The Black Silent

by David Dun

  "We've always known you as Sam. Who picked Sam?"

  "Actually, my mother, before they told her I died. She liked Samuel Clemens. That's the story, or as much of it as I can tell you right now." He looked away from his small mirror and into her eyes. "I'm trusting you to tell no one."

  She nodded, perhaps slightly happier now.

  "Were you a spy?"

  Sam thought for a moment.

  "I was chasing the worst form of sophisticated criminals and terrorists, and there were plenty of them to chase. For now, that's all I can tell you."

  She seemed, reluctantly, to accept this and went back to reading Ben's documents while Sam finished shaving. Sam liked to face things fair and square, but his relationship with Haley was not like most things.

  "I'm always amazed at how fast you read," he said, glancing at her while he began applying makeup.

  "Uh-huh," she said, oblivious now to everything but what was in front of her. The intense look of concentration heightened his curiosity.

  When she was done, she put down the papers and looked up. She took a long look at his disguise-in-progress and gave him a thumbs-up. "Ready to hear about the papers?"

  "You bet." Sam continued working while he listened.

  "The papers from the whale are in Ben's miserable shorthand, which I can barely read. I think he's making four peptide hormones with different protein expressions, using genetically altered bacteria at least for three of them. But I can't tell more than that.

  They're working notes-notes he wouldn't even type up."

  After a few minutes she spoke again. "This is pretty interesting."

  "What?"

  "Ben started with about two hundred eighty genes of the twenty-five thousand or so found in humans and other higher mammals."

  "Okay…"

  "To get down to six genes or so," Haley said, "is a major step. He clearly was onto something, but I can't see what that something was. Nothing here tells me that he was on the verge of solving the problem of aging."

  "Could six genes really solve a problem like aging?" Sam asked. "To get youth retention would be tough, like you said."

  "Exactly. Aging is a diffuse process. It's brain, it's body… it's widespread. How are you supposed to fix that with six genes? Add to this that when your body's cells divide to replenish themselves, they have a built-in clock… Well, you read Nature, you know about telomeres. You're stuck with old cells when you get old."

  "You still don't believe in this discovery, do you?" Sam asked.

  "Do I really believe that Ben has something that will allow people to live decades longer or hundreds of years? I haven't changed my mind. That would be hard to swallow."

  Sam had finished with the skin whitener and had gone on to the foundation. "You're a good teacher. Keep going, but hurry." He now applied the foundation makeup in layers of slightly different colors to give the mottled appearance of real skin. Because of time constraints he had opted for only a small bit of prosthetic plastic, so he had to do some contouring with nothing more than heavy makeup.

  "Oh, my God," Haley said.

  "What?"

  "Listen to this." She read aloud:

  "Microbial life in the deep seafloor is widespread, to depths of at least eight hundred meters into the bottom sediments. Samples indicate that methanogenesis occurs at the deepest sediment layers where carbon dioxide and hydrogen are converted to methane. The depth limit of anaerobic life in deep-sea sediments is not known. Most striking we have discovered that methane-producing Archaea divide every few thousand years, maybe one hundred thousand years. Their life span, if we could call it that, is unparalleled, indicating a DNA stability unknown in terrestrial life. Notably we have discovered a gene isolate in one species of methanogenic Archaea that differs by twenty-four percent from its nearest relative.

  "Then he goes on," and Haley continued to read:

  "Popular magazines have picked up on the longevity of Arcs and put it in much more poetic terms describing them as living in time with the slowest rhythms of the earth or as living in

  'geologic time’. Interesting that the basic truth is not obscure.

  "He actually mentions Discover magazine instead of a science journal. There's a little tongue in cheek there."

  Sam was silent a moment. "Archaea, it says?"

  "Ben wrote his own comment on the article. 'Archaea are the longest-lived life-forms on the earth. And they are closer to humans, DNA-wise, than are bacteria. The truth is under our nose in popular magazines and in numerous more serious journal articles.

  '"They live in geologic time,'" she quoted again. "That would mean these microbes are thousands and thousands of years old. At least. Geologic time implies millions of years old."

  Sam could see Haley's mind was spinning. She was determined not to be overly dramatic, but she knew better than anyone that Ben Anderson always chose his words carefully.

  "What is it?" Sam asked.

  "I think I get the concept of what Ben was doing, if not the details."

  "Tell me."

  "If a gene releases a protein that, say, translates to a pep-tide hormone that performs a vital function, and we can duplicate the protein or its function in medication, then maybe we affect aging. But how do you use a gene from a deep-sea microbe to help a human being?"

  Sam shrugged.

  "Here. We need to give you a wig, make you blonde, and put some age on you," Sam said.

  Haley was still concentrating on her discovery.

  "The answer is you don't use the gene. But Ben seems to be replicating gene functions with organic molecule products. In Ben's case he's allowing bacteria infused with the gene of interest to make the organic molecules that become the medicine. Yet he's still talking about a microbe and you would think its gene would not produce human-compatible proteins."

  "So," Sam said, "to know what Ben's doing, we'd have to know something about how certain of the microbe's genes function?"

  "To understand it, we would. I suspect what he is doing is letting genes express their products, which would be proteins and then using them as medicine with the caveat that the proteins may ultimately be broken down into pro-hormones, hormones, enzymes, or the like." She explained how that worked.

  Then Haley referred back to the notes while Sam splotched her face. "He calls these microbes 'Archaea.' He does have these two hundred eighty other genes he was studying.

  So maybe he found homologous genes in microbes, animals, and humans."

  Sam nodded. His makeup job looked nearly completed. Hers had a ways to go. "It would be astonishing if we could use ancient microbes to lengthen our life spans." He applied a finishing touch. "People might kill for that."

  "I just realized something else that makes sense," Haley said, trying to work on her makeup and talk at the same time. "Archaea microbes live in the bottom of the sea, down where the ocean cleanses itself. How about that?"

  They hadn't shot him.

  Ben didn't expect that they would until they got their information. They seemed unsure of themselves, which gave him the advantage, since he was completely sure of himself.

  No one was going to get a whiff of ARCLES, unless and until proper safeguards for the public were in place.

  They could try torture, but he had a glass capsule up beside his molars and it was filled with enough ricin to kill ten people almost instantly, and there was no known antidote.

  Game, set, match-or checkmate, if one preferred chess to tennis.

  Ben should have been grateful to be tied up in a chair and not tortured for what he knew. Instead, he sat there wondering why they weren't hurting him, or at least shouting questions at him.

  There has to be a reason.

  They already have the information? Impossible.

  The drugs and torture were still to come? Most likely. And soon.

  His heart beat faster and he could hear it and didn't like it. He listened for sounds but heard nothing except the faint blare of bluegrass music in the
distance. It sounded obscene in the face of his impending doom.

  He needed to urinate, and that bothered him as well. It had been many decades since he'd peed his britches and he was probably about due for diapers in another decade or two, but he hadn't been planning on it this weekend. Sons of bitches were being downright uncivilized.

  His sole comfort was that old man Sanker would by now be hysterical with frustration.

  Unless Sanker himself was behind Ben's current imprisonment. If so, it wouldn't take long to discover that Ben's secrets would not be easily won.

  Despite the jocular thought of Sanker, Ben was seriously frightened. If Sanker weren't behind this abduction, then at least two well-resourced parties were after him and ARCLES. At this point he had lost control of his life except to end it, which was not the sort of choice he wanted.

  For mental exercise he went through the possible identities of his captors: Sanker; Frick independently; federal agents, renegade or not; foreign oil interests or other nationals; even American Bayou, which could have gone around Nelson Gempshorn and taken him. Then the chilling thought occurred to him that Nelson could be in on it. Nelson was a bit of an odd man and never completely revealed himself, or so it seemed. The possibilities were nearly endless and there was no use speculating.

  All the while, Ben had been working hard on the arm restraints and intermittent effort seemed to be loosening the duct tape. He began twisting an arm, and although it was painful, he continued in the effort, stripping the hair from his skin and no doubt turning them lobster red. He figured he was now stretching the tape and getting his arms a good half-inch from the leather of the chair. Now he rolled his arms and rocked them, to and fro.

  The music grew suddenly louder, as if someone had opened a door. Ben heard someone fiddling with a lock. He wished he weren't wearing the damned blindfold.

  "I don't understand why we have to move him," someone was saying. It sounded like Stu.

  The door swung open.

  "Okay, old man, we gotta go." Definitely Stu Farley.

  "Before we go, I want you to listen to me." This was another voice entirely, with a heavy accent. Ben imagined an Arabic speaker. His gut tightened down as he realized he really did not want to die. "If you would answer the questions thoroughly"-the voice was measured and calm, but there was not the slightest hint of humanity in it-"we would not need to strap you to a table and jolt your body with electricity with large probes in your rectum and smaller probes in your bladder. And if that does not loosen your tongue, to inject you with a paralytic and slowly dissect you while you watch in mirrors and feel the pain. I do not need to dramatize this kind of agony. Consider what I've said while we move you. Consider whether you will talk."

  Ben felt the glass capsule with his tongue.

  A heavy hand grabbed his jaw and someone shoved rubber between his teeth. In a panic he tried to feel for the glass. Pliers grabbed his tongue and the pain was excruciating.

  Fingers slipped inside his mouth and suddenly the glass capsule was gone.

  The Arabic speaker grunted. "He thinks we're amateurs."

  Ben realized why they had left him alone. They had been watching on video, noting the slight movements of his jaw and tongue as he played with the capsule. Now even that choice had been taken from him.

  Sam kept a Kevlar vest in the Corvette and after a brief argument, convinced Haley to put it on. She thought he should wear it because, so far, he'd taken most of the physical risks. They climbed in the Corvette, ready to visit Lattimer Gibbons.

  First, though, Sam intended to stop at Rachael's house.

  "She'll freak," Haley said. "I thought the next stop was Lattimer Gibbons's."

  "It is, but we have to remember that we're on a small island that Frick pretty much controls at the moment. We could use a convincing messenger to get to the state attorney general and the state police. Remember the FBI memo?"

  "Okay. But what's Rachael going to do?"

  "We need someone to go to a main state police office, like in Seattle. That's where Rachael can help. There is nothing like someone in the flesh pleading for justice.

  Rachael's family is connected. The rich always know people."

  "I can hardly wait to hear this," said Haley.

  "You're about to," he said.

  "Maybe you should call first. You know how she is. She doesn't always wear clothes,"

  Haley said.

  "No time."

  It was 4:50 p.m. and Ben had been missing for over six hours.

  Rachael answered her door in a somewhat sheer bathrobe, seemingly unself-conscious about her obvious nudity beneath.

  Rachael was blond, beautiful, and fit. Her even teeth and Nordic face, with the astonishingly blue-green eyes, would normally leave an impression. Sam made it a point not to notice the slim threads or the natural beauty. For all the effect it had on his demeanor, she could have been a seventy-year-old farmer in overalls.

  Naturally she didn't recognize Sam in the makeup, but she squinted at Haley and figured it out. Then she gestured for them to enter.

  "Come in quick," she said, looking over their shoulders. "The news says you're wanted for the murder of a police officer and that you're armed and dangerous. They say you killed a lab tech-slit his throat. They say — Ben's missing too, in case you don't know."

  "We know," Haley said. "We know."

  "We also have some huge favors to ask of you," Sam said.

  "Will I be an accessory to murder?"

  "Eventually no. Initially maybe," Sam said. "You will be risking your life to do the right thing. But you'll be running to the police, not away from them-"

  "Please believe me," Haley cut in. "A deputy named Frick is framing us. He's working for the Sanker Corporation, which is trying to steal Ben's work the way they stole mine."

  Rachael looked from one to the other as the gravity of their request sank in.

  Haley explained in short hand what they knew and suspected about Frick. She told Rachael about their fears for Ben and about the shooting of the second officer.

  "That was the undersheriff," Rachael said. "They'll think you tried to murder him as well, won't they?"

  "You mean he's not dead?" Haley asked.

  Rachael explained that the news said that he had been taken by medivac helicopter to the Harborview trauma center on the mainland and was expected to recover.

  "To answer your question, yes, that's Frick's plan," said Sam. "He's using my gun and covering his tracks."

  Rachael nodded, still uncertain.

  "This won't get sorted out quickly," he said.

  Rachael put on a brave smile. "I suppose I always wanted to be a hero. What can I do?"

  Sam explained his plan to use her as a messenger.

  "This may help you." Sam held out the fax from Ernie. "It's an internal memo of the FBI. Parts of it have been excised, but you can see for yourself, they are suspicious that Mr. Frick has done bad things. When you get to the mainland, drive all the way to Seattle or Olympia. Find the highest-level state police officer you can find. Ask him to talk with someone from the attorney general's office. Show him this paper." Sam went on to explain what she should say and how to get Ernie on the phone. "But remember that Ernie could be bureaucratically castrated for this. There's only so much he can do."

  "I got it. He's a bureaucrat."

  "With big cojones, big heart, good brain, but yeah he's still a G-man."

  "Okay, I'll try."

  "I need some tools," Sam said. "And I need a dress for Haley, and a stocking cap."

  "That's easy."

  It took only a couple minutes to get the things together and put them in a large duffel bag that Sam put in the trunk of the car.

  "I'm recalling that you have relatives on Orcas," Sam said to Rachael. "If we got you there, could you make it to Anacortes from there without the ferry?"

  "Tonight?"

  Sam nodded.

  "Yeah. I believe I could. My uncle has a boat at a private dock."


  "Where?"

  "Near Poll Pass."

  Sam thought for a minute.

  "Is it a fast boat?"

  "Yeah, the Inevitable. A custom express cruiser. But why not the ferry?"

  "They may try to stop the ferry. You wait for our call. We'll figure how to get you to Orcas. It'll probably be an experience you won't forget."

  "This will help you?" Rachael asked.

  "Trust me," Haley said. "It's to save Ben's life. And ours."

  CHAPTER 13

  Sam drove the Vette down Cattle Point, hoping to get to Argyle without a roadblock on Mullis, one of four main thoroughfares into town.

  "Are we gonna walk?" she asked.

  "No. We're gonna make like baby kangaroos." They stopped next to a dilapidated barbed-wire fence in a second-growth forest. Sam called and talked Don, the tow truck mechanic, into coming over to Cattle Point to pick up the Vette. Don arrived in only six minutes. He looked like a fullback but acted about as cheerful and friendly as anyone Sam could recall, a lot like a big black Lab puppy.

  It was tough to get Don started hooking up and towing because he was dying to look under the hood. Sam promised Don could play with it when he got them back to the service station in Friday Harbor.

  They joined Don in the cab of his tow truck, and when they turned onto Mullis, just as Sam feared, they found a police cruiser waiting.

  Don pulled up slowly and saluted.

  "How goes it, Deke? What the hell you doin'?"

  "Don't you watch the news?"

  "Not if there's football, I don't. What do you think, I'm metrosexual?"

  "Who are your friends here?" the officer asked.

  "This is Mr. and Mrs. Raimes."

  The officer nodded and moved on to the next car.

  At the service station Don got out, and Haley whispered to Sam. "How are we going to get Rachael to Orcas any time soon?"

  "I have some ideas. Before we get into that, I need to know: any reason you can't fly Ben's plane tonight?"