Frozen Fire (51 page)

Horrified, humiliated, Garner tried to scream, to curse. He felt his mouth opening, his vocal cords straining, but he made no sound. He watched in spastic, involuntary silence as the smirking American folded his arms across his chest and continued to observe his descent into Hell.

The spasms became more frequent, more violent, and more painful until
Garner would have been screaming for mercy if he’d had a voice. And though every single muscle in his body was convulsing madly and continuously, he remained conscious, aware of every unbearably horrific motion, every agonizing twitch.

Slightly less than an hour after he’d taken that fatal mouthful of food, Garner’s body arced in one last, massive, shaking paroxysm and then went completely still, locked into instant, convoluted rigor mortis.

The American case officer waited for a minute or two to see if there would be any more movement, then went over and poked the tip of his shoe into Garner’s groin with no small force. The body moved the way a fallen log would—stiffly and as a whole. Satisfied, the agent put on his fake glasses, resumed the slouched, tentative posture of his geeky British alter ego, Cyril Ponsonby, and slunk out of the room.

Closing the door carefully behind him, he gave the incurious guards an exasperated look, complete with a roll of his eyes, and walked down the corridor. He had forty minutes to meet his contact and get the hell out of Dodge.

8:10
A.M.,
Monday, October 27, the White House, Washington, D.C.

The man needs to take a course in how to make friends and influence people
.

Lucy blinked at Ken Proust, the president’s campaign manager and unchallenged political power house. His face was dark red and entirely too close to her own as he loomed over her as she sat in a chair in his West Wing office. His ranting at Lucy was accompanied by a jabbing index finger and stagnant, coffee-laced breath.

She’d stopped listening to him several minutes ago, and was thinking that if he fell over from a heart attack right now, she might have to forget she’d ever learned CPR.

“Did you hear me?” he bellowed.

She looked up and calmly met his eyes. “Yes, I heard you, Ken. Now would you please step back and get your finger out of my face before I rip it off and hand it back to you?”

Startled, he followed her advice immediately and, from the look of it, instinctively.

Before he could resume his place inside her personal space, Lucy rose to her feet, moved away from the chair, and assessed him coolly. “Thank you. Now, Ken, yes, I did hear everything you said. I’m wondering, however, if
you’ve heard anything I’ve been saying. Let me recap: There are bodies being discovered all along the Upper Keys—in homes, on the beaches, in boats out on the water. Dead marine life is washing up on the beaches, and dead wildlife is being found everywhere else. First responders are in full hazmat gear, moving slowly through affected areas on foot and in golf carts. It’s the scenario I described to you last night.”

She paused. “An unexpected change of wind speed and direction has dispersed the methane to a still-high but no longer lethal concentration. It is still, however, at a concentration that will support exothermic combustion.” She stopped and looked at him. “That means fire, Ken. Very, very hot fire that starts with a big boom.”

His face turned a darker shade of red but she continued before he could get a word out.

“Overnight, the mixture of the methane and the dennisium has encouraged the production of phyrruluxine, which is both highly toxic and highly combustible. So people are still dying. That’s the story with the Upper Keys. Reports are coming in of people getting sick in areas between the Keys and Miami, Ken, places like Leisure City and the area around the former Homestead Air Force Base. Sound familiar? The same people who got flattened by Hurricane Andrew, what, fifteen years ago?” she snapped. “They’re not rich voters, Ken, but they’re the ones who make great headlines. Think babies, Ken,” she said, taking a step closer to him. “Think trailer parks and elementary schools and senior centers.”

He took another abrupt step backward.

“They’re not dying, thankfully, not yet, just experiencing varying degrees of respiratory distress. There’ve been reports of large, spontaneous fires here and there, Ken. Have you seen the morning news shows? The talking heads are falling over themselves, not knowing what to rant about first.”

Lucy took another step toward him and Ken actually stumbled as he moved away from her. “I told the president last night in unambiguous terms that this is what we would be facing. You were in the room when I did. He gave me carte blanche, Ken. You heard that, too. So tell me why you’re blocking me at every move?”

“The media are crawling up my ass, Lucy,” he snarled. “The governor of Florida has called out the National Guard. The tourism industry is already screaming about lawsuits. There’s talk of opening a Senate investigation.”

“There’s no need for one. We know exactly what happened and who did it. And who did what about it,” she added pointedly.

“Listen, Lucy, this is your problem. You’re a key member of the cabinet. There’s a national election in a little over a week.”

“I’ve got news for you, Ken: That’s not your biggest problem,” she snapped. “Your inability to see daylight when you look out through your own asshole is the problem. People are dying, Ken.
And you’re not letting the president save them
.”

He made a visible effort to calm himself, swiping a chubby hand over his shiny, sweaty face. “Germ warfare is not the answer.”

Her hands itched to grab the Montblanc pen he always kept in his breast pocket and jab it through his heart.

She took a breath. “Then what
is
the answer? People are getting sick and dying, and it looks like we’re not doing anything. Like the
president
isn’t doing anything.”

He stared at her. It was like being watched by the devil.

“I’ve got the microbes and the people who know what to do with them on their way to the region,” she said quietly. “All I need now is the president’s okay to go ahead.”

“We need—”

“I need the president’s approval, Ken” she repeated slowly, returning his glare with a far more effective one of her own. “If I don’t get it—and get it right now—I’m resigning, effective immediately. And I’ll go public. I’ll hold a press conference on Pennsylvania Avenue with the White House as a backdrop. Does that help your decision-making process, Ken?”

Lucy watched the color in his face increase to an almost muddy hue.

“You bitch. I’m going to make sure you regret this,” he snarled.

“You do that, Ken,” she said coldly as she turned to leave the room. “In the meantime, I’ll make sure you still have an electorate to lie to in South Florida.”

8:40
A.M.,
Monday, October 27, Taino

Dennis pulled the regulator out of his mouth, shut off the air tank’s valve, and dropped to the ground. Not even bothering to slide the tanks off his back, he leaned against the curved trunk of a coconut palm and took a few deep breaths of the sweet, heavy, island air. With a justified grin, he acknowledged that he’d completed his task just as the last of the air tanks was running low, and that was in spite of his efforts to keep his pace relaxed and his breathing easy as he’d made his way back and forth from the bunker into the dead zone.

He was proud of what he’d accomplished in three hours. The hundreds of books and other papers he’d carried out of the bunker’s library and down into the poisoned part of the forest would be enough dry fuel to get things started. He’d laid them open on their spines in a long path that snaked from the edge of the death zone to well into it. Then, just in case the concentration of methane wasn’t high enough to trigger or sustain combustion, he’d doused the books with the liquid propane that had been stored in the bunker to keep the emergency generators running.

The exertion, even the loss of his books, would be worth it. The methane flowing into the atmosphere would be burned off, breaking down into carbon
dioxide and water. And it would continue to burn off until the source was removed—until the broken pipeline was sealed.

That task he would likely have to leave to others. No doubt there would be plenty of governments willing to attempt it if for no other reason than to gain access to the site of
Atlantis
and harvest his technology, if not his crystals.

After allowing himself a few more moments of self-congratulatory relaxation after his grueling workout, Dennis gave a huge yawn and shut his eyes, just for a moment. But more than forty-eight high-stress hours with little rest took their toll and he fell asleep in a matter of seconds.

8:37
A.M.,
Monday, October 27, approaching the USS
Eutaw Springs
, off the coast of Taino

“What the hell am I doing here?”

Victoria heard Sam’s muttering over the roar of the engines and rotors only because she was seated right next to him. They and Marty Collins were the only civilian passengers on the large navy he li cop ter that was ferrying them out to the ship stationed off Taino. They had just received official word that the microbes had arrived on the ship and were being secured.

“Saving the world as we know it?” she replied with a tense smile and received a quick glance in response.

“Kinda hard to do when you’re about to toss your cookies.”

She shrugged and refrained from patting his knee. She wasn’t feeling too well herself. The chopper wasn’t built for comfort.

“Is that Taino?” he asked, pointing out the small window.

Victoria turned, then nodded, a hard lump forming in her throat. She hadn’t anticipated the emotion that rushed through her at the sight of the small slash of green edged by beaches of dark gray volcanic sand and frills of white breakers, by the miles of water that was green and translucent as sea glass, then rapidly turned to the darkest blue.

That blue marked the trenches that held the object of Dennis’s dark desire.

Victoria closed her eyes briefly. Somewhere on the other side of the island lay the murderous patch of foaming sea.

“Then that must be the ship we’re headin’ to. Looks too damned small from up here.”

She opened them at Sam’s words and craned her neck to see a large military ship set slightly apart from the flotilla of boats of every description, which hugged the invisible boundary line of Taino’s national waters.

They began to descend, closing in on the ship rapidly, and Victoria could see several other military ships flying other flags, as well as yachts, sailboats, fishing boats—

Moments later they came to a rocking stop on the
Eutaw Springs’s
helipad. They had barely stepped out of the chopper before being hustled on a winding journey through a maze of narrow gray corridors and shallow doorways and down two sets of steep, compact iron stairs. They eventually reached a reasonably large conference room filled with banks of computers and flat-screen monitors, and a lot of busy, silent people. No one looked up when they walked in.

Another surprisingly strong wave of emotion swept over Victoria as the memory of her last trip to the operations center of
Atlantis
crashed into the front of her mind. That had been just over forty-eight hours ago. Since then, everyone who had been there with her had died. And she’d been branded a traitor by Dennis and, less directly, by Tom Taylor and Lucy Denton.

Damn them all
.

She clenched her fists and started a slow count. By the time she reached five, she had unclenched her hands. By the time she reached twelve, Victoria felt calm. She looked up to see Sam watching her with a concerned look on his face.

“How’s your stomach?” she asked quickly.

“Better than expected. You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she whispered with a smile and looked away.

The commander of the ship, a tight-jawed, white-haired man who obviously hadn’t taken any shit from anyone in a very long time, stood up from his place at the center table. The civilians’ escorts snapped to attention and saluted him. He nodded in acknowledgment and they relaxed.

“Ms. Clark, Dr. Briscoe, Dr. Collins, welcome aboard the USS
Eutaw Springs
. I’m Commander Duffy,” he said, shaking their hands.

He invited them to sit down and immediately turned to Sam. “Dr. Briscoe, I understand you’re the one who came up with this plan.”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Is it going to work?”

Sam nodded. “The last time I checked the data, everything was behaving just as we modeled it, sir. The temperature, the currents. We’ve triple-checked the crustal structure using the most recent images that we have access to, and Marty here was studying reports of drilled cores for a good part of the night. I believe it will work, sir. I believe it will.”

The commander nodded. “Good. The payloads are being installed on the torpedoes and the missiles. I’ll get the current water and air data for you so that you can make sure all the conditions are still within acceptable parameters.” He turned away to speak to a uniformed woman.

Moments later, the woman came forward and turned on the monitors on the table in front of them. She briefly explained the layers of windows that appeared, each of which displayed different data that updated itself in real time. Sam and Marty both went a little slack-jawed with admiration as they flicked through the screens.

Victoria looked around the room, too tense to be bored, but knowing she was just extra weight until the operation was over and they could safely gain access to Taino. In a brief, private conversation, Lucy had made it clear to Victoria that she was only there to be the liaison with Taino, should one be needed—in other words, if there was anyone left alive on the island to give orders to. Whether anyone was alive or not, Victoria was to be the one to let the fox into the henhouse, the one who would let the American military in to see and steal pretty much whatever they wanted from Dennis’s files and those of the Climate Research Institute. Apparently what she’d already given them wasn’t nearly enough. They wanted everything. And she had to help them.