The War of Immensities (28 page)

She wondered if
she should have been shocked. Obviously, he was trying to shock
her. But instead she could smile. “I sure ain’t never been averse
to immortality, Lover.”

“Then we better
get your man over and start working on the details.”

Much to his
discomfort, everything was running so smoothly that when Barney
Touhey rang and said he had the good dope on Harley Thyssen, Joe
Solomon felt a severe pang of guilt. By that time, about half of
his daily workload was taken up with the Project Earthshaker
accounts. There was a credit understanding with the Chase Manhattan
and he needed only to forward the bills as they arrived and soon
cheques returned for his signature and dispatch. All costs, no
matter how great, seemed to fall without a murmur into the black
hole of that account. Well, not quite. Indeed, it almost came as a
relief when one of them came back with a query. Looking it over,
Solomon was surprised that he had accepted it himself, even though
he had been a participant in the expenditure. Was it true, the bank
wondered, that a chartered USAF Boeing 707 had flown
Melbourne—Darwin—Melbourne to absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
Apparently the crew had grumbled about the pointlessness of the
flight.

So had all the
others. In fact Darwin had just been a refuelling stop on the way
out and the passengers had been allowed no further than a guarded
transit lounge. The actual destination had been a point over the
Pacific Ocean five hundred kilometres east of the Philippine island
of Mindanao, where the plane had circled while its passengers
agreed that this was the place.

“It’s like a
religious trek,” Lorna Simmons said. “We’d be pilgrims if we had
somewhere to pilgrim to.”

But it wasn’t
funny at the time. A twenty hour flight to nowhere and back was
assured to induce grumpy moods and they collectively confronted
Thyssen about it when he met them at the airport. It was as
effective as all protests were with him—he took the wind out of
their sails by admitting that, yes, it was all his fault, that he
had known where they were going, that it was a waste of time.

“What bloody
drongo came up with this plan,” Brian Carrick muttered, looking
Thyssen right in the eye.

“I just thought
you’d be more comfortable at the focal point,” Thyssen said. “We
would probably have had to sedate you, had we tried to keep you in
Melbourne.”

“That’s not the
thing to say to a bunch of people at their wit’s end from lack of
sleep,” Felicity pointed out.

Thyssen could
not have looked more miserable. “Well, let’s look on the bright
side. We did get the precise co-ordinates of the focal point—that
might be useful later on. And we did prove that you all lost
interest in the focal point at the very moment Erebus blew. So we
gained a great deal.”

“Hardly worth a
good night’s sleep,” Lorna grumbled.

Thyssen smiled
at her. “Yes, and one other thing. Pilgrims. I like that. I think
from now on we will call you pilgrims, to distinguish you from
those sleepers who are still comatose.”

Lorna beamed a
big smile and gave a little bow.

“Better than
bein’ called fuckin’ lemmings,” Brian Carrick muttered as they
walked away.

But that was
Thyssen—always able to charm his way out of anything. Joe Solomon
would have preferred to keep an open mind but how could he when the
man was so bloody likeable. But, in any case, Barney Touhey who
turned up in his office next morning, carrying a video cassette and
a thick file of documents. He dropped the file on Joe’s desk with a
heavy thump. Joe regarded it grimly.

“I need to read
all that?”

“No. That’s
just the supporting evidence,” Barney smiled. “Mostly, we have it
all here on video.”

He waved the
cassette and Joe indicated the video player set in the bookcase
opposite his desk.

“You’re not
going to like it. He’s one of the good guys.”

“That doesn’t
exactly make me unhappy.”

Barney plugged
the cassette in, fast forwarded to the right place, then put it on
pause.

“Open the file
to the first page. You’ll see his real name is completely
unpronounceable.”

“Harrandel
Thöesen Heuwenstrepp,” Joe Solomon attempted, with a pause between
most syllables. “I can understand why he changed it.”

“He didn’t,
apparently. That was done at a refugee camp in USA when he first
arrived there. Born in Holmestrand, Norway, 1941. Mother was
Jewish, apparently. Parents fled the Nazis to New York but were
interned until the end of the war. They returned in 1947 to a small
place named Lavik in the fjords of Norway, but little Harley was
entitled to a US passport, which he has never claimed
apparently.”

“An un-American
American?”

Barney ignored
the heckler. “Educated in sciences in Bergen and graduated first
class honours in geology from University of Oslo, 1965. Post grad
in Hawaii, specialising in volcanoes. Wrote some sort of
ground-breaking paper on gas pressures in fumaroles, which is in
the file if you are interested.”

“Was the pun
intended?”

Barney looked a
little puzzled. He pressed the play button. “He was a tutor at
Berkeley in California at the time of the student riots protesting
the Vietnam war, but he sided with the students and became very
politically active at the time.”

“How
active?”

“Arrested seven
times. Fired from the staff but by then was travelling as a sort of
professional student protester.”

“No friend of
the CIA, then?”

The video was
running. At times, a slim gangly man with flowing hair and beard
appeared, looking half-stoned most of the time.

“Apparently
not. He got fired from three lectureships at three different
universities throughout that time. Even UCLA. Finally, no
university would touch him. In 1972, National Geographic took him
on to do a series on the world’s active volcanoes. The work he did
then established his early fame as a vulcanologist—no one else
could get so close to eruptions as he did. He seemed to have an
uncanny sense of where and when major eruptions would occur.”

“A talent that
seems to have deserted him now. His predictions have been
woeful.”

“No man is ever
quite as good nor as bad as his reputation,” Barney smiled.

On the screen,
volcanoes were blasting and lava was flowing, buildings were
falling, the earth was opening. Solomon had seen most of it before
at various times. They were amongst the great early images of
volcanoes.

“All of the
film you are watching now was taken by Thyssen at different times.
But we don’t see the man himself again until 1974, when still no
university would touch him and so Greenpeace snapped him up.”

Now the scenes
were of spray-swept Zodiacs tormenting whaling ships and
challenging French destroyers and Thyssen, bulkier but all muscle,
hair and beard trimmed along ancient warrior lines, looking fierce,
usually in a wetsuit.

“For the next
six years, he’s one of the top Rainbow Warriors, in where the
action is thickest, picking fights with French paratroopers on
nuclear bomb sites, riding the bow-wave of US nuclear warships,
chained up in front of all sorts of dangerous machinery—that sort
of thing.”

Muscle-bound,
teeth-gritted Harley grappling policemen and shoving whalers
around—the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the Green movement. And then
all smiles with his arm about a lovely woman, in matching wet suits
on a ship in bleak seas.

“Met and
married Karla Ann Somers at the time—fellow Greenpeace hardliner,
two children. Elmore lives in France, married, works for the Lyon
Transport Authority. Katrina is an Anthropology student, presently
working somewhere in Peru.”

Now the wild
man was replaced by more serene images of a comfortable family in
suburban surroundings as the children grew older. The beard became
very neat, the muscles diminished and the waistline expanded and
the wetsuit was replaced by a suit and tie with aplomb, or else
smart casuals.

“They quit
Greenpeace in 1980 and settled in Washington where Thyssen became a
major lobbyist for the Green movement. No politician dared close
their door to him in those days. Every Congressman and Senator
wanted to be seen as his friend. With Greenpeace, he made prominent
friends right around the world. As a lobbyist, he’s owed favours by
everyone in Washington. And that is how he gets things done.”

“That’s Harley.
Everybody’s friend.”

There were a
series of pictures of Thyssen with famous people—Jacques Cousteau,
Richard Nixon, Jackie O, Carl Sagan, Jane Fonda, Sadam Hussein,
Paul Ehrlich, others Joe knew he should have been able to
recognise.

“Yep. For all
that trouble and conflict and controversy, he seems to be the best
buddy of just about everyone who matters and doesn’t have an enemy
anywhere, outside France.”

Joe Solomon
laughed. “Yes. If you’d met him, you’d understand why. He has a
jovial way of being humble and commanding absolute authority
simultaneously. He has an aura of great knowledge and strength and
he gives it to you straight and simple, no bullshit. He allows
everyone, even lowly underlings, to ridicule him openly, admits his
every little mistake, seeks your opinion and makes you feel really
important by taking it seriously, no matter how silly it might be,
and the result is that you feel desperate to get the chance to do
whatever he wants. He’s kinda like God if God was a good bloke
instead of being a complete arsehole.”

“You seem very
impressed by him, Joe.”

“I would be if
I wasn’t so bloody scared of him. I just hope to hell we’re on the
same side.”

“Well,
according to all this, you are.”

“Yeah. That’s
what bothers me. He’s too much a good guy.”

“Not
completely. We’ll come to that. May I continue—there’s not much
more.”

“Go on.”

Now on the
video, the volcanoes roared again, this time more intense video
images.

“Then he got
bored with Washington life, whereas his wife was deeply into it. He
ran off, chasing volcanoes again, getting closer and closer than
anyone had before. He was after chemical changes in the magma
itself prior to eruptions with a view to predicting outcomes. Very
dangerous. The papers he wrote were all the rage in volcanoland. It
took him to the top spot in the discipline and, when he discovered
his wife’s illness, took the Chair of Earth Sciences at MIT, in
1992, where he still is. Karla died of uterine cancer in 1993, aged
41. He seems to have little contact with his children these
days.”

The woman in
the hospital bed was smiling, and still very beautiful despite the
obvious ravages of the disease.

“Wow,” Joe
Solomon said.

The video began
to provide images of Thyssen matching those familiar these days,
the shabby lumber-jack outfits, unruly hair, an obesity that ought
to have been ponderous carried lightly on massive legs.

“That’s the
good news over with. Ready for the bad?” Barney said slyly.

“How can there
be bad news after that?”

“I have an old
CIA contact—John Cornelius—who is very interested in all this. He
even wants to come here and suss it all out for himself.”

“What does he
think?”

“That Thyssen
gets whatever he wants from the US Government because his work has
weapons applications.”

“Oh really? Do
you have any evidence of this?”

“I’m just the
messenger. But Cornelius is serious. He said he’d like to make
contact with you some time in the future to discuss it.”

Solomon was
surprised to find himself saddened. Within him he felt the spike of
a loyalty to Thyssen that he would liked to have denied but could
not.

“So?” Barney
asked.

“So what?”

“Can I tell
Cornelius that you want to talk with him?”

“Are you
certain of his credentials?”

“Absolutely. A
trustworthy CIA veteran.”

“Isn’t that an
oxymoron?”

But he was
stalling, and he knew it. He almost flinched with pain as the spike
was withdrawn. It was the sadness he often knew in court, when the
fine ideals of justice once more fell to tawdry pragmatism. But the
other thing he also knew was that Harley Thyssen was far too good
to be true. While Barney was still trying to puzzle out the joke,
he said.

“Yes. Tell him
it will be okay.”

Immediately
upon their return from the pointless flight to the Philippines,
Thyssen had taken Kevin aside for what was obviously a formal
chat.

“You used to
run a security company in San Diego, Kevin?”

Thyssen, of
course, thought he knew everything.

“Not exactly.
It was a fire-fighting equipment company. Therefore alarm systems.
Security crept in as an optional extra.”

“Still, you
have some experience of the matter.”

“Some.”

“I want you to
take charge of security for Project Earthshaker.”

“Surely the
military...”

“That is
exactly what I want to avoid. I don’t want us to be beholden to
government at any level. Which means we must make our own security
arrangements.”

“Look, it does
sound interesting, Prof, but I’ve just established myself a nice
lifestyle in Sydney and I’d like to get back to it.”

“It’ll pay very
well. There will be a formal contract...”

“I don’t need
money.”

Thyssen
scratched his nose. Plainly he wasn’t expecting to be turned down.
It was nice to see him off-guard for a change.

“Give me a
chance to interest you,” Thyssen said carefully. “If my
expectations are even slightly right, Project Earthshaker is going
to expand, very rapidly. I anticipate further outbreaks, large
numbers of sleepers all around the world, very broad research
operations, large scale logistics. All of which needs to be secured
against all manner of threats.”