The Black Silent (10 page)

Frick heard himself cursing, then bit his tongue to stop himself. He realized he was becoming incoherent in his rage. His eyes were wide open, but only now was he seeing.

He'd moved down the hall from Anderson's office. For a moment he had to remind himself that he was a person very much in control. He was deliberate. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had been a detective. He was the most formidable industry security man in the country. He could put it all back together.

Christ, his face hurt.

Just then Ranken walked back in and came up the stairs.

"I want to register an objection here," the detective started. "I don't think you should be leading the hunt for Chase and Walther, and I don't think we should be searching the doctor's office or wall safe without a warrant. The whole thing looks bad. We don't even know that Ben Anderson's—"

Ranken stopped as Frick's eyes sank into him. "What exactly are your concerns?"

"I just told you. And this Chase or Sam fellow or whatever? He
apologized
to me on the way back out after spraying me. I mean, I'd like to kick his ass personally, but he wasn't acting like a cold-blooded murderer. Maybe we're talking about manslaughter here."

Ranken fidgeted under Frick's cold stare. "I don't know. Maybe we're pushing this thing too hard. We don't want more people getting killed needlessly."

"Robert Chase made an ass of you. He went right around you and stole the papers that were in the whale."

Ranken didn't respond.

Still holding Ranken with his gaze, Frick swept up the giant tweezers from the surface of Ben's desk. His hand was gloved. "I need to show you something else. It's down in the workshop in the basement."

Fifteen minutes later, Frick walked back to the conference room near his office in the Sanker Main Building. The expansive conference room, which overlooked Friday Harbor from the northern rim, had the best water-view seats in the house.

Frick dialed the phone.

"This is Doris," came the familiar voice from Vegas.

"Garth Frick. Give me Strope."

"Just a minute."

It took her about thirty seconds.

"Give me a number where Strope can call you," she said.

A few moments later, the phone rang.

"You must have a problem."

Typical Strope—already starting to gloat.

"I do," said Frick. "I want them now. Khan, Rafe, and the others, like we talked—ten crude, ten smooth."

"Yeah, yeah. I got eight crude, nine smooth for you. They're on your island as of yesterday. I'll call Khan and—"

"That wasn't our deal," Frick interrupted.

"Take it or leave it. I can't control when guys get sick or leave town. You're only down three. I'll make the price thirty grand less."

"Get me Khan now," Frick said, "and we're good."

"He'll be there within the hour," Strope said. "Two days max on location, right?"

"That's right."

Frick hung up, thinking about the total price. He would need more money. Except for Rafe Black and Khan himself, Strope's people didn't whack anybody as part of the plan.

The deal was that Khan could kill and Rafe could kill, but he had to make a separate deal for that with Khan. The only exception was self-defense and, of course Frick would label any inadvertent gunplay as just that: self-defense.

In addition to the basic fee of $350,000, actual dead bodies were $100,000 per head for the first two and $50,000 thereafter, regardless of who killed them or why. Any dead body that made it into the press added to the fee. He'd have to raise the price with Nash.

Frick shook his head. That meant another call to Sanker Corporation.

"I need more money," Frick opened with Nash. All negotiations regarding the project went through Nash.

"I'm afraid that's not possible," Nash said.

"Making sure Ben Anderson is safe is costly. Finding a kidnap victim is always costly. I don't have time to argue. Either you're with me or I have to resign." Frick reminded himself that it was necessary to maintain the fiction that any kidnapping that might occur would be done by someone else—certainly not Frick and certainly not Sanker.

"We already paid one hundred thousand to protect Ben Anderson."

Frick knew that saying nothing was the quickest way to end this session. He rubbed his sore jaw, but didn't speak. After a long pause he heard a sigh.

"All right," Nash said. "I suppose the one hundred grand was just to get people in place.

How much?"

"One million." Frick said it as if there were no room for negotiation. He wanted plenty for dead bodies, if it came to that. Already there were two—thankfully not on Khan's bill

—and more were likely on the way.

This time the sigh was bigger.

Frick placed his next call to Griffith, one of two men already on Frick's personal payroll. Grif had no formal connection to the sheriff's department except that he'd been arrested plenty in his life.

"Go to Ben Anderson's. Wait there for me. If the fellow Sam or the woman Haley shows up, call me immediately and stay out of sight. Got it?"

"I got it."

Frick slammed the handset down. All the talking had his jaw throbbing and the job had turned bad. His life was on the line and there wasn't enough money in Nash's coffers for that kind of risk.

There was no way this would end cleanly. His only hope of ending it quickly was finding Ben Anderson's secret in the safe—and then finding Ben Anderson.

Sam made his way toward Haley's place by a circuitous route, starting on Beaverton and then cutting down to San Juan Valley.

Haley had stopped crying, but she hadn't said a word for several minutes.

"If you're ready to look at this," he said, handing her a piece of paper, "I found something interesting that Frick and his men never saw."

The message, in Ben's writing, was cryptic:

Together they make more than they consume and they waste very little. We do the
opposite

and we are inefficient to boot. It's the by-products of inefficiency that they avoid and
that we

do not.

There is a reason Mother Nature has not given us the same gift and in due course I will
reveal it. If we take a lesson and get the gift for ourselves, we 'II have a rain check on
individual deaths, save ourselves collectively, and solve the biggest problem of our
discovery.

Perhaps the second phase of "creation," if you will, is for intelligent life to make
choices

that supercede natural selection. Intellectual life wants to preserve
consciousness as an
end in

itself. Now there's a thought. Check where the ocean cleanses itself.

"I think he wrote it for you," Sam said. "Someone he trusts and who knows something about science. At the end he seems to be telling us where to look. Does it mean anything to you?"

Haley thought for a moment. "He's discovered a creature, something amazing, apparently. The 'cleansing' thing rings a bell."

Sam was glad her mind was off Crew's death, for the moment at least. "How so?" he asked.

Haley explained that deep in the sea, oceanologists had discovered that the oceans did have a sort of self-cleansing mechanism. Miles below the surface, fracture lines occurred on the ocean floor, where the earth's crust's tectonic plates rammed each other like slow-motion bumper cars. The collision of the plates created geographic features like the mid-Atlantic ridge. They also created cracks, which allowed seawater to flow down into the earth's crust. Water forced into the crust was superheated to seven hundred degrees or more, then returned, under great pressure, back into the ocean through vents. Over the course of 6 to 8 million years, every molecule of seawater would have traveled, at least once, down into the earth and back out into the oceans.

"Okay," Sam said. "Where would that mean he's leading us?"

"I don't know. Vent sites are found a mile beneath the sea and lower. We won't be seeing them any time soon, so he must either be referring to studies or photos of the fissures or vents. He has plenty of pictures."

"Where?"

Haley took a moment to think about it. "One of his friends was on the team that took the deep-diving submersible
Alvin
down to the Snake Pit. A couple of miles deep, if I recall.

The pictures would be in his house."

"We've got two things to do," Sam said. "Ditch this car, and send Frick some place other than Ben's house. Did Ben have a safe-deposit box or any place a person might logically keep papers?"

"He had a box at the local bank," Haley said.

"We need to talk with Sarah. She'll be frantic about Ben." He thought for a moment.

"Maybe we can tell Sarah to let Frick know about the bank."

Haley grasped the idea immediately. "Okay."

Sam hastily outlined a plan. They would have Sarah call on the phone and ask Frick about Ben's disappearance. When Frick asked the obvious questions, she would tell him about the safe-deposit box. Then she would disappear to ensure her safety.

T
hey were proceeding along the water on the south side of the island while Haley called Sarah on her cell. Sam's own cell rang in the middle of the conversation. It was Ernie, of the FBI.

"I have a new boss and he's not real into meddling in your situation," Ernie began. "I guess he's impressed that Frick's an eyewitness to the murder of Officer Crew Wentworth. I told him that was bunk and that you would murder no one, and that sort of moved him back to center on the thing. Just to let you know the situation, I still can't be real aggressive on this like I could if the boss really believed your side of this. I gotta work with it, you know. I called the state police and it's a damn holiday, but they will get an assistant attorney general, they say. By Monday they'll be in full swing. They've called deputies on the island that they know and they say you killed Wentworth. And uh . . ."

"What?"

"You met my boss once in New York," Ernie said. "I guess you were trying to get some movement by the bureau on something. Anyway, you'd recall him as Special Agent Arnold Cross."

"Say no more. I understand," Sam said. "Does he still go around with a telephone pole up his alimentary canal?"

"Pretty much. And his daddy is a senator, so that doesn't hurt. If you were still in business, you'd be using 'Big Brain,' I suspect."

"I suspect you're right," Sam said. Ernie was talking about a supercomputer that Sam had used frequently in his previous life.

"So I, ah," Ernie's voice went quieter, "sort of ignored the boss . . . insubordination really . . . and got Grogg on a conference call. He connected to Big Brain remotely and we did a lot of checking real fast."

"I'm impressed," Sam said, smiling for the first time since this ordeal began. "And grateful." For a moment the sun burst through the clouds.

"It seems that Sanker Corp is in a merger deal with American Bayou Technologies,"

said Ernie. "They're both heavyweights, and the deal started friendly, but it couldn't stay that way because they're both predatory. Management of one won't live with the management of the other. Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose. Up until recently, Sanker thought they were certain to win. Maybe American Bayou knew something Sanker didn't. Now Sanker desperately needs a bump up in its stock price.

Stock price will decide who ends up with the controlling interest in the conglomerate.

Does anything you're dealing with have the potential to affect Sanker's stock price?"

"Yes. To say the least. In fact, one press release could do it." Sam gave Ernie a thumbnail description of the possible range and impact of Ben's work. "Of course, we don't know if this 'fountain of youth' discovery is all that potent. Or even real," he added.

"But just a good story would do it," Ernie completed the thought. "I get it. I wish I could call Cross on this, but, of course, I can't, because officially I don't know what you just told me, about the fountain of youth-thing. We never had this call. Somehow, though, I'll find a way to run across the information, and when I do, then I'll tell him."

"You're a good man, Ernie. You make me feel lucky."

"I'm touched by your compliment."

"Good. I have one more favor."

"Uh-oh. With you it's always the second favor that costs me."

Sam asked Haley if she had a home fax; fortunately, she did.

"Please fax me the memo about Frick."

"Are you out of your mind? That's FBI property."

"It could be critical in trying to bring in the Washington State Police."

In the long silence that followed, Sam could sense Ernie's stress.

"I must be losing my mind."

"Thanks, Ernie. I'll be careful with it. I wish I had a choice, but they want to put me in jail. We do have a dead officer."

Haley had ended her call with Sarah, so Sam filled her in.

"Sanker is merging with American Bayou, as you know."

"I don't really understand it."

"It means the strongest guy wins. The old man and all his henchmen could completely lose control of Sanker because their stock price tanked."

"When I told the truth about my new strain of sea grass, they screamed about the stock price. I just didn't know it was such a big deal for Sanker."

"They tell me the work you did was brilliant, coming up with the new strain of sea grass. What all does it do that's good?"

"Makes cheap protein. Feeds people. Has a lot of pharmaceutical applications like so many things from the sea. Immune-system drugs." Haley sighed as if wistfully remembering when she was at the height of her glory. "The issue was that the sea grass is host to a whole little universe of life. When I genetically altered it, you know, you change the house, you could change the inhabitants. I wasn't saying we couldn't use it, for God's sake. I'm not like one of these nuts who says we can't use genetically improved corn. I said we need to study it before going hog-wild on production. The seaweed seemed to be functioning differently after the genetic change. The single-celled organisms weren't acting the same. I wanted time to study it. Evidently Sanker was desperate about their stock price and wanted a big announcement."