Going through Berwick, she got a good view of North Berwick Law, a tight volcanic cone, six hundred feet high. It seemed to be smoking.

Past Berwick, the traffic stalled completely.

A man — forty-ish, thin, in a grimy business suit — clambered onto the road from rough ground beyond. He glanced up and down the row of cars, evidently selected Jane’s, and walked up to it.

Before she could react, he had yanked open the driver’s side door. “Out of the car,” he said, and to make his point he grabbed her sweater at the shoulder and pulled her sideways. She wasn’t wearing her seat belt, and she spilled sideways onto the road, grazing her knees; the pain was startling.

She got to her feet stiffly.

In the middle of the road, traffic all around, the man confronted her. “I’m taking your car,” he said bluntly.

But he was hesitating.

Here was a man who was not used to this, to highway robbery. She tried to think, to size up the situation.

In the scrub on the far side of the road, beyond the crawling traffic, was a fat woman with a couple of suitcases, and a kid, a sulky-looking teenage girl. Jane tried to figure what minor disaster had befallen this family. Maybe their car had broken down, or simply run out of petrol. Maybe they had been robbed themselves.

She could offer to give them a ride.

But now the man, with tongue protruding, grabbed her arm; he pushed his free hand inside her sweater, searching for her breast. He was doing this thing in front of his family, and hers. Just because he thought the rules were all gone; just because he thought he couldn’t be stopped.

Jane stepped back, breaking his grip easily, and threw a punch at his nose. She put all her weight behind it. Blood spurted, bright crimson, and he fell backwards.

“Fuck off,” she said.

She got back in the car and locked the doors from the inside. The car edged forward — given the traffic she could hardly get away — but she didn’t trouble to look back.

Jack was clapping her slowly, a grin on his lips.

Jane waved her hand in the air. “It bloody hurt. And don’t let me hear you use language like that.”

The traffic crept forward.

The air was strange. The sky was tinged orange. She could smell ozone and ash.

By evening, they’d come no more than ten miles, and they had to sleep in the car.

16

It was now 3.00 a.m. in Chuzenji, an hour or more since one of the monks had woken him with the news of the Pacific volcano. Declan Hague sat in his cubicle, pondering events.

Waves.

In Declan’s mind, the future was simple: it was a question of waves, and wavelengths and speeds, the simple physics he remembered from school.