the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”
Besides the normal systems programs — Windows ME,
But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.
The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.
“Eliminate Ewie Cameron. Set up as an accident. L (POUNDS) 100,000. CB.”
The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.
As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.
TEN
High above Ross island, the volcano’s fulminating lava lake seethed and bubbled and abruptly shot a dollop of molten rock into the sky with a belch of pressurized gas. Trailing smoke and licks of flame, the red-hot ejecta hurtled toward the rim of the summit cone, and over it, and then smacked into the mountainside a mile away. It was larger than a howitzer round, and its ballistic impact threw a cloud of ash, snow, and ice crystals up from the crater’s rim.
There the plastery magma bomb hardened in the supercooled air to lay among countless other chunks of igneous debris tossed across the slope.
While signs of the eruption traveled across many miles in this frigid and barren land, they drew only a scattering of attention.
It was heard clearly by National Science Foundation vulcanologists working on the mount’s upper elevations, and produced a tremor that rattled the equipment in their mobile apple huts. Its sonic precursors (vibrational pulses that signal an impending eruption) and signature oscillations (harmonic changes that indicate a discrete eruption, or series of eruptions, in progress) were registered by seismometers and broadband microphones that the researchers had installed and maintained with steady diligence throughout the Antarctic summer.
Ten thousand feet below on another corner of the island, the discharge and resultant concussion would be audible as two dull, thudding blurts of sound to McMurdites who took notice. Few did, however. The continuous volcanic output had never inflicted damage on the station, and was for them little more than background noise.
Eastward across the Transantarctic Mountains, the seismic precursors were detected in instantaneous-wave readouts from sensors on Erebus’s flank that had been well camouflaged from the NSF research team. As the sound of the explosive outbursts carried to Bull Pass, bouncing faintly between its craggy walls, hidden men and equipment went into clockwork action.
Three thousand feet underground, a boom-mounted drill came alive with a percussive jolt, its tungsten carbide bit boring into solid rock. Protected from its deafening clatter inside their safety cabin, the drill controller and his assistants breathed filtered air behind the face shields of their high-efficiency, closed-circuit respirator helmets.
Two thousand feet underground, a large jaw crusher began grinding and smashing the contents of its mineral fill chamber, the first stage in the yield’s multistage separation process.
A thousand feet higher, a pair of specialized trolley-assisted haul trucks, slung low for tunnel clearance, started forward on an inclined concrete ramp. On a stone shelf several levels beneath the surface, their semiprocessed loads would be stored in excavated pockets until ready to be moved into the open and rigged for helicopter airlift to the coast.
Soon after Erebus quieted, the trucks ceased to roll.
The deep drilling continued longer, a departure from the original requirement that it start and stop in tight coordination with Erebus’s rumbling expulsions. Once needed to preserve secrecy, the precaution was now followed only when opportune. Methods had changed after a half decade of continuous production. Engineering breakthroughs, advanced sound-baffling techniques, the current depth of excavation, and a shrewd, cavalier willingness to exploit every aspect of the unique environment had all led to terrific progress since the initial investment bore first fruit.
Five years. Expanding markets. Soaring profit margins. Things were going sensationally well. Output had reached an unbridled peak, and further growth was a given provided operations were allowed to keep running smoothly.
Like any other commercial organization, the Consortium was determined to ensure that no obstacles arose to interfere with its success.
The broad subject of the meeting was UpLink International, and those in attendance had come with understandable and fairly similar concerns.
His sky-blue eyes astute behind his reading glasses, Gabriel Morgan smiled from the head of the conference table; a great, expansive, vigorous whopper of a smile. Lots of teeth, his fleshy mastiff cheeks drawn up, his wide brow creased under a deliberately uncombed thatch of silver hair. Every facial muscle enlisted to make it the heartiest smile possible.
This was not to say his attitude was light or blase. Albedo was his brainchild, and he better than anyone else at the table understood that this session had been called to deal with a matter of pressing importance. But a smile could be spirited and serious at the same time, no contradiction. He’d learned that under the tutelage of his father at a very young age, the same way his father had learned from his grandfather. As chairman of the group, Morgan knew one of his fundamental responsibilities was to exude calm authority, soothe jitters, allay undue fears. Reassure his partners that he had a full awareness of the developments in Antarctica, knew their particulars top to bottom, and would by no means allow them to progress into a crisis situation. That they amounted to minor stumbling blocks, bothersome but easily remediable hassles.
Morgan trusted his ability to manage, and knew one of the keystones of his success was a talent for passing his confidence right on down the line. Business executives and government officials from several different countries, the people around him were behind-the-scenes movers, concealed switches embedded deep within the world’s political machinery. Men and women who could trip the right circuits and — by virtue of their relative obscurity — initiate activities their nominal superiors either would not or could not authorize. But he was the
He shifted his thickset frame in his chair. On his immediate right, Olav Langkafel, a quiet but integral cog in Norway’s Energy and Petroleum Ministry, was voicing an anxious hypothetical about the close reconnaissance capabilities UpLink might have out there on the ice. Morgan decided to address it with an example that would also hopefully resolve some of the issues raised by his six other guests. Give them the overview they seemed to be missing.
“Before you go on with that last what-if, let me ask you a question,” he said, raising a finger in the air. “Are
