by Mark Teppo
It never ends well.
He gives me a different number to reach him at—a private line I can call directly. After I hang up, I scour the house, looking for a source of useful news. Fortunately, the caretaker is one of those who prefers to thumb through a paper over breakfast rather than scan a newsfeed on a computer. I find a stack of newspapers in a recycling bin in the spare bedroom, but there's only a week's worth. If there was a story to be found in the Southern Ocean, the world has moved on already.
Australian elections are coming up and the front-runner has just been caught in the sort of scandal that would derail a US candidate, but as Down Under isn't as tightly wound as North America, the media has to work pretty hard to make the story seem worthy of the attention they're giving it. Piracy is up along the Somalian coast. People are still killing each other in Central Africa. Countries in the Middle East are changing governments. Again. Though it has been a long time since much dramatic change swept across Outremer. It used to take centuries for these lands to change hands, and now it is a matter of decades. A pipeline rupture near the Black Sea has caught the media's fancy as well as a story about infidelity between a Hollywood power couple. Based on the amount of column inches devoted to each story, it's hard to gauge which is the worse disaster, though I suspect the Hollywood couple's agents are milking the story a bit as neither has had a decent hit in the last five years.
The ecological and environmental impact of the pipeline rupture makes me want to run back to the woods and hide underground, but that's been the reaction for decades now and what has it gotten us? Arcadia weeps as the world dies a little bit more, and we're all incrementally closer to death. All of us.
Some more quickly than others.
There are scabs on the knuckles of my right hand and, compulsively, I pick one off. There is no blood, but the flesh underneath is pale.
“Careful,” I whisper to myself, “you could scar.”
Wouldn't that be a novelty?
I could bury myself beneath the roots of any of the cypress out there and wait for the world to change again. Would I wake up or would the chemical poison in my blood kill me while I slept? Would my decaying corpse end up poisoning the tree that was wrapped around me?
That's what Callis had warned me about. Poison, getting at the roots. Killing Mother, the Grove, Arcadia—everything.
Crawling into the ground and waiting for the end wasn't a soldier's death, anyway. I have fought on Mother's behalf for a very long time. My head is filled with half-remembered dreams of a thousand wars. I've been a good soldier. I deserve something more.
Who backed Kyodo Kujira? What does Prime Earth know? What happened to the Cetacean Liberty?
Mere will know how to find the answers.
NINE
Everything but the forward prow of the Cetacean Liberty is wrapped up tight in white plastic wrap, and it lolls in the water like a burn victim soaking in a saline bath. A harbor patrol car is parked on the dock nearby, and only one of its two occupants is awake. The other has his seat levered halfway back, his cap pulled down low on his face to block out the half-dozen mercury vapor lights permanently trained on the shrink-wrapped boat. The light reflects harshly off the white wrap, and there isn't a shadow anywhere within thirty yards of the Cetacean Liberty.
Either Prime Earth or the South Australian government has turned the boat into a floating art installation—a minimalist tabula rasa that waits for meaning to be imprinted upon its slick nakedness. What do we see when we look upon this abstract symbol? This bleached blot, waiting for its Rorschach stain.
I don't loiter, but I do make a second pass, walking in the opposite direction. The guy in the car doesn't even look up from his phone. The other one continues to sleep.
Reefie's is a noisy pub three blocks away, and after I enter and gauge my choices, I head for the bar and find an open spot next to a guy drinking alone. A half-dozen plasma screen TVs are competing for the patrons' attention with three different football games (two of the three are broadcasting Australian games), a pair of soccer games, and a US basketball game. Lakers versus someone else—no one seems to care, including the network that is broadcasting the game.
The bartender, a well-groomed man with precision-razored stubble, flips a coaster on the bar in front of me and I order a beer. “A lager. Whatever you've got on tap that isn't the tourist beer.” He squints at me for a second, trying to gauge if I'm trying to be a smart-ass, and when I put a bill on the bar, he stops wondering.
“Not a fan of the local?” The man sitting next to me stinks of fish, and his blond hair has been permanently stiffened by sea and sky.
“It's like that American coffee company,” I reply. “You can get it anywhere, but that doesn't make it good.”
He chuckles and raises his pint glass in my direction. I clink my glass off his, notice how empty his is compared to mine, and catch the bartender's eye. “Thanks, mate,” he says when another full pint is deposited in front of him. “So, journalist or investigator?” he asks.
“Excuse me?”
“If you're looking to chat me up, you're bad at picking out men who might be your type.”
“Was I trying to pick you up?” I ask.
My answer confuses him for a second, though it isn't hard to confuse him in his state. “I ain't got much else to offer,” he says, “and I don't believe in random charity.”
“And the world is a poorer place for it,” I say.
“Which are you?” He squints at me. “Angling for a payout or writing a story?”
“Journalist,” I say, figuring that's the answer he's looking for.
He nods and sticks out a hand. “I'm Ted.”
“Silas.” His hand is calloused, rough from the nets and a fishing knife. “You want to tell me something about that boat out there?”
He grins. We both know which boat I'm referring to. “Aye,” he says, “I can tell you a story or two.” He takes a long pull from his glass, moistening his tongue and making me wait a few seconds. Ted is a garrulous local, pre-greased by the media, and a bit of a drunk; he knows the routine and is happy to play along. I'm a good listener, and I have a pocket full of money taken from the caretaker's wallet.
We're going to be good friends.
* * *
Ted takes me back about two and a half weeks when stories began circulating among the fishing boats out of Adelaide that something had happened out on the water. A few days later the Cetacean Liberty was found, adrift, in the Great Australian Bight. She had suffered a fire, and all of her life boats were gone. The Royal Australian Navy flooded the Bight with ships and found a few drifting life boats. What survivors were in them were suffering from burns in addition to exposure and dehydration.
Ted doesn't know how many survived, but it doesn't sound like many.
The Cetacean Liberty was towed back to Adelaide and wrapped up tight. Prime Earth's management—back in San Diego and quick to point out that they are miles and miles from any sort of altercation in the Southern Ocean—stuffed their fingers in their ears and pretended nothing had happened other than an unfortunate galley fire.
Ted tries to milk me for a few drinks, but once I establish that he knows nothing about the whaling fleet, it's clear he isn't quite the fount of knowledge that he thinks he is, which makes sense, given the lack of ongoing speculation I hadn't seen in the local papers. The media did their routine of scrounging for scraps, looking for some morsel that they can worry long enough to show an upward trend in their readership metrics at their next quarterly shareholder meeting. But without some immediate scandal to keep their audiences' attention, their corporate overlords will simply can the stories. The story is lacking a champion, someone like Meredith Vanderhaven, to keep it alive. It dies with a whimper, a final update buried on the back page of the local news section, and the conspiracy community wanders off, looking for something with a bit more meat on it.
No one cares.
Much like this crowd's attitude toward the Lakers' game.
* * *
I go to ground at a cheap hotel, spending half of what remains from the money I took from the caretaker's wallet. I had gotten to Adelaide too late to visit Callis's bank, and after spending most of a day and part of the previous night in wait mode, I had gone down to the docks. I had to do something; the night was too precious a time to waste.
Wasting time. It's an odd thing to worry about. To be concerned that I might not have enough.
I get a room on the north-facing side of the hotel, put out the Do Not Disturb sign, and hang the comforter over the curtain rod for the windows. I am restless, but I force myself to lie down. Hurry up and wait: all soldiers know how to do it. Sleep when you can. Eat when you can. Keep your weapons ready. The violence will come later.
After a thirst-inducing nightmare of knocking over a blood bank, I get up, shower, and try to find some enthusiasm for going out. Adelaide's smog index isn't as high as many cities in the United States, but it is high enough that I can't be in the sun too long—my skin will have even worse reactions than it did during my idle days on the life boat. I find a coffee shop with computer rentals in the back, where I can spend a few hours. On the Internet and as far away as possible from the sun-warmed air that lies over Adelaide like a heavy blanket.
After a cursory search for mention of my fellow Arcadians, I scan the original stories written about the Cetacean Liberty accident. There is mention of another boat, but no names are given, and certainly no mention of the harpoon boat I wrecked or the one that Nigel attacked.
A search on Kyodo Kujira turns up a number of recent stories. The company's senior management is all dead, lost in a freak fire that ripped through a private facility outside of Ehime, where they were all gathered for a corporate retreat. The timing is awfully coincidental too: three days after Nigel and I went after the harpoon boats. Other than stating the barest of facts, Japanese investigators aren't speculating about the cause of the blaze. A need for further investigation, they say. The blaze was too hot, they explain in a press conference, we can't be sure what really happened.
I go back to the local news, noting the names of the writers who covered the incident for the major news outlets in Adelaide. I even find the name of the hospital where the survivors were airlifted. I find it curious there are no eyewitness reports of what happened. Eventually, I find a single, illuminating sentence tucked on the back page of one of the last stories written. All attempts to interview the survivors were referred to Prime Earth's lawyers—a firm with a long, comma-filled name. It isn't hard to guess the firm's basic response to anyone asking.
Captain Morse's name does come up, and it's only because it is common knowledge that he was the captain of the ship. I learn his first name is Thaddeus. There is no crew or passenger roster, and we're as much guilty of that lack of data as anyone else on the boat. Our own need for anonymity working against me.
I do a web search for Meredith Vanderhaven and find nothing but her byline on articles that are four months old. No hits on what she might have been doing in Australia. No hits on what story she is working on.
Which isn't surprising either. After Beering, she knew to keep her stories under wraps until they were ready for publication. Less time for her targets to prepare. Less time for people to shred documents, disappear sources, and hide the dump sites.
* * *
When the sun starts to get lost behind the taller buildings, I get a cab and go visit Callis's bank. It's more centrally located than I want to be in the city, but there's enough of a brisk wind that everyone on the street is more interested in getting to their destinations than eyeballing a haggard tourist like myself. The cab drops me off in front of a worn four-story building that is the lone holdout for modernization on the corner of King Williams Street and Waymouth Street. I keep my back turned to the high-rise going up across the wide boulevard of King Williams; the windows are in, and they're reflecting the sunlight directly across the street.
The bank's windows, on the other hand, are heavily tinted and the climate is tightly controlled at a reasonable temperature. The décor goes for ostentatious in its effort at replicating someone's vision of an aristocratic drawing room from a century ago. The ubiquitous security guard near the entrance straightens slightly when I enter. He's wearing a dark blue wool suit and an expensive silk tie.
It's that sort of bank.
I ignore the security guard who is eyeing me because I'm dressed down for bank's normal clientele, and I adopt the sort of laconic swagger that suggests more money than fashion sense as I head for the client services desks in the back. The ones with the comfortable leather chairs next to them. I throw myself down into one of the chairs, kick my legs out, and stare at the finely attired young man behind the desk.
The nameplate on the desk reads Rupert Gillam, and his sandy brown hair is cut very precisely across the back of his head, a scant millimeter above the finely tailored line of his collar. His suit is perfectly muted for a conservative banker, and his tie is a shade of purple somewhere between aubergine and plum.
“How may I help you?” he asks, setting aside whatever he had been pretending to be working on as I had approached.
“I need some money,” I say with just enough bluntness that he hesitates for a second, his eyes flicking across my attire and general scruffy condition. I smile, and it is my pristine dentition that convinces him that I'm not some homeless person who has come in to rob the bank.
“Certainly, Mister…”
I tell him the family name Callis and I had been using during our jaunt through late-nineteenth-century London. “Call me Silas though,” I say.
He pulls out a keyboard tray and clacks on the keys. “Do you know your account number?” he asks.
I stare at him and he fidgets for a moment, his eyes flickering back and forth from me to his computer screen. “Oh,” he says as he spots something on his monitor. “Oh,” he says again as he starts to read. “Yes,” he continues, licking his lips nervously, and I imagine he's gotten to the part where the account history goes back a hundred plus years. “Certainly, sir,” he finishes. “There's… ah… there's a password.”
“Of course there is,” I say, briefly wondering what it could be. Genevieve,” I settle on. Callis hadn't warned me, which meant it had to be something obvious to both of us. The name of the banker's daughter who Callis had a thing for, for instance.
Rupert nods. “Well,” he says, placing his hands on his desk. He smiles. His dental work isn't as good as mine, though it looks to have cost his family a great deal. “What can I do for you today?”
Finally, some good news. “I'll need some cash. About this much.” I hold two fingers several centimeters apart. “And a debit card of some kind. Something I can use to get more. Oh, and the name of the place where you get your suits.”
TEN
Where Rupert gets his suits turns out to be a place a few blocks away. The stack of cash is easy enough—that only requires a looping scrawl that passes for a signature—but the card will take an hour or two and so I spend it being fitted for a suit I'll never pick up. I buy other clothes too, an outfit that makes me indistinguishable from any other fashion-aware man in Adelaide. Afterward, I stop at a juice shop on the way back to the bank. A mega dose of chia and wheatgrass powder. Processing kills a lot of the green but in large enough quantities, it'll help keep the thirst at bay.
I'm heading to the hospital next, and I can't afford to lose control there. Regardless of what it smells like, most of the blood in the building is going to be compromised. My immune system is already under enough stress.
The Royal Adelaide Hospital is located in North Adelaide, on the south side of the River Torrens, and I cross the gently flowing water on a pedestrian foot bridge near the zoo. I'm tempted by the plethora of aromas wafting out of the Botanical Gardens and I promise myself that I'll scale the fence and admire the sleeping flowers later. The hospital is a brightly lit c
ontrast to the dark embrace of the Botanical Gardens, and I find my way into P wing where the burn wards are located.
The scent of the chemicals makes my skin crawl. Western medicine relies on its science too much. If it comes out of a laboratory and cost more than a billion dollars to create, then it must do something. And these products do, but it's not what these patients need. They need to know their skin will heal, that they'll be able to wear clothing without having to worry about how the synthetic fabric is going to irritate their flesh. They need to know their families won't look away when they enter the room; that someone will look past their melted skin and see the person inside. The creams and salves with the trademark names won't do any of those things. The pharmaceuticals will only make the pain go away. For a little while. But it's okay; there's a solution for the pain that persists after the creams have done their work. It has a trademarked name too, and the insurance companies will cover most of it. Maybe in a few years, the patient can talk about weaning themselves off the drugs. Maybe.
There's a handful of people in the lobby, draped across the uncomfortable furniture. They don't know how to keep a vigil for their loved ones, and the fluorescent lights have sucked all the hope out of their jaundiced faces. The staff move efficiently—some of them make eye contact, but most don't. The only reason they look up is to check the hands on the large clock over the nurses' station.
Patient rooms are on the first two floors, and no one shows any interest in me on the ground floor. As soon as the elevator doors open on the second, I lean forward and press the button for four, trying to appear annoyed that the elevator has decided to slow my ascent down.
There are two men in the waiting area, right in front of the elevator. They look like they bought their suits off the same rack, and they both glance up as the elevator doors open. They're good, but they stare a little too long.