Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight

by Randy Wayne White

  Both men were listening, although Armanie had pretended to be preoccupied. It got to him, though, when I mentioned Kazlov’s intelligence. I saw him react. It gave me additional confidence. Mentioning a hybrid beluga was proving an effective bait for the trap I soon hoped to spring.

  “Admit it,” I had pressed. “Kazlov is a brilliant man—if he really has found a way to produce beluga-quality eggs from a sturgeon with different DNA. My guess is, you’re worried about the media attention he’ll bring to your operations in the Caspian. Or you’re jealous.”

  That did it. Armanie couldn’t help himself. “Do you realize how ridiculously stupid you sound?” he said, keeping his voice low as he turned to face me across the table. “Kazlov is an uneducated farmer turned gangster. It’s the specialists he’s hired who have the brains—not him. Even so, only a fool would believe they would waste their time creating a hybrid from a beluga sturgeon and your disgusting Gulf sturgeon. And if they have, so what!”

  I looked into the man’s eyes, trying not to show how eager I was to hear what came next. “You lost me,” I lied. “Gulf sturgeon tolerate warm water a lot better than the beluga. They mature faster, too. Isn’t that Kazlov’s real plan? To start a company that operates outdoor sturgeon farms throughout the tropics? He already owns an aquaculture facility in the Yucatán. They can produce caviar year-round. His investors will get rich. In fact”—I lowered my voice as if sharing a confidence—“I’m thinking of investing a few thousand dollars myself.”

  Talas managed to say, “A few thousand! Such a risky sum!” before his jowls began to shake again, laughing.

  I replied, “To me, it’s a lot of money. But if things go as Viktor predicts, who knows? The three of us might do some business down the road.”

  The look Armanie gave me was memorable because his contempt was multilayered. I was a naïve American hick. Not only was I uniformed, I had no money—which meant I was powerless, and so useless to him.

  “You call yourself a biologist?” he said, staring at me, shaking his head. “You actually have a college degree? Then how can you possibly not know that what Kazlov is supposedly proposing is impossible.”

  “A hybrid fish?” I replied as if confused. “New hybrids are being developed every day.”

  “You idiot,” Armanie had laughed. “Even now you don’t understand. Here”—the man had put his elbows on the table and leaned toward me—“let me make it simple enough even for you to comprehend. The DNA of a beluga sturgeon simply cannot be disguised. Do you know why?”

  Yes, but I let the man talk.

  “Because the DNA of every commercial fish in the world is cataloged in an international data bank. Which means there is no possible way that beluga DNA would go undetected. Do you hear me? It’s impossible.”

  Armanie, very pleased with himself, paused to light another cigarette. “Your own country wouldn’t issue permits to raise such a fish, let alone the international governing bodies. The Convention on Trade in Endangered Species—have you even heard of the organization?”

  I had filled out enough CITES forms to wallpaper my lab. The man sat back and chuckled. “No competent professional would waste his time listening to Kazlov’s claims about a hybrid fish. Certainly not from two such very different animals. Which, I suppose, explains why you’re so enthralled with the idea… Doctor Ford.”

  Good. It wasn’t much of a trap, but Armanie had finally stepped into it with both feet.

  My expression blank, I slammed the trap shut by asking, “Then what are you two men doing here?”

  It had taken a few moments, but the fat man, and then Armanie, finally realized what had just happened. Abruptly, Talas stopped laughing. Armanie fumbled for his cigarettes, maybe hoping I’d give him time to think by talking.

  I didn’t. Not for several seconds, anyway, while I sat back and savored their befuddled reactions. Finally, I herded them deeper into a corner, saying, “You’re experts in the field. Yet here you are—at the invitation of an uneducated gangster. If disguising DNA is impossible, then why waste your time and money by coming to Florida? It makes no sense—unless you’re here for a different reason.”

  I pretended to be interested while I listened to Talas attempt to explain his presence by praising Vanderbilt Island as a beautiful vacation spot. Then referred to his other business interests in Florida, as Armanie nodded his agreement.

  To convey my skepticism, I gave it several more seconds of silence, as if thinking it through. “Sorry, guys. I don’t buy it. I don’t think you flew halfway around the world for a vacation. It has to be something else.” I leaned forward. “A genetically modified beluga, maybe?”

  The Iranian wasn’t convincing when he responded, “A what?”

  “We call it a G-M-O,” I replied with exaggerated patience. “A genetically modified organism. Imagine a beluga that matures in five years instead of twenty. Or how about a procedure that causes sturgeon to produce preovulated eggs regularly? You know, before the chorion perforates—the skin of the egg. Imagine a female sturgeon that produces eggs two or three times a year without having to be killed. Like milk cows on a dairy farm.”

  It had been Jim Michaels’s analogy, not mine, but the reaction it produced in the black marketeers was beyond anything I had hoped. It revealed the truth, and the truth was in Talas’s feigned confusion.

  “Why, the idea’s ridiculous. That has been proven too many times!”

  The truth was in Abdul Armanie’s eyes, too, as he glared at me through a veil of smoke and replied, “A fascinating fairy tale. Let me know how the story ends.”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” I answered, smiling because I had guessed right. I felt sure of it as I studied the men’s faces, yet it was still a shocking truth to process: Viktor Kazlov, and his researchers, had succeeded. They had apparently discovered one of the holy grails of caviar production. At least, that’s what the Russian had claimed privately to his three wealthiest competitors, I guessed.

  Later, over the course of the afternoon, the broader implications would crystallize in my mind. If true, it meant that Kazlov’s caviar weekend, and his claims about altering beluga DNA, were all camouflage. They had been contrived to cloak some kind of business deal taking place between four outlaw organizations. Not just any business deal. It had to be an illegal business deal, with a billion-dollar potential. The Russian wouldn’t have bothered staging such an elaborate ruse unless big money was involved—and unless he had something important to hide. Meeting his competitors in the United States, out in the open, on a well-known private island, fit one of the maxims of professionals who specialize in deceit: If you want to guard a secret, put it in a book.

  Vanderbilt Island was the book. The secret was that Kazlov was about to revolutionize the caviar industry with a genetically modified beluga.

  When I heard the bullet slam the hull of Tomlinson’s sailboat, the memory of Armanie’s reaction that afternoon flashed instantly to mind. The man’s face… his black eyes… the way he had glared at me when he’d realized I had tricked him into revealing the truth. Until then, he and Talas had considered me a powerless gnat. But then the gnat had bitten them on the ass and made them look like fools.

  Armanie would hate me for it. He would kill me, if he ever got the chance.

  Maybe he had already tried. Just now. Using a rifle and scope.

  11

  After tumbling off Tomlinson’s sailboat, I sculled water long enough to get my fins on over my running shoes, then I set off on my back, kicking hard. I couldn’t risk looking for the keys to Third Planet’s rental boats now. It was time to run. So that’s what I did—swam for my life.

  When I had put several boats, and a lot of darkness between myself and that damn relentless strobe light, I slowed enough to check my watch—11:15 p.m.—then turned onto my stomach and angled toward mid-island.

  Soon, I could see the roof of the fishing lodge backdropped by stars. Framing the building were groves of coconut palms that sa
gged, frond-heavy, hinged to their own shadows. Overhead, a satellite traced the boundaries of ozone and outer space with a fragile silver thread. As I watched, an owl probed the darkness, its whoo-whooing an ancient, resonate sound on an island that has been inhabited since the days of the pharaohs.

  I wasn’t wearing my dive mask. Instead, I’d positioned the thermal monocular over my left eye, mounted on a headband. Through it, I scanned the shoreline, but also occasionally turned to check the marina. The EPIRB strobe was still pinging away as it drifted with the tide, but the man who’d fired the shot had yet to appear.

  I was surprised. If Abdul Armanie, or his bodyguard, wanted me dead, why didn’t he check to see if he’d scored a hit? It gave the impression the shooter couldn’t leave his post… or that he was afraid to venture away from his little piece of the island. Which caused me to doubt that Armanie had pulled the trigger himself. The man didn’t take orders, he gave orders. After the meltdown we’d had, he would have made sure I was dead if he thought he could get away with it. The Iranian was no fool.

  Mostly, my attention was focused on the fishing lodge and the area around it. There, I saw something of concern. On the fourth-floor porch, near the flag, outside the room where I’d seen a candle flickering, was a man, standing guard. He was carrying what might have been a rifle or a semiautomatic pistol on a folding stock. The glow of the weapon’s barrel was pale in comparison to the heat of the man’s hands, yet it told me the weapon had been fired recently.

  Presumably, Tomlinson was still in the lodge. The fact that he had not come looking for me proved he was, at the very least, preoccupied with something important—or, more likely, being held hostage, which was tough for me to admit or even think about. The same with the few employees who’d been working in the lodge, and the three businesswomen from nearby Captiva Island. I didn’t know them well, but well enough to know they were respected and successful ladies who didn’t deserve to be terrorized by some asshole with a personal agenda.

  As I scanned various windows in the lodge, I pictured my pal with his hands tied, his mouth taped—which would have been the only way to shut the guy up, of course. Not that I empathized with the kidnappers. It was simply a fact.

  It worried me. Tomlinson doesn’t handle violence well—not that anyone who suffers pain, or inflicts pain, can walk away unscarred. But I’d seen him survive enough nasty encounters to know that violence stays in his system long after the physical scars have healed. Violence affects him like a slow poison. It rattles his confidence and mocks his conviction that we exist in an equitable universe where events happen for a reason. Which is nonsense, of course. But it is, at least, good-natured nonsense, and anchors the very core of the man’s personality and his sense of self.

  Hostages or not, whoever was behind this madness couldn’t expect to hold the island long. A service boat would arrive at the Vanderbilt Island docks at a little after sunrise to bring staff and maintenance workers. Every day, seven days a week, that’s the way the island functioned. Word would then get out—something that would happen much sooner, if I stayed calm, and methodically took the kidnappers apart.

  My mind was wandering, I realized. I rolled onto my back and treaded water as I told myself Concentrate, damn it! Then I began swimming, my eyes fixed on the fishing lodge.

  Using the thermal monocular, I found the porch once again and took a closer look at the flag. The breeze had died. In Florida, in June, night air has the density of warm lacquer. It sticks to the skin as it forms an invisible bubble at treetop level, sealing sky from earth. On a night like this, poisonous gas would hang close to the ground. It would disperse slowly, like steam after a summer rain, drifting among orchids, Spanish moss and palms. It would follow the contours of landscaped lawns, beneath houses built on stilts, and ascend in tendrils of mist through floors.

  Not good.

  I checked my watch again: fifty-five minutes until midnight. Flattening myself in the water, I began to kick with longer, stronger fin strokes.

  Soon, I was close enough to shore to smell the humic mix of earth and salt water. Then my feet touched bottom, and I used the night vision system to search the island before taking a first step.

  Off to my right, something big slashed the water’s surface. It caused me to jump, then freeze where I stood. Vladimir had been right about sharks, although he didn’t realize it. The brackish waters of Florida’s Gulf Coast are the breeding and feeding ground of many species of sharks—the bull shark among the most common.

  Most sharks don’t faze me. When a bull shark is in the area, though, I give it my full attention. A male bull is supercharged by testes that provide it with more testosterone than any animal on Earth. Which makes it among the most aggressive and dangerous predators on Earth.

  In the Florida backcountry, June is peak season for big bulls—some of them the size of Cessnas. And night was their favorite time to hunt. Which is why I stood motionless, watching a sector of black water where the fish had hit.

  When the fish slammed the surface again, though, I relaxed. It was an oversized snook, judging from the suctioning fuuuWHOP as it inhaled bait. The snook is an ascendant predatory, a marvel of adaptation and design, but it’s a finicky eater, and mammals aren’t on its list. I rotated my neck to relax the muscles in my shoulders and turned my attention to the island.

  Ahead, at the fishing lodge, the guard was still keeping watch from the fourth-floor balcony. For a moment, he appeared to be staring in my direction. Even from a hundred yards, I could see the cooler scaffolding of the man’s skull beneath glowing white skin. He stared in my direction for so long that I began to worry that he, too, was wearing night vision and had spotted me.

  It gave me reason to hurry as I removed my swim fins and tossed them toward shore.

  But then the guard turned, in no apparent rush… rolled his shoulders as if bored… then leaned his weapon against the railing before disappearing inside. Headed for the bathroom, probably, and would be back soon.

  I took a deep breath, relaxed a little, then panned to the floors beneath the balcony. The place was dark except for the bottom windows, which showed pale light. Candles or oil lamps. No one moving inside that I could see, though. Or was there… ?

  Squatting low in the water, I fiddled with the TAM-14’s focus rings and pressure switches. It wasn’t until I had dimmed the internal lighting system, which improved contrast, that I realized I was doing a poor job of interpreting perfectly good data.

  There were five or six people, maybe more, clustered in a room on the bottom floor. They weren’t near a window. I could see their heat signatures through the walls. The images were not detailed. More like ghostly figures, their body heat diffused by wood and insulation. When the images moved, they dragged a vaporous, glowing veil behind them.

  I checked the next two floors and found four people gathered in a single room. Island staff members, possibly, trying to hide from the violence. The fourth floor, though, appeared to be empty, which was unexpected, because the guard had not reappeared on the balcony.

  Where the hell had he gone?

  I blinked my eyes and adjusted the focus.

  Damn it.

  The guard’s rifle had disappeared, too!

  I crouched low, my head pivoting, as I tucked the waterproof bag under my arm like a football. If the guy had spotted me, it meant that he was wearing night vision. Nothing else could explain it. It meant that I was standing in plain view, an easy target. I had to move.

  So I ran—partly out of panic, but also because I had no better choice. I made way too much noise, carrying my clanking bag, knees high, kicking water, fighting for balance in ankle-deep muck, but it didn’t matter. In my mind, I imagined the guard shouldering his rifle from a new position. I felt the sting of crosshairs on my chest as the man steadied himself. I anticipated the impact of a slug I would never hear fired if I didn’t find cover before the guard touched his finger to the trigger.

  But I did hear the shot. The ri
fle made a pneumatic THWAP from the distance, which scared me so badly it caused my knees to buckle. I stumbled, got a hand on the ground as I regained my balance, and then I continued running, hunched low.

  I was thinking, A silencer. Like Vladimir’s pistol, the weapon was fitted with a sound suppressor, and the shooter was using some type of night vision system. The realization had all kinds of bad implications. If the man was professionally armed, he was probably well trained. If he was well trained, he wouldn’t miss twice.

  Ahead was an ornate cottage that had been converted into a VIP retreat. I had seen the place earlier in the day. The structure was a rectangle of yellow pine beneath a tin roof, with a private courtyard that contained a patio and dip pool, all walled with tropical adobe. Elegant Old Florida architecture for old-money guests—and it was empty, judging from the dark windows.

  Separating us, though, was an elevated plateau, smooth as a golf green. It was a croquet court. Winter residents of Vanderbilt Island were big on croquet. They hosted international tournaments. They drank gin fizzes in the shade of a huge banyan tree and ate canapés during breaks.

  The last thing I wanted was to cross an open area while a marksman dialed in the distance with a night vision scope. So I angled toward the tree.

  Banyan trees are unusual. They expand in circumference as they grow. Overhead limbs drop air roots to support their own weight so that, after half a century, the trees resemble the schematic of a circus tent that contains a maze of poles.

  The banyan tree—if I could put it between me and the fishing lodge, it would screen me from sight when I crossed the croquet court. So that’s where I headed, running hard.