Excerpt: 'Saving Cascadia'

March 9, 2005— -- In John Nance's 16th novel, a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey believes a small island off the coast of Washington state is about to erupt in a massive earthquake, thanks to the construction of a wealthy developer. The scientist is ignored, but as his prediction comes true and tremors and a tsunami start to shake the coast, he races to save the island's inhabitants.

San Francisco, California, Thursday evening, November 24th

Twice now on the way back from dinner Diane Lacombe had aborted the process of lighting a stale cigarette. She'd been dredging them from the depths of her purse -- her emergency stash buried just in case she had to fall off the wagon some night -- but once again she tossed the unlit cigarette into a street-corner trash can, pushing back her mane of auburn hair with an unsteady hand. Relaxing right now was an apparently useless quest, and the need to rummage for yet another cigarette was rising.

She calculated the number of blocks back to her Mission District apartment and dug in her purse for an emergency package of chewing gum instead. Too much agony with nicotine patches to blow it all now.

The Tonga Room had been fun, and all the more so since it was one of her dad's favorites, set amid the elegance of the grand old Fairmont Hotel. Some of her best childhood memories centered around lush, elegant dinners with her parents, the princess daughter scrubbed and dressed up and feminine, demonstrating impeccable manners and basking in family privilege and tradition. But this evening's visit to that world had felt like a hologram. She could see it, but she couldn't actually touch the old warmth of those moments, though nothing in the hotel had changed. Since she'd left for college, the childhood years were now only glimpsed through a murky lens, as if they belonged to someone else. It was an awful feeling she was determined to change.

A neighborhood tavern she'd frequented over the years was just ahead and she decided to duck in for their usually pathetic attempt at an espresso. She took the tiny cup to a dark corner like an addict, placing her laptop case by her feet where she could keep an eye on it.

Not for the first time she felt around in her coat pocket for the reassuring shape of the CD that she'd intended to hand to her father at dinner. Just the thought of committing that act was the source of her jangled nerves. It might as well have been a small nuclear device, she thought. It would have killed him just as surely. What had she been thinking?

Diane knew that California State Senator Ralph Lacombe had wondered through coffee and dessert why his beautiful, educated, twenty-seven-year-old daughter was so jumpy and distracted. Fit and distinguished in his late fifties with a large trademark smile, his full head of dark hair belying his age, the senior Lacombe had sat in patient, paternal puzzlement waiting, Diane supposed, for the explanation which never came. All the normal subjects they had once shared in open father-daughter communication seemed flat and forced -- the 49ers, the latest political betrayals in Sacramento, the plans for a summer Lacombe family reunion in the wake of her mother's surrender to cancer -- and nothing had reduced her jittery demeanor or ended her constant denials that anything was wrong. There she sat, elegant in a reasonably conservative, calf-length little black dress, smiling at him and lying her head off by saying none of the things that needed to be voiced. He knew his daughter was fibbing by omission, and she knew that he knew, but they played the game anyway, more like two strangers being courteous than familial confidants.

And all the while the CD had been burning a hole in her heart. The last thing she wanted was to make him a casualty of what she had to do.

How would he have reacted if she'd been foolhardy enough to hand it over? Would the most ethical man on earth fall to the level of ordinary mortal before her very eyes?

And how could he not?

How would the conversation have gone? she wondered. Oh, here, Dad, just a little hard seismic evidence that the critics were right after all about your old friend Mick Walker's Cascadia Island project, which means that not only is Mick going to be ruined, but my engineering firm may end up like Enron's accountants, and, oh, by the way, you'll probably be publicly accused of misusing your political influence on behalf of Walker for promoting his resort.

Was there any way a loving daughter or anyone else could expect Ralph Lacombe to say, "Sure, Honey, you go on and do what you have to. Blow the whistle. Destroy everything." Not even her father was that brave. Or foolish.