The Hammer of Eden

Be warned! We really mean it!

— The Hammer of Eden

It did not tell her much, but she knew that Simon would mine every word and comma for meaning.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

She thought for a minute. “I see a nerdy young student with greasy hair, wearing a washed-out Guns n’ Roses T-shirt, sitting at his computer fantasizing about making the world obey him, instead of ignoring him the way it always has.”

“Well, that’s about as wrong as could be,” Simon said with a smile. “He’s an uneducated low-income man in his forties.”

Judy shook her head in amazement. She was always astonished by the way Simon drew conclusions from evidence she could not even see. “How do you know?”

“The vocabulary and sentence structure. Look at the salutation. Affluent people don’t start a letter with ‘Hi,’ they put ‘Dear Sir.’ And college graduates generally avoid double negatives such as ‘you never do nothing.’ ”

Judy nodded. “So you’re looking for Joe Bluecollar, aged forty-five. That sounds pretty straightforward. What puzzled you?”

“Contradictory indications. Other elements in the message suggest a young middle-class woman. The spelling is perfect. There’s a semicolon in the first sentence, which indicates some education. And the number of exclamation points suggests a female — sorry, Judy, but it’s the truth.”

“How do you know she’s young?”

“Older writers are more likely to use initial capital letters for a phrase such as ‘state governor’ and hyphenate words such as ‘offshoot’ that young writers run together to make one word. Also, the use of a computer and the Internet suggest someone both young and educated.”

She studied Simon. Was he deliberately getting her interested to stop her from resigning? If he was, it wouldn’t work. Once she had made a decision, she hated to change her mind. But she was fascinated by the mystery Simon had posed. “Are you about to tell me this message was written by someone with a split personality?”

“Nope. Simpler than that. It was written by two people: the man dictating, the woman typing.”

“Clever!” Judy was beginning to see a picture of the two individuals behind this threat. Like a hunting dog that scents game, she was tense, alert, the anticipation of the chase already thrilling in her veins. I can smell these people, I want to know where they are, I’m sure I can catch them.

But I’ve resigned.

“I ask myself why he dictates,” Simon said. “It might come naturally to a corporate executive who was used to having a secretary, but this is just a regular guy.”

Simon spoke casually, as if this were just idle speculation, but Judy knew that his intuitions were often inspired. “Any theories?”

“I wonder if he’s illiterate?”

“He could simply be lazy.”

“True.” Simon shrugged. “I just have a hunch.”

“All right,” Judy said. “You’ve got a nice college girl who is somehow in the thrall of a street guy. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. She’s probably in danger, but is anyone else? The threat of an earthquake just doesn’t seem real.”

Simon shook his head. “I think we have to take it seriously.”

Judy could not contain her curiosity. “Why?”

“As you know, we analyze threats according to motivation, intent, and target selection.”

Judy nodded. This was basic stuff.

“Motivation is either emotional or practical. In other words, is the perpetrator doing this just to make himself feel good, or because he wants something?”

Judy thought the answer was pretty obvious. “On the face of it, these people have a specific goal. They want the state to stop building power plants.”

“Right. And that means they don’t really want to hurt anyone. They hope to achieve their aims just by making a threat.”

“Whereas the emotional types would rather kill people.”

“Exactly. Next, intent is either political, criminal, or mentally disturbed.”

“Political, in this case, at least on the surface.”

“Right. Political ideas can be a pretext for an act that is basically insane, but I don’t get that feeling here, do you?”

Judy saw where he was heading. “You’re trying to tell me these people are rational. But it’s insane to threaten an earthquake!”

“I’ll come back to that, okay? Finally, target selection is either specific or random. Trying to kill the president is specific; going berserk with a machine gun in Disneyland is random. Taking the earthquake threat seriously, just for the sake of argument, it would obviously kill a lot of people indiscriminately, so it’s random.”

Judy leaned forward. “All right, you’ve got practical intent, political motivation, and random targeting. What does that tell you?”

“The textbook says these people are either bargaining or seeking publicity. I say they’re bargaining. If they wanted publicity, they wouldn’t have chosen to put their message on an obscure bulletin board on the Internet — they would have gone for TV or the newspapers. But they didn’t. So I think they simply wanted to communicate with the governor.”

“They’re naive if they think the governor reads his messages.”

“I agree. These people display an odd combination of sophistication and ignorance.”

“But they’re serious.”

“Yeah, and I’ve got another reason for believing that. Their demand — for a freeze on new power plants — isn’t the kind of thing you would choose for a pretext. It’s too down-to-earth. If you were making it up, you’d go for something splashy, like a ban on air-conditioning in Beverly Hills.”

“So who the hell are these people?”

“We don’t know. The typical terrorist shows an escalating pattern. He begins with threatening phone calls and anonymous letters; then he writes to the newspapers and TV stations; then he starts hanging around government buildings, fantasizing. By the time he shows up for the White House tour with a Saturday night special in a plastic shopping bag, we’ve got quite a lot of his work on the FBI computer. But not this one. I’ve had the linguistic fingerprint checked against all past terrorist threats on record at Quantico, but there’s no match. These people are new.”

“So we know nothing about them?”

“We know plenty. They live in California, obviously.”

“How do you know that?”

“The message is addressed ‘To the state governor.’ If they were in another state, they would send it ‘To the governor of California.’ ”

“What else?”

“They’re Americans, and there’s no indication of any particular ethnic group: their language shows no characteristically black, Asian, or Hispanic features.”

“You left out one thing,” Judy told him.

“What?”

“They’re crazy.”

He shook his head.

Judy said: “Simon, come on! They think they can cause an earthquake. They have to be crazy!”

He said stubbornly: “I don’t know anything about seismology, but I know psychology, and I’m not comfortable with the theory that these people are out of their minds. They’re sane, serious, and focused. And that means they’re dangerous.”