Blackmail Earth

by Bill Evans

  To my children, Maggie, William, Julia, and Sarah. You have brought me more joy and love than anything else in life!

  —DAD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am a firm believer in work hard, keep your head down, stay above the fray, work as a team, and then good things will happen. I have a wonderful team to work with that has made me a great success. “Thank you” is just not enough for the outstanding work you have done to make Blackmail Earth come to life.

  I want to first thank the wonderful people at Tor/Forge Books for having the confidence in me once again! You guys apparently love the punishment of producing a book with me!

  Thanks to Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, and Melissa Singer at Tor/Forge for believing in me and for your extremely hard work. Melissa, you are the best editor on the planet. Let’s keep that our secret. Thanks to the world’s greatest book agent and friend, Coleen O’Shea of the Allen O’Shea Literary Agency. Thanks for all the great guidance and white wine. Thanks to Mark Nykanen for your love of weather and geoengineering.

  I want to thank my “extended family” at WABC-TV for their love and support all these years. Lori Stokes, Ken Rosato, Susan Greenstein, Eddie Arsis, Sandy Kenyon, Andy Savas, Vanessa Botelho, David Bloch, you make it a pleasure to go to work every weekday at 2:00 A.M.! Sorry for all those times I came in a little grumpy. You really find out who your friends are when you work the harsh hours that we do. Thanks so much for your love, kindness, and friendship.

  Thanks to my wonderful wife, Dana. I know I’m often away on book tours, and I thank you for your advice and support! You are the greatest.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Also by Bill Evans from Tom Doherty Associates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  There’s no need for retreat but he steps back anyway. For a better view. A body lies spread-eagled on the floor: once a woman, now a bloodied, disfigured form. Red smears on rough planks.

  The smells of salt and sweat and blood rise like the crackling madness of cicadas, millions of them beating their belly membranes in the surrounding fields and forests.

  A taper burns in his hand, flickering light that dares the shadows to dance, the reckless darkness to come to life.

  Carefully, with a true aim, steady hand, he dribbles wax on the five points of a pentacle that he’s carved into her chest, then stares at the smaller stars that he’s gouged into each of her perfect cheeks and her lightly lined brow.

  Her empty eyes are open, but even in death—so ravenous and raw—they hold his gaze. Not for long. He will grant them special attention.

  He retrieves two white votive candles from his pocket and lights them. The scents of anise, cinnamon, cloves, and rose hips fill his nostrils. Like cookies.

  He doesn’t touch her. Not directly. Not anymore. He tilts the taper till it spills hot wax on her fallen eyes, patiently sealing their glum surfaces. The rest of her face, though lit with an orange glow, proves no less opaque, its features drowned in a crimson flood, as if she’s been flayed in a furious rage. Purely unidentifiable at a glance, and that’s all he allows himself, for a calm has come; and his attention to the macabre details of murder is spent. For now.

  He smiles. He didn’t choose her. She chose herself. The laws of night coming alive in veils of sudden wonder.

  He stares at the red length of her, then places the taper on her bloody belly, where babies might have nested. The candle falls over, sticks to her richly scored skin, and sputters in the silence. As she did. Quickly snuffed. As she was.

  Straightening, he runs his index finger and thumb down the slippery sides of a beveled blade, his eyes on the drips that spatter the floor.

  Like the rain that never comes.

  CHAPTER 1

  Jenna Withers could see more than fifty miles from the shotgun seat of The Morning Show helicopter. None of it looked pretty. The farms and forests north of New York City had turned to tinder. Mid-October was as hot as mid-August had been, the third scorching year in a row. Lakes and reservoirs were drying up and the rivers looked like they’d slunk away from their banks, thieves in the night.

  It was just as dry—or drier—on the West Coast and across the Sun Belt. The hottest growing season on record. Much of the Midwest had been singed, too, with farmers in Iowa and Nebraska losing 80 percent of their corn crop. Food and fuel prices were rising as fast as the mercury.

  Minutes ago Jenna; her producer, Nicole Parsons; and their crew had choppered out of New York City, the heart of a drought emergency that had been declared two months ago. That was the second highest level of official panic, right below drought disaster—conditions so dire that they were bluntly unthinkable in a metro area of twenty million people.

  No one in the Big Apple had escaped the vicious grip of the Northeast drought. Water for parks, golf courses, and fountains? Fahgeddaboutit. Let ’em brown, where they hadn’t burned. Car washes? You gotta be kiddin’. Pools? You’re still jokin’.

  Not even sprinklers to cool off the kiddies, and fire hydrants were locked up tighter than Tiffany’s. Most of the water for everything but drinking now came from the Hudson River, where crews worked 24/7 to pump out tens of millions of gallons. The water level had dropped to historic lows. Sailors had to take extra steps to climb down from docks to their decks, but this was a minor inconvenience to a city in survival mode. A city that looked like it was on chemo.

  Jenna, a meteorologist, didn’t need the Ph.D. after her name to tally up the terror that could come from a cigarette tossed into the brittle brush down below, where a single spark could turn the region crisp as Southern California when the Santa Ana winds wicked all the life from the land, before burning the mountainsides black. Merely looking down at the devastation from the front passenger seat brought to mind the scores of scientific studies linking high temperatures and high-pressure systems to homicide and the full spectrum of urban violence.

  The current condition was a classic summertime high. It had originated just east of Bermuda. For most of the past two months, it had driven the polar jet stream north, into Canada, and the subtropical jet stream south, below the Gulf of Mexico. That left the “Bermuda high,” as it was aptly known, hunkered down like a big old bear at a beehive, far too content to move.

  “You finding our reservoir? I’m getting nervous back here.” Nicole’s voice came through Jenna’s headphones. In the seat right behind her, “Nicci” to those who knew her well, was the off-camera part of the weather team. She was as short and dark-haired as Jenna was tall and blond. They were the best of friends—real friends, not frenemies—which was good because they were virtually joined at the hip, “married” in the parlance of network television.

  “I don’t see it yet.”

  Nicci shot back, “We’ve got to land somewhere and go live in nine minutes.”

  The countdown, thought Jenna. There’s always a frickin’ countdown. Her stomach tightened as seconds flew by, softening only slightly when their
pilot, Harry “Bird” Stephenson, pointed to a huge empty bowl in the earth that was their destination, a reservoir wrung dry of every last ounce, as if a plug had been pulled on the whole works, but not a drop had drained: All the water had burned into the sky.

  Dust was rising now, engulfing the copter, swirling wildly as if they were in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bird flew by instruments—eyes locked on the panel, pudgy hands on the controls—and landed on the edge of the dry lake bed with the softest bump.

  With the engine shut down and the AC off, the glass bubble heated up faster than a cheap lightbulb. Jenna started to sweat immediately. Her blouse and panty hose felt like warm, wet leaves plastered to her skin. Even the dust still eddying outside looked more appealing than sitting in this sauna. But the instant she reached for the door, Bird took her arm.

  “I don’t want that goddamn grit getting in here. It’s hell on the instruments. Give it a sec to settle down.”

  “Bird,” Nicci said in her most urgent voice, “we’ve got about five minutes to get out, get set up, and get on the air. Five minutes, Bird. Let’s go.”

  Nicci shouldered open her door, rousing Andi, the camerawoman, from her open-eyed torpor. Andi cradled the high-definition digital camera in her arms as she started to climb out the left side of the chopper.

  Jenna sucked in one more breath before heading into the chest-choking air. Ducking, she hustled out from under the still whirling rotors, and spotted a man and his border collie in the drifting dust. Not a happy pair. The guy stood stiffly, rifle by his side. That made Jenna uneasy. She found little relief in glancing at Bowser. The dog was poised next to his master, staring at Jenna from a pair of unblinking blue marbles. Eerie freakin’ eyes. Doesn’t the dust get in them? Jenna’s own eyes were closed to slits.

  Squinting, she looked from beast to man. They looked like attitude squared, an opinion only confirmed when he roared, “You didn’t even see us, did you?”

  “I’m not the pilot,” she said calmly, hoping to soothe him. He did have that rifle. How did we manage to miss them? she thought.

  “You almost killed us.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Everywhere we ran, that helicopter kept coming at us, and then we couldn’t see a damn thing with all the dust. Four miles of open reservoir, and you just about planted that thing right on our heads. How stupid is that?”

  Jenna glanced at Bird, still sitting at the controls, staring straight ahead. Leaving her to own up.

  “Pretty damn stupid,” Jenna agreed. “Look, really, I’m sorry. I’m Jenna Withers. I do weather for The Morning Show.”

  “I know who you are.”

  Now she noticed a pistol hung from his hip.

  “Law enforcement?” she asked softly. Hoping. She’d grown up with guns—her dear departed father had been a hunter and marksman all his life—but years of city living had made her more wary of firearms.

  But you’re not in the city, she told herself.

  Before he could answer, Nicci snapped, “Weather girl”—only she could get away with that moniker—“three minutes. Three. Ready?”

  Jenna nodded, still hoping that the gunslinger was a cop because presumably they possessed a strong measure of self-control with their weapons. On the other hand, there had to be some really nasty FAA regulations about almost landing a chopper on an officer and his four-legged friend.

  “Dairy farmer,” she heard him say in the next breath.

  “Dairy farmer,” she repeated. That sounded friendly enough: Elsie the cow, right? Reassuring. So was the lowered volume of his voice. Which was good because she needed to focus on the live update, now less than ninety seconds away. She pulled weather data up on her laptop screen, then checked temperatures for the region; this was a story on the Northeast drought, so she didn’t need to worry about the entire country on this go-round.

  Pulling a tissue from her pocket, Jenna patted her face; sweat and dust stained the tissue when she was done. Or was that tan stuff makeup? She’d applied it during the flight, after all. Opening her purse, she drew out a small mirror in a sleek black leather case that looked like a notebook, and gazed at her face. The little case was a discreet way to check her appearance without reinforcing the narcissistic TV talent stereotype. The headphones had messed with her hair, but she straightened and fluffed it, then noticed that her eyes were red from the dust. Murine emergency.

  Andi peered through her viewfinder, then snapped together a wireless microphone and clipped it to the inside of Jenna’s blouse. The camerawoman kept eyeing the farmer and his border collie. Jenna understood the concern: Loonies were known to mess with live shots in the city. But you’re not in the city, she reminded herself a second time. And the dairyman didn’t look like a loony. Actually, he looked kind of handsome, but she had to put aside his presence and turn her thoughts to the work at hand, though in truth she figured that she could do an update in her sleep. And given the schedule of a meteorologist on The Morning Show—up at 2:00 A.M., on at 7:00 A.M.—she probably already had on numerous occasions.

  Besides, what she would say would play second fiddle to the split screen that the show planned to use as her backdrop: empty, dusty reservoir cheek by jowl with old footage of the lake brimming with cool water. The sweet “then,” the sour—and scary—“now.”

  Cued, Jenna chattered to the camera, alternately smiling and turning serious as she boiled down the update to “hot and dry,” the daily mantra since a high-pressure system had settled over the region five weeks earlier. The stagnant weather had shown no more inclination to move on than a two-ton boulder plopped on a trail.

  She engaged in snappy closing patter with Andrea Hanson, The Morning Show’s visibly pregnant host, a darling of viewers and a mainstay of morning television for the past five years.

  The dairy farmer and his furry pal watched Jenna sign off. She felt a familiar sense of relief when the camera went dark, then noticed that Andi was back to keeping a wary eye on the guy with the guns.

  “Is the drought making dairy farming tougher?” she asked in her most empathetic “the weather really sucks” voice, hoping to charm away the tension. She unclipped the mike and handed it to Andi, who pocketed it before heading back to the helicopter. Nicci had already boarded.

  “We don’t need a drought to make dairying tougher, but the cows are okay. They’re just moving a little slower.”

  “They free range?”

  “That’s chickens around here. Only thing free range these days are the roaches. They love the heat. Ever been to Puerto Rico? Cockroaches big as your fist. They’re getting that way around here.”

  Who did he remind her of? Somebody appealing. Tall as she was, wiry, with smooth skin and sharp features. “What’s your name?”

  “Dafoe. Dafoe Tillian.”

  “Good to meet you, Dafoe.” He shook her hand, and she knew that she had, indeed, charmed him, but try as she might, she could not place his face.

  The rotors whirled faster. Jenna climbed aboard and belted herself in. Dafoe hurried away from the dust storm whipping up from the lake bed, then turned around so quickly that even through a hurricane of dust and heat he caught her staring at his retreat. She wanted to look down, peel her eyes from his; but her body wouldn’t obey, and a smile betrayed her even more.

  As Bird flew them over the barren bowl, Jenna felt herself sink back to earth: He’s a farmer, for chrissakes. You left that life.

  She closed her eyes, catnapping till Nicci asked her to join a call to The Morning Show’s executive producer, Marv Balen, or “the twit,” as the two women called him in private. “He texted us a few seconds ago.”

  Up ahead, the city’s skyline poked through the low-lying smog like quills through a dirty old quilt. Jenna turned on her headset.

  “We’re here, Marv,” Nicci said. “Go ahead.”

  “We had three murders in the Bronx last night. Cops found the victims about an hour ago. They think they’ve got the shooter. Word is he snapped and started
shooting his poker buddies when the air conditioner went on the fritz. So that makes three more heat-related homicides this week.”

  “So you want us to do the story?” Jenna said, hope as irrepressible as ever.

  “Noooo. One of our correspondents will. But don’t get ahead of me. There’s more of the gore out on the West Coast. Fresno’s had a week of one-hundred-ten-degree weather…”

  Like we need you to tell us that.

  “… and last night they had their fourth murder during that heat wave. So you’re going to be our resident expert on how weather affects behavior, Jenna.”

  “It’s not really my area of expertise, Marv, but—”

  “Yeah, I know,” he interrupted, “but you can say that heat and high pressure systems are linked to higher murder rates.”

  The 101s of weather, Jenna thought.

  “It’s a lot cheaper than flying a crew up to MIT to get some professor to spew,” Marv went on, “and you’re an author. You can spout off.”

  He was referring, in his typically ham-handed way, to a book Jenna had published seven years ago on geoengineering—how technology could be used to combat climate change. There had been little interest back then, but the publisher had reissued her volume three months ago to great interest in both the academic and mainstream press.

  “So talk about heat and murder, and don’t go throwing in a lot of other stuff. Don’t complicate it. And Nicci, make sure she doesn’t go yammering on about global fucking warming. We’re keeping it supertight.”

  All stories had to be supertight these days: reports, live shots, updates, even the banter with Andrea Hanson. It was a presidential election year, and the news hole for everything but polls, politicians, and pundits had shrunk faster than a Greenland glacier.

  Minutes after they’d landed in Manhattan and raced back to the Weather Command Center, a crew hurried over from the Northeast Bureau. The correspondent was an up-and-comer who put together reports for The Morning Show as well as the evening news. He was all smiles and good cheer, which Jenna appreciated. Life was too short for sneakiness and sarcasm—for people like Marv, in other words.