Watermind (6 page)

Max shielded her with his broad back. He reached around her and scooped up half a jar of the milky slush.

“Good. Seal it,” she whispered.

“Stand up,” said the guard. “Turn around and face me.”

CJ said, “We were making love, okay? I have to button my blouse.”

Max twisted the jar lid tight and quietly stuffed it down CJ's shirtfront. Then, nervous with concentration, she
eased her arm out of the slush. They both let out a tense breath when her dripping hand came free. As the melting circle continued just perceptibly to widen, they eased away from the bank where the unseen guards waited with blinding flashlights.

“Stand up. I'm drawin' a bead on you right this minute.”

“When I say go, run like hell,” Max whispered.

“I can talk to them,” she whispered back, watching the circle of melting ice. “Oh. Oh God, Max!”

The melted area instantly expanded in all directions, and they plummeted into a bath of glacial Jell-O. Under the surface, CJ screamed and choked. When she felt Max's leg lashing out, she grabbed his ankle. Faster than she could comprehend, the slush liquefied completely, and they surfaced together, splashing and gasping for breath. They were yards away from where they'd gone under. Bullets popped like firecrackers.

The frigid temperature caused CJ's chest to contract. She couldn't get her wind. Violently she groped for Max's arm, and when he recognized her hysteria, he dove and came up behind her, then caught her chin in the crook of his elbow. More bullets popped. The guards were firing into the air, but Max didn't know that. With powerful sidestrokes, he hauled the panicked girl to the far edge of the pond, dragged her from the water and shoved her into a willow thicket. He put his hand over her mouth to hush her noise. Only then did he comprehend his own shock.

“Lie still,” he whispered, pressing her struggling body into the mud. Amid a snarl of willow shoots, he lay on top of her and kept her from moving while the guards crashed through the brambles, calling to each other and cursing. Their flashlight beams roved around the pond, but Max lay still, crushing CJ beneath him. He could feel her heart thumping, and when he moved his hand away from her mouth, she kept silent.

Max would have lain in the mud till dawn if necessary. But ten minutes later, inexplicably, the guards called off their search and withdrew. Their grumbling voices faded
into the distance. Max and CJ listened until they could no longer hear briars rasping against wet coveralls or heavy boots squishing through mire.

“We're safe.” CJ twisted beneath him, clamped her legs around his body and drew his face down for a kiss. “You saved my life,” she said, trembling in his arms. She almost said, I love you.

As she nuzzled against him and licked his ear, only then did she see the faint outline looming against the mist, not two yards away, like a terrible horned beast transmogrified from a nightmare. Its single eye burned scarlet. Before she could speak, the monster made a hideous noise, like the sliding click of metal against metal.

Max rolled over and switched on his flashlight. There stood Ron Moselle, wearing infrared night-vision headgear and covering them with his Ruger semiautomatic. He'd been dogging their steps all evening.

“Y'all are under arrest for trespassing,” he said. Gene Becnel had finally given him the go-ahead.

 

Thursday, March 10

9:00
AM

 

There are places on the globe where currents coalesce. Call them strange attractors—crossroads, melting pots, deltas of convergence and recombination. These focal gathering points exert a stronger gravitational pull than ordinary places. You know them. Certain cities, islands, coasts. They collect not only physical sediments but also tides of history, drifting languages and arts, the flotsam of our hopes and fears. Their slow pickling eddies stir and coddle until the diverse elements merge into something novel and unforeseen. Something like zydeco.

Dan Meir, Quimicron's plant manager, turned up the
radio on his desk. The local station was playing “Paper in My Shoe” by accordionist BooZoo Chavis. Meir needed the music to calm his nerves. He'd just had a call from FOWL—Friends of Wetlands in Louisiana.

“Damned bird lovers wanna send in an inspection team.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They must think they're the United Nations.”

He rocked back in his chair and squinted out his fifth-floor window at the barge canal. Steady drizzle roughened the gray water and drenched the workers on the dock. His workers, his dock, that's how Meir thought of the plant he'd managed for seventeen years. His gray buzz cut glistened with hairspray. He tugged at his collar, hating the tie. Lately, he'd gotten used to golf shirts. A former marine sergeant, his aging body still rippled with hard muscle, but creases patterned his neck, and wrinkles rayed outward from the corners of his eyes. Although the morning had dawned cool and rainy, Meir felt like steamed beef. Raindrops pooled and slid down his office window, and he thought about the man who had died yesterday.

Across the desk, Gene Becnel rubbed the rash on his forearm. His short blond hairs stood up like sewing pins across the top of his head, and his obese buttocks lolled off both sides of the narrow chair seat. Gene's field of interest did not include bird lovers or employee funerals. He had two terrorist prisoners cooling their heels in a basement locker room—prisoners he'd incarcerated on his own authority. Gene didn't doubt he'd acted in the right. The yankee flag-burner and her pothead boyfriend were dangerous malcontents, but here was Mr. Meir diddling over whether to contact the parish sheriff. If Gene were in charge, he would call Homeland Security.

The third man in the room, the brown-skinned Miami honcho in the three-piece suit, lurked in a corner, and Gene felt his presence like a neck itch. He twisted to see what the guy was doing, and the stranger glanced up briefly from his work. He sat with one thin ankle crossed over his knee, balancing a laptop and gripping a cell
phone between his ear and shoulder. Gene noticed his fancy silk socks, the airy-fairy kind that went all the way up his calf. Now and then, the guy mumbled something foreign into the phone.

Gene squared up his stack of collated reports, still warm from the copier. “The girl's from up
Noth,
Mr. Meir. You wanna see her file?”

“I've seen it.” Meir chewed his Oliva cigar, and the Miami guy said nothing. Gene found their indifference shocking.

The door opened, and Ron Moselle ushered in the female perpetrator. She still wore her muddy coverall, though she'd unzipped it and knotted the sleeves around her waist. She looked sleep-deprived. Good. Gene had ordered his men to keep both prisoners awake all night—to soften them up for interrogation.

CJ, however, felt anything but soft. Her pelvis blazed with cramps, and her bloated brain wobbled in her skull. She wore the expression of a ballistic missile. She didn't see the stranger in the corner, and she didn't know the obese blond security chief, but she recognized Dan Meir, the plant manager.

She went straight for him. “Meir, you're going to wish you never heard my name.”

“Take it easy, Miz Reilly.”

“Screw easy. Eight excruciating hours you've kept me sitting on that bench, shining a light in my face and not even a cup of water. I'm going to sue this company all the way to the Supreme Court. I'm going to put your face on CNN. You're going to rue the day you held Max and me at gunpoint. I'll never stop. I'll—”

“You're a consultant, yes?”

CJ whipped around and faced the stranger who had spoken. She hadn't noticed him sitting there in the corner. He was the good-looking manager who'd used his badge to unlocked the lab for her. Caught in a lie already—her face grew hot.

When the man looked her up and down, she became
conscious of her mud-streaked face, filthy clothes, and bare feet. In reflex, she crossed her arms and scowled.

“Carolyn Reilly?” Hollows formed under his gaunt cheekbones. He had the same tanned face she remembered, the same longish black hair. His eyebrows were thick, black, and straight, as if someone had painted them on with a ruler. When he stood and offered her his chair, he looked like a Spanish lord. Or a Spanish inquisitor.

She didn't want a chair. She wanted to vent. But he kept waiting, saying nothing, courteously holding the chair and wearing a polite expression that was not quite a smile—till finally she shrugged and plopped down.

Mildly, he said, “We have a complete record of your activities for the past twenty-four hours.”

CJ gripped the chair seat. She tried to keep her face blank.

“We also have this.” He lifted a sample jar of milky liquid from Meir's desk.

“That's mine.” She made a grab for it.

“I believe not.” He moved the jar beyond her reach, put a hand on her shoulder and gently forced her back into the chair. “This material was stolen from Quimicron property. But why did you take it, Carolyn?”

She blinked. He was baiting her. Surely they had discovered its properties by now. She could picture the corporate bigwigs popping champagne corks to celebrate their newest patent—a chemical reaction that squeezed pure drinking water from toxic swill.

But who was this Spanish aristocrat, some sexy shark from the legal office? He probably wanted to nail down Quimicron's property rights. The sample swirled in its jar with a tantalizing shimmer. She'd netted something real this time—something she could analyze. She lifted her hand a couple of inches, yearning to hold it.

Meir sat hunched over his desk, examining his cigar as if it were inscribed with runes. CJ wondered why Meir was letting this lawyer lead the meeting. She scrutinized the Spaniard more carefully. His ID badge was tucked in
his pocket so she couldn't read it. Maybe he wasn't a lawyer.

The stranger's glance raked across Meir and the blond man as if he were weighing them in a scale. She watched him stroll to the window and hold the cloudy sample jar up to the light. The liquid gleamed like mother of pearl.

“Carolyn, do you know what this is?” His glance sliced toward her like a rapier.

That trace of accent. Like nothing else she'd heard in Louisiana. When she crossed her arms and clamped her jaw, he lost his careful mask, and a gust of animal ferocity twisted his face. CJ pressed back in her chair, startled.

But his mild civility returned at once, and he almost managed to smile when he asked again, “Carolyn, what is this liquid?”

She blurted, “Haven't you analyzed it?”

“We overnighted a sample to our Miami lab.” He sat on a corner of Meir's desk, facing her. “Yesterday, one of our employees fell into a pool of this material and—died. I almost said ‘drowned,' but in fact, he had a heart attack. Were you aware of the accident?”

The room went white. CJ couldn't see the stranger's face, only the bright window. “At the pond?” she asked weakly.

“Manuel de Silva,” Meir said, stubbing his cigar in an ashtray. “Had a wife and three kids in Mexico.”

“It appears something frightened him to death,” said the Spaniard.

CJ laced and unlaced her fingers. That pond—she should have warned people. Again she remembered her powerless struggle to breathe, and her ragged nails sank into the upholstered chair seat. Max wanted to phone in the accident. She should have let him. The Spaniard stared down at her as if he could see her thoughts.

Meir said, “Please tell us. Didn't you hear a man's dead?”

“Maybe we should lock her in solitary,” said the blond man.

“Gentlemen, I'd like to speak with Ms. Reilly alone.”

The Spaniard delivered this request quietly, but there was no mistaking the command in his voice. The blond man seemed ready to argue, but when Meir got up and left the office, the blond man followed.

After the door closed behind them, CJ didn't know if she felt relieved or panicked. Once again, the Spaniard gazed into the sample jar as if it might reveal a vision. The pearlescent fluid stirred like the silty white glitter in a child's snow globe. He handed it to CJ, and she took it in both hands like a precious jewel—or a ticking bomb.

 

Thursday, March 10

9:35
AM

 

“Yesterday afternoon, when Manuel de Silva fell into the contaminated pool, witnesses said it froze over. Just like that.” The Spaniard snapped his fingers.

CJ flinched. She could feel him watching her reaction. He tilted Meir's desk chair around and sat facing her. Their knees were almost touching. “You know about this,” he said.

She placed the jar on the desk and tucked her shaking hands beneath her thighs. Now was the time to confess, before others died. But after all, what did she know? She watched the sifting jar, backlit with sunbeams. In that jar lay the truth. She longed to test and probe that glittery fluid the way the pond had probed and tested her.

The man's left eyebrow quirked upward, distracting her. As he leaned closer, courteous but unsmiling, she noticed again the touches of silver at his temples. His irises were very black, very hard to read. His manicured hands rested lightly on his tailored trousers. She noticed his loosened silk tie, his open collar, his bare throat. Without thinking, she glanced at his mouth.

Immediately, she reddened and shifted away. “Quimicron can't claim this. It belongs to the world.”

“What belongs to the world?”

His black gaze riveted her attention. But she would not let this corporate mouthpiece bully her. She remained silent.

“You have your father's spirit,” he said.

“What?”

“I met your father once. Dr. Reilly lectured in Buenos Aires.”

She gawked at him.

When she failed to speak, he said, “You have his eyes.”

“Liar.” She shot to her feet, knocking the chair backward. “I won't be part of your lies. If you don't make this discovery public, I will.”