Apocalypse

49

‘The hell do you mean?’ Ethan snapped and jabbed a thumb toward the screen. ‘He’s busted, totally.’

‘Busted he is,’ Jarvis confirmed, ‘but nobody will ever be able to see the footage outside of this room.’

Ethan massaged his temples with one hand.

‘Let me guess, national security?’

‘Afraid so,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Release this footage as evidence in any court case and the defense will demand to know how it was acquired and from whom. Before we know it one of our greatest intelligence assets will become common knowledge and before you can say conspiracy theory or human rights we’ll be sued by half the population for breaching privacy laws.’

‘This guy’s a mass murderer!’ Ethan shot back. ‘Who knows what havoc he’ll create if we don’t present this evidence?’

‘And if we go public,’ Jarvis countered, ‘the detectives heading virtually every unsolved criminal case will demand access to Watchman. We’ll be inundated with requests to prove that so-and-so didn’t murder victim X, that accused Y didn’t rob bank Z, and that naughty-little-goddamned Bobby from down the street didn’t shove a stick up his neighbor’s cat’s ass!’

Ethan sighed as he realized the scope of what Watchman was capable of achieving. It had the potential to solve countless criminal cases, and yet could not provide evidence that was admissible in court without exposing its existence and capabilities. For the first time, Ethan gained a sense of the limitations enforced upon such technologies by the vagaries of national security; of why Jarvis could not just let him use the device to locate Joanna. The paranoia of nations, the disease of mistrust that infected all governments, ensured that rather than be used to enforce world peace and uphold justice, Project Watchman would forever remain in the shadows.

‘Give us the coordinates of the yacht,’ Jarvis said to Ottaway. ‘It will help us to trace its current location.’

Ethan turned away and waited as the viewer on the screen zoomed out and away from Joaquin’s frozen, smiling face and took in the whole of the yacht. The scientist spoke into his microphone as he reached out for a series of power buttons.

‘Okay, let’s shut down.’

Ethan stared at the screen and then grabbed the scientist’s arm. ‘Wait! Send your man down there, to the rear of the deck.’

‘What do you see, Ethan?’ Jarvis asked.

Ethan squinted as the viewer zoomed down toward a small knot of men, their dark suits conspicuous against the yacht’s pristine white deck. As the camera zoomed in on them, Ethan realized that Jarvis had been right about Joaquin’s political connections.

‘I’ll be damned,’ the old man said beside him. ‘He’s not on his own.’

Although Ethan could not name all of the men now imaged so clearly by Watchman, he recognized enough of them to be sure that Joaquin was playing ball with the big boys.

‘Robert Murtaugh,’ Jarvis said, identifying the elderly media tycoon, ‘and that’s Congressman Goldberg.’

‘Harrison Reed,’ Ethan pointed to the man whose face was partially obscured by a broad Stetson. ‘Big oil guy from down Texas way, if I remember rightly.’

‘Looks like him,’ Ottaway agreed, ‘and the man on the end there is the governor of Florida. What’s his name? MacGuire?’

‘MacKenzie,’ Jarvis corrected.

‘Evidence of Joaquin being connected to our assassin,’ Ethan said. ‘Same boat, same time. Get any one of those men to turn on Joaquin Abell and we can nail him with probable cause and get the courts involved.’

‘I’d better make a call,’ Jarvis said, ‘get this in front of the department heads before we decide what we’re going to do.’

He was about to turn aside when Ethan stopped him, his eyes transfixed on another plasma screen nearby. The screen relayed information from an orbiting satellite monitoring seismometers around the globe. In the center of the screen an enormous spike had appeared.

‘I think it’s already gotten too big,’ he said. ‘Where is that coming from?’ Ethan asked.

Ottaway looked up at the screen.

‘Dominican Republic, on the northeast coast,’ he said. ‘Looks like a big one.’

Ethan looked at his watch. Sixteen seventeen hours.

‘Right on time,’ Ethan said to Jarvis, ‘just like Charles Purcell predicted.’

Jarvis looked at another screen, this one showing the electromagnetic spectrum being emitted by the planet in the region of the Florida Straits.

‘You got anything on GOCE yet?’

‘What’s GOCE?’ Ethan asked.

‘It’s the Gravity field and Ocean Circulation Explorer satellite,’ Michael Ottaway replied, as he squinted at a computer monitor filled with rolling data streams. ‘It uses the concept of gradiometry, the measurement of acceleration differences over short distances. Three pairs of accelerometers respond to tiny variations in the gravitational field of the earth. Because of their different positions in the gravitational field they all experience unique conditions, and thus can provide an accurate picture of earth’s gravitational field.’

‘Glad I asked.’ Ethan blinked laconically. ‘Can you use it to pinpoint the location of Abell’s facility?’

The scientist nodded, glancing back and forth from several different monitors and screens as data spilled from them in a torrent of figures, waves and charts.

‘There was a massive spike in seismic levels here,’ he said, pointing to one screen where a map of the Caribbean was overlaid against a chart of known geological fault lines deep beneath the seabed. ‘That’s the site of the earthquake now underway.’

Ethan looked at the screen and baulked.

‘Magnitude 6.8,’ he said. ‘That’s a big one.’

‘It is,’ the scientist agreed, ‘and it’s off the coast. There’ll be localized structural damage, but the real threat will come from the sea when the tsunami hits.’

Ethan found himself picturing the colossal destruction wrought by giant waves strong enough to flatten hotels and bury entire cities. Nobody had forgotten what had happened to places like Aceh years before. Ethan had flown there with Joanna within hours of the event, covering the humanitarian disaster that followed, tens of thousands of people made homeless and without access to food or water. But what had angered them both the most was the speed with which major corporations swept in and claimed the prime coastal land for themselves, displacing local fishing families whose descendants had lived there for centuries, and building hotels just as fast as they could. He thought of Joaquin’s plans to ‘rebuild’ disaster zones, and saw the same callous industrialism. Then he recalled the sheer force of the damage caused by the disaster.

‘Lopez is out there,’ he murmured to himself.

‘She knows what’s coming,’ Jarvis said. ‘She can look after herself.’

‘Ah, here.’ The scientist pointed to a screen, and tapped it with the tip of his pen. ‘Very impressive indeed.’

‘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.’