Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  He made a sound that was dismissal of her objections. “For this, for love, you must sacrifice. There will be pain.” She watched in fascination as he cut a square of flesh from the inside of her forearm. The blood ran slowly in a rivulet to her wrist, so bright in the wind from the sea. She could taste its brightness. The wind blew past her again as she stood on the dark rock, facing the sea.

  She felt danger, the desecration of a holy place forbidden to women even before the voice spoke behind her.

  “You’ll be all right,” the voice said.

  She opened her eyes. The living room blurred, came into focus. She could smell alcohol, feel its sting.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, coming into view. He held a swab in his hand. “Let me take care of that.”

  “I. Yes. I cut my arm. On the altar. It was a ritual, wasn’t it?”

  He smiled kindly. “I will do my best,” he said. “Perhaps it will work out. There is still a little of the ancient magic in these things.”

  He gave her a bandage. The inside of her forearm was weeping blood again after he’d swabbed it. She could feel the coolness as the alcohol evaporated.

  “The Maya dream together,” she said. “I’ve never experienced anything like that.”

  “You were very good,” he said. “You moved easily through the three realms. Your unihipili is strong.”

  “Three realms?”

  He waved it aside. “Oh, they’re all much alike, I imagine, these subtle structures.” Seated across from her once again, he began to explain in a calm voice the metaphysics of kahuna magic. Even later, when she was driving through the night toward Chazz and their apartment, she could not understand why she felt so uneasy, as if she had been warned.

  35

  The ultracentrifuge was whining down. Chazz tipped back in his office chair and rested his chin on his tented fingers, staring down at the pile of MacDonald’s lunch debris on his desk.

  Strachey was preparing the last batch. They had tissue samples from all the victims prepared, labeled and catalogued.

  “This is it,” he said, placing a new set of vials in the centrifuge. He set the dial, and a quiet whine started up the scale. He put his hands behind his neck and stretched. Chazz heard a loud vertebrae crack. “Ahh,” Strachey sighed.

  “What have we got, really?” Chazz asked.

  “We have twenty-five little jars of dense, colorless fluid,”

  Strachey suggested. “The question is, What are we going to do with them?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Okay, I’ve a hunch. We should purify mitochondrial DNA.”

  “Then weigh it out? Check for homologous sequences?” Strachey suggested.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Count the base-pairs? Unzip the strands and look for similar recognition sites?”

  “Sure.”

  “Run them through the sequencer?”

  “Yup, all of that.”

  “What are we looking for?” Strachey asked after a time. He sat heavily. “A stretch of viral DNA or some free-floating RNA? Intruder molecules of some kind? A retrovirus or a toxin? Pathology is not inconsistent with a neurotoxin, but there were no chemical indicators. Still, the neurotransmitter sites were deformed, weren’t they? An autoimmune response of some kind.”

  Chazz nodded. He rubbed his eyes, then climbed to his feet. His chair creaked when he got out of it. He picked up the vial labeled #1, checked the list. “Robert Hall,” he said. “Mitochondria. Let’s give it a go, shall we? A test run. If it works out all right, we’ll load it up and let her go.”

  They went into the next room. With a micropipette Chazz put two microliters of fluid in a special plastic container. This in turn went into the sequencer, a machine the size of a large freezer. He switched it on. The computer display winked into life, producing a graphic image of the DNA molecule, the graceful double-helix form twining round and round itself. At the moment, the image was static and stylized, a rough template for the sequencer to work on.

  With a quiet hum, the machine extruded the dense DNA molecule. Along the bottom of the screen, text printed out 5' and 3', codes for the start and stop ends. A blinking underline cursor waited at the corner, then slowly spelled out the first base pair as the sequencer analyzed the nucleotides. Symbols filled in the graphic representation of the DNA above in primary colors, blue for guanine, yellow for cytosine: G-C pair. The molecule notched up a base pair and rotated one-tenth of a turn. A few moments later the second pair filled in: A-T.

  “If it kept up this speed, we’d be done in about a million years,” Chazz murmured.

  Strachey laughed. “Mitochondria makes for a long, skinny molecule.”

  But as they spoke, the graphics picked up speed, flashing the letters of the genetic code faster and faster until they blurred. The counter indicated the sequencer was analyzing and storing at the rate of five kilobases/sec. The molecule was twisting off the top of the screen in a blur, the colors of the four bases flashing rapidly as the image twirled.

  Chazz tapped the keyboard of a separate terminal and got a reading of 2 Hr 49 mi 2.62 sec to completion: nearly three hours for the sequencer to finish each DNA molecule. Once this run finished, though, they could do four at a time. The seconds ticked off, the hundredths and tenths blurred, too fast to read.

  “We’re looking for… ?” Strachey asked.

  “I have this hunch,” Chazz said. “The computer will look for homologous sequences in all the DNA. If the agent is something that affects the genetic code and is found in all the victims, the computer will find and display all the matches. We can eliminate known sequences. If there is a sufficiently long stretch common to all the victims, we might have something.”

  He looked at Strachey. “Or it could be a dead end.” Chazz sighed. “It’s going to take a lot of time and computer power to do the matching. Fortunately, we have a lot of computer power.” He smacked the sequencer. “This baby was rebuilt by one of the technicians here. You’d hardly know it’s over ten years old. He’s got it connected to the mainframe computer in the basement. Massive amounts of optical storage, Christ, billions of bytes, and fast! Not like the old days, eh?”

  “Nope,” Strachey agreed. “Five years ago we couldn’t have done this kind of problem in under a year or two. Now it’ll take three days to do all of them, even the controls.”

  “It’s going to be a long night,” Chazz agreed. “Despite gigabytes of computer memory.”

  It was a long night.

  They sent out for dinner, ate absently, worked through the evening. They waited until the first sample was finished and the screen said, “Mitochondrial genome 97.63 % confirmed, error checking complete, deviation ±3.6%”

  “Why mitochondria, though? Matrilineal DNA,” Strachey muttered, watching the screen. “I wonder what that means?”

  “Means it’s inherited complete from the mother, all the way back to Eve,” Chazz said over his shoulder.

  “Sure. We’ve been doing ethnic genotyping with mitochondrial DNA for some time now. Any significance to this matching sequence being in the mitochondria, do you think?”

  Chazz shrugged. “Probably not, but it’s worth checking.”

  By two in the morning the rest of the samples were prepared and loaded into the long switchbacked conveyer inside the sequencer. They added in their own purified mitochondria as controls.

  Twisted helices climbed off the top of the screen; then, base pair after base pair coming together as the machine analyzed what they were, one after the other, for both DNA strands, each one a check on the other since they were mirror images.

  Computer memory filled, dumped to mass storage, filled again; each sample, Robert Hall first, then Sally Cameron and Rake Wyman and Freddie Delarota, moving through the sequencer in turn.

  Dawn paled the sky. The clouds were lower than yesterday, yet the storm still held off. Chazz and Strachey barely noticed. By ten o’clock they had put in the final sampl
es.

  “You know,” Chazz said, suppressing a yawn, “even if we’re right about this, I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?” Strachey was rubbing his eyes.

  “Even if we find something, a sequence they all have in common, what will we have, really? Just the beginnings. Whatever this is might be like oncogenes – they break, they move, they express for cancers. We’d need a huge lab, hundreds of people working on it. And now there haven’t been any deaths in a while. How are we going to convince people that we need all these resources?”

  Strachey shrugged. “I’m too tired to care now. Let’s get some sleep and worry about it later.”

  Chazz dialed his condominium. Patria’s sleepy voice answered. “Where are you and what have you been doing?” she murmured.

  “Strachey and I just finished. Christ, it’s been a long night. I’m coming home.”

  “Wait’ll I tell you about the kahuna,” she said. “We saw him before. I dreamed about it.”

  “We saw him before?”

  “Yeah. The sharks, remember? He’s good, Chazz. Really good. He has a lot of power.”

  “A regular Svengali, huh?”

  “You,” she declared, “are an incorrigible materialist. That’s your major failing.”

  “I love you too,” he said. “See you soon.”

  “Unh-hunh.”

  36

  Chazz, slumped with fatigue, spread the slats of the lab blinds and gazed across the courtyard. On the other side he could see a figure walk down the corridor, a dim outline behind the windows along the corridor where his office was.

  “I wonder where he went,” he said to himself.

  Strachey looked up from the screen, where spirals unwound at a furious rate. They were on their way home, but seemed to have trouble moving. “Who?” he asked.

  “Huh?” Chazz shook his head, clearing it. “Oh. Silver. He went somewhere. I wondered where he went. I thought maybe we could talk this problem over with him, then I remembered he left. That looked like Andrea over there.”

  “Mm.” Strachey pressed his hands into the small of his back. “Why am I standing here watching this infernal machine? It’ll be hours yet.”

  “Right.” Chazz tried briskness. “Let’s go.” They hung up their lab coats, switched off the lights and left the lab. Chazz was locking the door behind them when the phone inside the lab rang. They looked at each other for a moment.

  “We’d better get it,” Strachey said.

  Chazz nodded and unlocked the door. Strachey brushed past him and answered. Chazz thought it would be for him – Takamura, perhaps – so he hung in the doorway, half-listening. But Strachey stayed on, saying, “Yes, yes. Yes, sir.” Something in his voice made Chazz look up when he said, “No, sir, I can’t do that,” but the conversation continued, so Chazz went down the hall to the bathroom.

  His fatigue buzzed in him at the same frequency as the ceiling fixtures. The sound of the hand dryer reminded him of the whine of the sequencer. He caught himself staring at the chrome nozzle as warm air blew over his hands, then he realized he hadn’t washed them. They were dry.

  He shook his head and splashed cold water on a face he could barely recognize as his own, disembodied and haggard in the mirror. It helped a little, but not enough. Something gnawed at him, something about heat and dust, a vagrant image. Somewhere he had been recently. What had Patria said? The sharks. Something about the sharks, the kahuna, the Russian Fort. He walked slowly, frowning.

  When he got back, Strachey was hanging up slowly.

  “That was my boss,” he said. “I’ve been recalled to Atlanta. I’m to drop this project and fly out. Immediately, he said. I’m to catch the eleven-oh-five.”

  “You’re kidding.” Chazz came in and sat down. The sequencer hummed with the final samples. “We’re so close.” Strachey shook his head. “There’s some kind of emergency. He was vague. It sounded strange, but he said the eleven-oh-five. They’ve made a reservation. I’ve got to go. As soon as I straighten it out I’ll come back. It’s insane. He just wouldn’t say anything over the phone. Jesus, I’ve got fifty minutes to pack and get to the airport.”

  “I’d better drive you.”

  Traffic was heavy, cane trucks and delivery vans, streams of cars in both directions. Strachey fretted beside Chazz, caught in the amber density of traffic. As they approached the Kapuna Road turnoff, Chazz suggested they take it and go around. “There may be less traffic that way.”

  Strachey said nothing, his body tense.

  “Forty minutes,” he said, looking at the van’s dash clock. Chazz spotted a silver Brat that was approaching from Kapuna Road, and though he knew it couldn’t be the same one, he avoided the turnoff. He watched the Brat turn west onto the highway and vanish around a bend. He noticed his knuckles were tense on the wheel, and deliberately relaxed.

  “Tell me, Strachey, do you believe in magic?”

  Strachey stopped chewing his knuckle to look at Chazz. “Magic? Oh. Suggestion?” He shrugged. “There’s a lot we don’t know about the way the mind interacts with the body. Certainly, attitude has a lot to do with healing. But magic? No, I don’t think so. Not if you mean remote control, hexes, spells, that kind of thing. Disease always turns out to have an explanation.”

  Chazz nodded. “My wife thinks I’m a materialist.”

  Strachey was chewing his knuckle again. “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said absently.

  While he waited for Strachey to finish throwing his clothes back into his suitcase, Chazz said, “Somebody’s doing this, Strachey.”

  “Doing what?” he answered, slamming the case shut.

  “Somebody’s getting rid of you. Somebody’s afraid, somebody who can call the CDC and have you recalled.”

  Strachey stared at him. Then he shook his head. “Impossible,” he said. “I admit this is odd, but that’s impossible. It doesn’t work like that. We have a job, a mission, CDC does. It can’t be subverted. No, I won’t accept that. Something else is going on. You said it yourself: there haven’t been any deaths in a while. Maybe this has blown over.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  On the road approaching the airport, low gray cloud and leaden sea stretched to an infinity without horizon. There was no detail anywhere in that emptiness, as if time had come to a halt, motion itself had ceased. Only the old white van moved through a static world drained of life. They parked and walked to the terminal through an oppressive silence.

  Chazz stared listlessly at the empty sea while Strachey checked in.

  They shook hands at the gate. “I never even got to the beach,” Strachey said. “A trip to Hawaii, and I don’t think I even saw a coconut.”

  “I’ll send you one,” Chazz said. While Strachey boarded, Chazz wandered over to the pay phone and called Patria to let her know what had happened. He nearly replaced the receiver before the first ring when the thought She’s not going to answer drifted through his mind. After seven rings he hung up.

  “She’s taking a shower,” he said to no one in particular.

  He wandered back to the fence. Strachey’s plane was pulling away, dust billowing around the trees on the other side. Chazz considered calling Takamura to tell him they had just lost their medical expert, but he leaned there a little longer, watching the DC-9 taxi to the end of the runway. In a moment it roared into the air and vanished quickly into the clouds. They were lower than they looked. He supposed the ceiling was no more than a few hundred feet.

  In the parking area he caught himself looking around for a silver Subaru. He saw nothing suspicious. Just the usual assortment of taxis and rental cars and hotel buses. He paused at the pay phone again, but there was still no answer. When he tried Takamura’s office, the operator said he was out. Sammy Akeakamai was also out. Would he like to leave a message? He told her Strachey was gone. He called Patria again. There was still no answer.

  37

  He drove slowly toward town, gray sea at his back. The radio to
ld him the storm was coming, something he could feel as the air grew dense and heavy. Strachey was gone, and he would have to process all the information from the samples himself. Who had the power to have Strachey recalled? Or was this really just chance: something else came up, some epidemic in New Jersey or Texas which only Strachey, a young and inexperienced epidemiologist, could handle?

  Who, for that matter, were the two men in the silver Subaru?

  Where was Cobb? The County Building was on his left, and on impulse he turned into the lot.

  He was on his way to the pay phone in the lobby when Dr. Shih called to him. “Dr. Koenig! I’m glad to see you,” she said, bustling up to him. Instruments winked in her pocket. She tilted her head, looking up at him. “You look awful.”

  “I’ve been up all night. What are you doing over here? Shouldn’t you be down in the morgue?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I’m bringing over my final report. I hope. Have you found anything yet?”

  He shook his head. “It’ll be a few days. We’re looking at an enormous amount of information. And Strachey’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Recalled. I just took him to the airport. Back to Atlanta.”

  “I don’t understand that. They were cooperating, the CDC.

  Why would they call him back now?”

  “I don’t know. Have you seen Cobb?”

  “Not today, I haven’t. And you’d better get set. Walter’s coming.”

  “Walter?”

  “Tropical storm. I still can’t get used to these men’s names.” She smiled. “I guess I’m old-fashioned.”

  Takamura wasn’t in his office. The sergeant on duty said he was on his way in, though, and should be there in a half-hour. “He and Sergeant Akeakamai went down to Koloa for something.”

  “Koloa?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can I use the phone?”

  “Sure.”

  There was still no answer. By now she would have been in the shower for almost an hour. Chazz took the stairs two at a time.