Dry Ice (24 page)

The storm, from its start, was cataclysmic. Raindrops as large and hard as pebbles were flung from the sky in sheets of undisguised rage, creating instant torrents on the lush undulations of the greens and fairways. Hailstones, first the size of golf balls, then tennis balls, bounced off the grass, casting divots into the air. Ever larger spheres of solid ice fell from the clouds, smashing craters into the roofs of the speeding golf carts and sometimes into the delicate heads of their unlucky occupants. Multi-pronged spears of white-hot lightning struck the earth as if hurled by Zeus himself. Again and again, the sky exploded like the bellows of Hell, shattering the sound barrier and making the earth beneath tremble in response. Screams of abject panic caught in the throats of the living and the dying.

Those puny humans, often called the masters of the universe, cowered before this display of real power. Through the deluge, the world glowed an otherworldly green as the grass and trees reveled in the surfeit of ozone and nitrogen nature was so violently disgorging.

More than one cart toppled while racing over the crest of a sodden hill and slid, scattering people who grabbed mindlessly for the PING and Honma clubs tumbling around them. The true nature of these status symbols made itself known as their metal shafts served as irresistible attractors to the myriad electrical leaders strobing from the molten clouds. In staccato flashes, terawatts of power punctured and scorched shorn lawns and helpless golfers alike, littering paradise with smoking patches of charred carbon, some of which screamed desperately for help that would be a long time coming.

The storm raged on, as if Heaven—perhaps Hell—had decided to empty itself on these pristine grounds. Warrington Hall’s magnificent banks of leaded windows, expatriated from ancient ducal seats, shattered in the onslaught of hail and debris. The gales swept indoors to have their way with the decor and those persons sheltering inside.

Through the neighborhoods and the small, nearby burgs, walls of water rushed down inclines to collect in shallow, manicured hollows, surge through valleys, and wrench wider every available crevice in wood or stone. Trees that had survived both the American Revolution and suburban sprawl were torn out by the roots, crashing across streets and into mansions and bungalows alike. Terrified occupants ran for higher floors as homes, stores, and offices were inundated with rain and mud. Cars floated and spun as foaming currents gushed through streets. Caught off-guard, pedestrians struggled to walk against the wind and water, their resistance futile and occasionally fatal. Adult bodies bumped along in the sludgy, greasy flow until a vehicle or tree limb snagged them; smaller ones, some still in strollers, jammed the storm sewers.

Transformers exploded in paltry imitations of the lightning that provoked them. Power lines snapped, sparks spraying from the wildly snaking cables until the current died and the villages and neighborhoods went dark.

Through the bulletproof, floor-to-ceiling windows of his luxurious home nestled on high, open acres of back-country Greenwich, Gianni Barone watched the storm unfold and imagined the destruction taking place in the town. His decision to return to his house in the middle of the workday to retrieve a file had been a fluke, but now he was battling uncomfortable thoughts about Fate and Destiny. And Revenge.

The news about this morning’s massive, devastating earthquake in Mexico had left a heaviness on his mind that he hadn’t been able to shake. The suspicion that he and Croyden shared about its provenance was reinforced by the violence battering his town—Flint’s town—made his blood freeze.

He reached for his smartphone, hoping that the cell towers nearby were still functional.

CHAPTER
18

Admiral Alexander Medev sat in his office in the Pentagon, riveted to the live footage of the carnage under way in Connecticut. The devastation unfolding on the screen was as horrifying as it was irresistible. It was sheer luck that any of the networks had a camera crew on the scene, but one of the talking heads who’d risen high enough through the ranks to comment on the news instead of report it had been taping a feature story on the plight of resurgent Wall Street recessionaires. When all hell broke loose with the weather, the reporter had begun providing a real-time view of what was happening on Greenwich Avenue.

The admiral was darkly entertained by the realization that, in a disaster, the rich die the same way the poor do. Horribly.

The buzz of his desk phone interrupted his morbid fascination. The name that appeared on the screen didn’t surprise him.

“Medev,” he said, his fingers wrapped tightly around the handset as he pressed it to his ear. His eyes strayed back to the television screen. Something about tragedy from a distance mesmerized him.

“Admiral, what the hell is going on?” Gianni Barone’s voice was cold, calm, and very, very pissed off.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t make the mistake of playing me for a fool, admiral.”

“Mr. Barone, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The storm in Connecticut. Did you order it?” he snapped.

The admiral sat up straighter in his chair and tore his gaze from the screen. “I didn’t order anything, Barone,” he hissed, as if he were not alone in his office with the door shut. “Why are you asking me something like that? Are you insane?”

“No, I’m not insane. I’ll say it again, admiral.
Don’t take me for a fool.
I’m watching the storm through the windows in my living room and it’s only sheer luck that I’m not in the office—if the office is still standing. This storm defies every law of nature, so that only leaves two options: it came from HAARP or it came from TESLA. I’m asking you which one. I can assure you that I, that Flint, had nothing to do with it. Now, I want answers. Did you order it?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

The admiral got to his feet in anger. “How the hell do you expect me to answer that? I can just assure you that I didn’t.
We
didn’t.”

“Your assurances don’t count for jack shit with me anymore, Alex.”

“Look, I thought we settled our differences,” Medev replied, lowering his voice to a furious growl. “I told you I would back off, go through you first, and I meant it. When you nailed me, you nailed the department, and you know it. It was a fair fight and I lost. Okay? And because I lost, I’ve got a command performance for the Secretary of the Navy in half an hour and the topic is our black ops relationship with your company.”

“I’m not interested in—”

“Well, get interested,” the admiral snapped. “I’m guessing he’s gonna chew me out just for practice. Don’t expect me to cover your ass.”

“You? Cover
my
ass? For what?” Gianni demanded, incredulous.

The admiral stared hard at the framed commendation on the wall opposite him. It was for valor and signed by a president who had understood the value of power. “From day one, this relationship has been a mutual use,” he said. “We used you, you used us. You were the whore, we were your best customer.”

“What’s your point?”

“You changed our deal—”

“Not
our
deal. The deal was cut before either of us was on the scene,” Gianni interrupted.

Alex Medev continued, “You slammed me and this office into view. The big dogs got a radar lock on me and now I’m out of God-damned chaff. Now we gotta help each other, Barone. You owe me.”

“You must be joking. Help each other?
I owe you?
I don’t owe you shit. And you’re damned right I pulled the plug on that deal. What did you think I would do after finding out that you spent the last three months trying to fuck me over?” Gianni asked, his voice deadly calm. “For the last time: did the U.S. military order the creation of this storm?”

“I already told you we didn’t. I didn’t. Think about it. We have nothing to gain from—”

“Careful, or you’ll drown in your own bullshit,” Gianni snapped. “What are you going to put in that report Bonner wants?”

Medev went still.
No one is supposed to know about that report.
“What are you talking about?”

“What do you think I’m talking about, Alex? The report on Afghanistan that Bonner asked you to produce after he got his ass handed to him by the president. The one in which you dot every
i
and cross every
t
and make sure that no one learns anything about the provenance of that storm.
That
report. And don’t even think of mentioning the name Flint in it, or I will personally come down there and rip you a new one.”

“Barone,
we had nothing to do with that storm
.”

“I don’t believe you. When is the last time you communicated with Greg Simpson?”

Medev rubbed his forehead against the throb that had begun to pulse inside there. “We contact him through you—”

“Admiral,
when is the last time you communicated with Greg Simpson?
” Gianni Barone roared through the phone. “We pulled him from TESLA this morning and shortly after wheels-up on his outbound flight, the installation went off line. Since then there have been two—two, admiral—events that could have been triggered by TESLA. I need to game up for the situation
we
—and that includes you, Alex—may be facing.”

Admiral Alexander Medev, who’d fought, clawed, and brawled his way from ensign to admiral, never backing away from a fight or a gamble, swallowed hard, his throat suddenly so dry that he began coughing. It gave him just enough time to remember his last conversation with Greg Simpson.

I’m making the decisions now.

Medev felt his bowels surge sickeningly and fell back onto his seat as he realized Greg had taken TESLA rogue. The collar of his regulation shirt was clammy with perspiration and starch; sweat soaked his undershirt. He reached up weakly to loosen his tie before it choked him.

“Earlier today. Before dawn. The plane carrying Tess Beauchamp was en route,” he rasped, breathing as if the oxygen in the room wasn’t enough to keep him conscious.

“What did he say?” Gianni demanded. “What was his frame of mind?”

“He was furious with you, with Croyden. He said he was going to bring down the plane,” he finished in a hard whisper. The stream of cursing that flooded his ear went beyond the breadth and depth of anything he’d ever heard aboard a ship or in a dockyard.

“What else?”

“He said he was making the decisions now. Not you, not us.”

“What decisions? Was he talking about TESLA? Did—”

The admiral was taking huge, openmouthed breaths that stopped just short of being gasps. “He said he was going to address the situation as he saw fit. That sending Beauchamp to replace him was a declaration of war.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Medev leaned back in his chair, trying to breathe, to think.

“He was losing it, Alex, and you knew it,” Gianni said flatly. “You recognized the danger and made a game of it when you started going around me.
You
gave Greg the encouragement he needed to go over that edge. Now, you have to—”

“I have to go.” With shaking hands, Medev tried to replace the handset in its cradle, missing by several inches without noticing. He sagged heavily into his chair, head back, clawing at the buttons of his regulation shirt.

This would cost him his career. He’d flouted orders; he’d gone independent, thinking he could cater to Simpson and keep him in line and keep TESLA in service to the Pentagon. Medev took a large breath, fighting to fill his lungs. Everything he’d been associated with, from that decoration on his wall to his chest full of ribbons to his family, would be tainted. His name, his record—

The admiral lurched forward, heart pounding, stomach churning, nearly falling out of his chair as he reached for his wastebasket. He made his target, for the most part, but still managed to spatter vomit all over his shoes and his knife-creased trousers. He pulled open the third drawer of his desk and reached toward the back. With violently trembling hands, he slid out the loaded .22 caliber snub-nosed revolver he always kept there—another small act of defiance.

The little gun was heavy in his hand. Alex stared at it through a blur of tears, seeing little more than a pistol-shaped smudge of darkness against his palm.

Gianni’s voice was distant, coming out of the handset in bursts that sounded like he was shouting. The admiral ignored it.

He was a man of action. Too much a man of action, perhaps. He hadn’t taken any time for reflection before defying orders and approaching Simpson directly; it stood to reason he wouldn’t allow himself any time for reflection now. Only a coward would do that.

Medev cocked the hammer, then slipped the squat, smooth barrel into his mouth and twisted it to aim directly at the roof of his mouth and the brain beyond it. Then, made clumsy by the angle and his own desperate fear, he held the gun with both hands and squeezed the trigger.

The noise inside his head deafened him, the heat and smell of cordite burned his nostrils, but pain didn’t come immediately. Neither did death.

He slumped in his chair, his vision gone crooked. He didn’t know it was because one eye had been blasted from its socket, bursting like an egg yolk and mingling with the blood running down his face. The door slammed open and his assistant stopped short, looked at him, and opened her mouth in a scream he couldn’t hear.

The admiral’s vision clouded over then, just as the data from the raw and pulsing nerve ends registered in what remained of his brain. He wanted to join in the faint screaming now dully penetrating his damaged senses, but the gush of hot fluid in his throat prevented him. Hands were on him, moving him, but then the sensations stopped, the jolting, the pressure stopped. The sounds around him stopped, too, and he moved from chaos to endless silence.

*   *   *

Gianni stared at the storm raging beyond the huge windows of his home, knowing what the sharp crack on the other end of the phone meant. A female voice screamed seconds later, and he pressed the button on his smartphone to end the call.

He tried to summon remorse, even sympathy, but couldn’t. It would have been easy to say his lack of response was due to the sudden shock, but he knew himself better than that. The reason was anger. When the shouting stopped, someone would realize that a phone line was still open, and would look to see who the admiral had been speaking with when he pulled that trigger. Gianni would be identified, and the questions would begin.