Darkness Falls (6 page)

Beamon ignored the insult. "Look, you've been clear on how you feel about drilling here, and I'm sure you're enjoying the hell out of all this, but for your own good I suggest you start taking the situation a little more seriously."

"Are you threatening me, Mark? Because if so --"

"I'm not fucking threatening you. What I'm saying is that if you just forget about the hundreds of millions of dollars invested here, the incredible political costs of getting drilling in the wilderness approved in the first place, and the billions the energy companies expected to make here, it's still one of the country's biggest oil reserves. And that's a national security issue something a lot of very powerful people don't have much of a sense of humor about."

"The bacterial loads aren't high enough to bring down production in most of the other wells," Andropolous interjected hopefully, then looked at his boots. "Yet."

"Yet?" Beamon said, working to keep his voice even. "Could you define yet, please?"

Andropolous pushed through the door of a trailer and Erin followed, peeling off his jacket and feeling the warmth soak painfully into his bruised, sunburned, and now half-frozen skin.

The trailer was a typical wreck, just like he remembered from the old days: card tables covered in papers, an old sofa with the stuffing coming out of it, carpet covered with dirty footprints. Andropolous grabbed a damp notebook off the floor and tossed it to him. "This is everything we've got."

The first few pages consisted of maps of the ANWR fields with well positions superimposed and individual bacterial loads noted. Erin fell onto the couch and stared down at the diagrams, trying to make out a pattern.

"Well?" Beamon said.

He didn't answer, instead picking up a pencil and shading the different wells. The higher the bacterial load, the darker the shading. Then he connected them, gradually darkening and lightening the shading to smoothly join all the wells and give him a picture of how the bacteria might be traveling.

"Erin?" Beamon prompted again.

He ripped the page from the notebook and held it out. "Look at the different levels, Mark. This didn't start in one place and radiate out. And it wasn't already there or you'd have more random variation in the loads."

"So?"

"So in my opinion, you had a number of wells contaminated all around the same time, and now it's spreading from those individual wells."

"What are you saying?"

"If I had to guess -- and it's only a guess

I'd say that some of the drilling chemicals were contaminated, and when they got pumped down the holes, the bacteria took hold and started to spread. I'd look at suppliers the Alaska drilling companies have in common with the Saudis."

"Okay, let's say you're right. What can you do about it?"

Erin thought about it for a moment. "Nothing."

"That's not going to go over real big, Erin. You're going to have to do better."

"What the fuck do you want me to use on this stuff, Mark? Harsh language? I just spent an entire week in Saudi Arabia and got exactly nowhere."

Beamon's face, which had lost the green pallor it had taken on in the plane, now looked pale. "So you're saying more wells are going to go down?"

"Yeah."

"How many?"

"Eventually, all of them, I guess."

"All of them. That's just great. How long?"

Erin shrugged and looked over to Andropolous, who was trying to disappear into a corner. "Did you look at the spread rate?"

"We don't have any history, Erin. And we don't really know much about this reservoir. So, it's impos "

"For God's sake, Steve!" Beamon said. "I'm not here to shoot messengers. Just give me your best guess! A year? Two?"

Andropolous chewed his lip for a moment. "Oh, no, definitely not years. At this point, we're talking about months."

The two other men were sound asleep Beamon on the couch and Andropolous sitting in a chair with his chin tucked into his chest. Erin was on the floor, squinting blankly at the loose papers surrounding him. Another one of his many failings was his uncanny ability to obsess. Any problem that he couldn't solve, no matter how complicated, or even how trivial, could consume him. He'd once lost three days of sleep over why the door on his truck wouldn't close properly.

But this wasn't a truck door. How had the bacteria traveled between Saudi Arabia and Alaska? His initial idea that it had been carried by drilling chemicals didn't bear hard scrutiny. But every other idea he had was even worse. At this point, he was down to imaginary host animals that liked to swim across oceans specifically to crawl down drill holes.

Jet lag was catching up with him and it was obvious that he wasn't going to figure it out tonight, but he also knew that his mind wasn't going to let go easily. He needed something to shut his brain off, something mind-numbingly dull. He glanced around him, and finally settled on Andropolous's genetic profile of the bacteria.

In the dim light from a distant desk lamp, he leafed disinterestedly through the initial pages, but then stopped and flipped back to the beginning of the report. Even to his sleep-deprived brain, something here was familiar. The DNA structure of the bacteria had similarities to concepts he'd played around with years ago -- before Jenna had finally convinced him to abandon his genetic engineering ambitions because the world wasn't ready for a Frankenstein bioremediation bacteria. Now it looked as if nature had beat him to it.

He flipped forward and again stopped short, blinking hard as he tried to focus on a description of a specific and unusual adaptation displayed by the bacteria. This one wasn't just recognizable, it was an exact duplicate of an alteration he'd hypothesized could be achieved by inserting genetic material from a bacteria common in the Amazon Basin into a hydrocarbon-consuming bacteria he'd found in Nigeria.

Erin dropped the report and looked up to see if the sound had woken the other two. Beamon rolled onto his back and began snoring. Andropolous just looked dead.

He rose silently, finding it hard to balance himself as his tired mind grasped for an explanation of the contents of that report. He went out into the cold night, gently pushing the door closed behind him, and began walking across the brightly lit carpet of snow beneath the rig.

He continued past the equipment and through a break in the snow bank that surrounded the area, finally finding himself back out in the silent tundra. There had to be an explanation. If he'd found that adaptation potentially useful, maybe nature had too? Yeah, right. Nature had adapted an African bacteria to survive in Alaska and then combined it with one that wasn't found anywhere near either place.

He was staring at his feet as he moved forward, the cold penetrating his sweater. When he finally stopped and looked up, the plane was only about twenty yards away. He headed toward it and climbed in, taking one last look at the rig before starting the engine and opening the throttle.

Chapter
7.

It was only the middle of September, but the wind was already carrying the season's first snowflakes. Jenna turned her face upward and closed her eyes; she felt the cold sting against her skin and tried to push away thoughts of that storm in Alaska. Most of the time it seemed as if it had all happened to someone else, and then something would trigger the memories and they would consume her. She wondered if that would ever change.

Her modest house sat on an exposed knoll about an hour from Bozeman, Montana, surrounded by nothing -- no neighbors, no paved roads, no far-off glow of town at night, not even a distant glimpse of the dense forests that covered so much of the state. She increasingly found emptiness and bad weather comforting. Maybe it was just her penance. When the sun shone and she found herself seized by an unexpected moment of real happiness, it would inevitably bring back the image of Erin's expression when she'd told him she didn't love him anymore. More well-deserved punishment, she supposed.

Jenna grabbed the grocery bags from the back of her Subaru and began teetering up the driveway, using considerable athleticism to unlock the door and push through it with her back. Frozen pizza in front of the television again tonight. Or maybe Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. In her previous life, she'd liked to set out the good dishes and slave over some elaborate, experimental meal. But now cooking just amplified her loneliness and brought back more of those damn memories.

"Jenna Kalin."

She spun toward the voice, dropping her bags on the slate floor.

"No. It's Baker now, isn't it? I'm sorry, Jenna. I didn't mean to frighten you."

The adrenaline coursing through her made it hard to think coherently, but still she knew it was a lie. Frightening her had been exactly his intention.

Michael Teague was sitting in the living room, partially obscured by the semidarkness provided by the worsening storm outside. He waved her forward and she took a few hesitant steps but stopped again when she saw two more figures backlit by the window that dominated the room. Although she couldn't see their faces, there was no mistaking Udo and Jonas Metzger.

"What . . ." She discovered that her mouth was so dry it was hard to speak. "What are you doing here, Michael?"

"It's been a long time," he said. "Aren't you happy to see me?"

"It's not that . . ." she said, and then fell silent, realizing that she had no idea how to complete the lie.

When the four of them had scuttled their boat and run for opposite corners of the earth, she'd been surprised at the powerful sensation of weight being lifted from her. Despite having spent a great deal of time working together and for a while having similar goals, she'd never been comfortable with Teague. And now, with the benefit of hindsight, she realized that she was a little afraid of him.

"It is good to see you after so many years," Udo said, seeming to want to move toward her, but then deciding that he was close enough. His German accent had become more subtle since they'd last spoken, and he'd abandoned his comb-over for a much hipper buzz cut. His clothes were more expensive and carefully chosen, too, with the effect of transforming the forty-fiveyear-old biologist into something closer to a forty-five-year-old Cadillac salesman.

In truth, during all the time Udo had worked for her, he'd never been anything but pleasant. And yet, there was something about him -- the way his polite smile always lingered a little too long, the way his eyes fixed a little too blankly -- that made her think everything she saw was just a carefully crafted facade.

He jabbed his brother gently in the ribs. "Say hello, Jonas."

Unlike his brother, Jonas hadn't changed at all. He was still spectacularly handsome, with smooth, almost feminine skin and dark eyes that always seemed to be looking at something horrible. Jenna knew very little about him and, frankly, preferred it that way. In her estimation, he had been born a true believer -- one of those rare people who craved a cause to lose themselves in and to justify following the voices in their heads. If he'd been Muslim, he'd be a member of al Qaeda. If he was African, he'd be leading a genocidal campaign against a neighboring tribe. But he wasn't. He was an environmentalist -- a path he'd undoubtedly chosen for no other reason than his brother's involvement.

"You told me we'd never see or speak to each other again," she said. "That it was too dangerous. What's changed?"

"How have you been adapting?" Teague responded, his tone reminding her that he didn't like to be questioned. "You have a lot of time. What do you do with it?"

"I stay busy."

He smiled and pointed behind him at a nine-foot-tall artificial climbing wall bolted to the side of her fireplace. "Going up and down on that like a rat in a cage?"

"Sometimes," she said, though it was just another lie. Climbing had been one of her great passions, but now she couldn't remember the last time she'd so much as touched that wall.

Faking their deaths by sinking that boat had been the only solution to the fact that the FBI was using terrorist paranoia to intensify its scrutiny of environmentalist groups. Teague had been overly vocal in his beliefs about global warming, and there was little question that he and his associates were being watched.

Of course, he had planned their "deaths" with his normal efficiency, and it had gone flawlessly, allowing them to work without the fear of being exposed. But then she'd discovered one small detail that she hadn't considered: pretending to be dead wasn't all that different from actually being dead.

Teague stood and wandered around the living room, looking at things she knew he had no interest in. His hair was still long and thick, with just a little gray to hint that he was nearing fifty. Pale skin suggested that he rarely ventured into the environment he was so concerned about, and his clothes still appeared to be chosen for no other reason than to highlight the enormous personal fortune he'd amassed.

"We're getting reports that a number of rigs have been shut down in the Alaska wilderness," he said, finally.

Her legs suddenly went weak and she reached out to a small table for support. When she regained her balance and pulled her hand away, it left a palm-shaped sweat stain.

"It worked," Udo said as Teague silently appraised her. "Your bacteria, your delivery system. It all worked just like you designed."