Dry Ice (25 page)

He threw the phone onto the leather couch and poured himself a Scotch.

CHAPTER
19

Nik, Ron, and Nangpal entered the sandbox to see Tess standing near Etienne’s elbow as he sat at a workstation. She looked serious, her forehead creased as she stared at the screen.

“Pam was right about the geographical coordinates being messed up. That first set of pulses set off a huge earthquake in Mexico City. Knocked out communications for half the country. They’re only just starting to broadcast footage,” she said as the three of them walked toward her.

When they reached her side, she straightened up and Nik registered the annoyance in her eyes. He resigned himself to getting his wrist slapped.

“I realize old habits die hard, but you’re all going to have to try harder,” she said coolly and loud enough for everyone in the sandbox to hear her. “Next time anything happens, I expect to be informed first.” She paused. “That’s it. Nik, a moment?”

Oh, this will be pleasant.
Nik followed her to the conference room, opened the door, and let her pass through, then shut it and turned to look at her.

“Don’t you dare play gatekeeper with me,” she said in a low voice, her eyes spitting blue flames at him. “Do not even think of it. Do you understand me?”

“Hey—”

“No, Nik. I’m not interested in hearing excuses. What I am interested in is knowing what else you haven’t told me.”

He thought briefly about arguing, then just perched his ass on the edge of the table and folded his arms across his chest. “A while ago, one of the test beds began running a new set of algorithms that Ron thought—”

“Why did he go to you with it?” Tess looked like she was about to explode with anger.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, would you stop acting like there’s a conspiracy against you?” Nik snapped. “We’re in a very weird situation right now, Tess, and the people here are used to bouncing ideas off each other, not you. You’ve been here less than a full day, okay? He came to me because he thought that I,
as assistant research director for the past four years,
” he said pointedly, “might know what the algorithms were supposed to do. That’s all there was to it. Clearly, it’s not a secret, because I’m telling you now.”

She glared at him but had regained her composure. “Go on.”

“At first, Ron thought they were just being run to anticipate system capacity and estimate response time; we do that all the time, though these equations didn’t look exactly like the usual ones. But that was only part of it.” He paused, to make sure he had her full attention.

He did. All six-foot-one-inch-plus-high-heels of it. Her eyes were back to glowing as hot as cobalt 60 and she looked like she was about to jump him—not in a good way—if he didn’t keep talking.

“And?”

“They seem to be aligning bursts on different arrays to effect events that are simultaneous and consecutive, in multiple locations.”

“Simultaneous and consecutive? That makes no sense.” She moved to the chair at the end of the table and sat down.

“They’re strange commands, setting combinations of frequencies at all different ranges. There’s no coherence to any of it because the full suite isn’t there. There are definitely components missing, as if things are meant to be tested discretely as small executables. Every test bed is sewn up with them. Everything of ours that was in a queue was dumped.”

Her eyes widened. “Just like that?”

He nodded.

“And no one knows what these new algorithms are meant to do?”

“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 that 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.