The Leviathan Effect Read online

  He lived the life of someone else here, a man whose name and personal history he had invented. A life he’d created out of necessity. Thirty-one months earlier, Mallory had turned over D.M.A. Associates, his private intelligence contracting firm, to Joseph Chaplin, the chief of operations, with the idea that he would be free to disappear into a more normal life. At first, he had traveled, backpacking in South America and Europe, riding one-way buses and trains, living in unfamiliar rooms. But eventually he began to crave a routine again. Two years ago, he and a woman named Anna Vostrak had driven into this harbor town and decided to invent a life here. Mallory leased a store, Anna opened an art gallery. They rented an old fisherman’s cottage on the point and moved in.

  For most of their time here, it had been a good life, if a duplicitous one. Two weeks earlier, Anna had left to visit her family in Switzerland. Living a life of invention had begun to wear on her and he suspected that she wouldn’t return, at least not for a while. He didn’t blame her, although he missed her more than he had imagined he would.

  Mallory dressed and walked to the pickup, still shivering, and began to drive the winding road back toward the harbor.

  Several miles on, he saw an older model pickup parked in a clearing. He pumped his brakes, scanning the eyes and hands of the two men seated in the bed. Then, recognizing them, he waved and accelerated. He still did that—fell back into the observational habits from his years as an intelligence agent. It was no longer necessary when choosing a table in a restaurant to make certain that he could see who was coming in the door, but he did. Or to scan parked cars to make sure no one was sitting in them, but he did. Spy work was devil’s work. To understand the enemy, you needed to think like the enemy; to defeat the enemy, sometimes you needed to become the enemy. Here, though, there was no enemy.

  He pulled up in front of the store, parking next to two pickups he recognized as Clement Caldwell’s and Harvey Spellman’s.

  The wooden screen door squeaked and Spellman came out carrying a twelve-pack of Natural Light. The two men exchanged familiar greetings.

  Mallory’s store sold a little of everything—milk, beer, soda, toothpaste, chips, bread, used books, local art, bait, ball caps. He called it Harbor Store because that was how people named things here. There was a Harbor Tackle, Harbor Inn, Harbor Books, Harbor Fish Market, and Harbor Real Estate.

  He’d run the store himself for most of the first year. Then one day Clem had walked in, asking for a job. Mallory hired him to work the register three nights a week. But Clem had his own ideas and began taking on extra hours whether he was paid for them or not. Before long, he was calling himself the store “manager.” It seemed to give him an identity and Mallory didn’t mind the free time.

  Clement was seated behind the counter as he came in, wearing his knit cap and dark, tattered flannel jacket. He only shaved every few days; this wasn’t one of them.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been swimming again.”

  Mallory suppressed a smile. The store smelled of old pinewood and microwave popcorn. He stood in front of the space heater, watching the brightening harbor lights.

  Clement had come from elsewhere, too, but he didn’t talk about it. Occasionally, he mentioned a wife, Adele, who had died some years ago. But he preferred to talk on other topics, the weather and fishing, mostly.

  “What’s it looking like?” Mallory asked.

  “She’s coming. See how the birds’re flying? When the birds fly that low, the pressure’s down, she’s coming. See the rainclouds? They’re swollen with tomorrow already.”

  “How long?”

  “Oh, I’d say we’re good for another twelve, fourteen.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then she’ll come in hard. You can see it in the way the sky’s bending.” He pointed out the window. “Way out there to the northeast.”

  “How bad?”

  “Hard to tell. You can see her already in the outer squibs. See that out there?”

  Mallory looked and nodded. Clem had an instinctive understanding of coastal weather patterns and he had taught Mallory a few things about pressure systems and reading the clouds. Clem had spent much of his life on the water as a lobsterman, observing the sky and the sea for days on end. He had learned by looking, as Mallory had learned by watching people’s behaviors. Clem had developed his own vocabulary along the way, using words like “bends” and “squibs” as if they were real terms.

  “You better get out in that shower now, you’re going to catch pneumonia, freeze yourself to death. We’re not in summer any more, young man.”

  Mallory came out from the shower minutes later wearing faded jeans, a flannel shirt, and work boots, no longer shivering. Clement handed him a bottle of local-brewed beer, and they sat out back on rusty metal chairs watching the water breeze up and the last of the daylight fade, smelling the brine, the char-grilled seafood and the gasoline. Lights in windows were brightening on the small hillsides around the harbor.

  “Oh, I almost forgot. Your girlfriend come in, asking for you.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend anymore, Clem.”

  “She thinks you do.”

  She being Monica Tinsley, the woman who ran the historical museum. She’d become solicitous toward Mallory in recent days—ever since Anna left—and apparently Clement didn’t see anything wrong with playing cupid, although Mallory wasn’t interested.

  “I’m serious,” Clem said.

  “Don’t be.” Mallory took a pull on his beer.

  “You’re chomping a little bit again, aren’t you?” Clem finally said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I can tell.”

  Mallory looked out at the dark, featureless horizon and felt old yearnings. “You know what it is, Clement? It’s like that storm you were just talking about. Sometimes I feel there’s something out there I should be aware of. I don’t know what it is yet, exactly, but I can feel it. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  Minutes later, Mallory was finished with his beer and standing.

  “You just be careful now,” Clem said, pointing the neck of his beer at him.

  Mallory winked, but his mind was elsewhere. “She’s not going to be bothering me at home, is she?”

  “Never know.” This time, Clement winked.

  “I’ll be careful. Take care, Clem.”

  IT WAS A hilly road to the house that Charles Mallory rented on the point, a rocky arrow of land that jutted into an inlet on the Atlantic Ocean. He parked in the drive beside the house and sat for several minutes breathing the night air, listening to the waves on the rocks. Across the inlet, fog drifted past slowly, dimming the glows of the motel and the lobster restaurant along Main Street. Maybe he was chomping. But not to go back to Washington. Or Langley. There were too many unresolved memories there, still. Maybe it was something else.

  A couple of weeks ago, Charles Mallory had received two emails from his old employer, the United States government, asking him to contact them. Mallory had no intention of responding, but the messages had triggered something; ever since, he’d had idle moments of curiosity, as if a familiar voice from his past were trying to say something to him.

  Sometimes, now, he went days and even weeks without checking messages, in part to avoid those voices. He had found himself, literally, in a safe harbor here, separate from all that had gone before. The past didn’t exist in this place and that was how he liked it. But the past still existed in his head, and there were parts of it he couldn’t excise. Mallory’s father had been killed four years earlier, hunted surreptitiously because of what he knew about an undercover government operation. Mallory had helped bring the truth to light. But only some of it; the rest would probably remain in the shadows forever. Most of the time, he was at peace with that; there was no percentage in wrestling with it. But tonight, he felt the past seeping in again. Maybe it was the way Clement had talked about the storm. Or what he had seen in the news on television over lunch.

  Inside, he
fired up his computer for the first time in days. He typed in two seven-letter encryption codes, then called up emails that had been routed to him through his old secure and encrypted account, forwarded to an address he had set up anonymously.

  He saw that there were five new messages he had missed.

  Three were from his brother.

  Going back six days.

  The first two emails carried the same subject line: PCNTT.

  There was no text in the message windows. It was a simple code they had established years earlier: Please Call. Need To Talk.

  The third message, which had landed in his inbox thirty-one hours and twenty-seven minutes ago, contained an additional letter. U, meaning “urgent.”

  Then he saw that there were two encoded messages from Joseph Chaplin, who ran his old intelligence business from an unmarked office in Northwest Washington, D.C. Each with the same subject line: PC.

  He felt an anxious shiver, thinking of his brother’s dark, vulnerable eyes. In his closet, Mallory had stashed a half dozen untraceable, disposable cell phones. Some habits were hard to break.

  Chaplin had given him a number that he could call in cases of emergency, but he had never used it. Until now. The wind whipped across the water as he punched the number into a new phone.

  After four rings, he heard a click on the other end. “Greetings.” Chaplin’s lilting African accent.

  “You’ve been trying to reach me.”

  “Well, yes. Someone has,” he said. Chaplin, one of the most trustworthy men Mallory had ever known, still looked out for him.

  “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “I do. But you’ll need to visit Cleveland, sir, first. Mr. Green will meet with you next week. Room 789. Then to St. Louis in the afternoon. He’ll have more.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  Charles Mallory sighed. “Okay, then. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Mallory walked out onto the back deck to decipher what he had just been told. Chaplin wanted him to come back again. He had told him so with a simple verbal code that was written nowhere but in their heads. Words substituting for other words. Cleveland meaning Washington. Next week meaning tomorrow. Mr. Green was National Car Rental, and Room 789 a hotel in the Maryland suburbs.

  Just like that. Mallory felt a deep-rooted mixture of apprehension and curiosity. Chaplin was summoning him back. But it was really his brother reaching out to him. Jon was the “someone.” And that was the only reason he would even consider doing what he had sworn he would never do again. Mallory felt a fine mist of rain in the breeze and he thought about what might be coming. Storms he’d never imagined.

  EIGHT

  8:45 P.M. Oval Office, Washington, D.C.

  “HELLO, CATE.”

  Catherine Blaine reached across the famous Resolute desk to shake hands with Aaron Lincoln Hall, the President of the United States.

  “And welcome. Our circle has five members now.”

  Blaine smiled politely. The President’s face seemed tired, belying his upbeat tone. He was a tall, striking man with inviting brown eyes and a classic senatorial profile—strong chin, narrow, slightly curved nose, swept back silver hair. In meetings, journalists had said, his assurance and charisma seemed to “suck the oxygen from the room.” Blaine had been struck by the difference between how self-assured he could be in person, though, and how self-conscious and wooden he occasionally came off in television interviews. When you separated Aaron Lincoln Hall from the contact sport of politics, he was a sharp-witted man, and a brilliant speechmaker, even though his enemies had diligently branded him otherwise—he’d been called everything from a milquetoast to a Muslim terrorist sympathizer. For Blaine, the only criticisms that carried any weight were the claims that he could be too cerebral and that he depended too much on the counsel of his advisers, particularly in military matters.

  “I’m sure this has been a lot to absorb in a short period of time,” he said, looking at her as if they were the only two in the room.

  “It has.”

  “Naturally, I’m curious what your impressions are. I respect your background and what you can bring to this.”

  Blaine blinked self-consciously. She glanced at Harold DeVries, her former mentor, who was seated in the rosewood chair to her left. To her right was Clark Easton. These were the two advisers the President relied on most.

  “I know you’ve been given the outlines of what’s happened, Cate. I want you to understand we’re doing all that we can diplomatically. Which isn’t much. The Secretary of State has opened channels with Beijing. That’s not yielding much, unfortunately. We’re really in something of a holding pattern right now.”

  She nodded. “You said five members.”

  “Yes. The Vice President has been briefed on all of this. He’s the fourth, you’re the fifth. We’re a circle of five.” His smile faded so quickly that Blaine wondered if it had been there at all. The President was a man of big ideas and she could sense that he was already mulling over the possible outcomes of this crisis. “The Secretary of State has a limited knowledge but has not been privy to the actual contents of the emails. Nor has anyone else. We’re now honoring the request to keep those threats within a tight circle.”

  “What about at the IT level? Isn’t someone aware of this at NSA?”

  “Dean Stiles, yes, of course. It started there, as a cyber threat. The email incursions are being thoroughly analyzed by a special unit at Fort Meade, but the messages themselves have been scrambled or removed. As I say, we’re honoring the specific request to keep this within our group.”

  Blaine stiffened, slightly intimidated for a moment, as she often was, by her surroundings. The white marble mantle. The presidential seal on the rug and the presidential medallion on the ceiling. The two flags behind the desk—the US flag and the President’s flag. The Resolute desk, made of timbers from the HMS Resolute, presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 by Britain’s Queen Victoria.

  “As Secretary Easton told you earlier, we consider these messages a credible and urgent threat to national security,” the President went on. “And we are responding accordingly. The details, needless to say, cannot be divulged to family or staff. We have already communicated this to your chief of staff. Until this issue is resolved, Cate, DHS will be run by Deputy Secretary Laine Wells.”

  “Oh,” Blaine said, surprised.

  “You can set up office across the street in the EEOB.” Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the ornate 553-room slate and granite building that served as offices for the White House staff, the Vice President, Cabinet members, and various other government officials. “We need you on this full-time, Cate.” Then he took a slightly warmer tone. “We’ve set up a separate, secure room in the Eisenhower building, which is in effect the command center for this. We’re calling it the Data Visualization Center, which is serving as a portal to the NASA Center for Climate Simulation in Greenbelt. It’s been outfitted to monitor all available incoming storm data, from NASA, NOAA, the Space Station, as well as aircraft reconnaissance data, satellite, land-based radar data, buoy sensors, and computer models.” He slid a blank white rectangular badge across the desk, glancing at Defense Secretary Easton. “This will grant you access. We’re monitoring any and all geo-physical activity around the world that has the potential to become a threat to this country. From here forward, all of our meetings will be held either there, in the Cabinet Room or downstairs in the Situation Room. Okay?”

  “All right.” Blaine felt numb, thinking about the others in the “circle of five”—men, older than her; married, parents. She thought of her father, what he would think of her being here; it made her self-conscious.

  The President pushed a sheet of paper across the desk to her. “We’ve also set up a climate science advisory committee, which we will call upon as needed. Dr. James Wu is heading it up.”

  “Okay.” Blaine scanned the list quickly, looking for one pa
rticular name. Not finding it. The dozen names were all well-known climate scientists and meteorologists, most of whom she considered “policy” scientists. Men and women friendly to the administration’s views on climate change, global warming, and various other issues. The science of weather had become increasingly politicized in recent years and Blaine’s favorite source, Rubin Sanchez, once one of NASA’s most innovative researchers, had become marginalized because of his unorthodox views and even more unorthodox public presentations. It did not surprise her that he’d been left off the advisory board. Dr. Wu, the President’s chief science adviser, was a well-known professor of atmospheric science who’d been a pioneer in the field of storm forecasting, although he had taken an increasingly conservative stand on global warming and other weather issues.

  “You bring a valuable perspective to this, Cate,” the President said. “I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and questions.”

  “Thank you.” She tried a smile. “With all due respect, sir, being the last one in this ‘circle,’ I think I’d rather hear what you’ve already found before I venture any opinions.”

  “Understood. Let’s go through the latest, then.”

  DeVries summarized the efforts that had been made to track the source or sources of both the email threats and the geo-physical events. His report lasted just over nine minutes, mostly repeating what she’d been told earlier. Easton then explained how the United States had responded quickly and diligently to each of the natural disasters, extending aid to the devastated countries. Two former US presidents had established a relief fund to assist the ravaged Bay of Bengal region.

  Blaine nodded periodically, trying to be diplomatic, although Easton’s presentation rubbed her wrong. Finally, he straightened his notes and sat back, elbows on the arms of the chair.

  “Questions?”

  “A few, actually,” she said, “although this is probably territory you’ve already covered. So, please, if you’ll just indulge me.” The President blinked his assent, waiting. “The first, I suppose, is an obvious one: how could things have gotten to this point without our intelligence services picking up what was happening?”