The cafeteria — where a kindly security guard bought her coffee and a sandwich for lunch pending the day her IDs arrived — seemed to be the centrepiece of the campus. It was a spectacular multi-level glass cylinder built around a chunk of bona fide Berlin Wall, laden with graffiti, and giant posters of happy customers, overlooking a sparsely populated food hall. There was, bizarrely, a stream running right through the middle of the hall, with little stone bridges spanning it.

White security vehicles openly toured the campus. There seemed to be video surveillance in most office areas. She couldn’t receive faxes; these arrived at a central drop point and were distributed throughout the campus. A notice over her desk reminded her that even her e-mails could at any time be subpoenaed by the Justice Department.

A slow start, then.

On her third day, though, once her e-mail alias had been allocated, she arrived to a blizzard of mails, almost all of them utterly irrelevant.

She met her boss once, a pushy New Man who insisted on bringing his three-year-old kid into work every day: fun, but it made serious progress impossible, although he didn’t seem to recognize that.

Still, he gave her a first assignment: a major feature on the Rainier blow-out.

There was no shortage of material, of course, a lot of it gripping and dramatic, much of it in IMAX or 3-D formats. Here were the first ash eruptions, small, but sufficient to shroud Rainier’s snow-capped peak with black streaks. Here were the geologists earnestly studying the bulge that had grown out of the hillside at a rate of yards a day, in a time-lapse sequence visible to the naked eye.

Then came the sharp earthquake that dislodged the giant avalanche of ice and rock from the northern face of the mountain, releasing the pressure on the superheated groundwater and magma beneath the volcano.

And the explosion. Half of the remaining peak was torn off, like a cork popping, hurling the fragments across five hundred square miles of forested ridges, the biggest seismic event in the Cascades since Mount St Helens.

A whole set of last words, distorted and stark.

Here was the geologist from the USGS who had been measuring the bulge, and when the explosion came, just had time to radio his headquarters: Vancouver — Vancouver — I think… Here was the old Navy guy who had been manning a Department of Emergency Services volunteer warning station a mile north of the avalanche, who had coolly described the avalanche, and how it overwhelmed his partner a half-mile away, and even how, in the end, it came to get him too.