The Hammer of Eden (40 page)

The bastard is trying to talk me around!

Priest said: “Take the first exit and head back into town.”

Honeymoon indicated right and went on talking: “Nobody knows who you people are or where to find you. If you drop the whole thing now, you can get away with it. No real harm has been done. But if you set off another earthquake, you’ll have every law enforcement agency in the United States after you, and they won’t give up until they find you. No one can hide forever.”

Priest was angered. “Don’t you threaten me!” he yelled. “I’m the one with the motherfucking gun!”

“I haven’t forgotten that. I’m trying to get us both out of this without further damage.”

Honeymoon had somehow taken control of the conversation. Priest
felt sick with frustration. “You listen to me,” he said. “There’s only one way out of this. Make an announcement, today. No more power plant building in California.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Pull over.”

“We’re on the freeway.”

“Pull the fuck over!”

Honeymoon slowed the car and stopped on the shoulder of the road.

The temptation to shoot was strong, but Priest resisted it. “Get out of the car.”

Honeymoon put the shift in park and got out.

Priest slid over behind the wheel. “You got until midnight to see sense,” he said. He pulled away.

In the rearview mirror he saw Honeymoon try to wave down a passing car. It drove right by. He tried again. No one would stop.

Seeing the big man in his expensive suit and shiny shoes, standing at the dusty roadside trying to get a ride, gave Priest a small measure of satisfaction and helped to quell the nagging suspicion that Honeymoon had somehow got the better of the encounter, even though Priest had held the gun.

Honeymoon gave up waving at cars and began to walk.

Priest smiled and drove on into town.

Melanie was waiting where he had left her. He parked the Lincoln, leaving the keys in, and got into the ’Cuda.

“What happened?” Melanie said.

Priest shook his head in disgust. “Nothing,” he said angrily. “It was a waste of time. Let’s go.”

She started the car and pulled away.

*  *  *

Priest rejected the first location Melanie took him to.

It was a small seaside town fifty miles north of San Francisco. They parked on the cliff top, where a stiff breeze rocked the old ’Cuda on its tired springs. Priest rolled down the window to smell the sea.
He would have liked to take off his boots and walk barefoot along the beach, feeling the damp sand between his toes, but there was no time.

The location was very exposed. The truck would be too conspicuous here. It was a long distance from the freeway, so there could be no quick getaway. Most important of all, there was not much of value here to be destroyed—just a few houses clustered around a harbor.

Melanie said: “An earthquake sometimes does the greatest damage many miles from its epicenter.”

“But you can’t be sure of that,” Priest said.

“True. You can’t be sure of anything.”

“Still, the best way to bring down a skyscraper is to have an earthquake underneath it, am I right?”

“All other things being equal, yes.”

They drove south through the green hills of Marin County and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Melanie’s second location was in the heart of the city. They followed Route 1 through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park and pulled up not far from the San Francisco campus of Cal State University.

“This is better,” Priest said immediately. All around him were homes and offices, stores and restaurants.

“A tremor with its epicenter here would cause the most damage at the marina,” Melanie said.

“How come? That’s miles away.”

“It’s all reclaimed land. The underlying sedimentary deposits are saturated with water. That amplifies the shaking. Whereas the ground here is probably solid. And these buildings look strong. Most buildings survive an earthquake. The ones that fall down are made of unreinforced masonry—typically low-income housing—or concrete-frame structures without bracing.”

This was all quibbling, Priest decided. She was just nervous.
An earthquake is a frigging earthquake, for Christ’s sake. No one knows what’s going to fall down. I don’t care, so long as something does
.

“Let’s look at another place,” he said.

Melanie directed him south on Interstate 280. “Right where the San
Andreas fault crosses Route 101, there’s a small town called Felicitas,” she said.

They drove for twenty minutes. They almost passed the exit ramp for Felicitas. “Here, here!” Melanie yelled. “Didn’t you see the sign?”

Priest wrenched the wheel to the right and made the ramp. “I wasn’t looking,” he said.

The exit led to a vantage point overlooking the town. Priest stopped the car and got out. Felicitas was laid out in front of him like a picture. Main Street ran from left to right across his field of vision, lined with low clapboard stores and offices, a few cars parked slantwise in front of the buildings. There was a small wooden church with a bell tower. North and south of the main drag was a neat grid of tree-lined streets. All the houses were one story. At either end of the town, the street became a pre-freeway country road and disappeared among fields. The landscape north of the town was split by a meandering river like a jagged crack in a window. In the distance was a railway track as straight as a draftsman’s line from east to west. Behind Priest, the freeway ran along a viaduct on high concrete arches.

Stepping down the hill was a cluster of six huge bright blue pipes. They dipped under the freeway, passed the town to the west, and disappeared over the horizon, looking like an infinite xylophone. “What the hell is that?” Priest said.

Melanie thought for a moment. “I think it must be a gas pipeline.”

Priest breathed a long sigh of satisfaction. “This place is perfect,” he said.

*  *  *

They made one more stop that day.

After the earthquake, Priest would need to hide the seismic vibrator. His only weapon was the threat of more earthquakes. He had to make Honeymoon and Governor Robson believe he had the power to do this again and again until they gave in. So it was crucial that he kept the truck hidden away.

It was going to become more and more difficult to drive the vibrator
on public roads, so he needed to hide it someplace where he could, if necessary, trigger a third earthquake without moving far.

Melanie directed him to Third Street, which ran parallel with the shore of the huge natural harbor that was San Francisco Bay. Between Third and the waterfront was a run-down industrial neighborhood. There were disused railway tracks along the potholed streets; rusting, derelict factories; empty warehouses with smashed windows; and dismal yards full of pallets, tires, and wrecked cars.

“This is good,” Priest said. “It’s only half an hour from Felicitas, and it’s the kind of district where nobody takes much interest in their neighbors.”

Realtors’ signs were optimistically fixed to some of the buildings. Melanie, posing as Priest’s secretary, called the number on one of the signs and asked if they had a warehouse to rent, real cheap, about fifteen hundred square feet.

An eager young salesman drove out to meet them an hour later. He showed them a crumbling cinder-block ruin with holes in the corrugated roof. There was a broken sign over the door, which Melanie read aloud: “Perpetua Diaries.” There was plenty of room to park the seismic vibrator. The place also had a working bathroom and a small office with a hot plate and a big old Zenith TV left by the previous tenant.

Priest told the salesman he needed a place to store barrels of wine for a month or so. The man did not give a damn what Priest wanted to do with the space. He was delighted to get some rent on a near valueless property. He promised to have the power and water turned on by the following day. Priest paid him four weeks’ rent in advance, cash, from the secret stash he kept in his old guitar.

The salesman looked like it was his lucky day. He gave Melanie the keys, shook hands, and hurried away before Priest could change his mind.

Priest and Melanie drove back to Silver River Valley.

*  *  *

Thursday evening, Judy Maddox took a bath. Lying in the water, she remembered the Santa Rosa earthquake that had so frightened her when she was in first grade. It came back to her as vividly as if it were yesterday. Nothing could be more terrifying than to find that the ground beneath your feet was not fixed and stable, but treacherous and deadly. Sometimes, in quiet moments, she saw nightmare visions of multiple car wrecks, bridges collapsing, buildings falling down, fires and floods—but none of these were as dreadful to her as the recollection of her own terror at six years of age.

She washed her hair and thrust the memory to the back of her mind. Then she packed an overnight bag and went back to the officers’ club at ten
P.M
.

The command post was quiet, but the atmosphere was tense. Still no one knew for certain whether the Hammer of Eden could cause an earthquake. But since Ricky Granger had abducted Al Honeymoon at gunpoint in the garage of the Capitol Building and left him stranded on I-80, everyone was sure these terrorists were dead serious.

There were now more than a hundred people in the old ballroom. The on-scene commander was Stuart Cleever, the big shot who had flown in from Washington Tuesday night. Despite Honeymoon’s orders, there was no way the Bureau was going to let a lowly agent take overall charge of something this big. Judy did not want total control, and she had not argued about it. However, she had been able to ensure that neither Brian Kincaid nor Marvin Hayes was directly involved.

Judy’s title was investigative operations coordinator. That gave her all the control she needed. Alongside her was Charlie Marsh, emergency operations coordinator, in command of the SWAT team on standby in the next room. Charlie was a man of about forty-five with a grizzled crewcut. He was ex-army, a fitness freak and a gun collector, not the type Judy normally liked, but he was straightforward and reliable, and she could work with him.

Between the head shed and the investigation team table were Michael Quercus and his young seismologists, sitting at their screens, watching for signs of earthquake activity. Michael had gone home for a
couple of hours, like Judy. He came back wearing clean khakis and a black polo shirt, carrying a sports duffel, ready for a long spell.

They had talked, during the day, about practical matters as he set up his equipment and introduced his helpers. At first they had been awkward with each other, but Judy realized he was quickly getting over his feelings of anger and guilt about Tuesday’s incident. She felt she ought to sulk about it for a day or two, but she was too busy. So the whole thing got shoved to the back of her mind, and she found herself enjoying having Michael around.

She was trying to think of an excuse to talk to him when the phone on her desk rang.

She picked it up. “Judy Maddox.”

The operator said: “A call for you from Ricky Granger.”

“Trace it!” she snapped. It would take the operator only seconds to contact Pacific Bell’s twenty-four-hour security center. She waved at Cleever and Marsh, indicating that they should listen.

“You got it,” the operator said. “Shall I connect you or leave him on hold?”

“Put him on. Tape the call.” There was a click. “Judy Maddox here.”

A male voice said: “You’re smart, Agent Maddox. But are you smart enough to make the governor see sense?”

He sounded irate, frustrated. Judy imagined a man of about fifty, thin, badly dressed, but accustomed to being listened to. He was losing his grip on life and feeling resentful, she speculated.

She said: “Am I speaking to Ricky Granger?”

“You know who you’re speaking to. Why are they forcing me to cause another earthquake?”

“Forcing
you? Are you kidding yourself that all this is someone
else’s
fault?”

This seemed to make him angrier. “It’s not me who’s using more and more electric power every year,” he said. “I don’t want more power plants. I don’t use electricity.”

“You don’t?”
Really?
“So what’s powering your phone—steam?”
A cult that doesn’t use electricity. That’s a clue
. While she taunted him, she was trying to figure out what this meant.
But where are they?

“Don’t fuck with me, Judy. You’re the one that’s in trouble.”

Next to her, Charlie’s phone rang. He snatched it up and wrote in large letters on his notepad: “Pay phone—Oakland—I-980 & I-580—Texaco.”

“We’re all in trouble, Ricky,” she said in a more reasonable voice. Charlie went to the map on the wall. She heard him say the word “roadblocks.”

“Your voice changed,” Granger said suspiciously. “What happened?”

Judy felt out of her depth. She had no special training in negotiating skills. All she knew was that she had to keep him on the phone. “I suddenly thought what a catastrophe there will be if you and I don’t manage to come to some agreement,” she said.

She could hear Charlie giving urgent orders in a low voice: “Call the Oakland PD, Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and the California Highway Patrol.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” Granger said. “Have you traced this call already? Jeez, that was fast. Are you trying to keep me on the line while your SWAT team comes after me? Forget it! I got a hundred and fifty ways out of here!”

“But only one way out of the jam you’re in.”

“It’s past midnight,” he said. “Your time is up. I’m going to cause another earthquake, and there’s not one damn thing you can do to stop me.” He hung up.

Judy slammed down the phone. “Let’s go, Charlie!” She ripped the E-fit picture of Granger off the subject board and ran outside. The helicopter was waiting on the parade ground, its rotors turning. She jumped in, with Charlie close behind.

As they took off, he put on headphones and motioned to her to do the same. “I figure it’ll take twenty minutes to get the roadblocks in place,” he said. “Assume he’s driving at sixty, to avoid being stopped for speeding, he could be twenty miles away by the time we’re ready for him. So I’ve ordered the major freeways closed in a twenty-five-mile radius.”