Apocalypse (38 page)

‘What?’ Ethan asked, peering at a series of narrow, tall spikes, like a row of hundreds of thin razor-sharp teeth.

‘These pulses,’ the scientist explained, ‘they’re not seismic, they’re gravitational. It’s the signature of an object of extreme mass vibrating at high
frequencies, perhaps millions of times per second. If what you’ve all been saying is true, and Joaquin Abell has somehow captured a black hole, then he must have deliberately destabilized it,
causing it to vibrate, and then directed the resulting gravitational waves using whatever structure he’s built to contain the black hole. I’d guess he’ll be using a negatively
charged field, so he could lower the charge in one area of the field to direct the waves. And he could control the frequency of the vibrations and therefore their range by manipulating the strength
of the rest of the field, giving the gravitational pulses a sort of polarity. One set of waves goes into the earth, causing the earthquake; the other goes up into the sky, affecting
nothing.’

‘Except any unfortunate aircraft or boats passing overhead,’ Ethan said. ‘It would pull them straight down or shake them to pieces.’

Doug Jarvis considered this for a moment.

‘He could point it anywhere, flatten cities, if he wanted to.’

‘It would have its limits,’ Ottaway said, ‘but yes, he could use this as a weapon and it would be extremely difficult to stop him.’

‘Do you have its location?’ Ethan asked. ‘The origin of these waves?’

‘I do,’ the scientist said, ‘and it’s close to where IRIS is supposed to be running a coral-conservation area.’

Ethan felt a vengeful grin spread across his features as he turned to Doug.

‘Great. Send in the Navy and flatten that damned place. If we can’t use this as proof to convict him of his crimes, let’s just remove the bastard from play.’

Jarvis was already nodding and reaching for a nearby phone when Ottaway shook his head.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

‘Why not?’ Ethan asked. ‘The man’s a menace, he needs to be dealt with.’

‘I agree, believe me,’ the scientist said. ‘But he’s got a black hole down there, suspended in a delicate balance. You drop a bomb or something on it and one of two
possible things will happen, neither of which is good.’

‘Okay,’ Ethan said as Jarvis lowered the phone from his ear. ‘Spill it.’

‘The black hole becomes exposed to its surroundings and begins dragging material into its singularity and doesn’t stop until our entire planet has been consumed.’ Ottaway
looked at Ethan. ‘Once you get too close to a black hole’s event horizon, too deep inside the gravity well, nothing can escape, not even light.’

‘Maybe option two?’ Jarvis suggested.

‘The black hole is small enough that when it destabilizes it explodes in a violent burst of gamma rays, releasing its energy into the surrounding area. There’ll be a serious bang and
a lot of seabed will find itself with a half-life of twenty thousand years, but essentially the black hole decays instantaneously. If this facility is deep enough underwater, the majority of the
blast might be contained.’

Ethan digested what he had been told sufficiently to figure out a question.

‘So which one will it be?’

‘We don’t know,’ the scientist admitted. ‘It depends on the actual mass of the black hole. Fact is, as a species, we just don’t possess the kind of technology
required to contain a large black hole, so whatever he’s got down there should have the potential to decay away, releasing most of its energy as what’s known as Hawking Radiation.
Either way, it’s a hell of a gamble to go in there and level the place with heavy ordnance.’

‘And you can’t guess at its size?’ Ethan pressed.

Ottaway sighed, thinking hard.

‘It must be a relatively low-mass black hole, because if it were too large it would affect tides in the area, or even the orbit of the earth.’

‘Seriously?’ Jarvis asked.

‘Definitely. The moon gives us our tides because its gravity produces a swell in the oceans as it orbits the earth. A moon-mass black hole would exert a significant pull on the oceans
around IRIS’s base, and that’s not happening, so it must be smaller. That’s good for us, because micro black holes that size will evaporate in a nano-second, given the
chance.’

‘How big would it be?’ Ethan asked.

‘With the mass of the moon?’ Ottaway asked. ‘It would have a Schwarzschild Radius of no more than a tenth of a millimeter. A black hole with the mass of the earth would be
about the size of a peanut, but naturally the IRIS hole will be much smaller than that.’

‘Jesus,’ Ethan breathed. ‘Joaquin thinks he’s got a device that he can use as a weapon, but if it gets out of control we’ll be looking at a global
apocalypse.’

‘If it starts consuming material and cannot be contained,’ Ottaway said, ‘then yes, it would literally be the end of the world. But an object of that mass should evaporate,
although it will still be an extremely violent event.’

‘Joaquin’s site is in water deep enough that any radiation released by the blast should be contained,’ Jarvis hazarded. ‘We can ensure the area is closed off to the
public afterward, although that far off the coast I doubt it will present any problems.’

‘We could send in a SEAL team,’ Ethan suggested to Jarvis. ‘Surgical strike.’

‘There’s too many bodies getting involved already,’ Jarvis said. ‘Best we keep this under wraps.’

‘In other words, you want
us
to go in,’ Ethan said. ‘You ever realize, Doug, that there’s just the two of us, and you keep putting us in harm’s way? If we
get ourselves blown to pieces, who’s going to do all of this for you?’

‘The technology is just too sensitive,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘If it can be recovered discreetly it would be of immense benefit to the United States, Ethan. There’s no telling
what tragedies we could prevent from occurring in the future, or how many lives could be saved.’

Ethan sighed, looking at the violent spikes on the computer monitor.

‘Whatever he’s got down there, it’ll be well protected.’

‘Yes it will,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘But you also have something that you didn’t have before.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The element of surprise. Joaquin thinks that, with Charles Purcell dead, this case is closed.’

Ethan glanced up at the nearby television screens, and was about to reply when a news broadcast caught his eye. A shot of a leafy residential street, a police cordon, a white car surrounded by
armed police.

‘That’s Kyle Sears,’ he said as he saw the captain in the image. And then he recognized the house. ‘And that’s Charles Purcell’s home!’

Jarvis, Ottaway and several of the technicians watched as a limping police officer was lifted into an ambulance by his colleagues.

‘It’s a shot from yesterday,’ Jarvis realized, ‘when the police first turned up at Purcell’s house.’

Ethan watched the news piece and felt a surge of anxiety.

‘That’s how Purcell predicted the car accident outside his home,’ he said finally. ‘It had to have been on the news for him to see it, and therefore to know that Captain
Kyle Sears would be the detective on the scene. Joaquin might actually know when we will arrive,’ he said. ‘He’d only need to set up a camera at the entrance to his facility, link
the feed to one of the black hole cameras recording the future, and then take a peek. If it were me, that’s what I’d do. Nobody could walk into my facility without me knowing about it
in advance.’

Ethan’s guts were twisted with worry as he looked at the violent spikes on the GOCE’s data streams and the gravitational pulses radiating away from the Bermuda Triangle.

‘We might not be going
anywhere
if Lopez doesn’t make it out of the Dominican Republic’

‘This is what you signed up for, Ethan,’ Jarvis reminded him.

Ethan felt a surge of anger pulse within him as he glanced at Project Watchman’s screen and made his decision. He turned to Jarvis and shook his head.

‘We signed up to investigate crimes that the Defense Department and law enforcement had rejected as myth or fantasy. We didn’t sign up to put our lives on the line day after day. You
want us to go in there that badly, then you give us something in return.’

Jarvis glanced at Project Watchman.

‘You don’t know that they’ll be able to find Joanna, or even if she’s alive.’

‘You don’t know that they won’t,’ Ethan shot back and jabbed a finger in the old man’s direction. ‘Your call, Doug. Give me what I want and you’ll get
the result you want. I guess it all boils down to one simple question – whether you want your answers as badly as I need mine.’

Jarvis held Ethan’s gaze for a long moment, and then he sighed.

‘You get that camera, and I’ll get you your answers.’

June 28, 16:22

Dennis Aubrey hurried down one of the corridors that joined the main dome with the ancillary structures that ringed it, heading for the communications dome. He fumbled in his
pocket as he walked and retrieved a satellite phone, scrolling down through a series of numbers until he found the one that he needed.

The communications dome was normally controlled from the main hub, the two linked by optical fibers, allowing all major operations to be operated from Deep Blue’s main control panel.
Joaquin had ensured that Aubrey could not contact anybody on the surface, by locking him out of the communications panel. However, Aubrey knew for certain that Charles Purcell would have built
redundancy measures into the system, including the ability to contact the surface directly from the communications hub, in the event of a hull breach elsewhere in the facility.

Aubrey hurried toward the hatch, a lone guard on sentry duty standing with an assault rifle cradled in his grip. He looked up with a bored expression as Aubrey approached and raised one
leather-gloved hand.

‘No admittance without prior clearance from Mr. Abell,’ the soldier announced in a monotone military voice.

‘Do you think Joaquin would have let me out of his sight if he didn’t want me here?’ Aubrey shot back. ‘Mr. Abell is in the control center with the governor of Florida, a
member of Congress and an oil man worth more money than God. If we can’t ensure perfect communications with the outside world then I’ll know who to blame when Mr. Abell asks why we
failed.’

‘I’ll have to clear it,’ the soldier intoned dully.

‘Then clear it!’ Aubrey snapped. ‘Just hurry the goddamned-hell up!’

The soldier reached for his radio, keyed the microphone and droned into it. Aubrey listened as a scratchy-sounding voice replied. The soldier lowered the radio and looked down at him for what
felt like an eternity before he moved away from the hatch.

Aubrey wasted no time and heaved the hatch-seal handle before shoving the heavy door open with his shoulder and walking inside, careful to seal it behind him.

The communications hub was smaller than the others, little more than a shed-sized construction that contained a desk, two computers and a bank of radios, both digital and analogue, that
connected to the tethered antenna buoy some two thousand feet above.

Aubrey sat down at the desk and quickly grabbed a set of radio jacks, plugging one end into the back of the satellite phone he had stolen from the control panel and the other into a digital
transmission amplifier. He glanced at the controls and saw that the buoy’s transmitters had been shut off by Olaf, just as Joaquin had ordered. Aubrey smiled to himself. The satellite phone
provided its own transmission – the buoy’s inactive antenna would simply boost the signal when it reached the surface, much like a television aerial. Aubrey brought up Katherine
Abell’s number on his cellphone before dialing it into the satellite phone. He listened to the tone in his ear as the line began ringing.

‘Pick up,’ Aubrey whispered. ‘Come on.’

The line continued to ring and Aubrey clenched his fist in frustration as Katherine Abell’s cell went to voice-mail. Cursing, he waited until he heard the tone at the end of her message
before speaking.

‘Katherine, it’s Dennis. Listen to me, I don’t have much time. Joaquin isn’t running a conservation project down here. This is a military facility and he’s
developed a machine to cause earthquakes and other natural disasters. He’s aiming for where you are, Katherine. I am not allowed to leave this facility. Please, if you get this message, get
onto high ground until the quake has passed, and then get in touch with the authorities – the coastguard, the police. Hell, call the goddamned Navy, just get somebody out here as quickly as
you can!’ Aubrey paused and brought himself under control before continuing. ‘I’m going to try to stop him. Please hurry, and take care of yourself, okay?’

Aubrey shut off the line and unplugged the jacks before he stuffed the satellite phone back into his pocket and turned for the door. With a heave of effort he yanked the door open and stepped
out into the corridor. The guard glanced at him without interest as he pulled the hatch shut and shuffled off back down the corridor.

Aubrey reached the main corridor that ringed the central dome and branched off to each of the ancillary domes. Aubrey turned right, waiting until he was out of sight of the guard before breaking
into a run. He jogged around the outside of the hub until he reached a smaller, narrower hatch that led not to another tunnel but to a small storage facility attached directly to the side of the
main dome. A card-activated security panel was affixed to the wall beside the hatch, restricting access, and for good reason. The small room beyond was the armory.

Aubrey reached beneath his sleeve and slid out Olaf Jorgenson’s security card. What the towering giant possessed in strength he lacked in wits and intelligence, and Aubrey allowed himself
a nervous smile as he slipped the card in. It had taken only a mild sleight of hand to let the card fall into his shirtsleeve rather than drop into the box. The armory door clicked and he hauled it
open. He ducked inside and looked at the racks of assault rifles, underwater pistols, knives and small arms.