by Newton, Nero
She had been thinking all morning about what Eloy and the others would say under interrogation. They would eventually tell everything about Sanderson and the goons, but they would say they had know idea how the dead chimp had gotten into the trunk, and their interrogators might realize they were telling the truth.
Only Eloy would have any idea who had put the chimp there, because he was the only living one who knew that they hadn’t been alone when they tried to retrieve the v-chimps. Manny was dead; Gil and Dale had been boofed into oblivion before Amy was discovered.
Eloy might well be the only one of these three who had ever even heard Amy’s or Stephen’s names. The others hadn’t been involved in the attempts on her life as far as she knew, and might not even know about her. That kind of information – she hoped – had probably gotten passed along on a strictly need-to-know basis. The identity of the intruder at Elaine’s place was still a mystery, but whoever that was wouldn’t know that Amy or Stephen had appeared in the quarantine zone.
“Are all four of their tranq guns in the trunk?” she asked Brandon.
“One’s still in the back seat,” he said. “With one of those roll-up packets of darts.”
Amy had also brought along the tranq gun darts from the Hangar, the one she’d fired from the RV window. Its darts were loaded with stronger stuff than Eloy’s, which were only meant to knock out a seventy-pound v-chimp. She opened her door a crack, fired her gun into the air to scare off any lurking v-chimps, and said, “I’ll be right back.” It was about ten long strides back to the patrol car.
From the back seat she retrieved Eloy’s tranq rifle and a wallet-like plastic holder containing darts. Using an old towel from Brandon’s van to protect her skin, she tore Eloy’s hood off.
Stephen leaned out of the van and called, “Scare shot,” to warn her that he was about to fire another round into the air.
Amy unloaded the tranq rifle point-blank into Eloy’s cheek, then pulled the spent dart out and pocketed it. A satisfying welt appeared immediately. She put three more darts into Eloy’s face, leaving it strangely disfigured.
Eloy was a skinny, muscular guy, and his neck veins bulged prominently. Holding the rifle so that one of the veins bisected the barrel, she fired the fifth and sixth darts. Then she did the same with five of the Hangar darts.
Stephen fired another scare shot.
Amy wiped down the tranq gun, then pushed it into the bare hands of Gil, getting his prints all over it. Next she tore out the patrol car’s dome light and, leaving the driver door open, returned to the van.
“Whoever finds that car,” she said, “will see Eloy’s face all swollen and discolored, and won’t realize what caused it. The autopsy will show he died from a huge dose of tranqs, but whoever’s investigating will be chasing down a lot of mysteries in the meantime. And these darts’ll be long gone.” She turned to Brandon. “I know you need to drop us off and get back to the Hangar before dawn, but can we wait here for just a few minutes?”
“I guess so.”
Amy turned off the lights and the engine. A quarter moon was up, and as their eyes adjusted, they could see the outline of the patrol car.
With all the van windows shut tight, they couldn’t hear the rustling in the trees, but they all saw the creature that landed in a crouch on the ground next to the open driver door, then leapt up inside.
***
In the perfectly camouflaged, 1950s-built bomb shelter outside the crumbling farmhouse where Brandon dropped them off, Stephen and Amy lived on canned goods and crackers from the Hangar.
There was no shower, but the old latrine still had a toilet seat and a big open space beneath it, and it was in a separate compartment of the bomb shelter, with a door that mostly sealed the odor away from the main living area. Brandon had given them an electric camping lantern, a crate of batteries, a box of magazines, and toiletries. After satisfying themselves that they’d killed all the black widows nesting in the bomb shelter, they slept and slept and slept.
Even through several feet of earth and one foot of concrete, they could hear the choppers as the mountainside was scoured for intruders, fugitives, sick animals, and the body of Deputy Cisneros.
They couldn’t go outside at night because of the possibility that some v-chimps might have ranged far from the Hangar. In daytime, during long lulls in chopper noises, they sometimes climbed to the surface to enjoy a few minutes of fresh air.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
As soon as he got off the elevator in the ground-floor lobby of Sanderson Tropical Timber’s headquarters office, Wes Gimble could see the receptionist was terrified. Anyone would have been. The enormous man leaning across the counter towered over her. She rolled her chair a few feet back, but still had to crane her neck to look at his face – not that anyone would want to look upon such a sight. The guy’s gaping, deadpan expression was somehow scarier than if he’d been snarling and gnashing his teeth.
Two of the building’s security guards stood on either side of the guy, each gripping one of his elbows, but he acted as though he didn’t even notice them. Gimble felt sorry for the receptionist; she’d had to deal with pushy law-enforcement people several times in the last couple of days, and now this.
Whatever Hugh Sanderson had gotten into that made the feds want to question him, apparently it had also pissed off some dangerous private interests. As far as Wes Gimble could tell, the monster talking to the receptionist was just too big and blandly fearless to be anything but pure underworld muscle.
“Sir, please,” the woman was saying. “I don’t have any information about Mr. Sanderson. If you would like to leave your contact number….”
The visitor simply stared at the her, while the two guards kept trying to lead him away from the counter.
Strange that the guy would expect to get help finding someone who was clearly on the run – just by walking up to an office worker and asking. Or maybe this was all for show, making sure everyone knew that Hugh had screwed with the wrong people.
What burned Gimble up was that he did know where Hugh had gone. An hour earlier, Gimble had arrived at William Sanderson’s office a few minutes earlier than expected. He’d stood just outside the open doorway and overheard enough of a phone conversation to be able to figure out Hugh’s whereabouts. The conversation had been in a sort of makeshift code, and was with an intermediary rather than directly with Hugh. But Gimble had picked up on certain keywords and knew enough about Hugh’s habits to put the picture together.
He’d retreated from the doorway and returned a few minutes later. The reason William had summoned him, it turned out, was to ask what he, Gimble, planned to do in order to ease the effects of the coming storm.
Gimble had engineered one of the finest PR campaigns ever, and Hugh had utterly undone all that work by doing whatever had made him a fugitive. Instead of a shining jewel on Wes Gimble’s résumé, the Sanderson Tropical Timber green campaign was going to be remembered as a sticky mess. He would forever be trying to distance himself from it.
And now William wanted to know how Gimble was going to fix things up.
What he really wanted to do was call the feds and tip them off about what he’d heard – not out of any sense of patriotic duty, but simply to get even with the arrogant playboy and his ungrateful brother.
He was aware of that snotty little rhyme that Hugh had made up about him: I’m Gimble-him! / I’m Gimble-she! He had made Hugh a star, rather than just one more faceless corporate veep, but the man clearly didn’t appreciate it. Maybe turning in Hugh would be one of the more satisfying moments of his life. And maybe William would get smacked with obstruction of justice for not doing it himself.
Yet if the Green Angel were apprehended now, the PR mess would be worse than if he were nabbed after the story had cooled down a bit, and that would further undermine Gimble’s future career.
What he really hoped was that Hugh would never be found.
Hugh’s eco-messiah persona had been so successful
that, with his sudden disappearance, the air was thick with rumors of his martyrdom. A lot of websites were trumpeting the theory that the whole bio-terror scare involving the Wild Adventure Land had been a setup, a plot by the fossil-fuel and chemical industries to destroy Hugh Sanderson. Hugh had presented too much of a danger to the status quo. He’d been threatening to steer the economy green in a way that no politician had ever had the will to do, so Corporate Big Brother had made him disappear. Reporters were constantly demanding to know precisely what disease had broken out in the high desert, and when the feds didn’t have a straight answer, the situation stank even more of deception.
As long as Hugh remained a missing martyr, Wes Gimble’s greatest achievement to date would stay great.
Gimble looked toward the receptionist’s counter. Surprisingly, the big man was leaving quietly, flanked by the two security guards, who maintained only a light grip on his enormous elbows. Gimble followed them outside, staying a few yards behind. The guards returned to the building, shaking their heads, and the huge visitor lumbered down the sidewalk, never looking back.
The thought of approaching such a scary creep was nerve-wracking. Do you just tap a hit man on the shoulder and say, Excuse me, sir…?
But Gimble did exactly that after screwing up his courage. The big man’s face suggested he had no idea why some well-dressed little guy wanted to help him, but he did listen. Finally he began nodding, then produced a folded sheet of paper, wrinkled and sweaty, from his pants pocket. He wrote everything down, including the words, “Tell him Wes Gimble says hello.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Hugh Sanderson was back in the Caribbean, but could no longer risk staying at any of the better resorts. He was at one of the shoe-string-traveler places in Jamaica, enjoying sweet bread and a mango smoothie from a food stand on the beach. The sun had been up for barely an hour, and the air was almost cool.
The bulk of what Lou Burr had paid him before the whole deal exploded was in a Caymans bank just a few hours’ flight from here – nearly two and a half million dollars. He’d already bought high-quality fake travel documents and moved the money into a new account under the alias. He had thirty thousand in cash on hand in case he needed to go somewhere fast. He could take puddle-jumper flights back and forth between here and the Caymans quickly and easily if he ever needed to appear at the bank in person and pick up a really large sum of money. For more modest sums, there were ATMs.
He would have had closer to seven million in his account by now if things hadn’t gone horribly wrong, with a few million more to come. He wouldn’t be more or less in hiding, either. But things could have gone a lot worse. At least he’d had the sense to get the hell out of the U.S. immediately after government slapped a quarantine on the hills around Wild Adventure Land.
It didn’t look like there was much chance of reviving the deal with Burr, of importing the rest of the stink monkeys and setting up the lab at a new location. There wasn’t even anyone left in Equateur to work with anymore. The tall guard had disappeared. The barrel-shaped one had apparently been trapped in the old logging camp after some psycho blasted the mountain pass that led in and out of the basin where the stink monkeys lived. All those towering rock formations had collapsed inward, and now the pass simply no longer existed. Only a chopper could get the guy out, and that was not going to happen. No one would be heading into that basin any time soon.
The Equateurian government’s official story was that some stored dynamite had been set off by accident, but their other official story was that they’d been considering sealing the basin off anyhow, because of a possible health threat from the wildlife there. Some prick at Public Health had apparently managed to resurrect that phony plague story.
His legal situation back home didn’t appear to be a complete disaster. Pretty much everyone at Top Gun Security was either dead or, like Vendetti, functionally brain-dead. That meant almost everybody who knew what had really gone down in those mountains – or knew about Hugh’s connection with it – was out of the game. Lou Burr most likely was not worried, because the feds could not prove a connection between him and TGS – not anymore, with Vendetti effectively out of the picture. A couple of Burr’s people in Detroit knew the truth, but none of them were the type to give up anything on a witness stand.
But Homeland Security was still doing its indefinite-detention thing. Even William had been held for a few days. After all, Sanderson Wild Adventure Land was the epicenter of what appeared to be a mysterious outbreak, and the company had been harvesting timber in precisely the same location where a similar outbreak had occurred in Africa. Nothing would ever be proved because no bio-terror bugs would ever be found, but Hugh wasn’t taking any chances on going back to the First World until he was absolutely sure that everything had blown over.
And he was in no hurry. It was kind of breezy hanging out at these cheap places. The beach was still the beach, and there were plenty of pretty girls. He’d bleached his hair and grown enough of a beard that he wouldn’t be immediately recognizable. And he figured that, on the off chance that someone here did recognize him, they’d sort-of be on his side. After all, these young traveler types probably sympathized with the green movement, and the greenies were more on his side than ever, thanks to a wealth of rumors to the effect that Hugh Sanderson had been silenced by the great corporate machine.
Meanwhile, all he had to do was make his 2.5 million last, and although he hated the limitations of living on a budget, his time in exile was shaping up to be surprisingly enjoyable. No William, no Gimble, no Marcel. He had even survived going cold turkey on the stink juice.
No William.
That last face-to-face conversation with big bro had been sweet. Mentioning Lou Burr had been entirely gratuitous, of course; Burr had no stake at all in keeping Hugh in California. But watching William’s reaction to the name had been priceless.
And now he was on the beach, not having to answer to anyone, with all the time in the world. He was sitting on a wooden chaise longue on the sand, enjoying the morning breeze as the land heated up, watching young people come and go at the food stand. This was the same sort of crowd that used to frequent the Sanderson Free Forest Campground, creating the original market for ruby.
A slender brunette with a cute British accent was flirting with the shirtless, dreadlocked young man who worked there. She was somewhere under thirty, tanned and toned, with a colorful hummingbird tattoo on her left shoulder blade.
Two men and a woman, all Nordic-looking, sat around a small round table beneath a red nylon parasol. Hugh had shared a pitcher of Red Stripe with one of these men the night before. They had swapped scuba tales and sworn to go diving together soon.
It was glorious. Hugh was forty, yet he still had a place in this vibrant, vagabond world. He was healthy and rich and free, and that made him a younger man than a lot of twenty-five year olds.
His stomach growled. He had done a lot of swimming the day before, rented a jet ski, and even danced for a while after the sun went down, yet he had neglected to eat much of anything. It was catching up with him now. He decided he was hungry for more than the smoothie and the sweet bread. Real breakfast would be available in half an hour, as soon as the place down the beach opened.
A huge man sat down several yards away and opened a newspaper. He wore what looked like white painter’s pants and a t-shirt with white and green horizontal stripes. He was not hugely obese, but the extra bulk on his large frame made him seem to be spilling over the sides of the wicker armchair. He smoked a kind of filterless cigarette popular among young European travelers. Whenever he turned the pages of his newspaper, he would rest the cigarette on his lower lip, like a caricature of an old-time gangster. His face relaxed into a sloppy smile between drags on the cigarette. He looked a lot like that big oaf who had kept popping up at his lectures and at Free Forest Campground, the one Hugh thought of as Bluto.
Hugh nearly dropped his smoothie. This was Bluto. The same guy.
The apparition glanced toward Hugh, gaped at him for a moment, then returned to his newspaper.
Half a minute later, Bluto looked at him again. He looked a third and a fourth time, taking no pains to be discreet about it. Hugh doubted that he’d ever seen a more repulsive person in his life. It wasn’t just his features; there was something about his manner that was idiotic and animal-like all at once. The guy seemed entirely unconscious of his own facial expression, and of the sheen of excessive saliva on his lips, visible even from a distance.
Hugh was rattled now. He knew this guy had followed him a lot in the past, but how had he known to come here? And who the hell was he?
The man suddenly stood up and lumbered directly toward Hugh, revealing his height to be close to seven feet. His latest cigarette looked ridiculously small in his thick hands. His eyebrows, broad watercolor brushstrokes, were arched as if in pleasant surprise, although Hugh sensed that this was merely their default position. He swung his great weight from side to side as he approached, while his eyes and mouth remained slack. Add a little Baby Huey to that Bluto look, Hugh thought.
“You’re Hugh Sanderson.” The voice was a little high, a little husky. The big wet mouth stretched a little wider and the eyebrows went up more, as if he expected Hugh to be happy about meeting him here.
Hugh regarded him for a minute. Wanting neither to stay silent nor to admit to his identity, he asked the other man’s name.
“I’m Marty.”
Sanderson felt something bump lightly against his chest. He looked down and realized that Marty had put his hand up to shake. Sanderson had to lean back a foot or so in order to meet the open palm with his own. It was impossible to tell whether the man did not comprehend this awkwardness or did not care.
“And why are you here?” Hugh asked.
“I’ve been following you for months. You must have seen me at your speeches.”