Deception Point

Chapter 39-41
39

"We've got flagellates," Tolland said, staring into the luminescent water.

"Flatulence?" Corky scowled. "Speak for yourself."

Rachel sensed Michael Tolland was in no joking mood.

"I don't know how it could have happened," Tolland said, "but somehow this water contains bioluminescent dinoflagellates."

"Bioluminescent what?" Rachel said. Speak English.

"Monocelled plankton capable of oxidizing a luminescent catalyst called luceferin."

That was English?

Tolland exhaled and turned to his friend. "Corky, there any chance the meteorite we pulled out of that hole had living organisms on it?"

Corky burst out laughing. "Mike, be serious!"

"I am serious."

"No chance, Mike! Believe me, if NASA had any inkling whatsoever that there were extraterrestrial organisms living on that rock, you can be damn sure they never would have extracted it into the open air."

Tolland looked only partially comforted, his relief apparently clouded by a deeper mystery. "I can't be for sure without a microscope," Tolland said, "but it looks to me like this is a bioluminescent plankton from the phylum Pyrrophyta. Its name means fire plant. The Arctic Ocean is filled with it."

Corky shrugged. "So why'd you ask if they were from space?"

"Because," Tolland said, "the meteorite was buried in glacial ice-fresh water from snowfalls. The water in that hole is glacial melt and has been frozen for three centuries. How could ocean creatures get in there?"

Tolland's point brought a long silence.

Rachel stood at the edge of the pool and tried to get her mind around what she was looking at. Bioluminescent plankton in the extraction shaft. What does it mean?

"There's got to be a crack somewhere down there," Tolland said. "It's the only explanation. The plankton must have entered the shaft through a fissure in the ice that allowed ocean water to seep in."

Rachel didn't understand. "Seep in? From where?" She recalled her long IceRover ride in from the ocean. "The coast is a good two miles from here."

Both Corky and Tolland gave Rachel an odd look. "Actually," Corky said, "the ocean is directly underneath us. This slab of ice is floating."

Rachel stared at the two men, feeling utterly perplexed. "Floating? But... we're on a glacier."

"Yes, we're on a glacier," Tolland said, "but we're not over land. Glaciers sometimes flow off a landmass and fan out over water. Because ice is lighter than water, the glacier simply continues to flow, floating out over the ocean like an enormous ice raft. That's the definition of an ice shelf... the floating section of a glacier." He paused. "We're actually almost a mile out to sea at the moment."

Shocked, Rachel instantly became wary. As she adjusted her mental picture of her surroundings, the thought of standing over the Arctic Ocean brought with it a sense of fear.

Tolland seemed to sense her uneasiness. He stamped his foot reassuringly on the ice. "Don't worry. This ice is three hundred feet thick, with two hundred of those feet floating below the water like an ice cube in a glass. Makes the shelf very stable. You could build a skyscraper on this thing."

Rachel gave a wan nod, not entirely convinced. The misgivings aside, she now understood Tolland's theory about the origins of the plankton. He thinks there's a crack that goes all the way down to the ocean, allowing plankton to come up through it into the hole. It was feasible, Rachel decided, and yet it involved a paradox that bothered her. Norah Mangor had been very clear about the integrity of the glacier, having drilled dozens of test cores to confirm its solidity.

Rachel looked at Tolland. "I thought the glacier's perfection was the cornerstone of all the strata-dating records. Didn't Dr. Mangor say the glacier had no cracks or fissures?"

Corky frowned. "Looks like the ice queen muffed it."

Don't say that too loudly, Rachel thought, or you'll get an ice pick in the back.

Tolland stroked his chin as he watched the phosphorescing creatures. "There's literally no other explanation. There must be a crack. The weight of the ice shelf on top of the ocean must be pushing plankton-rich sea-water up into the hole."

One hell of a crack, Rachel thought. If the ice here was three hundred feet thick and the hole was two hundred feet deep, then this hypothetical crack had to pass through a hundred feet of solid ice. Norah Mangor's test cores showed no cracks.

"Do me a favor," Tolland said to Corky. "Go find Norah. Let's hope to God she knows something about this glacier that she's not telling us. And find Ming, too, maybe he can tell us what these little glow-beasties are."

Corky headed off.

"Better hurry," Tolland called after him, glancing back into the hole. "I could swear this bioluminescence is fading."

Rachel looked at the hole. Sure enough, the green was not so brilliant now.

Tolland removed his parka and lay down on the ice next to the hole.

Rachel watched, confused. "Mike?"

"I want to find out if there's any saltwater flowing in."

"By lying on the ice without a coat?"

"Yup." Tolland crawled on his belly to the edge of the hole. Holding one sleeve of the coat over the edge, he let the other sleeve dangle down the shaft until the cuff skimmed the water. "This is a highly accurate salinity test used by world-class oceanographers. It's called 'licking a wet jacket.'"

Out on the ice shelf, Delta-One struggled with the controls, trying to keep the damaged microbot in flight over the group now assembled around the excavation pit. From the sounds of the conversation beneath, he knew things were unraveling fast.

"Call the controller," he said. "We've got a serious problem."

40

Gabrielle Ashe had taken the White House public tour many times in her youth, secretly dreaming of someday working inside the presidential mansion and becoming part of the elite team that charted the country's future. At the moment, however, she would have preferred to be anywhere else in the world.

As the Secret Serviceman from the East Gate led Gabrielle into an ornate foyer, she wondered what in the world her anonymous informant was trying to prove. Inviting Gabrielle into the White House was insane. What if I'm seen? Gabrielle had become quite visible lately in the media as Senator Sexton's right-hand aide. Certainly someone would recognize her.

"Ms. Ashe?"

Gabrielle looked up. A kind-faced sentry in the foyer gave her a welcoming smile. "Look over there, please." He pointed.

Gabrielle looked where he was pointing and was blinded by a flashbulb.

"Thank you, ma'am." The sentry led her to a desk and handed her a pen. "Please sign the entry log." He pushed a heavy leather binder in front of her.

Gabrielle looked at the log. The page before her was blank. She recalled hearing once that all White House visitors sign on their own blank page to preserve the privacy of their visit. She signed her name.

So much for a secret meeting.

Gabrielle walked through a metal detector, and was then given a cursory pat down.

The sentry smiled. "Enjoy your visit, Ms. Ashe."

Gabrielle followed the Secret Serviceman fifty feet down a tiled hallway to a second security desk. Here, another sentry was assembling a guest pass that was just rolling out of a lamination machine. He punched a hole in it, affixed a neck cord, and slipped it over Gabrielle's head. The plastic was still warm. The photo on the ID was the snapshot they had taken fifteen seconds earlier down the hall.

Gabrielle was impressed. Who says government is inefficient?

They continued, the Secret Serviceman leading her deeper into the White House complex. Gabrielle was feeling more uneasy with every step. Whoever had extended the mysterious invitation certainly was not concerned about keeping the meeting private. Gabrielle had been issued an official pass, signed the guest log, and was now being marched in plain view through the first floor of the White House where public tours were gathered.

"And this is the China Room," a tour guide was saying to a group of tourists, "home of Nancy Reagan's $952 per setting red-rimmed china that sparked a debate over conspicuous consumption back in 1981."

The Secret Serviceman led Gabrielle past the tour toward a huge marble staircase, where another tour was ascending. "You are about to enter the thirty-two-hundred-square-foot East Room," the guide was narrating, "where Abigail Adams once hung John Adams's laundry. Then we will pass to the Red Room, where Dolley Madison liquored up visiting heads of state before James Madison negotiated with them."

The tourists laughed.

Gabrielle followed past the stairway through a series of ropes and barricades into a more private section of the building. Here they entered a room Gabrielle had only seen in books and on television. Her breath grew short.

My God, this is the Map Room!

No tour ever came in here. The room's paneled walls could swing outward to reveal layer upon layer of world maps. This was the place where Roosevelt had charted the course of World War II. Unsettlingly, it was also the room from which Clinton had admitted his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Gabrielle pushed that particular thought from her mind. Most important, the Map Room was a passageway into the West Wing-the area inside the White House where the true powerbrokers worked. This was the last place Gabrielle Ashe had expected to be going. She had imagined her e-mail was coming from some enterprising young intern or secretary working in one of the complex's more mundane offices. Apparently not.

I'm going into the West Wing...

The Secret Serviceman marched her to the very end of a carpeted hallway and stopped at an unmarked door. He knocked. Gabrielle's heart was pounding.

"It's open," someone called from inside.

The man opened the door and motioned for Gabrielle to enter.

Gabrielle stepped in. The shades were down, and the room was dim. She could see the faint outline of a person sitting at a desk in the darkness.

"Ms. Ashe?" The voice came from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Welcome."

As Gabrielle's eyes accustomed to the dark, she began to make out an unsettlingly familiar face, and her muscles went taut with surprise. THIS is who has been sending me e-mail?

"Thank you for coming," Marjorie Tench said, her voice cold.

"Ms.... Tench?" Gabrielle stammered, suddenly unable to breathe.

"Call me Marjorie." The hideous woman stood up, blowing smoke out of her nose like a dragon. "You and I are about to become best friends."

41

Norah Mangor stood at the extraction shaft beside Tolland, Rachel, and Corky and stared into the pitch-black meteorite hole. "Mike," she said, "you're cute, but you're insane. There's no bioluminescence here."

Tolland now wished he'd thought to take some video; while Corky had gone to find Norah and Ming, the bioluminescence had begun fading rapidly. Within a couple of minutes, all the twinkling had simply stopped.

Tolland threw another piece of ice into the water, but nothing happened. No green splash.

"Where did they go?" Corky asked.

Tolland had a fairly good idea. Bioluminescence-one of nature's most ingenious defense mechanisms-was a natural response for plankton in distress. A plankton sensing it was about to be consumed by larger organisms would begin flashing in hopes of attracting much larger predators that would scare off the original attackers. In this case, the plankton, having entered the shaft through a crack, suddenly found themselves in a primarily freshwater environment and bioluminesced in panic as the freshwater slowly killed them. "I think they died."

"They were murdered," Norah scoffed. "The Easter Bunny swam in and ate them."

Corky glared at her. "I saw the luminescence too, Norah."

"Was it before or after you took LSD?"

"Why would we lie about this?" Corky demanded.

"Men lie."

"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."

Tolland sighed. "Norah, certainly you're aware that plankton do live in the oceans beneath the ice."

"Mike," she replied with a glare, "please don't tell me my business. For the record, there are over two hundred species of diatoms that thrive under Arctic ice shelves. Fourteen species of autotrophic nannoflagellates, twenty heterotrophic flagellates, forty heterotrophic dinoflagellates, and several metazoans, including polychaetes, amphipods, copepods, euphausids, and fish. Any questions?"

Tolland frowned. "Clearly you know more about Arctic fauna than I do, and you agree there's plenty of life underneath us. So why are you so skeptical that we saw bioluminescent plankton?"

"Because, Mike, this shaft is sealed. It's a closed, freshwater environment. No ocean plankton could possibly get in here!"

"I tasted salt in the water," Tolland insisted. "Very faint, but present. Saltwater is getting in here somehow."

"Right," Norah said skeptically. "You tasted salt. You licked the sleeve of an old sweaty parka, and now you've decided that the PODS density scans and fifteen separate core samples are inaccurate."

Tolland held out the wet sleeve of his parka as proof.

"Mike, I'm not licking your damn jacket." She looked into the hole. "Might I ask why droves of alleged plankton decided to swim into this alleged crack?"

"Heat?" Tolland ventured. "A lot of sea creatures are attracted by heat. When we extracted the meteorite, we heated it. The plankton may have been drawn instinctively toward the temporarily warmer environment in the shaft."

Corky nodded. "Sounds logical."

"Logical?" Norah rolled her eyes. "You know, for a prize-winning physicist and a world-famous oceanographer, you're a couple of pretty dense specimens. Has it occurred to you that even if there is a crack-which I can assure you there is not-it is physically impossible for any sea-water to be flowing into this shaft." She stared at both of them with pathetic disdain.

"But, Norah...," Corky began.

"Gentlemen! We're standing above sea level here." She stamped her foot on the ice. "Hello? This ice sheet rises a hundred feet above the sea. You might recall the big cliff at the end of this shelf? We're higher than the ocean. If there were a fissure into this shaft, the water would be flowing out of this shaft, not into it. It's called gravity."

Tolland and Corky looked at each other.

"Shit," Corky said. "I didn't think of that."

Norah pointed into the water-filled shaft. "You may also have noticed that the water level isn't changing?"

Tolland felt like an idiot. Norah was absolutely right. If there had been a crack, the water would be flowing out, not in. Tolland stood in silence a long moment, wondering what to do next.

"Okay." Tolland sighed. "Apparently, the fissure theory makes no sense. But we saw bioluminescence in the water. The only conclusion is that this is not a closed environment after all. I realize much of your icedating data is built on the premise that the glacier is a solid block, but-"

"Premise?" Norah was obviously getting agitated. "Remember, this was not just my data, Mike. NASA made the same findings. We all confirmed this glacier is solid. No cracks."

Tolland glanced across the dome toward the crowd gathered around the press conference area. "Whatever is going on, I think, in good faith, we need to inform the administrator and-"

"This is bullshit!" Norah hissed. "I'm telling you this glacial matrix is pristine. I'm not about to have my core data questioned by a salt lick and some absurd hallucinations." She stormed over to a nearby supply area and began collecting some tools. "I'll take a proper water sample, and show you this water contains no saltwater plankton-living or dead!"

Rachel and the others looked on as Norah used a sterile pipette on a string to harvest a water sample from the melt pool. Norah placed several drops in a tiny device that resembled a miniature telescope. Then she peered through the oculus, pointing the device toward the light emanating from the other side of the dome. Within seconds she was cursing.

"Jesus Christ!" Norah shook the device and looked again. "Damn it! Something's got to be wrong with this refractometer!"

"Saltwater?" Corky gloated.

Norah frowned. "Partial. It's registering three percent brine-which is totally impossible. This glacier is a snow pack. Pure freshwater. There should be no salt." Norah carried the sample to a nearby microscope and examined it. She groaned.

"Plankton?" Tolland asked.

"G. polyhedra," she replied, her voice now sedate. "It's one of the planktons we glaciologists commonly see in the oceans under ice shelves." She glanced over at Tolland. "They're dead now. Obviously they didn't survive long in a three percent saltwater environment."

The four of them stood in silence a moment beside the deep shaft.

Rachel wondered what the ramifications of this paradox were for the overall discovery. The dilemma appeared minor when compared to the overall scope of the meteorite, and yet, as an intel analyst, Rachel had witnessed the collapse of entire theories based on smaller snags than this.

"What's going on over here?" The voice was a low rumble.

Everyone looked up. The bearish frame of the NASA administrator emerged from the dark.

"Minor quandary with the water in the shaft," Tolland said. "We're trying to sort it out."

Corky sounded almost gleeful. "Norah's ice data is screwed."

"Bite me twice," Norah whispered.

The administrator approached, his furry eyebrows lowering. "What's wrong with the ice data."

Tolland heaved an uncertain sigh. "We're showing a three percent saltwater mix in the meteorite shaft, which contradicts the glaciology report that the meteorite was encased in a pristine freshwater glacier." He paused. "There's also plankton present."

Ekstrom looked almost angry. "Obviously that's impossible. There are no fissures in this glacier. The PODS scans confirmed that. This meteorite was sealed in a solid matrix of ice."

Rachel knew Ekstrom was correct. According to NASA's density scans, the ice sheet was rock solid. Hundreds of feet of frozen glacier on all sides of the meteorite. No cracks. And yet as Rachel imagined how density scans were taken, a strange thought occurred to her...

"In addition," Ekstrom was saying, "Dr. Mangor's core samples confirmed the solidity of the glacier."

"Exactly!" Norah said, tossing the refractometer on a desk. "Double corroboration. No fault lines in the ice. Which leaves us no explanation whatsoever for the salt and plankton."

"Actually," Rachel said, the boldness of her voice surprising even herself. "There is another possibility." The brainstorm had hit her from the most unlikely of memories.

Everyone was looking at her now, their skepticism obvious.

Rachel smiled. "There's a perfectly sound rationale for the presence of salt and plankton." She gave Tolland a wry look. "And frankly, Mike, I'm surprised it didn't occur to you."