Frozen Fire (20 page)

7:30
P.M
., Saturday, October 25, Taino

Micki moved into the open doorway that led into Dennis’s office. She had to clear her throat twice before he looked up. He looked like hell. A five o’clock shadow had begun to stubble his chin and cheeks, and his face, usually handsome and full of energy, was dull and slack.

“When did you get back from the bunker?” she asked, moving into his office.

“I never went. I was in Victoria’s bungalow for a while, then I came here.” He paused. “I’ve been calling the families.”

The realization that Victoria had deliberately lied to her struck Micki like a blow, and her body responded with a surge of anger. The lie was a first. It would be the last.

“Trust is critical, but proof takes precedence.”

How many times had Victoria said that? Thousands, over the years. Well, those words were about to bite her. Micki would make sure of it.

Looking at Dennis, Micki raised her eyebrows and kept her voice even. “Does Victoria know that you’ve been calling the families?”

“No. And I don’t give a rat’s ass, either. How are things going?”

“I’ve been getting hourly reports from the boats. They’ve picked up a
lot of debris, but they haven’t found any survivors,” she said quietly, settling into a chair. “Dennis, has Victoria discussed any of her thoughts about who might have done this? Or planned it?”

“How could she? It’s too early. We don’t know anything yet.”

Micki nodded silently and glanced down at her hands.

“Has she discussed anything with you?” he asked after a moment.

Micki looked up and met his eyes. “No. Not really.” She shrugged. “Some nutty idea about ecoterrorists. It didn’t make a lick of sense to me. But when I brought up the possibility that whoever did it might have had inside help, she shut me down cold. It was so unlike her.” She pulled her brows together into a small frown.

“With all of her layers of defense—”

“Oh, I wasn’t implying any laxness on her part,” Micki rushed to assure him. “But I just found it so odd that she wouldn’t even entertain a conversation about an infiltration.”

Dennis leaned back in his chair, glaring at her. “Cut the bullshit, Micki. What are you getting at?”

“Well, I mean, she’s the one who taught me never to overlook something just because it might seem outlandish.” She paused and bit her lip for effect. She didn’t have to fake the heat that rose in her face. Adrenaline was pouring into her veins at the thought of what she was about to do.

“This is so hard to say,” she stammered. “But I just don’t think I could rest if I don’t say it. What if—what if Victoria was part of it?”

Dennis didn’t hesitate. “That’s preposterous.”

Heart pounding, Micki looked at him with every shred of emotion she could summon. “I know it sounds preposterous, Dennis, but don’t you think we have to entertain every possibility, no matter
how
crazy? Isn’t that the foundation of our entire security platform?”

“We might as well suspect you or me of complicity, Micki. Victoria did not bring down that plane.”

“Not intentionally, maybe, but what if she did something that helped someone get through—”

“No,” he said coldly.

“Well, why did she want to get off the island so quickly?” Micki almost shouted, pushing herself to her feet. “She’s needed here—”

“She didn’t want to go to D.C. She was going to send you. I told her to go instead.”

The news jolted her. “She was going to send me? She never said anything about that.”

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.”

I’ll bet it was
. Filled with a sudden, cool clarity, Micki lowered herself back into her chair. “There’s something you should know, Dennis. It didn’t make sense to me until just now,” she said, making her voice eerily subdued. “After she took off, I checked my e-mail. There was a message sent from my computer this evening that I didn’t send.”

Dennis frowned. “What?”

“There was a message sent from my machine that I didn’t send,” she repeated. “It was signed by me but I didn’t write it and I don’t recognize the name it was sent to.”

“You think someone broke your password?”

She met his eyes. “Not someone. Victoria. It had to be. No one else has her level of access to the system. Even I don’t.”

“What did the e-mail say?”

“It just thanked someone for his or her concern and said that you were still alive.” She made herself swallow hard. “It was sent to an internal address, but I didn’t recognize the name of the recipient, so I checked the personnel records. There is no such person, Dennis, and the mailbox for that name has executables that forward all mail it receives to other mailboxes.”

His gaze bored into her. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying we need to watch Victoria just like we’re watching everyone else, Dennis,” she answered after a long moment. “I don’t think she should be allowed to leave Washington until we know for sure she isn’t the mole.”

7:45
P.M
., Saturday, October 25, aboard the
Wangari Maathai
, off the coast of Taino

Leaning against the doorjamb in the cockpit of the
Wangari Maathai
, his research-boat-turned-rescue-vessel, Captain Simon Broadhurst picked up the radio handset and called to the captain of his ship’s twin, the
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
, whom he could see standing on the deck of her ship.

An unseen member of her crew called to her and, stopping to give Simon a tired wave, she turned to go into the bridge.

“This is Maggy on the
Marjory, Wangari
. Go ahead.”

“Simon here. Any news?”

“Lots of metal and upholstery. Luggage. Some—”

Captain Maggy Patterson paused and Simon knew without her having
to say it that pulling dismembered human body parts from the water had taken its toll on her.

“Got a few ourselves,” he said, clipping his words. “Would you like to do the inventory, or shall I?”

“Oh, God.” Maggy choked out the words.

“Right. I’ll do it, then. E-mail me a list, Patterson. Not much left to be retrieved out here. This is the
Wangari
out.”

“I’ll send the list,” Maggy replied. “Thanks, Simon.
Marjory
out.”

Simon checked in with the other search boat and, in minutes, was looking at a gruesome, updated inventory of the body parts the searchers had found and were storing in the ships’ onboard refrigeration units.

Most of the victims were accounted for, at least in part. Simon shuddered at the unintentionally macabre pun. None of the bodies had been intact.

A mixture of anger and grief knifed through him, not for the first time today, and sent his head into his hands. He’d seen the plane coming in, its elegant, streamlined white body vivid against the tropical blue sky. Seconds later, it became a memory suffused in smoke and fire, and he’d spent the day picking body parts and seat cushions out of the water where it had fallen.

This is insanity
.

A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over him, leaving him feeling uncomfortably vulnerable. To stave off any emotion—a useless expenditure of energy under the circumstances—Simon looked at his watch and swore under his breath. He’d been on the water for nearly twelve hours. He brought his gaze up to the sea, still slicked with rainbowed patches of jet fuel, and made a decision. Picking up the radio handset again, he called ashore for permission to change the operation from search and rescue to search and recovery.

7:45
P.M
., Saturday, October 25, Gainesville, Florida

Not sure whether he was more bored or annoyed, Sam flicked the television remote and sent the screen to darkness, then slumped against the back of the couch. He glanced idly through his ground-floor living room windows and watched the palm trees in his front yard swaying gently in the breeze. The street lights behind them cast languid shadows across the room’s walls, the dark screen of his television, and his body.

Ordinarily the shifting light bothered him and he just kept his blinds shut. Tonight, though, he wasn’t thinking about it. He’d been trying for two hours to get through to Cyn on her BlackBerry. His calls kept getting
sent to voice mail and she never called back. Undoubtedly she’d shut the damned thing off, and he was seriously pissed about it.

She might be furious at him, but she’d never not returned a call before. At least not for this long. And she couldn’t be that busy. She wasn’t official crew and the weather was perfectly calm where she was. The nearest thing to a storm was a small tropical depression a couple of hundred miles to the east, probably the last gasp of an otherwise uneventful hurricane season.

She must really be furious at him. Or in jail.

If she’d convinced her girlfriends and the captain of the boat to go along with her cockeyed plans to trespass into a restricted zone, she could be somewhere on Taino, or on a ship, locked up or being questioned.

He blinked once and stared hard out the window at the dark sky.

Locked up. Getting engaged and arrested in the same day. Wouldn’t that just beat all?

Who the hell knew what they did to trespassers on Taino? Dennis Cavendish was well known for being a privacy freak. And on that Caribbean speck of volcanic rock, he was the law. From what little Sam knew about it, Taino was the current poster child for banana republics, ruled by an autocrat and guarded by highly trained but no doubt extremely bored ex-military guys. Who probably hated journalists.

Damn it
. He reached for the phone again and dialed the number of the television station where Cyn worked as a news producer. At the first sound of the automated greeting, he punched in the extension of her boss and his occasional pool-shooting partner.

“Matt Frits.” The bored, abrupt voice made Sam’s mouth tilt upward at the corners. It was the first time he’d smiled since Cyn had wakened him with a kiss this morning.

“Dude.”

“Don’t give me that ‘dude’ shit, Briscoe,” the station manager snorted. “You’re almost as old as I am.”

“Not at heart, my man. Besides, I’m trying to remain cool and hip to maintain my appeal to my students,” Sam protested with a forced laugh, pacing the room and eventually coming to a stop at the window. He leaned against it.

“Fine. Get a ‘Kurt Cobain Lives’ tattoo on your forehead and pierce a few visible body parts. But when you talk to me, talk like a freaking grown up.”

“Ouch.”

“Now that we’ve gotten the pleasantries out of the way, what can I do for you, Sam?”

“I’m wonderin’ if you’ve heard from Cyn lately.”

“Not since this morning, when she was begging for permission to break a few international laws and put my ass in a boiling water bath.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That she wasn’t Gainesville, Florida’s answer to Christiane Amanpour. What the hell do you think I told her?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Yeah. But I mean, what did you actually say to her?”

“I reminded her that she was my producer and on vacation, not an investigative reporter on assignment. I told her anything she did down there was as a free agent, that I don’t do hostage negotiation, and that bail for employees isn’t in my bud get,” he said bluntly. “She went in anyway, didn’t she?”

Sam clenched his gut against a distinct slamming sensation. Cyn lied to him when she said she’d gotten the station’s okay.

A few hours after you agree to marry me, you’re lyin’ to me. Damn it, woman, what the hell are you up to?

It was what Cyn mockingly called “an Oprah moment”; a moment in time that exes refer to in tabloid, tell-all interviews, or in tawdry barroom confessions: It was the moment Sam knew their relationship was over.

It’s so like Cyn to make it happen from a distance
.

He cleared his throat. “She told me that you okayed it.”

“My fat, lily-white ass I did,” Matt snapped. “That kind of publicity I don’t need. Not that I thought for a second she’d do anything other than what she wanted to do but, for the record, Sam, I told her unambiguously to stay the hell away from the crash site and anything else having to do with Taino, and let the networks handle it. They’re the ones with the bail funds and satellite coverage.” He paused. “You argued?”

“Let’s call it a difference of opinion. You know Her Highness when she’s determined.”

“And now she’s not answering her phone.”

It was a statement, not a question, and Sam looked up to the shifting light on the ceiling. “Yeah.”

Damn her
. For much of their relationship—most of it, maybe—he’d been lazy and she’d been horny. Lately, though, he’d begun to think that three years of fun times and easy boundaries wasn’t enough, that all the convenience of their relationship had left a few gaps that he now wanted filled.

With a rueful smile, Sam admitted to himself that he knew getting serious
about her would be dangerous. It was plain stupid because Cyn had made it clear that she didn’t ever want to be in a relationship that would require more than merely pulling up stakes at the end.

Matt had known her much longer than he had, and had had the foresight to tell Sam to steer clear of her three years ago. It was advice Sam had ignored with a smile. He should have known better. She’d even let him know this morning he’d made a mistake in proposing to her.

Sam Hill Briscoe, you’re some kind of fool. A woman who doesn’t want to wear her engagement ring thirty seconds after getting it doesn’t want to get married
.

He’d met Cyn in New York; he’d been at a weather conference at Columbia University and had taken a behind-the-scenes tour at one of the television networks’ flagship stations. She’d been finishing her master’s degree in broadcast journalism and serving as an intern at the station. They’d met in the canteen, and had spent every minute of their free time together for the next two days. A year later, she’d given him a call, saying she’d just landed a job in Gainesville and if he wasn’t married, was he still interested?

He’d been bowled over by her long legs and boundless confidence, and the easy, laughing way she completely lived up to her nickname: Cyn.