“Which police?” Parker asked.
Important point, Romanus thought. “The Australian Federal Police.”
Parker seemed to consider this. While he did so, Somchai took the opportunity to press harder on the blood vessels in Romanus’s neck. The knife blade felt like a thin, hot wire.
“Don’t be crazy,” he gasped. “The cops know I’m coming here. I don’t owe Otto money—”
“Shut up,” Parker said.
The blade moved quickly. Romanus realized he was slipping away, but he was helpless to do anything about it.
“There’s somebody else in the Cruiser!” Tom whispered. “Look!” He handed the binoculars to Diana, who could just make out a third figure.
She and the boys continued to walk forward cautiously, one foot in front of the other, over the rough ground. This is how to get bitten by a snake, Diana thought. There were tiger snakes around the lake, and the ground was still warm enough for them to be lying about. Ahead lay Sonja’s house, with all its lights on, looking as gay as a party. She stopped and lifted the daytime glasses to her eyes, trying to see inside. “Hey!” she said. “They’re packing up!”
Inside the house, several figures were moving in and out of the main room, putting things into cardboard boxes. A long table was set up for dinner close to the glass doors on the veranda.
Diana watched the Land Cruiser disappear among the bushes of Sonja’s garden. Parker ran upstairs to the house and downstairs again a few minutes later. Then, after a while, he and another man went inside the house. “There weren’t three, there were only two in the Cruiser.” Diana frowned. She squinted through the night binoculars again and saw that the man walking behind Parker was not the man who had arrived in the air taxi, nor was he one of the people she had observed arriving at U-1 that morning. His shoulder-length hair was colored green by the night sights. Inside the house, people stopped work and gathered around the dining table. She counted them: Sonja and five men, including Parker and the one with long hair. The others sat at the table while Parker appeared to make a speech, a champagne bottle in his hand. There was a burst of laughter when he finished talking. He poured each person a drink.
“They’re going to toast something,” Diana said.
“I’d like some toast,” Tom murmured.
“There’s only sandwiches,” Billy said.
Diana smiled. “We’ll go back to the van and eat.”
She outlined her plan: The boys were to take turns keeping watch with the night binoculars while she went to the house. Every hour, she would come out of the garden and stand just left of the lamp that marked the junction between the spur road to Sonja’s house and the road to the airfield, and she’d wave to them. If she did not appear or did not wave, Billy was to drive the van through the gate, across the paddocks, onto the road, and straight up to headquarters. “Honk the horn,” she said. “Make a noise. They’ve got guards up at the labs and around the condos. Say I’ve broken into U-1.”
“I haven’t got a driver’s license,” Billy said. “I’ll get in trouble.” Diana put her hands around his soft little neck, as if to strangle him.
“If I blow my whistle,” she said, “it means I’m in trouble and you’re to drive straight to headquarters.”
The boys kept watch on the house while she made up a bed in the back of the van. Despite the care she took in hosing it out daily, the sharp smell of bird dung still hung about. As soon as Tom climbed in and lay down, he wailed, “It stinks!” She had to move the bed outside.
It was ten o’clock by the time he was settled. Fifty meters away, Diana set up a second bed, for Billy, on a part of the flying ground from which there was a clear view of Sonja’s garden. Diana had brought an alarm clock, which she set at one minute to eleven. When the alarm rang, Billy had to sit up and look through the night sights to see her waving. Then he had to reset the alarm clock for one minute to midnight. At 1:00 A.M., if she was still there and waving, he was to swap places with his younger brother.
Billy had told her that the door to U-1 was standing open the night he went in; he had not bothered to look at its lock. Diana suspected that it was likely to be a pin-number device, which she would have no hope of opening. But in case it was a simpler mechanism, she had brought bush keys: a bit of wire and a strip of plastic. Her other equipment was a small camera with a built-in flash, her pocketknife, the whistle, and a flashlight. If she could get inside the laboratory she would photograph the chimpanzees, the camera’s electronic chip recording the date on which each photograph was taken. She knew she couldn’t free the chimps: they could be infected with anything, and they would be stronger than she and likely to bolt.
It was cold, and the dew was so heavy that the gilgais had formed little ponds. Diana was wearing a padded parka and a woolen scarf, and as she set out across the paddocks she felt warm enough. The moon was high in the sky, yet there was not enough light to see easily, but she did not dare use the flashlight. She could remember, more or less, where the rabbit holes used to be, but had to walk looking down, sometimes stopping and feeling forward with the toe of her riding boot before taking a step. The yellow-lit house seemed a long way off. Whenever she glanced up at it, the people were still around the table. Occasional gusts of laughter rang out.
Parker was entertaining his boys with more stories of life in Thailand.
That morning when Phil, Steve, and Freddie had arrived for work, he announced, “We’re moving to Thailand. There’s trouble with Australian quarantine.” They had known that, sooner or later, this would happen. It had been part of the thrill of working for the Doc: his technique was right on the leading edge, and so were his tactics.
He talked about the better jobs and better pay they’d have in Siam’s big new biotech lab. “You’ll all be able to afford a housekeeper,” he said. “And girls! You’ve never seen such girls.…” He had carried them away into a land of luxury and easy brilliance, while their homes and families and colleagues grew small and dull and simple to leave behind. “I’m afraid, even if you wanted to, none of you would be able to find jobs in science in Australia for a while,” Parker said. “Anyway, Asia’s the place. Once you’ve worked in Thailand, you can move on to China. That’s where the jobs will be. That’s the place for great science, ten years from now.”
He gave them the rest of the day to arrange their affairs: get cash, pay their debts if they wanted to, collect their passports, gather some hot-weather clothes, and make any necessary personal phone calls. “Say you’ve been offered a job in Thailand and you’re flying up there over the Easter holidays for an interview,” he said. He lent them Sonja’s Land Cruiser in case they needed to drive into town.
By three o’clock that afternoon, they were all assembled in the icy whiteness of the Big Lab, where Freddie had hours of work on the computer before it would be ready to move. The others joined Parker in the tedious, fiddly task of packing up the laboratory and the animal house. “We must remove all traces of the chimpanzees,” he insisted.
They vacuumed the floors and the walls and mopped the room twice. Then they wrapped the ape cages in clear plastic, making airholes at the top. Lucy and Sailor poked more holes in the plastic, but the covering kept hair and skin flakes inside the cage. They could not risk burning the kindergarten furniture; local farmers would notice smoke and might even report it. They decided to break up the tables and chairs and dump the pieces, inside biohazard bags, in the giant autoclave up at the lab complex. Autoclave waste was put through a mashing machine and sold as landfill. They also bagged up thirty kilos of monkey chow, and the vacuum cleaner, and drove the lot to the big autoclave.
“By the way, where’s Lek?” Freddie asked late in the afternoon. He had everything on backup now, in case something went wrong with the stack.
Parker was sitting at his bench, examining a gel. He hesitated, then laid the dish carefully on the white Formica benchtop. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” he said. He seemed to be struggling with himself. “You
know she was ‘sick’ yesterday?”
Freddie nodded.
“She wasn’t sick. She knew I was going to Sydney to meet the new keeper, so she took the opportunity to go AWOL. She’s done a bunk. It seems she’s been giving information about our setup here to animal activists in Thailand. We’ve got her to thank for our speedy departure.”
“Sneaky bitch!”
Parker sighed. He was heartily sick of Lek now. While the boys had been out arranging their affairs that morning, he had had to cook her, bit by bit. In his small autoclave it had taken ages. He had two plans for what to do with the bags of sterile material. One was to take them on the aircraft and, at some point over the sea, throw them out. But what would he say was in the bags? Larnach was being officious about how much gear they could take. His second plan was more daring: to send off the bags, as bodytext, to be tossed in with all the other sterile waste that came from the huge autoclave up at the lab complex. But the image of a split head with its long black hair spilling out of a bag began to torment him. He remembered that Kalair carried mail. He rang Kerry and asked him to bring over a few mailbags. Lek would fit easily into two of them. I’ll say it’s documents, Parker decided.
When Diana reached Sonja’s garden, she checked her watch: she had ten minutes before she had to wave to Billy. She crept quietly up the wooden stairs until she could see the legs of the people seated around the table. One more step, and she saw faces and the backs of heads. Sonja and Parker were seated at opposite ends of the table, while the diners on either side were the young men she had seen coming to work that morning. Up close, none of them looked like the man who had arrived in the air taxi, although it was difficult to be certain. The green of the night sights distorted her ability to match images. Who’s the Asian? she wondered. Could Billy have mistaken him for a woman? He had very long hair for a man. His back was to Diana, and all she could tell about him was that he was short, thick-necked, and seemed tense: one bulging calf jigged under the table.
Everybody talked at once, and nobody seemed to be listening to anybody. “But what about extradition?” somebody shouted. “There’s no treaty,” another replied. “The Doc’s right. China’s the place. The Chinese are disciplined. We can thank Mao for that.” Parker cut in: “The white race is on the way out.” A young man laughed uproariously and pointed at the person opposite him. Parker held up his hand. There was a hush. “What about a song?” he said. “What about …” But before he could make a suggestion, two of the young men began to sway from side to side, bellowing, “‘If all those young ladies were little white rabbits …’ “Parker beat out the bass line with his dessert spoon and bellowed along with the others. Diana stared at Sonja: she had a bright spot of color on either cheek but did not look drunk. Abruptly she turned and looked into the dark, as if she had felt Diana watching her.
Diana ran back down the stairs. She skirted the Land Cruiser and a heap of cardboard boxes and went to the door of U-1: it had a combination pad that needed code numbers.
Her watch said three minutes to eleven. She made her way through the cool, still garden to a spot a few meters to the right of the lamp. From the house, sounds of revelry floated out. The hour came. She waved and returned quietly to examine the boxes under the house.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The first box she opened was filled with decorated knick-knacks: a tea tray, a shoe last, a woman’s wood-backed hairbrush with a pattern of cherubs and wreaths. The next box had an assortment of household equipment, including an electric whisk, a yogurt maker, and a dough hook. When she opened a box of summer clothes she thought, They’re planning a garage sale. The fourth box had a piece of machinery similar to one she had seen during the inspection tour yesterday. None of these boxes was sealed. She eased up the tape on a fifth box with the point of her knife. Inside were two piles of hard-covered, large-format books with lined pages, each with a sticker giving a name and a date on its cover: the lab books of Phil Stephenson, Steve Watson, and John Parker. Are they going to work in a different laboratory? she wondered. Up at the main complex, perhaps?
She counted thirty in the box, stacked chronologically. The volumes on top had all been written up in the last months of 1992, while those immediately below were for earlier in the same year and from the previous year. She lifted out one whole stack and saw that the earliest book was dated June-December 1990. Parker’s name seemed to be on more than ten books, as if he had kept the most complete records or had done most of the work. He must have recorded what he does with chimpanzees, she thought. Her hands shook as she opened a Parker book. The page was an impenetrable mass of unknown words, mathematical and chemical symbols, and groups of capital letters. She flipped pages, looking for a sentence she could understand, but the neat lines of cryptograms marched on and on. Someone will be able to decipher it for me, she thought. Since he’s keeping chimpanzees right now, I’ll take a current book. She chose the one he had begun on Christmas Eve, 1992.
By pulling the box hard against her knees, she was able to squeeze it shut again and restick the tape, more or less straight.
The tanbark made dull crunching noises as she returned to the waving spot on the edge of the garden. Out here the bushes hid her from the house, and she could risk using the flashlight. She needed a place to hide the book where she could find it again. She squatted down, pushed the tanbark aside, and made two cuts in the thick black plastic underneath. There was a layer of newspaper below the plastic. She slipped the book under the newspaper, replaced the flap, and spread the tanbark over it. When she stood on the spot, she could feel a bump.
She returned to the parking area, feeling the thrill of a small triumph. The only things she had not examined yet were a couple of lumpy objects lying close to the door to U-1. They turned out to be mailbags, closed with a light chain and small padlocks. She looked around to reassure herself that she could keep her eye on the path that led to the back of the house, then she set to work with her bush keys. Despite probing, the first padlock she tried would not budge. The bag felt heavy. She pushed it on its side, opened her knife, and began sawing at a seam on the bottom of the bag. A stitch popped open, then another and another, but the twine was so tough it blunted her blade, and she had to stop and sharpen it on the edge of the concrete. She was crouched down, grinding it, when overhead there was a thunder of chairs, and moments later footsteps rang on the veranda. She jumped up and ran into the garden.
The branches of the prickly bush where she hid herself were still moving when John Parker strode past, the stocky Asian at his heels. At the door of U-1, Parker punched in a code and pushed. The door opened, and both men disappeared. Upstairs, there was the sound of people moving around. Diana checked her watch: it was almost midnight.
As silently as she could, she worked her way through the garden, hands in front of her face to protect herself from the bushes. Twigs snapped as she pushed past, and beneath her feet the tanbark crunched as loudly as gravel, it seemed. She hurried on toward the lamp.
When she returned from giving her second signal to Billy, the door to U-1 was still open, and there was no sign of Parker and the Asian man. I could take a quick look, she thought. She ran to the door and stepped inside; there were stairs and an Inclin-ator. She pulled her camera from its case, focused on the stairs, and pressed the button. The momentary blaze of the flash and the hiss of the film spool winding on was like thunder and lightning. She listened for a noise from behind, then ran quickly down the stairs. She had never felt so frightened. With every step, a voice inside her said, Carolyn was murdered down here. At the base of the stairs there was a large, dingy room, furnished only with a table and chairs. She photographed the room from where she was standing, then moved toward the door that Billy had told her led into the laboratory itself. The door was shut. She pushed it open a fraction, her ears straining for any sound from the stairway behind. Then she pushed the door a fraction more. Suddenly it was shoved hard from the inside and Parker’s voice shouted, “Bugger it!
I’ve forgotten—” The door closed again as he moved away. Diana turned and leaped up the stairs two at a time, rushing into the bushes, panting and quaking.
She felt around with her hands and feet until she located a spot where she could sit and calm down.
After about ten minutes, Parker and his shadowy companion emerged from the laboratory, carrying something, which they put in the back of the Land Cruiser. Then they loaded in as many of the boxes as would fit. Parker walked to the base of the veranda steps and shouted up, “Hey, Freddie! Steve! Lend a hand.”
They came pounding downstairs. “You go with Somchai,” Parker said to one of them. “Help him unload. And you come with me.” The Land Cruiser set off, driven by the Asian.
It made two trips, but Diana was unwilling to move from her hiding place to watch where it was going. She supposed the boxes of household goods were being moved to the condominiums and that en route, at the lab complex, the mailbags would be off-loaded. But why in the middle of the night? she wondered. She still hoped she would see something that would demonstrate the presence of chimpanzees.
By twenty to one, nothing more had been brought up from U-1. Diana unfolded herself and crept through the garden. When she reached the waving spot, she saw the Land Cruiser returning from the airfield. For a moment she was aghast at the thought that the Asian and the other man had spotted the kids somehow and had driven over to the flying ground. The Cruiser swept past her, back to the house, and soon afterward drove out once more and headed for the airfield, where it stopped. The perimeter lights came on. In the blue-and-white glare she could make out the shapes of people unloading things. They’re doing a bunk, she realized. Where are the chimps?
She knew that every time she went to and from the waving spot she risked being seen from the house and that the less she moved, the better. She decided to stay where she was until her 2:00 A.M. signal, then to return and investigate the cabin behind the house. Perhaps the chimps had been moved in there.
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