Humanity was depending on him.
WEDNESDAY
May 25
1
DAPI ISLAND
No-no-no-no-no!
The backpack was gone.
Marten had remained in the bushes all night, napping now and again, but too much on edge to allow himself to fall into a deep sleep. What if he started snoring? He’d exerted himself all yesterday and had planned to have the island all to himself—well, except for the dapis—by the end of the evening.
And so he’d been wide awake when the sky began to lighten. Soon he could make out details of the forest around him. The sun had yet to peek over the rim, but he had more than sufficient light to see where he was going.
He marked the brightest part of the sky as east and began heading in a northerly direction, sticking close to the wall as he moved. He didn’t know whether he’d reach the backpack or the canisters first. It didn’t matter which, just as long as he found them both.
He’d left the backpack by an odd-shaped rock. He’d chosen it because it resembled a heart—the Valentine’s Day kind of heart rather than the real thing—and how many of those could there be? And now he’d found it, but no backpack. He was sure he’d left it behind this particular rock. He remembered standing back and taking a mental photo of it.
Along with the two bricks of C-4 and the detonator caps, the backpack contained two bottles of water and at least one, maybe two granola bars. He needed those other things to complete his mission here but, oddly enough, he missed the food and water more right now. He’d eaten one measly protein bar since yesterday afternoon, and he was starving.
Okay. Keep it together. Forget the rumbling stomach and find the VX canisters.
If they’d ruptured and spilled their contents, the backpack no longer mattered. Nothing mattered then, because he was doomed. Amaury and the brothers would start tracking him soon and inevitably find him.
And, with the Sorcière disabled, he had no way to leave. Even if he did manage to elude them, eventually they’d leave him here. How would he survive? He had no survival skills. He—
Stop! Just … stop.
This defeatist thinking was counterproductive. Focus on the goal: Find the canisters and the backpack. They had to be nearby. They couldn’t walk away by themselves, and no one was around to move them, so they had to be where they’d come to rest on Saturday.
Unless …
The dapis!
Even with coordinated effort, they weren’t strong enough to move the canisters. But the backpack …
They’d sniff out the granola bars inside and go after them. With their intelligence, they could figure out the zippers through trial and error, and easily gnaw through the buckle straps. They’d eat the granola, maybe even chew holes in the water bottles—easy with how flimsy they made them these days.
But what about the C-4? They couldn’t eat that. They might think it was edible at first, but if the smell didn’t turn them off, one bite would.
And the detonator caps? What interest could they possibly have in those?
Okay, they’d raided the backpack and carried it off. Mystery explained. He could still find it, or what remained of it, but even more important, he had to find those canisters.
So he began a methodical hunt, moving quickly along the base of the wall until he came across some crushed vegetation. He followed the damage inward and found the first canister. He now realized it had been a blessing and a curse that Mahdi had painted it olive drab. The color hid it from the casual passerby—Amaury and his crew would never spot it by accident—but it had made the task of finding it more difficult for Marten.
He approached it cautiously, looking for cracks in its surface or fluid puddled around its base. The lack of odor made VX more useful as a weapon, but he wished now it had some kind of stink. He checked the ground around it for dead insects—it had been invented as a pesticide, after all—but found none.
Everything looked dry so he gave the canister a gentle push. It made a quarter roll and still showed no sign of damage. Another push … still good.
Marten let out a breath. One canister, fully intact. He was halfway there.
He went in search of the other. It shouldn’t be far. And it wasn’t. He found it thirty feet away. Also undamaged.
He gave a little fist pump. He was still in business. Well, almost. Now he had to—
High-pitched howling suddenly filled the air, the same discordant ululations he’d heard yesterday evening. And just like yesterday, the discordance gradually diminished as the disparate tones modulated and blended into a single thousand-throated note that filled the caldera. The dapis sustained that note until, as if receiving a signal, they all cut off at once.
Marten looked up. He saw no dapis, but he knew they were there, watching … always watching. What he did see was sunlight beaming across the top of the baobab canopy. The sun had crested the rim. Morning had officially arrived in the caldera.
Was that what that howling signified? Saying hello and good-bye to the sun? But that would be a … ceremony.
A ceremony? Marten felt a pinching at the back of his neck. These little primates used cutting tools and had developed a sun ceremony. All very primitive, but they should have neither. They were exhibiting a level of sentience that should be well beyond them. Could it be their screwed-up genome? They carried hsa-mir-3998, but even that shouldn’t account for their unexpected behaviors. Or could it?
He shook himself. Moot. All moot. He had to concentrate on his next short-term goal: Find the C-4 and those detonators.
2
“That’s the last of them,” Bakari said in Portuguese as he sliced off a piece of protein bar and affixed it to the trap’s trigger plate. “Now can we go find him?”
Amaury set the spring on the trap’s door and reined in his temper—just barely. “Not yet, damn it!”
He and Razi had taken turns on watch through the night while Bakari slept the sleep of the dead. He’d brought his old beat-up Llama .38 revolver to the island on the chance that they might need defense against predators. Who would have guessed that the predator would be Jeukens? He doubted he’d return but hadn’t wanted to take the chance. He’d gone through the Afrikaner’s duffel and found the usual travel gear: extra clothing, toiletries, canned food, a flashlight, batteries, a satellite phone, but no mysterious little bottles that might contain poison.
Amaury had lent Razi the handgun for the first four-hour watch, and he had taken it back for the second. He wouldn’t tell anyone, but he had drifted off during his watch. If the howling of the dapis hadn’t awakened him and the brothers as well, they all might still be asleep.
Bakari seemed to have recovered but was moving slowly. He complained of hurting all over. The violent tremors of last night had left him with agonizingly sore muscles, but not sore enough to keep him from wanting to hunt down Jeukens.
Amaury had had plenty of time to think on that during his night watch, and he’d decided they should accomplish their mission here first.
“He tried to kill us,” Bakari said. “He very nearly succeeded with me. You are not hurting. You do not care.”
As bad as Bakari felt, he had insisted on helping to set the traps. While Razi, armed with the Llama, watched the equipment, Amaury and Bakari were out here setting up half the traps in scattered spots around the caldera. They were baiting all six with pieces of protein bars. Razi would go out later and bait his six with bamboo shoots. Lemurs loved the canned shoots but dapis might be different. They would find out. It didn’t matter which bait worked better; neither was in short supply.
“Of course I care. But we came here to capture these little primates, these dapis, and that is what we are going to do. When we have a couple dozen of them all secured on the boat, then, and only then, will we start searching for Jeukens.”
“But—”
“No buts, Bakari. He is not going anywhere. When I have what I came for, we can devote a few hours to search for him.”
He frowned. “A few hours? I want to find him—I need to find him.” He pounded a fist into his palm. “I have a score to settle.”
“Of course you do. But we’re not going to waste a lot of time on this. If we don’t find him, we’ll leave him here.”
Bakari gave him a puzzled look. “We let him get away with it?”
Bakari was a good trapper, but not the brightest.
“He’s not getting away with anything. When we leave we will be taking his duffel with his food, his phone, his clothes—everything. He will be marooned. He will have to find water, he will have to figure out what he can eat and what he cannot. When we return in a few weeks for our next batch of dapis, I don’t think we will have to go looking for him. If he has managed to stay alive I will bet you he comes looking for us!”
Bakari’s expression remained grim. “I do not wish to wait that long.”
“But you might have to. Sometimes delaying a satisfaction makes it so much better when you achieve it.” He saw no comprehension in Bakari’s eyes. He felt as if he were talking to a child. Well, if that was the case, he might as well drag out one of his mother’s old sayings: “And remember, all good things come to those who—”
From off to their left came the unmistakable sound of a trap door snapping shut.
“Do you hear that, mon ami? Already one takes the bait! That is the sound of money in the pocket! We may be looking for the Afrikaner sooner than you imagined!”
He led the way to the trap they had set just before this one. They found it as empty as they had left it. Emptier, in fact: The trap door was down and the bait was gone.
“What?” Amaury cried. He lifted it, examined it up and down. “How…?”
The only thing inside was a two-inch length of twig. He dropped the trap and rushed back to the next in line where he found the same thing: a sprung trap but no dapi and no bait. And another short twig.
“Impossible!”
Wait … impossible for dapis, yes, but not for a human.
Amaury turned and leaned close to Bakari. “Jeukens,” he whispered. “Don’t look around!” he added as Bakari began to turn. He raised his voice: “Let’s go check the other traps!”
They’d set six. The next was the third they’d set, and they found it just as empty of bait and prey as the previous two, though it too contained that short twig. Was Jeukens leaving it as a calling card of some kind?
They continued on to the first two traps they’d put out and found something different. No dapi trapped within, though the door on each had been sprung. But these still contained the bait. It made no sense.
Was the Afrikaner toying with them?
They had one trap left to check—the last one they’d just set. They rushed back to it and Amaury wasn’t terribly surprised to find it sprung and empty except for another twig.
It had to be Jeukens. He had no food, so he was raiding the traps for the pieces of protein bar. But why had he left the bait in the first two?
He brushed that concern aside. Why didn’t matter. They had to stop him from sabotaging their traps.
Keeping his voice low in case the Afrikaner was nearby, Amaury said, “Reset the trap with a larger piece of a bar. While you’re doing that, I’ll beat the bushes to see if he’s nearby.”
Amaury hurried through the undergrowth, ducking under the branches of saplings. He covered a fifty-foot radius and was pretty sure Jeukens was not about. Probably elsewhere looking for more traps to raid.
When he returned to Bakari, the trap was reset with a good-size chunk of protein bar on the trigger plate.
“You go that way,” he whispered, pointing south. “Go as far as you can without losing sight of the trap, then hide. I’ll do the same this way. He’s hungry. He’ll be back. And then you’ll have your revenge.”
Bakari’s yellow grin was not pretty. He nodded and loped off.
Amaury headed north. He found a spot thirty feet or so away where he could crouch behind a stand of bamboo and watch the trap.
It didn’t take long for company to arrive, but not the sort Amaury was expecting: Four dapis scurried down from the trees and headed toward the trap. They didn’t scamper on all fours, but crossed the gap in bounding leaps like exaggerated skipping, very much like he’d seen lemurs do when out of the trees. They seemed at ease, not cautious in the least. One hopped on top of the trap while another paused before the open end. The two remaining stood back to back on their hind legs, their forepaws dangling in front of them, much like meerkats do. What were—?
And then he knew: sentinels. They’d set up a pair of lookouts.
All right. Dapis instead of Jeukens. He’d settle for a dapi. They were the reason Amaury had come here in the first place.
“Go ahead,” he whispered. “Don’t be afraid. Go in and grab that delicious bait.”
Then he noticed that the dapi atop the cage, a female, was holding a slim twig, maybe six inches long. She worked it down through one of the slots in the trap door, then guided it through the mesh of the top and a couple of inches farther into the trap.
The small male darted inside, yanked the bait free of the trigger plate, and dashed out again, all without the door closing. The female on top snapped the twig at the level of the trapdoor. The released spring pulled the door down and slammed it shut as she followed the male and the two lookouts into the trees.
Amaury’s mouth hung open as he rose and hurried toward the cage.
What just happened here?
He reached the cage a few seconds before Bakari.
“Did you see that?” the big man said, his expression slack with wonder.
Amaury dropped to his knees beside the cage and found just what he expected: the little two-inch length of twig on the floor of the trap. They’d figured out the mechanism. But how was that possible? They were dumb little animals.
Then he remembered the Afrikaner’s words:… they learn very quickly … they’re highly intelligent …
But this was almost human-level intelligence.
And he remembered something else: Yesterday Bakari had stuck a slim twig through the top of the cage to poke the trigger plate … a twig very similar to the one the female dapi had used.
Jeukens had warned Amaury about not letting the dapis see how the trapdoor mechanism worked. Hide it from the watching dapis … the always-watching dapis.
Watching and learning.
Clearly, Jeukens hadn’t been stealing the bait. The dapis were behind it.
He saw it all now. The dapis had failed on the first two traps. They’d stuck the twig through as they’d seen Bakari do, triggering the trapdoor. But in the course of doing so the female had seen how the door worked. So she stuck the twig through one of the slots in the door and into the mesh beneath it, preventing the door from moving. That left the male free to go in and remove the bait. After he’d escaped the cage with his prize, she broke off the twig and let the door slam closed.
My God, if they could learn something that complex that quickly, surely they could be toilet trained. He grinned. An adorable missing link that could be toilet trained … The asking price for these little creatures kept going up and up …
The smile faded as the immediate consequences of what he had just seen slowly dawned.
“We are fucked,” he said softly. Then he shot to his feet and kicked the trap across the little clearing as he shouted to the trees. “Fucked!”
“What is wrong?” Bakari said.
“The traps—they’re useless. The dapis know how to get around them. We’ll never catch a single one!”
Which meant this trip had just become a complete waste of time. He’d have to go home empty-handed. Or rather, go home with only a broken-legged male, which was as good as empty-handed.
Or was it?
His thoughts ranged in all different directions. There had to be a way to salvage this.
A breeding pair.
Yes! He had a male. If he could catch a female, just one, he cou
ld start breeding his own dapis. Breeding primates was always a challenge, and he had a feeling these dapis would find ways to make it even more difficult. But they’d be worth all manner of trouble if he succeeded.
The problem was … how to catch that one female?
On occasion he’d captured parrots and other exotic birds with fine-mesh nylon nets. He had a couple stowed on the Sorcière. Maybe he could entrap a female with one of those. He and the brothers would have to be on her immediately before she chewed her way out.
Amaury nodded. Yes. He could make it work. Maybe once, twice at most—they learned too fast. He’d never catch the two dozen he’d planned on. His dream of a quick score had been crushed, but he could make do with a slower, long-term plan.
The most important question was: Were the nets still on the Sorcière or had he moved them into storage at the dock? He prayed he’d procrastinated about them. Because—
A faint sound caught his attention. As it grew louder, he recognized it as engine noise.
No. This couldn’t be happening.
He looked at Bakari. That wup-wup-wup sound could only be …
“A helicopter?”
3
“Finally!” Marten muttered as he fairly leaped upon the fourth and last detonator.
He’d been following a bread crumb trail—extremely odd bread crumbs—through the grasses and undergrowth for what seemed like half the morning. The first thing he’d found were the granola bar wrappers with no sign of the bars. Apparently they tasted pretty good to the dapis. Next came the empty water bottles.
Then … pay dirt: the two bars of C-4 within half a dozen feet of each other. Each showed signs of nibbling through the black wrappers and into the off-white plastique beneath—very little nibbling on the explosive itself. The polyisobutyline binder probably tasted awful. Same with the roll of duct tape he found nearby—nibbled, then tossed.
A short way farther on he’d found two of the detonators in a Gordian tangle, and nearby, his satellite phone, looking as if it had been dumped from the backpack as not worth a second look. Next came the ripped backpack itself, hanging from a branch. He checked inside and almost shouted with relief when he saw his two trigger phones and their batteries still attached to their plywood bases.
The God Gene: A Novel Page 24