Dry Ice (26 page)

“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.”

The comment caught her off-guard. Tess pulled herself together instantly and brushed a lock of hair from her face, then returned her hand to its fisted position under the opposite arm.

“You’re right. I’m part of it now. We control the weather. Or did until a few hours ago,” she said, her voice careful. “And I’m not happy about the change in status. We’ve lost control of the comms, the software test beds, and the arrays, Nik. Greg’s got logic bombs popping out of the software like ass cheeks at Hooters. We don’t know where to look next. We’re chasing shadows. All we know is that the arrays are doing big, very, very bad things to the outside world. We can’t tell anyone what’s coming and not just because our comms are down: we don’t know what’s going to happen or when or where.” She paused, glaring at him. “Why can’t we figure out what he’s up to and how to counteract it, Nik? What are we doing wrong?”

“What we’re doing wrong is approaching this like scientists who are rational and sane: two things Greg isn’t.”

“I can accept that. But back in the dark ages, Greg wrote very elegant code. Very clear and streamlined.
This
is dense, complex, and confusing. That bothers me. Greg doesn’t write crap code. Ever.”

“Not usually,” Nik said.

“Explain that.”

“There have been a few occasions since the arrays came out of testing a year ago.”

“What did the crap code do?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. But it was outside the spec of what we normally do here. None of us had seen anything like it before. Not since HAARP.”

Chills shot through her and Tess knew that her eyes had gone wide. Her pulse tripled, and all she could do was stare at Nik’s dark, shadowed, unsmiling face.

“You do remember what we were doing up there, don’t you?” he asked, his voice mocking. “Building ‘enhanced communications capabilities’ by bouncing electromagnetic signals through specific regions of the atmosphere’s upper strata. Even back then none of us believed it, Tess. We all thought it was weapons testing.”

“No, we didn’t, Nik. I didn’t. I wouldn’t have—,” Tess protested.

He cut her off with a look. “Come on. Remember how the experiment designs were always altered when they came back after testing? And we weren’t allowed to know the results?”

“That’s not so unusual—”

“Tess, take off those rosy glasses. Don’t you remember standing outside in the dark, freezing our asses off as we watched the sky erupt with all those weird, streaking lights and oddly shaped clouds? You know there’s no way in hell they were the result of long-range radio signals, and they weren’t the aurora. They only happened when the arrays fired, Tess.” He paused. “You used to say that the sky looked like it was warping and fracturing. Well, that’s what happens here, too. And you know TESLA’s signals aren’t comms and they aren’t benign.”

She said nothing for a moment, just looked at her hands. It wasn’t until years after she’d left HAARP that she’d begun to link the dates of world events with some of the “tests” she’d devised. She’d realized with no small sense of disgust that she was a contributor to the next generation of “peacekeepers,” the way her parents and grandparents had been. The clouds she created weren’t mushroom-shaped and the fallout wasn’t radioactive, but the destructive capability was infinitely greater. “Yes, I remember. I promised myself that I’d never again be involved with weaponry.”

“Let’s see. I’ll bet you also thought that Flint’s goals were benign.”

“No, Nik. Not benign. But there’s a long stretch of road between ‘not benign’ and deadly.”

“It gets significantly shorter when profit is involved,” he said bitterly.

She stared at him, at his dark eyes utterly devoid of any humor, any lightheartedness. They were cold and grim. “You’ve changed, Nik. Not for the better. Why?”

He grabbed a piece of paper from the recycle bin, scribbled a short list of words, then handed it to her.

Aceh. Sichuan. L’Aquila. Samoa. Haiti. Afghanistan.

The six words hit her like a fist. The paper fell out of her nerveless fingers and fluttered to the floor. Tess looked at him, unable to express the horror she felt. Together, those six events had claimed nearly three-quarters of a million lives.

And Nik had just taken responsibility for them.

Tess brought an icy, shaking hand to her forehead to brush away a stray hair, or pretend to. “You made these happen?”

“We realized afterward.”

She took a deep breath. It didn’t steady her nerves. “How long after?”

“January of this year. I spent two weeks in Sydney. I hadn’t been off the Ice in a year. So for three solid days, I just surfed the Net, catching up on the news.”

“What made you look into those?”

“There were times when Greg would put out some strange code—upload it, run it—and it pissed me off that he wouldn’t explain himself. I was supposed to be in on everything he did. So I kept those dates in the back of my mind. When I saw what had happened in the world, I made the connection.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I confronted him. He denied everything.” Nik paused. “Tess, you don’t look so good.”

“I don’t feel so good,” she admitted. Her voice sounded kind of wispy and breathless, even to her. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

“The altitude may be getting to you. Besides, you’re exhausted. You had a long and harrowing trip and then walked straight into a crisis. When’s the last time you slept?”

“I don’t remember. And I forgot about the altitude. You’re probably right. But I’m okay.”

“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty.”

“In the afternoon?”

He nodded.

“Then I think it’s been about six hours.”

“So throw low blood sugar into the mix. Want to continue this conversation over coffee and a sandwich?”

“Thanks, but let’s just keep going. I’ll be fine. So the dirty code that’s running now—?”

“It’s very similar to what Greg was doing when each of those six events happened.”

“How did you see his code? I mean, the earlier stuff.”

“I hacked his files,” Nik said bluntly.

She gave him a faint smile. “I’m impressed. Did he ever find out?”

“Not that I know of, but that’s not the point. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing this time, but the magnitude of whatever he’s doing is far greater than any of those events.”

“Oh God.” Tess paused as a deeply unsettling combination of fear and sadness welled up inside her. “Nik, I feel like I’m in an asylum. Or on the set of
CSI: Antarctica.
” She paused for a moment, then continued. “Let’s see if I have this straight: Greg isn’t just the antisocial jerk we all love to hate, he’s a mass murderer. And Flint ordered him to commit what amounts to genocide, repeatedly, using TESLA.”

“I never said Flint, Tess.”

She stared at him. “Then who?”

He shrugged. “Two of those events—China and Afghanistan—have strategic importance—”