He walked over to Marla, who did not raise her eyes to him. Her long hair had fallen forward, crowding her fine features, blocking most of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. Red streaks tinged the left side of her handsome blonde cut, as though she’d tried to push it out of her face and failed.
She fell against him, sobbing behind the gag of gray tape.
“Are the girls all right?” Brian asked the short man, who appeared to be in charge. Despite his height, he looked strong: thick in the legs, torso, and neck, like a hard-core bodybuilder.
“They’re fine,” he told him. “Tied up at the moment.”
“Promise?” Brian asked from what he recognized was a position of complete weakness. But he was wrong.
“They are right now, but they won’t be if you don’t cooperate with us.”
Brian didn’t need to ask. He knew they wanted his work on Ambient Air Capture, AAC, the Holy Grail of geoengineering, which used technology to fight climate change. AAC extracted carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. But unlike previous AAC efforts — puny in their impact — Brian’s prototype, built in his home lab, removed massive amounts of CO2 efficiently.
But he’d had to go rogue to do it. The American Oil Producers Association, AOPA, had insisted that he work for them in secret. The race to perfect AAC was so fierce among so many scientists and engineers that they’d wanted only a tight handful of men at the very top tier of their association to know where they’d placed most of their research money.
AOPA, along with the rest of the fossil-fuel industry, stood to make trillions from Brian’s work, for it would permit carbon fuels to be burned forever — and the industry’s massive profits to continue — because the heat-absorbing CO2 molecules spinning wildly into the atmosphere could be reclaimed by Brian’s invention, along with the carbon dioxide that had been up there several hundreds of thousands of years.
In malevolent hands, AAC could create an ice age or turn the earth into an oven. More responsible parties could use AAC to reduce global temperatures to what they had been at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, when massive amounts of carbon started getting pumped out of smokestacks. Regardless, whatever CO2 was removed could be turned into carbon monoxide, CO, and combined with hydrogen to produce hydrocarbons, including gas and jet fuels.
Work on AAC had begun in earnest with the development of artificial trees that could be placed anywhere; they did not have to be at the end of a factory exhaust pipe for Direct Air Capture, DAC. In fact, with the lower concentration of carbon dioxide in cleaner air, the “trees” were not overburdened with all the other noxious gases coming from factories or power plants. That made their most important task — capturing CO2—easier. AAC also addressed the nettlesome challenge of collecting carbon dioxide from widely dispersed sources, most notably from the transportation industry.
Dr. Ahearn’s great achievement was to invent highly engineered catalysts that turned CO2 into carbon monoxide at much faster rates than ever before, and much more cheaply. Because CO and hydrogen formed the chief components of petroleum and natural gas, Dr. Ahearn was making possible the recycling of CO2 into the very fuels that produced the greenhouse gas in the first place.
From the waste that now threatened to toast the planet would come wonder. AAC in Brian’s hands would become a perpetual money machine for the fossil-fuel industry. And that would make him a billionaire many times over.
So Brian had agreed to AOPA’s insistence on secrecy, even coming to behave as if the idea had been his all along, lording it over them by saying that capturing carbon dioxide from the air was strictly his until he said he was ready. He’d felt like Superman. But now it seemed that the oil producers were exerting their power in the cruelest way imaginable.
Brian was so wrong, so simplistic in his understanding of what was actually happening right before his eyes.
“We’ve stolen your hard drive,” the short muscular man said. “Now we want your external hard drive.” He pointed to a framed bright-green finger painting by Eva, the firstborn twin. It hung on a wall less than ten feet away. “Take that down and open the safe behind it. You were no better at protecting your files than you were at protecting your family. If you want your little girls to live, you’ll open that safe.”
But what about Marla? And me?
“You’re an intelligent man, Dr. Ahearn,” the short man went on. “You must see that we really won’t stop at anything. We thought you should know that from the start. Bad as that is,” he glanced at Marla’s hand, “it will get much worse for your little girls if you don’t do what I say.”
Brian nodded. “I’ll do it.”
“Of course you will.”
“I want to see my girls first,” Brian insisted. “I’m not doing anything if I don’t see them.”
“Fine.”
He and the gunman who’d grabbed Brian’s arm walked the professor into the girls’ wing, past a playroom and their study with twin desks, stopping only when they came to the large bedroom the twins shared. The girls lay blindfolded on their king-size bed, mouths taped like their mother’s, along with their wrists and ankles. Their ears were plugged and taped, too. Brian noticed the home security light beaming on the wall. But he knew if the men had the wherewithal to take apart his computer, they would have already disabled the alarm for private security service.
He reached for his girls. He was kicked away by a fourth man in a ski mask, who sat beside the twins on the bed.
“For God’s sakes, I just—”
“When does their nanny come home?” interrupted the short man.
“She has Friday nights off,” Brian said bitterly. “And Sundays.”
“It’s good to see you’re answering honestly. We know her schedule, name, nationality, place and date of birth. We know everything about her. We even know your ‘Hamburger Wednesdays’ professor friend has been having sex with her since your big summer barbecue.”
The man seemed to wait for a response, but Brian was speechless.
“All you have to do is open the safe and give us the external drive that you better have locked in there, and these two little girls will have long lives.”
By now Brian knew there was little hope for him or Marla. There couldn’t be for him, not if they wanted sole ownership of all that he’d developed. And they’d made clear that Marla was no more than a demonstration model for what they would do to his daughters if he didn’t cooperate.
“Ready to open that safe?” the short man asked.
Brian walked with them back down the hall toward the living room, noticing his open office door. He slowed when he saw his AAC prototype missing, no doubt disassembled, packed up, and on its way to an oil company’s laboratory.
Marla looked paralyzed with pain on the couch, still gripping her savaged hand.
Brian turned from her, removed Eva’s painting, and opened the safe.
“Take it out,” the short man said.
Brian handed him the external hard drive.
Then the leader told the tall bulky man to bring out the pizza.
He set it on a table in front of the couch.
“Do you want a slice?” he asked Brian, who shook his head.
“How about you?” he asked Marla, ripping the duct tape from her mouth.
“No.” She shook her head feverishly. Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Brian, what’s going on? What have you done?”
“What have I done?” he pleaded to her.
“No spats, you two,” the short man said. “Let’s eat,” he said to the others.
And they did. Each polished off a slice. Then the short man stood and took out his gun.
“Looks like your dinner got rudely interrupted,” he said to Brian.