by Rob Swigart
It was impossible for Chazz and Cobb to have reached the crash site in such a short time. Only forty minutes had passed since he’d watched them disappear into the forest. That must be the others, from the Ford Bronco. What were they doing west of the crash site?
He was about to shout, but realized it was too far. No one would hear shouting through the filters and face mask of the protective suit or over the sound of the water pouring down the tumbled rock streambed before him.
He considered lifting up the face mask to shout: after all, the traps had shown no evidence of toxin in the air. But Chazz had warned him not to take a chance. If a breeze sprang up, if the trades blowing across the top of the island curled down the precipice and blew this direction from that ridge over there, the toxin could come his way, and even a hint of it could have unpleasant consequences. Propter was fortunate to be alive at all. The woods might well be filled with the decaying bodies of animals unlucky enough to have been caught in the vicinity of the crash site.
That might explain the uncanny silence of this place.
He sat down with his eyes on the distant slope, the tiny white figures appearing and reappearing among the trees.
They vanished into forest again. Although he waited another fifteen minutes, nothing more happened. He decided to come back up here after checking the ceramic disks again.
* * *
Chazz and Cobb reached the wreckage just after ten-thirty.
“What the hell is that?” Cobb said. It was an uncharacteristic choice of words, and Chazz glanced at him in surprise.
Strips of sheet metal, scorched along edges apparently blown apart or burned, hung from branches or lay scattered along a short stretch of steeply sloping ground.
“It’s the satellite,” Chazz said.
“Is it?” Cobb asked.
Chazz could imagine an eyebrow lifted behind the face mask and hood, but he could not see it. “Sure. Metal, burned and scorched, scattered along the ground.”
Cobb shook his head, a gesture nearly unnoticed inside the folds of his hood and face mask. “No. There’s something wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Chazz lifted a scrap the size of a dinner plate with the toe of his plastic boot. “Looks like a satellite to me.”
“Not this. Shouldn’t there be some kind of containment vessel? Not to mention antennae, motors?”
“Burned up? Fell off somewhere over the Pacific… Wait a minute!”
“What is it?” Cobb looked around.
“I just remembered something…”
A figure appeared at the far side of the debris. It was soon joined by another. They stood cautiously, one up, one down the slope, faces invisible behind masks very similar to the ones Cobb and Chazz wore. The two pairs of men stood facing one another for a long time.
* * *
Handel was beginning to relax. He paused at the trap up the south slope, the third he had deployed, and checked it. The air was so oppressive and close he moved swiftly through the routine, eager to get back up on the ridge where at least he had a view of some surrounding scenery. He waited the two minutes for the damp circle to disappear without seeing any purple fluorescing, and hastily replaced the trap.
He moved back down to the Rover and up the north slope, checking the one he had hung on a branch. This time he barely glanced at it; he turned on the ultraviolet light and flashed it at the dish for a moment, then stared off into the forest for a few moments. When he looked back he thought for a moment there was a color change, and his heart caught in his throat. But on closer examination it appeared the light must have struck a polished spot on the disk and reflected an unusual color. It was now white and dry under the blue lamp.
He checked the one at the Samurai with the same negative results, so he moved on up the trail to the lava outcropping where the third trap was deployed. Water thick with red muck flowed swiftly over his ankles. His steps dragged. He paused for a time to watch it flow around his plastic boots.
Hi’iaka had seen the ghost of Lohi’au in a cave up on the mountainside. Handel looked up, expecting perhaps to see a cave with a wavering transparent figure before its black and open mouth. How did Lohi’au feel about being brought back to life only to be carried away to Pele’s home, only to die again? It seemed a mixed blessing. Hi’iaka, though, was lovely, a giver of life and beauty. Her sister was the jealous and wrathful witch, but she too was beautiful and passionate. To have two women like that, goddesses, fighting over him, that must have been flattering indeed. Scott thought about Miss Mendoza, whom he had dated a few times in high school, and smiled.
He decided to pass the outcropping. Around another bend or two he should come upon the river again, near its headwaters at the foot of the cliff. He passed the rock outcropping without climbing up.
Soon he could hear the river, and a few meters further, see it. The waters were a leaden reddish-gray, moving briskly over tumbled rock. The air, too, was leaden, but it did not move. He sat down on a deadfall and gazed across the narrow water at a tortured landscape. Twisted trees fought with clutching roots for meager scraps of soil between fallen boulders. Rock and tree and leaf glistened with moisture; all solid ground was overgrown with vines and rank weeds. The crater walls loomed impossibly high.
This had to be a sacred place. He let his eyes drift, softly focused again. Something everyone else had missed, some hint of heiau wall, of foundation, of shelter.
At first he saw nothing. No startlingly geometric shapes leaped out of the tumbled rock and thick growth. With a sigh he got up and went back down the trail, leaving the sound of the river, the ribbons of waterfall down the walls, the stunted trees behind. A thread of trail went to the left, and he plunged through the undergrowth a few meters, coming almost immediately to a concrete dam that redirected the water in a flume a couple of feet wide and a meter deep. The water in it was swift and very clear, a surprising change from the murkiness of the river itself. This was the source of the plantation’s irrigation system.
As he got back to the outcropping he climbed slowly, thinking it was odd there were no ancient remains up here. Of course, if there had been, someone would have spotted them before this. The flume had been built in the early years of the century. Perhaps it was not so surprising the ancient walls were destroyed or hidden. He sat down halfway up and looked across the canyon. From here he could not see the trail, hidden below, but he did see a tiny opening in the trees that revealed the worked stone of a low wall on the other side of the ravine. For a moment he didn’t understand what he was looking at, so unexpected, so fortuitous was it. But he smiled with satisfaction when he climbed the rest of the way to the trap. He would take great delight in telling Dr. Koenig about this discovery. His wife was an archaeologist or something.
It took a moment for him to realize something was wrong. The small ceramic disk was gone.
* * *
On the hillside, the wreckage of what should have been satellite 347 divided the four men. “Good morning,” one of them said in precise, unaccented English.
Cobb bowed slightly. “Ueda-san, I presume?”
“Just so. And you are Lieutenant Takamura of the Kaua’i Police?” He moved around the twisted sheets of metal and approached them. “What is this thing?”
“We thought perhaps you could tell us, Ueda-san,” Cobb said.
“Ah, indeed. It should be an American satellite, designated Sandstone 347D 6-1987 VFB. That is what we were led to expect here. This— this is worrisome. Mendokusai desu!”
Cobb Takamura would have removed his porkpie hat and examined its interior in perplexity had he not been enshrouded in plastic. “This is not the satellite?”
Ueda emitted a short bark of a laugh. “This is junk. We have been tramping over these ridges for some hours now looking for 347D. This is our second visit to this area.” He reached down and picked up a strip of metal. It was very thin, very flexible. Lightweight ribs were attached to it. “A satellite should be squat, round, vacuum-sealed. Thi
s is the skin of a lightweight aircraft. A very small, very cheap, probably remotely piloted aircraft. Almost a toy.”
“We have a mystery here, Ueda-san. A deadly mystery.”
“God damn it,” the man on the left said distinctly. “We’re wasting time here, Ueda.”
The suits Ueda and the others were wearing were white and opaque. Their figures, shrouded in protective plastic, were without features, without distinction. It was difficult to tell one from another.
But the voice was clear. “Mr. Linz,” Cobb said. “We have been curious of your whereabouts lately.”
“My whereabouts are none of your business.”
“On the contrary, Mr. Linz, your whereabouts are very much my business. Your father was recently murdered on my island. You took pains to conceal your presence here at the time of that murder. Lianne Billings was coerced into coming to Mr. Welter’s home, where she was imprisoned along with her small daughter. Mr. Welter panicked and committed a major crime before having a serious accident. My island has been poisoned as well, and all point to a strong connection between Victor Linz and this object on the ground before us. As Sergeant Chan of the Honolulu Police Department would say, ‘One wrong deed leads on to other wrong deeds, links in an unending chain.’ Chinese have saying that applies: ‘He who rides on tiger can not dismount’.”
“What does that mean?” Linz growled.
“I’m glad someone else asked that question,” Chazz said.
“It means that we have all come to this place at the same time to unravel the connections. Therefore the connections exist.”
“Very logical,” Linz sneered. He raised his hand. In it was a gun.
“Beretta M-Nine,” Cobb said calmly. “NATO weapon. Do you work for the federal government, Mr. Linz?”
“That is none of your business, Takamura.”
Cobb shook his head. “Tsk, tsk. We’ve already been over this ground. You come from Utah. From something called Sandstone, perhaps?”
“Yes,” Chazz put in. “And Sandstone has a special account on a restricted toxicology database. Sandstone is developing biological toxins for the army.”
“That’s not true,” Linz said, lifting the gun.
“Then why the weapon, Mr. Linz?”
“This entire matter is classified,” Linz said. “I am asking you to leave. Go back to town. Catch some crooks.”
Again Takamura shook his head. “Classified? Yet we have here a distinguished visitor from Tokyo, Mr. Ueda and his colleagues. International cooperation, perhaps? Makeda Pharmaceuticals in a joint venture with Sandstone. Could that be? And on board this satellite, wherever it is, a small factory designed to produce pure toxin. The satellite has crashed. Now let me guess.” He held up his hand, as if delivering a lecture to a class of police recruits. “Makeda sent Mr. Ueda to Kaua’i because the satellite might fall in our vicinity, and if word got out— because the toxin had escaped into the atmosphere and innocent people got sick or died, for example— if word got out that Makeda was involved, then Makeda stock would be adversely effected. I see I am right, Ueda-san. If Makeda were exposed because of a major disaster, then Sandstone, too, would be held up to public scrutiny. This would be bad for both companies, not to mention bad for both governments. With its cover lost, Sandstone might well lose its defense contracts as well. What I don’t understand as yet is why Victor Linz was murdered. As president of VPL Pharmaceuticals and its classified defense contractor subsidiary Sandstone, Victor Linz was most certainly involved. One thing we do know, of course, is that he did not come to Kaua’i just to look after his Kapuna Shores Development. Kapuna Shores must be a cover. There just isn’t much to the development yet, is there?”
“Kapuna Shores is a real investment,” Peter Linz said. “I’m sure Mr. Ueda will confirm that we have raised a considerable amount of money on this project, and that it will come to completion, and it will make money. Meantime it has offered a pretty good tax shelter for investors over the past few years, until the new tax law, anyway.”
Cobb almost laughed. “A borrowed beach, an abandoned sugar field, a small, incomplete condominium complex? Not much there. Oh, and a tennis court.”
Chazz made his move as Cobb was speaking. He slid swiftly beside Peter Linz and dropped his palm, thumb over Linz’s thumb, seizing the hand holding the pistol. He spun to the right, leading the gun away from Cobb and the others. Ueda started to move at the same time, as if to prevent him. Chazz led the gun hand in a wide horizontal circle, and Linz, eased off balance, had to follow. His finger was already squeezing the trigger as Chazz suddenly reversed his hips and twisted Linz’s hand upward, then quickly down again. The hammer inched back and dropped, sending a round into the treetops across the ridge with an enormously loud explosion. It was a repeat of the exercise he had taught so recently at the dojo.
* * *
Handel looked up at the sound. He had returned to the Samurai, his hand on the handle of the driver’s door, when the shot went off. “Lieutenant,” he said softly, completing the action of opening the door. But before he could climb inside, a hand reached across, seized his arm, and pulled him away from the car.
He gave a yelp of surprise and turned to look into the face mask of a stranger.
“Sorry,” he said. “Please excuse, but not go inside car.” The voice was heavily accented.
“Who the hell are you?”
The man shook his head. “So sorry. My English is not so good. Fujiwara. I am a scientist, biologist.” He held up the ceramic plate. “From up there. Use light, please.” Sergeant Handel aimed the ultraviolet light at the ceramic disk. It glowed with a virulent purple sheen.
* * *
Chazz completed his kote-gaeshi, and Linz’s feet left the ground. As he flipped backward through the air, Chazz neatly removed the Beretta, but before he could complete the throw and immobilize Linz, Ueda had seized Chazz’s other arm in a judo throw. Chazz, who was slightly off-balance from throwing Linz, yielded suddenly, releasing Linz’s wrist. The Beretta flew sideways into the brush and clattered downhill out of sight.
No longer supported by Chazz, Linz grunted, “Damn,” as he hit the ground with a heavy thud.
Chazz tucked into a shoulder roll and came up facing Ueda, who said, “Very nice,” with a slight bow.
Linz, struggling to his feet, reached out toward Takamura, who was moving forward toward Ueda at the same time. He tackled Cobb, and in the struggle somehow pulled Cobb’s Smith and Wesson from its holster.
Chazz, moving toward Ueda, stopped as Linz shouted, “Don’t move. It’s all over. You people don’t understand. Whatever this thing is, Candide is loose here.” Linz hefted the Smith and Wesson. “This is a national security matter. I’ll shoot.” Linz began squeezing the trigger.
* * *
Back at the Samurai Handel glared at Fujiwara. “What is that stuff?”
Fujiwara nodded. “So sorry. I have chemical test for Candide as well. Different test. This one you use is very interesting.”
“Interesting? You call it interesting? You son of a bitch.”
“Sorry, please. It is not so dangerous. This is not real toxin.” He held up a small aerosol can caked with red mud. “This contains attenuated toxin, not dangerous. Found it up hill today. Was bringing it down, meet Dr. Ueda here at car. Not real toxin,” he repeated. “This is fortunate. Is good for test, you see?”
“Test?” Handel snapped off the ultraviolet light, and the disk turned white again. “What test? And what the hell is going on up there? I heard a shot.”
Fujiwara put the disk in a pouch on his plastic jacket. “Ueda-sama can take care,” he said. “He is great man, Ueda-sama.”
“Has he been developing poisons? Is that the kind of great man he is? Even poisons that aren’t real.”
“Please. You do not understand. It is… cooperation. Japan must contribute to defense. American government says we must make agreement, do more for defense of Japan, for defense of U.S. So Makeda does a favor to J
apanese Defense Ministry. I am sent to Utah to work with American company.”
“Sandstone.”
He nodded. “You know? But we come here and find no satellite.”
“What are you talking about? We saw it.”
He shook his head. “No. No satellite. Something else. No satellite, but Candide toxin, yes. This aerosol, contains a little, not too dangerous. Attenuated, we would say. Make someone sick, maybe, but not kill. Not so dangerous.”
“I don’t believe this. You mean somebody deliberately poisoned Propter and the others? Who the hell would do such a thing?”
“Ah, that we too would like to know,” Fujiwara said.
* * *
Peter Linz, aiming Cobb’s weapon at him, squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened, though. The trigger would not budge. Linz looked surprised for a moment, then examined the gun. “There’s no clip!” He was offended.
“So sorry,” Cobb said with a shrug. “I have a habit of keeping the magazine separate from the gun. Smith and Wesson won’t work— no magazine.”
Linz seemed to give up, suddenly and completely. He let the gun drop. “This is a disaster,” he said.
“Explain it, please,” Cobb said gently.
Ueda reached out and took Chazz’s hand, helping him up the slope. “That was very nice. Kote-gaeshi, was it?”
Chazz nodded assent. “This is why you were following me? You wanted to find out what I knew about Madeka’s involvement?”
Ueda frowned slightly. “No, not really, Dr. Koenig. I feared you were perhaps interested in stealing Candide from Sandstone, from the satellite. I am happy you were not.”
“Go ahead,” Cobb urged Linz. “Why is this a disaster?”
“Sandstone does research on contract to the army,” Linz said. “The Soviets are heavily involved in biological and chemical weapons research. They have stockpiles… we have to keep up. We have no choice. VPL formed Sandstone to do the research. Makeda, in Japan, is a partner in a joint venture, cooperation between the Japanese Defense Ministry and the DOD. When we heard the satellite was coming down we had to be here. It was our research satellite, testing purification procedures in microgravity. Since shuttle flights were on hold, we had to test the process in an unmanned satellite. But something happened. The thing was coming down. If word got out… well, it’s a disaster.”