Cloud Atlas

1

Rufus Sixsmith leans over the balcony and estimates his body’s velocity when it hits the sidewalk and lays his dilemmas to rest. A telephone rings in the unlit room. Sixsmith dares not answer. Disco music booms from the next apartment, where a party is in full swing, and Sixsmith feels older than his sixty-six years. Smog obscures the stars, but north and south along the coastal strip, Buenas Yerbas’s billion lights simmer. West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, heroic, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, berserking American continent.

A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony. Her hair is shorn, her violet dress is elegant, but she looks incurably sad and alone. Propose a suicide pact, why don’t you? Sixsmith isn’t serious, and he isn’t going to jump either, not if an ember of humor still glows. Besides, a quiet accident is precisely what Grimaldi, Napier, and those sharp-suited hoodlums are praying for. Sixsmith shuffles inside and pours himself another generous vermouth from his absent host’s minibar, dips his hands in the icebox, then wipes his face. Go out somewhere and phone Megan, she’s your only friend left. He knows he won’t. You can’t drag her into this lethal mess. The disco thump pulses in his temples, but it’s a borrowed apartment and he judges it unwise to complain. Buenas Yerbas isn’t Cambridge. Anyway, you’re in hiding. The breeze slams the balcony door, and in fear Sixsmith spills half his vermouth. No, you old fool, it wasn’t a gunshot.

He mops up the spillage with a kitchen towel, turns on the TV with the sound down low, and trawls the channels for M*A*S*H. It’s on somewhere. Just have to keep looking.

2

Luisa Rey hears a clunk from the neighboring balcony. “Hello?” Nobody. Her stomach warns her to set down her tonic water. It was the bathroom you needed, not fresh air, but she can’t face weaving back through the party and, anyway, there’s no time—down the side of the building she heaves: once, twice, a vision of greasy chicken, and a third time. That, she wipes her eyes, is the third foulest thing you’ve ever done. She slooshes her mouth out, spits residue into a flowerpot behind a screen. Luisa dabs her lips with a tissue and finds a mint in her handbag. Go home and just dream up your crappy three hundred words for once. People only look at the pictures, anyhow.

A man too old for his leather trousers, bare torso, and zebra waistcoat steps onto the balcony. “Luisaaa!” A crafted golden beard and a moonstone-and-jade ankh around his neck. “Hiya! Come out for a little stargazing, huh? Dig. Bix brought eight ounces of snow with him, man. One wild cat. Hey, did I say in the interview? I’m trying on the name Ganja at the moment. Maharaj Aja says Richard is outa sync with my Iovedic Self.”

“Who?”

“My guru, Luisaaa, my guru! He’s on his last reincarnation before—” Richard’s fingers go pufff! Nirvanawards. “Come to an audience. His waiting list normally takes, like, forever, but jade-ankh disciples get personal audiences on the same afternoon. Like, why go through college and shit when Maharaj Aja can, like, teach you everything about . . . It.” He frames the moon in his fingers. “Words are so . . . uptight . . . Space . . . it’s so . . . y’ know, like, total. Smoke some weed? Acapulco Gold. Got it off of Bix.” He edges nearer. “Say, Lu, let’s get high after the party. Alone together, my place, dig? You could get a very exclusive interview. I may even write you a song and put it on my next LP.”

“I’ll pass.”

The minor-league rock musician narrows his eyes. “Unlucky time of the month, huh? How’s next week? I thought all you media chicks are on the Pill, like, forever.”

“Does Bix sell you your pickup lines, too?”

He sniggers. “Hey, has that cat been telling you things?”

“Richard, just so there’s no uncertainty, I’d rather jump off this balcony than sleep with you, any time of any month. I really would.”

“Whoah!” His hand jerks back as if stung. “Pick-ky! Who d’you think you are, like, Joni fucking Mitchell? You’re only a fucking gossip columnist in a magazine that like no one ever reads!”

3

The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. “Thank you,” says Luisa to the old man. “Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.”

He gives a grave nod.

Luisa thinks, He looks like he’s been given a week to live. She presses G. The ancient elevator begins its descent. A leisurely needle counts off the stories. Its motor whines, its cables grind, but between the tenth and ninth stories a gatta-gatta-gatta detonates then dies with a phzzz-zzz-zz-z. Luisa and Sixsmith thump to the floor. The light stutters on and off before settling on a buzzing sepia.

“You okay? Can you get up?”

The sprawled old man recovers himself a little. “No bones broken, I think, but I’ll stay seated, thank you.” His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in The Jungle Book. “The power might restart suddenly.”

“Christ,” mutters Luisa. “A power outage. Perfect end to a perfect day.” She presses the emergency button. Nothing. She presses the intercom button and hollers: “Hey! Anyone there?” Static hiss. “We have a situation here! Can anyone hear us?”

Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening.

No reply. Just vague submarine noises.

Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch . . .” There isn’t. She peels up the carpet—a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.”

“Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn’t dead?”

Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month’s brownout lasted seven hours.” Well, at least I’m not confined with a psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga.

4

Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to Illustrated Planet in 1967 to read your father’s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective. I’m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation.”

“You asked for it.” The story is polished with each retelling. “Dad joined the BYPD just weeks before Pearl Harbor, which is why he spent the war here and not in the Pacific like his brother Howie, who got blown to pieces by a Japanese land mine playing beach volleyball in the Solomons. Pretty soon, it became apparent Dad was a Tenth Precinct case, and that’s where he wound up. There’s such a precinct in every city in the country—a sort of pen where they transfer all the straight cops who won’t go on the take and who won’t turn a blind eye. So anyway, on V-J night, Buenas Yerbas was one citywide party, and you can imagine, the police were stretched thin. Dad got a call reporting looting down on Silvaplana Wharf, a sort of no-man’s-land between Tenth Precinct, the BY Port Authority, and Spinoza Precinct. Dad and his partner, a man named Nat Wakefield, drove down to take a look. They park between a pair of cargo containers, kill the engine, proceed on foot, and see maybe two dozen men loading crates from a warehouse into an armored truck. The light was dim, but the men sure weren’t dockworkers and they weren’t in military uniform. Wakefield tells Dad to go and radio for backup. Just as Dad gets to the radio, a call comes through saying the original order to investigate looting has been countermanded. Dad reports what he’d seen, but the order is repeated, so Dad runs back to the warehouse just in time to see his partner accept a light from one of the men and get shot six times in the back. Dad somehow keeps his nerve, sprints back to his squad car, and manages to radio out a Code 8—a Mayday—before his car shivers with bullets. He’s surrounded on all sides except the dockside, so over the edge he dives, into a cocktail of diesel, trash, sewage, and sea. He swims underneath the quay—in those days Silvaplana Wharf was a steel structure like a giant boardwalk, not the concrete peninsula it is today—and hauls himself up a service ladder, soaked, one shoe missing, with his non-functioning revolver. All he can do is observe the men, who are just finishing up when a couple of Spinoza Precinct squad cars arrive on the scene. Before Dad can circle around the yard to warn the officers, a hopelessly uneven gunfight breaks out—the gunmen pepper the two squad cars with submachine guns. The truck starts up, the gunmen jump aboard, they pull out of the yard and lob a couple of hand grenades from the back. Whether they were intended to maim or just to discourage heroics, who knows? but one caught Dad and made a human pincushion of him. He woke up two days later in the hospital minus his left eye. The papers described the incident as an opportunistic raid by a gang of thieves who got lucky. The Tenth Precinct men reckoned a syndicate who’d been siphoning off arms throughout the war decided to shift their stock, now that the war was over and accounting would get tightened up. There was pressure for a wider investigation into the Silvaplana Shootings—three dead cops meant something in 1945—but the mayor’s office blocked it. Draw your own conclusions. Dad did, and they jaded his faith in law enforcement. By the time he was out of the hospital eight months later, he’d completed a correspondence course in journalism.”

“Good grief,” says Sixsmith.

“The rest you may know. Covered Korea for Illustrated Planet, then became West Coast Herald’s Latin America man. He was in Vietnam for the battle of Ap Bac and stayed based in Saigon until his first collapse back in March. It’s a miracle my parents’ marriage lasted the years it did—y’ know, the longest I spent with him was April to July, this year, in the hospice.” Luisa is quiet. “I miss him, Rufus, chronically. I keep forgetting he’s dead. I keep thinking he’s away on assignment, somewhere, and he’ll be flying in any day soon.”

“He must have been proud of you, following in his footsteps.”

“Oh, Luisa Rey is no Lester Rey. I wasted years being rebellious and liberated, posing as a poet and working in a bookstore on Engels Street. My posturing convinced no one, my poetry was ‘so vacuous it isn’t even bad’—so said Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and the bookstore went bust. So I’m still only a columnist.” Luisa rubs her tired eyes, thinking of Richard Ganga’s parting shot. “No award-winning copy from war zones. I had high hopes when I moved to Spyglass, but simpering gossip on celebrity parties is the closest I’ve gotten so far to Dad’s vocation.”

“Ah, but is it well-written simpering gossip?”

“Oh, it’s excellently written simpering gossip.”

“Then don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

5

“Hitchcock loves the limelight,” says Luisa, her bladder now growing uncomfortable, “but hates interviews. He didn’t answer my questions because he didn’t really hear them. His best works, he said, are roller coasters that scare the riders out of their wits but let them off at the end giggling and eager for another ride. I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s . . . the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe—but only our toes. Hitchcock’s response was”—Luisa does an above-average impersonation—“ ‘I’m a director in Hollywood, young lady, not an Oracle at Delphi.’ I asked why Buenas Yerbas had never featured in his films. Hitchcock answered, ‘This town marries the worst of San Francisco with the worst of Los Angeles. Buenas Yerbas is a city of nowhere.’ He spoke in bons mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcock’s, you know.’ ”

Sixsmith wrings sweat from his handkerchief. “I saw Charade with my niece at an art-house cinema last year. Was that Hitchcock? She strong-arms me into seeing these things, to prevent me from growing ‘square.’ I rather enjoyed it, but my niece said Audrey Hepburn was a ‘bubblehead.’ Delicious word.”

“Charade’s the one where the plot swings on the stamps?”

“A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance. Hitchcock’s Buenas Yerbas remark puts me in mind of John F. Kennedy’s observation about New York. Do you know it? ‘Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.’ What might Buenas Yerbas be, I wonder?”

“A string of adjectives and conjunctions?”

“Or an expletive?”

6

“Megan, my treasured niece.” Rufus Sixsmith shows Luisa a photograph of a bronzed young woman and a fitter, healthier self taken at a sunny marina. The photographer said something funny just before the shutter clicked. Their legs dangle over the stern of a small yacht named Starfish. “That’s my old tub, a relic from more dynamic days.”

Luisa makes polite noises about not being old.

“Truly. If I went on a serious voyage now I’d need to hire a small crew. I still spend a lot of weekends on her, pottering about the marina and doing a little thinking, a little work. Megan likes the sea, too. She’s a born physicist with a better head for mathematics than I ever had, rather to her mother’s chagrin. My brother didn’t marry Megan’s mother for her brain, I’m sorry to say. She buys into feng shui or I Ching or whatever instant-enlightenment mumbo jumbo is top of the charts. But Megan possesses a superb mind. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at my old college at Cambridge. A woman, at Caius! Now she’s finishing her radioastronomy research at the big dishes on Hawaii. While her mother and her stepfather crisp themselves to toast on the beach in the name of Leisure, Megan and I knock around equations in the bar.”

“Any children of your own, Rufus?”

“I’ve been married to science all my life.” Sixsmith changes the subject. “A hypothetical question, Miss Rey. What price would you pay, as a journalist I mean, to protect a source?”

Luisa doesn’t consider the question. “If I believed in the issue? Any.”

“Prison, for example, for contempt of court?”

“If it came to it, yes.”

“Would you be prepared to . . . compromise your own safety?”

“Well . . .” Luisa does consider this. “I . . . guess I’d have to.”

“Have to? How so?”

“My father braved booby-trapped marshes and the wrath of generals for the sake of his journalistic integrity. What kind of a mockery of his life would it be if his daughter bailed when things got a little tough?”

Tell her. Sixsmith opens his mouth to tell her everything—the whitewashing at Seaboard, the blackmailing, the corruption—but without warning the elevator lurches, rumbles, and resumes its descent. Its occupants squint in the restored light, and Sixsmith finds his resolve has crumbled away. The needle swings round to G.

The air in the lobby feels as fresh as mountain water.

“I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey,” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.” Will I break this promise or keep it? “Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”

7

The flat world is curved in the boy’s eye. Javier Gomez leafs through a stamp album under an Anglepoise lamp. A team of huskies barks on an Alaskan stamp, a Hawaiian nene honks and waddles on a fifty-cents special edition, a paddle steamer churns up an inky Congo. A key turns in the lock, and Luisa Rey stumbles in, kicking off her shoes in the kitchenette. She is exasperated to find him here. “Javier!”

“Oh, hi.”

“Don’t ‘Oh, hi’ me. You promised not to jump across the balconies ever again! Suppose someone reports a burglar to the cops? Suppose you slipped and fell?”

“Then just give me a key.”

Luisa strangles an invisible neck. “I can’t rest easy knowing an eleven-year-old can waltz into my living space whenever . . .” your mom’s out all night, Luisa replaces with “. . . there’s a slow night on TV.”

“So why leave the bathroom window open?”

“Because if there’s one thing worse than you jumping the gap once, it’d be you jumping the gap again when you couldn’t get in.”

“I’ll be eleven in January.”

“No key.”

“Friends give each other keys.”

“Not when one is twenty-six and the other is still in the fifth grade.”

“So why are you back so late? Meet anyone interesting?”

Luisa glares. “Trapped by the brownout in an elevator. None of your business, anyhow, mister.” She switches on the main light and flinches when she sees the mean red welt on Javier’s face. “What the—what happened?”

The boy glances at the apartment wall, then returns to his stamps.

“Wolfman?”

Javier shakes his head, folds a tiny paper strip, and licks both sides. “That Clark guy came back. Mom’s working the graveyard shift at the hotel all this week, and he’s waiting for her. He asked me stuff about Wolfman, and I told him it wasn’t any of his business.” Javier attaches the hinge to the stamp. “It doesn’t hurt. I already dabbed stuff on it.” Luisa’s hand is already on the telephone. “Don’t phone Mom! She’ll rush back, there’ll be a massive fight, and the hotel’ll fire her like last time and the time before.” Luisa considers this, replaces the receiver, and starts for the door. “Don’t go around there! He’s sick in the head! He’ll get angry and wreck our stuff, then we’ll probably get evicted or something! Please.”

Luisa looks away. She takes a deep breath. “Cocoa?”

“Yes, please.” The boy is determined not to cry, but his jaw aches with the effort. He wipes his eyes on his wrists. “Luisa?”

“Yes, Javi, you’re sleeping on my sofa tonight, it’s okay.”

8

Dom Grelsch’s office is a study in ordered chaos. The view across Third Avenue shows a wall of offices much like his own. An Incredible Hulk punching bag hangs from a metal gallows in the corner. The editor-in-chief of Spyglass magazine declares the Monday A.M. features meeting open by stabbing a stubby digit at Roland Jakes, a grizzled, prunelike man in an aloha shirt, flared Wranglers, and dying sandals. “Jakes.”

“I, uh, wanna follow up my Terror in Sewerland series, to tie in with Jaws fever. Dirk Melon, he can be a freelance hack, is found under 50th East Street on a routine maintenance inspection. Or rather his, uh, remains are. Dental records and tattered press pass ID him. Flesh torn from corpse in manner consistent with Serrasalmus scapularis—I thank you—queen bitch of all piranhas, imported by fish freaks, then flushed down toilets when the meat bill gets too big. I’ll phone Captain Vermin at City Hall and have him deny a spate of attacks on sewage workers. Taking notes, Luisa? Believe nothing till it’s officially denied. So c’mon, Grelsch. Time you gave me that raise?”

“Just be grateful your last paycheck didn’t boing. On my desk by eleven tomorrow, with a pic of one of those snappers. A question, Luisa?”

“Yes. Is there a new editorial policy no one’s told me about that excludes articles containing truth?”

“Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it is. Nancy, what’ve you got for me?”

Nancy O’Hagan has conservative clothes, a pickled complexion, and giraffe-size eyelashes that often come unstuck. “My trusty mole got a picture of the bar on the president’s airplane. ‘Wing-dings and gin slings on Air Force One.’ The dumb money says the last drop’s been squeezed out of the old soak, but Auntie Nance thinks not.”

Grelsch considers. Telephones ring and typewriters clack in the background. “Okay, if nothing fresher comes up. Oh, and interview that ventriloquist puppet guy who lost his arms for It Never Rains . . . Nussbaum. You’re up.”

Jerry Nussbaum wipes dewdrops of choco-Popsicle from his beard, leans back, and triggers a landslide of papers. “The cops are chasing their own asses on the St. Christopher case, so how about a ‘Are You St. Christopher’s Next Slaying?’ piece? Profiles of all the snuffs to date and reconstructions of the victims’ last minutes. Where they were going, who they were meeting, what thoughts were going through their heads . . .”

“When St. Chris’s bullet went through their heads.” Roland Jakes laughs.

“Yeah, Jakes, let’s hope he’s attracted to flashy Hawaiian colors. Then later I’m seeing the colored streetcar driver the cops had on the rack last week. He’s suing the police department for wrongful arrest under the Civil Rights Act.”

“Could be a cover story. Luisa?”

“I met an atomic engineer.” Luisa ignores the indifference chilling the room. “An inspector at Seaboard Incorporated.” Nancy O’Hagan is doing her fingernails, driving Luisa to present her suspicions as facts. “He believes the new HYDRA nuclear reactor at Swannekke Island isn’t as safe as the official line. Isn’t safe at all, in fact. Its launch ceremony is this afternoon, so I want to drive out and see if I can turn anything up.”

“Hot shit, a technical launch ceremony,” exclaims Nussbaum. “What’s that rumbling sound, everyone? A Pulitzer Prize, rolling this way?”

“Oh, kiss my ass, Nussbaum.”

Jerry Nussbaum sighs. “In my wettest dreams . . .”

Luisa is torn between retaliation—Yeah, and letting the worm know how much he riles you—and ignoring him—Yeah, and letting the worm get away with saying what the heck he wants.

Dom Grelsch breaks her impasse. “Marketeers prove”—he twirls a pencil—“every scientific term you use represents two thousand readers putting down the magazine and turning on a rerun of I Love Lucy.”

“Okay,” says Luisa. “How about ‘Seaboard Atom Bomb to Blow Buenas Yerbas to Kingdom Come!’?”

“Terrific, but you’ll need to prove it.”

“Like Jakes can prove his story?”

“Hey.” Grelsch’s pencil stops twirling. “Fictitious people eaten by fictitious fish can’t flay every last dollar off you in the courts or lean on your bank to pull the plug. A coast-to-coast operation like Seaboard Power Inc. has lawyers who can and, sweet Mother of God, you put a foot wrong, they will.”

9

Luisa’s rust-orange VW Beetle travels a flat road toward a mile-long bridge connecting Yerbas Cape to Swannekke Island, whose power station dominates the lonely estuary. The bridge checkpoint is not quiet today. A hundred-strong demonstration lines the last stretch, chanting, “Swannekke C over our dead bodies!” A wall of police keeps them back from the line of nine or ten vehicles. Luisa reads the placards while she waits. YOU ARE NOW ENTERING CANCER ISLAND, warns one, another, HELL, NO! WE WON’T GO! and, enigmatically, WHERE OH WHERE IS MARGO ROKER?

A guard taps on the window; Luisa winds it down and sees her face in the guard’s sunglasses. “Luisa Rey, Spyglass magazine.”

“Press pass, ma’am.”

Luisa gets it from her purse. “Expecting trouble today?”

“Nah.” He consults a clipboard and hands back her pass. “Only our regular nature freaks from the trailer park. The college boys are vacationing where the surf’s better.”

As she crosses the bridge, the Swannekke B plant emerges from behind the older, grayer cooling towers of Swannekke A. Once again, Luisa wonders about Rufus Sixsmith. Why wouldn’t he give me a contact number? Scientists can’t be telephobic. Why did no one in the super’s office in his apartment building even know his name? Scientists can’t have aliases.

Twenty minutes later Luisa arrives at a colony of some two hundred luxury homes overlooking a sheltered bay. A hotel and golf course share the semiwooded slope below the power station. She leaves her Beetle in the R & D parking lot and looks at the power station’s abstract buildings half-hidden by the brow of the hill. An orderly row of palm trees rustles in the Pacific wind.

“Hi!” A Chinese-American woman strides up. “You look lost. Here for the launch?” Her stylish oxblood suit, flawless makeup, and sheer poise make Luisa feel shabby in her blueberry suede jacket. “Fay Li”—the woman offers her hand—“Seaboard PR.”

“Luisa Rey, Spyglass magazine.”

Fay Li’s handshake is powerful. “Spyglass? I didn’t realize—”

“—our editorial scope includes energy policy?”

Fay Li smiles. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s a feisty magazine.”

Luisa invokes Dom Grelsch’s reliable deity. “Market research identifies a growing public who demand more substance. I was hired as Spyglass’s highbrow face.”

“Very glad you’ve come, Luisa, whatever your brow. Let me sign you in at Reception. Security insists on bag searches and the rest, but it’s no good having our guests treated like saboteurs. That’s why I was hired.”

10

Joe Napier watches a bank of CCTV screens covering a lecture theater, its adjacent corridors, and the Public Center grounds. He stands, fluffs up his special cushion, and sits on it. Is it my imagination, or are my old wounds aching more of late? His gaze flits from screen to screen to screen. One shows a technician doing a sound check; another, a TV crew discussing angles and light; Fay Li crossing the parking lot with a visitor; waitresses pouring wine into hundreds of glasses; a row of chairs beneath a banner reading SWANNEKKE B—AN AMERICAN MIRACLE.

The real miracle, Joseph Napier ruminates, was getting eleven out of twelve scientists to forget the existence of a nine-month inquiry. A screen shows these very scientists drifting onstage, chatting amicably. Like Grimaldi says, every conscience has an off switch somewhere. Napier’s thoughts segue through memorable lines from the interviews that achieved the collective amnesia. “Between us, Dr. Franklin, the Pentagon’s lawyers are itching to try out their shiny new Security Act. The whistle-blower is to be blacklisted in every salaried position in the land.”

A janitor adds another chair to the row onstage.

“The choice is simple, Dr. Moses. If you want Soviet technology to burn ahead of ours, leak this report to your Union of Concerned Scientists, fly to Moscow to collect your medal, but the CIA has told me to tell you, you won’t be needing a round-trip ticket.”

The audience of dignitaries, scientists, think-tank members, and opinion formers take their seats. A screen shows William Wiley, vice CEO of Seaboard Inc., joking with those VIPs to be honored with a seat onstage.

“Professor Keene, the Defense Department brass are a little curious. Why voice your doubts now? Are you saying your work on the prototype was slipshod?”

A slide projector beams a fish-eye aerial shot of Swannekke B.

Eleven out of twelve. Only Rufus Sixsmith gets away.

Napier speaks into his walkie-talkie. “Fay? Show starts in ten minutes.”

Static. “Copy that, Joe. I’m escorting a visitor to the lecture theater.”

“Report to Security when you’re through, please.”

Static. “Copy. Over and out.”

Napier weighs the set in his hand. And Joe Napier? Has his conscience got an off switch? He sips his bitter black coffee. Hey, buddy, get off my case. I’m only following orders. Eighteen months till I retire, then it’s off to fish in sweet rushing rivers until I turn into a goddamn heron.

Milly, his deceased wife, watches her husband from the photograph on his console desk.

11

“Our great nation suffers from a debilitating addiction.” Alberto Grimaldi, Seaboard CEO and Newsweek Man of the Year, is king of the dramatic pause. “Its name is Oil.” He is gilded by the podium lights. “Geologists tell us, just seventy-four billion gallons of this Jurassic ocean scum remain in the Persian Gulf. Enough, maybe, to see out our century? Probably not. The most imperative question facing the USA, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘Then what?’ ”

Alberto Grimaldi scans his audience. In the palm of my hand. “Some bury their heads in the sand. Some fantasize about wind turbines, reservoirs, and”—wry half smile—“pig gas.” Appreciative chuckle. “At Seaboard we deal in realities.” Voice up. “I am here today to tell you that the cure for oil is right here, right now, on Swannekke Island!”

He smiles as the cheers subside. “As of today, domestic, abundant, and safe atomic energy has come of age! Friends, I am so very, very proud to present one of the major engineering innovations in history . . . the HYDRA-Zero reactor!” The slide screen changes to show a cross-section diagram, and a primed section of the audience applauds wildly, prompting most of the theater to follow suit.

“But hey, now, enough of me, I’m only the CEO.” Affectionate laughter. “Here to unveil our viewing gallery and flick that switch to connect Swannekke B to the national grid, the Seaboard family is deeply honored to welcome a very special visitor. Known on Capitol Hill as the president’s ‘Energy Guru’ ”—full smile—“it gives me profound pleasure to welcome a man who needs no introduction. Federal Power Commissioner Lloyd Hooks!”

An immaculately groomed man strides onstage to great applause. Lloyd Hooks and Alberto Grimaldi grasp each other’s forearms in a gesture of fraternal love and trust. “Your scriptwriters are getting better,” Lloyd Hooks murmurs, as both men grin broadly for the audience, “but you’re still Greed on Two Legs.”

Alberto Grimaldi backslaps Lloyd Hooks and replies in kind, “You’ll only wrangle your way onto this company’s board over my dead body, you venal sonofabitch!”

Lloyd Hooks beams out at the audience. “So you can still come up with creative solutions, Alberto.”

A cannonade of flashes opens fire.

A young woman in a blueberry jacket slips out of a rear exit.

12

“The ladies’ restroom, please?”

A guard speaking on his walkie-talkie waves her down a corridor.

Luisa Rey glances back. The guard’s back is turned, so she continues on around a corner and into a grid of repeated corridors, chilled and muffled by humming air coolers. She passes a pair of hurrying technicians in overalls who eye her breasts from under their caps but who do not challenge her. Doors bear cryptic signs. W212 DEMI-OUTLETS, Y009 SUBPASSES [AC], V770 HAZARDLESS [EXEMPTED]. Periodic higher-security doors have keypad entry systems. At a stairwell she examines a floor plan but finds no trace of any Sixsmith.

“You lost, lady?”

Luisa does her best to recover her poise. A silver-haired black janitor stares at her.

“Yes, I’m looking for Dr. Sixsmith’s room.”

“Uh-huh. English guy. Third floor, C105.”

“Thank you.”

“He ain’t been around a week or two.”

“Is that a fact? Can you tell me why?”

“Uh-huh. Went to Vegas on vacation.”

“Dr. Sixsmith? Vegas?”

“Uh-huh. So I was told.”

Room C105’s door is ajar. A recent attempt to erase “Dr. Sixsmith” from the nameplate ended in messy failure. Through the crack Luisa Rey watches a young man sitting on the table, sifting through a pile of a notebooks. The contents of the room are in several shipping crates. Luisa remembers her father saying, Acting like an insider can be enough to be one.

“Well,” says Luisa, strolling in. “You’re not Dr. Sixsmith, are you?”

The man drops the notebook guiltily, and Luisa knows she’s bought a few moments. “Oh, my God”—he stares back—“you must be Megan.”

Why be contradictory? “And you are?”

“Isaac Sachs. Engineer.” He gets to his feet and aborts a premature handshake. “I worked with your uncle on his report.” Brisk footsteps echo up the stairwell. Isaac Sachs closes the door. His voice is low and nervy: “Where’s Rufus hiding, Megan? I’ve been worried sick. Have you heard from him?”

“I was hoping you could tell me what’s happened.”

Fay Li strides in with the unimpressed security man. “Luisa. Still looking for the ladies’ room?”

Act stupid. “No. I’m all finished with the ladies’ room—it was spotlessly clean—but I’m late for my appointment with Dr. Sixsmith. Only . . . well, it seems he’s moved out.”

Isaac Sachs makes a “hah?” noise. “You’re not Sixsmith’s niece?”

“Excuse me, but I never said I was.” Luisa produces a pre-prepared gray lie for Fay Li. “I met Dr. Sixsmith on Nantucket last spring. We found we were both based in Buenas Yerbas, so he gave me his card. I dug it out three weeks ago, called him up, and we arranged to meet today to discuss a science feature for Spyglass.” She consults her watch. “Ten minutes ago. The launch speeches went on longer than I’d expected, so I slipped quietly away. I hope I haven’t caused any trouble?”

Fay Li acts convinced. “We can’t have unauthorized people wandering around a sensitive research institute like ours.”

Luisa acts contrite. “I thought signing in and having my bag checked was the security procedure, but I guess that was naïve. Dr. Sixsmith will vouch for me, though. Just ask him.”

Sachs and the guard both glance at Fay Li, who does not miss a beat. “That isn’t going to be possible. One of our Canadian projects needed Dr. Sixsmith’s attention. I can only imagine his secretary didn’t have your contact details when she cleared his appointments diary.”

Luisa looks at the boxes. “Looks like he’s going to be away for a while.”

“Yes, so we’re shipping him his resources. His consultancy here at Swannekke was winding up. Dr. Sachs here has done a gallant job of tying up the loose ends.”

“So much for my first interview with a great scientist.”

Fay Li holds the door open. “Maybe we can find you another.”

13

“Operator?” Rufus Sixsmith cradles the receiver in an anonymous suburban motel outside Buenas Yerbas. “I’m having trouble placing a call to Hawaii . . . yes. I’m trying to call . . .” He reads out Megan’s telephone number. “Yes, I’ll stay by the phone.”

On a TV with no yellow or green, Lloyd Hooks backslaps Alberto Grimaldi at the inauguration of the new HYDRA reactor at Swannekke Island. They salute the lecture theater like conquering sportsmen, and silver confetti falls from the roof. “No stranger to controversy,” says a reporter, “Seaboard CEO Alberto Grimaldi today announced the go-ahead of Swannekke C. Fifty million federal dollars will be poured into the second HYDRA-Zero reactor, and thousands of new jobs will be created. Fears that the mass arrests seen earlier this summer at Three Mile Island would be repeated in the Golden State did not materialize.”

Frustrated and weary, Rufus Sixsmith addresses the TV. “And when the hydrogen buildup blows the roof off the containment chamber? When prevailing winds shower radiation over California?” He turns the set off and squeezes the bridge of his nose. I proved it. I proved it. You couldn’t buy me, so you tried intimidation. I let you, Lord forgive me, but no longer. I’m not sitting on my conscience any longer.

The telephone rings. Sixsmith snatches it up. “Megan?”

A brusque male voice. “They’re coming.”

“Who is this?”

“They traced your last call to the Talbot Motel, 1046 Olympia Boulevard. Get to the airport now, get on the next flight for England, and conduct your exposé from over there, if you must. But go.”

“Why should I believe—”

“Use logic. If I’m lying, you’re still back in England safe and sound—with your report. If I’m not lying, you’re dead.”

“I demand to know—”

“You’ve got twenty minutes to get away, max. Go!”

Dial tone, a droning eternity.

14

Jerry Nussbaum rotates his office chair, straddles it, places his folded arms on its back, and rests his chin on them. “Picture the scene, me and six dreadlocked freaks of the negroid persuasion, a handgun tickling my tonsils. Not talking dead-of-night Harlem here, I’m talking Greenwich goddamn Village in broad goddamn daylight after a sixteen-pound steak with Norman goddamn Mailer. So there we were, this black bro’ frisks me down with his bitonal paw and relieves me of my wallet. ‘Wassis? Alligator skin?’ ” Nussbaum does a Richard Pryor accent. “ ‘No fuckin’ class, Whitey!’ Class? Those bums made me turn out my pockets for my every last cent—literally. But Nussbaum had the last laugh, you bet he did. In the cab back to Times Square, I wrote my now-classic ‘New Tribes’ editorial—no point in false modesty—and got it syndicated thirty times by the end of the week! My muggers turned me into a household name. So, Luey-Luey, what say you take me to dinner and I teach you how to extract a little gold from the Fangs of Fate?”

Luisa’s typewriter pings. “If the muggers took your every last cent—literally—what were you doing in a cab from Greenwich Village to Times Square? Sell your body for the fare?”

“You”—Nussbaum shifts his mass—“have a genius for missing the point.”

Roland Jakes drips candle wax onto a photograph. “Definition of the Week. What’s a conservative?”

The joke is old by summer 1975. “A mugged liberal.”

Jakes, stung, goes back to his picture-doctoring.

Luisa crosses the office to Dom Grelsch’s door. Her boss is speaking on the phone in a low, irate voice. Luisa waits outside but overhears. “No—no, no, Mr. Frum, it is black-and-white, tell me—hey, I’m talking now—tell me a more black-and-white ‘condition’ than leukemia? Know what I think? I think my wife is just one piece of paperwork between you and your three o’clock golf slot, isn’t she? Then prove it to me. Do you have a wife, Mr. Frum? Do you? You do. Can you imagine your wife lying in a hospital ward with her hair falling out? . . . What? What did you say? ‘Getting emotional won’t help’? Is that all you can offer, Mr. Frum? Yeah, buddy, you’re damn right I’ll be seeking legal counsel!” Grelsch slams the receiver down, lays into his punching bag gasping “Frum!” with each blow, collapses into his chair, lights a cigarette, and catches sight of Luisa hesitating in his doorway. “Life. A Force Ten shitstorm. You hear any of that?”

“The gist. I can come back later.”

“No. Come in, sit down. Are you young, healthy, and strong, Luisa?”

“Yes.” Luisa sits on boxes. “Why?”

“Because what I gotta say about your article on this unsubstantiated cover-up at Seaboard will, frankly, leave you old, sick, and weak.”

15

At Buenas Yerbas International Airport, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith places a vanilla binder into locker number 909, glances around the crowded concourse, feeds the slot with coins, turns the key, and slips this into a padded khaki envelope addressed to Luisa Rey at Spyglass, Klugh Bldg. 12F, 3rd Avenue, BY. Sixsmith’s pulse rises as he nears the postal desk. What if they get me before I reach it? His pulse rockets. Businessmen, families with luggage carts, snakes of elderly tourists all seem intent on thwarting his progress. The mailbox slot looms closer. Just yards away now, just inches.

The khaki envelope is swallowed and gone. Godspeed.

Sixsmith next lines up for an airplane ticket. News of delays lulls him like a litany. He keeps a nervous eye out for signs of Seaboard’s agents coming to pick him up at this late hour. Finally, a ticket clerk waves him over.

“I have to get to London. Any destination in the United Kingdom, in fact. Any seat, any airline. I’ll pay in cash.”

“Not a prayer, sir.” The clerk’s tiredness shows through her makeup. “Earliest I can manage”—she consults a teleprinted sheet—“London Heathrow . . . tomorrow afternoon, three-fifteen departure, Laker Skytrains, change at JFK.”

“It’s terribly important that I leave sooner.”

“I’m sure it is, sir, but we got air-traffic-control strikes and acres of stranded passengers.”

Sixsmith tells himself that not even Seaboard could arrange aviation strikes to detain him. “Then tomorrow it shall have to be. One-way, business class, please, nonsmoking. Is there overnight accommodation anywhere in the airport?”

“Yes, sir, third level. Hotel Bon Voyage. You’ll be comfortable there. If I can just see your passport, please, so I can process your ticketing?”

16

A stained-glass sunset illuminates the velveteen Hemingway in Luisa’s apartment. Luisa is buried in Harnessing the Sun: Two Decades of Peacetime Atomic Power, chewing a pen. Javier is at her desk doing a sheet of long-division problems. Carole King’s Tapestry LP is playing at a low volume. Drifting through the windows comes the dim roar of automobiles heading home. The telephone rings, but Luisa lets it. Javier studies the answering machine as it clunks into action. “Hi, Luisa Rey can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you.”

“I loathe these contraptions,” complains the caller. “Cookie, it’s your mother. I just heard from Beatty Griffin, who told me you split up with Hal—last month? I was dumbstruck! You didn’t breathe a word at your father’s funeral, or at Alphonse’s. This bottling-up worries me so much. Dougie and I are having a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society, and it’d mean the sun, the moon, and the stars to us if you’d abandon your poky little nest just for one weekend and come stay, Cookie? The Henderson triplets will be here, that’s Damien the cardiologist, Lance the gynecologist, and Jesse the . . . Doug? Doug! Jesse Henderson, what does he do? A lobotomist? Oh, funny. Anyway, daughter of mine, Beatty tells me by some freak of planetary alignment all three brothers are unattached. On the hoof, Cookie, on the hoof! So call the moment you get this. All my love now.” She ends with a suction kiss, “Mmmmchwaaa!”

“She sounds like the mother on Bewitched.” Javier lets a little time go by. “What’s ‘dumbstruck’?”

Luisa doesn’t look up. “When you’re so amazed you can’t speak.”

“She didn’t sound very dumbstruck, did she?”

Luisa is engrossed in her work.

“ ‘Cookie’?”

Luisa flings a slipper at the boy.

17

In his hotel room at the Bon Voyage, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith reads a sheaf of letters written to him nearly half a century ago by his friend Robert Frobisher. Sixsmith knows them by heart, but their texture, rustle, and his friend’s faded handwriting calm his nerves. These letters are what he would save from a burning building. At seven o’clock precisely, he washes, changes his shirt, and sandwiches the nine read letters in the Gideon’s Bible—this he replaces in the bedside cabinet. Sixsmith slips the unread letters into his jacket pocket for the restaurant.

Dinner is a minute steak and strips of fried eggplant, with a poorly washed salad. It deadens rather than satisfies Sixsmith’s appetite. He leaves half on his plate and sips carbonated water as he reads Frobisher’s last letters. He witnesses himself through Robert’s words searching Bruges for his unstable friend, first love, and if I’m honest, my last.

In the hotel elevator Sixsmith considers the responsibility he put on Luisa Rey’s shoulders, wondering if he’s done the right thing. The curtains of his room blow in as he opens the door. He calls out, “Who’s in here?”

No one. No one knows where you are. His imagination has been playing tricks on him for weeks now. Sleep deprivation. “Look,” he tells himself, “in forty-eight hours you’ll be back in Cambridge on your rainy, safe, narrow island. You’ll have your facilities, your allies, your contacts, and you can plan your broadside on Seaboard from there.”

18

Bill Smoke watches Rufus Sixsmith leave his hotel room, waits five minutes, then lets himself in. He sits on the rim of the bathtub and flexes his gloved fists. No drug, no religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse. You need a brain, though. Without discipline and expertise, you’ll soon find yourself strapped into an electric chair. The assassin strokes a lucky Krugerrand in his pocket. Smoke is wary of being a slave to superstition, but he isn’t about to mess with the amulet just to prove a point. A tragedy for loved ones, a big fat nothing to everyone else, and a problem solved for my clients. I’m just the instrument of my clients’ will. If it wasn’t me it’d be the next fixer in the Yellow Pages. Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun. Bill Smoke hears the lock. Breathe. The pills he took earlier clarify his perception, terribly, and when Sixsmith shuffles into the bedroom, humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the hit man could swear he can feel his victim’s pulse, slower than his own. Smoke sights his prey through the door crack. Sixsmith flumps onto the bed. The assassin visualizes the required motions: Three steps out, fire from the side, through the temple, up close. Smoke darts from the doorway; Sixsmith utters a guttural syllable and tries to rise, but the silenced bullet is already boring through the scientist’s skull and into the mattress. The body of Rufus Sixsmith falls back, as if he has curled up for a postprandial nap.

Blood soaks into the thirsty eiderdown.

Fulfillment throbs in Bill Smoke’s brain. Look what I did.

19

Wednesday morning is smog-scorched and heat-hammered, like the last hundred mornings and the next fifty. Luisa Rey drinks black coffee in the steamy cool of the Snow White Diner on the corner of Second Avenue and Sixteenth Street, a two-minute walk from the Spyglass offices, reading about a Baptist ex-naval nuclear engineer from Atlanta called James Carter, who plans to run for the Democratic nomination. Sixteenth Street traffic moves in frustrated inches and headlong stampedes. The sidewalks blur with hurrying people and skateboarders. “Nothin’ for breakfast this mornin’, Luisa?” asks Bart, the fry cook.

“Only news,” replies his very regular customer.

Roland Jakes trips over the doorway and makes his way to Luisa. “Uh, this seat free? Didn’t eat a bite this morning. Shirl’s left me. Again.”

“Features meeting in fifteen minutes.”

“Bags of time.” Jakes sits down and orders eggs over easy. “Page nine,” he says to Luisa. “Right-hand bottom corner. Something you should see.”

Luisa turns to page nine and reaches for her coffee. Her hand freezes.

“So”—Jakes grins—“is your exposé of the century screwed up now?”

Luisa’s skin prickles and her eardrums hurt.

“Whoops.” Jakes lights up a cigarette. “Were you close?”

“He couldn’t”—Luisa fumbles her words—“wouldn’t have done it.”

Jakes approximates gentleness. “Kinda looks like he did, Luisa.”

“You don’t kill yourself if you have a mission.”

“You might if your mission makes you crazy.”

“He was murdered, Jakes.”

Jakes represses a here-we-go-again face. “Who by?”

“Seaboard Corporation. Of course.”

“Ah. His employer. Of course. Motive?”

Luisa forces herself to speak calmly and ignore Jakes’s mock conviction. “He’d written a report on a reactor type developed at Swannekke B, the HYDRA. Plans for Site C are waiting for Federal Power Commission approval. When it’s approved, Seaboard can license the design for the domestic and overseas market—the government contracts alone would mean a stream of revenue in the high tens of millions, annually. Sixsmith’s role was to give the project his imprimatur, but he hadn’t read the script and identified lethal design flaws. In response, Seaboard buried the report and denied its existence.”

“And your Dr. Sixsmith did what?”

“He was getting ready to go public.” Luisa slaps the newspaper. “This is what the truth cost him.”

Jakes pierces a wobbly dome of yolk with a toast soldier. “You, uh, know what Grelsch is going to say?”

“ ‘Hard evidence,’ ” says Luisa, like a doctor making a diagnosis. “Look, Jakes, will you tell Grelsch . . . just tell him I had to go somewhere.”

20

The manager at the Hotel Bon Voyage is having a bad day. “No, you may not see his room! The specialized carpet cleaner has removed all traces of the incident. Who, I add, we had to pay from our own pocket! What kind of ghoul are you, anyway? A reporter? A ghost hunter? A novelist?”

“I’m”—Luisa Rey buckles with sobs from nowhere—“his niece, Megan Sixsmith.”

A stony matriarch enfolds the weeping Luisa in her mountainous bust. Random bystanders shoot the manager foul looks. The manager goes pale and attempts damage control. “Please, come through to the back, I’ll get you a—”

“Glass of water!” snaps the matriarch, knocking the man’s hand away.

“Wendy! Water! Please, through here, why don’t you—”

“A chair, for goodness’ sake!” The matriarch supports Luisa into the shady side office.

“Wendy! A chair! This instant!”

Luisa’s ally clasps her hands. “Let it out, honey, let it out, I’m listening. I’m Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, and here is my story. When I was your age, I was alone in my house, coming downstairs from my daughter’s nursery, and there on the halfway landing stood my mother. ‘Go check the baby, Janice,’ she said. I told my mother I’d checked her one minute ago, she was sleeping fine. My mother’s voice turned to ice. ‘Don’t argue with me, young lady, go check the baby, now!’ Sounds crazy, but only then I remembered my mother had died the Thanksgiving before. But I ran upstairs and found my daughter choking on the cord from the blind, wound around her neck. Thirty seconds, that would have been it. So you see?”

Luisa blinks tearfully.

“You see, honey? They pass over, but they ain’t gone.”

The chastened manager returns with a shoe box. “Your uncle’s room is occupied, I’m afraid, but the maid found these letters inside the Gideon’s Bible. His name is on the envelope. Naturally, I was going to have them forwarded to your family, but since you’re here . . .”

He hands her a sheaf of nine time-browned envelopes, each addressed to “Rufus Sixsmith, Esq. c/o Caius College, Cambridge, England.” One is stained by a very recent tea bag. All are badly crumpled and hastily smoothed out.

“Thank you,” says Luisa, vaguely, then more firmly. “Uncle Rufus valued his correspondence, and now it’s all I have left of him. I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sorry I fell to pieces out there.”

The manager’s relief is palpable.

“You’re a very special person, Megan,” Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, assures Luisa, as they part in the hotel lobby.

“You’re a very special person, Janice,” Luisa replies and returns to the parking level, passing within ten yards of locker number 909.

21

Luisa Rey has been back at Spyglass’s offices for under a minute when Dom Grelsch roars over the newsroom chatter, “Miss Rey!”

Jerry Nussbaum and Roland Jakes look up from their desks, at Luisa, at each other, and mouth, “Ouch!” Luisa puts the Frobisher letters into a drawer, locks it, and walks into Grelsch’s office. “Dom, sorry I couldn’t make the meeting, I—”

“Spare me the woman’s trouble excuse. Shut the door.”

“I’m not in the habit of making any excuses.”

“Are you in the habit of making meetings? You’re paid to be.”

“I’m also paid to follow up stories.”

“So you flew off to the crime scene. Did you find hard evidence missed by the cops? A message, in blood, on the tiles? ‘Alberto Grimaldi did it’?”

“Hard evidence isn’t hard evidence if you don’t break your back digging for it. An editor named Dom Grelsch told me that.”

Grelsch glares at her.

“I got a lead, Dom.”

“You got a lead.”

I can’t batter you, I can’t fool you, I can only hook your curiosity. “I phoned the precinct where Sixsmith’s case was processed.”

“There is no case! It was suicide! Unless we’re talking Marilyn Monroe, suicides don’t sell magazines. Too depressing.”

“Listen to me. Why did Sixsmith buy an airplane ticket if he was going to put a bullet through his head later that day?”

Grelsch extends his arms to show the size of his disbelief that he is even having this conversation. “A snap decision.”

“Then why would he have a typed suicide note—and no typewriter—ready and waiting for this snap decision?”

“I don’t know! I don’t care! I got a publication deadline Thursday night, a dispute with the printers, a delivery strike in the offing, and Ogilvy holding the Sword of What’s-’is-name over my head. Hold a séance and ask Sixsmith yourself! Sixsmith was a scientist. Scientists are unstable.”

“We were trapped in an elevator for ninety minutes. Cool as a cucumber. Unstable just isn’t a word that sticks to the man. Another thing. He shot himself—supposedly—with just about the quietest gun on the market. A Roachford .34 with fitted silencer. Catalog order only. Why would he go to the trouble?”

“So. The cops got it wrong, the ME got it wrong, everyone got it wrong except Luisa Rey, ace cub reporter, whose penetrating insight concludes the world-famous number cruncher was assassinated just because he’d pointed out a few hitches in some report, a report nobody agrees exists. Am I right?”

“Half right. More likely, the police were encouraged to arrive at conclusions convenient for Seaboard.”

“Sure, a utility company buys the cops. Stupid me.”

“Count in their subsidiaries, Seaboard Corporation is the tenth biggest corporation in the country. They could buy Alaska if they wanted. Give me until Monday.”

“No! You got this week’s reviews and, yes, the food feature.”

“If Bob Woodward had told you he suspected President Nixon had ordered a burglary of his political rival’s offices and recorded himself issuing the order, would you have said, ‘Forget it, Bob, honey, I need eight hundred words on salad dressings’?”

“Don’t you dare give me the I’m-an-outraged-feminist act.”

“Then don’t give me the listen-I’ve-been-in-the-business-thirty-years act! One Jerry Nussbaum in the building is bad enough.”

“You’re squeezing size-eighteen reality into a size-eleven supposition. The undoing of many a fine newspaperman. Many a fine anyone.”

“Monday! I’ll get a copy of the Sixsmith Report.”

“Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.”

“Apart from getting on my knees and begging you, I don’t have any other currency. C’mon. Dom Grelsch doesn’t snuff out solid investigative journalism just because it doesn’t turn up the goods in one morning. Dad told me you were just about the most daring reporter working anywhere in the mid-sixties.”

Grelsch swivels and looks over Third Avenue. “Did he bullshit!”

“He did too bullshit! That exposé on Ross Zinn’s campaign funds in ’sixty-four. You took a bone-chilling white supremacist out of politics for good. Dad called you dogged, cussed, and indefatigable. Ross Zinn took nerve, sweat, and time. I’ll do the nerve and sweat, all I want from you is a little time.”

“Roping your pa into this was a dirty trick.”

“Journalism calls for dirty tricks.”

Grelsch stubs his cigarette and lights another. “Monday, with Sixsmith’s inquiry, and it’s got to be hurricane proof, Luisa, with names, sources, facts. Who squashed this report, and why, and how Swannekke B will turn Southern California into Hiroshima. Something else. If you get evidence Sixsmith was murdered, we’re going to the cops before we print. I don’t want dynamite under my car seat.”

“ ‘All the news without fear or favor.’ ”

“Beat it.”

Nancy O’Hagan makes a not-bad face as Luisa sits at her desk and takes out Sixsmith’s rescued letters.

In his office, Grelsch lays into his punching bag. “Dogged!” Wham! “Cussed!” Wham! “Indefatigable!” The editor catches his reflection, mocking him.

22

A Sephardic romance, composed before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, fills the Lost Chord Music Store on the northwest corner of Spinoza Square and Sixth Avenue. The well-dressed man on the telephone, pallid for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “Cloud Atlas Sextet . . . Robert Frobisher . . . As a matter of fact I have heard of it, though I’ve never laid my sticky paws on an actual pressing. . . . Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going. . . . Let me see here, I’ve got a list from a dealer in San Fran who specializes in rarities. . . . Franck, Fitzroy, Frobisher . . . Here we go, even a little footnote. . . . Only five hundred recordings pressed . . . in Holland, before the war, my, no wonder it’s rare. . . . The dealer has a copy of an acetate, made in the fifties . . . by a liquidated French outfit. Cloud Atlas Sextet must bring the kiss of death to all who take it on. . . . I’ll try, he had one as of a month ago, but no promises on the sound quality, and I must warn you, cheap it ain’t. . . . It’s quoted here at . . . one hundred twenty dollars . . . plus our commission at ten percent, that makes . . . It is? Okay, I’ll take your name down. . . . Ray who? Oh, Miss R-E-Y, so sorry. Normally we ask for a deposit, but you’ve got an honest voice. A few days. You’re welcome now.”

The store clerk scribbles himself a to-do note and lifts the stylus back to the start of “¿Por qué lloras blanca niña?,” lowers the needle onto shimmering black vinyl, and dreams of Jewish shepherd boys plucking their lyres on starlit Iberian hillsides.

23

Luisa Rey doesn’t see the dusty black Chevy coasting by as she enters her apartment building. Bill Smoke, driving the Chevy, memorizes the address: 108, Pacific Eden Apartments.

Luisa has reread Sixsmith’s letters a dozen times or more in the last day and a half. They disturb her. A university friend of Sixsmith’s, Robert Frobisher, wrote the series in the summer of 1931 during a prolonged stay at a château in Belgium. It is not the unflattering light they shed on a pliable young Rufus Sixsmith that bothers Luisa but the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories. The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these “memories” as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.

I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t.

Builders are remodeling the lobby of Pacific Eden Apartments. Sheets are on the floor, an electrician is prodding a light fitting, an unseen hammerer hammers. Malcolm the super glimpses Luisa and calls out, “Hey, Luisa! An uninvited guest ran up to your apartment twenty minutes ago!” But the noise of a drill drowns him out, he has a man from city hall on the phone about building codes, and anyway, Luisa has already stepped into the elevator.

24

“Surprise,” says Hal Brodie, drily, caught in the act of taking books and records from Luisa’s shelves and putting them into his gym bag. “Hey,” he says, to hide a jab of guilt, “you’ve had your hair cut short.”

Luisa isn’t very surprised. “Don’t all dumped women?”

Hal clicks in the back of his throat.

Luisa is angry with herself. “So. Reclamation Day.”

“Just about done.” Hal brushes imaginary dust off his hands. “Is the selected Wallace Stevens yours or mine?”

“It was a Christmas present from Phoebe to us. Phone Phoebe. Let her decide. Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even. This is like a no-knock raid. You could’ve phoned.”

“I did. All I got was your machine. Junk it, if you never listen to it.”

“Don’t be stupid, it cost a fortune. So what brings you up to town, apart from your love of modernist poetry?”

“Location scouting for Starsky and Hutch.”

“Starsky and Hutch don’t live in Buenas Yerbas.”

“Starsky gets kidnapped by the West Coast Triad. There’s a gunfight on Buenas Yerbas Bay Bridge, and we’ve got a chase scene scripted with David and Paul running over car roofs at rush hour. It’ll be a headache to okay it with the traffic cops, but we need to do it on location or we’ll lose any semblance of artistic integrity.”

“Hey. You’re not taking Blood on the Tracks.”

“It’s mine.”

“Not anymore.” Luisa is not joking.

With ironic deference, Brodie takes out the record from the gym bag. “Look, I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

Luisa nods, feels grief rise and her defenses stiffen. “Yeah.”

“I guess it was . . . a release, of sorts.”

True, but only the bereaved can actually say so. Luisa resists the temptation to say something acidic. She remembers her father ribbing Hal, “the TV Kid.” I am not going to start crying. “So, you’re doing okay?”

“I’m doing fine. And you?”

“Fine.” Luisa looks at the new gaps in her old shelves.

“Work’s good?”

“Work’s fine.” Put us both out of our misery. “I believe you have a key that belongs to me.”

Hal zips up his gym bag, fishes in his pocket, and drops the door key onto her palm. With a flourish, to underline the symbolism of the act. Luisa smells an alien aftershave and imagines Her splashing it on him this morning. He didn’t own that shirt eight weeks ago, either. The cowboy boots they’d bought together the day of the Segovia concert. Hal steps over a pair of Javier’s filthy sneakers, and Luisa watches him think better of making a funny about her new man. Instead, he just says, “So long, then.”

Shake hands? Hug him? “Yeah.”

The door closes.

Luisa puts the chain on and replays the encounter. She turns on the shower and undresses. Her bathroom mirror is half-hidden by a shelf of shampoos, conditioners, a box of sanitary napkins, skin creams, and gift soaps. Luisa shunts these aside to get a clearer view of a birthmark between her shoulder blade and collarbone. Her encounter with Hal is displaced. Coincidences happen all the time. But it is undeniably shaped like a comet. The mirror mists over. Facts are your bread and butter. Birthmarks can look like anything you choose, not only comets. You’re still upset by Dad’s death, that’s all. The journalist steps into the shower, but her mind walks the passageways of Zedelghem château.

25

The Swannekke Island protesters’ camp lies on the mainland between a beach and a marshy lagoon. Behind the lagoon, acres of citrus orchards rise inland to arid hills. Tatty tents, rainbow-sprayed camper vans, and trailer homes look like unwanted gifts the Pacific dumped here. A strung banner declares: PLANET AGAINST SEABOARD. On the far side of the bridge sits Swannekke A, quivering like Utopia in a noon mirage. White toddlers tanned brown as leather paddle in the lazy shallows; a bearded apostle washes clothes in a tub; a couple of snaky teenagers kiss in the dune grass.

Luisa locks her VW and crosses the scrub to the encampment. Seagulls float in the joyless heat. Agricultural machinery drones in the distance. Several inhabitants approach but not in a friendly manner. “Yeah?” challenges a man, with a hawkish Native American complexion.

“I presumed this was a public park.”

“You presumed wrong. It’s private.”

“I’m a journalist. I was hoping to interview a few of you.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Spyglass magazine.”

The bad weather lightens a little. “Shouldn’t you be writing about the latest adventures of Barbra Streisand’s nose?” says the Native American, adding a sardonic “No disrespect.”

“Well, sorry, I’m not the Herald Tribune, but why not give me a chance? You could use a little positive coverage, unless you’re seriously planning to dismantle that atomic time bomb across the water by waving placards and strumming protest songs. No disrespect.”

A southerner growls: “Lady, you’re full of it.”

“The interview’s over,” says the Native American. “Get off this land.”

“Don’t worry, Milton”—an elderly, white-haired, russet-faced woman stands on her trailer’s step—“I’ll see this one.” An aristocratic mongrel watches from beside his mistress. Clearly, her word carries weight, for the crowd disperses with no further protest.

Luisa approaches the trailer. “The love and peace generation?”

“Nineteen seventy-five is nowhere near 1968. Seaboard has informers in our network. Last weekend the authorities wanted to clear the site for the VIPs, and blood was spilled. That gave the cops an excuse for a round of arrests. I’m afraid paranoia pays. Come in. I’m Hester Van Zandt.”

“I was very much hoping to meet you, Doctor,” says Luisa.

26

An hour later Luisa feeds her apple core to Hester Van Zandt’s genteel dog. Van Zandt’s bookshelf-lined office is as neat as Grelsch’s is chaotic. Luisa’s host is finishing up. “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”

“That’s why you rescued me from Milton and his compatriots.”

“I wanted to give you the truth as we see it, so you can at least make an informed choice about which side you’ll back. Write a satire about GreenFront New Waldenites in their mini-Woodstock and you’ll confirm every Republican Party prejudice and bury truth a little deeper. Write about radiation levels in seafood, ‘safe’ pollution limits set by polluters, government policy auctioned for campaign donations, and Seaboard’s private police force, and you’ll raise the temperature of public awareness, fractionally, toward its ignition point.”

Luisa asks, “Did you know Rufus Sixsmith?”

“I certainly did, God rest his soul.”

“I’d have put you on opposing sides . . . or no?”

Van Zandt nods at Luisa’s tactics. “I met Rufus in the early sixties at a think tank in D.C., connected with the Federal Power Commission. I was in awe of him! Nobel laureate, veteran of the Manhattan Project.”

“Might you know anything about a report he wrote condemning the HYDRA-Zero and demanding Swannekke B be taken off-line?”

“Dr. Sixsmith? Are you totally sure?”

“ ‘Totally sure’? No. ‘Pretty damn sure’? Yes.”

Van Zandt looks edgy. “My God, if GreenFront could get its hands on a copy . . .” Her face clouds over. “If the Dr. Rufus Sixsmith wrote a hatchet job on the HYDRA-Zero, and if he threatened to go public, well, I no longer believe he shot himself.”

Luisa notices they are both whispering. She asks the question she imagines Grelsch asking: “Doesn’t it smack of paranoia to believe Seaboard would assassinate a man of Sixsmith’s stature, just to avoid negative publicity?”

Van Zandt removes a photograph of a woman in her seventies from a corkboard. “A name for you. Margo Roker.”

“I saw her name on a placard the other day.”

“Margo’s been a GreenFront activist since Seaboard bought Swannekke Island. She owns this land and lets us operate here as a thorn in Seaboard’s side. Six weeks ago her bungalow—two miles up the coast—was burgled. Margo has no money, just a few scraps of land, land she’s refused to part with, whatever inducements Seaboard dangled. Well. The burglars beat her senseless, left her for dead, but took nothing. It’s not actually a murder case, because Margo’s still in a coma, so the police line is that it was a poorly planned heist with an unfortunate end.”

“Unfortunate for Margo.”

“And pretty damn fortunate for Seaboard. The medical bills are burying her family. A few days after the assault, an L.A. real estate company, Open Vista, steps up and makes an offer to Margo’s cousin for these acres of coastland scrub at quadruple its market value. To make a private nature reserve. So I ask GreenFront to do some research on Open Vista. It was registered just eight weeks ago, and guess whose name heads the list of corporate donors?” Van Zandt nods in the direction of Swannekke Island.

Luisa weighs all this. “You’ll be hearing from me, Hester.”

“I hope I will.”

27

Alberto Grimaldi enjoys his Extracurricular Security Briefings with Bill Smoke and Joe Napier in his Swannekke office. He likes the no-nonsense demeanor of both men, in contrast to the retinue of courtiers and petitioners. He likes sending his secretary into the reception area where company heads, union leaders, and government men are made to wait, ideally for hours, and hear her say, “Bill, Joe, Mr. Grimaldi has a slot for you now.” Smoke and Napier let Grimaldi indulge the J. Edgar Hoover side of his character. He thinks of Napier as a steadfast bulldog whose New Jersey childhood is unsoftened by thirty-five years of Californian living; Bill Smoke is his familiar, who passes through walls, ethics, and legality to execute his master’s will.

Today’s meeting is enhanced by Fay Li, summoned by Napier for the last item on their unwritten agenda: a journalist visiting Swannekke this weekend, Luisa Rey, who may or may not pose a security risk. “So, Fay,” asks Grimaldi, balancing on the edge of his desk, “what do we know about her?”

Fay Li speaks as if from a mental checklist. “Reporter at Spyglass—I presume we all know it? Twenty-six, ambitious, more liberal than radical. Daughter of the Lester Rey, foreign correspondent, recently died. Mother remarried an architect after an amicable divorce seven years ago, lives in uptown Ewingsville, B.Y. No siblings. History and economics at Berkeley, summa cum laude. Started on the L.A. Recorder, political pieces in the Tribune and Herald. Single, lives alone, pays her bills on time.”

“Dull as ditch water,” comments Napier.

“Then remind me why we’re discussing her,” says Smoke.

Fay Li addresses Grimaldi: “We caught her wandering around Research on Tuesday, during the launch. She claimed to have an appointment with Dr. Sixsmith.”

“About?”

“A commissioned piece for Spyglass, but I think she was fishing.”

The CEO looks at Napier, who shrugs. “Difficult to read, Mr. Grimaldi. If she was fishing, we should assume she knows what sort of fish she was after.”

Grimaldi has a weakness for spelling out the obvious. “The report.”

“Journalists have feverish imaginations,” says Li, “especially hungry young ones looking for their first big scoop. I suppose she might think Dr. Sixsmith’s death could be . . . How can I put this?”

Alberto Grimaldi makes a puzzled face.

“Mr. Grimaldi,” fills in Smoke, “what I believe Fay has too much tact to spit out is this: the Rey woman might be imagining we rubbed out Dr. Sixsmith.”

“ ‘Rubbed out’? Good God. Really? Joe? What do you think?”

Napier spreads his palms. “Fay might be right, Mr. Grimaldi. Spyglass isn’t known for keeping its feet firmly rooted in fact.”

“Do we have any leverage with the magazine?” asks Grimaldi.

Napier shakes his head. “I’ll get on it.”

“She phoned,” continues Li, “asking if she could interview a few of our people for a day-in-the-life-of-a-scientist piece. So I invited her to the hotel for tonight’s banquet and promised to make a few introductions over the weekend. In fact”—she glances at her watch—“I’m meeting her there in an hour.”

“I okayed it, Mr. Grimaldi,” says Napier. “I’d rather have her snooping under our noses, where we can watch her.”

“Quite right, Joe. Quite right. Assess how much of a threat she poses. And lay to rest any morbid suspicions about poor Rufus at the same time.” Tight smiles all around. “Well, Fay, Joe, that’s a wrap, thanks for your time. Bill, a word on some matters in Toronto.”

The CEO and his fixer are left alone.

“Our friend,” begins Grimaldi, “Lloyd Hooks. He worries me.”

Bill Smoke considers this. “Any angles?”

“He’s got a spring like he’s holding four aces. I don’t like it. Watch him.”

Bill Smoke inclines his head.

“And you’d better have an accident up your sleeve for Luisa Rey. Your work at the airport was exemplary, but Sixsmith was a distinguished foreign national, and we don’t want this woman to dig out any rumors of foul play.” He nods after Napier and Li. “Do those two suspect anything about Sixsmith?”

“Li isn’t thinking anything. She’s a PR woman, period. Napier’s not looking. There’s the blind, Mr. Grimaldi, there’s the willfully blind, and then there’s the soon to be retired.”

28

Isaac Sachs sits hunched in the bay window of the Swannekke Hotel bar and watches yachts in the creamy evening blues. A beer stands untouched on the table. The scientist’s thoughts run from Rufus Sixsmith’s death to the fear that his secreted-away copy of the Sixsmith Report might be found, to Napier’s warning about confidentiality. The deal is, Dr. Sachs, your ideas are the property of Seaboard Corporation. You don’t want to welch on a deal with a man like Mr. Grimaldi, do you? Clumsy but effective.

Sachs tries to remember how it felt not to walk around with this knot in his gut. He longs for his old lab in Connecticut, where the world was made of mathematics, energy, and atomic cascades, and he was its explorer. He has no business in these political orders of magnitude, where erroneous loyalties can get your brain spattered over hotel bedrooms. You’ll shred that report, Sachs, page by goddamn page.

Then his thoughts slide to a hydrogen buildup, an explosion, packed hospitals, the first deaths by radiation poisoning. The official inquiry. The scapegoats. Sachs bangs his knuckles together. So far, his betrayal of Seaboard is a thought-crime, not one of action. Dare I cross that line? The hotel manager leads a bevy of florists into the banquet hall. A woman saunters downstairs, looks for someone who hasn’t yet arrived, and drifts into the lively bar. Sachs admires her well-chosen suede suit, her svelte figure, her quiet pearls. The barman pours her a glass of white wine and makes a joke that earns an acknowledgment but not a smile. She turns his way, and he recognizes the woman he mistook for Megan Sixsmith five days ago: the knot of fear yanks tight, and Sachs hurries out via the veranda, keeping his face averted.

Luisa wanders over to the bay window. An untouched beer sits on the table, but there’s no sign of its owner, so she sits down on the warmed seat. It’s the best seat in the house. She watches yachts in the creamy evening blues.

29

Alberto Grimaldi’s gaze wanders the candlelit banquet hall. The room bubbles with sentences more spoken than listened to. His own speech got more and longer laughs than that of Lloyd Hooks, who now sits in sober consultation with Grimaldi’s vice CEO, William Wiley. Now, what is that pair discussing so intently? Grimaldi jots another mental memo for Bill Smoke. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is telling him an interminable story about Henry Kissinger’s schooldays, so Grimaldi addresses an imaginary audience on the subject of power.

“Power. What do we mean? ‘The ability to determine another man’s luck.’ You men of science, building tycoons, and opinion formers: my jet could take off from LaGuardia, and before I touched down in B.Y. you’d be a nobody. You Wall Street moguls, elected officials, judges, I might need more time to knock you off your perches, but your eventual downfall would be just as total.” Grimaldi checks with the EPA man to ensure his attention isn’t being missed—it isn’t. “Yet how is it some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. First: God-given gifts of charisma. Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity’s topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower—for want of discipline.” Grimaldi glimpses Fay Li steer the troublesome Luisa Rey to a circle where Spiro Agnew holds court. The reporter is prettier in the flesh than her photograph: So that’s how she noosed Sixsmith. He catches Bill Smoke’s eye. “Third: the will to power. This is the enigma at the core of the various destinies of men. What drives some to accrue power where the majority of their compatriots lose, mishandle, or eschew power? Is it addiction? Wealth? Survival? Natural selection? I propose these are all pretexts and results, not the root cause. The only answer can be ‘There is no “Why.” This is our nature.’ ‘Who’ and ‘What’ run deeper than ‘Why.’ ”

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency quakes with mirth at his own punch line. Grimaldi chuckles through his teeth. “A killer, Tom, an absolute killer.”

30

Luisa Rey plays the ditzy reporter on her best behavior to assure Fay Li she poses no threat. Only then might she be given a free enough rein to sniff out Sixsmith’s fellow dissidents. Joe Napier, head of Security, reminds Luisa of her father—quiet, sober, similar age and hair loss. Once or twice during the sumptuous ten-course meal she caught him watching her thoughtfully. “And, Fay, you never feel confined on Swannekke Island, at all?”

“Swannekke? It’s paradise!” enthuses the publicist. “Buenas Yerbas only an hour away, L.A. down the coast, my family up in San Francisco, it’s ideal. Subsidized stores and utilities, free clinic, clean air, zero crime, sea views. Even the men,” she confides, sotto voce, “come ready-vetted—in fact I can access their personnel files—so you know there won’t be any total freaks in the dating pool. Speaking of which—Isaac! Isaac! You’re being conscripted.” Fay Li grabs Isaac Sachs’s elbow. “You’ll remember bumping into Luisa Rey the other day?”

“I’m one lucky conscript. Hi, Luisa, again.”

Luisa feels an edginess in his handshake.

“Miss Rey is here,” says Fay Li, “to write an article on Swannekke anthropology.”

“Oh? We’re a dull tribe. I hope you’ll meet your word count.”

Fay Li turns her beam on full. “I’m sure Isaac could find a little time to answer any of your questions, Luisa. Right, Isaac?”

“I’m the very dullest of the dull.”

“Don’t believe him, Luisa,” Fay Li warns her. “It’s just a part of Isaac’s strategy. Once your defenses are down, he pounces.”

The alleged lady-killer rocks on his heels, smiling at his toes uncomfortably.

31

“Isaac Sachs’s tragic flaw,” analyzes Isaac Sachs, slumped in the bay window across from Luisa Rey two hours later, “is this. Too cowardly to be a warrior, but not enough of a coward to lie down and roll over like a good doggy.” His words slip like Bambi on ice. A mostly empty wine bottle stands on the table. The bar is deserted. Sachs can’t remember when he was last this drunk, or this tense and relaxed at the same time: relaxed, because an intelligent young woman is enjoying his company; tense, because he is ready to lance the boil on his conscience. To Sachs’s wry surprise, he is attracted to Luisa Rey, and he sorely regrets they met in these circumstances. The woman and the reporter keep blurring into one another. “Let’s change the subject,” Sachs says. “Your car, your”—he does a Hollywood SS officer accent—“ ‘Volkswagen.’ What’s its name?”

“How do you know my Beetle has a name?”

“All Beetle owners give their cars names. But please don’t tell me it’s John, George, Paul, or Ringo.” God, Luisa Rey, you’re beautiful.

She says, “You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“I, Isaac Caspar Sachs, solemnly vow not to laugh.”

“You’d better not with a middle name like Caspar. It’s Garcia.”

They both shake, noiselessly, until they burst into laughter. Maybe she likes me too, maybe she’s not just doing her job.

Luisa lassos her laughter in. “Is that all your vows are worth?”

Sachs makes a mea culpa gesture and dabs his eyes. “They normally last longer. I don’t know why it’s so funny, I mean, Garcia”— he snorts—“isn’t such a funny name. I once dated a girl who called her car Rosinante, for Chrissakes.”

“An ex-Berserkeley Beatnik boyfriend named it. After Jerry Garcia, y’ know, the Grateful Dead man. He abandoned it at my dorm when its engine sent a gasket through the back around the time he dumped me for a cheerleader. Cheesy, but true.”

“And you didn’t take a blowtorch to it?”

“It’s not Garcia’s fault his ex-owner was a swindling sperm gun.”

“The guy must have been mad.” Sachs didn’t plan to say so, but he’s not ashamed he did.

Luisa Rey nods in gracious acknowledgment. “Anyway, Garcia suits the car. Never stays tuned, prone to flashes of speed, falling to bits, its trunk won’t lock, it leaks oil, but never seems to give up the ghost.”

Invite her back, Sachs thinks. Don’t be stupid, you’re not a pair of kids.

They watch the breakers crash in the moonlight.

Say it. “The other day”—his voice is a murmur and he feels sick—“you were looking for something in Sixsmith’s room.” The shadows seem to prick up their ears. “Weren’t you?”

Luisa checks for eavesdroppers and speaks very quietly. “I understand Dr. Sixsmith wrote a certain report.”

“Rufus had to work closely with the team who designed and built the thing. That meant me.”

“Then you know what his conclusions were? About the HYDRA reactor?”

“We all do! Jessops, Moses, Keene . . . they all know.”

“About a design flaw?”

“Yes.” Nothing has changed, except everything.

“How bad would an accident be?”

“If Dr. Sixsmith is right, it’ll be much, much worse than bad.”

“Why isn’t Swannekke B just shut down pending further inquiry?”

“Money, power, usual suspects.”

“Do you agree with Sixsmith’s findings?”

Carefully. “I agree a substantial theoretical risk is present.”

“Were you pressured to keep your doubts to yourselves?”

“Every scientist was. Every scientist agreed to. Except for Sixsmith.”

“Who, Isaac? Alberto Grimaldi? Does it go up to the top?”

“Luisa, what would you do with a copy of the report, if one found its way into your hands?”

“Go public as fast as I possibly could.”

“Are you aware of . . .” I can’t say it.

“Aware that people in the upper echelons would rather see me dead than see HYDRA discredited? Right now it’s all I’m aware of.”

“I can’t make any promises.” Christ, how feeble. “I became a scientist because . . . it’s like panning for gold in a muddy torrent. Truth is the gold. I—I don’t know what I want to do . . .”

“Journalists work in torrents just as muddy.”

The moon is over the water.

“Do,” says Luisa finally, “whatever you can’t not do.”

32

In blustery early sunshine Luisa Rey watches golfers traverse the lush course, wondering what might have happened last night if she’d invited Isaac Sachs up. He’s due to meet her for breakfast.

She wonders if she should have phoned Javier. You’re not his mother, you’re not his guardian, you’re just a neighbor. She’s not convinced, but just as she didn’t know how to ignore the boy she found sobbing by the garbage chute, just as she couldn’t not go down to the super’s, borrow his keys, and pick through a garbage can for his precious stamp albums, now she doesn’t know how to extricate herself. He hasn’t got anyone else, and eleven-year-olds don’t do subtlety. Anyway, who else have you got?

“You look like you got the weight of the world,” says Joe Napier.

“Joe. Have a seat.”

“Don’t mind if I do. I’m the bearer of bad news. Isaac Sachs sends his sincere apologies, but he’s got to stand you up.”

“Oh?”

“Alberto Grimaldi flew out to our Three Mile Island site this morning—wooing a group of Germans. Sidney Jessops was going along as the technical support, but Sid’s father had a heart attack, and Isaac was the next choice.”

“Oh. Has he left already?”

“Afraid so. He’s”—Napier checks his watch—“over the Colorado Rockies. Breast-feeding a hangover, shouldn’t wonder.”

Don’t let your disappointment show. “When’s he due back?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.” Damn, damn, damn.

“I’m twice Isaac’s age and three times uglier, but Fay’s asked me to show you around the site. She’s scheduled a few interviews with some people she thinks’ll interest you.”

“Joe, it’s too kind of you all to give me such generous slices of your weekends,” says Luisa. Did you know Sachs was on the verge of defection? How? Unless Sachs was a plant? I’m out of my depth here.

“I’m a lonely old man with too much time on my hands.”

33

“So R & D is called the Chicken Coop because the eggheads live there.” Luisa jots in her notebook, smiling, as Joe Napier holds open the control-room door two hours later. “What do you call the reactor building?”

A gum-chewing technician calls out: “Home of the Brave.”

Joe’s expression says funny. “That’s definitely off the record.”

“Has Joe told you what we call the security wing?” The controller grins.

Luisa shakes her head.

“Planet of the Apes.” He turns to Napier. “Introduce your guest, Joe.”

“Carlo Böhn, Luisa Rey. Luisa’s a reporter, Carlo’s a chief technician. Stick around and you’ll hear plenty of other names for him.”

“Let me show you around my little empire, if Joe’ll give you up for five minutes.”

Napier watches Luisa as Böhn explains the fluorescent-lit chamber of panels and gauges. Underlings check printouts, frown at dials, tick clipboards. Böhn flirts with her, catches Napier’s eye, when Luisa’s back is turned, and mimes melon-breasts; Napier shakes his sober head. Milly would have clucked over you, he thinks. Had you over for dinner, fed you way too much, and nagged you on what you need to be nagged about. He recalls Luisa as a precocious little six-year-old. Must be two decades since I saw you at the last Tenth Precinct Station reunion. Of all the professions that lippy little girl could have entered, of all the reporters who could have caught the scent of Sixsmith’s death, why Lester Rey’s daughter? Why so soon before I retire? Who dreamed up this sick joke? The city?

Napier could cry.

34

Fay Li searches Luisa Rey’s room swiftly and adeptly as the sun sets. She checks inside the toilet cistern; under the mattress for slits; the carpets, for loose flaps; inside the minibar; in the closet. The original might have been Xeroxed down to a quarter of its bulk. Li’s tame receptionist reported Sachs and Luisa talking until the early hours. Sachs was removed this morning, but he’s no idiot, he could have deposited it for her. She unscrews the telephone mouthpiece and finds Napier’s favored transmitter, one disguised as a resistor. She probes the recesses of Luisa’s overnight bag but finds no printed matter except Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. She flicks through the reporter’s notepad on the desk, but Luisa’s encrypted shorthand doesn’t reveal much.

Fay Li wonders if she’s wasting her time. Wasting your time? Mexxon Oil upped their offer to one hundred thousand dollars for the Sixsmith Report. And if they’re serious about a hundred thousand, they’ll be serious about a million. For discrediting the entire atomic energy program into an adolescent grave, a million is a snip. So keep searching.

The phone buzzes four times: a warning that Luisa Rey is in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. Li ensures nothing is amiss and leaves, taking the stairs down. After ten minutes she rings up to Luisa from the front desk. “Hi, Luisa, it’s Fay. Been back long?”

“Just long enough for a quick shower.”

“Productive afternoon, I hope?”

“Very much so. I’ve got enough material for two or three pieces.”

“Terrific. Listen, unless you’ve got other plans, how about dinner at the golf club? Swannekke lobster is the best this side of anywhere.”

“Quite a claim.”

“I’m not asking you to take my word for it.”

35

Crustacean shrapnel is piled high. Luisa and Fay Li dab their fingers in pots of lemon-scented water, and Li’s eyebrow tells the waiter to remove the plates. “What a mess I’ve made.” Luisa drops her napkin. “I’m the slob of the class, Fay. You should open a finishing school for young ladies in Switzerland.”

“That’s not how most people in Seaboard Village see me. Did anyone tell you my nickname? No? Mr. Li.”

Luisa isn’t sure what response is expected. “A little context might help.”

“My first week on the job, I’m up in the canteen, fixing myself a coffee. This engineer comes up, tells me he’s got a problem of a mechanical nature, and asks if I can help. His buddies are sniggering in the background. I say, ‘I doubt it.’ The guy says, ‘Sure you can help.’ He wants me to oil his bolt and relieve the excess pressure on his nuts.”

“This engineer was how old? Thirteen?”

“Forty, married, two kids. So his buddies are snorting with laughter now. What would you do? Dash off some witty put-down line, let ’em know you’re riled? Slap him, get labeled hysterical? Besides, creeps like that enjoy being slapped. Do nothing? So any man on site can say shit like that to you with impunity?”

“An official complaint?”

“Prove that women run to senior men when the going gets tough?”

“So what did you do?”

“Had him transferred to our Kansas plant. Middle of nowhere, middle of January. I pity his wife, but she married him. Word gets around, I get dubbed Mr. Li. A real woman wouldn’t have treated the poor guy so cruelly, no, a real woman would have taken his joke as a compliment.” Fay Li smooths wrinkles in the tablecloth. “You run up against this crap in your work?”

Luisa thinks of Nussbaum and Jakes. “All the time.”

“Maybe our daughters’ll live in a liberated world, but us, forget it. We’ve got to help ourselves, Luisa. Men won’t do it for us.”

The journalist senses a shifting of the agenda.

Fay Li leans in. “I hope you’ll consider me your own insider here on Swannekke Island.”

Luisa probes with caution. “Journalists need insiders, Fay, so I’ll certainly bear it in mind. I have to warn you, though, Spyglass doesn’t have the resources for the kind of remuneration you may be—”

“Men invented money. Women invented mutual aid.”

It’s a wise soul, thinks Luisa, who can distinguish traps from opportunities. “I’m not sure . . . how a small-time reporter could ‘aid’ a woman of your standing, Fay.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. Friendly journalists make valuable allies. If there comes a time when you want to discuss any matters weightier than how many french fries the Swannekke engineers consume per annum”—her voice sinks below the clinking of cutlery, cocktail-bar piano music, and background laughter—“such as data on the HYDRA reactor as compiled by Dr. Sixsmith, purely for example, I guarantee you’ll find me much more cooperative than you think.”

Fay Li clicks her fingers, and the dessert trolley is already on its way. “Now, the lemon-and-melon sherbet, very low in calories, it cleanses the palate, ideal before coffee. Trust me on this?”

The transformation is so total, Luisa almost wonders if she just heard what she just heard. “I’ll trust you on this.”

“Glad we understand each other.”

Luisa wonders: What level of deceit is permissible in journalism? She remembers her father’s answer, one afternoon in the hospital garden: Did I ever lie to get my story? Ten-mile-high whoppers every day before breakfast, if it got me one inch closer to the truth.

36

A ringing phone flips Luisa’s dreams over and she lands in the moonlit room. She grabs the lamp, the clock radio, and finally the receiver. For a moment she cannot remember her name or what bed she is in. “Luisa?” offers a voice from the black gulf.

“Yeah, Luisa Rey.”

“Luisa, it’s me, Isaac, Isaac Sachs, calling long distance.”

“Isaac! Where are you? What time is it? Why—”

“Shush, shush, sorry I woke you, and sorry I was dragged away at the crack of dawn yesterday. Listen, I’m in Philadelphia. It’s seven-thirty eastern, it’ll be getting light soon in California. You still there, Luisa? I haven’t lost you?”

He’s afraid. “Yeah, Isaac, I’m listening.”

“Before I left Swannekke, I gave Garcia a present to give to you, just a dolce far niente.” He tries to make the sentence sound casual. “Understand?”

What in God’s name is he talking about?

“You hear me, Luisa? Garcia has a present for you.”

A more alert quarter of Luisa’s brain muscles in. Isaac Sachs left the Sixsmith Report in your VW. You mentioned the trunk didn’t lock. He assumes we are being eavesdropped. “That’s very kind of you, Isaac. Hope it didn’t cost you too much.”

“Worth every cent. Sorry to disturb your beauty sleep.”

“Have a safe flight, and see you soon. Dinner, maybe?”

“I’d love that. Well, got a plane to catch.”

“Safe flight.” Luisa hangs up.

Leave later, in an orderly fashion? Or get off Swannekke right now?

37

A quarter of a mile across the science village, Joe Napier’s window frames the hour-before-dawn night sky. A console of electronic monitoring equipment occupies half the room. From a loudspeaker the sound of a dead phone line purrs. Napier rewinds a squawking reel-to-reel. “Before I left Swannekke, I gave Garcia a present to give to you, just a dolce far niente. . . . Understand?”

Garcia? Garcia?

Napier grimaces at his cold coffee and opens a folder labeled “LR#2.” Colleagues, friends, contacts . . . no Garcia in the index. Better warn Bill Smoke not to approach Luisa until I’ve had the chance to speak with her. He flicks his lighter into life. Bill Smoke is a difficult man to find, let alone warn. Napier draws acrid smoke down into his lungs. His telephone rings: it’s Bill Smoke. “So, who the fuck’s this Garcia?”

“Don’t know, nothing on file. Listen, I don’t want you to—”

“It’s your fucking job to know, Napier.”

So, you’re addressing me like that now? “Hey! Hold your—”

“Hey yourself.” Bill Smoke hangs up.

Bad, bad, very bad. Joe grabs his jacket, snuffs his cigarette, leaves his quarters, and strides across the site to Luisa’s hotel. A five-minute walk. He recalls the menace in Bill Smoke’s tone and breaks into a run.

38

A swarm of déjà vu haunts Luisa as she stuffs her belongings into her overnight bag. Robert Frobisher doing a dine and dash from another hotel. She takes the stairs down to the empty lobby. The carpet is silent as snow. A radio whispers sweet nothings in the back office. Luisa creeps to the main doors, hoping to leave with no explanation required. The doors are locked to keep people out, not in, and soon Luisa is striding across the hotel lawn to the parking lot. A predawn ocean breeze makes vague promises. The night sky inland is turning dark rose. Nobody else is about, but as she nears her car, Luisa forces herself not to break into a run. Stay calm, unhurried, and you can say you’re driving along the cape for the sunrise.

At first glance the trunk is empty, but the carpet covers a bulge. Under the flap Luisa finds a package wrapped in a black plastic trash bag. She removes a vanilla binder. She reads its cover in the semilight: The HYDRA-Zero Reactor—An Operational Assessment Model—Project Head Dr. Rufus Sixsmith—Unauthorized Possession Is a Federal Crime Under the Military & Industrial Espionage Act 1971. Some five hundred pages of tables, flowcharts, mathematics, and evidence. A sense of elation booms and echoes. Steady, this is only the end of the beginning.

Motion in the middle distance catches Luisa’s eye. A man. Luisa ducks behind Garcia. “Hey! Luisa! Hold it!” Joe Napier! As if in a dream of keys and locks and doors, Luisa stows the vanilla binder in its black trash bag under the passenger seat—Napier is running now, his flashlight beam swishing the half darkness. The engine makes a lazy, leonine roar—the VW reverses too fast. Joe Napier thumps into the back, yells, and Luisa glimpses him hopping like a slapstick actor.

She does not stop to apologize.

39

Bill Smoke’s dusty black Chevy skids to a stop by the island checkpoint of Swannekke Bridge. A string of lights dots the mainland across the straits. The guard recognizes the car and is already by its driver’s window. “Good morning, sir!”

“Looking that way. Richter, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Smoke.”

“I’m guessing Joe Napier has just called you and ordered you not to let an orange VW pass the checkpoint.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Smoke.”

“I’m here to countermand that order, on Mr. Grimaldi’s personal authority. You will raise the barrier for the VW and let me follow. You’ll phone your buddy on the mainland checkpoint now and tell him not to let anything through until he sees my car. When Mr. Napier gets here, about fifteen minutes from now, you will tell him Alberto Grimaldi says, ‘Go back to bed.’ Understand, Richter?”

“Understood, Mr. Smoke.”

“You got married this spring, if memory serves?”

“You have an excellent memory, sir.”

“I do. Hoping to start a family?”

“My wife’s four months pregnant, Mr. Smoke.”

“A piece of advice, Richter, on how to succeed in the security business. Would you like to hear this piece of advice, son?”

“I would, sir.”

“The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away. Am I making sense to you, Richter?”

“You’re making absolute sense, Mr. Smoke.”

“Then your young family’s future is secure.”

Smoke reverses his car alongside the guardhouse and slumps low. Sixty seconds later, a choking VW swerves around the headland. Luisa halts, rolls down her window, Richter appears, and Smoke catches the words “family emergency.” Richter tells her to have a safe trip, and the barrier rises.

Bill Smoke puts his car into first, second. The sonic texture of the road surface changes as the Chevy reaches the bridge. Third gear, fourth, pedal down. The clapped-out Beetle’s taillights zoom up, fifty yards, thirty yards, ten . . . Smoke hasn’t switched his lights on. He swerves into the empty oncoming lane, shifts into fifth gear, and draws alongside. Smoke smiles. She thinks I’m Joe Napier. He yanks the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.

Smoke slams the brakes. He gets out into the cool air and smells hot rubber. Back a ways, sixty, seventy feet down, a VW’s front bumper vanishes into the hollow sea. If her back didn’t snap, she’ll have drowned in three minutes. Bill Smoke inspects the damage to his car’s bodywork and feels deflation. Anonymous, faceless homicides, he decides, lack the thrill of human contact.

The American sun, cranked up to full volume, proclaims a new dawn.