Dry Ice (40 page)

Candy looked down at her hands.
Northern Europe. Glaciers. Tundra. Ice caps. Shit.

“I’ve been on the phone so much in the last few hours, being shouted at and threatened, that I feel like a telemarketer. Everyone knows what’s going on,” the president said, her voice low and strained. “I can’t hold back the tempers of the world. Even our staunchest allies believe I’d rather spare the lives of thirty-four U.S. citizens than stop Armageddon. They’re threatening to take matters into their own hands—England, Australia, the Saudis, China: they’re threatening to use military action against TESLA. And they don’t mean troops, Candy, they mean nukes.”

The president paused to take a breath and she stared at Candy with a hard look on her face. “Look, between you and me, this sucks, okay? The situation sucks and the decisions I have to make suck. But millions of people have died in the last twenty-four hours and millions more will die from the aftermath. Tens of millions have been left homeless. I can’t wait any longer.”

“Ms. President,
please
—” For the first time in more than a decade, Candy heard her voice break. “Please let our men do what they’re trained for. Please. They’re almost there.”

The president locked her hot gaze on Candy’s eyes; it seared, a trial by fire for her very soul. Then she turned to the man who stood next to Candy. “Admiral Hormann, we need to talk.”

*   *   *

Greg sat in the center of the large conference room at FBI headquarters that was serving as his interrogation room. The chair was comfortable, an ergonomic design that rocked and swiveled. The room was a bit bland and filled with equally bland FBI agents and a few CIA interrogators, apparently there just for the entertainment value. They hadn’t opened their mouths.

Some of the agents sat at the table, typing furiously into laptops. Others leaned against the walls and stared at him. Their eyes flicked from Greg’s face to his hands and back again and, despite their relaxed postures, they were ready to leap at the first hint that he was about to move. Three more sat directly across from him and were doing their highly trained best to intimidate him into telling them what they wanted to hear. Which he had no intention of doing.

“I’m not quite sure why you fail to understand my position, Agent Dobson,” Greg said with condescending patience to the lead interrogator. She was a petite woman, blond and green-eyed, with a cheerleader’s smile and a Southern accent warm as honey.

But she’s a lousy actress.

She’d been through the whole “nice cop” routine, and was now playing the “bored cop” role.

“Oh, I understand it, Dr. Simpson,” she said, sitting diagonally from him with her hands folded in front of her on the table. “It’s just that we need to move along and get to the part where you admit that you’re behind all the tragedies the world has faced in the last few days. We have a nice cell all ready for you in a nearby federal detention center. If you’d rather sit there for a few days before we talk again, I can arrange that.”

“I’ve asked for a lawyer. You haven’t gotten me one.”

“Well, I don’t have to get you one because you’re not under arrest. Yet. You’re in custody, and you just might want to consider this protective custody because if any other country had gotten its hands on you—and believe me, they all want to—you’d be dog food already,” Special Agent Dobson said with a friendly smile. “Now, keep in mind that we can arrange that. That’s why our friends over here representing the CIA are present. They’re better at those sorts of handovers than we are.”

“Agent Dobson,” Greg began, “we’ve been over this ad infinitum. I don’t have to speak with you and I don’t intend to speak with you. I have immunity and I would ask that you try again to contact Secretary Bonner.”

“I know you don’t like to be told you’ve got it all wrong, Dr. Simpson, but you do,” she replied. “You’re confusing the Fifth Amendment with immunity. You see, if you have immunity, then you’re free to speak with us and tell us everything we want to know and you won’t be prosecuted for any of it. The Fifth Amendment allows you not to answer our questions if the answers would incriminate you, but if you have immunity, you can’t incriminate yourself so you can’t take the Fifth. That means if you have immunity, you have to start talking to us. Now.”

“Agent Dobson—”

“Actually, it’s Special Agent Dobson, Dr. Simpson.”

“—thank you for the lesson in constitutional law. I’m delighted that you were paying attention in school that day,” he said with a sneer. “But I have no intention of answering any of your questions until you confirm with Secretary Bonner that I have immunity.”

One of the male agents seated at the table cleared his throat. “Secretary Bonner,” he repeated slowly, looking at the screen of the laptop in front of him. “Would that be the same Secretary Bonner who’s just announced his resignation as Secretary of Defense, according to CNN?”

Greg felt his stomach drop. Every eye in the room turned to him.

“My guess would be that it is,” Agent Dobson said with a smile that had cooled considerably. “Maybe that’s why his office has been too busy to get back to us about the little matter of your immunity, Dr. Simpson.”

“Then try harder,” Greg snapped. He could feel sweat begin to gather at his hairline as he glanced at the wall clock. He’d been here for several hours, and he’d witnessed the agents making several attempts to contact Bonner. They’d even let him use his own phone to call him. The call had gone into voice mail and hadn’t been returned.

Bonner had never before failed to take Greg’s call.

He’s throwing me under the bus.

There was a small stirring among the agents working on their computers. They conferred in low voices, then one asked Special Agent Dobson to step outside for a minute. She came back in the room almost immediately and walked straight over to Greg. Her attractive face had changed to reveal a toxic mixture of fury and helplessness. She yanked the chair he was sitting on so that he spun away from the table.

“You son of a bitch,” the agent whispered, her voice rough. With no warning, the agent drew back her arm and hit him with a closed fist so hard that everyone in the room heard the snap of his jaw as it broke, heard the crack of his head as it caught the edge of the small table behind him. The force of the blow made the agent take a stumbling step or two forward before she caught her balance. Then she lunged at Greg. The chair went over as her hands went around Greg’s neck and she began squeezing. Through a haze of pain from his broken jaw, Greg began clawing at the vise-like hands locked around his windpipe.

The reaction of the other agents in the room was swift but not immediate, and Greg knew then that he was no high-value asset. They’d let him die, given half a chance.

His vision was awash with pinpricks of darkness when the pressure against his throat suddenly abated and the woman was pulled off him. Greg rolled onto his side, gasping, awkward within the confines of the fallen chair. He saw the agent, one arm twisted and shoved up against her back, being moved away from him.

“See, that’s the trouble with immunity,” he heard a male voice mutter, and seconds later the speaker moved into his line of sight and stood looking down at him. “It only helps if someone isn’t willing to kill you.”

Two other agents moved into his line of sight and Greg closed his eyes.

“Aw, hell, did he just die?” said the same voice.

“Go ahead and check, if you’re that interested.”

“I’m not.”

“He better not be dead,” came another voice. “He’s the only one who knows what’s going on.”

“Yeah, and he was just about to confess and tell us how to fix it,” the first voice said, dripping with disdain. “How long you been around here, Morrissey? Bad guys don’t do that in real life. He’s a psychotic asshole, okay?”

The voice paused and Greg heard murmurs too low to be distinguishable, then the harsh voice continued at a higher pitch of anger. “For Christ’s sake, who gives a flying fuck if he has a concussion? Irreversible brain damage would be too good for him.”

Greg felt a sharp thrust into his gut as he lay curled on the floor.

“Open your eyes, you pus-filled, motherfucking sack of shit.” The shoe jabbed him again, harder. “I said, open your eyes.”

Terrified, shaking, his jaw throbbing with white-hot pain, his throat scraped raw, Greg did as he was told.

“That agent who took you down? Dobson? She’s from Alaska, where you made an earthquake happen a while ago. She just found out she lost her whole family. Courtesy of you. Asshole.”

Greg stared at the men towering over him as he cowered, defenseless, on the floor. More faces moved into his field of view. They were all grim; some were flushed with anger, others were still and cold. The fury radiating from all of them was palpable, like the pulses from one of his arrays. It felt just as lethal.

I’m not going to get out of here alive.

The thought paralyzed him as he lay on the floor, waiting for he didn’t know what.

*   *   *

“Oh crap. Oh man, oh man alive,” Jonah, the youngest member of the science team, moaned in a voice thick with fear. As if pushed by an unseen hand, the young man fell against the back of his chair, his eyes squeezed shut.

“What?” Nik demanded, not looking away from his own monitor.

Jonah’s only answer was another low moan. He was the quietest, most even-tempered person at the installation. It was a shock to see his face sheet white, his eyes huge and swimming with unshed tears.

“We’re dead. He’s killed us all,” he said hoarsely, his voice choked with emotion. “I just figured it out.”

Tess had risen at Jonah’s first words. Now, she bent to see his screen and asked, “What are you talking about? What did you find?”

“I know what he did. Look. He reconfigured the array software. All of it. For every array.” He took in a large, audible breath. “It’s beginning to execute now. Every array is moving into position to fire simultaneously. Max power. He’s sending one enormous pulse down.
Down,
at max power,” the young man finished with a choking sob.

Tess felt a bone-deep chill settle over her as she looked at the code on Jonah’s monitor. She looked up at Nik, who was at her elbow.

“Is what he said true?” Nik asked, his voice strangely quiet, yet almost booming in the too-still atmosphere. The sound made the skin on the back of Tess’s neck crawl.

“Seems to be,” Ron replied, more subdued than Tess had ever seen him.

“When?”

“Now. A few minutes,” Jonah blurted in answer to Nik’s hushed question. “They’ve started moving into position.”

With hands that were shaking, Tess picked up her walkie-talkie. “I need everyone to the control room
stat.
I don’t care what you’re doing, get in here
now.
” She set the unit back into the holster clipped to her belt. “What’s a few, Jonah?”

“Thirty-five.”

Oh man.

She took a deep breath. “Plenty of time,” she muttered.

The room had filled in what seemed like seconds. People crowded into every open space.

Tess cleared her throat and took a deep breath. “The situation is critical. We’re in imminent danger of sustaining a catastrophic blow,” she said bluntly, speaking loudly enough to be heard throughout the whole room. It wasn’t difficult; you could have heard a feather drop. “The arrays are moving into a new position.” She paused.

“Sorry if this sounds like a science lesson, but you guys need to know the scope of what we’re facing. There’s a theory about the effect of a specific combination of magnetic fields on the earth’s gravity. Looks like Greg thinks he knows what the combination is and has decided to test it today.” She took another deep breath. “The theory states that, when combined in the right sequence and magnitude, magnetic fields will momentarily release the earth’s gravitational field in a very, very small area. That means for a few nanoseconds, that section of the earth’s crust would be in zero gravity and fully vulnerable to the spin of the planet’s magnetic core. Every fault line in that region would be able to move freely. And even though the gravitational pull would resume almost immediately, it would be too late; the crustal plates would be in motion.”

“But there aren’t any faults here, are there?” Fizz said. “This continent—”

“This half of the continent is one big seismic zone,” Tess explained. “The ice sheet we’re on is miles thick, but underneath all that ice is a large mountain range that’s home to a lot of small, live volcanoes.”

Fizz jumped as if someone poked her with a pin. “
Volcanoes
? Down
here
?”

Tess nodded, trying to remain patient. “About two and a half miles below us. The weight of the ice sheet keeps them from erupting into the atmosphere, but they have constant lava flows. Small icequakes happen every day down here. The ice sheet that covers the entire continent is moving slowly but steadily outward, toward the coast. The volcanoes aren’t actually the biggest problem,” she said after a slight pause, trying to keep her voice slow and measured so that the people listening, many with their jaws hanging open, could absorb it.

“The bigger problem,” she continued, “is that the weight of all this ice we’re sitting on has naturally, over the millennia, pushed the actual continent down. I meant that literally. So, in theory, the instant the gravity disappears, this ice we’re living on will fracture, possibly explosively, as the crust rushes up. Then all that volcanism that has never had an outlet will erupt. There will be no way to stop any of it.” She took a quick breath and went on.

“That’s just the beginning. Earthquakes will trigger across the continent, further fracturing the ice sheet and shifting the pieces. Major ice shelves will break off, flooding every coast in the southern hemisphere and allowing the interior of the sheet to slide unimpeded until it hits the water. Once there, it will break into huge icebergs that will eventually drift into shipping lanes. As they melt natural forces will pull the excess water into the northern hemisphere, causing more flooding and rising sea levels. Meanwhile, the massive influx of freshwater will severely and irreparably compromise the thermohaline convection cycle and the global weather will begin to change.” She shook her head, almost as if she couldn’t believe what she was saying.