Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  That necessary removal of such a worthless human from Garner’s existence was his first triumph and the first moment in his life that had ever held any meaning for him.

  There were other significant moments subsequently, especially the few quiet victories after his “rescue” by the English couple who adopted him the following year. The Blaylocks were what others called “good people.” They had unequivocally adored Garner and privately congratulated themselves on having had their noble gesture of saving a Romanian orphan validated by getting a boy who’d turned out to be so “English.”

  Named Garner after some missionary relative of theirs, he’d accepted his new life with no fuss. He was quiet, stoic, and respectful. He did well in school, did what he was told at home. The Blaylocks and his teachers were certain that his exemplary behavior was rooted in deep-seated gratitude. It never occurred to them that he simply didn’t care what he wore, what he was fed, what he was told to do.

  But Garner did care about what the people around him did. He watched with mute hatred as the Blaylocks and their friends gathered to hunt foxes, letting the frenzied pack of hounds rip the terrified creatures to pieces after the horses were exhausted and the humans had had their fill of adventure. He said nothing as they set traps baited with poison all around their home and farm to kill insects, rodents, and certain birds that annoyed them. As they castrated their bulls and dogs, as they slaughtered and ate hens and rabbits and weeks-old piglets.

  The Blaylocks gave him their name, an education that led to a degree from Oxford, and, eventually, their entire estate. Their deaths and those of his nominal siblings had been as necessary as the bully’s had been as Garner sought to restore balance, and achieve his financial goals. The deaths of his English “family” had required much more planning and forethought than the death of the bully, but he’d gotten away with them just as easily.

  When the Blaylocks’ biological son and daughter—twins—became teenagers, they also became so-called health nuts. Lacing a few of their herbal supplements with the poison their parents used on the mice in the barn hadn’t been difficult. The calamity had resulted in a large financial settlement by the American conglomerate that made the pills, and afterward the grieving Blaylocks had directed all their energy and attention to Garner, their remaining heir, who gave every appearance of caring.

  That’s why everyone said it was such a tragedy when, mere days after his graduation from university, the valve on his parents’ home’s ancient heating unit failed. The house had filled with fumes that eventually ignited. The only blessing, people said, was that they’d likely died of asphyxiation some time before the place exploded.

  Garner had returned from his barely begun European holiday to attend the funeral. He sold the farm as soon as he was able to. The neighbors were quoted in the local papers as saying it was for the best—the site of so much tragedy was likely too much for the quiet young man who’d always been such a good and devoted son. The statement was one of the few things in life that had ever made Garner laugh out loud.

  Despite his success in evading any hint of suspicion in either case, the Blaylocks’ deaths hadn’t been nearly as rewarding or enlightening as his first eradication. When he’d transformed the bully into a corpse, he’d transformed something evil into something good. As he’d watched Nature reclaim that body, it had become startlingly clear to him that the Earth and all of the innocent life-forms She supported were more important than humans. The last link on evolution’s chain—humankind and all the filth and means of destruction it had created and continued to wield with such oblivious abandon—came a distant second to all that preceded it.

  Over the intervening years, that epiphany had remained excruciatingly simple. Which instrument of evil a person represented—agroindustry, energy, banking, paper, the media—mattered little. They were all cogs in the ubiquitous, pan-national, military-political-industrial complex that had set the world’s population on a course of happy, deluded self-destruction over the last centuries. Prior to that, all living creatures had been of the Earth. Now, humans, and humans alone, were against the Earth. Everyone who lived a modern life, everyone who saw themselves as occupying some hallowed place above the one that Nature had preordained, supported the goals of domination rather than alliance.

  And they would pay the highest price for their greed while the Earth, injured, polluted, raped, would survive and thrive again. Garner and his organization, GAIA, would see to it.

  Even the overly analytical Wendy Watson was one of the hated, whether or not she wanted to believe it. With remarkable ease, Garner had pried open her tightly closed, middle-class mind and convinced her that she’d evolved beyond mainstream groupthink. In the pursuit of GAIA’s goals, nothing had been left to chance. Even while he’d been away, imprisoned for those years for defending the Earth against the rape of industry, GAIA’s work had continued, subdued but uninterrupted.

  His people, Micki especially, had done well. The selection of Wendy Watson as the first catalyst of GAIA’s new dawn had been the result of long, tedious study, and rigorous psychological profiling. She’d risen to the top of their short list as if the Earth Herself had ordained her the perfect candidate.

  Wendy had grown disillusioned with her life and its hollow triumphs, its soulless exultation of materialism. Her epiphany, as she liked to call it, had been little more than a nudge.

  Shaking his head, Garner began to smile as he remembered their first meeting. She’d been so fucking hungry for a new reality, so clearheaded and yet utterly pathetic in her willingness to conform to a vision so radically different from the one she’d adhered to for her entire life. She’d been over-ripe, and so ready to fall in line with his plans for her that it was a bit of a letdown, really. No challenge at all.

  He’d played to her strengths and insecurities without ever betraying that he considered her just another bit of self-serving scum, one of the walking, breathing pustules who deserved whatever karmic retribution they received. The fool never copped to the fact that her conversion had been staged, as had her seduction. And now she was going to carry out the first big action GAIA had undertaken in a long time. Garner was honored to know that he would have a hand in helping the Earth regain Her equilibrium.

  The frigid burn of water pelting his flesh was becoming less enjoyable as the moments passed. Scrubbed clean of every trace of her, he shut off the water with an abrupt twist of his wrist, hating the liquid’s faintly sulfurous smell and the presence of the murderous chlorine that he knew suffused every drop. He stepped onto the damp tile floor and shook himself like a dog before reaching for the towel. There had never been the need for chemicals to purify water until humans discovered how convenient it was to defile it. It was just one more thing that he would make them pay for in blood.

  But first, he needed Wendy to follow through and get the world’s attention.

  CHAPTER

  3

  9:30 A.M., Saturday, October 25, off the coast of Taino

  Though she was nearly a foot shorter than him, Victoria Clark matched the even pace of her boss, Dennis Cavendish, as they walked along the smooth bamboo floors of the quiet, softly lit hallway. Stunning photographs of undersea life, ocean sunsets, and submerged icebergs lined the grass-cloth-covered walls. The air was warm and humid enough to be comfortable, and held subtle aromatic hints of coconuts and green leaves, of sunlight and seawater, in its invisible and barely felt breeze. Sounds of the surf were just audible, as though heard from a distance.

  The ambience was exactly what one would expect in a professional building on a Caribbean island. This structure, however, was not on an island. It was adjacent to one. And below it by four thousand feet, give or take a few.

  Coming to a stop at the end of the short hallway, Victoria and Dennis in turn each pressed a thumb against the small dark red glass pad to the left of the heavy airlock door. When prompted, first he and then she punched in the alphanumeric codes that appeared on the LED screens of the random
code generators that hung from lanyards around their necks.

  “Eighteen characters?” Dennis’s voice held more amusement than annoyance. “Aren’t you getting a bit overzealous?”

  “I’d have thought that was a quality to be desired in your secretary of national security,” Victoria replied lightly.

  “At the topside offices, sure, but we’re four thousand feet below sea level, in a facility you can’t get to except from a submersible launched from an island that’s inaccessible without an invitation from me,” he replied, pulling open the titanium door as soon as the cipher lock released.

  Victoria stepped into the airlock. “All of which is nothing more than a challenge to persons of a malicious persuasion.”

  “You know damned well we’re not concerned about ‘persons.’ It’s countries with malicious intent—and the technology to exploit it—that keep you hopping.”

  “Excuse me. I don’t hop,” she said, trying to keep the smile off her face. “We call it ‘layering.’”

  “And how many layers do we have in place so far?”

  “That’s classified.”

  Dennis started laughing and, acknowledging his amusement with an answering smile, Victoria glanced up at him, taking in his tanned, sailor’s complexion and dark hair bleached to gold in some places and to silver in others. His blue eyes held a level of devilment not often found in a CEO or a head of state. These were the eyes of a renegade; the eyes of a man who had repeatedly turned a penchant for risk into fortunes that kept him hovering at the top of the world’s earners.

  “You can trust me, Vic. I promise. You run security checks on everyone, all the time. Probably even me.” He looked down at her with one eyebrow cocked.

  She shrugged. “You pay me to be thorough.”

  “And you are, to an extraordinary degree. That’s why no one would have a chance to—”

  “With all due respect, sir, ‘the chance always exists. All that’s ever lacking is someone to decide to move on it.’”

  A single note of surprised laughter from him punctuated her quiet statement. “You’re quoting me back to me? That’s cheeky, Vic. And don’t call me ‘sir’ unless we’re in bed.”

  “For God’s sake, Dennis, shut up. You know everything we say is being recorded,” she said under her breath even as she bit back a laugh. The heavy door slid shut behind them with a soft hiss and the keypad to the left of the next door lit up.

  He lifted a shoulder in unconcern. “It’ll give your boys something to think about.”

  “Like they, and everyone else, haven’t already thought that, thanks to you?” she muttered.

  “Well, yeah. I’m a man, you’re a woman. Obviously everyone thinks you slept your way into the job. People always think good-looking women sleep their way into jobs. If you want to convince them otherwise, you have to quit acting like you give a damn, Vic. You’ve built a God-damned fortress around this habitat and the island. Only a moron would think you did that while flat on your back with your legs in the air.”

  She pulled in a deep breath and counted silently to ten while glaring at his smirking face. “Gee, thanks, Dennis. Will you put that in a letter of recommendation for me?”

  “Thinking of leaving?” he asked with a grin as he finished punching in the code for the next airlock.

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “Well, don’t even think about it or I will tell the world you slept with me to get the job. One blog post is all it would take for everyone to know. And I’ll be sure to mention that rising-sun tattoo on your ass,” he replied casually as he let her enter the corridor ahead of him. Laughing quietly, he tilted his head toward the small speaker flush-mounted in the ceiling of the hallway. “Hear that, fellas?”

  Her mouth dropped open as his comment registered on several levels. “I don’t have a rising-sun tattoo anywhere. I don’t have any tattoos,” she protested, and smacked him on the arm none too gently as they began walking. “Certainly not that one.”

  “I wouldn’t know, but putting it out there would sure cloud the old employment issue for you, wouldn’t it? Especially with Western firms looking for a security wizard. Think of it. A little Japanese girl with a—”

  “I’m not a girl, and I’m not Japanese. I haven’t been for thirty-two years,” she snapped. “My looks stem from my DNA but cultural identity isn’t genetic. I’m a Tainoan and an American, in that order.”

  “Thank you for giving me priority, sweetheart, but I’m just pointing out that it’s better that you stay here and keep me and Taino safe from all those malicious persons you dream about at night.”

  They proceeded in silence for a few moments as she regained her composure, then she stopped in front of the next airlock and looked up at him. “Tell you what, Dennis, let’s talk business for a while.”

  “I don’t know. Why don’t we talk dirty, instead?”

  She let out a sigh that was half amusement and half exasperation. “You know, sometimes I really have to wonder how you ever got to be—”

  “I got where I am because my shareholders always loved me,” he said, interrupting her easily. “I made them a lot of money, I had fun doing it, and I pissed off the old guard at the same time. Even among my peers in the dot-com universe, I was the poster boy for the ‘Old enough to know better and young enough not to care’ mind-set. And I indulged in a behavior generally considered to be terminal in any industry: I always told the truth. A novel concept, unfortunately. But one that, as I recall, is what finally convinced you that leaving those tight-assed, white-bread old farts on Wall Street for the good life on Taino was a good idea. And it was a good idea. You were wasting your talents keeping all their secrets secret. Here on Taino, you’re making history. You’re helping to change the world. Hell, Vic, to be perfectly candid, I don’t even know what the hell you’re doing half the time, but I know that this baby”—he waved his hand toward the walls of the corridor—“this baby wouldn’t be here if you weren’t doing a good job. Make that a great job.”

  “Thank you, Dennis. I—” she began.

  “And that,” he continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “is why, as soon as we get topside, I’m going to draft a letter describing that tattoo and how I found it, and put that letter somewhere safe.”

  Her hands rose slowly in surrender as, laughing, the two of them came to a halt in front of the door that was the last stop on their itinerary.

  Operations Control was a dimly lit but comfortable room from which the world’s finest mining engineers, marine geologists, and underwater excavation experts ran the brains of Atlantis, the underwater habitat that Dennis Cavendish was counting on to change the way the world worked.

  Marie LaSalle, the installation’s chief science officer, glanced over her shoulder at them without bothering to straighten up from where she leaned casually against a long console covered with a neat bank of flat-screen computer monitors. She held up her hand to stop them from talking and returned her eyes to the screen she’d been watching. Dennis nodded and looked around the room, which was quietly humming with myriad live computers and the low voices of the fifteen people responsible for monitoring them.

  A moment later, Victoria saw his eyes widen and quickly realized why. On the screen that held Marie’s rapt attention, Victoria watched the real-time, three-dimensional animation that showed the titanium-toothed pipe burrow through the last few meters of cold, hard rock. It stopped abruptly as its sensors made contact with a pale substance that gave way without the slightest resistance. A burst of jubilation from the crew broke the atmosphere of heavy concentration.

  Marie stood up and smiled at them with a look of quiet triumph. “Bonjour, mon president. Welcome back to Atlantis. You were just in time to watch the largest deposit of methane hydrate in the Northern Hemisphere being breached. We’ve confirmed seismic stability, the tanks of dennisium are in place, and we are about to begin injecting it into the cache to stabilize the first pocket. To start, only twenty-two metric tons in s
itu,” she said in her lilting, flirtatious accent, lifting a shoulder with Gallic nonchalance.

  As if making history were all in a day’s work and halving the danger of a catastrophic underwater explosion was but a trifling task.

  Victoria kept her polite smile in place and unclenched her teeth. The Frenchwoman might be a complete bitch on land, but she was the undisputed queen of the seafloor. There was no one on the staff more talented or more driven than Marie, and if Dennis’s grand experiment of mining methane hydrate from an unmapped abyss on the floor of the Caribbean Sea was going to work, it would be because of her. Marie made things happen.

  “By tonight we should have test bed preparations complete and water flowing in,” she continued. “Then we will begin a test run of the full procedure. We’ll extract only a few tons the first time. You are going to return for it? It promises to be a good show.” She gestured to the large, unlit screen covering one wall.

  “I’ll be watching from above with some friends.”

  “So be it. Just make sure you send down the Champagne chilled and on time,” Marie said nonchalantly before turning back to the monitors.

  Victoria waited near the door while Dennis moved through the small space, greeting each person by name and congratulating them. While he believed in getting to know his employees personally, Victoria rarely interacted with any of them. She knew them all too intimately and too impersonally from having studied their personnel files and the frequently updated surveillance reports on each one of them, and needed to keep her distance in the event of a problem.

  Keeping herself disengaged from the rest of the staff didn’t bother her—childhood had provided lots of practice—but it meant the only one of her coworkers she really had a friendly relationship with was Dennis, and that had its benefits and drawbacks.