Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 40

Andrea Cabot worked her way through her morning yoga routine. Her instructor discouraged listening to the news, and in fact recommended “soothing music,” but Cabot was too busy not to multitask. CNN was on in the background.

She had to agree that the broadcast was not conducive to concentration. It was hyperactive, scattershot coverage of the Culpeper incident: the plane, the inoperable cars, the power outage, the “down” banking centers, the fires.

As Cabot executed the transition between Downward Dog and the Baby pose, the breathless reporter gave way to the first in a parade of experts.

“Remember that old movie? The Day the Earth Stood Still? A man arrives from outer space, and as a display of power, he causes every motor and engine in the world to stop for half an hour. That’s what happened to Culpeper. The world just… stopped.”

Andrea Cabot tuned out. She already knew more about Culpeper than she wanted to, thanks to an avalanche of flash cables that started to arrive within minutes of the event and had not yet diminished. She knew more than the expert or the reporter or the crazed eyewitnesses or the spokespersons for NOAA, FBI, and FEMA.

She knew that Culpeper had been deliberately attacked, that the array of disasters was not the result of a “solar storm” or “geomagnetic anomaly” or “coronal mass ejection.”

It was the result of an electromagnetic pulse of precise dimension and unusual power, probably from an E-bomb, but an E-bomb of “an unprecedented level of sophistication and precision.” What really stunned the analysts were two facts. The first was the power of the pulse. The banking facilities in Culpeper had been hardened against conventional EMPs, as was true of most sensitive facilities. This EMP had overwhelmed state-of-the-art shielding. The second thing the analysts couldn’t get past was the “surgical” nature of the attack. That was alarming. That meant the attack involved technology that the Pentagon itself did not possess.

In some ways, though, the assessment had set her mind at ease. It meant that Culpeper had nothing to do with her – and a good thing, too, because she already had a lot on her plate.

She came out of Baby and lifted into Cobra.

Two weeks ago, she’d picked up chatter about an upcoming chain of attacks against “Western” hotels in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. Something spectacular and coordinated in the Qaeda style.

But the boys over here would not be employing anything like the Culpeper device – whatever it was. They’d attack with fertilizer bombs. Or with improvised explosive rigs strapped to the chests of young men with Down’s syndrome.

Which was another way of saying that Culpeper was somebody else’s problem.