The Nemesis Program

Chapter Twenty-Four

They were pictures of disaster zones. One after another: the same thing. Shattered buildings and collapsed bridges and streets filled with tangled wreckage. People wandering forlorn among the levelled ruins of their homes. Homeless children playing in the dust. Survivors being pulled out of the ground.

‘Earthquakes,’ Roberta muttered. ‘But why? Claudine wasn’t a seismologist, or a geologist, or anything like that.’

‘She didn’t just take these images off the web,’ Ben said, thinking back to the immigration stamps he’d seen on the passport in Claudine’s apartment. ‘She travelled there in person and photographed these sites herself. But why? And what’s the connection with her Tesla research?’

‘That’s another good question,’ Roberta said, looking perplexed.

The image she had onscreen was a panoramic shot of a city that had been utterly devastated by an earthquake, once-grand buildings reduced to a barren field of rubble with a few miserable-looking people sifting about for anything they could retrieve from the destruction. ‘It’s terrible,’ Roberta said, then paused, peering more closely. She pointed. ‘Look at the architecture, or what’s left of it. And the people. Looks like somewhere in Central or South America.’

‘There was a South American visa stamp on her passport,’ Ben said. ‘Republic of Taráca.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ Roberta said, trying to remember. ‘Yeah, that’s right. There was a huge earthquake there some time back, wasn’t there? It was all over the news for a few days.’

‘But what was she doing there?’

‘Beats me.’

‘There’s one last image file below,’ Ben said. ‘It might tell us more.’

Roberta opened it up and they both stared at it, hoping for illumination. None came. The photo was of a house, or what had once been a house, in some leafy countryside setting surrounded by sunlit oak trees. All but one of the house’s stone walls had fallen in, and the roof was collapsed. ‘Where’s this?’ Roberta said.

‘France,’ Ben said. ‘Possibly Belgium.’ He pointed out the remaining window. ‘You can tell from the shutters. My old place in Normandy had ones just the same.’

‘It can’t be earthquake damage,’ Roberta said. ‘Look how all the trees are still standing. And when was there ever a bad quake in this part of Europe?’

‘Never. Either the house fell down with age, or …’

‘Or?’

‘Or maybe, just maybe, someone was out playing with their Tesla toys.’

‘Claudine?’

Ben shrugged. ‘Who else?’

‘I wish there was more,’ Roberta said in frustration. ‘All we can do is keep trawling through and hope we learn something.’ She closed the picture file and clicked on the next one down. The document opened up to reveal a whole mass of technical data analysing the steady build-up in intensity and destructiveness of earthquakes during recent years; there were charts and graphs of Richter scale readings, maps and aerial photos. ‘Christ, more seismology stuff,’ she groaned. ‘I just don’t get it.’

They ploughed on, both exhausted but too mesmerised to tear themselves away. The more they read, the more bafflingly diverse the material seemed to be. ‘Either it’s just a load of random stuff she loaded onto the drive purely for somewhere to store it—’ Ben began.

‘Or something else links it all together,’ Roberta finished for him. ‘Believe me, Claudine wasn’t the kind of person who did things randomly. There has to be a common factor. And that’s what I’m scared of. This goes way further than I’d imagined it might.’ She drew away from the screen and rubbed her eyes. ‘I don’t think I can take much more of this. My eyes are burning.’

‘Keep going,’ Ben urged her.

‘It gets weirder,’ she said. ‘Look at this one. Studies in predictive animal behaviour?’

For no clear reason, Claudine had collated a variety of veterinary psychology studies focusing on the unexplained phenomenon of how animals, either wild or in captivity, seemed to be able to tell when a major storm or a natural disaster was impending: dogs barking, birds fleeing their nests, zoo animals becoming distressed. Claudine’s own report on the findings was included in the document. ‘“Typically, studies have shown that the behaviour of animal subjects can help predict the event some two hours or more in advance”,’ Roberta read aloud. ‘“Analysis of the data shows how consistent this phenomenon is”.’ She snorted impatiently. ‘That’s just great, Claudine, but what the hell does it mean?’

‘There’s a video clip embedded there,’ Ben said.

As the low-definition video began to run, Roberta expanded it to full screen view. The footage had been filmed somewhere rural, arid and hot. ‘Spain?’ she speculated.

‘Maybe. Or it could be Latin America again.’

As they watched, an unsteady camcorder shot panned over a dusty-looking herd of equines milling nervously behind a makeshift barricade. ‘Why was Claudine filming horses?’ Roberta said.

‘They’re mules,’ Ben said.

‘Of course. That explains everything,’ she muttered.

The video’s background showed obvious signs of earthquake damage: a wooded hillside partially slipped away, crumbled limestone buildings shimmering in the heat haze, a truck half-buried under rubble, a gang of labourers gamely sweltering under the sun trying to clear up the mess. As Ben and Roberta went on watching, the camera wavered momentarily to one side and the figure of a woman came into view for just a second: slim, dark, early thirties, in a loose top and shorts. ‘That’s her,’ Roberta said sadly. ‘That’s Claudine. I wonder who was working the camera?’

Next, a burly guy appeared and Claudine’s voice introduced him off-camera in French-accented English as Señor Diego Sanchez, owner-operator of the Santa Catarina Mule Sanctuary six miles outside the city of San Vicente.

‘I’m sure I’ve heard of that city before, but I can’t remember what country it’s in,’ Roberta said. Ben didn’t reply and went on watching as an interview began in which Claudine quizzed Sanchez in her halting English about the behaviour of the animals in the lead-up to the recent earthquake. Sanchez described how, when the area had been hit by a smaller quake back in 1996, the animals had warned them a good two hours in advance by their nervous agitation. This time around, there had been no warning.

‘It took them as much by surprise as it did us,’ Sanchez said with a sigh as he looked across at his wrecked buildings. ‘It was like they lost their, you know, their sixth sense. They just didn’t know it was coming.’

There the clip ended.

‘So what was that all about?’ Ben said.

They’d been staring hard at the computer screen for nearly two hours. ‘God, I need to sleep,’ Roberta said, leaning away from the screen and covering her eyes with her hands. ‘I haven’t stopped since I left Ottawa.’

‘One more,’ Ben said. He was determined to try to make more sense of the puzzle before he took a break.

‘I can’t, Ben. I can’t think or see straight, and none of this is making sense to me.’ She stood up wearily, walked to the armchair and slouched heavily in it.

Taking over the computer from her, Ben clicked on a final file and found that it was full of saved emails. There were several dozen of them, without exception between Claudine and someone calling themselves ‘D’ who was using the kind of webmail account favoured by people who wanted to remain anonymous. The correspondence had taken place within the last eight months.

‘Think you might want to see this,’ he said to Roberta.