Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  Patria said, “This is some kind of racist proposal.”

  “Yes, it looks that way. Project Cetus is a cover. Oh, it’s real, all right, I’m sure of that. Freeman believed in it, Collins had seen it. They are making boats go faster.”

  “I think the Navy likes to call them ships,” Takamura said with a smile.

  “Ships, then. I’d be willing to bet that, inside the Navy lab, though, there is another group, probably smaller, a conspiracy working on a biological weapon. And that they are nearly finished with it. That’s what worries me.”

  “Meaning?”

  Patria said, “Meaning that he doesn’t know what the weapon is, but it has something to do with a common genotype of some sort. They could design something that would go after ethnic genotypes.”

  “Right,” Chazz agreed. “It’s worse than that, though. It couldn’t work. Not anymore. There’s been too much mixing. I doubt if there’s a single population in the world today that doesn’t share genes. I don’t think it could be fine-tuned precisely enough. That’s what scares me. Human subgroups may have complex families of genes that could help identify them, but it’d be extremely difficult to find them precisely. Unless…”

  “Unless?”

  “Unless the mitochondria is important after all.”

  Billy was cleaning the pool. He waved cheerfully and shook his head as the three walked past. The pool was a mess. One of the trees was almost down; the other two were leaning precariously; the surface of the pool was still so covered with palm fronds it was difficult to see the water.

  “Gotta clean up, Dr. K. Never any end to it.”

  Chazz nodded. “Never any end.”

  Later they sat in the living room and watched the darkness gather. No one moved for a long time. The gecko chirped in the rafters. Mynas hopped on the lawn. Chazz stared out at the scrub and thought of Renfrew hiding somewhere. Never any end.

  “We’re going to have to move,” Chazz said finally.

  “Mm.” Takamura didn’t seem interested.

  “Thinking about Sammy?”

  “Mm.”

  “How is he?”

  Takamura stirred in the twilight. “Holding his own. Barely. Lung punctured, just missed the aorta, two ribs. He’ll be lucky if he lives. Very lucky. Longer he lives, though, the better his chances. They say. I miss him. There’s something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s Hawaiian. If what you think is true, he’ll be a prime target. Ground zero, I think they call it.”

  “That’s nuclear weapons,” Patria said.

  Takamura shrugged, almost invisible in the darkness.

  “He’ll live,” Chazz said gently. “I know it.”

  “Sure.”

  Chazz repeated what he’d said before. “Something keeps nagging at me, Cobb. Something about the kahuna at the Russian fort… Going after Hawaiians doesn’t make sense. What would be the point? We’ve got to do something. We have to make a move.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “We’ve got to take a look.”

  59

  Silver worried at the ridge of bone just under his temple with a lean finger. His tiny office was just big enough for a small workbench and the chair in which he was sitting, rubbing that small spot beside his temple. Goode hung in the doorway watching him with annoyance.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked finally.

  Silver looked up, saw his own hand hovering near his head and put it abruptly on the workbench.

  “Come on, Ben. You do that when something’s bothering you.”

  “We’re rushing it,” he said slowly. “It’s not ready, not yet. With the vector the way it is, deploying it is risky. The last batch mutated again.”

  “What are the numbers?” Goode asked.

  “Fifty-five percent.”

  “Better than fifty-fifty,” Goode said. “It’ll have to do. We’re out of time.”

  “We’re setting national policy, Jim! We don’t have the authority! If we had ninety percent certainty. Even eighty…” Goode examined the ceiling as if examining architectural details of interest. Involuntarily, Ben looked there too. Acoustical tile.

  “Ben,” Goode began, still gazing upward, “we’re not setting national policy, and you know it. We’re creating a situation in which national policy can be implemented in a certain way, or not. We’re providing the chief executive with an option, a good one, that’s all. The decision isn’t ours to make. We don’t have to make the choice. They gave Truman the atomic bomb; they didn’t use it, he did. This is the same thing. Believe me.” He looked at Silver then. “Believe me,” he repeated.

  Their eyes locked, motionless. Very slowly, hesitantly, Silver’s index finger rose again to his temple and he began to rub.

  “Everything’s set,” Goode said softly. “Don’t worry. Just finish what’s begun.”

  Silver nodded without looking up. The officer withdrew. After a few moments Silver left the room. At a pressure-sealed door he opened a clothing cabinet. He slipped a paper cap over his head, a mask over his nose and mouth. He gowned, slipped off his shoes and put on paper slippers. A frame offered him rubber gloves. He pressed a coded sequence into the lock beside the door, which sighed open. He entered a small chamber. Pressurized air showered over him. The next door closed behind him, and his ears popped as the pressure equalized. He keyed in another sequence into another electronic lock, and the inner door opened slowly.

  The room beyond was large, cool and scrupulously clean. The hidden lights had an orange tint; the benches along the walls were surfaced with a white slick plastic laminate; even the walls seemed to repel dirt. A breeze flowed through the room, maintaining laminar flow over the workbenches. Silver knew that the space above and around the room itself was packed with equipment, pipes and ducts, cables, wiring, filter after filter. Air flowing out was sterilized with heat, ultraviolet radiation and a set of electric grids that killed any organism that may have evaded the earlier precautions. This was a P4 containment facility, with the finest, most advanced and sophisticated kinds of physical barriers to anything, living or dead, larger than .05 microns in diameter either entering or leaving the room.

  He still did not feel safe, even here. No one could feel safe in this environment.

  Yet the risks were not so great, nor the precautions here so elaborate, as the room beyond it: P5. Pressure suits, impermeable membranes and special atmosphere were used in there. He could work on materials in the P5 room from here using a series of glove boxes along the walls, or he could, if necessary, put on a pressure suit and go into the P5 room itself.

  Incubators, centrifuges and refrigerators lined the walls beyond the glove boxes. Flasks inside them contained extraordinarily virulent life, microbes or viruses that waited; that divided and ate and waited to kill. It was a seething veneer of life which barely concealed the skull of death.

  Silver did not like it. Two people had gotten careless in this laboratory over the past three years. Their bodies had been incinerated for seventy-two hours in the furnace set into the far wall rather than allow an opportunity for what their bodies had taken in to escape outside. The ashes had been subjected to another set of decontamination processes, the same ultraviolet radiation, but more intense and longer-lasting, the same filtering processes, acid baths, alkaline baths and final neutralization baths. The remains had been ground or dried to dust, heated again, sterilized utterly, buried.

  Such procedures were expensive. The budget for this project was nonexistent. It was large and could not possibly have been concealed. Which was why the Valiant had been such an essential part of the plan, why that man Wyman had to die. Fortunately, he had also been a suitable subject for the Lolo Project.

  But there were international laws, national laws, hell, even local laws against what went on in this laboratory. There were treaties that had been sacred for eighty years or more. Governments would fall if word of this project got out. People would die if the bugs got out, a very larg
e number of people.

  People, Silver thought as the door sighed shut behind him and latched with a small but heavy sound, would die anyway. Some people already had.

  That was the business of this laboratory; that was his business. He knew how important it was, how essential. What they did here would, after next week, prevent World War III. So he went to work.

  A refrigerated cabinet was filled with small vials labeled with codes and names. Here were samples from everyone at the Pacific Missile Approach Network, samples that had once been blood but now were minute amounts of viscous fluid: mitochondrial DNA. A twisted double chain almost six feet long when unraveled, but so thin it would not be visible except under the scanning beam of the electron microscope; a strip of computer tape with the physical, mental and emotional identity of a human being. Somewhere on that molecule might be the information on a man’s general character, the age at which his toenails would begin to yellow, his hair fall out, his eyesight fail.

  Ben Silver’s vial was in there. So was Jim Goode’s, and Charles Koenig’s. The new one was labeled Patria Koenig. So much genetic variety! Silver looked at the ranks of bottles sadly. It was too bad that all these people didn’t have more in common, that they didn’t share his ideals and concerns as well as his genotype. Diversity had made his job extremely difficult, but in the end he had found the common thread and the vulnerable point that thread would lead to. He could plant the deadly seeds in those bottles at that point. He could pull the thread that tied them all together. He could do what was necessary; he could make them dance or sing or die.

  He went to work.

  60

  Renfrew crossed the spine of the island, moving as swiftly as he could beneath the power lines. There was a dirt service trail under the wires, and as often as it was safe he stayed on it. Initially his one desire was to put distance between himself and the Koloa Mill. From time to time he took to nearly invisible trails he knew about, but the service road was faster, and Renfrew was in a hurry.

  It was not a great distance, as the rare Hawaiian crow called ‘alala’ flew, but the ascent was rugged; the road twisted, badly maintained, difficult, and wet.

  At times he skirted the housing developments at Kawaihau; the road climbed the steep slopes of ridges, followed their spines northeast through rain forest, descended into narrow valleys thick with ferns. At one time he walked for three hours through a wild bamboo forest where the trees were thirty or forty feet tall and darkness settled around him. The trees cracked and barked in the dim light with a sound like gunshots from different directions. The trunks were sometimes six inches in diameter, bare to great heights, then thickly branched, so the leaves brushed against one another in continuous whispering. The trail under here was extremely wet and slow, and mosquitoes filled the air, hung in a cloud around him and covered him with bites. Despite the mud he daubed on the exposed skin of his face and hands, they managed to get through. Finally he forced himself to stop slapping at them and settled into a jogging rhythm where nothing existed but the suck and pull of the trail at his feet.

  He rejoined the power lines after a time, moving parallel to the north coast of the island, passing within a few hundred yards of the shack where the old lady had lived. He had to ford the river there, holding his bow above his head. He kept moving.

  It took him two days. He arrived at the Ke’e Beach at the head of the Na Pali Coast Trail. Even at this time of year all the campsites were taken, and hikers trudged west along the eleven-mile trail to Kalalau Beach. There was, Renfrew knew, a trail crew cabin halfway in at Hanakoa where he could stay the night. Just another hiker.

  It was raining again. Drops fell on the broad, notched leaves of the ti, dripped down their graceful stems. Kukui, koa and hala trees crowded the edge of the trail. He ran in the rain.

  He found some mountain apples, called ohia ai, and paused to eat the crisp white meat. Later he found guava and mango. It was dusk by the time he got to Hanakoa. There were three people in the cabin, two wispy-bearded boys and a girl changing her shirt. She had a narrow face and large breasts. Renfrew gave her an intense look. She turned toward him as she slipped on a dry tank top in the gloom of the cabin.

  The two boys were preoccupied with their bedding. One of them turned just as she was rolling the tight top over her breasts, saw Renfrew staring, and growled at him. “What’re you looking at, pal?”

  Renfrew glanced at him casually. He reached back slowly and unslung his bow case, placing it between his feet on the plywood floor. He removed his pistol belt with his bayonet and canteen slung on it. He placed them on the floor as well without taking his eyes from the boy’s.

  The boy looked away. “Come on, Swett,” he said to his companion. Swett looked up in surprise. It took him a few moments to read the situation. Renfrew, out of the corner of his eye, watched understanding dawn. Swett didn’t say a word, but began in silence to roll his sleeping bag up again.

  “You coming, Dora?” the first boy asked the girl. She didn’t even look at him, but occupied herself with putting down her own bedding. Swett left the cabin without looking back. The other boy paused at the doorway to glare at Dora. She did not appear to notice. She was sitting cross-legged against the wall, her pale thighs below her shorts gleaming in the darkness. She was opening a can of peaches with a Swiss Army knife. She didn’t change expression when the boy turned and vanished into the twilight outside.

  Renfrew ignored her. He opened his own pack, pulled out some of the fruit he’d picked, and some dried meat. He chewed thoughtfully in complete silence. It was as if there was no one else in the cabin with him. The windows had plywood shutters, closed now to keep out the insects, and the darkness was complete by the time he finished eating. He put away his food by touch.

  “You a hunter?” the girl asked in the dark.

  Renfrew grunted. He moved his pack under his head for a pillow, curled into a half-fetal position and dropped asleep in moments. Sometime in the middle of the night she came to him like a moth to flame. He made love to her with a silent ferocity that made her cry out through teeth gritted in pleasure. Afterward he fell asleep instantly.

  Later in the darkness he awoke with the sense there was someone else in the hut. Fully awake at last, he saw the red-glinting eyes of the kahuna Kalaipahoa. A faint glow clung around his mustache and hair. The figure, seated cross-legged, stared at Renfrew in the dark.

  “I warned you,” Kalaipahoa said in a low voice.

  Renfrew tried to move, but could not. He sat paralyzed for hours.

  In the morning the hut was empty.

  It was noon when he reached the Kalalau Beach, a long, gentle curve of white sand. Rain was intermittent, alternating with harsh sun in the open. The fragrance of beach naupaka was so intense it was almost nauseating. Renfrew jogged doggedly down the beach to the end. There was a volcanic spur into the water. The only way around it was to swim. He sealed his bow case and plunged in. The waves were enormous in the winter season, the currents treacherous; it took Renfrew forty-five minutes to make it around the point to the small beach. He ran, dripping, down the middle of the lava tube in the running water. On the other side he continued without pause to the secret trail of the ancient alii. Two hours later he was inside the Koke’e Park. Whenever he sighted people, he hid. At night he camped again. Next morning he moved through dense mist to the Coast Guard lookout. From there he moved down the west side of the Waimea Canyon, descended Kahelu Ridge into a westward-running ravine toward the desert. He came across a family of feral goats, killed a kid with one arrow, butchered, cooked and ate some of it, leaving the rest to the birds.

  It was late afternoon when he reached the desert. There was little cover, and he had to negotiate the barbed-wire fences of cattle ranches. He’d left the rain behind him in the mountains, and his shoes and legs were white with the dust that puffed up at every step. The heat was intense, and he was forced to wipe off his face every few minutes.

  He waited in scrub at the edge of
the Naval Facility. The Cyclone fence was topped with barbed wire. The tall confusion of radio masts cluttered the horizon in two places. Otherwise there was nothing to see from here. He waited.

  Toward six, a twin-engine Navy plane banked in from the south and landed at the airstrip out of sight. Even the sound of engines died away once it had dipped below the low hills.

  He waited.

  Finally it was dark. He slipped across the Mana Road to the Cyclone fence. Renfrew had decided who his employers were.

  61

  “It’s not the Hawaiian genotype,” Chazz announced. “It’s not Hawaiians at all.”

  “I thought that was what they all had in common.” Patria chewed a fingernail, looked at it thoughtfully, then folded her hands in her lap.

  “That’s what I thought. But consider. Where did we first see the kahuna, and, I think now, Renfrew?”

  “The Russian fort. Oh, no.”

  “That’s the common genotype sequence. It’s so obvious I missed it. Cobb, look. In 1817 quite a few Russians lived on this island. They would have descendants here. All the victims have Hawaiian blood, true. But I would bet they also have Russian ancestors. Female ancestors. Robert Hall, hm? His real name was Luria, a Russian name. Was his mother Russian? And didn’t you say something about Sally Cameron’s mother being Russian? Someone did some genealogical homework. Then, somehow, they got cell samples from the chosen victims…”

  “Kalaipahoa! I did a ritual with him. He took a bit of my skin.” Patria looked at the scraped patch on her arm. “They could have my cells by now.”

  “Paul Ulana works for the Navy? I find that hard to believe,” Takamura put in. “Sammy’s uncle.”

  “I don’t think he would give it to them deliberately,” Patria suggested. “It’s a common practice for a kahuna to take bits of flesh for healing purposes. That man Renfrew could have known about it. I’d bet now he was studying kahuna.”