Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  The older man frowned slightly. “Now it’s starting to sound like a damned rendition. Just what do you think he’s going to do?”

  “We fully expect him to cooperate, sir, we’re just taking reasonable precautions.” Gianni paused and rolled the snifter slowly between his hands, warming the brandy and releasing more of its perfume. “It’s an extremely sensitive situation and I won’t deny that it has the potential for volatility. As you know, sir, before I came to you with this issue, when we were just beginning to have suspicions that something wasn’t right, we brought in a team of psychiatrists to review Dr. Simpson’s personnel profile. They determined that his emotional attachment to the entire concept of TESLA has shifted from reasonable to extreme. Their assessment held cause for concern on several levels, so I took the report to our director of security, and this is the plan she recommended.” He took a sip, savoring it. “The crews will be fully briefed—”

  “Not Tess? You’re not going to brief her on the situation?”

  Gianni shrugged. “I don’t want to make her anxious. Besides, if Simpson does act out, it won’t be her problem. The team going down there knows what they’re doing and what they’re there for.”

  Croyden’s frown deepened. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  Gianni shifted forward in the chair to rest his elbows on his knees. “We don’t have much of a choice, sir. We need Simpson out of there. We know he’s carrying out assignments from the Pentagon, assignments that we haven’t authorized and, in the case of Afghanistan, that both you and I specifically refused.” He took a deep breath. “Please trust me, sir, when I say that no one’s actions will be overt. Everything will be discreet and no one, including Dr. Simpson, will get the impression that he’s being taken into custody. Even in the event of hesitation on his part, Dr. Simpson won’t be harmed. The security team will be armed with Tasers and a variety of tranquilizers and sedatives, if needed. But all of that is only backup in the event of a worst-case scenario. Whatever goes down will be handled by the security team with a minimum of fuss.”

  “I’m not reassured, Gianni.”

  “There’s no other way to handle this, sir. We asked him to come to Connecticut. He refused.”

  After a long moment, the chairman nodded, apparently satisfied. “All right. Anything else?”

  Gianni paused briefly. “I think we need to discuss what our response will be when the Pentagon learns that they’ve lost such a valuable asset.”

  “You mean when the secretary of defense finds out, Gianni. The Pentagon has no idea that it ever had such an asset,” the chairman said with a smile. He lifted his snifter in salute and drank deeply from it without ever breaking eye contact.

  After a split second of hesitation, Gianni returned the smile and the toast, ignoring the dark chill that ran through him.

  CHAPTER 4

  Three weeks later

  Nik Forde sat in his small office on the top floor of the three-story TESLA habitat, listening to the wind howl on the other side of the inches-thick, impact-proof window to his left. The heavy blackout curtain was closed, as it had been for at least a month and would continue to be for much of the austral winter. He didn’t keep it closed to keep out prying eyes—there were none—but to add a small extra layer of insulation against the brutal weather and to keep the light inside. The less interference the humans provided to their environment, the more pure the results of their work would be.

  And he wanted his next effort to go off without a hitch.

  Smiling, humming an off-key version of “Eleanor Rigby,” Nik tapped away at his keyboard, responding to yet another email from his ex-wife, Eleanor Ryder—Ms. Eleanor Ryder, soon to be Mrs. Eleanor Ryder-Pentson—who had been the love of his life. It had been love at first sight, from the moment they met in the Harvard Coop—she a clerk, he a guest lecturer at nearby MIT—until the day she turned into a serious pain in his ass. That latter moment happened, not coincidentally, right about the time he’d taken a job in the very nerve center of the lower forty-eight, Washington, D.C. Right about the time she’d taken a job with a lobbying firm on K Street. Right about the time she’d met real power and real money and lost her taste for what she’d always affectionately called Nik’s “geeky charm,” preferring instead the oozy smarm of high-powered dairy lobbyist—Nik called him the Milk Man—Mitchell Pentson. Right about the time Nik decided to take off for the Ice.

  Best decision he’d ever made.

  “Sure, take his name. You never took mine. You said people would laugh, that Ryder-Forde sounded too much like a rodeo stunt. Well, I’ve got news for you, honey, Ryder-Pentson sounds like the kind of medical procedure you don’t discuss over dinner,” he muttered as he tapped away at his keyboard. “We’ll see about the last laugh.”

  He checked coordinates on the screen to his left and typed them into the fields appearing on the screen in front of him. The high-altitude instability he was creating would push a wide swath of turbulence through the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, culminating in a strong, late-season tropical storm centered near the island of Fiji. Nik had been orchestrating weather systems for years, so whipping up this kind of storm was child’s play. Or would be if the child were a prodigy with a pair of Ph.D.s trailing after his name.

  He frowned at the screen. “I have a conscience. My intent is not malicious, it’s—”

  Leaning back in his chair, Nik looked at the ceiling and the collage of photos he’d taped there. They were of nacreous clouds, beautiful and bizarre formations that only happen during extreme cold, when the nitric and sulfuric acids in the air mix with ice in the atmosphere to make huge clouds with the soft, blurred colors of mother-of-pearl. He’d taken the pictures himself a few weeks earlier as the Antarctic weather turned from autumn to winter. His office ceiling was the best place to keep them. Nik did a lot of staring at the ceiling while he worked.

  “My intent isn’t malicious,” he repeated, “this storm is meant to … inspire … okay, it’s meant to inspire fear. Healthy fear.” He paused again. “Okay, it’s meant to scare the hell out of her, but it’s not going to bring down her plane or anything else. Yes, I’m being immature, if not petty, and yes, I’m doing it because I can. That’s honesty. Done. No harm, no foul.” He brought his chair upright and, with a delighted grin, tapped in the last few commands, instructing the computer to store the algorithm in a queue and activate it in twelve hours. Right when the Milk Man and the newly minted Mrs. Ryder-Pentson—a very nervous flier—would be cruising at 38,000 feet, nuzzling in their first-class seats. Unless Ellie had changed dramatically, they’d already be into their second bottle of Veuve Clicquot. The Milk Man would be celebrating the start of their three-week South Pacific honeymoon. Ellie would be trying to make it through the flight.

  Nik turned to the third monitor on his desk, the one displaying the open email application, and began typing.

  Ellie, have a great time on your honeymoon. I wish you and

  He paused, running through all the descriptive phrases he’d like to use, and reluctantly settled on the only politically correct word.

  Mitchell all the best.

  Regards, Nik

  With a single click, the polite and ostensibly friendly message flashed through cyberspace, heading for Ellie’s iPhone, her office computer, and the laptop sitting on Ellie’s desk in her—and formerly Nik’s—historic town house in Alexandria, Virginia.

  Sitting back, Nik let satisfaction wash over him as he addressed the screen. “Bon voyage, Eleanor. Good thing you got such a good deal on the hotel. Enjoy the flight. Let me know how that motion-sickness patch you’ll be wearing works out for you.”

  * * *

  Greg Simpson stared at the email on the screen in front of him. The reassuringly green logo—balanced scales bearing the earth on one side and a stylized lab beaker on the other—seemed to sway. The message’s dark type blurred, its words merging into smudges as their meaning burned its way through his frontal lobe. His hands curled
into fists.

  You are not going to take TESLA away from me.

  But he knew they were going to try. His refusals, his unambiguous, adamant refusals to step aside, to take on “new projects,” had fallen on deaf ears.

  This most recent message from Croyden Flint thanked him for helping Flint AgroChemical become the leader in the field of weather manipulation in one sentence and booted him out the door of TESLA in the next. The presumption and the arrogance in the brief note were a bitter dose to swallow, all the more because Greg knew the wording was so deliberate, so meticulously crafted for maximum effect.

  “Help? No, I didn’t help Flint become the leader in the field. I made Flint the leader,” Greg whispered into the darkness of his office. “You supplied nothing but money, Croyden. Not the vision. Not the genius. Not the perseverance. Just the empty, lifeless dollars. And you’ll see how far that gets you now.”

  Greg had spent decades at HAARP enduring Arctic winters, military supervisors, and government budget wars, all of which had been unpleasant but necessary means to achieving his goal. Trading one frigid Hell for another, he’d spent the last six years in the coldest, most inhospitable place on earth—the interior of Antarctica, a few hundred miles from the South Pole, where at the height of summer the temperature was negative thirty degrees Fahrenheit. He’d endured the continent’s isolation, the desolation, the sensory deprivation, even the occasional lack of commitment from colleagues, and he’d triumphed over all of it just to get his creation to its current state. Developing and running TESLA was the culmination of his life’s dream and his life’s work. It didn’t matter who paid for it, nor would it matter where Greg stood on the globe: TESLA was his. No one—nothing—could change that.

  TESLA’s powerful transmitters had gone fully operational just one year ago, but Greg had engaged in live tests for several years before that. Since then he, through TESLA, had been getting nature to do exactly what he wanted it to do, what Flint’s executives wanted it to do.

  And, increasingly, what the Pentagon wanted it to do.

  That was about to change.

  Greg swiveled to face the small screen of his personal laptop and opened a private email application that gave him a secure link to a top-secret military satellite set in a low-earth polar orbit. He patiently worked through the four password-protected portals that led him to the window he needed. The message he typed was brief and was encrypted before it was sent.

  Call me. Now.

  No greeting was necessary, no closing offered. The person receiving the message, a high-ranking officer in the Pentagon’s E-ring, would not be pleased at receiving, rather than giving, an order, but Greg didn’t care about that. Only his own displeasure mattered. His own fury.

  To most of the fiscal-minded clowns occupying the C-suite at Flint, TESLA was the means to unimaginably vast power and unimaginably large profits, and nothing more. But the chairman, who’d learned his rapacious trade at the knee of his robber-baron grandfather, had never let himself be blinded by altruism, however warped. Croyden Flint had always known that the huge, secret array of transmitters whose development he was funding would not only micromanage the world’s weather—its growing seasons, monsoons, droughts, and floods, even its earthquakes and tsunamis, when needed—but would have a second, even more secret purpose: for the right price, TESLA could be the Pentagon’s shiniest new toy, its ultimate weapon.

  And the unholy alliance had been forged.

  Greg had discovered the truth about this arrangement a few months after the array came on line, when a deliberately bland, deliberately forgettable visitor had arrived for a quick and unforgettable visit, having nearly circumnavigated the globe to have a one-hour conversation with him. This high-level envoy from the Pentagon made Greg an offer he would have been a fool to refuse: occasionally, secretly, allow the military to sidestep its existing arrangement with Croyden Flint and come to him directly with requests. All he had to do was trigger an occasional weather or geophysical event when, where, and how the government asked him to … in exchange for whatever he wanted. Money. An invitation to become a JASON. A Nobel Prize.

  He’d settled for all three, plus immunity. Irrevocable, complete, eternal immunity from any culpability for his actions.

  And that had set him free.

  Greg had been reasonably content in his role as the science director at the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, known as HAARP, the publicly acknowledged military installation in Alaska focused on applied ionospheric research. There, he’d had access to research materials he’d only dreamed of: the original papers of the most ground-breaking visionary in modern electromagnetics, Nikola Tesla.

  Greg had studied the notes and drawings minutely, committing every word, every diagram, every equation to memory, and filling in critical gaps from his own knowledge and imagination. Over time, he’d drafted what he believed was the key to the most magnificent engine in existence: the weather. He’d kept his ideas to himself, burying small segments of his hypotheses in larger experiments that were then tested, but never letting anyone know that he was forming a larger, much different, focus. He’d heard too many stories—some real, some probably not—of how badly the government had treated Tesla, and the tales resonated too closely with his own experiences. He wasn’t about to squander his genius.

  Then Croyden Flint offered him the opportunity to devise the master plan for a new weather research installation, the first of its kind. The old man had promised him everything he’d ever wanted, if Greg would create a system that enabled Flint to exploit agricultural markets by controlling the ultimate means of production: regional weather on a global scale.

  Greg had accepted the offer without hesitation, and he’d delivered the goods on time. After two high-intensity years spent planning and five more spent building and testing every aspect of the installation, the results had been perfect, inflating the wildest dreams of the executives and bringing to fruition Flint’s three-generation quest for market domination. Then, a year ago, TESLA, fully operational and completely flawless, had been given the go-ahead to come on line.

  The executives, immensely proud that their investment had been worthwhile, viewed themselves without irony as the most magnanimous of corporate stewards. By moving high and low pressure systems around the world, by stopping, starting, and diverting storms, TESLA allowed Flint AgroChemical to moderate rainfall, relieving pressure on critical water supplies. Delusions of godlike grandeur had the executives directing Greg’s team to stave off floods and droughts, saving lives and reversing desertification. All the while, they crowed privately to themselves and one another about their ability to enhance sustainable worldwide agricultural food production.

  By diminishing the awesome power of cyclonic storms, the executives saw their actions as selfless opportunities to give battered populations and economies a chance to recover and rebuild. Of course, Flint made huge profits every step of the way. From betting on weather-related outcomes in the stock market, to increasing sales of seed and the pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers required to make genetically modified crops grow, to buying and selling those perfect crops grown under perfect conditions, the executives took advantage of every possible mechanism to reap their just rewards.

  The chairman, who had always understood the larger perspective, saw to it that the company reaped the unjust rewards as well. Croyden took a great deal of pleasure in the downfall of Flint’s competition as his enemies lost ships full of goods to storms at sea, as their crops and customers were lost to the capriciousness of nature, when prices for their primary crops went into freefall as markets suffered from surpluses due to weather that was too good to be true.

  TESLA’s atmospheric “adjustments,” as Croyden liked to call them, were untraceable, and the operations were conducted so neatly and at such a distance from the firm’s Connecticut headquarters, that they quickly became mundane; the consistently perfect outcomes came to be viewed as simply the well-deserved return on
a $250 million investment in “agricultural research,” as Flint’s public relations machine modestly described it.

  Greg’s Pentagon visitor had warned him that the executives—that band of pathetic profiteers—wanted to oust him. Greg had dismissed the warning as a ploy; months went by in peace, months in which Greg worked for two masters, sometimes for the same ends, sometimes for opposite results. And then it happened. Flint had begun making noise about “bringing him home.” He’d pushed back, of course, and that had ended the conversation. Until today, until a moment ago, when Croyden told him flatly that they were bringing him off the Ice, transferring him to the warmth of the corporate offices overlooking the Long Island Sound, where he would develop other projects.

  Greg smiled. What fools they were, to think that he’d agree, to think there could be other projects of greater importance, of greater impact, than TESLA. Their lives were petty, as were their goals. But his only goal in life had been to master the weather. There was no greater goal.

  And he’d achieved it.

  He, Greg Simpson, and his handpicked team had harnessed the immense power of the earth, something Man had tried to do for millennia by offering up prayers and penance, by deploying methods ranging from live sacrifices to cloud seeding. For centuries, humans had understood that weather was a critical variable in the outcome of wars—both the military and political varieties. Across time and civilizations, the gods of weather and war had been beseeched by the oppressed and appeased by the victors. Geniuses and madmen alike had devised plots and plans in their efforts to affect the weather, but none had ever succeeded in wresting control of the weather from the very forces that direct it.

  Until now.

  Greg’s team had turned Nature itself into the last, best weapon in the world’s history, the ultimate force multiplier. Severe weather everywhere was created and steered, and then dissipated when the goal had been achieved—or the lesson learned. One large earthquake had shown the world that a self-proclaimed superpower really wasn’t one at all.