Aftershock (6 page)

Johnny Xavier opened the file on his computer. In it were half a dozen emails from the past three months, all but one saying basically the same thing: ‘Stop construction.' The last one, sent a week earlier, was slightly different. It read: ‘Stop now. This is your last warning.'

He had told only one other person about the messages – his lawyer, Chuck Warberg. He certainly hadn't breathed a word about them to his brother. Chuck had, as always, advised caution. But, when it came to self-preservation and retaining power, Johnny was a very cautious man. Chuck had advised him to go to the cops, but to Johnny it was obvious this was the last thing he should do. He did not like the messages, but equally he could not hold up the project because of them. And so he had decided to say nothing.

The warnings had begun to appear as the hotel infrastructure was completed and crews were starting to fit out the interior. He had employed some tech guys to trace the emails, but they had drawn a total blank. It was then he had turned to Chuck, and been given the advice he did not need.

He called Chuck's mobile number. He was in London on business. It was early morning there, but he knew his lawyer would be working even if he was in his hotel room. He was always working.

‘Chuck, I've just been going through those emails again.'

‘For Christ's sake, Johnny. I'm shaving. Can I call you back?'

‘No, I've only got a minute.'

Xavier could hear his lawyer produce a resigned sigh. ‘I told you to go to the cops, didn't I?'

‘That was not an option, Chuck.'

The lawyer said nothing for a moment, then produced a small cough. ‘Johnny? Have you thought about ducking out of tonight?'

Xavier laughed. ‘Chuck, for a smart guy, you can sometimes say the most fucked up things.'

‘Okay.'

‘By the way,' Johnny Xavier went on, ‘
you
are conspicuous by your absence here tonight. You're probably the only person to turn down the invitation.'

‘I couldn't make it.'

‘Whatever,' Johnny slurred. Years of living in California had polluted what had once been the crisp British private school accent his older sibling still retained. ‘Anyway, as if I would duck out and let big brother take all the credit! So, what are you going to do about these messages?'

‘What do you expect me to do?'

‘Jesus,' Xavier hissed. ‘Sometimes I wonder why I pay you.'

‘Oh please. Don't give me that BS. You know why you pay me. Don't forget who's covering your arse, Johnny boy. Don't forget who's cleaning up the money for your little hedge fund. Don't forget who's keeping nosy parkers off your case.'

‘So you're saying there's nothing you can do about these emails? Is that it?' Xavier snapped.

‘Got it in ... what? ... Three.'

There was a pained silence from the other end of the line.

‘You tried the tech guys?' Chuck Warberg offered.

‘Yes. I tried the fucking tech guys. They were about as useless as you.'

‘Okay, Johnny. Gotta lot of work to do. I'm not going to stand here and let you insult me.'

‘Well go stick your bald head up your fucking arse then, you...' But the line was dead. Johnny slammed down the phone and looked up as the doorbell sounded.

‘Yeah?' he called.

‘It's me.'

Xavier sighed, pulled himself to his feet and strode to the door. Hilary pushed her way into the room and Johnny closed the door quickly.

‘Hilary! We're supposed to be downstairs in 20 minutes. What the hell are you doing?'

She turned to him, swaying slightly.

‘Oh fuck, you're...'

‘Yes, Johnny. I'm drunk.' She flopped onto the sofa and buried her head in her hands. Johnny looked around the room using all his reserves of patience to control his anger and frustration.

‘I just don't know how that man does it.'

‘Which man?'

‘Your damn brother. Who else?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I can't help but love him, even though he ignores me, ignores the family, cares only for this,' and she waved her hand in air. ‘This ... place.'

Johnny looked down at her. She used to be a really beautiful woman, he thought. Sexy, intelligent. He suddenly felt a wave of revulsion.

Hilary gazed up at him, makeup smeared across her face, tear streaks staining her cheeks, her hair a mess. She stood up. ‘God, I'm so fucked up,' she slurred and made for the drinks cabinet.

‘I think you've had enough,' Johnny said and took Hilary's arm.

She turned. ‘Oh, Johnny. You do care about me.'

Still the old acid tongue, even half-cut, Johnny thought to himself and smiled. Hilary fell into his arms and he held her, breathing in her perfume. In spite of himself, he started to harden. Hilary felt it too.

‘Oh my,' she whispered in his ear and dropped backwards onto the sofa, pulling him on top of her.

Ralph Gafton was alone in service conduit Number 6, running off the computer centre. His Puerto Rican boss, Miguel Bandonis, had sent him in to check on a set of relays the diagnostic systems had identified as malfunctioning. He suspected a short in one of the circuits. He unscrewed the panel and lay it on the floor of the conduit. It was a tight squeeze in the narrow passage and he had to twist his body round to get the torch into the opening so he could see what was up. He flicked the light around inside the wall unit, a box about 2 metres long and a metre wide. He could see nothing at first, but on the third sweep of the torch he caught sight of a small bundle of components covered in melted plastic. ‘Yep,' he said aloud. ‘That would be the blown relay.'

He started to pull his head and arm from the opening. There was a flash of light and a loud pop. He jolted back, banged his head on the rim of the wall unit and cursed. A sheet of flame flew across the space inside the box.

Gafton reacted quickly. He crawled along the conduit and tugged on the extinguisher attached to the wall, span around and headed back to the hole. Just as he pushed on the release button, a voice came through the radio attached to his shoulder. ‘Ralph, you okay? Just got a warning light.' It was his boss, Bandonis.

‘Yeah, everything's cool,' Gafton responded. ‘There's a small fire. I'm putting it out.' And he shot foam into the box of electrical circuits with practised ease. He had been an electrical engineer for a dozen years, including a spell on North Sea oil rigs. He knew what he was doing.

‘I'm coming down,' Bandonis said.

‘No need,' Gafton replied, but the line was already cut.

Gafton let the foam settle, then stuck his arm and head back through the opening. He flicked the torch beam around the cavity and had just pulled away, slipping back into the conduit, when Bandonis appeared at his side. ‘Let me see,' he said. Gafton sighed and crawled along the passage to give his boss space to check on the problem. Bandonis waved a torch around inside the unit, then pulled back and leaned against the conduit wall. ‘Seems all right,' he said. ‘It's the secondary relay for the emergency escape doors, right?'

‘Yeah,' Gafton replied. ‘The primary circuits are further back in the next conduit.' He nodded towards the wall. ‘They're well protected with sensors around them.'

Bandonis paused for a moment, a stab of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. They would be well protected, he thought, if the sensors were reliable, but he couldn't be sure they were. Bandonis had been on the engineering crew from the start of the build. He knew every nook and cranny of this place. More importantly though, he knew enough about how much Johnny Xavier had been cutting back on materials and skimming the building budget to line his own pockets.

‘Okay. We need to get a repair crew down here. And Ralph, don't make a fuss about this. I'll call Mr Xavier, but he's made it clear any problems stay with the systems staff, capiche?'

Bandonis crawled back along service conduit Number 6, leaving Gafton to replace the metal panel. He had no intention of phoning Xavier – he would go to see him in person. Drag him away from the table if necessary. He could do nothing about the man ripping off his brother and the other investors, but his own life and those of nearly 200 staff and guests would be on the line if this small incident got out of hand.

And that is exactly what was starting to happen – it was getting out of hand. A strip of printed circuits to the rear of the wall unit had remained untouched by the extinguisher foam. A wire from a transformer less than 2 centimetres away from this strip slipped from its plastic cradle. The wire touched the hot chip and a spark jumped 7 centimetres, igniting a tiny rectangle of paper on a metal case. The flame slithered through an opening in the back of the wall unit.

According to the original design of the hotel, a sensor system was designed to pick up any temperature rises inside electrical units. To save money, Johnny Xavier had cut two-thirds of the sensors. This meant each unit would have only one-third of the necessary sensors throughout the hotel or that two-thirds of the component units would be completely unprotected. Johnny had gone for the second of the two options.

Unfortunately, service conduit Number 6 contained electrical units that were unprotected. So, when the fire in the wall unit caught hold and started to eat away at the primary emergency door circuits themselves, no one knew about it until it was much too late.

Jim Kemple surveyed the scene and thought for perhaps the tenth time that he had never seen anything quite so awe-inspiring. Their table was close to the centre of the vast top floor of the dome. All around them, the ocean flowed. Jim couldn't comprehend how the dome could have been constructed even though before dinner he, Alfred and the other guests had listened politely as Michael Xavier explained how the project had come to fruition. Xavier mentioned something about a new material – micro-alloyed glass – that had been used to construct the domes. Apparently it had a thousand times the strength of normal tempered glass so that it could withstand the tremendous pressure at this depth.

The floor had been opened out. There was a stage at the north end encircled by a gantry of lights. At that moment, a contemporary dance troupe was performing a specially commissioned piece, and in a few moments Kristy Sunshine was due to walk on. Around the circumference of the banqueting hall ran the swimming pool, 6 metres wide, a ribbon of aquamarine that hugged the micro-alloyed glass dome. Eight large round tables had been arranged in the middle of the space, accommodating a dozen guests each.

Jim noted there was no head table, no hierarchy; celebrities and major shareholders intermingled with ordinary folk like him and Alfred. He scanned the table. Beside him sat a middle aged man in a rather scruffy dinner suit. He had introduced himself as Harry Flanders, a journalist who was making a TV report about the gala night. Next to him was a young couple from Boston. He was a computer whiz, his wife an anthropologist. Going round the table from them, Jim glanced at the Xavier children, the nine-year-old twins, Nick and Emily. Nick was wearing a dinner suit, white shirt and bow tie. His dark hair was slicked back. He looked like a miniature version of his father. Emily was a rather precocious little girl, Jim thought. But she did look pretty cute in her green silk ballgown. Next to Emily, her father was engaged in an animated conversation with the man to his left. Jim half-recognised him from the pages of the
New York Times
financial section. He was a banker, he recalled, someone important at Deutsche Bank. Next to the banker sat Hilary Xavier. She had arrived 10 minutes late. Jim thought she looked ill; her face was unnaturally gaunt as though she hadn't slept properly in a long time. Alfred sat to her left and had been trying hard to make conversation, without much success. On Alfred's other side was Johnny Xavier, dressed in an immaculate dinner suit. He was a good-looking man, Jim thought, but he had a hard face and an unpleasant air of self-absorption. He looked like a bad actor. Johnny, Jim decided, had secrets – nasty secrets.

Jim turned from Johnny Xavier to the person who sat between them, an elegant woman in her sixties. She had told him her name was Sheila Hoffman and that her husband, Felix, was the architect who designed the hotel. He had been involved in a car crash a week earlier and, as much as he would have loved to be here, his doctor had forbidden it.

‘So, shouldn't you be out in front of the camera, Harry?' Jim asked, turning to the journalist on his left. The man, he

noted, had single-handedly demolished two bottles of red over dinner.

‘Later,' Harry replied, draining his glass and refilling it. ‘My crew are busy though. See over there?' He pointed to a spot on the far side of the stage where a cameraman was filming the room.

‘Must be a very glamourous job,' Jim said.

Harry raised his eyebrows. ‘Can be, but not often, truth be told. Mainly involves a lot of sitting around and waiting, then a quick burst of activity
and
you're supposed to remember your lines.' He laughed good-naturedly. ‘Mind you,' he added, ‘can't complain about gigs like this.' And he raised his glass, clinking it with Jim's.

Jim turned to Sheila Hoffman and was about to say something when he realised the music for the dance troupe had faded. A moment later, a familiar voice came over the PA.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening.' There was a murmur from the diners and all heads turned towards the stage to see Hollywood legend Danny Preston dressed in an elegant tux and holding a microphone.

‘God! It's a talking fossil,' Harry said in Jim's ear.

Jim produced a faint smile and sat back in his chair, arms folded.

‘Well, ain't this something? I always wanted to play a part in a sci-fi movie,' Preston said, and beamed at the audience. ‘The closest I got was in my first film, when I played the part of a telepathic cactus. Even I've forgotten the title of that one.'

The audience laughed. Preston gazed around at the guests, pausing for a moment. ‘But this.' And he waved towards the expansive view beyond the glass walls. ‘This is science fiction come to life. I've been here most of the day, ladies and gentlemen, but I can still hardly believe my eyes. It truly is a new wonder of the world.

‘Now, I won't prattle on. My job here is to introduce the star of the evening and then buzz off. I'm told a glass of Dom Perignon awaits.'

A ripple of laughter.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. There are few stars who can claim to be truly global superstars, but tonight, the Xavier family have arranged a special treat. A young woman, who had her first hit when she was just 16. It is hard to believe that was only three years ago because it feels as though her name has been known around the world for so much longer. I give you ... Kristy Sunshine!'

There was a sharp tap on Johnny Xavier's shoulder. He turned to see a short, solidly built man with greying hair and a lined, tanned face. It was one of his senior engineers, Miguel Bandonis.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir,' the man said. ‘I couldn't reach you by phone.' He waved a hand in the air to indicate the noise.

‘What's up?' Xavier responded, standing up and escorting the engineer away from the table. He glanced back at the guests and then led the way over to the edge of the circular pool. Kristy Sunshine's intro music began with a throbbing drum and bass rhythm. Xavier cursed under his breath and was forced to shout to be heard. ‘Well?'

‘We've had a minor incident in one of the conduits, sir,' Miguel Bandonis shouted back above the noise.

‘What sort of “minor” incident?'

‘A relay blew. One of my men was repairing it and a small fire started inside the wall unit. It was extinguished almost immediately.'

‘What's the damage?'

‘Nothing really, sir. We replaced the relay, patched up some charred circuitry. One of the secondary systems is out of action, but...'

‘Precisely which secondary system, Bandonis?'

‘The emergency doors. But the fire was a long way from the primary door system. I'm just worried about the sensors around them.'

‘Why are you worried?'

‘They were one of the ... er ... cutbacks, sir.' Bandonis gave Xavier a meaningful look.

‘Cutbacks? What do you mean?'

Bandonis decided tact was essential if he were to keep his job. ‘I heard, er ... a while back, there were some budget cuts.'

‘Don't be absurd,' Xavier retorted.

Bandonis was smart enough not to push it. If Xavier wanted to play innocent, fine. ‘Okay, sir,' he said. ‘If the primaries for the emergency doors showed any problems we'd know about it immediately.'

Xavier looked around the room. The guests were on their feet, clapping excitedly, but nothing could be heard over the pulsing beat. Lights swept the stage. There was a palpable sense of expectation in the vast room. He looked away towards the ocean. ‘Yes. I think we would know about it, Bandonis,' Xavier said dismissively. ‘Keep me informed.' And he turned back to the stage as the engineer retreated.

The music reached a crescendo and the lights snapped on, full power. Kristy Sunshine was standing centre stage, arms raised, head down. She was wearing an ABBAesque silver jumpsuit, long tassels hanging from her arms. Her hair was pulled back, partially covered by a sequinned bandana. The opening notes of her first hit single, a ballad, ‘You Are My Everything'
,
spilled from enormous speakers at the sides of the stage, and she began to sing.

The audience moved to the hypnotic throb of the bass line. The sound grew as the first verse ended and the band crashed into the chorus. Kristy's voice soared above the music, a melody that had blasted from a million radios three years earlier, a hooky tune that had girdled the world. The sound reverberated around the dome, soaring and swooping into a solitary synthesiser riff. A hush as Kristy's voice came in again, quiet and pleading.

BOOM.

For a second, everyone thought it was a bass drum. Everyone but the drummer, that is.

BOOM.

The room shook. The music stopped. The high-pitched hum of powerful amplifiers bounced around the glass dome. Then came a solitary shriek of feedback.

Screams.

BOOM.

Screams.

The room shook again. A lighting rig tumbled forward and smashed across a table.

The entire dome shook.

Screams.

BOOM. BOOM.

A metal beam crashed to the floor, crushing a score of people. Tables flew through the air, bottles and plates cascaded onto the carpet. Two huge chandeliers plunged to the floor, each smashing into a thousand pieces. Human bodies slammed together. A man somersaulted through the air and landed on a metal post, the pole skewering him. Blood spewed into the air.

BOOM.

The crash of breaking glass. Metal grinding against metal.

Screams.

BOOM.

A massive rumble. The dome shuddered. The vast banqueting suite looked as though it had been filmed and the celluloid strip had caught, juddering, in an old-fashioned movie projector.

BOOM.

Silence.