Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  Without additional encouragement, the babble issuing from the world’s news organizations worked in ceaseless synchronicity to create rumors and foment panic even as their talking heads sat in their studios urging calm against the backdrop of somber riffs, which had temporarily replaced the programs’ usual, inane theme music. As entertaining as all of that was, Garner knew the real humor was to be found in the Oval Office, 10 Downing Street, the Élysée Palace, and the Kremlin, and in the halls of their respective legislative bodies.

  Garner pushed open the louvered doors at one end of the long room and walked onto the balcony. Leaning his naked body against the cool iron of the curved railing, he breathed deeply, taking into his lungs the hot, acrid breath of North Africa.

  All around the globe, heads of state and their high-ranking underlings were rushing to avail themselves of a new opportunity to flaunt their gravitas and dust off their tired, bombastic remarks about terrorism being a fact of life, security being at the top of the international agenda, and the need for constant vigilance on the part of Everyman.

  The problem with the politicians’ favorite argument was that Everyman wasn’t the target, and they knew it. And that’s why Everyman was fucking clueless about what terrorism was and how it worked and why it worked. And why governments were impotent against it.

  At some point, Everyman would have to cop to the fact that the self-proclaimed warriors leading their nations with chest-thumping abandon were like eunuchs pointing out the size of their biceps to anyone who would listen. At some point, Everyman would tire of the rhetoric and demand to see the size of their balls, and then the game would be over. And the truly righteous, the potent, the change-makers would have won.

  Refreshed by the thought, Garner stalked back to the low bed and flipped the woman over, ignoring her startled shriek.

  To the victors go the spoils of war.

  CHAPTER

  15

  7:30 A.M., Sunday, October 26, Taino

  Dennis sat as his desk after a mostly sleepless night and watched the morning breeze flirt with a short stack of papers that were held in place by a large chunk of volcanic glass. The sun was well up and it was going to be another sultry day in paradise.

  My shattered paradise.

  In the time since he’d spoken to Victoria, Dennis had been regaining his senses. And his sense of anger was building faster than anything else.

  The connection the Americans had made to that prick Blaylock made sense, and it pissed Dennis off to no end that it hadn’t occurred to him first. Blaylock had been a thorn in Dennis’s side on many occasions over the years by trying to block development and acquisition deals, and by engaging in negative publicity over how “green” the institute’s research really was—or wasn’t.

  Blaylock was smart, but he was also a cocky son of a bitch with vicious streak that he neatly covered up with that House of Lords accent and a heart that bled freely and on cue every time there was a camera nearby.

  Animal testing. Foxhunting. Factory farming. Overfishing. Pesticide development.

  Blaylock had pushed his sticky fingers into every hot-button environmental issue that could generate both publicity and cash flow. Dennis had always found it somewhat surprising that Blaylock also targeted alternative energy, since it didn’t directly affect his precious fauna. That Blaylock might know about the mining operation was more than surprising; it was God-damned frightening—primarily because he would have had to find out about it from an insider.

  And the timing of Blaylock’s actions, if he indeed had been the one to order the destruction of Dennis’s plane, could only point to either Micki or Victoria.

  Micki’s recklessness was counterbalanced by Victoria’s extreme caution; where Micki dared, Victoria planned. From that perspective, either could have been Blaylock’s mole. But Dennis knew Micki wasn’t smart enough to pull off something like that, and Victoria had always struck him as less capable of being bought.

  Not knowing which woman had betrayed him was maddening. It made him feel impotent.

  Dennis stood and walked to the window, seeing and not seeing the palms moving languorously in the early heat. There were two things he knew for sure: Whoever had done this was clearly insane, and that person would not stop until some additional goal—Dennis’s death, the destruction of the mining operation, maybe both—had been accomplished. All he could do now was to keep pushing both women until one of them revealed herself to be both an accomplished liar and a cold-blooded killer.

  A quiet tap at his door preceded the entrance of his assistant, Leanne, bearing a full, steaming cup of coffee.

  “I thought you might be ready for a fresh one,” she said with a hesitant smile.

  “You read my mind, as usual,” he replied, forcing a smile. “Thank you.”

  She came to stop at the edge of his desk and picked up the nearly empty mug that sat there, replacing it with the new one.

  “May I just say how very sorry I am, sir? Everything was so crazy yesterday that I never took a moment to say it.” Her voice was a near-whisper and her eyes were watery when he met her gaze.

  She’d worked for him for nearly two decades and knew him almost as well as he knew himself. Dennis picked up her free hand and kissed the back of it; it was an unlikely gesture, but one that felt right. “Thank you, Leanne. It’s a hard time for all of us. And this may only be the beginning.”

  Her eyes widened and her fingers curled around his in a snug grip. “The beginning of what?”

  He returned a slight squeeze of her hand before releasing it. “I don’t know. But enough people, including me, think that I was the real target of that plane crash, and that whoever did it may not stop there.”

  “Oh—”

  He stopped her alarmed exclamation with a hand raised slowly. “There’s no point in speculating. We just have to be more vigilant. Thanks for the coffee, Leanne. Right now I have to get back to work.”

  With a perfunctory smile, she left his office as quietly as she’d come in and Dennis was once again alone with his thoughts, and his demons.

  In direct rebellion against Victoria’s strong, and in his opinion, ridiculous—possibly treasonous—desire to have him sequestered like some warty has-been who needed protection, Dennis had returned to his office almost immediately after she’d left the island the previous evening. He’d remained there for much of the night, resuming the command that was rightfully his. He’d been surprised that Micki had hung around after delivering her bomb of an accusation, but little more had been said about it. No doubt she’d been waiting for him to make the next move. He had, by calling Charlie, but he hadn’t informed Micki of that.

  He’d also decided not to tell Micki what had transpired during the call with Victoria, but he’d summoned her immediately after he hung up, curious to see if she’d been monitoring his conversation. If she had, she’d given no indication of it and had simply done everything he’d asked her to do. He’d finally managed to catch a few hours of sleep, only to be up and at his desk again long before dawn.

  Micki had appeared not long after he’d set foot in his office. He’d given a cold reception to her annoyingly casual and unproductive report on the overnight progress of the search-and-recovery operations. She’d taken the hint and absented herself to the low cluster of buildings nearer the beach to check up on some communications issues that had erupted on the secure network in the last few hours.

  Looking up, Dennis glanced at the large television screens mounted on the wall opposite his desk. They were dark at the moment, taken offline deliberately so the comms team could do some troubleshooting. It was an uncomfortable and eerie feeling to be so completely cut off from the rest of the world. He didn’t like it.

  Being on a tiny island with a very small population comprised mostly of scientists, engineers, and other assorted high-tech gurus, Dennis had sunk enormous quantities of money into his communications systems. There were backup systems for the backup systems, and security for the primar
y and redundant networks was tighter than the clichéd drum. That Micki hadn’t been overly concerned at the unexplained troubles on their highly secure, heavily protected link with the outside world chafed at him; even knowing that it normally took a lot to rattle her didn’t assuage him. No matter how temporary the downtime would be, it was beyond frustrating. It was disconcerting. And dangerous.

  Dennis shook off the thought and brought his mind back to the text on his laptop screen. Still trying to make sense of the crash, during the long, mostly sleepless night, he’d begun composing notes for the remarks that he was going to make—Victoria’s inevitable outrage be damned.

  He’d known every person killed in the crash. The pilots and cabin crew had been handpicked by him, had worked for him, traveled with him. Some had been with him before he’d owned Taino, before he’d set up the Climate Research Institute. They weren’t quite family, but they’d been good people, intelligent, professional, loyal. Warm, energetic. Damned good people. He rubbed a hand over his exhausted eyes. The passengers had been his friends; he’d known some for a time that was measurable in decades.

  And they were dead because they’d accepted his invitation.

  That’s why he’d called the families last night. Screw the security argument for keeping him out of sight. Whether or not terrorist actions had brought down his plane, those families deserved to hear about their loved ones’ fate from him. Not from some embassy staffer in Washington, not even from Victoria, who wouldn’t know what to do with an emotion if she ever allowed herself to feel one.

  Whatever Victoria thought the world needed to know or not know, Dennis knew the world needed to see him alive and in real time, needed to hear from his own lips the somber news that there were no survivors. He’d never shied away from any challenge in his life, and breaking this news to the world was not going to be his first failure. And if the people who blew up his plane were watching—well, if nothing else, it would be one hell of a way to show those fuckers who they were messing with.

  He typed a few more words, then hit save—and watched his screen go blank.

  “Leanne,” he called, and saw his senior assistant appear in the doorway that separated their offices. “Did you do something to the local network connection?”

  “No, sir. Mine just died, too,” she replied calmly. “I’ll run down to the beach and find out what’s going on.”

  Dennis nodded absently and brought up the automatic backup copy of the file, which had stored itself somewhere on the laptop’s hard drive. Absorbed in writing his speech, he was only marginally aware that time was passing. When his assistant returned, he looked up to realize that half an hour had gone by.

  “What’s the latest? I’ve been working locally. Have they fixed it yet?” he asked.

  “No, sir. It’s next in the queue.”

  Both of his eyebrows rose. “Next in the queue?” he repeated. “What the hell is going on down there? What can be so important that they have to triage the network?”

  “Well, sir, it seems everything is down. I mean, not deliberately this time. They tried to bring the external communication links up and then everything started failing.” Leanne hesitated, faltering as the next words left her mouth. “And now the comms to the habitat are down.”

  Dennis stared at her, wondering if he’d heard correctly.

  “When the fuck did that happen?” he demanded. “We’re taking the operation to live testing in a few hours. Tell Micki—forget it. I’ll call her myself. What’s the number down there in the comms hut? That’s where she is, isn’t she?” He grabbed one of the cell phones on his desk.

  “Yes, she is, sir, but the—”

  She stopped talking as Dennis yanked the silent telephone away from his ear and stared at it, then looked back at her.

  No phone service.

  No computer networks.

  No way to let anyone know what’s happening on the island.

  An ominous coldness settled in his gut. “You’re sure she’s down there?”

  “Yes, sir, I just saw her.”

  He stood up and, without another word, headed for the beach and some answers.

  The normal muted hum of voices and equipment in the only air-conditioned building on the island had been replaced by a fierce tension that Dennis could feel the minute he walked in. He saw Micki leaning over the shoulder of the best communications engineer they had, peering at a monitor. The director of communications was by her side.

  “Micki.”

  She turned and slowly straightened up, then walked toward him. “Hey. I was just about to come get you.”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “To put it bluntly, we’re having catastrophic failure of every network. They’re crashin’ like dominoes, fallin’ over in slow motion,” she drawled with an understated shrug that made Dennis’s already-surging blood flow faster.

  “What are you doing about it?” he demanded.

  Meeting his gaze with a stony look, she took his arm and ushered him outside.

  “Obviously, Dennis, some of the team are trying to prevent the remaining networks from crashing and the rest are trying to find out what’s going wrong. When we brought down the external networks yesterday morning, we did it quickly but strictly according to protocol. We left the one super-secure channel open. Then, right before Victoria left, we began reopening some of the other critical channels. That was also done very carefully.” She shrugged again. “With nothing much to go on, we’re attempting to determine if these new failures are related to any of those actions, but so far we can’t find any logical or even discernible reason why this is happening. We don’t know why the electronics started acting up overnight and we don’t know why we can’t bring them back online.”

  “Things just don’t stop working for no reason, Micki.”

  “I know that, Dennis,” she said with obvious annoyance. “I’m going to get some people looking into whether it could be something physical. Maybe some of that heavy soot dirtied up some equipment topside, or some debris or jet fuel got into some underwater equipment. We just have to keep looking.”

  He glanced toward the water, so blue and calm, and frowned. The Brits, the Cubans, and the Americans were practically slavering at the thought of getting their mitts on his information, his equipment, his people. It was damned near a miracle that he’d kept them away from his playground this long. “Are we being jammed somehow, maybe from that God-damned traffic out there? Because if the neighbors are fucking around with us—”

  “There’s no evidence that we’re being jammed. That was the first thing we looked at.”

  Making a concerted effort to control his temper, Dennis asked, “What about the backup systems?”

  “All but one have gone down.”

  “You pulled them down, you mean,” he snapped.

  She nodded after the space of a heartbeat. “Yes. I pulled them down because they were having the same troubles as the primary network. The one remaining is still experiencing those issues.”

  “Leanne said we’ve lost contact with Atlantis.”

  Micki hesitated again, then nodded. “Yes, a few minutes ago. But Marie was apprised of the problems we’d been having, just in case.”

  “What do you mean, ‘just in case’? Did you know this could happen?”

  “Well, yes, Dennis, something like this could happen at any time,” she replied with some impatience, her drawl getting thicker with every word. “A computer network is a complex system comprisin’ lots of variables, which means it can fail at any time for any number of reasons. Satellite uplinks and downlinks, the fiberoptic cable to the habitat, wireless connections topside—there are a lot of vulnerabilities and a lot of potential points of failure. But the probability of this sort of catastrophic failure was so low, Dennis.” She took in a deep breath. “When things began to fail in such odd ways, the first thing we did was put everyone on high alert. The boats, the habitat, the port—”

  “What did Victoria sa
y?” he asked, watching her carefully.

  For the first time, Micki’s gaze left his face. “The external network went dark before we were able to reach everyone. Washington.”

  An icy burn in his stomach worked its way into his esophagus and stalled there, searing his chest.

  “You didn’t contact Washington? They don’t know what’s happening?” he asked in disbelief.

  “They have to know by now that we’ve gone dark, but I wasn’t able to warn them that we might ahead of time, or inform them of the communications troubles we were havin’.” She looked at him again as her chin rose. “I couldn’t have known when this started how widespread the problem would be, Dennis. If I had, I would have let Washington know first.”

  Micki’s voice had gone from calm to defensive and her eyes were displaying poorly hidden nervousness. But it was her body language that disturbed him, the way her hands had become restless, the way her feet shifted as she rebalanced her weight. He didn’t know what it signified, but all that movement was unlike her.

  Dennis studied her and attempted again to control the anger that was churning in him.

  “We need everything back online,” he said at last. “It’s almost time for Marie to initiate the first live test. We need to be in contact with everyone topside and in Atlantis.” He paused. “How long has Atlantis been offline?”

  “Less than ten minutes.”

  They both knew that the first rule of the habitat was to shut down everything and abandon the structure if they were unable to communicate with the surface for more than thirty minutes.

  Bringing everything back online after an emergency shutdown will take weeks.

  Impotent fury was boiling over inside him. He wanted to shake her, and settled for clenching his fists instead. “Micki, what the fuck is going on? You’re acting like we’re helpless.”