Frozen Fire (40 page)

He watched her expression change from panic to terror as he aimed the fifty-thousand-volt device at her and pulled the trigger.

The prongs embedded themselves in the side of her neck. Her scream lasted until the splash, but her body convulsed for several minutes. Whether that was due to the single powerful shock he’d administered or because her muscles were unable to respond to any voluntary commands and she was, therefore, drowning, he wasn’t sure. Actually, he didn’t care.

Feeling more satisfied with himself than he had in a long time, Dennis calmly took a sip of wine and watched her body flail with increasingly less vigor.

It didn’t take long for the splashing to stop. Wanting to ensure that there would be no more unpleasant surprises at her hands, Dennis remained in the room watching her body float face down in the water until he’d finished two leisurely glasses of Champagne.

Then he dressed and made his way to the control room where he reviewed all the footage from the closed-circuit security cameras she’d activated at his suggestion. In no time, he found footage of Micki going out the door, retrieving a case of equipment, and setting up a small antenna apparatus. Dennis slowed down the images and zoomed in as she keyed in her passwords and coordinates, then he sat back, smiling, and took another satisfied sip of wine.

She’d done it all in the open without wearing a hazmat suit.

Which made perfect sense now that he thought about it. He didn’t have to stay in the bunker. Under such calm conditions, the adulterated methane would hug the surface as it moved to the west and not come near the high, northern tip of the island unless those conditions changed.

He was about to stop the videotape when he saw her head snap to the left as if something had alerted her. Reaching into the dark case that had held the equipment, she withdrew a large handgun and rose slowly to her feet. Bringing it up in front of her, both hands gripping it, arms fully extended, she called out. There was no audio with the footage, but Dennis could tell from her stance that Micki had not been afraid.

He stared in disbelief as three men wearing the uniform wet suits of his security team emerged from the dense vegetation several yards away from her. They wore air tanks on their backs; their masks were off. They all had their arms in the air and the center one, the leader, spoke to Micki with a smile on his face as he lowered his arms.

Before Dennis had a chance to put names to their faces, Micki popped off three shots, leaving a small round hole in each man’s forehead and spattering the trees and shrubs behind them with a dark red spray interspersed with blobs of lighter-colored goo. All three bodies rocked backward and dropped in crumpled heaps at the edge of the clearing.

Micki calmly lowered the gun, walked to the bodies, methodically removed the radio units from their shoulders, and threw the units far into the brush. Then she returned to her position, kneeling in front of the laptop she’d hooked up to the satellite equipment, and continued her transmission.

As he watched her carefully repack the antenna array into its box, Dennis set the wineglass onto the desk with hands that shook from a mixture of shock and fury.

This madness has to stop
.

3:30
P.M.
, Sunday, October 26, Key Largo, Florida

It was a nice, quiet afternoon. The wind had picked up a little but it was still warm and Linda Carson had just sat down for what felt like the first time that day. With a grin, her husband eased open the screw top of a bottle of a New Zealand sauvignon blanc, poured some into a travel mug, and handed it to her. They toasted each other silently.

Both kids had only just fallen asleep for their nap and the minivan’s windows were closed for the moment against even the quiet, drowsy sounds of a sultry afternoon in the Keys. Linda would open them in a few minutes and raise the special screens they had bought, but not until she was positive the soft rustle of the trees, the whining drone of the crickets, and the symphony of frogs wouldn’t wake the children.

Right now Hunter and Chloë were still in what she and Dan called “the red zone.” For the next few minutes,
anything
could wake them. The slightest human noise—the creak of a lawn chair, a parental cough or whisper—would instantly wake the babies, which would mean that Linda would have to endure another half hour of singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in a breathy whisper and Dan would have to listen to it. Better that the two of
them just stayed quiet for a few more minutes until the children were deeply asleep.

This place, a small clearing in the midst of a little thicket of scrubby pine and wildly overgrown hibiscus only twenty feet from the road, was completely hidden. It was their favorite spot in the world. It wasn’t actually a legal campsite, situated as it was on the edge of the Crocodile Lake National Wildlife Refuge, but a legal campsite wasn’t what they had been looking for when they’d come here one moonlit night during spring break ten years ago. They’d only known each other for a few hours at that point, and had been looking for a quiet, private nook or cranny for some urgently required bonking.

It was so private and so romantic that they’d kept coming back, year after year, despite being able to afford to book into any of the resort hotels nearby. This was their little Eden—they’d celebrated new jobs here, gotten engaged here, spent their wedding night here while en route to Key West, conceived both kids here. In ten years of reasonably frequent visits, no one had ever bothered them.

The vehicles they drove had changed over the years, from Dan’s Camaro, to Linda’s Camry, to his Explorer, to the Range Rover he’d bought her when they got married, and now the luxury minivan they’d bought last year. With an infant and a toddler to accommodate now, it was getting a little cramped, but staying in the van was safer than pitching a tent and less obvious than parking an RV would have been.

Linda jumped as they heard a series of small, unlikely noises coming from the woods behind them. Even though the small crashes didn’t sound like human footsteps, she’d never known any animal to be so noisy. There was no urgency to the sounds, just the noise of brush and branches being pushed aside clumsily. With a reassuring look, Dan picked up her hand and kissed the back of it, and she returned his smile.

A frown crossed his face then and he dropped her hand to cover his mouth as he began to cough. A second later Linda felt a strange, burning tickle at the back of her own throat. Dan stood up, knocking over the folding chair he’d been sitting in, not caring that it banged into the side of the vehicle and instantly triggered screams from both children.

Coughing herself, and feeling a deeply uncomfortable tightness in her lungs, Linda stood up to go to the babies, but stopped in horror as she saw Dan bend almost double as he gasped for breath.

Unable to speak for the dryness in her throat, Linda moved to Dan’s side in time to break his fall, and flung him onto his back as soon as he was on the ground. His eyes were bulging and his hands clawed frantically at his shirt until they went limp and the fight went out of him. Before her dis-believing eyes, Dan’s face began turning bizarrely dark and bluish against the mop of white-blond curls surrounding it. Recognizing death, Linda tried to scream, but creating sound had become impossible.

Reaching for the car’s fender to support herself as she tried to drag herself to her feet, Linda could think only of getting away from whatever was attacking her, of getting into the car where her babies were and taking them away from there. Reaching for the door handle, she fell, her hand only partially easing her hard landing on the sandy ground. Her lungs were on fire and her brain was frozen with fear as she stared at the door handle, just out of reach.

Her vision dimmed then, and the sound of the babies’ cries grew faint, and then she heard nothing at all.

Strapped in their car seats and cocooned inside the closed vehicle, Hunter and Chloë Carson continued to breathe unpoisoned air, and they continued to wail.

4:25
P.M.
, Sunday, October 26, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.

“I really don’t care about regulations at this point, sir,” Sam said, trying as best he could to keep his voice from rising in the face of military implacability.

And imbecility, from his point of view. He hadn’t busted his ass and his credit limit to get from Gainesville to Washington just to stare at the un-adorned walls of a small, bare room in the security building next to the front gate of Bolling Air Force Base. Nor had he counted on spending so damned much time trying to make his point to a crew-cutted and uniformed guy who was probably ten years younger than him and whose expression hadn’t changed in fifteen minutes. It said “Don’t even try to fuck with me” loud and clear.

Sam was ignoring it.

“I’ve got to get in to see the director of national intelligence. It’s a matter of national security, a matter of life and death,” Sam repeated for what had to be the tenth time. “And I mean that literally.”

“So you’ve said. But you can’t go on base unless someone is expecting you and you’re cleared. I can’t clear you now. It’s Sunday afternoon.”

“Your
computers
don’t work on Sunday?” Sam asked, not hiding his derision. “The annual defense bud get is how many trillion dollars, and y’all give
machinery
a day off?”

“Sam.” With just the one word, Marty let Sam know that he was acting like a prick, that Marty was losing patience with the whole idea, and that Sam would be better off just shutting up.

Sam turned to glare at his friend.
You could get your ass over here and help me
.

Marty, who was sitting in a hard chair against the wall and looking mostly pissed off and only slightly scared shitless, very subtly moved his head from side to side, then looked away. Annoyed anew, Sam looked back at the military cop in front of him.

Having Sabina here might have helped
.

“Okay, I understand what you’re sayin’,” he lied, trying to put as conciliatory a note as he could muster into his voice. “But, look, you’ve already searched our stuff and frisked us. You know we’re not carryin’ anything illegal or dangerous. And I’m sure you’ve already run our Social Security numbers, so you know we’re not felons. I’m tryin’ to make it clear that I’m not a whackjob or some kind of crazy person—”

The cop said nothing, only lifted an eyebrow.

Well, thank you, son, that says it all
.

Sam took a deep breath and started over. “Look, sir, you’ve got my ID. It says right there that I’m Sam Briscoe, Professor Sam Hill Briscoe of the University of Florida’s School of Natural Resources and Environment. I’m a teacher and a researcher, not a terrorist or anything else.” He paused and gave the cop a good ol’ boy smile. “Let me tell you somethin’ else. Do you know why I’m Sam and not Samuel? Because I was named for Uncle Sam, that’s why, and Uncle Sam isn’t Uncle Samuel. He’s just Uncle Sam. And do you know why I was named that? Because I was born in Americus, Georgia, and my parents thought it was a nice thing to do. And I’ve got two sisters, named Libby and Jessie—Liberty and Justice.” He nodded. “So there’s my patriotism right there. I’m true blue straight from the womb. So I’m not about to do anything crazy, I’ve just got to get in to see the—”

“I know. The director of national intelligence. And I’m telling you that you can’t.” The cop’s lips barely moved but his mile-wide shoulders went back a little and the fingers that were as thick as sausages refolded themselves on the table in front of him.

“Well, can you at least call her? She’s got to be here.
You
may not know
about this, but there’s a seriously big-ass crisis going on fifty miles off the Keys,” Sam replied, his frustration level rising again. “Can’t you just call her office and see if she’ll let me in? Please? Sir.”

Clearly unimpressed, the cop stood up, gave both of them a hard, scathing look, and then left the room.

“Well, that went well.”

Sam stood up and turned to face Marty, who was looking back at him with a face as dark as a thundercloud. “How else are you supposed to deal with—”

“Watch it, Sam. The room is probably bugged,” Marty interrupted.

Sam glared at him. “I was goin’ to say ‘How else are you supposed to deal with the military but by tryin’ to pull rank?’ That’s all.”

“You don’t have any rank to pull, Sam. You’re a civilian,” Marty replied in the same sarcastic tone of voice and stood up to begin pacing around the small room. “What the hell did you mean by coming up here? And why the hell did you have to drag me into it?”

“I didn’t
drag
you into anything. You
offered
to pick me up at the airport.”

“Well, I didn’t know you were going to go postal,” Marty snapped. “When you called, you said you were coming up here because you needed to talk to some people. You conveniently neglected to tell me who it was or that they didn’t know you were coming. You might as well be trying to get in to see the president.” Marty shook his head in disgust. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I was thinkin’ of tryin’ to get someone to get movin’ on this catastrophe in the makin’.”

Marty rolled his eyes. “You think they don’t know about it? Or that they should have contacted you to ask your opinion or let you know what they’re doing about it? God Almighty, Sam, sometimes you’re a complete and utter idiot. Not to mention a total prick.”

“Well, thank you very much,
Methane Man
,” Sam shot over his shoulder.

Just then the door opened and the military cop who had been in the room earlier walked in, flanked by two other uniformed military police officers.