Deadout

by Jon McGoran

  He called back less than a minute later. “Can’t believe it,” he said. “Leave it to Stoma Corporation to take advantage of a catastrophe and turn it into a PR coup.”

  I wasn’t so sure it was a coincidence, but I kept that to myself.

  “The island’s going nuts,” he said. “The farmers are in a panic, half of them desperate to get on Stoma’s waiting list and the others trying to figure out any other way to take care of their crops. A couple days ago people were just worried about the early crops, but now they’re freaking out about everything. And no mainland beekeeper in his right mind is going to bring his bees here now.”

  “No?”

  “Are you kidding? Something just wiped out the island’s entire honeybee population. A few weeks ago, we were keeping the mainland bees off the island so we didn’t bring in the colony collapse disorder or whatever it is. Now whatever is happening here is a hundred times worse than anything out there. They don’t want whatever happened to our bees happening to their bees.”

  We were both quiet for a moment.

  “Have you talked to Nola?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. She’s freaked out. She’s trying to run Teddy’s farm for him while he’s locked up. I mean, she knows what she’s doing, she’s a good farmer, but it’s not her farm, and now she has to maintain the whole thing by herself, the chickens and everything, and she has less help than he did.”

  I called Nola as soon as I got off the phone with Moose, but she didn’t answer. As I put away my phone, I saw helicopters coming in from the south, headed toward the island. There was no swooping or banking; they were headed in a straight line, rising just enough to maintain their altitude as they crossed over the land. They stayed low and immediately disappeared over the trees. The phone rang in my hand. Nola, calling me back.

  “Sorry I missed you,” she said breathlessly. “I was trying to get a few things done before dark.”

  As she spoke I could hear the sound of the helicopters growing on the phone.

  “Helicopters?” I asked.

  “That’s the third time today,” she said.

  “I just saw them.”

  “They’re headed to Katama. Stoma is setting up another staging area for Bee-Plus. Protesters are there already. Are you back on the island?”

  “I’m on the ferry. Are you okay?”

  “Things are getting weird here.”

  “Weird how?”

  “The island feels like an armed camp. People are uneasy, and wherever you turn, there’s some Darkstar goon with an ear piece and a strange bulge under his jacket. Stoma is pulling out the stops, security wise.”

  ”Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just creepy.”

  “You should get out of there.”

  “Doyle, I can’t just get out of here. I made a commitment and I need to take care of this place.”

  “You didn’t make a commitment to do all of it yourself. Teddy should have made arrangements if he was going to go off and do something stupid. He should have planned for contingencies.”

  She sighed. “Well, he didn’t. And it’s not the chickens’ fault, so they shouldn’t suffer.”

  “Then I could come over,” I said.

  She sighed again, but this time with maybe a hint of a laugh in there. “Not yet, all right? I’m okay.”

  At least I made her laugh.

  50

  Jimmy answered on the first ring. “Hey, Doyle. Kind of in the middle of something.”

  The background noise sounded like the thing he was in the middle of was an all-out riot. “What’s going on there?”

  He laughed. “I got reassigned to the Eastern Front. Stoma’s bringing in more of those bees, and they’re setting up a staging area near Katama airport. Lots of knuckleheads from both sides.”

  “Any sign of Benjy?”

  I heard the muffled sound of the phone coming away from his ear, his voice yelling, “Hey, get down from there!” Then he came back. “No, but he’s probably okay.”

  I wasn’t so sure. “I need to trade notes with you on some stuff. Can we touch base after your shift?”

  He snorted. “Sure, whenever that is.”

  * * *

  It was dark when I got off the ferry. Walking back to my rented Jeep, I immediately noticed the vibe, just like the lobby at the Wesley Hotel. It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only instead of being transformed into aliens, half the population had been transformed into hard-faced, muscle-bound private soldiers. It was like a Darkstar corporate retreat.

  It felt like prison yards I’d walked through, dead-eye stares blowing around like dandelion fluff in the air, like a piece of it could just land on you and all of a sudden you’d be in the middle of trouble. Not what you’d expect on the gentle streets of Vineyard Haven. A couple of the men looked at me as I opened my car door, and I looked back at them blankly. Just another asshole, just like them.

  I texted Annalisa, told her I’d be there in a few minutes. She was waiting when I got there, watching through the tiny window in her front door. She came outside and locked the door behind her as soon as I pulled up.

  I kept the engine running, because it seemed like we might be going somewhere. She got in the passenger side and fastened her safety belt.

  “Can you drive me to the lab?” she asked. “And can you break into it with me?”

  “What are you talking about? Why would you need to break into your own lab?”

  “Not my lab. Sumner’s.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The fudged data on those data sheets is not just for external consumption. That’s the data Sumner has been sending to Stoma. Whatever he’s hiding from the world, he’s hiding from Stoma, too. Without the original data, we’re never going to know why, or why they seem to think it’s worth killing someone over. But Sumner is a scientist, and that data is extremely valuable, so I know he won’t have destroyed it. I’m pretty sure I know where it is on his secure server, but it’s going to take a little while to get at it, too long to try to sneak it during the workday.”

  “We should go to the police,” I said, feeling very mature and responsible saying it.

  “Well, that crossed my mind, too. But we have two things here. One is the faked lab sheets, and yes, if we can prove Sumner has submitted them in some official way, then, yes, he could get into trouble. But it would take years and the result would probably be a small fine, if anything. And by then any damage will have been long since done.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “The other thing is whatever happened to Claudia Osterman and Lynne Nathan,” she said quietly. “But that’s just a suspicion on our part, a suspicion of two murders with no bodies, that might have taken place on international waters, that have already been accepted as workplace accidents. Which they may have been.”

  I looked at her for a moment. This was the kind of reality check I was more used to giving than receiving.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m already into this,” she said, like it was taking a great effort to keep her voice steady. “If we stop now, without knowing what’s going on, I’ll spend the rest of my life worrying I’m going to end up like Lynne or Claudia.”

  “Okay,” I said, “where are we going?”

  * * *

  As it turned out, we had a stop to make first.

  “The gym,” she said. “In Vineyard Haven.”

  “The gym?” I said. “Do you usually have to warm up before committing a felony?”

  She gave me a look that was the opposite of laughter. “I have to pick something up.”

  She directed me to the Mansion House, a venerable grand dame of a hotel, right in the middle of Vineyard Haven.

  “This is the gym?”

  She nodded. “Gym/spa/hotel. Keep the engine running,” she said as she got out of the car. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I was double-parked in the middle of one of the busiest intersections on the island, preparing
to commit one crime while acting as an accessory to another. It wasn’t much more than the minute she promised, but sitting there so conspicuously, it felt excruciatingly long. As she got back in the car and I pulled into a knot of slow, congenial “Oh, no, I insist, after you” traffic, I crossed “getaway driver” off the mental list of occupations I might try if the whole police thing didn’t work out.

  “What was that all about?” I asked, compulsively checking my rearview as if we had just pulled off a bank job.

  She held up a white plastic swipe card with a red Stoma logo on it. It looked almost identical to the one I’d seen around her neck. Except this one said Julie Padulla. Sumner’s assistant.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “She’ll be swimming for another half hour, then forty minutes in the sauna and the whirlpool. The place is open till nine, and she closes it every Tuesday and Thursday. We just need to be sure I have this back in her locker before she’s done.”

  “This is a side I didn’t know you had.”

  She shrugged and looked out the window. “I didn’t know it either.”

  51

  Sumner’s lab was on the back end of Johnny Blue’s Farm, directly across the road from Annalisa’s lab. A half-dozen protesters remained, but they looked tired and fed up. A few of them looked like they’d been drinking, their eyes heavy with beer and belligerence.

  On the other side of the fence was a car that looked like a police car but wasn’t. It looked more like mall security than Darkstar.

  It seemed as though both sides had sent their “A” teams to Katama.

  A couple of the protesters looked up at us wearily, but when we turned toward the gate across the street, they looked away.

  I drove up the driveway and pulled in behind the lab unit, then killed the engine. The words “Leave Our Island” were spray-painted in red across the side, and the door was bent where it had been pried open.

  “That’s the vandalism?” I said.

  She nodded and rolled her eyes. I wasn’t buying it either.

  “Okay, so how do you want to play this?” I asked.

  “There didn’t used to be guards,” Annalisa replied with a tight, jittery shake of her head. “I’m allowed access to unit one. The server is in unit two. But once I’m inside the gate, I can use Julie’s card to access unit two, where the server is. They’re not going to let you in, though. Not with everything that’s going on.”

  “Are there surveillance cameras?”

  She nodded again. “Yes, but just at the front gate. To keep an eye on the protesters.”

  “Do they cover the entrance to this place?”

  “They might.”

  I studied her face for a moment: nervous but resolute. “How are you going to get through the crowd?”

  She shrugged, pretending she wasn’t scared at the prospect. “I’ll get through.”

  I stared at her for a moment, but she just shrugged again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Give me ten minutes to make my way around to the side. Then approach the gate. I’m thinking there should be enough commotion to cover the noise of me climbing the fence.”

  “Then what?”

  “Go open your lab, but wait by the door. Keep an eye on the other unit. When I give the signal, you hightail it over there and we’ll slip inside.”

  “Okay,” her mouth said, the rest of her face silently signaling that it was not okay at all.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said, my hand on her shoulder, but I was concerned about her getting through the small group of protesters.

  Annalisa looked up at me, her eyes sparkling in the moonlight and a brave smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She was an extremely beautiful woman, and I was struck by her strength, her bravery, her humor. And her proximity. She reached up and kissed my cheek, then whispered, “We’d better go.”

  I gave her shoulder a squeeze, and then jogged off toward the tree line. When I turned back she was standing in the moonlight, looking very alone. I gave her a wave, and she waved back. Then I plunged into the darkness.

  The underbrush was thick, and the going was slow and loud, like sound effects from an old radio show. The smell of skunk was in the air, and I hoped the noise would scare them away before I got too close.

  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I found my footing, the going got easier and quieter. I made a wide loop through the woods, crossing the road fifty yards up and doubling back on the other side until I came to a chain-link fence. I smiled. I’d done a lot of chain-link fence-climbing back in Dunston, and I had hoped I was done for a while. The smile faded as I thought about what had been behind those fences.

  I paused and listened to the slight breeze, the ambient sound of insect life, and a quiet conversation not too far away.

  On the other side of the fence, I could see the two lab units. One was just in front of me, back from the road and half obscured by shadows. The other was thirty yards past it. Twenty yards beyond that was the front gate.

  The security cruiser was parked between the two units, the rear of it just visible. Two guards were leaning against the trunk, their backs to the gate. They looked as tired as the protesters.

  I was starting to wonder what I would do if Annalisa got through the gate with no commotion. Then I heard her, voice raised. “Get your hands off me!”

  The two guards were startled to attention, and they quickly hurried toward the gate, accompanied by a chorus of raised voices, mostly protesting their innocence. I took my cue, scrambling up and over the fence, dropping to the other side, and scurrying over behind the closest lab unit.

  Clinging to the wall in the darkness, I could hear and feel a faint hum, like machinery running inside. I expected the outer wall to be cold in the night air, and metallic, but instead it was still warm from the day and it felt like wood. I caught a faint but distinct odor as well, homey but only vaguely familiar. A moment later, I saw the two guards accompanying Annalisa to the other trailer. They seemed apologetic, presumably for the reception she had gotten from the protesters. Annalisa was fumbling for her keys as she walked, squinting furtively into the darkness in my direction. I resisted the urge to wave to her.

  They walked right up to the door with her, and they waited for her to open it. I felt on the ground and picked up a couple of small stones. The smaller one was the size of a quarter. I flipped it high into the air and cringed, waiting for the impact, but all I heard was a soft thud. One of the security types turned around to look.

  His partner asked him something, and he shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, turning slowly back around to watch Annalisa.

  The next stone was bigger, maybe the size of a lemon. The difference in weight was substantial as I hefted it. As Annalisa opened the door, I flipped the rock up into the air.

  This time it landed with a loud crack followed by the sound of it bouncing across the hood of the security car.

  “What the fuck?” the first guard said as they both grabbed their sidearms and trotted back toward the gate.

  I stepped into the moonlight, dropping the third rock onto the ground and waving frantically for Annalisa to run over as the chorus of voices rose up once again, this time even louder.

  Annalisa was all business, hardly fumbling at all and barely looking at me as she swiped the card through the slot. She pulled me into the lab unit and pressed the door closed behind us with a soft click.

  52

  We stood with our backs against the door for a moment in what seemed like total darkness. Then I noticed a soft red glow coming from lights running along the base of the walls.

  The smell was even stronger inside, but I still couldn’t place it. Annalisa felt her way to a chair and a moment later a computer screen came to life, filling the room with harsh light.

  She swiped the stolen card through a reader and navigated through a couple of different screens then started tapping at the keyboard, bringing columns of numbers sliding up the screen. Every few seconds she would stop, star
e intently at the screen, and resume typing. A few times she lingered, tapping differently, and it wasn’t until I noticed the paper sliding out onto the tray at my elbow that I realized she was printing. “There’s no USB ports or disk drives,” she said, reading my mind. “Security.”

  As she went about her business, I studied the lab, bathed now in the bluish light of the computer screen.

  It was long, and narrower than I expected from the outside. There were no windows, just Formica countertops along each side and a couple of computer workstations with stools. The Formica curved up the wall six inches, like a backsplash. Every three or four feet, a pair of four-inch holes was cut into the wall. Above that, the wall was blank except for some shallow grooves, like horizontal paneling. Halfway down the counter was a rack of small glass test tubes. The Bee-Plus cartoon logo was sprinkled liberally around, on folders, binders, plastic bottles.

  “What’s the smell?” I asked.

  She reached over to the wall, where there were two rows of switches marked INNER PARTITIONS and OUTER PARTITIONS. She flicked the switch at the end under INNER PARTITIONS and the paneled sections of the wall began to slide up into the ceiling, revealing metal mesh, like a heavy-duty window screen. The smell grew instantly stronger, a yeasty mixture of beeswax and honey. I recognized it from the hives we had opened my first day on the island. Squinting into the darkness, I could make out the faint movement of bees crawling on vertical wooden slats.

  “Bees,” Annalisa said, glancing over at me. “It’s late. They’re mostly asleep.”

  “What is this place?”

  “This is Sumner’s mobile clinical lab, so he can study the bees. The hives open up on the outside so the bees can go out and find nectar. They always come back at night. That’s one of the things about honeybees.” I turned to the nearest test-tube rack. There were four tubes, the first three marked HONEY, NECTAR, and APITOXIN. The fourth one was marked APS9678. In the dim light, the liquid inside looked a pale amber.

  “What’s this stuff?” I asked, holding it up and swirling it around.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Put it down.” She took it from my hand, but then looked at the rack and back at the tube in her hand. I could tell she was curious. Cocking an eyebrow, she lifted off the plastic stopper. She put her nose close to the mouth of the test tube, but she didn’t need to—the smell seemed to fill the room, sweet but not like honey. More like bananas. The odor was accompanied almost immediately by a wall of noise, like a roiling, angry army of chainsaws.