Page 87 of Eruption

“Is that what you’re planning to do here?” she asked.

Mac looked at his watch. “You already know that, and I know you know that. But that’s not really why you’re here, is it?” He smiled again. This time neither one of them smiled back at him. It was official, he thought. Theyhadgotten off on the wrong foot.

But Mac still didn’t know why the two of them were sitting across from him.

“So how about this?” he said. “How about we all stop fucking around here?”

“You don’t suffer fools gladly, do you, Dr. MacGregor?” Imani Burgess asked.

“Actually,” Mac said, “I thought that was exactly what I was doing.”

No one spoke. Mac was comfortable with the silence, but it turned out that so were they.

“We’re here because we got a tip,” Sam Ito said.

“A tip about what?”

“We’re hearing some chatter that the eruption might not be the only threat to the island,” Burgess said. “And that there might be concerns about Mauna Kea too.”

“Do you know something about an eruption there that I don’t?” Mac asked. “Because as far asIknow, there hasn’t been an eruption on Mauna Kea in four thousand years, give or take.”

“The tip wasn’t about an eruption,” Imani Burgess said.

She casually reached out, placed a micro–tape recorder on the desk between them, and pushed what Mac assumed was the Record button because he saw the green light go on.

He picked it up, checked the buttons, and hit Stop. The green light promptly disappeared.

“If the tip wasn’t about an eruption, what was it about?” he asked.

“Our source didn’t know,” Sam Ito said. “He’d just heard that there was some kind of emergency there. What the natives refer to asulia popilikia.”

“I know what it means,” Mac said.

“Was there an emergency?” Ito asked.

He leaned forward. “At this point in time, I am basically working for the U.S. Army,” he said. “And I’m not supposed to talk about things they don’t want me to talk about, which is practically everything. Especially not with two reporters from theTimes.”

“How about if we’re talking about the public’s need to know?” Imani Burgess asked.

“When the public needs to know something, General Rivers will tell them,” Mac said. “If you’ve got more questions going forward, you should probably ask him.”

“We tried,” Sam Ito said. “He won’t talk to us.”

“I know.”

“General Rivers tell you that himself?” Ito asked.

“It’s more something I intuited,” Mac said. He shrugged andstretched his arms out wide, a gesture of helplessness. “Sorry I don’t have more for you.”

“Actually, you didn’t give us anything,” she said.

“I know,” Mac said sadly. “I know.”

He stood. They stood.

“One more question,” Sam Ito said. “Do you happen to know anything about some incident at the botanical gardens a few years ago?”

“What kind of incident?”