Dry Ice (21 page)

“Are you sure it was the Atlantic?” Tess asked, the information not sitting comfortably in her brain. “What would be the purpose of that?”

“Lowering the sea level and causing an uptick in the coastal real estate market?” Ron offered to the quiet group. “Okay, maybe not.”

“No,
I’m
not sure it was the Atlantic,” Pam replied to Tess while glaring at Ron. “But that’s what the data show. The location doesn’t make sense to me, either.”

Lindy let out an annoyed sigh. “None of this makes sense, frankly. What’s going on? Have we been hacked? I thought we were secure.”

“We are—from outside threats. I think we’ve been hijacked internally.” Tess knew her words would provoke a reaction, but she wasn’t prepared for universal, silent acceptance. “Unless anyone has another idea,” she added, looking around the table.

“There is no other explanation.” Nik took a deep breath and met her eyes. “Given: The trouble started after Greg passed out of our airspace. Given: The comms blackout is thorough, not random, and not mechanical. Given: The arrays have never been programmed to execute without continual operator input. Until now. Given: We have been effectively locked out from controlling the arrays and contacting the outside world.

“Hypothesis One: Greg is fucking with us a little bit. Hypothesis Two: Greg has gone over the edge and is fucking with Flint big time. Hypothesis Three: Greg has gone over to the dark side and wants to flex all the muscle he’s got.” He looked at Pam. “Blowing a hole in the middle of the Atlantic would not be his style.”

Pam looked at her hands for a long moment, then brought her gaze back to the group. “Okay, as long as we’re engaging in the crazy, wild-ass-guess version of the scientific method, I’ll throw this on the table: what if the problem is more granular than just feeding the arrays and the power system off-the-wall commands? What if the substrate of the system has been tampered with?”

“Meaning?” Tess asked, not liking the tension coiling like a snake in her gut.

“What if the geographical coordinates have been altered? Flipped, nudged, whatever. Set off by
x
degrees to throw us off.”

“So we wouldn’t know where the effects of the pulses were targeted,” Tess replied, slowly.

Pam nodded. “If you want to make an earthquake, which is about the only thing that particular pulse pattern could do, you wouldn’t make it happen where earthquakes don’t happen naturally.”

“You would if you want to shake things up—pardon the pun,” Nik argued.

Pam shook her head. “No, Nik. If this is Greg’s doing, he wouldn’t be content with just scaring people. He’s too results-oriented. He’d get more bang for his buck if he hit crustal zones that are already vulnerable to shifting. The pulses that just went out would do a lot more damage in the Pacific than the Atlantic because of all the active faults and subduction zones and—come on.” She let out an exasperated breath. “You want some statistics? Try these: There are more than 450 volcanoes ringing the Pacific, and that doesn’t even include the underwater ones, or the cinder cones, maars, and volcanic shields. I mean, take Mexico’s Michoacán-Guanajuato volcanic field. It’s a single magmatic system that covers fifty thousand square kilometers and includes—”

“We get it, Pam,” Ron interrupted.

“Did you say Michoacán?” Tess asked at the same time.

“Yes, I did. And, okay, I’ll shut up, but my point is that if Greg wanted attention, he’d go for the Pacific, or even the Mediterranean. The north-central Atlantic would be a non-starter.”

Tess remained quiet, not liking the flick of new fear that one word had inspired. Her parents lived near Michoacán.

Nik shook his head. “Think about it, Pam. What does he crave more, the attention that an unexpected, totally unpredictable earthquake would bring, or the destruction that would ensue if the quake hit someplace it would be expected?”

“He’d want the damage,” Pam said with quiet force. “And the attention that would follow. Flint monitors us, Nik. They already know what’s happened and where and that, whatever happened, we did it. It wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of other folks know, too. We’re the only ones without a clue.”

“Pam, I think your hypothesis about the substructure of the code is worth investigating. Please keep me apprised of what you find,” Tess said smoothly. “Nik, her other point that we could be the only ones who don’t have a complete picture of what’s going on is a valid one, too. We’ve been dark for about two hours. We know what the problem isn’t, and we have a pretty good idea of what the problem is, and it’s not going to be remedied quickly.

“I think we need to very strongly consider taking our situation ‘public,’ so to speak, and get some messages out via the bog-standard radio frequencies, as you called them earlier.” She held up a hand to ward off his objections. “I’m not implying that we need to send out a Mayday, but we need to let Connecticut know that we’re wounded. They’ll get in touch with Greg as soon as he touches down in Capetown. In the meantime, there isn’t much we can do except what we’ve been doing. Continue the search-and-destroy mission for Greg’s rogue code.”

She rose to her feet, indicating that the meeting was over. A few glances between the others at the table let her know that not everyone was in complete agreement, but they were willing to get behind her, which said something, considering no one but Nik had ever worked with her before now.

As she anticipated, Nik stayed behind, shutting the door behind the last person to leave. “Are you sure about this?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Look, we don’t have to transmit on the open frequencies yet,” Nik said. “There’s a pre-set signal that’s transmitted to the satellites a few times a day when everything is okay. If that signal changes or is interrupted, it means there’s trouble in paradise and the powers-that-be can take steps to determine the problem.”

“Is it still working?”

“Nothing has indicated that it’s not,” he said. “But it’s a passive signal, Tess. If we interrupt it, the only message they’ll get in Connecticut is that there’s trouble, which they already know. They know we’ve gone dark, and they know we’ve fired the phased array.”

“Then they’ll be expecting the signal to be interrupted.”

“If we’re in crisis mode. But if the signal continues, it will—or should—indicate that we’re not in crisis mode yet. In other words, that we’re handling whatever is going on.”

Considering his words, Tess let out a long breath and dropped back into the chair she just vacated. “Has this ever happened before?”

“Never for this long. The power blipped for about two minutes about a month ago.”

“Two
minutes
?” she repeated, wide-eyed. “Why?”

Nik waved a hand in dismissal. “It was nothing. Greg took responsibility. Said he’d goofed on a parameter.”

Tess sat up straight. “He what?”

“He’d just fired the array and said he got something wrong.”

“And you didn’t investigate?”

“Tess, there wasn’t any need to investigate. Greg knew what happened almost immediately. He put a report in the files.”

“Well that ‘report’ never made it to Flint, Nik. Believe me, I would have seen it and read it if it were in the files.”

Nik shrugged, annoyed. “Do you really need to focus on this right now? It was a minor glitch—”

“According to Greg.”

“Yes, Tess, according to Greg, who caused the glitch and fixed it.”

The situation was bad and had the potential to get much worse, and Tess was torn between wanting the security outside involvement would bring and wanting to prove herself capable of handling whatever Greg could throw at her.

“All right. We’ll wait,” she said slowly, meeting Nik’s eyes. “For a little while.”

*   *   *

Nik looked at his watch as he walked back toward his office.

Damn it.

He took a deep breath. It was pointless to try to fight off the mixture of guilt and nervousness that was assailing his conscience. The tropical storm he’d concocted in a fit of annoyance twenty-four hours ago, the one that was guaranteed to ruin at least the start of Eleanor’s honeymoon, would be breaking any minute.

What the hell was I thinking? I’m no better than Greg.

The conversation he’d just had with the team in the conference room had shaken him. He was sure that everyone was a lot more concerned than they were letting on—he sure as hell was. The thought of Greg playing God just to get back at Tess, or at Flint, or whatever other motive he might be harboring was enough to chill his blood—yet he’d just done the same damned thing out of jealousy.

And that’s all it really is, Nik, old boy, isn’t it? Jealousy and a bruised ego. Ellie found someone who treated her better and you just can’t take it like a man. You can’t even pretend to be a mature adult where Ellie is concerned. You couldn’t resist the temptation to make her cry. Nice going, Nik, you stupid ass.

It wasn’t just guilt. There was a hell of a lot of helplessness built into what he was feeling. If he could undo it now he would, but he couldn’t. That was the bitch about TESLA—there was no escape button to hit, no rewind, no pause. Whatever they wanted to make happen, happened. Most of the time, it happened just like it was supposed to, but sometimes Nature added her own surprise. That was never easy to take.

In the beginning, when they’d gone to live testing, and then had actually gone live, none of it had been easy to take. He’d fall into bed and try to block out the knowledge that everything he’d done that day would have both intended and unintended consequences; some people would benefit, others would likely be harmed. And he’d thought about leaving—a lot. Then the WinFly window had closed and he’d been stuck. Slowly, he’d gotten comfortable with what he was doing, with playing God; it had gone from being a job to being a challenge. He hadn’t been alone.

Greg had known that everyone in the sandbox had serious conscience issues when what they did moved from the realm of theory to application. He’d skillfully and deliberately led them along the path from conscience-stricken to competitive; up until a little while ago, they had all been living comfortably in the same cozy rut, wreaking havoc for fun and profit. Sometimes Nik would realize they were like kids striving for gold stars or a pat on the head, but he’d get over it. Greg had been brilliant when it came to making what they did seem like a dangerous game, one step removed from reality. After all, nothing they did ever affected
their
reality.

We were all complicit. Now, we’re all culpable.

He could kick himself for being such a clueless, adolescent prick. Now—when he couldn’t do a damned thing to stop his own storm or anything more that Greg might have planned—Nik felt like he was waking from a coma, wondering why the hell he’d done what he did. It wasn’t just Ellie his storm was about to terrorize, it was the hundreds of people on that flight. Everyone on any military, cruise, or container ships in the region. Islanders would be nailed as the storm broke up and dissipated across the South Pacific—and possibly a lot of them if the storm
didn’t
break up and instead combined with some unforeseen variable and grew into something really big. Supercyclones weren’t unheard of.

He shut his office door behind him and leaned against it for a long moment, feeling vaguely nauseated. Then he walked to his desk and woke up his computer, grimly determined to find out what Greg’s code was doing and stop it before it could do any more damage.

CHAPTER
15

Eleanor Ryder-Pentson, the former executive assistant to and brand-new third wife of one of the most powerful lobbyists in the agriculture industry, looked at her left hand, which was clasped—partly in affection and partly in desperation—with her new husband’s right hand on the armrest of their first-class seats on the inaugural Dreamliner flight from San Francisco to Fiji. It was an eloquent, telling tableau. His hand was so tanned, so rugged, so scarred and lived-in despite the neat, buffed nails; her hand was pale, smooth, and pampered. And it sported a pink marquise-cut diamond that would make Paris Hilton weep with envy.

The stone was huge, cold, and heavy on her hand. Wearing it still felt strange even after nearly a year. Ellie was sure she’d get used to it. Eventually. It was a bit more flashy—make that a lot more flashy—than she’d have chosen, if she’d been given the choice. But she hadn’t been. With every ounce of diplomacy in her, she’d tried to explain that she generally went for simpler things. But Mitchell hadn’t gotten where he was by taking no for an answer, so she’d acquiesced as gracefully as she could. After nearly a decade of wearing a plain gold band while married to a plain old man, Mitchell had said, she needed something with some sparkle and flash to suit her new life.

If Nik had heard that, he would have ruptured his appendix laughing.

She stiffened and caught her breath.
Get out of my head, Nik.

“Are you doing all right, Ellie?” Mitchell’s voice, so deep, so well-trained to convey exactly what was called for—in this case, kindness tinged with just a hint of condescension—reached her ears and went no farther. She turned to look at him, a tight, bright smile on her face.

“I’m fine,” she said with considerably more cheerful confidence than she felt. He smiled back and squeezed her hand.

“Good.”

A scrawny kid raised in the vast openness of central Wisconsin, Mitchell Pentson had learned early on that the last thing he wanted to do was spend his life shoveling snow off barn roofs for a few months a year and shoveling cow shit out of stalls for all of them, and doing it while denying himself every pleasure. Years of listening to his parents and their neighbors worry over every expense and rant about the cuts in government subsidies and land grabs by greedy agroindustrialists had taught him what true power was. He’d realized then that money was more important than loyalty because it could get you what you wanted faster. Using your brains brought bigger rewards than using your brawn ever could.

He wanted that money, that power, that influence, and a whole lot more besides. So he’d done whatever was called for to get himself into the University of Wisconsin, then Harvard Law, and then onto K Street. Still only in his early forties, he was already widely respected—or feared, depending on who you asked. And not just in his own industry, but in Washington in general. Several movers and shakers had suggested to Mitchell that he move back to the center of the country and consider running for office.