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  “Hardly. The presentation doesn’t have anything to do with me or the company, as such. It’s limited to those storms.”

  “What are you going to say about them?”

  “That they exhibited atypical behaviors due to criteria that remain unidentified and for reasons that remain unexplained.”

  He stared at her. “That’s it?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re just telling everybody that you found a problem and you’re not offering any solution?”

  She nodded again.

  He ran a hand through his amber waves of plugs and let out a long breath as he stopped and faced her. He didn’t look happy. He didn’t look pissed off, either, which was good, but “annoyed” might fit the bill. “You have to answer me some questions, Kate. First of all, what’s the point of doing that? It doesn’t exactly make you sound like the hotshot you are. And, second, why in the name of all that’s holy would you admit that to your peers?”

  And people call you an intellectual. She put her sarcasm in a closet and met his eyes. “Well, someone else might have an answer or be studying the same thing from a different perspective. Like you said, it’s a contribution to the body of knowledge. A colleague and I were talking about it and he said he thought it had some potential.”

  “Someone in-house?”

  “No. I spoke about it with Richard Carlisle. He’s a former professor of mine and—”

  “The weather guy from TV? The one that nearly got blown off that building a while back?”

  “Yes, that would be him.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Isn’t he a little old for you?” He raised an eyebrow.

  She resisted the temptation to fold her arms across her chest and glare at him. “Yes, Davis Lee, he would be if we were dating, not that that’s any of your business, but we’re friends. Can we get back to the conference?”

  “No offense intended. When’s the conference?”

  “The end of next week.”

  “Where?”

  “D.C.”

  “You taking the shuttle?”

  “The train.” She glanced at her hands for a split second, fighting the mingled residue of shame and anger that shot through her whenever the issue of travel arose. Her rational side knew she shouldn’t have to explain her decision every time, especially after six years had gone by, but the other side trumped that thought process because her decision was less a choice than a traumatic imperative. She’d been hard at work just before nine on September 11, 2001, in her thirtieth-floor office that faced the World Trade Center a few blocks away. The memories could still leave her paralyzed if she let them.

  Kate cleared her throat and returned her eyes to Davis Lee’s face. “I’m taking the train,” she repeated in a voice that had lost its fire.

  Davis Lee nodded. “That sounds fine. By the way, good call in Nebraska last week. Saved some wheat futures.”

  “Thanks. Make sure you tell my boss,” she replied dryly.

  They resumed walking, and before she realized it, he was steering her toward another crowded tent, this one full of tables laden with food. “I’ll be back in New York early next week. We can talk more then. In the meantime, I have to go see a man about a policy.” He turned to a heavyset woman behind him and flashed that charming smile at her. “Well, I’ll be damned. Tammy Jo. Isn’t this just lucky? Do you know Kate? She’s from the New York office. Kate, this is Tammy Jo, one of my assistants here in Campbelltown. My right hand, as a matter of fact. Kate is one of our meteorologists, Tammy Jo. Maybe you can get her to tell you why it’s rainin’ on our parade.” With a wink and a smile, Davis Lee drifted into the official-looking group of armed and headset-wearing men milling in front of the headquarters’s main door.

  Damn it. Kate forced herself to smile back at the blushing, beaming woman, who put a bottle of Bud Light into her hand and was urging her to get in line for the food coming off the grills.

  Kate put the chilled bottle to her lips and swallowed. Although she’d never admit as much to Davis Lee, learning that her paper had been accepted for presentation at the conference had left her with mixed feelings. It was an honor, of course. She’d be speaking to a pretty potent audience of weather research professionals, a growing number of whom were her fellow forecasters in the ever more cutthroat investment and financial markets.

  For the other half of the audience—the wonks, academics, and TV talking heads—standing up and saying that you didn’t know something was a perfectly acceptable thing to do. But if you called Wall Street your home away from home, it was less acceptable. Much less. Fund analysts and managers, stockbrokers, bond and commodity traders, and the rest of them would not only never do it, they also had a limitless supply of jargon and weasel words to get around acknowledging the fact that they weren’t actually God. If they heard that a person whose expertise they relied on had publicly admitted she didn’t know something that she should—well, it wouldn’t go down well. That’s why Davis Lee’s fairly calm acceptance of her plan had come as more than a surprise. She had plenty of doubts about what degree of career suicide she might be engaging in. She’d been prepared to drop it if he’d made a big enough fuss, and part of her had sort of hoped he would so the decision would be taken out of her hands.

  On the other hand, those storms were just so damned weird that maybe she wouldn’t have let it drop. She took another sip from the bottle.

  Despite what she’d implied to Davis Lee a few minutes ago, the truth was that Richard—friend, mentor, weather junkie, and the nation’s most-watched morning weatherman—had most definitely not been supportive of her research into the storms or of her decision to turn that research into a conference paper. He’d tried to talk her out of pursuing the research entirely by pointing out one possibility that she hadn’t considered, one that she hadn’t been able to forget.

  In his easygoing way, Richard had reminded her that weather fanatics and conspiracy theorists continually combed scholarly and scientific literature for unanswered questions. They turned these into “proof” of improbable threats, dire scenarios, and evil government plots.

  While Kate was hoping her thoughtful questions would capture the attention of someone with answers, according to Richard those very questions could lead the loo-lah brigade to hijack her hard-won credentials and excellent reputation by identifying her as yet another expert who had come over to their side. She’d be an unwitting poster girl for the legions of lunatics who put up homemade Web sites with black backgrounds and white type, and in badly written, slightly hysterical prose declaimed paranoid theories, anti-government rants, and junk science.

  Not quite what she had in mind for her fifteen minutes of fame.

  On the other hand, she was a trained scientist and unexplained phenomena chewed at her brain.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Rare or medium?”

  Kate blinked, realizing she’d been shuffling along the buffet line in a daze. She focused on the shiny, soot-streaked, entirely too earnest face of the young man smiling back at her. He was stationed between the hot, smoking grills and the tables sagging under the weight of brimming, steaming stainless-steel chafing pans. His paper chef’s hat had wilted in the humidity and sat in a flattened pouf on his sweaty head, perfectly complementing his char- and blood-streaked white coat. His right hand reached for her plate while his left held aloft a long-pronged meat fork with charred bits of many a steer clinging to its tines.

  “Sorry. Wrong line.” She smiled her thanks at the young man and headed for the salad bar.

  Unexplained phenomena were welcome to chew at her brain. Mad cow disease was not.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tuesday, July 10, 11:30 A.M., Campbelltown, Iowa

  If it was true that power was the greatest aphrodisiac, then surely proximity to power had a similarly potent effect. Being waved into the tightly secured inner sanctum of a presidential enclave had given Davis Lee a serious hard-on. The fa
ct that he was headed to his own office only enhanced the experience: His office was inside the ring of fire.

  He didn’t have to fake a smile as he walked past the phalanxes of Secret Service agents and presidential aides milling around the entrance to Coriolis’s headquarters and the various security checkpoints. As he pushed open the door to his office, his smile grew wider.

  There she was, the quiet, earnest, painlessly plain Elle Baker, whom he’d lured away from a low-level position in the White House chief of staff’s office to be his senior assistant for special projects.

  She was the perfect choice. He’d known it the first time he’d seen her during an interminably long and utterly boring party hosted by one of the wildlife conservation lobbies. Elle had been working her way along the walls of the room, following the sophisticates like a shadow and laughing without catching the jokes. Knowing big breaks inspire big loyalty, he’d made a point of finding out who she was and chatting her up, and then he’d had HR check her out and make her a Manhattan-based offer she couldn’t refuse. It had all taken less than ten days.

  She had come on board a few weeks later fully armed with undergraduate degrees in statistics and history, a master’s degree in library science, and an unexpected tenacious streak. Despite having lived and worked in D.C. for two years, Elle still bore all the hallmarks of an ambitious but clueless small-town girl from a flyover state. According to what HR had been able to find out, she’d gotten her position in the White House the old-fashioned way—she’d earned it.

  No connections to any significant Washington power structures had surfaced during a routine background check. Her name had never appeared on any blogs, scandalous or otherwise, and her Internet presence was limited to a tame page on Facebook that hadn’t been updated since she’d graduated from college. A deeper background check had revealed that although her mother had gone to the same college as the First Lady and they had belonged to the same sorority, Elle’s father was a staunch and vocal supporter of the wrong party.

  The director of personnel for Coriolis had laughed that it was more of a miracle than a mystery that Elle had been hired by the White House, and Davis Lee hadn’t argued. After her research internships at the national party headquarters and a private think tank, the White House had been an unusual next step, but two years in Washington had obviously garnered her some kind of connections. Elle wasn’t the most politically astute twenty-six-year-old Davis Lee had ever hired, but if she’d been able to pull off something like that, she was clever enough to do what he needed her to do.

  She had quickly shown herself to be gifted when it came to research, which made her more than tolerable until his current special project—he’d told her it was a behind-the-scenes biography to be privately published for Carter’s upcoming sixty-fifth birthday—was complete. In truth, there was no biography planned. Davis Lee simply considered comprehensive, clandestine digging around in someone’s personal history due diligence in the realm of corporate politics. Carter Thompson was a canny gamesman who held his cards close to his chest, but that didn’t preclude him from having a few up his sleeve.

  “Hey, Elle, I was wondering when you were going to get here,” he said as he walked toward his desk.

  “I flew in this morning. Tammy Jo picked me up at the airport and brought me out here a little while ago.”

  “Good girl. They didn’t give you any trouble out there, did they?” he asked, tipping his head toward the front of the building.

  “The security people?” She shook her head as she began to blush. “No. A few of the agents recognized me from the West Wing, so they checked me in pretty fast.”

  “Good. Now tell me what you’re doing in here when you should be out there having fun.”

  She smiled up at him, too widely and, frankly, too adoringly. If she’d been good-looking, it wouldn’t have annoyed him, but she was as plain as a picket fence. No makeup, no fashion sense, no efforts made to improve her looks. … He winked at her anyway and watched her quickly turn away. “Are you about to make me a happy man, Miz Baker?”

  Settling into the chair behind his imposing walnut desk, Davis Lee tapped a key on the keyboard to bring his computer’s monitor to life, then leaned back and slid his feet out of his thoroughly soaked hand-sewn Italian leather loafers. Damned Iowa mud.

  “I think you’ll be pleased, Davis Lee. I thought you’d want to see these right away and I didn’t want to leave them lying around. That’s why I waited for you here,” she replied softly as she stood up and carried a file folder to him. It was stamped with the word “CONFIDENTIAL” across the front in large, dark blue letters, followed by “DAVIS LEE LONGSTREET ONLY” handwritten with a red felt-tip marker.

  Subtle.

  With a deep breath, he accepted the folder from her, flicked it open, and gave it a two-second glance before setting it on his desk. He met her eyes. “More articles he wrote? I thought you found them all a while back.”

  She dropped gracelessly into the wing chair in front of his desk. “I thought so, too. But these weren’t archived in the same way. They’re not from what would be considered academic or scientific journals. They’re from …” She paused. “Well, they were cited in some old off-the-wall books I came across. About weather conspiracies. Like weather control and things like that.”

  He realized that he hadn’t breathed out and forced an easy laugh to cover it, then reached forward and keyed in his password. “Elle, you have to come clean with me. What do you mean you ‘came across’ old books about weather conspiracy theories? I find the fact that you were reading them almost more alarming than the citations you found in them. Don’t tell me that’s what you do for fun at night because I just won’t believe it.”

  “No,” she replied, with a smile that looked a little strained. “But in one of those dry papers Mr. Thompson wrote while he was at the Weather Service in the mid-sixties, he made an allusion to a topic I hadn’t come across before, so I decided to see where it led me.”

  His gaze moved from his screen to her face and he sent her a look intended to let her know this wasn’t a conversation he’d entertain for much longer. “And it led you to the whack-job world of weather conspiracy theorists?”

  She nodded and started to laugh. “Well, you told me to find whatever I could. I thought that there might be a little bit of color behind all the drab information I’d found so far. You know, something to spice up the biography a little. So far, I can’t imagine whoever writes it is going to have much to work with. I mean, most of his papers were about jet stream fluctuations and cloud physics.”

  “So what did you find?” he asked, his eyes drifting to his computer screen. One tap to the keyboard brought up his e-mail application. There were sixty-three new messages.

  “College term papers.”

  Davis Lee looked up. “Say what?”

  “He was interested in the role of meteorologists during times of war.” She leaned forward, eyes bright with geeky excitement. “He wrote about theories of weather manipulation throughout history. Like in the time of Shakespeare and Napoleon. And he was a big fan of what was going on weather-wise during the world wars. You know, like forecasting strategies and weather research. Cloud seeding and—”

  “Slow down there, Elle. You’re losing me.”

  She smiled, delighted with herself, and looked almost pretty.

  “I think it might have been an early hobby or passion or something, Davis Lee. Have you ever heard him talk about it?”

  He shook his head, a growing uneasiness whispering against the hairs at the back of his neck.

  “Then I guess we’ve stumbled across something, haven’t we? I mean, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. His senior thesis was on the British Meteorology Service and the D-day invasion, and his graduate work focused on the evolution of large-scale weather patterns. He must have dropped it as a hobby or whatever by the time he was getting his doctorate, because his dissertation is real scientific and pretty dry, but—”
/>   She read his dissertation? “Elle, stay on point. The term papers?”

  “Right. Sorry. So, this cluster of papers struck me as a little weird because, basically, he wrote ten undergrad term papers that were all variations on a theme. And they were all written in different years for different classes—even an English lit class. It’s kind of a stretch to be able to do that, and I think you’d have to really love the topic to be able to approach it so many ways.”

  “How did they end up in these books?”

  She shrugged, her hands tightly folded in her lap. “I guess he must have thought they were good, or important, or something, because he probably sent them to the people who cited them. I mean, I’m conjecturing here, but they didn’t have computers or the Internet or anything then—well, DARPA Net, but he wouldn’t have had access to that—but he had to have been in touch with these people somehow. How would they know about his work otherwise? He was just a college student. So if he contacted them, that means he had to have been pretty into the subject and must have thought his papers merited some attention. Don’t you think?” She paused for a quick breath. “I mean, why else would he have even corresponded with these people?”

  Her words were coming faster and her voice was getting breathy. If he didn’t stop her, she’d talk herself into a fit of hyperventilation.

  “Okay, just give me a second.” He held up one hand as he glanced at the title page on the top of the stack. “Playing God: Man’s Search for the Means to Control the Weather.”

  Davis Lee kept his face expressionless. Carter, what the fuck were you up to?

  He flipped through the rest of the papers. “The Role of Weather Prediction in the Outcome of the One-Hundred-Year War.” “‘Typhoon’ Halsey and Weather-Induced Losses in the Pacific Theater.” “The Role of Electromagnetism in Mythology and Superstition.” “The Effect of Climatic Changes on Commerce and Social Structure in the Nineteenth Century.” “Weather Imagery in Shakespeare’s Tragedies.”