Dry Ice (27 page)

“Strategic importance for whom?”

“The U.S. military. The earthquake in China was right before the Olympics, while we were in beta-testing down here. The floods in Afghanistan happened right before their elections. By then we were up and running.” He paused and leaned forward, bringing his face close to hers and speaking softly. “
We
did it, Tess.”

A shiver ran through her, the kind that as a child she had ascribed to someone walking over her grave.
How appropriate.
“Are you absolutely—?”

“I have proof,” he said harshly, and Tess caught her breath. “It’s all in the monitoring logs for the array. I think the results were much more intense than intended. I can’t accept the idea that the Aceh tsunami was an intended result. What I can see happening is that we were supposed to hit a remote spot on a volatile fault line; it would have been an easy win, and easy to assess the impact. But either he didn’t do enough research on that section of the fault, or his computer modeling was wrong, or he just set some incorrect parameters. He wrote all the code himself so I can’t say for sure.”

“Do you remember how he reacted when he heard about the tsunami?”

Nik looked at her. “Yeah. Everybody was pretty shocked, but he just went white, then red. Then he left the room.”

“Nobody connected any activity from the array with the earthquake?”

“There was no reason to suspect anything. He covered his tracks. The code was uploaded in advance, and the arrays fired when most of us were either partying or asleep. Or gone. There was a skeleton crew here. It was Christmastime. Summertime. Downtime,” he said with a shrug. “I left a few days later for my vacation. I confirmed the timing by reviewing the monitoring logs when I got back. He couldn’t have planned it better, Tess.”

“What about the other ones? They happened at different times of the year.”

“His control got better with subsequent events and I think he became much bolder about not hiding it. The Sichuan earthquake was big, on an active fault, but inland. The damage was dramatic but contained. L’Aquila was still more contained. Samoa was barely a blip.” He paused. “I don’t know what Haiti was meant to prove.”

“But Nik … No one knew?
No one
connected the dots?”

“We were busy with our regular work, Tess.” He gave her the shadow of a grin. “We’re not responsible for every bad thing that happens on the planet, you know.”

“What about Afghanistan?”

“Unambiguously political. Maybe he had a new client.”

As she stared at him, the universe seemed to narrow to a single view: Nik’s face. “Are you— Who do you work for?” she demanded.

“Don’t freak out. I’m no spy. I work for Flint. I don’t know if I can say the same about Greg.”

“Why haven’t you told anyone about this?” she demanded.

He looked at her. “Like who? Somebody is asking him to do this, Tess. Someone is bankrolling him. Maybe it wasn’t Flint and that’s why he was yanked. Maybe it was Flint and they really do want him doing other things. Maybe this is just Greg’s idea of fun.”

“It wasn’t Flint,” she replied, remembering Gianni’s veiled allusions to Greg’s actions.

A knock on the door cut off whatever Nik was about to say. He opened the door. Ron stood at the threshold.

“They cracked it,” he said, walking in and tossing a small collection of papers on Nik’s desk. Nik shut the door behind him as Ron continued, “The coordinates flipped out again so they don’t make any sense, but these are big events scattered all across the globe. Mother-freaking huge events of a magnitude we’ve never attempted. Nobody out there can decipher the commands, but the frequencies—,” he said heavily, his usual bantering tone gone. He brought up a hand to rub his eyes, then let it drop and looked at Tess and Nik. “I’m not being overly dramatic to say this really could be Armageddon.”

The three of them stood in silence for a moment, absorbing his words.

“So let’s assume that Greg is working for someone other than Flint. Who would want large-scale, simultaneous, consecutive events run in a dozen different locations?” Nik asked.

They were quiet for another minute. Tess closed her eyes as the reality became clear to her.

“I can only think of one person who’d want that, Nik,” she said, her voice low.

“Who? Bin Laden? Chávez? Putin?”

“Greg.” She looked up at him. His doubt was evident. Ron’s expression hadn’t changed.

“Tess … no. Come on.” Nik stared at her. “That’s crazy. He’s going to traumatize the planet because he’s been replaced?”

“Because he’s been replaced by
me.
”

“Sounds plausible to me, Nik,” Ron said quietly. “Nobody blinked when Nangpal said he thought Greg was behind the comms crash and the power blip, and no one else could have commandeered the arrays. He’s already trashed two locations. This is just another step on the same trajectory.”

Nik glared at him. “Greg ‘acting out,’ yes, I can see that. But taking down the whole world because he’s pissed off? Sorry, you’re overreaching.”

“Think about it, Nik. He has always liked to make his point with a sledgehammer when a scalpel would suffice. And now he has the opportunity to make one that Croyden Flint can’t miss. I think he’s gone rogue and those events in the queue are going to be successively bigger and uglier than what he’s already done.”

“So Flint is the target?”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it, that either the man or the company or both could be his target?” Tess replied. “Flint owns a lot of farms in western Mexico, and Croyden has a home in Baja. The headquarters is in Greenwich, and Croyden has a home there, too. The best way to get Croyden Flint’s attention is to hit him in the bottom line. And what better means of doing so than to use Croyden’s most expensive investment as a weapon against him
personally
?”

Nik moved away from the wall to perch on the corner of his desk, one leg swinging freely, a dark scowl on his face. “So what now? If we go with your hypothesis that Greg’s acting alone, we haven’t exactly cracked the code of what’s going to happen.”

“I know that, Nik, but it gives us a framework. It will help us focus.” She ignored his rolled eyes. It was getting more difficult to ignore his obstinacy. “So, I need to know one thing straight up: Who out there”—she motioned to the door—“are his true believers?”

“We’re all adults here, Tess. Intelligent ones,” Nik replied drily. “Everyone here now knows Greg was a few ticks off the dial from Normal.
No one
at this installation would knowingly participate—”

“Are you sure that no one would go along with him? Are you
sure,
Nik?” she interrupted.

“Tess, all of us—including you—are here for the same reason. For the adventure and the work. We know what we’re doing here is not ‘cutting edge’ stuff. It’s not ‘bleeding edge.’ It’s
over the horizon
stuff, practically science fiction. We put up with Greg’s bullshit because the ‘wow’ factor beat grading undergraduate papers, fighting for tenure, and sitting on dissertation committees. No one knew what Greg was doing.”

“You did,” she snapped, and saw Ron’s eyes widen as Nik’s face became suffused with an ugly flush. “If either of you have the slightest doubt that someone out there isn’t thinking clearly, I want them locked out of the sandbox and the system immediately. Understood?”

Nik stared at her. “Do you always stir up this much shit?”

“Honestly, Nik, I’ve never worked in a place where there was this much shit to stir up,” she muttered under her breath. “I have to get something to eat. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER
20

By late Friday night, Greg was comfortably installed in a small suite at the five-star Bay Hotel in Capetown overlooking a white-sand beach fringed with palms. It was almost midnight, and he had a glass of wine resting on the table next to him. His feet were up on the railing of his private balcony as he reveled in the warm, wet air of autumn. He wasn’t going to let the reality of the two-person security team—backup for the goons who’d been on the flight with him—ruin the ambience. He’d informed them that they would stand their watch outside his door, not within his sight. He’d put a rapid stop to their protests and Fred and Tim, his other babysitters, had reluctantly acquiesced.

He should have called Croyden by now; those executive lapdogs had requested and then demanded that he do so. He hadn’t. Gianni had called, demanding that Greg get on the phone. He’d refused that, too, opting for a shower and a nap first, and then a meal.

That’s when the velvet gloves—if that term could even be applied to the way they’d been treating him—had come off and they’d started making their puny threats. He’d just smiled. Nothing could faze him now. The game was already under way. The Mexican earthquake had been his opening salvo. The storm in Connecticut was intended to let Croyden know that no place on the planet would be safe. Every
x
hours—
x
being determined by Tess’s activity on TESLA’s networks—the world would experience another outrage, and Croyden would be treated to another show of Greg’s power. The earth would be ravaged. It would be the last, greatest reality game:
Survivor: Earth.

By now, the Teslans could see the havoc the arrays had begun to wreak, and they’d have figured out that more was to come. But he’d ensured that no one at TESLA would be able to hack his code and stop it, and no one would be able to bring the installation back on line. He’d foreseen that possibility back in the early days, when he’d been designing the program. At least half the programmers and most of the scientists had some hacking in their backgrounds; some of them had been good at it. But letting them win was never an option. He’d built the system to respond to every attempt they made, to every keystroke they entered. Every input would alter the code, usually with the effect of speeding it up, sometimes by ratcheting up the intensity. And if someone somehow managed to get too close to actually deciphering his code, they would trigger the last, best geostorm civilization would ever see.

He picked up the handset of the hotel phone on the table beside him—why be secure?—and, with a smile, directed the operator to put him through to Croyden in Park City, Utah, where Gianni had said he was vacationing with his family. Then Greg settled back in his chair and lifted the wine to his lips, enjoying it with every sense.

He’d been extremely thorough. He’d found every one of Croyden Flint’s many residences and then had moved on to identifying every Flint-owned entity from coast to coast, from continent to continent. He’d looked at every corporate unit, every field test station, every farm, every chemical and manufacturing and processing plant. Then he’d done the same for all of Flint’s largest competitors.

Certain areas—the southern and central United States, huge swaths of Canada and central Europe, northern Iraq, southern India, the plains of South America—were dense thickets of Flint-owned enterprises. Destroying Flint—the man and the company—was an eminently reachable goal.

The call was picked up on the other end.

“I believe you wanted to speak with me, Croyden,” Greg said silkily in response to Croyden’s gruff greeting.

“What the fuck are you up to?”

Greg smiled at the starry sky above him. “Well, at the moment, I’m sitting on a balcony in the moonlight overlooking Camps Bay Beach, enjoying an excellent Meritage and breathing soft, fresh, unfiltered air for the first time in months. What are you up to, Croyden?”

“Whatever you’re doing, Simpson, we’ll stop you. I’ll personally crush you,” the older man growled with a vehemence that made Greg laugh out loud.

“Croyden, don’t you understand? Your opportunity to do the right thing has passed. Crushing me would be futile and accomplish nothing of value. There is only one way to stop what I have planned for you, and that is to destroy TESLA, to obliterate it and the people there. We both know it’s a step you would never take. You’re powerless for, perhaps, the first time ever, and all because of a decision you made. How does it feel?”

“Listen, you—”

“No, Croyden, I’m done listening to you,” Greg interrupted calmly. “You just sit back and enjoy your surroundings. Springtime in the mountains. Such a lovely time of year. I have to go now.”

Greg disconnected the call, then informed the operator that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He settled back into the soft cushions of the settee and glanced at the watch on his wrist. It wouldn’t be too long now before the sweep of devastation would resume. With a smile only marginally warmer than the ambient outdoor temperature air at TESLA, Greg took another sip of wine.

*   *   *

The clouds had formed slowly over the coastal Pacific in the middle of the previous night and had settled over the always thirsty lower San Joaquin Valley just before dawn. The rain was gentle at first: heavier than a mist, lighter than a drizzle. It was the perfect type of rain to have this early in the growing season. Young crops stood up to it, soaking it in and thriving on it. From Fresno to Bakersfield and all the way across the wide, wide valley, nearly to the foot of the Sierra Nevada, millions of acres of overworked ground absorbed the rainfall greedily. The soft moisture swelled the particles of soil and filled the minute air gaps between them.

There had been few grumbles as the farm workers began another long day. The low, heavy clouds and warm showers would be a welcome change from laboring under a sun that had become relentless over the past several weeks.

In the small, plain buildings that held the field offices of Flint AgroChemical’s many test farms and experimental stations, none of the site managers, crop specialists, or agricultural engineers gave the rain a second thought. It was just Nature doing what Nature did best. They didn’t care as long as it didn’t ruin their weekend.

*   *   *

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nik asked as he accompanied Tess to the dining room.

“Yes. Since everyone’s probably gathered there already for dinner, it will be a little more relaxed than if I call a special meeting. Word will get to anyone who’s not there.”