Watermind (9 page)

 

Friday, March 11

7:45
AM

 

The sloughs and marshes of Devil's Swamp exhaled a chilly breath of ground fog that hung translucent in the air. Droplets beaded on waxy leaves, and water trickled in rivulets through the spongy biomass of soil and rot. Pools shivered beneath an icy drizzle, and bubbles rose. In the crescent-shaped pond, the dense bottom layer of fluid suddenly inverted to the surface, trapping warmer layers beneath. And the mud sighed with osmotic fullness.

Back at the Roach Motel, CJ found most of the extra-large pizza still waiting on her kitchenette counter when she woke. Barefoot and cold, she stood in her underwear and wolfed down a slice. The two-liter bottle of Coke had warmed to room temperature, but she drank some anyway. She also flipped open her laptop and plugged into the motel's dial-up Internet service.

By the clear morning light, she knew she'd been wise not to invite Roman Sacony into her room. More than once since her father died, she'd awakened to find a stranger occupying her bed. Some brief acquaintance whose unwashed body invaded her sheets. Too many evenings, she had embraced a kind knight—only to find in the morning a troll with sour breath and chin stubble.

Then came Max. Wrong background, wrong job, wrong style, completely unequivocally wrong. Max had remained a knight.

Mist beaded her window and blurred her view of the parking lot. She drummed her fingers on the glass pane. The motel dial-up took an eon to connect. As soon as the browser opened, she Googled Roman Sacony. While the results trickled in, she showered, dressed in serious business clothes, and styled her hair for the first time in weeks. She was going to the airport to meet the science team.

The tantalizing enigma of the ice revolved through her stream of consciousness. Roman wanted to know where the heat went, and so did she. Some unprecedented chemical reaction must have absorbed or converted or stored it somehow. And did that same reaction also produce the electromagnetic field? Maybe a downed powerline was trickling current through the water. But there were no power lines in Devil's Swamp.

She browsed her Google results, clicked on
Time
magazine, and read that Roman Sacony held a doctorate in material science from the
Universidad de Buenos Aires
. He hadn't mentioned that. The article described how he'd expanded his family's Argentinean business and established a beachhead in Miami. Under his command, Quimicron SA had swelled into a midsize conglomerate. Roman Sacony was multilingual, a pilot, a marathon runner, never married. He was forty-eight years old—exactly her father's age on the day he died.

She shut the laptop and chewed her fingernail. Something about Roman aggravated her. He was flying back to Miami this morning, and the fact that he would be hundreds of miles away gave her a sense of relief. She dug through the litter on her bed, found her cell phone and called Max.

“Ceegie, what happened? They don' tell me where they took you.”

Her conscience wrenched her. She should have called sooner. “I'm fine. Are you up? I'll come over.” Max lived across the river in West Baton Rouge, a few miles away.

“I'm workin',” he said. “They got us stakin' out the pond, watchin' to see nobody fall in.”

“You're working in the swamp?” Good, she thought. Max still had his job.

“Yeah, and it's raining. Bunch of protestors met us at the gate this morning. They standing in the rain, waving signs, carrying on. Call us ‘bird killers.' One
nomm
tried to sneak in.”

“Max, is the pond . . . doing anything?”

“Just old sump water. Kind of floury. We got backhoes filling in the little bayou that flows out the bottom. Gonna make sure
djab dile
stay put.”

“What did you call it?”

“
Djab dile.
Devil milk. We gonna scoop it up, seal it in barrels. Did you hear about Manuel?”

“Yeah.” CJ's attention wandered. Something Max had said triggered a vague alarm.

“Lord,
lamie,
every time I think about what mighta happened to you, I go crazy.”

His plaintive baritone weighed on her. “Don't worry about me. I have a new job.” She told him about the science team.

“
Sa grand.
That's where you belong.” He sounded genuinely pleased.

She cradled the cell phone between her ear and shoulder while she ran a motel shoe-mitt over her black high heels. “Do you know anything about Roman Sacony?”

“Mr. Sacony, he the head man. He live in Miami. Why you asking?”

“He was here in Baton Rouge. We worked together in the lab last night. He's . . . well, not what I expected.” She rubbed the soft shoe leather till it gleamed. “He's pretty smart.”

“Aw.” Max seemed to meditate over this news. He said nothing for a while.

She slipped on her shoes. “So what do you think about him?”

“I guess he's rich,” Max said softly.

“But can I trust him? Does he mean what he says?”

“Ceegie, I gotta get back to work.”

They agreed to meet later, and after she clicked off her phone, she sat on the edge of her bed for several minutes, feeling vexed and not knowing why.

 

Friday, March 11

9:52
AM

 

The general aviation office occupied a new brick building near the south ramp of the Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport, close to the private hangars. CJ waited alone in the passenger lounge, reading an article about hybrid aircraft. Rain pummeled the metal roof, and water writhed down the windowpanes like transparent snakes. She glanced at the clock. Her science team would land soon in the company's Hawker jet, and she was supposed to chauffeur them to the plant and brief them.

She hadn't seen Roman that morning, but she'd met with Elaine Guidry. There were tax documents to complete, nondisclosure forms to sign, policy memos to read and abide by. Now that she'd become a full-fledged employee, the corporation wanted to bind and shackle her in paper.

Waiting in the airport, she remembered how Elaine had rubbed her hands with lotion while they talked, how the lubricious white lather had foamed between Elaine's plump fingers, and how her bracelets had clinked together.

“Mr. Sacony is giving you an extra special raise, sugar.” Elaine leaned across the desk, and her powder-blue sweater stretched across her full bosom. “You musta made a real nice impression.”

I'm still free
, CJ wanted to shout.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The vinyl airport sofa squeaked every time she moved, and the vase of wilting tulips gave off a fusty reek. She snapped through the magazine as if she meant to rip out the pages.

Through the window, she saw two people crossing the tarmac, leaning into the downpour and trailing identical black zipper bags on rollers. Her colleagues. The magazine slipped to the floor. She felt almost light-headed. This
was her first real job working with bonafide scientists on a project of consequence. She hadn't yet acknowledged how much it meant to her. She wiped her sweaty hands on her skirt. Yes, she'd actually worn a skirt.

Her soon-to-be collaborators were pushing through the glass doors, shaking their wet clothes, stamping their feet and looking grim. The first was a tall morose Asian woman, well over fifty, rail thin and boney, with an iron-gray braid coiled at the crown of her head. Even the pouring rain had failed to dislodge her long hairpins. That would be Li Qin Yue, the team leader, a specialist in petrochemical engineering.

Behind her dawdled a lanky young blond man in a dripping black raincoat who squinted through thick fogged glasses. Peter Vaarveen, biochemist.

CJ touched her short pony tail, took a deep breath and went to meet them. In her best Boston manner, she stood ramrod straight, greeted each of them by name, and offered her hand to shake. Quietly, she wondered who she was trying to impersonate.

“I'm CJ Reilly,” she said. “So glad we'll be working together.”

Peter Vaarveen ignored her and made a beeline for the men's room, while Li Qin Yue glanced briefly at her outstretched hand. “Where's our car?”

CJ stood rock still, holding out her hand, seething. Then she marched out to the rain-lashed parking lot, leaving them to follow as best they could.

“Frankly, I can't understand why Roman hired you,” Li Qin Yue said a few minutes later, climbing into CJ's Rover. Soon, they were bowling up Highway 61, clinging to their seat belts as the Rover hydroplaned through standing water. CJ was driving over ninety miles an hour.

“Roman sent me your credentials.” Yue had to raise her voice above the din of rain. “You're hardly qualified for this project, despite who your father may have been. But, like all of Roman's young protégées, you're pretty.”

CJ glared at the woman, speechless and red. The windshield wipers scraped frantic arcs across the wet glass.

“Lighten up, Yue. We just got here.” Peter Vaarveen sprawled in the back seat, using his wet zipper bag for a pillow. He looked about thirty, but his hair was so pale, it gleamed almost white. Even his eyebrows and eyelashes looked bleached. He spoke in the clipped nasally accent of Long Island, New York. “At least Reilly's ABD. That's something.”

ABD. All But Dissertation. Yes, that was something. CJ clawed the steering wheel. Those three letters plunged her back into the caustic atmosphere of grad school. The posturing, the backbiting, the corrosive political angling for grant money. Her shoulders knotted, recalling the intense pressure that, every year, drove MIT students to leap from campus towers.

True, she had finished her coursework. All she lacked for the PhD was one groundbreaking experiment and the book-length documentation to explain it—her dissertation—two years' work if she pushed hard. She'd been working on chemical desalinization of ocean water, a cheap new process . . .

But that was her father's world. And Harry died.

She braked hard and skidded onto the turnoff toward the Quimicron plant, spraying the fence with mud.

“Yee-ha.” Peter Vaarveen slid across the backseat. “I'm awake now.”

Later in the lab, Peter rubbed sleep from his white-lashed eyes and made fresh coffee while Li Qin Yue frowned at CJ's test results. The Chinese woman seemed all skin and bones, and her sallow, age-freckled skin puckered in bags under her eyes. There was nothing soft or lovely about her, yet her ramrod posture spoke dignity. “There's nothing in this analysis but polluted water.”

“Right,” CJ said.

“This couldn't have created the effects you described.”

“Right.” CJ clenched her teeth.

“Who collected this sample? None of this has been properly done. We'll have to start at the beginning.”

“Right.”

“Peter, are you awake? I need new samples. See if you can find your way to the site. You know the control procedures. And take the illustrious Ms. Reilly with you. I can't train a novice today.”

“Aren't we in a jolly mood.” Peter zipped open his bag and lifted out a rack of empty sample bottles, each labeled and dated. He signaled to CJ. “Lead on, oh illustrious one.”

As they left, he winked at CJ and smirked. “The Queen Bitch rules.”

CJ's hands balled into fists. “I'll show her who's qualified.”

Peter gave CJ a quick sideways perusal, and his thick glasses magnified his eyes like pale blue fish in an aquarium. “Is that how you dress for field work?”

C.J. touched her skirt self-consciously. Under his black raincoat, Peter wore old jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers stained with red clay. Why had she donned this ridiculous skirt? “I thought—” She reddened. “Give me ten minutes to change.”

“Christ,” Peter muttered in his New York twang. “Amateurs.”

 

Friday, March 11

11:00
AM

 

Li Qin Yue worked alone in the lab. Shoulders tight, vertebrae creaking, she reviewed the curious list of techno-trash Carolyn Reilly had recorded in the sample. Some of the notes were in Roman's handwriting. She twisted one foot round and round, making her ankle bones pop. Outside, the rain clouds tore apart in sudden brief bursts of
sun, and luminous shafts roved over the sodden earth like spotlights. But Yue didn't notice.

The data did not surprise her. Americans threw everything in their rivers. She pecked scathing notes into her Pocket PC. She herself had been raised in Taipei, an island nation that knew the value of hoarding and husbanding. On her Pocket PC screen, the cross-hatched scars from her aggressive stylus mirrored the crosshatched worry lines on her brow.

While the sample fluid seethed in its jar, her mind lingered four states away in Miami, where she'd been formulating a new composite jet fuel. Hack work, she called it. Demeaning. Slutty. Once upon a time, she had revered the elegance of the Periodic Table. It was the alphabet of the
Tao
, the All That Is, or so she had gushed in an undergraduate essay. But now she whored her knowledge to churn out saleable products. She did it for Roman Sacony.

“Semiconductors, diagnostic chips, benzene rings.” She read Reilly's list, and her stylus scratched noisily. Behind her, unseen bubbles formed in the jar and migrated upward. “Bipolar transistors, disintegrated circuits, polysilicon conductors, a working logic gate . . . Working?” She shook her head. “Not likely, Ms. Reilly.”

Thinking of the Reilly nymph made her teeth itch. She picked up the jar and shook its milky contents. Her distorted image frowned back from the curved glass.

Li Qin viewed herself as skinny and plain. She didn't try to be charming. Life had gone sour, so she didn't see any benefit in playing sweet. She knew Peter called her the Queen Bitch. The only reason anyone tolerated her, she thought, was for her brains. In her life, three men had loved her, but she hadn't noticed them. The only man Li Qin had ever noticed was Roman Sacony.