Sharkman

by Steve Alten

  “Which is why it has to be done now. We’ll fly Kwan’s remains to Miami tonight and hold a press conference at Jackson Memorial Hospital in the morning. You’ll shed a few tears, the coroner will schedule an autopsy—that school counselor and her attorney will do whatever they’re going to do . . . and none of it will matter. By tomorrow night Kwan’s death will be yesterday’s news—a trickle of water over a bursting dam.”

  Sweat poured down my face. I held my breath, waiting for my father’s protests . . .

  “Do it. Kill him.”

  37

  My mind raced, my thoughts fluctuating between madness and panic. Hearing the door to my father’s stateroom open, I climbed back into bed, ripped the IV from my vein, shoved the bloodied needle into the mattress, and then pulled the covers up over my arm to hide the evidence.

  My eyes closed as the cabin door opened. I could feel the CIA assassin hovering close. Heard him remove something from his jacket pocket. Through half-closed eye slits I saw him inject a syringe of clear liquid into my IV bag.

  He adjusted the drip, then traced the line back to my right arm, lifting the blanket . . .

  Sitting up, I clubbed him across the face with my left fist.

  It was a glancing blow, allowing me a few precious seconds to leap out of bed and grab his wrist before he could aim his 9mm at my head. And in the midst of this brief struggle something bizarre happened to me.

  One moment I was consumed by a tornado of emotion—anger and rage and fear; the next I found myself in the eye of the storm, a place of calm . . . a place where my consciousness seemed to observe my reactive behavior and quell it. And within this Zen-like state I found the keys to controlling my mutation. It was as if I were an infant seeing my hand for the first time, realizing that not only did this strange five-fingered limb belong to me, but it was mine to control.

  Accessing a reservoir of strength I had no knowledge of seconds earlier, I crushed Jeffrey Elrod’s wrist in a vice grip that snapped his radius and ulna bones. So great was his pain that my would-be assassin let out a moan, rolled his eyes up in his head and fainted.

  Releasing the swollen, deformed joint, I lifted him off the ground by his waist and placed him in bed as if he were a child. Tearing the sheets into strips, I bound his ankles and wrists to the bedrails and gagged him.

  Yes, the thought to kill him had occurred to me. It would have been so easy to jab that IV death drip into his vein and justify the act using an-eye-for-an-eye justice . . . only I didn’t do it. And no, it wasn’t mercy or a sense of weakness as the Admiral would have called it; it was something beyond that . . . a sense that by killing this scumbag I’d be tainting my own soul.

  The act of restraint strengthened my resolve to stop my father from using a weapon I had delivered to him on a silver platter—only first, I needed to collect my bearings.

  Moving to the porthole, I slid back the curtains and realized that it was daylight and we were moving. That meant the diving bell would be sealed, preventing me from accessing the lab from under water.

  Moving to the door, I pressed my palms to the metal surface and changed the flesh on my hands to dermal denticles, manipulating my DNA as easily as a chameleon altered its color. Using the sensitive neurons located beneath the thick skin-teeth, I could feel/hear the engines reverberating two decks below, but the corridor itself seemed clear.

  Exiting the stateroom, I moved quickly down the empty passage to a watertight door that sealed a steep set of stairs. Setting my palms and instep on the handrails, I slid down the seventy-degree slope to the next landing, repeating the process to access the lower deck.

  Yanking open another watertight door, I entered the engine room.

  The noise of the running engines concealed the deck creaking beneath my weight as I made my way aft to the lab. Peering through the porthole window, I located Professor Gibbons. The man’s back was to me as he carefully packed a spherical device the size of a volleyball into a chocolate-brown leather carry-on tote bag.

  I entered the lab, quickly sealing the two watertight compartments behind me. The chamber pressurized, causing him to turn around. “Kwan? What are you doing here?”

  “My father sent me down for a briefing,” I lied.

  “Briefing?”

  “Amalek, the council, the whole nine yards.”

  “The Admiral discussed these things with you?”

  “How else would he recruit me? I’m in, dude. We’re in this thing together.” I pointed to the object he was packing in the brown carry-on bag. “Is that it?”

  “Huh? Yes.”

  “If you’re half the genius my father tells me you are, then I’m sure this baby will do some serious damage.”

  Gibbons smiled. “It wasn’t easy. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were aerial detonations; it’s hard to generate that kind of blast radius with a ground device. Plus this one’s being detonated on board a cruise ship, leading to all sorts of challenges. Would you like to see how it works?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  His ego properly stroked, the nuclear physicist stepped aside to show me the spherical device, which had a small clear Plexiglas canister strapped to it with duct tape. Inside the canister the back of a cell phone was visible.

  “We call this a SADM—Special Atomic Demolition Munitions. Inside this porous metal sphere are two polished sections of enriched uranium and a brick of C-4 plastic explosive. The cell phone’s battery connects to a blasting cap in the ball. When you dial the phone number, the ring will send a power surge to the blasting cap, setting off the C-4. The C-4, in turn, will blow one piece of the enriched uranium through the other, starting a chain reaction that will end in a nuclear explosion that will vaporize every object upwards of ten stories high inside a five-mile radius.”

  “Awesome. But what if you get a telemarketing call or a wrong number before the big boom?”

  “First, no one else has access to the phone number but members of the council. Second, the device is pre-armed using a timer. I just set the device to arm itself at seven o’clock tonight. In approximately six hours and forty-two minutes, Amalek himself will place the call, and once again the world will change.”

  “Nice.” My heart pounded as he rezippered the tote bag, my mind racing like Michael Corleone before he shot Sollozzo and that corrupt police captain in The Godfather. “The SADM . . . is it waterproof?”

  “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  Grabbing Gibbons by his arm, I flung him over a crate. Gripping the carry-on in my left hand, I reached for the sealed lid of the diving bell with the right and spun the wheel.

  The nuclear physicist regained his feet in time to see what I was doing. “No!”

  A fire hydrant of seawater erupted into the chamber, cutting off his screams and setting off alarms. The lab filled within seconds—by which time I had mutated into my shark alter ego. Clutching the leather bag to my belly, I jumped feetfirst into the aqua-blue hole, sinking like a rock.

  The keel of the Malchut passed overhead, both blades churning, shredding the clothing my dermal denticles had already sliced and shed from my body. Hovering in eighty feet of water, I looked down, surprised to find the seafloor a mere hundred feet below. Darting to the surface, I spy-hopped, my eyes searching the horizon.

  The Malchut had cut its engines, drifting several hundred yards away. Two miles farther to the west, I could see the Miami Beach shoreline.

  I quickly submerged, swimming north at a brisk twenty knots.

  According to Gibbons, the nuke would detonate in just under seven hours. That left me two choices. I could bury the device far out to sea, or I could bring the SADM to the authorities and have my father and his mysterious Amalek colleagues arrested and brought to justice.

  I decided upon the latter for several reasons. First, if I buried the device along the seafloor, the resulting blast coul
d wipe out any passing ships and create a tsunami. Second, unless I exposed my father and his fellow warmongers, I could never find peace—they’d come after me and my loved ones and “disappear us” as Jesse Gordon had called it.

  I considered pulling out the wires connecting the blasting cap to the cell phone. In the end, I decided to let the authorities handle this, not knowing if the act might automatically arm the device or even detonate the SADM.

  I sensed the Malchut bearing down on me seconds before my ampullae of Lorenzini detected a tiny electrical current pulsating along my left butt cheek. Gibbons’s injection . . . it wasn’t intended to help me survive the near-freezing temperatures in the trench, it was a tracking device!

  Even moving at twenty knots, I wasn’t about to lose the suped-up fishing trawler. Wherever I went, the ship would follow, the Admiral ready to deploy a crew to recover the device.

  There wasn’t enough time to make it back to the Puerto Rico Trench, so instead I went where their ship couldn’t follow.

  Altering my course, I trekked west . . . heading for land.

  Key Largo, Florida

  The creature was eight and a half feet long from the top of her pore-blemished scalp to the sickle-shaped curve of her mutated toes and heels. The additional length was a painful deformity caused by her bone softening into a lighter, more flexible, cartilage-like substance which stretched her skeleton like taffy. This sudden lack of rigidity along her spinal column had initially caused her to move through the water with inefficient serpent-like sweeps, until her dermal denticles had thickened along her dorsal surface to compensate. Black in color, these double-plated layers of “skin-teeth” were streaked gray every twelve to twenty inches with lateral lines—specialized clusters of sensory cells that allowed her to detect vibrations in the water over great distances. Set in four-inch-wide vertical canals along her dark dorsal surface, these silver-gray neuromasts resembled tiger stripes, fading as they wrapped around her pale abdomen.

  Her mouth had widened to accommodate a lower jaw filled with jagged triangular teeth. Her nose and brows had flattened with the extinction of her sinus cavity. Having lost their bone density, her arms had atrophied into semi-useless T-Rex-like limbs which hung flaccid by her side when she swam.

  Sabeen Tayfour had been close to death, her human DNA overwhelmed by a rapidly metastasizing army of shark stem cells that were systematically destroying her human immune system, yet remained stuck in a neutral state. Ironically, it had been the Australian brute’s attempt to drown her that had released a lifesaving wave of adrenaline and cortisol, the latter’s secretion instantaneously “switching on” her mutated genes.

  Sabeen’s transformation into a gilled species lacked the genetic balance necessary to reverse the mutation. With each passing minute she was becoming less human, and yet she was still bound to her Homo sapien species by her brain, her thoughts, and her tarnished memories. War had stolen her loved ones; revenge had demanded she become a freedom fighter. Her time in prison had robbed her of her dignity; her jailers’ cruelty had turned her into a predator.

  The final act of evil perpetrated against her had left her more dead than alive.

  Ravaged by fever, Sabeen hadn’t eaten in days. She had fought off her intended killer with a rush of adrenaline that was so sudden and so close to her demise that she never knew she had transformed. Held underwater, her inflicted bites had been a primordial reflex honed by a hundred million years of shark evolution.

  The effort had saved her life but had exhausted her physically, all cognitive thoughts jettisoned in a state of delirium. Swept away from shore by the currents, Sabeen drifted in and out of consciousness, oblivious to the fact that she was breathing underwater through a pair of gills in her neck. Her lower body dragged along the bottom as she futilely attempted to bob to the surface in twelve feet of water to gasp a breath of air. Too weak to use her legs, she propelled herself forward by wiggling her upper torso—an ineffective maneuver that left her struggling to push enough sea down her throat for her gills to process an adequate supply of oxygen.

  Hovering nearly vertically in the coral-rich shallows, her mind gone, Sabeen Tayfour was systematically drowning.

  Claudia Kukowitsch had arrived in Key Largo two days earlier with her boyfriend, Andy. Born and raised in Switzerland, the thirty-seven-year-old Alpine beauty had long blonde hair, blue eyes, and curves in all the right places.

  She had come to Florida on vacation with two goals: to visit Universal Studios in Orlando and to snorkel in the Keys. Andy had reluctantly joined her yesterday on a two-hour snorkeling excursion, but his back was scorched red with sunburn, providing him with an excuse to play golf.

  With the basics now behind her, Claudia opted for a charter boat—a thirty-foot Pro Kat high-powered catamaran she shared with four other guests and the captain. The vessel had left the dock an hour earlier, cruising across the brilliant green-blue shallows of Key Largo’s National Marine Sanctuary. Arriving at one of the park’s protected coral reefs, the five patrons had donned snorkels, masks, and fins, and then it was every man and woman for themselves.

  Drifting facedown along the glassy surface, Claudia gazed at the myriad of life darting in and out of soft coral beds that swayed with the currents. Toting a used underwater camera she had purchased at a local dive shop, she photographed clown fish, angelfish, a spotted sting ray, a pair of parrotfish, and a grouper that remained partially hidden within a cluster of sea grass.

  Growing bored, she fluttered her swim fins, moving beyond the reef and an expanse of empty seafloor until she arrived at another contained ecosystem—and the presence of a life form that took her breath away.

  The creature was immense—black with gray stripes. At first she thought it was a wounded eel, by the way it wriggled through the water. Hovering above the struggling creature, Claudia was shocked to see some seriously bizarre, almost human features. There was the shape of its skull and the hourglass spine that formed a mutilated tail. Split into two segments, the lower curved lobes resembled elongated, deformed toes.

  Then it occurred to her—My Gott . . . it’s a mermaid!

  Paddling along the surface, Claudia followed the sickly creature, snapping dozens of photos, only to realize she needed to get a lot closer for the money shot. She watched in fascination as the mermaid managed to wedge itself between two coral reef formations, its open mouth inhaling a stream of current that dusted up the sand, obscuring it from view.

  Claudia waited impatiently, but the dark being refused to move. She heard the dive boat sound its horn, recalling the snorkelers.

  Knowing fame and fortune depended upon her next move, Claudia inhaled a belly full of air from her snorkel and tucked her head into a steep surface dive, kicking hard to compensate for her natural buoyancy. Seconds later, her knees touched down along the sandy bottom a good fifteen feet in front of the reef formation.

  Before she could raise the camera strapped around her left wrist the current grabbed her—an invisible cushion of water that propelled her rapidly toward the object she desired. Rather than fight the stream she went with it, aiming her camera at the strange looking sea creature.

  Goot Gott im Himmel . . .

  Claudia dug the heels of her fins in the sand. This was not a mermaid; this was an alien life form! Its black eyes stared at her, its head cocked in a curious expression. Its almost human lower jaw hung open . . . filled with triangular teeth.

  Near panic, the Swiss woman kicked off the bottom—only to be embraced by the alien’s frail arms. One knotted five-fingered hand clutched Claudia’s right wrist, the other stroked her blonde hair as it palmed the back of her skull.

  Ich Fühle mich nicht gut.

  Claudia’s eyes widened as the voice whispered the German phrase, “I don’t feel well” into her head.

  The burning sensation in her lungs took precedence and she twisted and kicked her way free, ra
cing to the surface—the creature hitching a ride by grabbing hold of her ankle!

  Claudia’s head popped free and she gasped several breaths, searching for her voice—as the being surfaced next to her, its mouth opening with a horrifying gurgle.

  “Hilfe . . . help!” The Swiss woman pushed the listless creature away, slicing her hands on its rigid, extremely sharp skin.

  Sabeen submerged, her nostrils inhaling the swirling trickles of blood. The scent jump-started her senses, burning away the fog that had been veiling her consciousness. Homing in on the symphony of beating pulses, she grabbed the shrieking woman by her throat and bit her neck, her teeth gnawing on her prey’s cervical vertebrae.

  Blood spurted from the severed carotid arteries into Sabeen’s throat and down her open gullet, igniting a savage urge to feed. Following the blood stream, she buried her face and jaws into the blonde’s fleshy bosom, shaking her head like a dog as she ravaged the fatty morsels.

  Kurt Roberts heard his missing passenger’s scream and knew it was a shark attack even before he saw the spreading pool of crimson thirty yards off the port bow. Yelling “hold on,” he gunned the idling engines, nearly tossing a Canadian couple over the side.

  The thirty-foot Pro Kat covered the distance in seconds, forcing Captain Roberts to throttle back in a tight circle. Looking down, he saw the dark presence of a shark-like creature writhing beneath billowing scarlet clouds of blood.

  Roberts pulled his head back, feeling queasy. In twenty-two years of working the sanctuary, he had never heard of a shark-related fatality. As he reached for the radio, his passengers pointed excitedly at an object floating behind the outboard.

  The captain grabbed a reach pole from a storage bin and staggered to the stern. Floating along the surface was an underwater camera—still attached to the severed, blood-streaked left arm of its owner.

  38

  Atlantic Ocean, twenty-three miles due east of Port Everglades, Florida