“That’s because Gigi Blaine doesn’t exist. But the name is similar to—what did you say the GAIA leader’s name was?”
She felt her eyes widen as the nausea returned with a punch.
“Garner Blaylock,” she replied slowly. “Dennis, I didn’t send any messages before I left. I didn’t tell anyone to send anything for me. And I haven’t told anyone that you’re still alive.”
“The message showed up on Micki’s e-mail.” His voice, if not his words, was an accusation.
Trying to keep her frayed patience intact, Victoria mentally counted to three before answering. “Then she must have sent it, Dennis. Or someone else sent it from her computer. Did you ask her about it?”
“She’s the one who found it. And she didn’t send it.”
Victoria shivered suddenly, as if an icy hand had gripped her by the neck. “Dennis, did Micki tell you that she suspects me . . . that I knew about... that I had something to do with the crash?” she asked, fumbling the words. She fell back against the window frame as her knees began to buckle.
“Yes.”
“And you believe her?” she whispered.
The silence lasted way too long. “Yes.”
Oh, God. Victoria closed her eyes, feeling a void open inside her.
“Dennis.” She choked on the word and had to stop for a breath before going on. “Dennis, in eight, nearly nine years, when have I ever given you cause to doubt me? To distrust me? What could I have possibly done to make you believe Micki—”
“Too many bad calls today, Vic.”
“For God’s sake, Dennis,” she hissed, screwing her eyes shut to keep the tears in. “For God’s sake, what was I supposed to do? That plane crash was an assassination attempt. We both know that now, don’t we? Don’t we? You were a target. Garner Blaylock had to know you would be on that plane.” She took a deep breath. Despite it, her voice still shook as she continued. “The crash was a shock to us all, Dennis. Maybe in retrospect I didn’t make the best decisions this morning, but I had to make decisions. You weren’t fit to lead.”
Her words met only a cold, stony silence.
“How can you think I would betray you?” she asked, her voice harsh as she pushed the words past the hard, aching lump in her throat.
“Somebody did, Vic.”
“It wasn’t me. I swear to you on everything I hold dear that it wasn’t me, Dennis.”
“There’s only one other person who could and that’s Micki. You are the only people who would have access to the—Let me guess. You think she’s behind it,” Dennis said, his voice heavy with sarcasm and scorn.
Victoria swallowed hard and attempted to keep her tone even. “She could be. I don’t know what her motives would be, but she’d have the means and the opportunity. Micki knows the system almost as well as I do. If she put enough effort into it, she might have been able to circumvent some of the security parameters. Get information out. Meet up with people—”
“Not as easily as you could, though. Why did you want to send her away?”
“Because I thought she was losing it,” Victoria snapped, her voice rising. “When Micki started to accuse you of killing those people for the sake of publicity—”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he demanded.
“I’m telling you what she said to me right before I met with you in my cottage. She said she suspected you brought down that plane to draw attention to your plans. That it was a bizarre publicity stunt because the extraction operations are so close to becoming a reality. It was crazy and I told her so, but she wouldn’t let it go.”
“You’re the—”
“Dennis, be careful,” Victoria interrupted as a frigid tendril of fear began curling through her. “You just said that it had to be one of us, either Micki or me, and I think you’re right. I’ll admit that. If we were being targeted and someone on the outside was looking for a weak spot in the organization, Wendy wouldn’t have been an obvious or a logical choice. Even we, who knew her, are having a hard time believing it could be true; someone from outside would never consider her. But someone inside might have seen things in her—vulnerabilities, maybe, or beliefs that we never questioned.” She let out a hard, frustrated breath. “Micki would have had access to Wendy’s personal information, her psychological profile. They could have become friendly. I don’t—”
“So you think Micki—What is this, Vic, some sort of sick game the two of you have cooked up? You’re both in on it—”
“Dennis, listen to me. Nobody outside knows for sure what we’re doing. Not even the Americans. And if no one knows, no one has any reason to attack us. But if Blaylock does know about the drilling, if he’s been told that we’re starting an operation that he doesn’t agree with, that he would think is a violation of some, I don’t know, natural order, then that alone might be enough reason for him to want to kill you—” As the words came out of her mouth, Micki’s choking confession echoed in her brain and Victoria felt as if the wind had been knocked out of her.
“And that was the end of that dove. I’ll never forget it. It was just awful. I cried for days.”
And then she’d crippled the boy without a glimmer of remorse.
It’s her.
“Dennis,” Victoria hissed sharply, the horror of realization stealing over her. “It is Micki. She’s the mole. It can’t be anyone else. She’s behind the plane crash.”
The silence on the other end of the phone seemed interminably long, and with every second that ticked by, the constriction in Victoria’s chest began to ease.
Dennis would believe her. He always had.
She straightened against the window, feeling clarity return.
She would get word to the security teams on Taino and Micki would be taken into custody before she realized what had happened. Whatever plans she might have in store—
“Vic, consider yourself relieved of your duties. Charlie will accept your resignation and debrief you. You’ll remain in custody.”
His words, uttered coldly and clearly, pierced her like a shiv to the lung and she couldn’t breathe.
“Dennis, no—” Her words were strangled as emotion too overwhelming to suppress engulfed her. “You’re . . . you’re wrong. Those people . . . the institute . . . No, Dennis, I would never—” A huge, wracking sob, alien and painful, tore through her. “I’m . . . you’re my family, Dennis.”
“No, Victoria. I’m not. I’m your boss,” he said in a tone that froze her. “You’re an employee who killed fifteen people and tried to fuck me over. You’re sick and twisted and you thought you’d get away with it. I don’t know who’s paying you, but you won’t bring me down. Not now. Not ever.”
The line went dead and Victoria let the phone drop from her hand.
Still gasping for breath, she staggered across the room to the bed. Collapsing onto it, she curled into a ball and, with her mouth pressed against the handmade quilt, began to scream. She wasn’t sure how much time passed before the rage, the pain, and the disbelief numbed her and she dragged herself into the shower.
CHAPTER
14
10:30 P.M., Saturday, October 25, Gainesville, Florida
Phone pressed to his ear, Sam paced the new wood floors in his kitchen. They were Cyn’s idea, of course. He hadn’t really given a damn that the original floor was no-wax flooring in a pattern that was “so eighties.” The little geese wearing light blue bow ties or yellow bonnets as they marched around the squares hadn’t really bothered him. In fact, until Cyn pointed them out, he wasn’t sure he’d ever noticed them. It was a floor, for pity’s sake. You walked on it, spilled on it, occasionally washed it. And it had been in pretty much perfect shape. But to Cyn, it was a “statement.” So he’d had it ripped up and replaced with a sinfully expensive, appropriately “green” bamboo floor. Sure it looked nice, but it was still a floor. He still walked on it, spilled on it, and occasionally washed it. And now she was starting to bug him about replacing the cabinets.
Woman, if you ever want to get your way again, you had better not come home crowing about getting past Taino’s borders.
“Yeah, okay, we lost. Happy?” Marty muttered by way of a greeting.
There probably had never been a time when Sam had talked to Marty without a cold beer in his hand. Good times and Marty had always been a natural pair, like socks and shoes, beaches and sand, wind and rain. This conversation was going to be a first. But he had to get the pleasantries out of the way, so Sam made sure a grin was evident in his voice.
“Hell, yes, I’m happy. Not that I ever thought I’d be otherwise. Maybe y’all oughtta change your name from the Terps to the Twerps. Y’all looked like a bunch of high-schoolers out there in the fourth quarter. And I don’t mean Texas high-schoolers, either. I mean Yankee high-schoolers.”
“Are you done? Can I hang up now?”
Sam’s grin faded. “No. Actually, I’m callin’ about something we were talkin’ about earlier. About Taino. You have a minute? I mean, if you’re not consolin’ some cheerleader—”
“Jealous?” Marty drawled.
“Not really.”
Marty laughed. “Liar. Yeah, I got a minute. What did you want to know?”
Sam stopped pacing and leaned his shoulder against the edge of the sliding doors that led to his deck. “Well, that whole wild-ass story you told me about Dennis Cavendish minin’ methane at four thousand feet has sorta been chewin’ on my brain.”
“Yeah?” Marty said cautiously.
“How is that even possible?”
“Lots of money, lots of equipment.”
“No, smart-ass, I meant how could he get it out? The stuff is down there pretty damned deep. I mean, it’s down a couple hundred feet even once you hit solid ground. It’s not like oil. It’s a solid, so pressure isn’t goin’ to help drive it to the surface, and you can’t get in there with diggers. And it’s methane. It’s volatile. So how does he get it out?”
“Well, there have been a few theories floated for getting it out. Basically, all you need to do is get into the reserve and pump superheated water into it. The heat would liberate the gas from the crystals and then you harvest the gas.”
“Well, I’ll be damned, Marty. Is that all? Just push a big ol’ honkin’ pipe through four thousand feet of freezing cold water and pump a few million gallons of boiling water through it to melt the ice?” Sam said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“Look, I said it was a theory, okay? I don’t think anyone’s tried to do it. It would cost an obscene amount of money to even attempt it. Cavendish has that and isn’t shy about spending it, but it’s a completely impractical idea. The volatility of the gas is the biggest danger. I mean, there’s the whole explosion issue, but any kind of big release—without an explosion—is a huge environmental fuckup. And even if he worked around all of those things somehow, I know for sure Cavendish isn’t bringing it up because there isn’t a production plant in evidence on his island. He’d need a power plant to generate the hot water, and facilities for purification, storage, and distribution, none of which he has.”
“Where is it then? On the seafloor?” Sam asked bluntly.
A silence built that Sam was not about to break. Eventually, Marty cleared his throat. “It sounds crazy, really crazy, but . . . yeah. Maybe that’s where it is.”
Sam felt laughter coming on but it died as he realized there wasn’t a shred of amusement in Marty’s voice. “Run by remote control?”
“It would have to be. That wouldn’t be such a big deal, though. You know, the whole thing could be fabricated and assembled on land and then sunk and placed, just like an oil rig. And there are plenty of small offshore oil rigs that are run remotely. People fly out as needed.”
“Yeah, but the first offshore rig ever built didn’t operate remotely. It had people on it twenty-four/seven,” Sam interjected.
“True, but the first few generations of spacecraft did. And now there are spacecraft flying millions of miles away from earth, functioning just fine, and they’re controlled remotely. I can’t see why it would have to be any different with an operation on the seafloor. Theoretically, anyway.”
“Except that oil rigs and spacecraft rely on radio signals to communicate, Marty. Once you go underwater like that, you’re relyin’ on cables,” Sam pointed out.
“Well, yeah, cables. Not always, though. Anyway, so what? If something needs to be fixed, just send someone down in a submersible, or in one of those one-atmosphere diving suits. Hell, it can’t be that much different than sending an astronaut out on a space walk to do repairs. I think undersea and outer space projects have a lot of similarities. Similar challenges anyway.”
Sam stopped pacing. “You’ve thought about this, Marty. Either that or you know something you’re not tellin’ me.”
“I don’t know anything,” he protested. “I get paid to come up with theories.”
“Not about underwater mining operations, you don’t. Tell me what else you think that dude is up to.”
“I don’t know anything. Look, everything I’ve just said is pure speculation, okay? If this crash had happened two weeks from now, I might have been able to answer more questions because I’d already be back from the island,” Marty said, stifling a yawn. “And I don’t even know for sure that the man is actually doing anything with all that methane. But it just seems kinda odd that he’d be sitting on top of it and not messing around with it, not trying to get it out of there. We’ve both met him. He’s half genius and half lunatic. And he owns the island.”
“Well, I can’t argue with the genius-lunatic idea,” Sam drawled. “He’s an original.”
“Have you heard from Her Highness?” Marty asked after a moment.
“Yeah. Almost wish I hadn’t,” Sam muttered. “She’s hell-bent on turnin’ into an investigative reporter and pokin’ around that crash.”
“Bad move.”
“No damned kiddin’, Methane Man.” Sam sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Listen, buddy, thanks for the information. For a crazy man, you’re okay.”
“I aim to please,” Marty replied with a grin in his voice. “Later, Sam.”
After he ended the call, Sam remained at the door for a few minutes, then wandered back to his office. Sitting down in front of his computer, he logged on to his favorite search engine and typed in the words “methane hydrate.”
5:10 A.M., Sunday, October 26, Annaba, Algeria
Garner Blaylock wasn’t sure what awakened him, but knew that jet lag being what it was, he was unlikely to fall back to sleep any time soon. He rolled over and let his eyes adjust to the shades of darkness in the unfamiliar room. The darkest shapes were furniture. The filigreed striations on the walls had to be moonlight coming through the carved shutters. There was no artificial light brightening the sky this far outside of Annaba’s French-influenced city center. No man-made sound polluted the dawn, either. He heard only the soft susurrus of the trees and shrubs moving in the early-morning breeze, and the grunts and cries of animals following their instincts.
He’d leased the remote villa set in the slowly rising uplands beyond Annaba a few months ago, after being assured it came with all the amenities a wealthy European businessman—as Garner had described himself—could possibly want: privacy, luxury, armed security guards, and the woman in his bed.
He gave the warm, slick, female body next to him an almost gentle shove. The summer’s heat hadn’t completely disappeared and the autumn rains weren’t in full force yet, which left the weather overly warm and humid for this late in the year. That environment was compounded inside the room, making it too easy to remain in the sex-and-jet-lag-induced torpor in which he found himself.
Get up.
Despite his determination to become fully awake, he felt his eyes drift shut.
Seconds later, they opened again. Tired as he was, it was too damned hot to be this close to anything that sweated or smelled so heavily of sandalwood. The woman—he hadn’t bothered to ask h
er name—was too cloying by half.
“There you go, love. Over a bit more.” With a feminine but unladylike noise, she rolled away, leaving him more room to spread out on the low bed.
It didn’t matter. Less than a minute later he was on his feet, prowling the cool tile floor of the unfamiliar room as sure-footed as a cat, forcing himself into full wakefulness. There was too much to do.
A few members of Garner’s inner circle had arrived at the villa weeks ago to finish their work undisturbed by the annoyances of Western Europe. Police, politics, prudery—none of those had any relevance here. Here in the northeastern corner of Algeria, where the Mediterranean Sea hugged North Africa’s coast, locals were extremely amenable to looking the other way, if ensuring that became necessary. And, lately, it had become quite necessary.
Phase one had gone off almost exactly as planned. Micki’s e-mail had confirmed the turmoil, although Garner wasn’t entirely sure if he should be surprised that weak-minded Wendy had not come through for him as thoroughly as she ought. The deed was done, however, so it scarcely mattered. The exact coordinates had been hit at the right time and altitude and the small but effective bombs had detonated precisely in sequence, sending several of humanity’s foremost perpetrators of crimes against Nature to a terrifying, fiery death, which had been caught on tape and in vivid color.
Garner stopped pacing for a moment and let a quiet laugh slither through the silence. The visuals had been lovely. Utterly, fucking lovely, with elegant streams of smoke and flames brilliant against a pristine sky, and the light rain of the remains of the sinners falling like macabre confetti to feed the fish.
This manifestation of his drive and his genius had stunned the world, perhaps even more than had the World Trade Center’s demise. Such a small number of people had died yesterday, yet those few deaths were having an enormous effect.
He felt his smile fade as the taste behind it became bitter. It was triumph, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough, even though the aftermath was unfolding exactly as he’d planned. Cavendish’s people had been prompt in issuing their first information-free press release—he’d been delighted at the quixotic touch of irony as he watched Micki so calmly deliver her lies.
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