Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “All right. You’ve started it, I suppose you’d better finish. We don’t have anyone else who knows how to negotiate with creeps like this anyway. This just isn’t the kind of place we get a lot of this sort of thing.”

  Cobb turned to go.

  “Takamura,” the inspector said.

  Cobb stopped. “Yes?”

  “No Charlie Chan quote for the occasion?”

  Cobb smiled briefly and waved. He went back to the stairs and climbed slowly. Handel nodded to Cobb as he started up. Halfway to the door Cobb called out that he was coming.

  “Is the plane leaving?”

  “Call me Cobb, Grant.”

  “Cobb. I saw them, you know.” Welter’s voice was harsh, high-pitched, strident.

  “Who did you see, Grant?”

  Welter’s figure appeared in the dim light inside the doorway. Now that the plane was in shadow, the contrast between inside and outside was reduced. He was without question carrying a rifle. It was pointed at Cobb.

  “You bastard!” His voice was suddenly low, almost a growl. His eyes were bleak and hopeless. “Come in here, you bastard.”

  Cobb reached back for his gun, but despite its small caliber the rifle aimed his way could still put him in the drawer next to Victor Linz in the basement of the hospital. His hand hovered near his pocket a moment, then made a gesture of resignation. “Sure, Grant, whatever you say.”

  He entered the plane. A quick glance down the aisle showed passengers in every seat, staring wide-eyed at him. He saw children, mothers, men in casual clothes, an elderly couple in the front row in first class holding hands. Grant swung the barrel around, covering the passengers, then back at Cobb. The cockpit door was closed. When Cobb’s eyes turned that way, Grant shouted at the door: “I’m still here, so don’t get any ideas.”

  He gave a satisfied grunt. “Now,” he said. He pushed the barrel into Cobb’s throat. Again Cobb’s hand drifted back toward his weapon and stopped. “You lied.”

  Cobb moved his head back, away from the press of the bore. He said nothing.

  “You lied,” Welter repeated. His hair fell in lank streaks across his high forehead. The thin wrists, darkly haired, were bony and struck Cobb as curiously vulnerable. His eyes were wide and staring.

  “I don’t understand. How did I lie?” Cobb kept his voice low and level and calm.

  Grant leaned forward. His gun moved with him, pressing once more into the hollow of Cobb’s throat. Again Cobb moved, and Welter, noting the gesture, moved the gun back a few inches. “I saw them,” he whispered. “I saw them. I know.”

  “You saw them?” Cobb reached up slowly and removed his dark glasses. He let them drop on their cord and looked into Welter’s eyes. It was like looking into pits of heat without flame. They wavered like a mirage.

  “The suits, I saw them.” Grant’s whisper was urgent now. “The white suits, the helmets, like they were on the moon. They were carrying the thing, deadly. I heard them talking. They were only a few feet away. I saw them.” He leaned back, pointing the gun toward the passengers again in response to some movement only he could see. Suddenly he began to back down the aisle toward the rear of the plane, waving the gun around wildly. “I saw them,” he screamed. “I saw them. They were carrying it. I know what it is, Lieutenant. It’s Sandstone!”

  Cobb looked outside, chewing on his lip. Darkness was gathering quickly over the airport, shadows pooled deeply where the bright lights of the terminal could not reach. “What’s Sandstone, Grant? What are you talking about?”

  “It was dark. Early morning. I told you. I couldn’t sleep. And I saw them, loading the truck. Sometimes I take a walk, there’s nothing wrong with that! So I took a walk. Ueda could go run, I could take a walk. Then the satellite came down, and I knew. It was Sandstone, that’s why they were here.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Grant.”

  “That’s funny, Mr. Policeman. Very funny. I’m laughing, do you see. Ha ha. See, that’s for making sense. You can’t fool me, Mr. Policeman. We’re all dead. We’re all dead of the plague, and now those men are here to spread it around. It’s all over. And I can see you’ve got a gun. You lied.”

  He backed against the lavatories at the rear of the plane and raised the gun.

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAZZ FROWNED AT THE useless telephone on the floor. “His name is Elliot Propter, a journalist. Writes mainly about environmental and general muckraking issues,” he said.

  Kimiko was by the sliding door to the backyard watching Kenji and Kiki fold origami animals as the darkness grew. “Who’s that, Chazz?” she asked, not looking around.

  “I wish we had telephone service. I don’t like being cut off like this. It ain’t natural. The sick guy, Propter. Can you fancy that? It means ‘because’ in Latin. Funny name.”

  “Could it be a pen name?” she asked. She slid the door open a bit and told the kids to come in now.

  Chazz pushed the hair of his beard first to one side, then to the other, a gesture he seldom made. Had Patria seen it she would have known it was prompted by worry. “I talked to Dr. Shih this afternoon. There’s no significant change in his condition. What happened to him, and what was he doing here?”

  Patria poked her head out from the kitchen then. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Phone still not connected?”

  Chazz shook his head.

  “They promised it would be turned on today.” She frowned.

  “Oh,” Chazz waved his hands in a broad dramatic gesture. “We have a plague loose on the island. People are dropping like flies. Wheelbarrows pushed through the street to pick up the corpses. Whitewashed crosses on the houses of the doomed. The stench of pestilence, that sort of thing. I guess the phone company didn’t have time to connect our service, a small thing in the midst of this dreadful emergency.”

  “Now, Chazz,” she chided. “Don’t be sarcastic. People still don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Why not? We know what’s going on, don’t we? Four people are in the hospital, comatose from the effects of some substance, a gas or a poison of some sort. Nobody else is sick, and there have been no new cases, at least as of five-thirty this afternoon. Yet there is a full scale panic developing. Why is that? People are perverse.”

  Kiki and Kenji trooped in, carrying armfuls of paper animals. They poured them at Patria’s feet. “For the baby,” Kiki said with a smile.

  “Thank you.” Patria squatted down awkwardly and toyed through the heap, admiring one after another. “We’ll save them for her.”

  “You know the baby is a girl?” Kimiko asked, smiling.

  Patria grinned. “Of course not. It’s just a feeling this child is something like Kiki.”

  They settled around the kitchen table since there was neither dining nor living room furniture as yet. “Should we wait for Cobb?” Chazz wanted to know.

  Kimiko shook her head, her black hair swinging. “He’s sometimes quite late. We can start, I’m sure.”

  They ate in silence for some time. The darkness outside grew absolute. Only at odd times a gecko chirped in the rafters of the house somewhere, and soon that sound too ceased. The lights, still unshaded, cast harsh shadows. Even the children ate in silence.

  Kimiko began to look up at every sound. Finally Patria spoke. “You’re worried.”

  Kimiko smiled. “No, no. Not worried. It’s all right.”

  “Then I’m worried,” Patria said firmly. “Chazz could drive down to a phone. There’s a gas station on the Koloa Road.”

  “No, please. Not on my account.”

  Patria nodded at Chazz, who pushed back his empty plate. “I think I’ll go down there and make a few phone calls anyway. Apparently people have flooded the switchboards at the hospital complaining of poison symptoms all day. Do you have the radio?”

  “In the bedroom,” Patria said.

  “Turn it on, just in case they decide to make something besides vaguely reassuring announcements about how there’s no
thing to worry about and please don’t panic, causing half the people on this island to panic.”

  She nodded. Chazz pecked her cheek and touched her hair briefly. She knew then how worried he really was, despite his light tone.

  The night was very dark. Clouds covered the sky, offering only a faint silver glow where the full moon rose. The trees loomed around the house, and behind it to the north the mountains rose steeply into those clouds. It was easy to imagine panic on such a night.

  Chazz paused beside the van to look at his house. Through the kitchen window he could see the heads of his family and his friend, bowed over dessert, harshly lit. Beyond them the ceiling of the room was a confusion of reflected light and shadow. The walls were bare. The entry showed a bar of light falling into it from the living room beyond; it too was shrouded in gloom, as if filled with cobwebs that trapped the light.

  The dusty road wound through the forest for half a mile before reaching the next house. He realized how isolated this place was. What had been its prime attraction was now its most serious defect. Without a telephone they were cut off, and Kimiko had given the walkie-talkie to Cobb that morning, so they had no two-way radio to fall back on in an emergency.

  He knew the dust rose behind him as he drove, another form of mystery as it shrouded the already dark road and woods. Too many things were cloudy and dark.

  At the highway he stopped, considering his choices. There was a gas station on the Koloa Road, and it was closer. On the other hand, it would take only a few minutes more for him to get to the laboratories at DRC. There he would have a comfortable place to make calls. Furthermore there was a culture cooking he wanted to take a look at, and a database he could check for toxin chemistry. He turned right.

  Traffic was light. Most people were already at the airport, or clambering on board the occasional cruise ship if they could get passage. Charter flights had been booked all day, but now, as the airports closed down for the night, they had stopped. Some pilots had decided to remain in Honolulu for the duration of whatever peculiar emergency Kaua’i was undergoing, and had removed themselves from the list of available charters. What traffic there was even at this hour seemed to be headed west, in his direction. The road was nearly empty going the other way.

  He turned on the radio and caught a news broadcast. National news media were treating the medical emergency on Kaua’i as filler. After an initial flare-up of stories about a Soviet satellite crashing on a Hawaiian island, interest dwindled. The satellite was not radioactive, after all. It was difficult to take the emergency seriously from the mainland. No one was dead. The murder was not news anywhere but Hawaii, and it, too, had vanished from the airwaves.

  The road down to the DRC was empty. A quarter mile in he passed the gate. The guard waved him through, and he wound down through the trees. At one point he passed the entrance to a little-used service road, and thought perhaps he could take a look down there, since that was where Handel had encountered the white van. Then he shook his head and continued. He was supposed to be making calls, finding out what had happened to Cobb.

  He went to his office and called the police station.

  “There’s a hijacking at the airport,” the desk sergeant told him. “I think I heard Lieutenant Takamura was out there.”

  “He must be in the thick of it if he’s still there,” Chazz said. “He went out quite awhile ago. I’ll check back in a little while.”

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. Panic might well drive someone to attempt a hijacking, although it seemed a foolish and doomed thing to do. This certainly meant Cobb would be in trouble, though. A good thing he was carrying his gun, if he got caught up in events like that.

  For a moment he considered going home to tell Kimiko what he’d learned. But there seemed no point. He’d do better to stay here and find out more. Meanwhile he could check on his cultures.

  He was checking some skin peptides from the local frogs. He turned on his computer and looked over his notes:

  double-stranded complementary DNA (ds cDNA) -> pUC18 plasmid -> E.c RR1; clones screened w/ oligo-nucleotide d(GANGGPTANCCPAA). 2d lib λgt11.

  So far so good. The expression of the sequence should produce the DNA repair enzyme of interest. He worked on the sequence for a time. When he looked up over an hour had passed.

  Something nagged at him, though, and he paused with the phone halfway off the hook. Finally he redialed the police. The emergency continued at the airport. Cobb Takamura was definitely on the airplane with the hijacker. The plane was surrounded by police and they were trying to bring in a trained negotiator from Honolulu, but so far they had had no luck. Check back later.

  Chazz stretched. He stood up and looked around his office. He could check the pharmaceutical databases for toxin information, but he was tired of staring at the screen. There was still nothing much to report to Kimiko that wouldn’t just alarm her more.

  He went for a walk.

  The grounds were quiet. Few people worked this late on normal days, and these were not normal days. A light or two was on where a researcher was finishing up something, but by and large the Douglass Research Center was closed. He crossed the parking lot and started up the road.

  There was still no moon; darkness clotted thickly around him. The road itself, a faint gray glow in the darkness, vanished around a turn in the arboretum. He walked along, wondering what it was that was nagging at him. Something about the cloning he’d been doing.

  A few hundred yards up the drive he passed the service road again. Curiosity turned him. It was thickly overgrown, almost invisible, yet some of the plants were visibly crushed even in the dark. Of course, the mysterious white van had emerged from this road.

  Now that he thought about it, he could not remember seeing this road on the map of the Center. Abandoned and forgotten, yet someone had used it just last night.

  He wished for a flashlight. Darkness forced him to move slowly. Still he nearly missed it.

  It was well back in the trees and covered with brush. Only the more disturbed aspect of the plants growing between ruts in the road, and the recent rain, cautioned him. Some stray highlight caught at the glass— perhaps a moonbeam escaping through the cloud cover or a reflection from a distant streetlight he could not see. Certainly he was down to the threshold of his almost-middle-aged eyesight.

  He nearly decided to go back for a light. The faint silver trace of bumper trim, the unnatural hint of a straight line in the chaos of vegetation was what gave it away, but it was so faint, so indecipherable that if he hadn’t been subconsciously expecting a vehicle he would never have known it was there.

  He reached out and touched the metal. Running his fingers along the top of the bumper he came to the headlight, concealed by carefully arranged leaves. He had to move by feel. At the edge he moved his fingers along the side of the truck. Now that he was looking closely he could tell it was light but not what color it was. He squeezed between a tree and the front fender, almost forced to press his face against the glass of the window. As his hand moved along the hood, he felt a coiled antenna on the side.

  He listened carefully, letting his breath flow easily and silently in and out. There was no sound. The vehicle was dark. Slowly he groped for the door handle.

  The door was locked. The window was closed. The vent window was locked as well. He shrugged in the darkness and kept sliding, one foot crossing in front of the other, back along the paneled side. Branches scraped against his legs, his shoes scuffed in loose dirt and mud.

  Halfway back he paused. This was foolish. He worked here. His palm moved along the smooth side of the truck. He ran it lightly down in soft circular motions. Eventually he felt it, the deep groove of a recent accident. This was where Handel’s car had scraped the side of the truck. Probably whoever was driving had taken advantage of Handel’s condition to turn around and hide it again and had walked out. DRC was not fenced, nor particularly well guarded. There was no need for tight security. The gate had always been sufficie
nt to keep tourists and strangers out and monitor visitors.

  Here were strangers, though. They had gotten in, probably through an abandoned access road no one knew about. They were hiding in the wilderness in this part of the extensive acreage. They had encountered Handel late at night when they did not expect anyone, and now they were concealing their presence.

  Why were they here? He ran his fingers along the groove, feeling the broken paint, the faint scrape of new rust already forming in the humid air.

  This was a panel truck with no side windows in the back. There could well be someone inside, possibly asleep. If he tried the door he might wake them. He moved on.

  When he reached the rear of the truck and turned the corner he felt glass, windows on the back doors. They were pitch black.

  Slowly he lowered himself until he was squatting beside the rear bumper. He stared into the darkness without success. He could not see the license plate at all. Then he laughed silently.

  He reached out with his fingertips and painstakingly traced out the license numbers, the first vertical, the right angle at the bottom, the space. He had no paper or pencil, no matches or light, so he said it over and over to himself: LML432.

  He felt his way upright again, palms pressed softly against the back door. He was halfway up from his crouch when a high-pitched whine, accompanied by a metallic scraping sound startled him into straightening abruptly. He banged his elbow against the door panel and swore briefly.

  Upright he looked around, but could see nothing. The sound came from the roof of the truck. After a few seconds it stopped.

  He stepped onto the rear bumper, feeling the springs yield as he put his weight on it. He groped with his hand over the roof. He felt nothing but flat, cool metal in all directions. Clearly he could not reach far enough.

  He stepped down again, releasing his weight, and the truck rose slightly. He continued around it, moving through new silence, but something had moved on the roof. Again he felt the pull of branches at his legs, the suck of mud and dirt under his running shoes. At times like this he wished he were smaller and lighter.