The Leviathan Effect (14 page)

Louise was reminded of that today as she glanced up and saw something very strange crossing the open meadow. Something like she had never seen before—dark and V-shaped, a giant funnel, skipping over the land, raising up dense swirls each time it touched down. Then behind it, a second funnel, just as large.

Beyond the picket fence she saw Paul Martin next door, pointing frantically toward the sky and shouting something to her, his hair blowing wildly in a gust of wind. But he was too far away and Louise could not hear what he was saying. She looked back and became hypnotized by the otherworldly colors suddenly streaking the sky—odd shades of greens and browns and oranges—and by the dance of the
peculiar twin funnels: touching down, lifting up, kissing the earth, skipping back into the sky. It was almost like watching a life-size silent movie.

But then she began to hear the sound of it—a low roar of wind, like an approaching airplane—and she realized that the dark swirling funnels carried the wreckage of homes and trees; that it was chewing up the countryside like a giant lawnmower.

Her heart began to pound furiously as she breathed the cool, potent currents of wind. Paul was running toward her now. “
Depechez-vous! Entrez dans le sous-sol
!”

He grabbed her arm and led her across the yard and inside her house. Pulled her down into the cellar and bolted the door. Breathless, they huddled together in a corner of the concrete room, listening. Waiting.

Minutes later, she felt the tornadoes moving overhead. The house shook with terrible violence, what she imagined were the windows exploding, then the walls blowing apart. The roar seeming to hover above them for a full minute or more. Then the cellar doorway tore open and briefly the beast was visible again, hurling shredded debris down the steps toward them.

Paul moved in front of her in a protective crouch. A brave, fatal mistake; in the next instant, he was knocked back by a shaft of wood.

Louise huddled against the wall in the corner, shaking. She listened to the vortex of wind moving away from them. Waited. Eyes closed.

And then, all at once, there was silence.

She crawled to Paul and touched his forehead. His eyes were wide open, but he could no longer see anything. A spear of wood had gone through his chest. Blood was still oozing out, staining the front of his white shirt.

Louise pushed the broken wood out of her way as she made a path up the steps, knowing before she reached the top that none of her house remained. It was only a pile of wood and stone now, her belongings all gone. She stood at the top of the steps in what had been her living room, and peered out over the valley. All of it was gone. No one, nothing, moved. In every direction, destruction. But somehow,
she
had been spared.

What had been cottages and houses a few minutes before were
heaps of wood and stone. Cars were overturned and crumpled. Among the piles of wreckage, she began to see pieces of human debris—a man in his undershorts, his head and torso terribly crushed; an old woman she did not recognize literally torn in pieces, one of her legs against a pile of stones; a decapitated body on its back in a field; a child impaled on a tree branch. And in the valley, she saw cattle torn open, their limbs ripped off and scattered.

She felt a cold sweat ripple over her skin. “Help!” She turned and tried to scream. But nothing came out. No one was there to console her.
Why? Why had this happened?

The worst part was the silence. The lack of answers. There was not even a wind anymore, just stagnant air that was beginning to smell like death. Louise walked on into the shredded valley, trying to scream. Listening for a human sound but hearing only the silence. Imagining that she was the last person left alive on Earth.

C
ATHERINE
B
LAINE FELT NUMB
as she pulled through the White House gates near Fifteenth Street and parked in one of the VIP spaces. She checked in at the security booth, and was escorted inside by a Secret Service officer and through the French doors into the Cabinet Room. Name plates for each of the Cabinet members were on the backs of the chairs. The President’s chair, centered on the east side of the table, stood two inches taller than those of the Cabinet secretaries. Outside, a light rain blurred the Rose Garden.

Blaine felt the weight of history as she took her seat at the large mahogany table that dominated the room, a gift from President Nixon in 1970, beneath three pendant lights. This was the room where President Kennedy had deliberated about the Bay of Pigs. Where the Bush 43 Cabinet had convened the day after 9/11.

And now they had
their
crisis.

The “circle” shared a sober silence before the President signaled the start with a sigh. “This is clearly the event we were warned about,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information in yet. But Harold will first share what we do know.”

DeVries recited the grim details. A series of three deadly tornadoes had ripped through the Picardy region of France, near the border with Belgium. “We’re still receiving damage assessments and there are some contradictory reports. The latest number we have is eighty-nine confirmed fatalities. That number will certainly go up.” DeVries glanced at Blaine with his dark sober eyes. “The deadliest tornado in French history occurred in 1845, killing approximately one hundred. The reports we are getting from the ground in Picardy are putting
this disaster at probably two to three times that, with a huge loss of property.”

Blaine was thinking something else, though. Something she’d thought earlier.

“The words ‘Western Europe’,” she said, to fill the silence. “That’s a little odd, isn’t it? It’s a geographical area, but not often used in that context; it also has a political connotation, from the Cold War, doesn’t it? Eastern Europe. Western Europe.”

DeVries nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought of that. Good observation.”

“Needless to say, we will be offering our aid to them,” the President said, switching subjects. “I’ve already talked with the French president and we are issuing a joint statement later this afternoon.”

Blaine sensed the underlying frustration in his tone. There was a routine to this now and a sense of helplessness. She had to find out more on her own. This was a president who thought big, and she suddenly sensed that he might even have a parallel agenda that he wasn’t sharing.

Clark Easton was uncharacteristically quiet, his arms on the table. Several times he glanced at Blaine.

“Looking at patterns,” DeVries said, “two of the three follow-up messages came within twenty-four hours of the events.”

“So we’ll be back here again in a few hours,” Blaine said.

“Probably. And I hope we’ll have a clearer direction then,” said the President. “Any thoughts? Questions?”

There was a deadly silence in the room. Even the rain seemed to go quiet.

“Okay. Two additional items, then,” President Hall said. “We’ve had a report from the Janus Task Force that I’d like to share with you. The Vice President just brought this to my attention. They’ve picked up some additional electronic surveillance linking Janus to Chinese intelligence. As recently as last week. I don’t know if that will help us much, but I just want everyone to be up to speed. We’ll all receive briefings on it this afternoon. There’s a feeling that we may be closing in on him, anyway.”

Blaine saw DeVries lower his eyes and shake his head, as if momentarily disgusted. Easton rubbed the palms of his hands together.

“And secondly, as you know, we’ve got a storm out there in the
North Atlantic right now that we need to be watching very closely. This thing’s come out of nowhere and is developing in ways we haven’t seen before.”

Blaine watched the President as he relayed the news that Dr. Wu had shared with the Oval Office earlier about Tropical Storm Alexander, feeling a shared tension.

Two anomalies
.

And then it was over and they stood to return to their lives.
Until the next message. The next meeting
.

As they were leaving the Cabinet Room, DeVries caught her eye. Blaine lingered for a moment beside her chair, timing it so they would be at the doorway together.

“Talk for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Come on up. I’m heading to my office.”

T
HE AFTERNOON AIR
had turned crisp and the leaves were falling in the Virginia suburbs. Charles Mallory felt the delicious autumn breeze through the screen of his third-story hotel room as he ran Internet searches on the seven names, fighting off a nostalgic urge to daydream—growing up nearby, playing football every autumn; the way that life used to narrow down to a single, clear objective each fall as the team got better and the season’s end grew more tangible.

He had, in fact, found two more connections among the seven names, although they were not necessarily important ones. Two of the seven had worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government organization that studied hurricanes, and both had been involved in a computer analysis operation known as Project Cloudcover, though in different parts of the country.

The reason that this particularly interested Mallory was that he knew a former CIA analyst who had also been involved in Cloudcover—a woman named Patricia Hanratty. Whether she would talk with him was a different matter. But Mallory found a number for her and left a message.

Then he closed up his computer and walked out into the afternoon breeze, so that he could meet his ride at the Connecticut Avenue bus shelter at 6:17, to take him to his brother.

H
AROLD
D
EVRIES LED
B
LAINE
through the steel and concrete tunnel from the White House back into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Originally known as the State, War, and Navy Building, the EEOB was one of Washington’s most historic buildings, a stunning example of French Second Empire architecture, which had taken seventeen years to build. Not everyone had been taken by its ornamental façade, though. Harry Truman called it “the greatest monstrosity in America.”

They walked up the granite stairs to the intelligence director’s satellite office on the second floor. The marble echoed with their footfalls as they approached his office down an empty hallway. The cavernous space felt a little eerie to Blaine.

DeVries was in his early fifties now but retained the alert expression of a much younger man, as if life were a puzzle that he was perpetually on the verge of solving.

“Pardon the mess,” he said, closing his office door. “I’m not used to conducting meetings here. Try to make yourself at home.”

Blaine looked around and smiled. It was a functional office. Small, cluttered, only slightly larger than the one she’d been given on the fourth floor. Computer, phone, file cabinets, boxes. Nothing like his high-tech office at Liberty Crossing. She sat in the old leather armchair.

“So.” DeVries leaned back in his swivel chair behind the desk and watched her. “I take it you’re on board now.”

“You can still read me pretty well, can’t you?”

“I guess I can. I didn’t completely believe it at first, either. I don’t
know that any of us did. I think we’re hard-wired to think there has to be some other explanation. Coincidence. Hoax.”

Blaine nodded. “I’m sorry I questioned the intelligence earlier. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot.”

“No, no offense, Cate.” He chuckled. “Believe me, I’ve envisioned the headlines. ‘Eighty billion dollar intelligence community misses global threat.’ ‘Massive intelligence blunder cited.’ I’m cognizant that it ultimately comes back on me.”

“What do you think?”

“What do
I
think?”

“Yeah. What do you really think it is?”

He made a face, and swiveled to one side. “I don’t know, Cate,” he said, his voice softening. “I’ve been around and around about that. I think we’re engaged in a new sort of warfare. But I hate to speculate beyond that. I think it’s what the President said earlier. If someone cared about weather science as much as the United States did about sending a man to the moon in the 1960s, and they had the funding and the smarts, and I suppose the ruthlessness, they could probably make this happen.”

“Some
one
?”

He shrugged. “A country.”

“China?”

“Maybe. Or a sophisticated business consortium of some kind, maybe connected with the Chinese government.” He frowned at her. “You said yesterday it’s theoretically possible. It
could
happen.”

“If the funding were there, yes, it probably could. Although not all scientists would agree.”

He let his gaze linger ambiguously. It reminded Blaine of how he used to flirt with her, years before. And how sometimes she had responded, always pulling back before it led anywhere. DeVries and his wife Faye had been married for twenty-seven years and as far as she knew it was a good marriage, with two grown children, a son and daughter, both of whom were Washington attorneys.

“And we really don’t have the ingenuity to figure this out?” she said. “I mean, how they’re doing it.” She flashed again to the grainy images she had just seen of the mutilated corpses strewn across the French countryside and felt sick.

“We’re working on it around the clock, Cate. With each event,
there have been physical clues. Changes in air pressure, changes in the atmosphere, physical alterations in the sky. But we haven’t been able to isolate a location or locations yet.”

“Is it Janus?”

“I don’t know. Maybe yes, maybe no.”

Blaine turned her eyes away, feeling frustrated. “And you’re comfortable that we’re handling this right?”

“I think we have an obligation to be as thorough as we can,” he said. “But also to be united. To follow the President’s lead.”

“It doesn’t bother you that we’re keeping it so reined in, before this small group?”

He was frowning as if he didn’t understand. “No, that’s how you handle a crisis, Cate. You don’t do it out in the open.” He showed his cagey smile, but it seemed misplaced this time, as if he were being disingenuous. “Let’s wait for the next message. I have a feeling we’ll be getting something else tomorrow. Be patient. Go along with it, Cate. Don’t question too much unless it’s necessary.”