by Joan Francis
“Let me get this straight, you want to fingerprint me and run some sort of check on me before I can go to work. How long will that take, and what am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“About three days, and frankly I don’t give a fuck what you do as long as you stay away from our company records until I’ve cleared you.”
“And then what else? Will you find some other way to–”
There was a soft knock at the door.
“Who the hell is it?”
The door opened and James Nolan stuck his head in and gave us a smile.
“Hi. Understand there’s a slight misunderstanding down here.”
“Nolan, you try to interfere in security and I will have your nuts.”
James came in and put his hands up submissively. “Oh, hell no, Mr. Woods. I wouldn’t think of it. I just realized that Mrs. Gomez here may not have worked for a company with security clearance needs like ours, and she might think you’re picking on her. Now, Dolores, I know this seems a little severe, but we have a lot of military contracts here, and I’m afraid it is necessary. Now just go on and cooperate with Mr. Woods, and then we can get on with business.”
I hesitated wondering if James had any idea what he was doing. By the time those prints came back, I intended to be out of here. But what would happen to the guy who brought me in?
“Go on, it’s got to be done.”
I walked over to Woods and surrendered my hands, allowing him to roll each fingertip through the damned ink, then roll them onto the print cards. When he finished, I stood there waiting for him to supply me with something to clean my hands. Noticing the omission, James pulled out his handkerchief and offered it to me.
“Here, you can wipe the worst off with this, then we can walk back over to the commissary. You can clean up, and we can have lunch.”
We walked silently out of the building, then James left the elevated pathway and guided me down a lovely garden path lined with brilliantly colored flowers.
Once clear of the building, I asked in what I hoped was a jocular tone, “James, what if he discovers I’m really something terrible like a serial killer or something? What will that do to your position, since you brought me in?”
He stopped on the path just in front of me, picked a flower, and as he handed it to me said, “Or something like a private investigator? Game time’s over, Diana.”
At the sound of my real name, my heart started pounding faster. I looked from the flower to his eyes and saw that the Kahuna was gone and the warrior was back.
“He’ll deliver that card to the embassy in San Jose within three hours and get a report back twenty-eight hours after that. Now we are going to take a pleasant little walk around the grounds and have a little talk, and we don’t have time to waste. I’ll start, then I need to have some very straight answers from you.”
He spoke quietly as we continued walking up the path. “In one week, scientists from this company are going to release the first of two information bombs that will cause more economic, political, and diplomatic havoc than a full-scale war. Some of us in the company would like to believe we are doing the right thing and that the disruption we are going to cause is the lesser of two evils.
“A lady named Evelyn Lilac claimed to have information that could be crucial to a responsible decision, but the board of Blue Morpho hadn’t heard of her until just a few weeks ago. When I started checking I found that Woods and his bunch had been searching the world for Lilac, which gave credence to a report we had received. Now Woods is putting the same effort into finding one Diana Hunter.”
To my amazement, James began to chuckle. How could he find anything to laugh at?
“I would love to see that bastard’s face when those prints come back and he learns that you were standing two feet from him.”
My anger flared, and I grabbed his arm and pulled him around to face me. “Oh, yeah, that will be just hilarious. Does your company know that son of a bitch killed Evelyn and, so far, five other people that I know of?”
“We do now. What the hell do you think I’ve been doing down here, soaking up the sunshine? I have enough information to put him and several of his lackeys away, but I have to give him rope until I learn what the hell it is that Evelyn had. So give.”
“What’s next week’s information bomb?”
He studied me for several seconds before answering. “It’s a series of scientific studies by us and other petroleum companies confirming the worst predictions of global warming and proving that fossil fuels are the chief cause. It also contains papers proving conspiracy to deny and discredit these facts.”
“Wow! Like the tobacco industry admitting they knew nicotine was addictive.”
“Much worse. You can always quit smoking. The engine that drives the entire modern civilization is oil. Without oil, none of our factories will produce, none of our modes of heat and transportation will work, all of our economies worldwide will collapse. None of our home heaters or refrigerators will run. Do you suppose this modern civilization could turn around in a week and learn to string bows and chip arrowheads, go back to bringing home the bacon the old-fashioned way?”
“But that dismal picture is not exactly what Blue Morpho has in mind, is it? What is the second information bomb the company has planned?”
“We’ve developed a new fuel to gradually replace fossil fuel. It’s inexpensive to produce, clean burning, environmentally safe.”
“I suppose that news flash is timed to ride to the rescue after your first release has been checked by world scientists and everyone is nicely desperate about the future. But it won’t be free, will it? Your replacement fuel is patented by Blue Morpho, right?”
He nodded, and I found myself laughing and realized it was as inappropriate as his laugh had been.
“No wonder there is so much security and paranoia around this plant. You guys are planning to cut down the richest, most powerful people in the world and replace them with yourselves. Mr. Duffy’s dream comes true. Good luck. You’re going to need more than Woods’s toy soldier brigade to pull this off.”
“That’s not my problem. My problem is Evelyn Lilac’s information. If she has proof that the new fuel is actually more harmful to the environment than petroleum, our company will not proceed with next week’s release. I think you know what she had and where it is. I need you to tell me.”
Suspicion and cynicism truly are occupational hazards for both reporters and investigators. It’s not that you start out that way. It’s that time after time you learn through experience that nothing is ever what it appears to be . . . nothing. Suddenly I felt as though I had been manipulated ever since I got here in an elaborate game of good cop, bad cop. I wanted to ask how he knew my name and when he knew it, but this was not the time. Now I could reveal no suspicion of James Nolan. Now I had to play his game.
* * * * *
FORTY-ONE
“Well, James, as you put it, that’s not my problem, and not the reason I came down here. The FBI agent who is investigating Evelyn’s murder called me to identify her body. I held out on him because the story Evelyn told me about Martians colonizing Earth was so ridiculous, I figured he’d think I was as loony as she was. Now he wants to take my license and toss me in federal prison. I came down here looking for her murderer in the hopes that if I help him he will back off on me. Now you tell me a new whopper of international oil intrigue that sounds as crazy as Martians. If you really have hard evidence regarding Evelyn’s murder, I’ll take it to the FBI for you, and they can take care of Woods.”
He smiled. “I’ll bet you would. We might arrange something like that, but first I need you to give me the data Evelyn had.”
“Data? All she gave me was a chapter of a science fiction book.”
“No, I know all about her Martian book. She had something else, some old experiments that Duffy had done on an alternative fuel code-named ‘Hyacinth Red’.”
“She wrote about Red 19 in the Martian Diary, but
she never mentioned any real experiments or anything to do with Blue Morpho.”
He stopped walking, grabbed me by the shoulders, and turned me toward him. “Think. She must have told you something, a hiding place, a contact, a friend, a plan of some sort.”
My mind raced ahead, checking the parts of the story I could tell and what I could not. I wanted to appear cooperative and trusting and give him lots of detail, but none of it involving anyone else they could find and kill.
It’s tricky when you begin to lie extemporaneously and very easy to trip yourself up; so I stuck with the facts, except that I substituted Evelyn as the person who sent me the Martian Diary chapter. I told him the whole story of Antia’s escape from the subterranean Martian city and her narrow escape from Red 19. I told him about my encounter with Evelyn and her would-be kidnappers on the river and her hasty departure and disappearance. I left out the receipt of the second chapter, but told him in painful detail about my embarrassing interview with Agent Camas, my subsequent search for the boat, and my entombment in the ocean-going container. I avoided mentioning my side trip to the desert where I met Jim, and left out any mention of Sam’s special assistance, Richard’s disguise mastery, and my friend Barbara’s reluctant assistance with Customs and the LAPD.
As I talked, his expression became more and more grim. If I hadn’t seen what a wonderful actor he was, I would have been sure that he believed every word and was totally discouraged by my lack of useful information. He let out a big sigh and shook his head.
“When I learned you were the last one to talk to Evelyn, I hoped–”
I interrupted. I didn’t want him to ask questions that might poke holes in my story. “James, I was far from the last person to talk with her. Our meeting was two weeks before her body was found. I have been in over my head since this whole thing started. If I stick around and those prints get back, Woods will have me killed too. I need to get out of here.”
The look he gave me was so different from the friendly, boyish face he had presented at the ambassador’s dinner that he seemed like a different person. “Evelyn got out. He still killed her. I warned you he’s very good at what he does.”
He was quiet for a long moment, then shook his head again. “I was foolish to bring you in here, but now that you’re here, your only chance is with me. Listen carefully. We are going to have lunch, then you’re going to take a dinner back to your room and stay there until dark. At nine o’clock you will meet me over there at the High Security Building.
“Why?”
“Old man Duffy discovered and quietly patented Hyacinth Red, but he never used it. His formula turned up after Blue Morpho took over his research facility in California. It is the fuel from that formula that will be announced by the corporation next week unless I can find the original studies that proved Hyacinth poses a worse environmental hazard than petroleum. Needless to say there is not a large group of us in the company who are looking too hard for the downside of this fuel. If you really don’t have Evelyn’s copies of his studies, our only chance is to find the original reports. I have been looking each night, but now that Woods has your prints, this will be our last night to search. And Diana, don’t come out your door. It will be watched.”
* * * * *
FORTY-TWO
After our lunch, I headed down the elevated walkway toward my cabana and found that Folger was back, playing shadow. When I went inside, he took up his post out front. I locked the door and stepped out onto the balcony to survey the area and make my plans.
The mosquitoes buzzed around me, and I knew they would be worse at night. I took my quinine, stripped, slathered my whole body with mosquito repellent, and wrapped myself in my Tahitian pareau., basically a piece of hemmed yardage you simply tie around your body. They were invented by European missionaries to cover the heathen nakedness of the Pacific islanders. Now the missionaries’ granddaughters wear thong bikinis and the tourists buy pareaus. Cool and comfortable, it rolls into a small ball, travels well, and can be everything from a sun dress to a nightgown. Like my Amex card, I never leave home without it. This particular one is covered with bright tropical flowers and is highly visible from a distance.
I laid out my green hiking shirt, pants with cargo pockets, and small daypack, then stuffed the pants pockets and the pack with things my prospector great-grandfather would have called possibles. That meant anything you might possibly need. My hiking shoes went into the pack.
At five o’clock I ate the light supper I had brought from the diningroom, then took two pillows and went out on the balcony, leaving the cabin door open. I stretched out in the hammock and both slept and feigned sleep until eight. By then it was quite dark.
Folger’s movements had been routine all afternoon and evening and were not hard to follow, because his heavy boots were not exactly designed for stealth. He had maintained his guard outside my front door, doing one tour of inspection around the building each hour on the hour, and had just returned from his eight p.m. inspection.
In case there was a second guard who was not so noisy, I moved carefully, untying the pareau and laying the loose edge over the top of the pillows at my side. With gymnastic control I didn’t know I still possessed, I moved to the deck, leaving my pareau behind and causing little rocking of the hammock. Lying in the darker shadow between the hammock and the wall, I listened to all the night sounds of the rain forest, trying to discern any that might belong to the human jungle. After several minutes of careful listening, I crouched behind the hammock, arranged the pareau carefully over the pillows, then crept inside the room.
I put on the shirt and pants and shrugged into the daypack, then slipped back out onto the balcony. Crouching down and moving slowly in the shadow of the wall, I reached the end of my balcony, folded myself over the top of the stucco wall, and slithered to the floor of the next balcony.
Moving slowly and silently, I reached the far end of that balcony and climbed down the trellis, feeling carefully for each hand and foothold. At the bottom I stepped to the cool, wet ground, then slipped behind the trellis and under the balcony. An overcast obscured the stars and moonlight, making it a dark night. I stood there for several minutes, listening, watching, giving all my senses time to adapt to the night: eyes, ears, nose, taste, skin, and that sixth sense that is harder to define. I could smell Folger’s cigarette smoke, the rotting foliage on the damp forest floor, the dank green river at the edge of camp, the resin used to treat the wood in the balcony, a faint sweet perfume from some night-blooming flower, the musky odor of some nearby rodent nest. My sixth sense told me there was more. I waited.
I could faintly hear a radio playing in the next duplex, frogs croaking near the river, an occasional bird or animal cry, and over all the constant buzzing and humming of the insects. No cars. A slight, damp, balmy breeze kissed my cheeks.
Then it came. The crack of a twig, the crushing of leaves, sounds that did not belong to the forest. My second watcher was on a small hill about thirty-five yards west, between me and the river. From his vantage point he would have a clear view of the back of my cabin, as well as the elevated walkway to the diningroom and the garden path that led around the encampment to the front road. Training my senses in his direction, I prayed whoever was there was not equipped with infrared goggles.
The sound of his urine splattering against the leaves on the ground reached my ears a few seconds before the breeze carried its strong smell to my nose. My brain does work in strange ways. While one member of my internal board of directors debated whether Nolan or Woods posted this guy up there, the mother in me was noting that he should take water with him on watch because his urine had that strong stink of dehydration. Some rational voice on the board suggested that neither thought was truly useful at the moment.
The building where I was to rendezvous with James was farther south and west, across the main bridge and on the other side of the river. If I moved to the south, I would be in the watcher’s line of sight and be back-lit by the l
ights of camp. If I went around in front, I would be spotted by Folger. The only route open was to head first north, then west to the river and follow the river south, past the back side of the hill.
I crouched to the ground, moving out from under the balcony, feeling carefully before I put weight on either my hands or my bare feet, making sure I made no sound. Just three feet from the balcony I reached the cover of tall heavy foliage and could stand almost upright and still be hidden from the view of the guard on the hill. Moving as quickly as I safely could, I made my way past the end of the hill and down to the river.
There I met my first real obstacle. To the south, there was no path or open ground of any sort. Deep thick undergrowth grew all the way to the water’s edge. There was no way to move through that stuff silently. In fact, there was no way through it without a machete. With the main road out of the question, crossing the river would require back-tracking to the long swinging foot bridge. It would be impossible to move across that bridge without setting up vibrations that would make the bridge swing.
Going into the river would be my last choice. Though my childhood trained me pretty well for surviving in the wilderness, the wilderness I knew best was the Southwest desert and the High Sierras. My experience with tropical rivers was just sufficient to make me wary. I had no idea what could live in this one. Whether this river held schools of paranha like the Rio Caroni in Venezuela or tiny parasitic critters that entered various bodily openings, like the Amazon, or large crocodiles, like the Sarapiqui, I had no desire to go swimming.
Hoping to find another route toward the rendezvous point, I backtracked to the path. I was debating my chances of making it across the swinging bridge unseen when my ears picked up a familiar sound, water slapping against wood. I headed to the river and there found two boats tied under the bridge, one a rowboat with oars and the other a small motorboat.
