The Hammer of Eden by Ken Follett Page B

date, then typed: “To the Acting Special Agent in Charge.”
    She wrote: “Dear Brian: This is to confirm my resignation.”
    It hurt.
    She had given ten years of her life to the FBI. Other women had got married and had children, or started their own business, or written a novel, or sailed around the world. She had dedicated herself to being a terrific agent. Now she was throwing it all away. The thought brought tears to her eyes.
What kind of an idiot am I, sitting alone in my office crying to my damn computer?
    Then Simon Sparrow came in.
    He was a heavily muscled man with neat short hair and a mustache. He was a year or two older than Judy. Like her, he was dressed casually, in tan chinos and a short-sleeved sports shirt. He had a doctorate inlinguistics and had spent five years with the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. His specialty was threat analysis.
    He liked Judy and she liked him. With the men in the office he talked men’s talk, football and guns and cars, but when he was alone with Judy he noticed and commented on her outfits and her jewelry the way a girlfriend would.
    He had a file in his hand. “Your earthquake threat is
fascinating,”
he said, his eyes glowing with enthusiasm.
    She blew her nose. He had surely seen that she was upset, but he was tactfully pretending not to notice.
    He went on: “I was going to leave this on your desk, but I’m glad I’ve caught you.”
    He had obviously been working late to finish his report, and Judy did not want to deflate his keenness by telling him she was quitting. “Take a seat,” she said, composing herself.
    “Congratulations on winning your case today!”
    “Thanks.”
    “You must be so pleased.”
    “I should be. But I had a fight with Brian Kincaid right afterward.”
    “Oh, him.” Simon dismissed their boss with a flap of his hand. “If you apologize nicely, he’ll have to forgive you. He can’t afford to lose you, you’re too good.”
    That was unexpected. Simon was normally more sympathetic. It was almost as if he had known beforehand. But if he knew about the fight, he knew she had resigned. So why had he brought her the report?
    Intrigued, she said: “Tell me about your analysis of the threat.”
    “It had me mystified for a while.” He handed her a printout of the message as it had originally appeared on the Internet bulletin board. “Quantico were puzzled, too,” he added. He would have automatically consulted the Behavioral Science Unit on this, Judy knew.
    She had seen the message before: it was in the file Matt Peters had handed her earlier today. She studied it again.
    M AY 1 ST
    T O THE STATE GOVERNOR
    Hi!
    You say you care about pollution and the environment, but you never do nothing about it; so we’re going to make you .
    The consumer society is poisoning the planet because you are too greedy, and you got to stop now!
    We are the Hammer of Eden, the radical offshoot of the Green California Campaign .
    We are telling you to announce an immediate freeze on building power plants. No new plants. Period. Or else!
    Or else what, you say?
    Or else we will cause an earthquake exactly four weeks from today .
    Be warned! We really mean it!
    —The Hammer of Eden
    It did not tell her much, but she knew that Simon would mine every word and comma for meaning.
    “What do you make of it?” he asked.
    She thought for a minute. “I see a nerdy young student with greasy hair, wearing a washed-out Guns n’ Roses T-shirt, sitting at his computerfantasizing about making the world obey him, instead of ignoring him the way it always has.”
    “Well, that’s about as wrong as could be,” Simon said with a smile. “He’s an uneducated low-income man in his forties.”
    Judy shook her head in amazement. She was always astonished by the way Simon drew conclusions from evidence she could not even see. “How do you know?”
    “The vocabulary and sentence structure. Look at the salutation. Affluent people