Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “What the hell’s going on?” Renfrew demanded. Goode shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Something’s going on in there. You’re holding out on me, aren’t you?” He tugged back on his arrow. The barbs gleamed. “No. Wait. That’s the lab. It’s P5, you can’t go in there.” “They’ve been making something, haven’t they? Something with these bugs. There’s more than just assassination, isn’t there? You’ve got something really big here.”

  “No. It’s not what you think, it’s just not very reliable, really.”

  Renfrew shot him. The arrow penetrated just under Goode’s right clavicle, the razor barbs slicing through the second and third ribs and the soft tissue between them as if they weren’t there. The first audible sound was his scapula shattering. The barbs, still moving at close to 180 feet per second, carried Goode up slightly and backward against the vinyl and plaster wall, and sank into the soft substance before penetrating a fir stud. The arrow continued another four or five centimeters before it stopped, buried to the fletching in Goode’s chest, the steel Wasp head embedded in the stud. Short of pulling the feathers through his scapula from the front, Commander Goode was effectively immobilized, standing on tiptoe. Blood oozed in thick pulsing gouts around the feathers, soaking his white uniform shirt.

  “Christ,” Goode said weakly. His left hand groped at the feathers protruding from his chest. It came away black with his own blood.

  “That’s for lying,” Renfrew said cheerfully. “Like I told you, you’re working for me now. I demand more loyalty than you did.”

  Goode said nothing. His eyes rolled up. He sagged against the arrow. Pain revived him, and he pushed himself up on his toes.

  Renfrew had another arrow nocked. There were three left on his bow quiver. “Looks like I might have nicked an artery,” he said. “That’s too bad for you. Means you’ll bleed to death rather slowly unless I get you down. You should keep your hands up, you see, especially when you’re lying. I would have missed the artery if your hands had been higher. Well, can’t be helped.”

  “Get me… down,” Goode said. He was staring in disbelief at the black shining liquid on his hand.

  “You didn’t tell me about the lab here.”

  “National security,” Goode wheezed. “I couldn’t… It’s… Soviet Union.”

  Renfrew stared at him. “You’re going to off the Soviets? All of them?”

  Goode tried to shake his head. He winced in pain. Waves of agony swept across his face. “No.I mean, not really.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Renfrew said. One of the two suited figures in the P5 lab was gesturing urgently at him. Then the figure saw the intruders and turned away, talking urgently and in utter silence.

  The lights flickered on, and the blood on Goode’s shirt turned a wet, disturbing crimson.

  68

  Ben Silver was angry and frightened.

  The conveyers and robot packaging equipment in the factory section had stopped. The red emergency lights were dim, and the white Styrofoam boxes were sitting on the belt, pushed up against one another. They were finished, packed and ready, bumped up against the door to the airlock, where they would have been sprayed with ethylene oxide and bathed in ultraviolet light. The liquid wastes would have gone down to the acid biowaste liquid sterilizers; the air itself would have gone through its own sequence of sterilization and filtration procedures.

  But nothing was happening, and because the lab was isolated from the rest of the world, out of radio or telephone contact, communication could only take place through the plastic diaphragms set into the walls between P5 and P4. On the other side of the window Silver could see nothing in the blood-dim light.

  Suddenly his positive pressure suit stiffened on him. That meant that pressure in the lab was rising and the suit’s air system was trying to maintain positive pressure. The fans were down and airflow had been disrupted.

  Fear told him that P5 lab integrity could go anytime. This could only mean sabotage, and that meant he needed help. He pushed the large red panic button set into the wall.

  Help was slow in coming.

  Instead, three new people had entered the lab. The tech was huddled against the far side of the autoclave, and Koenig was pressing him to the wall, demanding through his helmet audio system the location of the viroid.

  “Koenig,” Silver shouted, his puffy gloved hands out, “listen to me. This is critical. We’re so close. You don’t understand what you’re doing.”

  Chazz saw his glance through the glass into the dim factory area. He saw the Styrofoam boxes. “Really?” he asked.

  “What are you?” Silver said urgently. “Just another scientist. Ignored, undervalued. Give us this, people say. Give us a cure for cancer, unlimited power, perfect safety. They demand, don’t they, Koenig? And we deliver, we scientists. We work. We work hard. Long tedious hours, days, years! And we deliver, we give them what they want. Or someone else does, and all our work is wasted. Look.” He touched Chazz’ sleeve with his fat air-filled gloved fingers. “You could share the credit. Come on our team. No more fear, no more carping and kowtowing to the Soviet Union. The President will honor you.”

  “The President?”

  “Yes. This project is sanctioned from the top, Koenig. The very top. And the world will be grateful.”

  “Grateful.”

  “Disarmament. Total world disarmament. No more nuclear terror.”

  “We might keep a few of the bugs, though, mightn’t we? Just in case?”

  “I don’t–” The lights flickered and came on. The air pressure changed again, releasing the clumsy puffiness of their suits, revealing the scene on the other side of the glass wall between P4 and P5. Silver gasped when he saw Jim Goode pinned to the wall and the camouflaged maniac with the bow.

  Oddly, Chazz nodded as if he expected it. Renfrew, when the lights came on, moved out of sight, leaving Goode pinned. Chazz watched for a moment as Goode reached up and twisted the feathered end of the arrow in his left hand. Painfully, Goode seemed to be unscrewing the arrow shaft from the head buried in the wall. Chazz asked Silver about the trigger.

  “Trigger?”

  “The DNA inserts. Something has to switch on the gene. A trigger.”

  “It’s a spindle virus mutation. You’ll understand this. You’re one of the few. You, and Jim. The trigger is easy. Cold virus. It’s going in with some State Department people. They’d never know. The cold winters in Moscow. You don’t understand, Koenig. The computer projections… six months puts us into fall. We can announce. There’s no simple antitoxin; only two amino acids differ from standard botulism toxin, but the three-dimensional conformation – its shape– is different. Uninfected people— non-Slavs— they just get colds.”

  “And the test subjects, Dr. Silver. What about them? Cameron and Wyman, that couple by the Slide? No antitoxin for them either?”

  Silver stared at him. “Are you serious? We had to test on humans. Who they were wasn’t for me to decide, Chazz. Intelligence made the decision. Who the subjects were. That was a military decision. The stakes are so high.”

  “Ah!” Renfrew, without a suit, had opened both airlock doors and was moving through the factory room toward the Styrofoam cases. Shinawa saw Chazz look, turned, and opened the airlock door. Takamura shoved a wheeled steel table into the inner door. The pumps had started up again, but were not made to cope with this breach of containment.

  “You can’t do that!” Silver shouted at Renfrew. “This is a P5 facility.”

  “Project’s over, Ben,” Chazz said quietly. “The lab’s closed.” The outer door was open now. Air moved in eddies, not the smooth inward flow it had been before. The door at the end of the hall burst open, and six men ran through, finally responding to the alarm Silver had set off. The whoop-whoop of klaxons came from the P4 area now that the isolation had been broken.

  “Halt!” One of the men waved his .45 at them. Koenig, Shinawa and Takamura drew back behind the airlock door as a bullet wh
ined off the steel. Chazz waved, and they moved back through the first airlock door. The group charged through as Chazz pushed the steel table, which shot out into the lab and collided with Silver. He fell backward to the floor, hit his helmet hard on the vinyl. It starred with cracks. At close quarters the fight was a melee without form. Guns were useless. None of the intruders were wearing their suits, which allowed them far more maneuverability. Yet Shinawa moved with small fluid grace despite his bulky garments, twisting aside as the men charged, turning slightly away when a blow was directed at his helmet. No-neck, his arm in a cast, and the other man whirled, their charge taking them past the three in the airlock. By then Chazz and Takamura were out the second airlock door. Shinawa hurried through, and they swung the door closed. It clicked home, temporarily locking the group, along with Silver and the technician inside. Chazz threw his helmet aside.

  “Renfrew,” he shouted, pointing. They climbed out of their suits and moved down a corridor parallel to the factory. Air was rushing past them now, and a rotating emergency flasher threw red shadows down the hallway. They entered a now useless second airlock into the factory and ran past the stainless steel fermentation vats toward the conveyer. Renfrew looked up, saw them coming, whirled, drew, and loosed an arrow so swiftly that Chazz had no time to react.

  The shaft buried itself in the door. Renfrew settled, drew, and aimed carefully the second time. Chazz and Takamura moved behind the stainless steel vats.

  Shinawa, however, stood still in hanmi, the triangular aikido stance, knees flexed, weight forward, hands relaxed. Chazz couldn’t see the arrow move, but Shinawa’s hand twitched and the arrow clattered to the floor, deflected. Renfrew had strung another by now. Chazz moved behind the vats toward Renfrew. The archer heard and, undecided, started to swing his bow toward Chazz.

  “Stop,” a stern voice called from behind Renfrew who, startled, loosed his arrow before it was fully drawn. It skittered across the smooth floor harmlessly, lost in the dimness under the fermentation tanks. He detached his last arrow, loaded as he swung around.

  Silence fell like a guillotine blade.

  Kalaipahoa stood in the doorway beside the loading bay, which led outside. He held a wooden staff taller than he topped with a spray of colored feathers. He held the staff toward Renfrew and spoke in an eerie chant: “Make emoole. naha ke kua, eu ka ilo, Popopo a helelei, kau make, e Kane.”

  Renfrew crouched, cowering back. “You,” he hissed. “You should be dead. No! No curse, old man. I did you! Damn you!”

  He drew back the string. The silencers fluttered in the wind of the string’s snap, but they did their job: the only sound was the slap of the arrow when it hit the old kahuna’s larynx.

  Ulana toppled back through the open doorway into the night. Renfrew threw his bow aside. He slashed open one of the Styrofoam packages, seized the small glass vial inside and started toward the door. A figure loomed up over Kalaipahoa’s body, holding a gun. Patria. Renfrew, unarmed now except for his knife, turned back. He ran to the side, away from Chazz and the others, toward a side door leading to the P4 section of the lab, where the corridor ran along the length of the Cetus project labs. Commander Goode was in one of those rooms.

  Silver was crawling along the floor, blinded by the shattered faceplate of his helmet. The technician was collapsed against the wall under the observation window.

  Chazz ran at an angle to cut off Renfrew’s escape. Renfrew saw he wouldn’t make it, so he threw the vial, which shattered on the floor in front of Silver. Renfrew drew his bayonet. Chazz slowed and circled. The knife point followed him. Renfrew slashed at him, and Chazz jumped back. The knife followed, nicking the front of Chazz’s black jacket.

  “You must be ready to die,” said a voice, and Chazz never knew whether Shinawa actually said it then or he only remembered the words. Fear vanished, though. He stopped backing up and waited. Renfrew crouched, stepped forward and slashed again. This time, instead of jumping back, Chazz took one small step back; the knife grazed his shirt, and Renfrew, angered by this second failure, reversed the knife and slashed again.

  Instead of stepping back, though, Chazz stepped forward, inside the arc of Renfrew’s slash. He pivoted with it. Renfrew’s knife arm continued, this time harmlessly in front of Chazz, who gently blocked with his inside forearm while guiding the hand holding the knife around and up, spinning his own body down on top of Renfrew’s shoulder as he did. Renfrew staggered off balance, tried to correct, lost control. Chazz now had the blade pointing straight up, and was driving his own shoulder down. They spiraled together to the floor. Chazz leaned forward as he twisted Renfrew’s hand and wrist, and the knife fell.

  The glass from P5 shattered, and a heavy stainless steel table came through, the same one they had used earlier to wedge the airlock open. John and No-neck started through. Chazz scurried back as a pistol fired. Ricochets clattered and pinged through the vats. Somewhere a steam pipe burst.

  Renfrew leaped up and dashed toward the corridor again. Chazz saw he had another Styrofoam container, but couldn’t move directly. He crawled back along the line of vats, eyes on Renfrew’s feet.

  There was a strange whirring sound. Even Renfrew’s steps seemed to hesitate a moment at the sound. No-neck screamed. He was clutching at a metal object embedded in his chest, a shuriken, a small disk-shaped star with razor barbs on it.

  Shinawa was just spinning the second one toward John. “Stops but doesn’t kill,” Shinawa had told them earlier.

  “They are small, but they do hurt.”

  Renfrew’s hesitation was over. He threw open the door to the corridor and dashed in. Chazz had jumped to his feet and was ten meters behind him.

  He went through the door in time to see Commander Goode – a bunch of feathers protruding from his chest, the now tipless shaft of Renfrew’s arrow emerging from his back, soaked with blood – apply a pressurized inoculation gun to Renfrew’s shoulder.

  There was a brief hissing sound and Goode slumped to the floor, dropping the gun. He was bathed in his own blood, ebbing weakly. Renfrew staggered back against the opposite wall, staring at his shoulder.

  There was nothing to see. But Renfrew’s face said he knew.

  “He’s killed me,” Renfrew said wonderingly. Sweat popped out on his forehead, streaking his camouflage paint.

  Chazz, kneeling by Goode, looked up. “The viroids will be replicating, a generation every few minutes. Growth is exponential. That’s the stuff you’ve been hitting people with. The couple by the Slide, Sally Cameron, Collins. The toxin is deadly.”

  “Shut up,” Renfrew said dully. “I did my job.” He looked at Chazz then and smiled. “I buried the money. I cursed it, too. I knew this would happen. I knew.”

  His eyes rolled back in his head. His breathing became labored. He seemed to have trouble swallowing. The perspiration had broken out all over his body, now soaking his clothing. The paint ran in streaks down his cheeks.

  His back arched. “I can’t see.” He was trying to shout, but his voice was strangled. He slumped to the floor. “I can’t see,” he repeated weakly. His breathing rasped a few times. Then he smiled.

  Goode’s eyes were closed, but he asked in a quiet, surprisingly calm voice, “Did he die?”

  “Yes,” Chazz said.

  Goode nodded. His hand was still clutched around the empty vial with Renfrew’s name on it.

  “Come on,” Takamura said behind Chazz. “It’s over.”

  “What did the old man say?”

  “The kahuna curse? Something about ‘Let his be a speedy death.’”

  “Looks like it worked.” Chazz stood up. “You dumped the stuff?”

  “We got it all. Except that one.” He pointed at the shattered vial. Silver was gone. Shinawa and Patria were using a hose on the small pool of fluid. The stain on the floor washed toward a drain, dissolving, gone. The fragments of the vial swept away before the jet of water also vanished. The acid baths below would kill anything left alive.

  �
��If Silver did his job properly, it should be harmless. There are no Russians around here, anyway. Let’s go.”

  “Right. The truck is outside.” Takamura grinned. “We do still have to escape, but as the great detective says, ‘Justice can be brought to dead men.’ Perhaps we can call on Dr. Silver later on.”

  Chazz nodded. “Okay. By the way, didn’t the great detective also say, ‘Good idea not to accept gold medal until race is done’?”

  69

  Sammy Akeakamai smiled weakly. “Hi, boss,” he said.

  “Kukui Nut. You decided to stay with us.”

  “Yes, boss. High-poi diet. I dreamed of ancestors and ka’ai. My bones in the woven casket.”

  “Kalaipahoa made it for you. He’s using it now.”

  “I’m sad, boss. He was a great kahuna, my uncle.”

  “Yes, he was, Sammy. A great kahuna. We suspected him, but he was a good man.” Sammy closed his eyes. “He made me ka’ai, boss. That was good. Respect.”

  Takamura smiled. “You’re a philosopher, Kukui Nut.”

  “Sure, boss,” he said without opening his eyes.

  The nurse touched Takamura’s arm, and he went out.

  Chazz raised his eyebrows, questioning. “He’ll be all right,” Takamura said.

  Dr. Shih was sitting in the gardens with Patria, discussing Han Dynasty burial practices. Chazz waited for a pause before he asked, “What about Ben?”

  Dr. Shih tilted her head. “No.” Her voice was dry and brittle. “I’m sorry. I’m told the bullet went at an angle through the palatine bone, the sphenoid process and exited the left parietal. There was considerable damage to the brain tissue. Frankly, it’s a wonder his body is still alive. It won’t be for long. A .45 does considerable damage when fired through the roof of the mouth. Why did he do it?”

  “He’d put a lot into the project,” Chazz said. “His reputation, his life’s work, were at stake. More than that, he had Slavic blood. I never knew that. His grandparents were from Russia. He’d crawled through the vector. He’d been infected, undoubtedly. I think he knew he might die of it anyway, especially if the vector was still unstable.”