Frozen Fire

by Evans, Bill; Jameson, Marianna

  It didn’t matter anyway.

  1:40 A.M., Monday, October 27, Annaba, Algeria

  Arms folded across his chest, Garner rested his ass against the edge of the wide, stone windowsill and looked at the young woman standing a few feet in front of him. Her name was Bridget Malloy, and she was young enough, beautiful enough, and smart enough to do anything she wanted in the world of business. A degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had been followed by a master’s from the London School of Economics. And then, one fine day, two years ago she’d blown off an interview at British Telecom to spontaneously participate in a peaceful demonstration outside an animal research lab.

  It hadn’t taken his staff too much time or too much effort to persuade her to join the ranks of GAIA. Since that day, she had proven her loyalty to the cause over and over again. That steadfastness was one of the reasons Garner had brought Bridget into his inner circle and to this villa. He was sure it was also why she wasn’t complaining about the many inconveniences North Africa had to offer someone used to a high-end, thoroughly Western lifestyle.

  Despite being an American, Bridget Malloy was amazingly adaptable and wonderfully easygoing. She didn’t complain about working around his schedule as he recovered from jet lag. She didn’t complain about the food, or the heat, or having to hide herself beneath traditional Muslim clothing.

  Though Garner had no patience for religion of any sort, he’d nevertheless instructed his women to wear the region’s long robes and head scarves, even on the villa grounds, to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves. The household employees were locals, and the last thing he needed were rumors drifting through the city about any goings-on at the villa, real or imagined. He needed GAIA’s next project to stay under the radar and on schedule.

  Garner shifted position and felt sweat trickle down the side of his face and from underneath his arms. It was the middle of the night, but the air was still hot and the wind was still dry and gritty with the fine sand that found its way everywhere. Neither seemed to bother Bridget. She’d arrived in his suite a few minutes ago, covered from shoulder to foot in a loose-fitting dark blue abaya, her head and neck draped in a lavender hijab.

  But even though she followed his rules without argument, she found ways to make herself comfortable. The moment the guards who had let her into his private office had closed the door behind them, she’d casually let her face veil drop and slipped the lightweight scarf from her head. And as she’d begun debriefing him on the imminent deployment of his latest project, Bridget had slowly been opening the trail of buttons down the front of her long, dark tunic. Stopping after undoing the button just below her waist, Bridget shrugged off the garment designed to protect her modesty and presented Garner with a vision that couldn’t be more Western or more decadent. Every curve, every shadow was visible through compellingly sheer lingerie.

  “Your interpretation of my dress code is as unique as your execution of it is provocative,” Garner said quietly, lifting an eyebrow and letting his gaze drift appreciatively over her body before meeting her eyes again.

  She put her hands on her hips and executed a quick twirl. “I had to show someone. This is the first summer in my life that I haven’t had tan lines.”

  “So I see.”

  “These getups aren’t as uncomfortable as I thought they’d be, even in this heat, but swishing around in all that shapeless fabric makes a girl want to get a little . . . dirty,” she said softly, her voice extending an invitation.

  “In a moment. Business first, unfortunately,” Garner replied lightly. “When will you deploy the malware?”

  Bridget pushed her bottom lip out in a false pout and then laughed immediately, the blinding-white wholesomeness of her smile at odds with her sexiness. “I have already.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, really, Garner. While I’ve been pining for your return, your dirty girl has also been a busy girl.” She pushed her long, loose blond hair over her shoulder, away from her face in a motion imbued with both youthful triumph and the knowing sensuality of a high-priced call girl. “The failure code has already been embedded on corporate e-mail servers all over the world. At a preset time, just a few hours from now, it will insert itself into every attachment that passes through an infected hub and begin to do its business of changing strategic numbers, deleting key files.” She shrugged and sent him another smile. “It’s so nasty, it’s lovely. And completely undetectable.”

  “You’re sure?” Garner asked, getting to his feet and walking toward her slowly.

  “Absolutely. It will bypass every means of detection. We’ve tested it against every piece of antivirus software and antispyware that’s out there, and every known firewall. It’s a randomly self-mutating code, so every generation is different from the last and all are different from one another.” She offered him a subtle, rich laugh. “Pardon my pride, Garner, but it is truly the most superior code ever written. It will drive cyber cops and IT people crazy. There is no pattern to be discovered, it leaves no trail, and it will die off and disappear in twenty-four hours, and no one will even know where to begin looking to see what it has destroyed. And it can never be traced, which means there is no cure for it.”

  “So we can use it again.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.” She brushed away a fly that had landed on her face.

  “And it’s in every organization on the list?”

  Bridget nodded, swatting at another fly.

  “Stop doing that,” Garner said mildly. “Just let them be.”

  With an affectionate roll of her eyes, she complied and then began moving forward to meet him in the center of the airy room, her dark eyes sparkling with a fiendish playfulness.

  “Every petroleum company, every major bank, every shipping and telecom company, agribusiness concern, every company that even dabbles in the pharma sector—everyone, Garner. By the time Western civilization is up and running, our code will be replicating millions of times every minute, burrowing into every level of every one of the companies. By the time the Stock Exchange opens in New York, conservatively fifty million servers will have gone AWOL and will stay that way for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “What about the other code?” he asked.

  “The code that Cyril was working on will take over a few more million systems and launch massive, simultaneous denial-of-service attacks on all the government, corporate, and academic Web sites you listed. The networks will crash, and in the ensuing panic, people will—” She shrugged with a smile, which turned into another laugh. “Do whatever it is you want them to do, I guess.”

  Coming to a stop in front of him, Bridget reached out and unfolded Garner’s arms, then slid into the freed-up space against his chest.

  “I will, too,” she whispered. “But you already know that.”

  “Indeed I do. You don’t give me much of a chance to forget it.” He smiled at her, lowered his mouth to hers and kissed her just long enough, just deeply enough to get a full taste of her. Raising his head, he met her eyes.

  “Hey, I’ve been working hard for you. I deserve more,” she whispered in a soft pout against his lips. “That was a great kiss, but one kiss isn’t enough for me.”

  He slid his hands upward from her waist, lingered over her breasts, then brought his palms up to rest on her shoulders, his thumbs lightly stroking her throat.

  “But one kiss was enough for me. I’d forgotten that the flavor of treachery can be so sweet. Too bad it’s one I’ve never acquired a taste for,” Garner replied and snapped her head back, applying deadly force to the fragile tissue surrounding her windpipe.

  Her fingernails dug into his forearms and her eyes widened with panic as she tried to suck air past his stranglehold.

  “Don’t bother struggling, Bridget. You’re dead,” he said calmly, maintaining the pressure on her throat.

  “Garner—” Her garbled scream was cut off and, even as her hands pulled at his and her long, l
ithe legs connected with his body in a painful, powerful kick, he could tell by the look in her eyes that she knew he was right. She was dead.

  “Don’t worry, love. We’ll let your Washington friends know you died. And why.”

  With a cold smile, Garner added just a bit more pressure and felt her whole body go limp. He held on for a few more seconds, then let go.

  She hit the floor with a heavy thud, a crumpled and ungainly heap of femininity. As he watched, the faint bluish cast quickly faded from her skin.

  Stepping over her, Garner went to the door of the room and opened it. Beckoning to the two armed men who leaned against the courtyard wall a few yards away, Garner pointed at Bridget’s limp, nearly naked form. The men’s eyes followed the gesture, then flicked back to Garner’s face with expressions that were both prurient and wary.

  “She’s an American spy,” he snapped at them in French. “I need her gotten rid of. She’s unconscious. I don’t care what you do with her. Enjoy her. Just make sure she’s very dead when you’re done, and put her somewhere she’ll be found.”

  Slinging the straps of their semiautomatic weapons onto their shoulders, the stock of the weapons resting against their backs, they moved into the room and picked up the woman by the armpits and ankles. As an afterthought, Garner flung her discarded clothing across her stomach. He had no need of it.

  Not that she does, either.

  Garner smiled when he heard her dull moan, and was a little disappointed she didn’t open her eyes before she was out of the room. It would have been interesting to see how she reacted when she realized what was going to happen to her.

  Stupid whore. Whatever they do to you, it will be less than you deserve.

  Closing the door behind the trio, Garner crossed the room and pulled open the heavy door on the opposite wall.

  Although the ceiling fan in the room was spinning and the shutters on the window were open, the room stank of sweat and spicy food and fermenting oranges. Flies buzzed loudly as they feasted undisturbed on a pile of discarded rinds.

  At least some things are proceeding as they’re meant to.

  “Cyril,” Garner said, his voice clipped with annoyance at being ignored, however briefly.

  A tall, gangly Englishman looked up as if startled and unfolded himself from a seat at a table strewn with paper and two laptops.

  “Oh, hello.” The man looked at his watch. “Must have lost track of time. Buggery bollocks, it’s late. Where’s Bridget?” he said, rubbing eyes that were bleary behind dark-rimmed glasses.

  “She’s been working so hard, I thought she could use a little R and R. Sent her off straightaway. Bloody hard to get Americans to take a holiday, isn’t it? It’s all work, work, work with them,” Garner replied smoothly. “How was her code, Cyril? She said she’d already deployed it. Did you have a chance to look at it? Did it need a scrubbing?”

  “Jolly right it did. Some things in there didn’t make much sense.” Cyril shrugged. “Just a few small things, really. Nothing terribly amiss. Works better now, though.”

  I’ll bet it does. Miserable whore. Garner kept his anger hidden. “What was wrong with it?”

  Cyril scratched his scruffy, sweaty cheek absently. “Hard to tell, really. She writes very dense code, bloody hard to read. I’d have expected more elegance from her. Anyway, there seemed to be some negations buried in some of the longer strings.”

  “Negations?”

  “Commands that would undo other commands,” Cyril explained, adjusting his glasses again. “It’s not so unusual to find them in code. Sometimes I do it myself. Put things in just to remind myself how I got them in there and working.” The man gave a small laugh. “Just a geek thing, I suppose. Nothing worse than getting to the end of some code and forgetting what you’ve done halfway through.”

  “Right. Did you take them out?”

  “Certainly. I wouldn’t mind asking her why she’d forgotten to remark them as comments, though. They quite undid things. Bloody careless.” He shook his head in a mild scold. “Unlike her.”

  Garner forced a smile. “That conversation will have to wait, I’m afraid. Is it all set then?”

  “Oh, yes. Quite. I’ve re-sent what’s already gone out. You know, the new code without the negations. We may not get exactly quite the same bang as we might have originally, but we’ll make a proper showing.”

  “Excellent, Cyril. Excellent.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  7:15 P.M., Sunday, October 26, the White House, Washington, D.C.

  Lucy stepped into the Oval Office and did a quick count of the people looking back at her. Ken Proust, the president’s campaign manager, Katy Wirth, secretary of defense, a few others—the usual suspects. All the faces were famous, and all of them were drawn, ashen, and angry.

  “Good evening, Mr. President,” she said.

  The president nodded. “Lucy. Have a seat.”

  She sank into the nearest chair.

  “As I was saying, sir, every Caribbean nation is completely freaked out over this—”

  Lucy bit the inside of her cheek as the president, sleek, silvered, and as self-important as the office required, dropped the temperature in the room by a few degrees with the look he leveled at the person who had just spoken. Lucy’s private opinion was that the youngest-ever assistant secretary of state might well be a wunderkind on policy, but he was in a state of arrested development when it came to presentation.

  “ ‘Freaked out’? For Christ’s sake, Grover, can’t you come up with a better term than that?” President Benson snapped.

  Grover Hartfield adjusted his glasses but there was no air of apology about him. “Not really, sir. It’s an apt description. They’re, like, totally worried about the earthquakes and the methane release and the idea that these smaller ruptures could continue to happen all over the region.”

  The president shot a look at Lucy. “Could they?”

  “Yes, sir, they could. But they weren’t earthquakes. We’ve confirmed that they were detonations.”

  “Oh, hell.” The president shook his head and looked at his campaign manager, then back to Lucy. “Bring us up to date.”

  His tone—annoyed, condescending, and impatient—lit a flame of anger in her.

  Why don’t you try to give a damn, Mr. President? Or at least pretend to, instead of worrying about what this is going to do to you at the polls.

  Keeping her face neutral, Lucy folded her hands in her lap and met his eyes. “GAIA has claimed responsibility for the detonations and for the landslide they precipitated. The target seems to have been a methane-hydrate mining operation that Dennis Cavendish was about to bring online. That facility has been destroyed, as far as we know, and the pipeline into the methane bed has been severely damaged. Methane is coming out of the opening and filtering through the water column into the air. There are serious long-term climate implications, but the immediate problem is that the methane is not pure and is displacing the air at the surface, creating a plume of unbreathable air that is migrating to the Keys.”

  “The Keys? The Florida Keys?” Ken asked.

  “Yes, the Florida Keys,” Lucy replied, and continued as if he hadn’t interrupted her. “I have it from Taino’s secretary of national security that in the process of mining the methane hydrate, they injected a proprietary additive to stabilize the crystals. This additive makes the methane heavy, so it is remaining much closer to the sea surface than it normally would. As I said, the gas has formed a plume and is moving toward the Keys. According to our expert on atmospheric methane, a stable air current that typically moves through the area will most likely begin to disperse the gas in a northerly direction.”

  “Toward Miami,” the president said bluntly.

  Lucy gritted her teeth against the cold fear that sliced through her without warning. “Yes, sir, that’s a distinct possibility.”

  “What’s the worst case?”

  Lucy hesitated only for a second. “If the wind stays as
calm as it is, pockets of mass asphyxiation could continue to occur. For instance, on beaches or on the water in the path of the gas. Anywhere a—”

  Staring at her in disbelief, the president held up his hand and she immediately stopped talking.

  “Lucy, did you just say ‘mass asphyxiation could continue to occur’?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  He leaned toward her. “People are starting to die on the beach just from breathing?”

  “From breathing methane, sir. The density of this plume is displacing the air at sea level,” she repeated as neutrally as she could. “There have been some odd reports filtering in from Coast Guard patrols. A few unexplained deaths. A pod of whales, a few dozen dolphins here and there. Whole flocks of sea birds.”

  “Christ, Lucy, what are you, a reporter for Animal Planet? Like we give a fuck about animals,” Ken Proust sneered. “I thought you were talking about human deaths. Give me something we can use.”

  Lucy didn’t even look at him. The urge to drive the heel of her pump deep into his eye socket was nearly overpowering.

  “Some of the dead creatures were people, Ken. Rich people, judging by the boats they were on. Does that make you happy?” she replied.

  “No, Lucy, it doesn’t,” he snapped. “This isn’t good.”

  She knew he was thinking of all the voters—and all the electoral votes—in South Florida. It made her want to vomit.

  “How very astute of you, Ken,” she replied coolly.

  “Cut it out, you two. What are we doing about it?” President Benson demanded, his eyes boring into hers.

  “We’ve brought in experts on Caribbean methane beds and the effects of atmospheric methane releases—”

  “I’m sure that’s charming, Director Denton, but can we focus on, as you called it, the ‘immediate problem’?” Katy Wirth spoke with her customary sarcasm. Lucy ignored it.