Frozen Fire Read Online Free

floor, released it from the pincers, and began retracting the arm as slowly and carefully as she’d inserted it. Its placement so far into the cave would preclude the box from being seen by anyone who might be sent to these coordinates to investigate her actions—which would only happen if Simon disobeyed her orders and began tracking her movements. Not that it really mattered. Even if Simon could convince Victoria to send an investigative team to find out what she’d been doing, it would be too late. Investigators would not be facing an abyssal wall. They wouldbe facing a blank expanse of ocean, still turbid with the debris of a catastrophic submarine landslide.
    The arm fully retracted, Micki moved forward three hundred feet along the wall and repeated the procedure with the second box. Her mission accomplished, she aimed the pod upward and moved in a slow arc back toward the tender ship. When she broke the surface, Micki reactivated the communications channel and announced to the dive master that she was ready to be retrieved.
    It wasn’t easy keeping the triumph out of her voice.

 
     
     
     
 
CHAPTER
1
 
     
     
     
    4:30 A.M. , Saturday, October 25, Miami, Florida
    Dennis Cavendish became aware that he was drifting toward consciousness and forced himself to open his eyes, demanded his brain kick into high gear. Too much was going to happen today for him to allow himself the luxury of a slow awakening, or even another round with the pair of warm, lush redheads flanking him. He pulled himself to a sitting position, then gave the woman on his left a light slap on her well-shaped behind.
    “Time to go.”
    He shook the other woman’s shoulder, and both began to make small murmurs, indicating that waking them would not be an easy task. He climbed over one of them, took a moment to stretch his pleasantly aching muscles, then ripped the covers off both women. The chill in the air-conditioned room sent them into fetal crouches.
    He flipped on one of the lamps next to the bed. “I said it’s time to go.”
    One of the women pushed herself upright on one elbow, brushing hair out of her eyes with her other hand. “Is something wrong? What time is it?” She looked at him blearily, her eye makeup smudged.
    “It’s four-thirty and you have to go. I’ve got work to do,” Dennis liedsmoothly. “Get your friend to wake up. You have to be out of here in five minutes. There will be a car waiting for you when you get downstairs.”
    Still confused and squinting, the woman nevertheless pushed her companion until she woke up. With barely a word spoken between them, the women threw on most of their clothes, and Dennis escorted them to the elevator door in the living room of his condo. They departed with wary, friendly waves. The moment the door slid shut, Dennis went to the shower to brace himself for the day ahead.
    Forty-five minutes later Dennis was airborne, the engines of his Lear jet screaming as his pilot executed a steep takeoff from Miami International Airport. He would be on the ground on his island, Taino, in twenty minutes. Not long after that he would be in a small submarine headed four thousand feet to the bottom of his slice of the Caribbean. It wouldn’t be a joy ride; it would be the last trip to see the dream of his lifetime while it still belonged just to him:
Atlantis
, the first fully staffed habitat ever built at that depth—and the operations center for the newest and best means of changing the way the world worked.
    In a few hours,
Atlantis
would begin to retrieve methane hydrate crystals from beneath the seafloor and introduce the world to the next, arguably the only, clean fuel that the planet had to offer.
    From entertaining the first glimmer of a thought to watching the last beams being sunk into place, Dennis had known that this was what life was about. This was the brass ring, the golden goose; attaining this kind of power was what every hackneyed cliché referred to, what every fairy tale