The Black Silent (26 page)

A loud boom came from outside—strong enough to rattle the windows.

"Check that out!" someone hollered.
"Opus Magnum just
went off like a firecracker."

Sam appreciated the timing but worried about Haley.

He made it all the way to Ben's office without being stopped. Those who saw him were evidently too busy looking out the window at Frick's barbecued boat to pay attention.

Inside half an hour Sam hoped he would be reading documents that without a doubt would blow his mind.

Ben Anderson had not disappointed him yet.

It was evening, and Sanker was in a mood.

Rossitter walked in wearing new shoes.

"That bad, huh?" Sanker said.

"What do you mean?" Rossitter didn't get his meaning.

"You're wearing new shoes."

Rossitter still appeared confused by the comment, which was troubling because it meant the man didn't understand his own eccentricities. Sanker knew it was one thing to have them and another to lack any self-awareness of them. The old man sighed, suddenly feeling weary.

"Did you talk to our Judas?" he asked Rossitter.

"I tried calling him back. He won't return calls. Something is happening, I can feel it,"

Rossitter said. "I think it's like you said: Judas is two people, and I have a good idea who one of them is."

Suddenly the old man felt a welcome shot of adrenaline. "Well, who?"

"Sarah James—Ben's assistant." Rossitter said it as if trying to convince himself.

"How did you and your minions come to this conclusion?"

"Judas said we should follow Sarah to find Ben," Rossitter said. "Even said tell Frick to let her go."

"That's inconsistent, isn't it? First he says we don't need to find Ben, that's not part of the deal. It's a backup in case Frick doesn't get him. Then he tells us to find Ben? By following Sarah?"

"What do we do?" Rossitter looked more and more worried as their control of the situation grew thinner.

"One thing Judas likes doing is talking. Let him talk. You listen. Act cooperative, but don't agree to anything. Then report back to me."

"I see," Rossitter said. "He really could be on anybody's side." "He's on his own side.

We just have to figure out what he really wants. I'm tending to believe he wants something that Sarah has," Sanker said.

"Sarah James is close to Ben Anderson. I hear she fancied him and he her. Ben took obvious precautions, hiding his work, et cetera. It's logical that she might know something. Or have something. Judas can't get to her if Frick has her. And Judas is supposed to deliver Ben's secret to us if he wants his reward."

"I still wonder why deliver it to us."

"That's easy," the old man said, growing more sure of himself. "Judas wants the Arc regimen. It's a complicated recipe, apparently. Judas says it has six primary components.

He knows so much about it that I think he's seen it, maybe used or taken it. So he's desperate. What if he can't get any more of it? If he can't get it from Ben, he hedges his bets. He knows we would have the means to produce it, if only we knew how. Can't you see it?"

"Isn't that a lot of conjecture?"

"I made my fortune being good at conjecture," Sanker snapped back.

"So you think this Sarah knows the Arc regimen?"

"Not necessarily. She knows something that Judas wants to know, or has something he wants to have."

Rossitter looked down at those new shoes, clearly at sea.

It didn't matter. Sanker knew Judas's need intimately, because Judas's need was his own.

"There is nothing in here," Walrus Face said.

"What do you know about this?" Thin Man asked.

Sarah sat huddled in the back of Sheriff's Boat 3. Like Boat 2 it was a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler, but this one had a pair of 225-horsepower Suzuki outboards, and a tiny cabin. It was unusually aggressive for Thin Man to make the inquiries.

"I don't know a thing, other than what I told you," Sarah said. "I just saw the boat from the road."

Thin Man: "In the dark?"

"I wasn't sure this was the boat. But he usually ties up to that dock."

"That sounds like bullshit to me, designed to waste our time," Walrus Face said.

A breeze on the bay made sizable ripples that rocked the boats. The sheriff's boat tapped the gunnel of Ben's when they pitched.

"I'm sure you'd enjoy a stint with Frick," said Thin Man. "He's a charmer."

Walrus Face climbed back in the boat. "I think it's time for some candor lessons."

Walrus came toward her, and Sarah eyed his gun without staring. She had to get to it.

Once she did, she was good enough to use it effectively. He pulled her to her feet and pushed her toward the cabin.

She opened the cabin door and stepped in front of the opening. Down inside the cuddy cabin there was a bunk. She knew that what she had in mind could get her brutalized, but given her options, it was worth the risk.

He came toward her and pushed her back inside. "I'd love to hump the hell out of you,"

Walrus Face said as if considering it, but not planning on it.

He reached for her coat and grabbed the zipper. She struggled and he slapped her across the face. Without further significant struggle she let him unzip the coat. He ripped open her blouse.

"I know what you want. Let's get it over with," she said.

She didn't have to work at making her hands tremble as she began unfastening his belt.

"You first," he said, obviously surprised and uncertain. She had called his bluff.

She didn't step back but made as if to open her blouse.

Walrus Face started feeling around for a light switch. At the same time she reached for his groin, again surprising and distracting him. His mouth came open slightly and he gasped. For those few seconds she had no scruples. It was a job and she aimed to get it done. Using her left hand, she reached for his gun, releasing the holster snap and pulling it free, while he tried to adjust to what he thought she was doing. In a split second he was looking down the barrel of his own gun.

Shock was apparent on Walrus Face. It was as if he'd looked into the future and seen his end.

She couldn't quite see his eyes. He could try to grab it. At that moment she wished he would. In the movies they grabbed guns. In real life people usually got shot when they tried it. Her father had been a cop before he was a contractor and they had discussed such things. They had also fired hundreds of rounds from various weapons and she still remembered how to do it, and she knew that on a night such as this, a thug would carry the gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.

She watched him swallow hard and slid by him out of the cuddy cabin.

Thin Man hesitated, trying to comprehend what was happening. She backed to the corner stern of the boat, where she held the gun aimed in their direction.

"Jump over," she shouted at Thin Man. She lowered the gun and fired, missing his leg by inches. The gun boomed up the bay. "Next one blows your leg off," she said. "Ten-millimeter round, I think." Thin Man jumped. "You're next, Walrus Face."

"You bitch. . ."

She fired. The near miss rocked him back. "Next one's in your chest," she said, her hands shaking more than before. "It'll knock the crap out of you even with your flak jacket."

He jumped at her and she fired, knocking him back against the wheel. He looked like he was all done. Then he shook himself and somehow regained his faculties. Again he came at her, stumbling, and again she shot, this time two rounds. They knocked him down, the bullets' force incredible. She guessed she had hit the steel breastplate in the vest. It didn't matter. She knew it would incapacitate him, for the moment.

"You just couldn't stand that you were bested by a woman. So like an idiot you kept coming," she said, amazed and shaken at his bullheaded tenacity.

In the dash lights she could see his eyes rolled back, spittle running down his chin. He was shaking himself, trying to recover.

"Get up, you bastard."

No blood, so she knew the injuries were internal only. She was shaking and barely able to aim the gun. She fought hysteria and, oddly, guilt that she had actually shot a man three times. Struggling, he managed to get to his knees, holding his ribs in terrible pain.

"My ribs are broken."

"Good," she said. "I'll shoot some more if you don't crawl over the side."

"Please, I can't," Walrus Face groaned.

She couldn't help herself. She was starting to feel sorry for him. Seeing him wounded made a difference, somehow. "Get up or, so help me, I'll kill you." She put the gun a foot from his head, knowing that she didn't mean a word of what she said.

"I can't. I swear, I can't move. It feels like I got ribs in my lungs."

He was in real pain. What she saw couldn't be faked and there were those holes in the clothing over his chest. She reached down and felt a dented steel breastplate in the Kevlar. Another big dent in the Kevlar wasn't over the breastplate. It must have hurt him bad. Her daddy had talked about vests as well. In fact, Walrus Face probably felt as if he couldn't move.

On his belt she found handcuffs. Based on what she'd seen in the movies and on watching her nephew play with real cuffs, she clamped one end of a cuff on tight to his wrist, then cuffed the wrist to the outboard-motor bracket. It was more than stout. She turned on the ignition and left Thin Man to flounder through the mud to the private dock. In seconds she was going forty-four knots back toward the main marinas. Riding over the small waves, the boat and motor vibrated and Walrus Face screamed in pain.

Sarah had to get to Ben quick. She was already thirty minutes late.

O
nce on Warbass Street, it had taken Haley only a few seconds to put her soggy backside on the soft leather of Rachael's BMW. She started it, begging aloud for the heat. Her clothes stuck to her skin, her body felt like rubber, and her teeth literally rattled with the shivering. Never had she been so cold. She checked her pocket with trembling hands to make sure she had the keys to Ben's airplane. God, it was hard to think when your body felt so cold. Her thoughts were a jumble of genes, longevity, the end of the world, and a desperate determination that neither Sam nor Ben should die.

Get to the plane and get to Sam,
she reminded herself. She could come in second in this race. She struggled with the old feeling that her mother's loser's karma was trying to take her down. This time she fought it like she had never fought it before, and the fight was part of the antidote to giving up.

Already near panic, she gasped at what she saw in the rearview mirror. Headlights were coming down the street and a spotlight was moving side to side. Looked like another sheriff's deputy. There was no time to put on the dry clothes in the backseat.

She stepped on the gas, careful not to spin the rear tires. The deputy was traveling slowly, probably looking for someone on foot. She continued down Warbass, then noticed that the deputy was speeding up and had doused the spotlight. She exited Warbass near the top of the ferry landing and took a quick, sharp left back up the hill, accelerating hard now that the patrol car was out of sight. In seconds she found herself back on Gibbons's street.

It gave her an idea. She pulled into Gibbons's garage, jumped out, grabbed the bag with her dry clothes, and pushed the garage door button as the deputy's car went careening past. It was a shock when the garage light automatically turned on at the push of the button. It was like a neon sign.

Down the block the brake lights of the deputy's car shone bright.

Without waiting, Haley hit the button, stopped the garage door from closing, grabbed the clothes, and sprinted out into the night. As the police car was backing, she turned into the thick hedge next to the garage, forced her way through, and began climbing the hill at a frantic pace.

Flames were still skyrocketing from
Opus Magnum
three minutes after the crash. Frick was still waiting for the ferry search to commence and trying to figure a way to keep the ferry stationary all night. He would use his men for something more productive than a full-scale search of the ferry. It smelled like a ruse and he couldn't follow every one of this bastard's feints. The deputies were starting to look for survivors at the wreck site.

That would have to end quickly.

Frick had just yelled at the assistant to the CEO for the ferry system when, amazingly, the transportation secretary called. Obviously he had already been briefed.

"I'm sorry," the secretary said, "but we just don't keep ferries all night at Friday Harbor.

We have a boatload of passengers. We'll call the state police and have them search as people get off in Anacortes. They'll search the vehicles, I'm told."

"I'm calling from the Sanker Foundation," Frick replied. "Mr. Sanker, of the Sanker Corporation and this foundation, and the governor's friend, does not want to call the governor on the Thanksgiving holiday. We believe scientific papers of the utmost importance, so valuable that they might have national-security implications, have been stolen. An informant claims that the thief—who's already shot two police officers, one to death, and killed one employee of Sanker— is on that ferry. We want to keep this confidential and there is no way to do that if that ferry heads back to Anacortes and you bring in the state police. Furthermore, that ferry is due to stop at Lopez and there is no security there whatsoever."

There was a long pause. Frick knew that the last thing the secretary would want would be to disturb the governor on the holiday weekend with a problem from his department.

Old man Sanker had probably contributed a lot of money to various political causes at the governor's suggestion. Although it was doubtful the secretary knew the amount, or even the order of magnitude of the contributions, he could imagine the general level of Sanker's influence by reputation alone. Guys like the secretary got their jobs because they understood politics.

"Mr. Secretary?"

"I'll call right now and ask the CEO to suggest to the captain that he remain at the Friday Harbor dock for repairs to the electronics. It's still much closer than Anacortes and it's dark. We'll do it for safety. The search will be incidental. I don't want to set a precedent here."