Read Not the End of the World Online
Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Tags: #Police, #Mystery & Detective, #Los Fiction, #nospam, #General, #Research Vessels, #Suspense, #Los Angeles, #Humorous Fiction, #California, #Mystery Fiction, #Fiction, #Terrorism
The eruptions had begun long before dawn, heralded as ever by the night’s tremors, spewing forth pumice upon the waters and blackness into the air, confounding we who thought there could not be so much ash in the world as had already smothered the life from our lands on Kaftor. Those fleeing in boats from Tira’s shores found their eyes and skin begin to burn, as if their bodies had been flayed and vinegar poured upon the wounds. Their throats and noses became choked with this searing vapour, which ate through flesh and smelt of death and decay. Upon the stricken island, the mountain’s heat had crazed the very winds of the air. Men and beasts, even trees, were lifted bodily from the earth, drawn into the rage of debris and flame that filled the skies, there to be torn apart as by a thousand spears in flight. Then the sea itself began to boil. The waters in the bay convulsed in frenzy, rising as if to escape the earth, falling back in fearsome swoops, like carrion fowl in fiercest dispute. The waves had no purpose or direction, only the wildest agitation. Those boats in the bay were smashed like tinder by this violence. The stout beams of hulls that had traversed all the seas of the world were shattered like baked clay. Neither were all the vessels spared that had reached the open sea. Though there was no wind for their sails, they began to speed back towards land, all together, faster than ever they had ridden the waves before. It was as though time had turned upon itself as the boats’ journeys were reversed, unknown forces drawing them irresistibly into the bubbling cauldron where they met their end, disappearing beneath the waters as though swallowed whole. From the mouth of the mountain, a vast pillar of steam violated the skies, punching through the heavens and beyond in a white, unbroken shaft, reaching in the blink of an eye higher than all the mountains of the world piled one atop the next. Then in one moment, one single moment, Tira, our neighbour, our sister, was torn from the earth. Obliterated. Even on a hillside in Kaftor I was thrown to the ground as the air was shaken by the greatest sound any man had ever heard. There was a dark shape on the horizon, expanding into the sky and in all directions about itself a great cloud with fire flashing through it like the jagged barbs of lightning, and all the while the sound continued to boom and rumble, as though the air was crashing upon us in waves. An island. A country. Lands and farms on its back, towns and villages. Ports, woodlands, fields. All turned to flame and dust and stone in one terrible instant.
Maria had thrilled as she read each of the passages, sent to her at tantalisingly random intervals as Jerry’s translation team made their unsteady progress. This narrator, whoever he had been, was describing a devastating caldera eruption, which fitted exactly the theories that had been hypothesised about Thera’s destruction. More than that, the description actually divulged something further about the nature of the eruption than extant knowledge had been able to suggest. It indicated that the final explosion had been caused by the collapse of a giant magma chamber, as had happened at Krakatoa. The ‘boiling of the sea’ and the spontaneous retreat of the boats would have been created by billions of tons of seawater flooding into the chamber. Then, when that enormous body of water met an equally enormous supply of molten magma and turned instantly to steam, there suddenly wouldn’t have been room for it all. Hence, bang. Or more accurately, the biggest bang ever seen or heard on the planet. But that – unprecedentedly destructive as it was – had been only the start. The real action would have got going about forty minutes later, when the largest seismic waves in history, or indeed prehistory, encountered the first thing in their path: Kaftor. The last message she’d got from Jerry had been about two weeks ago to say that he was almost ready to send her ‘the money shot’, as he called it, mocking her ravenous impatience to see the passages depicting the flood. Ever since then she’d been scanning her e‐
mail for his name each morning before being disappointed and having to get on with what she was actually paid for. Now, finally, it was here, and it didn’t seem to matter. She sat staring at the blue and white envelope icon through tear‐
welling eyes, lacking the will even to move the mouse and open it. She didn’t want to know what it contained. She’d far rather have two thirty‐
year‐
old adolescents standing behind her making dumb jokes about it instead. Jesus. It hurt. It hurt so much. Maria knew there were some at CalORI who hadn’t accepted it yet, who were holding out for a happy ending. Dreaming up crazy scenarios, torturing themselves with a desperate hope that had no greater foundation than the fact that no bodies had been found. She appreciated the tempting succour it offered, but appreciated also that that way madness lay. Like signing up to join the mothers of the disappeared. Sandra Biscane’s death last year had forced her to understand that terrible things do happen, that your worst fears do get realised, and the big question marks still hanging over that dreadful episode had made her that bit more ready to accept further tragedy. But she wasn’t going to let her imagination run paranoid until all the facts were out in the open, any more than she was going to torment herself chasing the mirages of merest possibility.
Whatever had happened to them, it happened three hundred miles out in the world’s biggest ocean. There would be no bodies. Only an endless absence. No more Mitch, no more Cody, no more Coop, no more Taylor. No more all‐
night work‐
ins with longnecks and pizza. No more lunch‐
time two‐
on‐
two in the parking lot. No more discussions, no more arguments, no more falling‐
outs, no more making ups. No more dumb jokes. Ironically, there had been a sense of impending doom in the air for a while before it happened, although this was hardly the outcome everyone had been afraid of. Nonetheless, there had been a pervasive feeling of time running out. That wasn’t hindsight putting a spin on it, and it wasn’t some stupid 1999 thing either. There had been a precariousness about the St John business from day one, and it had intensified in recent weeks. Maria hadn’t been involved in the project herself, being four months into her own team’s current study when it began, but it was Calori’s biggest undertaking in years, so it had infected the mood of the whole place. Time running out. Or, more accurately, money running out. They were all just waiting for the financial plug to be pulled on the whole deal, and every day it didn’t happen was a bonus. Backing for ocean geological research tended to come from three main sources: oil companies, oil companies, and occasionally, if you were real lucky, oil companies. Coop and Cody had found stuff twelve layers down in sediment cores that dated more recently than the last known government cash, and with a vision as wide as Cingrich’s (about two molecules; three tops) looking out from the public purse, that was unlikely to change. The government wouldn’t spend two bits on any kind of research that didn’t have a projected military or industrial application. It was as though they had decided we already know all the avenues the human race might ever need to go down; no time for the frivolities of the road less travelled‐
by. Jesus, girl, you might discover somethin’ we can’t monopolise, process, package and sell. And if we can’t blow folks up with it, what in the hell are we s’posed to do with it? As Mitch had put it, the money men don’t window‐
shop. They know what they’re in the research market to buy. They go to the petroleum geologists to buy ‘where’s the oil’.
Seismologists like him and Maria they approach looking for ‘how can we stop this’ or ‘give us some notice’. Which was why he had spent so much time in Honolulu with the tsunami early‐
warning project. The sort of ‘pure research’ exploration the Gazes Also was undertaking and with those kind of resources – lay in the realms of what they called DBS. It was a cynical in‐
joke that had two definitions but one meaning: forget it. Dream Benefactor Scenario. Don’t Be Stupid. Except that it had happened. It happened to CalORI, right out of the proverbial blue. Admittedly, Luther St John was nobody’s dream anything, except maybe cell‐
mate for Hannibal Lecter, but what the hell, his face wasn’t on the banknotes. Mitch was the only one of them to have met the man, and his reluctance to discuss ‘what he’s really like’ was palpable enough for everyone to quit asking. They had all seen him on TV down the years, although obviously not on his own network: sentience tended to interfere with reception of the Christian Family Channel, perhaps the CFC most guilty of fucking up the atmosphere. He had kept a comparatively low mainstream‐
media profile in recent years, only sticking his head above the public parapet again in the past eighteen months or so, but everyone still remembered with great fondness his hugely entertaining Presidential bid in ’92. Back in the Eighties he was so much the detested totem of religious ultra‐
conservatism that if he hadn’t existed already, liberal students like Maria would have had to invent him. He functioned as a kind of anti‐
catechism: if you weren’t sure where you stood on something, you just had to find out Luther’s opinion and take a large step to the left. In latter years, though, he had been mainly a figure of fun, a laughable anachronism. As if rendered harmless by his humiliation, his opinions and pronouncements were now, to most, a source of amusement where they had once seemed an ugly threat. To most, but not to everyone. Maria had read the Vanity Fair article last summer, tracking what its author, Gilda Landsmann (whose journalistic scrutiny had dogged St John for years), perceived to be a calculatedly strategic re‐
ascent towards the limelight. Landsmann said that when St John looked at you, as one outside his ‘Communion of the Saved’, you could physically feel his revulsion, like a leper before a king. Mitch disagreed. Revulsion was a kind of contempt, and contempt ran hot in the blood. When St John looked at you, it was with cold pity. ‘He doesn’t look at you like he hates you,’ Mitch had told her. ‘He looks at you like you’re already dead.’ The fear that his patronage was too good to be true didn’t survive the Gazes Also’s blank‐
cheque refit, far less St John’s gift of the submarine Stella Maris, but it didn’t quite die either. Instead it transubstantiated into the fear that it was too good to last, and each month, each week, brought in new rumours on the breeze. As St John was a far from hands‐
on kind of sponsor, Mitch often seemed like the only link the institute had with him. This, of course, wasn’t true. CalORI’s accountants were in rigidly regular contact with St John’s organisation, and the scientists’ remoteness from the institute’s bean counters – on a number of levels – was the wasteland where the winds of rumour whipped up. But Mitch – and only Mitch – was the guy who presented St John with the fruits of their labours and of his cash. St John wasn’t exactly looking over their shoulders, but he took more than a passing interest in their work. His funding wasn’t just some tax side‐
wind and it certainly wasn’t a PR exercise. He genuinely wanted to know what was going on, enough to send a private jet to fly Mitch to and from Arizona to make his presentations. Presentation being the keyword. Maria had watched Mitch work hours and days perfecting computer models of his findings, 3‐
D rotatable graphics of the sub‐
oceanic landscape, with animated demonstrations of the seismic and geological stages in that landscape’s evolution: the fractures, trenches, plains, seamounts and guyots. He also knew how to pander to his audience, putting special emphasis on samples or developments that could be dated to coincide with biblical periods and events. This involved playing somewhat fast and loose with the error margins of several different dating systems, but Mitch figured if it kept his wallet open to hand the guy a test‐
tube of compressed shell fragments and tell him their former owners bought it around the same time as Solomon, why burst everybody’s bubble?
Then St John’s prophecy went top of the news. They heard about it over the radio. Mitch’s team were back on‐
shore at CalORI at the time. Under any other circumstances they’d have found it as hilarious as everyone else, but when the two‐
minute news item ended, no‐
one was laughing. They all saw the same ghastly eventuality. There was no scientific basis in anything the GA had discovered, anything Mitch had presented, to support what St John was predicting. Fortunately, their research hadn’t been cited, yet, but they all knew that if it was, or if the source of their funding was made public, they would be put bang on the spot and asked for their expert opinions. Which would come down to a straight choice between sacrificing all professionalism, dignity and future credibility on the altar of their paymaster, or declaring unequivocally to the nation that their benefactor was talking out of his ass. Mitch had got on the phone straight away and demanded a meeting with St John, who was surprisingly happy to accommodate him. Mitch’s insistence had alarmed the rest of his team, as they were still wondering what oil could be poured on this troubled water, but Mitch reasoned that they could not afford to sit around. Far better that he explain to St John what position they would be put in and what response they would have to give, than for the media to squeeze them for an answer first, and St John to hear them rubbish him over the airwaves with no prior warning. Far better, true, but effectively just the difference between committing financial suicide and politely committing financial suicide. The jet was dispatched that same afternoon, to convene a meeting that might have reassured everyone at CalORI if it hadn’t clearly disturbed the hell out of Mitch. ‘Don’t worry,’ St John had told him, in the back of his white stretch Caddy. ‘I’ve no intention of putting you or your colleagues in an uncomfortable situation.’ Mitch said St John spoke to you like he was reading from a prepared statement. There might be an opportunity for questions later, but definitely not until he had finished. Drink your water, sit comfortable and listen up. Press packs will be available on your way out. ‘Let me assure you that I have not made and will not make reference to your work or your organisation. Let me also assure you that my funding of the Institute remains an entirely confidential matter. I would not expect you to support my, ah, theories, from your strictly scientific perspective, but I can guarantee that no‐
one will approach you for such an opinion in direct connection with myself and my statements. If, by coincidence, you are questioned solely in your capacity as a seismologist – and I mean a seismologist, not the seismologist connected to the research I have supported – all I would ask is that you might do me the courtesy of making your excuses and being too busy to comment.’ Mitch knew his team could live with that. The odds were very long on himself or anyone else at CalORI ever having to cross that particular bridge. The networks and the news agencies already had their seismological rentaquote vacancies filled, especially in the Southland, where tremor discussion was practically a full‐
time job. But there was one thing he had to know. St John knew that what he was theorising was not supported by the GA’s findings, so if he wasn’t planning to make reference to the team’s research …