Frozen Fire (18 page)

“Yes, ma’am—”

“So I’m sure you understand my desire to get to the embassy as quickly as possible. My presence was requested by our ambassador and he and his staff are waiting for me,” Victoria continued with pointed politeness.

“Yes, ma’am—”

“Feel free to have your representatives call the embassy later this evening, or tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll have some information to share. Right now, I must be going. Please convey to the secretary my most profound thanks for such a gracious reception.” In one smooth motion, she began to turn toward the door.

“Ms. Clark.”

The voice was not particularly deep, nor did its tone possess any particular urgency. But there was a dark chill in it, and Victoria knew without
needing to be told that it came from the lean, well-built man in the corner, the one who very casually had not been introduced. The one who looked like he’d had a lot of experience fading into the woodwork until it was time to make himself known.

The one who had “spook” written all over him.

Victoria stopped immediately, but made sure she did so gracefully. Turning to face him, she met his dark eyes with practiced calm. She was not at all surprised to find that he had stepped forward or that the others had taken a step back, giving him center stage and the power it afforded.

“I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” she replied.

The faintest shadow of a smile crossed his cold but youthful face. “I’m Tom Taylor.”

His gaze was shuttered, but she had no doubt that it could burn like a laser as needed.

“How do you do, Mr. Taylor?”

“I’ve been better, Ms. Clark.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

The pause that followed her words lasted long enough to have the others in the room shifting their weight and clearing their throats.

“I understand your hurry, but I’d like to talk with you about this morn-ing’s accident sooner rather than later. Would you mind if I accompanied you to the embassy? That way I won’t have to delay your arrival,” he said as though several minutes hadn’t ticked by.

She lifted an eyebrow. “That’s rather unorthodox, Mr. Taylor. Surely we can set up—”

“These are unusual circumstances. I have a car waiting.”

She counted four slow, steady heartbeats. “Very well.” She flicked her gaze to Elizabeth Keene, who looked both confused and relieved. “I trust this meets with your approval?”

“Yes. Thank you. I’ll be in touch with you later, Secretary Clark.”

Victoria gave a slight nod, then turned toward the door. “Mr. Taylor,” she said, tilting her head toward the door, “please don’t trouble your driver. My car is this way.”

Tom didn’t know much about Victoria Clark other than that she’d come from tough circumstances to rise to the top of her profession as quickly as anyone with no connections could. According to the thin dossier he’d reviewed, her intelligence and professional abilities were unquestioned. What
interested him more than her accomplishments, however, was that people who had worked for her universally ascribed something more to her than simply smarts. Some called it intuition, others more imaginative terms, but the end result was that she was held in high esteem by her colleagues and was rarely challenged. And was just as rarely wrong in her decisions.

The descriptions and few pictures included in the file, mostly from old passports and driver’s licenses, hadn’t done her justice. She was stunning: dark, petite, and obviously in great shape; every movement she made was graceful and controlled. But it was her eyes—almond-shaped, with irises of dark, brilliant blue—that sent her looks beyond beautiful and over the edge of exotic. Her cool confidence sharpened that edge.

Tom was looking forward to finding her flaws.

He was partly amused and partly impressed, though not surprised, that she betrayed not even the slightest hint of nerves as she directed the remaining attaché from Taino’s embassy to sit in the front seat of the town car and left word that the other should take a cab back to Georgetown with her luggage.

She fell silent as they headed through the maze of airport roads toward the George Washington Parkway. As they turned onto the GWP, she raised the panel that separated them from the driver, then swiveled to face Tom. Those deep and startling blue eyes met his.

A slight smile appeared on her face as she spoke. “What’s on your mind, Mr. Taylor?”

Tom returned the smile. “Terrorism, Ms. Clark. It’s what’s on my mind most of the time these days.”

“May I infer that you think this morning’s accident is—”

“It was no accident.”

“You sound very sure of yourself.”

“And you sound remarkably unsurprised.”

“I’ll admit that seeing the plane come down was a shock and a tragedy for everyone on Taino, but I don’t surprise easily, Mr. Taylor. Call it part of my charm.” She lifted one shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Tell me what makes
you
so sure today’s tragedy wasn’t an accident.”

“I hope I’m not being too forward if I say that your performance is enchanting.”

She said nothing and her expression remained fixed and calm, but she couldn’t stop the annoyance that flashed in those eyes.

So she is human
.

He reached into the breast pocket of his suit coat and pulled out his BlackBerry. It took him less than a minute to pull up the photos of Blaylock and Wendy Watson. He passed it to her. “Does anyone in these pictures look familiar to you, Ms. Clark?”

“Of course I know Lieutenant Colonel Watson. She was a consummate professional, President Cavendish’s chief pilot, and a well-respected member of the staff. She’ll be greatly missed.” She frowned slightly. “I don’t recognize the man with her, although he seems familiar. I think I may have seen his face—”

“On the news? Or maybe on a post office wall?” Tom offered with feigned helpfulness. “Move forward to the next picture. He’s a bit younger in that one.”

Victoria hesitated before doing so, and as she looked at Garner Blaylock’s mug shot her eyes widened slightly. The face in the picture was bearded and the hair was shorter, nearly shaved.

As she handed Tom his BlackBerry, her eyes met his and he saw something resembling fear in them.

That’s right, honey. You’ve just met your first mistake. And it’s a beauty
.

Tom took the gadget out of her unresisting hands, returned it to sleep mode, then slid it back into his breast pocket. “Looks like your memory just got better. His name is Garner Blaylock, the brain power behind a British organization called GAIA.”

“The environmental group?”

He smiled at her and it was almost genuine. “He’d be delighted at your description. He likes people to call GAIA that.”

“What should I call it?”

“Call it anything you like. In the circles I move in, we call them terrorists.”

Tom watched her run the tip of her tongue over her lips. Nothing else moved.

“They’re ecoterrorists, then?”

“If you need to be that precise, yes.”

“I thought radical environmentalism died out years ago. After your people infiltrated the Earth Liberation Front and prosecuted some of them, it seemed like other groups took the hint and abandoned the red-paint-throwing and tree-spiking variety of activism in favor of politicking and rubbing shoulders with sympathetic celebrities.”

So you’ve done your homework
. “Some of the groups, like ELF, died out.
Others splintered. True believers like Blaylock went dormant until a new generation decided avenging the ills brought on by the industrialized world would be a fun way to spend idle afternoons,” he replied. “This time around, the activities didn’t remain the brainchild of tree huggers and suburbanites who put on their plaid shirts for a few days of playing weekend warrior. The message this time penetrated the brains of kids who shrinks like to call ‘disaffected urban youth.’ Punks and low-lifes, in other words. Inner-city tenement dwellers with no money and a lot of attitude who hooked up with suburban delinquents in possession of a bad combination of money, brains, and what they consider to be righteous anger, who think their high-tops and iPods should have come to them without an environmental price tag and who want to punish those who ran up the bill.”

He shrugged. “Most of these pseudo environmental-terrorist organizations still adhere to the old Earth First! model of a loose or gan i za tion al structure and no formal hierarchy. They rely on local, small-time lunatics to fill the void and cause the trouble. GAIA is different. Blaylock is too smart and too much of a narcissist for that. He founded GAIA while he was in his mid-twenties. Its or gan i za tion al structure is fairly flat, and Blay-lock controls everything. His public persona is a starry-eyed romantic seeking utopian harmony, but beneath that façade, he’s a control freak and a sociopath, bent on destroying whatever industry creates. And he has a private source of money, which is one thing most of them don’t have.” Tom paused. “You’re not curious about that?”

“Should I be?”

“I would think you’d be curious about anything that might have to do with the plane crash.”

He watched a muscle work in her cheek.

“Okay. Where did he get the money?”

Tom sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “His adoptive parents died under unusual circumstances very shortly after he graduated with an honors degree from Oxford. He was their only heir, since their two biological children had died tragically while in their teens.”

“Was he investigated for their murders?”

“No, but we’re pressuring the British to review the circumstances of their deaths.”

“You said they were his adoptive parents?” Victoria asked.

“Yes. The Blaylocks adopted him when he was about five. From Romania. He was an orphan.”

From the corner of his eye, Tom saw one of Victoria’s hands clench almost imperceptibly.

Is that sympathy for the devil, orphan girl? There’s only one way to find out
.

“Pretty interesting, huh?” he continued, keeping his voice casual but his eyes watchful as he pricked her a little harder. “Those amazing Romanian orphanages. No affection, practically no attention given to those kids. It’s amazing so many of them survived.” He paused. “I guess you could say a lot of them actually thrived. After all, those
orphanages
”—he repeated the word deliberately—“were the breeding ground for many of today’s best hackers and thugs. They nurtured a whole generation of cold-blooded, free-range sociopaths unencumbered by morality or ethics. They live by the law of survival of the fittest. I doubt Stalin could have done better.”

A harsh, dull flush had crept up Victoria’s neck and she was holding her body so stiff he could feel the hot tension radiating from her.

“How does this relate to what has happened off Taino this morning, Mr. Taylor?” she asked, her voice remarkably cool as she glanced at the slim gold watch encircling her wrist. “What is Garner Blaylock’s connection to Lieutenant Colonel Watson?”

“We believe Blaylock recruited Wendy Watson and that she had a role in bringing down your plane this morning,” he said bluntly. “The plane she’d named
Gaia
.”

Victoria’s head snapped up and cold blue fire sparked in her eyes as they met his. “I find your statements inflammatory and highly offensive, Mr. Taylor. Wendy Watson was a highly decorated officer in the United States Air Force before she came to work for President Cavendish. She wasn’t radical in any respect. She was also, as are all of our staff, thoroughly investigated prior to being offered her job, and routinely and closely monitored afterward,” she said. “I fail to see why, based on the strength of one photograph, you can conjecture that Lieutenant Colonel Watson was working for Garner Blaylock’s organization or had developed some sort of relationship with him.”

He lasered a look at her that conveyed every bit of his exasperation. “Ms. Clark, do I seem that stupid? Just own it. You fucked up. Big-time.”

“If I make a mistake, Mr. Taylor, I do own it,” she snapped. “In the four years that I knew her, Wendy Watson never expressed any opinion about the environment. In fact, she spent most of her adult life being a loyal member of an organization that performed activities that could easily be described as destructive to the environment—at least to Afghanistan’s environment.
She was no pushover, Mr. Taylor, but a highly decorated career military officer with many dangerous and successful combat search-and-rescue missions to her credit. She was hardly the type to fall for some romantic, New Age, environmental rhetoric spouted—”

“To the contrary, she was just his type.”

Victoria frowned at him. “Wendy Watson was an exceptionally intelligent woman, and a woman of tremendous personal integrity. I know that for a fact. As I said, I conduct exhaustive background investigations on the people who come to work for us, and—” She paused and took a mea sured breath in a late attempt to regain the composure she’d lost. “She was perhaps atypical for a combat-hardened pilot in that she wasn’t in it for the excitement. She was no adrenaline junkie and didn’t fit the ‘warrior’ stereotype. She was quite the opposite, very practical and stoic and steady. She hadn’t had many romantic relationships and all of them were brief and extremely circumspect.”

“Are you saying she never got laid? Easy score for Blaylock then. Gratitude can be a big turn-on for some guys.”

Victoria’s eyes turned hot and furious for a split second. “What I am saying,” she snapped, “is that she was certainly not a woman to be taken in by a mane of golden hair, a hard body, and an English accent, nor by any ridiculous, radical propaganda.”

Tom smiled at her, keeping it cold. “Think that about her if you like, but I’d advise you not to underestimate Garner Blaylock. He’s a modern-day Svengali and could charm the chastity belt off Granny Clampett.”

Victoria didn’t even blink. “If you were aiming for droll, you missed, Mr. Taylor. I’m neither offended nor amused.”

“I’ll have to try harder, I guess.” He shrugged. “Blaylock’s got the psychology down pat; he knows the right words to say and when and how to say them. He doesn’t blink without knowing exactly what effect it will have on his audience. Most of his minions are women, usually smart and good-looking. As improbable as it sounds, when he starts talking to people about ‘nurturing natural magic,’ about the need to ‘reenchant the earth’ and ‘disrupt the anthropogenic constraints on the universal life force,’ they go slack-jawed and believe him.”