Hurricane Fever Read online

  “And Beauchamp is going to this Hurricane Ball?”

  “The guest list is … exclusive,” Rhodes said. “But we got a peek at it. What we want you to do, now, is go there.”

  Roo looked over. “You know what happened the last time I showed up to a party. He tried to kill me.”

  “Yes. Right now we are counting on it. We’re tossing you in, Roo. A live grenade. Because we need something to happen so we can come down on this man like lead brick. Right now, all we know is that you claim he has this virus, but we have nothing concrete.”

  “You’re hoping he’ll kill me.”

  “Try,” Rhodes said. “Or, to be honest, even succeed. Either way, we get what we need. We’re going to mic you up, add some video, and turn you into our very own human ROV. You are going in to poke the bear, Mr. Jones.”

  “Good,” Roo said. “How do I get in? The list is exclusive?”

  Rhodes pulled a gold-leaf ticket out of the inner pocket of his jacket. “Call me your fairy godmother.”

  Roo examined the ticket. “Who’s August Charleton?”

  “The sponsor of this latest Hurricane Ball. A financier for one of Barbados’s more interesting projects, the Verne Plus.” A picture of a long artillery barrel replaced the glittering party scene. Roo looked at it for a while, and then realized his sense of scale was all wrong. There were tiny people down at the base of the barrel, which was suspended by cables inside of a long bridge-like structure. It was an easy quarter of a mile long.

  “That’s a big gun,” Roo said.

  “It’s the resurrection of an old project. In the 1960s a Canadian-American research team used U.S. Navy guns to try to build a system to shoot small satellites into orbit. It was called Project HARP. Barbados was a great launch point, as it aimed east out over the Atlantic. They shut it down, and the inventor later tried to build a supergun for the Iraqis. Either the Israelis, the Americans, or Iranians assassinated him in 1990; none of them wanted a dictator with the ability to shell their countries from hundreds of miles away.”

  “And Charleton’s building a successor?”

  “They’ve built a twenty-inch-bore cannon. Longer. Project HARP shot a mini-satellite a hundred and twelve miles up. The Verne Plus puts five hundred pounds into orbit. For a fraction of the price of a rocket. Fairly clever. The government helped co-fund the plan; the idea was to make Barbados a center for space launch activity around the project. What didn’t raise alarms at the time was that Charleton turned down the offer to use the old HARP facility near the airport and Barbados Defense Forces training grounds; he purchased tracts of land near Hackleton Cliff, and a lot of land downrange of it, to build the complex. Guess he and Beauchamp didn’t want the BDF being close by.”

  “They plan to launch people?” Roo asked in amazement, looking at another picture of the barrel. It pointed up into the air at a forty-five-degree angle in this shot, explosive gases gushing out from the end.

  “No, you’d end up meat-flavored toothpaste, so it’s just satellites and equipment. Fuel,” Rhodes said. “But it stands to make Charleton a very, very rich man.”

  “Do I get a gun?” Roo asked.

  Rhodes snorted. “No. See, this is a party full of dignitaries and very—and I want to stress this—very, rich people. You go on, you get your response, and we go from there.”

  “Right. I’m human chum,” Roo said.

  “Exactly.”

  Rhodes swapped back to a photo of the exclusive partygoers.

  “We’re going to have to dress you up. A tailor will be in tomorrow,” Rhodes said.

  “When’s the ball?”

  “Just before Okath’s landfall. Two days. Time enough to get you tailored up, mic you up. Hopefully no one gets it into their head to try and stop this.”

  “Just two days,” Roo said. “Been one after another.”

  “Heavy weather,” Rhodes said.

  22

  The limousine whined along as Roo looked at the beaches passing by. Villas crowded the white sands, their foundation pillars raising them up off the ground so that storm surge could sweep under them. A whole generation of beachfront property had long since been battered away by hurricane-force weather. Insurance companies no longer insured houses that sat on ground level on a coast anywhere in the world.

  But the mansion they pulled into the driveway of was built right on the land, like an inland house. But it hid behind protective walls. The outer perimeter of the property had fifteen-foot stone walls as thick as any ancient fort, with gates of steel so thick they could have worked in a canal.

  In the heart of the hurricane fortifications, the marble pillars of an overly art deco mansion were braced by angular statues of Titans holding fast, their grim faces lifted up toward the skies.

  As they passed through the giant steel gates, Rhodes looked out at the cars lined up in front of them. “I think some of those are running on gas; they haven’t been converted,” he said.

  They both stared at a Porsche 911’s muffler for a moment.

  “Hell of a statement,” Roo said. “Literally have money to burn for fun.”

  “Many of these guests probably do,” Rhodes said. “You have your ticket?”

  It was the third time he’d asked. Roo didn’t bother to respond. He unzipped a small bag at his feet and pulled out a pair of new work gloves he’d overnighted to the office Rhodes had kept him in.

  “What are those?” Rhodes asked.

  “Every well-dressed man needs a pair of gloves,” Roo replied.

  “Those are work gloves.”

  “They sometimes come in handy for just that,” Roo said. He opened the door, not willing to wait for the car to make it all the way to the polished stone steps leading up to the entryway.

  Rhodes grabbed his shoulder. “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  Roo slid out and shut the door. It was raining, the hurricane beginning to make itself felt. But the tuxedo slicked the rain away with its hydrophobic fibers.

  Security guards with portable scanners checked him over and took the ticket. A computer verified its unique RFID signature. “If you did not make arrangements to have valet parking, and you need to return to your home, we have tornado-armored Humvees available to take you wherever you might need,” one of the guards said. He pointed at one of the vehicles, parked outside by a clump of coconut trees. It was black and massive, covered in slabs of thick impact armor and with small slits for windows. “Would you like to reserve one for a return trip right now?”

  “No,” Roo said.

  Inside the great ballroom Roo paused a moment. There were models of large rockets hanging from the ceiling, a sign of Charleton’s influence on the party. But the rest of the decoration was hurricane-chic. The walls danced and flickered with images of windswept ocean east of Barbados. The cliffs on the east coast had dramatic footage: cameras up at the top showed massive waves thundering against the rock.

  Step into the right spot, and tight tunnels of audio would fix on a person’s location. The hum of the party dipped away. Roo found himself briefly standing in a spot where the thud of waves striking pounded his chest and the hiss of spray drifting in the aftermath filled his ears. Wind howled.

  He stepped out and back into the snatches of random conversation.

  Roo drifted into line at a small temporary bar. “Hi,” said an intense man with silvered hair. “I’m Gregor Upton, I don’t think I’ve met you before. What’s your line of work?”

  Roo shook his hand. “Prudence Jones. I’m mostly retired these days. I used to be in security. You?”

  “Hurricane refits,” Upton said. “I built the walls for this mansion. The owners viewed putting it up on pylons as gauche.”

  “View’s better on pylons,” Roo noted. “You’d get to see the beach.”

  “The stone walls are retractable.” Upton waved the objection away. “When hurricane season is over they lower them so that the beach is viewable. Beats the hell out of hammering wood
over your windows!”

  As they waited their turn for drinks, he talked about his work growing more artificial reefs on islands up and down the Caribbean to help with storm surge and beach mitigation. “I also am spending a lot on a project to genetically engineer tougher foliage. There’s some neat things you can do with sea-grape trees, but I think the good money’s on mangroves. We really need more mangroves to blunt hurricane damage. The more people we can put into hardened high-rise buildings, and restore reef and greenage around them, the less increased hurricane activity hurts us.”

  Roo took one of his cards and politely disengaged.

  The tiny earpiece embedded deep in Roo’s ear canal kicked on. “Roo, this is Rhodes. I’m riding shotgun.”

  Roo grunted.

  A waifish woman with deep green eyes talked to him for a while about bauxite derivatives and hurricane insurance, and then Roo had to listen to an older government official talk about the Beijing Accord meetings, where he’d played some role in advocating for an infrastructure bank that invested in bike highway systems across the world.

  The lights dimmed, cutting off the humble bragging. At a set of steps around a chocolate fountain at the front of the room a bald-headed man raised a hand. Screens faded away, and the audio qualities of the room shifted as devices kicked in audio tunneling focuses to allow him to speak to everyone softly.

  “Thank you so much for attending yet … another successful Hurricane Ball. One of many more to come, I’m sure, given the Atlantic’s busy summer.” People in the room chuckled. “I am your host for Okath, and I want to say, thank you for trusting me to this. As your host, I’m allowed just a few words, I promise I’ll make this brief. I won’t pull a Petrov on you.”

  More polite laughter, obviously an inside joke. Roo noticed some people glancing around, then joining the laughter. Those who didn’t laugh would stand out.

  A way to separate who was new to the ball, Roo thought.

  “You all know we’ve come a long way since the government-dominated days of missions to orbit and beyond. Many know that I think it’s important that we, as a species, find a way to live off our planet. Not just because our world now turns against us with storms and disaster, but because there are those among us filled with a desire for war. All it would take is one dangerous nation, one rogue state, to take us all down with them.”

  Charleton paused dramatically and looked at his audience.

  “My life’s work has been to create a very cheap way to put lots of what we need into orbit, and the Verne Plus gives us just that. It is an important leap for our species. And for us. Imagine, not hunkering down in a building like this, but watching these storms from orbit. Secure. Safe. Above it all.”

  Behind him a live satellite picture of the great swirl of Okath’s arms appeared as a hologram in the air. As if everyone in the room were already above the atmosphere. In Charleton’s vision of the future, they were all looking down at the inconvenience of the storm. Above plagues. Above it all.

  Upton had moved back Roo’s way, and nodded at him. “One vision of the future,” he groused. “Never mind trying to fix what’s on the ground. Just leave it all behind and run away.”

  Roo scanned the attentive audience for some sign of Beauchamp.

  “After this remarkable storm passes,” Charleton continued, “I invite any of you who wish to come and see a launch of the Verne Plus for yourselves. The location, on the east coast of the island where the Atlantic hits the shore, is stunning. However, to demonstrate the all-weather abilities of our system, we will actually be making a launch tonight, right in the middle of the storm. A weather instrument system that will remain suborbital and take measurements of both Okath and, at the other side of its trajectory, a new hurricane already developing off the horn of Africa. So please, enjoy our live feeds, or just head upstairs to the blast-proof windows and enjoy the storm!”

  Video appeared on walls of the strikingly long barrel of the Verne Plus. Live hurricane feeds resumed on others. Some guests headed for the curved stairs up toward the top of the mansion.

  There were antique wooden chairs and tables in nooks and quiet spots around the edge of the ballroom. Roo sat down at one with his empty glass, watching the hundred or so guests.

  An attendant in tails appeared and held out a stiff piece of paper. “The menu, sir.”

  “Oh.” Roo stood. “I’m not hungry, I didn’t realize that’s what the chairs were for.”

  “Of course,” she said. Her long hair was expertly pinned, lacquered, and sculpted into a spiral shape. More hurricane references. “Can I refill your glass?”

  “I think I’ll just leave it and go upstairs to see the storm,” Roo said.

  “Very good, sir,” she said, as if he’d just made a wise choice of some sort.

  He meandered away, up the long sweep of stairs and through corridors. Small clumps of people sat on couches and chatted about things Roo couldn’t hear due to invisible audio chips neutralizing their words outside the bubble of space they stood in.

  There would be deal-making going on. Business. Fortunes making connections.

  “Roo!” hissed Kit. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him down the corridor.

  She spun him into a bathroom, locked the door behind them both, and yanked a small pen from a purse. She clicked it and static swamped Roo’s earpiece.

  “Katrina Prideaux, formally Beauchamp,” Roo snapped. The anger in him boiled over, threatening any attempt he had been planning of being even-tempered if he saw her. “It seems every time I meet you, I meet a whole new person.”

  “I can’t believe you came here,” she muttered, ignoring his anger. “You might have made things worse if he saw you. Do you know if he saw you?”

  “You should have told me you were his daughter,” Roo shouted.

  “Hush. Life is packed with the misery of things we should have done.” Kit searched through her purse for something. “I should have realized I’d be followed, instead I ended up getting your nephew killed. Almost got you killed. Couldn’t talk you out of going right to the labs. I should have just left with the frog. It had the info I needed, but I stayed to help with your mess. What are you hoping to do here, something even more spectacular?”

  Roo folded his arms. “The CIG is listening and watching everything, and I promised them I wouldn’t do anything. But the short answer is: I’m here to kill your father. Somehow.”

  “You’re not broadcasting,” Kit said.

  “What?” As soon as he said that out loud, he felt silly. The static. Of course.

  She waved the pen in the air. “I’m using the same technology you had on the boat to jam any signals.”

  Roo reached for the pen, curious. Kit grabbed his wrist. “I need you to pay attention, Roo. You need to tell this to your people. Get your attention off revenge and onto the bigger issue.”

  “Which is?”

  “The reason I helped you at the island. The reason I helped you storm that ship to get away. My father and his people are launching the engineered plague tonight, in the storm. They’re going to use the Verne Plus.”

  “They’re dumping it into Okath?” Zee’s obsession with storms and wind patterns now made sense.

  Kit nodded. “To spread it around the Caribbean and into America. The moisture-rich storm environment will help the virus from getting dried out. A second launch directly into Africa also finishes it up.”

  “It’s going to be hard to bomb them in the middle of a hurricane,” Roo said.

  “And a cruise missile capable of sterilizing the coastal area near the Verne Plus might well veer of course in those winds and kill Barbadians,” Kit said. “Or worse, spread the virus across the island if it doesn’t quite hit right. So you need to mobilize troops when your team comes to get you out of here. Now, please answer my first question: did my father see you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good, then he won’t launch early.” Kit looked relieved. She slid a capsule
out from her purse and jabbed the end into Roo’s forearm. It spit against his skin.

  “Kit!”

  “Sorry. It’s just a sedative. I need a head start. I didn’t think you would show up here. Not after what you’d been through.”

  Roo leaned against a sink, his vision failing. “You should have … told us…”

  “I’ve been doing the best I can. I just now heard Charleton give the speech saying he was launching in the middle of the storm. That was when I realized what he was doing. I’m sorry, Roo.” She grabbed his shoulders and helped him slide gently down to the polished marble tile floor. “There’s just one last thing I need to tell you. The fever: did you notice what its victims had in common?”

  Roo breathed deeply, trying to fight the drugs. “They…” He frowned.

  “The immigrants in France. My husband, Hamid. They all had high melanin counts, Roo. They were brown-skinned.”

  “Zee didn’t have that much melanin,” Roo said. Zee had passed as white in Europe. In fact, it made him a useful agent for the CIG, even if Zee was as Caribbean as anyone else in the office.

  “That may have given him the time he needed in Florida to contact you before he died,” Kit said. “My father lied to you about the fever. I’ve been able to do some snooping of my own, Roo. The virus is targeted. I think it hunts specific genes related to skin color. He has been terrified of what he calls the clash of civilizations in Europe. He thinks we’re living in the final days of the end of Western Civilization, and is determined to strike first.”

  “Kit…”

  “He killed Hamid, Roo. I’m going after him. I have to stop him. For Hamid. For me. For everyone. You’ll be out for fifteen minutes, Roo. That’s all I need, a head start. Talk to your people.”

  Roo’s eyes had been closed for a while, but now her words faded away as well.

  * * *

  He startled himself awake with a dry mouth and wiped drool off the side of a numb face with his sleeve. He unlocked the door, swaying for a second, then pushed it open. An annoyed man standing outside said, “Finally!”