Dry Ice (35 page)

He nodded slowly. “I’m serious. I just don’t know if I’m right. It’s an educated guess. I never spent much time thinking about what that energy would do if used outside of the ionosphere. That’s outside TESLA’s spec. We discussed it briefly in the context of an accident, but that’s it. TESLA’s max output, under the worst circumstances, would be … bad.”

“Bad?”
she repeated sharply, then looked away, licked her lips, and took a sip of her soda. “How bad?”

Gianni noticed that her hands had a tremor that wasn’t there before. “Real bad.”

“You also mentioned the energy could be directed toward the earth. The oceans. What fresh hell would that bring to the mothership?” she asked more calmly, setting the glass on the table and meeting his eyes again.

“As I said, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis,” he said flatly. “How big would depend on the magnitude of the energy burst.”

“The pulses could be directed anywhere?”

He nodded.

She paused. “Just out of curiosity, Mr. Barone, has this been tested? Or is this just a theory, like what you said about outer space?”

“It’s not just a theory,” he replied slowly.

“You’ve produced earthquakes besides this last one in Mexico?”

He nodded and closed his eyes. “At the request of Admiral Bonner and, presumably, the last administration.”

“Where?”

“China.” His throat felt thick suddenly and the word came out strangled. He met her eyes, which held shock and disgust.

“Which one?”

“Sichuan, 2008. And Haiti, 2010. The tsunami, 2004,” he said, his voice barely audible to his own ears. “That was the first geomagnetic test. It was just a small pulse, but there were some miscalculations—”

“Ya think?” she snapped, then collected herself immediately and stood up. “Gianni, let’s stop here. To be perfectly candid, this has been one hell of a chat. More enlightening than I had anticipated or hoped, and more disturbing than I’d expected. I suppose that goes with the territory.” She managed to give him a tight smile. “Thank you very much for coming. I’ve made arrangements for you to stay at a hotel. You can get some sleep, and some food, and then we’ll continue this conversation later. I’ll be in touch.” She looked past him to her assistant. “Jo, call a car to take Mr. Barone over to the Ritz Carlton.” Candy looked back at him. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Gianni shook her hand and allowed himself to be led out of the room. The same stone-faced agents who’d brought him down from Connecticut escorted him to the elevator. Just as the doors were about to slide shut, a very tall man wearing starched Navy beige walked past him and casually made eye contact.

The glance was quick, over in an instant, but something in the man’s eyes left Gianni with a decidedly sick feeling in the pit of his already roiling gut.

CHAPTER
28

Teke Curtis walked through the anteroom, knocked once on Candy Freeman’s office door, then let himself in. The chair behind Candy’s desk was turned toward the window that framed the sun’s early-morning glow over the District of Columbia.

“Thanks for listening in, Teke.”

“No problem. This has been a hell of a day so far,” he said drily as he crossed the room and walked around the desk to perch on the wide windowsill, partially blocking her view. “Nothing but doom and more doom in the forecast.”

Candy was slouched down awkwardly in her chair. She flicked her eyes up to meet his and he was stunned at the hollow look he saw there.

“I don’t think I’ve gotten all of the story yet.”

Saying nothing, Teke stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankle.

Candy leaned her head against the back of the chair. “I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be focusing on right now. The thought of weather being the new ‘nuke’ is one I thought we wouldn’t have to face for a few more years. But here we are. A few ‘miscalculations’ caused the greatest disaster of the last, what, fifty or so years? Maybe more? Hundreds of thousands died from that tsunami. Tens of thousands dead from that Chinese earthquake. Two hundred thousand in Haiti. And that’s just what he’s admitted to. There could be more. And Bonner ordered all of it.” She shook her head. “Am I unpatriotic if I say I hope something heavy and sharp fell on his head when he was cowering in that cozy embassy bunker this morning?”

“He was just the man in charge, Candy. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been whoever was in his place,” Teke said bluntly. “What Flint does at TESLA is what we’ve been trying to do at HAARP for decades. Since the first battle ever fought—when Cain picked up that rock and knocked the shit out of his goody-goody brother—warriors have wanted a weapon that gave them an unassailable edge. Natural events similar to the ones TESLA can produce have changed the course of world history. The eruption of Krakatoa broke the back of the Dutch influence in Southeast Asia and arguably helped Islam flourish. A cyclone hit Pakistan in the early 1970s and pretty much sealed the deal on statehood for Bangladesh. You could even argue that an earthquake helped bring down the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.”

Teke gave a one-shoulder shrug and continued. “Now the disasters are custom-designed. The 2004 tsunami reset the political landscape in Aceh and Sri Lanka and even caused peace to break out for a while. Katrina pointed out some glaring issues in our own domestic politics and policies. The earthquake in Sichuan nurtured some much-needed political unrest in China’s interior. All the shit going on in Haiti for decades was reset to zero. And the landslides in Afghanistan gave the guys in the E-ring a hard-on of epic proportions because it neatly and completely trashed the plans of their brand-new female commander in chief.” He walked around to the front of Candy’s desk and sat down in the chair Gianni had recently vacated. Candy twirled around to face him.

“Come on, Candy, we both know that the homegrown response to any disaster can seriously affect domestic politics and even social and economic stability. It’s also a given that any disaster presents political bodies farther afield with myriad opportunities to ‘get involved’ in the situation. Remember Cuba offering the U.S. assistance after Katrina?” he said.

“Please go on, professor.”

He nodded. “Take what Barone said and look at it from the angle of ill-gotten gains. Sure, a half million or so people died because of that tsunami, but that was just the price of progress. That event gave Bonner and Flint—and Simpson—proof they could make the earth release a burst of energy measuring about 32,000 megatons. That’s not small potatoes.”

“No, it isn’t. And we’re going to make sure that that sort of progress is stopped. Handling Bonner is going to take some delicacy, but Simpson is going to be in our custody the minute he touches down on U.S. soil. In fact—” She leaned forward and depressed the intercom button on her phone. “Joely, honey, I need you to make a few phone calls. I need you to get the tail number of the Flint Gulfstream that’s currently en route from France to the U.S. with Greg Simpson aboard. I want it intercepted by a couple of our whup-ass jets ASAP and escorted to someplace nearby, then I want some of our guys to greet Dr. Simpson as he exits the plane and get him chatting. You let me know what the plan is when it’s all set, sugar.”

Candy leaned back in her chair. “Everything I’ve heard makes him sound just as nasty and just as crazy as a rabid dog, but I don’t think we can do an Ol’ Yeller on him. Much as that would solve a lot of problems.” She closed her eyes and let out a long breath. “Lord above, Teke, the sun is barely up and I already feel like I’ve been shot at and missed and shit at and hit, if you’ll pardon the expression.” She paused. “You know Tess Beauchamp. What is she capable of?”

“She’s smart. I mean street smart, and tough enough, for an academic. What do you need her to do?”

“I don’t know yet. I think the first thing should be to get that array off line somehow. With that off the table—”

“That’s a lot,” Teke said, interrupting her. “It couldn’t be done surreptitiously or probably even attempted without their full cooperation. I’d guarantee there are fail-safes and trapdoors built into the system architecture precisely as safeguards against accidental or deliberate attempts to pull it down. If Simpson is as nuts as people think he is, he’ll have put logic bombs into the software. Those things are damned hard to find before they trigger, which makes them a narcissist’s weapon of choice. They can be set to execute if an action
isn’t
taken at a certain time or under certain circumstances, or if a certain action
is
taken. It’s like laying mines in cyberspace. You only know you’ve found one when—”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Please don’t give me any gory minefield visuals, Teke. I’ve got enough bad images in my head this morning.” She paused. “I get what you’re saying about the narcissism, but it just doesn’t sound like he’d do anything destructive to the system. I get the impression that he’d sacrifice the planet before the software.”

Teke raised his eyebrows. “You think he’s
that
crazy?”

“I haven’t heard anything to make me think he’s sane.”

A tense but companionable silence grew.

“When do you meet with the president?” he asked.

“Soon.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“Damned if I know. I’ll think of something on the way.”

*   *   *

Tess entered the sandbox and said to no one in particular, “Nik just called me. Is he still in the conference room?”

Lindy nodded. “Hey, Tess, before you go in there, have you seen this footage?”

Tess walked over to her workstation and set down her laptop. “What footage? I haven’t logged on yet today.”

“There was a hurricane in the Mediterranean overnight.”

“In the Mediterranean?” Tess leaned over Lindy’s shoulder to watch the streaming video. The devastation was extensive and heartrending. She felt her stomach drop. “Did we do that?”

Lindy glanced up at her. “What do you think?”

Tess shook her head, then straightened up and walked to the conference room. Ron opened the door when she knocked. The expression on his face wasn’t a good one.

“What’s wrong?” She stepped into the room and immediately closed the door behind her.

“Ron just found more commands in the queue that don’t mesh with the mission. We don’t know what the hell they are or what they’ll do, and we’re still locked out.” Nik stood up roughly and the chair he was in skittered backward. “Fuck this. We have to hack the array control system.”

“Oh, pipe down. Can’t you even say ‘good morning’?” Tess snapped, setting her laptop on the table and booting it up. “We haven’t been able to hack the comms system, and the control system is way more dense.” She looked at Ron. “What is everyone out there supposed to be doing other than watching what we did to the Mediterranean last night?”

“That’s another fucking mess,” Nik muttered.

Before anyone could comment, there was a short tap on the door, then it opened. Pam stuck her head in. “Got a minute?”

“Lots of ’em. What do you have?” Ron replied.

“Bad news.”

“Come on in,” Nik said, leaning back in his chair. “This is Bad News Central.”

She came through the door and leaned her slight frame against it, then gave a nervous laugh. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Try me,” Tess suggested.

“I’ve never done this to myself before, but I was just reviewing the activity log to remind myself of all the things I’ve tried in terms of trying to get the arrays back under our control. I noticed that every time I entered something, small lines of that goofy ‘Greg code’ appeared in the log.” She looked at each one of them. “The array control system has become heuristic. For every thing any of us do, there’s a change made in the system by Greg’s code. And it’s all encrypted. It looks like the same thing has been happening in the comms code.”

“Holy shit,” Nik muttered.

“I’m with you on that,” Ron murmured and looked at Tess. “It’s your turn.”

Tess flashed a look at him, then returned her eyes to Pam’s flushed face. “I’m not sure what there is left to say.”

“Well, we can’t stop what we’re doing. It won’t help anything. Whatever is in the queue is going to execute. We have to keep hacking at the systems and hope we can break in,” Nik said forcefully, watching Tess.

“Agreed.” She looked at Pam’s kind, worried face. “It’s critical to get the communications network bright again.”

“But those commands—”

“We still need to find out what the commands in the queue are meant to do, but we can’t tell anyone or warn anyone about them until we get the comms up.”

Pam nodded and left the room. Tess waited until she was gone, then closed the door.

She looked at Nik. “I want you to check in again with Dan to see if those sensors checked out—”

“What sensors?” Ron asked.

“The ones on the storage tanks. The hydrogen storage tanks,” Nik said bluntly. Ron’s face paled slightly.

“And I want you to dust off the ‘In case of emergency, use 110-year-old technology’ radios just in case we need them,” Tess finished.

“Don’t bother. They won’t work,” Ron said.

Both Tess and Nik looked at him in surprise. “Why not?”

“Jamming signals.” Ron looked from one to the other. “They came on when the comms went down. I thought you knew that.”

“No, I didn’t. How could I have if no one told me?” Tess demanded.

Ron shrugged. “Sorry.”

Tess rolled her eyes and paused briefly to log on to the system with the new passwords Nik had given her. “When the arrays fire, those signals would be obliterated.”

“They go off when the arrays fire and come right back on when the arrays go to ‘down’ mode.”

Tess snaked her hands through her hair and tugged viciously at the roots.

“What are you doing?” Nik asked, frowning at her.

“Getting some blood to my brain,” she ground out. “Ron, is there anything else you thought we knew and clearly don’t?”

“I don’t know, Tess.”

She stood up, folded her arms tight to her body, and started to pace. “Seems like we have one card left, and it’s not an ace. We have to shut down the all-clear signal.”