Mercury Rises (10 page)

Crispin's least favorite part of his job, though, was burning seeds. As an agricultural research site, the facility produced a high volume of seeds from genetically modified crops. Most of this seed would never get legal approval to be sold in Africa or anywhere else in the world, and Tri-Fed's protocols required that it be incinerated. That meant that Crispin had to leave his air-conditioned trailer to go to a non-insulated metal building that was always at least a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, fire up the incinerator, and then toss many large bags of seed into the fire. It got so hot in the incinerator building that on heavy seed-burning days, he actually feared for his life.

Then those guys from Tri-Fed corporate showed up in a helicopter and delivered a shiny metal briefcase to the scientists. Crispin had no idea what was in that briefcase, but after that, there was even more seed burning to be done. Crispin had had enough.

One day he was sitting at his desk when a seed-burning order came through, and he happened to look up and see a poster for a Canadian relief organization
⁴
working nearby, and he had an idea---an idea that would mean no more trips to the incinerator, not to mention a few bucks in his pocket: he would sell the excess seed to the relief workers. He had called them up and talked to a woman named Maya, who was cautiously receptive to the idea. The first time, Maya had arrived with two men, but the next few times---having evidently been convinced that Crispin posed no threat---she had come alone. This was the first time he had seen this other woman. Kind of cute, he thought, although there was something not quite right about her face.

Maya followed the dirt driveway around the metal building to the greenhouse. A pallet of burlap bags marked TRI-FED lay on the ground. Maya and Christine exited the truck.

"How much?" asked Maya.

"Two hundred," replied Crispin.

"Two hundred? That's double what it cost last time!"

"This is really good stuff. Hey, if you don't want it, I can burn it. Got the incinerator all ready."

"I'll give you a hundred and twenty."

"A hundred and fifty. No less. I've got student loans to pay off, and this job doesn't pay shit."

"Fine," said Maya. "A hundred and fifty." She counted out a hundred and fifty dollars and handed it to the man.

"Nice doing business with you," he said, smiling, and turned to waddle back to the building.

"You're not going to help us load it?" Maya asked.

"Not for a hundred and fifty bucks. Have fun."

"Asshole," Maya muttered. "OK, help me load these bags into the truck. We gotta get going."

"What was that all about?" Christine asked. "I thought they were giving you surplus seed."

"More or less," Maya replied. "Not so much surplus as not-yet-commercially approved. They can't legally sell it, so they give it to us."

"Except that you just bought it."

"I have to give Crispin some spending money or he won't give it to us."

"Oh, so you're not
buying
it," Christine said. "You're just exchanging money for something you want."

Maya sighed. "We're not buying it from Tri-Fed. They're giving it to us. But sometimes to get somebody to give you something, you have to grease the wheels a bit. It's how things work down here."

"Why can't they sell it? What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing's wrong with it. They just haven't gotten approval to sell it yet. It takes forever for the new seed patents to get approved, and every country has its own rules. They end up having to incinerate thousands of pounds of perfectly good seed. Crispin gives me a call when he's about to burn it."

"And this doesn't strike you as suspicious?"

"Christine, you've seen where we work. People are starving to death every day. I'm not going to let 'suspicious' stand in the way of me helping these people produce their own food. Now shut up and help me load these bags."

Christine did what she could to help, but was still feeling weak from her illness and nearly passed out loading the third bag. She went and sat in the truck while Maya finished up.

Maya was predictably irritated by Christine's inability to help, and on the way back she drove faster, seemingly in an effort to punish Christine. It worked: some ten miles from the Tri-Fed facility, the Land Rover's right front tire hit a cavernous pothole, ejecting several of the seed bags and nearly overturning the vehicle.

"I'll get it," Christine said, getting out of the Land Rover. She steadied herself against the truck, took a deep breath, and then set about reloading the ejected bags. When she had finished, she returned to the truck.

"Oh, shit," she said.

"What?" demanded Maya.

"I think we've got a flat tire."

Maya walked around the truck and inspected the tire. It had lost most of its pressure already, and was hissing more air as they watched.

"You have a spare?" Christine asked.

"That was the spare," Maya replied.

"What?" Christine asked. "We drove twenty miles into the godforsaken Kenyan wilderness without a spare tire?"

"If I didn't pick up the seed today, Crispin was going to burn it. Usually there's no hurry, but he called me yesterday and told me that if I didn't pick it up today, he was going to have to burn it all. Tri-Fed bigwigs coming out to inspect the place or something. I had no choice."

Christine bit her tongue.

Maya used the walkie-talkie to call Brian, the resident EH mechanic, but he was away in Nairobi for the day, picking up supplies.

"Looks like we may have to hunker down for the night," said Maya, bending down to inspect the tire.

"Hunker down?" Christine asked, dismayed. "Is that safe?"

Maya replied, "It's unlikely any of the raiders will come this far out..."

"Raiders?" Christine exclaimed. "There are raiders?"

"Look, we'll be fine," Maya said. "Just don't panic."

"Uh huh," replied Christine. "So, these raiders. Are they tall, mostly naked black guys with spears?"

"Spears?" Maya asked. "Why do you...?"

She looked up to see a group of half a dozen tall, lean men wearing loincloths and bearing spears, standing in front of the Land Rover. The men didn't look happy to see them.

ELEVEN

Not long after the disastrous briefing at which he had floated the idea of a rift in space-time sucking Anaheim Stadium into another dimension, Jacob Slater was pulled off the Anaheim Event and instructed to return immediately to Washington, D.C. He had packed his duffel bag and was currently waiting for the army transport helicopter that would take him to the Los Angeles airport. The helicopter wasn't just for him, of course; HeadJAC had arranged regular flights to and from LAX for the convenience of Deputy Assistant Director Lubbers and the other VIPs at ACHOO.

While he waited, he continued to pace the implosion area (as he insisted on thinking of it), eyeing the dozens of men and women going about various mysterious tasks at the site. He could only assume these were other investigators or scientists of some sort (geologists? structural engineers? immunologists?) developing their own narrative of what had happened at the site. Jacob couldn't help but think of the story of the blind men assessing the elephant: one man, feeling the elephant's tail, described the elephant as being like a rope; another, feeling the elephant's trunk, likened it to a snake; a third, feeling the elephant's leg, said that the elephant was more like a tree trunk.

I'm like the blind man at the elephant's tail, thought Jacob. Except that studying the tail wasn't enough for me. I had to keep pushing, and now I'm elbow deep in elephant shit.

His fellow blind elephant observers milled about the site, oblivious to what the other teams were doing. Each team would write up a report, and that information would work its way up the chain of command until it had reached someone with the appropriate security clearance to compare it to six other reports he couldn't make heads or tails of---probably D.A.D. Lubbers. Lubbers would report to the director of the FBI, who would report to the president of the United States, who would order a bombing raid on some backwater dictatorship that had nothing to do with the Anaheim Event but really wished they had.

Israel's war with Syria still dragged on, and some hawks in Congress were already hinting that Syria "couldn't be allowed to use an Anaheim-type device on Israel." This was such an absurd assertion that it was virtually impossible to argue against. In addition to the fact that no one had any idea what type of device (if any) had been used at Anaheim and that there was no reason to suspect the Syrians of being involved, it was unclear how anyone could stop them from using such a device if they
did
have one. Furthermore, if they did have another device, why hadn't they used it already to wipe out Tel Aviv? And for that matter, why had they used the first one in Anaheim, a city that most scholars agree is not one of the major points of contention in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict? Still, the hawks urged preemptive action due to the "scale of the threat," an argument that boiled down to the notion that it was better to be wrong than dead. Jacob feared that unless the various factions at the site of the implosion managed to come up with some compelling alternate explanation, escalation of the conflict in the Middle East was inevitable.

As Jacob regarded the surreal landscape, he took special interest in three large green canvas tents that had been erected roughly in line with each other, about a hundred feet apart. They were round like circus tents and maybe fifty feet in diameter. He had seen men moving in and out of these tents carrying all sorts of equipment, most of it apparently excavation related. They were digging something up inside of those tents, he knew, but so far he hadn't been able to find out what. National Guardsmen maintained a perimeter thirty feet around each tent, and his protests that he needed to take soil samples from the area inside one of the tents were met with curt rejection.

"What's under the big top?" he muttered to no one in particular. In the distance he heard the
whup-whup-whup
of an approaching helicopter. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he trudged toward the helipad on the other side of ACHOO.

The helicopter waited on the ground for twenty minutes, but when it finally took off the only passengers were Jacob and a junior congressman from Delaware who, failing to have elicited any interest from the media in his presence at Ground Zero, decided to cut his trip short and head home. As the chopper lifted away from the crater, Jacob pulled his phone from his jacket pocket and snapped a picture of the site---a memento of the high point of his career.

He got to LAX a mere half hour before his flight was to depart, but the airline had overbooked the flight and was offering a free ticket to anywhere in the U.S. to anyone who would wait three hours for the next flight. Jacob, who badly needed a vacation and was in no hurry to return to Washington, D.C., jumped at the offer. As a result, he spent the next two hours dozing in the waiting area of the departure gate.

While he slept, he dreamed of a snake about to bite its own tail. As the snake's fangs sank into its flesh, he awoke with a start, falling out of the chair and frightening a nearby family. Wiping drool from his cheek with the back of his hand, he stood up and went for a walk down the concourse.

Something was bothering him about the implosion site, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. Still not fully awake, he unthinkingly pulled out his phone to call his now ex-girlfriend, Karen, which is what until three weeks ago he had always done when he was feeling uneasy. She had broken up with him because, as she put it, "You're always bringing me down with all this heavy shit." He reflected ruefully that if he had ceased his practice of calling her when he was uneasy a week earlier, he might still have a girlfriend, albeit one who no longer served what was, in his mind, the primary purpose of a girlfriend.

Jacob had no friends, per se. He had mastered the basics of social interaction but found it nearly impossible to make any sort of deeper connection. The closest he had come to making a friend was in graduate school, over ten years earlier. Jacob had graduated from the University of Michigan with dual degrees in chemistry and physics, and before deciding to work for the FBI, he had intended to go into theoretical physics. He was accepted into the graduate program at MIT, where he met an eccentric young professor named Alistair Breem. Allie, as they had called him, became Jacob's advisor and mentor, and the very first thing he advised Jacob to do was to get out of theoretical physics. After two years of study, during which he realized that the only quark he was interested in was a bartender on
Star Trek
, Jacob obliged him. He had felt a special bond with Allie, but they lost touch when Jacob dropped out of the program, and he heard that Allie had been killed in a car wreck not longer after.

As a result, Jacob now stood in front of a newsstand at LAX with his phone in his hand but no one to call. His eyes alighted on one of those children's activity books filled with mazes and connect-the-dots puzzles. On a whim, he brought up the photo of the implosion site he had taken from the chopper. The picture was small and grainy; the three tents were merely dark green dots in a field of gray. "Connect the dots," he mumbled to himself.

An idea struck him. At the newsstand he bought a map of Los Angeles with a detailed blowup of Anaheim and a souvenir ruler. He then walked across the concourse to a coffee shop where he sat at a table and laid the map out in front of him. Examining the picture on his phone, he carefully made three dots on the map with a ballpoint pen and then, with the ruler, found a fourth point that was equidistant from the other three. He marked this point as well.

Next, to the puzzlement of several onlookers, he removed his shoelace and tied one end around the pen. Holding the pen as close to vertical as he could, he place the tip of it on the dot marking the location of the middle tent and with the fingers of his left hand pulled the shoelace taught across the map, pinning it to the fourth point with his index finger. Keeping his index finger still, he traced an arc that traveled east past the Costa Mesa Freeway, down to the Santa Ana, across to Garden Grove and up to Fullerton before returning to the implosion site.