Oh, shit, Goldfinger thought, although not in dread, at first: in amazement. His watch swept past the three-minute mark and kept going. He thought better of it, and lurched away. The base was lurching, too, back and forth a foot at a time, digging a trench in the yard. The building itself was base-isolated, a seismic-safety technology in which the body of a structure rests on movable bearings rather than directly on its foundation. The flagpole atop the building he and his colleagues had just vacated was whipping through an arc of forty degrees. The trees, still hung with the previous autumn’s dead leaves, were making a strange rattling sound. It was, Goldfinger thought, like driving through rocky terrain in a vehicle with no shocks, if both the vehicle and the terrain were also on a raft in high seas. The earth snapped and popped and rippled. Nor, from the feel of it, was there ground on the ground. There was a chill in the air, and snow flurries, but no snow on the ground.
At a minute and a half, everyone in the room got up and went outside. Goldfinger, who is tall and solidly built, thought, No way am I crouching under one of those for cover. The seats in the conference room were small plastic desks with wheels. Then it ticked past the sixty-second mark, making it longer than the others that week. The earthquake was not particularly strong. The speaker at the lectern was wondering if he should carry on with his talk. The conference was wrapping up for the day. When Goldfinger looked at his watch, it was quarter to three.
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