Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3)

by Swigart, Rob

  Chazz felt that fear reach out and touch him at the back of the neck. A man who would do such things would lie in wait, invisible against the background of normality, and strike without warning and without mercy. He was indiscriminate in his choice of victims. There was a sense of him as evil in a way Chazz had thought was impossible, given the psychologizing of the late twentieth century. This man would be camouflaged, like a venomous creature pretending to be harmless, a centipede disguised as a caterpillar.

  He did not have human feelings, and that made him invulnerable and invisible.

  And he was not in Tahiti— he was in Kauai. Chazz was certain of that now.

  He walked along a dusty road through trees only vaguely familiar. Similar to Hawaiian trees, but not quite the same, a subtle difference that he found disorienting, as if everything had the familiarity of a dream. A nightmare.

  On his left was a house, spread out under trees. A hammock swung idly between two of them. A car sat in the carport. The house was obviously empty and forlorn, despite the car. A small hand-painted sign told Chazz this was the Maison de Queneau. The judge, their host, who lay in the morgue in town.

  The woman had hidden in those trees over there, watching. She waited until he was asleep and then crept forward with a stone in her hand.

  Chazz walked over to the hammock. Someone might have been sleeping there a few minutes before, driven away by the soft drizzle. The soft cords of the hammock were damp. He walked over to the edge of the woods and looked around. Ferns, pandanus, banana trees. The air was heavy with perfume. Chazz grunted and brushed the moisture away from his face. He walked back to the road and looked at the house. It was painted green with white trim.

  Someone was walking down the road toward him, a stringy old fellow with a rolling gait and a wide, gapped smile. “Ia orana,” he said brightly.

  “Ia orana,” Chazz replied.

  “I am Tepe,” the man said in English.

  “Chazz.” They shook hands, standing on the road in a mist that flowed like a wraith through the tops of the trees on either side. “You found him?” Chazz asked, pointing at the house.

  “Yes, yes.” Tepe nodded vigorously, his smile fixed on his face. “Very bad.” His face darkened for a moment. “A good man. Queneau. You knowed him?”

  “No.”

  “You are Marite, American.” Tepe was proud. “My sister been to America.”

  “Yes, American.”

  The conversation reached the limits of language and foundered. They looked together at the ghosts among the leaves, drifting.

  “You meet many people?” Chazz asked after a time.

  “Yes, yes, many. Tepe likes meeting people.”

  “You meet a man called Prévert? Or a man called Calabrese?”

  “Sure, sure, meet him.” Tepe nodded again, smiling.

  “Which one?”

  He looked puzzled. “Which one?”

  “Prévert or Calabrese. Which man did you meet?”

  “Same man, different name. Look different, a little, but same man. His business.”

  Chazz chewed on his lip a moment. His mustache and beard were wet and matted, cold to the touch. “I see. What was his business, do you know?”

  “Sure,” Tepe said. “Poissons. Fish.”

  “Fish?”

  “Sure, sure. Ask me, where are fish. Wants special fish. I say no good. Huehue.”

  “Oh. Huehue?”

  “Sure. Huehue.”

  “What kind of fish is that? In English?”

  Tepe shrugged. “Don’t know.” He puffed up his cheeks and blew out, laughing.

  “Blowfish?”

  “Maybe so. Bought two.”

  “When was this, when the man asked about the blowfish?”

  “Six weeks maybe.”

  Conversation fell asleep again, and this time it did not wake up. Tepe waved and walked on, down the road to the highway. He was smiling. The world was a wonderful place, full of mystery and delight. He had talked to a Marite. This did not happen every day. Usually he met only the Farani, like the four coming up the road toward him now. He waved and said “Ia orana`’ to them, but they did not answer. Very rude, the Farani.

  Chazz kept walking. Prévert-Calabrese was interested in blowfish. He bought two of them. A delicacy to the Japanese, a dangerous treat. The liver and ovaries were highly toxic. Tetrodotoxin, a paralytic. Kimiko Takamura had a lot of funny aphorisms about blowfish. Fugu, in Japanese. What did she say? I want to eat blowfish but I value my life. She had another one he remembered: The man who eats blowfish is a fool. So is the man who does not.

  Was he buying them to eat? Chefs who prepare fugu in Japan are licensed by the government and must undergo rigorous training. There are only a few such chefs in the country, so it can cost several hundred dollars for the thrill of flirting with death. A tingling inside the mouth is part of the desired effect.

  The road dwindled to a trail and wound into the mountains. Chazz climbed hard on the sudden switchbacks as the trail moved into the steeply ridged country behind the town. Small streams tumbled down the slopes. The trees closed in.

  He stopped and cocked his head. He had a feeling of being watched. Zanshin, he thought. The almost supernal awareness of the martial artist. Or, more likely, nerves. Paranoia. There was no one. He went on.

  The killer has come from Haiti. He knew about voodoo, zombies. He knew about superstition, how to manipulate it. He knew about poisons. He had pretended to be a pharmaceuticals salesman. He had come to Tahiti a few months ago.

  Why? What brought him halfway around the world?

  He wanted to kill someone.

  Queneau? It was certainly risky to start his creature after the man and leave her behind to do the job. Something could have gone wrong. She could have recovered. She could have starved to death in the mountains. She’d been missing for weeks, wandering around, eating off the land.

  All right, Queneau was a side issue. He did not come around the world to kill an obscure retired French judge, a man beloved by everyone, who had no enemies until he made one of the killer. He was a random victim, a test for the killer’s techniques. The ship was his real target.

  The trail steepened. He crossed a stream just below a long thread of a waterfall. He was deep in the cloud now and could barely see the trees along the trail. The falls had a curiously muffled sound, hidden in mist. The trail fell away to his right, and he looked down into depthless gray. Occasionally, the dim outline of a broad-leafed tree or twisted branch formed and faded.

  His calf ached, but the walk was doing it good. He could feel the blood rushing in his body. His breathing was deep and regular. He was in good shape.

  Okay. The killer was psychotic. He came to Tahiti because they speak French, and he is French. They spoke French in Haiti, too, so why leave? He came deliberately, to reach the Ocean Mother.

  It was a small sound, very faint, muffled like all sounds in the shroud of fog. He nearly dismissed it. An animal of some kind, a goat or a pig or a dog. But the sound did not repeat, and an animal would have kept moving, knowing where he was. He was not trying to be quiet.

  His thoughts were spooky, circling a killer— a psychotic, irrational, random killer who used poisons and superstition and suggestion.

  The trail switched back again. He must be nearing the top. The slope fell away to his left now. If he went over the side, he would fall or roll to the trail below.

  Or a killer who strangled women.

  Chazz felt the chill again, the tendrils of fear. It seemed impossible that it was the same man. But if they were the same, then Patria might be directly threatened. And Kimiko.

  The strangler seemed to have picked up the women he killed. That wouldn’t happen with Patria.

  He wished he had learned more about the second killing.

  The trail widened and flattened. He felt the expansion of spaces around him, but the fog here was thicker than ever. His own steps were muffled on the damp ground. It had been rainin
g, was about to rain again, but there was plenty of plant debris to soak up the water.

  The sound was almost below the threshold of his hearing, but he spun quickly. The shapes were a blur in the mist, and he dropped his center, bending his knees slightly, standing in hanmi, the triangular aikido stance, waiting.

  Nothing happened. The shapes melted away. The leaves dripped softly.

  When they came it was together, in silence, out of the fog.

  The fight became a blur of soft motion punctuated by grunts of pain. Chazz spun, dropped, felt for the flow of attack and went with it. One of the attackers flew head over heels into a tree, and Chazz heard a crack. Another feinted to the left then came in high, and Chazz dropped under the attack, pivoted, and threw the man over his hip in a smooth koshinage, but the man was up and on him again. Soon it was down to struggle, force against force, and Chazz was pinned.

  The fourth man, the one who had hit the tree, came out of the mist. There was blood on his face, but he was smiling. Chazz knew the smile. He had seen it the night before, at the Disco Onyx.

  They began to beat him, and the pain in his calf was nothing in comparison, and there was nothing he could do about it at all except guard the most vulnerable areas and minimize the damage.

  So Chazz went away. A man of peace who wanted to protect others from his rage. A man of good intent.

  He heard Shinawa tell him he must be ready to die. Was he ready? He was surely dying. The blows came to his stomach, his kidneys, and ribs. The kicks came to his thighs, his back. He was down, and the heavy shoes hit him again and again, leaving the muddy imprint of their tread. He felt his eye close and tasted blood.

  The shadows leaped in the mist, elongated and unreal. Heavy limbs came out of the gray emptiness and filled his world with pain.

  The pain left and took the world with it, leaving behind only dreams and fragments of dreams. A fire that burned in a rotting night sent shadows leaping across walls that met at tilted, crazy angles.

  The fire spoke to him. It spoke of damp, clotted earth, falling on his dead body. Each clump hit his flesh and sent cold pain down in a swift spiral through his bowels, turning them to panic, to terror.

  The cold grew and grew, the cold of poison rising up, extinguishing life as it rose, leaving behind limbs that were dead and rotting, foul green corruption, black of frostbite, black of dead flesh falling from bone.

  Patria said, “I met this man, he is handsome and brave and true, I am going with him,” and he wanted to shout to her, “No, he is the killer, he is the man with many faces, don’t,” but his voice would not work, he had no air in his lungs, no strength to speak, and she was gone, and he knew with all the despair in the universe that she too was dead.

  Crowds came at him with empty eyes, dead eyes staring wide and hideous. They reached for him with long fingers that dropped flesh the way the wax images at the museum in Hiroshima dropped sheets of skin like cellophane, melting off them. They were the walking dead, and they reached for him, and touched him with their hands, and where they touched his own flesh dripped and melted. He had been to Hiroshima, he saw the figures looming out of the flames, and he was one of them.

  He was dead. Tall skeletal figures stood around him, towering into a sky ablaze with fire, desert sun, intolerable heat. The figures were black with wide hats that were also black. They spoke, and their voices rumbled wordlessly, one to the other across his dead body that was slowly drying and shrinking in the heat, turning black and shrinking and drying and growing smaller and smaller, leaving behind only black ash. The figures spoke, and what they said was “Too bad, but he was already dead, too bad, too bad.”

  Anger rose in his dreams, a small red knot that he tried to feed. What was his intent? He heard the question. His intent was to kill, to feed the rage, to nurture it and make it grow until it was as large as he had been and to send it out as his messenger and to give back whatever it was that had been given to him. To give back this death.

  But the red knot of anger would not grow. It dimmed instead, became sullen, and shrank and died away.

  And then he too was gone.

  SEVENTEEN

  VINCENT

  Vincent Meissner glared at the man across the desk. The man looked uncomfortable, but not nearly uncomfortable enough.

  Meissner was outraged. The French had assassinated the Ocean Mother crew. The ship was derelict, and a solid international scandal was in the works. Vincent regretted the loss of the crew, certainly. Jacqueline Guillaume especially would be missed. Her influence and prestige were enormous, especially in Europe. She had been a tireless spokesperson for all the right green causes. She had a core of decency and virtue that shone for the world, a beacon in the night of greed and corruption.

  Now that she was a martyr to the world environment, donations were flowing into the Foundation’s account. The others, too, had been dedicated volunteers. Organizations like Gaia could not survive without people like them, like Tracy Ann and Clarence, or people with real skills like Russell and Jeffrey and Willem. It was difficult to find masters and pilots who were willing to take low pay in return for the limited glory of protest. Especially now.

  But this French diplomat, Sangier, had not been moved by Vincent’s sense of outrage. He had smiled blandly, examining his nails where they rested on the edge of the polished wood desk. The wood was dark, and the reflection of his hand was visible in the polished surface.

  They were in a small conference room at the Hilton. Vincent had moved when it became obvious his stay on the island would be protracted. False asceticism was not one of Vincent’s strengths. He needed the solidity, the name recognition, and the facilities of a major hotel.

  Sangier kept referring to a “falling out among the crew.” This was not the course Vincent planned to take. His crew did not fall out. His crew was a well-forged unit with high morale and a clear sense of mission. The French had been willing to reveal their spiteful side before. Vincent was maintaining that they had done it again.

  There were only two of them facing each other across this smooth surface. Vincent’s recording device was concealed. His questions had been carefully framed for maximum publicity.

  The answers had been unsatisfactory. Sangier stonewalled. He deflected. He smiled. Sometimes he frowned. He presented a smooth and polished manner that was helpful and eager yet did nothing. He was a mirror, like the top of the desk. He reflected.

  Wheels inside wheels, like one of those elaborate medieval models of the crystal spheres of the heavens, all turning at different angles and different speeds. Vincent suspected Sangier was also recording. Later they would go over the recordings, trying to tease out truth from all the rest, the deception and missteps.

  “Let’s take this one more time, Monsieur Sangier. We know that someone else, someone who was not a member of the crew, came aboard the Ocean Mother in Raïatéa. There is evidence that this person was aboard when she left French waters.”

  “Ah, I fear, Monsieur, that is not correct,” Sangier contradicted gently. “There is no evidence this person was aboard, no documents that suggest it. The ship’s log says nothing on the subject. Immigration control has no record. I regret, but you cannot say with any confidence that such is the case.”

  Vincent sighed. “The log was tampered with. Pages were missing. I’m afraid, Monsieur Sangier, that you give me no choice. I had not wanted to produce the evidence, because it is unpleasant. It does not look good at all. But I fear I must.” He opened his briefcase and pulled out a file folder, which he placed on the empty surface before him. He looked at the folder somberly for a moment then pushed it across the table.

  Sangier looked at it without curiosity. He made no move to open it.

  “This is, Monsieur, documented proof that the French government was behind the assassination of my crew in a blatant attack on the high seas. The Gaia Foundation must now pursue all means for redress.”

  Sangier flicked the folder with one finger. “Proof? I do not thi
nk so.”

  “You do not understand the extent of the environmental movement. We draw support from the full range of the political spectrum. The environment is not a petty issue, it is a global human issue. There are people even inside the French government who understand that. That is why the cable traffic summarized in this file became available to the Gaia Foundation. A woman of the stature of Jacqueline Guillaume is not martyred without consequences.”

  Sangier frowned. He opened the file and looked at the fax sheets inside. He shrugged and closed the file. “Anyone can do this, Monsieur. You cannot succeed in forging documents like this, in such an amateurish way.” He pushed the folder back across the desk.

  Vincent smiled. “These are faxed copies, obviously, with translations. We possess the originals. If you look carefully, you will see that these cables come with the proper codes. This is French diplomatic traffic. There is no question that any jury in the world would conclude the assault on Ocean Mother was a well planned and well executed covert operation of French Security services. But it does not need to stand up in a court of law. Only in the court of world opinion.”

  Sangier opened the folder and disdainfully picked up the sheets, which he read slowly, one at a time, laying them face down on top of one another when he finished. He closed the folder over the stack.

  “No,” he said. “It does not say there was such an operation.”

  Vincent had not stopped smiling. “But you can see how that impression might develop. Someone reading those cables in light of events might be willing to conclude such a thing. For example, I quote: ‘Do everything possible to divert or discredit the vessel and her crew.’”

  “That does not mean kill, Monsieur.”

  Vincent pressed on. “Perhaps not. But that is an early cable. Read here, where it says, ‘Take appropriate action to neutralize.’ That certainly could sound like murder.” Meissner shook his head, and his chins folded over one another. “And here: ‘Long range action to prevent further damage to national credibility… Keep test results from reaching a wider public… Deploy necessary resources for effective damage control.’ But this here, I’m afraid, might be the most damaging: ‘The vessel in question should not reach unfriendly territory with its contents intact.’”