Blackmail Earth

EPILOGUE





The funerals came first. The two Joes—Joe Santoro and Joe English—had died trying to stop the North Korean assassins. Jenna attended both services, as did dozens of her fellow network employees. Genuine grief filled the faces of everyone in attendance. The men were well liked and deeply appreciated. Jenna contributed generously to funds for the families of both men.

Geoff Parks had survived. His dog, Kato, hit three times, also pulled through. Master and dog were both healing. Jenna looked forward to seeing the pair patrolling the studio after the first of the year, when they were expected to return to duty.

Jenna did not end up in a supermax, despite the vice president’s threats. To her surprise, her efforts to draw attention to the North Korean rockets were credited with sparking a huge surge in voting, which exit polls said proved decisive to President Reynolds’s reelection. Roger Lilton conceded the race early and eloquently.

Not only was potential imprisonment never mentioned again but Jenna, Dafoe, Forensia, and Sang-mi, along with her father, were even feted in a secret White House ceremony. The president cited their “valiant efforts to draw attention to the worst threat the world has ever known.”

Jenna also remained on the task force. When the group met again, Senator Higgens gave her a big boozy hug and offered her a substantial stipend to serve on the United States Energy Institute’s board of directors.

“But that would compromise my integrity,” Jenna said, genuinely aghast at the proposal.

“I tried,” Higgens replied with a weighty shrug, reminding Jenna that the energy industry, no matter how great its failings, never allowed itself to become mired in self-doubt, embarrassment, or remorse—not as long as profits flowed thick as crude.

North Korea proved as difficult to deal with as Big Oil and Big Coal. On election day, President Reynolds sent secret messages to the Supreme Leader telling the tyrant that he held him in the highest esteem for his wisdom, wit, and intellect—and by the way, would the Great One please keep the sulfates in the silos in exchange for thousands of tons of food, medicine, and firearms of a distinctly smaller variety, along with luxury items that only a distinguished man with the rarefied taste of the Supreme Leader could truly appreciate?

The pandering went on into the wee hours of the following morning, but Reynolds’s willingness to extend the most craven compliments might have saved the world from years of winter, mass starvation, and countless wars.

The president also called on the U.N. to hold a special session to air the grievances of less-developed countries over the impact of climate change. Whether it was simply spin on the president’s part remained to be seen, but sometimes spin was a prerequisite to turning around a crisis.

* * *

Andrea Hanson took maternity leave the day after the gun battle in the studio. Elfren promptly appointed Jenna as the interim host of The Morning Show, and named Nicci as the new executive producer. Eight weeks later Andrea delivered a healthy baby girl, whose photo Jenna displayed the next morning to much rejoicing. Viewers of The Morning Show flooded the network with hundreds of thousands of congratulatory e-mails.

The network had cut Marv loose faster than a trash fish on a tuna charter. While the tabloid press heralded Jenna with lively and largely laudatory headlines such as WEATHER GAL RAINS BANG-BANG ON BAD BOYZ and HURRICANE JENNA STORMS STUDIO, Marv received the less flattering sobriquet of WEATHER MAP WEENIE. The only job he could land was in Boise, Idaho, producing an early morning farm report called The Spud Spot.

Marv wasn’t the only one caught in a lie on camera. James Elfren received video of Alicia Gant from an anonymous source. The video showed Alicia in front of the entrance to the Golden Crescent Hotel badgering Jenna to say exactly what the producer wanted to hear. Elfren promptly suspended Gant, which proved wise. The same video was leaked to a Times reporter, who wrote a scathing story that called into question all twelve of Gant’s Emmys, seven of them for reports on terrorism. The next day Elfren fired Gant, saying that the network had conducted a review of her work and found violations of news-gathering principles too egregious to permit her continued employment. She filed suit for wrongful termination. She never formally charged Nicci with sexual harassment, but Nicci showed Jenna a string of annoying e-mails asking her for a “discreet date.” Nicci ignored Gant’s messages.

Jenna had a pretty good idea where the damning video had come from: the crew that Gant had treated so poorly. Alicia had violated more than common decency in ordering them about like slaves, she’d violated common sense: If you abuse people who can expose your lies, they’ll hoop you at the first opportunity.

Jenna’s personal life also beamed brightly. Every Friday after work, she abandoned New York City for Dafoe’s farm. He’d healed fully from the gunshot wound that had almost taken out a kidney. Bayou also recovered handsomely and greeted her every Friday with as much enthusiasm as his master. Living together on weekends felt like a beta launch for the rest of their lives. As for marriage and children: not yet, Jenna decided. But soon. He was, after all, “the one.”

Rick Birk had an altogether rockier experience in the days and weeks after the end of the hijacking. Initially, he was acclaimed for enduring torture, dismemberment, and extreme privation, but almost immediately it was discovered that the captain had been the source of the chopped-off fingers, and that Birk had encouraged the savagery to spare his own hide. Coupled with his drunken appearances on camera before and during the hijacking that were deemed unbecoming of a correspondent, Elfren forced him to retire at the age of seventy-four.

Alas, Birk did not go gently into the night. Rather, he plunged right back into the public eye, proving that in the age of the Internet, there are second acts in American life. Birk, like the shootout video, went viral—with the most unlikely companion.

Beaver Falls Glove Company had the squirrelly but intriguing idea to bring together Birk and Captain Moreno for a Web-based ad campaign. Beaver Falls’s CEO took a considerable portion of the small firm’s earnings for the previous year to pay Birk a fat six figures—the captain half as much—to appear side by side.

Birk, glassy-eyed but not falling-down drunk, sat wearing a pair of Beaver Falls Rick Birk Signature Edition Fingerless Gloves. A large moose head loomed over him from the wall of a hunting lodge. To Birk’s left sat a dour-faced Captain Moreno.

“My recent experiences,” Birk intoned imperiously, “have taught me the value of fingerless gloves.” Birk offered a drinker’s generous smile and picked up a tall gin and tonic. “Because, let’s face it, sometimes you need all your fingers to handle the finer things in life,” said America’s most notorious dipsomaniac before draining the drink in a single go.

Moreno glared at him and turned to the camera. Speaking in awkward, recently acquired English, the Spaniard said, “And sometimes you do not need to have gloves with fingers.” At this point, he raised his pitiable hand, which had been left with only a pinkie and ring finger to poke out of a red glove. “So why pay for more glove than you really need?” asked the captain, still palpably pissed off.

“That’s one thing we can both agree on,” Birk said. Then with a glance at the steaming captain, Birk added, “Maybe the only thing.”

The captain glared back at Birk, then stared at his miserable hand.

Okay, till now the ad remained marginally within the realm of, well, if not good taste, at least reasonable standards, but then Birk snarled, “Oh, stop your goddamn whining. All the time, it’s ‘What happened to my fingers? What happened to my fingers?’ I’ll tell you what’s happened to your goddamn fingers. I got them. Wore them right off the f*cking boat. Here,” Birk tossed three bloody fingers at the captain, “let me give you a hand.” Then Birk reached behind him. “And here’s my shirt. It’s got your goddamn blood all over it. Go get it cleaned, it’s the least you can do.”

The ad ended with a look of shock and outrage on the captain’s face.

Later, it came out of course that the entire finale had been staged with the help of “fingers” from a special effects company in L.A., but not before the ad achieved record viewership on YouTube. It also appeared on all the networks and major cable channels, replete with bleeps, where news anchors and show hosts demonstrated indefatigable disgust—even after repeated showings of the entire thirty-second spot.

* * *

GreenSpirit’s murder was solved, but not as Sheriff Walker had planned. He was charged with the crime, and after dark-suited FBI agents escorted the handcuffed lawman to an unmarked vehicle and drove him away, the special agent in charge of the New York office, Albert Messinger, held a carefully planned press conference. In his prepared statement, he announced that key evidence against Walker had come as a result of “extensive and painstaking” searches over a ten-square-mile area surrounding the cabin in which GreenSpirit had been killed.

“Agents discovered a tiny swatch of clothing containing both Sheriff Walker’s DNA and the victim’s,” Special Agent Messinger said, his blue eyes roving over a phalanx of reporters. “The swatch,” which Messinger described as about one inch in diameter, “had been caught on the broken branch of a dead maple tree.”

“What about the bloody bandana that the sheriff said he found?” fired a short reporter with the bleary, haunted look of too many martinis for too many years. “That had the kid’s DNA on it, didn’t it?”

“It did, indeed,” Messenger replied, evidently warming to the task at hand. “We believe that Jason Robb’s DNA was placed on it by the sheriff when he took the young man into custody, which he did by himself despite being part of what was supposed to have been a coordinated state, federal, and local effort. As I’m sure many of you are aware from all the prime-time tutorials on forensics that you can watch almost any night of the week,” Messinger smiled, wrinkling his handsomely tanned face, “the sheriff could have lifted Robb’s DNA from the bars of his cell, or from Robb directly, without the young man realizing it, and that could have been enough to implicate him. As for GreenSpirit’s blood, we believe Walker committed the crime, so he had ample access to that.”

“Is that all you’ve got?” carped a regional reporter who had just written a lengthy story that lionized the sheriff for his “courage, thoroughness, and diligence.”

“We think the DNA evidence is sufficient to convict the sheriff of murder, but we also have other compelling evidence against him. Let’s start with Sheriff Walker’s contention that Robb disappeared the weekend of the murder of the Pagan in Vermont. We now know that that was the weekend that Robb and his girlfriend made their first trip to her family’s cabin. The young woman in question would not confirm this detail until she learned that she was pregnant. The timing of conception, while not conclusive, does support her claim, as do paternity tests that were conducted at the Bureau’s request. We also now have a credit card receipt placing Robb at a convenience store near the Wennerstroms’ cabin two hours before the murder of the Vermont victim, as determined by a medical examiner in that state and confirmed by the FBI’s crime lab. It is not possible for Robb to have committed that murder, either.”

“Then are you suggesting that Sheriff Walker murdered the Vermont Pagan?” asked a stout, gray-haired female reporter.

“No, we do not believe those crimes were committed by the same killer.”

“Then how do you explain the similarities between the two?” bellowed a rugged, well-known New York media figure who sounded highly skeptical.

“An examination of Sheriff Walker’s hard drive on his home computer showed that he used his privileged position as a law enforcement officer to request confidential files containing unreported details of the Vermont crime. We believe that he used that information to commit a copycat killing and to implicate Jason Robb in both murders.

“We also found that Walker had personal motives, both for murdering GreenSpirit and for attempting to frame Robb. The sheriff was extremely upset at his daughters’ involvement with Paganism, and numerous times expressed those concerns to members of his church, who were forthright in speaking to us. We believe that Walker’s anger reached murderous proportions when he learned that his oldest daughter attended a naked initiation ceremony. He found out about this because of a televised report by CBS News in which his daughter could be clearly seen and identified. Jason Robb made no secret of the fact that he directed the news crew to the initiation and gave her name to the press.”

“So the sheriff was trying to kill two birds with one stone?” asked a reporter for a Spanish language radio station. “GreenSpirit and Robb?”

“You could say that,” Messinger replied.

“Has Robb been released?” the reporter followed up.

“Yes, earlier this morning. He’s with his family.”

Those who knew the young man couldn’t help but ask themselves whether Jason had been chastened by his arrest as a serial killer. The answer was no. Not in the least.

After Aly revealed her pregnancy—and announced that they planned to marry—Jason pulled a Levi Johnston to her Bristol Palin. “No way, dude,” was his surly response, delivered with animated hand signs that were vaguely derivative of gang culture, on his Facebook page.

Other mysteries, however, remained unsolved. Forensia and Sang-mi, for example, could not contact GreenSpirit again, despite holding five séances. They finally attributed the Pagan leader’s ongoing silence to the peace that she’d found since her killer had been arrested. Then they turned their attention to the ongoing drought. A gathering of Pagans, in the familiar clearing where the initiation had taken place, performed a rain-summoning ritual.

Jenna, hearing of this plan, was skeptical. Both she and Dafoe were surprised when, moments after the ritual was scheduled to end, it began to rain. And this was no mere thunderstorm, here today, gone in an hour. The rain held steady for three full days, and when it ended the reservoir where Jenna and Dafoe had met held water for the first time in more than a year—enough to cover the carcasses and skeletons of drought-stricken deer and coyotes.

The last mystery was a murder in the Maldives that proved the final footnote to the tanker hijacking.

Adnan’s mother found Parvez’s body shifting in the restless tide on the island of Dhiggaru, a bullet wound in the back of his head, a bag of limes with a bomb lying feet away on the beach. The Maldivian media speculated that Khulood had played a lethal role in the murder of her son’s oldest friend. She had plenty of reasons for revenge. Adnan had been hauled off to an American prison in Afghanistan and Maldivian authorities had told her that it was doubtful that a man who’d been a would-be suicide bomber would ever be released. Men suspected of far less serious crimes had been held at the prison for years.

But no evidence was found that linked Khulood to Parvez’s violent demise, although the bag of limes hinted that perhaps the cleric had wanted Adnan’s mother to smuggle the fruit—and the bomb—to diamond island.

In any case, there appeared to be little interest in solving the crime. Khulood did make one public statement. Translated into English it read: “Crime? What crime?” Many in the international community quietly agreed with her concise assessment.

Rafan was not among them, ironically enough. He saw that his beautiful island nation was succumbing to the brutalities that had long afflicted the rest of the world, including the erosion of the rule of law. But he had vowed to try to stop the spread of jihad, and imbued with that spirit he visited Dhiggaru one last time. He walked the shore where Parvez’s body had been found, searching for evidence that might have eluded less interested investigators. He found nothing.

His eyes roamed from the ocean to the acres of land that he’d had ravaged for soil, when as minister of dirt he robbed Peter to pay Paul. Then Rafan looked back to the shoreline creeping ever closer, like ecoterrorism in a world slowly engulfed by the sea.

The warm salty water rushed over his bare feet, and when he stepped away the evidence of his presence vanished as easily as might the protective sky that enveloped the Earth and gave it life.





AUTHOR’S NOTE

Recently I’ve read a lot about geoengineering and what role scientists might play in finding ways to eliminate or reduce the warming that has been going on around the planet the past twenty years. Is it conceited for mankind to even think it could actually alter the planet’s climate, or could this possibly be a reality? After all, we know that for thousands of years volcanoes have put ash and sulfates into the atmosphere and have altered weather patterns around the world, causing changes that have lasted for years.

Take the volcanic eruption at Tambora in 1815 that created “the summer that never was” in the northeastern United States. In 1816 the ash cloud that circled the globe caused so much atmospheric cooling that snow fell during June and July. So it would be only natural for scientists to theorize that sulfates, artificially placed in the atmosphere, would behave like a volcanic ash cloud. The sulfates would reflect the sun’s rays back into space, cooling the Earth.

So, could some type of geoengineering be the solution to planetary climate change?

The main contributor to global warming is water vapor from the Earth’s oceans. If you could cool the oceans, would that not cool the water vapor, and eventually the planet?

One solution geoengineers have proposed involves the use of iron. Tons of iron oxide dumped into the oceans could significantly lower the Earth’s temperature, counterbalancing the heating going on elsewhere in the world. However, these noble intentions could have a great cost, and all geoengineering theories are essentially untried.

That volcanic eruption in Tambora is actually a classic example of what can go wrong. The ash from the volcano caused worldwide cooling and an abrupt drop in temperature. The result was widespread famine in 1815 and 1816 as crops failed due to lack of sunlight and warmth. Livestock, deprived of hay and feed, starved. Hundreds of thousands of people died. Too much cooling could have just the same effect as too much warming—throwing the planet’s atmospheric engine out of balance. The right amount of iron poured into the oceans may cure global warming, but is the risk worth the reward?

Recent news reports have detailed no overall rise in global temperatures between 1998 and 2008. News accounts suggest that China’s release of sulfates into the atmosphere from coal-burning industrial plants has caused the planet to become cooler.

Iron oxide or sulfates: could they be a geoengineering answer or a planetary nightmare?