Free Darkness Falls by Kyle Mills Page B

Jenna," he whispered to himself as he slid an as-yet-unopened box toward him. It was essentially her tomb or at least the best facsimile he'd been able to come up with. Her body had sunk in thousands of feet of dark, freezing cold water, as had most of her possessions. With the exception of the pictures he had hanging in his house, this single box contained everything that was left of her.
    He tore open the top and pulled out some clothing she'd forgotten when she left, a few photo albums, and a stack of stale-smelling letters. At the bottom he found what he was looking for -- the clippings about her death.
    Her ship -- actually Michael Teague's ship had gone down with more than just her. Teague had died, as had Udo and Jonas Metzger.
    He'd known Teague pretty well, though he still couldn't think of anything positive to say about him even now that he was dead. His ego had eclipsed everything, creating its own constantly shifting reality with no regard to fact or for the opinions of others. He'd been the ultimate scare monger, never missing an opportunity to absolutely guarantee that exhausting the planet's oil supply would leave the earth a lifeless wasteland. A tortured leap of logic that Erin had gleefully shredded in a number of papers and articles.
    The German brothers he didn't know as well. Udo was a biologist of moderate gifts, and Jonas was . . . what? A creepy thug as near as he could tell.
    Erin leaned back again, the relative cool of the adobe wall seeping through his sweat-soaked shirt. It had always perplexed him that Teague had suddenly shrunk down the large environmental organization he'd started, and that had provided him so much notoriety, to a core group that consisted only of Jenna and the Metzgers. Now it was crystal clear.
    Jenna had dumped him and more or less immediately disappeared with Teague, leading Erin to partially convince himself that she'd developed a romantic attachment to the man. But even in his darkest moments he'd never really been able to believe that. Now it seemed fairly certain that she'd had other things on her mind -- namely, developing the bacteria he'd theorized and modifying it to destroy oil reserves in the ground.
    After another hour of riffling through boxes, the answers he thought he'd found began to turn into questions. Why had she left him? Was it really because she didn't love him anymore, or was it because she didn't want to involve him in what she was going to do? When she went under for the last time in that cold water, did she --
    He shook his head violently. No, this went against everything he thought he knew about Jenna. Sure, he could see ANWR. She could be a little nuts sometimes, and when drilling had been approved there, she'd reacted as though someone had authorized bizarre medical experiments on her dog. Besides, ANWR was nothing more than a government publicity stunt that produced a completely insignificant amount of oil, most of which was sold to the Chinese.
    Ghawar, though? That wasn't a little nuts, it was bat-shit insane. You were talking about virtually shutting down Saudi Arabia's already shaky economy and sending economic ripples -- tidal waves, actually throughout the world. One way or another, if Ghawar went down, people were going to die -- maybe in a civil war in the Middle East, maybe from the United States falling back on military power to replace the lost oil, maybe from poorer countries being cut off by higher bidders. The bottom line was that this went way beyond a little overly passionate environmentalism.
    So he had to ask himself again: could these bacteria have evolved naturally?
    And again he had to answer that it was one in a billion. Could someone else have come up with it without having seen his notes? The chances were better, but still only one in a million.
    No matter how the facts were twisted and turned, Jenna remained at the center.
    He began flipping through a photo album full of pictures of her as a child, stopping at one