Frozen Fire (5 page)

The room was quiet except for the muted clink of silver against china as the occupants served themselves coffee.

“All right. I’m teeing off in an hour. Let’s get this show on the road,” the president said abruptly, turning from the window and crossing the room. His trademark stride had always struck Lucy as an odd combination of Ronald Reagan’s macho Marlboro Man walk and the fluid movement of a trained dancer. It brought to mind both elegance and restrained power, as it was no doubt supposed to, and it fit perfectly with Winslow Benson’s aristocratic bearing and silvered good looks.

But something about that walk had never seemed to blend in completely with the rest of the package. That’s how Lucy had always perceived the president, even before he’d taken office: a carefully crafted package put forth for public consumption. But she knew there was a flaw in that package and, though she couldn’t identify it, the imperfection made it impossible for her to trust him.

The rest of the group seated themselves after the president had lowered himself into his favorite wing chair. Before the last of them was settled, he began to bark out the names of regions, countries, corporations, and their leaders, and the others in the room responded with information relevant to business, the economy, and any real or perceived threats to America’s stability. It was like a high-stakes pop quiz where no one person knew all the answers, but everyone was delighted to torch you for missing a nuance.

“Okay, not a whole lot of surprises,” the president said at last. The tension in the room dissipated as he rose to his feet.

“It’s not a big surprise, sir, but I do have something I’d like to mention,” Lucy interjected quietly. All eyes turned to her. Most of the hostility in them was subtle. Grandstanding was not appreciated among this crowd.

“What’s that, Lucy?” The president stopped moving, and didn’t sit back down. The message was unmistakable.
Make this quick
.

“Dennis Cavendish is hosting some sort of small conference on—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Lucy. That’s hardly—” Ken Proust, the president’s campaign manager and part-time minion of Satan, rolled his eyes.

Not for the first time Lucy thought how nice it would be to Taser Ken’s testicles, just to find out if he’d enjoy the sensation.

“Ken.” The president didn’t have to say anything more and Ken retreated, glowering.

Lucy continued. “We’ve confirmed that six heads of major corporations are flying to Taino later today. There may be more. He’s been wining and dining a bunch of them in Miami for the past two days. We’re still attempting to learn why, but we’re fairly certain that it has to do with his underwater drilling project.”

“Who’s heading there?”

“Kobiashi Nakamura, head of Takayashi International; Muriel Gastenau, CEO of PetroPharmacol; Dave Coopersmith, CEO of Austral Petroleum, and Fritz Dierbaum, his CFO; Tim Flannery, CEO of BGC Industries; and Peggy Lester, COO of Flint Agrochemical.”

The president narrowed his eyes as he looked at her. “That’s an impressive lineup.” He looked at one of the national security advisors. “What do you make of it?”

The woman, a former Wall Street wunderkind, smiled. “As a group, those companies represent highly diversified holdings, and each has a little problem with too much cash on hand right now. They’re primed to make some serious capital investment.”

President Benson turned his gaze back to Lucy. “And you think there are more heading down there? What’s Cavendish drilling for?”

“Yes, sir. As far as the drilling project, we’re fairly certain it’s for methane hydrate. There has been speculation for years that there is a huge deposit beneath the eastern Caribbean.”

“No proof, though?” He looked from Lucy to the security advisor.

The other woman cleared her throat. “I don’t mean to be flippant, sir,
but that’s very deep water. Designing a rig for experimentation is a high-risk, extremely expensive proposition. No company wants to undertake it alone. There are several consortia considering it now but their plans are still only on paper.”

“But you think Dennis the Menace is doing it?” the president asked, more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice.

Lucy didn’t smile. “Yes, we do, sir. We haven’t been able to penetrate security on the island, but we’ve been tracking purchases and shipping manifests for years, and monitoring everything we can via satellite. If he’s not already drilling, he’s preparing to drill for something that’s not oil or natural gas. We’re sure of that.”

“How the hell can we not know what he’s doing?” The president turned to the chief of naval operations, who was seated to his right. “You people keep telling me and Congress and everyone else who will listen that we have state-of-the-art equipment that can identify anything that moves underwater. Why the hell don’t we know what that bastard is doing fifty miles off our coast? And I don’t want to hear that his equipment is better than ours.”

To his credit, the admiral didn’t visibly react to the president’s anger. “It’s not just about the equipment and technology, sir, although those are certainly significant to the situation. President Cavendish—”

“
Don’t call him that
. That island is all of, what, four square miles?” the president snapped. “I don’t give a shit if he wears a crown and calls himself emperor of the dolphins. It’s a fucking banana republic with a constituency of one.”

No one in the room so much as let out a breath, although Lucy was hard-pressed not to laugh.

“Taino is a very small island, sir, about thirty-two square miles, but it’s well secured,” the admiral replied evenly. “Taino’s security forces are relatively small but very highly trained, from what we know. He’s picked from among the best, sir. SEALs, Delta Force, Mossad, the Royal Navy. They guard a relatively small area and they use technology that we’re still trying to deploy. Cavendish has been able to establish an extremely high level of situational awareness. His entire outfit is tight and fluid, sir, just like a SEAL team. It can adapt to meet threats almost as they occur. And we’re his biggest threat.”

“If I can add to what the admiral said, sir,” Lucy interjected, “we’ve been monitoring him as heavily as we can. He knows it, too, and has taken
a lot of steps to deflect our interest and obscure what he’s doing. It doesn’t hurt that his secretary of national security is extremely clever.”

“So is everyone in this room, Lucy, and everyone in our intelligence services,” the president replied with no small amount of acid. “Your people can tell me what Putin ate for breakfast and what time Chavez got out of bed, so I find it damned hard to believe they can’t tell me what Dennis Cavendish is drilling for on the seabed
fifty God-damned miles off Marathon Key
. What is he doing that we can’t fucking find out what he’s up to?” He pulled in a hard breath. “That prick has been a serious pain in this country’s ass for fifteen years. I want to know what the hell he’s up to.”

Lucy met the president’s angry eyes. “I understand that, sir. Part of the difficulty in determining what he’s doing is that for more than ten years now he’s had a heavy security net set up just inside the boundaries of his territorial waters—”

“A net? What the hell does that mean? Like some giant fishing net?”

“In some respects, yes, sir. It’s along the lines of the antisubmarine nets used to secure strategic ports during World War II. In those situations, the nets were raised and lowered, or moved on booms to allow transit. Cavendish has a permanently secured mesh of electronic sensors. In some places it’s a physical mesh, almost like a flexible chain-link fence. In most areas it’s just a series of huge sensor arrays. They can identify whatever passes near them—similar to the instruments we’ve been putting on our ships for the last few years. They use sonar, radar, temperature differentials, water displacement, 3-D mapping, electronic frequency and wavelength signatures—the full gamut of identification technologies. He’s deployed them around the entire circumference of the island’s territorial waters.”

The president stared at her in silence for a moment, as did everyone else in the room.

“Lucy, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said eventually.

“I assure you, sir, I’m not.”

“He’s built an underwater fence around his entire island? How deep is it?”

“A fence is a reasonable analogy, but it’s actually primarily an extensive sensor array. And from what we’ve been able to determine, it does encircle the island from close to the sea surface to the seafloor,” she said, explaining as if she hadn’t just said the same thing seconds before.

Another brief silence filled the room.

“Lucy, Taino is a volcanic island on the edge of a Caribbean abyss. The water around that island is thousands of feet deep—” Katy Wirth began.

Lucy refused to react to the patronizing tone. “Yes, Madam Secretary, you’re right. The island does sit at the edge of an abyss. The deepest part that’s been mapped sits at approximately four thousand feet.” She shifted her attention back to the president, who didn’t seem convinced. “This barrier is extraordinary in the extreme, sir. The arrays took years, perhaps a decade, to build and deploy, and the project was probably under development long before the U.S. became interested in what Dennis Cavendish was doing on his little island. For years after he bought that island and declared sovereignty, he was written off as another eccentric billionaire with some eco-issues. There have been enough of them.” She shrugged. “Even when he built a deepwater port and began bringing in people and equipment, our services took note of it but never bothered to do the math, so to speak.”

“Why can’t we get in there? We’ve got people everywhere else on the planet. Why not there?” President Benson demanded.

“Because his secretary of national security, Victoria Clark, is damned close to a genius when it comes to security, sir, if you’ll pardon my language. While we haven’t been able to penetrate the organization, we’ve been able to determine who he has working for him on the island and at his embassy here in Washington. We’ve collected background data on them and tried to piece it together with the satellite and environmental data we’ve collected to figure out what he’s up to. The personnel list of Cavendish’s Climate Research Institute reads like a Who’s Who of academic and industrial brain power. Marine architects, engineers from every discipline, informatics and computer geeks, physicists, hydrogeologists, marine biologists—you name it. Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Oxford. They’re from everywhere. It’s an international brain trust.” Lucy paused and looked the president straight in the eyes. “They’re also all single, and nearly everyone of them fits the clinical definition of having Asperger’s syndrome.”

The president frowned at her. “What’s that?”

Lucy let the faintest hint of a smile appear on her face. “Generally speaking, it’s a variation of autism that’s broadly characterized by low emotional involvement, poor social skills, rigid, repetitive behaviors, and a propensity to develop an intense, narrow focus on specific subjects. It’s a pretty good set of traits to have in a group of geniuses whom you want to work nonstop for a few years on a small island where there’s nothing much to do but work. It
presents an extra challenge for us, though. We’ll eventually infiltrate Cavendish’s organization, but these individuals will be difficult to turn. What we consider social norms aren’t typically normal for them. They operate on different wavelengths, so to speak, and each person’s wavelength will be different from the next.”

The silence in the room was only broken by the gradually louder noise of
Marine One
’s rotors slicing the air as it came to a rest on the lawn beyond the walls of the White House.

“Okay, we’re done,” the president announced and stood up, causing everyone else in the room to get to their feet. “See you next week.”

Lucy blinked as she watched the president walk through the doors and wondered if she was the only person in the room who thought what she’d just said was important.

8:00
A.M.
, Saturday, October 25, Miami, Florida

Garner Blaylock watched Wendy walk down the concrete steps leading to the trash-strewn parking lot of the slummy apartment complex. It wasn’t her knife-creased pilot’s uniform that made her look so out of place, it was just her. She was one of those people who had never and would never fit in anywhere.

Lucky, that
.

He watched her cross the lot, musing not for the first time that her stride was the farthest thing from feminine, from natural, that he’d ever witnessed. And her posture so erect one could easily infer she had a steel rod running from her flat, boyish ass to her socially calcified brain.

She didn’t turn around to see if he was there, which was a good sign. She only glanced up briefly after she had opened her car door. Her grim, tight smile told him everything he needed to know.

She was going to follow through.

He returned her look with a warm, encouraging smile buttressed with an abbreviated nod, and watched her start the car. When she had driven out of sight, his smile disappeared and was replaced with a cold sneer.

What a clueless, miserable whore
.

Closing the door, Garner narrowly avoided stepping on a two-inch-long palmetto bug that skittered across his path. He waited until the creature was safely out of his way before he headed to the cheap apartment’s puny bathroom, stripping off his worn T-shirt and shorts as he walked.

Killing helpless creatures, even those despised by most people, was something he avoided. Those creatures simply lived and each in its own way kept the world working as smoothly, as elegantly as it should. They ate what Nature intended them to eat, functioned the way Nature intended them to function, and met their fate with grace.

Garner had realized long ago that the dominance of the so-called highest-order species was evidence that evolution had exceeded its utility. Humans had the most evolved cognitive abilities, but wasted them on pursuits that ranged from stupid to criminal, and which extended in scope to the outer edges of horror. Only humans chose to use their so-called intelligence to thwart Nature or harm the helpless; only humans killed in cold blood. Only humans needed weapons; only humans started wars; only humans could destroy the Earth.