no-holds-barred, in-depth documentary tackling the issue, and the network’s brass signed off on it. And so, with the vast majority of her colleagues mired in the quicksands of the marathon election campaign back home, she focused her energies on examining all the available data on the climate issue and meeting everyone who mattered. She was soon convinced that greenhouse gases had undoubtedly risen in the last few decades, and the earth did appear to be warming, but she still needed to find out if the connection between the two was as direct as it was now being portrayed. And so she’d crisscrossed the globe, from the remote science station of Cherskii in Siberia, where 40,000-year-old permafrost was now thawing and, in the process, releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, to Greenland, where massive glaciers were sliding toward the sea at a rate of two yards every hour, taking a forensic look at every new report on the matter during her travels.
Her investigative claws sharpened when she looked into the Global Climate Coalition, the Information Council of the Environment, and the Greening Earth Society—all of them cleverly misnamed, created and funded by the automotive, petroleum, and coal industries with the sole purpose of deceiving the public by spreading disinformation and callously repositioning global warming as theory rather than fact. It didn’t take long for her to become more and more convinced that the planet was indeed in trouble because of us. What was far less clear, however, was what we could realistically—and pragmatically—do about it. That was a far more contentious, and troubling, debate, and one she felt very passionate about.
But she hadn’t expected it to lead to this.
She breathed out with exasperation. “I’m getting nothing here. You having better luck?” she asked Finch as she got out of her chair and walked over to the window to scan the skies.
Finch had been talking to the news desk back in D.C. and trawling through his own contacts list. “Nope. If it’s natural, no one’s seen anything like it. And if it’s not, they’re all telling me the technology to pull off something like this just doesn’t exist.”
“We don’t know that,” Dalton objected, looking up from his monitor. “I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”
“Yes, but what we don’t know about doesn’t really matter in this case, because there’s nothing we know about that even comes close.”
“You lost me.”
“Technology breakthroughs—they have to start somewhere,” Finch explained. “They don’t just come out of nowhere. No one suddenly came up with cell phones. It started with Alexander Graham Bell two hundred years ago. There’s a progression. Regular phone, cordless home phones, digital phones, and eventually, cell phones . . . Stealth fighters—we didn’t know about them, but they’re just evolutions of other fighter planes. You see what I mean? Technology evolves. And that thing we saw . . . there doesn’t seem to be anything out there that we can point to and say, ‘Well, if we took that and made it bigger, or more powerful, or used it in such a way, it could explain it.’ It’s in a whole different ballpark. And everyone’s trying to figure it out. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up the latest e-mail from D.C. “It’s going ballistic,” he enthused. “Reuters, AP, CNN. They’re all carrying it. Every station from London to Beijing is running it. Same for the big news blogs. Drudge, Huffington. It’s been voted up to number one on Digg and we’ve crossed two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And the chat rooms are just going nuts over it.”
“What are they saying?”
“From what I can see, people are in one of three camps. Some of them think it’s some kind of harmless stunt, a CGI, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Others also think it’s a con but they see something more sinister in it, and they’re throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas about how it could have been pulled off, none of which seem to hold water if you read the mocking replies they’re getting from people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”
“Is there anyone who doesn’t think we’re behind it?”
“Yep. The third group: the pro camp. The ones who believe it’s the real thing—real as in God, not ET. One of them called us ‘the heralds of the Second Coming.’ ”
“Well that makes me feel so much better,” she groaned, her chest tightening with unease. Greed and fear were tugging