Read Online Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre - Free Book Online Page B

glared.
    ‘I mean, it’s not my theory, I’m just …’
    ‘Let’s pretend we didn’t have this conversation,’ he said in a low, bassy near‐
whisper.
    She held up her hands. ‘You got it.’
    ‘We’ll just stick with the basics. You figure they took off in the sub – let’s stay with that and not dream up any crazy reasons why they took off in the sub, other than they were doing their jobs. You know where the boat was found, so you know where the sub would have set off from. Any chance we can recover this thing?’
    Janie laughed drily. ‘Boat was somewhere around Fieberling Guyot. That’s a kind of sub‐
oceanic mountain.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘So the sea‐
bed, the foot of that mountain, is about fifteen thousand feet down. If the Stella Maris lost power or hit a turbidity current, Jesus.’ She grimaced, looking away. ‘It would implode on the way down. Crushed like a beer can.’
    ‘What’s a turbidity current?’
    ‘It’s kind of like an underwater landslide.’
    ‘Okay. Okay. But effectively, you’re saying if we take out the spook factor for a moment, we’re looking at a bunch of folks who didn’t do the washing‐
up one night, then went out in the morning and had a real bad day on the job.’
    ‘In short, yeah.’
    ‘Well let’s go with that first and see how far the facts carry it. I’ll need to speak to someone from this CalORI place. First one over there to dry their eyes, get them to gimme a call.’
    ‘Sure thing.’
    ‘Meantime, I’d appreciate it if we could keep a tight lid on this thing regards the media. If they ask, all we got here is a tragic accident at sea, okay? I don’t want them knowing anything about coffee cups and dinner plates. I’ve already heard the half‐
assed theories your buddies produced. I don’t want to find out what the tabloids’ imaginations can dream up using the same material. The families will have enough to deal with without reading any X-Files crap about their lost loved ones.’
----

four.
    Maria thought the e‐
mail would set her off crying again. That was one of the countless symptoms of her grief – you never knew what trivial or unlikely thing was going to trigger another painfully cherished memory, bring back a part of what was lost for just long enough to remind you of what you were missing. Strangely, it was never the obvious ones, like the sight of their empty desks or the growing piles of unopened letters. Maybe that was because you knew to put up your guard at those times, so it was the sucker punches that got you, the ones you didn’t see coming. Like this e‐
mail. Soon as she saw who it was from, some part of her that hadn’t kept up with current affairs was telling her to look over her shoulder in case Coop or Taylor saw, as it would only give them more ammunition for their dumb jokes. what she wouldn’t give now to be hit with both barrels. The message was from Jerry Blake in the Lebanon, following up on something that had seemed the most exciting thing in the world to her this time last week. It seemed death liked to come along every so often and remind you how little value or purpose anything really had as long as it was ultimately in charge. That the message was to do with archaeology – dead people, dead civilisations – seemed to underline that in red pen. Maria’s interest in the Minoan empire was very much an extra‐
curricular pursuit, hence the jibes from Coop and Taylor when she was indulging it on ‘company time’, but it was an understandable fascination for a seismologist. The Minoans’ native Crete had been ground‐
zero during the most destructive seismological disaster known to man, and in studying it she had become intrigued by the ancient civilisation. Unfortunately, research and evidence were thin on the ground, partly due to the effects of the aforementioned disaster, and partly due to the Minoans having been ‘rediscovered’ by archaeology only at the beginning of the century. Further