—We therefore submit the question to the Philosophical Society.
Cover your six o’clock, as the chopper pilots said. Or, in the language of the marketplace, cover your ass.
Jessica Frazetta knew that there were two natural forces that could sneak up on her and wreck the Mississippi Valley, and her career along with it.
The first was flood. The second was earthquake.
Flood and the Corps of Engineers were old acquaintances. The Corps had been fighting the river since well before Colonel of Engineers Robert E. Lee, in the 1850s, had been sent to Missouri to prevent the Mississippi from crabbing sideways into Illinois and stranding St. Louis inland, a mission he had performed with his usual efficiency.
Practically all of the Corps’ efforts in the Mississippi went into controlling the water and keeping river navigation safe. It was to secure these goals that all the levees had been built, the dams, the locks, the revetments, the spillways. For these reasons the Corps had planted lights and buoys, dredged the harbors, charted the depths, pulled snags by the thousands from the bed of the river. But the second, far more dangerous threat was that of earthquake. Jessica knew that an earthquake of sufficient force could undo hundreds of years of the Corps’ efforts in an instant. The levees, the revetments, the dams, the spill-ways… all gone at once.
The Mississippi Valley’s last big earthquakes had occurred from 1811–12, when there were less than three thousand people of European descent living west of the Mississippi.
The world of those three thousand, and the thousands more Indians who lived in the area, was torn asunder by three major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks. The first of the quakes had been estimated as 8.7 on the Richter scale, the second-largest quake in all human history. Fifty thousand square miles were devastated, and millions more suffered damage. Fissures tore open every single acre of farmland. The Mississippi ran backward for a day. Islands vanished, while other islands were formed. Dry land submerged, and the bottoms of lakes and rivers rose dry into the sunlight. The Missouri town of New Madrid, where the quakes had been centered, had been destroyed, and the Mississippi rolled over the remains. The quakes were so powerful that they smashed crockery in Boston, caused panicked people to run into the streets in Charleston, rang church bells in Baltimore, and woke Thomas Jefferson from sleep at Monticello.
The New Madrid fault had remained active through much of the nineteenth century, providing the country an occasional jolt, but it had fallen quiet during the twentieth. And it was during the twentieth century, when memories of the quake had faded, that the Corps built most of its structures in the Mississippi Valley.
In the years since the New Madrid quakes of 1811–12, millions of people moved into the danger zone. Major cities, like St. Louis and Memphis, were built close to the fault, supported by a complex infrastructure of bridges, dams, reservoirs, power stations, highways, and airstrips, few of which had been built with earthquake in mind. Industries flourished: factories, chemical plants, and refineries had been built on the yielding soil of the Mississippi Delta. Billions of dollars in commerce moved up and down the river every year. Millions of acres of farmland, fertile as any in the world, stretched from the rivers, protected by man-made levees.
It had only been in recent decades, when geologists began to study the mid-continental faults, that the true scope of the danger was known. The New Madrid fault, and other faults beneath the Mississippi, were still seismically active, although the vast majority of its quakes were so small as to be undetectable by humans. To judge by historical precedent, a much larger and more destructive earthquake was inevitable.
If the faults should snap again, Jessica knew, millions of lives, and billions of dollars in property, were in jeopardy. The Corps had been striving to reengineer its public works so as to make them resistant to earthquake damage, but the procedure was far from complete.
In her briefcase, Jessica had the Corps’ earthquake plan, released in February 1998, as well as reports concerning the regular inspections of Corps facilities and reports relating to the floods in Iowa. The floodwaters would inevitably channel into the Mississippi from Iowa, and would inevitably test Corps structures farther south as they progressed to the Gulf.
Jessica looked at the stack of papers, at the heavy report.
The earthquake, she thought, was in the indefinite future. The floods were now. She put the earthquake plan back in her case.
She would deal with it when she had the time.
“I’ve got a proposition for you, Vince,” Charlie said, “and—I warn you—I am talking risk here.” Vincent Dearborne steepled his fingertips and looked at him with a little frown. His eyes, however, were not frowning, not frowning at all… Charlie could see a glimmer of interest, and the little lines around the eyes were smiling. Vincent Dearborne, Charlie knew, had been hoping that this moment would come.
“Tennessee Planters and Trust,” Dearborne said in his cultured Southern voice, “is, generally speaking, risk-averse.”
“I know, Vince,” said Charlie, and smiled with his white, dazzling, even, capped teeth. “But you’re not averse to taking a little flyer now and again. When I told you about those straddles two years ago, you backed my play.”
“Yes. And I wondered if doubling the bet was sound. But…” The glimmer in Dearborne’s eyes increased in candlepower. “You made us twenty-four million dollars.”
“Twenty-four million dollars in three days,” Charlie reminded.
“And almost gave me an ulcer.”
Charlie laughed. “You can’t fool me, guvnor. You can’t get an ulcer in three days.” Dearborne grinned and tilted his noble graying head quizzically, the way he always did when Charlie let his East London origins show. It was as if he were amused and puzzled both at the same time. Here was this strange Englishman who talked like a movie character, and who could make tens of millions in a matter of days, and who amounted to… what?
It was as if Dearborne couldn’t figure Charlie Johns out. Charlie came from… some other place. Whereas Dearborne’s place in the world was not only clear, it was on display. His office was a monument to mahogany and soft brown leather, subdued lighting and brass accents. Golf trophies stood on display in the corner—golf was a safe sport. Certificates and awards were ranked elsewhere on the walls. Chamber of Commerce, Lions, United Way—safe organizations. There were pictures of ancestors on the walls: judges, legislators, bankers. Safe ancestors. His pretty wife, displayed in photographs, wasn’t too pretty, and his well-scrubbed children, pink-cheeked in school uniforms, looked—well—risk-averse.
Tennessee Planters & Trust was a safe place to put your money, and Dearborne was a safe director for a bank to employ. That was the message sent by the office decor, by the Memphis skyline visible through the office windows, by the ten-story Planters Trust building of white Tennessee field-stone, even by a bright turquoise pattern in Dearborne’s tie, which was laid to rest next to another, more tranquil shade of blue, like a moment’s bright, shining thought being smothered beneath a reflex of conformity. But Charlie, who prided himself on his discernment, knew that Vincent Dearborne was not quite as sound as his calculated environs made him out to be. A little over three years ago, when Charlie was working in New York for Salomon Brothers and Tennessee Planters Securities flew him out for a secret weekend meeting with the directors, Dearborne had taken Charlie not to the office but to the country club, and made him part of a foursome with two of the other directors.