There was a sudden flash of green.
It was not the green flash of the kind seen at sunset in Key West and other resort spots, and it was not a firework burst. This was soft, deeper, and it seemed to pulse upward from beneath the rolling waters, as if a great light bulb was turned quickly on and off, there and gone.
“Beautiful…,” breathed Ari as he grabbed his crotch and gave it a squeeze.
“Here it comes,” said Valen. His own emotions were hovering between dread and excitement. They had never tried the machine out like this before. Gadyuka and the senior party members needed proof that the millions of dollars invested were going to pay off. They wanted proof. They wanted headlines. Valen was sure they would get at least that much.
The sea suddenly changed. It wasn’t another flash of green. Instead, the sea seemed to darken as if tons of octopus ink had been discharged into the waters, and there was a strange stillness that lasted nearly a full minute. Then the seabirds all launched themselves off the gently rolling waves and into the air, crying out in alarm as they rose high, fleeing from sea and land for the protection of the empty air.
Valen picked up a pair of binoculars, adjusted the focus, and studied the water and the beach. The same agitation as on the surface of his champagne was stirring the waters between their boat and the shoreline, except everything was on a massive scale. The rollers disintegrated into tens of thousands of spiky wavelets which grew and grew, spitting seawater up at the flawless blue sky. On the beach the sand rippled, too. Slowly at first, and then in shivering waves that seemed to march from the waterline up the beach to the rows of trees and shrubs that separated the tourist beaches from the rocks. People were getting to their feet, standing by their beach chairs or on their blankets. Dozens stood in the shallows, with the water dancing erratically around them.
“This is going to be big,” said Ari, and despite his growing horror at what they were doing, Valen felt his pulse jump.
Suddenly the sandy beach seemed to explode as geysers of water and sand leapt up and showered the tourists. It was impossible to hear the screams two miles out, but he could see the open mouths, the panic in body language. People running or caught in frozen moments of shocked indecision.
“Ni-i-i-ice,” said Ari, drawing it out.
“The computer models were right,” said Valen. “Right to the damn minute.”
Valen turned the gain on his hearing aid to full. The sound was there, rolling over the waves toward them. A soft, deep, growing growl, as if the earth itself was being awakened from a long sleep and was not at all happy about it.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked Ari. “Look at the frigging hotel. You can hear it come apart.”
It was true. The fa çade of the big building looked for a moment like an image painted on a screen that was rippling in a variable breeze. Then the big picture windows on the first floor exploded as the frames twisted out of shape. Glass blew outward in glittering clouds. Valen flinched as people fell, slashed to red ribbons. Others staggered awkwardly away, clutching at faces, covering their blinded eyes, trying to slap at their bodies as if the stings they felt were nothing more than biting insects. One woman carrying a baby suddenly caved over it as if she could protect it, but a chunk of masonry leaned out from the cracked wall and crushed her flat.
Valen closed his eyes. Distance was the only buffer for him. He could not hear their cries, or the crunch of their bones. He could not smell their blood. He had no animus toward the people of Valparaiso, and he hoped mother and child had died quickly. He gagged and tasted bile burning the back of his throat. More deaths. More ghosts. So many more this time. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Dead because of him.
They are not my people, he told himself. They’re not Russian . They’re not Communists. They were not …
The word “human” floated to the top of his mind, and he gagged. They were innocents, caught in the unforgiving gears of politics and war. Bad things happen even to good people, and Valen tried to convince himself of the reality of Hobbes’s eloquent quote that life outside of society was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This destruction was a patriotic choice. This was war, even if the lunkheads in the West thought the war had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As if. No, the war had never ended, and these people were unfortunate casualties of that conflict. Collateral damage.
The rationalization worked for nearly five seconds. But it, too, crumbled.
I am a monster . He opened his eyes and forced himself to witness his own crimes. The rumbling continued as balconies broke from other hotels and collapsed onto the patios. Valen reached up and turned his hearing aid down.
“Fuuuuuuck,” howled Ari, drawing it out, pointing at the catastrophe. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”
“Yes,” said Valen weakly, “I saw it.”
“Christ, I want to take this moment, bend it over the rail, and fuck it up the ass. That’s what I want to do.” Ari was rubbing his crotch and it was clear he had an enormous erection. Then he grabbed for the bottle and refilled their glasses as if more booze would help the moment hurry along. “Come on, come on, come on…”
The rumble became a deeper growl and finally a full-throated roar. The whole hotel seemed to leap upward as if the entire structure, all 240 rooms, had abandoned its reliance on gravity, was trying to escape the moment and fly into the safety of the blue sky. Then it broke apart. Bang. Just like that. Masses of it jumped away from the central structure and collapsed across the beach. Dozens of people vanished beneath it, and the rest were swallowed by clouds of smoke, dust, and sand. The guts of the hotel were visible and Valen caught one moment of a woman standing naked beside her bed, one leg raised to step into a floral bathing suit, her eyes wide, mouth open in a silent Oh. And then the floor beneath her simply disintegrated into nothing and she was sucked down into the hungry teeth of concrete and structural steel. Valen was glad he could not hear screams at this distance.
The trees began falling then, because by now the earthquake was in full fury. They watched shock waves ripple through the hotel and along the cliffs, tearing it all apart. On either side of this hotel the competing resorts flew apart, and the mountain against which they were set shook itself like a wet dog. A massive avalanche of dirt, rocks, trees, and people hammered down onto the crumbling buildings. Valen wished he had Superman’s X-ray vision so he could look into the earth and see the process as the subduction zone interface between the Nazca and Pacific plates went to war with each other. He wanted to see the science so that he did not have to see the pain.
“Start the engine,” said Valen, and then had to shout it to jolt Ari out of whatever daydream of carnal carnage was playing out in his thoughts. “Hey! Are you deaf now? We need to get away from here.”
The Greek snapped out of it. “What? Oh, shit. Yes.”
Within a few short minutes they were far out to sea, chased by the echoes of the devastation.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
“Tell me fast, Doc,” I said. “Getting close to D.C.”
Ghost sat up beside me, staring at the lifelike 3-D image but unable to sniff anything. I dared not suggest a scratch-and-sniff upgrade to the Betty Boops, or Mike Harnick would install them.
“Okay,” said Doc, “we’ve been gathering intel since the Secret Service first ambushed you. Whoever sent them with the thought of hauling you in against your will was one fry short of a Happy Meal.”