THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller (6 page)

Scenes of devastation flickered behind her: flooded fields and leveled homes; the one-legged silhouette of Vidu.

“The U.S. Geological Survey has identified sand and gravel deposits carried inland a great distance by inundation . . . ”

As Swenson lectured, she drifted, thinking about her own past. Once, she too had been as fresh-faced and scrubbed and open to the world as these young students, when she’d first heard Dr. White speak at that lecture in Los Angeles. She had been at USC then, after her escape from South Dakota.

Born in a small town called Chance to Eric Swenson, a geologist, and Dolly Aalborg, part-time clerk, Emily had been precociously intelligent from the very start, skipping two grades by the time she was but ten. At twelve, she had lost her mother to lung cancer. Soon, she was working after school in the same tourist shop her mother used to manage, selling turquoise and fake Native American nick-knacks to tourists on their way to and from the Badlands. Only her swimming had kept her sane. She’d been captain of the local high school swim team, and an accomplished diver, winning a state championship at sixteen. The following year she had been accepted to USC on a scholarship where she had majored in oceanography, with a minor in geology – just like her father, with whom she was still close. On the weekends she’d worked at a local dive shop, and this too became a lifelong passion. But, even then, her beauty had worked against her.

Tall, voluptuous and blond, with robin-egg-blue eyes, few could believe she was the same person they got to know online, through her papers or academic correspondence. She looked more like a movie star. Most men were too intimidated to even ask her out, assuming, falsely, that she was destined to be busy; to the point, ironically, where she spent nearly every weekend on her own, linked to the world exclusively through her computer, forever working.

Her professors always discounted her because of her good looks. The women generally felt threatened. And the men either assumed she was a dumb blonde, or they fell in love with her. Even when it was Platonic, many ended up playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza. That’s why she’d left USC, after a brief affair with one of her professors – the infamous E.J. Dubinsky, author of
This Primal Earth
, for a few brief months a best-seller on
The New York Times
non-fiction list.

She had broken it off only a week or so before a scheduled expedition – 150 kilometers east of Atlantic City – designed to study some mysterious craters suspected of being formed by gas eruptions. Despite the recent terminus of the affair, they had descended together anyway, in a three-man Deep Submergence Vehicle called the
Alvin
, and at one point, out of nowhere, Dubinsky had tried to kiss her. Then, something went wrong. They had lost power and the DSV had drifted out of control. It was only after forty-five excruciating seconds that they had finally found a fix. But not before Swenson had panicked, not before she had screamed hysterically and accused Dubinsky of disabling the craft intentionally. That had really been the end of the affair. Soon after that, she had transferred to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to work with Dr. James L. White, one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on tsunamis. She rarely thought about E.J. anymore. And, since that episode aboard the
Alvin
, she had never stepped foot inside a DSV again.

The student had a thick accent. He sounded Indian or Pakistani. It was amazing how cosmopolitan the Institute had become. “I don’t believe so,” she replied. “Some geologists have tried to stimulate seismic activity. You know – for oil and gas exploration. That sort of thing. But none has succeeded. At least, not to my knowledge. But you might want to ask Dr. White about that one. I know he has some pretty controversial theories on vulcan stimulation.” Then she turned and looked about the crowd. They were starting to pack up. No one else had raised a hand. “Alright then,” she concluded. “I notice we’ve reached the end of our allotted time. I’ll see you all next week. Thanks for coming out so late tonight.”

The students burst into applause. It had been a lecture disguised as a video game. It spoke to them in their own language, with lightning cuts, and contemporary colors and design. It pulsed and moved. And it tore at both their heads and hearts.

Swenson descended from the stage, shimmied through the usual crowd of well wishers, sycophants and Lotharios who always seemed to gather at these affairs, and made her way across the Quad to Dr. White’s administrative office in the Bigelow Laboratory. She had been working there on her paper about the Indian Ocean tsunami because it was quieter than in her own shared quarters, and because – though small – the office had a spectacular view of the bay. Suddenly, someone shuffled by the door. The handle turned and Swenson was startled to see Dr. White materialize like a ghost within the brightened doorway. White had been out of the office for months, on leave, tending to his wife who was bed-ridden with cancer.

“I’m sorry,” Swenson said. “Dr. White, I didn’t know you were coming in.” She began to gather up her papers. “I’ll get out of your hair.”

“Don’t be silly,” Dr. White said. “I’ll only be a minute, Emily. I’m the one who’s barging in.” He glanced over at Swenson for an instant, then turned and averted her gaze. “And as I recall,” he added, “I gave you permission to use my office any time you wanted to. Especially when you’re working on a paper. Believe me, I know the value of solitude, and its curse.”

Dr. White seemed harried and distracted. He looked exhausted. He stuffed a dozen files into a bulging leather briefcase. Swenson chalked it up to his wife’s illness.

“I enjoyed your lecture, Emily,” White said, after a moment. “You’ve come so far.”

Swenson was surprised. She hadn’t seen Dr. White in the audience. Normally, when he showed up, he came down to the front when it was over, mixing in with the well-wishers.

“You’ve become a great asset to the field,” continued Dr. White. “There is nothing particularly revolutionary, nothing new about your findings, Emily, but you express them in a revolutionary way, and I guess that’s what science needs today. Especially oceanography.” He shook his head. “Despite the tsunami last year, our work is still under-funded compared to other fields. People have always underestimated the power of the sea. Their ships litter the sea floor. But now that we can fly – like demigods, like Angel apes – we think we’re above it all. We’ve become too arrogant. We whip the waves like Darius. The sea gods are not so easily dismissed. You’ll see, Emily. The whole world will see.” He sailed across the room, stood immediately before her, reached out and brushed a strand of golden hair behind one ear. “I may not have made much in this world – at least not financially – but I’ve left you a legacy of learning. I’ve always loved you like my daughter, you know that, Emily.” He kissed her on the cheek and she suddenly realized that he’d been drinking. “Don’t ever forget that.”

“Don’t talk that way, James,” she said, stepping back. “You’re acting like I’m never going to see you again.”

“I’m putting Doris in a hospice,” he continued. “She needs twenty-four hour care and I just can’t provide that for her. After all, I can’t stay on leave forever. This job may be rewarding in many ways – on an intellectual plain – but it’s never made me rich. Frankly, Emily, I just don’t have the money. Doris was never one to stick to a budget. She wasn’t raised that way. And her inheritance is gone.”

Swenson thought about her lecture. You could take all kinds of measurements of deep water, get to know something pretty well, across multiple dimensions, only to discover that you didn’t know it at all. You miscalculated the inundation, the currents of the heart. “What are you going to do?” asked Swenson. Having lost her mother to cancer, she was all too familiar with the hardships of the caretaker.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let this be a lesson to you. Academia is a political cesspool, with no financial return. I should have left and gone to work for some oil company years ago. Now it’s too late. Look at me. I’ve got nothing left. I’m as dead as Doris.” His voice broke. “But you,” he continued, clutching at his scuffed brown leather case, “you still have a chance to get away. Get away, Emily,” he stammered, leaning close to her, his brown eyes bulging, a drop of spittle on his lips, his breath unbearable.

Just then, there was a soft knock on the door. White and Swenson both looked up. The door swung open with a creak, revealing a small, Middle Eastern-looking man in the doorway. “Dr. White,” he said in English as he glanced about the hall. “It is getting late.”

Dr. White brushed past the desk and headed for the door. His dark companion had already disappeared. As he pressed his briefcase to his chest, White turned and said, “Don’t forget what I told you. Please, Emily. Don’t wait. Get away. Get away before it’s too late.”

SECTION II

Jami

Chapter 5

Friday, January 28 – 4:05 AM

Tel Aviv, Israel

Seiden sat in his office at Mossad headquarters, re-reviewing El Aqrab’s file. After a preliminary study, no one could come up with a plausible explanation as to why the infamous terrorist had come back to Israel to kill this particular family. According to neighbors, Ariel Miller managed a furniture store. His wife was a secretary in an advertising agency. Miller was a drunk, fat and unfaithful. Harmless, really. Except for a brief stint, years before – when he’d served as a guard at Ansar II prison in Gaza, during his compulsory conscription – Miller had never done anything that would remotely connect him to Islamist terrorists. And El Aqrab had never been in prison, not even as a boy.

Perhaps it was just a random act of violence, just as the words El Aqrab burned into his victims’ flesh were random snippets from the Qur’an. Or some kind of killing for hire, or for a friend who had been in prison. Seiden was mystified. One thing was clear though: El Aqrab had positioned his victims in a particular way. Miller had been facing north-northwest, directly away from Mecca, as if in a kind of anti-prayer. And the boys perpendicular to him, at right angles to the Muslim holy city.

Seiden stood up, picked up the file, and headed out the door, down the long green corridor toward the holding cells.

“Hello. My name is Saul Weinstein,” he said, as he entered Interrogation Room B. It was a small cell, barely five meters long, and three and a half meters wide, with a mirror running the entire length of one wall, and a small desk by the door. In the far corner, the prisoner stood chained to the ceiling by his wrists, facing the other way. “This won’t take long, perhaps an hour or two,” Seiden continued. “I need to update your file. Your . . . interrogator has been delayed.”

He took a DVD from the folder under his arm and slipped it into a player on the desk connected to a nearby television set. Seiden turned the screen so that it was visible to both himself and El Aqrab. Then he dropped the folder onto the desk, sat down and flipped it open. “It says here you were born Mohammed Hussein, on February Third, 1963,” he began in an off-hand kind of way. “In a town called Rihane in Jezzine. It’s your birthday soon. Congratulations.”

El Aqrab did not respond.

“The son of Jusef and Fatima Hussein,” Seiden continued. “Your father was a . . . ” He glanced down at the file, although – of course – he already knew the information intimately. “ . . . part-time electrician and handyman who moved north to Beirut to work in the various stores and office buildings owned by wealthy business mogul Hanid ben Saad.” He looked up at El Aqrab but the terrorist remained impassive. He did not even turn around.

“You began to work with your father,” Seiden continued, “in one of Hanid ben Saad’s many properties when you were just eleven. Your parents were killed by the Israeli Army in Rihane in March of ‘78, when we attacked PLO positions in south Lebanon. This was in retaliation for the murders of some thirty bus riders by Palestinian guerrillas. They were not alone, your parents. I believe fifteen hundred Lebanese were killed in that engagement.

“After your parents’ death,” Seiden continued, “you joined Imam Musa Sadr’s Movement of the Deprived, Harakat al-Mahrumin, the precursor of Amal and Hezbollah. That was the same year that Musa Sadr ‘disappeared’ in Libya, no doubt at the hands of Colonel Khadaffi. It was around this time that you acquired the street name El Aqrab. How did you get that name?” Seiden asked. “I’m curious. You look very little like a scorpion, Mohammed.”

El Aqrab turned around for the first time. He was a slight man with narrow shoulders and even narrower hips. His face was thin, almost haggard in its appearance, with high cheekbones framing a beak-like nose. He had a wispy black beard, thin as an adolescent’s. In fact, he looked much younger than his forty-two years. Were it not for his eyes, large and deeply set, obsidian and glassy, he could have passed for thirty.

The terrorist grinned, lending his face a lupine quality; his canines were unnaturally large. Then he spoke for the first time. “I know you,” he said in Arabic. “You were at the apartment. Your name isn’t Saul Weinstein. It’s Seiden. Acting Chief Seiden. What time is it?” It was a pleasant voice that served to mollify his predatory gaze.