by David Dun
"What do you make of that?" Dan said.
"It's a secured document room. The sort of place you'd keep highly confidential information."
"What do you suppose is through that door?" Dan said, nodding to the right to the end of the hall and the economy door.
"I don't know, but I doubt we're meant to find out," she said. He began walking. "Young, let's discuss this." She moved in front of him with one hand on his chest.
"You talk and I'll listen," he said as he reached around her for the knob and began slowly turning it.
"All balls, no brain," she muttered as she stepped from between him and the door.
He peeked through the crack at 3,000 square feet of modern laboratory, packed with all sorts of equipment that looked electrical and chemical. There were at least a dozen people in casual attire, concentrating on then" work. In the middle of the lab were two huge vats with a lot of tubing running around them and apparently in them. He guessed they were under pressure.
"What do you see?" she asked.
"Take a look."
She stepped around him and put her eye to the crack.
"What are they doing?"
"Something they obviously don't want us to know about. What if we just walk out there in our blankets and introduce ourselves-maybe they're not all bad guys," he said.
"Dumb idea. We'd never leave with anything."
He put a hand gently on her head, moving her down the crack so that he could hunch over the top of her and get a better view. After a minute or two a couple of technicians began walking toward the door.
"Close the door, they're coming."
"In here," he said, opening a storage-room door. It was a room perhaps twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide, lined floor to ceiling with large shelves stacked with ordinary-looking supplies. Mostly it appeared to be paper products. On the floor in front of a large bottom shelf was a row of five-gallon cans of industrial cleaner. Behind the small aluminum drums the shelf appeared empty.
"Come on," Maria said, moving a couple of cans and crawling onto the shelf.
"Are you crazy?"
"Hurry, damn it."
Dan crawled in backward, only to discover that there wasn't enough room.
"I'll get on top," Maria said, sliding over him. He stayed prone underneath Maria, who lay facedown on his back.
With considerable effort he pulled the cans in front of the shelf.
"If they were coming, they'd already be here," Dan said.
Then a woman's voice.
"I think the file folders are in the big locker."
''You can look, but I think they took them all out of there and I think we've run out. We go through those damn things like bugs on a chicken farm." Male voice.
The door opened.
"Somebody keeps leaving the lights on."
Dan held his breath. Fortunately, Maria was a small person. Neither of them made a sound. He could see the woman's legs in navy blue slacks. She wore cheap white tennis shoes that squeaked over the floor as she rummaged through the shelves. She was working her way back and would surely see them if she began moving cans or looked just over the tops. It was inconceivable that she would miss them. Glancing back, he noticed Maria's petite white thigh on top of his meatier, even paler version, the blankets scrunched to the side. He liked her taste in panties-bikini style but not thong. It surprised him; he would have had her pegged for more matronly briefs. Unfortunately, nothing else in this place was the flesh white of their untanned thighs or the ivory white of Maria's underwear.
One shelf back the lady was searching too thoroughly. They were going to be found.
The door opened.
"If you're looking for file folders, we moved them over to the file room."
"Well, why didn't somebody say something?"
"Hell if I know."
The door slammed; the lights went out.
"That was close." Maria let out a deep breath.
First Dan moved two cans; then he let her slither out, unable to ignore the smooth warmth of her skin sliding on his. More concerned for Maria's safety than he cared to admit, he slowly opened the door, finding an empty hallway once again.
At the opposite end of the corridor stood the heavy wooden door, dark in color, that looked more executive than the rest. Instinctively they were drawn to it. They both hurried, imagining that at any moment the door from the laboratory might open once again. When he tried the door, he expected it would be locked. It opened.
A soft light in the corner partially illuminated the office. Inside, it had been decorated much more lavishly than the other rooms they had seen. There was a window with vertical mahogany blinds, a cherry television cabinet, custom bookcases to match, a large rosewood desk, a beige carpet overlaid with real or imitation Persian. There was a large folding-door, freestanding closet that when opened revealed various items of clothing on hangers, a lot of snack foods, rain gear, golf clubs, two rifles, and a sawed-off shotgun.
"Damn, look at that," Dan said.
Maria flipped up the corner of the rug.
"It's real. Handmade. Let's see what we can find." She went to another door that led into a small bathroom complete with a shower.
Dan tried the filing cabinet behind the desk. It was locked.
They both rummaged through the drawers of the desk but found no key.
"Most morons put the key in the desk," he said.
She went to the other filing cabinets and began looking through them.
"We better do this fast," he said.
"I'm hurrying."
"Oh, look what I found." She held up a flat gray box.
"What is it?"
"Box full of keys, all labeled and each key attached to the bottom with Velcro. And one says fireproof cabinet."
"Bingo."
Quickly they opened it and started rooting through files full of paperwork. Many pages of equations were unintelligible. They found computer printouts with chemical names and numerous spreadsheets that contained numbers and chemical symbols.
"Look," she said, holding a stack of photos. They were pictures of dead-looking bats.
"What's that mean?" he whispered.
"What's any of it mean? Those equations look formidable," she said. "A lot of very fine print. Whoever wrote them must be a math or chemistry person."
"Why do chemistry people take bat photos?" he said.
"Or write stuff about bat neurons," she said, holding up an equation with an explanation related to brain activity and consciousness. "We better get the hell to the other side of that wall before they find out we know about this."
"I'd like to know what it is that we know," Dan said. "Let's take one bat photo and these pages of chemical equations."
"I wish we knew what we were doing," she said, sliding the drawer closed. Dan was still rifling through another. "You wanna die in here? Come on." She opened the door a crack. "Shhh!" She closed the door quietly. "In here, quick."
"What? Why?" he whispered as she shoved him in the bathroom.
"We have been crapped on by the gods, that's why," she said, opening the shower. They both stepped in and quietly closed the frosted-glass door. "The white-haired guy is at the other end of the hallway talking to the thugs. Listen."
The outer office door opened and closed, then silence for a moment.
''Let me talk to Hans." There was a pause. ''Hmm. Hmm. They're in one of the supply rooms.'' After a time he cleared his throat. "I've already called the cops. They're trespassing." A long silence. ''You do that and they could never leave here, Hans. No way. And even if we did, we don't know for sure whether anybody knows they're here.
"I know all about the division of labor." More silence. "Well, you can damn well do as you please next time. But the cops will be here in half an hour." Sounds of the chair rolling on plastic and a deep sigh punctuated the silence.
"I don't want to know. That's your deal. Your department.. " There was a solid smack on wood, then the sound of liquid pouring and the clink of
a crystal decanter. ''Yeah? Well, fuck you too, Hans." He slammed the phone.
After a few minutes the office door closed again.
"Let's go," Maria said.
"I don't need any encouragement."
The hallway was empty. They rushed through the office door and down the hall to the pass-through, their bare feet whispering over the linoleum.
"Let's get back in there," she said, prying it open.
While she was crawling through, he went to the cupboards in the hallway but was only finding more meaningless computer printouts. He wished they had found something he could understand, something in plain English.
"Will you come on?" she pleaded.
With one photo and five pages in Maria's purse, they lay on the cots and tried to look as calm and bored as possible.
8
The eighteen-foot mahogany table was inlaid with redwood burl and cherry, exquisitely made with feet capped in heavy brass and with fine carvings down the legs. There was a distinctly Asian flavor to the design in keeping with the preferences of the man who sat at its head. The Amada regional headquarters, about fifteen minutes outside of Palmer and forty-five minutes from the redwood-forest research compound, was second only to the San Francisco offices in grandeur and opulence.
Kenji Yamada had married Micha Asaka Yamada, the third daughter of Yoshinari Asaka, one of the ten wealthiest men in Japan. The Asaka family's corporate holding company, Kuru, was heavily invested in the wood-fiber industry, manufacturers of fine paper, pencils, wooden blinds, wooden windows, medium-density fiberboard, and a host of other derivative products.
Kenji had been relegated to the U.S. subsidiary, Amada, which was not a Japanese name but sounded so to the Western ear and was very pronounceable to the Western tongue. Among Amada's chief assets was one million acres of timberland in the United States and Canada. About 250,000 of those acres were located on the north coast of California not far from the Oregon border. Since it was substantially north of San Francisco, not many even knew that this wild area existed.
Kenji devoted every waking moment to furthering Amada's business. At age forty-nine he worried that life was passing him by, and that if he didn't have some outstanding success in the near future his father-in-law would die not realizing that his third son-in-law brought him the most honor. Today he stood on the brink of greatness, thwarted only by some legal technicalities and a stubborn mystery that seemed to defy resolution.
Kenji sat in an ornate chair differing from the others both in the detail of its carvings and its mass. His face remained impassive as he listened to the other three men. Only occasionally did he let his fingers run lightly over his close-cropped jet-black hair-an expression of his annoyance at what he was being told. To his right sat Hans Groiter, his chief of security, a Caucasian man whose skin was deeply freckled and nearly hairless. To Groiter's left sat his bespectacled lawyer.
''I am disappointed Herschel would bring them into the compound without consulting us,'' Kenji said.
"Well, now they're about to leave," Groiter said. "We'll never know what they know or what they suspect unless we do something, and fast."
"You have this Dan Young's address?"
"If I get your drift, we can start planting bugs tonight."
Kenji merely nodded, dismissing him. The ride from the Amada office to Palmer was short. With luck Groiter would get his work done before Dan Young arrived home.
"Why are the damned bats going crazy?" Kenji asked Kim Lee. "In this country that kind of thing could attract more curious biologists."
"We know they are an undiscovered subspecies," his attorney answered. "And I think we're getting them all killed off."
"Oh yes, and to find that out, we had to kill a goddamned snoopy biologist who asked too many questions?"
"It was a heart attack."
Kenji didn't bother replying. It had been stupid to bring in a man they couldn't control. The second week on the job the man had wanted to bring in an army of his brethren. Another one of Herschel's mistakes.
"So when do we know something?"
"About the bats? About our problem in the mine?"
''How about the railroad?" Kenji asked, shifting his attention to a topic only slightly less vexing.
"They won't sell."
"Why not? For good money they should."
"If we go to them and hint at big money, what do you suppose they will think?" Kim Lee tried, and failed, not to sound condescending to his boss.
"They'll think we have found something of value. So how much should we offer?"
"Ten dollars per acre."
"And why should they take that?" Kenji asked.
"It's a place to start negotiating, but I don't hold out much hope. The railroad always keeps the mineral rights."
"Why we didn't buy everything when we bought this land is a mystery to me."
The exasperation showed on Kim Lee's face, but he remained silent.
"I know I don't have to remind you of the money that each of you will make if this project is a success."
Following a helicopter ride to the police station, Dan and Maria had arranged for the recovery of the ruined rental car and for the borrowed truck to be returned to their' 'benefactor." Then they were ticketed for a trespassing infraction and sent home. After a taxi ride back to the pub, they retrieved Dan's car and drove through Palmer past darkened houses made quiet for the night.
For the hundredth time Maria wondered aloud what secret the men at the compound could be guarding so carefully.
"No clue," Dan said, "but Hans, whoever he is, wanted some creative persuasion, and our buddy was pointing out they'd have to kill us if that happened."
"Maybe we should have told the cops."
"No. We've got nothing. Nothing that couldn't be explained away. This way we can talk to our clients, get clearance, find some experts, maybe make something of the bats or the equations. Then, if appropriate, convince the cops to go out with a search warrant without warning."
"I don't disagree."
They pulled up in the driveway of the Palmer Inn. Although Maria had not planned to stay the night, she had long since missed her flight and had now decided to attend an early-morning telephone conference with Patty McCafferty and Jeb Otran-a discussion she wanted to hear.
"Look," Dan said, "why don't you come to my house? You have no luggage. You don't even have a toothbrush. I have a guest bedroom. Pepacita, my housekeeper, is there. You wouldn't be the lone female."
"Hey, that's a leap across a giant gulf. In the morning you'd wake up and realize this is Maria the enviro under your roof-the enemy. Isn't that what you guys call us?"
"We call you worse than that. But this is an emergency."
He watched her brow furrow.
"You're going to feel strange walking into the lobby like that. What will you do in the morning?"
"Oh, and you've got a whole size-eight wardrobe?"
"I do."
"You-you didn't get rid of your wife's clothes?"
"No. Not all of them. Not yet. She was a generous and good person. She would have given you the clothes if she were alive, so why not when she's gone?"
"You've got clothes I could wear to a seven a.m. meeting?"
"Absolutely. Size eight. Tess weighed one hundred twenty-five pounds. She was five foot eight inches tall. Pepacita is a great cook. There'll be dinner whenever we get there."
"What if we get the clothes and I come back here."
"You can decide when you get to my place."
"I am famished."
"Good. We'll at least get you dinner and a wardrobe."
''You know, any day now we could be in court on opposite sides of a timber-harvest plan, clawing at each other until our fingernails are hanging from bloody stumps."
''What happened to the old saying: 'Let us strive mightily but eat and drink as friends.' "
"This is real life. This counts. If you cut down a grove of redwoods a thousand years old-well, they're gone fo
rever."
He straightened his hat and looked at her as if he had an answer.
"You wanna say something dumb, like they'll grow back."
He laughed. "Let's go to my house before we start an all-night fight."
Hans Groiter liked dried pumpkin seeds. He liked the little ritual of cracking the salted shells between his teeth and sucking out the meat. The trick was that after removing the heart he ate the shell as well.
As he drilled through the sub-floor of Dan Young's house, he ground a shell to a pulp between his teeth. Peering around the edge of the Venetian blind, he had watched a heavy Mexican woman puttering in the family room. Figuring carefully the location of the large couch, he had entered the crawl space under the house and used a hand drill to create a 1/8-inch pilot hole. Although his spike mike had wood-boring threads, he wanted to make it easy and silent.
He worked by the light of a battery-powered lantern, keeping it turned away from the entrance to the crawl space and hoping that some stray beam of light would not penetrate the darkness outside the residence and give him away. With the predrilled hole he easily screwed the mike through the floor with his right hand while his left arm mindlessly brushed aside cobwebs. Around him the pillar and post foundation supported a crawl space that varied between twenty-four and thirty-six inches over uneven ground. Protruding through the plywood floor were the nails that held the sub-floor to the plywood. If he wasn't careful, they would bloody his knuckles.
By the time the mike was screwed through the plywood, the medium-density fiber (MDF) sub-flooring, and the carpet, he had a strong feeling that he better get the hell out before he was caught. He worked with a fierce sense of urgency. If they did come, his men would trigger a quiet beep on his walkie-talkie and alert him to listen. So far, the silence had been reassuring. Once the mike was in place, he inserted a tri-pronged plug to a wireless transmitter.
As quickly and as quietly as possible, he retreated to the small, hinged door in the side of the house, exited the crawl space, and walked the one block to a waiting van.
In the forest behind the house, buried in an azalea, stood a large, sensitive microphone aimed at the family-room window. Sound waves from inside that hit the window could be picked up by Groiter' s hidden paraphernalia and broadcast to the van. Any kitchen or family-room conversation that could not be detected by the spike mike under the couch could probably be heard through this giant ear. Also, Groiter's best surveillance man, a guy too expensive to be anything but an independent contractor, had done a phone tap at the pole, also using a transmitter with a feed to the van.