Last Gasp (15 page)

Cheryl had been distracted by someone across the restaurant. She touched Theo’s arm, who leaned back in his chair, a slow smile lighting up his face. The man came over to their table and as she watched the reunion a childhood memory stirred within her. She remembered meeting the Russian and his wife, whom she recalled as rather a finicky little woman, though kindly and fond of children, as many childless middle-aged women are.

“You will not know me,” Boris Stanovnik said in his deep Russian voice, taking her hand. “You were a little child, with golden hair and, er—what are they called?” He tapped his cheeks and nose.

“Freckles,” Cheryl smiled. “I still have them in summer, but not the golden hair unfortunately. Yes, I do remember you. I was tiny and you were a giant,” she said, at her most artful.

Boris chuckled. “And children never forget giants, eh?”

Cheryl shook her head, smiling, liking this man at once. He was how she imagined a fairy-tale Russian peasant to be, honest as the day, lacking all sophistry and guile. It pleased her immensely that her father had found a friendly soul in a desert of indifference.

It was still quite early, a few minutes after nine-thirty, and she could see that Theo was in the mood to chat for hours yet. Feeling tired, and happy to let them talk, she rose and excused herself, at which the Russian lumbered to his feet and gallantly kissed her hand. She was charmed, knowing the gesture to be one of genuine courtesy and not mere flashy display.

On her way to the elevator, thinking, Oh, Gordon, what a helluva lot you’ve got to learn! she passed the board in the lobby and words in colored plexiglass seemed to spring out at her ... Global ... Toxic ... Ozone ... Hazards ... Carbon Dioxide ... Problem ... Waste ...

It was all there, screaming to be heard. After all, the people at the conference were the concerned ones, the responsible ones. They would have listened, she was convinced, if only Theo had been given the chance to speak. Why had that damned committee turned him down? It baffled her and also made her feel uneasy. Was there a political slant to it? Were they frightened that what Theo had to say was too alarmist? Or was she being too dramatic herself, imagining boogeymen where none existed? Maybe the truth was that the committee’s attitude was typified by the official with his round shoulders and meek eyes and closed mind.

As the doors slid open and she stepped inside, Cheryl was struck by a vision of the stinking red algae bloom churning up from under the stern of the
Melville.

That, surely to God, was proof that what her father feared was fact and not fantasy: a glimpse of the coming horror he had seen in his mind’s eye.

The doors were halfway closed when a man slipped through. He was tall, broad-shouldered, burned dark by tropical sun, and wearing a white suit. Preoccupied, Cheryl didn’t think it odd when he didn’t inquire which floor she wanted, but pressed the one button that happened to be her floor, too.

“I don’t fancy yours,” Nick said.

“I don’t fancy either one.”

“Come on, Gav, don’t be like that. The one with the big bumpers hasn’t taken her eyes off you all night. The little redhead will suit me fine. How about it?”

Chase drained the last few drops of pilsner beer, grimaced—no wonder they drank more wine than beer on the Continent—and set the glass down. He wiped his mouth and said, “Not tonight, Josephine. But go right ahead. You can take your pick. Only please don’t come crashing in at two in the morning, will you?”

“Great!” Nick said without enthusiasm. He scratched his beard viciously. “If I’d known you were the Virgin Mary I’d have asked Lord Longford to come instead. Thanks a bunch.”

“See you at breakfast,” Chase said, sliding down from the barstool. “You’re not really going?”

“Looks like it.” At the foliage-shrouded entrance to the bar he turned and saw Nick semaphoring with his eyebrows to the two young girls, one of whom, he had to admit, was rather attractive. The one with the big bumpers, in fact. As he went out he saw her gazing after him, and for just one instant regretted his premature departure. No, he couldn’t. Not that he was morally whiter than white, not that at all. It was the thought that Angie herself might be having an affair (harmless flirtation?) that stopped him cold. The worm of suspicion had burrowed deep inside him and he couldn’t kill the little bastard. It tainted everything, rotted the flesh of the apple.

He walked across the lobby, belching warm beer fumes, and just made it to the elevator as the doors were closing. The woman inside, feathered hat swaying above a face like a weathered prune, regarded him with distinct hostility as he tried to contain a rippling belch, failed, and didn’t get his handkerchief out in time either. The reverberation seemed to rock the elevator.

The feathered prune got out at the second floor, much to Chase’s relief. He carried on to the third and walked along the densely carpeted corridor, trying not to think about what Angie was doing, and by default thinking about it. The strident cry stopped him in his tracks, and he stood, caught in midstride, his mouth instantly dry.

“You heard me—get out, you bastard!”

A woman’s voice, very angry, frayed at the edges with fear.

The corridor seemed to have swallowed up the sound and in the silence Chase wasn’t sure he’d actually heard anything.

“Get out or I’ll call the police! I mean it, I mean it!”

It was coming from the room two doors down from his. Chase’s first instinct was not to interfere. He thought it might be a domestic quarrel. He moved softly onward until he was level with the door, paused, and stood listening. There was a sound, one he couldn’t identify, and then a kind of strangled half-sob.

Chase tapped on the door. “Are you all right in there?” It sounded fatuous, but he didn’t know what else to say.

“No, I’m not all right. Come in please, come in!”

He grasped the knob and turned it and pushed the door open, but after a few inches it was impeded by something, probably a foot.

There was another unidentifiable sound followed by the woman’s shrill, “If you’re coming in, for Christ’s sake get in here!” and when Chase used his full weight the impediment (foot?) shifted and he was inside, staring hard at a young woman with short, sun-streaked hair who was standing on the far side of the bed holding a tiny traveling clock above her head.

As an object of aggression it seemed rather puny.

Then Chase saw the other participant in the drama. Or rather his hairy wrist emerging from the embroidered cuff of a white jacket, his thick brown fingers gripping the edge of the door.

“Is this a private quarrel?” Chase asked. More fatuousness.

“No, everybody’s welcome to join in,” the girl answered, tightlipped.

The man said nothing. He opened the door still farther. Chase was six feet tall and this fellow topped him by a good three inches. Still holding the door, not looking at Chase but at the girl, the man in the white suit said in a low American accent, “You get the message. I’m not going to repeat it. Tell your father we mean what we say.”

The girl swung the clock back. “Take a running jump, you creep,” she spat at him.

It was then that Chase recognized her—the girl in the hall arguing with the officials—and was about to open his mouth to say something when the man in white pushed him aside and went out without bothering to look at him.

“Shut the door,” the girl said at once. “Lock it.” She wasn’t much over five feet, with a full figure, and still wearing faded blue jeans.

Chase did so. “You seem to cause trouble wherever you go,” he said conversationally.

“I don’t know you,” Cheryl said, “but you seem okay.”

“In that case would you mind putting the clock down?” Chase stood with his back pressed against the door. He wasn’t keen on any more surprises. He stifled a belch and said, “Who the hell was that?”

“I don’t know.” She was massaging her left wrist, which he saw was inflamed with fingermarks. “The bastard, whoever he is, was in the elevator. He followed me to the room and when I tried to shut the door in his face he grabbed me and threw me inside.”

“Why was he threatening you?”

“No idea. I should have gone for his privates. That’s if he’s got any.”

“Hadn’t you better call the police?”

“And tell them I was attacked by a tall American in a white suit?”

“There can’t be that many in Geneva.”

“He can easily change his suit.”

“But not his height.”

Cheryl nodded swiftly. “I guess you’re right, I ought to report it. But I want to see my father first. Will you—would you mind coming down with me to the hotel restaurant? I don’t like to impose, Mr.—”

“Chase. No, I don’t mind,” Chase said. Then it would be her father’s problem and not his.

On the way to the elevator she said, “My name is Cheryl Detrick. Thanks for coming in, Mr. Chase. I nearly ruined my traveling clock.” There was a moment’s delayed reaction before he said, “Detrick? Is your father Theo Detrick, the marine biologist?”

“You know of him?” It seemed to please her.

“He wrote the bible,” Chase said sincerely.

“Are you a delegate?”

“Yes. Sort of. That’s my field too.”

“And mine. Postgraduate at Scripps.”

“We marine biologists should stick together,” Chase said, smiling down at her.

“My sentiments precisely,” Cheryl said with feeling.

The doors opened and Cheryl moved ahead of him into the elevator. Chase wouldn’t have credited himself with such lightning reactions. Mindful of her sore wrist, he took her by the scruff of the neck and pulled her out again as the man in white lunged forward, hands outspread like brown claws. Chase kicked instinctively, aiming for the crotch, and missed, landing just below the second button of the immaculate white suit.

The man grunted and snarled a curse and fell backward, sprawling, as the elevator doors mercifully closed.

Perhaps coincidence ran deeper than anyone suspected. Conceivably there was an ordered pattern, a system, to which everyone was blind, perceiving it only as a series of random events conglomerating at a particular point in time and space, which for the sake of convenience and for want of anything better they called “coincidence.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

Chase started, broke from his contemplation.

“The refrigerator is full of stuff,” Cheryl said, smiling warmly at him. “What would you like?”

“Er—whiskey, with ice. Thanks.”

Cheryl gave a cute little bunny dip. “Coming right up, sir.”

Boris Stanovnik shook his head in a perplexed fashion, though he was half-smiling. “I like your daughter very much, Theo, but I do not understand her. She dictates to life, not life to her.”

Yet another coincidence, Chase was thinking. That he should be sitting in Theo Detrick’s hotel room with Boris Stanovnik, the man he had come all this way to meet. It gave him a prickly feeling on the back of his neck and he was conscious of a vague sense of unreality. But the glass of Scotch in his hand was real enough, and the taste reassuringly familiar.

The big Russian leaned forward, elbows on knees, a glass of beer looking tiny in his clasped hands. “You think what happened is to do with what we were discussing?” he asked Theo.

“Of course it is.” Sitting in the bright halo of light from the corner lamp Theo Detrick’s face seemed darker and craggier than ever. “They warned me officially, through the proper channels, and then thought it necessary to make the warning more direct. More personal.”

“They?” Boris said in amazement. “The conference committee?”

“No, the people acting through the committee.”

“But who
are
‘they’?”

“The State Department. The CIA. Some political lobby or other. I don’t know, Boris. Somebody with something to lose.”

Boris was still frowning. “It’s possible that the man who attacked Cheryl was with your State Department?”

Theo nodded.

“He would make the threat so openly?”

“Sure, that’s nothing,” Cheryl said, making herself comfortable on the foot of the bed nearest the window. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot me in the back and leave a note pinned to my panties. Threats, coercion, blackmail, frame-ups, these people are experts.” She gave a sardonic smile. “America is a democracy, don’t forget. You’re free to threaten anybody you want to.”

Chase was mystified by all this. He said, “That paper of yours must be pure dynamite, Dr. Detrick. What were you intending to speak about?”

“Its title is ‘Back to the Precambrian,’ Dr. Chase,” and when he saw Chase’s blank expression, went on, “ ‘Precambrian’ is the term I have given to describe the reversion of the earth’s atmosphere to what it was two billion years ago when the constituents were principally a highly corrosive mixture of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane. But no oxygen,” he added significantly.

“You believe the earth is reverting to that state?”

“Unfortunately, I do,” Theo said gravely. “I wish I could draw other conclusions from the work I’ve done, but...” He shook his head sadly. “Your work on diatoms, you mean?”

“On the phytoplankton species in general. In the equatorial Pacific, which is normally one of the most productive regions of the ocean, all classes of phytoplankton are in drastic decline. As the oceans provide most of the oxygen requirement there must inevitably come a time when the level of oxygen produced is reduced. Possibly within the next twenty to fifty years. Within a hundred years all the free oxygen at present circulating in the atmosphere will either have been consumed or will be locked up in various oxidation compounds, such as rocks, decaying matter, and so on. When that happens we shall be left with an atmosphere similar in composition to what it was in the Precambrian period, two billion years ago.” He gave a wan smile. “Man is a most arrogant species, Dr. Chase. He forgets that for millions of years this was a sterile planet with a poisonous atmosphere. It was only with the liberation of oxygen into the air that our form of organic life was able to evolve—but the biosphere doesn’t owe us a living. We take it as a God-given right that oxygen is there for us to breathe, when in fact it is an accident, a biological quirk, so to speak, of nature.”