Authors: John M. Green
“Hello? Hello?” grunted the irritated professor. “Who the hell’s there? Do you know what time…?”
“Robert, it’s Bill Edwards. From the Party. I’ve got Isabel Diaz on line with me…”
“Hello, sir,” said Isabel.
“…and her campaign manager, Gregory Samson, as well as your grandson-in-law Oliver Pryor.” He chose not to mention the other six he knew Gregory had on the line.
“Hi, Pa.”
“I won’t speak to you,” Dupont snapped.
If anyone could’ve seen Oliver Pryor, they’d have guessed he’d either just been hit with the first foul sniff of a dead elephant’s rotting carcass or he’d
discovered he’d been cut out of his inheritance.
Bill took the lead; Oliver’s silence spoke to him louder than if he’d actually seen the lawyer’s face. “Robert, on Oliver’s behalf, on all our behalves, I sincerely
apologise for calling you at this ridiculous hour but…”
“That’s not why I won’t talk, you fool,” said Dupont. “And Bill, cut the obsequious crap… Excuse the French, ma’am. I know why you’re calling me
and, frankly, I’d have called me too, but I simply
can’t
talk, okay… lawyer-client confidentiality and all.”
And may God bless you, Joshua! smiled Gregory though, on reflection, he hadn’t counted on locating the magic box but not being able to pry the lid open.
“Then we’re in a bit of a bind,” Bill said.
“That you are,” said Dupont, pausing for a moment as if he wished to say more. “We all are, actually. But, ah, the Constitution is the Constitution. Nothing we can do about
that, not now. Ollie… you there?”
“Sir?”
“It’s a shame you didn’t call your old Pa before my, er, client did. Not that I could’ve changed the outcome… you just would’ve been more prepared. Ms
Diaz…?”
“Professor?”
“The only thing I can say to you…,” he paused, and everyone held their breath. The silence seemed to go on forever as the old man carefully collected his words.
“…I just wish that old buzzard Orrin Hatch had got his stupid amendment through. Like I said, I can’t talk. Good night to all you fine folks. You, too, Ollie.”
“Well, that was useless,” Bill snorted. “And he’s supposed to be a friend?”
“He is that, Bill,” said Isabel. “He was giving us a clue. People,” said Isabel, taking control, “what constitutional amendments did Senator Hatch fail
on?”
The call immediately descended into a rabble, with everyone trying to have a say, until Isabel spoke again. “Jack, are you on this call?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the campaign’s research director, who was already typing and clicking.
“Can you get someone onto this?”
“Already have…”
Thirty seconds later, Jack came back on line. “Okay,” he said. “I can only find two really significant ones… a constitutional amendment to… protect the rights of
victims of violent crime…”
“No,” said Isabel; in her case, that one was already three decades too late.
“Well, there’s his Arnie amendment... Remember that? Here… I’m reading from the
Salt-Lake City Tribune
: ‘…Republican Senator Orrin Hatch wants to
terminate the constitutional prohibition against foreign-born citizens such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and others from becoming president if they’ve been citizens for twenty years.’ Hatch
proposed it back in ’03. Barney Frank—you know, the Dem. Congressman?—he drafted a similar bill before that but…”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Bill interrupted. “Bel, you
were
born in Newark, right? Shades of Barack Obama’s birthism, for chrisssakes! But really, if
you were born in Newark, who cares where your parents came from… Bolivia… Chile… whatever?”
“The plane’s about to land,” said Isabel. “I can hardly hear now. Call me when you know something.”
F
URIOUS FUMES OF grey and white smoke—explosions?—billowed up from the sixteen bridges scattered around the edges of Manhattan. Diana,
one of six around the country watching this on computer screens, spun her volume control to low, just loud enough to make out the blasts.
The silver-tubed Metro-North train was reversing fast, racing back over what was left of a blue bridge that a moment earlier had connected Manhattan to the Bronx.
Another ring of explosions rocked the island. These flashes were brighter, the smoke thicker, and darker, and the noise fiercer, even on her low volume setting.
In the briefing, Isis had explained that each detonation was precisely calibrated for the target it destroyed—for the subway stations, its depth underground, its exact position along the
network, and the force of blast needed to intensify the shockwave it was intended to build. Who, or rather, what determined the calculations and the pinpoint timing of each explosion was a
sophisticated computer program called Shockwave.
Every few instants a new and tighter ring of blasts rang out, smoking higher and fiercer until, perhaps twenty seconds later, a vast ball of flames erupted into an inferno at the centre of the
island, around 42nd Street. Almost simultaneously, it heaved back out to the island’s edge in a circular shockwave of such scale and intensity that it pounded everything in its path to the
ground. Whole blocks fell into the vast fissures that cracked apart everywhere. Subways ripped open and fell in, crushing the rush hour commuters crowding the platforms.
Those above ground would be no luckier. If they weren’t sucked into a chasm as the ground split beneath them, flying debris would pound them. Skyscrapers collapsed in on themselves pulping
everything and everyone in their way.
What Diana and the others were watching was horrific. Beyond imagination.
But it was also virtual, not real. Not yet.
Isis explained it was an elaborate computer graphics simulation created by the young Jax Mason, whose brilliant career had been cut regrettably short, as Diana and Lucky knew first hand,
“though not short enough,” said Isis pointedly.
Silently, Diana squirmed.
Isis continued, explaining that in creating the program, Jax had conquered the complex theory of how shockwaves move through tunnels and up through the ground above them—the intricate
technical interconnections between the mathematics, the fluid mechanics and the engineering.
Jax, Isis knew, had turned himself into a world expert on shockwave dynamics. On burst, airblast, yield scaling, overpressure prediction, dynamic pressure prediction, cratering, ejecta,
airslap-induced ground shock, upstream-induced ground shock, shock spectrums, Brisance—shockwave energy—and Wef—effective energy. What Jax didn’t know about displacement
asymptotes and acceleration asymptotes wasn’t worth knowing. One of Isis’s team had found Jax’s computer print-outs of calculations for “composite near-surface particle
velocity wave forms” stowed under his bed, under his discarded dirty underwear and the research data on the Dresden fires in Nazi Germany he’d collected or, when he’d illegally
tapped into the Smithsonian’s World War II archives, stolen.
But Jax’s work was not mere academic theory. This was his passion.
Jax had accessed and manipulated global geophysical data and research papers, and stress-tested his shockwave data on the actual geology of Manhattan. It was crucial to know, as Jax did, that
from soft soil clay at the southern tip, the island’s subsurface shifted to a ledge of hard rock by 14th Street which extended north, for five blocks, to the unstable schist ridge of Murray
Hill. That, in turn, extended underground for twenty blocks north, from 22nd through to 42nd streets. Jax had reviewed material on Manhattan’s geology all the way up to the 190s, near the
Fort George portal where, according to the yellow Post-it-marked page of a book propping up a leg of his wobbly kitchen table, the rock was fragile, made porous by underground springs. The Fort
George schist, like Murray Hill, could hide large pockets of decayed, shattered rock; important to know if you were going to send a shockwave through it.
With all that under his belt, Jax also researched the dynamics of explosives terrorists had used, or could easily get, and their specific blast characteristics.
He had turned himself into an expert on all relevant aspects of the forensic engineering of underground excavations in rock and soil, including the probabilistic modelling of bomb damage to
tunnel linings, and the technical prediction and assessment of property damage caused by vibration.
People in the real world—engineers and insurance companies—did this for a living but for Jax it was a mission. If he had wanted to apply himself commercially, there would have been
firms all over the world who would have snapped him up, despite his eccentricities. He knew who they were, since he’d hacked into them all.
To complete the picture, according to his blog, Jax had scoped out the entire subway network taking countless trips himself—his charged-up Metrocard had bought him trips up and down every
line, at least twice, and he personally visited every station, taking as many photographs and videos as he could without arousing uneasy eyes. After Najibullah Zazi was arrested for trying to blow
up the subway himself, Jax assumed as low a profile as he could while still needing to collect data, and took to using his mobile phone to take his shots, simultaneously pretending to be talking on
it.
The kind ladies in the New York Transit Museum had even made him coffee while they helped locate old dusty drawings for him. Jax had been thorough.
Even on Jax’s short-lived trip to London, all expenses paid, he’d completed the entire circuit of the Underground, but this time took no photos; Londoners were even more suspicious
than New Yorkers—for good reason; terrorists had targeted their subway repeatedly. But they had been amateurs, Jax had heartlessly thought, so engrossed was he in his own plans to subvert
them.
He’d spent hours in the London Transport Museum, located in the former Flower Market in Covent Garden, perusing relevant photographs and drawings and further updating his London computer
model.
What a mine of information for terrorists Jax had found there, Isis marvelled: 80,000 historic engineering drawings including the original signed plans for several of the stations and tunnels.
How crazy was the free world?
Jax hadn’t yet done his step-through scouting of Washington DC’s Metro. He’d temporarily put it on hold after public sensitivity and security were heightened in October 2010
when an FBI sting operation uncovered a ham-fisted terror plot to blow it up with wheelie bags, and he hadn’t got around to finishing it.
According to Jax’s logs, said Isis, the part Jax got the most thrill out of was sitting on a bench in Central Park and hacking into the municipal archives in London, Washington DC and New
York to steal the actual detailed blueprints of their subway systems, including pinpoint precision data. That way he could overlay them onto his computer model. With New York, Jax couldn’t
believe his luck. The City’s Office of Emergency had set up the Public Safety Geographic Information System (GIS) Data Development Centre to collect and organise geospatial data, and
they’d already GIS-converted the architectural drawings for all 468 subway stations. The revised data sets displayed the precise locations and sizes of all tunnels, exits, including emergency
exits for evacuations, and information on hidden spaces like storage and equipment rooms, corridors, and other sealed-off areas. Hacking into that had been a dream come true.
Incredibly, in just five months working alone—excluding his time at Princeton—Jax had developed workable, shockwave simulations for both New York and London, simulations that Isis
described as chillingly accurate, and he had been partway with Washington DC when he was cut short.
The part Jax laboured over for the longest time was the most trivial, as it usually is: showing how clever he was by creating the glitzy, almost movie-quality computer graphics and animated
video drama, which Isis was now playing to the team. “He made it to present his case as powerfully as possible,” said Isis, “to convince sceptics not just with cold facts and
threats but, according to one of his blogs, to ‘scare them shitless’. But as we know, he had spent so much time on his simulation, he had only just started contacting those in authority
and, fortunately for us, his letters, emails and videoclips had only got to minor officials who’d all dismissed him as a crackpot.”
For the older members of this small group, the image that Jax Mason had edited in next evoked the haunting memory of a still photograph from a previous generation: one of a young Vietnamese girl
screaming, tears streaming, arms flailing, running frantically for her life. For others it triggered flashes of ash-caked hair and the blank faces of bewildered souls straggling up from the World
Trade Centre decades later, or blood-spattered commuters emerging out of the London Tube. Jax’s own graphic was “shot” at the 42nd Street subway station. A young businesswoman,
glued to her cell phone, was strutting up the subway exit steps when an invisible force hoisted her up off the ground and flung her violently forward through the air, her feet flapping unable to
get purchase on anything, and slammed her with a nauseating thud through the side of a passing delivery truck.
Jax’s simulation was sickeningly lifelike. One or two seconds later, while a number of Isis’s accomplices were rubbing their suddenly parched lips or pinching the tops of their
noses, the same truck was mashed by what moments before had been a 40-floor office building.
As the underground crater greedily gaped below, devouring whatever was fed to it from above, the tremor’s assault drove upwards. The street above was an easy victim. They watched on-screen
as Times Square split apart like a dry cracker and whole sections collapsed in single chunks into the widening cavern, dunking screaming street vendors, bumper-to-bumper cars and Yellow Cabs, and
every other bit of human detritus unlucky enough to have been there.
Buildings shook, tall and small, glass blew out, shards speared bystanders frozen in shock. The famed flashing signs and illuminated billboards flickered, convulsed and randomly sputtered out.
Almost one by one they tore loose of their moorings, segments swayed and ripped off, tumbling down to crash on the street or onto the few people still there, or into the ever-growing hole into
which more of the roadway was still falling.