Dry Ice

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

“I imagine Greg does,” he replied drily. “Like I said, we’re not seeing the full package. Frankly, it’s the ugliest set of strings you ever saw. Convoluted, extraordinarily complex.” He shook his head. “They’re a mess.”

  “Okay. Let’s back up for a minute,” she said, folding her hands on the table in front of her and looking at Nik again. “The simultaneous and consecutive—explain that to me.”

  Nik slid off the table and into the chair to her left. “Multiple locations around the world. We don’t know where; what looks to be the code for the coordinates is a mess of spaghetti code. Whoever wrote it intentionally made it difficult to decipher. Maybe the coordinates are randomly generated.” He shrugged. “We haven’t figured that out yet. With the geocoordinates disarrayed—”

  “Not anymore.”

  “What?”

  “When the comms downlink came back on line, the coordinate software reshuffled itself and everything seems to be back in order. I think Pam’s a little wigged out about it.”

  Nik frowned at her. “And you’re not?”

  “Why would that get me stressed any more than anything else that’s gone on since I arrived? I’m beginning to think I’m in Oz and Greg’s the man behind the curtain,” Tess replied drily. “It’s crystal clear to me that Greg is playing with us, and he’s never been one for fighting fair, Nik. Everything is a blood sport to him.” She watched him for a moment, then continued, “That second set of bursts created an atmospheric event. Together, the two thirty-millisecond bursts of EHF reordered the bulk volume neutrality but left free-floating pockets of intensely energized, ionized particles. Big storm, Nik. Bad storm. Lightning deaths, flooding, bodies in the streets. You can see the footage yourself, courtesy of Greg.”

  “That’s the one that hit Gander Bay?”

  “That’s where we thought it struck,” she replied. “We were wrong. It hit the northeastern U.S. Ground zero was Greenwich, Connecticut.”

  For just a split second, Nik felt the blood stop running in his veins. “That has to be a fluke, Tess. That kind of pinpoint control—if it was even our storm—”

  “It was.”

  “—is impossible. Even for TESLA.”

  She didn’t say anything right away, just looked at him with a tight smile on her lips, a deep coldness in her eyes. “If you think so, Nik. Tell me more about the algorithms.”

  “They appear to command a set of events to occur simultaneously with one another in disparate locations, then another series triggers at a pre-set interval in the future from the first, in different locations. And so on.”

  Her expression became one of bemused fascination. “You don’t know what it is?”

  “Um, mass devastation on a global scale?” he asked, with no shortage of sarcasm.

  “In a word, yes. It’s also one of the things I was working on before I came here. It was for Flint, but classified—highly classified. Greg shouldn’t have had access to any of it.”

  “Why were you working on—?”

  “I wasn’t aiming for the same outcomes. I was going for synchronous fronts to block storms, not to create simultaneous destruction.”

  “But he got at your research anyway, despite not having official access to it?”

  “Seems like it. Gianni told me Greg had appropriated some of my other research. He must not have known about this. I’m sure he would have told me.”

  Nik leaned back in his chair. “Okay.”

  She watched him for a minute, then shook her head and gave a small, slightly thunderstruck laugh. “Nik,” she said finally, her voice dropping almost to a whisper. “Don’t you get it? This is one of the things Nikola Tesla wrote about, one of the things he theorized about but could never make work, even on paper.” She dropped her gaze to her hands, which were folded on the table in front of her. “I went to Belgrade. I got permission to view his archived papers. There were only hints in them, so I petitioned the CIA—” She glanced up at him. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, so if you squeal on me, I’ll have to kill you. But they let me into their archives, Nik. They let me look at the papers they confiscated when Tesla died.

  “What I found there dovetailed with what I saw in Belgrade. Greg saw them, too. His name was on the register at Langley—can you imagine? The CIA still has paper registers in their archives?” She took a deep breath. “What I saw still wasn’t complete. But somehow Greg seems to have cadged together some of the missing information.”

  She paused for a moment, staring at her hands again, then met his eyes. She was smiling, her eyes alight with a different kind of fire. It transformed her face from pretty to … intriguing.

  “Nik, this is what Tesla was working on when he died. It was … he was so close to a breakthrough. I think Greg put the final pieces together.”

  It was as if someone had flipped a switch in Nik’s brain. There weren’t any words left in his mind; her statement had erased them all. He could only stare at her, realizing after a minute that his mouth had dropped open. He closed it.

  “Nik, did you hear what I said?” she asked, frowning at him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he confessed.

  She blinked at him again and he watched the crease in her brow deepen. “You don’t? But you’re—” She stopped.

  The old burn flared to life, hot and painful as ever, and Nik glared at her.

  “I’m what?” he ground out.

  * * *

  Tess blinked at the sudden anger in Nik’s eyes.

  Uh-oh.

  In her excitement, she’d forgotten what she’d meant to keep to herself—another thing she’d meant to keep to herself.

  It’s too late now. He knows I know.

  She folded her arms in front of her and gave a tight, one-shouldered shrug. “Well, you’re Tesla’s only living male heir, right?”

  “How do you know about that?” he demanded.

  “I’ve heard rumors over the years that you were named for him,” she admitted. “And it’s in your personnel file. But I would have figured it out anyway, Nik, when we stopped in your office for a second this morning and I saw what you had on your wall.” She paused. “I don’t know too many guys who keep handwritten Serbian love poems framed in their office.”

  He frowned at her. “You read Serbian?”

  “And French, Italian, Russian, and Greek. We always had a lot of foreigners traipsing through WhizMer,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “Plus, I studied Serbian for a few months before I went to Belgrade so I’d know what I was looking at when I saw Tesla’s papers.”

  “He sent the poem to my great-grandmother,” Nik said stiffly. “It was his favorite.”

  “They were friends?”

  Nik looked at her without saying a word.

  “Hey, you know all about my sordid past,” she pointed out. “You made out with me fifteen years ago in Greg’s office while he was out doing his special snake dance through the dipole array. I even let you feel me up. I think that qualifies me to get a little insight into your background. Especially considering that it may have just taken on some global security significance of potentially epic proportions. Kind of a tit for tat, as it were?”

  She could see that he was suddenly fighting back a grin.

  “Your tits were great back then.”

  Well, I asked for that, didn’t I?

  “They’re even better now,” she retorted. “But we digress. What I need to know is how Greg put the pieces together. His name wasn’t on the register in Belgrade, Nik, it was only at Langley. That means that I’ve seen more of the old guy’s work than Greg ever did, but I couldn’t put the pieces together. Apparently, Greg did. I need to know if there is anything you told him or showed him that you haven’t told or shown me.”

  He let out a slow breath. “Nikola Tesla was my great-grandfather,” he said slowly, as if the words were being forced out of him. “I know the legend is t
hat he was celibate, famously so, but my great-grandmother was a force of nature. Irish, with a big brain and a pretty smile. She was his secretary when he had a lab on Fifth Avenue in New York City. The lab burned to the ground one night and she, ah, helped him through his grief, which accounted for the appearance of my grandmother.”

  Nik’s words inspired the same tingle Tess had felt when she’d been reading the great man’s papers. “Wow,” she murmured. “Did they get married or anything? I mean, if all the biographers got the celibacy thing wrong—”

  “No marriage. Great-granny was a suffragette, apparently, and remained single. As did my grandmother and my mother. It was an all-female household until I arrived,” he replied. “Happy now? Can I stop?”

  “Are you kidding? What are the other things on your wall?”

  “Just some early sketches. His version of a particle beam weapon, circa 1899 or thereabouts.”

  Tess felt her mouth drop open. “Can I see them?”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Let’s go.”

  He held open the door for her and, ignoring all the startled looks as they passed through the sandbox, they left the control center headed toward Nik’s private office. “So were you named after him, too?”

  “No,” she said with a smile. “You’re not the first person to ask me that, either. I was named after my grandmother Thérèse. It morphed into Tess when I was little because the neighborhood kids didn’t want to deal with the French pronunciation. I thought about going back to it while I lived in France, but by then I’d been Tess too long.”

  Once inside the office, he took the frames from the wall and handed them to her.

  She took them from him gently. “These must be worth a fortune,” she breathed.

  “They would be if I ever wanted to sell them,” he said, his voice as dry as the air outside.

  She sat down on the lone chair in the room and took her time studying them, then held one up. “Do you know what this one is? What it’s for?”

  “No, they’re all jumbled. They’re strays, not a full set of anything.”

  She looked at him, then blinked. “Did you say ‘all’? You have more than these two?”

  He nodded. “They’re layered behind those. I didn’t have time to get them all framed.”

  Tess could feel her pulse kick up a few beats per minute. “May I?”

  He shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  She turned over the frame. The brown paper had been slit and taped shut. “So I’m not the first.”

  “What? Let me see that.” Nik took it out of her hands and stared at the neat seam as if he’d never seen it before.

  Their eyes met then and neither said a word. He handed the frame back to her.

  Okay.

  Tess slid the papers out and studied them, one at a time, then reluctantly returned them to their not-so-secret hiding place. She handed the frames to Nik, who replaced them on the wall.

  “Thanks.”

  “Did they do anything for you?”

  She smiled. “Not much. They really are just a collection of mismatched sketches.” She paused. “Tesla once said he wanted to devise a superweapon that would put an end to all wars. That’s what I’ve read, anyway.”

  “The family stories support that,” Nik replied tightly, and sat down at his desk. “And yet here we are, you and I, trying to get Greg to stop playing with the game-changer great-granddad never quite created.”

  “The irony of it all. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “Not quite.”

  Tess flashed him a look of contrition. “I know I pushed it, Nik. Thanks for trusting me.” She paused. “I won’t repeat anything—”

  “Thanks for that,” he snapped.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was a sore spot. I mean being related to him. If I had, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “It’s not a sore spot. It’s just none of your business. It’s not anyone’s business but mine.”

  Annoyed silence hung thick in the room for a long moment, then Tess sighed and leaned back. “With all due respect, I beg to differ. Your heritage is more than just your business, Nik. You’re the last carrier of the genes of Nikola Tesla. That sort of puts you up there with Caroline Kennedy’s children and Princes William and Harry—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, would you just—”

  She glared at him, frowning. “No, I won’t drop it, if that’s what you were going to say. The man was an icon, Nik, and way, way ahead of his time. He was also undisputedly a genius—”

  “Don’t leave out ‘delusional’ and ‘suffering from dementia,’” he interjected bitterly.

  “Oh, to hell with that. That happened because he didn’t know enough about what he was messing with and let himself be exposed to too much of a good thing, as in electromagnetic radiation,” Tess replied, dismissing his words with a roll of her eyes. “In fact, that’s probably where Greg got the idea to hang out in the antenna fields while they were—”

  “Tess—boss—with all due respect,” he ground out, openly mocking her, “shut the fuck up, okay? It’s really none of your business.”

  “No, thank you, I won’t. I want to know why you haven’t capitalized on it, Nik. The man was famously and openly celibate, and yet here you are. It’s documented. You could have—”

  “I could have what? My own reality TV show?” he snapped. “I don’t need any bullshit from you about my family tree. The identity of my great-grandfather has always seemed to me to be a private matter. I’d appreciate you taking the same view.”

  Tess sat for a moment in silence. “I apologize for bringing it up. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You already said that. Apology accepted. Are we done now?”

  “Maybe.”

  He let out a frustrated breath. “Okay, I have a question for you. What the hell is WhizMer?”

  She cocked her head and squinted at him. “It’s what we called the White Sands Missile Range.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me. My family. All the kids on the range.” She stopped and shrugged. “I thought you knew. I guess I never told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “That you’re not the only one with familial baggage. I’m not the long-lost heir to scary particle-beam blueprints, but I am third-generation spooky in my own way. All four of my grandparents worked on the Manhattan Project. That’s how they met, and how my parents met—they grew up together. I was born on the Missile Range. I don’t mean nearby, I mean on. My mother was out doing some field work when I decided I’d drunk enough amniotic fluid. I was delivered fifty yards outside the base hospital by a geologist assisted by a radiation specialist. I grew up on WhizMer, too.”

  “The military did surface testing of nuclear bombs there. They let people get pregnant?”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Kinda hard to stop them. Anyway, it was a unique childhood. My first complete sentence was ‘It’s need to know, mom.’ In school, the standard excuse, because it was usually true, wasn’t ‘the dog ate my homework,’ it was ‘my dad was helping me and started making notes on the back of the page, and now it’s top-secret, so I can’t turn it in.’ It was like growing up in the dark because of all the security protocols,” she said, trying to wipe the stony expression off his face and maybe get him to smile.

  “I got a security clearance when I was twelve so I could go to my mother’s office and empty her trash can to earn my allowance. And to top it all off, my first and only summer job during college was at the Skunk Works—the place where they tested and built the Stealth Bomber. I’m still not allowed to list it on my CV,” she said with a laugh. “So, are we even now? Can we get back to talking about you?”

  “No,” Nik said, his voice flat with finality.

  “Wrong answer. Does Greg know about great-grandpappy? Has he seen these?”

  “Seems like it. That backing was fine when I moved down here.” He let out a harsh
breath and looked at the ceiling again. “I always figured he knew, and that’s why he tolerated me.”

  His words sent a shiver down Tess’s back.

  “Does he think you channel the genius of Nikola Tesla?”

  “No, I’m pretty sure Greg thinks that he channels Tesla’s genius.” Nik stood up and took two steps away from the desk to lean against the wall. He thrust a hand through his hair, then shoved it into the front pocket of his jeans. “It’s more likely that Greg assumed I have some insider knowledge of Tesla’s theories, but he never asked.”

  Tess cocked her head and looked at him, squinting just a little. “It’s not far-fetched.”

  “The man died nearly seventy years ago.”

  “But you have the sketches. Do you have anything more?”

  Nik shrugged casually. “My great-grandmother worked for him for years, and maintained a close relationship with him after she left. Rumor has it she was with him when he died.”

  Tess didn’t let her excitement show. “I never heard that.”

  “Maybe that’s because only my mother ever said it.”

  “Does that mean there is a cache of documents that no one knows about?”

  Nik shrugged and dodged the question. “My grandmother always said that her mother told her that she made extra copies of the important documents in case something went wrong. Tesla didn’t even question it.”

  “And she kept them? My God, Nik! Where are they?”

  Nik frowned at her. “You just saw them.”

  Tess folded her arms in front and hugged them tight against her ribs. The question wouldn’t budge, weighing on her mind like a dull ache. “Okay, listen, Nik. We both know what’s done here. You mess around with the world’s weather so that fields planted with Flint-engineered crops stay healthy through to harvest. They get enough rain, enough sunshine. Meanwhile Monsanto, ConAgra, Cargill, Bayer, and the rest of the competition don’t feel the same sort of love.” She looked at him. His face was neutral. “Right? Their farms and factories and test fields get trashed by the biggest can of environmental whup-ass the world is ever likely to see. Custom-made by you.”

  “That’s twice you’ve said ‘you,’” Nik interrupted, defensiveness seeping into his voice. “Aren’t you part of this, too? As I recall, you’re a vice president of Flint now.”