Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Ueda.” The driver nodded vigorously. He turned right onto the Kaumuali’i Highway.

  “Makeda is a diverse organization, Mr. Welter. Our interests on the mainland include a number of investments from real estate to manufacturing. It is also a discreet organization. Your employer must understand that we are here because he telexed Tokyo about a potential problem. Should this turn out to be a useless trip— what you would call a ‘wild goose chase,’ I believe— our president will have considerable difficulty in future justifying further investment in this area.”

  “Yes, sir. We all understand that, sir. But the problem appears to be very real. A crisis is about to break, and we need to be united in our response, all of us. This is not just a public relations problem.”

  “There is no such thing as ‘just a public relations problem,’ Mr. Welter. International business lives, breathes, and moves on public relations. But please continue. The report was somewhat vague.”

  “Yes, sir, I know that. That’s because our own intelligence is so far still uncertain. Except for what’s been in the news, we know very little. What we do know suggests that there is some, ah, ambiguity.”

  “I see.” Ueda thought for a moment. “This suggests a way out, does it not?”

  “Our thinking exactly,” Welter said. He slowed the car and turned left into a modest driveway screened by an overgrown hedge.

  The drive wound through an extensive forest of banana, pandanus, and ti before reaching a sprawling plantation house surrounded by large screened lanais. The driveway gravel crunched under the tires as they stopped.

  “Very nice,” Ueda said without irony. “I’ve not seen this facility before.” He climbed out of the car and moved vigorously up the three broad steps to the front door. His two associates followed with the luggage, leaving Welter to put the car away.

  Inside it was dim and cool. Ueda glanced around the entry at the wood paneling, the built-in burglar alarm, the gun cabinet set into the wall. Then he put his briefcase on a table and walked into the living room. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the aroma of sandalwood from the beamed ceiling. He moved to the large carved oak table at the end of the room and sat down, facing the gardens outside. Over the nearest trees he could see the slopes of Kapohakau, now draped in rain. He gazed for some time at the green hillsides. Then he turned to the papers stacked neatly on the table before him.

  They consisted of a small stack of telexes and some newspaper clippings. He read through them quickly, placing them carefully in a separate pile as he finished. As he was lining the final page up with the rest, his two associates entered the room. He spoke to them in rapid Japanese. One of them said, “Hat,” and bowed. Welter came in, rubbing his hands together.

  “Well, well, Mr. Ueda. Find everything? Staff prepared all the materials available so far. I’m sure you’ve seen some of it before, too.”

  “Tokyo had some of this same information, yes, Mr. Welter. But it is somewhat different being on the spot. Still, there is not much to go on. It is difficult at this point to say how serious this situation is likely to be.”

  “Yes, sir. We understand that, of course. Yet it seemed critical enough yesterday. The local papers have been covering the story extensively. If Makeda’s involvement gets out… well, you can see what would happen.”

  “Of course. We would see repercussions on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Makeda stock would be hurt. This would be very bad for business. What is bad for our business would also be bad for yours. When is it all supposed to come down?”

  “They say a little after eight tomorrow night. Of course the forecast is not very reliable, but that was the best information we could get. The newspapers are even less reliable.”

  “All right. Now, I will need to make some calls. I had no time in Honolulu. I will need a computer terminal. Then we will all need to rest.”

  “Down the hall, Mr. Ueda. Our computers have a gateway to all the nets.”

  “I won’t be able to use your gateways, Mr. Welter. Please get Matsushima Honolulu on the telephone. I will speak with Taro Asao. The number is on this card.”

  Welter bowed in unconscious imitation of Ueda’s two associates as he accepted the card. He went to a multiline telephone on a sideboard and dialed the number. While he was connecting, Ueda carefully removed his suit jacket and folded it over the back of his chair. Then he stepped out onto the terrace behind the house through the double French doors and began to perform a series of slow exercises. He was deep into the Yang series of Tai Ch’i movements when Welter came outside with the telephone.

  Ueda’s stocky form, etched against the tinted glass of an extensive solarium to the left, wavered as he took the receiver and barked into it. He listened, then plunged into conversation. In what seemed a very brief time he handed the receiver to Welter without looking at him and continued the series where he had left off. Welter watched for a while, puzzled, then shrugged and carried the phone back inside.

  He waited then, watching Ueda move slowly, swinging arms and legs, hopping softly from one foot to the other or pivoting completely around on the ball of one foot. Ueda had not loosened his tie or made any other concessions to the heat except removing his jacket. At last he finished and came back inside. He was neither breathing heavily nor sweating.

  “We should have established security by now,” he said. He picked up his jacket and put it on as he moved across the living room and out the archway to the hall.

  “Fourth door on the right,” Welter called after him. “Do you want any help?”

  “No, thank you, Mr. Welter, that will be all I need at present. Please show my associates to their rooms. They will be tired from the trip and in need of a bath, food, and a night’s sleep. I will be along shortly. First I must talk to Tokyo.”

  He took his briefcase from the table in the entry and vanished down the corridor.

  The room was smoothly modern. Computer consoles built into rosewood cabinetry lined the righthand wall. Beneath the screens was a generous desk surface supporting keyboards and telephones. Opposite the door two windows overlooked the rear gardens. In front of the windows a table of dark oiled wood held a small vase of flowers. The lighting was indirect.

  On the left side of the room a small set of chairs and a sofa grouped around a coffee table faced a large-screen television monitor. The wall above the monitor, Ueda knew without looking, contained the cameras, recorders, and microprocessors needed for small-group teleconferencing. At the moment the monitor was off and the cabinet doors that concealed the electronics closed.

  Ueda sat at a computer terminal and pulled the keyboard onto his lap. The screen came to life automatically. He typed a series of numbers and microwave relays on the roof activated silently. The screen displayed the numbers, changing as connections formed. A world time-zone map appeared on the upper part of the screen. Shading covered the nighttime half of the world. Honolulu appeared at the edge of daylight.

  The words “Matsushima Honolulu” appeared in the text area on the bottom of the screen, followed by times, coordinates, frequencies, and scrambler codes. An uplink to a geosynchronous communications satellite traced on the screen in red. The message “Dialing” appeared, followed by the Makeda Corporation’s Tokyo number. The red line connected the satellite with Tokyo. Local time appeared above the city: Honolulu, 4:32 P.M. Tokyo, 11:32 A.M. (Next Day).

  A chime sounded and the screen now read: “Connect.” Ueda lifted the handset of a telephone on the desk. A clock onscreen began timing the call, indicating scrambler delay and the rate at which the scrambling algorithm was changing. This told Ueda how often the method of mixing the bits of data that made up his voice was changed to foil attempts to decipher his conversation.

  “Communications check,” he said in English. “ ‘Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.’ Point one. ‘La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.’ Point two. ‘Furu ike
ya kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto.’ Point three, complete.” He listened for a moment, watching the screen intently. Then he leaned back, satisfied.

  “All right,” he said. “Our partners in Honolulu have done a good job providing us with a secure communications channel. Tell President Makeda all is well so far. I expect to meet with the principals tomorrow. Nothing will happen until then, so I will be taking advantage of this time to obtain some sleep. Expect me to call back in forty-eight hours unless something comes up in the meantime.”

  He replaced the receiver and pushed the keyboard back under the screen. In a few moments it went dark, but Ueda was already moving toward the door.

  He found Welter in the living room. “We will accept our dinner now, if it is convenient. Then we will sleep. Our biorhythms will be out of adjustment for a time.”

  “Of course, Mr. Ueda. This way.” He led the way into the dining room where places for four were set on the table. The two younger men were already seated, but they stood when Ueda entered the room. He waved to them and sat down.

  The meal was swiftly and discreetly served by an elderly man of indeterminate ethnic origins. Ueda ignored him. When the meal was over and he was sipping tea, Ueda asked what the agenda was for the next day.

  “The meeting is arranged for late afternoon tomorrow,” Welter told him. “That should give plenty of time to decide on strategy. The morning is yours. I will be at the office in Lihu’e then if you need anything. I would suggest a walk behind the house. There are some pleasant trails up there.”

  After dinner Ueda strolled in the garden with the older of his two associates; he looked much younger without his dark glasses. Ueda paused to make sure that Welter was not in sight. “You placed the call to Washington, D.C., Fujiwara?” he asked in Japanese.

  “Hai, Director Ueda,” Fujiwara answered, bowing from the waist. “They are tracking things down and expect they will know something by Monday morning. Local time, of course. It will be afternoon there. The public relations people are alerted as well. They thought there would be no problem.”

  “Of course,” Ueda said curtly. “They always think there will be no problem. They believe that is what they are paid to think. It is in the nature of American public relations people to think that. But it is not by thinking that there will be no problem that problems are avoided, Fujiwara. It is by forethought, by planning, and by preparation that problems are avoided.”

  “Yes, Director Ueda.”

  Ueda’s expression softened slightly. He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You should get some sleep, Fujiwara. We should all get some sleep. We will need our energies if this affair turns out to be serious. We may, meantime, hope that it will not be serious. It was the German philosopher Nietzsche who said, ‘Hope in reality is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.’ We must remember that as well.”

  Fujiwara bowed again and preceded his superior to the bedrooms.

  Ueda smiled at the younger man’s back. He would progress at Makeda, Ueda thought. He is quiet and efficient and knows how to listen. He will not go all the way to the top, because he is neither a creative thinker nor quite assertive enough. But he is expert at understanding the flow of events, the shifting of attitude and intention that determines our place in the fabric of the world. He is a good protégé.

  Ueda watched the dawn come to Kaua’i. Biorhythms always betrayed him and he had, as expected, slept little. He dressed in darkness and went out into the garden. In darkness he went through the Yang series. Then he walked around the house and down the driveway, moving quietly.

  Morning in the house was very quiet. The three guests, abandoned to their own devices, drifted into the garden or sat in the living room. Late in the morning they seemed to grow sleepy once more, and Ueda suggested they lie down to rest. Tonight could be a trying time for them all.

  In his room Ueda removed his jacket once again and hung it in the closet. He removed his tie and his shoes and placed them also in the closet.

  Then he sat down on the bed and telephoned his wife at his home in Shinjuku. They spoke of the children Yukiko, who was in her second year at Tokyo University, and Joro, who had just left the house to take his practice examinations. He told her he hoped to be home soon, but could not say for sure how long this business would keep him in the United States. He said he had arrived in time to attend to this business before it got out of hand, which was better than waiting too long and having to clean up something that had already damaged the reputation and credibility of their company. He said good-bye.

  The room was dim. Outside the trade winds moved in the banana leaves, making a sound like the whispering of conspirators outside the window. Sunshine reflected off some bright surface outside onto the wall and ceiling of the room. He lay back on the bed and watched the light. It seemed that the surface of things concealed more than it revealed. Such was the way of it. He would have to wait.

  Soon the long flight from Narita to Honolulu faded away. The small remaining vibration of the Cessna engine too faded from his body. The numbers on the screen affirmed their dependability. All the proper connections were made. The past became past. There was no future to worry about. Everything became present.

  The light died into sleep.

  Ueda was awakened, abruptly, completely, by the urgent knocking on his door. He sat up smoothly, swung his feet to the floor, padded to the door, and paused, holding the knob. Then he swung it open.

  Welter was standing there. He looked pale.

  “It’s Mr. Linz,” he said.

  Ueda said nothing.

  “He’s dead. Someone shot him. This morning. I just found out. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 5

  SOMETHING WAS GOING to happen. It was an instinct by now, a feeling Elliot Propter located somewhere at the nape of his neck.

  He sat in his rented Toyota parked on Rice Street and watched the County Building. Four people had gone in. He knew one of them well; not personally, of course, but by sight and reputation. The other three were strangers, but they had that look. All of them were from the mainland.

  It was after six. The County Building would ordinarily be closed on Sunday, but at quarter to six the four had gone inside and not yet come out.

  He made a note. Wakefield + 3?? To??

  Maybe it wasn’t really instinct. The papers had been full of this satellite coming down in the mid-Pacific somewhere. Elliot had spent a lot of time on the phone to Washington. Word the last day or two was that it was a Soviet Kosmos prognoz, a “research” satellite, which suggested a number of possibilities. It could be nuclear powered. It could be antisat or surveillance, although the orbit was odd for such purposes.

  Elliot knew better. He checked a chart on the seat. The County Building contained department offices of Public Works, Civil Defense, County Attorney, Economic Development, Housing, Finance, and offices of various commissions, including ethics and civil service, not to mention water and liquor. If Wakefield and the others were going to meet someone from one of these offices, which one would it be?

  A satellite was falling. Would Security Intelligence Group, a quasi-independent and little-known office in the Pentagon, be interested in a satellite, possibly Russian and probably secret? They would. But why would Jordan Wakefield come to Kaua’i? Jordan Wakefield was a member of the Security Intelligence Group; his background was in biological sciences and systems analysis. He was a middle manager, outspoken on matters of national defense, but not a field officer (although his job description in unclassified government documents was certainly vague enough). Wakefield was a theoretician, a man who worked with ideas, numbers, systems, not with falling objects, no matter whose they were.

  Yet here he was, walking into the Kaua’i County Building. After hours.

  Something was about to happen.

  A satellite was going to fall. It was going to fall on or near the island of Kaua’i. It was a Russian satellite. Perhaps.

  It was that perha
ps, that small doubt, that made the nape of Elliot’s neck itch. Something was going to happen, and it had to do with the satellite, and the satellite was not Russian, it was American, and that was why Jordan Wakefield, a light colonel retired from the army, currently a civilian employee at the Pentagon with an advanced degree in biology and systems analysis, was here. At one time Propter had even tried to read Wakefield’s doctoral dissertation.

  There was something significant about that satellite, and Elliot Propter did not think it was plutonium or a new kind of camera.

  So he waited, sitting in the rented Toyota watching the front door of the County Building. Wakefield and the others would come out, sooner or later. And with them, or some time thereafter, someone else would leave. And that someone else would be the person or persons unknown with whom Wakefield had been meeting.

  When he knew who it was, Elliot would have the first interesting beginnings of a major story. And this story, he was sure, could well represent a major scandal.

  He watched the palm trees in the small park in front of the building. As the breeze died with evening, the leaves stopped stirring. He watched the clock on the concrete pagoda, a monument to the hundredth anniversary of the immigration treaty with the Japanese. The clock told him nothing new about the time.

  He looked over at the other end of the little park in front of the building. There was a statue of a Philippine hero, built by the local Filipino cultural society. The hero held a book in one hand.

  A certain pastel brilliance came with evening.

  He took more notes, sketching out his chain of reasoning. He thought about how to break the story, whatever it was.

  It was big, and it was going to happen tonight.

  The door opened. He leaned forward, trying to see inside, but already the light was beginning to fail. It was almost seven. The light was wrong, and he could not see inside the dark doorway. The door stood open, but whoever had opened it seemed to be hanging back. They were still talking.