Dry Ice (44 page)

“A plane just touched down. A U.S. Navy C-17. It’s taxiing toward the hangar.”

Tess was swinging her legs over the side of the bed when Nik stopped her.

“You stay here. Whoever it is, I’ll bring them to you.”

“I don’t care who it is,” she called after him as he sprinted out the door. “Just make sure they have enough room on that plane to get all of us home.”

*   *   *

Nik was in the first vehicle to reach the idling plane. Even before his Delta pulled to a stop, the plane’s door opened and a metal ladder slid out, stopping a foot above the ground.

Nik climbed out of the Delta and reached the bottom of the ladder just in time to greet the first person, who landed on the ice easily despite the thick, shapeless layers of ECW.

“Admiral Teke Curtis, U.S. Navy,” the mouth behind the balaclava shouted.

“Nik Forde, assistant director of research. Am I ever glad to see you.” He motioned at the Delta and climbed in. The admiral climbed in behind him and Nik watched in mild amazement as people covered from head to toe in ECW with an arctic camo pattern streamed out of the plane, landing on their feet lightly with no loss of balance and immediately setting to tasks. The huge cargo ramp in the plane’s underbelly was being lowered and what looked like brand-new tracked vehicles were being driven off it, headed toward the installation.

“What’s all this?” Nik asked, motioning to all the activity.

“We brought a Special Operations team and a support team. We’re evacuating you. All of you. Right now, we need to get refueled. I’d like to be airborne again ASAP in case the weather changes.” The admiral looked closely at Nik. “I saw the power plant go up and heard that someone drove a plane into it. Hell of a thing to do. Any survivors?”

“There were two people in the plane and they both made it. Concussions, lots of bruises, some broken bones.”

“What exactly did they do?”

Nik didn’t answer right away, not wanting his voice to break. He still couldn’t believe what Tess had done or that she had survived. “Just what you said. They ran a Dash 7 into the building at about a hundred miles an hour and threw themselves out the back door at the last minute.”

“Damn. They’re lucky to be alive.”

Nik nodded. Talking about it was more difficult than he’d thought it would be. By the time the two men got back to the habitat, the Special Operations team and support team had already peeled down to their flight suits and were moving through the installation, gathering everyone into one area.

“They’re going to freak people out,” Nik told Teke as they stripped off their gear.

“They’ll be okay. They know they’re dealing with civilians. We’re just here to get everyone out and turn off the lights.”

Nik stopped what he was doing and stared at him. “Turn off the lights? You mean—”

Teke nodded. “We’re pulling everything off line. Where is Tess Beauchamp?”

“She’s in the clinic.” Nik saw the admiral’s eyebrows rise. “She was on the plane. She was driving.”

The admiral’s eyes grew wider. “She was? Can I talk to her?”

“Sure,” Nik said. He showed the newcomer to the clinic and listened with mixed emotions as plans were made to shut down TESLA for good.

*   *   *

Tess’s trip stateside was hectic. She’d insisted that all non-essential personnel be evacuated at once, that same day, but a few of them—Ron, Nik, and herself—had remained to make sure TESLA was brought down carefully and secured. She wasn’t a whole lot of help in her semi-invalid state, but Teke had remained with them and they were able to leave within twenty-four hours of the others. The Flint board had sent the entire fleet of corporate jets to Christchurch to bring home the Teslans, sparing no expense in luxury and medical attention.

It was the least they could do, especially in light of the media blitz that awaited the personnel when they landed on American soil.

Stories of the devastation around the globe dominated the news cycles for weeks afterward; images of horrific injuries and destruction were seared onto Tess’s brain.

As news of what had happened began to leak and trickle into the mainstream press, Greg became the living symbol of evil. His exploits and their aftermath resulted in global death tolls that rivaled those of Hitler and Stalin combined. The administration had pushed for a speedy trial in the face of the incontrovertible evidence of the TESLA monitoring logs, the diaries of Croyden Flint, and the testimony of Frederick Bonner. Greg had behaved callously in court, and his outbursts were the rants of a lunatic, but even his own legal team never raised the question of his sanity and the trial had gone forward. Greg was now among a new set of peers in the low-tech solitude of a supermax prison.

The outcome for Tess had been different. The media glare had focused on her even before she arrived in the country, and her name had been linked with Greg’s in every imaginable way. It mattered to no one that she’d been Greg’s scapegoat, that she’d lost her parents in Greg’s first salvo. She’d gone from having cameras shoved in her face to death threats in her email to bricks thrown through her windows. Armed guards had been posted outside her hospital room when she had surgery on her collarbone, and she’d been moved from safe house to safe house every other day for the entire three months of congressional hearings.

By the time she was finally cleared of wrongdoing and the talking heads began to call her a hero, the public wasn’t interested anymore. She didn’t care. All she wanted was to grieve in private for her parents, for Gianni, for all the countless souls who’d died because of Greg’s vindictiveness. As soon as she could, she’d picked up what was left of her life, severed her ties with everyone, and, leaving what remained of her reputation behind, moved back to Europe.

CHAPTER
34

Tess sat in the early-spring sunshine on her tiny patio at the back of her house in central France. The fields came right up to the edge of her small space; they were her fields, but rented to her neighbors, who tended them as if they were their own.

Life was finally good again. No one knew about her past here and she had no complaints with being known as just another crazy
Americaine
with romanticized views of life deep in the French countryside. She had enough money to do what she liked, which usually entailed little more than reading, taking walks, eating, and surfing the Web.

Though good, life was also very slow in Lavoine. The high-speed Internet access she’d paid a small fortune to get had been a saving grace sometimes, keeping her informed about the world and her former colleagues. And Nik.

She stared at the screen of the laptop she had in front of her on the small table and felt prickles of both fear and desire run along her spine.

Nik was still in the business—after most of the furor had died down, he’d been offered and had accepted an endowed chair at MIT—and was speaking in Moscow in four days.

She rested her elbow on the table, set her chin on her cupped palm, and looked out.

Solitude is a luxury.

So is the company of an old friend.

And even if I chicken out and don’t meet up with him, I’ll at least have gotten out of the house for a while.

With a smile, Tess logged on to the Air France website and began to look for a flight.

*   *   *

Nik generally drove conference organizers crazy with his insistence that the lights in the hall remain lit. For one thing, he hated being in the spotlight, literally or figuratively. For another, he liked seeing who he was talking to and how many people were in the room. And that quirk of his was the only reason that, just after he was introduced, he saw the tall, blond figure in a coat and boots slip into the side door of the auditorium that had once been an opera house, and settle into the nearest open seat. After that, keeping focused on the notes in front of him had been a challenge, and he’d opened up the floor to questions earlier than he’d planned. He just wanted the damned lecture over so he could catch her before she left, in case she was thinking of sneaking out the way she’d sneaked in.

It would be just like Tess to do that. She had ignored his emails and phone messages and every other attempt he’d made to contact her since the congressional hearings had ended a year earlier. Most of the people involved had gone to ground to get out of the media’s unrelenting eyes, but Tess had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

Until now. In Moscow, of all places.

There’s no way this is a coincidence.

Nik wrapped up the Q&A and waited patiently for the applause to subside. Miracle of miracles, Tess didn’t bolt out of the room at her first opportunity. She hung around through all the applause and even lingered in her seat as various scientists, students, and members of the press came up to the stage to chat with him. Finally, all the others drifted toward the exits and she was the only figure left in the red velvet and gilt seats of the opulent but tattered auditorium.

And to think I was bitching about being the last speaker of the day.

Nik grabbed his jacket and managed to refrain from sprinting down the steps at the edge of the stage and up the aisle. In a moment, he was in front of her. She’d risen and moved into the aisle.

“Hi, Nik.” Her voice was soft. Everything about her was soft—her hair, the sweater he could glimpse through the opening of her heavy coat, even her eyes. They didn’t have that haunted look in them anymore. Not like the last time he’d seen her—the afternoon the congressional hearings ended. She’d stepped into the back of a waiting limo and disappeared without a backward glance.

“Hi, Tess,” he said, not quite sure what to say or do next. It was a first. “You’re looking well.”

Her smile was the same, maybe a little hesitant. “Thank you. So are you.” She paused for a second. “It was a good talk. Maybe a little rushed.”

“That was for you.”

Still smiling, she glanced away. “You’ve made the Schlüchthofen band into a household term. Who knew it would capture anyone’s imagination other than ours? I heard that one of its internal belts is named for you.”

He gave a silent laugh. “Yeah, I guess that counts for the big time in this business.”

She smiled, but didn’t say anything.

“I’m glad you came, but I doubt you learned anything new.”

“Well, to be honest, I already know everything about fractal clusters at the internal periphery of the Schlüchthofen band. I came to see you,” she said.

The silence that built between them was heavy.

“You left without a trace, Tess. You didn’t even say good-bye,” he said at last.

She was silent for another moment, then met his eyes. “I know.”

“I tried to contact you. A lot.”

“I know that, too.”

He let out a hard breath. “Tess, what happened to you? I—” He stopped as an unwanted blast of emotion threatened to crack more than his voice. He looked at the ornate ceiling soaring many feet above them and counted to five. Once more in control of himself, he continued, “I was worried about you, Tess. You just … disappeared.”

“I was worried about me, too, Nik. That’s why I left,” she said quietly, looking away again and shifting on her feet. “I needed to be someplace where my face wasn’t on the news every day, where I didn’t have cameras following me and microphones shoved in my face and death threats overloading my email—where I wasn’t called a mass murderer one minute and a hero the next.” She let out a long breath and he could see tears glittering on her downcast eyelashes. “I’m sorry that I ignored you. I ignored everyone, if that makes you feel any better.”

“It doesn’t,” he said with a short laugh. “Let’s go somewhere. Get a coffee or a drink?” He glanced at his watch. “Dinner. Something.”

She nodded, then slipped her arm through his. They walked slowly through the bustling, early-evening streets, dodging urban Russians headed in all directions. It was impossible to converse over the noise and, after a few blocks, wanting to get out of the teeth-rattling cold, they ducked into a small, crowded, too-warm bistro for a drink, which led to dinner.

With the soft lighting and languorous French music in the background, the setting might have been romantic if their conversation hadn’t been so painful.

“So that was it,” she said much later, pushing away the empty demitasse cup in front of her. “The hearings were over, I’d been demonized, my career was … I didn’t know where my career was going, my parents were dead, and the world was in shambles.” She shivered and shook her head as if to get rid of the memories. “All I wanted was to disappear, to go someplace where I could remember what ‘good’ was. So I went back to France, to a small town I’d driven through once.”

Nik nodded as if he understood, though he didn’t fully. “You didn’t have to do that, you know. The public’s attention never lasts too long. After a few months, we were all back to being ignored by store clerks and getting no recognition whatsoever when we said our names out loud.”

Tess gave him a sad smile, brushed some of that long blond hair from her face, and flipped it over her shoulder. “I’m glad that for you it’s that way. But you weren’t the face of it. I was—” She shook her head again and forced a brighter smile onto her face. “Sounds like you’ve stayed in touch with the team.”

Nik lifted a shoulder. “I worked with most of them for several years, so, yeah, we kept in touch.”

“How is everyone?”

“Pretty well, for the most part. Ron got hitched. Well, eloped actually, but the party when they announced it was fun. Lindy married some admiral. Dan and Fizz got hitched, too—” He stopped and shook his head, watching the light from the table’s lone candle flicker across her face. “So where are you living?”

“Outside of Lavoine in Allier. Central France. It’s a tiny town that’s not known for anything in particular. You’d have to look at a very detailed map to find it,” she replied. “I’m surrounded by fields and vines and sheep and just a few people. We get four distinct seasons and very few tourists. It’s great.”

“But is it ‘good’?” he asked lightly. “Did you find what you were looking for?”