Watermind (27 page)

Meir clapped Max's shoulder and startled him. “Stop here, son.”

Max signaled the other boat, then killed the motor and steered briskly to avoid a collision. In mid-river, the dark swollen current ran high and fast, and the two small speedboats fishtailed against their taut anchor lines. Even at this hour, factories operated full steam, cranes moved cargo on and off barges, and fishermen provisioned trawlers and johnboats for the day's work. A Coast Guard ship cruised upstream, tending buoys. Nearly half a million people lived along this stretch of river. Max scanned the city skyline and picked out his daughter's neighborhood. Then he closed his eyes and prayed to his
gros bon ange.

“We have to go public. There's too much at stake.” Dan Meir turned the collar up on his windbreaker. “What if that stuff kills a fisherman?”

“Wait,” Yue called from the other boat. “I have an idea.”

She made Rory steer their boat closer till the two gunwales bumped, then she leaned across and spoke confidentially to the CEO. Max couldn't help but overhear. She said, “We could let it go.”

Roman and Yue searched each other's faces like a pair of wild beasts. The sound of their breathing made Max's neck shiver.

“You know what I'm saying,” Yue continued in a undertone. Her boney fingers clutched the gunwale. “We could turn around and go home. Where's the proof tying this to Quimicron?”

“She's right. Our company didn't create this mess.”
Dan Meir spoke in a more straightforward voice. “Let's get on the horn to the Coast Guard, tell them what we know. They're better equipped to deal with it.”

Max heard Roman gripping his armrest. His Spanish eyes leered at the water as if he wanted to drink up the whole river. Slowly, he shook his head, and when he spoke, his flat timbreless voice grated Max's ear. “The colloid came from my property. Everyone will sue me, no matter what I say.”

“Cut your losses,” Yue growled low in her throat. “Deny everything. It's the smart move.”

“We can't be held liable for something we didn't do,” said Meir.

“Enough. I will not let this
picaro
destroy Quimicron.” Roman sat rigid, facing forward in his seat, clenching the armrest as if he were strangling an enemy's throat. “We'll use the EMP here, in the river.”

Max edged away from him. The man seemed ready to detonate. But when he spoke next, his flat voice had a stiff, strained calm. “Radio that Coast Guard tender, and report a chemical spill. Tell them it's inert, and insist on a media blackout. They'll agree. They won't want a public outcry.”

Max sucked his teeth while Meir switched on the boat's satellite radio and called the captain of the nearby Coast Guard tender.
Djab dile
inert? Max expected Roman Sacony to lie, but Mr. Meir, too? His respect for the plant manager plummeted.

Max couldn't know how closely Meir's feelings tracked his own. Dan Meir hated dishonesty, and he was not a good liar. He shifted from one foot to the other as he spoke over the radio to Capt. Marcus Ebbs. A career Coast Guard officer, Captain Ebbs had a gruff military style of speaking that made ex-Marine Meir feel even more like a turncoat.

Captain Ebbs listened and said little. In his nearly twenty years with the Eighth Coast Guard District, Ebbs had patrolled every major river from the Appalachians to the Rockies, and he'd met every shape of prevaricating
polecat. He had rescued 752 tomfool civilians, saved over $22 million worth of private property, responded to 1,712 incidents of environmental pollution and conducted a thousand boardings for the purposes of law enforcement. His father had hunted German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II.

Captain Ebbs twisted the waxy tip of his snow-white handlebar mustache as he listened. Though he was pushing mandatory retirement, Ebbs stood as straight as he had at age thirty-five. For the past four years, he'd commanded the
Pilgrim,
a sixty-five-foot tender assigned to babysit river buoys on the lower Mississippi. Much to his discontent, his current mission did not include law enforcement, but Ebbs was not always careful about crossing lines.

As Meir spun his yarn about a submerged slick of harmless refrigerant, Ebbs's practiced old ears heard mendacity. “Inert,” Meir said. Ebbs suspected a ruse. When Meir asked if his private corporation could use the nation's top-secret military satellites to help locate a cold spot in the river, Ebbs raised his bushy eyebrows.

Give these unknown civilians clearance to view America's most sensitive spy photographs? “You bet I will,” he said. Then he switched off the mike and turned to his first officer. “Stay on 'em like a bluejay on a stinkbug.”

Max listened to the radio conversation with a growing sense of his own failure. He knew he should interrupt and shout a warning. Cramped in the small boat, he shook his leg and thought wildly of jumping in the river, swimming to shore, finding his daughter. While he squirmed and debated, it didn't help that Roman Sacony was quietly ripping the vinyl armrest with his fingers.

When the
Pilgrim
glided toward them, everyone in both speedboats stirred uneasily. The buoy tender was a large, blunt-nosed vessel, painted black from stem to stern. The closer it approached, the more Max's heart thudded. Should he speak up and tell them the truth? He rubbed his
sweaty hands on his jeans. Who would believe such a mixed-up tale from a Creole boat driver?

But his chance to speak never came. Sacony told him to stay with the speedboats while the others went aboard the
Pilgrim
. As soon as they'd gone, Max tried CJ's cell phone again. Still no answer.

Cool damp vapors moved over the water, carrying aromatic molecules of fish slime, crude oil, and Canadian clay. Max knew that smell as intimately as his own body odor. He'd breathed the Mississippi all his life. As the taste of its fog dissolved on his tongue, he keyed redial.

Suddenly, his phone vibrated with an incoming call.

“Max, I see you. Don't look around. I'm behind the yellow freighter to your starboard. I've turned off the Viper's running lights.”

“Ceegie—”

“Don't say my name. Listen, my cell went dead, so I'm sending you a new number. This one's a satellite phone, okay?”

Max memorized the phone number displayed on his screen. “It's not safe to be on the river without your lights,” he whispered.

Nervous hilarity rippled through the phone. “Lots of things are not safe, Max. Tell me what's going on.”

Max bent as if to tie his bootlace, but no one on the tender was watching him. With the phone cupped in his palm, he told CJ how Mr. Meir lied to the Coast Guard.

“Good,” she said. “Those military satellites have infrared cameras. They'll find the cold spot. When they do, call me.”

“They want to fire the EMP,” Max said.

“That's insane. Not even Roman would fire an EMP this close to the downtown waterfront.”

“But what is it?” Max asked.

CJ deliberated how to explain. “Well, our phones are using EMP right now. Electromagnetic pulses carry our voices back and forth through the air. But the shockwave generator, that's lethal.” She described how an enormous burst of electrons would shoot through the water at light
speed and burn conductive material from the inside out. Copper wires. Microchips. Carotid arteries. She warned Max to be careful.

He glanced across the dark water at the gargantuan yellow freighter with ten-foot-high Chinese characters painted down its side. In the shadow of its towering stern, Max glimpsed the hull of a small speedboat rocking in the current.

“You be careful,
lam
.”

 

Thursday, March 17

5:01
AM

 

Neon reflections dimpled the river along the Baton Rouge waterfront. Blue, pink, and yellow, they rippled and broke in pieces as boats passed by. Across the river lay the smaller town of Port Allen, and already dockworkers teemed on its wharves. The early morning sang with engine noise, and blue fumes drifted on the breeze like silk scarves. Gentle waves slapped the banks, while in mid-river, the current charged downstream like a megaton explosion.

Li Qin Yue ignored the surrounding cityscape, the same way she ignored Peter Vaarveen's reverberating snores. While Vaarveen sprawled across the boat's backseat in semi-hibernation, she glanced across to the other boat, where Roman sat like a vigilant gargoyle. More than once, she had seen him whip people up to extraordinary feats, yet his ability still amazed her. When the Coast Guard refused to let them view satellite scans, he had placed a personal call to a congressman, and in less than an hour, Yue was downloading infrared images from a classified FTP site.

The cold water anomaly registered as a dark blue blot
pooling along the river's west bank near Port Allen. Its temperature hovered near the freezing point. And its size had swelled. Yue extrapolated its volume at fourteen liquid tons. Evidently, the slick was fattening on the Mississippi's rich chowder of waste.

Yue worked awkwardly in the small boat. Across her angular knees lay a dozen sheets of printout, crumpled and crosshatched with deep gouges from her fountain pen. It was CJ Reilly's report. Yue kept it with her always, hating it and re-reading it. How often she had tried to shake off her envy. Who could have guessed Roman's newest little whore had a brain?

Back and forth, Yue read the report. Over and over, she underlined certain references to the colloid's sound response. On her computer screen, the frigid signature drifted like a wavering blue star through the mostly yellow river. And like molten ice, it was sliding South.

In the other boat, Roman took a sip from Meir's thermos of obscene watery coffee, then spat it in the river. With tight lips, he counted the neon signs on the Casino Rouge. He counted the delivery trucks rumbling along the waterfront. In the state capitol tower, he counted a column of windows. Thirty-four windows. The building where Huey Long was shot had thirty-four floors.

Roman understood that the fear in his gut was so vast and black that if he once acknowledged its presence, it would suck him under. Rather than give in, he rushed from one task to the next, trying to avoid the one impossible dread:
The colloid will bankrupt me.

So far on its short joyride downriver, the blur of electronic liquid had etched gaping holes in three steel barges. Roman knew this because the owners reported their leaking hulls on open radio channels. He also knew there would be other leaks, not yet discovered. He'd counted the barges they'd passed and calculated the probable cost. Figures spun through his mind in a deadly vortex. As of yet, no one had connected the mounting damage to his refrigerant spill, but he knew that couldn't last. His only
chance was to act quickly, to bring the colloid's rampage to an end.

He had held the enemy in his palm and let it slip away—that was the thought that tortured him. He had come so close to caging it. If only he had tried harder, made better decisions, it would still be contained in his canal.

“We're gonna be here a while,” Meir said from the rear seat. “Creque'll bring the
Refuerzo
at first light to try the collar again.”

Roman twisted to catch Yue's attention in the other boat, but she was too absorbed in her laptop screen to notice. He wanted to see that scan. He wanted to look his enemy in the eye. He hated the awkward separation of these two small four-seater speedboats.

“Charter a yacht,” he said to Meir, “and order some food.”

Not far away, hidden behind a fishing trawler, CJ tore off a strip of cold rubbery pizza and crammed it in her mouth. She'd brought a bagful of provisions for this trip, but she was too agitated to taste the food. She watched the Coast Guard ship that was tailing the two speedboats.

As of today, her period was two weeks late. She tried not to think about it. Her ebbs and flows had never been reliably periodic. But still . . . that day in the pirogue with Max, their first time together, neither of them thought to bring condoms. She traced the rim of her navel with her fingertip. She swung her binoculars back to the Coast Guard ship. Its presence worried her.

Her shoulder ached from squeezing the cell phone against her ear. Max had a shoulder ache, too, though she didn't know it. Max was trying to keep his phone hidden—he was grateful for the darkness. He and CJ kept an open connection, and though they occasionally spoke, mostly they shared long tense silences. When Max heard her chewing, he dreamed of breakfast. His mouth watered for buttery eggs and thick
Andouille
sausage frying on a griddle.

“How fast do you think the water's moving?” she asked.

“ 'Bout ten knots. River always runs high in March.”

“Hey!” CJ saw a burst of activity in the small boats. “Why are you weighing anchor?”

Max could feel her voice vibrating in his shirt pocket, but he was too busy to respond. Meir had just given him fresh orders. But CJ didn't need him to tell her the colloid was on the move again. She watched the Quimicron speedboats steer downstream, followed closely by the blunt black
Pilgrim
. They stuck close to the western bank, skirting Port Allen's industrial wharves. Clearly, they were searching. Across from them, near the increasingly active Baton Rouge waterfront, CJ glided out of her hiding place and kept watch.

 

Thursday, March 17

6:00
AM

 

Baton Rouge greeted St. Patrick's Day with blaring car horns, jackhammers, and distorted gusts of windborne radio news. Toilets flushed, showers steamed, and thousands of coffeemakers dripped black liquid stimulant. Cops worried about traffic flow at the Irish street fair, while parade queens worried about their dresses. Out on the river, Max worried about everyone.

He had eight cousins and two aunts living in Baton Rouge. If the citizens learned what was drifting down their river, he already knew how the fear would seize them. The awful aftermath of the last hurricane still lingered fresh in everyone's memory. Another alarm right now would be bad. Eyes closed, Max pictured his daughter sleeping beside the river, and he quietly prayed to every spirit he knew.
Voudon
-Seminole-Judeo-Christian-Islamic, he begged them all for grace.