'Yeah,' Fogerty said. 'You know, I miss Georgetown. It might be nice to be back.'
They watched him head off down a white-walled corridor.
'You did well in there, Wagner,' Levine said. 'I think he liked you.'
'I would have appreciated being told about the subject matter, sir. In particular the radiation.'
'Got to learn to duck and weave in this business. That right, Barnside?'
Barnside looked at her and smiled coldly. He was a big, fair-haired man, with the hard, strong physique of a football player, and no niceties at all. Barnside called it how he saw it, and if that meant he came across as charmless and aggressive, he really didn't give a damn. She could understand his rise through the Agency. He was smart, dedicated, and hard-working, with no private life that anyone got around to talking about. Just a bright provincial boy from Arizona who rose through the ranks.
'For what it's worth, Wagner,' Barnside said, 'I think that solar thing is a crock of shit. Not that I have your impeccable science background to prove it. You want my guess? Someone sneaked some nuclear device onto one of these planes. You wait and see. Occam's razor. Simple explanations. Bombs and bullets. It usually comes down to one or the other.'
'In that case,' she said, 'it's over to you boys in Operations, and S&T can go back to peering into test tubes.'
'Now, wouldn't that be peachy?' Barnside grunted.
CHAPTER 13
Time Past
It was early on a beautiful evening in Mallorca and Michael Lieberman was slowly acquiring the idea that it was to be one of the strangest of his life. A few hours before, he'd been staring at the screen trying to make sense of the crazy solar activity figures that were coming down the line. Then the news flash came up on the monitor, intruded into everything without being asked, and suddenly it was as if this remote Spanish mansion were hooked into the feverish nervous system of the Washington machine. Phones rang, people looked devastated, and there was a fever in the air that said this was about more than just the news itself, somehow the happenings in the sky had intruded right into their lives.
He looked through the big glass window at the back of the room and stared at the giant illuminated LCD map of the world set on the main wall of the control centre. It was one of those neat ones that painted day and night on the relevant parts, moving with the path of the sun and its elevation in the sky. The universal time was marked in UTC — which he still liked to think of as Greenwich Mean Time — in the corner. You could almost see the summer solstice approaching. The high point of noon was reaching the East Coast of America. A huge curving sweep of daylight, shaped like a breast pointing downward, ran from the North Pole, now in permanent sun, down through the East Coast of North America, through the Caribbean, south past the tip of Tierra del Fuego, to the edge of the Antarctic, where the sun never rose at this time of the year.
This was that ever-moving object midday, where the sun was at its highest, casting its brightness on the greater part of the world. On either side sat, to the right, approaching night, and to the left, rising morning. Darkness was sweeping across Australia, all of Asia, and the south-eastern foot of Africa, fast approaching the farthest tip of the Mediterranean. On the West Coast of America it was ten AM. A fine time to be sitting on the beach in Half Moon Bay, he thought. At least it ought to be, if the sun hadn't been so damn strong of late that you wondered what it was doing to your skin as you sat there watching the slow, strong swell of the Pacific.
He walked out of the room, racking his head for some explanation. People didn't die like this, presidents in particular. The air was still full of heat outside. He walked over to the old stone wall that ran along the cliff edge, parked himself there, watched the motion of the waves, the way the gulls moved on the currents of wind blowing off the ocean. There was a shadow next to him and he wished he could have summoned up the courage to ask her to go somewhere else. Mo Sinclair sat down beside him, unasked, and tossed a pebble over the wall, watched it make a tiny white dot of surf in the clear blue water a couple of hundred feet below.
'You look like a man about to resume smoking after a hitherto acceptable absence,' she said.
He gave her a sickly grin. His head was spinning. He didn't feel up to this.
'It's like the Kennedy thing, I guess,' he replied eventually. T was too young for that. Just. But I know what they mean now. And I wish I was thinking about the other people more. It wasn't just Rollinson. There were hundreds of them.'
'I know,' she said.
'It gets you the same way?'
She nodded. 'He's the icon, Michael.' She shrugged. 'His death makes it all real to us.'
'Right.'
She watched the smart, troubled face gaze out into the blue emptiness of the sea and wondered why he seemed to take this so personally.
'There's more to all this, Mo. You understand that?'
'How can there be?'
He shook his head violently. 'There is more to this. These plane crashes. Why we're here. Some of this craziness I do get. The instability of the weather, we know where a lot of that is coming from. The solar cycle. The crap we're getting from the flares right now. But…'
He watched a shining white seabird dive down the face of the cliff and disappear beneath the waves, waited for it to re-emerge, and knew he could never predict the point at which it would break surface.
'But we don't know. Give them time.'
'Yeah,' he said, and flashed a look at her she didn't understand. 'We really are overloaded with that here now, aren't we?'
She felt it was time to change the subject. 'You weren't always doing this, were you, Michael? I remember you said something to Annie. About designing satellites or something?'
'Oh yes.' The bird reappeared on the surface, something silver and wriggling in its beak, and true to form it was nowhere near where he expected. 'You ever hear of SPS?'
'No.' She looked puzzled. 'Should I?'
'Probably not. You're a little young for that particular dream.'
He shuffled on the uncomfortable stone wall and wondered why he was digging out this particular sheaf of bad memories right then.
'I'm waiting,' she said.
'SPS stood — no, stands — for solar-powered satellite. Back in the seventies, when everyone thought that the oil would run out before long and we desperately needed some alternative to carbon-based fuels, it was quite the theoretical thing.'
Mo smiled. 'I've heard of solar power. I thought it didn't really work.'
'Not on earth. Too costly, too inefficient, although those things may change. What won't change is the weather. You get clouds, you lose the throughput. Plain fact.'
She looked at the perfect day.
'It would work just fine here.'
'Yeah, but here's not where you need all those millions of watts of electricity. Try Detroit. Or Osaka. Not so good.'
'So?'
'So you collect it with a satellite. You put something with huge collection wings into orbit, pick up the juice, beam it back to the earth in the form of microwaves, and close down all the nuclear power plants, stop burning carbon.'
'Wouldn't that be dangerous?'
'You mean, do we get the fiendish death ray from the sky? Not at all. All of this was provable in theory by the early seventies. Just theory, mind. It took a bright, inquiring, optimistic mind to turn that into some kind of fact, design the satellite itself, come up with some costings to get it into space.'
She placed a hand gently on his shoulder. 'This wouldn't, by any chance, happen to be you?'
'No.' He looked offended. 'Do I come across as that arrogant?'