Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  “Thank you, Secretary Wirth. That’s precisely what I am focusing on. With your permission . . . ?” Lucy directed her attention once more to the president. “We’ve brought in Dr. Sam Briscoe. He’s well respected in his field and his explanations are fairly easy to understand. The atmosphere itself is the vector. The adulterated methane is displacing the air along the trajectory of the air current, forming plumes of oxygen-deficient gas. Anyone or anything trying to breathe in such an area will suffocate in less than a minute.” Lucy paused. “We believe this was the cause of death of the people and animals that I previously mentioned. They come up for air, or fly, or otherwise move through the plume, and die.”

  “Jesus H. Christ.” The words burst out of Ken Proust’s thin-lipped mouth as he launched himself out of his chair.

  Drama queen. Lucy resisted the urge to roll her eyes at him.

  “Wait a minute. Who is this so-called expert? And where the hell is he getting this stuff?” the president demanded. “Sounds crazy to me.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I wish such a scenario were crazy, sir, but unfortunately, it’s happening. Dr. Briscoe is with the University of Florida. He has a background in chemistry and microbiology in addition to his atmospheric research.”

  “How long is this going to last?” Ken demanded, still on his feet and pacing to the door and back. “When is it going to stop?”

  “The time that the concentration will remain lethal depends on its rate of diffusion, which depends on wind speed and direction, but the gas won’t stop coming up until we plug that leak. There are additional concerns besides deaths at the surface, sir,” she said, her voice rising as Ken tried to interrupt her again.

  “There’s more? For God’s sake, Lucy,” President Benson snapped.

  “Dr. Briscoe indicated that the methane is essentially being pumped out of the cavity. That was his word. ‘Pumped.’ As the gas rises through the water, it decreases the density of the water column, and as it rises through the air, it could do the same thing to the air column. So even if the rate of diffusion renders the air breathable at the surface, the atmosphere may not be able to support aircraft, or it may become combustible.”

  Ken came to an abrupt stop in front of her chair. “Lucy, are you sure this guy is sane? This all sounds like a James Cameron flick.”

  Only Katy Wirth had the nerve to give a snort of laughter and Lucy ignored her. Stiffening her spine against an especially withering presidential glare and the wary disbelief of everyone else in the room, Lucy met the president’s eyes.

  “I know it sounds bad—dire, even, Mr. President—but we did check him out. He’s published quite a bit on the subject in peer-reviewed journals. And Dennis Cavendish tried to hire him a few years ago.”

  President Benson shoved his hands into his trouser pockets and pursed his lips as silence fell over the room.

  “So we have to issue some sort of alert for South Florida so people stay indoors?” he asked after a few minutes.

  Too damned little, too damned late, you soulless prick.

  Lucy took a deep breath, and wondered why she’d ever taken this job. She hated politics almost as much as she hated politicians. “Sir, that could be a solution if the weather helps us, but if the wind stays calm, the methane won’t diffuse and people could be trapped in their houses. I think the only-real option is an evacuation.”

  Katy let out an incredulous gasp. “Evacuate Miami? Tell two million people they have to leave home to avoid a threat they can’t see? Are you insane, Lucy? That’s political suicide.”

  Lucy shot her a sharp look. “The alternative is mass murder, Secretary Wirth. Not suicide, murder. Because with suicide the victim has a choice,” she snapped, then looked back to the president. “Sir, if people wait, it will be too late to save them. One good lungful with no oxygen in it and you’re dead where you fall,” she replied bluntly. “Everything and everyone present when the gas plume comes through will be dead. Cops on their beats, executives in limos, babies in strollers. Everyone, sir.”

  “An evacuation isn’t necessary, sir. We’re prepared for this,” Ken Proust said quickly. “Our first responders are trained to handle biological warfare—”

  “No,” Lucy interrupted, getting to her feet and facing him. Ken actually took a stumbling step backward.

  You should be afraid of me, you stupid little shit.

  “This isn’t biological warfare. Forget about first responders,” she snapped. “It won’t be like what happened after Katrina or Simone. No one will have to go house to house looking for survivors, Ken. There won’t be any survivors, and the bodies will be everywhere. And until that gas cloud moves or disperses sufficiently, we won’t be able to get any personnel on the ground there anyway, unless they’re wearing full hazmat suits and self-contained breathing units. And if the plume is stationary, every person going into the danger zone will have to be on foot or use battery-powered vehicles because combustion engines need oxygen.” She paused and took a breath, adrenaline still burning through her bloodstream. “I could go on but I won’t, because I think I’ve made my point. We are not prepared for this, Mr. President. It’s not sarin in a subway or an airplane flying into a building. It’s a blanket of invisible poison miles long and potentially miles wide and it’s moving. And there’s an unlimited supply of it.”

  Lucy let out a hard breath and sat down, staring at her hands. “Unless we cut off the supply of methane at the source, it will just keep coming straight up, sir.”

  The room was so quiet that the faint ticking of the antique carriage clock on the president’s desk seemed loud.

  “Well, yes, obviously we need to seal the rupture. There are technologies for capping—”

  Lucy looked at Katy. “Yes, there are conventional technologies for capping things like burning oil wells and the reactor at Chernobyl. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  “Yes, along those lines.”

  Lucy shook her head and reined in her fraying temper with difficulty. “Don’t you get it? There is nothing conventional about this situation.”

  Instantly regretting her display of anger and frustration, Lucy leaned back and took a deep breath. “We can’t get any equipment near the site of the rupture. It’s four thousand feet underwater. That’s nearly a mile, straight down. When you dive, one atmosphere of pressure is added for about every thirty-three vertical feet of water. You do the math—that’s a lot of pressure. And anything we sent down there would have to withstand moving from the pressure at sea level to that intense pressure, and then possibly to a dramatically reduced pressure the instant it crosses into the degraded water column. There is nothing we know of that can withstand such rapid, catastrophic changes in pressure. That means anything entering that water column will be destroyed instantly.”

  When she looked up at President Benson, Lucy noticed that his face had paled beneath his tan. Scanning the room, she noted with satisfaction that Ken, who was still standing near her chair, looked like he’d just been kicked in the balls. Katy Wirth and the others looked like scared little rabbits.

  “How fast would this gas cloud get big enough to reach Miami?” the president asked, his customary abruptness somewhat subdued.

  Lucy frowned. “I don’t know if there’s any real way of knowing exactly—”

  “Before the election or after?” Ken interrupted.

  Lucy had to work hard to keep her disgust off her face. “The election is more than a week away. If we’re still talking about this in a week, there may not be any voters left in South Florida to worry about, Ken.”

  “That’s enough,” the president snapped. “I want to hear what we’re going to do about it. I need timelines and scenarios. Get whoever you need on it immediately. Joint Chiefs, FEMA, NOAA, everybody. I don’t give a damn.”

  As if the president had poked them with live wires, everyone in the room began to move and a buzz of low conversation erupted.

  It stopped when Ken asked, “What about the press? What
do we tell them?”

  The president glared at him. “We don’t tell them a fucking thing until it’s over. And I mean not a fucking thing, Ken. No leaks.”

  “There is one possible solution that we’re already pursuing, sir,” Lucy said, cutting through the murmurs and bringing the group back to silence. “I think it has to be fast-tracked. Dr. Briscoe has done extensive research on, to put it bluntly, methane-eating microbes. They occur naturally all over the globe. I’ve put him in touch with people at NOAA, GISS, Homeland Security, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to see if they can come up with a workable rapid-response plan to enlist the microbes in lessening the impact of the methane release,” she said carefully. “At this point, I’d like to include the Joint Chiefs, too, sir.”

  “Let me get this straight. You want to deploy biological weapons off the coast of Florida?” Katy Wirth said stridently. Lucy shot her an icy look.

  “It’s the only solution on the table at the moment,” Lucy snapped. “Bombs won’t work, robots won’t be able to do anything, and we can’t send in any land, sea, or airborne divisions, so I don’t really see what options we have other than to explore this.”

  “Are we going to get any return on this, Lucy?” the president asked.

  She turned to face him. “I’m not sure what you mean, sir. What sort of return?”

  She watched him frown at the floor for a moment.

  Don’t say votes. Please God, don’t say votes.

  He raised his eyes to hers. “All that methane hydrate. It’s still going to be down there, and Cavendish is the only one who knows how to get it out. I think that learning how he does it would be a reasonable payback for all the lives he’s ended and the damage he’s causing.”

  Lucy couldn’t remember any other time in her life when she’d been speechless.

  “We’re going to bail out his sorry ass on the world stage. I think sharing that technology with us—exclusively—would be an appropriate thank you.” The president shrugged one shoulder, then met her eyes with his trademark steely gaze.

  Just some routine industrial espionage—you’ve done it before, he seemed to say.

  Yes, I have, but in those days I knew I was working for the good guys. Now I’m not so sure.

  “See what you can do about that, will you, Lucy?” The president gave her a tight grin. “As for the rest of it, do what you need to do. Keep me apprised.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” She had to force the words out.

  The president issued a casual gesture of dismissal to Lucy and turned back to the young assistant secretary of state, who had gone very quiet and rather green.

  Commit industrial espionage. And keep the press out of it.

  Lucy fumed as she exited the Oval Office. She knew the president wanted to operate in the dark, keeping the people ignorant and dying until Ken could determine where to lay the blame. Obviously, it would be Cuba. New leader or not, if something was affecting Miami, Cuba was the best scapegoat. Even in an election year, demonizing Dennis Cavendish wouldn’t be enough to secure the proper result. She had no doubt this would be spun into a Cuban Missile Crisis, updated for the new millennium.

  Ken, you are a son of a bitch, and it will be a good thing to see you taken down.

  Stepping into the sunshine, Lucy took a deep breath, then climbed into the waiting limo.

  CHAPTER

  32

  7:15 P.M., Sunday, October 26, Key Largo, Florida

  Millicent—Miley—Cody sat in the Back Bay rocker she favored and looked out over the beach that gleamed like half-polished pewter in the light of a rising quarter moon. Even though her house was a block away from that stretch of talcum-soft Key Largo sand, she had an unencumbered view of it and had long since considered it her beach. She’d been here long enough, and was wealthy enough, to enjoy the conceit.

  A brief, impulsive marriage to a washed-up bad-boy rocker years ago had been both the means and the incentive for her move to the Keys. Miley hadn’t been young and she hadn’t been stupid, but she’d married him anyway, and it turned out to be the only positive return-on-investment she’d enjoyed in her entire life. She’d had to endure only a few months of his incoherent rages. Being stoned most of the time had helped. Then, before they’d reached their first anniversary, she woke up one hot L.A. afternoon next to a cold, stiff body.

  Dealing with the cops had been a hassle; so had dealing with the press. Her old friends had been the worst, though, with their hushed statements about cautionary tales. She’d ignored the commentary and stayed in L.A. as if she’d had something to prove. Then she’d hit her forties and couldn’t face middle age among the trite suburbanites so many of her old friends had become.

  That’s when she’d fucked off for the Keys where she could lie in the sun naked without sunscreen and without censure, and could, with impunity, inject, smoke, snort, and sleep with anything she wanted to.

  The way she looked at it, the many decades’ worth of recreational pharmaceuticals she’d taken had prepared her for what she was undergoing now. Of course, what she was doing now was legal, and they called it chemotherapy. Once a week she was pumped full of toxins and the rest of the time she spent puking, or toking to get her mind off it.

  Without even thinking about it, she took another hit from the neatly rolled spliff in her hand and held the hot smoke in her lungs.

  Hell of a way to go, with half your organs missing and the other half slowly falling to shit.

  She closed her eyes and exhaled, then breathed in the easy, peaceful night scents that surrounded her. Night had always been her time, and it was still her best time, even now. Maybe especially now. The nature of her days had changed, though. They were no longer just the means to another night. She had to endure the daylight hours now, and they had their own identity: harsh, bright, hot, too full of promise, too reminiscent of what she was going to lose all too soon. Miley preferred the darkness, the magic, bone-deep island darkness that wrapped itself around her like a wizard’s cloak and made reality reinvent itself. It’s why she spent so much time out here on her widow’s walk with nothing but the sea in front of her. At night she had soft air, soft light, and, except for when the tourists arrived, the nights were usually full of soft sounds.

  And her beach. She loved her hidden slice of beach for many reasons, but one of the best was its entertainment value. Her beach was a perennial favorite for unsuspecting tourists. Couples, always couples, would park their cars near the dunes and jump and skid down the rocks or, if the tides were right, walk around the broken old seawall that jutted out from the sand. Thinking they were unseen, they would usually get right to it. No messing around, just togs off and—Action!

  After years of it, most of the action was pretty fucking boring—pretty boring fucking, she thought with a grin—but that didn’t stop her from watching. Hell, if they wanted privacy, they should pay for a motel.

  She didn’t think of her behavior as voyeuristic; it just was what it was. Life went on, and she had a seat in the bleachers.

  She heard the door to the widow’s walk open.

  “Miley?”

  Her new nurse’s voice was too gentle, too sweet, but what else could she expect from a blond, blue-eyed angel? Miley preferred the last nurse, Barbara. She’d been big, strong, and loud, strident almost. Barbara had been compassionate but unsympathetic, and had made Miley laugh too hard. But the big house tucked away on a quiet edge of the Keys hadn’t been to her liking. Barbara needed people around her, and all the dirt and noise that came with them, so she’d headed back to Detroit. The aptly named Angela had taken her place just this week and now Miley had to put up with the tender touch of an angel. Obviously, she was nearing the end or the universe would never play such a cruel joke on her.

  “Yes?” Miley rasped.

  “I just wanted to check on you. Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

  Angela wouldn’t come into the small space unless Miley asked her to. It wasn’t the thr
ee-story open height that bothered her, it was the couples on the beach. Angela had made it demurely clear that she thought watching them was perverted, even if it was from a block away.

  Miley shifted to look at the nurse’s young, unlined face. “I’m fine. But I think I’ll go downstairs, since you’re here. That way I won’t have to call you in a few minutes.”

  “I don’t mind coming back for you.”

  “I know. But I’ll be nice to you for a change.”

  She carefully tamped out her joint until it wasn’t glowing any longer, gently slid the nasal tubes back onto the perpetually sore skin of her septum and turned on the small flow of oxygen, then stood up. Grabbing the frame of her walker, Miley felt its legs meet the ground sturdily as she began to put her weight on it. Angela’s arms were around her then, lifting, guiding. When Miley was on her feet and steady, she lingered for a minute, trying to detect a last hint of the night’s scents past the faintly antiseptic odor of her manufactured oxygen.

  Vague human commotion down on the beach brought forth a delicate sound of disapproval from Angela, and Miley glanced at her with a grin. Then other muffled noises, strange and ominous, pulled the women’s attention from each other.

  “What is that?” Angela asked suddenly as a soft shape plummeted to the ground from the top of a tree a few yards away. “A bird?”

  “I’ve never seen one fall out of a tree,” Miley replied dryly. “Maybe it ate some pot seeds I left lying around this afternoon. It wouldn’t be the first stoned seagull in the Keys.”

  “One fell over there, too.” Angela was pointing toward the other end of the widow’s walk and, as Miley turned to look at her, a look of surprised panic filled the nurse’s face.

  “I . . . I can’t breathe.” She let go of Miley and sucked in a huge lungful of air, her hands wrapping around the base of her throat. Then she bent from the waist and dropped to the floor, writhing and making choking, squealing sounds as Miley watched the young woman’s eyes roll back in her head, their whites glowing horrifically in the shadows of the night.