Callsign: King - Blackout

27

Paris-2028 UTC/Local

King guided the Zodiac north, up the channel separating the two islands, and scanned the banks looking for a place to land the boat. He had just spied a stone ramp, descending from the battlement-like seawall surrounding Ile de la Cite, when the hull beneath him began to shudder as if passing over a washboard. King eased back on the throttle, letting the boat coast, but if anything, the turbulence seemed to increase. The black water all around him rippled violently, sloshing onto the nearby ramp and splashing in frothy waves against the seawall. Huge stone blocks were tumbling from the wall, crashing onto the nearby ramp and splashing into the undulating surface of the river.

King killed the outboard, and as the throaty roar died away, the night became filled with a discordant symphony of car alarms and grinding stone, punctuated every few seconds by an explosion. Even from his low vantage, King could see city lights bobbing crazily. Far off in the distance, a brilliantly illuminated needle shape-the Eiffel Tower-was snapping back and forth like the radio antenna of a speeding car.

“Earthquake?” King muttered. Paris was one of the most geologically stable places in Europe, but impossible as it was, there could be no other explanation.

The shaking continued, intensifying, and the cacophony grew louder. Then, as abruptly as a candle flame being blown out by a stiff wind, the entire skyline went dark. Other lights started to dance across the skyline, not stationary fixtures but the running lights of aircraft-helicopters, he guessed-spiraling chaotically downward to disappear in the darkened cityscape.

King shuddered in horrified disbelief. Helicopters were falling from the sky. An earthquake couldn’t cause that. What the hell is happening?

As suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. The deep rumbling noise ceased, but the din of the temblor’s aftermath continued to fill the lightless city-strident alarms and screams, punctuated by the crump of distant explosions and collapsing buildings. Though he could barely comprehend it, he knew that in a few mere seconds, the City of Light had become a disaster zone.

Brown still lay unmoving in the boat, and King dismissed the idea of trying to rouse him. The gambler was unlikely to share anything meaningful and King wasn’t in the mood to entertain the man’s triumphant crowing. He knew that this event was somehow connected to the activation of the quantum phone, and his gut told him that Brown’s grand scheme would not merely be limited to a regional catastrophe. Whatever his plan, this was surely only the opening gambit.

There was one man who would be able to give King the information he needed. Not Brown. From past experience, King knew the gambler rarely troubled himself with the details-the physical realities-of his schemes. No, the man who could answer his questions was the man who had built the quantum phones in the first place.

King fired up the outboard, and brought the boat around, heading back toward the floating casino and the man who had taken his nom de guerre from the Hindu god of destruction. Bandar Pradesh. Shiva.