Frozen Fire Read Free

world’s next-generation energy source would be wasted. The world would be shown once again, vividly, that greed and arrogance led inevitably to incalculable damage to the Earth and all Her inhabitants.
    Yes, Dennis, in a few days, you will have changed the world forever. For the worse
.
    Fully ensconced in the one-person diving tube, Micki mentally counted the clicks and hisses as the crew secured the seals that would keep her separate from the sea and safe from its frigid pressures. As she waited for the dive master to speak to her through the headphones, she kept her eyes trained on the small black boxes she’d carefully secured to the platform at the front of the tiny vessel.
    When she’d approached Simon about this unscheduled trip, Micki had told him the twin units were a pair of new, state-of-the-art surveillance devices made by a boutique firm in Switzerland. With a deprecating roll of her eyes, she’d added that they were being deployed as a favor to the company’s owner, a business associate of Dennis’s. The boxes were beta units and Dennis had agreed to let Taino be their first real-world test bed because he believed the technology held promise and would provide them with useful data if it worked as planned. Micki had added, as offhand as ever, that even she wasn’t entirely sure what the devices were meant to do; she had been told only that she was to place them in specific secure locations without her movements being tracked.
    Everything she’d said was a lie, of course. The units were highly sophisticated bombs, the brainchild of Garner Blaylock, Earth activist, unsung genius, and Dennis Cavendish’s worst nightmare. When activated remotely by Micki, the black boxes would exploit the one vulnerability that Victoria Clark, Taino’s white-hat paranoiac secretary of national security and Micki’s immediate boss, hadn’t taken into account in all of her continual brainstorming about terrorism: sabotage. The kind that could be carried out by aninsider, a member of Victoria’s trusted, handpicked inner circle. All those endless hours of security audits and exhaustive tabletop exercises would have been for nothing.
    Micki couldn’t wait to see the look on Victoria’s face when she realized it.
    Talk about a blind spot
.
    Working side by side with Victoria for the last few years and overseeing the ubiquitous background checks, covert surveillance, network trolling, and physical searches on the employees, it had become apparent to an incredulous Micki that Victoria hadn’t taken any precautions against the most obvious option. She’d never considered that someone she trusted implicitly—and had investigated so thoroughly—could set a bomb and destroy everything Victoria was meant to protect. This ludicrous arrogance was a rather alarming character flaw in Victoria, who prided herself on her emotionless perfectionism. In a moment of supreme and deliberate irony, Micki had even suggested the notion of a mole, an insider with malicious intent.
    Victoria had considered it carefully, of course. She considered everything carefully. But then she dismissed insider cooperation as a viable threat. For such a plan to be carried out would require there to be too many gaps in her heavily fortified, overtly redundant security perimeter. Micki had listened in awe as Victoria, one of the most highly respected security experts in the world, told her that—on Taino, on
her
turf—such a threat fell into the category identified by security experts as having extremely high impact but extremely low probability. Micki had even argued with her, pointing out that that was the same category into which the notion of people flying airliners into tall office buildings had once been placed. But Victoria was adamant. Not on Taino. Not with
her
security parameters in place.
    It was a significant source of amusement to Micki that Victoria had never considered that the very person responsible for maintaining those parameters could be