The Rapture (28 page)

In the next image, the windscreen of the manned crane has sunlight on it, making it hard, initially, to distinguish much beyond the outline of the operator's head. But Bethany is pointing excitedly.

'Let's see the top right. Behind his left shoulder and up a bit.' The fair-haired man is lifting a can of Dr Pepper to his lips with a gloved hand. 'Higher,' commands Bethany. Something pink and glistening comes into lurid focus. Ned pulls out until the entire girl materialises. She is Chinese.

Her legs are spread wide.

Between them, a slick, meaty confusion.

'That's the one,' says Bethany, non-committally. She seems to have lost interest.

Ned flicks the screen off, engulfing us again in the room's gloom. When he speaks, his voice is constricted. 'It's Buried Hope Alpha.'

'Christ,' says Kristin Jons dottir. 'It's in the North Sea. A hundred kilometres off the coast of Norway.'

'Norway,' repeats Harish Modak. He breathes in deeply and exhales in silence. I think: mountains. Cruises in fjords. But then stumble, stuck. Looking bored, Bethany rummages about in the chocolates, mews in disgust at the cheese, and settles for a lychee.

'Buried Hope Alpha belongs to Traxorac,' says Ned. The colour has abandoned his face, making his dark stubble stand out. He has a haunted look. It strikes me that he feels as lonely as I do.

'Can you get the exact co-ordinates?' asks Frazer Melville. Kristin Jons dottir is biting her lip.

After a false start, a geological map fills the screen: a huddle of thin concentric rings intersected with lines of latitude and longitude, with a small red dot indicating what I assume is the rig. Bethany is now yawning widely, frustrated at no longer being the centre of attention.

'I see. Well, this is not good,' says Harish Modak. He has become as sombre as the others.

'I told you,' says Bethany casually. We all look at her. 'I kept saying it was close. I told you we'd be drowned. I said all along. But no one listened. Story of my fucking life.'

'Can someone explain?' I ask.

Frazer Melville removes his exhausted face from his hands. 'Have you heard of the Storegga Slide?' I shake my head, still unable to look at him directly. It's all too raw, too agonising. I want to leave this place and never come back. 'It's a massive package of sand and mud off the continental shelf that stretches for eight hundred kilometres, from Norway to Greenland. It's the result of the biggest submarine upheaval we know of, eight thousand years ago. It generated a huge tsunami that washed over most of the British Isles. This rig is sited on the edge of Storegga.'

But somehow, he can't continue.

If I loved him I would feel sorry for him. I would want to take him in my arms and kiss his cheekbone. I glance at Kristin Jons dottir. She seems too busy with her own reactions to be concerned with his. Her delicate eyes have become glassy and perturbed.

Harish Modak clears his throat and takes over. 'It seems, Miss Fox, that we are faced with the interesting prospect of a disaster which will begin very, er . . .
locally
. A huge underwater collapse anywhere in the Storegga region will cause a tsunami that will devastate the entire area. Norway's coastline is the closest to Storegga but the sediment package will push the water into the basin in the other direction to begin with, projecting it faster east than west. Making your country the first to be hit. It will be amplified in the river estuaries and in the funnel of German Bight.' There's a gape of quiet, as though the air's molecules have squeezed into a new shape and sucked out noise. 'Norway and Denmark will be hit next, and the rest of northern Europe. The tsunami will certainly reach Iceland, and if it's big enough, the United States.'

'And the date?' asks Frazer Melville. His breathing is ragged. 'Bethany, are you still sure about the date?'

'The coming of the dragon and the false prophet! The battle of Armageddon!' Bethany chortles, peeling off the shell of a lychee.

'Bethany,' I say. My throat is bunching up. 'You said October the twelfth.'

She is rummaging around in her tartan robe for a piece of lychee shell, dropped during the peeling process. 'Did I? I don't know. Maybe before. There's a thunderstorm. It's after that. But this thing's different from everything else.' She fishes out the piece of shell and flicks it across the room, then returns her attention to the fruit.

'Miss Krall has been correct before,' says Harish Modak, watching Bethany intently. 'For the sake of argument we should perhaps assume that she is correct again.'

'Too right you should. You know,' Bethany murmurs, holding up the pearly orb of her lychee to the light, 'these things look like eyeballs.'

For a long time there is a pensive silence, broken only by Bethany's tuneless humming. It's Kristin who breaks it. 'Harish, it's the tenth. You must help us.'

He turns to her as if in pain. 'Must? Must is an interesting word. It belongs with
should
and
ought
. I do not trust it.' Bethany looks interested.

Kristin flares. 'You mean you came all this way -'

'My dear Kristin. You know me well. So you know the question I shall ask. The same question I have spent half my life asking. To what end?' Kristin shoots a hopeless look first at Frazer Melville, then at me. Harish smiles. Bethany is nodding perkily, as though egging him on. 'To what possible end, when the world that remains beyond this disaster will be unrecognisable?'

'Have you heard of moral duty?' Ned speaks calmly enough, but he looks ready for violence. 'Have you heard of non-assistance to people in danger?' He gets to his feet and starts pacing the room, stroking at his stubble.

'Speaking personally, I would always prefer to know my options,' says Frazer Melville. 'So that I could make my own choices. We don't have the right to deny that to others.'

Harish Modak does not look impressed. 'I am glad to be this old,' he says, sighing. 'I would hate to be young.'

'It completely fucking sucks,' agrees Bethany, sticking her finger in her ear and tilting her head back carefully, as though it contains liquid that might spill.

'Harish,' I say. He swivels his head and frowns.

'My dear Miss Fox.'

'Whatever the future's like for most people, it's going to be even harder for me. But I don't want to die. I want to live.' I sound more sure of this than I feel.

'There is living and there is surviving.'

'Are we back to the avoidance of grief?' I notice Kristin stiffening.

'In a way, we are,' says Modak. 'And is there anything wrong with that?'
The decision was to avoid grief. For oneself but also for others.

I turn to Kristin. 'You knew Meera well. What would she say now, do you think?'

Modak looks stung at the mention of his wife's name. Good. If Meera is forbidden territory, then trespassing will have an effect.

'I tell you what she'd say, Gabrielle,' says Kristin. She's addressing me but her words are for him. 'She'd be ashamed to hear her husband talking like this.' Modak's face tightens and he lets out an exasperated noise. 'She didn't see the world the way Harish does. She never did. She sacrificed too much for him.' His eyelids close to shut her out. But she won't stop. 'She wanted children. But you wouldn't agree, would you, Harish? She'd have risked grief, for the sake of some kind of future. If she were here now she would tell you that if it's the last thing you do -'

Kristin breaks off and looks away, too furious to go on.

'I agree with Professor M here,' grins Bethany. 'The world sucks. Humans suck. We don't deserve to live. None of us. Let something else take over the planet. Some kind of scorpion or whatever it's going to be. Toadstools. Hyenas. Those glow-in-the-dark creepy-crawlies. So what if a load of idiots get swept away.'

'That is not what I am saying, Miss Krall,' he says, standing up, his fists clenched. 'You are misrepresenting me.'

'How?'

'In every way possible.'

'You don't agree then?'

'The present universe has undergone innumerable deaths and rebirths.'

I grab his clenched hand, pull him down next to me and force him to look at me. I want him to witness my fury. 'Whatever you feel about the Great Cycle and Gaia and the futility of the species is irrelevant, Harish! The issue is about the people who are alive now, who will die if you don't help us warn them!' He wants his hand back but I won't let go. 'Look at me. I felt like a murderer after Istanbul. So did Frazer. If we fail to act now, none of us is any better than any war criminal on trial in The Hague. Most of all you, because you're the one with the power to do something.'

Kristin moves over and stands behind him, resting her fingers lightly on his shoulder.

Abruptly, Ned leaps up, grabs the tray and heads for a side-cupboard. He returns with six glasses and unscrews the Laph-roaig.

'We all are. Let's drink to your health, Harish. And your moral courage.'

'But I haven't -' Harish begins.

'Yes you have,' I say. 'And we salute you for it.'

He draws away from me and stands up. We're all looking at him. He sighs. As though drained of energy by the conflict, he sits down again with a small hard thud.

'I will say one thing to all of you. And I will say it to anyone thinking beyond this disaster. Be careful what you wish for.' Then, blinking, he reaches for the jar in his briefcase. It is too intimate. I look away.

Determined to keep the momentum of Harish's forced decision, Ned clinks glasses and proposes a further toast to Bethany. 'A Coke for you, Bethany? Fruit juice?'

It might be the first time in her entire life that anyone has proposed a toast in her honour, but she shakes her head sullenly. The look on her face, as she rolls another lychee between her fingers, disturbs me. She is working up to something.

'If my wife were here, she would remind us that there's a common misconception about the Chinese character that represents the word "crisis",' says Harish Modak, sipping his whisky. With the inoral decisions behind him, he seems to be rallying.

'Crisis equals danger plus opportunity,' says Frazer Melville.

'So Western business gurus and life coaches would have you believe. They'll show you how the strokes break down, and say: look. Danger and opportunity. But the Chinese will tell you that is in fact a myth.'

'The moral being?'

'That a crisis is simply a crisis, nothing more and nothing less.'

'For Traxorac, this is going to be about pride, self-image, about face,' I say, thinking aloud. 'We're dealing with the emotions of institutions, with herd psychology. And herds are unwieldy and tumultuous, they have mood swings, they go through phases in their thinking, they get
id
é
es fixes.'

'No one likes to admit they screwed up,' agrees Ned. 'But it will apply to governments too.'

'Our job is to warn the maximum number of people in the most efficient and convincing way about what's coming, whether or not Traxorac admit the danger, and whether or not the authorities listen,' says Kristin Jons dottir. If I didn't hate her I would like her. And I hate her for not letting me like her. 'I'll bet that once they recognise it's happening, they'll be more preoccupied first with a cover-up and then with looking for a scapegoat than in tackling the logistics.'

'She's right,' says Ned, reaching for a notepad. 'I've seen it from the inside. The first instinct will be denial, but then they'll flip into blame mode.' He is jotting something down.

'If a horizontal crack's forming, and loosening the sediment package where they've been drilling, there will be proof of it somewhere,' says Frazer Melville, taking a slug of whisky.

'Yes. One piece of evidence would do it,' says Kristin. 'If it were uncontestable. If it's visible anywhere, it'll be in Traxorac's latest seismic logs of the drill-site. If you compare them over time, and there's a discrepancy, it means there's been movement. That would be proof.'

'Harish,' says Ned bluntly, looking up from his note-making. 'We'll be needing your clout there too.'

'I feel a thousand years old.'

'Once we have the logs, we hold a press conference and present the facts and the public can make its own decision. Which is what we owe them. Then we get somewhere safe, fast.'

'Who's we?' says Bethany. The room goes still. 'I said who the fuck is
we?'

With a huge effort, she tries to stand up. But it's too soon: she's weak. She sways on her feet, and looks ready to topple. 'You listen to me, fuckwits.' She seizes hold of the sofa arm and manages to right herself. Frazer Melville moves to help her but she shakes him off. She has our attention. 'I'm the one who saw it happening. So don't even fucking think about handing me back to those wankers at Oxsmith. Or Kiddup Manor. You know what'll happen there.' No one speaks. Ned shifts uncomfortably. 'Well?' she accuses. 'Well, Professor M? Ned? Frazer? Kristin? Wheels? Are you going to dump me now you've got what you need?' Her eyes are having trouble focusing. Spotting it, Frazer Melville pulls her firmly back down to the sofa. 'Flush me down the fucking toilet, you arseholes? Is that your plan?'

'We're obviously a team,' begins Ned hesitantly. But he can't follow it through. Being more pragmatist than diplomat, he's thinking the obvious thought. She's a loose cannon. A danger to herself and others. A mad girl. A liability. The police are looking for her. There is no way she can be involved. Kristin is eyeing Bethany with a mixture of dismay and profound distaste. The physicist is inspecting his hands.

'Wheels,' says Bethany. Her eyes are glittering and her mouth has turned down at the edges. I feel a faint, high buzzing in my ears, like a pressure-change on an aeroplane.

When I swivel to face the others, an ache spreads across my shoulders, pressing me down. I shift and straighten.

'This is also a moral decision.'

The é
minence
grise sighs wearily. The others look uneasy.

Modak says, 'They seem to keep coming.'

'Yes, Professor My' snarls Bethany. Angry tears are tracking down her face. 'And you're supposed to be good at them. Your reputation's kind of based on that idea, right? I Googled you.'