Solstice

'Any particular reason for ruling them out?' Helen asked.

'The Libyans and the Iraqis have got the wherewithal to do something like this, Miss Wagner. I don't understand how a bunch of tree-huggers can hope to achieve the same. What's their means? You want my opinion? It must have been a bomb at altitude.'

Helen watched the way Levine and Barnside were shifting in their chairs, and wondered what was going through their heads.

'Bombs in two planes simultaneously, sir?' she asked.

Fogerty stared at her through owlish, tortoiseshell glasses.

'You have a better explanation, young lady?'

She smiled at him, thought that if someone else gave her the young lady routine she might go crazy, and said, 'Not right now, sir. These ecoterrorists: Did they give a name?'

'The Children of Gaia.'

'Ah,' she said, and nodded. 'Gaia. That's kind of a nature figure, I think.'

'Gaia, my dear,' Fogerty said, adopting his professor pose to the full, 'in Greek mythology was the Mother Earth, the daughter of Chaos, from which all creation sprang. There are modern beliefs — cults, if you would have them — which translate Gaia into meaning some kind of spirit of the earth within the universe, as if the planet itself was some kind of living entity in the solar system. Some think this spirit will rise to protect the earth from the damage we seem to be inflicting upon it. I think there are a good many quite respectable, if cranky, tree-huggers who follow this line, and doubtless a few crazies too. The crazies may well be capable of some such thing as Oklahoma. We all know that kind of act takes little in the way of organization and technology. Bringing down Air Force One over central Russia isn't something you can achieve with sacks of fertilizer and a homemade fuse.'

Helen listened in silence. For all his intellect, Fogerty clearly wasn't a man to waver from a fixed view of the situation.

Levine shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He needed a cigarette, she thought. It was written all over his sallow features.

'There is one other possibility,' Levine said. 'Which is why, in fact, I asked you here, Wagner.'

'Sir?' she said, thinking she could learn to hate this bastard a lot if he made a habit of leading her blind into heavyweight sessions like this.

'The sun thing, for chrissake. You read the papers, don't you?'

'Right'

Don't bluff, think fast, Helen counselled herself. That's what Belinda taught you.

'So,' Levine continued. 'You're the scientist. Can there be a link?'

Nice guy, she thought. Asking her to paraphrase an entire branch of astrophysics in a sentence, and one that people were only just beginning to understand in any case.

'It seems unlikely,' she said. 'It's no secret that we are about to be engulfed by a major solar storm. That happens every eleven years or so, and we usually experience some effects, such as the breakdown of power grids, the loss of telecommunications systems. We know the sunspot cycle is erratic right now. We know that the planetary alignment is disturbing it and altering a broad spectrum of solar radiation and other waveforms on the earth. None of this is new, though this time around their frequency and geographical spread are more diverse than anything we've seen before. That, I suspect, gives you your answer. If there was evidence that the force of the solar intrusions was increasing, and not just the frequency, then I think there is a possibility that the incident had its cause in some related activity. But we have no proof of that, or that airplanes have been affected by this kind of problem before.'

'No?' Fogerty asked, eyes wide behind his glasses. 'We still don't know what really brought down TWA 800. There's a whole host of unexplained plane crashes in the books.'

'But do they match up with the solar cycle, sir? I doubt it. Someone would have made the connection before. There's really no evidence that we are in for much else from this solar storm except some severe telecommunications disruption and an enhancing of the process of climate change, something we have been helping along ourselves in any case. I'm not saying it may not be painful, and it's a fact that disaster response teams around the world are on low alert. But it's not an intelligence issue, surely.'

'Really?' Levine grunted. 'Then how do you explain the fact that the Russian ground team that's there already reports the wreckage they've found is hot? Radioactive. I got them wiring back to us asking for safety equipment.'

Helen gritted her teeth.

'Since I was unaware of that fact until you mentioned it, sir, I can't explain it. When you pass me the file I will happily work on that information.'

'Makes more damn sense than Greek gods,' Barnside mumbled.

Tim Clarke looked at his watch. 'I want an hourly update on this. From all of you. If there is clear evidence of terrorist activity, I want to hear it from you people first, not CNN. And the same goes for any other theories. As far as the press is concerned, this is an inflight tragedy. Graeme, you go see the publicity people. I want the tone of this broadcast right. Let's focus on the loss of a President, not something we still can't put a finger on.'

'Sir,' Burnley said, and disappeared out the door.

Clarke looked at them all. 'You guys work together on this one. I know how you people like the odd border war now and then. This is bigger than all that. You understand me?'

'We both have clear-cut mandates, and we know where they're drawn, Mr President,' Fogerty said, smiling.

'Yeah, you make sure you do. And Miss Wagner?'

He was looking hard at her. She wondered what was going on in his mind.

'Sir?'

'Pursue every angle on this. Every one.'

Then the meeting was over. Clarke rose from the table, stared at each of them, and turned to leave.

'Mr President?' Fogerty said.

'Mr Fogerty?' Clarke replied at the door.

'I don't have the right words to say this, sir. To become President is an honour, probably the greatest any man can hope for. And to win that prize this way must be one of the oddest feelings on earth.'

'You can say that again, mister,' Clarke replied quietly.

'What I wanted to say was, you are the President now. There's nothing to qualify that. And I, along with everyone here, wish you well in the job. For all our sakes.'

'Thank you for that,' Clarke said, peering at him. 'I appreciate it.'

Then he was gone.

Five minutes later, outside in the corridor, on the way to the car lot, Fogerty smiled at Levine and said, 'You were pushing it in there, Ben. This guy's ex-Army. He likes to think you care. He also happens to be the President now. He deserves our respect.'

'Clinton appointed me,' Levine grunted. 'I'm just one more white Democratic appointee who gets his ass kicked out of the way once Clarke gets his feet under the table. You watch, we're in the same boat. Besides, this is just for show under the circumstances. A couple of hours from now he'll feel the weight of all that good old White House paper bearing down on him and sit back into the job. Shame, really. I'd hoped we'd have someone in that job who didn't shake when the wind started to blow a little hard. As for the respect thing, Dan, hell, you know as well as I do, no one deserves it. You earn it, that's all.'

Helen marched one pace behind the three men, staring at the wallpaper, wishing she wasn't hearing this.

'He'll make a good President,' Fogerty said. 'He'll earn your respect. Don't you worry. Not my politics, that's true. A hell of a way to get the job, though. Particularly if you're black.'

Fogerty stopped at the front desk and stared at them. 'I got someone else to see before I go, Ben. You heard what the man said on this. No range wars.'

Levine smiled and pulled out a pack of Winstons from his pocket, started to play with them, waiting for the moment he could light one outside. 'Cross my heart. And hope to die.'