Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

to his door, step into the adjacent room, and then advance another thirty-five feet to Mitchell’s desk in order to have a face-to-face conversation. It became office policy to use the intercom instead, though Mitchell still jumped every time the reedy crackle of Charnoble’s voice disrupted the woolly silence of his vast empty chamber.
    Mitchell pressed the intercom button.
    “What do you mean, ‘an exorcist in reverse’?”
    “Instead of warding off demons,” said Charnoble, “you summon them.” There was a pause, but since the static continued to emanate from the machine, Mitchell knew Charnoble was preparing another thought. “I think the word is ‘necromancer.’”
    Mitchell pressed the intercom. “We really need to move to a different office,” he said.
    “You don’t like the intercom system?”
    “I don’t like being in the Empire State Building. It is not safe, and it is not good for business.”
    “I agree, but Brumley won’t approve anything until our client list is larger.”
    Mitchell pressed the intercom button, then removed his finger. He’d had enough of the intercom. It was making him feel as if he were delusional, hearing voices. He pushed himself away from his small desk, walked across the ivory carpet, and entered the foyer. Charnoble’s office door was closed. Mitchell knocked tentatively, but he was impatient to continue the conversation, and knowing that Charnoble was merely sitting at his desk across the room, he opened the door.
    The room was empty.
    9.
    Mitchell began to spend most of his time at the library. He requested books on the engineering of New York skyscrapers, bridges, and highways. He found information that he could draft directly into his fear reports. He learned, for instance, that three-quarters of all city water lines had exceeded their design life, many by a century. The suspender bars that held up the Brooklyn Bridge had been snapping with alarming regularity since 2010. If the four ventilation fans on either end of the Holland Tunnel were to break down, drivers would die of carbon monoxide poisoning before reaching New Jersey. More violent crimes were committed in the Thirty-fourth Street BDFM subway station than in any other in New York. On the RFK Bridge there had for many years stood a sign that read IN EVENT OF AIR ATTACK, DRIVE OFF BRIDGE.
    He examined so many topographical and geological maps of the city that the librarian informed him, in a hushed voice, that he had been added to an FBI watch list. He printed out stacks of reports prepared by international aid groups and government agencies. He started to think of them exclusively as acronyms: FEMA, USCG, NOAA, NYSOEM, DHS, ARC, DOT, DIA. He devised an acronym to remember all the acronyms: FUNNY DADDI. Yes, just like Tibor and his rib-tickling tales of the Hungarian pogroms.
    Mitchell became gluttonous for information. The disaster research he’d done in college now seemed amateur, pathetically incomplete. He’d never had access to such resources before—an endless supply of industry and government reports, internal corporate records, and the use of proprietary software that Charnoble had imported from Brumley Sansome’s Risk department. But his greatest resource was time. For ten hours every day he was free to devour the raw data of disaster. The more he consumed, the more his appetite grew. The thousands of facts he ingested daily kept out Brugada, his parents, and the emptiness of his spooky, squalid orange-lit apartment. The facts were thrilling. Manhattan’s highest natural elevation was Bennett Park, an outcropping of schist in Washington Heights, 268 feet above sea level. Its lowest point was the Battery Park City Esplanade, seven feet above the Hudson River. A fault line ran across 125th Street and any day could trigger a magnitude 6 earthquake. Mitchell memorized the Richter scale and its equivalencies. An earthquake measuring 4.0 was equivalent to the detonation of a small atomic bomb; a