Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “What is that?”

  “The satellite was real. It must still be up there.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Cobb said.

  “Then let us all hope the real one does not come down. Fujiwara found an aerosol near the crash. It contained the poison that put Mr. Propter and the others into the hospital. Where did that aerosol come from?”

  Cobb nodded. “I believe Victor Linz brought it to the island. He delivered the attenuated toxin to the team from SIG, to make their little game more realistic.”

  “Just so.” He bowed again and left the room.

  Lianne Billings was holding Corinne to her. She looked very young. “Of course, Peter Linz did coerce you into coming to Welter’s house.” Cobb said. “You could press charges.”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s over. Let’s forget it.”

  “ ‘It is always darkest underneath the lamp’.” Cobb said. “I regret, too, about Elliot Propter. I believe he meant a great deal to you.”

  “He was very kind to me when my husband was killed. We were… friends, for a time. I care about him, of course.”

  Cobb nodded. The sorrow on his face was only partly concealed. If Lianne noticed she ignored it. She turned to Scott Handel and held out her hand. “Thanks for rescuing us. That’s really what I came here to say.”

  Sergeant Handel nearly blushed. “Oh, it was, uh, nothing.”

  She smiled. “Really? Well, thanks anyway.”

  The squad room was now truly empty, but for the four of them. Cobb lifted his eyebrows as he put on his hat. “Coming?”

  There were no stars. Even the street lights looked dim, as if the entire island were now under water at depth, and light could not penetrate far. “Where are we going?” Patria asked.

  “To interview the murderer?” Chazz suggested.

  “In due course,” Takamura said, pausing to breathe deeply of the damp air. “In due course we will have to talk to him. For now, I think, we should meet Mrs. Takamura for some dinner.”

  Handel, who had been humming softly, stopped. “Wait a minute! He did it,” he said. “Propter. He shot Victor Linz.”

  Cobb smiled. “Ah, so? And what about the gun?”

  Handel snapped his fingers. “Robert Short. We haven’t tracked it down yet, but I’ll bet the purchase Robert Short made was a rifle. Propter is a journalist. He probably has some false identification tucked away. In the name of Robert Short, for example. I bet he threw the ID away after he bought the gun, but he forgot to get rid of the receipt. I’ll check out the gun stores and the county records. But I’ll bet I’m right.”

  Cobb nodded his approval. “You have the makings of a fine detective, Sergeant. But now, dinner.”

  They drove to the hotel. Kimiko was already there, reading the menu. It was the first time Chazz noticed she wore reading glasses. She smiled brightly as they sat down.

  “Well,” she said to her husband. “Did you figure out who did it?”

  “Of course, Mrs. Takamura.” Cobb picked up the menu, although by now he must have known it by heart. He was immediately engrossed in difficult decisions.

  “It was Elliot Propter, was it not?” Kimiko Takamura suggested as she resumed her own perusal of the menu.

  “It does seem likely, Mrs. Takamura. Of course, it would be nice if we had a murder weapon. But we do not, not yet. I believe, though, that I know where to find it. I believe that if we drive up the road to where Propter’s car was found and search the bushes, we will uncover it. He stopped there for a reason, and I do believe it was to get rid of the weapon before coming on Wakefield and the others. We may also find some identification for a Mr. Robert Short, although that is certainly more doubtful.”

  “But why?” Patria asked. “I know Propter’s sister was crippled by one of Linz’s drugs, but why after all this time did he shoot him? Why not earlier, when he was still upset?” Patria held her palm against her belly as she spoke, as if she were holding a baby for Sharleen Propter.

  “I suspect we will find this was a case of what they are calling ‘psychological stress.’ Propter was following Linz, of course, because he was on assignment to do an in-depth profile of a man he hated. An assignment he had asked for. I did call R and L Publications, after all. He’d been after Linz for years, trying to expose him. He followed Linz, and when he saw him hand over the toxin to Wakefield, and realized he was involved in defense research on chemical or biological weapons, he bought a Ruger twenty-two rifle and waited for Linz to go jogging. Linz being involved in such activities was too much, on top of what happened to his sister.”

  Chazz and Patria looked at one another. Handel said, “I’ll be damned. Then this murder is cleared.”

  “Yes, perhaps,” Cobb said. “Once we find the weapon. But first, a little mahi-mahi, yes? After all, ‘Patience always brightest plan in these matters’.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Chazz Koenig asked his friend Cobb Takamura. Everyone was smiling.

  “Beats me,” Cobb Takamura answered.

  Hot Washup

  TWELVE MEN WERE SEATED around the plain table. Their hands, holding wooden pencils, rested on the otherwise empty surface beside yellow legal pads. In the corner of the room the videotape machine hummed quietly as the tape turned.

  The camera, mounted in the corner near the ceiling, took them all in, even the broad-shouldered, hard man at the other end of the table, seated before the white board with a file folder open before him on the table.

  “We now begin the hot washup of the Candide simulation,” Colonel Wakefield said. “We feel that in general this simulation concluded successfully. There were some minor problems in the execution of the containment and disinformation phases, and a number of events that played in our favor and skewed the results were coincidental. We could not count on such events in a real crisis situation, and have eliminated their effects from the final report summary, relegating them to an appendix.

  “Among these events we include the death of Victor Linz, who had delivered the attenuated toxin to us only the day before, and the accidental elimination of the journalist Elliot Propter. Propter has been a problem to us for some time, so while his hospitalization was the result of accident, it worked in our favor. We determined that his discovery of our presence on the island was coincidental.

  “Corporal Battavia, who released the attenuated toxin via aerosol, is exonerated of blame in Propter’s poisoning. Using the aerosol was, in itself, considered a high-risk move, but proved unexpectedly effective. No animals turned up with toxic effects, but Propter and others who touched his vehicle were hospitalized. Since Propter has been charged in the Linz murder, and the weapon he used was recovered, events have neatly unraveled in our favor.

  “We have recommended closing out the Sandstone contract effective immediately, and taking full control of three-four-seven from Fort Detrick.

  “We have further recommended new procedures for the management of biological and chemical warfare projects with civilian subcontractors. The public relations problems are growing more complex and difficult to control. We were fortunate in this case, but our good fortune was the result of careful planning and efficient execution of those plans. Manipulation of the civilian civil defense organization, the State Health Department, and others was managed especially well. Ed can take credit for coming up with the Russian accent tip,” the man nodded at one of the air force officers halfway down the table. “That was a nice idea, Ed.”

  “Thank you,” the officer murmured.

  “Disinformation concerning the origins of the satellite worked particularly well. Its true origin was not uncovered until after the team had left the island, and then only because it was not deemed cost-effective to remove the RPV debris from the crash site. Likewise, control of civilian panic, especially after the alert was sounded by the civil defense agency, worked well. If this had been a real crisis, and had a real satellite come down under the circumstances of this simulation, the crisis team’s deployment and ac
tions would have been over 92 percent effective in controlling information flow and removing the research cannisters with Candide from the wreckage.

  “The full report of this Hot Washup will be read into the tape for filing. I want to thank you all for an excellent job. America can be proud of the work you have done. This concludes the Hot Washup.”

  The End

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  Other Books by Rob Swigart

  The Thriller in Paradise Series:

  VECTOR

  TOXIN

  VENOM

  As Well As:

  THE DELPHI AGENDA

  Archaeology Novels:

  STONE MIRROR

  XIBALBA GATE

  Satire:

  LITTLE AMERICA

  A.K.A./A COSMIC FABLE

  THE TIME TRIP

  Science Fiction:

  THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS

  PORTAL

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  About the Author

  ROB SWIGART is the author of one nonfiction book, four electronic fiction titles, and 11 novels, including Little America, declared as “Wildly funny…” by the LA Times, and hailed as a “Bold and brassy … breathless romp with prose that crackles like a live wire, bites like a rabid dog, [and] smoothes like 30-year-old Scotch,” by the San Francisco Review of Books. His classic and highly revered interactive novel Portal has attained near cult status as the first ever narrative “game” produced by Activision, published two years later as a hard copy novel by St. Martin’s Press, and heralded as “spooky, audacious, breakthrough science fiction” by Timothy Leary.

  Now a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Archeology Center, Swigart’s most recent books include The Delphi Agenda, as well as two teaching novels, Xibalba Gate, a novel of the Ancient Maya, published by AltaMira, and Stone Mirror, a novel of the Neolithic, by Left Coast Press. These works weave near-future science fiction with famous and obscure archeological events, melding true fact and fiction as a conscious product of Swigart’s lifelong passion for using narrative to tell stories of the past as found in material records. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about the Neolithic.

  Praise for Rob Swigart’s Venom:

  “Lush with the aura of Pacific islands, this exciting account of the hunt for a mysterious killer delves into exotic toxins, ancient religions and deep-sea diving with such energy that readers will view the languid tropics with new eyes… descriptions of man-made, floral and marine venoms, as well as of island lore and magic, are fascinating.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An offbeat blend of voodoo and science…”

  —Kirkus

  VENOM

  A Thriller in Paradise

  By Rob Swigart

  booksBnimble Publishing

  New Orleans, La.

  Venom

  Copyright 1991 by Rob Swigart

  All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  ISBN: 9781625171504

  www.booksbnimble.com

  First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: August 2013

  Cover by Roy Migabon

  PART ONE

  THE GRAVE

  There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: the grave, and the barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire that saith not, It is enough. —Proverbs xxx, 15.

  Tutti venini sono freddi: “All poisons are cold.” —Brunetto Latini

  ONE

  KIMIKO

  Kimiko Takamura saw the man as soon as she had climbed halfway over the safety rail. She stopped, one slim leg hooked over the top, and said, “Excuse me, are you in trouble?” It was a reasonable question. The ship had floated into the cove as if out of nowhere, and despite its size, she hadn’t seen it until it had grounded only a few yards from where she had been enjoying her solitude under a hau tree. There should have been sound, the low thump of an engine, the splash of water against the bows. Instead there had been an eerie silence.

  Her question, though reasonable, did not elicit an answer.

  She brought her other leg over and sat on the rail. When he failed to move, she tilted her head and squinted at his outline against the late afternoon sun.

  He was seated at the helm, but there was something odd about his posture. When she saw the ropes, she realized he was tied to the wheel, as if his ship had encountered a storm and he was afraid he might be thrown overboard.

  She didn’t expect an answer when she asked again, “Are you all right?” She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the damp material of her bikini and the suddenly puckered flesh of her own sides. She leaned forward in that position and peered at him intently.

  He did not move, and she knew he was dead. When she went over and touched his neck to feel for a pulse that no longer existed, it was an empty ritual, part of the form.

  He looked about thirty, a burly red-haired man with what must once have been an open, friendly, conventionally handsome face. Now he was simply a carcass slumped on a plastic seat, open eyes no longer looking through the windshield at the lush coastline of Kauai. Or anything else.

  The ship stopped moving after a slight lurch, and Kimiko reached out to steady herself against the seat back. The body shifted against her hand, and she jerked it away as if shocked.

  The ship’s bow rested gently on the sand shelf of the beach where moments earlier she had enjoyed the late-afternoon warmth and calm, free of children and responsibilities for an hour or two. This silent bulk was out of place.

  She was a good eighty or ninety feet, Kimiko guessed, and still trailed the rope ladder Kimiko had climbed. Ocean Mother, Vancouver, was printed on the life rings lashed to the cabin walls and across the stern. Rust streaked the letters below the anchor port, the scuppers of her upper deck. The glass in the portholes along her sides was scratched, almost opaque, and Kimiko had been unable to see anything within.

  For some reason, the body had not surprised her. The ship was so obviously a derelict adrift in the gentle Hawaiian seas, so clearly a plaything of the current and trade winds that she half expected to find something unpleasantly wrong.

  A fly buzzed near one of the man’s open eyes, which was blue and very bloodshot. It seemed as if there should be some sign on his face, some reaction to death— an expression of horror or surprise or fear— but she knew that in most cases death relaxed the facial muscles. There was no clue to the cause of this death. It was as if someone had cut away everything that had been human or even alive. The face was as empty as the sea.

  She stood beside him and considered what to do next. He didn’t smell, not yet. It was a good half-hour climb back up to her car, and another twenty minutes to get to a telephone, so it would be nearly an hour before she could get hold of her husband at the County Police. Meanwhile the rising tide would lift and, as it ebbed, carry the ship back out
to sea. She thought it would be better if she looked things over before reporting, despite the sudden chill this dead man seemed to impart to the air. There was no one else around, for this was an inaccessible beach at the end of nearly impassable, abandoned cane roads. The beach was used exclusively by natives and then almost always to hunt for sea urchins and whelks in the tide pools along the inside of the small cape.

  She hesitated for a moment here on the bridge, wondering whether she should do something to stabilize the ship’s position, secure it. But the bow was gently grounded; Ocean Mother was not going anywhere for a while. In an hour or so, when the tide changed, the ship would lift off the sand and she could try starting the engines and backing away, or could lower the anchor. Meanwhile there was nothing pressing to do: the dead man would not be coming back to life. She went down the stairs into the main cabin.

  It was empty as the pilot’s face. A bench upholstered in faded tan corduroy lined the starboard wall. Two elaborate salt-water aquariums were built in opposite it, and a large rack of instruments and radio equipment blocked the center, creating two narrow aisles on either side. This appeared to be some kind of research vessel.

  The fish tanks were illuminated, the filter systems pumping soft streams of tiny bubbles through the water. Small kelps and other seaweed drifted back and forth in one tank, in the other several elaborately colorful, spiral-shelled cone snails and a sea cucumber shared the water with a small puffer fish that stared out at Kimiko with its round quizzical mouth pursed in disapproval.