Dry Ice (6 page)

“Gianni, good to see you.”

The older man’s hand was warm and dry, his grip firm.

“Thank you, sir. It’s a pleasure to see you again,” Gianni said with just the right mixture of respect and obsequiousness.

“Have a seat. How did your conversation go with Dr. Beauchamp?”

“I’m pleased to report that she’s agreed to come on board, Mr. Flint. I’ve already notified the office. We’ll smooth things over for her with the university, maintain her apartment in Paris for her.” He shrugged. “Whatever it takes for her to be comfortable with the move. She’ll be with me when I return to Connecticut in two days,” Gianni said, letting a smile cross his mouth. “She should be at TESLA within three weeks.”

The chairman of Flint AgroChemical laughed heartily and clapped Gianni on the shoulder, then turned to cross the room. “Excellent. This will teach that damned Pentagon bomb-jockey Medev to try an end run around me. What does she know about the situation?”

“Enough to get her down there,” Gianni replied, feeling relaxed for the first time in more than a month. “I had to tell her more than I intended to, but not enough to spook her.”

“She’s okay with it?”

“Not entirely. She’s clearly uncomfortable at the thought of what Simpson might be doing, and she’s got a do-gooder streak that she has trouble fighting. The point is, sir, that she’s agreed to go and doesn’t have any illusions about what she’ll face when she gets there. She knows Nik Forde from her days at HAARP.”

“Is that a good thing?”

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Gianni answered with a shrug.

“And Simpson?” the chairman asked, pouring two large drinks from a faceted crystal decanter that sparkled in the low light as if it were encrusted with diamonds.

“I’ll have safeguards in place before I tell him, and that won’t be until Tess is in the air, en route from Capetown.”

Nodding his approval, the older man recrossed the room to hand Gianni a heavy snifter that fit perfectly into his cupped palm.

“Thank you, sir.” Gianni paused to inhale the rich, heady aroma of the cognac. The fumes alone were intoxicating, holding within them the sweet, musty scent of decadence and extreme wealth.

Still in robust health at the age of seventy-two, the chairman was known for never drinking anything younger than he was. It was rumored that the cognac the old man kept on the yacht was nearly two hundred years old, rescued by his grandfather during World War I from a château that was later destroyed by the Germans.

I don’t care how old it is; sharing it with him is nothing more than I deserve.

Enjoying a private sense of entitlement, Gianni waited until his host had taken a sip before indulging himself.

The chairman resettled himself in his chair and gestured for Gianni to do the same. “After you tell Simpson he’s done, then what?”

“TESLA personnel will be informed of the change and, when Tess arrives, there will be a peaceful handover. She’ll have Tate from Legal and Bamberger from HR with her, and two assistants—”

“Assistants?” Croyden raised an eyebrow.

“Security,” Gianni said, his voice clipped. “Because it’s a long flight from Capetown to the interior, there will be two crews on the plane. Dr. Simpson will be on the return flight, which will take off as soon as they’ve refueled. We don’t expect them to be on the ground for more than two hours.”

Croyden was silent for a long moment, staring at the deep amber fluid swirling in his glass. “How well do you know Simpson?”

“Pretty well, sir. I worked for him for ten years at HAARP.”

“So you know what a nut he can be. And you think it will be that easy to get him out of TESLA? That he’ll just go along without a fight?” Croyden asked, not hiding his skepticism.

“We hope it will be, sir, but we’re prepared for some pushback. That’s why we’re sending Security, just to be on the safe side. They’ll all be low-key, though, and won’t make themselves known unless there’s a need for it.”

The older man frowned slightly. “Now it’s starting to sound like a damned rendition. Just what do you think he’s going to do?”

“We fully expect him to cooperate, sir, we’re just taking reasonable precautions.” Gianni paused and rolled the snifter slowly between his hands, warming the brandy and releasing more of its perfume. “It’s an extremely sensitive situation and I won’t deny that it has the potential for volatility. As you know, sir, before I came to you with this issue, when we were just beginning to have suspicions that something wasn’t right, we brought in a team of psychiatrists to review Dr. Simpson’s personnel profile. They determined that his emotional attachment to the entire concept of TESLA has shifted from reasonable to extreme. Their assessment held cause for concern on several levels, so I took the report to our director of security, and this is the plan she recommended.” He took a sip, savoring it. “The crews will be fully briefed—”

“Not Tess? You’re not going to brief her on the situation?”

Gianni shrugged. “I don’t want to make her anxious. Besides, if Simpson does act out, it won’t be her problem. The team going down there knows what they’re doing and what they’re there for.”

Croyden’s frown deepened. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

Gianni shifted forward in the chair to rest his elbows on his knees. “We don’t have much of a choice, sir. We need Simpson out of there. We know he’s carrying out assignments from the Pentagon, assignments that we haven’t authorized and, in the case of Afghanistan, that both you and I specifically refused.” He took a deep breath. “Please trust me, sir, when I say that no one’s actions will be overt. Everything will be discreet and no one, including Dr. Simpson, will get the impression that he’s being taken into custody. Even in the event of hesitation on his part, Dr. Simpson won’t be harmed. The security team will be armed with Tasers and a variety of tranquilizers and sedatives, if needed. But all of that is only backup in the event of a worst-case scenario. Whatever goes down will be handled by the security team with a minimum of fuss.”

“I’m not reassured, Gianni.”

“There’s no other way to handle this, sir. We asked him to come to Connecticut. He refused.”

After a long moment, the chairman nodded, apparently satisfied. “All right. Anything else?”

Gianni paused briefly. “I think we need to discuss what our response will be when the Pentagon learns that they’ve lost such a valuable asset.”

“You mean when the secretary of defense finds out, Gianni. The Pentagon has no idea that it ever had such an asset,” the chairman said with a smile. He lifted his snifter in salute and drank deeply from it without ever breaking eye contact.

After a split second of hesitation, Gianni returned the smile and the toast, ignoring the dark chill that ran through him.

CHAPTER
4

Three weeks later

Nik Forde sat in his small office on the top floor of the three-story TESLA habitat, listening to the wind howl on the other side of the inches-thick, impact-proof window to his left. The heavy blackout curtain was closed, as it had been for at least a month and would continue to be for much of the austral winter. He didn’t keep it closed to keep out prying eyes—there were none—but to add a small extra layer of insulation against the brutal weather and to keep the light inside. The less interference the humans provided to their environment, the more pure the results of their work would be.

And he wanted his next effort to go off without a hitch.

Smiling, humming an off-key version of “Eleanor Rigby,” Nik tapped away at his keyboard, responding to yet another email from his ex-wife, Eleanor Ryder—
Ms.
Eleanor Ryder, soon to be Mrs. Eleanor Ryder-Pentson—who had been the love of his life. It had been love at first sight, from the moment they met in the Harvard Coop—she a clerk, he a guest lecturer at nearby MIT—until the day she turned into a serious pain in his ass. That latter moment happened, not coincidentally, right about the time he’d taken a job in the very nerve center of the lower forty-eight, Washington, D.C. Right about the time she’d taken a job with a lobbying firm on K Street. Right about the time she’d met real power and real money and lost her taste for what she’d always affectionately called Nik’s “geeky charm,” preferring instead the oozy smarm of high-powered dairy lobbyist—Nik called him the Milk Man—Mitchell Pentson. Right about the time Nik decided to take off for the Ice.

Best decision he’d ever made.

“Sure, take his name. You never took mine. You said people would laugh, that Ryder-Forde sounded too much like a rodeo stunt. Well, I’ve got news for you, honey, Ryder-Pentson sounds like the kind of medical procedure you don’t discuss over dinner,” he muttered as he tapped away at his keyboard. “We’ll see about the last laugh.”

He checked coordinates on the screen to his left and typed them into the fields appearing on the screen in front of him. The high-altitude instability he was creating would push a wide swath of turbulence through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, culminating in a strong, late-season tropical storm centered near the island of Fiji. Nik had been orchestrating weather systems for years, so whipping up this kind of storm was child’s play. Or would be if the child were a prodigy with a pair of Ph.D.s trailing after his name.

He frowned at the screen. “I have a conscience. My intent is not malicious, it’s—”

Leaning back in his chair, Nik looked at the ceiling and the collage of photos he’d taped there. They were of nacreous clouds, beautiful and bizarre formations that only happen during extreme cold, when the nitric and sulfuric acids in the air mix with ice in the atmosphere to make huge clouds with the soft, blurred colors of mother-of-pearl. He’d taken the pictures himself a few weeks earlier as the Antarctic weather turned from autumn to winter. His office ceiling was the best place to keep them. Nik did a lot of staring at the ceiling while he worked.

“My intent isn’t malicious,” he repeated, “this storm is meant to … inspire … okay, it’s meant to inspire fear. Healthy fear.” He paused again. “Okay, it’s meant to scare the hell out of her, but it’s not going to bring down her plane or anything else. Yes, I’m being immature, if not petty, and yes, I’m doing it because I can. That’s honesty. Done. No harm, no foul.” He brought his chair upright and, with a delighted grin, tapped in the last few commands, instructing the computer to store the algorithm in a queue and activate it in twelve hours. Right when the Milk Man and the newly minted Mrs. Ryder-Pentson—a very nervous flier—would be cruising at 38,000 feet, nuzzling in their first-class seats. Unless Ellie had changed dramatically, they’d already be into their second bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The Milk Man would be celebrating the start of their three-week South Pacific honeymoon. Ellie would be trying to make it through the flight.

Nik turned to the third monitor on his desk, the one displaying the open email application, and began typing.

Ellie, have a great time on your honeymoon. I wish you and

He paused, running through all the descriptive phrases he’d like to use, and reluctantly settled on the only politically correct word.

Mitchell all the best.

Regards, Nik

With a single click, the polite and ostensibly friendly message flashed through cyberspace, heading for Ellie’s iPhone, her office computer, and the laptop sitting on Ellie’s desk in her—and formerly Nik’s—historic town house in Alexandria, Virginia.

Sitting back, Nik let satisfaction wash over him as he addressed the screen. “Bon voyage, Eleanor. Good thing you got such a good deal on the hotel. Enjoy the flight. Let me know how that motion-sickness patch you’ll be wearing works out for you.”

*   *   *

Greg Simpson stared at the email on the screen in front of him. The reassuringly green logo—balanced scales bearing the earth on one side and a stylized lab beaker on the other—seemed to sway. The message’s dark type blurred, its words merging into smudges as their meaning burned its way through his frontal lobe. His hands curled into fists.

You are not going to take TESLA away from me.

But he knew they were going to try. His refusals, his unambiguous, adamant refusals to step aside, to take on “new projects,” had fallen on deaf ears.

This most recent message from Croyden Flint thanked him for helping Flint AgroChemical become the leader in the field of weather manipulation in one sentence and booted him out the door of TESLA in the next. The presumption and the arrogance in the brief note were a bitter dose to swallow, all the more because Greg knew the wording was so deliberate, so meticulously crafted for maximum effect.

“Help? No, I didn’t
help
Flint become the leader in the field. I
made
Flint the leader,” Greg whispered into the darkness of his office. “You supplied nothing but money, Croyden. Not the vision. Not the genius. Not the perseverance. Just the empty, lifeless dollars. And you’ll see how far that gets you now.”

Greg had spent decades at HAARP enduring Arctic winters, military supervisors, and government budget wars, all of which had been unpleasant but necessary means to achieving his goal. Trading one frigid Hell for another, he’d spent the last six years in the coldest, most inhospitable place on earth—the interior of Antarctica, a few hundred miles from the South Pole, where at the height of summer the temperature was negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit. He’d endured the continent’s isolation, the desolation, the sensory deprivation, even the occasional lack of commitment from colleagues, and he’d triumphed over all of it just to get his creation to its current state. Developing and running TESLA was the culmination of his life’s dream and his life’s work. It didn’t matter who paid for it, nor would it matter where Greg stood on the globe: TESLA was his. No one—nothing—could change that.

TESLA’s powerful transmitters had gone fully operational just one year ago, but Greg had engaged in live tests for several years before that. Since then he, through TESLA, had been getting nature to do exactly what he wanted it to do, what Flint’s executives wanted it to do.