Micro

by Michael Crichton

  “And you are helping,” he said. “Believe me. You are.”

  Unable to sleep, unable to eat, tormented by Jorge’s information, Peter Jansen stood at the balcony of his room. The view looked away from the ocean, across the city, and up into a jumble of mountain peaks, wild and black, without lights, outlined only by stars in the night sky. Alyson Bender had made three brief calls to a phone number. The time of these calls, 3:47 p.m., stuck in his mind. Late afternoon. He remembered that the video shot by the couple had been time-stamped. He tried to recall the time stamp. He had a head for numbers; he used numbers constantly in his data sets. The time stamp rose in his mind’s eye: 3:50 something. Just three minutes after Alyson made those calls, Eric’s boat was stalled in the video.

  Wait. What about that text message from Eric? When did that come in? He went indoors and got his phone, and scrolled through the call log. The text—dont come—had arrived at 9:49 p.m. Eastern time. There was a six-hour time difference between the East Coast and Hawaii. It meant…it meant that Eric had sent the text at 3:49 p.m. He had sent it just two minutes after Alyson Bender had made three calls to a disposable cell phone. It was only a two-word text, “dont come.” That was because Eric had been in a life-or-death crisis and had not had any time to send a longer text. Eric had sent the text from his boat while he was struggling to get the engine started, moments before he had jumped overboard. Peter’s hands were clammy, and his phone almost slipped from his fingers. He stared at the words: dont come. He was reading his brother’s last words.

  Chapter 6

  Ala Wai, Honolulu 28 October, 8:00 a.m.

  A kamai Boat Services was right on Ala Moana Boulevard, next to the Ala Wai Boat Basin, at the end of Waikiki Beach. The taxi dropped Peter off at eight in the morning, but the boat yard was already busy at work. It wasn’t a large yard, perhaps ten or twelve hulls out of the water, and it took him no time to locate the Boston Whaler.

  He was here because of Alyson’s question the night before: Did the police check the boat?

  Why would she ask that? Supposedly she was concerned about her boyfriend, yet she seemed to care more about the boat. He jumped off the boat.

  Peter walked around the boat now, looking closely.

  Considering the pounding it had taken in the surf, the Boston Whaler seemed surprisingly intact. True, the white fiberglass hull was scratched all over, as if it had been clawed by giant hands; a jagged rip ran several feet along the starboard hull, and a chunk had been whacked out of the bow. Whalers were famous for their ability to float even if the hull was broken into pieces. His brother had had years of experience with Whalers. Eric would have known the boat hadn’t been in danger of sinking. Certainly, the damage to the boat did not justify Eric’s abandoning it. Plainly, his brother shouldn’t have jumped. He would have been safer staying on board.

  So why did he jump? Panic? Confusion? Something else?

  There was a wooden ladder on the far side of the boat, and he climbed up onto the stern. All hatches and the door to the cuddy cabin were sealed with yellow CRIME SCENE tape. He wanted to look at the outboard engines, but they were sealed as well.

  “Can I help you?” A man below, shouting up. Heavyset, grizzled, streaks of grease on his work clothes. Dirty baseball cap shaded his eyes.

  “Oh hi,” Peter said. “My name is Peter Jansen. This is my brother’s boat.”

  “Uh-huh. What’re you doing here?”

  “Well, I wanted to see—”

  “You illiterate?” the man said.

  “No, I’m—”

  “Well it seems like you must be, because that sign over there says plain as day, all visitors register at the main office. Are you a visitor?”

  “I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you register?”

  “I just thought I could—”

  “Wrong. You can’t. Now what the hell you doing up there?”

  “This is my brother’s—”

  “I heard you the first time. Your brother’s boat. You see all that yellow tape? I know you do, and I also know you can read it, ’cause you told me you’re not illiterate. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s a crime scene, and you got no business up there. Now you get the hell down right away, and go to the office and register, and show us some identification. You have identification?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then. Get down off of there, and stop wasting my time.” The man stalked off.

  Peter climbed down the ladder on the far side of the boat. As he came near the ground, he heard a gruff male voice say, “Can I help you, Miss?” And a woman’s voice answered, “Yes, I’m looking for a Boston Whaler the Coast Guard brought in.”

  It was Alyson’s voice.

  He paused, hidden from view by the hull of the boat.

  “Goddamn,” the man said. “What is it about that fricking boat? Gets more visitors than a rich uncle on his deathbed.”

  “How’s that?” she said.

  “Well, yesterday some guy shows up, claiming it was his boat, ’cept he had no identification, so I told him to get lost. The things people try! Then this morning we have some young guy, claiming it was his brother’s boat, I had to get him out of the cockpit, and now we got you. What is it about that boat?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” Alyson said. “Myself, I just left something on the boat, and I wanted to get it back.”

  “No chance of that. Not unless you got a letter of authorization from the police. Do you?”

  “Well, no…”

  “Sorry. That’s a crime scene, like I told the young guy.”

  “Where is this guy?” she asked.

  “He was coming down the ladder. Probably still on the other side of the boat. He’ll be along. Want to come inside the office?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “We can call the police, see if they’ll give you a waiver to get your stuff off the boat.”

  “That seems like a lot of trouble. It’s just my, well, it’s my watch. I took it off my wrist…”

  “No trouble.”

  “I guess I could buy another one. It did cost a bit—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I thought it would be easy.”

  “Well, suit yourself. But you still better sign in.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “You’re supposed to.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in any police thing.”

  Peter waited a few minutes, then heard the man say, “You can come out, son.”

  He came out from behind the hull. There was no sign of Alyson in the yard. The heavyset man looked at him quizzically, head cocked to one side. “Didn’t want to run into her?”

  “We don’t get along,” Peter said.

  “I figured.”

  “You want me to sign in?”

  The man nodded slowly. “Yes, please.”

  So Peter went into the office and signed in. He couldn’t see what difference it made. Alyson Bender already knew he had gone to the boat, and therefore she already knew he suspected something. From this point on, he would have to move fast.

  By the end of the day, he thought, he had to be finished.

  He went back to his hotel room, where he found an e-mail from Jorge on his laptop, with no text. Instead there were three .wav files, sent as attachments. One was a recording of Alyson Bender’s call to Vin Drake. And there were two new files. He listened to them. They were recordings of two phone calls Alyson had made from her cell phone in the hours after Eric had disappeared. Both calls seemed fairly routine. In the first call, Alyson had phoned somebody, perhaps in a Nanigen purchasing department, and asked for a new budget breakdown. In the second call, she had spoken briefly with another person, a man, perhaps an accountant, on the subject of expenses.

  ALYSON: Omicron has lost two more, uh, prototypes.

  OTHER PERSON: What happened?

  ALYSON: They didn
’t tell me. Vin Drake wants you to account for this as an ordinary research expense, not a capital write-down.

  OTHER PERSON: The loss of two Hellstorms? But that’s a big cost—the Davros people—

  ALYSON: Just call it research, okay?

  OTHER PERSON: Of course.

  Peter saved the files after listening to them, but they didn’t make sense or reveal anything he could use. He also saved the telephone conversation between Alyson and Vin, however, which would be very useful. He downloaded it onto a flash memory stick and slipped the stick into his pocket, and then burned a CD of the same conversation. Then he took the CD to the hotel business center and had them print a professional label that said “NANIGEN DATA 5.0 10/28.” When he was finished, he checked his watch. It was shortly after eleven in the morning.

  He went down to the terrace to have a late breakfast and sit in the sun. Over coffee and eggs, he realized he was making a lot of assumptions. The most important assumption was that Nanigen would have a conference room equipped with the usual electronic equipment. That seemed a safe enough bet. All high-tech companies had such rooms.

  Second, he assumed that the tour would move all the graduate students together en masse, instead of breaking them into smaller groups or taking them around individually. But he suspected that Vin Drake would give the tour himself, and Vin liked an audience—the bigger the better. Also, if everybody stayed together, it would be easier for Nanigen to control exactly how much information they were given.

  For Peter, it was important that the students be kept together, because he felt he needed as many witnesses as possible for what he was planning to do. Or should he try to stage it in front of just one or two witnesses? No…his mind raced…no, try to provoke a blowup in front of many people. That might be the best way, he thought, to get Drake’s facade to crack, and perhaps reveal what Drake and Alyson had done to his brother. Finally, he had to hope that Drake would lose his cool, or at least that Alyson would, especially if they were primed in a way that made them nervous. And he thought he knew how to do that. If he pulled it off, Drake or Alyson might get very upset in front of the grad students. And that was what he wanted.

  Chapter 7

  Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 3:00 p.m.

  The taxi drove away from the ocean, and soon was climbing steeply into the hills. Broad acacia trees shaded the road.

  “That’s the university, on both sides,” the driver said. He pointed to featureless gray buildings that looked like condominiums. Peter saw no students.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Those are dorms. They’re at class now.”

  They passed a baseball field, a surrounding residential area, small homes, bungalow-style. But as they drove on, the houses thinned and the trees grew larger. Now they were heading toward a green mountain wall, heavily forested, rising two thousand feet into the air in front of them.

  “That’s Ko‘olau Pali,” the driver said.

  “No houses up there?”

  “No, you can’t build nothing there, that’s straight-up, crumbly volcanic rock, can’t climb it or nothing. You come way back here like we do now, you leave the city, you in wilderness now. Too much rain mauka side, near the mountain. Nobody live back here.”

  “What about the arboretum?”

  “Half mile up this road,” the driver said. The road was now a single lane, dark beneath a heavy covering of towering, dense trees. “Nobody come here, neither. Folks go to Foster or the other pretty arboretums. You sure you want come here?”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  The road narrowed and climbed, zigzagging along a steep, jungle-clad mountainside.

  A car came up behind them on the twisting road, and honked, and roared past them, people in the car waving and yelling. He blinked: the grad students from the lab were crammed into the car, a midnight-blue Bentley convertible sedan. The taxi driver muttered something about crazy lobsters.

  “Lobsters?” Peter asked.

  “Tourists. Way they burn.”

  Soon the road arrived at a security gate, steel, massive, new. It stood open directly in front of a tunnel. A sign warned unauthorized persons to keep out.

  The driver slowed the taxi, brought it to a stop before the gate and tunnel. “They’ve been doing some changes up here. Why you want to go in this place?” he said.

  “It’s business,” Peter said. Even so, looking at the tunnel, he got an uneasy feeling. With the steel gate in front of it, it seemed like a tunnel of no return. Peter wondered if the gate was to keep people out—or was it to lock people in?

  The driver sighed, and took off his sunglasses, and drove into the tunnel. It was a narrow, single-lane passage cored through a shoulder blade of the mountain. The road emerged into a pocket valley. The valley was deeply forested and walled in by the slopes and cliffs of the Ko‘olau Pali. Waterfalls trailed from misty jungle mountains. The road descended, and they came into a clearing, dominated by a large, glass-roofed shed. In front of the shed were a few parking spaces in a muddy area. Vin Drake and Alyson Bender were already there, standing next to a red BMW sports car. They both wore boots and hiking clothes. The students were piling out of the Bentley. They became less boisterous when Peter stepped from the taxi.

  “Sorry, Peter…”

  “Sorry about your brother…”

  “Yes, sorry…”

  “Any news?” Erika kissed his cheek, took his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The police are still investigating,” Peter said.

  Vin Drake shook his hand with a firm grip. “I don’t have to tell you this is a great, great tragedy. If it proves true, and I hope to God it does not, it’s a dreadful loss to all of us personally. To say nothing of a terrible setback to our company, which Eric was such a part of. I am so sorry, Peter.”

  “Thank you,” Peter said.

  “It’s good the police are investigating.”

  “Yes,” Peter said.

  “They haven’t given up, lost hope…”

  “Quite the contrary,” Peter said. “It seems they’re taking a new interest in Eric’s boat. Something about a missing cell phone? One that may have broken up inside the engine compartment? I didn’t really follow what they told me.”

  “A cell phone in the engine compartment?” Vin frowned. “I wonder what that could—”

  “As I said, I didn’t really follow,” Peter said. “I don’t know why they would think there was a phone there. Perhaps my brother dropped his…I don’t know. But they’re also going to check phone records.”

  “Phone records. Ah yes. Good, good. No stone unturned.”

  Had Vin turned paler? Peter couldn’t be sure.

  Alyson licked her lips nervously. “Were you able to sleep, Peter?”

  “Yes, thanks. I took a pill.”

  “Oh good.”

  “Well.” Vin Drake rubbed his hands, turned to the others. “At any rate, welcome to the Manoa Valley. What do you say we get to the business at hand? Gather round, people, and I will give you your first insight into how Nanigen works.”

  Drake led them from the parking lot toward the forest. They passed a low shed housing earth-moving machinery, although, as Drake said, “You’ve probably never seen machines like this before. Notice how small they are.” To Peter, the machines looked like tiny golf carts fitted with a miniature backhoe, with an antenna drooping over the top. “These diggers,” Drake went on, “are specially manufactured for us by Siemens Precision AG, a German company. The machine is able to precision-dig soil with millimeter accuracy. Which is then placed in the flats you see in the back of the shed. Those flats are thirty centimeters square—about a foot square—and either three or six centimeters deep.”

  “And what about the antenna?”

  “As you see, the antenna hangs directly over the backhoe. The antenna enables us to locate precisely where to dig and to keep a record in our data files of the exact place where the sample of soil came from. This will all be clear as the day go
es on. Meanwhile let’s look at the site.”

  They plunged into the forest itself, the ground suddenly uneven beneath their feet, the trail narrow and twisting among the giant trees overhead. The massive trunks were wrapped with broad-leaf vines; the ground was covered with plants and bushes to knee height, and the overall impression was of a thousand shades of green. The light filtering through the tree canopy overhead was pale yellow-green.

  Drake began, “This may look like a natural rain forest…”

  “It doesn’t,” Rick Hutter said. “And it’s not.”

  “That’s correct. It’s not. This area has been cultivated since the 1920s, when it was an experimental station for Oahu farmers, and more recently for ecological studies run by the university. But in recent years nobody has bothered with this tract, and the land reverted to a more natural state. We call this area Fern Gully.” He turned and walked down the trail while the students followed him, going slowly and looking at things, occasionally stopping to examine a plant or flower.

  “Moving along now,” Drake went on, speaking briskly, “you’ll notice a profusion of ferns. Prominently around us you see the big tree ferns, Cibotium and Sadleria, and lower down to the ground, the smaller Blechnum, Lycopodium, and of course—” he indicated the mountainside with a swipe of his hand—“up there, the uluhe ferns, which cover the mountain slopes over much of Hawaii.”

  “You missed that uluhe fern right at your feet,” Rick Hutter broke in. “It’s called Dicranopteris, also known as false staghorn.”

  “I believe so,” Vin Drake said, barely concealing a flash of irritation. He paused, and bent down on one knee. “The pe‘ahi ferns line this path, the larger ones are maku‘e ferns, which spiders like to live on. You will notice the large number of spiders here. Some twenty-three species, in all, are represented in this small area alone.” He stopped in a clearing, where trees opened into views of the mountainsides around the valley. He pointed up to a peak on a ridge overlooking the valley. “That peak is called Tantalus. It’s an extinct volcanic crater that looks down on this valley. We’ve been conducting research at Tantalus Crater, as well as here in the valley.”