‘You knock yourself out, honey. And I will move heaven and earth to be at that concert.’

He kissed Marilyn on the top of her head and loitered briefly by the window, squinting into the morning glare in the hope of picking his kids out of the small, scattered crowds down on the beach. A large but orderly swell pushed regular sets of clean barrelling waves up onto the sand and he knew that they would be somewhere down there: his children, Debbie, a handful of choir-girls and at least one or two parental chaperones, all playing in the surf, trying to keep their minds away from dark places. They were doing well at it too, all things considered, and he sent a quick, silent prayer of thanks up to the Lord for that small mercy. Especially for his daughter, who had found in her new friends a salve for the loss of so many old ones.

On the television the blustering admiral was gone, replaced by a handsome but harried-looking middle-aged man in a white shirt and bright yellow tie. He stood on what looked like the trading floor of some bank or brokerage house and his thick East London accent was difficult to follow, but certain words tolled like funeral bells. ‘Meltdown… crisis.… credit shocks… market collapse…’ A ticker line of breaking news items scrolled across the bottom of the screen. Massed rocket attacks on Israel from southern Lebanon. ‘Pre-emptive’ Israeli air strikes on dozens of targets in Syria, Iran and even Egypt. Another American cruiser, the USS Hopper, swarmed by Hamas suicide bombers on jet skis. Food riots in Berlin. Street fighting between thousands of youths in Paris. More refugees pouring into Guantanamo Bay. A declaration of martial law in six Chinese provinces. A toxic supercell storm forming in the Bay of Biscay.

There was no question in Jed’s mind what everyone was doing down on the beach below him. They were trying to ignore the end of the world.

‘Bye-bye, honey,’ he said to Marilyn as he picked up his briefcase and kissed her again, on the forehead this time.

‘Okay. I’ll see you later, darlin’,’ she replied, surprising him with a fierce hug that almost pulled the 205-pound lawyer off his feet. When they separated, her eyes were puffy and haunted. ‘Everything’s gonna be cool, ain’t it, Jedi Master?’

It was one of those questions he wasn’t meant to answer truthfully.

‘Sure, honey. Everything’s gonna be cool.’

And he wasn’t lying exactly. Things would probably be better for his family than for most survivors, because Jed Culver had come flying out of the starter’s gate, throwing himself at an overwhelmed administration, impressing the hell out of them with his extensive background in disaster management and civil-military relations – two bits of fluff on his resume that might best be described as completely fictitious. Didn’t matter. Nobody was going to be checking his bona fides for a long time, if ever, and fact was, if you had to put a realistic description on Jed Culver’s colourful employment history you could do no better than saying: Jedediah Armstrong Culver got things done and made sure they stayed done.

Indeed, he couldn’t think of anyone better qualified to stick his hands into the fire and haul everybody’s asses out with a minimum of singeing and whingeing. And if the price of that was his family getting looked after because he’d snuggled up tight to the surviving power structure, well, then that was just a win-win situation, wasn’t it? As he squared his shoulders, still powerful from years of college wrestling, and headed out of the apartment, he was already thinking about that power structure, which was becoming one of his more difficult projects. In his briefcase he had letters from four ambassadors each putting himself forward as interim President, until a new Congress or election could be organised. It wasn’t a bad idea, stiff-arming a senior diplomat into the job for a strictly limited amount of time. There were decisions that needed making at a national executive level that simply weren’t getting made. But the four bozos in his briefcase were all political appointments – one of whom he’d actually played a very sly hand in getting up – and Culver didn’t rate a single one of them much higher than a stale sack of shit. Frankly, anyone seeking power at the moment definitely couldn’t be trusted with it.

No, they were going to need someone who actually didn’t want the job. Someone who was available but who was nothing like him or any of his peers in the shark tank. They were going to need someone honest. As honest as George Washington, or at least a good enough actor that he, or she, could pull it off. But who?

He was going to have to start doing some digging, finding out what was happening beyond the Hawaiian Islands. The Alaskan state government was consumed with the job of making sure its people didn’t starve and freeze to death. Seattle and those parts of Washington outside of the Wave’s effect seemed to be muddling through after some unpleasantness with riots and looting, although it was hard to tell with news coming out of there in a drip feed. Perhaps that might be the place to start looking.

Culver stalked through the hotel corridors towards the lift at the end of the hall, brooding on a tangle of competing thoughts, among them how much emptier the Embassy Suites seemed compared to just a few days ago. Almost all of the foreign guests had checked out, but there seemed to be fewer Americans in residence, too. Operation Uplift hadn’t started yet and he wondered where they might have gone, since most would have hailed from the mainland. That was less of an issue, however, than the lack of maids. Every morning when he’d emerged from his rooms, at least three housekeeping trolleys were parked somewhere on his family’s floor, but this morning, nada. Of course, it might mean nothing, but he made a mental note to check with some of the staff whether there were problems with their pay, whether some people had just stopped turning up to work, or whether there might be any signs of order and organisation starting to fall apart. Of the three surviving US states, Hawaii was the least able to sustain itself. Without massive amounts of external assistance, the islands would probably be ungovernable, even with a huge armed-forces presence. Both the civilian and military authorities were alive to the very real possibility of starvation and a rapid fraying of the social fabric. Given the shit going down in Europe, nobody was sanguine about just muddling through anymore.

He walked into the elevator, which was empty, and punched in the button for the lobby. The lift stopped only once during the descent, to pick up a German couple and their luggage.

‘Howdy.’ He smiled as they wrestled their bags in. ‘Heading home?’

‘No,’ the man responded in perfect, clipped English. ‘We have relatives in Australia we are to visit. Winemakers in the Barossa Valley. Do you know it?’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Not much of a wine drinker, though.’

The Germans both nodded as though he’d said something profound.

‘So, you think you’ll be going home any time soon?’ Jed asked when the silence began to stretch out.

‘No,’ the man replied just as quickly, as they reached the ground floor. He bowed his head brusquely and said, ‘My sympathies for your loss,’ as they squeezed out with their suitcases.