The technicians looked at each other in embarrassment.
“Doc,” Phil said quietly, “you don’t have to lose all your design work, you know. All the other clones are in the fridge outside.”
Parker’s mind seemed jammed on his own stupidity, and he stared as if what the boy said was gibberish. Then a smile spread across his lips, and with a clumsy hand he ruffled Phil’s hair. “Of course!” he said. “Of course they are! I used only one. I’ve got eleven more!”
“We could sequence them now,” Steve ventured. “It’ll only take three hours.”
After dinner that evening, Parker returned to U-1 to leave the gels exposing to film overnight. Next morning, he read the sequences: the stop codon was just where he expected to find it on the clone he had used. He went quickly to the other clones and after a couple of hours found one that had only his desired mutation. “We’re back on the road!” he announced at morning tea.
In nine weeks, with no more mix-ups, he would have made Perfect Vaccine II. Three months later, he would tell Grossmann, “Otto, get ready to become a billionaire.” By Christmas, Parker would be ready to give the planet the best present it had had since Homo sapiens sprang out of a tree half a million years ago.
Romanus, in his elegant new suit, had taken photographs of the guests at Otto Grossmann’s reception in Bangkok. He shot in color and next day gave Miss Bochang a few sets of prints to be posted out as mementos of the evening to those who featured in them. He had another set of prints, onto which he had stuck names and a line of description—“Siam Enterprises board of directors,” “logging contractor,” “primate dealer”—and these he tossed into a cardboard box he kept in his room.
It was a week now since Diana had taken a bird to the flying ground, and five days since she had visited her territory at all. She was anxious about Morrie and about damage caused by the Homicide team that had searched the area. Why on my land? she asked herself for the hundredth time. The dead-duck letter she had received on Wednesday morning seemed to say that it meant something.
When she pulled up at the lake’s edge on Friday afternoon, the land near the fence looked as if an army had marched across it. Inside a boundary marked with pegs and red nylon rope, every centimeter had been trampled. Gilgais were flattened. The sandy bed of the creek had been dug up. But a couple of good rains would bring up the gilgais and reshape the creekbed. The desecration was not so bad as she had first thought.
Farther along the fence, something shiny caught the sunshine.
There was a new padlock on the gate, which on close inspection turned out to be already useless, for the hasp had been cut and all that held the gate closed was its stump. On the hard, bare ground below, minute chips of metal glinted. She jiggled the lock, pushed gingerly, then stepped through the gate.
It was a weird feeling to be standing once more on a place known so well but barred to her these past ten years. Ahead of her, the ground rose in a granite outcrop that concealed all the buildings of the Research beyond it. She imagined that at any moment her father could appear, arms held wide, grasping the handlebars of the Harley-Davidson he rode to check the fences.
In the weeks that had followed his murder, people tried to push her and Carolyn together. “The two poor little girls,” they said. One day Carolyn announced, “I really hated my mother. I’m glad your rouseabout killed them.” Diana remained silent, swinging her legs. “Did you like your father?” Carolyn asked. Diana nodded. Then she stood up and punched Carolyn in the stomach.
After a while Diana returned to her side of the fence, replacing the useless bolt and lock so that from the other side the gate would look secure. I mustn’t blow it, she said to herself. It was only a matter of days now before she would be able to flash a pass at the guards and walk right into the Research. Standing with her back to it, she stared up at Mount Kalunga. The sun had moved, turning the mountain dark.
“Morrie!” she called.
The branches of the Aleppo pines swayed almost imperceptibly in the warm air currents of late afternoon.
“Morrie!”
She waited a few minutes for him to make some sign, then returned to her van. The owl was in there, ready for release.
The ebbing day colored the lake red-gold, like Japanese silk, and birds of all sorts called from their roosts in the lignum islands. A kangaroo herd of buck, does, and juveniles bounded past.
Inside the van, the owl waited with perfect alertness. Hooded birds would ride in the back of her van, crooning to themselves and leaning into the curves like men on motorbikes, but there was no such thing as a hood for an owl. Diana had put thongs on the owl’s wings to prevent its flying around while she was driving, and at first it was huffy with her for embarrassing it. At the height of sunset, she carried it to the old fence post where Morrie left messages. She removed the thongs. The owl looked so beautiful that for a moment she wished Raoul were there to photograph it.
It stood still, facing the dark pyramid of mountain where it would hunt later. Its mysterious eyes surveyed the disappearing landscape, then it turned a little to stare out at the sky above the lake. Suddenly its satellite-dish face spun right around until its head pointed backward, at the airfield.
All Diana could see was a Land Cruiser. The people down there were invisible and inaudible to her—but not to the owl, which, from a kilometer away, was hearing their conversation.
After a minute, the twinkling red, green, and white lights of an airplane appeared, lights the bird had seen already. They distracted Diana’s attention, and in that moment the night hunter, as if sensing the bond between them loosen, rose on silent wings.
Diana turned up her face just in time to see a denser piece of sky move above her, then vanish into the darkening air.
The aircraft was now only two hundred meters above the lake.
She returned to her van, thinking about Raoul’s kisses of congratulation when she released a bird. These days, Grace and the boys sometimes came to the flying ground to watch her. The joy in their eyes gave her pleasure and eased her memories of Raoul. He had never contacted her. She didn’t even know in which country he now lived. But he’d stayed in touch with Carolyn.
On a hot afternoon a month ago, Carolyn had appeared on the terrace at Fig Tree Gully Road. She was got up in a red pleated skirt that just covered her backside, with a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. Diana was standing on a ladder, cutting back the wisteria. She called out, “Grace, is the side gate open? Someone’s got in from the street.” She concentrated on secateuring a woody stem.
Carolyn called, “Diana, I’ve got to talk to you about something. I spoke to Raoul this morning. Please don’t…” Her face creased with anxiety. Then she lisped, “I know you’re very particular, miss, and I should have filled in a request in triplicate, but—”
“Get out!” Diana shouted. She had always been able to intimidate Carolyn. She was taller, she was stronger, she rode better, and she ran faster. When it came to shooting, there was no comparison at all. From her vantage point on the ladder, she could see the brown roots of Carolyn’s hennaed hair. She made another savage cut.
“You’ve got to hear—”
“No I don’t. Piss off.” Diana jerked the secateur blades together.
“Listen, Bozo!” Carolyn yelled. “You want a better world, don’t you? Well, it’s about the illegal wildlife trade.”
Diana came slowly down the ladder. Just then the door opened and Grace ambled onto the terrace. “You like a cuppa, love?” she asked Carolyn. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
“Die for one, Gracie.” Carolyn smiled.
They went inside. The air was cooler in the kitchen, and on the table a basket of garden tomatoes gave out a spicy smell that mingled with the fragrance of Grace’s corn bread, just out of the oven. Carolyn fiddled with her hair, twirling a strand around her long, gold-ringed middle finger. Hands like her mother’s, Diana thought. “Well?” she said.
“Well. Raoul is in Thaila
nd—”
“You said wildlife trade,” Diana interjected. A vein beat rhythmically in Carolyn’s neck. Diana stared at it, not listening properly, then with an effort she tuned in.
It sounded mad: Asia’s biggest breeder of laboratory primates had sent between fifteen and thirty chimpanzees to Australia in the past five or six years, none of them with proper clearances. “We should try to find out who is buying them. As they’re not being listed, they’re probably being sacrificed.”
“Since when have you cared about that?”
For the first time, Carolyn’s nerve seemed to fail. “I know I was a bit slow off the mark, but for the past two years …”
Since your affair with my lover. “So how are these chimpanzees being sent to Australia?” Diana asked.
“I don’t know. But there’s a lot of illegal immigration from Thailand to Australia, so maybe—this is just a guess—the same method that’s used to bring in people. Whatever that is.”
Diana snorted. “Does it make sense to you that someone with enough money to spend on a scam like that would bother? Why not do the research somewhere else?”
“I know it sounds improbable. But these days …”
“So what do you expect me to do? Telephone the primate food supply companies and start asking questions? They’ll expect a bomb.”
Carolyn leaned across the table. “Say you’re me!” Her face was so close, Diana could see the yellow flecks in her irises. She drew back.
“Do it yourself.”
But Carolyn pressed on recklessly, her breath coming in short gasps. “I can’t do it! You know what the Research is like. It’s a boarding school! We don’t have private phones in the labs. Everybody watches everybody else. The telephone system monitors incoming and outgoing calls. If I start making inquiries about chimpanzees, the whole place will know about it by lunchtime. Talk will go all round the country and back again in a week. People will think it’s to do with AIDS. You’ve got no idea how much money there is in AIDS. It’s a wonder the Mafia isn’t funding vaccine research.”
“Maybe it is,” Diana muttered.
Carolyn paid no attention. “You’ll have to—or I’ll have to come over here and do it one day during the week. You can pretend you’re doing a survey. There’s an organization called TRAFFIC that monitors trade in wildlife and has links with the U.N.”
“You are well briefed,” Diana said dryly.
“I could use the phone in the gallery.” Carolyn said. “That is, if Grace didn’t mind. I wouldn’t come upstairs and bother you.”
Damn right you won’t come upstairs, Diana thought. Her gray eyes glinted coldly.
“I’d better be going.” Carolyn plucked in a vain, self-conscious way at her skirt. “I obviously haven’t convinced you.”
“You’ve convinced me,” Diana blurted. But she could not force her pride to surrender. Abruptly she stood up and strode along the kitchen, the heels of her riding boots ringing on the slate. At the counter where the warm bread was cooling, she stopped, took a knife, and cut off a slice, which she crammed into her mouth. Then she turned and came toward Carolyn, the knife still in her hand. Her eyes fixed on Carolyn’s neck, as if something about it hypnotized her.
Carolyn sat paralyzed. She wondered why she had thought it would be safe to come into this house again—but then two large, strong hands pushed down on her shoulders, and her head was suddenly cushioned against the soft warmth of Grace’s breasts.
Diana laid the knife on the table. Her cheeks flushed, and the fury drained from her eyes.
“How ‘bout I butter us all a bit a bread?” Grace said. “Stead a you eatin’ it like that.”
When Carolyn left, half an hour later, Diana flung herself into Grace’s arms. “I hate her so much!” she wailed.
“There, there,” Grace murmured. Diana was an idealist: it was herself she hated, for hating Carolyn.
Over on the airfield, the plane had landed and was taxiing toward the Land Cruiser. Diana drove along, distracted by the bitterness of her memories, passing within half a kilometer of Jason Nichols, Kerry, his baby brother, and Sailor, who lay limp and silent in the crate after traveling for four days sedated with Lorazepam.
At U-1, Parker and Lek came running up the stairs and scrambled into Sonja’s Land Cruiser. Two minutes later, they pulled up near the wind sock beside Kerry’s Cruiser, joining Jason and the Larnach boys. Sonja was on the veranda, keeping watch.
Since John’s return she had assured Joe Miller there was no need for patrols around her place, and he had readily agreed, but neither she nor John believed this meant Joe would remove surveillance from the area.
Sonja had watched Diana put an owl on the fence and seen the owl fly away. She now followed the yellow van with her night-sight binoculars to make sure that as it drove close to the airfield it did not slow down. It didn’t, and she returned her attention to the group now standing beside the two Land Cruisers. A sudden tingle of nausea spread through her. She refocused the binoculars to observe her husband’s hand caressing Lek’s bottom. She felt poisoned! Her system was toxic with adrenaline.… He bent down and kissed Lek while the others weren’t looking!
Sonja slumped into a canvas chair. She pushed aside a bracelet and tried to count her pulse.
It seemed like hours, although it must have been only minutes, before headlights appeared up to the left near the lab complex. Sonja darted inside, her fingers trembling as she pushed the buttons on the phone. “Cruiser up at the labs,” she said.
“Right. We won’t be a tick,” Kerry answered.
“Coming this way,” she added.
Down at the airfield, her Land Cruiser was already moving. Young Brian Larnach returned to the plane and climbed on board, followed by Jason.
“Hurry, hurry,” Sonja said.
John had to drive back under the house and get the crate out of the Land Cruiser and downstairs—or at least inside the U-1 door—before the security guards arrived for the evening surveillance check of the fence. The guards’ vehicle was belting along the road. Sonja gripped the balcony railing, gasping for breath. On the airfield, the airplane was rushing down the runway. Her Land Cruiser sped toward the house, on a collision course with the guards, but it reached the turnoff first and a moment later was driving through her garden and vanishing underneath the house.
The guards continued on, leaving the road and lurching toward the Cyclone-wire fence. Sonja saw a flashlight beam aimed at the wire; the patrol was examining it for damage. Her intercostal muscles loosened, but the shock of what she had seen at the airfield returned, and as she descended the stairs she felt so disoriented that for a moment she forgot who she was.
John and Lek, with Kerry looking on, were washing Sailor in the staff bathroom. Lek was inside the shower recess with the chimpanzee, making splashing noises and squealing. Her wet brown arm shot out through the shower curtain, and Parker put a towel in her hand. The arm withdrew. A few minutes later, the whole woman appeared, blouse sticking to her breasts. She held the ape by the hand, and both of them stepped carefully out onto a cotton bath mat Parker had laid for their feet. Sailor was still groggy and hung on to the bath mat with his toes. Sonja stared at the two pairs of broad, strong feet.
“Why isn’t Jason here?” she asked.
“He has to go to Sydney,” Parker said. “He checked Sailor out at the airfield. We’ll be finished soon, darling.” He was hoping Sonja would leave. The more people, the greater the stress on the chimp and the longer it would take him to recover. Parker disliked visitors in the lab at any time, and tonight, after the fun he had had at the airfield, he was keen to be alone with Lek. Things had developed so fast after he had given her that smack on the bottom yesterday. Bench work! he thought. It was years since he’d had sex on a lab bench—but down in U-1 there was the problem of dodging the security cameras that watched from the ceiling. The Animal Room, the Big Lab, and the Machine Room each had a camera connected to the monitor in Sonja’s kitchen, upstairs
. The few blind spots were too small to allow him to embrace Lek without some parts of their bodies being seen. But there was no camera in Level 2.
“This is just routine,” he added to Sonja, and gave her a light push.
“I don’t want to miss anything.” She stared at Lek.
The girl was now cuddling the clean-smelling ape, grooming him and making kissing faces, while he gazed at her sleepily and toyed with her ear. Sonja could not take her eyes off Lek: the movements of her limbs, the way her pig cheeks squeezed her eyes shut when she smiled, her big, square teeth and mauve gums, her black hair lying flat on her scalp, the movements of her small, bright eyes. What’s she got that I haven’t? she asked herself. Why does he kiss her, when he’s always too tired to make love to me? I’ll never get pregnant, she thought.
She stayed until Sailor was locked in his sleeping cage for the night and they had turned out the lights and all gone upstairs. There, on the dank-smelling concrete, Sonja turned to Lek. “Mr. Larnach is having dinner with us. There are plenty of vegetables. Would you like to eat with us too?” she asked.
The girl glanced at Parker for guidance. “No, sank you, Miss Sonja. Sank you very much. I have food.”
“But it’s too late for you to start cooking. Everything is ready upstairs.”
“No, excuse me, please. I go to my own room now.” Her eyes met Parker’s again.
“Night, Lek,” he said in an offhand voice.
“Good night Dr. John. Good night Mr. Kerry. Excuse me.”
On the balcony, Parker said, “You mustn’t ask her to eat with us, darling. She’s a chambermaid, for God’s sake.”
When Sonja went to the kitchen, Kerry found the opportunity he had been waiting for all evening. “Mate,” he said, “something to tell you about Jason Nichols.” He glanced indoors to make sure Sonja was not listening. “You know I’m friendly with Kev from the police station? Kev and I went to primary school together. Anyway …” He peered inside again. Sonja’s torso was visible through the serving hatch in the kitchen. “Kev reckons they’re ready to finger Nichols for those letters. They’ve identified some of the pictures as coming from veterinarian magazines. That means he’s a top suspect for the murder.”
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