“What the hell is that?” Tori asked in amazement.
The sparks radiated high and low, far and wide across the heavens. Blazing tendrils showed every color imaginable, so massive a display that Page was stopped in his tracks, awestruck.
The sky seemed on fire.
At once the ray of light ceased.
It vanished at the same time as a blast lit the horizon, off in the direction of the observatory. The colors drooped in the sky. The sparks fell, their luster fading. As the hiss-crackle-hum went silent, the only illumination came from the grass fires.
Coughing from smoke that drifted over him, Page found that he was able to move again. He and Tori urged the man through the darkness. They reached a fence, lifted the man over it, passed between parked cars, and sank onto the road.
A new sound filled the night. The sound of hundreds of people crying.
“Great-grandfather,” the man said.
People stumbled past them. Some got into cars, but the vehicles wouldn’t start. Others called the names of loved ones. Pleas for help from God or somebody, anybody, blended with moans. A crowd gathered on the road, plodding along it, people looking like refugees from a war zone as they made their way toward Rostov. Sirens wailed from the direction of the town.
The fires showed Medrano climbing onto a pickup truck.
“Everybody stay calm!” he yelled. “We’ll take care of you! Help’s on the way!”
Page looked at the stranger they’d set on the road. His face was dark with blood.
“Hear those sirens? Just hang on, and you’ll be okay,” Page tried to assure him.
The man didn’t respond. At first Page worried that he had died, but then he saw that the man’s eyes were open, unblinking, staring at something that might have been far away, or else locked in his mind.
Page reached over and gripped Tori’s hand. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“We’re alive,” she answered. “Can’t get much better than that.”
The siren blared closer, red and blue lights flashing in the dark.
80
Anita woke periodically in the night, gradually recovering from the effects of the anesthetic. This time, when she opened her eyes, sun- light drifted between slats in blinds, revealing the hospital bed she lay on. Her left arm was in a cast, the weight of which added to the deep pain in her arm.
“The bullet did a lot of damage to the bones in your arm,” a voice next to her said with effort, “but they were able to save it.”
Anita looked to her left and found someone in the room’s other bed. She recognized the voice-it was Brent’s-but she couldn’t see his face, which was covered with bandages.
“I told you I’d be here when you woke up,” he said, his voice muffled. “I’m a man of my word.”
Anita frowned. “What happened to you?”
“I chased that story until it caught me.”
Still groggy from the drugs she’d been given, Anita said, “I don’t understand.”
“I got too close to it.” Brent’s voice dropped. “I got burned by it.”
“Burned?”
“I don’t think I’ll be going to Atlanta. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be coanchoring with Sharon anymore, either. But given what the story cost us, I can guarantee that you and I will get that Emmy.”
Anita tried to sit up. She was desperate to make sense out of what he was saying.
“You were burned?”
“The doctors aren’t sure how bad the scars will be. They talked about skin grafts and specialists. If I’m lucky, I might be able to do some investigative reporting as long as my face is in shadows when I’m on camera.”
Anita couldn’t speak for a moment.
“Lo siento.”
“Since I’m probably going to be in El Paso for quite a while, I guess I’d better start learning Spanish. What did you just tell me?”
“I’m truly sorry.”
“Thank you. We made a good team.”
“We’re still a good team,” Anita said.
“All the same, I think you’d better start looking for another partner.”
“Do you like Mexican food?”
“I don’t know what that’s got to do with anything, but the truth is, I tried the stuff once and hated it.”
“That’s because you didn’t eat in the right place. You haven’t tasted anything till you dig into my mother’s chicken enchiladas.”
81
“A massive electrical storm?” Costigan leaned back behind his desk. Although he wore his uniform and gunbelt, he still had the bandage around his head. It made him look vulnerable.
“A huge cell of dry lightning. That’s what the feds say happened,” Medrano told him. “All kinds of government types got involved, particularly the FBI and the National Science Foundation. The NSF runs the observatory. Or used to. The facility blew up last night.”
“From dry lightning.” Costigan looked confused. “Is that even possible? Could something like that disable the power systems in a couple of hundred vehicles? Not to mention several helicopters and a Cessna?”
“Whether or not it’s possible isn’t the point. That’s the official explanation for what happened, and with all the television cameras disabled last night, we don’t have pictures to prove otherwise.”
“What about the satellite that exploded? Half the southern United States saw it.”
“Space debris blew it apart. What looked like sparks was the wreckage burning as it entered the atmosphere. The fact that it happened at the same time as the dry lightning is entirely coincidental. There’s no way the government’ll admit that it was experimenting with a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy.”
Church bells rang across the street, announcing the start of the Sunday service.
“A weapon?” Costigan frowned. “You think that’s what was going on?”
“I was there, and I promise you that what I saw wasn’t dry lightning. I can think of only one thing that stops engines and generators and everything else that depends on electricity or magnets. You know anything about astronomy?”
“Enough to tell the difference between it and astrology.”
“Ever since I was a kid and saw my first comet, I’ve had a telescope,” Medrano said. “I subscribed to Astronomy magazine for as long as I can remember. Black holes, supernovas, spiral nebulae. They’re all pretty sexy. But solar storms are my personal favorite. I don’t dare look at the sun through a telescope, of course. I need to rely on films taken by special cameras in observatories. Solar storms give off flares that look like the flicking end of a giant whip. They can get as hot as a hundred million degrees. They radiate the electromagnetic energy of ten million atomic bombs.”
Costigan listened intently.
“They tend to run in eleven-year cycles,” Medrano continued. “From almost no activity to spectacular eruptions. At their peak, the electromagnetic waves have so much strength that when they reach Earth they can knock satellites out of orbit, shut down power plants, and turn television broadcasts into static. The Northern Lights are caused by them. What I saw last night looked like a combination of the two: Northern Lights and solar flares.”
“Solar flares. An awful long way from the sun.”
“I’m not saying they were solar flares. I’m just saying that’s what they looked like. An electromagnetic burst from somewhere on the ground would explain a lot of what happened last night.”
“But what caused it?”
“That’s another way of asking what the lights are. Here’s a theory. The Earth’s core is hotter than the surface of the sun.” Medrano shrugged. “Maybe there are fault lines around here that allow electro- magnetic waves to find their way to the surface.”
Costigan thought about it. “As good an explanation as swamp gas, quartz crystals, radioactive gas, and temperature inversions, I suppose.”