The Black Silent

CHAPTER 22

Haley could barely keep the boat on a course as it skipped through the blackness. To the eye, it was like hurtling through an abyss; to the stomach, it was a pounding free-for-all.

There was no anticipating the jarring. The waves were a blur in the spotlight and the mind was taxed to the max trying to control the foot throttle. Weary, she had backed off to seventy again in order to maintain some semblance of control and to minimize going airborne.

When she was almost across the San Juan Channel, near to Shaw Island, she glanced back and saw one set of deputies just exiting the Fisherman's Bay. The other sheriff's boat was in the middle of San Juan Channel coming in her direction. Using the GPS and the radar, she headed right for Point Gregory on Shaw Island. Behind the point was Parks Bay, rimmed in rock to the sides with a nice flat beach at the bottom of the boot.

On sunny days the rock and the trees surrounding the sheltered bay relaxed her mind. It was away from the busyness of Friday Harbor and it was nice to lunch at anchor.

Tonight she intended to hide in it and to get near enough the rocks that, again, her pursuers couldn't discount the fact that passengers may have landed on the island. The other more important factor was that Sam might not yet be through in Sanker and she was a major distraction for Frick.

Suddenly there was a loud bang and a jolt, and a split second later, she knew she had hit a small piece of wood. The engines are still running. No vibration. RPM's good. Rudder indicator okay. Trim tabs fine. If she'd hit a prop, the damage wasn't bad; the drive units were still straight. No sooner had she assimilated that information than she had covered another half-mile.

She slowed to about fifty, and flashed by Point Gregory less than two hundred yards off the rocks. Her chart plotter indicated that the water was only about thirty feet deep. The shore was but a shadow in the night. After she dropped the power a bit more, she lay the boat over in a turn so tight it threw her into the side of the seat. She sped around the point and into the bay, then went in close behind the point and killed the power. At idle the engines made a throaty rumble. She waited-her gut in a knot. The thought of guns gripped her. She was shaking. This time she didn't want to pass close enough for the sheriffs to shoot.

After waiting for just a couple minutes, she stomped the pedal and the engines came to life. Then she heard a sound that was a cross between a lip smack and a quiet tap on a bass drum. She glanced at the temperature and saw that the starboard engine was overheating. Kelp leaves or sea grass on the cold water intake. She prayed that it hadn't gone into the sea strainer. She watched in horror as the temperature climbed toward 220 degrees. Once she was back out in the channel, she headed toward Friday Harbor. As she applied power, the wind blurred her eyes; the skin on her face was smoothed back and she became engulfed in the feel of an unremitting hurricane. One sheriff's boat was coming at her, the other was in the distance moving away from Fisherman's Bay at Lopez. In the lee of Shaw Island the water was relatively calm. Going over one hundred miles an hour, she came to port twenty degrees with a barely perceptible nudge of the wheel and headed right at her adversaries.

They were more worried about living than she was. They kept coming, their closing speed over 150 miles per hour now, less than a few seconds to collision.

Temperature 190. Steam was venting. She took the flare pistol and tried aiming dead on at the sheriff's boat, but the jostling and pounding made it ridiculous. She pulled the trigger and it burned brilliantly. The deputies did a panic turn, heeled to the starboard, throwing a wall of water. She was literally screaming her frustration as she bore down on them, aiming to convince them that she would slice them clean through-missed them by less than fifty feet traveling a full one hundred miles per hour plus. When she hit their wake, Opus Magnum slammed explosively through the top of the wave, sending her airborne like a javelin in the wind. Instantly she got her foot off the throttle, trying to guess when she would slam down. It was surreal. She hit the throttle and hit the water at almost the same moment. Nothing came apart, but it was a neck-snapping crash. It felt like she needed to get her stomach back above her guts.

Haley imagined the panicked curses and shaking hands. Desperation for their lives would help them concentrate on getting off her tail.

Temperature two hundred degrees. The seawater pump would burn. She killed the power and a huge following wake slammed into the stern, pushing the boats ass high into the air and throwing water everywhere. She waited a moment, backed up hard, then stood on the gas once again. The temperature began to drop. She had shaken off the seaweed.

She didn't want the deputies to die and she needed to live long enough to find Ben-the beauty was that they wouldn't know about any desire of hers to live. If they shot at her, she didn't hear it. Aiming would have been nearly impossible.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw them turning around at what was probably full throttle. Safe boats could do that. The other boat was coming at her, but with her incredible speed, it would not intersect her course.

Brown Island was coming up fast.

Haley's mind raced; she felt barely able to hold it together. She knew she was shaking, and that things were happening too fast and overwhelming her. No way could she think ahead of the boat. Instead, she was just hanging on, trying to aim this fiendish rocket that seemed any second ready to fling itself and her into space. When she came to the tip of Brown Island, she slowed to sixty and the terror ride became more manageable. She made the turn, able now on the calm water to plot mentally her course in front of the docks and through the anchored boats. The first time had been a practice run. She waited until she was about opposite the first dock in the series to punch the autopilot.

The boat was probably going sixty when she leaped overboard and hit the water very near the most prominent dock. The impact of her body on the water was bad and she actually rolled across the water, skipping like a stone before she slowed down. It stung like a beating with willow branches. Then the cold rushed over her, crushing and aching to the bone. Like many marine biologists, she was an avid diver and water person, and around the San Juans she wore a protective suit for warmth. Tonight she had nothing.

In water like this, in the low fifties, the average man could survive only about twenty minutes before losing consciousness-the average woman a little longer.

She had locked the autopilot of the Opus Magnum onto the floating log raft. She heard a great explosion when the boat reached its destination-another crime added to their collection. Apparently in calm water the autopilot worked fine at over thirty-five.

She found she was no more than forty feet from the ladder at dock's end. It took less than two minutes and she was out of the water and running. The sheriff's boat was two hundred yards down bay, near the burning hulk, looking for bodies; the other just coming around Brown Island.

Perhaps by this time Sam had found the answer to Ben's puzzle, or maybe even Ben himself.

Now the toughest part of her job had come.

Sam glanced around, expecting Frick to step out from behind a cabinet at any moment.

When that didn't happen, he looked back out the door and saw an empty hallway. The odds were now with Frick. He probably had thirty, maybe forty, trained men. It was a small island and he was right under the man's nose. There was no doubt in his mind that the deputies would see Ranken or a digital photo, and Frick would have a suggestion as to how they should feel about it.

After a last look at Ranken's corpse, Sam turned and saw the supply shelves that Gibbons had described and moved them. Behind was a simple door with a wooden sort of twist handle that was flush with the wall. Sam opened the door and inside was an amazing little office with a very large freezer. Alice in Wonderland came to mind.

Sam could picture Ben working undisturbed here on his ARCLES files, but he couldn't imagine what was in the freezer. Immediately Sam spotted notebooks matching those at Gibbons's and his heart raced. He felt like a plunderer of pyramids who just found the pharaoh's vault. His vision of reality shifted again. Maybe Gibbons wasn't lying, after all.

All three volumes had the word ARCLES at the bottom of the page. He grabbed them and put them in his duffel.

He opened the freezer and looked inside. It contained a wooden box lined with Styrofoam. Inside it were what looked like test tubes with caps. They were color coded with paper bands and there appeared to be six different colors. One grouping of vials, the red, appeared to be empty.

Curiosity burned in him. Why was Ben hiding vials in a freezer? There were six different kinds of something, judging from the color code. Probably the product of at least six different genes. Some of the liquids could be mixtures. Expressed proteins or their products, the documents had indicated. Alongside the vials lay a brown manila envelope.

With eager hands he picked up the envelope, certain he was about to find something.

Four-digit numbers ran down the left-hand margin of the page. Each four-digit entry down the side seemed to correspond to a row across the page. The four digits probably referred to the animals that were receiving the injections, substitutes for names.

What if they aren't animals?

He told himself that was a giant leap. There could be thirty-six mice or rats or octopuses. There was no reason to think Ben had already turned to people. He left the vials but kept the volumes, envelope, and papers; then he closed the freezer and returned to the outer workshop area.

Frick had left Ranken with his weapon, so Sam took it off the body and an extra speedloader with six bullets. Ranken carried a rather lightweight firearm, a Smith amp; Wesson model 10 thirty-eight special. It was economical and better than throwing rocks.

Sam also took the pepper spray. He wanted to take Ranken's body down and treat it with respect, but he knew he would be destroying forensic evidence.

Taking the weapon was the worst form of manufacturing circumstantial evidence, but Sam needed it. Even with the revolver, his odds were little better than nil. Standing again, his knee felt as if it were punctured by a hot needle and muscle cramps were beginning in his thigh, along with the increasing stiffness in his lower back. Moving around was now an ordeal. Carefully planned exercise was so different from racing around with an adrenaline-filled body. He didn't know what would happen if he tried to fight again.

He took one last look around the room before leaving. After a moment his eye went to three wooden boxes identical to the one in the freezer. Sam took a closer peek, trying to make out the small print on the wooden box. Surprisingly, it said American Bayou Technologies.

That was food for thought.

Sam crawled out of the little room and heard footsteps coming down the hall. After dousing the lights he pulled the. 38 and stood behind the door. This could be the end of it. Thank God for the gun.

The door pushed open slowly. Probably someone was using his foot and had a gun in his hand as well.

In fact, the gun came next, a semiautomatic visible in the light from the hall. This was not a trained individual.

"Hey," came a voice from behind the figure. "We're doing this organized. We're down at the other end. You don't just go off by yourself."

"I've seen Dr. Anderson slip in here in the evening. I thought it would be a good place to look."

"We're doing this by the numbers. We're all down at the other end."

"Okay," the man sighed.

Sam waited about two minutes, then opened the door.

Surprisingly, the hall was empty. They were in rooms at the far end. He decided to take a chance and hurry down the hall to the stairs. It seemed to take an eternity and any moment he was sure he would be stopped. As he approached the stairs that would take him to the second floor and Ben's office, he heard voices. He ducked in a room and discovered it was the dive room. It was near both the door to the docks, where Sam had entered, and the stairwell to the second story.

Right away he noticed a pile of clothing. He checked the wallet in the jeans and it was Ben's. Very interesting. Ben had left his credit cards and driver's license. Amazingly, no one had thought to check the dive room yet. Sam fished through the pants pockets and found a piece of paper. He pocketed it, returned to the door, flipped off the light, and listened. When he opened the door, it was plain that a group of three or four men was searching the lower floor, one room at a time. They had started at the far end and still had a distance to go.

Exiting the dive room, he rushed up the stairs to the first landing. He was able to see the top. A man sat on a stool, nipping through a magazine. Obviously he was permanently stationed. Sam doubted that he could bluff his way through, despite his fraying disguise.

He would need to try another way. Feeling exposed, he went back down the stairs and managed to cross the hall to the outside door without being seen. Once again he went down the outside of the building, only this time he remained low, and traveled in the opposite direction, heading for the balcony from which Ben had originally jumped.

He found the balcony and climbed one of the small trees at the southern end. It was a fir and it sagged terribly under his weight, but he managed to make it to the edge of the balcony and climb over. The door to the interior was locked. There was a window and he looked inside. Someone was turning on all the lights during the search for him. He waited, hi a couple of minutes someone made his way to the end of the hall, turning on lights in the various labs and offices.

When he reached the end of the hall, Sam tapped on the glass. Instead of panicking, as Sam expected, or calling for help, as Sam also expected, the man decided to be a hero, drew his gun, and approached the door. Sam lay on his back beside the door. The door opened and he could see the tip of the man's gun. Throwing the door open, the man stepped through, looking everywhere but down. His mouth was open and Sam shot a stream of pepper spray right at his partially opened mouth. Before the man could comprehend what had happened to him, he dropped the gun and grabbed for his throat.

In an impressive display of total surrender, the man fell to the ground with his eyes open wide.

"You'll be okay, it's just pepper spray," Sam said. He could empathize because he was suffering badly enough just from the residue.

Working quickly, he got the man's pants and shirt off and put them on over his own.

Fortunately, he was a big guy. Sam found a badge indicating he was a special deputy, no doubt one of the newly deputized. Another play in Frick's game.

Unfortunately, the clothes reeked of pepper spray and the residue continued to burn his eyes. Using the man's own cuffs, he locked his hands behind his back; then he quickly closed the door, leaving the man gasping in his underwear.

This man carried a SIG-Sauer P229, standard fare for the FBI and a better weapon than Ranken's Smith amp; Wesson, if the criteria for "better" was the efficient killing of people.

Sam hobbled down the hall dressed in the uniform of a security guard.

A loud boom came from outside-strong enough to rattle the windows.

"Check that out!" someone hollered. "Opus Magnum just went off like a firecracker."

Sam appreciated the timing but worried about Haley.

He made it all the way to Ben's office without being stopped. Those who saw him were evidently too busy looking out the window at Frick's barbecued boat to pay attention.

Inside half an hour Sam hoped he would be reading documents that without a doubt would blow his mind.

Ben Anderson had not disappointed him yet.

It was evening, and Sanker was in a mood.

Rossitter walked in wearing new shoes.

"That bad, huh?" Sanker said.

"What do you mean?" Rossitter didn't get his meaning.

"You're wearing new shoes."

Rossitter still appeared confused by the comment, which was troubling because it meant the man didn't understand his own eccentricities. Sanker knew it was one thing to have them and another to lack any self-awareness of them. The old man sighed, suddenly feeling weary.

"Did you talk to our Judas?" he asked Rossitter.

"I tried calling him back. He won't return calls. Something is happening, I can feel it,"

Rossitter said. "I think it's like you said: Judas is two people, and I have a good idea who one of them is."

Suddenly the old man felt a welcome shot of adrenaline. "Well, who?"

"Sarah James-Ben's assistant." Rossitter said it as if trying to convince himself.

"How did you and your minions come to this conclusion?"

"Judas said we should follow Sarah to find Ben," Rossitter said. "Even said tell Frick to let her go."

"That's inconsistent, isn't it? First he says we don't need to find Ben, that's not part of the deal. It's a backup in case Frick doesn't get him. Then he tells us to find Ben? By following Sarah?"

"What do we do?" Rossitter looked more and more worried as their control of the situation grew thinner.

"One thing Judas likes doing is talking. Let him talk. You listen. Act cooperative, but don't agree to anything. Then report back to me."

"I see," Rossitter said. "He really could be on anybody's side." "He's on his own side.

We just have to figure out what he really wants. I'm tending to believe he wants something that Sarah has," Sanker said.

"Sarah James is close to Ben Anderson. I hear she fancied him and he her. Ben took obvious precautions, hiding his work, et cetera. It's logical that she might know something. Or have something. Judas can't get to her if Frick has her. And Judas is supposed to deliver Ben's secret to us if he wants his reward."

"I still wonder why deliver it to us."

"That's easy," the old man said, growing more sure of himself. "Judas wants the Arc regimen. It's a complicated recipe, apparently. Judas says it has six primary components.

He knows so much about it that I think he's seen it, maybe used or taken it. So he's desperate. What if he can't get any more of it? If he can't get it from Ben, he hedges his bets. He knows we would have the means to produce it, if only we knew how. Can't you see it?"

"Isn't that a lot of conjecture?"

"I made my fortune being good at conjecture," Sanker snapped back.

"So you think this Sarah knows the Arc regimen?"

"Not necessarily. She knows something that Judas wants to know, or has something he wants to have."

Rossitter looked down at those new shoes, clearly at sea.

It didn't matter. Sanker knew Judas's need intimately, because Judas's need was his own.

"There is nothing in here," Walrus Face said.

"What do you know about this?" Thin Man asked.

Sarah sat huddled in the back of Sheriff's Boat 3. Like Boat 2 it was a twenty-seven-foot Boston Whaler, but this one had a pair of 225-horsepower Suzuki outboards, and a tiny cabin. It was unusually aggressive for Thin Man to make the inquiries.

"I don't know a thing, other than what I told you," Sarah said. "I just saw the boat from the road."

Thin Man: "In the dark?"

"I wasn't sure this was the boat. But he usually ties up to that dock."

"That sounds like bullshit to me, designed to waste our time," Walrus Face said.

A breeze on the bay made sizable ripples that rocked the boats. The sheriff's boat tapped the gunnel of Ben's when they pitched.

"I'm sure you'd enjoy a stint with Frick," said Thin Man. "He's a charmer."

Walrus Face climbed back in the boat. "I think it's time for some candor lessons."

Walrus came toward her, and Sarah eyed his gun without staring. She had to get to it.

Once she did, she was good enough to use it effectively. He pulled her to her feet and pushed her toward the cabin.

She opened the cabin door and stepped in front of the opening. Down inside the cuddy cabin there was a bunk. She knew that what she had in mind could get her brutalized, but given her options, it was worth the risk.

He came toward her and pushed her back inside. "I'd love to hump the hell out of you,"

Walrus Face said as if considering it, but not planning on it.

He reached for her coat and grabbed the zipper. She struggled and he slapped her across the face. Without further significant struggle she let him unzip the coat. He ripped open her blouse.

"I know what you want. Let's get it over with," she said.

She didn't have to work at making her hands tremble as she began unfastening his belt.

"You first," he said, obviously surprised and uncertain. She had called his bluff.

She didn't step back but made as if to open her blouse.

Walrus Face started feeling around for a light switch. At the same time she reached for his groin, again surprising and distracting him. His mouth came open slightly and he gasped. For those few seconds she had no scruples. It was a job and she aimed to get it done. Using her left hand, she reached for his gun, releasing the holster snap and pulling it free, while he tried to adjust to what he thought she was doing. In a split second he was looking down the barrel of his own gun.

Shock was apparent on Walrus Face. It was as if he'd looked into the future and seen his end.

She couldn't quite see his eyes. He could try to grab it. At that moment she wished he would. In the movies they grabbed guns. In real life people usually got shot when they tried it. Her father had been a cop before he was a contractor and they had discussed such things. They had also fired hundreds of rounds from various weapons and she still remembered how to do it, and she knew that on a night such as this, a thug would carry the gun with the safety off and a round in the chamber.

She watched him swallow hard and slid by him out of the cuddy cabin.

Thin Man hesitated, trying to comprehend what was happening. She backed to the corner stern of the boat, where she held the gun aimed in their direction.

"Jump over," she shouted at Thin Man. She lowered the gun and fired, missing his leg by inches. The gun boomed up the bay. "Next one blows your leg off," she said. "Ten-millimeter round, I think." Thin Man jumped. "You're next, Walrus Face."

"You bitch…"

She fired. The near miss rocked him back. "Next one's in your chest," she said, her hands shaking more than before. "It'll knock the crap out of you even with your flak jacket."

He jumped at her and she fired, knocking him back against the wheel. He looked like he was all done. Then he shook himself and somehow regained his faculties. Again he came at her, stumbling, and again she shot, this time two rounds. They knocked him down, the bullets' force incredible. She guessed she had hit the steel breastplate in the vest. It didn't matter. She knew it would incapacitate him, for the moment.

"You just couldn't stand that you were bested by a woman. So like an idiot you kept coming," she said, amazed and shaken at his bullheaded tenacity.

In the dash lights she could see his eyes rolled back, spittle running down his chin. He was shaking himself, trying to recover.

"Get up, you bastard."

No blood, so she knew the injuries were internal only. She was shaking and barely able to aim the gun. She fought hysteria and, oddly, guilt that she had actually shot a man three times. Struggling, he managed to get to his knees, holding his ribs in terrible pain.

"My ribs are broken."

"Good," she said. "I'll shoot some more if you don't crawl over the side."

"Please, I can't," Walrus Face groaned.

She couldn't help herself. She was starting to feel sorry for him. Seeing him wounded made a difference, somehow. "Get up or, so help me, I'll kill you." She put the gun a foot from his head, knowing that she didn't mean a word of what she said.

"I can't. I swear, I can't move. It feels like I got ribs in my lungs."

He was in real pain. What she saw couldn't be faked and there were those holes in the clothing over his chest. She reached down and felt a dented steel breastplate in the Kevlar. Another big dent in the Kevlar wasn't over the breastplate. It must have hurt him bad. Her daddy had talked about vests as well. In fact, Walrus Face probably felt as if he couldn't move.

On his belt she found handcuffs. Based on what she'd seen in the movies and on watching her nephew play with real cuffs, she clamped one end of a cuff on tight to his wrist, then cuffed the wrist to the outboard-motor bracket. It was more than stout. She turned on the ignition and left Thin Man to flounder through the mud to the private dock. In seconds she was going forty-four knots back toward the main marinas. Riding over the small waves, the boat and motor vibrated and Walrus Face screamed in pain.

Sarah had to get to Ben quick. She was already thirty minutes late.