The Swarm (36 page)

‘You're suspicious of happiness. I was like that once. It didn't do me any good.'

‘Are you happy now?'

‘Yes.'

‘No misgivings?'

Johanson flung up his hands in a despair. ‘Come on, Tina, everyone has misgivings. I just try to be honest with myself and with everyone else. I like flirting, wine, having a good time and being in control. I don't talk much, but I don't feel the need to. Psychiatrists would find me deeply boring. I want my peace and that's all there is to it. My life suits me. But that's me. My way of being happy is different from yours. I trust mine.
You'll have to learn to do the same. But you haven't much time. Kare won't wait for ever.'

The breeze played with Lund's hair. ‘If Stone goes out to the slope,' she said, thinking aloud, ‘I'll have to go to Stavanger. That's OK, though. The
Thorvaldson
is ready to sail. Stone could leave tomorrow or the day after. The Stavanger job will take longer. I'd have to write a detailed report. So there'd be a few days spare for me to drive to Sveggesundet and…do some work from there.'

‘Some work?' Johanson grinned.

She pursed her lips. ‘I'll think about it and talk to Skaugen.'

‘You do that,' said Johanson. ‘But think quickly.'

 

Back at the office he checked his inbox for messages. There wasn't much of any interest. The final mail caught his attention when he saw who it was from: [email protected]

He clicked on it.

‘My, my,' murmured Johanson. ‘So journalists
can
be co-operative.'

Had Lukas Bauer gone missing?

Maybe he should request a meeting with Skaugen and tell him his theory. But there was no evidence to support it - just a nasty feeling that the world was coming unstuck and the sea was to blame.

If he wanted to take the idea any further, he needed more evidence…He should hook up with Weaver as soon as he could. Why not meet her in the Shetlands? The flights shouldn't be a problem, if Statoil was paying. In fact, it would all be very easy. Hadn't Skaugen said he could nail him to a cross if he wanted?

He didn't need to go that far. A helicopter would be enough.

Johanson leaned back in his chair and studied the clock. He was supposed to be lecturing in an hour, and then he had a departmental meeting about some DNA sequencing.

He created a new folder and entered a file name:
The Fifth Day
.

It was the first thing that had come into his mind. On the fifth day of creation, God had filled the sea with living creatures…

He started to type, and a chill swept through him.

Vancouver and Vancouver Island, Canada

For the past forty-eight hours Ford and Anawak had been poring over the same sequence of data. At first total darkness. Then an oscillation from an audio signal outside the human range. Three signals in total. And finally the cloud. A luminescent, blue-tinged cloud. Out of nowhere it appeared in the centre of the screen and scattered outwards, like a universe expanding. The light wasn't bright, more a faint blue glow; a dim, diffuse glimmer, just strong enough for the huge silhouettes of the whales to loom into view. It spread rapidly and filled the screen. The whales hovered in front of it, as if bound by its spell.

Several seconds passed.

Deep in the cloud something shot forwards like winding, twisting lightning. Its tapered point struck a whale on the side of the head. Lucy. The whole thing was over in less than a second. More flashes blazed towards the other whales, then the spectacle ended as abruptly as it had begun.

Next the film seemed to play in reverse. The cloud collapsed in on itself and vanished. The screen went dark. Ford's technicians had slowed the footage, then slowed it again. They'd tried everything they could think of to optimise the resolution and let in more light, but even after hours of studying the tape they were still no closer to solving the mystery of the whales.

In the end Anawak and Ford decided to write their report for the emergency committee. They'd been authorised to call on the help of a biologist from Nanaimo who specialised in bioluminescence. It took him a while to get over his bewilderment, but then he backed their conclusions: the cloud and the flashes were organic. According to the expert, the flashes were caused by a chain reaction within the cloud, though he couldn't say how they'd been triggered or what purpose they served. Their twisting motion and the way they tapered off towards the tip
reminded him of squid, but a creature that size would have to be truly gigantic, and it was doubtful that giant squid could luminesce. Besides, that wouldn't explain the cloud or where the serpentine flashes were coming from.

But their instincts told them one thing unequivocally: the cloud was responsible for the change in the whales.

All of this was duly recorded in the report, which vanished into a hole of impenetrable darkness. The
Black Hole
was what they called the emergency committee, which sucked everything in without trace. Initially the Canadian government had encouraged the scientists to work alongside them, but since the US-led allied committee had been set up, all that was required of them was the provision of information. Vancouver Aquarium, the lab in Nanaimo and even the University of British Columbia were just links in a one-way chain of knowledge. The only time the scientists ever heard anything was when the committee instructed them to submit their findings, hypotheses and frustrations as reports. Neither John Ford, Leon Anawak, Rod Palm, Sue Oliviera nor Ray Fenwick had any idea how their input was being used or whether the committee agreed with their findings. Comparing their work with that of other groups was a key element of their research, and now it was being denied them.

‘Things were fine,' said Ford, ‘till Judith Li took the helm.'

Anawak had Oliviera on the line. ‘We need to look at some more of those mussels,' she said.

‘I can't get hold of anyone from Inglewood,' he told her. ‘They won't talk to me, and Li's insisting that it was all an accident, a blunder with the tow line. No one's said anything about mussels.'

‘But you saw them with your own eyes! And we need another sample, plus some of that weird organic substance. Why won't they co-operate? I thought they wanted our help.'

‘You could try contacting the committee directly.'

‘It all has to go via Ford. I don't get it, Leon. What's the point of an emergency committee, if this is what happens?'

Perhaps it was the nature of crisis squads and emergency committees to work furtively, thought Anawak. When had an emergency committee ever faced the same problem twice? Its permanent members had to get to grips with terrorism, political and military crises, all of which had to be handled in confidence. But they also faced malfunctioning nuclear
power stations, broken dams, forest fires, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes and famines. Did all that have to be handled in confidence? Probably not, but it usually was.

‘It's not as though we don't know what causes volcanic eruptions and earthquakes,' said Shoemaker, when Anawak voiced his frustration. ‘Sure, you can be afraid of nature, but at least it never tries to catch you out or trip you up. Only people do that.'

The three were having breakfast on Leon's boat. The sun peeked out between the white clouds overhead and it was pleasantly mild, but no one was in the mood to appreciate it. Delaware was the only one with any appetite and she was demolishing a plateful of scrambled egg.

‘Did you hear about the gas tanker?'

‘The one that exploded near Japan?' Shoemaker took a sip of his coffee. ‘That's old hat.'

Delaware shook her head. ‘No. Another went down yesterday. Burst into flames in Bangkok harbour.'

‘Has anyone said why?'

‘No.'

‘Maybe it was technical failure,' said Anawak. ‘We shouldn't read too much into it.'

‘You're beginning to sound like Judith Li.' Shoemaker slammed his mug on the table. ‘You were right, by the way. There was practically nothing in the news about the
Barrier Queen
. They wrote mostly about the tug.'

Anawak wasn't surprised. The emergency committee seemed to like to keep them guessing. Maybe that was part of the game. Find your own answers. Well, he was on the case already. Straight after the plane crash Delaware had begun to scour the net. Had whales gone on the offensive anywhere else? As the
taayii Hawi'lh
had said:
Maybe the whales aren't the problem, Leon. They might be just part of the problem - the only part we can see
.

George Frank had hit the nail on the head, but Anawak didn't feel any the wiser for it when he saw the results of Delaware's foray. She'd browsed websites from South America, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Australia and Japan. Elsewhere the problem was jellyfish, not whales.

‘Jellyfish?' Shoemaker burst out laughing. ‘What are they doing? Flinging themselves at boats?'

At first Anawak hadn't seen the connection either, but maybe aggressive whales and plagues of toxic stingers had something in
common that wasn't readily apparent - two symptoms of an underlying problem. Delaware had found a statement by a Costa Rican scientist who seemed to think that the jellyfish terrorising South America weren't Portuguese men-of-war but a similar, as yet unidentified but infinitely more toxic species.

The problems didn't stop there.

‘Around the same time that we were starting to have trouble with the whales, boats started to disappear in South America and South Africa,' Delaware said. ‘Motorboats and cutters. All they found was the odd piece of debris. But when you put two and two together—'

‘You get a pack of vicious whales,' said Shoemaker. ‘So how come we didn't hear about it earlier?'

‘Well, most of the time we don't take an interest,' said Anawak. ‘No one's usually bothered about what's happening in other parts of the world.'

‘Either way, there've been far more shipping accidents than we've been told,' said Delaware. ‘Collisions, explosions, freighters sinking…And there's the epidemic in France. It started with algae lurking in the lobster, and now a pathogen's sweeping the country. Other nations have been affected too, I think. But the more you look into it, the hazier it gets.'

From time to time Anawak felt sure they were making fools of themselves. Of course they wouldn't be the first to fall for America's favourite invention, the conspiracy theory. Every fourth US citizen harboured some kind of paranoid suspicion. According to some, Clinton had worked for the Russian secret service, and plenty of people believed in UFOs. But why would a government be interested in trying to hide events that were affecting thousands of people? Especially since keeping them secret seemed impossible in the fist place.

Shoemaker was sceptical too: ‘This isn't Roswell, you know. There aren't any little green men falling from the sky, or flying saucers hidden in bushes. All that conspiracy stuff - it doesn't happen in real life. I bet if a whale attacked today, the whole world would know tomorrow. And we'd know too, if something happened elsewhere.'

‘OK, consider this, then,' said Delaware. ‘Tofino has twelve hundred inhabitants and only three main streets. But people here don't know all there is to know about each other all of the time.'

‘So what?'

‘If one small town's too big to keep track of, what does that make the planet?'

‘Oh, please!'

‘What I'm trying to say is that the government can't always
withhold
news, but it can play things down. You just rein in the reporting. I bet most of what I fished out from the Internet was in the media here - we just didn't notice.'

Shoemaker squinted at her. ‘Right…' he said uncertainly.

‘We need more information.' said Anawak. He prodded his scrambled egg. ‘Although, strictly speaking, we've got it. Or Li has.'

‘So ask her for it,' said Shoemaker.

Anawak raised his eyebrows.

‘If there's something you want to know, you should ask. What's the worst that could happen? A straight refusal and a kick in the teeth.'

Anawak fell silent. Li wouldn't tell him anything - Ford hadn't and he'd asked till he was blue in the face. On the other hand, Shoemaker had a point. There was a way of asking questions without anyone noticing.

Later on, when Shoemaker had left, Delaware placed a copy of the
Vancouver Sun
on the table in front of him. ‘I didn't want to show you while Tom was around,' she said.

Anawak glanced at the front page. It was the previous day's edition. ‘I've read it.'

‘Cover to cover?'

‘No, just the important bits.'

Delaware smiled. ‘So read the unimportant bits.'

Anawak immediately spotted what she meant. It was a short article, only a few lines long. A photo was printed next to it, showing a family - father, mother, and a young boy, who was looking gratefully at the tall man next to him.

‘Unbelievable,' murmured Anawak.

‘Say what you like,' said Delaware, and glared at him. Today she was wearing yellow-tinted glasses with rhinestone crosses on the frames. ‘But he's not that big an asshole.'

Anawak folded the paper and flung it back on the table. ‘Shoemaker would have gone mad,' he said.

For a while neither said anything. Anawak watched the clouds moving slowly overhead and tried to feel angry, but the only people he was angry with were General Li and himself.

In fact, mainly himself.

‘Why does everyone have a problem with Greywolf?' asked Delaware.

‘He can't stop causing trouble.' Anawak ran a hand over his eyes. Even though it was first thing in the morning he already felt tired.

‘Don't get me wrong,' Delaware said cautiously, ‘but he did pull me out of the water, just as I was thinking I was done for. I went looking for him two days ago. I found him sitting at the bar in a pub in Ucluelet, so I went up and thanked him.'

‘And?' said Anawak wearily.

‘He was surprised.'

Anawak looked at her.

‘He wasn't expecting to be thanked. He was pleased. Then he asked how you were.'

‘Me?'

She crossed her arms and leaned forward on the table. ‘I don't think he's got many friends.'

‘He needs to ask himself why.'

‘And I think he's fond of you.'

‘Come off it, Licia.'

‘Tell me something about him.'

What was the point? thought Anawak. Why can't we talk about something more pleasant?

He thought for a moment. Nothing occurred to him.

‘We used to be friends,' he said curtly.

He waited for Delaware to leap up in the air, yelling, ‘I knew it!' Instead, she just nodded.

‘His name is Jack O'Bannon and he comes from Port Townsend in Washington State. His father's an Irishman who married a half-Indian, from the Suquamish, I think. In the States Jack tried all kinds of jobs - he was a bouncer, a graphic designer, a bodyguard and finally a diver with the US Navy SEALs. That's when he found his calling - dolphin-handling. He was good at it, until they diagnosed his heart defect. Nothing serious, but they're a tough lot, the SEALs. Jack did well there - he's got more distinctions than you can count - but it was the end of his time in the navy.'

‘How did he wind up here?'

‘He always had a soft spot for Canada. At first he tried his luck in Vancouver's film business. He thought that with his build and looks he might become an actor, but he didn't have any talent. And things have never worked out for him because he can't keep his cool. He once put a guy in hospital.'