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  An argon-filled, weighted racquet-ball-sized canister would drop from the chute in the bottom of the plane and burst open five seconds later, releasing dozens of delicate microsensors that would activate on contact with the desert air. Smaller than a dime, with a working life of no more than twenty minutes, the sensors would gather data and transmit it to the plane’s transceiver at a furious pace before burning up from the heat generated by their splintersized silicon processors. If they made it as far as the ground, they would disintegrate into metallic confetti that would scatter onto the desert floor and be hidden under shifting sand.

  “Ten, nine, eight. Sensor released. Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Initiating the laser.”

  Carter felt his heart rate spike again as he imagined the invisible beam of infrared energy, releasing more heat than one hundred thousand 100-watt lightbulbs, blasting through the atmosphere and into the heart of his clouds, heating them and releasing the energy they stored. Releasing the life-giving rain they held.

  The pause from the cockpit lasted less than twenty seconds. “It’s a go. Two pulses of one-point-five seconds discharged at a point-five-zero-second interval. Mission complete. Earth-Four out.”

  Carter had zoomed out slightly as the cumulus congestus clouds on the screen began to billow in all directions, frothing against the black sky, evolving from pristine silvery paleness to dark, dirty gray, obscuring the small, empty square of desert as the counters on the bottom left of the screen flashed new readings. Altitude, temperature, air pressure, relative humidity, wind strength—each variable was moving steadily in the correct direction until the data came to an abrupt stop as the sensors were incinerated or simply shattered against the ground.

  The constriction in his chest began to ease, and sitting back in his chair, Carter let a satisfied grin steal across his face as the intensity of his breathing lessened. His lungs ached as they expanded. Dreamers and scientists alike had long strived to create rainfall on demand. The world needed it, and now, thanks to his tenacity and talent, the world had it. He had it. Nothing, not even death, could take that from him.

  He closed his eyes. Earlier successes had been sweet, but never as sweet as this. This was vindication, and after a lifetime of waiting, it tasted like nectar. Like cold, pure water. It tasted like rain. It tasted like power.

  Man had been attempting to control the weather for centuries. From the days of sacrifices offered to ancient gods to chemical cloud seeding experiments still underway, people had clung to the belief that it could be done. For decades, the world’s most advanced intelligence services and military organizations had spent countless millions trying to control the weather. Carter knew that firsthand.

  As the American military was being ground down in Vietnam in the sixties, the Central Intelligence Agency had plucked him and a small group of other scientists out of their doctoral programs in the atmospheric sciences and made them part of a highly classified, highly specialized, fast-track research team devoted to weather control. Intelligence had confirmed that the Soviet Union had surpassed American efforts to dominate and control the weather. The U.S. was determined to win—the weather war, the Vietnam War, every war.

  With an enormous budget, virtually no oversight, the best technology in the world at their disposal, and an unassailable cover as government staff scientists, Carter’s group quickly outstripped the fledgling Soviet attempts to break the chaotic “code” of weather patterns. The key to Carter’s team’s many successes was that, unlike the Soviets, Carter’s team hadn’t focused on manipulating the weather or controlling it. They’d focused on creating it.

  As the geopolitical situation grew worse, other issues took precedence in the minds of Soviet leaders. The Soviet weather program devolved and practically disappeared, leaving the American program the victor by default. Not long after the Agency learned of the demise of the Soviet program, hints about the American program appeared in major newspapers across the country, leaked by anonymous sources.

  Carter had always assumed—known in his heart—that the leak came from the offices of Winslow Benson, a young, ambitious junior senator from New York who had a healthy respect for power but no respect for science or nature. Having the power to create and control the weather was an awesome responsibility and a staggering opportunity, but Benson, who was heavily if quietly backed by the emerging nuclear power industry, had also seen its potential damage to his backers. Skillfully playing upon the fears of a distrustful, Cold War-hardened public, Benson had openly decried Carter’s program, the very program that Benson’s committee had secretly funded for nearly ten years, as being part of a Strangelovian scheme that would prove more destructive than beneficial. It didn’t take long for the CIA to eliminate the program.

  Unwilling to accept the decision, Carter had fought back in Agency offices and Senate hearing rooms, to no effect other than to watch his scientific career and his credibility go up in flames. Livid, humiliated, but with stubbornness that bumped up against the edges of rationality at times, Carter had abandoned the conjoined worlds of government and academia and had gone into business, continuing to do independent weather research whenever and however he could. Initially, the realities of having a family to support and a business to run had slowed his progress and reshaped his objectives, but the passage of time had also hardened his resolve into something a little less flexible than steel. And now, thirty years and many millions of dollars later, he’d achieved his goal.

  In every cell, to the very depths of his soul, Carter knew this morning’s accomplishment was more than just a technological breakthrough, more than arbitrary luck or the result of hard work. It was deeply, magnificently symbolic. Managing the weather on a global scale was the ultimate authority man could assume over the earth. Exacerbating a storm here, diminishing one there, literally keeping the rain outside of the city so it didn’t rain on the government’s parade—the Russians and the Chinese had been doing that openly and unapologetically, almost whimsically, for years, without any concern for the interruptions they caused to the flow of Nature.

  But what Carter had done today was different.

  He took in an easy, reverent breath. He’d created clouds where Nature’s tortured climate denied their presence. And from those clouds, from that bone-dry desert air, he’d created rain.

  He’d created the means of Life.

  The thought resonated in his head as strong and pure as the last note of a hymn in a towering cathedral.

  The means of Life.

  His talent, his intellect, had wrested from Nature this privilege, this gift beyond comprehension. Over time, regulating rainfall locally, regionally, even globally, could return denuded rain forests to their natural state and reverse desertification, counteracting the effects of global warming. It could reduce Third World poverty and hunger while diminishing poor nations’ dependence on the First World’s extortionate largesse.

  He gripped the arms of his chair, the well-worn leather meeting his palm, giving way beneath hard fingertips as the second realization of the day struck him.

  Rain.

  Reign.

  His hands relaxed as the duality of peace and purpose surged through him. There couldn’t be a mandate more clear: With this privilege came the equal and opposite responsibilities to punish the destroyers and to protect the innocents.

  It was the ultimate philanthropy.

  An electronic crackle from the speaker jolted him from his euphoria.

  “Sir. We may have a problem.” The pilot’s voice still conveyed cool British disinterest.

  The challenge wasn’t finished. Carter leaned forward and smiled. “Go ahead.”

  “The flight director thought he might have seen some campers in the path of the storm. Reconnaissance confirmed the presence of a small camp in a canyon not far from ground zero.”

  Carter went still. “How far?”

  “Less than half a kilometer.”

  This wasn’t good news. While it was occasionally unav
oidable, collateral damage—human deaths—occurring on his test beds tended to distract the crew and increase the risk of discovery.

  “Why didn’t you see them earlier?” he asked, his voice calm and matter-of-fact.

  “The night-vision video camera and infrared scanner had already been shut down. Standard ops. We would have had to be directly over them to pick up a picture anyway. It’s a tight canyon.”

  Alone in his office, Carter nodded, knowing every step of the test procedures. As a routine precaution, non-essential electronic instrumentation in the specially equipped plane was powered down before the big, power-sucking laser was brought to life.

  He took a decisive breath. Initiating a rescue would not only reveal too much, it would likely be useless. Unable to absorb any appreciable amount of water quickly, the hard-baked desert floor would speed the copious rainfall along the path of least resistance. The canyon walls would act as a funnel, pushing the water, making it deeper and more deadly. Even if they were awakened by the roar, the campers would likely be dead before they could identify the sound.

  So be it. “Proceed per orders, Earth-Four. Contact me when you close your flight plan.”

  The pause was minuscule, but Carter picked up on it and frowned as the pilot’s voice came back online. “Roger that. Earth-Four out.”

  Carter sat back in his chair, deeply annoyed and unable to enjoy the green undulations on the screen before him. He didn’t like mistakes. Nor did he like anything to impinge on his moments of glory. They were private moments, a time of communion between himself and his destiny. He sat in the darkness trying to recapture that fleeting sense of wonder until a light tap at his door broke his concentration.

  “Daddy?”

  His eyes opened at the softly spoken word, and he saw the face of his youngest daughter, Meg, framed in the doorway.

  “Are you okay?”

  He smiled and stood up, tightening the belt of the light flannel robe he wore over his pajamas. “Meggy, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better. Where are you off to?” he asked, clicking the mouse to lock the computer screens before crossing the hardwood floor.

  “Jane and I are going out for a run before the hullabaloo starts. The kids are all still asleep, or at least we think they are.” She stopped talking long enough to give him a kiss on the cheek, then turned to walk with him to the kitchen. “There’s no noise up there anyway. Mom’s still asleep, too.”

  His next youngest, Jane, sat at the breakfast bar tying her shoes. “Hi, Dad. Why are you up? Too excited to sleep?” she asked with a grin. “It’s going to be a long day.”

  “I haven’t been up long,” he said, brushing away her question with a smile. “It’s just great having everyone together. It doesn’t happen too often anymore, so why should I waste my time sleeping?”

  Both women laughed.

  “When the population of the house goes from two senior citizens to two senior citizens plus fourteen twenty-and thirtysomethings plus ten children under the age of seven, you should be flat-out exhausted,” Meg pointed out.

  “Never. I’ve always said you girls and your mother were the sources of my energy. That hasn’t changed. Except that there are seven husbands and the grandchildren in the mix now. Everyone being healthy, happy, and here is more important to me than the reason you’ve come.”

  Jane stood up and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “We wouldn’t miss it, Dad. This company has been part of our lives forever. We’ve watched you build it from scratch. You deserve the party. You deserve more than a party.”

  “We’re so proud of you,” Meg added in a whisper. “You’ve shown them all that no one can keep Carter Thompson down.”

  The looks on their pretty faces brought back a faint, fleeting version of the squeezing sensation in his chest and he forced a smile against it. They were good girls. Smart girls. All of his girls were. And they were sincere, honest, and worthy of his trust. That’s why they had all wanted to work for him when they’d finished their studies, and that’s why he’d hired them to work for his companies, the companies that had made everything else possible. He was blessed, so truly blessed in so many ways.

  “Go have your run before you start getting soppy,” he said gruffly, waving them to the door. “Stay near the pond. I think the airstrip has been secured for the president and I don’t want you getting shot by those Secret Service hooligans.”

  Rolling their eyes with gentle, amused exasperation, they left the house. He watched them launch into an easy, steady pace as they headed along the grassy path to the small lake half a mile away, then made his way through the silent kitchen of the old farmhouse and upstairs. His wife, their other five daughters, and their families, all asleep, had no idea that he, Carter Thompson, had just secured the health and prosperity of the world and its people.

  Of course, an inevitably steep cost would be borne by a few, but it would be far outweighed by the inarguable benefits to so many.

  It was a matter of simply restoring the world’s equilibrium. The thought made him smile.

  CHAPTER 4

  Tuesday, July 10, 6:35 A.M., Washington, D.C.

  Freelance work had its perks, but meetings like this wasn’t one of them.

  Tom Taylor, eco-terrorism expert and special advisor to the Director of National Intelligence, shifted in his chair. He’d been sitting too long and wanted more than anything to get up and get some circulation back into his lower extremities. But first he had to subdue this beast that would not die and would not fucking listen to him.

  Being dismissed on sight as too young to be in the position he was in was an ordinary enough occurrence. His gene pool had conspired to give him the face of Dorian Gray. The older he got and the more brutal, brain-fogging shit he saw, the younger people thought he was. It worked to his benefit in its own weird way, but he had to put up with condescending crap for the first few minutes of every God-damned meeting he’d ever had. He handled it, though. It was better than the alternative. If his face revealed half of what he knew or half of what he’d seen, he’d scare the hell out of the Angel of Death. But right now, he wouldn’t mind doing exactly that to the prick with the chest full of ribbons sitting across from him.

  He looked up from his papers to meet the eyes of the general seated at the end of the table in the comfortable, secure conference room several stories below the ground floor of the Pentagon. “With all due respect, General Moore, you’re not going to change a thing. The jet stream stays parked where it is.”

  “You don’t mess with Mother Nature, Mr. Taylor,” the general replied, his jaw barely moving as he spoke. “This isn’t what HAARP was intended for. It’s called the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program for a reason. It’s a communications and surveillance research program, not a weapon. We’ve never applied consistent, continuous, wide-scale atmospheric interference for this length of time before, even when a situation clearly warranted it. What we’re doing right now is what whack-job assholes have been accusing us of doing for years.”

  Stand down, you fucking prima donna. “I understand your concerns, General,” Tom said in a calm tone calculated to infuriate people who thought they were the AIC, which was his shorthand for the role he normally occupied: Asshole In Charge. “The CIA’s Director of Operations and the Director of National Intelligence understand that HAARP is strictly an atmospheric research tool and that to use it otherwise is to give credence to the rants of conspiracy theorists. But the Pentagon’s public relations machine is not our highest priority at the moment. We’re looking at a bigger mission right now, sir. One with incalculably high stakes and a potentially catastrophic outcome. We’re changing the rules, and you have to play along.”

  The general’s skin was as coarse as granite and nearly the same color, or had been until a moment ago. Now it was turning a deep shade of red. His eyes were blue and burning with anger at being overruled. Given that he’d been on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the former administration, powerlessness probably wasn’
t a sensation the man was used to experiencing, but that was too damned bad. He wasn’t calling the shots this time. The CIA’s DO was, at the direct request of the DNI.

  Nevertheless, Tom wished again that he’d brought along some technical backup for the meeting, especially since the general had brought reinforcements. But his best researcher had died unexpectedly and his replacement wasn’t up to speed enough to warrant bringing him in now.

  “General, I have a meeting at Langley in a little while, so I propose that we cut to the chase. We’re confident that a terrorist cell operating within U.S. borders has devised a means of controlling the weather. We’ve asked you to cover our backs while we hunt for the members of this cell and to keep the weather over the continental U.S. stable until we’re able to flush them into the open by making them blink first. Thanks in part to your cooperation, we’re close to identifying the terrorists, General Moore. Now, I’d like to understand your objections to continuing this operation.”

  He could practically see the man’s blood pressure spike. “My objection is that we’re disrupting necessary, critical cycles that fuel global weather, including thermohaline convection. My objection is that we don’t know what the consequences will be if we continue interfering with weather systems at this level, Mr. Taylor. And at this point neither do we know what will happen when we stop the interference.” He paused, apparently waiting for some response.

  Tom provided none and instead leaned back in his chair, masking with nonchalance his alarm at the general’s admission. This was not the way things were supposed to play out. He knew that, the general knew that, and the DNI knew that. Smoking out terrorists was not supposed to take this long. It had taken eight months to find Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden had been more fucking elusive than anyone had anticipated, and now these bastards—