by Rob Swigart
Table of Contents
VECTOR
TOXIN
VENOM
BONUS: THE DELPHI AGENDA
Praise for VECTOR, the FIRST book in Rob Swigart’s Thriller in Paradise series:
“Entertaining!”
—Best Sellers
“An intriguing blend of jungle action… and cliffhanger suspense.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A fast-paced novel with an exciting, climactic ending.”
—Peninsula Times Tribune
VECTOR
A Thriller In Paradise
By Rob Swigart
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Vector
Copyright © 1986 by Rob Swigart
Cover by Roy Migabon
ISBN: 9781625171412
www.booksbnimble.com
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: May 2013
PART I
PARADISE
1
Cobb Takamura ignored the light rain-hiss on the sagging metal roof of the porch. The drops sliding down the corrugated grooves were dark with rust when they fell on his porkpie hat. He absently wiped the brim with a delicate forefinger, then looked at the red stain with a bemused smile. The falling drops obscured his view of the body seated in the doorway.
It might have been the cheerful smile on the body’s face that kept anyone from noticing that rigor had set in long before. A greeting hello-how-are-you smile, nice-day-today-eh?
Now, though, with the steady dripping from the rusted roof, the low gray clouds overhead trailing veils of light rain, with the sibilance of moisture caressing banana leaves, the flat green light of early afternoon, the slick mud of the road that twisted through these urgent volcanic foothills and with the swift gurgle of the river nearby, the smile seemed less authentic.
In fact, Takamura observed, it was not a smile at all, but death rictus, and it spoke not how-are-you? but good-bye agony. He sighed heavily. This was a quiet island. He hoped this wasn’t a homicide. It was only February; a homicide would double his statistical averages for this time of year.
The wooden porch creaked under his weight. Takamura was not a big man, but the porch was rotten, the shack a one-room affair with gaps in the boards. An abandoned kitchen sink was tilted in the red dirt under a drain spout beside the porch; a ragged hole had apparently been kicked through the wall to give the inhabitant access to the water in the sink,water which at the moment quivered darkly with mosquito larvae. He crouched down to look through the hole in the wall at the interior, but the light was dim and the chaos within total. He turned back to the body.
Male. Age unknown. Ethnic origins unknown, though apparently mixed. Like the house, the grin had several gaps. Cause of death: unknown.
“Sammy!”
Sammy Akeakamai, leaning against the faded yellow Toyota skewed at the end of the dirt road, took the toothpick from his mouth and looked up. “Yeh?”
Takamura gestured for him to come up. Sammy threw his toothpick into the wild lantanas and threw himself into his half-speed waddle. He was overweight. Too much poi in his diet; he liked to claim he was on a high-starch, low-protein diet designed by his ancient kahuna ancestors to promote mystical powers. For this reason, among others, Takamura often referred to him as The Kukui Nut.
“Whadda you think?” Takamura asked, pointing at the body.
The body’s face had a coppery color that gave it the tanned look of robust good health. From a distance. One skinny arm was draped across the casually crossed knees, palm up, exposing the inside of the elbow.
“Tracks,” Sammy grunted. He hunkered down on his heels. His pudgy forefinger touched the needle marks. The flesh was like wood.
“Mmm,” Takamura muI’mured. “Know him?”
Sammy shook his head; his jowls rolled back and forth. “Lotta boys up here in the woods. Don’t see ’em downtown much. Some of them never, maybe. Think you know everyone, then somebody’s relative turns up somewhere, down from the mountain where they been living on taro and bananas and mangoes.” He shrugged, a lugubrious gesture. “Or tourist, maybe.”
“Maybe.” Takamura looked doubtful. He uncoiled to his feet and stepped inside over the body.
The odor rocked him for a moment. It shouldn’t smell this bad, not with all those gaps in the walls, the hole for the sink, the rain. This was the wettest February in years. Hot, too. He leaned back to breathe, then plunged in.
The hut said bare survival. It said below the poverty line. It said indifference and (he was quite sure from the smell) terminal despair. He glanced back down at the Toyota. The end of the road. The body had quite possibly put this place together itself. Very little skill was in evidence.
“Starvation. Disease. Overdose.” Takamura ticked off items on his list in a quiet voice. “Homicide. Maybe.” The body had lived here for some time. If you could call it living. There were no toilet facilities per se. “Per se,” Takamura said aloud. “Per se.”
“What’s that?” Sammy called, still hunkered by the body. He was watching the grin. A fly explored it, moving from the teeth to the upper lip when it came to a gap. The fly moved away from the grin, crossed the fleshy part of the nose and cautiously approached the corner of one open eye. Wrinkles of good humor radiated away from the eye, and the fly paused there to probe some gummy fluid.
“Per se,” Takamura said, a little louder. “No toilet per se. He used the floor.”
“Oh.” The fly was cleaning its legs.
Takamura appeared in the door again, trim in his flower-printed shirt and tightly creased tan slacks. His watch had a black plastic strap, his smoke-tinted glasses had a black nylon cord that looped around his neck. He shrugged eloquently. “No help,” he said. “No I.D., nothing.” His mouth twitched in disgust. “No paper at all in there.” He flicked his hand at the body. “Nothing on him either, uh?”
The Kukui Nut shook his head and grinned. “Paper no last long in tropics, bwana sahib.”
Takamura smiled. “Give ’em a call, Gunga Din. Tell Kim to bring the pickup. I don’t think this stiff is going to ride into town lying down. To quote the great detective—”
“Charlie Chan,” Akeakamai interrupted.
“Charlie Chan,” Takamura agreed. “‘Man who flirt with dynamite sometimes fly with angels.’”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sammy wanted to know.
Takamura made a gesture with his hand, and the fly buzzed off. The rain had stopped. A mourning gecko the color and texture of bark crouched beside the tilted sink; it casually flicked its tongue and the fly was gone. The lizard winked slowly at him.
Takamura winked back.
2
The rain clouds had blown away by the time Rake Wyman finished loading his gear. He scratched the gray stubble on his chin and squinted into the sun for a moment. Pete Williams tossed the mesh bag containing Rake’s spear gun and knife into the boat.
“Bring back a big one,” Pete said without conviction. Rake never brought anything back. He was a nut who liked to dive alone, and someday he wouldn’t come back at all.
Rake answered with a grunt. The exchange was a long habit to which he paid no attention. “Gonna be hot,” he said. He always said that too. The temperature never varied more than ten degrees from winter to summer. Not here in the Waiakale harbor on the south side of the island. And the water temperature never varied anywhere.
“Yeah,” Pete agreed. “Hot.”
Rake started the o
utboard with a roar and carved a wake around the breakwater of Hanalolo to the west. He was right about one thing: it was going to be hotter on the west side where it almost never rained and the sun glared off the water. In half an hour Rake was opposite the Navy’s Pacific Missile Approach Network Facility. The waters were restricted here, but Rake had never paid much attention to arbitrary boundaries. He gave PACMAN (some wag in Naval Operations had thought that one up) the finger, certain that although no one was visible on shore, he was well registered on radar or sonar or infrared or some such. Maybe satellites, for that matter.
***
He was right, of course. Lt. J.G. Spencer Collins was watching Rake’s boat through his binoculars, momentarily undecided whether to send out the patrol boat to wave Rake Wyman away, or merely to log the passage. There were no tests scheduled today, so he decided to log the incident. It was roughly the twentieth time in the past three months that Rake had challenged him with his middle finger. Lt. J.G. Spencer Collins knew who Rake Wyman was. His predecessor had warned him of Rake’s habit— the other dive boats always observed the restricted limit.
Rake laughed as his boat moved north of the boundary and he picked up speed toward The Slip. It was almost noon. Lieutenant Collins entered Rake’s passage in the computer log, noting only that nothing was happening aside from a research dive that had left several hours before. Lieutenant Collins went back to his missile-attack simulation. At the moment a massive flight of Soviet Backfire bombers was sweeping across the Bering Sea and he was monitoring a three-pronged response of B1-fired Cruise air-to-air missiles the computer had provided him along with satellite-tracking cluster-spray mobile-launched SAMs from a remote army base north of Anchorage, and his own sub-launched radar frequency seek-and-destroy anti-intruder Ferret missiles. Most of this defensive hardware existed only in the computer’s memory and the imagination of Naval programmers in San Diego, not in the real world. It was considered good training, though, and Collins was going for a Facility record score, so it was with considerable dismay that he watched the Soviet Backfires destroy his Alaskan base, electronically derange the Ferrets and dodge most of the Cruise missiles, which were, of course, very slow.
Lieutenant Collins was watching most of the Pacific Northwest vanish under a nuclear barrage when Rake dropped anchor over The Slip, a ragged tumble of rock and coral left over from the eruption of Wai’ale’ale some four million years before.
Despite the gentle swaying of his Zodiac as it rode the swells, Rake managed a sizable toot for clear-headed appreciation of the deep aquamarine, wiped the white powder from his nose with the back of his hand and licked it off. His tongue flashed numb as his nose and he was ready.
He screwed down the regulator, opened the valve and sucked once. It worked fine. Habit told him just the right amount of air to let into his buoyancy compensator. He spit in his mask, swirled it in the ocean and slipped it on. He stuck the second stage in his mouth and tipped himself overboard.
He drifted casually along the rock wall. He’d been out here too many times. The Slip was a favored dive location, and he expected to find half a dozen groups of tourists poking through the reef, gawking at the fish, but there was no one around. No one.
He floated to a halt before a hole in the rock wall. A moray pulled back slightly, wicked mouth agape. Rake poked his spear at the eel and shook his head. He could almost imagine the ugly creature hissing at him.
He checked his depth gauge. Sixty-five feet. Plenty of time.
He knew the Valiant was down here. He felt it in his bones, his gut. The Navy wouldn’t admit it, or it didn’t know, but he had traced the ship to this location years before, yet no one had ever found it. Perhaps only Rake Wyman knew it was here. Perhaps.
This was why he preferred to dive alone. The Valiant had been carrying platinum bars when the kamikaze got it off Kauai in 1943. Rake wanted that cargo. He’d been looking for it for almost twenty years, and he believed fervently that it was just within his grasp now.
Clouds of sergeant majors scattered around him. A silver school of bonitas paralleled his course for a time, then vanished over a ridge.
He could no longer see the bottom, for the relatively level area on the north side of The Slip dropped in vast steps to an abyss nearly three miles deep. Rake prayed the ship had not gone down much farther north where it would be out of his reach, but three weeks before he’d found the propeller. It was heavily calcified, and a bitch to get up and into the boat. Now, though, it sat in the garage behind his shack in Wailanai covered with burlap.
He had found it at 134 feet.
He raised his auto-inflation hose and vented some air out of his BC. As he began to drift downward, he flipped over and swam toward the dark. The rock and coral wall shimmered beside him. He ignored it. What he wanted was down below somewhere. He entered a narrow sloping defile; at the end he looked down. A long, vaguely regular shape was outlined in the silt below, and elation rose in him. The Valiant! It had to be.
He hovered for a moment, wondering whether he was imagining the shape; whether this really was a regular shape. It could be just a ridge of volcanic rock softened by currents. He checked his depth gauge, noted he was at 145 feet, and was about to tip down to the ship when he sensed a presence behind him. As he twisted a half-turn in the narrow defile to look, his air stopped flowing. He sucked hard on the regulator, certain at first he had merely run out of his main tank and needed to pull reserve. He reached behind him as soon as it hit him that, pull as he might, no air was coming through. The reserve valve moved easily, but still the air did not come. Then he felt a touch on his shoulder.
Rake’s eyes were wide behind his mask when he saw a muscular Navy diver beside him. For a moment he thought the frogman was going to kill him for crossing the restricted zone, but then he saw with a flood of relief that the man was offering him a regulator from his second tank.
Rake dropped his own regulator, seized the proffered one, purged and breathed. Air flooded into his lungs. Gratitude flowed into him with the air and he nodded his thanks.
The diver circled thumb and forefinger and pointed at him. You okay?
Rake gave his okay sign. The other diver reached over and took Rake’s dangling regulator, unkinked the line and purged it. Bubbles burst from it.
Rake nodded. His line had gotten twisted. He didn’t notice the second diver drifting away around the edge of a sharp scarf of the rock wall, a pair of heavy-duty clamps in his hand.
The first diver, who looked like a body-builder, nodded. He handed Rake’s regulator back and swam off with easy, powerful kicks. Rake went back onto his own air and backed out of the shallow crevasse. It wasn’t until he had come to a halt above the boat shape on the bottom that the funny feeling hit and suspicion flooded him.
A wave of black light washed across his vision; for just a moment he thought it was nitrogen narcosis. But Rake was experienced in narcosis, and this was something else.
As a whirlpool opened beneath him, he started to gasp for air. He realized as he was dying that the Navy did know about the Valiant.
With his last strength he yanked the emergency cord on the CO cartridge; his buoyancy compensator exploded full, and heedless of bends or decompression he shot toward the surface. By then it was too late anyway. The pit had opened inside him, and although his body went up, all the rest swirled away in fragments.
3
Charles Koenig stood beside a stainless steel sink, frowning at his white lab coat thrown casually over the back of a metal chair. In his hand he held a small vial marked Radioactive. In his other hand he held another vial.
He was about to tag the proteins with radioactive iodine.
A young man with a fuzz of down on his cheeks came in holding an infant. “Hi,” he.said.
Chazz nodded, then saw he was talking to someone else at the other end of the lab. The other, a stocky girl in a lab coat, cooed over the baby. Chazz shook his head and pipetted the 125I into the second vial. It was not his bab
y. He had no children. Babies, Patria said, got in the way; they were responsibility, a burden; they interfered with the important things— career, for example. Instead, Charles Koenig was in this Hawaiian laboratory pouring minute quantities of radioactive iodine from one jar to another. Career. His… and hers. Patria definitely did not want babies. Patria was in the jungles of Yucatan, doing her science.
“Science,” he said to himself, as no one was nearby. “Science favors the unprepared mind.” His mind was much too well prepared.
He scratched his cheek with a blunt finger. Graying hair fluffed out of his open shirt. He heard the hum of refrigeration units, the hum of fluorescent lights, the faint whine of a centrifuge. Once all these sounds had been comforting and familiar, the ambience of his professional life— these sounds and the touch of plastic containers, of pipettes and microscope controls, cool controlled air. Out the window stretched green lawns; broad palms swayed in a breeze he could neither hear nor feel. He could see the red splash of poinsettias against the far wall where his office was. He could hear the baby cry out, a soft, gurgled bark.
Suddenly he put the vials into the fridge, hung his lab coat in a locker and went out to his van.
The desert was empty. He preferred the emptiness. Boredom grew distant there, the restlessness faded, the tender spot around the heart grew tough again. He got out and hiked until he sweated and the dust blew around his boots in small familiar dragons.
Sand was blowing over the southern highway as he started back. He crossed the Waimea River at the mouth of the canyon where it flowed through the village of Hanapepe. An ancient truck with a bed full of automobile wheels rattled along in the opposite direction, load swaying in the rising wind. A haphazard network of carelessly looped rope lashed the tires.
