On the opposite side of the drab street a small crowd had gathered in front of an appliance store. It was weird to see people bunched together like that in this drowsy little town. That store must be having a hell of a sale. Not having anything in particular to do, he wandered over to see what was going on.
The crowd seemed to be standing in shocked stillness, watching a scene playing out on a dozen televisions at once. Andrew’s first thought was that it had to be some kind of big-budget Hollywood movie, the kind with incredible special effects, because, well, those screens all showed what appeared to be a huge glassy wave standing upright under the Golden Gate Bridge. That couldn’t be real, simply. But if this was a movie, it was awfully slow paced. The wave fluttered and swayed near its summit, but other than that it didn’t seem to move much. A crowd of people pressed against the bridge’s railings, staring down, backed by rows of cars that weren’t going anywhere either.
There was no sound through the window, but a news ticker scrolled relentlessly along the bottom of the screen: “San Francisco’s standing tsunami, now at hour six. The wave appeared at 3:28 this morning, accompanied by unexplained music. Police have been attempting to evacuate the bridge, but they are meeting with resistance from the crowd. We are awaiting further reports.”
“Is that some kind of joke?” Andrew asked. For some reason, the lingering music that always throbbed on in his head seemed to be getting a little louder. The mermaids’ songs he’d heard that time had made him pass out; it was something about the unbearable way that Luce’s voice had dueled with the strange mermaid’s. But didn’t this look a bit like something he remembered from the moment before he’d lost consciousness?
“It’s real,” a big gray-haired woman said sadly. She didn’t turn her eyes from the screen as she spoke. “It’s real, but nobody knows what’s going on. There was some talk about a lot of people spotted down there in the water, but that doesn’t stand to reason either.”
“Sure doesn’t,” he told her. Unless whoever was in the water weren’t people, or anyway not people in the strict sense of the word.
He had only a few dollars left and he wasn’t about to shame himself by calling Kathleen collect. But he absolutely had to talk to her about this, right away. He had to know what she thought, and as he walked briskly away to hunt for a pay phone, an imaginary conversation was already playing in his mind: “You’re seeing this, Kath? You think that’s them? It’s got to be. I’ve got to get down there!”
And then the words he knew he couldn’t say: “You should come with me. Please come with me. I know I ain’t done right so far with my life, but now . . .”
“Now,” he murmured to himself. It had gotten pretty hard to find pay phones since everybody had a cell these days, but there was one behind the plate glass of that Laundromat down the way. He broke into a run, praying that the lousy thing wasn’t busted and scrounging through all his pockets for quarters.
It wasn’t Kathleen who finally answered, though. “It’s you,” Nick said with rough hostility. “You’ll be proud to hear how meeting you has worked out for Kathleen. A thirty-nine year-old woman with everything to live for doesn’t drown herself that way out of nowhere!”
Andrew couldn’t understand what Nick was talking about.
Who had drowned?
Ben Ellison spent the night trying to pack up his office as calmly as possible. After twenty-three years of devoted service to the FBI, it was hard to accept that he deserved to be fired so abruptly. Heaps of papers slid from the desk and cascaded onto the floor in terrible confusion. Only the images streaming live from his laptop provided any real satisfaction. The government’s efforts to keep Operation Odysseus secret—to keep the very existence of the mermaids secret—had evidently come to a dramatic end. The media was going to be bombarding the White House with impossible questions now. Reporters would strike out and investigate on their own, too. There was no way Moreland would get through this debacle unscathed.
Ellison had been kept in the dark about the maneuvers of the previous night, but it seemed clear from the helicopter gunships wheeling in disorder above the bridge that there had been a major assault on the mermaids. It was also apparent that the attack had failed in spectacular fashion. Looking at that wall of water gleaming in the morning light, Ellison knew he didn’t owe Dorian the promised phone call. Lucette Korchak was alive and free and wreaking havoc.
Ellison observed with relief that these mermaids obviously weren’t trying to kill anyone. A vast crowd of easy victims lined the bridge, mouths agape and eyes staring. This Luce seemed to be too media-savvy—or possibly, possibly she was actually too good-hearted—to allow the mermaids with her to sing all those awed, defenseless humans to their doom. And that was precisely the kind of move on her part that Moreland would have no idea how to handle. It was utterly unpredictable, bold and daring and brilliant.
Bone-tired as he was, Ellison couldn’t keep a hard, brutal grin off his face.
Whose side was he on, anyway?
Dorian woke up to Theo shaking his shoulder. “Sorry to bother you before noon, good sir, but the world is ending.”
Theo’s tone was ironic enough that Dorian didn’t immediately feel worried. “Yeah? Somebody release a herd of stampeding dinosaurs or something?”
“Tsunami. Epic scale. If you can call it a tsunami when it just stands there. In San Francisco.”
That made Dorian sit up abruptly, his heart quickening with hope. In the next moment he realized how absurd his idea was. Luce’s ability to control water with her voice was impressive, but he was fairly sure she couldn’t do that. “How big is it?”
“That’s what you want to know?” Theo laughed. “Not something reasonable? Like, oh, ‘How the fuck is that possible?’ It’s big enough to block off everything under the Golden Gate Bridge, is how big it is.”
Dorian was halfway out of bed, hauling on the jeans he’d dropped on the floor the night before.
“It’s on the news?” Dorian was groping for a T-shirt. There was one around somewhere.
“I know it’s crazy, but the media does seem to be finding the event rather noteworthy, yeah. My mom can’t even talk straight, she’s so shocked.”
Dorian was dressed and on his feet, stumbling after Theo down to the den, where Amanda Margulies sat on the green leather sofa in her yoga clothes. She was clutching a cup of coffee with a veil of cold scum on its surface, and drying tears streaked her face. Theo sat down next to his mother and hugged her warmly.
Dorian stared at the huge TV screen: on it there appeared a wall of bright water with fluted, faintly pulsating sides. The delicate rust red curves of the Golden Gate Bridge swanned above the unmoving wave, and in the background he could see the open ocean. Cordons of police boats were keeping a good distance from the bridge, shooing back the various sailboats and kayaks that jostled forward, trying to get closer to the action. And, above the clatter of gathered helicopters and the excited babble of the newscasters, there was a distinct musical thrum, sweet and immense and enthralling . . .
Dorian realized that the music was very much like something he’d heard before, except this sound was incomparably vaster and more complex: a rich, nuanced swell that could only be hundreds of magical voices thrilling together.
“What are those people doing?” Dorian suddenly asked. At the edge of the crowded bridge, a news crew was engaging in some kind of fussy activity involving ropes and pulleys. Whatever they were up to, it looked like a bad idea.