Ark Storm (34 page)

“Take a seat, Gwen. And don’t veil your feelings, will you?”

Gwen stopped frowning, sat down opposite him. “Stop scrutinizing me with that laser look then.”

Messenger raised his hands in surrender.

“I’ve stopped. Look, I got you in here for several reasons. One was to discuss the next step with Project Zeus, but another was to say thank you for all your work on it. I tested the model last week, sent up the drones. You’ve got the yield up close to nine percent.”

Gwen blinked. “Wow! It worked.”

“And some,” beamed Messenger. “Sheikh Ali and I would like to thank you.”

“Just doing my job,” replied Gwen.

Messenger slid an envelope across the desk. Gwen stared at it.

“Take it,” said Messenger. “It’s not booby-trapped!”

Gwen took it.

“Go on then,” urged Messenger. “Open it up.” He was smiling.

Gwen felt uneasy.

She tore open the envelope, pulled out a check.

“Holy hell!” she exclaimed, echoing Messenger’s earlier words.

“One million dollars! That’s insane!”

Messenger burst out laughing, but Gwen saw anger in his eyes.

“I swear you are a one-off! I just do not get you. Every other person in this office would be whooping with glee, but you.… you look almost outraged!”

Gwen felt like she was being bought. She wanted to hand back the money, or at least demand why, really why, she had been given it. But her warning bells were clanging and she pushed down her defiance.
Act, you silly fool!

“I’m overwhelmed, that’s all,” she stated. “You have to remember a few months ago I was flat broke. Now I am a millionaire many times over. It’s a leap.”

She forced a smile. “Sorry, I’m being ungracious.” She leaned across the desk, offered Messenger her hand to shake. Messenger gripped it in his customary clench.

“Thank you,” said Gwen. Messenger held on past the time of release. Gwen felt his scrutiny again. Finally he released her.

“My and the Sheikh’s pleasure. Now go and put that in your pocketbook before you lose it, or before someone sees it, and would you please call in Peter and Kevin and come back in here?”

“Sure,” murmured Gwen. Heart pounding, she stashed the check in her pocketbook. It nestled in the bottom, against the lining, touching the location transmitter.

*   *   *

Peter Weiss and Kevin Barclay sat at the round table. Gabriel Messenger paced. Gwen took a seat beside Barclay, gave him her bright, slightly mocking smile. His bruises had almost, but not quite faded. His wariness had not gone. He looked away, met Weiss’s eye. Weiss frowned at Gwen, puzzled by the undercurrents.

“We are at the next stage of Project Zeus,” announced Messenger, steepling his fingers, voice slow and low as he glanced between his three employees. “Thanks in part to your efforts, Gwen, we have got the rain yield of Zeus up to where we can make a significant economic difference to agricultural yields on farmland.” He leaned forward, eyes gleaming. “Kevin and Peter have identified the best potential land areas to buy. I wanted to run them past you, Gwen, get any weather observations you might have.”

Gwen just nodded. There was a visceral, tangible hunger in the room. She saw it in the three men’s eyes.

Messenger pointed to a map he had pinned up on his cork board. In it were stuck ten red pins.

“To back up a bit, here’s the initial thinking. In the initial stages, we wish to limit the risks. I told Kevin and Peter not to go for Africa—too unstable, huge corruption, poor transport infrastructure, political instability. Much better to go for Australia—serious water problem, huge marginal semi-arid areas, and Anglo-Saxon law, not to mention easy access to the enormous Asian markets.” Messenger swept his hand across the map, shot a smile at Gwen.

“And right here on our doorstep in the US Midwest there are extensive areas of marginal farming territory which could be bought for a song, but which crucially have the transport infrastructure, as would Australia.”

Barclay and Weiss were nodding enthusiastically.

“We are also planning to buy, build, and own storage, transportation, and port infrastructure, both at the exporting as well as the importing ends, as well as grain trading companies. The idea being, once we have the entire supply chain sewn up we can make a fortune.”

Messenger sat back, folded his arms across his stomach, beaming at his own brilliance. Weiss and Barclay gazed up at their boss like the acolytes they so clearly were.

Gwen nodded, said nothing for a moment, finally found her voice.

“Wow. You’ve got it all planned out.”

“That’s why we’re here. That’s what we do,” replied Messenger, looking hard at Gwen, as if seeking out any hint of sarcasm in her words.

It was like a military campaign, thought Gwen, or a kind of modern-day colonialization by capitalism.

88

Half an hour later, her input given for the sake of her cover, Gwen walked from the office, out into the gray November afternoon toward the Cupcake. It was empty, save Narissa and Luke.

“Late lunch. Gimme anything, please,” said Gwen. She ran her hands over her face. Low blood sugar and a feeling that she could not go on like this gave her the slightest of trembles.

She sat, wondering how much all the farmers who would so gratefully sell their land to Gabriel Messenger would be shortchanged. Zeus would change the economics of their land totally. Zeus could have kept the land in the hands of the family who had owned it for generations. But Zeus was a private tool for making money, not an instrument of public good. The metrics of moneymaking. The metrics of morality had no room there. Gwen felt sick.

Her cell phone rang. Joaquin.

“Hey, flaco. What’s up?” she asked, injecting some lightness into her voice.

“Hell has come to Punta Sal!” declared Joaquin theatrically. “Seriously, it’s like an inferno and we’re getting rain like it’s the end of the world. All over Peru. Five villages in Huaraz have been swept away by landslides, over four thousand people killed, just washed away in an ocean of mud. There’ve been three fatal shark attacks in the last ten days. No food. Water’s too hot. The upwelling’s dead and the nutrients are all stuck deep in the thermocline. The food chain’s going to hell and the sharks are going after humans, anything. Two kids, just down the coast, then a surfer a day later,” he announced, voice sorrow-tinged.

“Shit,” murmured Gwen.

“Yeah, shit covers it.”

“It’s a mega-Niño, Joaquin,” Gwen said softly. “We always knew it would be ugly. They always have blood on their hands,” she added.

“There’s numerous outbreaks of typhoid and cholera,” continued Joaquin, “caused by all the flooding, the stagnant waters.”

“All we can do is what we’re doing,” Gwen replied with lame comfort. “Report and warn.”

Only that was the hell of it, thought Gwen. She wasn’t allowed to report and warn. Her information was too valuable. Everyone knew now it was a mega-Niño, but not two months ago. Back then, flood defenses could have been prepared, sandbags ordered, terracing fences dug into mountainsides above villages. But none of that had been done because Gabriel Messenger wanted to make money. And because she was on a mission to prove him guilty of murder. And because she was employed by him? Because she had taken the thirty pieces of silver? To the tune of first, ten million dollars. Now another million sat burning a hole in her pocket book.… How much blood is on your own hands, Gwen? she asked herself.

89

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE, FRIDAY NIGHT

The setting sun filtered through a dome of high cirrocumulus clouds, the rippled clouds known as “mackerel sky.” It gilded them red gold. Gwen and Dan stood on the back lawn near the cliff edge sharing a bottle of beer and admiring the display. They stood hip to hip, finding reason to touch, as they so often did. Dan wasn’t saying much. Gwen could sense his preoccupation, felt it cloud her own mood. Dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt, she gave a sudden shiver as a gust of wind pulsed over them.

Dan put his arm round her, pulled her closer, gave her his heat.

Gwen molded to him. He had the quality that no other man but her father had had: the gift of making her feel safe. When he held her, she could feel in that moment that all was right in her world, never mind whatever was going on outside the circle of their arms. She knew it was transitory, partially illusory, didn’t care.

“Storm’s coming,” she said, gazing up at the clouds.

Dan frowned. “How can you tell? It looks so peaceful up there. Those clouds are downright beautiful.”

Gwen looked into his eyes, smiled. “Beautiful things can be lethal too.”

“Oh, I know it,” he answered with a smile of his own. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Well, firstly, the large area of high cloud tells me there’s a lot of moisture up there at the top of the troposphere,” said Gwen, swinging from play to serious, enthusing about her passion.

“In temperate regions like here, this can be an advance warning of a depression coming in, bringing rain. And those ripples we see? Up high they’re real big choppy clouds, like big waves on a rough sea. That means the winds up there are strong.”

“I’m impressed, Doctor Boudain. Let’s go in and light the fire.”

“Is that code?”

Dan laughed, the tension he had carried breaking. He gave her his crooked smile.

“Both.”

*   *   *

Inside, they lay together on the sofa, staring into the fire that jiggered and played in the stone fireplace. Neither spoke. After a while, Dan got up, opened a bottle of Carmel Road Chualar Pinot Noir, poured out two generous glasses, drank a good sip, and handed one to Gwen. He lifted her legs, sat on the sofa, drawing her legs back over his lap. Gwen noticed his tension had returned, furrowing two vertical lines between his eyes.

“I’m being surveilled,” Dan said slowly. “Four different guys over the past week. It’s a Pattern of Life study. The full works.”

“Shit!” replied Gwen, spluttering into her wineglass. She knew better than to ask if he was sure. His eyes said he was. They were oddly dispassionate.

“The question is, why would anyone want to surveil me?” Dan continued, his voice thoughtful, empty of the outrage Gwen would have felt.

“Messenger’s bad guys?” she suggested.

“Yeah, but here’s the weird thing. They’re not surveilling you.”

“And you know this because?”

Dan gave a grim smile. “Because I returned the favor, slipped them without appearing to try to do so, surveilled them. They didn’t follow you. I checked several times. No one’s on your tail, unless you’re with me.”

“Wonderful,” declared Gwen, taking a big swig, swallowing with a gulp. “So what do we do about it?”

“We appear to do nothing.”

“You think they’ve bugged you here?”

Dan shook his head. “Not in the house. I’ve checked. It’s too well protected for them to get in anyway. But my car’s bugged. The driving mirror has a little fucker stuck behind it.”

“Nice. You leave it there?”

“Of course, so we have to watch what we say in there. Listen, Boudy, do something for me, please try to stay away from situations where you find yourself isolated, or alone. I have a real bad feeling about this. I’ll be with you a good chunk of time, but I can’t protect you twenty-four/seven and I know you wouldn’t want me to.”

Gwen sipped her wine. She kept the glass pressed to her lips, gazed over the rim at Dan.

“We can’t go on like this, just you and me, a two-man investigation team.”

Dan said nothing, just swirled his wine in the bell glass, gazed thoughtfully into the viscous red.

“Let’s just give it a bit more time,” he said, looking across at Gwen. “We get the FBI in, we scare the bad guys off and we’ll never get the bastards. I get the feeling things are accelerating. Some kind of move is gonna be made. Let’s just keep our nerve.”

“I guess we can give it a bit more time,” said Gwen thoughtfully. “It’s beginning to get a bit out-there on the mad-and-scary spectrum tho.”

Dan nodded. “We need to keep alert, keep our radar on, keep to crowded places.”

Gwen thought of the faceless men, perhaps watching Dan’s house even now, beyond the curtained windows, out there in the darkness.

90

SEVENTEEN MILE DRIVE

In the early hours of the next morning, the first big storm of the season roared in and hit California. Gwen and Dan lay in their usual tangle of limbs, warm, languid, fast asleep. And then the night seemed to deliver a punch to the house. Gwen sat up. Dan woke with her. Outside, the wind roared. Dan jumped from their bed and closed the window they both always loved to have open.

“Wild out there,” he said, climbing back into bed. “You were right, Guru.” He took Gwen in his arms, held her. The punch came again. Gwen felt it in her lungs, like an explosion.

“Gotta be gusting near a hundred Ks per hour,” murmured Gwen, sleepy, waking up fast. “Your house built strongly?” she asked.

“We’ll see, won’t we? One thing I did do last weekend was cut down the overhanging trees.”

“Good plan. Don’t fancy being squashed in my bed by an oak.”

Still, the wind roared. As the hours passed, the pitch rose to a scream. Gwen lay awake, surprised by the ferocity of the storm. She listened in a kind of rapt thrill and fear, as if by staying awake she could somehow keep the worst of the storm at bay. Then the rain started, a hissing sluicing sound, relentless, torrential, too extreme to be comforting in any way.

It slammed into the roof, pouring in torrents from the gutters, waterlogging the grass. This was not the gentle rain of a fantasy, enjoyed from the safety of a warm dry bed. It felt to Gwen like rain with
intent
.

91

THE LAB, MONDAY MORNING

It rained throughout the weekend. On Monday morning it was still raining. The sky was slate gray, seemingly liquid. Gwen sat at her desk sipping from a mug of coffee, warming her hands around it, reading the
San Francisco Reporter,
drying off. The dash from car to entrance had soaked her in five seconds.