5 Days to Landfall Page 2

  “What else am I going to do? Sit at home and worry about Sarah? At least I’ll have something to focus on.” Can we change the subject?

  “I guess I understand,” Delaney said. “Listen. Where you headed tomorrow?”

  “Not sure. Start in Charleston, watch Gert, take a guess. Supposed to meet up with that New York Times reporter.”

  Delaney raised an eyebrow. “Jack Corbin?”

  “Yep.”

  “You meet him before?”

  “Once, years ago,” Amanda said. She squelched the deep breath her chest wanted as she thought of Jack Corbin. “He wants to write a feature on me, my work, my hurricane chasing. I think his real motive is to use me to be in the right spot at landfall.”

  “That would be Jack Corbin,” Delaney said. “He’s aggressive. So, he uses you—that’s OK. Maybe more people will pay attention to the storms. Listen. If you’re careful—I mean really careful—you could plant a bug in his ear about Harvey.”

  “Good idea. Jack knows the risk, and he knows what a mess the City’s evacuation plan is in. He could be a great asset later in the week. Frank? Can we…”

  He put his hand up. “I know. What should you do if he asks about the LORAX. Listen. You know more about Harvey than anyone. I trust you to get proper coverage. But under no circumstances can you discuss the LORAX. Christ, word gets out that we’re paying attention to a non-operational forecast model and it’s both our asses.”

  “Are we paying attention to it?”

  Frank Delaney sighed and slumped deep into his chair. Amanda waited.

  “Not officially, no,” he finally said.

  CHAPTER 2

  OUTSIDE SANTO DOMINGO,

  DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

  12:30 P.M.

  Maximo never made the calls. His people called him. If they didn’t, they died. Maximo had become wealthy by virtue of a lot of simple rules like that. The phone rang. He looked at his watch. The call would be from the United States.

  Maximo’s soft voice was as gruff as he could make it. “Nombre?”

  “Octopus.”

  “My friend.” Maximo let his jovial nature out of the box. His voice was velvety and distinct, a hint of an accent and practiced enunciation, but warm. “How are you?”

  “I’m well,” the Octopus said. “How is your lovely girlfriend, Maximo?”

  “Thank you for asking. Which one?” Maximo’s hearty laugh turned into a smoker’s hack. He looked around the pool at the three young, curvaceous, bikini-clad women who were keeping him company today. “They keep me happy. We have lovely young women here in the Dominican Republic, my friend. You will have to come see for yourself one day.”

  “I hope to,” the Octopus said.

  Maximo’s tone became serious. “Did you get the package, then?”

  “It arrived. I’m letting it cool down a little.”

  “Problem?”

  Maximo could hear the Octopus shift in his chair. “Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “Very well then. I trust you, my friend, even though you are not Dominican.” Maximo laughed again, coughed twice. “Besides, we have more important things to discuss, no?”

  The Octopus lowered his voice. “We do.”

  “Very well. What company?”

  “Global Insurance Company, NASDAQ ticker symbol GLIC.”

  Maximo: “What do you know about this GLIC?”

  “Overexposed in North Carolina,” the Octopus said. “Looks like Gert is going to hit there. If she does, GLIC is a sure bet. Trading at fifty-six dollars a share today. I think we can wait until tomorrow to make our bet.”

  “My bet. Do not forget that, my friend.”

  “Of course not,” the Octopus said. He cleared his throat. “I’m only thinking of the organization. I think you can wait until tomorrow sometime to sell the shares short. Make sure where Gert is going first. It’ll be a couple days, at least, before the market realizes what has happened, and then it won’t take long for the shares to lose half their value.”

  “Let us hope so,” Maximo said. “Five million is a lot of money, even for me.”

  “I have every confidence you’ll be able to buy the shares back at a much lower price.”

  “Very well. I feel so American, you know, profiting from another firm’s misfortune.”

  “Yes,” the Octopus said. “That is the American way.”

  “By the way, I commend you on your research so far, though I fear your methods may have been underhanded?”

  “The information is not widely known, and no one knows we have it.”

  “Ah, just as I feared! Well done,” Maximo said. “Of course, if you are wrong…”

  “…You will have to kill me.”

  Maximo laughed again, friendlier this time. He knew the Octopus would squirm around in his chair. The threat was no joke. The Dominicans didn’t trust most non-Dominicans as far as they could throw them. The Octopus was a rare exception to Maximo’s exclusionary policy, and he’d done well in the organization, but it was critical that he be reminded, now and then, of Maximo’s simplest rule: a single slip-up could cost him his life.

  Maximo’s laugh wound down. The Octopus took the opportunity: “I have two more I’m digging on that might come in handy when Harvey decides where he’s going. I’ll call you as soon as I know more. One of them looks real good if Harvey visits New York.”

  “You have mentioned New York before, my friend. But, really, when was the last time a hurricane hit New York?”

  “1938,” the Octopus said. “Long Island. I realize this is a long shot, but the payoff would be huge. And remember, I can affect the outcome.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Maximo said. “Maximum death and destruction, as you so quaintly put it.”

  “Harvey would do the heavy lifting, but I can lend a big hand. And the connection you gave me at Goddard may come in handy. We’re going to do a brief test tomorrow night just before Gert comes ashore.”

  “Connections. That’s how the world works.”

  “And connections are the key to our plan,” the Octopus said. “The way these companies have spread their risk around combined with the extensive interruptions to business that the storm would cause, well, the financial market will be rocked when we finally get a New York hurricane. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it cascade into a bear market, which would only help your investment.”

  “You’ll have to explain your theory on that to me sometime,” Maximo said. “Meanwhile, let’s concentrate on this first storm. Perhaps our next investment will be a bit more substantial, if your system works and if the wind does as you hope. Trust that you will be duly recognized either way.”

  Maximo hung up first, as he always did. Terese climbed out of the pool wearing a bikini bottom, no top. The long-legged twenty-eight-year-old blonde was the only American on the Pérez estate, essential now in helping Maximo understand aspects of the culture that sometimes baffled him. She was a good find, and once he got her off the drugs she proved to be better in bed than anyone he’d ever had.

  Terese pulled her long wet hair back and returned to the lounge chair next to him. Nobody sat within listening distance when Maximo was on the phone. Not even Terese. It wasn’t that Maximo hid much from her. She’d been his primary lover for a year now, and Maximo was prone to confiding in the woman who most frequently shared his bed. But it was a simple unspoken rule around the estate that you didn’t eavesdrop on Maximo. If he wanted you to know something, he’d tell you.

  “The Octopus says we have a shot at New York,” Maximo said. He watched glistening drops of water dribble into the crevice between her copper breasts. Terese didn’t look at him. But Maximo detected a stiffening.

  “Do you have a problem with me making money from the misfortune of your hometown?”

  She lit a cigarette, puffed once, then held it perched above a bent wrist and ignored his question. “Won’t that hurt business?”

  That’s what Maximo loved most about Terese. She
could think to the next step, she was willing to challenge him, and she was smart enough to do it in private. Maximo couldn’t afford to accept challenges to his power. But so long as Terese kept hers private, and so long as she continued to give him such pleasure in bed, she would be an exception.

  Lately, though, her irreverence had seemed to sharpen. Maximo wondered if she had something else, or someone else, on her mind. He made a mental note to keep his eyes open. For now, she seemed to have relaxed again, so he did too.

  “We’re going to move the main business to San Francisco soon anyway,” Maximo said. “I have been planning to do that for some time now. New York is getting too crowded. It seems every expatriate has set up shop there. It would be nice to go out with a bang.”

  “Just be careful,” Terese said without looking at him.

  “I’m always careful.”

  CHAPTER 3

  MIAMI SUBURBS

  10:15 P.M.

  Wearing a plain, oversized gray t-shirt and plaid boxer shorts, Amanda sat in her sparsely furnished study, a few miles from the Hurricane Center. The room was bathed vaguely in dim blue light from her computer monitor. Behind her, the door to a short hallway was open, allowing in a whisper of brightness from a distant floor lamp in the living room. Open windows pulled a light breeze through the house.

  On her desktop computer were various tracking and analysis programs for storms. She was normally frugal, but when it came to her job, she allowed herself luxuries. She also had a portable, suitcase-sized satellite setup that worked with her laptop to connect to the Internet from anywhere, without external power and without relying on cellular towers that might come down in a storm.

  Sarah’s father was late, as usual. Amanda had expected it, put Sarah to bed and then drifted into the study to check the storm. Amanda resolved not to make a big deal out of Joe Springer being three hours late to pick up his daughter for the only two weeks he’d spend with her the whole year. It would only start another fight.

  She typed a password into the computer and from over the Internet accessed the non-public section of the Hurricane Center’s forecasting database. She pulled up the official forecasted track for Gert. The green line ran straight toward South Carolina, representing the forecast of a computer model developed at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. The model was known simply as the GFDL. If Amanda had her way, by next season the GFDL model would be replaced by the LORAX, a model she was working on with a small team of researchers, an improved tool that she expected to be ten or twenty percent more accurate.

  Amanda typed another command, and the red line appeared over the green one. The northward turn was more pronounced. She pulled up a sea of numbers that explained the path of the red line, studied them. Sarah came in, rubbing her eyes with one fist, dragging a sad-looking stuffed Piglet with the other.

  “There’s my little girl. C’mere.”

  Sarah hopped up on her lap, frowning. Piglet fell to the floor. Sarah’s hair was like her mother’s, dark, hanging straight, but longer. Sarah wouldn’t allow her hair to be cut. It hung all the way down her back. She had her mother’s olive skin, sharp cheeks, eyes that squinted when she smiled, turned down at the corners. But she had her father’s eyebrows, thick and dark. And those eyebrows could frown.

  “What are you doing up?” Amanda asked.

  “Can’t sleep,” Sarah frowned. She played with the holes in the feet of her favorite pajamas, the pink ones. Though Amanda kept buying her new ones, Sarah refused to wear any others. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’ll be here soon.”

  “He was supposed to be here at seven.”

  “I know, honey. Did you read some?”

  “Two books already.”

  “Count sheep?”

  Sarah stuck her bottom lip out. “A hundred of them.”

  “I tell you what,” Amanda said. “Why don’t you listen to one of your tapes?”

  Sarah brightened. “The Lorax!”

  The girl had dozens of books on tape. Amanda sometimes worried she was addicted to them, but it was better than television, she decided, and a single mother had to be creative. The Dr. Seuss tape that included The Lorax was Sarah’s favorite. Amanda’s, too. She was never too old for Seuss.

  Amanda stuck her chin down to her chest, lowered her voice and recited a line from the book: “‘Mister!’ he said with a sawdusty sneeze…”

  “‘I’m the Lorax,’” Sarah chimed in, “‘I speak for the trees.’”

  “We need to get you some more of those tapes,” Amanda said.

  “Winnie the Pooh!”

  “I’ll look for it. Now how about you go off to bed. If you don’t get a nap in you’re going to be extra cranky.”

  “When’s Daddy coming?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart.”

  “What are you working on, Mommy?”

  “My forecasting program.”

  “Is it broken?”

  “No, it’s just not quite finished yet.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Well, if it works right, it will tell me where the wind will take hurricanes.”

  “How come there’s so many hurricanes all of a sudden?”

  Amanda chuckled. The answer to that question—in the long-term sense—had to do with, among other things, the diminishing El Niño, which when it was strong tended to suppress the formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic. When El Niño subsided, the Atlantic tended to fire up hurricane production. Amanda thought it humorous that even the absence of El Niño could be blamed for severe weather. In the short-term sense, there was a simpler answer for her daughter. “There’s always more of them in the summer and fall.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve told you before. Can you remember?”

  Sarah looked up into a corner of her brain. “Um. Because the ocean has to be warm?”

  “Good for you.”

  “Why does that make hurricanes?”

  “Well, you remember when I showed you how thunderstorms worked?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah, the bored look of a too-smart child in her rolling eyes. “The warm air goes up.” Her head and arms moved in exaggerated undulations. “It gets cold, makes rain, comes down.”

  She’s going to be just like her mother. God help her. “Let’s see. Well, hurricanes are like thunderstorms. Actually, a hurricane is made up of a whole bunch of thunderstorms, all gathered together in one big swirl.”

  Amanda found a pen and some blank paper, drew a pinwheel with several bands that grew in width as she sketched inward, curving counter-clockwise. In the middle she drew a black dot.

  “This is what a hurricane looks like from outer space. Each of those swirls is a band of thunderstorms,” Amanda said. “And the wind is rushing to the middle.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the warm, moist air is rising in the middle. Remember what happens?”

  Sarah fingered a hole in her pajamas, studied it. Her forehead knotted as she thought. “The other air has to take its place?”

  “Yep. So air rushes in from all around. Now, the warm water is the hurricane’s fuel.”

  “Like gasoline?”

  “Maybe more like the fire in a hot-air balloon. Like the one we rode in last summer. Remember how the pilot would turn the fire on, and the balloon would go up? In a hurricane, the air gets warmed by the water instead of a fire.”

  Amanda drew a cross-section of a hurricane, with a tall cylinder in the middle and a series of clouds on either side representing thunderstorm bands. With a red pen she drew arrows pointing upward in each band of clouds. “The air is rising in each of these thunderstorms. The worst ones are near the center, where the air is rising the fastest. So what happens to the wind at the surface there?”

  “It blows harder.”

  Amanda nodded. “So the wind is circling in and going up. The faster it rises, the harder it sucks other air in, and the stronger the wind gets.”

  Sarah w
as shifting in her seat. Amanda was about to explain how the rising air condensed, how the condensation produced heat and caused the air to rise even more, how the increasing winds whipped up the ocean’s surface, allowing even more water to evaporate into the storm and, ultimately, how the hurricane fed on itself.

  Instead, she drew an arrow that curved out from the top of the cylinder in the middle. “The air rises way up into the sky…”

  “Higher than the balloon went?”

  “Much higher. Higher than most airplanes go.”

  “That’s high!” Sarah’s brown eyes were wide and she nodded her head.

  “Eight or ten miles. Then the air is pushed out, like smoke from a chimney, making room for more rising air.”

  Sarah pointed to the cylinder in the middle. “Is that the eyeball?”

  “The eye,” Amanda said. “Some air sinks back into the center. As it sinks, it gets warmer and it’s calm and quiet. There are usually no clouds in the eye.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “To a hurricane?”

  “To the eye!” Sarah pointed to some imaginary place over Amanda’s shoulder.

  Amanda bounced Sarah on her knee. “I’ve never even been there. Yet. And I think it would be a rough ride, sweetie. I don’t know if you would like it.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Sarah said.

  Amanda believed her. “Maybe someday you can fly a plane into one yourself,” she said. “People fly in and measure the wind. They’re called Hurricane Hunters.”

  “Really?” Sarah’s eyes lit up and Amanda saw a reflection of her own young, hopeful and determined eyes. “Can I be a Hurricane Hunter?”

  “Why not? You can do anything you want.”

  “Mommy. Will you read me a book now?”

  “Nope. Off you go. It’s going to be a long night, and you need sleep.”

  “I’ll sleep on the plane. Daddy said we could go swimming tomorrow.”

  “You be careful, swimming in the ocean.”