Dry Ice (22 page)

Ellie knew that Mitchell’s mature, easy good looks hid a ruthless determination to succeed. He got what he wanted and rarely played fair. With his Common Man background and insider experience, Mitchell would do justice to any office.

“Happy?” Mitchell asked, his eyes scanning her face.

“Divinely.” Ellie forced another smile and leaned forward to accept his kiss.

She hated to fly more than just about anything in the world. She hated to fly even more than she’d hated being single; more than she’d hated getting divorced; even more than she’d hated being married to Nik for that last year, which was saying a lot.

Yet here she was, cruising five or six miles above the biggest, deepest ocean on the planet. It wasn’t a complaint, she assured herself, it was a sign of how much she loved and trusted Mitchell. He was wonderful and thoughtful, and there would always be topics on which they differed. Some, like this one, would be a topic she considered significant. He thought her usual mechanism for coping with flight-related stress—sleeping pills—was dangerous, and he’d made it clear that he didn’t want to spend the first day of his honeymoon next to an unconscious bride. Good Champagne was his solution to her jitters.

Reluctantly, Ellie had agreed, and the first cork had been popped before business class finished boarding. She’d been smiling and sipping dutifully ever since because she wanted to please him, but Ellie knew there wasn’t enough bubbly on the planet to turn her into a carefree flier. That’s why, without telling Mitchell, she’d taken enough anti-anxiety meds to make water-boarding sound like a good time. But even that wasn’t working.

She truly, truly wanted nothing more at this moment than to be on solid ground or even the deck of a ship or, failing that, unconscious.
Anything
would be better than enduring this hours-long feeling that each moment could be her last, that the natural laws of force and motion and momentum would succumb to the supremacy of gravity and she would fall out of the sky, hurtling to earth in a ball of smoky fire and screaming metal.

The thought became all too real a split second later, when the plane did one of those odd, startling little mid-flight plummets. Perfectly typical. Perfectly terrifying.

Ellie choked on a breath and instinctively squeezed Mitchell’s hand as hard as she could.

He laughed gently and disengaged his hand to slide his arm around her. His other hand covered hers as it gripped the armrest. “Ellie, sweetheart, you’re safer up here than you are driving home every night across those D.C. bridges,” he murmured into her hair. “Relax. It’s like hitting a bump in the road. Harmless.”

“I know the statistics, Mitchell,” she hissed, trying to sound reasonable and failing miserably, “but we’re not on a road. We’re in the air, over the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from the nearest land mass. There are no bumps up here.”

“Updrafts. Whatever. Darling, nothing is going to happen. Let’s have some more Champagne,” he said, reaching up to press the call button and then taking her hand again.

His easy gesture and soothing words were interrupted by the soft
bong
of the seat belt sign coming on, immediately followed by the click of an open microphone and the pilot’s voice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a bit of high-altitude weather forming ahead of us. It’s not unusual in the tropics to run into these upper-air disturbances. We’re going to try to get above it, but things might get a little bumpy. At this time, I’d like to ask you to please return to your seats if you’re moving about the cabin, and make sure your seat belts are securely fastened.”

The flight attendants moved a little more quickly as they passed through the cabin, removing trays and empty glasses, and checking passengers’ laps for compliance.

“Ellie, you’re cutting off my circulation,” Mitchell laughed, kissing the back of her hand as he disengaged her fingers.

“Oh God, Mitchell. I hate turbulence. I hate flying. I hate … this,” she whispered, tightening her seat belt until there was no more give and wishing her seat had a chest harness like the flight attendants’ seats had.

“Just breathe, Ellie. Slowly. Close your eyes if it helps, darling.” Mitchell pulled her close, tucking her head onto his broad, warm chest just as the plane began to bounce and wobble.

“Oh God, Mitchell, I told you staying at The Greenbriar would be fine,” she snapped. “We could have
driven
there. You wouldn’t listen.”

“Ellie—”

“Why did I ever agree to this?” she moaned into his shirt, her eyes squeezed shut, her body rigid.

“Shh, Ellie, Ellie, it’s nothing. Just a little bumpy air.” He ran a gentle hand over her hair.

Then, making a liar out of him, the plane jerked and swayed as wildly as a Wall Streeter on a mechanical bull. The gasps and muffled cries from around the cabin did nothing to console Ellie. She gripped the front of Mitchell’s shirt in her hands, not even hearing the small sound of the fine silken threads snapping.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to—

The public address system came on again, more staticky this time. “Flight attendants, take your seats.”

Oh God. Oh God. Hail Mary, full of—shit, shit, shit, what am I doing up here?

A scream built in her throat as the plane made an unnatural movement sideways, as if the hand of God was trying to slap it out of the sky. Ellie’s mind went blank. She felt like she had the time she got caught in one of those awful, heavy Alaskan blizzards, when every human sense was smothered by white and cold and you couldn’t tell if you were hallucinating or dying.

The aircraft made a sudden, steep plunge that felt like it would never end, as if the plane had been thrown toward the earth. Screams came from all corners of the plane. Even Mitchell stopped murmuring reassuring platitudes. She felt his body go rigid, his hands gripping her painfully, his fingers digging into her arms and back. Lightning strobed outside so brightly that it lit up the insides of her squeezed-shut eyelids.

The plummeting stopped just as suddenly as it had started, as if that same awesome hand had jerked the huge jet to a shuddering halt. Braced to hear the hellish squeal of the plane’s superstructure being torn apart, Ellie heard nothing but sobbing, cursing, and moaning. There was no thunderous crack as the composite frame fractured, no violent splash of icy salt water or ungodly roar of frigid, sucking air. Fully intact, the plane kept flying, buffeted viciously by winds that Ellie just knew were about to rip off the wings.

Death has to be better than living through this. Death would be peaceful. Death would be calm. Take me. I’m ready. I don’t want to do this anymore.

Yet the massive jet, made puny by the magnificence of the storm, kept moving, as if it would never give up even such a hopeless fight. Over and over, the airliner lurched up through the sky at ear-popping speeds only to freefall again as if in mortal agony, the helpless victim in a sadistic game of atmospheric cat-and-mouse.

It didn’t take long for the acrid stench of vomit to fill the cabin and, in sympathy with her fellow panic-stricken passengers, Ellie’s stomach released its contents all over the beautiful, comforting man who had just sworn to be at her side through the good times and bad. And then the woman Nik had called a perfection-seeking, brass-balled bitch with a glacier where her heart should be the last time he saw her began to sob like a terrified child.

CHAPTER
16

The windows in Gianni Barone’s office stretched nearly floor to ceiling. They were scrupulously kept clean and offered an unsurpassed view of the Greenwich Yacht Club and, in the distance, Long Island. The view and the office had only been his for a little over a year, since he’d been brought from the depths of mid-management into the C-suite at Flint AgroChemical as chief technology officer and vice president of strategic planning. Before that he’d been, well, not quite a grunt, but a mid-level executive who kept his hands dirty playing with the toys he’d helped create.

Gianni had come up through the ranks of the software development world, but not on the retail side or the Web side. His early employers didn’t have pool tables and latte machines in the office, didn’t take their nerdy
wünderkinder
on cruises on a whim, didn’t sponsor intramural Nerf basketball tournaments with their fiercest competitors. No, during the years when the chic geeks were vying to see who could place the most outrageous demands on their employer, Gianni was working on the dark side of technology, for military contractors. No cushy offices, fancy food, or prima donna behavior had ever clouded his vision.

He’d started earning his chops straight out of college, working in top-secret installations that rivaled one another for re-creating the most Spartan workspaces: cavernous warehouse sites with cement floors and forty-foot ceilings from which dangled infant spacecraft mock-ups held together with duct tape and tinfoil, the coated wire of their guts spilling to the floor in Gordian tangles. He’d kept at it for a decade or so, burrowing deeper and deeper into the darkest recesses of the black tech world until he’d found his niche. In Alaska. At HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program funded primarily by the United States Navy. HAARP’s multi-acre array of antennae held the promise of changing the world.

Weather “research”—a euphemism for the manipulation and control of the world’s most chaotic and powerful system—was something Gianni had never considered getting involved with only because he hadn’t known it existed outside of comic books and science fiction novels. When the Beltway bandits he worked for pulled him off a space-borne-weapon project to put out some high-end digital fires on HAARP, it was as if angels had started humming in his ears.

His new boss, Greg Simpson, hadn’t had to persuade Gianni to remain on the tundra. Or to follow him when Greg left HAARP for Flint and TESLA seven years earlier.

By that time, Gianni had had enough of endless snow and ice. Connecticut sounded like heaven. The lure of a big salary and somewhere to spend it—like Manhattan—had enticed him back to the lower forty-eight and kept him there. Greg had been disappointed when Gianni had remained at the corporate headquarters instead of accompanying the newly assembled team to the depths of Antarctica. As a trade-off, Greg had asked Gianni to become his eyes and ears in the halls of power. Gianni had accepted eagerly—especially since Croyden Flint had asked him, not long before, to keep a close eye on Greg.

Gianni leaned back in his desk chair, staring through the window at the yachts moving languorously in the distance. From the start, he’d understood the power that came with being a trusted source of information for the two most paranoid, power-mad people he’d ever met. Croyden held the kind of massive financial and political clout that could make anything happen and make it happen fast, but the power Greg held was exponentially more impressive. Should he ever get angry enough, Greg would be able to crush anything Croyden had planned.

At first, Gianni had tried not to let his position go to his head and had focused instead on maintaining an exquisitely delicate balancing act. But after spending time outside the tight orbit of Greg’s insular world, and gaining entrée to Croyden’s expansive one, Gianni had become annoyed at the sheer scope of Greg’s ego and narcissism; his single-minded and increasingly vicious determination to get his own way; and his belief that he knew better than Croyden Flint what the company should do with the installation it had spent $250 million building and bringing on line. Greg was becoming a liability to the company and to Gianni’s personal goal of becoming first indispensable to Croyden and, eventually, his successor.

Shortly after his arrival in the C-suite, Gianni had been made aware of the firm’s unique relationship—dangerous, deeply intimate, and of long duration—with the Pentagon. It had been initiated by Croyden’s grandfather, who had founded the company; Gianni recognized immediately that it was a natural and mutually beneficial fit.

As a private company with virtually limitless resources, Flint could spend freely on research and development, unencumbered by congressional oversight. Offshore, the corporation had even more freedom to do as it pleased. But there were some things that even money couldn’t buy, and in those instances, Flint turned to its five-sided friend for assistance. When lucrative regulatory, diplomatic, and intelligence favors were bestowed, Flint was happy to oblige the Pentagon by providing custom-made weather, perfectly crafted to resolve a vexing situation.

These days, Gianni was the man who made it happen. He was the man who took the meetings, who made the deals, who decided if what the Pentagon wanted would help Flint’s bottom line—or hurt that of its competitors. It had been a heady and rewarding few months; being a puppetmaster was a rush beyond description.

But then he’d had to turn Admiral Medev down a few times in succession. The decisions were warranted and Croyden had backed him up: the rewards weren’t clear, the risks too high, the consequences unfavorable. In hindsight, those refusals had to be what set into motion the situation he now faced.

Gianni had been speechless with anger when the denied weather events happened where and when the Pentagon had requested. They weren’t coincidences—Nature didn’t deal in coincidences like that, with pinpoint accuracy and impeccable timing. Croyden had demanded explanations. Gianni could offer him only two scenarios: the Pentagon had retooled HAARP to do what TESLA could do or had done an end run around him and had gone straight to Greg.

It didn’t take long to figure out which was the more likely scenario.

Gianni had no illusions about Greg Simpson. The man was insane enough to take TESLA down in a blaze of irrational fury. He had the intellectual capability to do it. He had the technological and logistical means to do it.

It hadn’t taken much to convince Croyden that Greg had to be shut down. It had been more difficult to get Croyden to agree to bring Tess on board as Greg’s replacement. Ultimately, Croyden had accepted his word that Tess had qualities that would better serve Flint’s purpose.