Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  The door opened behind Takamura, and an officer came in, followed by Ward Freeman.

  “Ah,” Takamura said, standing. “Mr. Freeman, so good to see you. We’re releasing you and Dr. Dewilliter.”

  Freeman stared at Dewilliter. “Oh?” he said.

  Dewilliter showed his teeth. “Don’t worry, Ward. Everything’s under control. In a week it won’t matter, anyway.”

  Takamura smiled thinly.

  Freeman looked at Dewilliter in disgust. “You’re a fool,” he said. He turned to Takamura. “He’s a technician. I assure you of one thing, though: this entire situation has been blown all out of proportion. Really. It’s completely under control by now.”

  “Is it so?” Takamura said politely. “Well, of course, when the police uncover murder, they must investigate, despite what others who work in government might say. You understand that, of course, Mr. Freeman. Several people have died, as a result of your experiments, apparently. A man with a bow and arrow shot one of my men, too. That disturbs me.”

  Freeman shifted. “That was a mistake, I assure you. I don’t know where that man came from, really.”

  “I know you’re lying,” Takamura said gently. “Or a fool. But I can’t hold you any longer. Lawyers have been making noise for your release. You’re required to remain on the island, though.”

  “Of course,” Freeman said. He waited until Dewilliter had preceded him out the door. Dewilliter did not look at him; his triumph was gone. Freeman followed him out. Takamura nodded at the officer waiting by the door.

  “Check them out, would you? They’re free to go.”

  He called Chazz at the Douglass Research Center. The sun was shining brightly. Temperatures returned to seasonal norm. Takamura would not be fooled by that, though. When Chazz came on the line, Takamura said, “‘Tongue often hang man quicker than rope.’”

  “Come on over,” Chazz said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  57

  The screen was tinted yellow. Chazz made an adjustment, and a square of ordinary black and white television picture opened in the center, framed by the yellow tint. He moved the controls and the image swam to the side, the black and white window moving over alien terrain: spheres and elongated cell structures, tangled sheets of whitish cobweb, vacuoles, snakes of chromosome.

  The scene floated above a long cell, found a shoot, moved outward. The shoot turned left, and Chazz drove the view in that direction. Then he stopped.

  “There,” he said. “It looks like we’re moving over the sample, but of course it’s really the other way around, the sample is moving under the scanning beam. That little place there is what we’re after. Nerve cell. This is the wall.” He tapped the screen with a finger. “Something is invading the host – the victims. How’s it getting into the body, how does it insinuate itself into the host’s DNA, and what does it do once it is there? I think we have the answer to the last question right here.”

  He tapped an indentation in the cell wall. “This is a receptor site, a synaptic junction. A neurotransmitter called acetylcholine should cross this gap and bind in there. You can see the way that the surface, which should be deeply pocked with niches like this, is flattened out. A protein is responsible for this, similar to the exotoxin from Clostridium botulinum spores.”

  “Sounds like botulism,” Patria said.

  “Right.”

  “Surely there are tests,” Takamura said.

  “Certainly.” Chazz was sweeping across the cellular landscape once again. “Dr. Shih ran them. Negative. Results were negative. But a toxin could break down and disappear. Look.” He pointed out another spot.

  “Looks the same.”

  He flipped a switch, and the image acquired depth. He switched off the yellow filter and began to bleed in colors. “Computer-generated,” he said. The receptor site jumped forward. The image moved, exploring. Chazz moved the image up a stalk-shaped structure to small round bodies. “Vesicles produce the acetylcholine. If it’s blocked, the transmitter builds up inside the cell. Muscles don’t get the message to move. The result is considerable pain. It could explain their expressions. Note the distorted shape of the nerve ending here. The toxin enters the cell and binds to the inner surface of the nerve membrane. No messages get out.”

  There was silence. Such a tiny place to go wrong, such a subtle perversion of the complex processes that made life possible. Patria thought of cultural diseases, also subtle, difficult to notice. The wrong kind of repression, a small misdirection of energy, and you could have National Socialism or organized crime. This was smaller. Much smaller. Yet this was no product of evolution: humans had willed it.

  Takamura stood up. In the darkness of the microscope room, he was a dim shape outlined in red moving in shadows. “We have a week or less. Then something is going to happen.”

  Chazz creaked his chair as he sat back, lifting his hands off the controls. “How do you mean?” His voice was tight in the darkness.

  “Something Dewilliter said. ‘In a week it won’t matter.’ I don’t know what he meant; it was a slip. I almost failed to notice it.”

  “You didn’t fail.”

  Chazz could almost hear the tight smile in Takamura’s voice. “No, but he thinks I did.”

  “That could mean…” Patria stopped.

  “Yes?” Takamura spoke politely.

  “This is deliberate. They’re not just making boats go faster.”

  “They are making people go slower. They’re killing. But why would the Navy want to kill people?” Chazz was thinking of something else, his voice dreamy.

  “Assassination? That’s not their job. Their job is boats and missiles and submarines.” Patria could hear the concern in Takamura’s tone. Such a tiny thing, this bug.

  “What’s happening in a week?”

  “Yes,” Takamura said. “My thoughts exactly.”

  “We need to pay some visits, Lieutenant. As you said, talk will not cook rice.”

  Amber lights flicked on, replacing the red, and Chazz prepared another sample. The specimen chamber was vacuum sealed. A small airlock in front cycled the sample out.

  While he worked, Patria spoke thoughtfully. “Everyone worked at the sugar mill except Collins. So some infection – a slow virus, you said – got to them at the mill. Years later, they began to die. Someone discovered the disease and thought it could be used. Someone at PACMAN, where Collins was stationed, say. Others, here at DRC, got involved. Collins was accidentally infected, and died quite soon. The bug has mutated; it now acts quickly. A cover-up begins.”

  “That fits some of the facts,” Takamura agreed. “Not all of them, but some. Enough for now, perhaps.”

  “The cover-up involved kidnapping and murder,” Chazz said. “They tried to get me involved. Perhaps to help unravel the genetic background of this bug. But how does it relate to a bug that makes boats go faster? Unless they are involved in DNA research of what used to be called a ‘purely defensive nature…’”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Patria asked.

  “Supposedly it means researching methods of detecting and defending against things like nerve gases and Lassa fever. In reality it means manufacturing variants on such things in order to understand them. Unfortunately, it also makes them available to those who think we should develop such weapons. It’s particularly insidious because it is very difficult to detect, research is cheap and easily hidden; and even with treaties there is no safe way to detect development and stockpiling of such agents.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Chazz had another specimen platform about the size of a half-dollar ready. He cycled it through the airlock. The lights went off. The image began to swim across the small screen. Colors filled in the shapes, vivid greens, yellows, reds. The plain they flew over was littered with debris that looked like tumbled rock. A chain appeared, as if dropped on the ground. The magnification jumped toward the chain, a vivid purple on a gray-green
ground. It had red and yellow highlights.

  “Imagine something, though,” Chazz said in the darkness. “Not a disease like Lassa fever or tularemia – things covered by the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Imagine instead a piece of RNA, a messenger version of RNA, for instance. It enters a cell. It has certain senses, this messenger, certain, well, talents. It can sense things, recognize them; and when it does, it can make something, and it can make the thing it made do something. Now imagine that the messenger, having done its job in silence and secrecy, dissolves. Poof, it’s gone. But something new has appeared in the host DNA.”

  “Okay,” Takamura said.

  “Now imagine that this new sequence is some kind of time bomb, perhaps remotely triggered.”

  “I’ve imagined it,” Takamura said. “I think we are in a lot of trouble.”

  ***

  In the scrub wasteland the heat was intense, windless. A line of perspiration had formed across Renfrew’s brow. It started to drip, and he drew the back of his hand across it to clear his vision. The entrance of the Douglass Research Center was visible from here.

  Renfrew was waiting.

  He had withdrawn from the dirt road to his camp. He’d explored the area, knew the dirt roads, the cattle trails and goat tracks and cane roads in the scrub. He knew how often they were used and by whom; he knew who was likely to wander by, and when.

  Only one highway separated Koenig’s apartment from the DRC. It was a nearly ideal situation for the hunter. Only if they went somewhere else, to Lihue or Koke’e, say, would he be out of luck, confined as he was to moving on foot. Even then, they would always return to one of these two places.

  The door opened. Renfrew raised his binoculars. Koenig, his wife, and the cop came out.

  They drove off in the cop car. Renfrew could run back to Koenig’s apartment in less time than it took them to drive. He headed back into the scrub.

  There was no trail, and he had to pause from time to time to sight on Wai’ale’ale to the north and the Hoary Head to the southeast, but he made good time. When he came to the trail which led him to an old cane road, he turned right. Five hundred meters farther, he came to the Koloa Road.

  A road crew worked on a tree fallen across the road, filling the air with fragrant eucalyptus scent and the sound of McCullough saws. Fallen branches and sawdust littered the area. Renfrew paused at the edge of the scrub, uncertain, but the quarry was driving back and he should be there first.

  He moved down the road, away from the crew.

  It took him an extra ten minutes to get across. His clothes were drenched and the bugs had begun to bite by the time he found himself standing on the stone wall again. Somehow the discomfort gave Renfrew an obscure satisfaction.

  The car was already parked beside the condo. No one was in sight. Renfrew jumped down onto the dirt road. Most of the flattened toads had dried up, leaving leathery shapes on the dirt. The dirt was already dry, too, despite the recent heavy rains. Only a few pools of standing water, places where the four-wheel-drive ruts were particularly deep, caught the harsh sun. The surface of the mud had solidified and cracked; but underneath, it was still wet enough to leave three sets of prints, headed north, on the dirt road.

  Two men and a woman had walked here recently. Renfew couldn’t walk on the road without leaving his own track, so he was forced to move parallel, through the scrub.

  He noticed the sound first, strange, inarticulate barks, deep, muffled speech made up almost entirely of vowels booming out into the baffling brush. Shrill whistles, clipped metallic noises at irregular intervals. Rumbles. Gruesome indecipherable chewing. Gulps.

  As he got closer, the sounds separated, became more distinct.

  “Whittaker. Front office.” The voice was bass, distorted. A cane truck rumbled out of sight somewhere. A shrill whistle blew again, followed by the sound of a truck backing up, warning with a monotonous beep-beep-beep.

  The cane factory rose above the tops of the scrub, stacks and roofs, the long open-sided sheds, finally the road itself. Renfrew stopped up at the edge of the scrub and examined the mill. Loudspeakers mounted on the walls of the main building blared nearly incomprehensible messages. The Koenigs and Takamura were just climbing the short flight of wooden steps to the main office. Renfrew watched as they vanished inside and the screen door slammed shut behind them. Why were Koenig and the cop visiting a sugar mill?

  He settled down to watch.

  “Hey! Hey, you!”

  Renfrew looked around to see who the man was shouting at. The confusing cacophony from the public address system drowned out the speaker.

  He was shouting at Renfrew!

  Without a pause Renfrew uncoiled to his feet and melted back into the scrub. There was a cattle trail a few yards away, and the man, already suspicious, was on top of Renfrew before he could get away.

  Renfrew turned. The man was slightly overweight; a gap of belly exposed between his dirty T-shirt and green pants. “Hey,” the man shouted, moving toward Renfrew. “What the hell are you doing here? This is company property.”

  “Sorry,” Renfrew said. His hand rested on the hilt of his bayonet. He realized he was not an ordinary sight, dressed in now filthy fatigues, binoculars and canteen, hunting bow and muddy guide boots. “I didn’t know.”

  “Like hell, buddy. There’s no hunting down here. What the hell are you doing? Planning to steal something, were you? I think you’d better come into the office.”

  “Listen, really,” Renfrew said, unsnapping the leather strap across the hilt of his bayonet with one finger while he waved the other hand in the air. “I didn’t know.”

  “You were casing the place,” the fat man said. “Come on.”

  Renfrew slipped the knife out in one fluid motion and slashed across the exposed inches of sweat-grimed belly. The man jumped back as a red mouth opened in the skin, yawned widely and began to weep bright blood. He fell back, his scream lost in the pounding inarticulate sounds of the loudspeaker. His hands clasped across the open wound in his gut as Renfrew melted into the scrub and was gone.

  The front of his green pants were soaked a wet chocolate by the time he crashed through the screen door into the front office. Patria caught him as he fell. Behind Takamura the manager of the mill said “Jesus Christ” very softly.

  58

  Patria lowered the man to floor. “Get me a towel,” she barked without looking around. “And some tape, if you’ve got it.” The manager muttered, “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Never.”

  “Just get tape,” she ordered. The manager vanished into the back.

  “Emergency vehicle will be here in twenty minutes,” Takamura said, putting down the phone. The man on the floor had fainted and was unavailable for questioning.

  “He’ll be all right,” Patria assured him. “It’s a good thing he’s fat; that saved his life.” She tucked the last of the white adipose tissue back into the wound and closed it up. The manager handed her a towel, and she folded it over the wound. Methodically she taped it to his belly. “This was done with a sharp knife. Look how clean the edges are. That’ll help save him. I’ve seen wounds made with Stone Age weapons.”

  “Renfrew,” Chazz said.

  “Eh?” Takamura and Patria looked at him.

  “Renfrew. The fellow in fatigues up in Koke’e. With the bow and arrow. It’s him, I’m sure. He’s following us.” Over the odd sounds of the mill they could hear the siren screaming. Once it had vanished back down the dirt road, bearing the wounded man, they went back inside. The manager was shifting uneasily.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “You’ve got to stop him. He’s out there in the brush; somebody could hide out there for years, you know.”

  “Please don’t worry,” Takamura said. “We will catch him. We have good reason. He shot my partner. Now, about these people, Mr. Hodgkin. They were all associated with the mill, is that correct?”

  Hodgkin shook his head. “We had a man named Cameron he
re. He was younger, though, and he left the island. The kid, Delarota, it was his father worked here. The others, yeah, they were here. Hall worked here years ago, I remember, but only for a short time. I think he used drugs. A bad worker. Wyman was here later, stayed, oh I suppose about a year.”

  “Damn.” Takamura frowned.

  “It’s what I thought,” Chazz said.

  “How do you mean?” Takamura looked at him sharply. “This mill is not the connection. You had to check it out, of course, but this isn’t it, unfortunately.”

  “Oh. Why unfortunate?”

  Chazz shook his head, and Takamura turned to Hodgkin.

  “I seem to be forgetful these days,” he said. “Please forgive me, Mr. Hodgkin. Thank. you so much for your invaluable help. We needn’t delay your work any longer. Shall we go?” he said to Chazz and Patria.

  They walked back up the dirt road. There were no tracks in the mud, but Takamura kept his gun loose in its holster, and the two men walked on either side of Patria. When they got back to Kapuna Road and were walking toward the condo, Takamura repeated his question. “Why unfortunate, Chazz?”

  “Because,” Chazz said, “that fact increases the probability that I’m right, and that is unfortunate.”

  “Would you care to share it with us?” Patria always needled Chazz when he grew reticent. It was his lecturing mode; she thought it was merely withholding.

  “The connection among the victims is not that they were all associated with this mill at the same time. They weren’t.”

  “Wait,” Patria said. “The connection is a common ancestry. They all have Hawaiian blood. Right? The old woman, Freddie Delarota, Robert Hall, even that diver, Wyman, all of them had Hawaiian ancestry.”

  “Yes,” Chazz said.

  “Collins? The Canadian girl?” Takamura asked gently.

  “The Canadian girl was murdered, throat cut. Collins could be part Hawaiian, or it could have been something else he died of, or they poisoned him.”