Micro

Chapter 6

Ala Wai, Honolulu 28 October, 8:00 a.m.

A kamai Boat Services was right on Ala Moana Boulevard, next to the Ala Wai Boat Basin, at the end of Waikiki Beach. The taxi dropped Peter off at eight in the morning, but the boat yard was already busy at work. It wasn’t a large yard, perhaps ten or twelve hulls out of the water, and it took him no time to locate the Boston Whaler.

He was here because of Alyson’s question the night before: Did the police check the boat?

Why would she ask that? Supposedly she was concerned about her boyfriend, yet she seemed to care more about the boat. He jumped off the boat.

Peter walked around the boat now, looking closely.

Considering the pounding it had taken in the surf, the Boston Whaler seemed surprisingly intact. True, the white fiberglass hull was scratched all over, as if it had been clawed by giant hands; a jagged rip ran several feet along the starboard hull, and a chunk had been whacked out of the bow. Whalers were famous for their ability to float even if the hull was broken into pieces. His brother had had years of experience with Whalers. Eric would have known the boat hadn’t been in danger of sinking. Certainly, the damage to the boat did not justify Eric’s abandoning it. Plainly, his brother shouldn’t have jumped. He would have been safer staying on board.

So why did he jump? Panic? Confusion? Something else?

There was a wooden ladder on the far side of the boat, and he climbed up onto the stern. All hatches and the door to the cuddy cabin were sealed with yellow CRIME SCENE tape. He wanted to look at the outboard engines, but they were sealed as well.

“Can I help you?” A man below, shouting up. Heavyset, grizzled, streaks of grease on his work clothes. Dirty baseball cap shaded his eyes.

“Oh hi,” Peter said. “My name is Peter Jansen. This is my brother’s boat.”

“Uh-huh. What’re you doing here?”

“Well, I wanted to see—”

“You illiterate?” the man said.

“No, I’m—”

“Well it seems like you must be, because that sign over there says plain as day, all visitors register at the main office. Are you a visitor?”

“I guess.”

“Why didn’t you register?”

“I just thought I could—”

“Wrong. You can’t. Now what the hell you doing up there?”

“This is my brother’s—”

“I heard you the first time. Your brother’s boat. You see all that yellow tape? I know you do, and I also know you can read it, ’cause you told me you’re not illiterate. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“So that’s a crime scene, and you got no business up there. Now you get the hell down right away, and go to the office and register, and show us some identification. You have identification?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then. Get down off of there, and stop wasting my time.” The man stalked off.

Peter climbed down the ladder on the far side of the boat. As he came near the ground, he heard a gruff male voice say, “Can I help you, Miss?” And a woman’s voice answered, “Yes, I’m looking for a Boston Whaler the Coast Guard brought in.”

It was Alyson’s voice.

He paused, hidden from view by the hull of the boat.

“Goddamn,” the man said. “What is it about that fricking boat? Gets more visitors than a rich uncle on his deathbed.”

“How’s that?” she said.

“Well, yesterday some guy shows up, claiming it was his boat, ’cept he had no identification, so I told him to get lost. The things people try! Then this morning we have some young guy, claiming it was his brother’s boat, I had to get him out of the cockpit, and now we got you. What is it about that boat?”

“I really couldn’t say,” Alyson said. “Myself, I just left something on the boat, and I wanted to get it back.”

“No chance of that. Not unless you got a letter of authorization from the police. Do you?”

“Well, no…”

“Sorry. That’s a crime scene, like I told the young guy.”

“Where is this guy?” she asked.

“He was coming down the ladder. Probably still on the other side of the boat. He’ll be along. Want to come inside the office?”

“Why would I do that?”

“We can call the police, see if they’ll give you a waiver to get your stuff off the boat.”

“That seems like a lot of trouble. It’s just my, well, it’s my watch. I took it off my wrist…”

“No trouble.”

“I guess I could buy another one. It did cost a bit—”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought it would be easy.”

“Well, suit yourself. But you still better sign in.”

“I don’t see why.”

“You’re supposed to.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in any police thing.”

Peter waited a few minutes, then heard the man say, “You can come out, son.”

He came out from behind the hull. There was no sign of Alyson in the yard. The heavyset man looked at him quizzically, head cocked to one side. “Didn’t want to run into her?”

“We don’t get along,” Peter said.

“I figured.”

“You want me to sign in?”

The man nodded slowly. “Yes, please.”

So Peter went into the office and signed in. He couldn’t see what difference it made. Alyson Bender already knew he had gone to the boat, and therefore she already knew he suspected something. From this point on, he would have to move fast.

By the end of the day, he thought, he had to be finished.

He went back to his hotel room, where he found an e-mail from Jorge on his laptop, with no text. Instead there were three .wav files, sent as attachments. One was a recording of Alyson Bender’s call to Vin Drake. And there were two new files. He listened to them. They were recordings of two phone calls Alyson had made from her cell phone in the hours after Eric had disappeared. Both calls seemed fairly routine. In the first call, Alyson had phoned somebody, perhaps in a Nanigen purchasing department, and asked for a new budget breakdown. In the second call, she had spoken briefly with another person, a man, perhaps an accountant, on the subject of expenses.

ALYSON: Omicron has lost two more, uh, prototypes.

OTHER PERSON: What happened?

ALYSON: They didn’t tell me. Vin Drake wants you to account for this as an ordinary research expense, not a capital write-down.

OTHER PERSON: The loss of two Hellstorms? But that’s a big cost—the Davros people—

ALYSON: Just call it research, okay?

OTHER PERSON: Of course.

Peter saved the files after listening to them, but they didn’t make sense or reveal anything he could use. He also saved the telephone conversation between Alyson and Vin, however, which would be very useful. He downloaded it onto a flash memory stick and slipped the stick into his pocket, and then burned a CD of the same conversation. Then he took the CD to the hotel business center and had them print a professional label that said “NANIGEN DATA 5.0 10/28.” When he was finished, he checked his watch. It was shortly after eleven in the morning.

He went down to the terrace to have a late breakfast and sit in the sun. Over coffee and eggs, he realized he was making a lot of assumptions. The most important assumption was that Nanigen would have a conference room equipped with the usual electronic equipment. That seemed a safe enough bet. All high-tech companies had such rooms.

Second, he assumed that the tour would move all the graduate students together en masse, instead of breaking them into smaller groups or taking them around individually. But he suspected that Vin Drake would give the tour himself, and Vin liked an audience—the bigger the better. Also, if everybody stayed together, it would be easier for Nanigen to control exactly how much information they were given.

For Peter, it was important that the students be kept together, because he felt he needed as many witnesses as possible for what he was planning to do. Or should he try to stage it in front of just one or two witnesses? No…his mind raced…no, try to provoke a blowup in front of many people. That might be the best way, he thought, to get Drake’s facade to crack, and perhaps reveal what Drake and Alyson had done to his brother. Finally, he had to hope that Drake would lose his cool, or at least that Alyson would, especially if they were primed in a way that made them nervous. And he thought he knew how to do that. If he pulled it off, Drake or Alyson might get very upset in front of the grad students. And that was what he wanted.