by David Dun
“I understood it was a plaything.”
“Oh, no, Jason, you wondered.” He punched Jason gently in the shoulder. “You always wonder and you never know for sure, do you? But it’s at the bottom of Heron Bay now. Right now I need you to tell me where the CD is. You had two CD-ROMs, the regular and the backup. Did you give the backup to Anna?”
“No. It’s around. If the Nannites didn’t take it we’ll find it.”
“There are no Nannites. You know that. Now where is the CD?”
Jason did not reply.
“We’re counting on you,” Roberto said before he turned around and left the room.
Jason detested those words. He turned back to his office. Down both sides of the room ran bookshelves lined with math treatises. Set apart from its companion volumes, in the center, was Bertrand Russell’s five-volume work, Principia Mathematica. It was a signed edition. Also set apart in their own special slot were Einstein’s initial publications, papers really, on the general theory of relativity.
Most of his library comprised texts on quantum mechanics and quantum math.
There were two photographs in his office, one of Anna, another of his daughter, Grady. Memories of his life before moving to this island were disturbing. Memories of his life before France were even more disturbing, and hence seemed to have washed away, like sand castles on an incoming tide. He had had several girlfriends, but only one of note, and she had borne him a daughter when he was a nineteen-year-old prodigy at Georgia Tech and about to transfer to MIT.
There had been a court order before he went to France to work for Grace Technologies, and he was not able to keep his daughter. Grady’s mother had wanted no part of him. Although she had given the girl her own last name, Lasky, Grady so despised her mother that upon turning eighteen she had changed it to Wade. Jason knew that his daughter cared little for him either, but he wasn’t sure how he had come to that realization.
The picture of Grady had come from Anna; without it he wouldn’t know his daughter if he met her on the street. But he thought about her, and he used to dream that one day he might shake the Nannites and go find her. Now such a thing seemed impossible—it would be dangerous for Grady—and he wanted more than anything to believe that she was safe. Anna, for whatever reason, wouldn’t talk about Grady, so he let his daughter rest as a picture on his side table.
There was a phrase that he had heard somewhere about a millstone around the neck. Life was becoming like that, a steady weight of worry and fear. Any little thing could seize his mind. Only one small focus for his hope had not yet been extinguished. He had hacked his way into the Kuching sections of the Grace computers. It had taken him months of playing to breach the firewalls.
Within the Kuching laboratory files he had discovered encrypted file folders. He did not have the software to break the code, although slowly but surely he was developing software that might do the job. But it could take years. Although he couldn’t open the files, he had developed a program that would download them. Those files were on the CD he had given Anna, and they might hold secrets of the Nannites. Curious minds would not rest until they opened them. Of that he was certain.
In forty minutes Nutka would give him his massage and there would be some respite to his misery.
Inevitably, his temper had risen like a cobra from its basket. Chellis erupted.
“Roberto is a disaster. Now we’ve got to bring Gaudet in. I don’t give a damn what it costs. Roberto’s foul-ups will cost us more. He’s gotten Jason to sink a sailboat with a rocket launcher. A rocket launcher, for God’s sake! What’ll be next? If this keeps up, Jason will end up in a sanitarium. And if that happens, it’s the end of some big programs for us.”
“You are right to use Gaudet for this one,” Benoit said. “Would you like me to get him?”
“I don’t like it that the bastard is becoming a habit. But you better do it now.”
“Thank you again,” Anna said. “I’m not sure I could have made my way to this sleeping bag.”
“You might have, had you paddled in the right direction. You are resolute and strong.”
“Thank you. That’s a better compliment than most I get.”
“They tell you you’re beautiful?”
“Incessantly.”
She was fading fast, and he waited to see if another sentence would come. It didn’t. His hand was on her shoulder. She reached up and patted it before the final deep breath that sent her into sleep.
Once the cabin started to warm, things seemed less desperate. Sam’s old world was rapidly coming back and with it the old habits. He would have paid a couple grand for a smoke.
The problem was that Anna had a jump on his imagination. She was beside him, nearly in his bed. Being close to her and feeling her body sleep made for a sexy coziness.
If Sam was anything, the old Sam or the newly emerging version, he was in control. Cool. Objective. This unilateral interest on his part that he thought might be forming would not be cool, and that was the first problem. The second was that she was a celebrity, and he could never be with a celebrity again. It was one of the few absolutes in his life.
In the darkness he could see the barest outline of Anna’s head. Finally she had uncoiled her body, stretching out on the floor, but he was still spooning her back in an attempt to stop her shivering. It seemed that the swim in the cold water had taken hold.
He could still smell the shampoo odor in her hair, like oranges, and a slight salt smell mixed with her natural scent—all of it focused his mind like a rifle sight before his eye. Her butt was tight but nicely curved and her shoulders were squared. Made extraordinary by the novelty, the tactile sensation of his thighs touching hers even through the bags, his chest against her back, was good. It put a craving in him.
It was odd about women and what made them attractive. It was never a single thing. But Anna had some freckles on her back that made her seem less a woman on the marquee and more a woman in his bed. He had noticed them in the sailboat before she did the move with her foot and shut the cabin door. Right now he wanted to run his fingers over the skin, contemplate the attraction, and forget that she irritated the hell out of him.
With his nose in Anna’s hair, he put his mind to drifting—some would call it meditation—and his body followed suit. Cutting off the odor of her was the last effort. After several minutes he concluded that the scent of her was more difficult to quell than the pain of cold. Smell was one of the earliest and most primal senses of the mammalian brain with a very direct neural pathway to the cerebral cortex. There was no ignoring her and there was no leaving her because she needed the warmth. Unless he could sleep, he would live with the gentle torture of his own desire.
“You’re not sleeping,” she said.
Scrambling out of bed in the dark, he moved near the stove, which was draped with their clothes and now thankfully warm. He went back to a cupboard where he’d seen a small jar of moldy salmon eggs. The stink disintegrated any remembrance of the Anna smell. With an old rag he cleaned out the slimy contents, put two candles in the jar, and placed them on the stove to melt.
“If you plan to sneak off,” she said, rolling onto her back, “perhaps you could let me know.”
Sam allowed himself a smile. “I’ve got to coat these wooden matches in wax. We’ll need them.”
“You need to sleep if we’re going to run.”
“This cabin isn’t that far from the inlet and there is smoke. The scent could carry.”
“I don’t know anybody over on Windham except Nutka that knows about this place.”
“We can stay awhile.”
“Promise me you’ll let me buy you a new boat and that you’ll keep quiet about this.”
“Nobody kills Harry and walks; they don’t blow up my boat without hearing from me.”
“Please help me.”
“Tell me what we’re running from.”
She didn’t answer, and he hoped she would sleep. Although he was used to celebrit
ies in general, this one at this time was a pain in the ass. The last thing he needed was somebody to take care of, a mission—especially when the mission involved a strong-willed actress who did what she damn well pleased. He wanted a drink in the way he used to want a drink. The way it was after his son died.
The mind was a peculiar thing, capable of rebuilding and renewing itself without necessarily growing a lot of new cells, just new pathways through the old cells. With some patience and a fair degree of effort, he had been reorganizing his approach to living. Life had become well ordered with his return to his roots.
One part of his beginnings involved his father, a man who had made nature a challenge and man a conqueror. It was a one-dimensional worldview that Sam could never fully understand, much less put a name to.
All that had changed when Sam found his mother and his grandfather, Stalking Bear. Until his death, his grandfather had been his pipeline to his heritage; these days it was his mother and Kier, his cousin. Sam saw himself as the strangest of paradoxes: fascinated and nourished by the old of the Tilok past, but made rich, and by some calculations successful, in the technology-driven world of supersleuthing. Although he retained only remnants of his professional life, it was that life that had bought him his freedom in more ways than one. Of course it had also bought him his son’s death. Now, apart from his involvement with the Tilok, his days were mostly workouts and the usual sailing routine of reading, hikes, maybe a little flirtation with the tourist ladies, and exploration of ancient native sites and landmarks throughout the British Columbia coast and Vancouver Island.
It had been months since the last time he had seriously wanted a drink. The good in his old personality, the keen instinct, the incredible memory, his ability to organize had all remained. But the cravings and the restlessness, the need for alternate kicks of booze and adrenaline had finally left him. Before the moment he decided to go pull Anna from a rock, skydiving or rock climbing and other artificially created risk was all he needed. An annual near-death experience wasn’t a requisite for life.
But from the moment this woman had fallen into his world, he felt like a guy with something big to do.
He tried to tell himself that his feelings for Suzanne, the only major love of his life, were like the populist love for Kennedy that may have grown considerably once the president was dead and gone forever. Nevertheless Sam persisted in his nearly sacred feelings toward the memory of Suzanne. Further complexity came when he tried to unravel Suzanne’s and his son’s deaths. Maybe to his poor mind, honoring his son somehow went hand-in-hand with preserving his feelings for Suzanne, for whom his son had died.
He looked at Anna as she slept.
Occasionally, Sam became possessed of an urge to uninhibited, screaming copulation, distinguishable from the urge to make love, but during the year since Suzanne’s death there had been only an occasional warm body from women who wanted a bump in the night before Sam sailed on. As to serious romance, there hadn’t been a whiff.
Of course when he sat under a clear night sky with chocolate-covered coffee beans to clear his mind, and the grandeur of the firmament to bring out the truth, he realized that he hadn’t a clue how he could have managed with Suzanne’s celebrity status—even assuming he could have found something in the humdrum of glitz that might have saved them from the usual unhappy end.
Sam had always stayed cool when the fires of romance would have taken lesser men to the altar. His father had been the ultimate Mr. Cool, never getting excited—not even about his own death, because he ended his life so unobtrusively. It could also be said that he didn’t give a damn about Sam’s life or he would have stuck around to watch. Sam recognized the bitterness in himself, but he considered his feelings about his father to be realistic, even inevitable. Of the three souls that he might have loved, only his mother still lived, and he loved her very much.
Anna stirred and blinked.
“You look like you’re thinking. You’re no doubt pissed. I can understand that,” Anna said.
“So for the sake of my dead Harry, why don’t you tell me what’s happening?”
She hesitated. He could feel her indecision.
“How do I know you’ll keep my secret?”
“You’ll have to figure out what kind of a fellow I am. Tough assignment on short notice. Or you could take a leap of faith and trust me.”
“Why is trust so good for me and so bad for you?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “The truth is I don’t have any better choices. So swear to me you won’t betray my confidence.”
“You and I both know that no amount of swearing buys you anything. I’m either honest or I’m not.”
“Humor me.”
“I promise I won’t reveal your secrets unless compelled to do so by a court, or unless it will save the life of innocents, including your own. How’s that?”
“Spoken like a lawyer.”
Astute, he thought.
She inched her bag closer to the stove and began the story of her morning.
Six
Anna sat on the back step of the lodgelike facility on South Windham Island and watched Nutka paint. Jason’s house had a name—Cedar Spirits, a reference to a common Kwaikutl phrase, according to Nutka. Anna had befriended her and found her to be unmarried, thoughtful, and unburdened by cultural expectations, a confident woman who seemed to be able to make her own freedom. Surprisingly, Nutka managed the household staff and groundskeepers, most of whom were men and many years her senior. Although Frank Stefano, a Grace Technologies employee from France, officially ran the place, he always spoke with Nutka in order to get the work done.
Nutka had good-humored eyes and was small of stature, maybe 110 pounds and five feet four inches. She kept her hair braided and wore a clean and pressed slightly faded house dress under an earth-toned, elaborately designed, hand-made blanket that she draped over her shoulders.
Nutka was painting from memory a stream that poured into Knight Inlet, an immense fjord to the south that penetrated well into the British Columbia mainland wilderness.
“Many artists have to look at what they are painting,” Anna said.
“I prefer to see it through the mind of the child I was when I first saw it,” Nutka said. “I used to go there every summer with my grandparents. We said it was a place for owls because the spirits were strong there; my grandfather said they were wise spirits and you could feel them in the breeze.”
“Was it a spiritual place for you?”
“Oh, yes. It is where old men go to build a sweat house and see visions. They find meaning in being Salish.”
“I thought you were Kwaikutl.”
“I am half and half. This is the Kwaikutl land and my mother’s family is Kwaikutl. My father’s family is Salish. The Salish are in the south. But I am painting a place near a village of people called Kwakwaka’wakw. Confusing, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is hard to say.”
“I don’t go there anymore, at least to the place I’m painting. As my people say, the government’s giant giving hand tends to take more than it gives.”
“You know, I’m worried that it’s that way with my brother and Grace Technologies.”
“Yes,” Nutka said, her eyes shining and gaze direct.
“Tell me something about my brother.”
“Yes?”
“I know that your massage must be good, but why does he crave it so?”
“When I miss more than two days he is very nervous until he gets the massage, unless one of the other girls does it, which he doesn’t like.”
“And why doesn’t he like the other girls?”
Nutka looked away and giggled. “He is, uhm. I don’t want to say it.”
“But if I could understand ...”
“Maybe he has a crush on me. It embarrasses him.”
“You mean he ... can’t help being drawn to you?”
“Yes. Most definitely.”
“Well, maybe he just likes you.”
&nb
sp; “Then I wish he would say it. But the oil will give him relief no matter who puts it on him. I think the oil is some kind of medicine.”
“Medicine? Where do you get it?”
“Grace provides it. It comes on the helicopter. I’m careful to save a little bit from each container. I think about what would happen if they stopped sending it.”
“And you massage him every day.”
“Not every day, but usually at least every other day.”
“Can you get me some of the oil?”
“I think so. I would need to sneak it.”
Just then one of the Grace security people walked by with two rotweillers straining at their leashes.
“I do not like those dogs,” Nutka said.
“Me either.”
“You never explain exactly what you do,” Nutka said. “I know you are famous in the movies.”
“You know what? Next visit I’ll show you what I do.”
“Good. I would like that.”
“I’d better go find my brother,” Anna said.
She walked through the large kitchen into the great room where her brother did his work. In the middle of the room stood a dark walnut table, crafted without frills and graced with a single roller-wheeled desk chair. On the table sat two computer screens with cables that disappeared into a brass fitting in the middle of the hardwood floor.
Anna sat alone in the room in the overstuffed chair that Jason had designated as her seat.
Footsteps and the whoosh of a swinging door announced Jason. He looked healthy enough. Curly-haired and dark-skinned, five feet ten inches, solid but not fat, he had a spot of jet-black whiskers on his chin and a sly smile that looked a little whimsical. Because his eyes smiled with his lips, you tended to like him. When he did not have the soul-starved look of worry, just by looking at him, you assumed him to be a man of compassion and good humor. As he stared down at her, his eyes found hers and for a moment he looked more serious than she had ever seen him. It almost seemed as if he’d read her mind.
He glanced around, wary, then led her through the back door into the garden. He touched Nutka’s shoulder and smiled at her in a way that made Anna feel good and sad at the same time. If he were near normal he might be capable of loving Nutka, and there were few women as worth loving as she was.