The Hammer of Eden Read online

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

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  Lie Down with Lions

  On Wings of Eagles

  The Man from St. Petersburg

  The Key to Rebecca

  Triple

  Eye of the Needle

  A Place Called Freedom

  The Third Twin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  "Smoke on the Water." Words and music by Jon Lord, Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, and Ian Paice (Deep Purple) (c) 1972, reproduced by permission of B. Feldman & Co. Ltd. trading as Hec Music, London WC2H 0EA.

  "There but for Fortune" by Phil Ochs, (c) 1963 Barricade Music ASCAP, quoted by kind permission of Barricade Music, a division of Rondor Music International.

  Copyright (c) 1998 by Ken Follett

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York

  10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  www.randomhouse.com

  CROWN and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Follett, Ken.

  The hammer of Eden / Ken Follett.--1st ed.

  I. Title.

  PR6056.O45H3 1998

  823'.914--dc21 98-26882

  eISBN: 978-0-30777511-5

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part 1: Four Weeks

  Part 2: Seven Days

  Part 3: Forty-eight Hours

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  Four Weeks

  When he lies down to sleep, this landscape is always on his mind:

  A pine forest covers the hills, as thick as the fur on a bear's back. The sky is so blue, in the clear mountain air, that it hurts his eyes to look up. Miles from the road there is a secret valley with steep sides and a cold river in its cleft. Here, hidden from strangers' eyes, a sunny south-facing slope has been cleared, and grapevines grow in neat rows.

  When he remembers how beautiful it is, he feels his heart will break.

  Men, women, and children move slowly through the vineyard, tending the plants. These are his friends, his lovers, his family. One of the women laughs. She is a big woman with long, dark hair, and he feels a special warmth for her. She throws back her head and opens her mouth wide, and her clear high voice floats across the valley like birdsong. Some of the men quietly speak a mantra as they work, praying to the gods of the valley and of the grapevines for a good crop. At their feet, a few massive tree stumps remain, to remind them of the backbreaking work that created this place twenty-five years ago. The soil is stony, but this is good, because the stones retain the heat of the sun and warm the roots of the vines, protecting them from the deadly frost.

  Beyond the vineyard is a cluster of wooden buildings, plain but well built and weatherproof. Smoke rises from a cookhouse. In a clearing, a woman is teaching a boy how to make barrels.

  This is a holy place.

  Protected by secrecy and by prayers, it has remained pure, its people free, while the world beyond the valley has degenerated into corruption and hypocrisy, greed and filth.

  But now the vision changes.

  Something has happened to the quick cold stream that used to zigzag through the valley. Its chatter has been silenced, its hurry abruptly halted. Instead of a rush of white water there is a dark pool, silent and still. The edges of the pool seem static, but if he looks away for a few moments, the pool widens. Soon he is forced to retreat up the slope.

  He cannot understand why the others do not notice the rising tide. As the black pool laps at the first row of vines, they carry on working with their feet in the water. The buildings are surrounded, then flooded. The cookhouse fire goes out, and empty barrels float away across the growing lake. Why don't they run? he asks himself; and a choking panic rises in his throat.

  Now the sky is dark with iron-colored clouds, and a cold wind whips at the clothing of the people, but still they move along the vines, stooping and rising, smiling at one another and talking in quiet, normal voices. He is the only one who can see the danger, and he realizes he must pick up one or two or even three of the children and save them from drowning. He tries to run toward his daughter, but he discovers that his feet are stuck in the mud and he cannot move; and he is filled with dread.

  In the vineyard the water rises to the workers' knees, then their waists, then their necks. He tries to yell at the people he loves, telling them they must do something now, quickly, in the next few seconds, or they will die, but though he opens his mouth and strains his throat, no sounds will come out. Sheer terror possesses him.

  The water laps into his open mouth and begins to choke him.

  This is when he wakes up.

  1

  A man called Priest pulled his cowboy hat down at the front and peered across the flat, dusty desert of South Texas.

  The low dull green bushes of thorny mesquite and sagebrush stretched in every direction as far as he could see. In front of him, a ridged and rutted track ten feet wide had been driven through the vegetation. These tracks were called senderos by the Hispanic bulldozer drivers who cut them in brutally straight lines. On one side, at precise fifty-yard intervals, bright pink plastic marker flags fluttered on short wire poles. A truck moved slowly along the sendero.

  Priest had to steal the truck.

  He had stolen his first vehicle at the age of eleven, a brand-new snow white 1961 Lincoln Continental parked, with the keys in the dash, outside the Roxy Theatre on South Broadway in Los Angeles. Priest, who was called Ricky in those days, could hardly see over the steering wheel. He had been so scared he almost wet himself, but he drove it ten blocks and handed the keys proudly to Jimmy "Pigface" Riley, who gave him five bucks, then took his girl for a drive and crashed the car on the Pacific Coast Highway. That was how Ricky became a member of the Pigface Gang.

  But this truck was not just a vehicle.

  As he watched, the powerful machinery behind the driver's cabin slowly lowered a massive steel plate, six feet square, to the ground. There was a pause, then he heard a low-pitched rumble. A cloud of dust rose around the truck as the plate began to pound the earth rhythmically. He felt the ground shake beneath his feet.

  This was a seismic vibrator, a machine for sending shock waves through the earth's crust. Priest had never had much education, except in stealing cars, but he was the smartest person he had ever met, and he understood how the vibrator worked. It was similar to radar and sonar. The shock waves were reflected off features in the earth--such as rock or liquid--and they bounced back to the surface, where they were picked up by listening devices called geophones, or jugs.

  Priest worked on the jug team. They had planted more than a thousand geophones at precisely measured intervals in a grid a mile square. Every time the vibrator shook, the reflections were picked up by the jugs and recorded by a supervisor working in a trailer known as the doghouse. All this data would later be fed into a supercomputer in Houston to produce a three-dimensional map of what w
as under the earth's surface. The map would be sold to an oil company.

  The vibrations rose in pitch, making a noise like the mighty engines of an ocean liner gathering speed; then the sound stopped abruptly. Priest ran along the sendero to the truck, screwing up his eyes against the billowing dust. He opened the door and clambered up into the cabin. A stocky black-haired man of about thirty was at the wheel. "Hey, Mario," Priest said as he slid into the seat alongside the driver.

  "Hey, Ricky."

  Richard Granger was the name on Priest's commercial driving license (class B). The license was forged, but the name was real.

  He was carrying a carton of Marlboro cigarettes, the brand Mario smoked. He tossed the carton onto the dash. "Here, I brought you something."

  "Hey, man, you don't need to buy me no cigarettes."

  "I'm always bummin' your smokes." He picked up the open pack on the dash, shook one out, and put it in his mouth.

  Mario smiled. "Why don't you just buy your own cigarettes?"

  "Hell, no, I can't afford to smoke."

  "You're crazy, man." Mario laughed.

  Priest lit his cigarette. He had always had an easy ability to get on with people, make them like him. On the streets where he grew up, people beat you up if they didn't like you, and he had been a runty kid. So he had developed an intuitive feel for what people wanted from him--deference, affection, humor, whatever--and the habit of giving it to them quickly. In the oilfield, what held the men together was humor: usually mocking, sometimes clever, often obscene.

  Although he had been here only two weeks, Priest had won the trust of his co-workers. But he had not figured out how to steal the seismic vibrator. And he had to do it in the next few hours, for tomorrow the truck was scheduled to be driven to a new site, seven hundred miles away, near Clovis, New Mexico.

  His vague plan was to hitch a ride with Mario. The trip would take two or three days--the truck, which weighed forty thousand pounds, had a highway speed of around forty miles per hour. At some point he would get Mario drunk or something, then make off with the truck. He had been hoping a better plan would come to him, but inspiration had failed so far.

  "My car's dying," he said. "You want to give me a ride as far as San Antonio tomorrow?"

  Mario was surprised. "You ain't coming all the way to Clovis?"

  "Nope." He waved a hand at the bleak desert landscape. "Just look around," he said. "Texas is so beautiful, man, I never want to leave."

  Mario shrugged. There was nothing unusual about a restless transient in this line of work. "Sure, I'll give you a ride." It was against company rules to take passengers, but the drivers did it all the time. "Meet me at the dump."

  Priest nodded. The garbage dump was a desolate hollow, full of rusting pickups and smashed TV sets and verminous mattresses, on the outskirts of Shiloh, the nearest town. No one would be there to see Mario pick him up, unless it was a couple of kids shooting snakes with a .22 rifle. "What time?"

  "Let's say six."

  "I'll bring coffee."

  Priest needed this truck. He felt his life depended on it. His palms itched to grab Mario right now and throw him out and just drive away. But that was no good. For one thing, Mario was almost twenty years younger than Priest and might not let himself be thrown out so easily. For another, the theft had to go undiscovered for a few days. Priest needed to drive the truck to California and hide it before the nation's cops were alerted to watch out for a stolen seismic vibrator.

  There was a beep from the radio, indicating that the supervisor in the doghouse had checked the data from the last vibration and found no problems. Mario raised the plate, put the truck in gear, and moved forward fifty yards, pulling up exactly alongside the next pink marker flag. Then he lowered the plate again and sent a ready signal. Priest watched closely, as he had done several times before, making sure he remembered the order in which Mario moved the levers and threw the switches. If he forgot something later, there would be no one he could ask.

  They waited for the radio signal from the doghouse that would start the next vibration. This could be done by the driver in the truck, but generally supervisors preferred to retain command themselves and start the process by remote control. Priest finished his cigarette and threw the butt out the window. Mario nodded toward Priest's car, parked a quarter of a mile away on the two-lane blacktop. "That your woman?"

  Priest looked. Star had got out of the dirty light blue Honda Civic and was leaning on the hood, fanning her face with her straw hat. "Yeah," he said.

  "Lemme show you a picture." Mario pulled an old leather billfold out of the pocket of his jeans. He extracted a photograph and handed it to Priest. "This is Isabella," he said proudly.

  Priest saw a pretty Mexican girl in her twenties wearing a yellow dress and a yellow Alice band in her hair. She held a baby on her hip, and a dark-haired boy was standing shyly by her side. "Your children?"

  He nodded. "Ross and Betty."

  Priest resisted the impulse to smile at the Anglo names. "Good-looking kids." He thought of his own children and almost told Mario about them; but he stopped himself just in time. "Where do they live?"

  "El Paso."

  The germ of an idea sprouted in Priest's mind. "You get to see them much?"

  Mario shook his head. "I'm workin' and workin', man. Savin' my money to buy them a place. A nice house, with a big kitchen and a pool in the yard. They deserve that."

  The idea blossomed. Priest suppressed his excitement and kept his voice casual, making idle conversation. "Yeah, a beautiful house for a beautiful family, right?"

  "That's what I'm thinking."

  The radio beeped again, and the truck began to shake. The noise was like rolling thunder, but more regular. It began on a profound bass note and slowly rose in pitch. After exactly fourteen seconds it stopped.

  In the quiet that followed, Priest snapped his fingers. "Say, I got an idea.... No, maybe not."

  "What?"

  "I don't know if it would work."

  "What, man, what?"

  "I just thought, you know, your wife is so pretty and your kids are so cute, it's wrong that you don't see them more often."

  "That's your idea?"

  "No. My idea is, I could drive the truck to New Mexico while you go visit them, that's all." It was important not to seem too keen, Priest told himself. "But I guess it wouldn't work out," he added in a who-gives-a-damn voice.

  "No, man, it ain't possible."

  "Probably not. Let's see, if we set out early tomorrow and drove to San Antonio together, I could drop you off at the airport there, you could be in El Paso by noon, probably. You'd play with the kids, have dinner with your wife, spend the night, get a plane the next day, I could pick you up at Lubbock airport.... How far is Lubbock from Clovis?"

  "Ninety, maybe a hundred miles."

  "We could be in Clovis that night, or next morning at the latest, and no way for anyone to know you didn't drive the whole way."

  "But you want to go to San Antonio."

  Shit. Priest had not thought this through; he was making it up as he went along. "Hey, I've never been to Lubbock," he said airily. "That's where Buddy Holly was born."

  "Who the hell is Buddy Holly?"

  Priest sang: " 'I love you, Peggy Sue....' Buddy Holly died before you were born, Mario. I liked him better than Elvis. And don't ask me who Elvis was."

  "You'd drive all that way just for me?"

  Priest wondered anxiously whether Mario was suspicious or just grateful. "Sure I would," Priest told him. "As long as you let me smoke your Marlboros."

  Mario shook his head in amazement. "You're a hell of a guy, Ricky. But I don't know."

  He was not suspicious, then. But he was apprehensive, and he probably could not be pushed into a decision. Priest masked his frustration with a show of nonchalance. "Well, think about it," he said.

  "If something goes wrong, I don't want to lose my job."

  "You're right." Priest fought down his impatience
. "I tell you what, let's talk later. You going to the bar tonight?"

  "Sure."

  "Why don't you let me know then?"

  "Okay, that's a deal."

  The radio beeped the all-clear signal, and Mario threw the lever that raised the plate off the ground.

  "I got to get back to the jug team," Priest said. "We've got a few miles of cable to roll up before nightfall." He handed back the family photo and opened the door. "I'm telling you, man, if I had a girl that pretty, I wouldn't leave the goddamn house." He grinned, then jumped to the ground and slammed the door.

  The truck moved off toward the next marker flag as Priest walked away, his cowboy boots kicking up dust.

  As he followed the sendero to where his car was parked, he saw Star begin to pace up and down, impatient and anxious.

  She had been famous, once, briefly. At the peak of the hippie era she lived in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Priest had not known her then--he had spent the late sixties making his first million dollars--but he had heard the stories. She had been a striking beauty, tall and black haired with a generous hourglass figure. She had made a record, reciting poetry against a background of psychedelic music with a band called Raining Fresh Daisies. The album had been a minor hit, and Star was a celebrity for a few days.

  But what turned her into a legend was her insatiable sexual promiscuity. She had had sex with anyone who briefly took her fancy: eager twelve-year-olds and surprised men in their sixties, boys who thought they were gay and girls who did not know they were lesbians, friends she had known for years and strangers off the street.

  That was a long time ago. Now she was a few weeks from her fiftieth birthday, and there were streaks of gray in her hair. Her figure was still generous, though no longer like an hourglass: she weighed a hundred and eighty pounds. But she still exercised an extraordinary sexual magnetism. When she walked into a bar, men stared.

  Even now, when she was worried and hot, there was a sexy flounce to the way she paced and turned beside the cheap old car, an invitation in the movement of her flesh beneath the thin cotton dress, and Priest felt the urge to grab her right there.

  "What happened?" she said as soon as he was within earshot.