Page 61 of Sheltering Instinct

“What now?” Goose asked.

“I don't remember the specifics, but in general,” Reaper said, “they’re releasing some kind of pollutants into the sky to try to cool the planet.”

“It’s a startup company,” Tess explained, “that got a million dollars in venture capital to run their experiments. The future money would come in when industries offset their carbon footprint by purchasing sulfur dioxide balloons and shooting them into the sky.”

“Is that a real thing?” Levi asked.

“It's called solar geoengineering, and it’s a research subject in all the major universities right now,” Tess said. “They think it might be an option to put a reflective substance into the sky, sort of like ozone sunscreen. Until I went to the conference, I thought that was only happening in the laboratories.”

“People are actually out there sending sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere?” Iris asked.

“Into the stratosphere,” Gwen said, “But yeah, that’s what’s happening.”

“Who's funding that?” Craig followed Enrico’s finger as he pointed out the front window.

“That’s the training grounds over there,” Enrico said. “Looks like they’re ready for us.”

“I think it's crowdsourced, Dad.”

“There ought to be a law!” Craig railed.

“You don’t know to make a law until someone does something like this that can impact the population,” Goose said. “Mexico is leading on that.”

Gwen pulled her pack up from the floor and set it on her lap, getting ready to get out. “And when they make those laws, the conspiracy theorists believe that the government wants to keep control of the weather all to themselves as a power move.”

“You know what? I actually saw that playing out on a real-world mission.” Levi said. “My clients believed our government targeted their colleagues for retaliation, and the U.S. showed their hand through the precision use of weaponized weather.”

“Are you serious?” Gwen looked at him with flirtatious eyes, which startled him. Levi sent a glance toward Tess; yup, she was paying attention, and she’d seen it, too.

“Was this with Tidal Force?” Reaper’s voice had a cautionary tone.

“A private contract I took on before I interviewed with Iniquus. The group that was affected was not my client. Client adjacent. They knew each other through business.”

Reaper nodded.

“I was coming off my military contracts and started going through the process of interviewing with Iniquus. I took a week-long private contract with some buddies of mine to do close protection on the island of Capri.”

Iris smiled. “There are worst places you could've been.”

“Yeah, it was a hardship,” Levi laughed. “Absolutely gorgeous island, beautiful water, just an amazing experience. The only thing that marred it was when we learned that there was—” Levi stopped and looked at Gwen, saw the same look in her eyes, and turned to Tess instead, “There’s a stretch of water that Phoenicians used for thousands of years. There’s a specific wind.”

Gwen tapped her shoulder against Levi’s. “The Mistral is a strong wind that comes down from the north and makes the Mediterranean choppy.”

Levi felt a blush rise from his collar. “Yes, thank you. The coast guard assured us the Mistral wasn’t blowing, and the area would have calm sailing. But then we got word from them that big storms were coming up, and so we insisted that our people stay in their hotel until the danger passed. That wind was intense. It was almost like a hurricane. It shook the buildings like an earthquake. My client's buddy was out on his sailboat. It was supposed to be unsinkable.”

“Let me guess,” Craig said, “it was named the Titanic?”

“It did go under quickly like the Titanic. Something wild and, as Gwen and Tess have been saying, unprecedented happened. There was a—I’m uncomfortable throwing out weather terms in front of you two—a downward pressure wind that I think they called a downburst.”

Though he was looking at Tess, it was Gwen who answered. “Yes, that’s pretty fierce,”

“The authorities believe it was a downburst or a waterspout, and it so happened to strike the exact spot where this billionaire’s yacht was anchored. It was a tragedy. People died.”

“And the government tie-in?” Gwen asked.

“The billionaire, who died in the event, had been under investigation for fraud, but, apparently, the grand jury said the prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to take it to trial, and the charges were dismissed. The conspiracy is that where the Russians might have accidents like falling off a balcony or down a flight of stairs, the United States could use precision weather to remove people from the equation. Making it worse, the billionaire’s partner, who had been part of the same scheme, had died the day before. He’d been riding his bike along a bluff in Oregon when a gust of wind blew him over the cliff.”

Iris’s eyes were wide. “My goodness, I might see how a person could latch on to that conspiracy theory. What are the chances? Two acts of weather. Two different countries. Two people tied to the same crime?”

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