Overfall (5 page)

Chellis only visited every couple of months, and he appreciated that with Jacques running the facility more frequent visits weren’t necessary. Benoit Moreau, his assistant and his mistress, came a little more frequently. Marie, Chellis’s wife, didn’t care for Malaysia, and although, for appearances, he did not like traveling alone with Benoit, he would not be without a woman. That was the main reason he’d assigned Benoit to monitor Kuching. She had been his assistant for eight years and his mistress for seven of them, and therefore only occasionally resided in Kuching. Chellis’s life was further complicated by that fact that Benoit was Marie’s sister.

This trip he had Benoit meeting with the heads of each department to obtain research summaries and to keep her away from the macaques demonstration.

“You don’t think the aerosol is ready yet, even if we just limit ourselves to a phase-one paranoia continuum.”

“Not quite.”

“If we want only to achieve phase one on Samir with a simple paranoid continuum, do we need to put him to sleep?”

“Yes.”

“But you know the effect?”

“We’ll get the receptors, but the magnitude of the effect isn’t completely dear. It’s a question of how well the gene expression comes through, which depends primarily on the volume of vector particles. And frankly, the human will has incredible powers of adaptation. The mind with all its abilities is created by an odd composite of neuronal activity. The neurons, billions of them working together, trillions of interconnections create consciousness, but they are not consciousness. People can literally sometimes think their way or learn their way out of a change in physiology. Maybe we could say that training or thinking creates physiology. In the end physiology wins.”

“So if I go ahead with my little plan, we don’t know exactly how good the result will be on Samir?”

“That’s right.”

“But he will be nervous.”

“Yes. It would be shocking if he weren’t at least somewhat paranoid. Especially for the first few months.”

“But not completely crazy. And we alone can provide him relief.”

“It should make him a lot more manageable. We will see. You know I can guarantee nothing. We are reasonably sure but we don’t have the controls, and the volume for a human-sized mammal remains a question.”

“I know. I know. But let’s do something.”

“Imagine what you could do to a head of state, or an entire parliament ...”

Chellis didn’t mind Jacques’s probing; he wasn’t going to get anywhere with it.

“Is the gas chamber foolproof?”

“You must get him placed between the nozzles. If you don’t we’ll have to try again on the way back, maybe use force and rely on memory blockers.”

“Samir should be here any moment; I need to get to my office.”

“You could use mine,” Jacques said.

“No. No. I don’t need to impress this man.”

When Samir entered Chellis’s office, Chellis stood and greeted him in quiet tones. Samir was a big man, thick like a wrestler with glasses like Coke bottles, and an aura of confidence that was palpable. They had met for the first time fifteen years earlier, and since then had actually met face-to-face on perhaps a dozen occasions. They had become not so much friends or acquaintances as uneasy joint venturers, each keenly aware at any given moment of what the other might hold for him.

“Well,” Chellis said, interrupting the mutual pleasantries. “I know you’re a busy man and would no doubt like to get on with business.”

“I’m not like the Orientals who require an hour’s socializing before getting down to work,” Samir said, “but I do need to see what you’re developing so I can begin thinking about how we might employ it.”

“I’d like to ask that only you view the demonstration. It’s top secret.”

Samir hesitated but was unreadable. “My men can wait outside the door?”

“Of the molecular biology wing.”

Samir nodded, clearly not pleased but amenable. Weapons carried by Samir’s men were hidden only in a crude fashion. There were obvious lumps in their clothes.

They went down long halls, and finally emerged into the main molecular biology lab, but this time Chellis led him to a different door. It was metal and heavy.

“What is this?” Samir asked.

“We go through an air lock. An anticontamination measure.”

They walked to a second heavy metal door that said:

AIR LOCK. CLEAN ROOM.

Chellis removed a plastic card and inserted it into a shiny stainless box. As if to ease Samir’s mind, he explained:

“We have to keep out foreign bacteria. Ordinarily we wouldn’t traipse through with street shoes on, but today it’s okay.”

With a sucking sound the heavy door opened to reveal a three-meter-by-five-meter chamberlike area with all-metal walls and to the left, hanging on the wall, heavy white suits looking rather like astronaut garb. They approached an even more massive door. Chellis determined that Samir was perfectly placed between the two gas nozzles.

Chellis took a deep breath and held it. A whirring could be heard as the sliding door began closing behind them. There was a loud pop and rushing gas. Samir, startled, took a breath, then began to look wildly about, gasping. Within ten seconds he began to stagger and to lose motor control. Chellis grabbed his own throat and swayed as if drunk, turning to look in Samir’s alarm-filled eyes as he fell to the floor. Chellis stepped back to the door through which they had come. A crack remained to allow his exit; then the door closed. By the time Samir’s eyes had rolled back in his head, Chellis was outside the chamber with the door closed.

Two hours later Chellis, as was his custom when under stress, went on a ten-minute screaming tirade. Jacques, appearing pale, began to stare down at his shoes, and Chellis realized that he was repeating himself badly. “You never said he would get uncontrollably angry.” Jacques blinked his irritation but said nothing. “Answer me! I had Samir Aziz in the lab. We gassed him. How could you screw this up?”

“There is no indication that we screwed anything up. He is angry. He probably always gets mad when he feels powerless. Mad is different from aggressive. Aggressive means killing people; it comes from phase two, and he received no phase-two-vector particles. No receptors for those areas of the brain. You watch, the fear will increase, but he won’t become more hostile or aggressive. When you have had a chance to introduce him to a masseuse, the massage oil will work perfectly. He will calm himself temporarily with each introduction of the hormone. More than that, he will crave it once he tries it.”

At that moment Benoit arrived with Jacques’s right-hand man, a bearded fellow with a round face and stomach. He stood back and nodded toward Chellis, who looked at Benoit as she put a hand on Chellis’s arm.

“I am sorry. I wondered if I might interrupt.”

“I want it working,” Chellis said, no longer yelling but ignoring Benoit. “I’m going to see him in a few hours and he’s mad as hell.”

Chellis escorted Benoit down the hall, knowing he should not have alluded to the Samir situation in her presence. He kept her out of such things.

It was a short walk to her comfortable six-bedroom home, a small mansion set carefully at the jungle’s edge with lush gardens and a ten-foot brick wall to ensure privacy. Benoit held his arm as they came up the walk and he nodded at the servants whose names he could never remember. Benoit seemed to know them all. It bothered him that she held his arm, as it gave the appearance of impropriety.

In the study he found a bottle of Glenlivet. After the first sip he turned his attention to Benoit. She was dark-haired and with the same stark-white unblemished skin as her sister Marie, his wife, but with large, doelike, brown eyes. She was slightly more squared in the shoulders than Marie, which he liked, and unlike Marie she was petite in the torso with a small bust.

Two years younger than Marie, Benoit looked more like five years her junior; at forty-one she looked to be in her early thirties. While Marie was a witty observer, an arranger of things, passively inviting sexually, and generally warm to everybody, Benoit was calculating and aggressively sexual, a small tigress with a killer instinct. In his most private thoughts it seemed to Chellis that they were two halves of a marvelous whole: sweet and succulent but tart and nourishing; luxurious and classy but practical and gritty. Where Marie was sexual crème brûlée, Benoit held the hot tang of his favorite chutney. Together they had it all, and which of them he wanted in his bed depended on whether he wanted to rhapsodize or sweat.

He made sure the shades were drawn and the door locked. Although he was still not quite in the mood, he gave Benoit a long, slow kiss, very carefully, with enough of his tongue to warm the heart but not so much as to move over the line to disrespect. If he hadn’t made it right, she would be a bitch for a while. It was one of the few concessions he made to another person playing with his carefully spun reality. Never would he tolerate diffidence from a man, but the two women in his life were different.

Benoit gave him a good smile. She was pampering him. And he knew it was because she had a strong opinion about Jacques and his value and she felt the need to manipulate his mood any way she could.

“It will be fine. Give it time and it will work just like it did with Jason. You know I would never tell you your business, but it strikes me that Jacques is very capable. Perhaps we should not unfairly blame him.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“DuShane, darling. I know what you tried with Samir.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I snooped in your briefcase on the jet when you went to sleep.”

“There was nothing in my briefcase.”

“There was a planned experiment for this afternoon on a macaque with a body weight of 240 pounds.”

“Maybe a young gorilla.”

“Okay.”

“You knew it was Samir Aziz?”

“Of course.”

“Just how did you know?”

“Jacques’s secretary booked a hotel reservation for him. He weighs about 240 pounds. We don’t have any young gorillas. They don’t stay in hotels.”

The phone rang.

Even in Kuching there was a screening computer on his phone system that would not allow a call unless the computer recognized the phone number of the caller or unless the caller knew a code. He picked up the phone.

“Yes.”

It was Roberto, insisting that Chellis hear the story of Anna Wade’s tumble into the saltwater rapids. Chellis could feel himself being dragged into something and he didn’t like it.

“Are you certain the scrambler is on?”

“Yes, we checked.”

Roberto told the story twice, repeating each and every detail and taxing Chellis’s patience.

“Get the CD back or make sure it’s gone for good.” Chellis interrupted when Roberto tried to respond. “If she had an accident, that would be ...”

“Yes, an accident,” Roberto said.

“And don’t forget who you are dealing with here. Even in Canada this won’t go away quickly if something else happens to her.”

“The currents here are fierce.”

Immediately after he hung up Chellis knew he had made a mistake. This was happening too fast. He shouldn’t be involved directly with this.

While fidgeting for the want of another smoke and on the verge of surrendering to Anna temporarily, Sam heard the splash—a body hitting the water? He ran to the stateroom and tried the door. Locked.

Damn it. She had climbed out of the hatch.

Harry barked and ran to the companionway. Sam jumped over Harry and hit the third stair and one other before making the top. He dashed through the wheelhouse and made the aft deck in three strides.

No rubber boat.

“It leaks!” he shouted. “Come back. It’s dangerous.”

“Help me.” In the wind he heard nothing more. With only a piece of his rudder it would be difficult to drive the boat after her and there was no time to pull anchor or don a dry suit. He had seconds to decide. He could feel himself drawn into the old life as surely as his boat had been drawn into that wave. His mind sat on a high wire, contemplating the possible opposing forces, the risk of falling and losing what little peace he had left. His son was dead. His hero days were over. On the other hand, dying might just be easier than living.

“Damn her.”

Reaching under a hinged seat, he grabbed a life jacket. For a second he rummaged around until he found a large waterproof light that he snapped to a ring on the jacket. Then he thought about the drag and figured he could make shore without the jacket, so he snapped the light to a belt loop instead. He had to move fast and catch her before she got headed in the wrong direction. If she missed the point, about two hundred yards off, she would no doubt drown. Dumb woman.

Harry whined.

He needed waterproof matches. She was getting too far away. Taking off his topsiders, he tied the rawhide laces into his belt loops so he could swim with bare feet. “Stay, Harry.” Then he dived neatly over the lifelines and as his head emerged, gasped from the frigid water. He forced himself to focus, creating a perfect rhythm to his stroke that melded with his breathing, losing himself in motion. He imagined himself in a pool and thought of his mind as a warm light that retreated deep within. Soon the cold was far away. Clouds drifted, but he was sure he found the North Star and kept it a bit to his right.

Every third stroke he saw the trees of the ridge against the stars and kept himself straight. After a time he slowed to hear the splashes of her paddle, and with the thought of it came the cold, driven away only by reclaiming the rhythm. The current was running enough that he knew they would be swept up Heron Bay. It appeared she would miss the point. He had to catch her. Once more the barely audible splash of her stroke drew him on and once more the cold invaded his mind. He was a powerful swimmer in superb shape. Steadily he gained until he saw her—nearly sunk.

“Get out. It leaks. You’re barely moving. Wrong direction.”

“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Tie your shoelaces to your belt.”

She also swam well. It took him minutes to guide them to the point and the shore. It was too far even to think about getting her to swim back. His foot touched bottom and he grabbed her around the waist. She was very weak from two major dunkings in the frigid water. The last fifty feet he carried her. On dry land he put her down and they put on their shoes.

“Come on,” she said, wobbly but obviously determined to go someplace. He caught her and grabbed her shoulder.

She turned.

“What are you—” he began.

“Took you a while,” she said through ragged breaths. Turning back toward the trees, she kept going.

He followed. “You could have killed yourself.”

“Thanks to you once again, I didn’t, though, did I?”

“What the hell does that mean? You are one frustrating—”

“Frustrating what?”

“Just how were you gonna keep from freezing to death?”

“That was your department.”

“What made you think I’d be stupid enough to follow you?”

Astounded at her grit, he trudged with her down the beach next to the trees. He had no dry matches, no smokes, and he would have to make a fire.

“There’s a cabin inland over on Greene’s Bay,” she said. “It’s almost two miles. We can break in.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it a couple days ago. Jason and I crossed over to Sonoma with Nutka and went for a walk. She’s a native.”

He filed away the names for future consideration. “Are we looking for a trail?” He snapped on the waterproof light.

“Turn it off!” she said. “Wait until we’re out of sight of the Windham Island shore.”

“Who’s on the Windham shore?”

“If we walk along this beach there is a tiny creek. I’ll recognize it. If we go up the channel about three-quarters of a mile, we’ll come to this concrete box with a pump at a spring with a plastic pipe going into it. We follow the pipe.”

“They have a generator?”

“I guess they must. They have a pump.”

Just then an eerie rushing sound echoed across the channel. He turned toward the boat as it erupted in a ball of fire.

“You can thank me later,” she said.

“You should have said something.”

Neither spoke for a moment as they stood with the heat of adrenaline moving through their bodies.

“Give me a break,” she said. “You weren’t listening.”

“You weren’t talking.”

“Why are we arguing? You would have been dead.”

“I liked the damned boat,” he said. “And I loved the dog.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Not as sorry as the guy with the rocket launcher.”

Within two minutes the boat was gone to the bottom.

“Who did it?”

“We’ll discuss it. I’ll make everything right. Better boat, everything.”

“You can’t give me what I lost!”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know they’d do this.”

“Do they have a boat?”

“Yes.”

The words weren’t out of her mouth before they heard the sound of whirling rotors, the thump of metal beating air, and saw a brilliant light skimming the water.

“Do they have a chopper?”

“They have one. I didn’t know it was here now.”

“So you don’t know if the chopper is friend or foe.”

“I don’t know who is friend or foe.”

“Move,” he said in a harsh whisper as they ran up the beach and into the trees.

For a moment they watched as the brilliant beam of an incandescent light skated over the wind-crinkled black surface to the spot where the boat had been lying at anchor. Like a mad mosquito the copter searched the area.

He noticed that in addition to the shaking, Anna was starting to lose her balance.

“So now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

She stood silent, with her teeth chattering while she rubbed her arms.

“Let’s go,” he said, frustrated that she still wasn’t talking.

Until they heard the copter leave they walked just inside the trees with no light. By the time they found the creek, they were turning blue around the lips and she was shaking to the point that speech was difficult. He had been similarly cold before and had a few layers of muscle to help. Anna had very little womanly fat. If she was right about the distance, they had a long way to go.

They clawed their way through low-hanging branches and walked hard for what seemed like nearly half an hour until they found the spring. As she had said, the water pipe led right to the cabin some fifteen hundred yards overland on a small saltwater bay. In the circle of the flashlight the board siding was weathered gray but appeared intact. The tarpaper roof looked in good repair. On the door there was a sizable padlock and there were shutters over the windows.

“How do we get in?” She slurred her words as if drunk. Any minute he was afraid she would fall over and go permanently to sleep. He had to get her warm fast.

“How were you going to get in?” he asked.

“I was going to let you figure it out.”

Surveying the door, he realized that ramming it with his shoulder would likely break his collarbone if they had a hearty bolt on the inside. Everything about the place seemed pretty beefy; he supposed they’d have a door latch to match. Maybe even a crossbar.

“And how the hell did you know I would be here?” he said, fumbling with a window sash.

“You didn’t let me drown the first time.”

“Don’t tempt me again.”

She was almost smiling when she patted him on the shoulder and kissed his cheek.

On the second window, he found enough purchase to yank it open. After that it was simply a matter of breaking the window and unlocking it. They both crawled through the open window and found a spartan cabin interior.

“Aim the light at the wall. And if you plan to leave before I get back, let me know.”

“I love you for saving me. But otherwise go to hell.”

“It’d be a lot warmer.”

Sam unbolted the door and went out front. With the shutters and door closed, only the tiniest crack of light shone through at one window. It was easily fixed by propping a discarded board. Satisfied, he went back into the cabin and took a more careful look around. It was lined with some type of pressed board that retained a golden brown mottled surface. There were two hanging lights with frosted glass shades. The floor was painted concrete. When the place was occupied there would be a generator to run the meager electrical service, the few lights, and the water pump. On the lone table sat a gas lantern. They verified that the place had no food or matches.

“Search for lighters, blankets, matches, and clothes,” Sam muttered. There was an old woodstove and a little kindling beside some hardwood logs. They rifled through more cupboards and drawers, desperate to find matches. She started to sit down.

“No.” Sam stopped her and made her lean against the wall. “You can’t go to sleep. You’ll die on me. And then there would be a police report and they’d want my last name.” He started rummaging through cabinets. Although she was barely able to move, he watched her emulating him, trying to help. In a closet they found two threadbare sleeping bags, a folded-up rusty three-burner Coleman stove that looked about twenty years old, and a blanket worn thin and barely green, with a few holes and sun-faded with age.

“I thought, given the antenna outside, that there would be a radio in here,” she said.

“Well, there isn’t.”

“We need to get you a new boat and we need to get back to civilization.”

“I’ve got to find the men who sunk my home.”

“On the other end of this island ... someone is building. An oyster farm, I think.”

“It’s not on the
chart. Even if you’re right, it must be at least four miles down this island through a brush-filled forest.”

“We can go in the morning. First thing.”

It was about forty-two degrees, near as he could guess.

“Dry off and crawl into the bag,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Take care of things.”

“Turn off the light,” she said.

“In just a minute.” He unfolded the Coleman stove. “Yes!” he said, finding a box of wooden matches. She turned her back. He grabbed the paper towels, put them beside her, and doused the light. Quickly he stripped and dried off. He felt for his sleeping bag.

“I’m in,” she said.

Sam crawled into his and could detect only a slight barrier to the cold. It had been a lightweight bag maybe five years ago. Now it wasn’t worthy of the name.

“This won’t work.” Sam turned on the light. He went to the woodstove, took the small amount of remaining kindling, and placed it on a loose wad of paper towels. It burned nicely; he added more kindling. When it flamed he added a thick piece of branch. He was breathing hard and shaking slightly, but at least there was warmth on the palms of his hands. The sleeping bag over his shoulders wasn’t doing him much good. Soon the branch had ignited and he added a larger piece of wood, leaving the stove door ajar for maximum draft. Anna hopped over in her bag and sat down against the stove. After the flame was established, Sam went out in front of the cabin and studied the stovepipe. There was no visible light, nor were there sparks. Uneasy, but satisfied that the fire was not a dead giveaway, he went back inside.

He lay on his back next to the stove with the bag over him, put his hands on the floor, and raised his abdomen so that his body was arched with only his feet and hands touching the Doug-fir planks. He began taking deep breaths.

“That’s a very good
Ûrdhva Dhanura.”

“So you do yoga too. It’s hard to be original anymore.”

“Control the breathing, slow the heart, the body will warm from the quiet exertion. Defeats the cold. I know what you’re trying, but if you’re that good I’ll be jealous, and you probably aren’t that good, so either way let’s huddle close to the stove.”

“Yoga is a way to stretch. I think it’s nothing more.”

After a full minute of stretching he crawled into his bag and they sat close.

“I’m still freezing,” she said.

“We could put one bag inside the other, then wrap you in a blanket and both get in.”