The Black Silent

CHAPTER 19

Frick sat in the conference room in the main building at Sanker with Khan, waiting for the arrival of Sarah James and also for reports from the checkpoints and from men going house to house. The two men after Sarah hadn't found her at her home, but they had just minutes previously seen somebody running and they were searching now through the forested area, hopeful that they'd capture her. Although the Orcas sergeant, officer 201, was still sedated in his own basement, the canine unit he handled could be brought to Lopez if they didn't find her soon.

On the wall was a map with pins showing the various places from which private boats might leave San Juan Island, the locations of known friends of Ben Anderson, and the locations of four private airstrips. They would see to it that all the planes at the private strips were inoperable for the night. None of the air services out of the main airport would run a charter tonight. No one was leaving on public transportation by his order.

Frick wasn't only worried about the fugitives or Ben Anderson, he was also worried about someone telling stories and bringing in the feds or the state.

Rolf, the hacker, was trying to tell him something. Frick gave him his attention.

"We have something really weird," Rolf was saying.

"What's that?"

"Long story short, Ben's computer is set up to pass certain e-mails through to his home and it automatically double-deletes them on the Sanker computer. There are numbers of retired scientists that he corresponds with, and now that we look at the phone bills, he's been calling all over the place. He's working with a lot of people besides Sanker scientists and contractor labs."

"How many?"

"More than twenty. Probably more than thirty."

"Why in the hell didn't McStott know about this?" Frick asked. "Never mind. I guess you wouldn't know that."

"The e-mails from a dozen or so men are automatically forwarded and deleted," Rolf said. "Clever, right? But the e-mails of their secretaries, assistants, or spouses are not. I gather that they meet over on Orcas. Lots of credit card activity in the West Sound retail area."

At that moment McStott showed up and plopped himself down in one of the conference room's swivel spring-back conference chairs. No doubt he was worried about being upstaged by Rolf. McStott had on a bright pink shirt that irritated Frick.

"Any relation between all this collaboration and Anderson's aging research?" Frick asked McStott.

"We don't know," said McStott. "But we do have an idea of one topic under discussion."

"What's that?"

"Natural disasters, millions dead, due to sudden methane release. Tsunamis, climate change. Some of it's hypothetical, some based on the geological record. Pretty compelling stuff."

"Like what?"

"Do you really want me to bore you with the details?"

"Bore me with killing millions of people? With more than twenty damn scientists we don't know anything about? With secret meetings on Orcas? Risk it and bore me!"

"We found this file folder full of articles, journals, and magazine stuff," said McStott.

"It all related to the danger of methane deposits. Listen to some of these quotes.

'"Prehistoric oceans could have had releases with energy up to ten thousand times the entire nuclear arsenal in the world today,'" McStott read.

'"Similar, smaller-scale eruptions of methane over time could account for other events and climatic changes, including the biblical flood.'

"They cite an article from the American Journal of Physics postulating that methane bubbles from the seafloor could be sinking ships in areas like the Bermuda Triangle.

"Apparently there's a huge methane deposit just off the coast of Oregon-there's a map here that shows it and all the other methane pockets along the continental shelf. Potential time bombs, they say. And all the methane's made by tiny undersea microbes. One of the articles says: 'Unfortunately, they make so much methane that if even a tiny portion of it were released, we would be faced with gigantic tsunamis from underwater landslides, runaway global warming from methane in the atmosphere, and resulting extraordinary extinctions.'"

"Impressive," said Frick. "But nothing about aging?"

"Nothing direct or concrete, but we found a note that said this methane release could start happening at any time but most likely within about four hundred years in the Arctic because of warming trends affecting permafrost and shallow water. Get this: one of these scientists noted that with 'Arc,' something they're apparently working on, some people alive today could be alive when a cataclysmic methane release begins."

"Four hundred years?" Frick asked.

"Uh-huh. Bingo."

"Seriously?"

"They obviously believe it," said McStott. "One more thing: one of the twelve main collaborators is Nelson Gempshorn, of American Bayou Technologies."

Frick held up a hand to stop McStott so he could think. The job had just become more complicated than killing an old scientist and stealing his secrets.

Frick puzzled it out silently for a few minutes. American Bayou's retiring vice president met with Haley Walther. What the hell did that mean? A disaster for Sanker if Ben was dealing with American Bayou too. And why was Anderson studying doomsday scenarios? Were the twenty or thirty other scientists in on the secret of aging? There had to be answers and he needed them now.

"The ferry is coming, running a little ahead of schedule. I'll call the deputy." Khan picked up a second phone that had been plugged in temporarily and set it on the conference table. "That ferry is huge; must be all kinds of places to hide."

"It doesn't matter about hiding," Frick said. "That ferry doesn't leave."

"How you gonna do that?"

"We're gonna tell them they probably have a coldblooded killer on board." Frick turned to McStott and Rolf.

"Find out why Ben is studying doomsday, if it's really four hundred years that people might live, and get me the names of all of those scientists that he's working with. Find out where they meet on Orcas."

Frick dismissed them and told Khan to assign a couple of the smartest and least thuglike men to assist McStott and Rolf. Khan nodded yes while listening to somebody on the phone. Frick's mind was spinning. Khan pushed the button on the speaker phone and Frick heard one of his deputies at the ferry trying to reassure Khan that he had searched the ferry traffic as it waited in line.

"They have to get on the boat to escape," the deputy said, obviously referring to the fugitives.

"All they need is a friend's truck, and a deputy that isn't too thorough," Frick said. "We don't have that long. We…"

Frick paused, not believing what he was seeing. "What the hell is that?" he heard himself shouting as the scene outside the window gelled in his mind. "My boat's lit up."

Frick picked up the radio. "Down on the dock, fast! They're stealing my boat!"

Haley had felt power like this in her former boyfriend's boat, but she had never felt such stark fear. It displaced her anger at Frick as the lump in her gut. When she approached the outer dock of the Friday Harbor marina, she saw Rachael, slowed, and came alongside, allowing Rachael to leap in the boat. It was a gutsy maneuver and they were lucky Rachael wasn't hurt. As she once again invoked the awesome power of the big engines, Rachael hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. In seconds the danger in what she was doing overtook her and she couldn't even take a perverse pleasure in stealing Frick's precious toy, not at this speed.

She knew that driving the eight-foot-beam boat at over one hundred miles per hour would feel like driving a motorcycle on rough ice. The connection between fingertips and the throttle pedal and the ocean's surface would be highly sensitive when she couldn't see, and any misstep potentially disastrous.

Glancing at the radar while trying to feel the water through her hands on the wheel, she tried to keep the boat headed just off the tip of Brown Island so that she would pass close by it as she headed into the San Juan Channel. For a couple of seconds she spied a radar target in the bay a quarter of a mile to her starboard, knowing that she would see it again in a short time. It was a log raft used as a tie-up for some derelict sailing yacht occupied by a fellow of little means that had no doubt been kicked out of the harbor, leaving behind only what had been his floating front porch.

It was smooth in the harbor and so she was able to go full out. The noise was all-encompassing, like standing beside Niagara Falls. The vibrations of the first little wind waves came hard. Rachael was gripping a handhold in front of her, watching the electronics.

Only the slightest touch of the wheel was required to control the boat. As she passed through the entrance out of Friday Harbor into San Juan Channel, the turbo-charged diesels were screaming in a high-pitched whine, and when she looked back, she saw the sheriff's safe boat accelerate quickly from the mouth of the main marina, its twin custom-installed 325-horsepower turbo-charged diesels pushing it to sixty miles per hour.

She heard shouting on channel 16, something like, "Get them." Only nobody could get this water rocket because there wasn't a boat north of Seattle, short of a hydroplane, that could catch Frick's ocean racer.

Out in the channel near the shore of Brown Island, she encountered moderate chop. It did not bode well for the next leg of their trip to Wasp Islands. For the moment they would circle Brown Island to increase their lead on the sheriff's boat and to reconnoiter the planned finale of her boat ride. Opus Magnum began to pound and some of the smacks on the water hurt their teeth if they didn't clench. Rachael looked grim.

Sometimes the boat wanted to ricochet off the small lumpy waves, and at those moments she felt out of control. Wind whipped over her head and then was catching the loosened canvas boat cover that had never been removed. Glancing at the speedometer, she noticed that she was at one hundred miles per hour when the canvas pulled off the grommets and disappeared behind the boat.

Even at night the sensation of speed at 106 miles per hour was incredible. The skin on their faces was molded back by the wind and their ears literally vibrated. At these speeds the wind came at hurricane force.

Blips on the radar screen held their eyes and Rachael's unending concentration. Every bird on the water, every decent-size chunk of wood, even waves with unusual crests, could make a blip, and a blip dead ahead could mean disaster.

In less than two minutes they had run the entire length of the outside of Brown Island and slowed to about seventy miles per hour to round the southernmost tip of the island, now heading back into Friday Harbor.

"Opus Magnum, Opus Magnum, this is the sheriff."

The sheriff's boat with its sirens and lights was hailing her. And it was gaining on her, having made a much tighter corner around Brown Island still at top speed. She swung wide and went very close to San Juan Island, so close she was afraid of hitting the docks. There was much more to this game than making it around the island. She had to worry about the longest of the docks. Using the radar, she lined up the tips of the yacht docks that came out into the channel like a series of fingers. She let her eye fall on the most prominent that reached out much farther into the water than the rest. Without increasing her speed she set the autopilot for dead ahead. Autopilots were not normal equipment for these boats and the placard said not to use it when traveling in excess of thirty-five knots, which was almost always. Ignoring the placard, she lined up perfectly on the Sanker Foundation docks and the small floating log raft in the channel between Brown Island and San Juan. At night the raft was visible only on the radar.

"Slow down, slow down," the deputy yelled. "You'll hit something. Dead ahead on the radar; dead ahead, turn!"