The Black Silent

CHAPTER 30

Sam was amused on an otherwise intense day. Haley, for all her brass, was obviously conservative in some matters. Wrapped in blankets and out of the wet clothes, he felt as though he might actually recover from the hypothermia. His clothes were in the dryer.

They found a frozen ham, used the microwave, and ate it half-thawed.

"How many days have you had like this in your life?" she asked. "This is my first."

"I've had days like this. But this one's been exciting enough to suit me."

He watched her as she went through the first-aid kit, pulling out bandage materials.

Her hair came down to her jawline and curled at the ends just below it. There was a slight tautness to her face, so there was a subtle inward curve between her cheekbones and her jaw, making her cheekbones more prominent than soft. It was a strong face; the eyes, reminding him of Sarah, were blue-green and thoughtful; the smile when it came was engaging; her even white teeth gave it confidence. Her brows were neither heavy nor stiletto thin. At the moment she showed no sign of panic or desperation. Being busy with a purpose was a good antidote, he knew from experience.

He was drawn to her face and he knew that under other circumstances he could gaze at it for pleasure. Her arms, he noticed, were firm in the muscle but slender and shapely.

He turned and engaged her eyes and it brought a slight smile.

He tried to handle the bandages but still shook so bad she had to help him. With his knowledge and her hands they went to work. Experienced in emergency medicine, he directed the cleaning of the wound and the slathering on of antiseptic. By the time they reached the bandage stage, he was a little warmer and steady again and he helped her fashion an impressive structure of gauze and tape in just about two minutes. Fortunately, it was an inch-long clean cut that didn't go into the muscle.

Leaning against him with her arm around his waist, she helped him out on the patio and got him to the edge of the tub. They stopped. She ran her hands over his chest and then put her face against it.

"There was a time…," she said, and stopped. Obviously she was displeased with herself for starting down the path.

He understood and in his own mind came to a dead-end wall. It was a large wall and would take some contemplation if he was to scale it. He climbed in the tub sans the blankets in order to get warm, but also to separate her from him.

"Why don't you find a suit and get in," he said.

She just smiled and held up her bandaged upper arm as though the answer to the question was obvious. And he supposed it was, but it had nothing to do with her arm.

"You could keep your arm out of the water."

She nodded but looked unconvinced. "With me friendly-fun hot tubbing is like a prelude at the symphony. You're about to tell me that sharing a tub is not even music.

Probably that you don't even do music. I don't unpack the instrument if I'm not going to play. And frankly, I'm in a state. And so are you."

"I won't even take a quick look at the program." He made a show of closing his eyes, illustrating that she could enter the tub unobserved.

"I can't," she said.

And he knew she meant it. So he left it alone.

"Sometimes I get the impression that you've become like a priest," Haley said.

"Consecrated. I do wish you would explain this consecration."

He could tell this was important to her. Perhaps if he had such a vow, it would make her feel a little less like her mother's daughter. Maybe there was a way for her to escape the shame that haunted her and still leave the memory of her mother with a mother's respect.

He would think on it.

It was polite and appropriate that they were both ignoring his sizable erection. One could be consecrated in the heart, if not the body, and obviously that is what she meant.

It was a gutsy suggestion for her and one likely to get turned down. On the other hand, he supposed he could reconsider his decision to hold inside himself the pain and perhaps fear-yes, it was also fear-of the missing memory.

"Think about where I am in life, Sam," she added.

It was an odd remark, but he understood it. There was a lot of self-awareness in Haley.

Emotionally she had been through the fire. She'd been stripped of her reputation and struggled with what was left of her dignity. The pain of her mother's humiliation lived inside her. If that weren't enough, everything she valued had been taken from her, except Ben- and now even Ben was threatened. And then there was the summer of '94, Sam's abrupt departure, and the long silence that followed. Probably years. He couldn't remember exactly how many. Haley would not have wanted to be angry when he came back, but Sam knew anger was a common escape from sorrow because anger wasn't as painful. Interestingly, she seemed to understand this about herself. It had happened with Sanker as well. If he honored Haley by telling her what had happened to him, maybe he helped her a little. Maybe he helped himself. If only he knew all of it. But he didn't know the most important part.

Sam had never told anyone, not even his mother, what had happened to Anna and him.

He pondered for a few seconds and felt the stress of indecision. It was not a familiar mental state. Normally, he made his decisions crisply and without hesitation, a habit that had kept him alive. But this was not that kind of decision. It was too big and too personal an issue to resolve in the middle of this emergency.

"Relationships come out of good times and bad times. We're having the bad times. Let's get this over with and have some good. Then we can talk."

The disappointment in her eyes pained him.

"We can't stay more than just a few minutes," he added as if to explain. "We should look at the papers I took from Ben's, just in case there is more than one relevant section."

In the end neither her pain nor frustration made him change his mind. In part he decided to tell her because putting it out in front of another human being was a moral challenge.

Partly it was because they had just faced death together, and still did face it.

"I was married to Anna Wade-"

"So the stories were true."

"The actress," he finished.

"She was murdered in a robbery."

"It wasn't a robbery. We hushed the torture part for her family. It's been part of my job in life to deceive the press, and we did that. We even deceived the police because they allowed themselves, on an official level, to be deceived. There was no one to prosecute.

The assailants died. That's why you can't tell anyone."

"The magazines said it happened at home," Haley said.

"It didn't. We were caught by some very bad people. They wanted revenge and information. They were torturing her while I was required to watch. In the process of torturing her they began on me. It was much worse than if they were just torturing me.

"They were cutting their way up my legs. It was a woman who did the cutting; the man with the grudge watched. I remember Anna being tortured, but I can't remember the end.

I do remember that when they were ready to castrate me, they made a mistake. They wanted me to participate in some manner that was… not important. They thought they had broken me and that I would do what they wanted. They said I could save my eyesight and they would let Anna live if she could, if I cooperated in their sick game. I didn't believe them. They were just crazy enough to take that chance with me.

"There were four of them, in all. Three men and a woman. Two of the men who were torturing Anna left the room. Anna was screaming, begging to die. The man and woman loosened one of my hands; they were going to make me participate. I know I surprised them, got my fingers into the woman's eyes. That's all I can remember. They found me wandering, semiconscious, I guess. Everyone was dead, with bullets in them, including Anna."

Sam sank a little deeper into the tub water.

"I must have gotten one of their guns and shot them. I tell myself now that I was saving us from the men, but I had to know it was a small, concrete room. Didn't I know Anna might get hit? Maybe I was willing to risk killing her to end her pain. She was pretty far gone already. Or maybe one of them shot her."

Haley had tears in her eyes, and so did Sam.

"Every night I tell myself that I wasn't trying to hit her," he said, "and every night I end the matter not knowing."

Haley put her hand on his.

"How did you escape?" she finally asked.

"We figured that it took me almost twenty-four hours to get my upper body free of the chains. Then I was able to reach one of the captors to find a key to the leg irons. I have a vivid memory re-created in my dreams of the bodies and the blood. I don't remember seeing Anna, although certainly I did see her body."

"Who were these people?"

"A man named Trotsky. He had been the right hand of a terrorist who killed people for money. I killed Trotsky. Gaudet, his boss the terrorist, is still in prison in France, where he can't be executed because they don't do the death penalty. He's really messed up physically after what some inmates did to him. There are some badass Muslim terrorists in that jail and he has a problem with them about some money he lost. Trotsky had a brother, who was a killer, and a crazy sister, who was even more vengeful than he was.

Together they worked on getting me. I suspect Trotsky's brother took money from some others to kill me as well. The torture was for free."

"I am so sorry," Haley said. "I never could have imagined. I didn't mean to…"

Sam managed a smile. "It's okay."

"It's such a horrible story. Especially for your wife."

"It was much worse living it."

Sam felt a little relief, maybe not as much as he'd hoped. He knew that things now made more sense for Haley. It still did not explain the summer of '94 and the following months. He wasn't sure there was an explanation. There was only an excuse.

"Now you've got to get to work on those papers," he said.

While she began carefully sorting through the soggy papers, Sam let the heat soak into him; other than the immense pain of thawing out all the damaged muscle tissue, it felt good to get warm at last.

It had even felt good to tell someone.

"I'm tired of waiting to hear what the fountain of youth will do for me. And how it will do it and what it will cost me," Sam said. "Imagine the lines."

She looked up for just a moment and smiled, obviously getting his dry humor. Then she went back to her reading. He saw the reflection of her in the water. She seemed completely engrossed, observing everything and saying nothing for fear that she might miss some subtlety in the sopping wet papers.

A moment before he had been sure that he was the object of her interest. Now it was the papers. It was tough losing out like that, he thought, laughing inwardly at his whimsy.

"I'm really interested in this mitochondria stuff."

"You really don't have time to figure it out."

"I'm a scientist. I read this stuff faster."

"Tell me what you see."

"You know the mitochondria are these tiny little things in your cell, like metabolic furnaces, that burn the oxygen you breathe. Each cell has about five hundred of them and it's how you get your energy. All this health-supplement pap that you read about- antioxidants in the pills, in the wine, in the dark chocolate, in the whatever-is supposed to counter what these little bad boys do when they get old. These furnaces get rusty, to borrow a not inappropriate metaphor, and then they produce the escaped oxygen molecules called free radicals that oxidize your body, in particular your DNA. As you age, your DNA doesn't copy itself quite right because of the oxidation. Hence, everybody wants an antioxidant to stop the deterioration of the DNA."

"I got that."

"Eons ago, mitochondria were actually symbiotic, separate organisms living inside the larger cell of the host. So they've got their own DNA, even though they are inside the cells of our body, and each of our cells has its own human genome."

"So we've really got two sets of DNA. One that is ours and one that belongs to our mitochondria," Sam said.

"Yeah. And get this, Ben tantalizingly suggests in a note that human DNA and mitochondria DNA might have something in common:

"We have all read that Arcs are closer to us genetically than are bacteria. What if the Arcs and the mitochondrial DNA and the human genome have something in common?

"You should know that human mitochondria use electrical transference and that they operate at about two hundred millivolts. We believe that mitochondria operating at one hundred fifty millivolts do not lose their oxygen-burning efficiency as rapidly.

Therefore, they age much more slowly. They also produce fewer free radicals when operating at lower voltage. Therefore, the human that has mitochondria operating at one hundred fifty millivolts may suffer less DNA deterioration and live longer.

"We believe that mice on low-calorie diets undergo a change in their mitochondria so that they run at lower voltage. We believe the same is true of mice that have their growth hormone genes suppressed at birth. We all know that these mice live longer than normal mice. Is this making sense? Think this through. I wish I were there to see the light go on behind your eyes.

Regrettably, if you're reading this, my presence is obviously impossible. There is so much more."

"That's pretty fascinating," Sam said.

"It is. The missing link for us now is the nature of the connection between human mitochondrial DNA and Arc DNA. Arcs don't use oxygen. It would be poison to them, in fact. So one wonders how they could have anything to do with us."

"But they don't suffer the DNA deterioration that we do if they can reproduce themselves after thousands of years. And remember what we found in the other note that they had discovered an Arc gene they called Arc Two."

"You are so right," she said.

"I thought I saw something where they are looking for a gene and he thought the answer might be in the Sargasso stew," Sam said.

"What?" She shuffled through the papers. "Yes. Here it is. Apparently they are looking for a gene or, more correctly, a particular Arc with a certain gene. That's strange. They found one gene Arc Two, but are they looking for its source. How could that be? I don't get the Sargasso stew. I'll have to think about that. Something rings a bell, but I can't remember."

Rossitter had their Judas on the speakerphone. Sanker was listening for more than could be heard, hunched over his bar where the speakerphone was mounted. He normally used it to settle bets and the like, or check the stables before post time at the racetrack, especially on weekends. Sanker owned racehorses and had done rather well at them, like everything else that he undertook. This weekend's particular permutation of corporate life at Sanker was fast becoming a notable exception to his usual success.

"How do you know that Sarah James is in danger from Frick?" Rossitter asked.

There was a pause, as if the Judas were thinking over the answer.

Sanker's mind worked feverishly trying to imagine what was at risk, whether they might even be taped by the authorities in some sort of sting operation. Not likely, but then again his sons would swear he was over at the stables at this very moment. Hanging it on Rossitter was a last resort, but necessary, in case of disaster.

"Giving you my sources of information," their Judas continued, "won't help me or you.

So let's stick with the current events. I believe he has her. If Frick were to torture her, that means he'll have to kill her. Eventually. You see? I'm telling you that this result could be very bad for you. You need to act."

"It should be obvious to you that anyone associated with Sanker Corporation is not going to be kidnapping people," Sanker replied, "and if they were to commit such incomprehensible evil, they certainly are not going to tell us or anyone else about it.

Men of this ilk don't go explaining their activities. On the other hand, your allegations are extraordinary, and if you have information, you should do the right thing with it. Tell the state or federal authorities."

"Get off this crap. You're not speaking into a microphone. It's a little late to get paranoid. You're in this too deep. You know there is no way to call the state and stop something that's happening at this very moment at an unknown location."

"We don't know what you're talking about," Rossitter insisted. "You're not telling us anything we can use."

"Well, you better figure it out if you want Ben Anderson's secrets after he's gone. You better get off your ass and stop Frick."

The Judas hung up.

"He's desperate," Sanker said. "This isn't good. He's more concerned about Sarah James than he is about getting us the secrets. I can hear it in his voice. Then again, maybe she is the key to the secret."

"Should we call Frick?"

"Certainly not," Sanker said. "The minute we get involved in the details, we're culpable.

We'll just have to trust Frick to extract what we need." The old man thought for a minute. "You know, it may be much better for us if Frick denies any knowledge of her whereabouts. If he has her, he'll never admit it. Never. Without revealing it to Frick, put a private investigator of impeccable reputation on the phone with you and Frick-he'll be a witness to Frick's denial."

Haley worried that Sanker's men would be at Ben's beach house and she worried that Sam was in no shape to fight anybody or even run away. She optimistically argued to herself that maybe there wasn't a lot wrong other than his bad knee and hip and a multitude of cuts, scratches, and near-hypothermia. At times it seemed he could barely walk, and then when he had to move, he somehow managed to hobble along in a sort of spastic lope.

"We've got to get out of here," he said.

"I know, I know, but this is so pertinent."

She was flipping through pages with one ear out for Frick's men, concerned that at any moment they would come knocking at the door, but literally unable to stop reading. She had found some fairly analytic text and proceeded to a page that seemed out of place: The gene holding the secret to the marvelous paradox between duplication and re-creation and how to control the benefits of each.

"Here it is. He is talking about the fact that DNA needs to excel at both duplication and re-creation. The incredible beauty of DNA is that it is changeable in sexual reproduction and we make babies. What is more awesome than a baby? A mixing of two people-

Nature at Her most creative."

"God at His most creative."

She smiled. The "he vs. she" joke was not lost on her.

"Anyway, this is profound, what he's saying. DNA's strength in sexual reproduction is also its greatest weakness. It comes apart and changes. But when our body replaces old, worn-out cells, they're supposed to be exact duplicates. In duplication, DNA's changeability is a problem. The copies get blurred, like copies off a bad copy machine. I wonder if Ben's solved that problem somehow. He's hinting at it."

"We really need to go," Sam said. "I'm impressed, but we gotta go."

She took one last look through the papers while Sam gathered his semidry clothes and erased all possible traces of their presence from the Williamses' house.

"Here's another reference to Sargasso stew. I think he's talking about the Sargasso Sea, and I think I know what he means."

Sam had everything together and cleaned up. He was checking the windows for the arrival of any unwanted guests. Or hosts.

"Tell me, but let's get out of here soon." "We looked at an article at the open-air mausoleum near the old Del Haro Hotel."

"The McMillan family ashes are in the marble seats in this shrine in the forest and old graves mark the path. Hard to forget," Sam said.

"Ben and I had walked there while we were waiting for more dinner guests at the McMillan House restaurant and Ben had gene-sequencing data to go over at dinner.

They had used some of Venter's method with help from Venter's lab for analyzing octopuses' genome sequences. It got dark and we were sitting on the family's ashes in the marble seats around the marble table. Anyway, they pulled up on the computer this little article about Venter. Some kind of a voyage on his yacht."

Haley glanced at the computer on the desk in the nearby study.

"I wish I knew the password. We could search for it."

"You probably don't need to. Many home computers don't use a password," Sam said.

Sam turned it on and a password dialogue box came up.

"Oops." Sam fished around in the desk drawer and found the Windows install disk. He put the CD in the computer and then unplugged the computer. Immediately he plugged the computer back in and hit the escape key and F2 key simultaneously.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting into BIOS. We've been here this long, I guess we can gamble on a few more minutes and hope it doesn't kill us."

Another dialogue box came up asking for a password. In about one minute Sam had the back of the computer off and he pulled a pin disconnecting the jumper. Pushing the computer reset button put him into the BIOS. In BIOS configuration he directed the computer to look at the CD before it went to the hard drive, thereby changing the booting sequence.

"I've effectively told the computer to boot off the CD. Voila. No password needed."

Sam installed the new system and used the new system to access the Internet.

"I'd love to know how you used this in your former life."

"Any computer tech could do this, no problem," Sam said. "It's nothing."

"So passwords are baloney."

"You could say that. Especially on home applications."

They found a number of articles. Then they found the one that discussed the Sargasso Sea:

Venter is a pioneer in gene sequencing first on the human genome, when he beat the federal

Government, and now in beginning to catalog the diversity of the seas. He's on a round-the- world voyage with a yacht equipped with gene-sequencing computers. To prove that human genes (some 25,000 of them in all) are a tiny minority among millions of other genes on the planet, Venter pulled up water samples from the Sargasso Sea. It was thought to be a relatively unproductive ocean. Using his advanced gene-searching techniques, Venter isolated 1.2 million genes from no more than a few buckets of seawater. He discovered 1,800 new microbes.

"See that's Sargasso stew. Venter's sequencing methods applied to a random mix," Haley said.

"Why specifically would that be of interest to Ben?"

"You saw something in all these papers about looking for a gene?"

"So I did."

"This is a way to look. Only maybe you look in deep-sea sediment. But I don't think we've figured out the Sargasso stew." Haley sighed. "Maybe the reference is to something else. We'd better go to the beach house. Maybe the rest of his files will tell us something."