THE WAVE: A John Decker Thriller Read online

  Praise for THE WAVE – A John Decker Thriller

  Kirkus said, “Sandom’s strength lies in the verve of his story, with writing that has both muscle . . . (and) brains . . . Races from improbable to crazywild, all in good fun, with Sandom always one step ahead . . . A story with enough manic energy to be worthy of a nuclear explosion.”

  Praise for The God Machine

  Caroline Thompson (author of Edward Scissorhands) said, “Move over, Dan Brown . . . All hail J.G. Sandom . . . (The God Machine) is a thrilling and breathless, rapturously-written and mind-blowing read. It’ll keep you up all night, turning pages as fast as your little fingers can manage.” BookPage said, “Sandom has a knack for combining legendary gospels, ancient secrets, star-crossed lovers and Masonic puzzles to create a simmering stew of conspiracy, intrigue and danger that keeps the plot pot boiling until the very end.” And the Historical Novels Review said, “History galore, violence, and intrigue fill the pages of this tightly plotted, twisting and turning adventure story . . . A very impressive historical thriller!”

  Praise for Gospel Truths

  Library Journal said, “By turns contemplative, descriptive, and emotive, this mixture of mystery and intrigue reveals intense preparation and fine writing.” Booklist called Gospel Truths, “A splendid, tautly woven thriller . . . (and) an intelligent mystery of tremendous spiritual and literary depth.” And Mostly Murder called it, “A fascinating mystery . . . captivating and engrossing.”

  Praise for The Hunting Club

  Scott Turow (author of Presumed Innocent and Ordinary Heroes) called The Hunting Club, “A gripping story, well told . . . Not only a tale of murder and betrayal, but an intelligent exploration of issues of male identity.” Kirkus termed it, “Slickly entertaining, right down to the last, inevitable twist.” And Booklist said, “Sandom writes with stunning elegance and nearly poetic beauty . . . A sure hit with any suspense reader.”

  Written under Pen Name T.K. Welsh

  Praise for Resurrection Men

  Previously named a Junior Library Guild selection, Publishers Weekly called Resurrection Men, “A haunting tour of London's underclass during the 1830s . . . Teens will likely be both captivated by Victor's harrowing story as well as his ability to prevail in the face of harsh injustices.” VOYA said, “Teen readers will thoroughly enjoy the hair-raising suspense in this historical thriller.” KLIATT said, “Like M.T. Anderson's The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, this look at sinister events in history makes the era come alive and lingers in the memory." And School Library Journal said, “Part historical fiction and part adventure story, the novel brings excitement to Victorian England . . . Readers will be on the edge of their seats.”

  Praise for The Unresolved

  Ranked one of the Top Ten Children's Books by the Washington Post, THE UNRESOLVED was named an Association of Jewish Libraries Notable Book for Teens by the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, nominated for a Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) Teen's Top Ten, a Cybils literary award, and one of only a handful of books selected as a Best Books for Young Adults (BBYA), by the American Library Association (ALA). Most recently, the novel was added to Horn Book's list of Recommended American Historical Fiction. The Washington Post said, “Welsh writes with a precision and delicacy unusual for YA fiction . . . a subtle gem (of a book).” In its starred review, School Library Journal said, “The Unresolved tells a remarkable story in a remarkable way." Horn Book Magazine called The Unresolved, “A decidedly unconventional ghost story . . . (and) a tightly wound novel.” Midwest Book Review called the novel, “a wonderfully different kind of ghost story.” And Bookslut.com said, “The Unresolved scores on several levels, most notably as a drama that blows apart all preconceived notions of how history can be retold.”

  Also by J.G. Sandom:

  The Seed of Icarus (under pen name T.K. Welsh)

  The Blue Men

  Gospel Truths

  The Hunting Club

  The Publicist

  The Unresolved (under pen name T.K. Welsh)

  Resurrection Men (under pen name T.K. Welsh)

  THE WAVE -- A John Decker Thriller

  The God Machine

  THE WAVE

  A John Decker Thriller

  J.G. Sandom

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007, 2010 by J. G. Sandom

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to [email protected].

  Published by:

  CORNUCOPIA PRESS

  Philadelphia

  Printed in the United States of America

  June 9, 2010

  THIRD EDITION

  ISBN: 1452839239

  EAN-13: 978-1-452-83923-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  Acknowledgements

  The following individuals not only provided me with assistance in the creation of this book, but they were – and remain – a great source of inspiration: my readers, Sylvana Joseph and James Wynbrandt; the journalist Juan Antonio Hervada, for his insights on the wars in Lebanon; Mark Douglas Thompson, whose technical expertise concerning computer systems remains unparalleled; Dr. James L. Olds, Director of the Krasnow Institute and fellow Amherst College graduate, for his broad-ranging scientific insights and knowledge of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute; Carl and Vanessa, in whose pool house much of The Wave was originally conceived and written; and my daughter, Olivia, for her patience and fortitude. To all these individuals, and to the countless others who have helped me on my way, I am forever grateful.

  J. G. Sandom

  May 2010

  For Olivia,

  who sweeps my heart away each day.

  The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.

  EURIPIDES, Phrixus [fragment]

  PROLOGUE

  November 26 – 11:26 AM

  Bimini, The Bahamas

  Dr. James White had brought his wife to the Bahamas as soon as they had learned that she had cancer. Fifty-five yet spry, with short gray hair and sporting a navy one-piece bathing suit, Doris sat in a deck chair on the private beach reading yet another murder mystery. Dr. White watched her out of the corner of his eye and sighed. A great sorrow filled his heart but he only smiled when she turned and asked him, “Why don’t you just get the hell out of here, James? You look bored to death.”

  “Not at all,” he lied. He pretended to read the manuscript on his lap. It was a treatise on subduction written by one of his graduate students back at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. “I’m having a great time,” he continued. “Want another iced tea?”

  Doris scowled. “We’ve been married for twenty-three years, James. Don’t you think I know when you’re miserable? For God’s sake, why don’t you go for a swim? Take a walk. Hunt seashells. Go for a drive in that silly little Moke you rented. Do something! If I hear you sigh like that one more time I’m going to shoot myself before the crab gets me.”

  “That isn’t funny, dear,” he said. He dropped the manuscript on his lap.

  “It wasn’t meant to be.” She reached out and took him by the hand. “Honestly, James. I’m fine here by myself. And if I need anything, I’ll j
ust ask Harvey.” She glanced over at the muscular black man in a starched white uniform beside the swimming pool bar. “He’s better looking than you ever were.”

  Dr. White laughed. Then he stood and stretched, looking at his wife the whole time. She was still beautiful, even after all these years. In a month or two she would be bald. After the chemotherapy. But she’d still be beautiful to him. He tried to smile, chiding himself for all the time he’d spent away from her on field trips, or lecturing at foreign universities and symposia. He’d been in the Canary Islands two months earlier, working on his book, when she had telephoned and told him to come home. They had found a lump under her left armpit. That had been the harbinger. The first sign of impending doom. The omen. “I think I’ll take a drive then, head over into town,” he said. “Do you want me to get you anything?”

  She smiled and it occurred to him that it was this that had made him fall in love with her, in graduate school, over twenty-five years earlier. Her smile was devastating. He could still feel his heart throb every time he saw it.

  “Another bottle of rum would be nice,” she said. “The dark one we had yesterday.”

  She was drinking like a fish, but there was little point in arguing. “Alright,” he answered, as he slipped on his Hawaiian shirt and sandals. “I’ll see you in an hour or so for lunch, back at the hotel. Save some lobster for me.” With that he turned and trudged back up the beach.

  It took him only a few minutes to dress in the bedroom of their bungalow overlooking the Atlantic. The hotel was expensive but he didn’t care. Nothing mattered now but his wife’s happiness and comfort. And she had grown up wealthy on Cape Cod. She was used to the finer things in life. He checked himself in the mirror – trying to ignore the distended belly, the balding head, the wrinkles around his eyes – and, with another sigh, dashed through the door.

  The front seats of the Moke, a kind of open-air mini jeep, were baking hot. He started her up without a fuss and made his way along the white, shell-covered driveway of the hotel, out the main gate and into the palmary. He was glad now that he’d left Doris behind. Despite himself, her very presence made him depressed these days, and he felt guilty for a moment as he followed the twisting narrow road between the palm trees. It wasn’t her fault she was sick, he told himself. Of course, the cigarettes hadn’t helped; she’d been smoking since she was fifteen.

  As he turned a bend and quit the palmary, the sun blasted down onto his neck and the entire east coast of the island opened up before him. It was an amazing view. The ocean glimmered to his right, gleamed and glistened, with a pale moon high in the turquoise sky. He pulled the Moke over onto the side of the road and got out.

  Down the coast, he saw a chevron jutting from the water, like the naked backbone of some beached leviathan. The landscape was littered with boulders, bloated and huge, some over a thousand tons, ripped from the ocean floor and dumped unceremoniously onto the ground a hundred meters from the sea. One hundred and twenty thousand years ago, he thought. It must have been a frightful storm. Terrible in its ferocity. Relentless. As violent as the one that raged inside his heart.

  He turned and stared across the shimmering Atlantic, far, far away, at the waves that crawled inexorably to shore, at the pale toenail of the crescent moon which dangled in the sky above him, the slightest paring, almost diaphanous. He knew what had launched the monumental forces that had carved these islands in the stream. It was the subject of his latest book. But despite his understanding, the sight of those great boulders and that distant chevron charged him with a sense of awe. And suddenly, from nowhere, he recalled the ending of a poem he had learned in college, years before – Dover Beach, by Mathew Arnold:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Dr. White stared across the glittering sea. Then he looked up at the sky, at the pitiless blueness of the firmament. “Dear God,” he said. “What have I done?”

  SECTION I

  Masjid

  Chapter 1

  Thursday, January 6 – 4:38 PM

  The Quad Cities, Iowa

  John Decker, Jr., drove along I-74 in a non-descript tan van packed full of electronic equipment, across the bridge that spanned the Mississippi, from Illinois toward Bettendorf in the Quad Cities, Iowa. A Cryptanalyst Forensic Examiner with the FBI, Decker had been contacted two hours earlier and told to drive out – on the double – to a farm in the little town of New Liberty, Iowa, in order to intercept and decipher some communications. As he drove across the bridge, he stared down at the glassy Mississippi. The river moved lethargically below, wide-bellied and recalcitrant, studded with chunks of ice. It was a cold, gray day. The highway was still covered with smatterings of snow. He passed another semi carrying feed and realized that he hadn’t been back to Iowa for almost fourteen months. A long time. Yet nothing had changed. Rock Island looked the same, despite the thinning of the military base. The bridge still needed painting. The river still rolled inexorably toward New Orleans. He pulled into the right lane, a dozen yards or so in front of the truck, and tried to tear his mind away. He should be happy, he told himself. It was rare he was called into the field; normally he was lashed to his desk. But he felt as though the frigid waters of the river were pulsing through his veins. Decker was going home.

  As he drove along the highway, Decker tried to recall the details of the briefing he’d been given in Chicago two hours earlier. Ed McNally, leader of the local chapter of the White Apocalypse, his wife Mary, and his brother-in-law Peter Sampson were all holed up inside their ramshackle white clapboard farmhouse in New Liberty. So were the McNally’s three children: Sarah, Rachael and Rebecca. Ed McNally had a long rap sheet, including arson, armed robbery and tax evasion. He and Peter Sampson had been stockpiling weapons at the McNally farm west of the Quad Cities for months. This, plus recent purchases of various chemical fertilizers that could be leveraged for bomb making, had brought the extended family to the attention of the FBI. But since both acts were legal, there was little the authorities could do.

  Then, following a recent high school basketball game, Sarah McNally’s boyfriend, Malcolm Burns, had gotten into a fight with the center from the predominantly African-American rival high school from Rock Island, Illinois – a kid named Evan Hudson. The facts were somewhat sketchy but witnesses later claimed that Burns had called Hudson a “nigger” in the parking lot outside the school after the game.

  At first, Hudson had just ignored him. His parents were both Evangelical Christians and, summoning up a reservoir of self-restraint, he had tried to walk away. But Burns hadn’t let it go. He had followed Hudson toward the bus the rival team was boarding and before the boy could get inside, had pushed him from behind, called him a “mud pussy,” and kicked him when he slipped on the icy pavement to the ground. A fight ensued. Ironically, it wasn’t even Hudson who responded to the assault. It was his fellow teammates. They streamed out of the bus and tore into Burns and his friends. The mêlée was brief but brutal. Several of the youths were badly injured, on both sides of the altercation. Then, just as it seemed to be winding down, Ed McNally pulled up outside the schoolyard in his battered gold Ford pickup.

  McNally had come to pick up his daughter from the game. When he saw what was happening in the parking lot, saw his daughter Sarah in the midst of the thrashing arms and kicks and punches being thrown around her, he jumped out of his truck with a tire iron he kept under the front seat, and weighed into the crowd of teenagers.

  It was just bad luck the coach from the rival team, a tall ex-Marine named Aaron Turner, happened to be black. He was i
n the midst of trying to pull the fighting boys apart when McNally struck him from behind. Turner went down, rolled, and then sprang back to his feet. He tried to reason with McNally but the man seemed absolutely deaf to his entreaties. So he had struck the farmer with a right cross that shook McNally to the core. If Turner had followed up right then, if he had taken the advantage, perhaps it would have ended at that moment. But the coach had simply raised his hands and said, “I don’t want to hurt you, mister. Just take it easy.”

  The words only seemed to make McNally angrier. He side-stepped to the right, threw a jab and swung the tire iron at Coach Turner’s head. Turner stepped back but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The end of the tire iron caught him on the mouth and drove his head back with a loud thwack. Blood spurted from his face. Two teeth went flying. He raised his hands in self-defense but McNally swung the tire iron once again and brought it down on Turner’s collarbone. It snapped like a Popsicle stick. Turner screamed as he collapsed. McNally kicked him in the face, and kept on kicking him until the combined weight of the boys from the rival high school finally managed to drag him from the bleeding man. McNally backed away. He shouted at his daughter Sarah to get back into the truck. Then he swung the tire iron threateningly at the crowd and laughed. “Fucking coons,” he said. “You ain’t worth my sweat.” With that he turned and walked away. Everyone was in a state of shock. A few of the boys knelt down to help Coach Turner. The rest simply stared dumbfounded as McNally started up his pickup truck and drove nonchalantly out of the parking lot. He never even turned around.