The Noise

by James Patterson, J. D. Barker

Genres: Action & Adventure; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

'A really entertaining thriller [that] like Michael Crichton . . . keeps ratcheting up the suspense' Booklist
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Two sisters have always stood together. Now, they're the only ones left.

In the shadow of Mount Hood in the US Pacific Northwest, sixteen-year-old Tennant is checking rabbit traps with her eight-year-old sister Sophie.

The girls are suddenly overcome by a strange vibration rising out of the forest, building in intensity until it sounds like a deafening crescendo of screams.

From out of nowhere, their father sweeps them up and drops them through a trapdoor into a storm cellar. But the noise only gets worse . . .
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Praise for James Patterson

'The master storyteller of our times' Hillary Rodham Clinton
'Nobody does it better' Jeffery Deaver
'One of the greatest storytellers of all time' Patricia Cornwell
'A writer with an unusual skill at thriller plotting' Mark Lawson, Guardian
'James Patterson is The Boss. End of.' Ian Rankin

© James Patterson 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Release date: August 16, 2021

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 400

Sample

Chapter One

Tennant

The forest had a particular scent to it, a dewy moistness off the Columbia River mixed with Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, red cedar, hemlock, and maple. Overnight, a fog had rolled down from the peak of Mount Hood, the sun crackling over the ghostly landscape, glistening shadows marred by flecks of white, now warming with dawn.

Sixteen-year-old Tennant Riggin took each step over the earth with practiced care, her footfalls silent as she avoided the twigs, fallen branches, leaves, and pine needles, her leather boots leaving no trail. Just as Poppa had taught her.

Three feet to her left, her eight-year-old sister, Sophie, took no such precaution. She crashed through the underbrush, thrashing her crooked walking stick as if intent on waking all of Mother Nature’s creatures who dare to still be sleeping when she had to be awake.

“Will you be quiet?” Tennant urged.

“I will not,” Sophie fired back. “If you wanted quiet, you shoulda let me sleep.”

“Momma wants you to learn. You need to hunt, too.”

“Coulda learned an hour from now just as good. What makes you think you caught anything at all, anyway?”

Sophie was annoying, but she was right. While Tennant’s traps had improved substantially over the years, they weren’t as good as Poppa’s. Half the time, her bait was gone or her post snapped, or the noose was missing. Yesterday she’d seen a plump hare jump right into one of her twine nooses, but successfully break free, running off with her bait and half her trap in tow. She’d caught it, but only after nearly an hour. She hadn’t told Momma or Poppa that part. Sophie knew, though. She’d perched on a rock and laughed as her big sister chased that damn rabbit.

Tennant set six snares yesterday, made with wire this time rather than twine.

The Riggin sisters were fourth-generation survivalists, both born within three hundred yards from where they now stood, and neither had ever left the woods of Oregon. They’d heard stories, they knew there was another world out there, but they had no desire to see it. More than once, Grammy Riggin had sat them down and told them the horrors of the outside world, with its pollution and greed and waste, and on her deathbed last fall she made them promise never to take part in that debauchery. Tennant told her she never would. She swore to it. She loved their little village of 187—correction—188 with the birth of Lily last week—and that outside world didn’t concern her. Saying that Sophie felt the same might have been a bit of a white lie. Sophie had started asking questions when Kaitlyn and Jeremiah’s boy Kruger went to Portland for nearly three months. He came back different, and Tennant had caught Sophie watching him, following him around, listening to the things he said. She was nosy for an eight-year-old, and most folks around here hushed up when she came round. Not Kruger, though. He seemed to like having her ear.

They both heard the scream, and froze. A baby’s wail, a keening from up ahead. A desperate rattling in the brush.

“Oh, stars, you got one!”

Rabbits made the most horrible of sounds when frightened or injured.

But there shouldn’t be any sound. When set properly, a snare ought to choke the rabbit to sleep, death a moment later. Quick. Humane. Efficient. This wasn’t the sound of a dying rabbit. This was one fighting for escape. Something had gone wrong.

Another scream, about twenty feet away, louder than the first.

A third, this one more faint, beyond the first two. Tennant had set six traps in total, all with the new wire.

The excitement melted from Sophie’s face. Her eyes got wider as the screams grew louder. The blood left her cheeks, and she went pale, near tears. “Make it stop, Tennant.”

Tennant carried a small jar of beeswax in her pack for tick and bug bites. She fished it out, scooped some on her fingertip, and pressed globs of wax deep into each of her ears, reducing the screams to dull, muted cries. She held the jar out to her sister, who waved it off—too messy for little Miss Prissy.

Sophie covered her ears instead.

Tennant dropped the wax back in her pack, retrieved her knife, and extended the blade. “Come on.”

Sophie didn’t move. Instead, she planted her feet firmly and shook her head. She said something, but Tennant couldn’t make out her words through the wax.

Tennant heard something else then, not from the forest but from deep in her mind. A ringing. First faint, barely audible, but steadily growing. A single tone gaining strength, joined by others, shrill, louder. Hungry. Ugly. There was a pressure, too. As if her head were filling with water and didn’t have enough room. Cold sweat trickled down the back of her neck. The world swooned, her vision clouded, and Tennant felt like she might pass out.

She thought it was all in her mind until she glanced over at Sophie, whose eyes welled with panic—her sister’s mouth hung open as she looked up into the trees, toward the dull gray of the morning sky, her hands cupped tightly over her ears.

The sound grew louder.

Deafening.

A crescendo of screams.

As if every human, animal, and creature of Mother Earth all cried together in fevered pain.

Tennant was on her knees, her sister curled up beside her, as Poppa burst from the bushes with a rifle slapping against his back, Momma behind him. She didn’t feel Poppa scoop her into his arms, didn’t remember it. She blinked and they were running through the trees, toward Bill McAuliffe’s barn at the far edge of the village. She blinked again, and Poppa was lowering her through the trapdoor into the cellar. Momma handed Sophie down to her and Tennant tried to catch her, but instead they both tumbled down the steps to the dirt floor, landing in a heap.

Tennant caught a glimpse of Poppa’s eyes as he slammed the door down from up above, Momma behind him, their faces white as paper and skin stretched tight with pain. She’d never seen eyes so bloodshot.

This sound.

This loudest of sounds.

Somehow, grew louder.

Oh, God, why didn’t Poppa and Momma come down, too?

Chapter Two

Tennant

Sophie’s scream cut through Tennant like a dull, rusty blade.

Her sister’s voice blended with the horrible wail coming from both everywhere and nowhere all at once. Her bones wanted out of her skin. The dirt floor of the cellar pulsed with the penetrating hum. Dust and dirt jumped, stirred angrily through the stale, musty air.

Tennant rolled from her back to her side, dug her fingers deep into her ears against the sound, yet the deafening cry managed to dig further—past her fingers, through the wax, a knitting needle clawing at her brain, scraping the inside of her skull, cracking against the bone.

What had started as a single high-pitched tone had grown to all sounds—high and low, both deep and shrill—screeching, shrieking, all at once.

The cellar wasn’t large. Ten by ten, at the most. The dirt walls were lined with wood and cinder-block shelves filled with canned goods, beef jerky, powdered milk, gallons of water, wheat.

All of this came to life, vibrating from the sound.

Cans and packages tumbled from the shelves and crashed to the ground. A bag of flour burst.

The walls groaned as the weight of the earth pushed in from all sides.

The boards of the ceiling rattled as if stomped on from above.

Still, the sound grew louder.

Tennant had no idea she was screaming, too, until she ran out of breath and choked on the air—dirt, dust, flour—all filling her lungs at once. She coughed it back out, forced herself to stand, clawed at the cellar door.

Why had Poppa locked them in?

They’d die down here.

And Momma and Poppa out there?

On the ground at her feet, Sophie’s hands and arms wrapped around her head, her knees pulled tight against her chest. Blood dripped from the corners of her eyes, from her button nose, seeped out from between her fingers over her ears. Thick, congealed blood, dark red, nearly black. One of her hands shot out and wrapped around Tennant’s ankles and squeezed so tight the pain brought her back down to the floor.

The sound grew louder.

Tennant wanted to hold her sister, but her arms and legs no longer obeyed her. Her heart drummed against her ribs, threatened to burst. She couldn’t get air, each gasp no better than breathing water. Her eyes rolled back into her head, her vision first went white, then dark, as the walls closed in. The cellar no better than a grave.

Chapter Three

Tennant

When Tennant woke, her eyes fluttered open on muted darkness. Light crept down from above, leaking from between the cracks in the ceiling boards, flickering over the dust hovering in the air, finding her on the floor, on her back, her right leg twisted awkwardly beneath her.

Utter silence.

The silence so complete, Tennant thought she could no longer hear at all. Then she remembered the wax in her ears and clawed it out, sat up, gathered her senses.

“Sophie?”

Tennant had experienced earthquakes before. Two she recalled vividly, and neither had left the cellar in such disarray. Most of the shelves had collapsed. Those still in place were bare, the ground littered with their contents. Canned berries and jams had exploded, their sweet scent mixing with the dust, shards of glass everywhere. The once-familiar room looked foreign to her.

She spotted Sophie tucked into the corner, crouched, rocking side to side on her feet. Matted hair and blood covered her face. Her eyes were wide but unfocused. Her lips moved in some silent conversation.

Tennant shuffled through the debris and went to her. Every muscle in her body ached, as if she’d spent the day in the cornfield or baling hay.

When she reached out to Sophie her sister didn’t respond to her touch, only continued to mumble, although Tennant couldn’t make out the words.

Her eyes were bloodshot, like Momma and Poppa’s. She was horribly pale, too. Cold to the touch. “Sophie, can you hear me?”

Her sister didn’t respond.

Tennant wrapped her arms around her, tried to stop her from rocking, but her sister continued to move side to side.

Tennant leaned in closer, brought her ear to her sister’s lips.

Sophie’s incoherent mumbling was barely a whisper. Tennant didn’t know what her sister was saying, but there was urgency to the words. Her head nodded as she spoke, her eyes flickering about the room without really looking at anything at all.

Tennant snapped her fingers.

Nothing.

She slapped her.

She didn’t want to, but it did work.

The rocking stopped. Sophie sucked in a breath and went rigid. Her gaze fixed on her sister.

Tennant pressed her palms to Sophie’s cheeks. “You okay?”

Sophie stared at her for a moment, confused. Then her hands went to her ears, her fingertips digging inside. Tentatively at first, then more fevered, aggressive. Tennant grabbed her wrists and tried to make her stop, but she was so strong.

Both their hands came away bloody—Sophie screamed, and that only made things worse. She slammed her hands against the sides of her head. “Can’t hear! Can’t hear!”

Tennant tried to pull her arms away, but Sophie just slapped at her, banged the sides of her head again, each blow more harsh than the last. “No! No! No!”

“Sophie! Stop!”

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

She started rocking again, faster than before—left to right, right to left, back again.

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

Sophie pushed her back, sending Tennant tumbling across the floor into a barrel of cornmeal.

She had to get them out of there. She knew Bill McAuliffe kept an ax down here. Normally, it hung on the wall in the far right corner, but now she found it on the ground under a pile of powdered milk cartons.

Tennant hefted the heavy ax and scrambled up the steps to the trapdoor. With the blade facing up, she gripped the handle with both hands and swung up at the door. She aimed for the hinge but struck the wood about four inches off-center. She repositioned and swung again. On the third hit, the first hinge snapped. The second hinge took five blows. The door fell in, and sunlight streamed down through the opening.

Dropping the ax, Tennant went back down into the cellar and grabbed Sophie’s hand. “Come on!”

At first, she thought her sister would fight her, but instead she was on her feet. She pushed past Tennant and raced out into the open air.

“Wait!” Tennant hollered after her, bounding up the steps.

There shouldn’t be daylight.

Chapter Four

Tennant

The McAuliffe barn was gone.

Tennant found Sophie standing where the barn door had been, her back to her. The roof of the old building was missing, the walls nothing but a crumbled ruin. Cracked and splintered boards littered the ground, hay tossed about wildly. Only a single post remained, sticking awkwardly out from the earth, no longer straight, but like a finger pointing east on a bent knuckle.

The air was still, filled with unsettling calm.

Tennant crossed over to her sister, each step heavier than the last, as she realized what Sophie was looking at.

Their village was gone, too.

Leveled.

Not a single structure still standing. Even the stone well, near the village center, had been reduced to nothing but a hole in the ground with the heavy stones as far as twenty feet away embedded in the dirt.

There were no people. No bodies. No wildlife.

Tennant’s stomach twisted into a heavy knot.

Poppa had told them about tornados, but he also told them they were rare in Oregon. She had never seen one, but nothing else could explain this.

Her hand was on Sophie’s shoulder, and she must have squeezed too hard; her sister shook her off, slowly started rocking again—left to right, right to left.

A dog barked across the emptiness, and Tennant’s head swiveled toward the sound.

Zeke.

She found herself walking toward him in a half daze, towing Sophie by the hand.

They found the yellow Labrador cowering in the remains of their home, nothing more than a shivering puddle of fur pressed against the flattened hearth of their fireplace, the chimney a pile of rubble beside him.

Tennant fell to the ground and buried her face in his body. “Hey, boy. It’s okay. It’s okay.”

At first, he didn’t seem to notice her. Then he tentatively lifted his head and licked her cheek.

Sophie remained standing, her feet moving in place, her gaze lost in the direction where their room should have been, beyond that to the empty space of their parents’ room. She choked back a sob. “Where are Momma and Poppa?”

Zeke whimpered and buried his face in the crook of Tennant’s arm.

“How did you escape this, brave boy?” she asked him.

He only buried his face deeper.

Sophie’s eyes narrowed and she raised a hand, her finger pointing at something in the distance, toward the center of the village.

“What?”

She didn’t answer. Tennant couldn’t be sure she even heard her. Her stiff finger quivered, and she started toward whatever it was she found.

Tennant chased after her, Zeke reluctantly following—his snout first on the ground, then sniffing at the air, a steady whine from his throat as he chuffed with concern. A bumblebee crawled out of the flattened grass and took flight—the only other sign of life she’d seen since leaving the cellar.

Sophie had stopped beyond the well, near a large reddened heap surrounded by matted grass.

Tennant froze, unsure if she wanted to get any closer. A voice in the back of her mind told her not to, told her to turn and run in the opposite direction, put as much distance between her and this place as she could.

Zeke lowered himself to the ground. His tail thumped once, then went still.

Sophie rocked again—left to right, right to left. Her small hands closed into fists and opened again in a steady rhythm like the ticking of a clock.

A metronome.

“What is it, Sophie? What’d you find?”

No answer came, but Tennant hadn’t really expected one. The blood seeping from Sophie’s ears had slowed but hadn’t stopped. She feared her sister would never hear again.

Tennant sucked in a breath, forced herself to move. She made her way to Sophie’s side.

She’d known the scent of death since her earliest memories. Momma had once told her she’d grow used to it, and she told Poppa that she had. That had been a lie. The familiar sickly-sweet odor crawled through the grass like a venomous snake, silent and fierce.

Death came from the pile at Sophie’s feet. But what really frightened her was that the scent of death was everywhere.

The bloody mass at Sophie’s feet was a horse. Beaten, pulverized, a horrid mound of flesh lay in opened waste, intestines and innards strewn about from a ragged tear in the animal’s dark, glistening fur, as if it had burst under the pressure. She’d never seen anything like it.

About twenty feet to their left, a horde of dark flies filled the air, dipping down to the ground and back up again in a fevered dance. Tennant couldn’t see what they were feasting on. She didn’t want to.

Beside her, Sophie rocked. Right to left, left to right, tick, tock.

She reached over and squeezed her sister’s shoulder. “We should go.”

As she took a step back, her foot rolled and she nearly fell.

Half-buried, a single leather work boot protruded from the ground.

A boot she recognized.

Poppa.

Chapter Six

Martha

The headset was far too large for Dr. Martha Chan. Even with the band adjusted to the smallest setting, they kept slipping down her forehead—she found herself holding them in place, alternating from her right hand to her left and back again whenever her arm got tired. They did the job, though. The heavy thwack of the helicopter rotors were reduced to a rhythmic thump with the metallic breathing of her pilot amplified over the speakers.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said again. “They’re the smallest I have.”

He’d apologized twice now.

At only five foot one, Martha was no stranger to things not fitting, particularly when it came to military aircraft. After getting picked up at just after two in the morning from her apartment in San Francisco, she’d been shuttled to a C-1 transport plane at Yerba Buena Island, rushed from the Army sedan up the steps and into one of the jump seats on the port side of the aircraft. She’d felt like a child as one of the pilots helped secure her with a double-banded belt, tugging it tight over her shoulders. She’d noted his fatigues bore no name badge or insignia of any kind; same with the other pilot. Aside from the two of them, she was alone in the large aircraft as it lumbered down the tarmac and took flight.

Two hours later, they’d touched down. The moment the plane stopped moving, the pilot was back, unfastening the safety harness and ushering her down the steps to the awaiting EC135 chopper less than fifty feet away.

“Where are we?” Martha had asked, attempting to take in the airfield as they ran, ducking as they approached the spinning blades, her leather overnight bag slapping against her leg. She could see nothing beyond the lights of the airstrip and a group of hangars off in the distance. The night sky was black and gray, filled with dark, churning clouds. Even the moon had abandoned her.

“I’m not at liberty to say, ma’am.”

The too-large headphones had been sitting on the backseat of the helicopter. She’d put them on and adjusted the microphone as her escort closed and locked the door, then ran back toward the plane.

Her new pilot had looked back at her and nodded toward a large manila envelope on the seat beside her. “Ma’am? Please place your cell phone in that envelope. I was told to collect all communication devices before I’m permitted to go airborne.” He glanced at her Apple Watch. “That, too, please.”

Martha frowned. “The watch isn’t cellular. I just use it to track my fitness information.”

“Please, ma’am. I have orders.”

She sighed. She knew better than to argue with military personnel. He’d sit here for the next two weeks and wait on her before he’d violate orders. None of these guys seemed to think for themselves. She supposed that was appealing for some, but not for her. Mark, her ex-husband, would be the first to tell anyone willing to listen that Martha was a control freak of the highest degree. In the final months of their marriage, they’d had blowout arguments over things as ridiculous as who got to control the television remote. Understandable, considering his choice in programming was shit, but the arguments didn’t stop there—they’d managed to find a way to fight about damn near everything. Fighting might have been the only thing they were good at. Two strong-willed type-A personalities under the same roof was bound to end bad, always did. The twins held them together that last year. Without those two, they would have called it quits a long time ago.

Christ, the twins.

This coming weekend was her turn to take them. Nobody had told her how long she’d be gone this time. They never did.

A two-hour flight in the transport plane from the airbase in San Francisco could put her anywhere in the western United States—Idaho, Utah, Arizona. Maybe Wyoming, Colorado, or New Mexico. Even Baja, although she hadn’t seen any sign of the ocean. She had no way of knowing what direction they’d flown. She didn’t like not knowing where she was. She liked communication blackouts even less.

Martha powered down her phone and smartwatch, dropped them into the envelope, and handed it up to the pilot. The chopper was airborne a few minutes later, soaring through the night.

From the window, she studied the distant skyline. “What city is that?”

The pilot glanced out the window, then at her in the mirror. “I’m not at liberty—”

She waved a hand and cut him off. “—not at liberty to say, I understand.”

They flew in silence for thirty minutes. The pilot was the first to speak. “You’re not military,” he asked. “Are you some kind of doctor?”

“What makes you think I’m not military?”

“Your clothes, that leather bag. The way you’re gripping your armrest. My military passengers tend to sit back and enjoy the ride, happy for the downtime. You look like you’re ready to jump. Civilian.”

Martha released the armrest and nudged her headphones back up on her head. “Doctor, yeah.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“I did my undergrad in biology at UC San Francisco, then four years at Hopkins studying trauma surgery. After that, I got my psychology PhD from Berkeley.” She was looking out the window again. “Are those mountains down there?”

He ignored her. “That’s a lot of school.”

“I like school.”

“Kids?”

Martha nodded. “Boy and a girl, twins. Emily and Michael.”

“How old?”

“Eight.”

“Good for you.”

Light started to creep up over the horizon. They were heading east.

“I’ve got a little boy, name’s Tim, after his grandpa. He’s going on thirteen now.” The pilot showed her a photograph of a boy with a mop of white hair holding up a fish.

“Tighten up your belt. We’re about to land.”

Through the window, she spotted a familiar landmark. Mount Hood. She and Mark had gone camping up here once, back when things were good. So this was Oregon.

Chapter Seven

Martha

The EC135 touched down in the grass about thirty feet from two other helicopters, and a fiftyish man in a tan uniform with dark-olive pants ran out from the porch of the cabin, one hand holding his hat, the other shielding his eyes as the blades kicked up dust and dirt.

Martha took off her headphones and fumbled with the latch on her belt.

The man opened her door and shouted over the engine noise. “I’m Hoyt Rayburn with Forest Rangers. Welcome to Zigzag Station. Can I help you with that?” He snatched Martha’s bag from the seat before she had a chance to answer and helped her out of the chopper.

They were halfway to the cabin when the helicopter shot back up into the sky.

Martha turned and frowned. “He still has my phone and watch.”

The blades of one of the other choppers started turning as a transport helicopter lowered a concrete barrier to the ground on thick cables, setting it down next to several others already in place. There were people crowded around, directing the work. The noise was deafening.

“What?” Rayburn shouted back.

“Never mind.”

One hand still on his hat, he yelled, “Let’s get you inside. They’re waiting on you.”

Another truck pulled up. Some type of military transport. A few men jumped out the back and began unloading rolls of chain-link fencing.

Martha followed Rayburn up the steps and into the building.

He closed the door behind her, took off his hat, and brushed the dust off. “They’ve got a crane on the way to finish up the barrier, but the powers that be didn’t want to wait so they brought that thing in from Kingsley. Probably scaring the wildlife half to death.”

“Why are they building a barrier?”

“Dr. Chan?”

A man in jeans, black boots, and a white button-down shirt stood in a doorway toward the back of the room. He was about Martha’s age, with thinning dark hair cropped close to his head. “In here, please.”

Martha didn’t move. “You are?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he turned and walked back into the room.

“DIA,” Rayburn said softly. “At least I think so. He got here first. I heard him on the phone.”

“Defense Intelligence Agency?”

“Now, Dr. Chan,” the man called out from the other room.

Rayburn handed Martha her leather bag. “Best to keep that close.”

Zigzag Station was larger than it appeared from the outside. The walls of the main room were lined with educational displays—photographs of local wildlife with detailed descriptions and histories stenciled beneath protective plastic. Martha imagined this was the kind of place schoolchildren visited on field trips. There was a counter off to the far right covered in pamphlets and brochures for local tours and outings. There were several vending machines, too, stocked with water and soda, candy and energy bars. Although the exterior of the cabin was covered in siding, the interior was made up of exposed beams and white oak, most likely sourced locally. There was a fireplace, but it didn’t look like anyone had used it in some time, more for show now.

As she stepped through the doorway at the back, three more people looked up at her from around a large oak table. Two men and a woman. One man wore a suit, the second was in a sweatshirt and jeans, the woman wore a tank top and yoga pants, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Martha pictured a crew similar to the one that collected her picking this woman up from the middle of a morning jog somewhere. Without a word, they all looked back down at the large stack of papers in front of each of them.

The man from DIA pointed toward a vacant spot. Another pile of pages there, a black ballpoint on top. “Please take a seat, Dr. Chan.”

“I’d like to know what we’re doing here.”

“No speaking until you’ve read and signed the NDA. You’ll need to initial each page in the bottom right corner as well.”

Martha frowned. “NDA? I have Top Secret clearance.”

The man in the suit fought back a grin and flipped to the next page of his papers.

Martha glared at him. She wasn’t in the mood for this. Not at this hour. “This funny?”

Without looking up, he said, “We all have Top Secret clearance, Doctor. We all argued with this upstanding civil servant, and we all found ourselves no better for it. Best to read the document and sign so we all can get on with it.”

He spoke with a slight accent. British, but faint. Like he came to the States as a child.

The woman in the yoga pants glanced up at Martha, offered her a soft nod, then went back to reading.

Martha placed her bag in the corner of the room, sighed, and dropped down into the vacant chair. “Can I at least get some coffee?”

Chapter Eight

Martha

The topmost page of the thick document simply read, OFFICE OF THE JOINT CHIEFS.

As Martha read, two others joined the group and were handed NDAs of their own. A man and a woman, both in their mid to late forties. Although dressed casually, Martha caught a glimpse of a lab coat stuffed into the man’s bag, which was simply a canvas shopping bag. From their soft grumblings, she got the feeling they had been picked from a lab somewhere, and not allowed time to pack.

Thirty-seven minutes passed before the last person slid their NDA across the table to the man from DIA. He placed each of them carefully in an oversize leather briefcase, snapped the locks, and set it behind him on the floor against the wall.

Martha leaned forward in her chair. “Now can you tell us what this is all about?”

He studied each of their faces in turn, then looked down at his watch. “Shortly. We’re waiting on one more.”

“Introductions, then?” the man with the British accent said. “I’m Sanford Harbin with NOAA.”

“A climatologist?” Martha asked.

Harbin nodded.

“Interesting. I’m Martha Chan, a civilian liaison with the military for medical crises, and a PhD in psychology at Berkeley.”

“Dr. Chan. Pleasure. I read a paper you wrote about a decade ago on the negative psychological effects of overpopulation in first-, second-, and third-world populations,” Harbin said.

“I read that paper, too,” the man in the white sweatshirt and jeans said. “My name is Russel Fravel. Astrophysicist. I’m with Garner out in Boulder.” Fravel, an African American, his hair graying at his temples, studied her from behin