Frozen Fire (7 page)

“For God’s sake, Dennis, shut up. You know everything we say is being recorded,” she said under her breath even as she bit back a laugh. The heavy
door slid shut behind them with a soft hiss and the keypad to the left of the next door lit up.

He lifted a shoulder in unconcern. “It’ll give your boys something to think about.”

“Like they, and everyone else, haven’t already thought that, thanks to you?” she muttered.

“Well, yeah. I’m a man, you’re a woman. Obviously everyone thinks you slept your way into the job. People always think good-looking women sleep their way into jobs. If you want to convince them otherwise, you have to quit acting like you give a damn, Vic. You’ve built a God-damned fortress around this habitat and the island. Only a moron would think you did that while flat on your back with your legs in the air.”

She pulled in a deep breath and counted silently to ten while glaring at his smirking face. “Gee, thanks, Dennis. Will you put that in a letter of recommendation for me?”

“Thinking of leaving?” he asked with a grin as he finished punching in the code for the next airlock.

“As a matter of fact—”

“Well, don’t even think about it or I
will
tell the world you slept with me to get the job. One blog post is all it would take for everyone to know. And I’ll be sure to mention that rising-sun tattoo on your ass,” he replied casually as he let her enter the corridor ahead of him. Laughing quietly, he tilted his head toward the small speaker flush-mounted in the ceiling of the hallway. “Hear that, fellas?”

Her mouth dropped open as his comment registered on several levels. “I don’t have a rising-sun tattoo anywhere. I don’t have
any
tattoos,” she protested, and smacked him on the arm none too gently as they began walking. “Certainly not that one.”

“I wouldn’t know, but putting it out there would sure cloud the old employment issue for you, wouldn’t it? Especially with Western firms looking for a security wizard. Think of it. A little Japanese girl with a—”

“I’m not a girl, and I’m not Japanese. I haven’t been for thirty-two years,” she snapped. “My looks stem from my DNA but cultural identity isn’t genetic. I’m a Tainoan and an American, in that order.”

“Thank you for giving me priority, sweetheart, but I’m just pointing out that it’s better that you stay here and keep me and Taino safe from all those malicious persons you dream about at night.”

They proceeded in silence for a few moments as she regained her composure,
then she stopped in front of the next airlock and looked up at him. “Tell you what, Dennis, let’s talk business for a while.”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we talk dirty, instead?”

She let out a sigh that was half amusement and half exasperation. “You know, sometimes I really have to wonder how you ever got to be—”

“I got where I am because my shareholders always loved me,” he said, interrupting her easily. “I made them a lot of money, I had fun doing it, and I pissed off the old guard at the same time. Even among my peers in the dot-com universe, I was the poster boy for the ‘Old enough to know better and young enough not to care’ mind-set. And I indulged in a behavior generally considered to be terminal in any industry: I always told the truth. A novel concept, unfortunately. But one that, as I recall, is what finally convinced you that leaving those tight-assed, white-bread old farts on Wall Street for the good life on Taino was a good idea. And it
was
a good idea. You were wasting your talents keeping all their secrets secret. Here on Taino, you’re making history. You’re helping to change the world. Hell, Vic, to be perfectly candid, I don’t even know what the hell you’re doing half the time, but I know that this baby”—he waved his hand toward the walls of the corridor—“this baby wouldn’t be here if you weren’t doing a good job. Make that a great job.”

“Thank you, Dennis. I—” she began.

“And that,” he continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “is why, as soon as we get topside, I’m going to draft a letter describing that tattoo and how I found it, and put that letter somewhere safe.”

Her hands rose slowly in surrender as, laughing, the two of them came to a halt in front of the door that was the last stop on their itinerary.

Operations Control was a dimly lit but comfortable room from which the world’s finest mining engineers, marine geologists, and underwater excavation experts ran the brains of
Atlantis
, the underwater habitat that Dennis Cavendish was counting on to change the way the world worked.

Marie LaSalle, the installation’s chief science officer, glanced over her shoulder at them without bothering to straighten up from where she leaned casually against a long console covered with a neat bank of flat-screen computer monitors. She held up her hand to stop them from talking and returned her eyes to the screen she’d been watching. Dennis nodded and looked around the room, which was quietly humming with myriad live computers and the low voices of the fifteen people responsible for monitoring them.

A moment later, Victoria saw his eyes widen and quickly realized why. On the screen that held Marie’s rapt attention, Victoria watched the real-time, three-dimensional animation that showed the titanium-toothed pipe burrow through the last few meters of cold, hard rock. It stopped abruptly as its sensors made contact with a pale substance that gave way without the slightest resistance. A burst of jubilation from the crew broke the atmosphere of heavy concentration.

Marie stood up and smiled at them with a look of quiet triumph. “
Bonjour, mon president
. Welcome back to
Atlantis
. You were just in time to watch the largest deposit of methane hydrate in the Northern Hemisphere being breached. We’ve confirmed seismic stability, the tanks of dennisium are in place, and we are about to begin injecting it into the cache to stabilize the first pocket. To start, only twenty-two metric tons in situ,” she said in her lilting, flirtatious accent, lifting a shoulder with Gallic nonchalance.

As if making history were all in a day’s work and halving the danger of a catastrophic underwater explosion was but a trifling task
.

Victoria kept her polite smile in place and unclenched her teeth. The Frenchwoman might be a complete bitch on land, but she was the undisputed queen of the seafloor. There was no one on the staff more talented or more driven than Marie, and if Dennis’s grand experiment of mining methane hydrate from an unmapped abyss on the floor of the Caribbean Sea was going to work, it would be because of her. Marie made things happen.

“By tonight we should have test bed preparations complete and water flowing in,” she continued. “Then we will begin a test run of the full procedure. We’ll extract only a few tons the first time. You are going to return for it? It promises to be a good show.” She gestured to the large, unlit screen covering one wall.

“I’ll be watching from above with some friends.”

“So be it. Just make sure you send down the Champagne chilled and on time,” Marie said nonchalantly before turning back to the monitors.

Victoria waited near the door while Dennis moved through the small space, greeting each person by name and congratulating them. While he believed in getting to know his employees personally, Victoria rarely interacted with any of them. She knew them all too intimately and too impersonally from having studied their personnel files and the frequently updated surveillance reports on each one of them, and needed to keep her distance in the event of a problem.

Keeping herself disengaged from the rest of the staff didn’t bother her—childhood had provided lots of practice—but it meant the only one of her coworkers she really had a friendly relationship with was Dennis, and that had its benefits and drawbacks.

“Hey, Vic, come over here and see what—”

She sent Dennis a closed-mouth smile and remained where she was. He shook his head and rolled his eyes and returned his attention to the monitor he’d been studying a moment ago.

Fascinated though she was with what Dennis envisioned and what he had accomplished by building a comfortable habitat and functional mining operation four thousand feet below the surface of the sea, her occasional visits to the habitat were trips Victoria would have preferred to miss. She knew it was a state-of-the-art structure designed by the finest marine architects in the world and that everyone on the design team had been required to spend time living in it before the mining operations began. None of that mattered to her. The few times she’d been down here, it took all of her mental energy
not
to focus on the fact that she was in a man-made edifice that had been placed in an environment as alien and unforgiving to humans as outer space. It wasn’t a simple thing to dismiss.

She wished Dennis would get on point and do what he came here to do. Not that he couldn’t have done it on land. He could have. It just wouldn’t have been as much fun. For him.

“Ready?” he asked, coming up to her and rubbing his hands together as if he were about to sit down to a long-anticipated feast.

“Whenever you are,” she replied, and followed Dennis to the corner of the control room that was set up for videoconferencing. The small table and chairs that were usually there had been pushed to the side and a narrow green screen had been lowered from its recessed home in the ceiling.

He came to a stop in front of the screen and turned to face the tripod-mounted camera and its operator. Victoria stopped just out of camera range. As the person who knew more about Dennis Cavendish and his secrets than anyone else alive, she avoided cameras and any other technology that might be used to publicize her existence.

“What background do you want to show, sir?” the young man beside the camera asked.

“External footage of the pods. Give me a countdown.” Dennis cleared his throat and stared into the camera.

After a few taps on the keyboard, the young man looked up and nodded.
“We’re ready on one, sir. Four. Three. Two.” He pointed a finger at Dennis, who smiled on cue.

“My friends, you know by now that I was unable to join you today on your flight to my Paradise of Taino, but I am delighted that you’ve accepted my invitation to join us for the weekend. That invitation was not issued casually. Your visit is not merely a social occasion, nor is it entirely a business event.” He paused. “You have been invited to be the first outside witnesses to what is certainly the most significant achievement in my life and, I am no less certain, one of the greatest achievements in the course of human events.

“Ladies and gentlemen, what you see on the screen behind me is
Atlantis
, the world’s first deep-sea habitat and fully operational underwater methane-hydrate mining operation. I am speaking to you from the command and control center, which is part of a habitat that houses a permanent staff of twenty-two and a dozen others who rotate through.
Atlantis
rests on the abyssal seafloor at a depth of four thousand feet off the western coast of Taino, less than fifty miles from the eastern shore of the Florida Keys. This combined structure is situated above one of the largest deposits of methane hydrate ever discovered.” He paused again and his smile widened. “Three gigatons, my friends. That is our estimate of the first deposit.”

His enthusiasm was infectious and, watching him, Victoria felt a zing of excitement.

I’m watching history being made
.

Not one to underplay when he had a captive audience, Dennis placed his hands on his hips, stretching the white golf shirt that accentuated both the deepness of his tan and the breadth of his well-toned chest. “I count every one of you as both a personal friend and worthy colleague, and that’s why I want you be the first people outside my organization to learn about this venture. You also represent nine of the largest, most diversified conglomerates in the world. You don’t need me to tell you that the combination of the size of this deposit and the first safe, economically feasible means of extracting methane hydrate is much more than just another business opportunity. This isn’t just another step forward for technological evolution, my friends; this is the dawn of the world’s second Industrial Revolution. That means
jobs
. Real jobs, and lots of them. Not just for the boys on Wall Street, not just for the accountants. But for steelworkers and pipe fitters, civil engineers and administrative assistants. There will be jobs at transfer stations, offices, and billing centers. Web sites will need to be built, prospectuses written—this is
‘trickle
up
’ economics, and there is no doubt in my mind that it will truly take our economy to the top of the world. There’s a new Golden Age waiting just ahead, and you,
we
, will be the people who introduce the world to it.”

He stopped and stared intently into the camera. “What we’ve accomplished here means that the balance of the world’s power is about to undergo a civilization-altering shift. It means we in the West can finally achieve independence from petroleum-based fuels without irradiating the planet to do it. The success of
Atlantis
means affordable clean power, a surge in the development of new technologies, and the revitalization of stagnating national economies.” He leaned forward from the waist, as if he were talking to a group standing in front of him instead of a group who would be watching him on a screen.

“I know what some of you might be thinking right now. You’re thinking about all the bad things you’ve heard about methane, how it’s the nasty cousin of carbon dioxide, that its presence in the atmosphere would speed up climate change. That a large release would be catastrophic. Well, we know all about it. We know more about it than anyone does, and that’s because we have more to lose than anyone does if something goes wrong, catastrophic or not.” He flared his hands in front of him with a half-shrug. “If you need to hear me say something negative about the project, I’ll admit that what scientists say about methane is true. Pulling it out of the seafloor could be a double-edged sword—if we have an accident. But there won’t be any accidents. Everything we’ve done has met standards set far beyond the most stringent safety regulations. We’ve looked into the probability of earthquakes, tsunamis, even terrorist activity. We rewrote the actuarial tables using Doomsday as our starting point.” He grinned and gave another shrug. “Nothing is going to go wrong.”