Dry Ice (34 page)

She came out from behind her desk, walking easily on the highest heels he’d ever seen on a woman outside of New Jersey, and shook his hand with a grip that made him wonder what her forearms looked like. Her suit wasn’t basic Beltway attire. It was well cut and fitted, but short-skirted, and of an orange so deep and bright it reminded him of a South Pacific sunset.

“Mr. Barone, thank you for making the trip down to Washington. It’s always so much nicer to chat in person, isn’t it?”

Her honey-thick drawl was soft and feminine, and between that and her Southern belle manners he had to fight an urge to laugh. Everything was at odds with the rumors he’d heard about her, which included many dark deeds done for the CIA.

“Thank you for inviting me, Ms. Freeman,” he said, not bothering to mask his sarcasm.

She ignored it. “My pleasure. Let’s sit over here. Would you like something to drink?”

A double Scotch, neat.
“Coffee would be fine, thanks.”

She walked to the door, opened it, and said something quiet to someone on the other side, then returned to where Gianni stood. Candy gestured to the pair of wing chairs that faced each other across a low table. They sat.

Opposite him, a window framed the many-hued lights of Reagan National Airport strobing the air and sparkling off the still-dark Potomac. The view was a little bit fairy-tale-ish, but the last twenty-four hours had been so surreal that he took it in stride.

The woman from the outer room came in bearing a tray with a silver coffee service, a china cup and saucer, and a frosty can of Dr Pepper next to a crystal tumbler. She was followed by another woman who settled into a chair near the door and placed a small notebook computer on her lap.

“Thank you, Margaret. Mr. Barone, this is my assistant Joely,” Candy said, with an airy wave toward the woman in the chair.

The door closed softly and Candy leaned forward to pour some coffee from the ornate silver pot into the china cup, then handed the cup to him. “I hope you won’t mind me getting right into the topic, but I really need to know what’s going on down at your TESLA installation.”

The calm, casually uttered statement left Gianni speechless for a moment. “Could you be more specific, Ms. Freeman?”

“Do I need to be, Mr. Barone?” she asked, her eyes making direct, unwavering contact with his own. “I’m talking about the storms.”

Gianni sat back in his chair. “Do I need an attorney?”

“I can’t imagine why you would. You’re not under arrest.”

“I’m in custody.”

She smiled. “You might want to consider it protective custody, considering how many governments have been asking us some very unusual and rather pointed questions in the last few hours. It’s only a matter of time—and not much time—before they start kicking ass and looking for a culprit.” She paused. “Now, how about we get to the point. We know what TESLA can do. We know that this great nation of ours occasionally partakes of Flint’s … largesse. We know you were the last person to speak with Admiral Medev before his untimely demise, and, in fact, that the call hadn’t even been completed when he met his unfortunate end. The big question in certain circles is what you two gentlemen were talking about that provoked such a dramatic response.”

Gianni ran through several possible answers before deciding that he didn’t need to court more trouble; he and Flint were already in deep. “We were discussing the storms.”

“Were you also discussing their provenance?”

“Some of the recent activity at TESLA could have provided the trigger point for the atmospheric agitation that contributed to the storms,” he said cautiously.

Candy shook her head from side to side slowly, the look on her face scornful. “Activity and agitation. Such nice words,” she said quietly. “We’ll get back to them in a minute. Let me ask you another big question that’s floating around town, Mr. Barone. Why would Flint want to destroy its own headquarters and a large portion of its most productive cropland, not to mention several cities in which its CEO owns homes?”

Gianni took a deep breath. “If the storms originated from TESLA, and it appears likely that they did, they were unauthorized.”

“But someone
is
authorizing them,” she pointed out. “Unless your equipment can do this on its own.”

“These actions are not authorized by Flint,” he said firmly, starting to get annoyed.

“So we’ll call it unauthorized devastation. What an odd expression. How frequently is devastation authorized?”

“Ms. Freeman, I don’t appreciate your sarcasm,” he snapped. “Flint is a company lots of people love to hate, but nothing the company has ever done—
ever,
in its hundred-and-forty-year history—has been done with malicious or destructive intent. Whatever is happening now is not happening at the direction of the company.”

She leaned forward, popped the tab on the can of soda, and poured some into the tumbler.

“Is Greg Simpson still in charge?” Her kittenish tone was gone.

He hesitated, not pleased at playing mouse to her long-clawed cat. “No. We’ve replaced him.”

“With Tess Beauchamp?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Greg?”

“En route from Capetown to Greenwich on one of our corporate Gulfstreams. They touched down to refuel in France a little while ago.”

“He’s still onboard?”

“No one got off the plane.”

She nodded. “I’d like you to have him land here, in Washington, instead. I’ll have someone make the arrangements. Let your people know to expect a call.”

“You’re going to take him into custody?”

Candy’s mouth tilted into a smile, but her eyes remained cold and serious. “Surely you didn’t think we’d release him into the wild? Have you spoken with Tess since she landed there?”

“Once. Briefly.”

“Why only once, with all that’s been going on?”

Gianni pulled in a deep breath. “Because TESLA went dark shortly after Greg departed. We have not been able to re-establish communications with them.”

“Ho, that’s not good.”

“No, it isn’t,” he snapped. “I’m getting tired of this pointless banter, Ms. Freeman, so if you’re about done—”

She smiled again. “Oh, I’m nowhere near done, and this is anything but pointless, Mr. Barone. But if you’d like to change the way this conversation is going, I’m willing to work with you on it.” Candy leaned an elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her chin on her loosely closed fist. “Our files on Greg Simpson go kind of silent after he left HAARP. I want you to tell me what he’s like now and what he’s been up to lately.”

Gianni set his untouched coffee back on the tray. “He’s been working on proprietary systems. His personality is much the same as it’s always been.”

“Why did you replace him?”

Gianni smiled. “I want immunity from prosecution, Ms. Freeman. Full and unconditional.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I’ve already made it clear that you’re not under arrest, Mr. Barone.”

“I don’t care what you want to call it. If you want me to say anything more,
anything,
Ms. Freeman, tell me what I want to hear. If you have to wake a few people up, go ahead. I’ll wait.”

“Make a note of that request, Joely,” she said calmly, looking past him. Then she returned her gaze to his face. “The Attorney General has authorized me to offer you full immunity from any federal prosecution arising from Flint’s actions in this regard, Mr. Barone. Please continue what you were saying.”

“Greg was making his own decisions, using our arrays for purposes not aligned with Flint’s goals. The event that tipped me off to what Medev was doing was the landslide in Afghanistan in March. He’d asked us to do that and I said no,” he said quietly. From the corner of his eye, he could see the Washington Monument stabbing the brightening sky. “When it happened, I realized Medev had gone directly to Greg. I worked backward from that and discovered it wasn’t the first time.” Gianni paused. “Ms. Freeman, I get the feeling nothing I’ve said so far has surprised you. I’m wondering why we went to such extremes to place TESLA in Antarctica when we have the same level of privacy as we would have had were it in Newark.”

“Perhaps you chose Antarctica because it doesn’t smell as bad as Newark,” she replied with a smile. “Don’t worry about what we know. Was the side deal the only reason you decided to replace him?”

“I didn’t need another reason. Greg was using TESLA as a weapon of mass destruction, proving that he’d become dangerously unstable. In a small, isolated environment like TESLA—” He shook his head. “I couldn’t afford to wait. I did what I could, put the best person in place as quickly as I could. And I can assure you that if what’s going on can be stopped, Tess will stop it.”

“‘If,’ Mr. Barone?”

“I can’t offer any guarantees. I can only tell you that the team down there is exceptional.”

She paused, thinking about that for a moment, then shifted in her chair, kicking off her ridiculously high heels and tucking her legs underneath her on the seat. “What’s your plan?”

Gianni looked at her, feeling the acid eating through his stomach lining. “I’m sorry?”

“What is Flint doing? What if there are more disasters in the chute? Are you going to disable the arrays remotely? Take TESLA off line?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. There’s no way to disable the array or take it off line remotely, short of destroying it. It’s a contained system, heavily fortified.”

“So your plan is to just wait and see what happens?” Candy Freeman demanded. “Do you have any idea where this is going to end?”

“No.” He leaned back in his chair and glanced out the window. The sky was lightening and the Potomac was edging from black to dark brown. The airport lights were less startlingly bright. “We thought we’d addressed every contingency. This sort of occurrence—”

“Let’s just call it ‘terrorism’ and be done with it, Mr. Barone.”

Gianni nodded. “Nothing like this ever occurred to us. Our focus was on preventing external attacks.”

“Does the installation have defensive capabilities?”

“No. The equipment was never the primary concern; the software was. There’s a continuous backup to a secure vault beneath the habitat. If certain required protocols aren’t performed as scheduled, the system will lock down. Everything topside will be degaussed automatically.”

She thought about that for a minute. “Let’s go back to the unauthorized devastation for a minute. Have we seen the best TESLA can do with these storms—Park City, Greenwich, etc.?”

“No. And TESLA didn’t only produce those storms,” he replied. “It triggered Tropical Storm Ayala, although I’m not sure how that fits into the picture.”

“I haven’t heard of that one.”

“The South Pacific, about a thousand miles from Fiji. It blew up from nothing to a pretty wild state very quickly yesterday afternoon. Predictions are that it will become a typhoon later today. It isn’t threatening any major land mass yet, but it easily could.”

“I’ll keep my eye on it. What about the Mediterranean? Secretary Bonner seems convinced that TESLA was involved.”

He looked at her. “I haven’t heard anything about that.”

“A huge hurricane sprung up out of nowhere and ripped down the middle of the Mediterranean, then slammed into the central and northern coasts of Israel a few hours ago.”

Gianni felt his eyes widen and he caught his breath, feeling as if someone had sucker-punched him. “Where?”

“Everything from Tel Aviv to Haifa is trashed. Damascus sustained some serious damage, as did points farther north, but Israel seemed to be hit the hardest, according to early reports.”

He rubbed a hand over his face. “We just completed a three-hundred-million-dollar desalination plant near Haifa. Secretary Bonner was going to bring it on line today.”

Gianni swallowed hard, then looked at Candy and decided to give her everything she wanted. There was no point anymore in holding anything back. Greg had clearly decided to destroy Flint and anything that came in his way. “TESLA caused the earthquake in Mexico City.”

“Are you serious?” she demanded, showing the first hint of surprise since he’d walked into her office.

He nodded wearily.

“You have to explain that to me.”

“The planet is just a spinning ball with a powerful magnet at its core, and tectonic action is controlled by geomagnetic waves.”

“Okay.”

“Greg hypothesized that if we could control the atmosphere’s electromagnetism, there was no reason we couldn’t control the earth’s geomagnetism. Everything TESLA does is based on a very simple idea, Ms. Freeman. The arrays direct pulses of magnetic energy with specific signatures to specific locations in the atmosphere, the earth’s crust, or, if there was a reason to do it, into outer space or into the oceans.”

“What happens in those scenarios?” she asked warily.

“Directing it into the earth, as you’ve seen, creates tectonic action. Earthquakes. Volcanoes could be triggered. Tsunamis.” He shrugged. “If we direct it into space, the immediate, short-term results would be the crash of communication grids—”

“Whose?”

“Anyone’s. Everyone’s. The type and amount of energy TESLA can produce could knock nearly everything in low-earth and mid-range orbits right out of the sky. That would be most of the telecommunication satellites. Telephone systems, anyway. Iridium and other satellite constellations—gone. They might blow up. They’d certainly go dark. It would happen in minutes. The waves of energy wouldn’t stop there. They’d continue to propagate out, crashing things in higher orbits, geosynchronous. Maybe not everything would be destroyed, but enough would. It would be a global communications disaster. I don’t know what would happen as the energy continued to travel through space. Depends on what the initial burst is, which frequencies are used, how powerful it is. It could affect smaller orbiting bodies—”

“Such as?”

“Comets, asteroids, meteors.” He lifted his hands and let them drop. “The moon.”

As he said the last word, Gianni watched Candy Freeman go pale.

“The moon?” She shook herself, as if to pull herself together. The effort wasn’t successful, judging by the grip she had on the padded arm of the chair. “Are you serious?” she said again.