Frozen Fire (26 page)

Looking up, Dennis glanced at the large television screens mounted on the wall opposite his desk. They were dark at the moment, taken offline deliberately so the comms team could do some troubleshooting. It was an uncomfortable and eerie feeling to be so completely cut off from the rest of the world. He didn’t like it.

Being on a tiny island with a very small population comprised mostly of
scientists, engineers, and other assorted high-tech gurus, Dennis had sunk enormous quantities of money into his communications systems. There were backup systems for the backup systems, and security for the primary and redundant networks was tighter than the clichéd drum. That Micki hadn’t been overly concerned at the unexplained troubles on their highly secure, heavily protected link with the outside world chafed at him; even knowing that it normally took a lot to rattle her didn’t assuage him. No matter how temporary the downtime would be, it was beyond frustrating. It was disconcerting. And dangerous.

Dennis shook off the thought and brought his mind back to the text on his laptop screen. Still trying to make sense of the crash, during the long, mostly sleepless night, he’d begun composing notes for the remarks that he was going to make—Victoria’s inevitable outrage be damned.

He’d known every person killed in the crash. The pilots and cabin crew had been handpicked by him, had worked for him, traveled with him. Some had been with him before he’d owned Taino, before he’d set up the Climate Research Institute. They weren’t quite family, but they’d been good people, intelligent, professional, loyal. Warm, energetic. Damned good people. He rubbed a hand over his exhausted eyes. The passengers had been his friends; he’d known some for a time that was measurable in decades.

And they were dead because they’d accepted his invitation.

That’s why he’d called the families last night. Screw the security argument for keeping him out of sight. Whether or not terrorist actions had brought down his plane, those families deserved to hear about their loved ones’ fate from
him
. Not from some embassy staffer in Washington, not even from Victoria, who wouldn’t know what to do with an emotion if she ever allowed herself to feel one.

Whatever Victoria thought the world needed to know or not know, Dennis knew the world needed to see him alive and in real time, needed to hear from his own lips the somber news that there were no survivors. He’d never shied away from any challenge in his life, and breaking this news to the world was not going to be his first failure. And if the people who blew up his plane were watching—well, if nothing else, it would be one hell of a way to show those fuckers who they were messing with.

He typed a few more words, then hit save—and watched his screen go blank.

“Leanne,” he called, and saw his senior assistant appear in the doorway
that separated their offices. “Did you do something to the local network connection?”

“No, sir. Mine just died, too,” she replied calmly. “I’ll run down to the beach and find out what’s going on.”

Dennis nodded absently and brought up the automatic backup copy of the file, which had stored itself somewhere on the laptop’s hard drive. Absorbed in writing his speech, he was only marginally aware that time was passing. When his assistant returned, he looked up to realize that half an hour had gone by.

“What’s the latest? I’ve been working locally. Have they fixed it yet?” he asked.

“No, sir. It’s next in the queue.”

Both of his eyebrows rose.
“Next in the queue?”
he repeated. “What the hell is going on down there? What can be so important that they have to triage the network?”

“Well, sir, it seems everything is down. I mean, not deliberately this time. They tried to bring the external communication links up and then everything started failing.” Leanne hesitated, faltering as the next words left her mouth. “And now the comms to the habitat are down.”

Dennis stared at her, wondering if he’d heard correctly.

“When the fuck did that happen?” he demanded. “We’re taking the operation to live testing in a few hours. Tell Micki—forget it. I’ll call her myself. What’s the number down there in the comms hut? That’s where she is, isn’t she?” He grabbed one of the cell phones on his desk.

“Yes, she is, sir, but the—”

She stopped talking as Dennis yanked the silent telephone away from his ear and stared at it, then looked back at her.

No phone service
.

No computer networks
.

No way to let anyone know what’s happening on the island
.

An ominous coldness settled in his gut. “You’re sure she’s down there?”

“Yes, sir, I just saw her.”

He stood up and, without another word, headed for the beach and some answers.

The normal muted hum of voices and equipment in the only air-conditioned building on the island had been replaced by a fierce tension that Dennis could feel the minute he walked in. He saw Micki leaning over
the shoulder of the best communications engineer they had, peering at a monitor. The director of communications was by her side.

“Micki.”

She turned and slowly straightened up, then walked toward him. “Hey. I was just about to come get you.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“To put it bluntly, we’re having catastrophic failure of every network. They’re crashin’ like dominoes, fallin’ over in slow motion,” she drawled with an understated shrug that made Dennis’s already-surging blood flow faster.

“What are you doing about it?” he demanded.

Meeting his gaze with a stony look, she took his arm and ushered him outside.

“Obviously, Dennis, some of the team are trying to prevent the remaining networks from crashing and the rest are trying to find out what’s going wrong. When we brought down the external networks yesterday morning, we did it quickly but strictly according to protocol. We left the one super-secure channel open. Then, right before Victoria left, we began reopening some of the other critical channels. That was also done very carefully.” She shrugged again. “With nothing much to go on, we’re attempting to determine if these new failures are related to any of those actions, but so far we can’t find any logical or even discernible reason why this is happening. We don’t know why the electronics started acting up overnight and we don’t know why we can’t bring them back online.”

“Things just don’t stop working for no reason, Micki.”

“I
know
that, Dennis,” she said with obvious annoyance. “I’m going to get some people looking into whether it could be something physical. Maybe some of that heavy soot dirtied up some equipment topside, or some debris or jet fuel got into some underwater equipment. We just have to keep looking.”

He glanced toward the water, so blue and calm, and frowned. The Brits, the Cubans, and the Americans were practically slavering at the thought of getting their mitts on his information, his equipment, his people. It was damned near a miracle that he’d kept them away from his playground this long. “Are we being jammed somehow, maybe from that God-damned traffic out there? Because if the neighbors are fucking around with us—”

“There’s no evidence that we’re being jammed. That was the first thing we looked at.”

Making a concerted effort to control his temper, Dennis asked, “What about the backup systems?”

“All but one have gone down.”

“You
pulled
them down, you mean,” he snapped.

She nodded after the space of a heartbeat. “Yes. I pulled them down because they were having the same troubles as the primary network. The one remaining is still experiencing those issues.”

“Leanne said we’ve lost contact with
Atlantis
.”

Micki hesitated again, then nodded. “Yes, a few minutes ago. But Marie was apprised of the problems we’d been having, just in case.”

“What do you mean, ‘just in case’? Did you know this could happen?”

“Well, yes, Dennis, something like this could happen at any time,” she replied with some impatience, her drawl getting thicker with every word. “A computer network is a complex system comprisin’ lots of variables, which means it can fail at any time for any number of reasons. Satellite uplinks and downlinks, the fiberoptic cable to the habitat, wireless connections topside—there are a lot of vulnerabilities and a lot of potential points of failure. But the probability of this sort of catastrophic failure was so low, Dennis.” She took in a deep breath. “When things began to fail in such odd ways, the first thing we did was put everyone on high alert. The boats, the habitat, the port—”

“What did Victoria say?” he asked, watching her carefully.

For the first time, Micki’s gaze left his face. “The external network went dark before we were able to reach everyone. Washington.”

An icy burn in his stomach worked its way into his esophagus and stalled there, searing his chest.

“You didn’t contact Washington? They don’t know what’s happening?” he asked in disbelief.

“They have to know by now that we’ve gone dark, but I wasn’t able to warn them that we might ahead of time, or inform them of the communications troubles we were havin’.” She looked at him again as her chin rose. “I couldn’t have known when this started how widespread the problem would be, Dennis. If I had, I would have let Washington know first.”

Micki’s voice had gone from calm to defensive and her eyes were displaying poorly hidden nervousness. But it was her body language that disturbed him, the way her hands had become restless, the way her feet shifted as she rebalanced her weight. He didn’t know what it signified, but all that movement was unlike her.

Dennis studied her and attempted again to control the anger that was churning in him.

“We need everything back online,” he said at last. “It’s almost time for Marie to initiate the first live test. We need to be in contact with everyone topside and in
Atlantis
.” He paused. “How long has
Atlantis
been offline?”

“Less than ten minutes.”

They both knew that the first rule of the habitat was to shut down everything and abandon the structure if they were unable to communicate with the surface for more than thirty minutes.

Bringing everything back online after an emergency shutdown will take weeks
.

Impotent fury was boiling over inside him. He wanted to shake her, and settled for clenching his fists instead. “Micki, what the fuck is going on? You’re acting like we’re helpless.”

“At the moment, we are,” she snapped. “We’re doing everything we can to get back online.”

“Fuck that. You’re not here to—”

At that moment, the door to the communications building opened and the director stuck his head out. “We’ve lost communications with the boats.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Dennis exploded. “The boats are on
radio
channels. We can’t lose that. They have nothing to do with the network.”

“Well, the radio channels are still open,” the engineer admitted. “We haven’t been using them because of the likelihood of being monitored by all the uninvited company. But our secure lines are encrypted; they bounce off a backup transponder we leased on a maritime bird.”

“On a leased satellite?” Dennis looked back to Micki. “How the hell does a problem happen with that?”

“It happens
on the ground
,” she snapped, her voice rising. “It’s not the transponders that are the problem. The problem is on the island and the boats. The problem is in the system.”

“Okay, thanks,” Dennis said, glancing at the engineer, who was watching them impassively.

The other man withdrew into the building and the door closed.

“How much of this is connected to what happened yesterday, Micki?” he asked bluntly. “And I’m not talking about any God-damned jet fuel contamination or dirty air filters.”

Micki met his eyes. “I’m not a believer in coincidences, Dennis. Are you?”

“So the plane was a diversion and the real target is
Atlantis
?”

“Seems logical.” She hesitated and glanced away. “I heard one of the guys muttering that it’s almost as if a command were executed that changed the codes. Or code. He might have said ‘code,’ as in it might have been that software was rewritten rather than just a code in the software was changed.”

Her words ricocheted through his brain.
“A command was executed that changed the codes.”

“What are you doing about it?” he demanded.

“Well, nothing right now,” she snapped. “The only thing anyone could do is review the monitor logs, but I wouldn’t know where to tell someone to start looking. It would be a waste of time.”

“Why?”

“Well, it could be that someone went in yesterday and messed around, but it could also be a rogue executable that’s causing all this trouble. A logic bomb could have been embedded days ago, or even months ago, with a trigger set to activate at a certain date and time.”

“Who’s authorized to do that? Get into the code and change it, I mean?”

She paused and gave him a look that chilled him. “There are about four programmers who are authorized to do it, Dennis, but all of them need either Victoria or me to log them on and log them off. And I haven’t logged anyone on in months.”

His cold anger turned to hot fear, but he refused to show it. “Damn it, Micki. Stop giving me the runaround. Give me some fucking answers.”

She tilted her head and gave him an oddly calm look. “I’m trying to, Dennis, but, unfortunately, I think that the person with the good answers made a fast getaway. She’s probably having breakfast in some upscale café overlooking the Potomac right about now.”

He said nothing, just stared at her.

“Look, I know she’s your little pet, Dennis, and I know what I said last night really pissed you off. So I really hate to say this, but she’s the only one who could be behind something like this.” Micki grabbed his arm and glared at him with hot, furious eyes. “She wrote the rules. She knew the codes, the software, the—”

“Get in touch with
Atlantis
. It will take too long to send someone down in a sub, so ping them with sonar. Use Morse code or the underwater telephone. I don’t care what you have to do, but I want the habitat locked down and all those people evacuated topside immediately. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I’m not going to let anyone hurt the operation,” he said grimly.