Blackmail Earth Read Free Page A

pleasing appearance, Nicci cupped the receiver on her phone and said, “It’s Rafan on line two.”
    “Rafan?” Jenna sat up. He was an old boyfriend, one of the few real loves of her life. “Where is he?”
    “The Maldives, I guess. He says it’s pretty important.”
    Jenna got on the line right away.
    “I saw you on The Morning Show, ” Rafan said in his accented English. “You do weather now.”
    Had it been that long since they’d spoken? She’d been doing the show for three years. She told him this gently, as if she might break his heart all over again. They used to talk all the time: in bed, first thing in the morning, at the beach, the market—
    “Here, the weather gets hotter. The islands, they will disappear.”
    “I know, Rafan. It’s so sad.” She’d been aware of the threat to his country’s archipelago of twelve hundred islands since she’d started on her doctoral work ten years ago. The Maldives had been her home for several months of research. She’d look out and see nothing but islands and Indian Ocean all the way to the horizon. Now the Maldives was destined to become the first country to fall victim to global warming. Seas rising much faster than the U.N.’s predictions had already claimed coastline, and now had started claiming thatched houses. To see your homeland washing away must be heartbreaking, she thought.
    In recent years, the Maldivian president and his ministers had strapped on scuba gear for an annual underwater cabinet meeting to dramatize the plight faced by his country’s three hundred thousand people. To no avail. Most Americans, Jenna had found, still hadn’t heard of the Islamic nation, much less of its highly endangered status.
    She listened closely to her old lover, but knew that if he was pitching a climate story, he’d picked the wrong person. Especially in a political year. But no, he was pushing a story that always had traction.
    “Muslims here, they are angry. It’s not like before. Remember? We would go to parties, have a good time. Here, it’s changing, Jenna. It’s changing very fast. People say the West, your country, is doing this to us. They say the decadence is killing us. Come see for yourself. I think they will strike back. Soon.”
    “What do you mean, ‘strike back’? How?”
    “How do you think? How do you think?”
    Jenna looked out her window and saw another warm summer day not so many years ago.
    “You should come. I can show you.” Rafan said good-bye.
    She walked to the window and looked as far as she could see to the right. She didn’t do this often. It hurt too much. But she let herself stare at the smoggy sky where the Twin Towers once stood.
    How do you think? How do you think?

 
    CHAPTER 2
    I am now Minister of Dirt.
    Rafan was actually a civil engineer in the Maldivian Ministry of Home Affairs and Environment, but at the moment he couldn’t get that strange title— Minister of Dirt— out of his head.
    With that absurd burden, he stepped into the throng hurrying down the narrow winding street of the Maldivian capital of Malé, where government officials huddled behind white walls and hatched crazy plans to pile dirt on an island to try to save it from the hungry sea.
    That’s if Rafan could find dirt. Millions of cubic meters of it. Not easy in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And these days that wasn’t the only absurd plan afloat (though perhaps that was the wrong word for the circumstances). A real government minister—of development—had proposed building a towering skyscraper to house his country’s people. Kind of a modern-day castle with the whole ocean as a moat. Rafan whistled at the madness. Cuckoo.
    A crazy country. Crazy. The president was even more ambitious, if equally deluded: He was looking for an entirely new land where he could move everyone, as if a Xanadu were waiting just for them—the cursed Maldivians. And last night Rafan had heard a rumor that some of his government colleagues were already