Dead of Night

17

Serpiente

Dr. Desmond Stokes-Mr. Sweet.

Dasha liked replaying the name; it gave her a warm feeling because it brought Solaris into her head.

Mr. Sweet had told Dasha, “What I’ve been doing is only a hobby. It’s not my life’s work. But the… satisfaction of the last fourteen months. Manipulating germs, disease vectors-relocating soldier-animals to help Earth retaliate. Thinning the human population of ‘primasites.’ I’m contributing. Which is why we can’t allow that little retard, Applebee, to stop us.”

He invented words to remind people he was a genius. Primasites were human parasites. Soldier-animals-things with stingers and teeth.

Helping Earth fight back-he had a bunch of speeches on the subject. Maybe even believed it at one time. But Dasha had been working for him long enough to know it was a lie. All the rich man cared about was scamming more money, more control. Ways to demonstrate his superiority-that’s what it was about.

Revenge, too. Mostly revenge.

She’d discovered that on her own. Went through the man’s files when she got the opportunity. The ones on his personal computer, the files in his office.

Head of security. Her job had its advantages.

A couple of years after Stokes had gotten out of medical school, he’d gone before a state review board and lost his license. Something to do with a therapy he’d been working on, injecting people with cells from the placentas of sheep.

Around the same time, the government shut down his fledgling vitamin company. He’d been illegally mining petrified coral somewhere around Key Largo, then processing it into calcium tablets.

Purest form of calcium. Holistic. Expensive. Buyers fell for it.

The state of Florida nailed him both times, and the feds got some licks in, too.

Revenge was a major motivator.

Power. That’s what he preached to leaders of the militant Greenie Weenie groups who visited the island. Over the last year, there’d been dozens of them. From the States, Britain, France, Canada. Everywhere. They were rallying behind some idiot article in an American music magazine. Smuggling dangerous exotics across the border was the newest kind of guerrilla warfare.

Mr. Earl had sent out many thousands of copies of the article over the Internet, Dasha had also discovered, inviting Greenie Weenies to the Bahamas for help and advice.

The surest way of displacing primasites, Dr. Stokes told them, was to create panic, disrupt the local economy, then be ready with organizational funds to buy properties cheap when they came on the market. Dump a thousand piranha into lakes in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, then sit back and wait. The West Nile virus outbreak on Cape Cod-same technique, different tools.

“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it,” he told them. “Abbie Hoffman.”

They always applauded that line. Idiots.

“The best way to save the land is to buy from the fools who are destroying it.”

The Greenie Weenies saw it as a righteous war. For Mr. Sweet, it was a way to get even.

Dasha knew. Took note of what made the rich man tick. Began researching him, putting together a secret dossier.

The only people he actually associated with? Respected? There were a handful, all billionaire power brokers. Sugarcane. A couple of Texas oil barons. A guy who ran one of the largest mining and lumber companies in the world. Private jets, private conversations, secret deals.

The idiot Greenie Weenies had no idea what Mr. Sweet was all about.

How would they? Go to the public records, do a computer search, and the name Dr. Desmond Stokes would not appear as owner of several thousand acres of agricultural property, Central Florida, or as an officer of Tropicane-even though he controlled much of the stock. Maybe a majority.

The name of his personal assistant was on the record, though. Mr. Earl. Same with a long list of companies: OffShore Gulf amp; Caribbean Petroleum, Coralway Pharmaceuticals, Ragged Isle Shipping, and others that Dasha traced to Stokes through the name of Luther T. Earl.

The man owned sugar, a couple of phosphate mines, four oil tankers his company leased to a Hong Kong-based group named Evergreen, stock in steel mills in Sweden and Germany, a rubber plantation in Sumatra. Plus pharmaceuticals. That’s where the real money was. Paid investors eight times the return per hundred thousand dollars invested.

Mr. Sweet had a bundle in the big ones. Pfizer, Great Britain Ltd, plus his own: Coralway Pharmaceuticals Ltd.

The man known publicly for manufacturing holistic vitamins and championing environmental causes was actually an international industrialist.

Dr. Desmond Stokes had discovered that the most satisfying way of looking down on people was from atop a mountain of money.

Mr. Sweet was right-screwing with the Greenie Weenies was small time. Only a hobby. But the man loved it.

Stokes’s pet idea: Spread flesh-eating parasites around Disney World, into the Everglades. New strains of malaria, same delivery method. Cripple Florida’s tourist industry while also devaluing massive hectares of real estate.

“We’ll scare away the primasites and make more room for wildlife,” he told them.

Also, more room for Mr. Sweet to slip in and buy, buy, buy.

That’s what caused Dasha to start guessing. Didn’t know if Stokes wanted a bigger piece of the sugar industry, or had something else planned. The weird little nerd, Applebee, was involved somehow.

She figured that out right away.

The nerd and the rich man had a special deal going. The genius doctor helped the nerd, if the nerd did what the genius doctor told him to do.

“I’m doing research… procedures. In Africa, there’s a parasitic worm. I’m not good with… with words. A cure-yes. A cure, that’s what I’m looking for.”

Applebee had said that to her more than a year ago. He was a shy little man, never made eye contact, always covered his mouth with his hands as he spoke. Hiding. That was the impression.

Find a cure…

A cure for an African parasite. Why bother?

Dasha had gone over and over it in her mind. Did the research, and came up with something surprising. There were prescription drugs on the market for malaria. Preventative drugs for all kinds of parasitic disease, as well as drugs that mitigated their symptoms. But for guinea worm disease? Zero. No pharmaceutical relief available.

It was one of the few easily contracted diseases in the world for which there was no cure, or help.

Interesting.

How much money would a company make if it had a drug licensed, tested, and waiting when Florida suffered an unprecedented guinea worm epidemic? There was no profit in finding cures for diseased people in West Africa. Poor folks couldn’t pay, so why bother? But visitors to Disney World?

Talk about taking revenge on Florida!

Dasha was guessing, already figuring ways to turn it to her advantage if she was right.

Brilliant.

The rich man’s interest had nothing to do with saving the Everglades.

Whenever she had the opportunity, she paid special attention to Applebee. The way his skin flushed as he ducked behind his hand, she guessed he had a crush on her.

But did he care enough to double-cross Dr. Stokes?

Applebee. A sore subject for the rich man.

Standing in the doctor’s office now, she listened to Desmond Stokes tell her, “Finding that computer is a priority. We’ve got to find out what he copied from my files. That’s an absolute must. But there’s another reason, too. Something you don’t know.”

Dasha tried to react with the appropriate expression: interested but confused. As if she had no idea what the man was talking about.

“What I haven’t mentioned is that I commissioned Applebee to do a special study. Had to do with the guinea parasites. If we don’t recover his computer, all the data he accumulated will be lost.”

“What kind of study?”

“Don’t worry about the specifics. You’ve been asking why we haven’t used the crop sprayers yet? That’s why. Until I see and understand the data that Applebee developed, we can’t move ahead on

… on a larger scale.”

Early on, Mr. Sweet had tasked her with a problem: Find the most effective way to spread an illegal waterborne agent over a landmass.

Dasha’s solution: radio-controlled helicopters, commercial-sized crop sprayers. Almost unknown in the U.S., but gaining popularity in Asia and Australia.

Mr. Sweet had been enthusiastic… until the trouble started with Applebee.

“Goddamn it, I want that computer. I paid for the fucking research. The results belong to me.”

Stokes said it again: “The damn retard!”

Dasha was thinking: The little man outsmarted you, outsmarted Aleski. Even outsmarted me. And he’s the retard?

She took a paper from her pocket, held it up. “That’s why I come to you this morning, Dr. Stokes. To get permission.”

It was the copy of a UPS billing receipt she’d found in Jobe Applebee’s home. It was addressed to someone named Frieda Matthews, Tallahassee, and insured for two thousand dollars.

The missing computer?

Possibly, so she’d called the phone number, saying she was with UPS. Told the man who answered there was maybe a mistake, they needed to confirm the serial number.

“My wife’s brother’s laptop?” he asked. “It’s silver-colored with an apple on it. Something called a ‘PowerBook.’ ”

Dasha had smiled. Idiot.

“I don’t know anything about computers, but I’m taking it with me to Kissimmee tomorrow. Maybe my wife will know how to find the serial number. Do you want to know where we’re staying?”

How could anyone be so stupid?

Dasha approached Stokes’s desk and placed the billing receipt in front of him so that he could read it without having to touch it.

That’s what had set him off about Applebee.

After he’d ranted about it awhile, calling the little man a retard, Stokes grabbed the receipt and flung it on the floor. Immediately, he began to change gloves.

He kept white cotton gloves hidden everywhere.

“Applebee was autistic. I’m an expert on autism. Their brains aren’t capable of interpreting moral subtleties. Ethics? Meaningless. He was perfect for what we wanted him to do. There was no reason for me to fear he’d sneak in and copy my computer files, then refuse to give me the results of his study.”

Dasha said, “He tried to cancel your order for the drone helicopters,” as if reminding him, but actually to demonstrate that she was on the rich man’s side. Let her expression tell Stokes he had every right to feel betrayed. “What a shitty thing to do. Sneaky. And you were giving him special treatment.”

“I acted as his physician. Created a special diet. Provided him with supplements that would purge heavy metals from his body. Coral calcium and glycosamine-products that we make right here. Pure. Can you imagine what I would’ve charged anyone else? He wanted to be normal.” Stokes made a snorting noise of contempt. “As if being normal’s special. Not revealing the results of his study.”

“Sneaky shit fooled you.”

Dasha knew he was leaving something out. Copying his files had gradually become less important than Applebee’s research on guinea worms.

Find a cure.

Spread the parasites by crop duster all over South Florida and have an expensive cure waiting. Applebee had the answer.

“Stole from you, that’s what the little bastard did. No way you could have known.”

Stokes’s expression agreed, saying, Yes, I was betrayed, but I’m used to it. “Exactly! I believed I was dealing with a man who had autism. There’s no medical precedent for his behavior. I would know. Autistics can’t rise above their autism. Which is why I’m now convinced that he was retarded. A savant.”

Stokes slapped his desk-he had the muscularity of a corpse two months gone, so it made the sound of fingers brushing a pillow. “We’ve got to find the goddamn thing or I’m ruined.”

Dasha told Stokes that’s why she was asking permission to fly to Orlando that afternoon. Her and Aleski. They might return with a nice surprise.

As if it were unimportant to her, she added, “Mr. Earl wants permission, too. But in a separate plane. Something to do with one of your pharmaceutical companies.”

She relaxed slightly when Stokes replied, “Mr. Earl can leave whenever he wants. That sly son of a bitch knows I can put him in prison. All I have to do is pick up the phone.”

Dasha thought, That explains a lot.

She didn’t add that Luther Earl could not leave the island any time he wanted. It wasn’t the way she had the security set up.

Stokes paused, took a moment. Didn’t want to sound eager. “When you say come back with something nice-do you mean Applebee’s computer? I’ll give you a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus if you do. And can prove he hasn’t sent off copies somewhere.”

“You told me Applebee never made copies of anything. You said it was part of his-” She’d forgotten the word.

“His syndrome. Avoidance can be a manifestation of compulsion. Applebee refused to back up his work, as far as I know. But the son of a bitch copied my files, so he might have tricked me about copying his own research data, too.”

Dasha said earnestly, “I’m hoping to come back with the computer. But a bonus isn’t necessary. It’s part of the job, and you already pay me well.”

The rich man liked that. Over the months, he’d gradually come to trust her. Not in the same way he trusted Mr. Earl, but close. But that didn’t mean she was off the hook.

“The whole sad episode should’ve never happened in the first place. You’re head of my security. You’re the one who let that little retard get away. It wasn’t my fault.”

Applebee was dead. That was escaping? Mr. Sweet never accepted blame. A neurotic head case.

“If I’m ruined, you people are ruined! You’re like parasites. That’s why you’ve got to protect me.”

He was ranting. It would go on for a while, the fury, his paranoia peaking.

She’d gotten permission to leave. That’s all she cared about. You couldn’t get off the island without it, not even her-and she’d made the rules.

It was the right procedural decision. A professional decision.

Dasha had tightened the island’s security procedures soon after they’d finished assembling, then testing the first of four RMAX radio-controlled crop duster helicopters.

Restricted ingress and egress. She kept the chopper drones under camouflaged netting unless she, Aleski, Aleski’s cousin, Broz, or one of the other Russian pilots she’d hired had them out practicing. They used laptop computer-sized remotes to make low-level passes over the ocean, spraying a watery fog that did not contain the larvae of South American mosquitoes or guinea worms-but soon would.

Beautiful little choppers, five meters long, weighed only a hundred kilograms. They carried a payload large enough to treat several hundred acres with pesticides-or any other liquid.

Dasha was proud of the choppers. Her idea.

When they’d tasked Jobe Applebee with finding the fastest way to circulate waterbome parasites through the Everglades, he’d spent months building a precise model of the state. Something called a diorama. She should’ve known then that Applebee was different.

Mr. Sweet was still slapping at his desk. A spoiled child throwing a tantrum. “Get out of here! Come back with that computer or don’t come back at all!”

Leaving the room, Dasha gave him a farewell grin. This time it said, Fuck you until it’s my turn…