The Covenant Of The Flame

EIGHT

Houston, Texas.

Virgil Krause, the newly appointed chief executive officer of the Pacific-Rim Petroleum Corporation, urgently thrust documents into his briefcase, about to rush from his top-floor office in Pac-Rim's American headquarters. An hour from now, he was due at Houston 's Intercontinental Airport, where a company jet made frantic preparations to speed him to Hong Kong. Krause was forty, in excellent health, known for his energy and resilience, but already the shock of his sudden promotion had made him breathless. He'd been able to spare just five minutes to phone his wife and explain his new responsibilities. She would join him in Hong Kong as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Krause anticipated an intense, mostly sleepless flight during which he would not only have to review the mistakes that had caused the Argonaut disaster but would also have to come up with solutions for cleaning the spill and avoiding another one.

More to the point, Krause wouldn't get much sleep on the flight because he feared that the promotion he'd so often prayed for would be his damnation.

Malone, Stark, and Thompson. Their brutal deaths had been as startling as the Argonaut disaster.

Will I be next? Krause thought, his hands trembling as he shut his briefcase.

A secretary intercepted Krause as he darted from his office. This telegram just came for you, sir.'

Krause crammed it into his suit-coat pocket. 'Got to hurry. I'll read it on the plane.'

'But the messenger said it was urgent. He insisted you read it as soon as possible.'

Krause faltered, yanked the telegram from his pocket, and tore it open.

The three sentences made him more breathless.

MISTAKES DEMAND PUNISHMENT. DON'T LET THE ARGONAUT HAPPEN AGAIN. THE LORD IS YOUR WITNESS.

'GOD BLESS'

ONE

Manhattan.

In her office on the fifteenth floor of a soot-dinged building on Broadway near Thirty-Second Street, Tess Drake set a reproduction of a painting onto her desk. The painting, by an early nineteenth-century artist, was a colorful representation of a wooded slope in the Adirondack Mountains in upper New York State. Typical of his time, the artist had idealized the wilderness, making it so romantically lush, so idyllic and gardenlike that the painting seemed an advertisement for pioneers to settle there, an American Eden.

Next to the painting, Tess set a photograph, dated 1938, of a similar section of the Adirondack Mountains. Because of limitations in color photography during that period, the hues weren't as brilliant as in the painting. A further contrast was that the photograph didn't idealize the landscape but rather presented the forested peaks realistically, the cluttered chaotic woods more impressive as a consequence.

Finally Tess set down a photograph, taken last week, of the slope depicted in the 1938 photograph, and now the contrast was startling, not because improvements in color photography made the hues vivid. Quite the contrary. The image was alarmingly drab, disturbingly lusterless. Except for a hazy blue sky, there were almost no colors. No green of lush foliage. Only a muddy brown, as if something had gone wrong when the film was developed, and indeed something had gone wrong, but it hadn't happened in the processing lab. It had happened in the air, in the clouds, in the rain. This section of the forest had been killed by acid in the water that was supposed to nourish it. The trees, denuded of leaves, looked obscenely skeletal, the grassless slope cursed.

Tess leaned back in disgust to study the sequence of images. They made their depressing point so effectively that the article she was preparing to write to accompany them couldn't possibly be as strong, although of course the article had to be written, just as she'd written God knows how many others on related environmental disasters, in the hope that people would at last respond to the global crisis. Her commitment explained why, despite lucrative employment offers from such mainstream publications as Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair, she'd chosen to work for Earth Mother Magazine. She felt an obligation to the planet.

Granted – she readily admitted – it wasn't any sacrifice for her to be idealistic. At the age of twenty-eight, while most of her contemporaries seemed obsessed with money, she had the benefit of a trust fund from her late grandfather that gave her the freedom to be indifferent to the temptation of high-paying jobs. Ironically, that trust fund provided not only independence but a motive for her to devote herself to environmental causes, for the considerable money in that trust fund had come from her grandfather's extremely successful chemical factories, the improperly discarded wastes from which had killed rivers and contaminated drinking water throughout several sections of New Jersey and Pe

She was statuesque, five-feet-nine, with cropped blond hair, attractive glowing features, and a sinewy sensuous figure that she kept in shape with a daily workout at a health club near her loft in SoHo. Her eyes were crystal blue, her only makeup a slight touch of lipstick. Jeans, sneakers, and a cotton pullover were her favorite clothes. She reached toward an apple in a well-stocked bowl on her desk, savored the taste of the fruit, sensed someone behind her, and turned toward a man in the open doorway to her office.

'Working late again?' The man's eyes crinkled. 'You'll make me feel ashamed for going home.' His name was Walter Trask. The editor of Earth Mother Magazine, he had his suitcoat draped over the arm of his wrinkled white shirt. His top button and his tie were open. Fifty-five, portly, he had gray thi

'Late?' Tess glanced at her watch. 'Good Lord, is it seven o'clock already? I've been putting together my piece on acid rain. I guess I got so involved I-'

'Tomorrow, Tess. Give yourself a break, and do it tomorrow. The planet will manage to survive till then. But.you won't last much longer if you don't go easy on yourself.'

Tess shrugged self-consciously. 'I suppose I could use a swim.'

Trask shook his head. 'How I wish I had your energy.'

'Vitamins and exercise.'

'What I need is thirty less years. Have you read the papers? The murders at the Pac-Rim Corporation after the spill. What do you think?'

Tess raised her shoulders. 'It's obvious.'

'Oh?'

'The spill pissed somebody off.'

'Sure.' Trask sighed. 'That's not what I meant. Do you think we should do a story on it?'

'Earth Mother Magazine isn't a tabloid. The spill's the story. Not the murders. They're a sidebar. A small one. Fanatics hurt our cause. Too many people think that we're fanatics, exaggerating the threat to-'

'Sure,' Trask said again. 'But our profit-and-loss statement's in the red. If we could… Well… Never mind. Lock up when you leave, will you, Tess? And soon, okay?'

'Word of honor.'

'Good. See you tomorrow, kid.' His shoulders stooped, Trask walked down the hallway, disappearing.

A half-minute later, Tess heard the elevator descend. She finished her apple, assessed the artwork for her article, and decided that Trask was right – she needed a break. But the trouble was, she knew that after her swim at the health club, after a shower, a walk home, a salad, a meatless tomato sauce on pasta (with plenty of mushrooms, onions, and green peppers), she'd still feel compelled to work on the article. So in spite of Trask's advice, she packed up her artwork and two boxes of research, slung her purse across her shoulder, hefted both boxes as well as her clipboard of legal-sized yellow notepaper, used an elbow to shut off her office light switch, and proceeded along the hallway, elbowing other light switches as she passed them.