The Black Silent (25 page)

Suddenly there was a loud bang and a jolt, and a split second later, she knew she had hit a small piece of wood.
The engines are still running. No vibration. RPM's good. Rudder
indicator okay. Trim tabs fine.
If she'd hit a prop, the damage wasn't bad; the drive units were still straight. No sooner had she assimilated that information than she had covered another half-mile.

She slowed to about fifty, and flashed by Point Gregory less than two hundred yards off the rocks. Her chart plotter indicated that the water was only about thirty feet deep. The shore was but a shadow in the night. After she dropped the power a bit more, she lay the boat over in a turn so tight it threw her into the side of the seat. She sped around the point and into the bay, then went in close behind the point and killed the power. At idle the engines made a throaty rumble. She waited—her gut in a knot. The thought of guns gripped her. She was shaking. This time she didn't want to pass close enough for the sheriffs to shoot.

After waiting for just a couple minutes, she stomped the pedal and the engines came to life. Then she heard a sound that was a cross between a lip smack and a quiet tap on a bass drum. She glanced at the temperature and saw that the starboard engine was overheating. Kelp leaves or sea grass on the cold water intake. She prayed that it hadn't gone into the sea strainer. She watched in horror as the temperature climbed toward 220

degrees. Once she was back out in the channel, she headed toward Friday Harbor. As she applied power, the wind blurred her eyes; the skin on her face was smoothed back and she became engulfed in the feel of an unremitting hurricane. One sheriff's boat was coming at her, the other was in the distance moving away from Fisherman's Bay at Lopez. In the lee of Shaw Island the water was relatively calm. Going over one hundred miles an hour, she came to port twenty degrees with a barely perceptible nudge of the wheel and headed right at her adversaries.

They were more worried about living than she was. They kept coming, their closing speed over 150 miles per hour now, less than a few seconds to collision.

Temperature 190. Steam was venting. She took the flare pistol and tried aiming dead on at the sheriff's boat, but the jostling and pounding made it ridiculous. She pulled the trigger and it burned brilliantly. The deputies did a panic turn, heeled to the starboard, throwing a wall of water. She was literally screaming her frustration as she bore down on them, aiming to convince them that she would slice them clean through—missed them by less than fifty feet traveling a full one hundred miles per hour plus. When she hit their wake,
Opus Magnum
slammed explosively through the top of the wave, sending her airborne like a javelin in the wind. Instantly she got her foot off the throttle, trying to guess when she would slam down. It was surreal. She hit the throttle and hit the water at almost the same moment. Nothing came apart, but it was a neck-snapping crash. It felt like she needed to get her stomach back above her guts.

Haley imagined the panicked curses and shaking hands. Desperation for their lives would help them concentrate on getting off her tail.

Temperature two hundred degrees. The seawater pump would burn. She killed the power and a huge following wake slammed into the stern, pushing the boats ass high into the air and throwing water everywhere. She waited a moment, backed up hard, then stood on the gas once again. The temperature began to drop. She had shaken off the seaweed.

She didn't want the deputies to die and she needed to live long enough to find Ben—the beauty was that they wouldn't know about any desire of hers to live. If they shot at her, she didn't hear it. Aiming would have been nearly impossible.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw them turning around at what was probably full throttle. Safe boats could do that. The other boat was coming at her, but with her incredible speed, it would not intersect her course.

Brown Island was coming up fast.

Haley's mind raced; she felt barely able to hold it together. She knew she was shaking, and that things were happening too fast and overwhelming her. No way could she think ahead of the boat. Instead, she was just hanging on, trying to aim this fiendish rocket that seemed any second ready to fling itself and her into space. When she came to the tip of Brown Island, she slowed to sixty and the terror ride became more manageable. She made the turn, able now on the calm water to plot mentally her course in front of the docks and through the anchored boats. The first time had been a practice run. She waited until she was about opposite the first dock in the series to punch the autopilot.

The boat was probably going sixty when she leaped overboard and hit the water very near the most prominent dock. The impact of her body on the water was bad and she actually rolled across the water, skipping like a stone before she slowed down. It stung like a beating with willow branches. Then the cold rushed over her, crushing and aching to the bone. Like many marine biologists, she was an avid diver and water person, and around the San Juans she wore a protective suit for warmth. Tonight she had nothing.

In water like this, in the low fifties, the average man could survive only about twenty minutes before losing consciousness—the average woman a little longer.

She had locked the autopilot of the
Opus Magnum
onto the floating log raft. She heard a great explosion when the boat reached its destination—another crime added to their collection. Apparently in calm water the autopilot worked fine at over thirty-five.

She found she was no more than forty feet from the ladder at dock's end. It took less than two minutes and she was out of the water and running. The sheriff's boat was two hundred yards down bay, near the burning hulk, looking for bodies; the other just coming around Brown Island.

Perhaps by this time Sam had found the answer to Ben's puzzle, or maybe even Ben himself.

Now the toughest part of her job had come.

Sam glanced around, expecting Frick to step out from behind a cabinet at any moment.

When that didn't happen, he looked back out the door and saw an empty hallway. The odds were now with Frick. He probably had thirty, maybe forty, trained men. It was a small island and he was right under the man's nose. There was no doubt in his mind that the deputies would see Ranken or a digital photo, and Frick would have a suggestion as to how they should feel about it.

After a last look at Ranken's corpse, Sam turned and saw the supply shelves that Gibbons had described and moved them. Behind was a simple door with a wooden sort of twist handle that was flush with the wall. Sam opened the door and inside was an amazing little office with a very large freezer.
Alice in Wonderland
came to mind.

Sam could picture Ben working undisturbed here on his ARCLES files, but he couldn't imagine what was in the freezer. Immediately Sam spotted notebooks matching those at Gibbons's and his heart raced. He felt like a plunderer of pyramids who just found the pharaoh's vault. His vision of reality shifted again. Maybe Gibbons wasn't lying, after all.

All three volumes had the word
ARCLES
at the bottom of the page. He grabbed them and put them in his duffel.

He opened the freezer and looked inside. It contained a wooden box lined with Styrofoam. Inside it were what looked like test tubes with caps. They were color coded with paper bands and there appeared to be six different colors. One grouping of vials, the red, appeared to be empty.

Curiosity burned in him. Why was Ben hiding vials in a freezer? There were six different kinds of something, judging from the color code.
Probably the product of at
least six different genes. Some of the liquids could be mixtures. Expressed proteins or
their products,
the documents had indicated. Alongside the vials lay a brown manila envelope.

With eager hands he picked up the envelope, certain he was about to find something.

Four-digit numbers ran down the left-hand margin of the page. Each four-digit entry down the side seemed to correspond to a row across the page. The four digits probably referred to the animals that were receiving the injections, substitutes for names.

What if they aren't animals?

He told himself that was a giant leap. There could be thirty-six mice or rats or octopuses. There was no reason to think Ben had already turned to people. He left the vials but kept the volumes, envelope, and papers; then he closed the freezer and returned to the outer workshop area.

Frick had left Ranken with his weapon, so Sam took it off the body and an extra speedloader with six bullets. Ranken carried a rather lightweight firearm, a Smith & Wesson model 10 thirty-eight special. It was economical and better than throwing rocks.

Sam also took the pepper spray. He wanted to take Ranken's body down and treat it with respect, but he knew he would be destroying forensic evidence.

Taking the weapon was the worst form of manufacturing circumstantial evidence, but Sam needed it. Even with the revolver, his odds were little better than nil. Standing again, his knee felt as if it were punctured by a hot needle and muscle cramps were beginning in his thigh, along with the increasing stiffness in his lower back. Moving around was now an ordeal. Carefully planned exercise was so different from racing around with an adrenaline-filled body. He didn't know what would happen if he tried to fight again.

He took one last look around the room before leaving. After a moment his eye went to three wooden boxes identical to the one in the freezer. Sam took a closer peek, trying to make out the small print on the wooden box. Surprisingly, it said
American Bayou
Technologies.

That was food for thought.

Sam crawled out of the little room and heard footsteps coming down the hall. After dousing the lights he pulled the .38 and stood behind the door. This could be the end of it. Thank God for the gun.

The door pushed open slowly. Probably someone was using his foot and had a gun in his hand as well.

In fact, the gun came next, a semiautomatic visible in the light from the hall. This was not a trained individual.

"Hey," came a voice from behind the figure. "We're doing this organized. We're down at the other end. You don't just go off by yourself."

"I've seen Dr. Anderson slip in here in the evening. I thought it would be a good place to look."

"We're doing this by the numbers. We're all down at the other end."

"Okay," the man sighed.

Sam waited about two minutes, then opened the door.

Surprisingly, the hall was empty. They were in rooms at the far end. He decided to take a chance and hurry down the hall to the stairs. It seemed to take an eternity and any moment he was sure he would be stopped. As he approached the stairs that would take him to the second floor and Ben's office, he heard voices. He ducked in a room and discovered it was the dive room. It was near both the door to the docks, where Sam had entered, and the stairwell to the second story.

Right away he noticed a pile of clothing. He checked the wallet in the jeans and it was Ben's. Very interesting. Ben had left his credit cards and driver's license. Amazingly, no one had thought to check the dive room yet. Sam fished through the pants pockets and found a piece of paper. He pocketed it, returned to the door, flipped off the light, and listened. When he opened the door, it was plain that a group of three or four men was searching the lower floor, one room at a time. They had started at the far end and still had a distance to go.

Exiting the dive room, he rushed up the stairs to the first landing. He was able to see the top. A man sat on a stool, nipping through a magazine. Obviously he was permanently stationed. Sam doubted that he could bluff his way through, despite his fraying disguise.

He would need to try another way. Feeling exposed, he went back down the stairs and managed to cross the hall to the outside door without being seen. Once again he went down the outside of the building, only this time he remained low, and traveled in the opposite direction, heading for the balcony from which Ben had originally jumped.

He found the balcony and climbed one of the small trees at the southern end. It was a fir and it sagged terribly under his weight, but he managed to make it to the edge of the balcony and climb over. The door to the interior was locked. There was a window and he looked inside. Someone was turning on all the lights during the search for him. He waited, hi a couple of minutes someone made his way to the end of the hall, turning on lights in the various labs and offices.

When he reached the end of the hall, Sam tapped on the glass. Instead of panicking, as Sam expected, or calling for help, as Sam also expected, the man decided to be a hero, drew his gun, and approached the door. Sam lay on his back beside the door. The door opened and he could see the tip of the man's gun. Throwing the door open, the man stepped through, looking everywhere but down. His mouth was open and Sam shot a stream of pepper spray right at his partially opened mouth. Before the man could comprehend what had happened to him, he dropped the gun and grabbed for his throat.

In an impressive display of total surrender, the man fell to the ground with his eyes open wide.

"You'll be okay, it's just pepper spray," Sam said. He could empathize because he was suffering badly enough just from the residue.

Working quickly, he got the man's pants and shirt off and put them on over his own.

Fortunately, he was a big guy. Sam found a badge indicating he was a special deputy, no doubt one of the newly deputized. Another play in Frick's game.

Unfortunately, the clothes reeked of pepper spray and the residue continued to burn his eyes. Using the man's own cuffs, he locked his hands behind his back; then he quickly closed the door, leaving the man gasping in his underwear.

This man carried a SIG-Sauer P229, standard fare for the FBI and a better weapon than Ranken's Smith & Wesson, if the criteria for "better" was the efficient killing of people.

Sam hobbled down the hall dressed in the uniform of a security guard.