by M M Buckner
The cold water anomaly registered as a dark blue blot pooling along the river’s west bank near Port Allen. Its temperature hovered near the freezing point. And its size had swelled. Yue extrapolated its volume at fourteen liquid tons. Evidently, the slick was fattening on the Mississippi’s rich chowder of waste.
Yue worked awkwardly in the small boat. Across her angular knees lay a dozen sheets of printout, crumpled and crosshatched with deep gouges from her fountain pen. It was CJ Reilly’s report. Yue kept it with her always, hating it and re-reading it. How often she had tried to shake off her envy. Who could have guessed Roman’s newest little whore had a brain?
Back and forth, Yue read the report. Over and over, she underlined certain references to the colloid’s sound response. On her computer screen, the frigid signature drifted like a wavering blue star through the mostly yellow river. And like molten ice, it was sliding South.
In the other boat, Roman took a sip from Meir’s thermos of obscene watery coffee, then spat it in the river. With tight lips, he counted the neon signs on the Casino Rouge. He counted the delivery trucks rumbling along the waterfront. In the state capitol tower, he counted a column of windows. Thirty-four windows. The building where Huey Long was shot had thirty-four floors.
Roman understood that the fear in his gut was so vast and black that if he once acknowledged its presence, it would suck him under. Rather than give in, he rushed from one task to the next, trying to avoid the one impossible dread: The colloid will bankrupt me.
So far on its short joyride downriver, the blur of electronic liquid had etched gaping holes in three steel barges. Roman knew this because the owners reported their leaking hulls on open radio channels. He also knew there would be other leaks, not yet discovered. He’d counted the barges they’d passed and calculated the probable cost. Figures spun through his mind in a deadly vortex. As of yet, no one had connected the mounting damage to his refrigerant spill, but he knew that couldn’t last. His only chance was to act quickly, to bring the colloid’s rampage to an end.
He had held the enemy in his palm and let it slip away—that was the thought that tortured him. He had come so close to caging it. If only he had tried harder, made better decisions, it would still be contained in his canal.
“We’re gonna be here a while,” Meir said from the rear seat. “Creque’ll bring the Refuerzo at first light to try the collar again.”
Roman twisted to catch Yue’s attention in the other boat, but she was too absorbed in her laptop screen to notice. He wanted to see that scan. He wanted to look his enemy in the eye. He hated the awkward separation of these two small four-seater speedboats.
“Charter a yacht,” he said to Meir, “and order some food.”
Not far away, hidden behind a fishing trawler, CJ tore off a strip of cold rubbery pizza and crammed it in her mouth. She’d brought a bagful of provisions for this trip, but she was too agitated to taste the food. She watched the Coast Guard ship that was tailing the two speedboats.
As of today, her period was two weeks late. She tried not to think about it. Her ebbs and flows had never been reliably periodic. But still . . . that day in the pirogue with Max, their first time together, neither of them thought to bring condoms. She traced the rim of her navel with her fingertip. She swung her binoculars back to the Coast Guard ship. Its presence worried her.
Her shoulder ached from squeezing the cell phone against her ear. Max had a shoulder ache, too, though she didn’t know it. Max was trying to keep his phone hidden—he was grateful for the darkness. He and CJ kept an open connection, and though they occasionally spoke, mostly they shared long tense silences. When Max heard her chewing, he dreamed of breakfast. His mouth watered for buttery eggs and thick Andouille sausage frying on a griddle.
“How fast do you think the water’s moving?” she asked.
“ ’Bout ten knots. River always runs high in March.”
“Hey!” CJ saw a burst of activity in the small boats. “Why are you weighing anchor?”
Max could feel her voice vibrating in his shirt pocket, but he was too busy to respond. Meir had just given him fresh orders. But CJ didn’t need him to tell her the colloid was on the move again. She watched the Quimicron speedboats steer downstream, followed closely by the blunt black Pilgrim. They stuck close to the western bank, skirting Port Allen’s industrial wharves. Clearly, they were searching. Across from them, near the increasingly active Baton Rouge waterfront, CJ glided out of her hiding place and kept watch.
Swell
Thursday, March 17
6:00 AM
Baton Rouge greeted St. Patrick’s Day with blaring car horns, jackhammers, and distorted gusts of windborne radio news. Toilets flushed, showers steamed, and thousands of coffeemakers dripped black liquid stimulant. Cops worried about traffic flow at the Irish street fair, while parade queens worried about their dresses. Out on the river, Max worried about everyone.
He had eight cousins and two aunts living in Baton Rouge. If the citizens learned what was drifting down their river, he already knew how the fear would seize them. The awful aftermath of the last hurricane still lingered fresh in everyone’s memory. Another alarm right now would be bad. Eyes closed, Max pictured his daughter sleeping beside the river, and he quietly prayed to every spirit he knew. Voudon-Seminole-Judeo-Christian-Islamic, he begged them all for grace.
But Roman kept his eyes open. Standing next to Max in the rocking boat, he analyzed mental spreadsheets, weighed his capital position and reviewed worse-case scenarios. He listened to Meir talking on the phone to Elaine. He listened to Godchaux muttering over a rosary. He listened to Vaarveen snore. Then he pivoted on one heel, opened his fly, and pissed into the river.
Near the opposite bank, CJ felt something very different from fear. As the morning grew more radiant, a potent stir of hormones buoyed her spirits and stirred her powers of rationalization. She felt ever more certain that she alone understood the colloid. A bright inquisitive child, unsure of his footing and often harassed by unexpected attacks—yes, she knew how that felt. Her infant colloid didn’t realize he had killed Manuel de Silva. He didn’t know what a human being was.
“Sa moving into the Port Allen Canal,” Max whispered into his hidden phone.
CJ rummaged quickly through her bag, overstuffed with candy bars, soda cans and electronic gear. Something clattered, her wooden castanets. She’d brought them for good luck. At last, she found her maps. “Okay, I see it.”
The Port Allen Canal linked the Mississippi to the Intracoastal Waterway—a shortcut to the Gulf that bypassed New Orleans. Its entrance bay was shaped like a champagne flute, and the slender neck led to the Port Allen Lock, a few hundred yards inland. The lock’s massive gates and channels raised and lowered ships between the Waterway and the higher level of the river. Beyond the lock, the Intracoastal shipping channel ran as straight as a freeway, due South through the Atchafalaya Basin to the Gulf.
“Djab dile moving toward the lock,” Max whispered. “Sacony gonna trap it inside.”
CJ bent over the map, biting her finger. “How?”
“He asking the Corps of Engineers to close off the lock.”
“That’s wrong.” Arguments bubbled up in her throat. The Intracoastal Waterway led into uninhabited swamplands, the perfect learning ground for her prodigy. Why trap him here, near the city? Why not let him move through the lock into the wild wetlands? She wished she could tell Roman what she thought of his plan.
The search vessels moved deeper into the goblet-shaped bay, and where it narrowed to a neck, they dropped anchor. She had to admit the channelized neck was a good place for a trap.
A little later, Max said, “Sacony getting tripped up in his own lie. The Corps say, if this spill is harmless, why they have to close the lock?”
CJ heard Max’s hostility, and she felt it, too. She wanted to shake Roman till his head wobbled. But Roman didn’t need another jolt. He’d just received a call that the Brazilian banker had flown back
to Rio. If Roman wanted his petroleum port in Fortaleza, he would have to pursue the banker to his own ground and beg. The necessary bribes would escalate. If only he had a deputy whom he could trust to send in his place. But there was no one.
He ran his hands through his loose wavy hair and tried to sort out priorities. Within five years, a new port in Fortaleza could increase Quimicron’s revenues by 50 percent, and Roman needed that future cashflow to service his debt. On the other hand, this present risk could sink him.
Where was the yacht he’d ordered? The confines of the speedboat made him restless, and he scowled at the rippling brown river. It was like time and opportunity, shifting, formless, insubstantial, rushing every minute through his grasp. He hated it.
He opened his cell phone and keyed the number for Arturo Villanova, drug runner.
Spit
Thursday, March 17
6:29 AM
After numerous dead ends, Roman managed to track down Villanova on vacation in Barbados. The Panamanian drug dealer owned a legitimate company called NovaDam, a supplier of water-inflated barriers for use in dam construction. The huge, yellow carbon nanofiber bags were stronger than steel, impervious to acid, and much easier to transport than traditional dam structures. Pumped full of water, they weighed hundreds of tons and stood rigidly immovable. Villanova imported the bags from Germany and transported them by air to remote construction sites in Latin America, good cover for the other items he transported by air. Roman caught him having breakfast with his four young children.
“Arturo, I need a dam. This morning. In Baton Rouge. This afternoon is too late.”
Villanova laughed. “And how much are you willing to pay for this miracle?”
“Don’t hold me up. You have eight bags in Matamoros, and I’ve chartered a sea plane.”
“But amigo, those bags are in use. What shall I tell my customer when his worksite floods?”
“Whatever you like, Arturo. Remember Nicaragua.”
“Ah yes, you always remind me.”
Although Villanova’s German-made products were rock solid, his finances were sometimes a little soft. A few years back, he’d annoyed the wrong people in the Nicaraguan government, and they confiscated a shipload of his inventory. NovaDam would have gone under if Roman hadn’t stepped in, crossed the right palms, and saved Arturo’s assets. Since then, Roman had not failed to demand returns on his investment.
“Baton Rouge? You must send me some Hoppin’ John. My children love the white trash cooking.” Villanova had the husky caramel voice of a Spanish crooner.
Roman rinsed his mouth with bottled water, then spat over the gunwale. “The dam, Arturo. This morning.”
“Impossible, you know.”
“Deliver it to the Port Allen Canal. I’ll show you where to install it.”
“Ah, you’ll show me. That’s beautiful.”
“Arturo, I need this. Do this for me, and we’re even.”
“No, my friend. You’ll be in my debt.”
In the speedboat, Roman shut his phone and slung it to the floor between his feet. He hated being obligated to a character like Villanova. He slumped forward and furiously counted the dials on the dashboard.
Whisper
Thursday, March 17
7:00 AM
Chasseur was the name lettered across the rented, forty-four-foot Cruisers motor yacht. She carried a satellite TV, full galley with eat-in dinette, flush toilet, shower, sleeping accommodations for six, and a swim platform. She also carried Elaine Guidry and a fully catered hot breakfast.
Peter wanted to eat, but first Yue made him set up a field lab in the galley while she assembled their equipment on the stern. Next, they dropped plastic pickle buckets on ropes over the side to draw water samples. In his lab, Peter munched a runny egg sandwich while he analyzed gallons of extraordinarily pure pollutant-free water through the SE scope. He found no working mote computers, but one bucket netted a clump of proplastid with a partial chain of microchips. The clump also contained a large concentration of mutant bacteria cells. Something had restructured their nuclei.
“More Quimi-chimeras,” he quipped. The genetically modified cells were churning out strange new nano-structures. He showed them to Yue. “No way can you call this coincidence.”
“Let me guess.” Yue folded her thin arms. “You believe our swamp creature communes with aquatic life.”
“Communes?” Peter snickered. “More like enslaves. Look at those.” His blunt fingertip hovered over the image of the bloated cells. Their pregnant chloroplasts looked ready to burst.
Yue huffed. “God knows what’s in this river.”
Nearby on the Refuerzo, Creque and Spicer waited with their collar and pumps. As soon as the lock closed, the Corps expected them to deploy the collar and suck up the refrigerant spill, and Captain Ebbs had agreed to direct traffic. Only Roman’s team knew the real plan—they would fire the EM pulse. Roman had ordered Creque to capture a sample if possible, but that was not his priority.
The Chausseur rocked and chuffed as a freight ship larger than a stadium slid by, throwing up dingy ochre wake. Its engine noise distorted the air and temporarily drowned out Spicer’s radio program—he was listening to NPR. Yue read the ship’s Chinese markings, and Max felt it block all light flowing through his porthole in the aft cabin.
He squeezed his phone tighter and cupped a hand over his ear. “Ceegie, you still with me?”
“Oh yeah, I’m playing shuffleboard on my lido deck.” Through binoculars, she saw Rory drop the yacht’s anchor. That must mean they’d found the colloid again. The Pilgrim was anchoring, too.
“You could come onboard with us, Ceegie. There’s pancakes. I know they wouldn’t mind.”
“I’m doing an experiment. Call me later.”
Experiment? Max rose in his bunk and peered through the small round window, but there was little to see from his angle. He’d been ordered to sleep, so he lay down, closed his eyes and whispered to his met tet guardian spirit: “Osun Moses Maria Maker of Breath, protégez-nous.”
CJ also whispered a prayer. “Harry, so help me, this better work.”
She squinted at the mixed-up readings from her field finder. Her muscles throbbed from the long confinement in the boat, and her eyes hurt. There were so many EM fields in the harbor, it was hard to pick one from another. Tense and alert, she steered out of her hiding place.
River traffic was dense and noisy. Fishing boats zipped behind thirty-barge tows, and monumental freighters cruised into dock with truck-size containers stacked up on their decks like children’s blocks. She stuffed her hair under a faded Red Sox cap, put on a pair of sunglasses, and hoped that in the middle of so many diverse vessels, she might pass unnoticed.
She approached the Chasseur obliquely, aiming toward the bow, keeping out of sight of the Pilgrim. Luckily, no one was on deck to see her. The closer she came, the clearer the water sparkled. She dipped up handfuls and sniffed the clean fresh smell. “You’re here,” she said, inwardly rippling with joy. Soon her field finder detected the faint outline of the blossom-shaped energy field. She recognized its shape like a familiar face. It was welling beneath the yacht. “You!”
She bit her finger to staunch the intensity of her excitement. Cutting off her engine, she let her boat drift under the Chasseur’s upswept bow. Her Viper rode low in the water, so anyone on the larger craft would have to lean far out over the rail to see her hiding directly under the bowsprit. She hung a pair of fenders over her gunwale to avoid bumping, then tied off to the Chasseur’s dripping anchor chain. Next she bungeed the Lubell speakers together and lowered them into the water on a ten-foot cord.
“How about a music lesson?” she whispered.
It was Max who thought to retrieve the Lubell speakers and box of CDs after CJ walked off in a pique. Max, the good knight. She rummaged through the dozens of disks till she found the simple keyboard melodies he’d recorded. There were twelve in all, held together in a rubberband, and nestled a
mong them was a folded piece of paper. She opened it and recognized Max’s handwriting. He’d written down the titles in proper order. “Sa progression,” he said. The order was important. She slotted the first CD.
Trailing her fingers through the fresh sweet water, she pondered a riddle whose solution still eluded her. What was it about music that made the colloid respond?
Max’s words came back to her. “Little children know. Even animals know.”
Well, it worked. That’s what mattered. And if the small skein isolated in the lagoon could learn to compose a waltz, surely the full-fledged colloid would become a maestro.
She balanced Max’s CD player on one knee and her field finder on the other. It took concentration to track the faint edges of the colloid’s field drifting among so many noisy patterns. She had to keep a close eye on her instrument.
“Let’s jam,” she whispered. Then she pushed the button marked “Play.”
Dissolve
Thursday, March 17
9:01 AM
Roman sat on the floor beside Yue’s bunk, rocking on his haunches. The seaplane was coming, bringing the NovaDam bags to trap his enemy. Vaarveen was keeping watch. Soon, soon. Roman swallowed another red-and-black capsule and rocked back and forth. He hadn’t rocked that way since his early youth, when his widowed mother locked him in a closet for skipping Mass. His mother didn’t factor in his life anymore. Bitter and arthritic, she languished in the old yellow house in Mar del Plata. Let her berate the ocean and clouds. He paid her expenses, that was enough. Still, as he sat on the Chasseur’s mildewed carpet watching Yue sleep, he wasn’t able to stop rocking.