Honeymoon had somehow taken control of the conversation. Priest felt sick with frustration. “You listen to me,” he said. “There’s only one way out of this. Make an announcement, today. No more power plant building in California.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Pull over.”
“We’re on the freeway.”
“Pull the fuck over!”
Honeymoon slowed the car and stopped on the shoulder of the road.
The temptation to shoot was strong, but Priest resisted it. “Get out of the car.”
Honeymoon put the shift in park and got out.
Priest slid over behind the wheel. “You got until midnight to see sense,” he said. He pulled away.
In the rearview mirror he saw Honeymoon try to wave down a passing car. It drove right by. He tried again. No one would stop.
Seeing the big man in his expensive suit and shiny shoes, standing at the dusty roadside trying to get a ride, gave Priest a small measure of satisfaction and helped to quell the nagging suspicion that Honeymoon had somehow got the better of the encounter, even though Priest had held the gun.
Honeymoon gave up waving at cars and began to walk.
Priest smiled and drove on into town.
Melanie was waiting where he had left her. He parked the Lincoln, leaving the keys in, and got into the ’Cuda.
“What happened?” Melanie said.
Priest shook his head in disgust. “Nothing,” he said angrily. “It was a waste of time. Let’s go.”
She started the car and pulled away.
Priest rejected the first location Melanie took him to.
It was a small seaside town fifty miles north of San Francisco. They parked on the cliff top, where a stiff breeze rocked the old ’Cuda on its tired springs. Priest rolled down the window to smell the sea. He would have liked to take off his boots and walk barefoot along the beach, feeling the damp sand between his toes, but there was no time.
The location was very exposed. The truck would be too conspicuous here. It was a long distance from the freeway, so there could be no quick getaway. Most important of all, there was not much of value here to be destroyed — just a few houses clustered around a harbor.
Melanie said: “An earthquake sometimes does the greatest damage many miles from its epicenter.”
“But you can’t be sure of that,” Priest said.
“True. You can’t be sure of anything.”
“Still, the best way to bring down a skyscraper is to have an earthquake underneath it, am I right?”
“All other things being equal, yes.”
They drove south through the green hills of Marin County and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Melanie’s second location was in the heart of the city. They followed Route 1 through the Presidio and Golden Gate Park and pulled up not far from the San Francisco campus of Cal State University.
“This is better,” Priest said immediately. All around him were homes and offices, stores and restaurants.
“A tremor with its epicenter here would cause the most damage at the marina,” Melanie said.
“How come? That’s miles away.”
“It’s all reclaimed land. The underlying sedimentary deposits are saturated with water. That amplifies the shaking. Whereas the ground here is probably solid. And these buildings look strong. Most buildings survive an earthquake. The ones that fall down are made of unreinforced masonry — typically low-income housing — or concrete-frame structures without bracing.”
This was all quibbling, Priest decided. She was just nervous.
“Let’s look at another place,” he said.
Melanie directed him south on Interstate 280. “Right where the San Andreas fault crosses Route 101, there’s a small town called Felicitas,” she said.
They drove for twenty minutes. They almost passed the exit ramp for Felicitas. “Here, here!” Melanie yelled. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
Priest wrenched the wheel to the right and made the ramp. “I wasn’t looking,” he said.
The exit led to a vantage point overlooking the town. Priest stopped the car and got out. Felicitas was laid out in front of him like a picture. Main Street ran from left to right across his field of vision, lined with low clapboard stores and offices, a few cars parked slantwise in front of the buildings. There was a small wooden church with a bell tower. North and south of the main drag was a neat grid of tree-lined streets. All the houses were one story. At either end of the town, the street became a pre-freeway country road and disappeared among fields. The landscape north of the town was split by a meandering river like a jagged crack in a window. In the distance was a railway track as straight as a draftsman’s line from east to west. Behind Priest, the freeway ran along a viaduct on high concrete arches.
Stepping down the hill was a cluster of six huge bright blue pipes. They dipped under the freeway, passed the town to the west, and disappeared over the horizon, looking like an infinite xylophone. “What the hell is that?” Priest said.
Melanie thought for a moment. “I think it must be a gas pipeline.”
Priest breathed a long sigh of satisfaction. “This place is perfect,” he said.
They made one more stop that day.
After the earthquake, Priest would need to hide the seismic vibrator. His only weapon was the threat of more earthquakes. He had to make Honeymoon and Governor Robson believe he had the power to do this again and again until they gave in. So it was crucial that he kept the truck hidden away.
It was going to become more and more difficult to drive the vibrator on public roads, so he needed to hide it someplace where he could, if necessary, trigger a third earthquake without moving far.
Melanie directed him to Third Street, which ran parallel with the shore of the huge natural harbor that was San Francisco Bay. Between Third and the waterfront was a run-down industrial neighborhood. There were disused railway tracks along the potholed streets; rusting, derelict factories; empty warehouses with smashed windows; and dismal yards full of pallets, tires, and wrecked cars.
“This is good,” Priest said. “It’s only half an hour from Felicitas, and it’s the kind of district where nobody takes much interest in their neighbors.”
Realtors’ signs were optimistically fixed to some of the buildings. Melanie, posing as Priest’s secretary, called the number on one of the signs and asked if they had a warehouse to rent, real cheap, about fifteen hundred square feet.
An eager young salesman drove out to meet them an hour later. He showed them a crumbling cinder-block ruin with holes in the corrugated roof. There was a broken sign over the door, which Melanie read aloud: “Perpetua Diaries.” There was plenty of room to park the seismic vibrator. The place also had a working bathroom and a small office with a hot plate and a big old Zenith TV left by the previous tenant.
Priest told the salesman he needed a place to store barrels of wine for a month or so. The man did not give a damn what Priest wanted to do with the space. He was delighted to get some rent on a near valueless property. He promised to have the power and water turned on by the following day. Priest paid him four weeks’ rent in advance, cash, from the secret stash he kept in his old guitar.
The salesman looked like it was his lucky day. He gave Melanie the keys, shook hands, and hurried away before Priest could change his mind.
Priest and Melanie drove back to Silver River Valley.
Thursday evening, Judy Maddox took a bath. Lying in the water, she remembered the Santa Rosa earthquake
