State of Emergency Read Online Free PDF Page B

turned to see a smiling waiter holding a
tray of drinks. He had arrived late. The event was the launch
of the latest book by the art historian Anna Fitzgibbon, with
whom he shared a literary agent, Carl Reed of Reed & Stringer.
He noticed Carl accompanying a statuesque woman to a
podium at one end of the room. A who's who of the New
York literary and art scene were here to sip Veuve Clicquot,
eat expensive canapés, and cheer the celebrated author.
Away from the stage, they huddled in groups, sticking in
the verbal knife in hushed tones.
    Josh was finding it hard to engage. He didn't know many
people here, but it wasn't that. It was the news on the radio
as he drove to the museum. The city of Charleston, South
Carolina, was facing the worst storm ever seen that far north.
Hurricane Nell was hours away from the city and showing
little sign of losing its potency. The Ashley River was at an
all-time high and the levee was about to break. A city of over
700,000 people was facing imminent disaster. It was New Orleans all over again , Josh Thompson thought, as he made
his way to the edge of the small crowd clustered around the
podium.
    Anna Fitzgibbon was a real pro, but Josh had never been
interested in the minutiae of painters and painting. In many
ways he was a down-to-earth character with simple tastes.
When it came to art, he could appreciate a good picture
for its own sake. He didn't have much time for what his
army buddies would have called 'arty-farty rubbish', and
he couldn't care less how the artist had arrived at his or
her revolutionary technique or what drugs were consumed
while they painted their masterpiece.
    Josh surveyed the room, the well-fed tuxedoed, the
smug and the sequined. He drained his glass. Right now the waves will be smashing into Old Charleston , he thought. The authorities would be doing their best to evacuate people. Brave volunteers would try to stand up to the unimaginable power of nature. At this very moment, people are dying.
    Later, after the speeches and the toasts and the
backslapping, Josh found himself sitting alone on the front
steps of the museum. It was an unseasonable balmy evening.
From all around came the hum of the city, car horns, sirens,
the pulse of millions of individual lives.
    He suddenly felt very lonely. The press of those millions
of people made little impression; it passed like a shadow.
He'd always been comfortable with solitude – especially
since Maggie had left him four years before. She always
claimed that the SAS had ruined him, had turned him into
an obsessive individual married to the army. But he knew
this was only partly true. He was indeed an obsessive, but
he hadn't been married to the army, he had been married
to his specialisation – cryptography. He was a multitalented
man and had excelled at many things, but what really
obsessed him was the study of codes and ciphers, the arcane
mathematical roots of the discipline.
    And now he found previously unimagined pleasure in
bringing that deeply intellectual work to the world through
his popular books. It was a shame , he thought for perhaps
the thousandth time, that Maggie never understood that side of me . Or perhaps it had been his fault for not illuminating
his true drives and ambitions. He had a sneaking feeling
his ex-wife would have liked being married to a bestselling
author more than an SAS major.
    'Gets a bit much after a while, doesn't it?'
    Josh turned to see Tania Boreman, a writer friend from
years back, lowering herself onto the step beside him.
    'What's that?'
    'Oh, the whole self-satisfied 'I love me' vibe. You know
what I mean.'
    He laughed and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek. 'It's
good to see you again, Tan. What've you been up to?'
    'You know. Still looking for the perfect man. Still trying
to write the Great American Novel. The usual.'
    'Well, you're not going to find either here.'
    'Now really, what makes you think that?' She tilted her
head to one side. 'Impress me, Josh Thompson. Take