Micro

by Michael Crichton

  Peter was staring down at the water below. Greenish nearest the shore; then, farther out, deep blue, with whitecaps blown by wind.

  “How are the currents here?” he said.

  “Depends,” Watanabe said. “A good swimmer can manage on most days. The problem is finding a place to get out of the water without getting cut up on lava. Ordinarily you’d swim west, try to make it to Makapu‘u Beach over there.” He pointed to a sandy strip half a mile away.

  “My brother was a strong swimmer,” Peter said.

  “So I heard, but the witnesses said they couldn’t see him after he dived in the water. There was big surf that day, and he disappeared into the foam. They lost sight of him right away.”

  “How many people saw him?”

  “Two. There was a couple picnicking, right by the edge of the cliff. There were some hikers, too, and some other people, but we haven’t been able to locate them. What do you say we get out of this wind?” He started back up the hill; Peter followed. “I think that finishes our work here,” Watanabe said. “Unless of course you want to see the video.”

  “What video?”

  “The picnicking couple shot some video, once they realized the boat was in trouble. They recorded about fifteen minutes of tape, including the jump from the boat. I didn’t know if you wanted to see that or not.”

  “I want to see it,” Peter said.

  They were on the second floor of the police station, looking at a tiny screen on a video camera. It was noisy in the station, and busy, and Peter had difficulty focusing on the screen. The first images showed a man of about thirty, sitting on the green grassy hillside, eating a sandwich; then a woman of roughly the same age, drinking a Coke and laughing, waving the camera away.

  “That’s the couple,” Watanabe said. “Grace and Bobby Choy. First part is them horsing around. Goes about six minutes.” He pushed the fast-forward button, then paused the video and said, “It’s time-stamped.” The stamp in the screen showed the time was 3:50:12 p.m. “Now here, you see Bobby pointing offshore—he’s spotted the boat in trouble.”

  The camera panned to show the ocean. The white hull of the Boston Whaler bobbing against the blue horizon. The boat was still a hundred yards offshore, too distant for him to make out his brother. The camera panned back to Bobby Choy, who now was looking through binoculars.

  When Peter next saw the boat, it was much closer to the shore. Now he could make out the figure of his brother, bent over, intermittently appearing, then disappearing again. “I think he was trying to clear the clogged lines,” Watanabe said. “That’s what it looks like.”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  The camera now showed Grace Choy, shaking her head, trying to place a cell phone call.

  Then it panned back to the boat, closer now to the white surf.

  Then back to Grace Choy, shaking her head as she talked on the phone. “You don’t have good cellular reception up there,” Watanabe said. “She called 911 but couldn’t get through for a while. The call kept breaking up. If she’d gotten 911, they would’ve called the Coast Guard right away.”

  The camera work was jerky, but Peter saw something that—“Hold it!”

  “What?”

  “Pause it, pause it,” Peter said quickly. As the image froze, he pointed to the screen. “Who’s that in the background?”

  The screen showed a woman, dressed in white, standing on the hill a few yards above the Choys. The woman stared intently offshore, and seemed to be pointing at the boat.

  “That’s one of the other witnesses,” Watanabe said. “There were three joggers as well. We haven’t been able to identify any of them yet. But I doubt they would give us more information than we already have.”

  Peter said, “Does that woman have something in her hand?”

  “I think she’s just pointing at the boat.”

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, “I think she has something in her hand.”

  Watanabe said, “I’ll get the AV evidence guys to look at it. You might be right.”

  “What does this woman do next?” Peter said.

  The tape started again.

  “She leaves right away,” Watanabe said. “Goes up the hill and out of sight. You see: there she goes now. She’s hurrying, looks like maybe she’s going for help, but nobody ever saw her again. And there were no more calls logged to 911.”

  Moments later on the tape, Eric jumped from the Boston Whaler into the roiling surf. It was difficult to be sure, but he appeared to be about thirty yards offshore at the time. He didn’t dive, but rather jumped feet-first, vanishing into white foam.

  Peter watched closely to see if he emerged, but he did not seem to. And Eric had done something jarring, even disturbing: he had not put on a life jacket before he jumped. Eric knew enough to put on a life jacket in an emergency. “My brother wasn’t wearing a life jacket,” Peter remarked.

  “I noticed,” Watanabe commented. “Maybe he forgot to bring it on the boat. It happens—you know—”

  “Did he send out a mayday call on the radio?” Peter asked the police officer. Eric’s boat had certainly been equipped with a VHF marine radio. Eric, as an experienced boater, would have sent out a distress call on channel 16, the channel always monitored by the Coast Guard.

  “Coast Guard didn’t hear anything.”

  That was very strange. No life jacket, no distress call. Had Eric’s radio broken down? Peter continued to stare at the heave and pulse of the blank ocean in the video…an ocean that showed no trace of his brother. After another minute, he said, “Turn it off.”

  Watanabe stopped the camera. “He was lost in the boneyard.”

  “The what?”

  “The boneyard. It’s that churning wash after the waves break. Where all the foam slick is boiling. He may have hit rocks in the boneyard. There are some outcrops that are only five, six feet below the surface. We just don’t know.” He paused. “Do you want to see any of it again?”

  “No,” Peter said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  Watanabe flipped the screen shut, turned the camera off. “That woman on the hill,” he said casually. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Me? No. She could be anybody.”

  “I wondered…You had such a strong reaction.”

  “No, sorry. I was just surprised by—it was like she just suddenly appeared, that’s all. No idea who she is.”

  Watanabe was very still. “You’d tell me, if you knew,” he said.

  “Sure, of course. Yes.”

  “Well, thanks for your time.” Watanabe gave him his card. “I’ll get one of the detectives to drop you at your hotel.”

  Peter said little on the drive back. He wasn’t inclined to talk, and the detective didn’t press him. It was true the images of his brother vanishing in the surf were disturbing. But not as disturbing as the woman on the hill, the woman in white pointing at the boat with some object in her hand. Because that woman was Alyson Bender, the CFO of Nanigen, and her presence at the scene changed everything.

  Chapter 5

  Waikiki 27 October, 5:45 p.m.

  I n his hotel room, Peter Jansen lay down on top of the bed, experiencing a sense of unreality. He didn’t know what to do next. Why hadn’t he told Watanabe who Alyson Bender was? He felt exhausted, but couldn’t rest. The video kept running through his mind. He saw Alyson holding something in her hand in the video, while watching Eric’s death as if it meant nothing to her. And then she had hurried away. Why?

  He began thinking about something Rick Hutter had said to him about Erika Moll. How to check up on somebody. He took out his wallet and began going through it, pulling out cards, money. There it was—the card Rick had given him, back in the lab, more than a week ago. It had Rick Hutter’s handwriting on it. Just the word JORGE and a number.

  The guy who could access telephone records. The MIT phone hacker.

  It was a Massachusetts area code. He called the number. It rang for a while. And rang some more. There was no voic
e mail, so Peter just let it ring. Finally it was answered, sort of, with a grunt: “Yuh?”

  Jansen identified himself and explained what he wanted. “I’m a friend of Rick Hutter. Can you get me a list of recent calls to and from a certain phone number?”

  “Yuh? Why?”

  “Rick told me you could do it. I’ll pay whatever you ask.”

  “Money doesn’t work. I only do something if it’s…intriguing.” A faint Latino accent, a soft voice.

  Peter explained the situation. “A woman may be involved in my brother’s…my brother’s…death.” Death. It was the first time he’d used the word in connection with Eric.

  There was quite a long pause.

  “Listen—I have the phone number that the woman used to call me. Can you find out who else she talked to on that phone? I’m assuming it’s her phone.” He read out Alyson’s number.

  There was an emptiness on the line, a silence that extended. Peter held his breath. Finally Jorge said, “Give me—” pause—“a couple of hours.”

  Peter lay back on the bed, his heart pounding. He could hear traffic going past on Kalakaua Avenue, for his room faced mauka—inland, across the city and toward the mountains. The day lengthened; the sun began to go down; the room filled with shadows. Maybe Eric had reached shore; maybe he was suffering from amnesia and would turn up in some hospital; maybe there had been some terrible mistake…Peter had to hope, had to believe, that maybe Eric would turn up, somehow, somewhere—there was always a faint chance. Or had Eric been…murdered? Finally he couldn’t stand being in his room any longer, and he went outside.

  He sat on the beach in front of his hotel, watching the red streaks of the setting sun darken to black over the ocean. Why hadn’t he told the police officer that he recognized her in the video? It had been a kind of instinct to say nothing. But why? What had made him do it? When he and Eric had been younger, they had looked out for each other. Eric had covered for him. He had covered for Eric…

  “There you are!”

  He turned to see Alyson Bender approaching in the evening light. She wore a blue Hawaiian print dress and sandals, looking quite different than she had in Cambridge, when she’d worn a business suit and pearls. Here, she looked like an innocent young girl.

  “Why didn’t you call me? I thought you were going to call me right after you were done with the police. How did it go?”

  “It went okay,” Peter said. “They took me to that point—Makapu‘u Point—and showed me where it happened.”

  “Uh-huh. And is there any news? I mean, about Eric?”

  “They still haven’t found him. Or the body.”

  “And the boat?”

  “What about it?”

  “Did the police check the boat?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “They didn’t say.”

  She sat on the sand beside him, put her hand on his shoulder. Her hand was warm. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Peter, it must have been awful for you.”

  “It was difficult. The police had a videotape.”

  “Videotape? Really? Did you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And? Was it helpful?”

  Had she really not seen the video camera in the hands of the couple seated just below her on the hillside? Was it possible she was only looking at the boat? Her eyes scanned his face in the twilight. He said, “I saw Eric jump…but he never came up.”

  “How awful,” she said softly.

  Her hand moved to squeeze his shoulder, rub it. He wanted to tell her to stop, but he didn’t trust himself to speak. The whole thing was incredibly creepy.

  “And what do the police think?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About what happened? I mean, on the boat.”

  “They think it was a clogged—”

  His cell phone rang. He fished it out of his shirt pocket, flipped it open. “Hello.”

  “This is Jorge.”

  “One moment.” He stood, said to Alyson, “Excuse me a moment, I have to take this.” He walked some distance down the beach. Stars were starting to come out in the darkening sky above. “Go ahead, Jorge.”

  “I have the information you want for the phone number you gave me. The number is registered to the Nanigen MicroTechnologies Corporation of Honolulu. Attached to the number is the employee name Alyson F. Bender.”

  He looked back along the beach; Alyson was a dark shape on the sand. “Go on,” he said.

  “At three forty-seven p.m. yesterday afternoon local time, she called the number 646-673-2682 three times in a row.”

  “Whose number is that?”

  “It’s an unassigned number, for one of those junk phones you can buy and use until the prepayment runs out.”

  “She called three times?”

  “Yes, but very briefly—three seconds, then two seconds, then three seconds.”

  “Okay…Meaning she didn’t think she was getting through?”

  “No, she clearly got through, no answering message, it went right to the beep. She knew she connected. Two possibilities. Either she kept calling because she was expecting the person to pick up, or she was triggering a device of some kind.”

  “A device…?”

  “Yup. You wire a cell phone to set off some device when there’s an incoming call.”

  “Okay, so three calls in a row. What then?”

  “At three fifty-five she called another number at Nanigen, assigned employee name Vincent A. Drake. You want to hear that call?”

  “Sure.”

  Ringing, then the click of a pick-up.

  VIN: Yes?

  ALYSON: (breathless) It’s me.

  VIN: Yes?

  ALYSON: Listen, I’m worried, I don’t know if it worked or not. There should have been smoke or something—

  VIN: Excuse me.

  ALYSON: But I’m worried—

  VIN: Let me stop you there.

  ALYSON: You don’t understand—

  VIN: Yes, I do understand. Now listen. You are on the phone. I need you to speak…more exactly.

  ALYSON : Oh.

  VIN: You understand what I am saying?

  ALYSON: (pause) Yes.

  VIN : Okay. Now. Where is the object?

  ALYSON: (pause) Not available. Vanished.

  VIN: Okay. Then I don’t see a problem.

  ALYSON: I am still worried.

  VIN: But the object did not reappear?

  ALYSON: No. VIN: Then I suggest there is no problem. We can discuss this further in person but not now. Are you coming back now?

  ALYSON: Yes.

  VIN: All right. See you soon.

  Click.

  Jorge said, “There are two other calls. Want to hear them?”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Okay. I’ve e-mailed them to you as. wav files. You should be able to listen to them on your computer.”

  “Thanks.” Peter looked back at Alyson, and shivered. “Can I take this to the police?”

  “No way in hell,” Jorge said. “You need a court order to access this stuff. You take it to them, you ruin any chance of prosecution. Illegal search and seizure. Also—you’ll, uh, put me in a jam.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “Hm-yuh,” Jorge grunted. “I don’t know—get them to confess.”

  “How?”

  “Sorry, can’t help you there,” Jorge said. “But if you need more phone records, call any time,” and he hung up.

  Peter walked back to Alyson, feeling a cold sweat on his body. It was getting dark now, her expression impossible to read. She sat very still on the sand. He heard her say, “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  In fact, Peter felt as if he was drowning, overwhelmed by onrushing events. All his life he had been a student, and until now, he felt his life experiences had given him a clear—even cynical—sense of his fellow human beings and what they were capable of. Over the years, he’d had to deal with cheat
ing students, students dispensing sexual favors in exchange for grades, students falsifying their results, and with professors who appropriated student work. In one bizarre instance, there’d been a thesis advisor on heroin. He felt, at the age of twenty-three, like a man who had seen it all.

  Not anymore. The idea of murder, that someone would, with calculation, try to kill his brother, left him shaken and sweating and cold. He didn’t trust himself to speak to this woman, who was supposed to be his brother’s girlfriend but who had evidently plotted against him. No tears from this girlfriend—she didn’t seem upset at all.

  She said, “You’re awfully quiet, Peter.”

  “It’s been a long day.”

  “Buy you a drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Mai tais are famous here.”

  “I think I better call it a night.”

  “Have you had dinner?”

  “Not hungry.”

  She got up from the sand, brushed herself off. “I know you must be upset. I am, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why so cold toward me? I’m just trying to—”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. He didn’t want her to suspect anything. That would be unwise, even dangerous. “It’s all been such a shock.”

  She put her hand up, touched his cheek. “Call me if I can do anything.”

  “Thanks. Okay.”

  They walked back inside the hotel. “All your friends are arriving tomorrow,” she said. “They’re upset about what happened to Eric. But the tour of the facilities is all arranged. Do you want to go on it?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, “I can’t just sit around…feeling like this. Waiting.”

  “The tour will start at the Waipaka Arboretum, in Manoa Valley, in the mountains near here,” she said. “That’s where we get a lot of our rain-forest materials for research. Four o’clock tomorrow. Should I pick you up?”

  “That’s not necessary,” Peter said. “I’ll take a cab.” He somehow managed to give her a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks for coming by, Alyson. It means a lot.”

  “I just want to help.” She looked at him doubtfully.