The Zul Enigma (65 page)

Rachael’s father’s
friend, Drew Roberts, made a quantum leap in his career when he started working
on the Space Elevator project. In early 2014 he, Erika Stone and her two sons
moved to Bremerton in Washington State on the west coast, where the LiftPort
Group had their headquarters. They were married the following year and Erika
became a full-time mother. LiftPort relocated to San Diego, California in 2022
and that same year Drew was hired to head the Space Station Settlement
Programme, an organisation created to coordinate projects utilising the Space
Elevator, which came under the auspices of the Global Space Agency. He
continued working for SSSP until he retired at seventy years of age, the year
the first Space Elevator made its inauguration lift in 2028. He continued
working with them as a consultant for many years and saw four elevators
successfully tethered.

Having got the
impression from her mother’s book that until Drew unexpectedly came into his
aunt’s inheritance and the NASA redundancy package back in 2012, he’d always
been the poor relation in comparison with her father’s high profile career, she
was pleased to see how successful he’d become. He had died in 2043 when he was
eighty-three and Erika, thirteen years his junior, outlived him by nineteen
years.

When she researched Greg
Howard she confirmed what her mother said, that he resigned from the UN in
March 2013 after the Criminal Tribunal discovered how the virus had been
distributed to the poor. Rachael wished she could have met him. She could tell
from the way her mother described him what a good man he was and what a good
friend he’d been to both her parents. She read that just after they were shot
dead he packed up his home in New York and went back to the family farm outside
Brisbane in Australia, withdrawing from public life altogether. Rachael spotted
an obituary that reported his death in 2036 at the age of eighty. His wife,
Tracy, had preceded him two years before.

Out of all the people
Rebecca mentioned in her book, Rachael discovered only Joseph Fisher –
Drew and Carlos’s old friend, and Scott Fuller – who used to report to
Barbara Lord back in 2012, were still alive. Although she could find no record
of what Scott Fuller did after the NI was disbanded, his name popped up in a
report about Barbara’s funeral, and from that link Rachael learned he’d moved
to Miami where, as far as she could make out, at eighty-eight years old, he
still lived with his wife. Joseph Fisher, however, sixteen years older, had
been far easier to trace. He’d retired from his consulting position with IAI at
ninety-five and having reached the grand old age of 104 had been resident for
the past five years at the nursing home wing of a Jewish hospital located near
Miami Beach. Well, Rachael thought, that made life easy. She checked
availability of flights from Málaga where she now lived and booked herself a
seat.

Miami, she thought, here
I come.

Rachael was forced back in her seat as the plane hurtled down the runway and
she felt a thrill of anticipation explode in her stomach as it took off and
banked over the sea. She took her mother’s manuscript out of the bag she’d
stowed in the compartment underneath the window. Her neighbour, a young man in
his early thirties, stared fascinated as she leafed through real paper, but she
didn’t care. She loved the smell of the yellowed pages, and more than that,
loved knowing her mother’s hands had touched every sheet.

She found the chapter
describing the flight Greg Howard had made with Carlos to Washington DC at the
end of March 2012. Although it wasn’t Domaine Laurent-Perrier Brut, sitting and
drinking wine on a plane as her father had once done somehow made her feel
extra close to him.

Air travel had
progressed since his day, although not as quickly as it would have had there
been no global massacre. The latest commercial jets could achieve speeds of
over Mach 2, much like the old Concord, which halved the typical flying times
of 2012.

During the flight
Rachael tried to keep a reign on her excitement, reminding herself that both
Scott and Joseph were old men and for all she knew their mental faculties might
be shot. It was very possible neither of them would even remember Carlos Maiz,
let alone any details that might help her. They may not even agree to meet her
at all.

After boarding the Miami Airport auto shuttle and being transported through
hail and sleet to her hotel, before even trying to contact Scott, Rachael made
a holovideo call to the nursing home where Joseph was resident. Finding out
he'd been transferred to the hospital wing for some routine annual tests
earlier in the day, she explained that she was the daughter of one of his old
friends, left her name, and asked that he return her call when he could.

CHAPTER 4

‘So how long did it take you to track me down?’ Scott asked, rubbing his knee
as he flexed his leg.

‘The time it took to
drink ten pots of coffee,’ Rachael replied, and they laughed.

‘Do you enjoy playing
bloodhound?’

‘I trained as a
journalist, but my nose is very rusty.’

‘Take a break then. Let
me do some digging. Tell me about yourself,’ Scott said.

‘I started out working
on a magazine. I must get the love of writing from my mother. And having read
her book, I know I get the addiction to coffee from my father.’ She smiled at
Scott. ‘Today was the first time I’ve drunk tea in years.’

He laughed. ‘Some Brit
you turned out to be.’

Rachael shrugged. ‘Well
I’m not any more, am I? I’m half Spanish.’

‘But you grew up in
England?’

‘Yes. Near Oxford.
Although Mum and Dad – my adoptive parents – were originally from
Bristol.’

‘I guess they moved to get
away from the news hounds.’

‘It must have been tough
for them, although they never let on to me. But ever since I can remember, we
always had this strong attachment to Spain. Every year we’d visit an elderly
couple, friends, who lived on a farm outside Estepa in Andalucía. I adored them
and their family. They treated me like a princess. They used to kiss me and
pinch my cheeks. Their daughter had two sons a bit older than me. I’m still in
touch with them. They taught me Spanish. I speak it fluently. Now I know they
were my father’s parents, their daughter his sister and her kids his nephews.’
She smiled.

‘Have you told them
about your mother’s book?’

‘Not yet. I want to see
what more I can find out first.’

‘It’s good your adoptive
parents kept the connection with your Spanish family.’

‘They were good people.
I loved them very much. After my maternal grandparents died, we moved to
Málaga. Estepa’s only a hundred kilometres to the northwest – just over
an hour by car in those days. That was in 2026 when I was thirteen. Mum and Dad
said they moved for the warmer weather, but now I know it was to keep me close
to my father’s family.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Spain? Oh I loved it!
And I love Málaga. I still live there.’

‘What did you do when
you left school?’

Rachael took a sip of
her drink. ‘I went to Bristol University and studied journalism. After I
graduated I came back to Spain and got a job working on a magazine in Málaga. A
few years later, when I broke up with my long-term boyfriend, I went travelling.
I got writing jobs along the way to support myself. English was the Global
Language and it was a good way to earn money.’

‘That was adventurous.’

‘It was an incredible
experience. I had the best time. Then when I was in Brazil, I started working
for GRS, the Global Reclamation Society.’

Scott nodded. ‘I
remember when it was established in 2020.' He clinked the ice in his glass.
‘And how did you enjoy it there?’

‘It was amazing,’
Rachael said. ‘The group I worked with located equatorial cities that had been evacuated
due to health reasons after the massacre. We’d go in to assess the possibility
of transforming them into functioning habitats for people being driven out of
other areas due to climate change. The long-term plan was to develop an
interconnected ribbon of existence girding the planet, stretching from the
tropic of Cancer to the tropic of Capricorn, which could support humans during
future years of cooling. Also, since the Space Elevators are tethered at the
equator, it made sense to move the population as close to them as possible.’

‘Isn’t GRS involved in
some cultural heritage stuff too?’

‘Yes. It catalogues and
preserves everything the groups uncover.’

‘What year did you join
them?’

‘2040. My job was to
write the reports. It was exciting and sad. And frightening. Most of the places
I went to hadn’t been visited for nearly thirty years. Usually the remains of
urban existence had been all but obliterated by jungle, making data and
artefact collection hazardous to say the least.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘But the thing that kept
me going, all of us going really, was that occasionally, very occasionally,
we’d come across a tiny pocket of civilisation that had lost touch with the
rest of the world. These people thought they were the only ones on the planet
and the relief and joy that shone out of their eyes when they realised they
weren’t alone was… well… it was indescribable. It more than made up for the
harsh conditions we had to put up with.’

‘Didn’t you get burned
out?’

‘Yes. After ten years in
the field, I joined the executive group. I was responsible for the sponsorship
and implementation of reclamation projects. I lobbied countries to sponsor the
redevelopment of cities that had viable reclamation scores and sourced the
extra funding required to finish the job. But I left six months ago to look
after Mum when she fell ill.’

Scott sighed. ‘The past
few weeks must have been very emotional for you.’

‘They’ve been
exhausting. First Mum dying, then finding out who my real parents were. Then
reading the book and the diary? That really brought it home to me… the
paralysing shock that enveloped everyone at the time. It was bad enough
learning about it as a child, but for everyone who lived through it… well… it
must have been horrific.’

Scott drained his glass.
‘It defied description.’

He swung his legs off
the chair and rubbed his knees. ‘Another Scotch?’

Rachael smiled pushing
her dark curls off her face. ‘Thank you.’

‘Did your mother have
any idea who was behind Zul?’

‘She had a theory about
motive, but as to the individuals involved… she had no idea… although…’

‘Tell me about her
theory.’

‘She thought NASA had a
secret that predicted such a radical change in climate, it threatened human
life on Earth.’

‘You may not know this,’
he said as he poured the drinks, ‘but from the late ‘80s up to 2012 people
feared global warming. That was the buzz back then, even though by the turn of
the century more and more scientists argued that warming predictions were based
on flawed and insufficient data. The problem was that a lot of people had
jumped on the global warming bandwagon, some sincere, but many who were
downright opportunistic and just out to make a buck.’

Rachael shrugged. ‘All I
remember is global cooling. They announced that in the early ‘20s, right?’

‘Yeah. But if your
mother was right and NASA
did
know we were entering a rapid cooling
phase back in 2012, making it public then would have caused an absolute
uproar.’

‘Why?’

‘Those making money out
of global warming would have wanted to keep creaming the myth for as long as
they could. But also, just think about it, had scientists and world leaders
been forced to admit they were wrong in promoting global warming, how seriously
would anyone take them when they started telling us we were in fact entering a
global cooling cycle? They had to move slowly and artfully to keep a grip on
the public’s confidence, while they manoeuvred themselves to take a
diametrically opposing view.

‘It was around that time
the media started talking about climate change instead of global warming… I bet
you that was the first conscious step those in the know took to recondition the
man in the street.’

Scott gripped the arms
of his chair. ‘Now I think about it, I remember an interview with an old NASA
hand after global cooling was announced. He mentioned a Russian study, back in
2006 I think it was, monitoring solar cycles that forecast the world was on the
verge of another Ice Age. He claimed the Russian technology was installed on
the International Space Station a couple of years later and started its own
research in 2009. So by 2012 NASA could well have gathered enough evidence to
convince them the Russian prediction was correct.’

‘Looks like my mother
was
right,’ Rachael said.

‘Tell me more.’

‘She thought if the
American military knew about global cooling it would change their imperative
from owning space as a military strategy to owning space for survival. So they
invented Zul and the theory of evolution to prepare the planet for a culling to
ensure America would survive as the major super power and guarantee mankind’s
safe evacuation to space when the time came.’