Frozen Fire (6 page)

Those were just a few reasons Garner held his species in such low regard. Certain groups, such as politicians, financiers, industrialists—and people like Lieutenant Colonel Wendy Watson, who was a willing stand-in for all of them—deserved even greater scorn. Wendy was a child of disgusting privilege who had no imagination; a hard-bodied, androgynous athlete with no curves and no body fat; an uptight, emotionless, military automaton masquerading as woman. Her flawed veneer of conscience had developed too late. Spending the last twelve hours trying to fuck her boneless had nearly killed him. He needed a shower.

No, I need a bloody vacation
.

Stalking into the grimy bathroom, he didn’t bother to flick the switch for the overhead lights. The dim sunlight beyond the filthy window provided enough dim illumination. He stepped into the scum-slicked shower and wrenched the tap, bracing himself for the barrage of icy bullets.

Sleeping with the enemy, or doing anything else to the enemy, had never caused Garner a second’s guilt or regret. He’d known since the first bright flame of cognition lit his brain that the Earth and Her creatures were to be honored, that following Her dictates and serving Her needs was the most important thing he could do.

His earliest memory was of the soft tickle of roaches scuttling over his skin as he lay still and silent in his crowded cot. The stinking bodies of the
other children curled around him in the bed were what kept him warm during those early, harsh Bucharest winters, but providing warmth was all the other children had been good for. None of them had been as fascinating as the other creatures living in the orphanage. He’d spent every day studying the huge and thriving colonies of roaches that swarmed in the broken walls, marveling at the tenacity of the lice that clung to fragile strands of everyone’s hair, enjoying every gleeful leap of the fleas across the stained, rotting mattresses. And he remembered how right it had felt to finally punish one of the older boys who delighted in trapping and torturing helpless creatures, including Garner. The boy had always made a point of displaying his cruelty to any interested parties.

One night—he couldn’t have been more than five—Garner climbed on top of the bully as he slept, much as the boy had done to him so many times. But Garner hadn’t done the horrible, painful things the other boy always did to him. Instead, he’d simply pressed the boy’s face into the foul mattress, had sat on his head, gripping the heavy iron bedframe with his hands until the muffled screams and the writhing stopped. The other boys in the bed had watched blankly, making no move to help the bully, no move to stop Garner. They just watched as Garner sat there, his arse and thighs clamped around the bigger boy’s ragged, greasy head. After a long time, Garner had climbed off him and dragged the limp body from the cot. He placed it along the wall knowing that it would provide sustenance for many creatures infinitely more deserving of life. The other boys ignored him, too busy staking their claims to the empty, still-warm space on the bed.

The next morning, the matrons found a few dozen mildly curious children gathered around the stiff body, and Garner sitting next to its head. Rats had discovered the corpse during the night, as had the flies and roaches, and they all carried on as Nature directed with sublime disregard for their audience. One of the matrons sent the children scattering with a few heavy, indiscriminate, backhanded slaps; another pulled a sheet from the nearest bed and covered the remains. Late in the day, what was left of the body was taken away.

That necessary removal of such a worthless human from Garner’s existence was his first triumph and the first moment in his life that had ever held any meaning for him.

There were other significant moments subsequently, especially the few quiet victories after his “rescue” by the English couple who adopted him the following year. The Blaylocks were what others called “good people.”
They had unequivocally adored Garner and privately congratulated themselves on having had their noble gesture of saving a Romanian orphan validated by getting a boy who’d turned out to be so “English.”

Named Garner after some missionary relative of theirs, he’d accepted his new life with no fuss. He was quiet, stoic, and respectful. He did well in school, did what he was told at home. The Blaylocks and his teachers were certain that his exemplary behavior was rooted in deep-seated gratitude. It never occurred to them that he simply didn’t care what he wore, what he was fed, what he was told to do.

But Garner did care about what the people around him did. He watched with mute hatred as the Blaylocks and their friends gathered to hunt foxes, letting the frenzied pack of hounds rip the terrified creatures to pieces after the horses were exhausted and the humans had had their fill of adventure. He said nothing as they set traps baited with poison all around their home and farm to kill insects, rodents, and certain birds that annoyed them. As they castrated their bulls and dogs, as they slaughtered and ate hens and rabbits and weeks-old piglets.

The Blaylocks gave him their name, an education that led to a degree from Oxford, and, eventually, their entire estate. Their deaths and those of his nominal siblings had been as necessary as the bully’s had been as Garner sought to restore balance, and achieve his financial goals. The deaths of his English “family” had required much more planning and forethought than the death of the bully, but he’d gotten away with them just as easily.

When the Blaylocks’ biological son and daughter—twins—became teenagers, they also became so-called health nuts. Lacing a few of their herbal supplements with the poison their parents used on the mice in the barn hadn’t been difficult. The calamity had resulted in a large financial settlement by the American conglomerate that made the pills, and afterward the grieving Blaylocks had directed all their energy and attention to Garner, their remaining heir, who gave every appearance of caring.

That’s why everyone said it was such a tragedy when, mere days after his graduation from university, the valve on his parents’ home’s ancient heating unit failed. The house had filled with fumes that eventually ignited. The only blessing, people said, was that they’d likely died of asphyxiation some time before the place exploded.

Garner had returned from his barely begun European holiday to attend the funeral. He sold the farm as soon as he was able to. The neighbors were quoted in the local papers as saying it was for the best—the site of so much
tragedy was likely too much for the quiet young man who’d always been such a good and devoted son. The statement was one of the few things in life that had ever made Garner laugh out loud.

Despite his success in evading any hint of suspicion in either case, the Blaylocks’ deaths hadn’t been nearly as rewarding or enlightening as his first eradication. When he’d transformed the bully into a corpse, he’d transformed something evil into something good. As he’d watched Nature reclaim that body, it had become startlingly clear to him that the Earth and all of the innocent life-forms She supported were more important than humans. The last link on evolution’s chain—humankind and all the filth and means of destruction it had created and continued to wield with such oblivious abandon—came a distant second to all that preceded it.

Over the intervening years, that epiphany had remained excruciatingly simple. Which instrument of evil a person represented—agroindustry, energy, banking, paper, the media—mattered little. They were all cogs in the ubiquitous, pan-national, military-political-industrial complex that had set the world’s population on a course of happy, deluded self-destruction over the last centuries. Prior to that, all living creatures had been of the Earth. Now, humans, and humans alone, were against the Earth. Everyone who lived a modern life, everyone who saw themselves as occupying some hallowed place above the one that Nature had preordained, supported the goals of domination rather than alliance.

And they would pay the highest price for their greed while the Earth, injured, polluted, raped, would survive and thrive again. Garner and his organization, GAIA, would see to it.

Even the overly analytical Wendy Watson was one of the hated, whether or not she wanted to believe it. With remarkable ease, Garner had pried open her tightly closed, middle-class mind and convinced her that she’d evolved beyond mainstream groupthink. In the pursuit of GAIA’s goals, nothing had been left to chance. Even while he’d been away, imprisoned for those years for defending the Earth against the rape of industry, GAIA’s work had continued, subdued but uninterrupted.

His people, Micki especially, had done well. The selection of Wendy Watson as the first catalyst of GAIA’s new dawn had been the result of long, tedious study, and rigorous psychological profiling. She’d risen to the top of their short list as if the Earth Herself had ordained her the perfect candidate.

Wendy had grown disillusioned with her life and its hollow triumphs,
its soulless exultation of materialism. Her epiphany, as she liked to call it, had been little more than a nudge.

Shaking his head, Garner began to smile as he remembered their first meeting. She’d been so fucking
hungry
for a new reality, so clearheaded and yet utterly pathetic in her willingness to conform to a vision so radically different from the one she’d adhered to for her entire life. She’d been over-ripe, and so ready to fall in line with his plans for her that it was a bit of a letdown, really. No challenge at all.

He’d played to her strengths and insecurities without ever betraying that he considered her just another bit of self-serving scum, one of the walking, breathing pustules who deserved whatever karmic retribution they received. The fool never copped to the fact that her conversion had been staged, as had her seduction. And now she was going to carry out the first big action GAIA had undertaken in a long time. Garner was honored to know that he would have a hand in helping the Earth regain Her equilibrium.

The frigid burn of water pelting his flesh was becoming less enjoyable as the moments passed. Scrubbed clean of every trace of her, he shut off the water with an abrupt twist of his wrist, hating the liquid’s faintly sulfurous smell and the presence of the murderous chlorine that he knew suffused every drop. He stepped onto the damp tile floor and shook himself like a dog before reaching for the towel. There had never been the need for chemicals to purify water until humans discovered how convenient it was to defile it. It was just one more thing that he would make them pay for in blood.

But first, he needed Wendy to follow through and get the world’s attention.

9:30
A.M.
, Saturday, October 25, off the coast of Taino

Though she was nearly a foot shorter than him, Victoria Clark matched the even pace of her boss, Dennis Cavendish, as they walked along the smooth bamboo floors of the quiet, softly lit hallway. Stunning photographs of undersea life, ocean sunsets, and submerged icebergs lined the grass-cloth-covered walls. The air was warm and humid enough to be comfortable, and held subtle aromatic hints of coconuts and green leaves, of sunlight and seawater, in its invisible and barely felt breeze. Sounds of the surf were just audible, as though heard from a distance.

The ambience was exactly what one would expect in a professional building on a Caribbean island. This structure, however, was not on an island. It was adjacent to one. And below it by four thousand feet, give or take a few.

Coming to a stop at the end of the short hallway, Victoria and Dennis in turn each pressed a thumb against the small dark red glass pad to the left of the heavy airlock door. When prompted, first he and then she punched in the alphanumeric codes that appeared on the LED screens of the random code generators that hung from lanyards around their necks.

“Eighteen characters?” Dennis’s voice held more amusement than annoyance. “Aren’t you getting a bit overzealous?”

“I’d have thought that was a quality to be desired in your secretary of national security,” Victoria replied lightly.

“At the topside offices, sure, but we’re four thousand feet below sea level, in a facility you can’t get to except from a submersible launched from an island that’s inaccessible without an invitation from me,” he replied, pulling open the titanium door as soon as the cipher lock released.

Victoria stepped into the airlock. “All of which is nothing more than a challenge to persons of a malicious persuasion.”

“You know damned well we’re not concerned about ‘persons.’ It’s
countries
with malicious intent—and the technology to exploit it—that keep you hopping.”

“Excuse me. I don’t hop,” she said, trying to keep the smile off her face. “We call it ‘layering.’”

“And how many layers do we have in place so far?”

“That’s classified.”

Dennis started laughing and, acknowledging his amusement with an answering smile, Victoria glanced up at him, taking in his tanned, sailor’s complexion and dark hair bleached to gold in some places and to silver in others. His blue eyes held a level of devilment not often found in a CEO or a head of state. These were the eyes of a renegade; the eyes of a man who had repeatedly turned a penchant for risk into fortunes that kept him hovering at the top of the world’s earners.

“You can trust me, Vic. I promise. You run security checks on everyone, all the time. Probably even me.” He looked down at her with one eyebrow cocked.

She shrugged. “You pay me to be thorough.”

“And you are, to an extraordinary degree. That’s why no one would have a chance to—”

“With all due respect, sir, ‘the chance always exists. All that’s ever lacking is someone to decide to move on it.’”

A single note of surprised laughter from him punctuated her quiet statement. “You’re quoting me back to me? That’s cheeky, Vic. And don’t call me ‘sir’ unless we’re in bed.”