Overfall (6 page)

“Only in the movies.”

Jason lay on his desk, facing the ceiling, the fear still there. Always there. Every morning he woke and knew that there was something wrong and that it would not go away.

When he smelled breakfast cooking and opened his eyes to look from the window by the bed, he might try to find something bright, perhaps the sunlight as described by a bard who knew the look of a tree with its tufts of moss-life and the speckling of bark, the sap in the white wood, the bursting of crinkled green shoots, the tireless withering of old leaves before the new. But each time Jason found the bright it was bounded by shadows, dark spots in the crooks of the branches. The darkness ate at him, turned his stomach sour even before he rose. Maybe a bird would flit by, but he knew it would die in winter with little things crawling over its skin, rotting it, smelling like yesterday’s fish. Wind harbored soulless ghosts, the mountain was cruel, and everything on it died, and nothing lived that hadn’t risen from the ashes of another’s death.

Fear lived in his chest as if a barbed hook were stuck fast in the wall of his gullet He couldn’t swallow his spit, let alone sing, without knowing the fear.

They said that without hope you die, and he realized his hope was so dim it barely lit the back rooms of his conscious thought. It helped being naked, especially when he got his massage. Before he picked up a three-ring notebook and walked over to the
Principia Mathematica,
he sat on the floor and stripped himself of every stitch of clothing. It felt better, but only a little.

Roberto walked in through the kitchen and startled him.

“Relax, Jason. Everything is fine.”

“I understood it was a plaything.”

“Oh, no, Jason, you wondered.” He punched Jason gently in the shoulder. “You always wonder and you never know for sure, do you? But it’s at the bottom of Heron Bay now. Right now I need you to tell me where the CD is. You had two CD-ROMs, the regular and the backup. Did you give the backup to Anna?”

“No. It’s around. If the Nannites didn’t take it we’ll find it.”

“There are no Nannites. You know that. Now where is the CD?”

Jason did not reply.

“We’re counting on you,” Roberto said before he turned around and left the room.

Jason detested those words. He turned back to his office. Down both sides of the room ran bookshelves lined with math treatises. Set apart from its companion volumes, in the center, was Bertrand Russell’s five-volume work,
Principia Mathematica.
It was a signed edition. Also set apart in their own special slot were Einstein’s initial publications, papers really, on the general theory of relativity.

Most of his library comprised texts on quantum mechanics and quantum math.

There were two photographs in his office, one of Anna, another of his daughter, Grady. Memories of his life before moving to this island were disturbing. Memories of his life before France were even more disturbing, and hence seemed to have washed away, like sand castles on an incoming tide. He had had several girlfriends, but only one of note, and she had borne him a daughter when he was a nineteen-year-old prodigy at Georgia Tech and about to transfer to MIT.

There had been a court order before he went to France to work for Grace Technologies, and he was not able to keep his daughter. Grady’s mother had wanted no part of him. Although she had given the girl her own last name, Lasky, Grady so despised her mother that upon turning eighteen she had changed it to Wade. Jason knew that his daughter cared little for him either, but he wasn’t sure how he had come to that realization.

The picture of Grady had come from Anna; without it he wouldn’t know his daughter if he met her on the street. But he thought about her, and he used to dream that one day he might shake the Nannites and go find her. Now such a thing seemed impossible—it would be dangerous for Grady—and he wanted more than anything to believe that she was safe. Anna, for whatever reason, wouldn’t talk about Grady, so he let his daughter rest as a picture on his side table.

There was a phrase that he had heard somewhere about a millstone around the neck. Life was becoming like that, a steady weight of worry and fear. Any little thing could seize his mind. Only one small focus for his hope had not yet been extinguished. He had hacked his way into the Kuching sections of the Grace computers. It had taken him months of playing to breach the firewalls.

Within the Kuching laboratory files he had discovered encrypted file folders. He did not have the software to break the code, although slowly but surely he was developing software that might do the job. But it could take years. Although he couldn’t open the files, he had developed a program that would download them. Those files were on the CD he had given Anna, and they might hold secrets of the Nannites. Curious minds would not rest until they opened them. Of that he was certain.

In forty minutes Nutka would give him his massage and there would be some respite to his misery.

Inevitably, his temper had risen like a cobra from its basket. Chellis erupted.

“Roberto is a disaster. Now we’ve got to bring Gaudet in. I don’t give a damn what it costs. Roberto’s foul-ups will cost us more. He’s gotten Jason to sink a sailboat with a rocket launcher. A rocket launcher, for God’s sake! What’ll be next? If this keeps up, Jason will end up in a sanitarium. And if that happens, it’s the end of some big programs for us.”

“You are right to use Gaudet for this one,” Benoit said. “Would you like me to get him?”

“I don’t like it that the bastard is becoming a habit. But you better do it now.”

“Thank you again,” Anna said. “I’m not sure I could have made my way to this sleeping bag.”

“You might have, had you paddled in the right direction. You are resolute and strong.”

“Thank you. That’s a better compliment than most I get.”

“They tell you you’re beautiful?”

“Incessantly.”

She was fading fast, and he waited to see if another sentence would come. It didn’t. His hand was on her shoulder. She reached up and patted it before the final deep breath that sent her into sleep.

Once the cabin started to warm, things seemed less desperate. Sam’s old world was rapidly coming back and with it the old habits. He would have paid a couple grand for a smoke.

The problem was that Anna had a jump on his imagination. She was beside him, nearly in his bed. Being close to her and feeling her body sleep made for a sexy coziness.

If Sam was anything, the old Sam or the newly emerging version, he was in control. Cool. Objective. This unilateral interest on his part that he thought might be forming would not be cool, and that was the first problem. The second was that she was a celebrity, and he could never be with a celebrity again. It was one of the few absolutes in his life.

In the darkness he could see the barest outline of Anna’s head. Finally she had uncoiled her body, stretching out on the floor, but he was still spooning her back in an attempt to stop her shivering. It seemed that the swim in the cold water had taken hold.

He could still smell the shampoo odor in her hair, like oranges, and a slight salt smell mixed with her natural scent—all of it focused his mind like a rifle sight before his eye. Her butt was tight but nicely curved and her shoulders were squared. Made extraordinary by the novelty, the tactile sensation of his thighs touching hers even through the bags, his chest against her back, was good. It put a craving in him.

It was odd about women and what made them attractive. It was never a single thing. But Anna had some freckles on her back that made her seem less a woman on the marquee and more a woman in his bed. He had noticed them in the sailboat before she did the move with her foot and shut the cabin door. Right now he wanted to run his fingers over the skin, contemplate the attraction, and forget that she irritated the hell out of him.

With his nose in Anna’s hair, he put his mind to drifting—some would call it meditation—and his body followed suit. Cutting off the odor of her was the last effort. After several minutes he concluded that the scent of her was more difficult to quell than the pain of cold. Smell was one of the earliest and most primal senses of the mammalian brain with a very direct neural pathway to the cerebral cortex. There was no ignoring her and there was no leaving her because she needed the warmth. Unless he could sleep, he would live with the gentle torture of his own desire.

“You’re not sleeping,” she said.

Scrambling out of bed in the dark, he moved near the stove, which was draped with their clothes and now thankfully warm. He went back to a cupboard where he’d seen a small jar of moldy salmon eggs. The stink disintegrated any remembrance of the Anna smell. With an old rag he cleaned out the slimy contents, put two candles in the jar, and placed them on the stove to melt.

“If you plan to sneak off,” she said, rolling onto her back, “perhaps you could let me know.”

Sam allowed himself a smile. “I’ve got to coat these wooden matches in wax. We’ll need them.”

“You need to sleep if we’re going to run.”

“This cabin isn’t that far from the inlet and there is smoke. The scent could carry.”

“I don’t know anybody over on Windham except Nutka that knows about this place.”

“We can stay awhile.”

“Promise me you’ll let me buy you a new boat and that you’ll keep quiet about this.”

“Nobody kills Harry and walks; they don’t blow up my boat without hearing from me.”

“Please help me.”

“Tell me what we’re running from.”

She didn’t answer, and he hoped she would sleep. Although he was used to celebrities in general, this one at this time was a pain in the ass. The last thing he needed was somebody to take care of, a mission—especially when the mission involved a strong-willed actress who did what she damn well pleased. He wanted a drink in the way he used to want a drink. The way it was after his son died.

The mind was a peculiar thing, capable of rebuilding and renewing itself without necessarily growing a lot of new cells, just new pathways through the old cells. With some patience and a fair degree of effort, he had been reorganizing his approach to living. Life had become well ordered with his return to his roots.

One part of his beginnings involved his father, a man who had made nature a challenge and man a conqueror. It was a one-dimensional worldview that Sam could never fully understand, much less put a name to.

All that had changed when Sam found his mother and his grandfather, Stalking Bear. Until his death, his grandfather had been his pipeline to his heritage; these days it was his mother and Kier, his cousin. Sam saw himself as the strangest of paradoxes: fascinated and nourished by the old of the Tilok past, but made rich, and by some calculations successful, in the technology-driven world of supersleuthing. Although he retained only remnants of his professional life, it was that life that had bought him his freedom in more ways than one. Of course it had also bought him his son’s death. Now, apart from his involvement with the Tilok, his days were mostly workouts and the usual sailing routine of reading, hikes, maybe a little flirtation with the tourist ladies, and exploration of ancient native sites and landmarks throughout the British Columbia coast and Vancouver Island.

It had been months since the last time he had seriously wanted a drink. The good in his old personality, the keen instinct, the incredible memory, his ability to organize had all remained. But the cravings and the restlessness, the need for alternate kicks of booze and adrenaline had finally left him. Before the moment he decided to go pull Anna from a rock, skydiving or rock climbing and other artificially created risk was all he needed. An annual near-death experience wasn’t a requisite for life.

But from the moment this woman had fallen into his world, he felt like a guy with something big to do.

He tried to tell himself that his feelings for Suzanne, the only major love of his life, were like the populist love for Kennedy that may have grown considerably once the president was dead and gone forever. Nevertheless Sam persisted in his nearly sacred feelings toward the memory of Suzanne. Further complexity came when he tried to unravel Suzanne’s and his son’s deaths. Maybe to his poor mind, honoring his son somehow went hand-in-hand with preserving his feelings for Suzanne, for whom his son had died.

He looked at Anna as she slept.

Occasionally, Sam became possessed of an urge to uninhibited, screaming copulation, distinguishable from the urge to make love, but during the year since Suzanne’s death there had been only an occasional warm body from women who wanted a bump in the night before Sam sailed on. As to serious romance, there hadn’t been a whiff.

Of course when he sat under a clear night sky with chocolate-covered coffee beans to clear his mind, and the grandeur of the firmament to bring out the truth, he realized that he hadn’t a clue how he could have managed with Suzanne’s celebrity status—even assuming he could have found something in the humdrum of glitz that might have saved them from the usual unhappy end.

Sam had always stayed cool when the fires of romance would have taken lesser men to the altar. His father had been the ultimate Mr. Cool, never getting excited—not even about his own death, because he ended his life so unobtrusively. It could also be said that he didn’t give a damn about Sam’s life or he would have stuck around to watch. Sam recognized the bitterness in himself, but he considered his feelings about his father to be realistic, even inevitable. Of the three souls that he might have loved, only his mother still lived, and he loved her very much.