by Rob Swigart
“It’s all over, then,” Patria said.
“Maybe,” Chazz agreed. “But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. They couldn’t have mounted a project of this size locally. They had to get rid of the platinum. They had to build the lab. That meant they had to have some backing in Washington, in the Navy, in the Pentagon, the White House. I’ve read statements of the President’s; he believes the Russians are developing similar biological weapons. He’s asked for appropriations to do the same. Congress has turned them down, but presidents before now have been known to have a secret task force to do this sort of thing. I’d guess someone on the White House staff planted information, probably in Russia itself, that the Soviets were working on a viroid like this. Silver made several trips to the Soviet Union. A double agent of some sort could have handed it to him. The President could have wanted some zealot inside the scientific community to work on it. We’ll never find out, and could never prove it anyway.”
“That could mean there’s another task force somewhere else, trying to develop it too,” Takamura said.
“Yes. I don’t think it’s likely, but it certainly is possible,” Chazz admitted. “It’s hard to keep a project like this secret, though.”
“Do you mean the other side probably isn’t developing a weapon like this?” Patria asked.
“It would be extremely difficult for the Soviet Union to do. There are no pure American ethnic strains of any size. And even the Slavic vector had to be awfully complex and the viroid code extremely intricate. Overlapping is good, but there is too little redundancy. A slight mutation would have destroyed its effectiveness.” He shrugged. “We’ll never know if it would have worked. It all went down the drain. It might have worked as planned. The chances were better than fifty-fifty.” After a pause he continued. “If it could be done once, it could be done again.”
Patria shuddered despite the sun. “I hope not,” she said.
The newspaper headlines noted a local bow hunter had gone on a killing spree at the PACMAN Naval Facility, and had set a fire that destroyed the Officers’ Club and part of a laboratory. There had been fatalities, including the head of the laboratory, Lieutenant Commander James Goode, who had heroically given his own life killing the madman. Because of the disturbance and fire, a goodwill visit by the nuclear submarine Fortune had been cancelled.
In an unrelated incident, a biologist from the Douglass Research Center had been seriously injured by a self-inflicted gunshot wound and was not expected to live. The police said he apparently was despondent over ill health.
Takamura shook his head and turned the paper over. “I trust my statistics will return to a more normal level now. This is a quiet island.”
“What about those other two, Dewilliter and Freeman?” Patria asked.
“We don’t have anything on them, not really. Besides, the Navy doesn’t want any more publicity.” Chazz smiled thinly. “I suspect Dewilliter is going to become intensely interested in lobelioids again. They didn’t really know what the project was doing, anyway. Dewilliter was working on the vector for Silver, but he knew only the spindle viroid part of it.”
Kids ran by in dappled sunlight. Plumeria scented the air.
“Shinawa says you learned well…” Takamura told Chazz. “He’d like you to take his class while he goes on vacation. His flower arranging master is going to be in Honolulu, he says. He is going there to study. He says the problem with Hawaii is that it has too much. It is difficult to develop simplicity.”
Chazz grunted but said nothing.
“‘End of journey bring sadness,’” Takamura said.
“Don’t kid me,” Chazz said. “You’re glad it’s over.”
“Yes.”
“What about Renfrew’s money, the stuff he buried?” Patria asked.
Chazz shrugged. “I’m sure he did a good job. He probably did curse it well, too. He was very good at what he did. I doubt anyone’ll find it. How about you? What are your plans now?” Chazz did not look at her.
Patria smiled. “I finished my fieldwork in Yucatan. I suppose I could stay here for a while.” Her voice softened with silvery laughter. “Perhaps children… I’ve ignored their role in culture before. Perhaps even having a child or two– though certainly no more than that, and purely for the sake of science, you understand– wouldn’t be a bad idea. Sort of see the problem from the inside, as it were. Besides, I’ve gotten interested in kahuna healing, too.” She touched the sore spot on her arm. “Do you think I could find another kahuna?”
“We can ask The Kukui Nut,” Takamura said. “He would know, if anyone would.”
She nodded. “How about you, Chazz?” she asked without looking at him. “What are you going to do now?”
“Well,” he said, and he looked at her now, “I suppose I might teach Shinawa’s aikido class while he’s on vacation. And in the meantime, maybe I can develop a taste for nice quiet lab work again. I could do with a little less excitement. Especially if you’re going to stay on, Pat, I’d like to experience a little boredom for a change. How about you, Cobb? This was supposed to be a boring island, I heard.”
“It is true,” Takamura said. “This is a very boring place. We like it that way. So to pep it up a little, the two of you are invited for some of Mrs. Takamura’s famous tempura tonight. It’s about time, I think. After all, ‘Man who sits by side of road sees world pass by.’”
“What does that mean?” Patria asked Chazz.
“Beats me,” he said.
THE END
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Also by Rob Swigart
The Thriller in Paradise Series:
VECTOR
TOXIN
VENOM
As Well As:
THE DELPHI AGENDA
Archaeology Novels:
STONE MIRROR
XIBALBA GATE
Satire:
LITTLE AMERICA
A.K.A./A COSMIC FABLE
THE TIME TRIP
Science Fiction:
THE BOOK OF REVELATIONS
PORTAL
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About the Author
ROB SWIGART is the author of one nonfiction book, four electronic fiction titles, and 11 novels, including Little America, declared as “Wildly funny…” by the LA Times, and hailed as a “Bold and brassy…breathless romp with prose that crackles like a live wire, bites like a rabid dog, [and] smoothes like 30-year-old Scotch,” by the San Francisco Review of Books. His classic and highly revered interactive novel Portal has attained near cult status as the first ever narrative “game” produced by Activision, published two years later as a hard copy novel by St. Martin’s Press, and heralded as “spooky, audacious, breakthrough science fiction” by Timothy Leary.
Now a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Archeology Center, Swigart’s most recent books include The Delphi Agenda, as well as two teaching novels, Xibalba Gate, a novel of the Ancient Maya, published by AltaMira, and Stone Mirror, a novel of the Neolithic, by Left Coast Press. These works weave near-future science ficti
on with famous and obscure archeological events, melding true fact and fiction as a conscious product of Swigart’s lifelong passion for using narrative to tell stories of the past as found in material records. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about the Neolithic.
Praise for Toxin, the SECOND book in Rob Swigart’s Thriller in Paradise series:
“Swigart gets a lot of mileage out of the beauty and isolation of his Hawaii locale, and his characters are thoroughly likable, especially Cobb, who seldom misses the chance to quote Charlie Chan, his spiritual mentor… A welcome return for an unusual cop in an exotic place.”
—Peter Robertson, Booklist
“Toxin has all the ingredients necessary for a superior thriller: strong characters, an exotic background, and a compelling central puzzle.”
—Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle
Toxin
A Thriller in Paradise
By Rob Swigart
booksBnimble Publishing
New Orleans, La.
Toxin
Copyright 1989 by Rob Swigart
Cover by Roy Migabon
ISBN: 9781625171450
www.booksbnimble.com
All rights are reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First booksBnimble Publishing electronic publication: May
One day on a road in the English countryside, a clergyman happened to meet Plague. “Where are you going?” asked the clergyman.
“To London,” responded Plague, “to kill a thousand.”
They chatted for a few moments and went their separate ways.
When they chanced to meet again some weeks later, the clergyman inquired, “I thought you were going to kill a thousand. How is it that two thousand died?”
“Ah, yes,” replied Plague. “I killed only a thousand. Fear killed the rest.”
Prologue
“I’ve got an anomaly, sir,” the young man watching a screen in a windowless room in Colorado murmured into a telephone headset.
“I’ll be right there.” The answering voice was slightly bored. The young man leaned back in his swivel chair and clasped his hands behind his neck. He stretched against them, working tired muscles.
The room was large and well lit. There was about it an air of purposeful and serious activity. Screens flickered everywhere. Under soundproof hoods paper rolled past heads printing at very high speed essential data from several thousand sources.
Men and women in uniform moved quietly from place to place. They wore on their breasts top-secret clearance passes, with pictures and thumbprints. The walls displayed world maps in several colors, crisscrossed with orbital tracks.
On the mountainside above, and in several widely scattered geographical locations from Alaska to England, in Antigua, Ascension, Kwajalein and Kaua’i, batteries of dish antennae moved slowly, tracking invisible travelers in the sky.
“What is it, Lieutenant?” The owner of the tired voice wore captain’s bars. He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder and leaned down to peer at the screen.
The younger man put his forefinger to the screen. “Here, sir. Three-four-seven. But there’s something else.”
“What do you mean?”
“See this? Another object. We’ve been tracking it for a month now, since oh-two-five-five Greenwich on the eighteenth. Soviet.”
The captain grunted softly. “Antisat?”
“I don’t know, sir. The satellites are live, but tumbling. Both of them.”
“I see.” The captain tapped the lieutenant’s shoulder absently. “Probably not antisat, then. Contact?”
“Lost, sir. No telemetry from ours, and it looks like the other one has stopped sending, too. We have only passive tracking. I requested radar track. Altitude five hundred forty miles, orbital inclination sixty-eight-point-three degrees.”
“What’re the projections?”
The lieutenant changed screens. An orbital profile appeared. “One of them is coming down.”
“One of them?”
“That’s right, sir. One of them.”
“Which one?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
The captain looked around the room. No one was paying any particular attention. “What’s the ID on ours?”
The lieutenant typed briefly. The screen flickered with new lines of letters and numbers. “Sandstone 347D 6-1987 VFB.”
“What the hell do you suppose that is?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. Scientific payload, Launched from Vandenberg, June, eighty-seven. That’s all we know.”
“Of course.” He straightened and frowned. “Punch up the ground track, would you?”
The lieutenant typed some more and an earth map appeared on the screen. A red dashed line curved sinuously along it, moving farther north of the equator than south. He pointed at some numbers along the side of the screen and the captain grunted. “Period, ninety-one-point-zero. Inclination eighty-two-point-six. Apogee, five hundred forty. Perigee, four hundred fifty-two. Very close to the other one. I’ll call mission control, if I can raise them. It’s a military payload.”
“Yessir.”
“Hmph. I wonder what Sandstone is. Oh, well. It’s probably something harmless like the effect of weightlessness on Ping-Pong balls or some such.”
He moved away, and the lieutenant recalled his original screen. It listed thousands of scattered pieces of space junk orbiting the earth— trash bags, debris, abandoned and expired satellites. “This,” the lieutenant said aloud, “is the technological Siberia of satellite tracking.”
The captain strolled across the room, moving deftly around consoles and desks piled with printout. On his way out he glanced up at the huge insignia on the wall: the sword protecting a North America enclosed in the eagle’s wings, the emblem of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
From his office he called Huntsville, Alabama. “Orbits show perturbation,” he said.
“Three-four-seven you say?”
“That’s right. Or the other one. A Soviet project, 1988 424R. Twelve hundred twenty-three kilograms. No name. Cataloged as eighteen-fìve-six-six.”
“OK. Three-four-seven’s an Army project. Low priority. It was piggybacked with a comm satellite on the second June flight.”
“That’s the way we make it,” the captain agreed.
“And the other was oh-two-five-five Greenwich on the eighteenth. We have a Soviet code on it?”
“Kosmos-four-two-four-R. They call it research, a prognoz.”
“That’s what they always say. OK. We’ll look into it. But with all this nonsense going on in the Sudan it’s going to be damn difficult to get anyone’s attention.”
“One of them’s coming down,” the captain insisted. “Probably in chunks.”
“Come on, man. Earth’s seventy-five percent water. Whatever’s left’ll fall in the drink, if it doesn’t burn up. They always do.”
“Probably,” the captain agreed again. “But not always. You never know.”
“No, I suppose not. OK, I’ll file it. Keep on it. When you have a firm impact forecast, call me. And see if you can figure out which one of the buggers is falling!”
After he hung up, the man in Huntsville dialed another number. The secure light beside the phone went on, showing the conversation was scrambled.
“Detrick,” a deep voice answered. “Lab one.”
“It’s three-four-seven.”
“Yes?”
“It might be coming down.”
“Oh? When?”
“Four days, give or take.”
“What do you mean, might?”
The man in Huntsville explained.
“OK,” Detrick responded. “We’re on it. Keep us advised.”
Huntsville assured him they would keep tracking. Then he turned back to his own console and ordered extra radar coverage
of the two satellites.
The man in Fort Detrick disconnected, then redialed.
“Sandstone,” a woman answered. “How may we help you?”
“Give me Badger,” the man said. “Priority one.”
“A moment, sir.” The line clicked twice.
“Badger.”
“Candide could make an unscheduled return.”
“Is that so?” He didn’t sound unduly concerned. “When?”
“Looks like four days. Is it a problem?”
“Not really. We got everything we needed from telemetry. The project was effectively over.” After a pause, he went on, “I suppose there could be a public relations angle… We’ll have to say something to the press. They still seem to be interested in satellites coming down. Especially military satellites.” Badger stared out the window at the Utah desert, stretching brown and desolate to the mountains in the west.
“My thoughts exactly,” Fort Detrick said.
“What’s the best guess on splashdown?”
“What makes you think it’ll be a splash?”
Badger laughed softly. “They always are,” he said. “They always are.”
CONTAIN
CHAPTER 1
THE SUN HAD YET TO RISE over the ocean east of Kaua’i when the jogger left the Moali’i Hotel. He paused on the first step just outside the door and breathed deeply, inhaling the still-fresh scents of tropical flowers. A light rain had fallen recently, and the air was heavy with the moisture that usually collected just before dawn. He breathed out noisily and moved down the steps. Overhead a few tattered clouds obscured the stars. The moon had already set, and the darkness was nearly absolute away from the light of the hotel entry. For a few minutes he trotted alongside the roadway almost by feel.