by Swigart, Rob
The blond man pulled the trigger instead, sending a spray of bullets in an arc toward Sammy, shattering tanks along the wall. He ducked into another kick spin, and Sammy fired as he turned; the man’s leg gave out and he lurched sideways. Sammy’s bullet caught him high on the hip, spun him the other way. He fell heavily, and his blood pumped out and mingled with the aquarium water on the floor.
He had not dropped his gun, and now he screamed in rage and pain as he lifted it. Chazz stomped on his hand and picked up the gun. “Looks like that limp just got worse.”
“I was aiming for his leg,” Sammy said.
They left the blond man and moved side by side into the next room.
It was dark. Someone had turned off the aquarium lights. The sculptural shapes were dim outlines barely visible in the light from the shark tank.
The other two could be anywhere. Chazz knew the man with the scar was the only one with Phoenix now, but he was also the most dangerous. Chazz felt a twinge from his cracked rib and dismissed it. The spear point of his anger gleamed.
Chazz sensed a presence, melted back. “Cobb?” he hissed.
“Chazz,” the answer was whispered. “Over here.”
Chazz moved toward a sculpture of a whale. “Where are they?”
Cobb stood up in the darkness. “We came in through the offices above the window. Then that scream. Wallace?”
“Yes. Dead. One Bad Guy down. Sammy got him in the hip. He could bleed to death. That would be too bad.”
“Okay. The other two are in the building. Handel’s watching the service area.”
“They can’t get out the front without setting off the alarm. Lights, sirens, the whole whoop-whoop. But they got what they came for, so they’re probably on their way out by now.” Chazz led the way.
The sharks still circled in their tank, slowly, around and around.
There was a soft phht and glass shattered nearby, followed by pouring water: another aquarium broken. Chazz crept toward the sound, looked out.
Plato rode a torrent through the front of his tank. The small octopus thrashed its tentacles, landed in a soggy heap on the carpet and convulsed feebly.
“Bastard,” Chazz said. He bent low and raced toward the octopus, scooping it up in his hand. The tentacles twined around his arm.
He spun on one foot and sprinted back to the narrow hall along the wall of aquariums, looking for the one he wanted, when someone loomed toward him like a stain of darkness from behind an exhibit of pelagic birds.
Chazz flowed with the attack, a slash from a knife, stepping first back, then inside the reversed slash. He was hampered by the octopus on his arm, but once inside the attack he swiveled around behind his attacker, knowing who it was, knowing it was the man with the scar, knowing he was an expert with the knife. He said nothing and moved silently. The man slashed again, not sure where Chazz was. When he realized Chazz was behind him, he tried to pivot, then stepped back into Chazz and stomped down hard on his foot.
But it wasn’t there. Chazz had moved a fraction to his left. He lifted his arm and pressed the octopus into the man’s face.
The man recoiled, and Chazz blended with the recoil, stepping out of the way and slamming the base of his palm up into the raised chin.
There was a sharp crack and the soldier was down. He did not move again.
Chazz flowed on. He reached the tank he was looking for, knocked out the protective panel above it with his elbow, reached over the edge and eased the octopus into the water.
He held it there for what seemed a long time, waiting for the creature to let go. Gradually, the tentacles eased their convulsive grip on his hand and arm. Finally, the animal drifted away.
Chazz waited. He moved his hand to the side of the tank and slowly slid it down the glass. A soft sound came from the rear arch, the sound of a foot stepping on wet carpet. The sound stopped. The Phoenix had corrected his mistake.
It was too late. Chazz found what he was looking for. He worked his fingers carefully, prying underneath, dislodging sand and gravel and round lumps of coral. A shape distorted the clean vertical line of the arch, barely visible against the faint glow from the tanks in the Bounty of Nature Hall. The distortion disappeared. Phoenix was in the room.
Chazz waited. Phoenix knew where he was. Slowly, he lifted his hand, keeping it underwater near the surface.
The man was almost to him. He stopped, sensing Chazz. “You’re there,” he said softly. It was not a question.
He spoke quietly, his words interrupted from time to time by humming, scraps of his song. “Et Ie bec, oui, oui, oui,” he sang. “I got your wife, didn’t I? I took her. Doesn’t that make you mad? You should be mad. I was going to change her, make her my creature, the way I did the others. Now I will have to disappear.”
“No disappearing this time,” Chazz said, as quietly as the other man. Could Takamura and the others hear?
“Don’t be stupid. I am the Phoenix. I die, and I rise again.”
“No, Guillaume. We know who you are now.”
There was silence then. Chazz waited. Then he heard the singing, a soft crooning undertone. “I killed her, you know. I watched her die. Oh, it was wonderful.” His English began to deteriorate. “Before me, you know. She saw. She knew who I was, her son, come to avenge. Bitch, she died looking in my eyes. She can never say I am not good enough again. I laughed at her. I made the pain very great. All in good cause, yes? Destroy Ocean Mother, destroy mother too, yes.”
He stopped. When he spoke again he was beside Chazz. “You are here. Yes. Your bitch wife too, she said things about me. I didn’t like that. And you, and that Nip cop, all going to die. I have the cone here, you know what it can do. This is a giant cone, my friend. You are the little fish. The heart stops, breathing stops. You are dead before you hit the floor, yes. Et Ie bec, sous le robinet, drinking, she always singed that song at me, my lovely mother, so loved by the world, always the politicians, the journalists talking her, she is a star, you will die my friend.”
“The snail is dying in the air, Guillaume. It’s harmless.”
“Then I will kill you with my hands.”
“Stop,” Cobb Takamura called loudly from the entry to the shark exhibit as he flicked on a powerful flashlight. He was holding his automatic steadily in the beam, pinning Guillaume and Chazz in its circle of light.
Guillaume blinked. Then he dropped the snail and turned, pulling Chazz in front of him.
Chazz let the waiting point of his rage fly. He moved, and his hand came out of the water holding something black and shining and quivering with six-inch spines: a sea urchin. He laid his other hand on the back of the man’s neck as he continued the sweep, and the spines flew point first into the face and eyes of the Phoenix, whose real name was François Guillaume.
Who screamed until long after someone turned on all the lights.
He was still screaming when they took him away.
TWENTY-NINE
PLATO
“I’m leaving,” Patria said.
The two women sat opposite one another in the tea garden. This early, sunlight did not fall into the small pocket of carefully shaped plants. Orli slept in the stroller beside the table.
Kimiko looked at her friend with calm eyes and said nothing.
“I’m going back to Berkeley.” She looked into the roughly shaped cup in her hands at the green tea leaves in the bottom.
A light trade wind soughed through the branches of black pine against the wooden fence. Koi hung golden and orange in the pond, moving their fins gently. Patria looked up. “Something happened. It’s like the color has gone out. I see it all in black and white and gray.” She bit at her lower lip. “I love Chazz, but…”
The silence grew, first light, then heavier.
“I can’t let him touch me,” she said finally. She was looking down again. She pushed her cup away.
“It will take time. The horror…” Kimiko did not smile or try to reassure her. Patria was glad of that.
They didn’t talk about it for a time.
Patria let her hand drop protectively on the side of the stroller, made a circle around her child for a moment. “Yes,” she said at last. “So ugly, all of it. He told the others, the soldiers, he was doing a job, sanctioned. But he meant to kill his mother. That was what he really wanted all along. Not Noel Taviri, but his mother.”
“What about the women, Richards and the other one?” Kimiko wanted her to talk, now.
“He hated women. Once he killed her, Jacqueline Guillaume, he was cut loose from whatever bound him to the human. There’s no other way to understand it. He could make people believe. You saw that house. He killed the old woman as if she didn’t count. He painted the walls with those images. He poisoned Cavanaugh, Meissner, the woman in Raïatéa. He killed Duvalois – they got the dental patterns back. His fingerprints were on the jar. It’s like he slipped his gears, was running out of control. Not just ugly, though. Evil. He believed in himself as a bokor, a sorcerer. He thought he was invincible, immortal. He had conquered death, of course. Sex was part of it. Sex is always part of it.”
“What he did to you, he…”
“No. I can’t. He didn’t really rape me, you know. Not completely. But it was so… filthy. I can’t stand to be touched, now.”
“Time.”
“Maybe. Maybe time. But I’m a scientist. I tell myself I should be able to detach, take the long view. It was all so… interesting, for an anthropologist. But I can’t. I was involved. It touched me. I’m not even sure I can do it any more, my profession. He stole that from me too. He took everything.”
“Revenge?”
Patria shrugged then and tried a smile. It almost worked. “He lost an eye, they say. I don’t care. His face is marked too. Revenge? I suppose. He’ll carry the marks as long as he lives. It doesn’t matter. Not now. I can’t go back.”
She stopped talking then.
Kimiko spoke. “Have you told Chazz?”
“He knows.”
“What will he do?”
Patria spread her hands on the table. “I don’t know. He doesn’t talk.”
Fire roared in the sea. Sheets of superheated steam coruscated over the congealing rock, blue flame. Chazz Koenig floated just above the bottom of the sea and watched the end of everything. He thought this was the birth of new land, new promise. But it did not feel that way. It felt like destruction; it felt like the end.
The octopus clutched his arm. He let the arm hang limply near the reef. The destruction was far enough away, and it was slowing. Soon the volcano would stop its rage. Pele’s rage. She would go back to sleep. The sea would be tranquil again; it would start to work away at the land again.
A tentacle reached down, a question mark in the sea. The octopus was letting go. Soon it dropped away, settled near the coral. The fire in the water was no threat here. Chazz watched through the glass of his mask as the creature changed color. It was hard to pick it out against the jumble of sand and stone and coral, only the smooth motion of an arm reaching out, uncurling, to clutch at a stone. Then a sudden swift movement and Plato was gone.
Sometime later Chazz broke the surface. He handed his tanks to a sailor and climbed onto the fantail of the Coast Guard cutter. Commander Shafton stood in a starched white uniform, riding the swells; he reached out and gave Chazz a hand.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” Shafton said. “All part of the service. Everything go all right?”
“Plato’s home.” He turned away, watching the waves: his name, written in water.
The officer nodded. “Well, Lieutenant? Shall we go back?”
Takamura lifted his sunglasses dangling from a black cord around his neck and put them on. He put his porkpie hat on his head and looked at Commander Shafton. “Yes. ‘You can go home decked in the shining garments of success.’”
Shafton looked down at his brilliant white uniform. “What’s that? Oh, yes. Charlie Chan, of course.”
Cobb Takamura nodded. A sailor handed Chazz a large white towel, and he began drying his hair. “Got a phone call,” Cobb told him. “Wonderful gadgets on these state-of-the-art federal vessels. The four Frenchmen had hired a dive boat. The captain apparently drowned himself in whiskey after banging his head on the galley counter. Twice. This raises some questions we will have to ask.”
Chazz grinned. “I never really liked them much.”
“Nor I. Also, Meissner will recover.”
“Oh. That’s nice. What about the girl.”
“Some improvement. They have hopes. And the boy, Danny Cavanaugh. He has amnesia, doesn’t remember what happened to him. But he went home.”
Shafton said. “It’s all over, then. All’s well now.”
“Yeah.” Chazz said. “All’s well.” He finished drying himself and tossed the towel into a plastic hamper.
Shafton gave an order. The cutter made a wide sweeping turn and headed out to sea, back toward Kauai.
The End
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Other Books 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] smooths 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 fiction 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.
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