A Dream of Ice (5 page)

With Senator Cooper happily burbling away about press releases and news spots, she let her mind wander back to that experiment until it was necessary to answer a question.

“Say, Dr. Davies,” said the senator, “does this mean I can get a trip to Antarctica? My daughter would love to see penguins.”

“Yes,” Flora said, “the Group Science Foundation will be thrilled to give you a junket in Antarctica.” She did not mention that half the continent's penguins had left due to the ice event that only her aide had witnessed.

They ended the call convivially. Flora used both hands to massage
her face out of its scowl, then headed downstairs to the basement corridor, now crammed full of destroyed deep freezers. She really had to figure out a way to dump those unobtrusively. Opening the door to the smallest lab, she encountered the glare of what had turned out to be the best and worst part of the bargain with Berkeley: Adrienne Dowman, a reportedly brilliant if contrary young scientist, newly arrived the day before, who refused to exhibit even a veneer of social grace, from manners to lip balm to deodorant. She looked as if her lips bled every night.

“How's it coming?” Flora asked as pleasantly as she could.

“It's not going to work,” Adrienne barked.

“Well, Peter sent me quite the optimist, didn't he?” Flora whipped back.

“You asked for my opinion.”

“I did not,” Flora replied. “I asked for a progress report. Let's be clear. While you're working with me, which will be for the rest of your career, you have an ‘on' button but not an ‘opinion' button. Got it?”

“It's never been done at this scale,” Adrienne said, undeterred. “That's informational, not an opinion.”

Flora gave up, for now. “When are we starting?”

“In a few minutes.”

Adrienne turned back to work on the room, which had been emptied and its soundproofing tripled in the last forty-eight hours. Flora had made it clear to Peter that the scientist doing this favor for the Group would be hers permanently in order to keep a lock on the Group's “proprietary information.” Peter had leaped at the chance to offload his least-favorite associate. On the plus side, Adrienne was a profoundly gifted physicist and tech. She had installed eight black panels in the room: two large ones fixed on floor-to-ceiling columns and six smaller but still sizable panels on rotary devices by the walls. A viper's nest of wires led outside the room to the Group's private generator and to a control box that looked like the kit of a DJ. On the platform fixed to the floor sat the last stone Mikel Jasso, one of the Group's field
agents, had brought back from the Southern Ocean. Flora had privately dubbed it “the Serpent” because there had been no trouble at all in her garden of relics and finds until this one showed up. Since its arrival there had been a succession of ruptured, melted deep freezers and her researcher Arni Haugan had been found dead on the lab floor, his gray matter liquefied and pouring from his ears. This experiment had to work or Flora would have to seriously consider throwing the artifact back in the ocean. Success here would be preferable.

“Ready for nothing,” Adrienne grumped. She handed Flora headphones with an embedded communication device and placed a set on her own head.

“How audible is this going to be if the soundproofing fails?” Flora asked. “I do not want to be aggravating my neighbors.”

“Nobody's going to hear it,” Adrienne snorted. “Including us, unless you have canine ancestry.”

Before Flora could respond to the dig, Adrienne flicked a switch and said, “But ultrasound decibels can do damage too.”

Flora most certainly felt the sudden hum of electricity. But far more importantly, the Serpent stone jumped four feet in the air and hung there, at the exact midpoint between the floor and ceiling panels. Flora laughed out loud. To date, the heaviest object to be acoustically suspended was a metal screw. Now they had lifted something magnitudes larger.

Adrienne was not indulging in a celebration. The stone was bobbling wildly and she was quickly but lightly turning knobs, nudging the side panels into different angles. The stone stabilized for a moment, then two—then suddenly flipped upside down, and Flora gasped. Its crescent carvings were now facing the ceiling, the object quivering.

“Huh?” said Adrienne.

“You weren't expecting that?” Flora said over the hum.

“A stone shouldn't suddenly become bottom-heavy, like a water balloon.”

“Magnetism?” Flora suggested.

Adrienne glanced at readings on a laptop, shook her head. She bent over her console, turning a knob with a feather touch Flora would have thought impossible from her lumpen personality. In the center of the room the stone returned to its previous equilibrium.

Adrienne stood still, watching intently.

“So . . . ?” Flora asked, pondering.

“That should have been impossible,” Adrienne replied. “I knew there would be minor fluctuations, but in order for an object to flip like that, the sound wave on one side would have had to overpower the other, which would have destabilized the levitation. The stone would have dropped to the floor.” Adrienne peeled her eyes from the major milestone she had just achieved, which no one would ever hear about, and looked at her new employer. “What the hell is this thing, Dr. Davies?”

“A very ancient relic with properties we do not understand,” Flora said. “Yet.”

“You already told me that,” Adrienne said. “What
aren't
you telling me?”

Flora's implacable expression caused Adrienne to snort in frustration and turn away. As she did, her eyes shifted to the door, beyond which sat the destroyed freezers. She looked back at her new boss.

“Flora, did it try—to get
out
?” Adrienne asked.

“Not exactly,” Flora replied. “Lord, don't go imparting intelligence to it. It's just a mass of nickel and iron.”

“And uranium is just silvery white metal,” Adrienne said. “This thing has all the hallmarks of being very, very dangerous.”

Flora glanced at the levitated stone. “Not anymore.”

Adrienne turned a little scarlet. “Christ, you could have told me. What did it do?”

“Hopefully, nothing it will do again,” Flora replied. “In fact, now that you've tamed it, why don't we see what
it
hasn't been telling
us
.”

A
ndreas Campbell pulled his mail cart west on Ninth Street. He stopped outside the Augustine Apartments and switched off the audiobook on his iPhone. Elizabeth Bennet was just telling Mr. Darcy he was the last man she'd ever marry. Leaning over his cart to retrieve the building's bundle of mail, Andreas suddenly doubled over with pain. The stabbing in his gut was so sharp, he had to transfer his full weight to the cart, and the pain kept coming. He felt a spike of blinding, searing heat rocket to his head, as if his body temperature had just soared to triple digits—which it had.

Looking down the street, he saw people near Sixth Avenue and called weakly, trying to get their attention. He waved helplessly at the lobby beyond the glass doors of the Augustine. The doorman was chatting with a maintenance man, not looking at the street, and the security camera was pointed in the opposite direction. Andreas fumbled for his phone in his pocket.

As the next assault of pain lunged through his kidneys, he fell to his knees, clasping his stomach and then screaming at his own touch. His midsection felt like it was exploding outward in every direction. He vomited on the sidewalk, trying to scream through his convulsing
throat. Then the heat came again and he screamed so hard that blood vessels burst in his eyes.

The doorman finally caught the strange and desperate image through the sliding glass doors and he and the maintenance man ran down the steps to help. There they found the mail carrier lying on the sidewalk, blood pooling around his body, vomit sprayed around his head.

“Call 911,” the doorman yelled, loud enough to attract attention from passersby on Sixth Avenue. He knelt next to the man, hands hovering over him, not knowing what to do as Andreas continued to claw at the pavement, his voice losing force.

A crowd began to gather, gawking and gossiping about the nice man who had worked in the neighborhood for years as they captured the tragedy on their cell phones. In the background the maintenance man attempted to describe the scene in broken English while pleading for an ambulance. Finally they heard a siren in the distance, coming nearer.

“Hold on,” they told Andreas. “Hold on!”

•  •  •

Flora Davies was heading from the basement up to her office when her phone chimed with an alert. A week before, when rats had inexplicably stampeded from Washington Square Park to the basement entrance of the mansion, she had set a dozen tracking systems to alert her if anything unusual happened nearby. These were a confluence of social media platforms that fed her data based on keywords and GPS locales. An algorithm used by the NYPD starred potentially disruptive events. There had been surprisingly few alerts: a couple of muggings, a police takedown of a sword-swinging nut on Bleecker Street, and tiresome celebrity sightings. Now there was a stream of tweets with photos and exclamation points.

“Probably a rock star,” she muttered irritably. Then she noticed
the sprawl of a body, and the blood. It was in front of the nearby Augustine. She moved rapidly through the tweets and, yes, someone had snapped the carrier's ID and posted his name. She knew him, she thought, though she could barely recognize his face.

Flora called to her assistant, “Erika, look up Andreas Campbell, male, late forties, early fifties.”

“Andreas? Our mail carrier?”

“Yes. Start with pharmacy records.”

The Group had long ago established methods for consulting the medical history, bank statements, and credit reports of virtually anyone in America, and they were working toward global access. Any individual would be fairly well delineated with just those sources.

Flora rushed from the building, the front door slamming behind her. Down Ninth Street she heard a siren abruptly shut off. By the time she got to the Augustine Apartments the ambulance doors were closing, Andreas Campbell behind them. She grabbed the nearest bystander, an older man walking his Yorkshire terrier, who was straining toward the blood as far as its leash would allow.

“Did he die?” Flora asked.

“We don't know.”

“What was it, what was the matter?”

“Something bad,” the man replied. “I heard a paramedic say it looked like he bled out half his body.”

The crowd watched the ambulance drive away and then slowly, conspiratorially dispersed.

“Leave it, Bisco!” the old man snapped as the terrier growled and strained toward the mess. The man yanked definitively on the lead and the two of them walked away, leaving only Flora and the maintenance man to contemplate the remains. Flora crouched down on her haunches as close to the vomit as she could get without contaminating the pool of blood.

“Ma'am, what do you think you're doing?”

Flora quickly stood and transferred a twenty-dollar bill from her pocket to the maintenance man's hand. She then pulled out her debit card.

“Whatever you're going to do, do it quick before the cops come and turn this into a crime scene,” the man said.

Holding the edge of her suit jacket over her mouth and nose, Flora used the tip of her debit card to sift through the puddle of vomit. It was filled with one-inch, pale, squirming objects, hundreds of them, if not thousands. Flora stood up just as her phone rang. It was Erika.

“Our friend has friends, Dr. Davies. He's got a prescription for albendazole, which is—”

“I know,” Flora said. “Intestinal parasites.”

“Yes. Herring worms, specifically,” Erika said. “How did you know?”

“I think his pals just ate him from the inside out.”

Erika made a gagging sound as Flora hung up. She used a tissue to wipe off her card.

“You all done here, lady?” the maintenance man asked.

“Yes, I'm quite through with that,” she said, motioning at the ruddy mixture. “Make sure you tell the police to bag it and use disinfectant. Don't let them hose it into the gutter.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”

“Only if a dog or pigeon or some other unfortunate ingests it.”

The man looked at her in disgust and gave a short nod of his head. “Whatever you say, lady.”

As Flora walked back to the mansion, Arni, the dead researcher, was heavy on her mind. Upon entering the building she asked Erika if there had been anything else special about Andreas Campbell: mental irregularities, any psych meds?

Erika reported nothing unusual about Campbell, ruling out a potential link to Arni, who was a synesthete.

Flora sat at her desk and flipped open her laptop, calling up a map of her neighborhood. Then she remembered Andreas had just been at
the mansion. She had heard the mail slot flap open and shut. Fifteen minutes later he was falling catastrophically ill two-thirds of a block away with parasites that
never
caused that much damage that fast. Yet it had happened, in the brief time that Flora was—

In the basement. With Adrienne and the Serpent.

First Mikel came back with the stone, then the rats stampeded, then Arni literally melted, then intestinal parasites went wild. By no reasonable yardstick was this a coincidence.

She switched to an advanced mapping program and drew two vectors, one from the Augustine to the mansion, the other from the mansion to the arch in Washington Square Park, the origin point for the rats. Her skin crawled as she remembered the undulating mass of clawing, twitching rodents that had covered the arch before they ran down and past her.

Like the grid of New York, the two vectors on-screen made a right angle crossing at the mansion.