Without Warning (2 page)

A flick of the remote and the screen lit up.

“CNN?” asked Caitlin.

Monique flicked through the channels, but couldn’t find the news network. White noise and static hissed out of the television from channel 13, where it should have been. She shrugged. There was nothing on MSNBC either, just an empty studio, but all of the French-language channels were available, as was BBC World.

“Can we watch the Beeb then?” asked Celia. “Me French, you know, it’s not the best.”

Caitlin really just wanted to carve out a couple of minutes to herself, where she could get her head back in the game. Her injuries must be serious, having put her under for three days, and although her cover was still intact, she didn’t want to take any chances. She needed to reestablish contact with Echelon. They’d have maintained overwatch while she was out. They could bring her back up to …

“Eh up? What’s this then?” blurted Celia.

Everyone’s eyes fixed on the screen, where an impeccably groomed Eurasian woman with a perfectly modulated BBC voice was struggling to maintain her composure. “… vanished. Communications links are apparently intact and fully functional, but remain unresponsive. Inbound commercial flights are either returning to their points of origin or diverting to Halifax and Quebec in Canada, or to airports throughout the West Indies, which remain unaffected so far.”

The women all began to chatter at once, much to Caitlin’s annoyance. Onscreen the BBC’s flustered anchorwoman explained that the “event horizon”
seemed to extend down past Mexico City, out into the Gulf, swallowing most of Cuba, encompassing all of the continental U.S. and a big chunk of southeastern Canada, including Montreal. Caitlin had no idea yet what she meant by the term “event horizon,” but it didn’t sound friendly. A hammer started pounding on the inside of her head as she watched the reporter stumble through the rest of her read.

“… from a Canadian airbase have not returned. U.S. naval flights out of Guantánamo Bay at the southern tip of Cuba have likewise dropped out of contact at the same point, seventy kilometers north of the base. Reuters is reporting that attempts by U.S. military commanders at Guantánamo to contact the Castro government in Havana have also failed.”

Caitlin realized that the background buzz of the hospital had died away in the last few minutes. She heard a metallic clatter as a tray fell to the floor somewhere nearby. Caitlin had a passing acquaintance with the Pitié-Salpêtrière. There had to be nearly three thousand people in this hospital, and at that moment they were all silent. The only human sounds came from the television sets that hung in every room and ward, a discordant clashing of French and English voices, all of them speaking in the same clipped, urgent tone.

“The prime minister, Mr. Blair, has released a statement calling for calm and promising to devote the full resources of the British government to resolving the crisis. A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that British forces have gone onto full alert, but that NATO headquarters in Brussels has not yet issued any such orders. The prime minister rejected calls by the Liberal Democrats to immediately recall British forces deployed in the Middle East for expected operations against the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

“That’d be fuckin’ right,” Auntie Celia said quietly to herself.

The reporter was about to speak again when she stopped, placing a hand to one ear, obviously taking instructions from her producer.

“Right, thank you,” she said before continuing.

“We have just received these pictures from a commercial satellite that passed over the eastern seaboard of America a short time ago.”

The screen filled with black-and-white still shots of New York. The imagery was not as sharp as some of the milgrade stuff Caitlin had seen over the years, but it was good enough to pick out individual vehicles and quite small buildings.

“This picture shows the center of New York, as of twenty-three minutes ago,” said the reporter. “Our technical department has cleaned up the image, allowing us to pull into a much tighter focus.”

Caitlin recognized Times Square from above. She quickly estimated the
virtual height as being about two thousand meters, before the view reformatted down to something much closer, probably about five or six hundred feet. The Beeb’s IT guys were good. It was a remarkably clear image, but profoundly disturbing. Her brief curse was lost in the gasps and swearing of the other women. Fires, frozen in one frame of satellite imagery, burned throughout the square, where hundreds of cars had smashed into each other. Smoke and flames also poured from a few buildings. Buses and yellow cabs had run up onto the sidewalks and in some cases right into shop fronts and building façades. But nothing else moved. The photograph seemed to have captured an unnatural, ghostly moment. Not because they were looking at a still shot of a great metropolis in the grip of some weird, inexplicable disaster, but because nowhere in that eerie black-and-white image of one of the busiest cities in the world was there a single human being to be seen.

The lower reaches of the Cascades never failed to impress James Kipper. Dropping his backpack for a five-minute rest and a drink of water, he rewarded himself for the morning’s trek with a moment staring down the long, deeply wooded valley up which he had climbed. Snow lay in patches along the well-beaten trail, and dropped in wet clumps from the sagging branches of fir and pine that covered the gentle slopes below him in a dense green carpet. He loved it out here. Nature was so powerful, the hand of man so light, you could have been hundreds of years removed from the twenty-first century. The brisk but unseasonably sunny morning had made hiking up the remote valley a rare pleasure for the senses. The air was fragrant with sap and the rich brown mulch of earth warmed by sun for the first time in months. A breeze, just strong enough to set the treetops swaying, carried the natural white noise of a nearby stream, running heavy with an early melt. As he stood at the edge of a small plateau he could imagine the landscape below dotted with castles and mounted knights. He was the father of a little girl just lately in school; knights and castles and fairy tales were seldom far from his mind these days.

Kipper sucked in a draft of air so clean and cold it hurt all the way down into his chest. But it hurt
good.
The temperature hadn’t snuck much past the mid-fifties, but he was well dressed for the hike, and could even feel sweat
trickling down the inside of his arms. Another mouthful of icy spring water added pleasantly to the discordant sensations of feeling both hot and cold. His breath plumed out in front of him, and his stomach rumbled, reminding the engineer that it had been four hours since his last substantial meal, a bowl of pork sausages and beans cooked over the coals at his campsite a few miles farther downrange. Kipper unzipped his Gore-Tex jacket and fished around inside for the protein bar he’d stored in one of the many pockets before setting out that morning. It would be satisfyingly warm and chewy by now.

He frowned at the buzzing in one of the pockets. A second later the trilling of his satellite phone punched him back into the real world. The phone was a concession to his wife, Barb. Three days a year he was allowed to run around in the woods by himself, but as a former New Yorker, Barb had “issues” with his “nature-boy shtick” and insisted that if he was going to go commune with the elves he should at least take a sat phone and GPS locator beacon with him. “So we can find your body before the coyotes and buzzards are finished with it,” she said.

He took out the heavy lump of hated technology, scowling at the small screen as he realized it wasn’t even her on the line. The number looked to be someone at City Hall.

Well, now I’m really pissed,
he thought. Only his wife and the park rangers were supposed to have this number, and true to her promise Barb had never actually used it. But apparently she’d gone and given it to some pinhead at work.

Unless of course it’s telemarketers. Please God, don’t let it be telemarketers.

He was simultaneously dreading and relishing the prospect as he answered. If this was some asshole in New Delhi trying to sell him a time-share apartment…

“Kipper. You there?”

The chief engineer of the Seattle City Council closed his eyes and exhaled.

“Hey, Barney. This better be good, man.”

Whoever had decided they had something worth interrupting his precious hiking holiday had chosen the messenger well. Barney Tench was his closest friend and probably the only person who could call him right now, safe in the knowledge that he would survive the encounter.

“It ain’t good, Jimmy,” said Tench, and for the first time Kipper noticed the tremor in his friend’s voice. Was he scared?

When he spoke again he sounded like he’d just survived a train wreck. Like he was terrified.

“It’s fucked, man. Totally fucked. You gotta get back here right now. I know it’s your break and all, but we need you, right now.”

Kipper shivered as a single bead of sweat trickled down his spine before hitting a patch of thermal underwear and being absorbed.

“What’s up, Barn? Just tell me what’s going on.”

Tench groaned.

“That’s it, Jimmy. Nobody knows. Could be a war. Could be a fucking comet strike. We don’t know.”

“A what?”

His surroundings were completely forgotten now. All of James Kipper’s attention was focused down the invisible connection to his friend and colleague back in the city. A friend who seemed to have lost his marbles.

“What d’you mean a comet or a war, Barney? What’s going on?”

“The whole country is gone, Jimmy. All of it, ‘cept us. And Alaska I guess. Even Canada’s gone. Most of it, anyway, in the east.”

The ice water he’d just swallowed was sitting very heavily in his stomach, as though he’d gulped down a gallon of the stuff instead of just a mouthful. That might have been anger. He was beginning to suspect that this was some sort of prank. Tench was famous for them. When they’d been rooming together in college he’d fabricated an entire gala ball at the Grand Hyatt, convincing a couple of college babes to hand out “free,” “strictly limited” tickets on campuses all over town. Tench and Kipper had got as drunk as lords sitting in the lobby bar, dressed in rented tuxedos, watching hundreds of students waving their bogus ball tickets in the face of a bewildered hotel manager. Barney Tench was more than capable of fucking with someone’s head for a laugh. Especially Kipper’s.

“Gone where, Barney?” he growled. “You’re not making any sense.”

“Just gone, Jimmy. Just fucking gone.” His voice was scaling higher with every word he said. “Turn on your locator beacon. There’s a National Guard chopper headed your way soon. They’re gonna pick you up and transfer you to a plane somewhere. A C-130 or something, they said. One of them big fat ones. It’ll get you straight in here. Council’s called an emergency meeting. All heads of department. Governor’s office is sending a team, although nobody can find Gary Locke. His schedule had him in transit today. In the air,” he added, as though that explained everything.

“Barney, is my family safe?” asked Kipper.

“They’re fine, buddy, they’re fine. Barb gave me your number. Look, I gotta go. The guard can fill you in. I got a thousand calls to make now that I found you. Just fire up that beacon, sit your ass down, and wait.”

“Bar …”

But the line cut out.

“What the fuck was that about?” he muttered. Shaking his head, Kipper
knelt in front of his pack and popped the snap lock on the pocket containing his personal locator beacon, a lightweight ACR Terrafix unit. He powered up the little yellow device and couldn’t help searching the skies, even though he knew his ride was probably still an hour away. Assuming it came at all, and Barney wasn’t now roaring with laughter, about to fall backward off his chair. Who knew?

Subzero air torrents high above him stretched a few scraps of cloud into long white ribbons, streaming away toward the coast. He caught sight of a giant hawk as it dived into the valley, wings folded back.

“Someone’s about to get eaten,” he thought aloud.

Then he noticed the contrail, maybe twenty miles farther north. The sky was crisscrossed with contrails during the colder months, great white arcs of vapor trailing the jetliners as they headed for Seattle, or the Pacific and the long haul to Japan or down to Honolulu. There seemed to be fewer than usual, just this one actually, and he had never seen a plane tracking that low over the Cascades before. His unease at the weird call from Barney tightened into alarm as he watched the slow arc of the aircraft and realized it wasn’t going to clear the mountains toward which it was headed.

“No,” he whispered, aware that he almost never spoke aloud on his hiking trips, and that he was positively yapping his head off today. “No, don’t.”

His mouth was dry, and he drank from his canteen without thinking. The cold water hit his clenched stomach like acid, and for a second he thought he might vomit. That faraway plane, a thin tube of metal enfolding—what? a hundred, two hundred souls?—slowly, gracefully, inexorably speared itself into the side of a mountain, impacting just over the snow line, freeing great blossoming petals of dirty yellow flame to roll away into the morning air.