Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Right. Then we could have lunch.”

  Kano was not at the office. The secretary, buffing her nails, told them laconically that he was “out at the site.”

  He was staring into the empty swimming pool in the middle of the only completed complex. “Look at that,” he said.

  The pool was not entirely empty. It had offered someone shelter. There was evidence not just of a takeout meal enjoyed and discarded, but of active lovemaking after.

  “It’s disgusting. What can you do? They sneak in here after dark. Only have people in one unit, and they weren’t around last night. It would be different if the units were finished, sold and occupied. Besides, then the pool would have water in it.”

  “At least they practiced safe sex,” Sergeant Handel observed.

  Cobb spent a moment examining the inside of his porkpie hat before replacing it on his head. “It must be difficult, organizing a development of this size.”

  Kano sighed. “You’re telling me. Especially now.”

  “What has happened now?”

  “Angela—Vic’s… fiancée—is also his heir. She had already studied the will. He had a living trust and she gets it all. It put her in charge of Kapuna Shores, and she wants out. You can see,” he gestured around. “We’re well underway. We can’t stop, but if she pulls out we’ll have to seek investors elsewhere. It is going to take time, especially now that Makeda seems to be getting cold feet.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t understand it, personally. It’s a wonderful investment.”

  “Well, there is the archaeological site,” Cobb observed.

  “Not important. Islands are full of them. They’re all the same.”

  “Yes,” Takamura said drily. “What do you think the connection is between Victor Linz and the satellite?”

  Kano was surprised. “What gives you the idea there’s a connection?”

  Cobb was once again examining the inside of his hat. “Oh,” he said, replacing it on his head. “It’s an impression I got from Mr. Ueda.”

  “Well, I wish to hell I knew what the connection is. But you’re right about one thing. Ueda sure seems to believe there’s some connection.”

  “Yes,” Cobb said. “Well, thank you for your help.”

  “What help? Now I’ll have to find someone willing to clean that stuff up.” He was staring once more into the pool.

  They stopped for lunch. Handel wanted fried chicken again, but Cobb insisted they eat Japanese at a little place in Hanamaulu.

  * * *

  Sergeant Hirogawa had set up a small television and an eight-mm deck in Cobb’s office. He slipped the tape into the machine. Before he pressed the play button, he looked at Cobb.

  “Don’t worry,” Takamura assured him. “Elliot Propter’s in the hospital. The tape will be returned to him. I took his reference to this tape as permission to view it. This isn’t evidence, it’s investigation.”

  “Of dubious legality,” Hirogawa said, pressing the button. He left the room with a grunt, closing the door softly behind him.

  The screen displayed a set of color bars and a high pitched whine filled the room. Handel turned down the volume. After a minute or so, during which the two men sat stolidly, staring at an immobile pattern on the screen and listening to the insistent whine of the test tone, the screen went blank and a message appeared:

  DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE WARNING:

  THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL IS

  SIG CLASSIFIED.

  SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE GROUP

  DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS ONLY.

  CANDIDE CLEARANCE REQUIRED.

  The message faded, replaced by another.

  TAPE ONE: BRIEFING AND FIRST SESSION. AUGUST 23.

  The date faded and was replaced by a man’s head and shoulders, seated in front of a wall map depicting satellite orbital tracks, day and night regions and time zones. The man began to read. As he did so, his name appeared over the image at the bottom of the screen: COL. JORDAN WAKEFIELD. He was apparently in his early forties, eyes and arms and hands all hard as stone, and a mustache that was so closely trimmed it might not have been there. His eyes were blue, and stared straight into the camera as if he had memorized the text he was speaking.

  “Five hundred forty miles above the blue brown planet,” he said, “the zero is nearly absolute, attended by emptiness and utter silence.

  “The object, a squat silver and gold cylinder with broad wings spread to a sun now hidden, moves swiftly in the hard vacuum. Here in the earth’s shadow only the small, distant stars throw light on its metal skin. From time to time the wings twist to catch some stray light, or a small antenna rotates in silence, seeking a new target below.”

  He continued, in this poetic fashion, to describe a process by which two satellites apparently came close enough to one another to disturb their orbits. One of the orbits decayed, the other changed. Both satellites stopped sending telemetry. He described a process of notification that led from the Air Defense Command in Colorado, through Huntsville, Alabama, and Fort Detrick, Maryland, to a place in Utah and the code name Badger.

  He described what people said, what their surroundings were like. There was the word: Sandstone. And the other: Candide.

  Wakefìeld finished and vanished from the screen. The next sequence showed an amateur touch, with uneven lighting, an awkward angle for the camera, and poor sound. It depicted a bland meeting room, steel-and-plastic tables and chairs, blank walls, a whiteboard at the opposite end. The color scheme was chrome and muted green. There were no windows. The camera, mounted high in a corner near the ceiling, looked down along the length of the table. The wide-angle lens included everyone in the room.

  There were twelve men seated around the table, and one man standing at the far end, beside the whiteboard. The reproduction of the tape was seriously degraded, as if it had been hurriedly dubbed on old equipment, and it was nearly impossible to make out anyone’s features, but Cobb thought the man at the far end might well be Colonel Jordan Wakefield. He was drawing a diagram on the board, but resolution was too poor to make out what it was.

  The sound, too, was inadequate. Unlike the opening sequence, which was of relatively high quality, the sound now was muddy, with high tones clipped out.

  The man at the board was speaking. “…come down near, or on, the island. Probable release of Candide agent because of accelerated reproduction and mutation in microgravity environment, provided the object is, in fact, three-four-seven.”

  The audience took notes on yellow legal pads. They were all turned with their backs to the camera, but five of them were in uniform. The other seven were in suits or shirtsleeves. One of the military officers asked, “If it’s the other side?”

  “Uncertain,” the man Cobb increasingly thought of as Wakefield said. “Soviet prognoz. Possibly an agent as well. Intelligence estimates suggest our researches are closely parallel.”

  One of the men apparently made a joke on the word “intelligence.” Though his words were indistinguishable, everyone laughed.

  “Yes,” Wakefield said. “But it’s the best we have. Main problems are these: identification, evaluation, and control; damage containment; public relations; misdirection, manipulation of civilian emergency procedure.”

  “What if it falls in a populated area?” someone asked.

  “Unlikely. Only the coastal perimeter of the island is populated, and a small area on top, near the Alakai Swamp. The rest is dense forest and very rugged mountain. Odds are strongly against a crash in a populated area.”

  They took more notes.

  A discussion, much of which was muffled, ensued. It seemed to center on a number of factors, including methods for getting communications and surveillance equipment onto the island, search strategies, and ways to launch emergency evacuation procedures while covering classified information.

  “What are the pk estimates?” a civilian in glasses and shirtsleeves asked.

  “Probability of killing for Candide runs a
round point eight-two.”

  “Field trials?” a man in air force blue asked.

  An army officer answered. “That’s laboratory tests and double-blind animal studies.”

  The image vanished, replaced by ten seconds of blank screen. The words HOT WASHUP appeared for a moment. Then nothing.

  Handel reached forward and pressed the fast-forward button. Blank screen continued, barred by lines of static.

  “Looks like that’s all, Lieutenant.”

  Cobb grunted, slowly turning the brim of his hat around and around in his hands.

  “ ‘Detective business made up of insignificant trifles. One after other of our clues go burst in our countenance.’ We have heard some familiar words now, haven’t we?”

  Handel nodded. “Sandstone. Candide. Candide sounds like some kind of poison, doesn’t it? Sort of like we had here.”

  “Sort of, I’d say. And then there was Fort Detrick. This was a military satellite that spread its nasty little toxin around my island. Frankly, Sergeant, it makes me angry. And I am now certain that Victor Linz is connected with Sandstone. Does it not strike you that Peter Linz, son of the victim, is from Utah, location of something called Sandstone?” He smacked his hat back on his head, leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his neck. “Let’s run it again, please.”

  The opening sequence, with Wakefield reading a prepared script, lasted twelve minutes. The meeting took slightly longer. The last few sentences of the opening lingered in Cobb’s mind:

  Badger stared out the window at the Utah desert, stretching brown and desolate to the mountains in the west.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Fort Detrick said.

  “What’s the best guess on splashdown?”

  “What makes you think it’ll be a splash?”

  Badger laughed softly. “They always are,” he said. “They always are.”

  “How the hell did Propter get hold of this tape?” Handel asked. “And who is Badger?”

  “Yes.” Cobb moved to the window and opened his Levolor blinds so he could look out at the mountains. “How indeed? Mr. Propter is a journalist. Journalists have their sources. It looks to me as if someone copied a tape in a hurry for Mr. Propter and was interrupted or frightened partway through making the copy. He must have smuggled what he had out to him. What, though, is SIG?”

  “Special Intelligence Group.”

  “Yes. But what makes it special, I wonder? There were one or two other matters I uncovered in Propter’s room I want to follow up on; his sister, for example. I have a feeling Sharleen Propter is important to this case. And I’d like you to run down a name: Robert Short. He purchased something last Saturday for two hundred thirty-five dollars and ninety-seven cents. Perhaps he purchased it on this island. I don’t know where and I don’t know what, but it’s worth trying to find out. And now, if you’ll excuse me, please, I have some phone calls to make.”

  CHAPTER 27

  “IT SCARES YOU, DOESN’T it? ‘You were entirely naked, without even a malo about your loins…’ ” Patria stopped and leered at Chazz. “I like that part,” she said. “You’re sexy indeed without your malo…”

  He leered back at her. “Go on,” he said, leaning forward to put his hands on her knees.

  She continued reading from David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities, “ ‘Your tongue was hanging out, your eyes staring wildly at me.’ There, you see. I love your tongue, especially the way it hangs out like that. Not to mention those eyes…”

  “Mmm,” he said, licking the inside of her lower lip and rolling his eyes.

  “Mmm, yourself. Now sit back down over there and let me finish. This is not really about sex, you know. It is about necromancy, kilokilo uhane. The kahuna here is scaring his victim in order to extort wealth from him. He is describing not a lust-crazed husband and sometime sober scientist, but the ghost of his victim, foretelling his imminent death. ‘You rushed at me and clubbed me with a stick until I was senseless. I was lucky to escape from you with my life’.”

  He sat back in his swivel chair. “Wait a minute. I thought he was supposed to be scaring the victim, here, not whining that the victim was attacking him.”

  She rolled her own eyes. “So literal! See, later he says, ‘Now is the proper time, if you see fit, to make peace with me, whilst your soul still tarries at the resting place of Puu-ku-akahi. Don’t delay until your soul arrives at the brink of Ku-a-ke-ahu. There is no pardon there. Thence it will plunge into Ka-paaheo, the place of endless misery’.”

  “OK, OK,” he laughed. “Endless misery it is. Now let me tell you about the current scientific state of such matters. Mycotoxin.”

  “Mycotoxin?”

  “Yes. Fungus. My guess is secondary metabolites. I think you were right yesterday, about Candide. I don’t think it does refer to the book, except by allusion. I think it refers to Candida, a yeast. I think what we’ve seen is the result of some very, very sophisticated biology. Not accident, not mutation, not some wandering agent that caused Elliot Propter and the others such grief, but something very deliberate and nasty.”

  He turned back to his computer. “This is a simulation program. I can run through a number of experimental protocols, try them out, see which ones look the most promising. I narrow down considerably what would have been a random search— trial and error. It could have taken months, or years, to figure this out the old way. Now, I do this.”

  He spoke as he moved the mouse of his computer around, pointing and clicking on objects or menu items, dragging graphics of chemical groups and joining them to others.

  He moved backward from the signs Propter had exhibited: vomiting, diarrhea, skin lesions, dizziness, gastrointestinal bleeding. His search through the toxicology database revealed a litany of pharmacologic effects, from cardiotoxic, dermotoxic, emetic, hemolytic, hepatotoxic, nephrotoxic, neurotoxic, tremorgenic to teratogenic, mutagenic and carcinogenic substances.

  “Slow down,” Patria said. “I recognize a lot of the words, but put them in context, please.”

  He nodded. “The effects on the victims were: one, dermotoxic, as in the skin lesions; two, emetic, consistent with vomiting, diaarhea, and gastrointestinal bleeding; three, neurotoxic, consistent with dizziness and convulsions and coma. I ran a search using these as keywords. They all pointed to mycotoxin, specifically something called T-2.”

  “And that is Candida?”

  “No. Candida is a very common organism. Candida albicans, cause of a common oral or vaginal infection. T-2 was the agent suspected in southeast Asia back in the late seventies and early eighties. The fungal toxins are called ‘trichothecenes,’ from a fungus that sometimes infects cereal grains. The effects on mammals are very unpleasant, as I’m sure Mr. Propter can attest. The U.S. government raised a big stink, blaming the Soviet Union for its use in Asia.”

  “What happened?”

  “It turned out to be bee droppings, not T-2.”

  “Bee droppings?”

  “Right. They contained a lot of the local pollen.”

  “OK. But if this is T-2, why Candide?”

  “You don’t think those involved in research into chemical and biological warfare agents are so crude as to use T-2, do you? Watch.”

  The screen displayed graphic representations of chemical groups, text information, search tree paths. The four-color DNA spiral, labeled “Candida clone,” appeared, twisted, coiled on itself. “This in itself is an extremely sophisticated clone,” Chazz said. “Very difficult.” The clone produced complementary DNA. Sites of entrons were labeled with small up-arrows. These were spliced out. Next to this the T-2 DNA appeared, manufactured messenger RNA molecules, which in turn used reverse transcriptase to make complementary DNA, which then combined with the cloning vector, the Candida. It looked to Patria like someone winding film through a film editor at high speed, snipping and splicing, rearranging, and rewinding again.

  “Good enough?” Chazz asked when the new DNA coiled, complete, on the screen. “The genes
that produce tyrosine have moved into the Candida genetic material. A common yeast now produces a primary metabolite. The metabolite, the material produced by the ordinary life processes of the fungus, produce in turn the secondary metabolites, the toxin.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “No. I suspect it. But there were strong signs of DNA repair in the tissue samples Dr. Shih gave me. So we run these experiments, in simulation.” Again he started a graphic sequence which unreeled on the screen.

  “You see? Nothing to it.”

  “Very funny. Still, it’s just a simulation, not real life. Just like kilokilo uhane. Are they, whoever ‘they’ are, using this to extort wealth from their victims?”

  “No, you’re right. It’s not real life. But I did run the assay, and it is a complex toxin, and I have the chemist over in the next building figuring out its structure. It looks like it may not only have a good portion of the T-2 structure, but an aflatoxin subregion. And that could make it very carcinogenic as well. This could be an extremely nasty substance. You can’t tell from molecular structure alone what its effects will be, but we already know those.”

  “Why is it here?”

  He shrugged. “Accident? The satellite came down, and according to the news reports that was a mistake. It has something on it, for one reason or another. Something nasty. Research? Or perhaps they were planning to let it drop on an opponent or something, though if that were the plan we’d most likely all be dead by now.”

  She smiled at him, putting the book aside. “But we’re not, are we?”

  He smiled back. “No. I have to admit, we’re not.”

  “We’re very much alive, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “And we’re going to stay that way. Aren’t we?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Because we are going to have a child.”

  “Yes. A son.”

  “A daughter, Chazz Koenig. A daughter.”