Ark Storm (6 page)

“What’s up Mel?” he asked, leaning forward, arms crossed on his desk, the busy doctor asking his patient her symptoms.

Mel had a random desire to peel off her shirt and ask him about her rotator cuff. She quickly subdued it.

“Interesting, our new recruit…” She threw out her gambit.

“In which particular respect?” asked Messenger, glancing at his wall clock, a look Barbieri saw. She got to the point.

“No PR. That’s why. Nada. No photo, no write-up. Nothing to even keep on file. Premature, she called it. She was adamant, tried to backpedal, but she was still adamant.”

Messenger leaned back in his chair, eyed Barbieri with interest. They all competed for that look, some got it regularly. She got it rarely. The job of the unsung. Now she felt the glow.

“Interesting, potentially, but she’s just come on board. PR right now
is
arguably premature.

Mel shook her head. “Nah. It’s more than that. She dressed it up saying she’d done enough posing in swimsuits, just wanted to get on with her job, but I didn’t buy it.”

“And your theory?”

“I almost got the impression she was running from something. Just a look in her eyes, just for a second, and then she covered it up, all California surfer drawl. All cool. Only it wasn’t. I saw fear in her eyes.”

13

THE LAB, CARMEL VALLEY

Gwen devoted the entire morning to shopping and modeling. She rang her suppliers, ordered buoys and sensors, and begged and cajoled them to expedite the order with express delivery to Joaquin Losada in Peru. She went online and purchased megabytes of input data she hadn’t previously been able to afford. She played with her model, broadening it, deepening it, running the new data over past Niños, checking how well the new statistics and her evolving model predicted them. Glorious what a fat bank account could achieve.

At 1:00
P.M.
, stunned by all her new data, she stood and stretched. Her t-shirt rose above the low-slung waistband of her jeans revealing the corrugated muscles of her stomach. She looked up, arms locked overhead, as she heard someone whistling surprisingly tunefully. She recognized the song: “Losing My Religion” by R.E.M. Then the whistler came into sight: Peter Weiss, ambling by. He glanced at her and shyly away.

Gwen took her pass and headed out with a plan to grab some fresh air and to check out the gym and the Cupcake Café.

She walked round the building. A repetitive thwack, thwack, thwack led her to the far side of the old barn. There on a clay court, clad in immaculate whites, Messenger was playing tennis, but this was no casual knockabout. The bout looked gladiatorial, the standard near-Davis Cup. Messenger played without a shirt, and his brown, lithely muscled body glistened with sweat under the broiling sun of an unseasonably hot fall day. She felt sure he hadn’t seen her as she stood and watched. Every fiber of him was focused on the ball and on his opponent, a man his size but perhaps twenty years younger. The match seemed almost perfectly balanced. But while the opponent seemed focused, Messenger burned with an intensity that was almost frightening. He seemed to want to exterminate his opponent. He played every stroke as if it were match point at Flushing Meadow.

Riveted, Gwen watched. Finally, she saw Messenger race from one side of the court to another, take a ball on the volley and shoot it to the far right corner of his opponent’s court just out of reach.

Messenger straightened, arms and racket erect, in a victory spasm that was almost sexual.

Feeling suddenly voyeuristic, Gwen turned quickly, headed for the barn. As she did, she noticed a worn-looking man emerge from the trees. Something about him jarred. He looked out of place, and he seemed to be in the grip of some powerful emotion, almost vibrating with it. Gwen could see it in the tension in his face, the fisted hands. A kind of fury and grief. Gwen watched him approach Messenger, who was striding off the court, flush with victory. Messenger halted. His face hardened. He walked toward the man, jaw jutting.

“Get off my property now. I am asking you nicely. If you do not I will get my security to bodily remove you.”

“You’re good at that, aren’t you, bodily removals. Or should I say disposals,” said the man, refusing to be cowed.

As if alerted by some sixth sense, Randy Sieber strolled out of the barn in his workout kit. He approached the man, took his arm with surprising gentleness.

“Come on, Mr. Freidland. This isn’t helping you. Please.”

The man looked up at Sieber, at his muscles pumped and slick with sweat. Physical frailty met outrageous vitality, but it seemed to be Sieber’s gentleness that won. The man gave him a faint smile and nodded. He started moving back the way he had come, Sieber walking with him, but he turned and shot a last look at Messenger.

“I’m not finished with you,” he said in a rasping voice. “I won’t be. Until I’ve proved what you are.”

14

THE LAB, CARMEL VALLEY

Gwen headed for the barn, mind racing.
What you are? Bodily removals? Disposals?
Sounded like Messenger had bought some company or other from the old guy. Clearly they knew him. Had Messenger fired him, slashed and burned through the employees, creating something lean and mean and worth more? Or was that the domain of corporate raiders, not venture capitalists? Disconcerted, but not enough to lose her appetite, Gwen swiped her card, entered her PIN, pushed open the door to the barn and walked into the café.

“Gwen!” called out Peter Weiss. “Come join us.”

Weiss was sitting at a long table alongside the picture-perfect jock who’d preened past Gwen’s office a few times that morning and whom she had affected not to notice. Opposite, seemingly forming a little unit of their own, was a conspicuously attractive young black woman with a medusa-like headful of long braids; a huge, NFL-type with shorn fair hair and an uncertain smile; and a short, wiry, intense looking man with spiky black hair. They all wore identical-looking shirts, save the color, respectively pink, blue, and white. Gwen wanted to ask them if they’d got a three-for-one.

She mosied over.

“Hi, I’m Gwen Boudain,” she said, smiling down. The trio stayed sitting, chorusing out their names and hellos—friendly from the men, Jihoon Lee and Curt Cuchinski, faintly hostile from the woman, Atalanta Washington—but the jock leapt to his feet and stuck out a hand.

“Kevin Barclay,” he announced. “Good to have you on board,” he added, as if he were some kind of skipper. Gwen took in at a glance the immaculate khakis, the crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled up as if ready for business, the sporting tan, not too dark, not trying too hard. From his artfully layered brown hair to the tip of his Tod’s loafers, he spoke East Coast Privilege. The ever-so-slightly constipated Boston accent sealed the deal. He was good-looking, as a young Rob Lowe, in the way that would enslave teenage girls, and his cocky eyes said he knew it.

Gwen took his proffered hand, shook it with a smile whilst telling herself A) not to leap to conclusions and B) not to be so judgmental. She was behaving like an animal happening onto a strange pride on the savannah, quietly analyzing everyone: friend or foe, prey or predator, carnivore or veggie. She suppressed a smirk and sat down opposite Peter Weiss.

“We were just taking a bet on which of the grunts would be fired first,” announced Barclay, nodding at the trio opposite. The two men gave an infinitesimal cringe; the woman looked openly furious.

“Good for the digestion,” murmured Gwen.

Barclay laughed. “It’s not personal. Two of the three always get fired. Natural selection.”

Gwen cocked her head. Maybe her savannah analogy was not so far-fetched.

“This some sort of tradition?”

“It’s how Dr. Messenger staffs up his analysts,” explained Peter Weiss, Barclay’s note of pride absent from his voice, clearly not quite so enamored of the dog-eat-dog school of business. “Hire three or four every year, cull all but one at the end of the year. Sometimes cull them all.”

“That’s how Peter and I came up, through the ranks,” intoned Barclay. “Proving ourselves, no cutting in solo,” he added, veiling the barb with his Harvard smile.

Weiss laughed. “Ignore him. He’s just jealous.”

Gwen wondered whom else her rival-less entry had annoyed. She shrugged. Their problem.

“That’s more your vice, Peter,” Barclay replied with the smooth delivery of the truly annoyed. “So, join our bet?” he asked Gwen.

“Real kind. Think I’ll pass.”

“No biggie. I’m putting my money on you, Curt,” he said, nodding at the NFL type. “Atalanta, nobody with a brain would let you go,” he added to the black woman.

Gwen felt her rush of fury, and her impotence as Atalanta literally bit her lip and shook her head.

A young, smiling, and pretty waitress sashayed up, breaking the simmering tension.

“Hello new girl. Welcome to the Cupcake Café. I’m Narissa and that sad sack back there in the kitchen is Luke.”

Gwen glanced at Luke. Longish dark hair, red-and-black bandana round his head, watchful brown eyes. He eyed her back, frowning like a workhouse matron confronted by another starving orphan.

“Lasagna’s on today and it’s real good,” said Narissa.

“Sounds great. I’d love one.”

Narissa balanced a heap of emptied plates, and with a communally contagious glancing at their watches, Barclay and the trio got to their feet and flocked away.

Weiss poured Gwen a glass of water from a jug on the table. “Don’t mind Kevin. He’d bet against the sun rising then paint the windows black,” he said in his almost mesmerically soft voice. “Can’t help himself.”

“That so?” remarked Gwen levelly.

Weiss was silent for a while. He seemed to be gathering himself. He turned to Gwen.

“I’m sorry about your parents.”

Gwen’s eyes flared in alarm.

“Dying in a car crash,” said Weiss, shooting her a quizzical look. “What did you think I meant?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Gwen said quickly. “It was just the way you said it, as if there were something else.”

Weiss nodded slowly. He kept looking down at his empty plate. “There is,” he said quietly.

Gwen felt her heart begin to pound.

Weiss looked up. “We’re more alike than you think,” he said slowly.

“Meaning?” Gwen knitted her fingers in her lap, began to twiddle her ring compulsively.

“I don’t have parents either. Lost them both.”

“My God! How?”

“My mom killed herself,” said Weiss, eyes locked onto Gwen’s as if daring her to look away from his grief. “My father used to beat on us both, for years. Wore her down so much till there was nothing left. She’d left her family, her homeland, everything to marry him, and this is what she got in return. So, when he finally took off, she was left with nothing, in a way. So she killed herself.”

“She had
you,
” answered Gwen.

“And she left me too.”

“Where’s your father?”

Opposite her, Weiss sat motionless, head bowed, as if trapped in his pain, unable to move under the weight of it.

“I have no idea,” replied Weiss. “Haven’t seen him since I was sixteen. Never want to see him again.”

“I get that,” said Gwen. She reached out, took Weiss’s hand, gripped it hard. “I am sorry, Peter.”

His eyes moistened. He nodded. “Just wanted you to know that you weren’t alone, you know.” He gave an almost helpless shrug. “That shit happens.”

15

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, BIG SUR, MONDAY NIGHT

The girl ran through the darkness. This was like something out of a nightmare, only it was real. Her heel broke on the rough trail. She kicked off the other one and ran on. The man followed. He seemed to have all the time in the world, as if he knew he would catch her. It had started so well.

The flash car shouted money, the crisp shirt and suit murmured class. Some tony husband cheating on his wife, looking for fresh meat, for something quick, and paying well for it. He had paid her straight off, four hundred dollars, told her all he needed was an hour but that he had a thing about the forest, could they park and do it there,
make me feel like I’m a teenager again
, he had said with a winning smile. And she had stepped into his car and into the nightmare.

He had driven to Seventeen Mile Drive. Ritzy, she had thought. Then, as advertised, he had turned off into a forest, parked. He took out a silk scarf, reached across, kissed her, then tied it round her mouth. Then as she struggled with the locked door, he took another, grabbed her hands, and bound them behind her back.

“Get out,” he’d said as fear exploded in her stomach. His voice was different, his eyes were different. He seemed amused, but didn’t share the joke with her.

“Go on. Run. If you want.”

And run she did. Spurred by terror. She ran as fast as she could with her hands bound behind her. She could hear him, keeping pace. Now he accelerated. In seconds, he caught her, pulled her down. She saw he wore gloves, and she whimpered into her scarf.

He reached his hands around her neck. She pleaded with her eyes, with all the voice she could summon.

He smiled again. “You want to ask why? There’s a time to talk. And a time to stay silent. You didn’t know the difference. Good-bye.”

She struggled, she tried to scream out, but he was too strong, too big. There was nothing she could do. She saw the fireworks as her brain, starved of oxygen, began to shut down; then there was nothing.

16

THE LAB, CARMEL VALLEY, TUESDAY

The next morning, Gwen parked and stepped from her Mustang. She reached into the passenger seat to grab her laptop when a roar made her straighten up with a frown. A motorbike sped up, braked at the last minute in a cloud of dust. The leather-suited rider swung his leg off and parked his bike. He pulled off his helmet.

“Dr. Messenger,” said Gwen coolly, brushing the dust off her t-shirt. “Didn’t have you down as a motorbike man.”

“My car’s in for valeting. The Beamer can match it for speed. Runs like silk. And looks like a work of art.”