kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller)

by Chesler, Rick

  “Then let me go,” Kristen spat, squirming in the gunman’s vice-like grip.

  “First we must complete the testing. Not far from here. In the special conditions of Lake Wai’au.”

  He barked a command to his security team. “Line them up.”

  Lance, Kristen and their father were formed into a single-file line, in that order. Guards were positioned in front, behind, and on either side of them. Then they began to march down from the summit.

  “Are you alright, Dad?” Kristen called behind her. A kidnapper promptly pistol-whipped her in the forehead. “Silence! Walk only,” he said as a rivulet of blood sluiced down Kristen’s face. Any doubt she had as to their fate was removed by the pistol.

  She forced herself to think about the science of GREENBACK to take her mind off her suffering. The sought-after microbial system was an atmospheric one, she knew. So why did the kidnappers want to go to the lake? Yes, the lake had some interesting microbial activity of its own, but she didn’t see what it could have to do with GREENBACK.

  As they stumbled down from the summit in near darkness, she felt the first rain drops began to fall.

  “Aha!” one of the Chinese men said. “This is a predicted effect of the microbial launch. CO2 uptake has resulted in atmospheric water formation, hence, it rains!” he exclaimed, sounding quite pleased. Behind Kristen, her father nodded, but remained silent.

  As the grim procession descended the grand slope of Mauna Kea, Kristen wondered to herself, Why would they want to take us to the lake if it’s not connected to GREENBACK? She glanced over at the observatories, where the only people near the summit could be found. The star-gazing parties were farther down the mountain, at the visitor center and below. They were alone up here, and Lake Wai’au would be completely deserted, except for Dave and Tara...

  Kristen actually stumbled because her brain momentarily stopped telling her feet to move when it came upon the realization: they’re going to kill us at the lake.

  She didn’t think the kidnappers would take a chance on shooting her up here on the ridge, where the shot would be heard at the observatories in the quiet of this pristine wilderness area. But in the depression of the lake...There is no other testing to be done. They just don’t want us to freak out. And Dad probably knows this, but he doesn’t know what to do.

  The flanking guards eyed her as she lost her footing, and then as she regained her stride, a static blaring issued from underneath her parka.

  The walkie-talkie.

  Dave's voice issued from the radio while the guards converged on Kristen.

  “Sis, there's nothing down here. How are you guys up there?”

  She had to warn Dave. Not to warn him would be signing his and Tara's death warrant. Signing all of their death warrants. She had to risk whatever punishment they would mete out. In one swift movement, Kristen reached under her parka and retrieved the radio unit. She keyed the transmit button.

  “Kidnappers taking us down to the lake! Go get—”

  The guard on her left snatched the radio from her and threw it to the ground, crushing it under his hiking boot. A second guard elbowed Kristen in the gut, causing her to double over with a grunt. Another guard's gun waved back and forth between her father and Lance, as if daring any of them to use this as an excuse to start a fight. They did not.

  The kidnappers spoke rapidly to one another in Chinese. Then one of them took off at a trot down toward the lake. They had been alerted to Dave’s presence, but not Tara's. Still, Kristen did not want Dave to be simply shot on sight as soon as he came within range. At least now he was on alert.

  At least she hoped so. She hadn’t had time to hear a reply back on the radio. What if he hadn’t heard the message?

  There was nothing more she could do. Except march. March to their death. Every step down the mountain took her closer to the lake. From their position on the ridgeline, she judged that at their current pace, the lake would come into view in about five more minutes.

  For the first time in her life, Kristen felt completely out of control. Even her father, who was one of the few people she judged to be more successful than herself, was now powerless to help her.

  Or was he? William Archer had been oddly silent since their meeting, Kristen thought. Almost detached. Perhaps this could be attributed to the abuse in captivity he had suffered at the hands of the kidnappers. But it seemed more than that.

  The rain intensified.

  ...ACCA72ACGT...

  7:58 P.M.

  The half-moon high overhead provided the only light as the kidnappers marched the Archer family down the final rock-strewn yards to Lake Wai’au. Presently the advance scout they had sent down trotted back up to the leader. He spoke something in Chinese, accompanied by a shake of the head.

  Kristen didn’t need to know Chinese to understand what was said. The scout had found no one.

  So where were Dave and Tara?

  Kristen guessed that at least Dave had heard the radio message. She wondered if he and Tara would have enough time to summon help. At least that’s what she hoped, as she heard one of the guards grunt and point at the nearest lake shore. They marched to the water’s edge. Two guards walked point, looking for Dave but seeing no one. No one was on the trail back to the main road, either, and it was not possible that Dave had ran the distance already.

  The lake’s surface, ordinarily placid, was now peppered by raindrops. Kristen looked up at the ridges and cinder cones around her. It was as if they were standing in a bowl whose bottom was covered with water. Even under duress, Kristen marveled at the intensity and sheer number of stars in the sky. It was like being in a planetarium, she thought. She had had no idea that, separated from the light and air pollution emitted by major urban centers, and elevated above much of the atmosphere, this was what the night sky truly looked like.

  But her mind quickly left the stars and came back down to Earth when she saw one of the kidnappers force Lance at gunpoint to walk ankle deep into the lake.

  Then her father received the same treatment.

  Now, a guard came for her, grabbing her roughly by the elbow and dragging her to the water’s edge.

  It seemed to Kristen that her family had no recourse. Altogether there were six kidnappers—all of them armed, and only three of them, each unarmed.

  “Dr. William Archer,” the squat Chinese man said, pointing his gun at Kristen’s father, “we thank you for your scientific contributions to TYR Corporation. Unfortunately, your services are no longer required. Now that we own and control the functional GREENBACK biotechnology, you and your family have become a liability to us.”

  Kristen's mind screamed, WHERE ARE THEY?

  “Hey, what happened to our deal?” Lance interrupted. “I gave you what you wanted.”

  The kidnapper frowned while his henchmen were largely unreadable. One pulled a hood down tighter against the heavy rain driven by lashing winds.

  “And for that we thank you. No doubt your father does not,” he added with a chuckle, “but we most certainly do. I hope you have had sufficient time to enjoy the payment we made to you.” This elicited much laughter from his cohorts, except for one, who remained quiet on the edge of the group, gaze roving around the lake bed.

  “It gives me no pleasure to do this,” the man continued, “but in order to control this bio-resource, you must all be ‘out of the picture’, as they say in America. You will be buried forever in this sacred Hawaiian lake. Not the worst possible fate, I suppose. Had you decided to stay away as we warned you,” the kidnapper said, jerking his silenced pistol toward Kristen, “then you would have outlived your father, as was nature’s purpose. But unfortunately, it will not be so,” he concluded, nodding to an assistant who then pitched Lance forward into the lake.

  The kidnapper followed him into the frigid water, jumping on top of him and forcing his head underwater by placing a knee on his neck.

  Then he aimed a pistol point blank at the back of Lance’s head and cocked it.


  ...ACAC73GAGT...

  8:15 P.M.

  Kristen screamed as she heard the shot. Her guard quickly moved to cover her mouth, but by the time he realized, as did Kristen, that the shot had not come from his fellow kidnapper’s gun, it was too late.

  Tara rose from where she had been hiding in the lake—snorkel still in her mouth and a mask on her face—firing her Glock at the kidnapper standing on Lance. He was not more than ten feet away. The intense rain splashing into the lake had kept her from being seen as she lurked just below the surface, only the tip of her snorkel protruding from the water.

  Then, to everyone's surprise and astonishment, Dave stood up directly next to Tara, also lying in wait in the freezing lake where the two had been buddy breathing from the same snorkel.

  Dave fired the kidnapper's gun that they had found in Lahaina—two shots into the kidnapper’s head, then quickly blasted off one round each into three more.

  Tara also continued to shoot, now from a crouch stance in the water.

  The distraction was all Kristen and her father needed.

  While Kristen’s kidnapper was squinting out onto the lake, trying to figure out what had happened, Kristen wrenched his gun from him and shot him in the throat. He dropped like a lifeless sack, not even clutching his ruined windpipe.

  Kristen didn’t wait around to gloat over her victory. She rolled to the ground in case she was about to be fired upon. Then she got off two quick shots from her dead assailant’s gun at one of the other kidnappers. One round blew apart his right knee and the second grazed his face as he fell.

  William Archer now grappled with two kidnappers. Tara was walking out of the lake, shivering from the cold and clearly unable to aim her weapon with confidence at the sparring bodies. Lance’s hands clawed at the shallow lake bed, locating the gun of the man Tara had killed. He ran to his father.

  As he approached, one of the assailants whirled around and shot Lance, striking his rib cage on the left side. Lance stumbled and returned fire, missing. Then William Archer picked up a football-sized chunk of jagged, volcanic rock and slammed it into the temple of the gunman shooting it out with Lance. That man teetered and dropped.

  Dave staggered from the lake. He nearly collapsed from weakness due to hiding for so long in the frigid water, but Kristen caught him, holding him up until he was steady enough to regain his own footing. Tara remained apart and alert, slowly turning a circle with her pistol in a two-handed grip, ready for anything, trusting nothing.

  Then Lance struggled to his feet and limped to each kidnapper in turn while Tara watched, relieving them of any weapons in case they were not dead. It was difficult to be sure in the wet darkness. As Lance approached the third fallen assailant—the kidnapper who lay farthest away on the edge of the group—the motionless form stirred.

  A groaning sound escaped from the kidnapper’s lips. Then he reached into his parka.

  Tara fired her Glock—

  —and Lance fired the last remaining round from one of the kidnapper's pistols. Tara's arm was shaking so badly from the cold that her shot went wide right, thudding harmlessly into a volcanic rock pile. Lance's shot found its mark, the kidnapper's body convulsing for a moment from a shot through the skull before succumbing to a permanent stillness. Then Lance, too, slumped to the ground, clutching his left side where the previous kidnapper's shot had pierced his ribcage.

  Tara ran to the kidnapper to check the body for weapons. She found none. Tara made a point to relieve Lance of his weapon, but she soon realized that Lance was no longer conscious. She put two fingers on his carotid artery, feeling for a pulse. Looking at Dave, she shook her head.

  They called Kristen and the senior Archer over.

  Kristen gasped upon seeing Lance dead. She fell to the earth, hugging her dead brother's body. After a few minutes, she felt her father's arms pulling her up. She looked at her father, then back to the woman Lance had just shot to death. Her parka hood had slipped off, revealing the fact that she was in fact a woman as well as Caucasian.

  “Is this one of your kidnappers?”

  Archer wiped a string of mucousy blood from his right eye. “Yes, the lead scientist. Very intelligent. A shame she had to end up like this.”

  “What’s her name?” Kristen asked.

  Dr. William Archer looked up at the blanket of stars as the rain began to lighten.

  “I don’t know,” he said, wiping a tear from his face that was indistinguishable from the rainwater. He shook his head.

  “I don’t know who she is.”

  Tara looked into Dr. William Archer's eyes, knowing he was lying, but understanding that he wanted to protect Kristen from more pain. She doubted the secret would remain so in the weeks to follow, as the media picked up the scent of the violent spree across the Aloha state, but she herself would say nothing. Kristen has been through enough, she thought, watching the microbiologist's face turn ashen, eyes wide with incomprehensible fear and disbelief at the sheer scale on which things had gone wrong.

  But it was William Archer’s face that Tara would never forget—his tortured expression as he held his dead son's hand while gazing at the stars. That he could understand so much and yet so little in the world must be unbearably frustrating, Tara thought. She left him to reconcile his keen understanding of genetics with his inability to comprehend his own son, the product of his very own genes.

  FURTHER READING / SUGGESTED RESOURCES

  Books

  Fielding, Ann, Robinson, Ed. An Underwater Guide to Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

  Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of the Gene. Harvard University Press, 2000.

  Scientific Literature

  Heider, D., A. Barnekow. 2007, DNA-based watermarks using the DNA-Crypt algorithm. BMC Bioinformatics 8:176.

  Wong, et al. 2003. “Organic Data Memory Using the DNA Approach,” Technical paper, Communications of the ACM.

  Yamamoto, et al. 2008. Large-scale DNA memory based on the nested PCR. Natural Computing: an international journal Volume 7 Issue 3.

  Other

  J. Craig Venter Institute’s Sorcerer II Expedition:

  http://www.sorcerer2expedition.org/version1/HTML/main.htm

  Photo credit: Tabbatha Chesler

  Rick Chesler holds a Bachelor of Science in marine biology and has had a life-long interest in the ocean and its creatures. When not at work as a research project manager, he can be found scuba diving or traveling to research his next thriller idea. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, son and some fish.

  Don’t miss the next Tara Shores thriller, SOLAR ISLAND, coming in December 2012 from Seven Realms Publishing. Please enjoy the following sneak preview:

  A madman uses a floating energy production platform as an opportunity to establish his own rogue nation. After the FBI receives an alarming and unusual call for help originating from the artificial island, Special Agent Tara Shores goes undercover as a reporter in the South Pacific. Once there, she uncovers a tightly run dystopia reflecting the distorted visions of the island’s reclusive creator. As a powerful hurricane bears down on the island, cutting her off from support, Tara must find a way to bring a murderer to justice while saving herself and averting an international energy crisis.

  SOLAR ISLAND

  Chapter 1

  Pacific Ocean, southeast of Japan, 8:30 AM local time

  "It won’t hurt that much. Let’s just get this over with so we can leave this godforsaken island, alright?" One man addressed another as they stood huddled together in conference, eyes alert for unseen peers while the tropical sun rose in the open blue sky.

  Only one thing stood in the way of the wild, unrestrained energy from the sun on its way to the depths of the sea. A floating island marred the unending expanse of water--a sprawling artificial construction whose sole ostensible purpose was to control a tiny fraction of that radiant energy--to harness a timeless force.

  On this island, Bernard Riley studied a stencil he h
eld in his hands. His associate, Chris Tenner, was losing patience with his stall tactics. “Bernie?”

  Bernard looked up from the stencil. "As long as you think it’ll work, Chris. If Lightner catches us--”

  “Don’t worry, it'll work! We've got the schematic. The hard part's over. Now all you need do is get some sun for a few hours."

  "This is really going to hurt, isn't it? How come you can't do this part?"

  "We've been over this! You've got the day off. I have to be at my station in sixty minutes. That's not enough time to let the stencil set."

  "You mean burn."

  Chris said nothing. They both knew set was a euphemism. At length Chris joked, "You look like you could use some color, anyway."

  Bernard looked up from the stencil. "You know damn well after twenty minutes I’ll be red as a lobster."

  "Use the sunscreen on your arms, legs and neck so it's not obvious you've been tanning. Stick to the plan."

  Bernard removed his shirt, a polo bearing the Solar Island logo: a circular raft of solar panels on shimmering blue water reflecting back a blazing ball of light. He tossed the shirt on the "ground," as residents of Solar Island were used to calling it, even though this section was functionally and materially closer to a ship's deck. Now clad only in a pair of khaki shorts and sunglasses, Bernard shoved the intricate stencil into Chris' hands.

  "Tape it on."

  Chris looked at the stencil to make sure he had it aligned properly. Its convoluted cut-outs had been painstakingly done by hand with a precision blade during several sessions over the course of two tension-fraught months. During this time, the two men had maintained constant vigilance in order to access a secure area of the island normally off limits to them.