perhaps her father...
He doesn't have a key. But Don does!
The impulse to call the police and try to have Don Brevin
arrested for breaking and entering was already forming in
her mind, a deserved retribution for his being a boorish
ex-boyfriend and for refusing to return the key when
they'd argued earlier in the day. He'd probably come back
for his meager belongings, she decided. He wasn't
dangerous, just a slob and an egomaniac, and she couldn't
fathom why she'd ever dated him, let alone allowed him to
move in for two very long, very unsatisfying months. Just
another in a long line of toxic rebound boyfriends, and
her tastes were getting worse.
I should have changed the locks.
She pushed open the door and stood stunned by the chaos
that had been her apartment. Someone had ransacked her
things, pulling out drawers, opening cabinets and spilling
the contents. She stepped in, leaving the door to the
hallway open in case anything moved inside and she needed
to flee.
Her largest suitcase was in the corner, pulled from the
back closet and opened and left at an odd angle. The sofa
had been ripped open, its stuffing strewn everywhere. The
recliner had also been gored. In all the mess, she
couldn't tell whether anything was missing.
The new high-definition TV she couldn't afford still stood
untouched where she'd left it in the corner of the living
room, and she felt a momentary spark of relief, as if now
everything would be all right.
The spark quickly died.
Diane stepped over the strewn clothes, papers, and books
and moved cautiously toward her bedroom door. Inside, it
appeared little or nothing had been taken, but virtually
everything had been dumped and, she assumed, pawed
through -- including lingerie. She felt violated and
dirty, as if she, and not her apartment, had been raped.
And she felt an old familiar rage escaping from its cage
again.
But this didn't make sense. Brevin was a sideshow, and a
harmless one at that. He wouldn't do such a thing. Would
he?
A sudden realization chilled her. Brevin wasn't the cause.
Someone was looking for something!
The small, toxic object in her pocket was the target.
Someone was on her trail and this was a very clear
message.
But how on earth could they already know? No one was
supposed to know of her plans, but someone must have
figured she might have the records.
And here I stand with the CD waiting for whoever did this
to come back!
A crystalline memory of what she'd written in her e-mail
to Dr. Lam popped into her mind. Was there anyway it could
have been intercepted and tracked back to her?
No! She concluded. I didn't even send it from my computer.
But what else could have tipped them off?
She thought about Jerry Schultz, her boss, the dithering
neurotic she secretly called the world's only walking
invertebrate, a man scared of his own shadow. Her
purported supervisor, she'd labeled him. There was simply
no way Schultz could have figured out what she'd done, let
alone have been brave enough to invade her apartment. Who
then?
At least I had the disk with me instead of leaving it
here, Diane thought. The overall mission was intact, even
if her apartment wasn't. She'd been more than naive, but
considering the money at stake, the loss was small.
Don Brevin forgotten, Diane revised her plan on the spot.
She jumped like a startled cat and began rummaging quickly
through the spilled contents of her top bureau drawer
until her passport emerged from underneath the wild
display of her costume jewelry. There was a small gym bag
in the middle of the floor which used to be in the closet
and she grabbed it and began scooping a supply of basics
into it before dashing to the bathroom and dumping in
makeup and toiletries to accompany her toothbrush and
dryer. The bag was too stuffed to be zipped fully closed,
but she grabbed it up anyway, holding the straps extra
tight to keep the contents inside as she dashed to the
door.
Distance and anonymity were the keys to success -- and
safety -- now that someone was on her trail. She raced
into the empty hallway and headed for the stairwell,
focused on ways to evaporate from San Francisco.
Copyright © 2005 by John J. Nance