Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  Welter considered this. He lifted the rifle away from his body, as if about to put it down, pulled it back into position, hesitated, lowered it. Then he straightened. “I don’t believe you.”

  “How many shots have you fired? Do you remember?”

  This question startled him. He looked down at his rifle as if it had betrayed him.

  Cobb pressed him. “You just got it, didn’t you? Perhaps you stole it this afternoon? You aren’t really familiar with that weapon. Perhaps you have no more shots.”

  “No. This was at the house. It’s been there for years,” he said doubtfully. “I didn’t steal it, I brought it from the house.”

  “All right, Grant. I believe you. Now I’m holding a Smith and Wesson Model four-fifty-nine double-action automatic with a fourteen-shot clip. This is one of the most accurate and powerful nine millimeter handguns made. I haven’t fired yet. I still have fourteen shots. That rifle holds a ten-shot magazine. How many do you have left?”

  “Enough.” The sweat glistened on his forehead.

  “Come on, think about it. How many have you used up?” Cobb’s voice was very gentle, almost sorrowful.

  “I got some left. I got one left, anyway. And that’s for you.” The rifle hung slack in his hands despite his words.

  “You’ll be lifting your rifle to shoot at me. Already you have missed a number of times. How many is it, now? Think about it, Grant. Your record is not very good so far.” Cobb shook his head. “If you do start to raise that rifle, I will have to shoot. If you do get off a shot, which is not likely, chances are you’ll miss. And unlike you, I am a highly qualified professional law enforcement officer, recently re-qualified, using this very weapon, with the highest rating; I won’t miss.”

  Welter began backing up again, aware both of the vulnerability of his position in front of the windows and his proximity to Cobb. “You’re… bluffing,” he said. His eyes were downcast. “You won’t shoot inside the plane. Someone could get hurt.”

  Cobb nodded. “Very good. You’re beginning to understand at last. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. Not any of these innocent people, not me, and not you. Just put down the rifle and come with me. We can go talk, somewhere, away from all these people.”

  He heard a series of low curses from the stairs. “It’s all right, Sergeant,” Cobb called. “Mr. Welter is beginning to understand. No need for haste.” He looked at the hijacker, now at the rear of the plane again. But Welter’s eyes were moving around and he did not notice.

  Cobb waited.

  He held his weapon out in front, two-handed. He made no particular attempt to take cover, aside from turning slightly to present a smaller target.

  All the passengers were down as low as they could get in front of their seats. While no heads were showing above the seat backs, the seats themselves offered little protection.

  “It would be like this, Grant,” Cobb went on conversationally. “I fire one shot at your chest. It doesn’t matter where I hit you, really, because the recoil of the pistol raises the barrel slightly, and I fire another shot immediately. Because of the recoil, this one is a head shot. Two shots, fired like this in succession, is called ‘double-tapping.’ You may have seen such a maneuver on television. Police are highly trained in this technique, which is very useful if the adversary is wearing body armor. I am quite sure you are not wearing body armor, Grant, so probably the first shot will be incapacitating, if not fatal. Certainly the second shot will kill if the first does not.”

  Welter said nothing.

  “What is Sandstone?” Cobb asked softly.

  “A company.” Welter almost shouted it, angry and sullen at the same time. “It’s a company, that’s all!”

  Cobb was intrigued, despite the tension. “A company?”

  Welter’s eyes narrowed. “Never mind.”

  “Does Sandstone manufacture toxins, Grant? Is that what you know? Do the people you saw work for Sandstone?”

  Welter shook his head, his thinning hair falling forward into his eyes. He brushed it back with his left hand, still holding the rifle, lowered but ready. The conversation seemed to be soothing him, to be allaying some of his desperation.

  Cobb pushed him. “Who were they, then, if they weren’t from Sandstone?”

  Welter’s mouth tightened. He said nothing.

  Cobb moved to his right. He held his gun out, still leveled at the man with the rifle. “What connection does Sandstone have with the satellite?” he asked. “We don’t even know whose satellite it is, much less what was on it.”

  Welter’s eyes darted around, as if considering some further action, threatening the passenger in front of him, trying to get a shot at Cobb, waiting. Finally he spoke. “I can’t say any more. They’d kill me if they even suspected I know!”

  “I thought you were dead already, Grant.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Of course not. Don’t you find this conversation odd, Grant? First you protest that you brought the gun and didn’t steal it, a minor legal problem in comparison with air piracy and kidnapping. Now you explain that they, whoever they are, will kill you if you tell me what you know, yet you insist that you are dead already, that we are all dead. That the toxin is loose on the island, which I know it is not.”

  Welter’s eyes grew more frantic and trapped. “Shut up!” he shouted. “Just shut up. No more talk. We got to get out of here.”

  “It will take time, Grant.”

  “Make it quick. No more talk.” Welter’s voice had risen an octave.

  “All right, Grant. We’ll try to get permission to take off. I’ll just tell Sergeant Handel outside. Did you hear that, Sergeant? Grant has given us an hour.”

  “Ten minutes,” Welter shouted. “Ten minutes. That’s all!”

  “Sorry,” Cobb said. “Half an hour, Sergeant.”

  “I’ll work on it.” Sergeant Handel moved away from the plane in a crouching run.

  The standoff continued. The Smith and Wesson catalog said this weapon weighed twenty-eight ounces. That didn’t sound like much, but Cobb began to wonder if he could hold this increasingly heavy weapon up for another half hour.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE DARKNESS HAD DEEPENED. Thick clouds hung over most of the island, hiding all the heavens, the moon and stars and the small winking of tumbling satellites.

  Chazz hurried down the drive, the flashlight bobbing a dismal circle of uneven light on the asphalt ahead of him. He had pains in places he didn’t remember having— a branch had dug into him somewhere near the shoulder, a rock on his thigh. He’d twisted his ankle when he fell off the back of the truck, and now limped as he jogged. His steps created a peculiar syncopated rhythm that accompanied the bobbing of the light, step ka-thump, step ka-thump.

  His office light was still on. The computer screen glowed with letters and numbers still:

  ds cDNA -> pUC18 plasmid -> E. cRRl.

  He sat heavily and glared at the screen as if it intended him harm.

  He pulled a small notepad and wrote LML432, his fingertips still humming from their touch of the truck’s license plate.

  He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck, cracking joints as he turned back and forth in the chair. Some of the aches eased a little.

  He should call, find out what was happening at the airport. He should go back to the house and reassure Patria and Kimiko and the kids. He should finish designing the next phase of his experiment. He should get a good night’s sleep, take a fresh look at everything in the morning. He should get everyone he loved off the island before the toxin killed thousands of people and the federal government had a mass disaster on its hands.

  “Too many shoulds,” he said aloud, blinking at the screen. “To hell with it.” He switched to his telecommunications program and logged on to a major medical/pharmaceutical database and began a more or less random search of toxin chemistry. As he did he made notes on the pad.

  A satellite down. A toxin on board. Why?
>
  Japanese men on the island.

  A government team examining the satellite.

  A white panel truck, license LML432. Whose? They spoke American English.

  A man shot in the coconut grove. Any connection? What?

  DNA repair.

  Toxin.

  Toxin. What kind of toxin?

  Chazz glared resentfully at a table on his screen. Elementary information, he thought. Start at the beginning, move slowly, methodically.

  Toxins fall into two main types: exotoxins and endotoxins.

  Exotoxins derive from gram-positive bacteria. They released the toxin protein into the external environment. If that environment was a human being, the body produced antitoxins. An altered toxin, or toxoid, could also elicit antitoxins, providing immunity. Examples included botulism, tetanus, diphtheria, cholera. Long-range effects varied, from paralysis of the nervous system in the case of botulism to electrolyte imbalance and brain-cell death in cholera, to vomiting, nausea, and diarrhea in food poisoning. Scarlet fever produced blood leakage to the skin and resulting rashes.

  Some of the effects seemed to parallel what afflicted the four men in the hospital. But no one toxin seemed to produce all the signs.

  Check for antibodies, Chazz wrote. Then it is exotoxin. Bacterial production. Gram-positive.

  Endotoxins often produced endotoxin shock: brucellosis, plague, bacterial dysentery, etc. Endotoxins do not elicit antitoxins.

  Of course, bacteria were not the only sources for toxins. The list of other sources was long, intricate, and depressing, and included everything from man-made chemicals— strychnine, for example— and natural chemicals like snake or fish venom to fungi.

  “I’d rather they had an allergic reaction to something,” Chazz muttered.

  He wanted to talk to someone, thrash out the vague notions that were forming, try to define and clarify an idea, but there was no one else at the lab. A series of chemical figures formed and dissolved on the screen. For a moment he watched the principal pathways of sugar catabolism in fungi form, one step at a time.

  Then he called the police station again. The line was busy. He set the phone on autodial and moved through the database some more.

  Could his own research into DNA repair help him define the toxin? It seemed as if there was some avenue to follow there, but he was growing too tired to think it through coherently. Every fifteen seconds the telephone redialed the police station in Lihu’e. It stayed busy.

  Ten minutes passed.

  Chazz had worked with fruit flies. Everyone worked with fruit flies. They had large chromosomes, bred fast, and were easy to work with.

  They were not toxic, though. One of his recent papers, “Patterns of Gene Expression and Repair in Drosophilia,” was sitting on an editor’s desk somewhere.

  The poison could be produced by an organism. It could be a chemical. It could be something ordinarily harmless that had mutated. This would explain how it got on the satellite. Suppose someone was doing pharmaceutical research in weightless conditions, and the culture mutated, producing a pathogenic organism?

  Of course, the rumors implied it was deliberate. They also said it was the Russians. Paranoia was a toxin, too.

  The phone beeped as it redialed. Still busy.

  Chazz sat in the midst of what was certainly the most sophisticated biological research center on Kaua’i, and probably in the state. He had at his disposal transmission electron microscopes, scanning electron microscopes, a new experimental tunneling electron microscope, X-ray-crystallography equipment, electrophoreisis, ultracentrifuges, and sophisticated DNA sequencers. He ought to be able to do something about those men in the hospital at least.

  The phone tried again.

  He tore the sheet from the notepad and folded it carefully, putting it in his shirt pocket. He pressed the Cancel button on the telephone, logged off the database, turned out the lights, and left his office.

  The gate opened automatically when he left. The highway was deserted when he got there. He drove slowly at first toward home, but when he came to the turnoff he stopped. It was getting late. They would be worried. At the same time, he had nothing to report except that there was an emergency at the airport. He turned.

  The house was dark. He went in, moving cautiously through the house. Kimiko was awake, seated on the floor of the living room, her back to the wall beside the sliding doors to the back garden. She spoke softly to him after he had closed the front door. “Patria and the kids are asleep,” she said.

  He dropped cross-legged to the floor. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Cobb usually calls, you know. But with no phone, I worried a bit. Especially when you did not come back.”

  He told her that Cobb was involved in a problem at the airport and that he was on his way there to find out what was happening. “Go to sleep,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m sure we’ll both be back soon.”

  “OK,” she said, but she didn’t move. Chazz touched her shoulder in the dark and went back out.

  The highway looked odd. Even in the distance he saw no headlights. He turned east and drove, slowly at first but with increasing speed and recklessness, toward Lihu’e. He was almost to town, just coming down the final dip past the sugar mill before he saw the cars.

  They were parked by the side of the road right up through the light where Rice Street began and the highway turned north. A traffic officer in an orange emergency vest waved a flashlight at him as the van labored up the final grade, signaling him to pull over. He did so, rolling down the window. “What’s going on?”

  He held up his hand against the light as the officer approached. The man leaned in the window, looking at Chazz, who had to look away from the light. “Emergency,” the officer said. “No one’s allowed through. You’ll have to stop here or turn around.”

  “My name’s Koenig. I’m looking for Lieutenant Takamura. His family are staying at my house and they’re worried about him. I understand he’s at the airport. I’d like to get through, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sorry. No one’s allowed through. There’s a full-scale panic on the island. Everything’s tied up. I’m sure when the lieutenant is through out there he’ll be in touch.”

  “Why are all these cars parked here?”

  “Traffic jam. We’ve spent hours clearing it. This place was a mess. They’ll come get them in the morning, I guess. When the emergency is over.”

  “I haven’t heard the sirens since last night.”

  “Look, Mr. Koenig, there’re all kinds of rumors flying around. Supposed to be some poison loose, from that satellite. Reports we got from the hospital are that people are pouring in there claiming they’re dying. Hospital says they aren’t. Meanwhile it seems like forty thousand people are all trying to leave the island at once. Just turn around. Please.”

  Chazz shrugged and put the van into reverse.

  The airport was at least four kilometers away in a straight line. Slowly he turned around and went back down the road. Once over the top of the next rise he pulled over to the side.

  An overgrown dirt road vanished into scrub. He pulled in, parked, and switched off the lights.

  Thick silence matched the darkness. His engine ticked as it cooled. His chest felt tight. Was he breathing in a deadly toxin? Was it already at work in his lungs? He forced himself to take a deep breath.

  Then he started off, across the road, moving through fields and over fences, in the direction of the lights of Lihu’e, and beyond them, the airport.

  His thigh and ankle ached, and his shoulder fired off sporadic jolts of pain. As he ran, the various sore spots smoothed out, blended into one generalized ache. He crossed the Nawiliwili Road and blended into the shadows again. Even here on the suburban side streets cars were abandoned at the side of the road.

  He got lost and found himself stumbling back onto a quiet road he had already crossed once. He nearly fell down a bank into the Nawiliwili Str
eam, crossed it, and climbed back onto Rice Street not far from the Pay ‘N Save. On Kapule Road he saw another police car, stuck in the traffic that clogged both directions. Where did so many cars come from on a small island like this? Two uniformed officers stood beside their car. One was speaking on the radio. Chazz could hear the spattered sound of the radio voice, but could not make out the words.

  He moved through a lumberyard where sprinklers shed artificial rain on stacks of board. Now he could see the lights of the airport across a vast field. He climbed a fence and jogged across the field. The green and white beacon on top of the tower alternated its colors brightly. As he approached a helicopter lifted off and tilted steeply to the west, passing a few dozen feet overhead.

  He was gasping by now, and slowed to a steady walk.

  The terminal was jammed. Red and blue police lights flickered up the access road, as if they could not reach the terminal itself through all the abandoned cars. He noticed as he moved along the edge of the street that most of the cars were rentals.

  Once at the terminal he had to push his way through crowds huddled over luggage. Children lay draped across their parents’ laps, sleeping or fussing. The empty floor spaces and available seating were filled with weary and frightened people who did not look up as he pushed his way past them.

  Two security officers and a heavily armed officer in camouflage stood at the gate. Chazz approached cautiously. “Inspector Taxeira,” he said.

  The big cop turned. “What the hell are you doing out here, Dr. Koenig?”

  “We got worried— Kimiko and the kids are at our place and Cobb was late. I heard he’s been negotiating.”

  Taxeira nodded. He took Chazz’s arm and led him through the gate. On the other side away from the crowd the area at first appeared deserted. After a moment he saw two men in camouflage, holding M16 rifles, concealed in the shadows. Behind the gate they could hear people talking in low, tense voices.

  “He’s on the plane with some nut named Welter. He’s shot up the plane a little; Sergeant Handel got a ding on his cheek from a stray, but no one else’s been hurt. So far.”