The Black Silent

CHAPTER 25

Haley had pressed her way into a large, leafy hedge near the garage, and once beyond it, she had sensed no one behind her. Heading up through the brush and the neighbor's yard, she went as fast as she could, even if not as quietly. Between Harrison Street, Lattimer's, and a main thoroughfare on the east side of the airport runway, there were forested areas and small neighborhoods. The first twenty feet into the brush had been miserable going as she picked her way through the dense undergrowth. Her eyes were unaccustomed to the dark. Any second she had expected the officer to start shouting for her to stop, but, in fact, she had probably been invisible in the darkness.

The siren from the other patrol car had been sounding closer, though. Then it had been joined by a second, probably a half-mile away.

After only a short distance Haley had broken out into an area with widely spaced trees and a couple buildings. She cut across it and came to a four-way intersection and ran down the street toward a forest. For a block she was completely exposed, but she covered the ground quickly.

Then she was in thick woods with more heavy underbrush. Running, walking, and crawling, she felt like it would go on forever. To her right she knew was a large open field, and to her left a long row of residences that went on for a quarter-mile or more.

Putting her hands in front of her, she tried to feel her way around the tree trunks. In a particularly dark and foreboding thicket, she took several steps and, with one of them, went into a hole that put her in brush up to her waist and skinned her shinbone. She pushed on, vines ripping at her clothing, her skin feeling stings as if from attacking bees; her raw flesh protested the mistreatment. She traveled as fast as she could, holding the bag of clothes, sometimes on three of all fours, desperate to claw her way through.

She crested the top of a gentle hill and moved closer to the houses but remained in the trees and in the backyards that bordered them, stumbling over barbecues and children's toys and all manner of junk.

The two sets of sirens came closer.

She crossed a large street that she knew to be Grover. There were new construction homes on the far side and down a large residential drive. Just as she arrived at a home in the new subdivision, a patrol car came around the corner off Grover, seemingly following her. Fortunately, she was off the street out of the path of the headlights. She hit the ground and the car whizzed past and continued. Quickly she hurried into the shadows alongside the home. It was full of loud-talking teenagers and rock music. There was a light on a back patio and it cast a glimmer into the deep shadows and she tried to avoid the fingers of light that felt their way into the darkness. Careful not to run into anything, she went as fast as she dared. For a good distance she clawed through more brush and trees until she spotted what she knew to be the county fairgrounds, where she encountered a fence.

She reached out. It was chain link. She struggled over it and ran in the open, fearful that at any moment she would be yelled into halting or, worse yet, a target for a gun.

The silent bleachers of the fairgrounds created a ghostly backdrop and underscored her aloneness in a place designed for happy people living safe, normal lives.

Coming down Argyle, a new patrol car was shining its spotlight to the fairgrounds side of the road. It indicated to her that for some reason they believed she hadn't crossed over Argyle, traveling toward the airport. Instantly she hit the dirt and crawled quickly back away from the street. When she had put the major county buildings between herself and the road, she turned back and began traveling parallel with the main road and the airport runway. There were more trees to the south. She crossed a small street and eventually came to a sizable home.

Hoping she wouldn't be seen in the open, she climbed through a board fence, and went down the driveway toward the house, thinking she should get in the bushes but not wanting to slow down. Eerily, the squad car was coming back up the main street. She remained hunched over, low to the ground. Then the car turned up the side street, where she hid, moving its spotlight. It couldn't be a coincidence, she told herself. Perhaps someone in the house had seen her moving.

Another cruiser was coming up the main street, also using its spotlight. Through the trees she could see yet more flashing lights, indicating that she was slowly being corralled.

When she arrived at the next house, still at least a half-mile from the airport, she saw two police cars out on Argyle. They seemed to have stopped to confer. With all the attention, she had no idea how she'd get to the hangar that housed Ben's plane. It was on the opposite side of the airport complex.

As she came to the back of the house, she slithered through the fence and scratched her back in the process. Looking at the newly constructed home, with its hints of a Victorian lineage, hopeless fear penetrated to her bowels-add a few cobwebs and some faded paint and it could be something out of a Stephen King novel. Go in the house or face Flick's goons-her choice.

One of the officers was exiting the car when a third dark sedan rolled up. A man got out and spoke with the officer and then they both proceeded toward the front of the house.

She looked at the time. When her cell phone rang, it frightened her out of her mind. It was about as subtle as a foghorn in the living room. Sam sounded weary and beat-up.

She listened, casting about for a place to hide.

Sam had mentioned he had papers but no time to talk.

Curiosity burned in her, but she had to find a way to stay alive first.

She switched her cell phone to silent, then quickly looked around for a place to hide before the men started searching behind the house. There was a back door and a flagstone patio. On the patio were two tricycles, a bike, a ball, a bat, some large trucks.

The trees were too far distant and there were no bushes that would afford a decent hiding place. She tried the back door and, quite unbelievably, it opened.

By her watch it was 8:32 p.m. Sam needed her now and she was still a long way from flying Ben's plane-even assuming it would fly at all.

All Sam heard was an excited yelp, but he knew it was the dog crossing fresh man scent. That was an amazingly fast response. At about the same moment Sam found a narrow trail through the forest. Because the dog was near, he changed strategy to gain speed. Pulling out his small light, he began walking as fast as his stiffened knee would allow. With any luck this would be the right kind of trail. It wound through salal, huckleberry, some madronas in the understory, and Douglas fir in the crown. Then it led to the jackpot he was looking for-a fishing spot on the water where people warmed themselves by a large campfire. Or maybe it was teenagers communing in the dark, listening to the gentle lap of the inland sea. Whatever the reason, there were plenty of charred sticks here.

Picking up a good-size stick, with a well-blackened end, he ran it all over his body from the waist down, covering his clothes and skin with the charcoal. Then he walked to the water's edge, backtracked, and ran up the trail for twenty paces before he turned around and ran back to the fire pit. Finally he moved away from the trail, plunging through the brush so that he would not come nose to nose with an aggressive dog. Fortunately, he had gone only about one hundred yards before coming to another trail and a few hundred more yards down the new trail to another small clearing. Again he heard the dog, dangerously close. Apparently the animal was casting about, making an S-shaped search pattern through the woods. The charcoal seemed to have him confused.

They passed each other with only about a fifty-yard gap.

Dogs' noses were so sensitive that they could on occasion distinguish between fires if the combusted wood was of differing species. Sam wanted to smell like every campfire along the edge of the forest, but that wouldn't be possible. He may have found the only one, and even if he hadn't, finding another in the dark was unlikely.

From the clearing he went off into the woods, paralleling the salt water for a couple hundred yards, then dropped down to the steep rocky bank at the water's edge. Hidden behind a badly placed cloud, there was no moon on the darkened wind-ruffled surface and the steep slippery rocks looked ominous. With his bad legs they would be a nightmare.

Without thinking more about the suffering to come, he hobbled down to the water and tried not to scream as the salt water burned into the many cuts and abrasions on his lower leg. He entered the water halfway up to his knees and walked along the rocks, working desperately to keep his already tentative footing. The rocks were uneven and at times he stepped to thigh-deep bone-chilling water when he least expected that result.

Salt water on his raw flesh was a new form of hell. But he would use the water to mask the scent of his footsteps, leaving the dog with nothing more than the fire smell at the beach.

He exited the water around the northern side of a blunt-shaped point and stayed very near the steep rock slope that was the beach so as not to spread any scent in the forest.

Eventually they would try walking with the dog along the entire beach. By that time Sam needed to be gone.

Surprised, he found a lone house accessed by what looked to be a small private drive. It was set in the forest near the point with a good view of the water. Only one light shone inside, no car was in the driveway. It was an isolated spot. Quickly he checked the garage. No car. He decided to chance staying a few minutes. He was only a little bit amazed when he found the door unlocked. It was probably on university property; here people were casual about locking doors and the like.

It was blessedly warm inside. Sam was still shaking from the cold. He needed to wait for Haley and the plane-at the same time an isolated home was an obvious place to search. He would thumb through the papers.

With shaking hands, he pulled out the note he had taken from Ben's pocket. On it was scribbled: SJ: Please remind Lattimer to take groceries to Orcas. That seemed to be the original note; on the back was written: Haley and Sarah meet Nelson 12:00 am. Sunday at M Chef. Then there was a phone number, perhaps for Nelson. Finally came the notation: Flowers Sarah, and a phone number.

Puzzling, he thought. Gibbons to take groceries to Orcas. Ben had no place at Orcas. Or did he?

The other was obviously a reminder note of a meeting with Nelson Gempshorn on a Sunday. But why both Sarah and Haley? Very strange. Haley said nothing about Sarah attending any meeting with Nelson, so perhaps this was a future meeting. Today? Sam was anxious to get Haley's take on the note. He decided to wait to call her, and instead to look at the documents he'd taken, then leave.

He hurried. The first volume's content was obvious and shocking. They were calculating the volume of methane hydrates and trapped methane gas beneath a given area of ocean floor and the small temperature changes required to release about half the methane on the planet. Mostly natural causes. One author argued that placement of a nuclear device in the right deep-sea trench would trigger the methane release; that, in turn, would trigger a landslide that would cause a devastating tsunami.

Sam started to see that portions of this volume had been written for laymen, perhaps policy makers, and that was an interesting new wrinkle. In plain English they described how a chain release of methane might start in the Arctic.

Volume two, the Nobeltec bathyscaphic charts, depicted the seafloor off Cape Hatteras, on the eastern seaboard. Apparently the Arcs had been busy off Cape Hatteras; pock-marks and fissures were opening up off the cape, a clear indication of escaping methane.

According to Ben's notes, the most likely result of methane release would be massive underwater landslides, resulting giant tsunamis and catastrophic global warming, methane being a greenhouse gas. Other authors had postulated massive conflagrations in the atmosphere or simple asphyxiation near the coast.

Sam skimmed, always thinking about a hasty exit.

Hurriedly he looked for the fountain of youth. It was all too complicated. They were searching for some gene. Stranger yet was a notation penned in Ben's hand: The answer may be found in the Sargasso stew.

What the heck was that? He had to go. There was much more and it looked the most interesting-more fountain of youth-stuff. Human mitochondria.

The aging stuff fascinated Sam. He was tired of thinking about global catastrophes and the end of the world. He wondered, though, how much of this Ben had already shared with the U.S. government. Any of it? Sam would have Ernie look into the matter.

Anything that could become a new terrorist recipe would invoke federal jurisdiction over the entire matter. Probably a long shot.

In his excitement over all the new aging material, Sam decided to call Haley.

She answered, clearly out of breath. Quickly he explained what he had found.

"I couldn't tell, but I thought he might be saying there was some important similarity between Arcs and humans. Maybe in the mitochondria."

"That has me curious as hell," Haley said. Sam caught a set of headlights coming through the trees. Without a word he stepped out the back door and plunged into the pitch-black forest.