Black Fall Page 4

  “That’s the obvious answer to me. There could be hundreds of videos out there with him calling out earthquakes that never happened. When a major one did, whoever is behind this released the one that fit the most. We don’t know about all the wrong ones. Until there’s a video describing an event before it happens, there’s no reason to think anything else is going on.”

  “He’s been dead for years. That would mean thousands of videos,” says Jennifer.

  “Hundreds. Three hundred if you just want to cover the next ten years.”

  She gives me a puzzled look. “He said today’s date.”

  “He didn’t say today. He said within a six-day window of today. That could be six days on either side, covering thirteen days. That’s less than thirty videos per year.”

  Jennifer acquiesces. “Fair enough.” Clearly I satisfied her analytical side.

  I turn to Ailes. “But you already knew this.”

  “It’s fun to watch you perform,” he replies. “And being fooled is healthy.”

  “I never admitted defeat,” says Jennifer.

  “That’s why sports have referees,” Gerald shoots back.

  I think for a moment about why Ailes had me go through all that. “Wait a second. You’re not worried about this video? It’s what’s next that has you concerned.”

  The smile fades from his face and he’s back to looking weary. “If we’ve learned anything about people who like to do things in a dramatic fashion, they never lead with their strongest bit.”

  “They save it for the end,” I answer. Grandfather’s secret to winning over an audience was to promise them something really amazing as a finale, like vanishing a chorus line of dancers, but instead making an elephant appear. Never reveal the real surprise. Save your powder is what he used to say.

  I wish we were only dealing with a cigar-chomping megalomaniac who just wanted a standing ovation.

  “Precisely,” agrees Ailes. “This video has everyone’s attention. They’ll be debating it for days. Eventually they’ll reach the same conclusion you have: that this was just a magic trick. I think that’s when the next one comes.”

  “The real prediction,” I reply.

  “Yes. The one where he tells us something is going to happen before it actually happens. It will be something even more terrible than this.”

  “But what?” I wonder.

  “That’s why I want you off McGillis for now and working on this. Hopefully it’s nothing. But if it’s not—”

  “It will be big.” I have to agree with him. I want to take McGillis down myself, partly for personal reasons. But this could be much more important. “Alright.”

  “And I have a favor to ask.”

  I know where this is going. He’s broached this before, but he can tell from my reaction that it’s the last thing I want to do.

  “To anyone else, Blackwood, this would be an honor.”

  “I’m not a political creature like you,” I shoot back.

  “Maybe not, but you never know when you might need to call in a favor.”

  “Dr. Ailes.” I shake my head. He’s right and I just have to accept it.

  “She’s especially disturbed by the earthquake. She has asked to meet with you again. Please, do it as a personal favor to me.”

  Ailes isn’t the type to pull that card unless it’s absolutely necessary. I’ve watched him work the phone, getting CEOs and senators to assist us by subtly reminding them they owe him. Never calling in debts for personal gain, only when lives are on the line.

  Asking me this way tells me it’s critical I say yes. Things must be worse than he’s letting on.

  “Fine. Set it up while I get on the earthquake stuff. Any smart people I should talk to?”

  “I have a couple in mind. And thank you, Jessica.” I can tell he’s relieved, because he used my first name. “The first lady will be very happy to hear you’re coming.”

  Chapter Six

  Nonlinear Calculations

  On a satellite map, the Appalachian Mountains resemble a rumpled green blanket with long ridges stretching north and south along most of the East Coast. Standing on a cliff near Big Schloss overlook, Virginia appears to me as a relatively flat plain to the east, with DC itself hiding behind the distant haze. West Virginia, to the west of the overlook, is a series of valleys and mountains that seem to go on forever.

  Professor Charles Kaur, our FBI expert consultant on all things earthquakes, has been giving me a crash course on the Virginia Seismic Zone—where continental plates collide, forming the Appalachian Mountains. An athletic man in his midfifties, he spends a good deal of his time hiking over these hills installing sensors and studying landslides. He has receding sandy blond hair, a tan complexion, and a boyish quality I notice in a lot of scientists and engineers. I can tell that the humanist in him is conflicted with his inner scientist over what happened. Washington, DC, and most of the East Coast is still reeling from the quake and the aftershocks.

  He points to the rock below us. “The peculiar thing about East Coast earthquakes is that the rock here is much older than it is on the West Coast. It’s had a chance to cool down.”

  “That’s why we get fewer earthquakes out here?” Growing up in Los Angeles, I’ve gone through my share of earth shaking.

  “Part of the reason. But it also means the ground behaves differently. On the West Coast, the rock is spongy and so it absorbs tremors, minimizing the impact area. Out here, the rock is harder and so the effects of an earthquake can be felt from Canada to the Florida Panhandle. Were you here for the twenty eleven quake?”

  “No. I was still a police officer in Miami.”

  Kaur nods his head to the south. “Louisa County was the epicenter, but it cracked the Washington Monument.”

  “This one did even more damage,” I reply, stating the obvious.

  “That’s because it was a hell of a lot closer to the city. Location, location, location.” He points to a range to the west. “This quake knocked our reflector six inches out of alignment,” he says, with the emphasis suggesting that six inches is quite a lot in his field of study. A few yards away, a stubby tripod is being secured firmly into the bedrock by a group of students. “The laser can correct for up to three inches either way. Not six. We weren’t expecting that when we mounted it out here. Six inches.” He shakes his head again in disbelief.

  Scientists often get labeled as cold or unemotional, but I think the opposite is true for many of them. They care very deeply, only often about things most of us barely comprehend. It’s easy to get excited about space when a television host shows you stunning pictures of planets and distant galaxies, but for a man like Kaur—whose area of study is miles below the surface of the earth, and whose most exciting visual aids are squiggly lines on a graph—the disconnect is tremendous. It takes a tragedy for people to appreciate what he’s devoted his life to understanding.

  The rural landscape is serene, a sharp contrast to the chaos of the city, but as I see the hills and valleys through Kaur’s eyes I begin to appreciate the titanic forces at work beneath our feet. I glance over at the laser. “So despite all this technology, it’s impossible to see an earthquake coming?”

  “I wouldn’t say it like that. I’m saying that even with the information I have available they are unforeseeable. I sure as hell didn’t see this one coming. There were a couple of minor quakes a few hours before. Major quakes are often preceded by them, but are rarely ever followed by them. The East Coast has fewer quakes than the West—about a tenth as many—which makes it hard to get enough data to determine their source.”

  “So you think the Devon prediction is a hoax?” I’ve already shared with him my after-the-fact prediction theory.

  “I’d say that’s the most likely answer.”

  I nod my head. “Fair enough.”

  “But . . .” He hesitates. “It’s not that simple. Some things are truly chaotic. We can’t know what’s going to happen because subatomic events can send an
event in any direction. You see that cloud?” He gestures to a puffy wisp drifting over a distant hill. “A stream of cosmic rays could knock a few water molecules into each other at any given moment and start a cascade effect, leading to a downpour before the cloud even gets to the other side of the hill. There’s no way for us to know if that’s going to happen because we don’t know what went on inside the sun eight minutes ago, which is when those particles would have been emitted.”

  “Chaos theory?” I had a mathematics professor at the University of Miami who loved to wax on about how small factors could influence big events.

  “Or complexity. However, earthquakes present a different problem. Since we’re dealing with massive slabs of rock that weigh trillions of tons as opposed to the fate of one little particle, it’s more of an information issue. If you have enough information, you might be able to make a better forecast. But in seismology, most of our data is gathered after the fact. The hard part is knowing what’s going on deep down. We discover a fault only if the fault makes itself known. We can then apply sensors to that fissure and watch for any changes.

  “It would be nice to have a bunch of pressure sensors in the earth to tell us what’s there, but the deepest hole we’ve ever dug is about eight miles. A shallow earthquake, like the one we just experienced, can originate about fifty miles below. Intermediates can be almost two hundred miles below, and deep quakes as much as five hundred miles. That’s as far as DC is from Atlanta. Our only way of knowing what’s going on that far down is by listening. But waiting for a signal to make it through a hundred miles of rock isn’t the most precise method of measurement.”

  “So it’s unknowable,” I answer. I came out here to get Kaur to definitively sign off on the notion that there is no way Devon could have made that prediction with any foreknowledge, so we could focus on how whoever posted the video managed to make it look that way. Instead of shutting the door, he’s revealing new ones.

  “Well, that’s where it gets tricky.” He puts his hand on a metal box at the base of the laser. “Inside here is a sensor glued to the rock. It’s extremely precise. If a butterfly landed on top here, it could count the wing beats. It’s the most accurate civilian sensor you’ll find outside a lab.”

  “Civilian?”

  Kaur nods and looks frustrated. “This is decades-old technology. I can only guess what the folks at the NSA have down there so they can listen in on Pakistani bomb tests, or what gear they have sitting on the ocean floor waiting for a Russian submarine to swim by so when the captain flushes the toilet they can tell what he had for breakfast.”

  “So you’re saying that an intelligence agency could have seen this coming?”

  “No. They’re not looking for this kind of thing. I mean, it could be in the data, but you have to know what you’re looking for. But they do have access to all kinds of instruments that those of us on the civilian side can only dream about. Besides passive listening, they’re researching quantum-entanglement radar, and a host of other things that might be bullshit, solely for the purpose of getting funding.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’ve been attempting to predict these things for a while, and I think it’s less and less likely that we can. Yet, like the weather, we still hold out hope that a better data set, a faster computer, or deeper sensors could tell us what we need to know. So, while I wouldn’t bet on it, I wouldn’t rule it out entirely.”

  I try to figure out how I’m going to wrangle that nonanswer into a report.

  He sees the look on my face. “I’ll throw you another thing to think about. Remember all the effort we went through to save the Hubble Space Telescope? All this fuss about what an amazing achievement it was? And then, a couple years ago, the National Reconnaissance Office calls up NASA and says, ‘Hey, we got two spare spy satellites even better than the Hubble just sitting in a warehouse. You want them?’ Makes you wonder what else they have up there in space. It also makes you wonder what kind of other equipment and technology they have access to that we’ve never even heard of.

  “Scientists thought the bottom of the ocean was a desert until just a few decades ago. But if you look through old naval archives, you’ll find out they knew a hell of a lot more about what was down there. The thing is nobody was paid to care. The folks listening in on Pakistan through the dirt might have a hell of a lot more information about what’s going on under our feet than even they’ll ever realize. They have access to supercomputers, maybe even quantum computers, which can perform calculations I could only imagine. Last year, roughly the same number of people were killed by earthquakes as by terrorism. Care to guess what the US Geological Survey’s budget is compared to that of the intelligence community?”

  I sense his frustration at being unable to answer my question. He’s out here with a bunch of student volunteers trying to study science that affects tens of millions of people, while government spooks are playing with tens of billions of dollars to find out what’s on our iPhones.

  “I know. I know.” He grins. “You were hoping I’d shut the door for you on this Devon thing potentially being true. That’s the trouble with science. We can never shut the door completely. The debate, in fact, is never over. Some things just seem less likely than before.”

  I thank him for his help and head back to my car at the base of the trail. All I’d wanted was for him to laugh off the idea of the earthquake being predictable. I don’t need a conspiracy theory to add to the already convoluted situation. The Peter Devon prediction is going to be harder to shut down than I hoped. I’m leaving with fewer answers than I had when I arrived.

  Speaking of answers, I check my watch. There’s barely enough time to go home and change before I’m expected to provide a few to a woman who wants more than I have.

  Chapter Seven

  1600

  As the granddaughter and former frequent assistant of a world-renowned magician who loves rubbing elbows with celebrities and politicians—even if it means barging his way into their circles—I’m no stranger to meeting famous people. The walls of Grandfather’s house are lined with photos of all the different people we’ve encountered and accosted. My favorite one is of a nine-year-old me, full of awkward, pulling a coin from behind one of the Prince of Wales’s famous ears. His broad grin is sincere. I still remember the way he looked at me, as if I were some kind of dwarf cunningly disguised as a young girl.

  Many of these photos were taken in Hollywood restaurants, which is where Grandfather would go to seek out a particular A-lister he wanted to ingratiate himself with. He’d send me over to a table where Brad Pitt or Sandra Bullock was dining. Then as I walked by I’d pretend to find a hundred-dollar bill on the ground and ask if they’d dropped it. Half the time their managers would say yes, and try to reach for it, at which point I’d make it vanish in a snap of my fingers. This invariably elicited laughter, and Grandfather would rush over, profusely apologize, and manage to get us invited to sit down.

  Growing up like this means I’ve never been intimidated by fame or power. But I also never developed Grandfather’s gift for talking to people in those positions. He has a way of flattering them while elevating himself to their level. He has a sixth sense for spotting who the real kingmaker is. He’ll often disappear at a party to smoke cigars with a Russian banker or the head of a film studio, regaling them with stories and making them laugh raucously the whole time. But I’m not sure what his connections and social skills actually got him. At best, the bankers might hire him for parties in Manhattan or their dachas on the Black Sea, and the studio heads might throw him a consulting job or give him an occasional development deal he’d never follow through on. One of our family’s best-kept secrets is how many people he’s hand doubled for, including two James Bonds. Although the reason this is such a secret isn’t due to the actors or the studios. It’s because Grandfather, full of ego, was always angry the rest of him wasn’t playing the actual part.

  In retrospect, I think for Grandfather these con
nections were the end goal. To be able to sit on a veranda with a bunch of powerful people and feel for a moment like a kind of equal—that was the prize.

  Compared to the rest of the White House, the first lady’s office feels like the waiting room in a medical clinic. Fluorescent light fixtures, white ceiling tiles, and a complete lack of decorative molding give it a blandness at odds with its location inside the most historic building in America, which largely serves as a museum of colonial-era design. I’d say my anxiety is about on par with that of a doctor’s visit. It reminds me of the hospital hallway I was standing in when the earthquake hit. Thankfully, the DC metro police have told me the infant is back with her mother and doing fine. This is one ray of light in an otherwise dark time. Good thing the child will have no memory of that horrible day. We should all be so lucky.

  I focus on the present and look around. As far as I can tell, the modern and comfortable couch and chairs are straight out of an Ethan Allen showroom. The only sign we’re someplace special is the depth of the windowsills, a reminder that the exterior of the building is made of foot-thick armor.

  I wonder what it must have been like to be inside the White House when the earthquake hit. The building and subbasement probably sit on some kind of shock absorber designed to minimize the impact of a nuclear bomb. But what about a shock from below? While there are broken windows and cracked foundations just a block away, the White House appears to have made it through unscathed. I’m sure there were people cleaning up any broken dishes or tilted picture frames within seconds of the aftershock. The last thing anybody wants is for the center of power for the free world to appear to be in disarray.

  First Lady Miriam Kent appears anything but disarrayed as she walks into the room. In her late forties, the former competitive swimmer still has the poise that helped her become an Olympic alternate. Though she is confident in her walk, as her eyes dart around the room I sense that underneath her smile she’s still trying to get stable footing.