Unacceptable Risk

Chapter 20

The gray mist hung in the trees and lay over the water, just fitting in the channel as if cotton placed by loving hands. The mountains were steep and sprinkled with oak and mixed conifers. Michael had read about them but had not seen them since childhood, and his fascination was keen.

Although it had been only three days since the meeting in Central Park he was disappointed that he had heard nothing about any capture of Gaudet.

Frederick, a mule on loan from a local hunting outfitter, seemed bored with the mountain and clearly wanted the oats that were his due every time he made the bottom or the top. It was a bit of mule psychology that Michael had learned from the owner.

Yodo was in a good mood this morning and had actually made a little conversation on the way down.

"A very good place," he had said, followed by a few com parisons with the Hokkaido Forest in Japan. It was a speech for Yodo. Yodo's succinct approach to communication suited Michael fine. The best thing about Yodo was not what he said but the way he occasionally smiled. It carried a hint of irony that Michael found appealing.

This morning it helped in only a small way with the melancholy inside him. The disappointment of losing Grady would linger and he was still affected by Marita's death and the loss of Eden, his wife. Things could come together in the mind like ocean waves that mount one upon the other.

He had seen the desert in summer and it seemed a very tired place and he thought of it now. When his father had taken him, it was parched and had become like an old face, the deep lines in the clay running out everywhere and nowhere, for good reasons, but not according to any predetermination that a man could explain; the moisture of it was blown away, leaving only grit and subtle shadings of warm colors that blended easily with no line between the brown, the tan, and the gold. His soul had become like the desert, and Grady had become the white cloud forming against the incessant blue-she made him see promise of an end and a beginning; new rain that turned the soil alive and the air sweet, the restoring of the arid terrain.

Now she was gone.

They were down in a deep canyon on the Wintoon River in northern California. One thousand feet above them ran a two-lane asphalt road and at their feet, two hundred yards below, the river frothed in a deep rock canyon. Michael pon dered the cable stretched across the river, a good one hun dred feet off the water at its lowest point. On the far side there was a bluff and a flat two-acre area with two log houses, one with several rooms and one a cabin.

The bluff was bordered on two sides by the intersection of two rivers at right angles, the Wintoon and Salmon rivers. There was no feasible way to access Michael's new home ex cept a white-water trip in a kayak or a long, torturous hike down the mountain and then a boat ride across the river or a hand-pull on a cable-suspended cart. Unless one crossed the gorge suspended from the cable, any other access across the river entailed scaling a cliff to Michael's plateau. To Michael, this meant protection, but Sam had been concerned about the sheer number of hiding places and the difficulties of security in any forest environment. Still, it was much better than New York, and since Michael was a free man, he decided that this would be his home. For now. It was a primitive place. Michael could feel the wildness here that he loved so well. California, even some of the remote parts, could get a bit crowded, but this area was not well traveled once you moved more man one hun dred yards off the highway. Michael's home's location elimi nated all but the most determined. Tourists wouldn't make it down the trail, much less across the river, unless they wanted to try their hands at white-water swimming in a cold river.

This place was called an inholding. It was surrounded by national forest and the government had wanted to buy it. Their only problem was that the white-haired gentleman who had owned the place cared only a little for money, loved his land, and hated the government. It was a formula that brought Michael his new home. Old and tired, the owner had been hauled off by his only child, a daughter, more or less against his will-even if his shackles were the bonds of love. Now, a few days after first laying eyes on the place, Michael was moving in.

The cable car was actually a flatbed with no sides. Michael and Yodo loaded his stuff and Michael tried to summon his old enthusiasm. The donkey had carried his two hundred pounds and Yodo, about 125. Michael's wounds were still healing so he carried only his camera and notepad. They hobbled Frederick, gave him oats and hay, and Michael climbed aboard the flatbed of the cable car to pull his way across the two hundred feet. It was easy to see why the realtor refused even to consider making the trip and had listed the property without ever setting foot on it.

Once on the other side Michael sent the cart back for Yodo and began hauling the two hundred pounds of stuff into his new home. He would make twenty or thirty such trips to move in, but he didn't mind. Solitude was worth a great deal. He realized that he had become a bit of a recluse. In the Amazon, in recent times, silent visits from Marita had been plenty, so long as he had his weekly trips to Angamos to play his Quena flute with the Red Howler band. Around these parts a car went by every five or ten minutes, but they were a thou sand feet above him. On his side of the Salmon River one had to ascend over five thousand feet and travel a good dis tance back to get to the nearest wilderness area trail-all perfectly satisfactory.

For a while Sam's men would be keeping him company. The revelations concerning the law firm had brought disturbing news about the lengths to which some would go to have the secret of the Chaperone. He had delivered the phony journal as promised, mainly to help Georges and Benoit, of whom he'd quickly grown fond. He had invited Raval to come and stay here once his spy days were over. Evidently, Raval's spy days were short-lived, because he had already arrived. Michael looked forward to the day when the technology en tered the public domain and they would no longer have to wear Kevlar.

Although he was volunteering to be the bait, he wondered if Sam hadn't happily shuttled him off to a secret life in California to get rid of him and to keep him safe. At least here, he and Georges could pore over the Chaperone papers in relative safety. One day, perhaps soon, Raval would tell him everything he knew. It would be fascinating to understand. In the meantime, Sam said, focus on staying alive.

"Your chin is practically on your desk," Jill said. Grady was nursing a cup of coffee. Jill pulled up a chair.

"I'm lost. I broke up with Clint last night."

"You only told him last night? You left him long before that."

"Why am I this way?"

"The reason now lives in the north of our great state, back in the mountains on the Wintoon River."

"I want to be with him."

"The problem is that Gaudet may be watching him. He must know that you're important to Bowden. Do you want to go through that all over again?"

"I understand the reasoning. But I don't have to like it. I just wonder if Gaudet would be right about the 'important' thing. Michael hasn't called or written."

"For God's sake, he thinks you have a boyfriend."

"So what do I do?"

"Sam would say suffer for the time being, but maybe you could write him."

"I want to see him just for a day or two. That's all. Then I can write. I could disguise myself as a boy or whatever."

"Where you gonna hide your chest?"

"Very funny."

"I'll talk to Sam. Maybe a short visit, hair under your hat. We're trying to get a government helicopter to scour the mountain with infrared so we'll know if someone's watch ing. If Sam says okay, take everything you could conceivably need. It's miles from nowhere."

"I'm not just gonna say howdy and have sex," Grady said, catching Jill's drift immediately.

The okay from Sam came more quickly than Grady could have imagined. Sam liked the effect she had on Michael and that, she was told, was the only reason. This was the one time in Grady's life that she had packed in fifteen minutes. It was because the flight departed in two and a half hours. She landed in San Francisco at 7:00 a.m. and took the 8:30 A.M. flight to Eureka. There she rented a car and got soaked in a gray rain that seemed dismal enough that even the dogs looked wet and depressed with their hair plastered to their ribs. The sky was everywhere and nowhere, blurring the green of the trees and reminding her that this was also a rain forest but in the cold, without the womblike warmth of Amazonia.

She drove into the town of McKinleyville and bought a poncho, some gloves, and a stocking cap. She already had a warm coat. Then she drove into the mountains. Nothing had really prepared her for this, having spent most of her life in LA. She had gone on family vacations but they stayed at re sorts and recreation areas in the south of the state or they went back east with money from Aunt Anna for what her mother called cultural experiences. Camping was never sug gested or undertaken, so she knew the vast stretches of mountains and forests that were in the West only through books and television, and they did not convey the feel of the place.

From the plane it had become apparent that California had far more trees than people. Behind the so-called red wood curtain lay miles of rugged, mountainous forest land that was largely unknown to the public. To go there from anyplace that anybody ever heard of, you had to fly in small planes or drive winding two-lane roads.

From Eureka she drove nearly an hour and a half into the mountains, past rivers that cut gorges thousands of feet below the mountaintops. She noticed that the water was crystalline, clean enough to scrub the soul. Trees were massive along the road and there were mosses and vines and all manner of green that she could not name. She had never seen anything like it and she found herself stopping the car and looking into the forest. There were bracken ferns like those she had seen around rural areas, one of the few plants she recognized. The conifers felt so strong and ancient that she got out of the car almost without thinking, as if drawn by sorcery. It was now near freezing and rain had turned to heavy mist, so she grabbed a GORE-TEX parka.

She walked to the forest's edge and looked, straining to see like a child peeking in a stranger's house. She stepped in among the trees. There was brush, but not much. The forest actually looked fairly open. Back nearer the coast, she recalled, it was more dense. Here the lower trunks were clear of branches and grayish green brush had grown up. Moments ago she had been in a rush, intent on being with Michael Bowden, but in this place of quiet and wild, where things were more timeless, it seemed a few minutes wouldn't matter. For a while she wandered down a gentle hill, enjoy ing the unfamiliar mystique of the forest. When next she stopped, she heard a stream and walked on to investigate. What she found was a series of beautiful pools a few feet across and vigorous cascades running between them.

The moss was almost effervescent and the grasses lush. The rocks were white and speckled and, even in the deep of the pools, the water was translucent and small green trout were vividly outlined, the black speckles of their backs plain. Something about the place made her shiver, but it wasn't the cold. Nor was it fear.

A very large tree attracted her attention and she walked to its base. She wondered if it might be a Douglas fir. Sam had told her long ago how the species was named after a Scotsman, a Mr. David Douglas, who was the first white man to publicize its existence. Instead of asking the Indians the tree's name, it was named after Douglas. The forest floor all around looked soft and thick with old needles.

She sat and watched the pools, and in a few moments there was a whirr sound and she realized that a large bird had landed in a nearby tree and she could just see the branches bobbing. On the tree that might be a Douglas fir, there was a giant fungus that looked mushroomlike. She wondered at its age. Something made her suspect that such a fungus would grow very slowly. She wondered how big the tree was on the date of her birth and realized that it had probably changed very little in the last twenty years. She couldn't imagine how old it might be. She imagined bringing Michael to this place and having him explain about the tree, the fungus, and the creatures. Surely, if he had been in these woods only a few days, he would know more than she might ever learn. She knew he was like that.

Near her shoe she spied a small salamander and farther away a chipmunk running over the litter on the ground like a picky shopper at a fruit stand.

Things were so different in the world of men than in the world of giant trees and quiet streams. A couple of weeks earlier, she thought, she might at least consider spending the rest of her life with a working stiff making babies. Then something strange had happened: Michael Bowden had come along.

The tree was not like her life. It never moved.

For a moment she thought she might be nuts sitting here in a forest several hundred miles from her home. This trip could leave her feeling very foolish. She was in love with a man who lived in her mind and now she was on a mission to discover if something in this world, one Michael Bowden in the flesh, might roughly match the man in her head. Of course she realized there was another possibility and that was that maybe he was different from her fantasies but nevertheless destiny's truly intended. Where love was concerned even the most cynical corners of her mind had to yield to a little magic. Looking at the fungus and the tree and the enchantment of the stream, the barely visible sky above, she felt truly insignificant. Still, somehow, people and their thoughts of her and her thoughts of them made her life im portant because most of mankind seemed bound by some metaphysical strangeness sometimes called consciousness or love, and if there was anything else out there in the great beyond, it might also be subject to this same love and this same self-awareness.

When she turned around, she had to think a moment where the road was and then realized she could just listen for the next car. She stood and waited. Nothing came, or at least she heard nothing, until she heard a snapping of branches off behind a thicket of trees.

This was a lonely winter road.

Listening again for cars, she still heard nothing. It could be anything in the forest, she told herself. She reached in her purse and removed the Desert Eagle. 357 magnum semiau tomatic that Sam had given her to supplement the less po tent, but much more compact, SIG Sauer P232 that she still had in the car. Pointing the big gun in the direction of the sounds, she began backing toward the highway. Maybe the stream drowned out the road noise. Then she considered. On one side of her, she had a stream, on the other a road. It should ensure that she wouldn't get lost. Or would it? The road had been making a giant U of sorts and wasn't running straight; so if she missed the U, she would actually be walking parallel to the earlier stretch.

Looking back toward what she supposed was the location of the road, she didn't see any parting of the bushes to indicate where she might have come. Unfortunately, she had walked through something of an open forest and paid little attention to landmarks. Again there was movement in among a thicket of trees. Fear surged through her and she turned and began to trot. She thought of Gaudet and imagined his cold eyes as he watched his men torture the Matses girls and realized she could have been followed from as far back as Los Angeles.

She began to run even as she told herself that if Gaudet was here and armed, he would have confronted her. After maybe a hundred feet she heard the whisper of a car, breathed a quiet sigh of relief, and vowed to tell no one. There didn't seem to be anyone following. Perhaps her fear had been silly.

She emerged on the road, jogged to her car, and drove on, the mountains becoming progressively steeper and the deep canyons deeper. Rocks left scars down the hillside where they flowed like rivers and abutments had been constructed to keep them off the road. Often they failed and she had to be careful, lest she high center the rental car on a boulder. Again Grady felt small in this mammoth-size wilderness.

She used her odometer to find the wide spot in the road where, according to the realtor, the trail to Michael's house began. Jill had been smart about discerning how to find the place. Since it had just sold, Jill knew that the real estate community would have some vague idea or description of how it might be found. And they did. They said if you kept going two hundred yards past a mile marker on the highway paralleling the Salmon, you could look down the cliffs and see the cabin. At the trailhead there was nothing but a forest and a slight incline that obviously led to much steeper terrain. Slowly she drove up the deserted two-lane road and was struck with the grandeur of the walls of rock and the velvet of great forests that rose into the clouds and looked as if conjured by one of the turn-of-the-century landscape artists she had studied in art history class.

When she came to the next wide spot in the road, she got out into the chill of the mountain air and looked over the side. Almost straight down a thousand feet she saw a large, cascading river intersected by a smaller one known as the Wintoon River. Where the Wintoon River emptied into the larger Salmon, a series of magnificent cascades churned white. In the whole of the giant canyon there seemed one level spot and that was on the far side of the Salmon, at the confluence with the Wintoon. It was a plateau a slight dis tance above both rivers, tiny, mostly wooded, and utterly isolated. On the large bench of land stood two cabins, one fairly large with a gray plume of smoke and a light in the window that created a sense of humanity in the valley.

Looking through her binoculars, she saw various works of stone about the place. They resembled walls and wall seg ments and cone-shaped structures that she couldn't quite fig ure out. Who would have built these rock creations? Why would they bother? Grady could make out two rock piles that appeared to be small fortifications of a sort and it seemed as though she could make out a man inside one of them, for there was the barrel of what looked to be a large gun, judging from its location and the posture of it.

Ah. Of course. Sam's men.

Gaudet had the point of the knife under her chin and Benoit was backed into a corner. Her mind struggled to remember all that Spring had said. Everything was starting to be a jumble in her mind.

"Hold still or you'll be cut. Making a deal makes me hungry for Benoit. Somewhere beneath this sanctimonious bullshit that you seem to have picked up in prison, there is the old Benoit, my playmate, and I am going to find her."

"But, like I said, it's-"

"I don't care."

He pulled a condom out of his pocket and stuck it in his teeth.

"Let me unzip the dress, you can cut the rest," Benoit said. He let her turn around and then he slid the zipper down. She was near panic. Sam had come up with real blood from a blood bank and she had used a speculum to pour it inside herself before inserting a tampon. When she removed the tampon in her charade with Gaudet, she lost all the blood. If Gaudet discovered she was lying, he might kill her. The French might or might not require her release before they closed the escrow in forty-eight hours.

"I am going to use the restroom."

"That's not necessary. I like what you have on, having selected it myself."

"No, I mean I really have to go to the bathroom."

"Hurry up."

She went in the bathroom and closed the door. She was shaking. They were on the twentieth floor and escaping out the window was not possible. Besides which, she didn't yet have enough information. She turned and looked, not knowing what she was looking for; then something struck her- the makeup in the drawer provided by Gaudet. She pulled it out. There was red fingernail polish. Mixing it with water, she created a solution that looked like menstrual blood. She turned on the water and began filling the tub. It took her only seconds to strip and climb in as it slowly filled. She poured the fingernail solution between her legs creating tendrils of red in the water. Then she lay back with her eyes closed.

"What's going on?" Gaudet opened the door without knocking and came and sat on the edge of the tub.

"The presentation isn't bad. I always loved you nude."

"Have you seen the Loire Valley?"

"Of course."

"In the summer, when I was a girl, I went there to my grandfather's place. The flowers were amazing in their variety with marvelous colors and so many translucent, delicate petals. I remember particularly the beautiful blues. There were trees a thousand years old, and there were creeks and the river, and grass as green as Ireland, and butterflies. Even the snakes were beautiful and it was so peaceful in the buzz of the hot afternoons, everything seemed at rest and in its place, and there was no discord. Can you think of a place like that for you?"

"It's pure illusion. The frogs eat the bugs, and the birds eat the frogs, and the foxes eat the birds, and the men hunt the foxes down with hounds, and the dogs tear them to pieces while their hearts still beat, and the men laugh and feel strong. I don't live in illusions." "But the flowers are beautiful."

"They are deceptions. Flowers persuade bees to fuck and men use them to persuade women to spread their legs and incur the misery of childbirth. That is all they are good for." "Tell me about your mother."

"My mother and father died when I was young and probably never gave a shit about me anyway. I think my mother was an adulterous bitch and my father well on his way to being a drunk. I have no soft memories. I am a realist. As a young man I drove away my boss's competitors in the laundry business with my fists. Then I killed my boss and took his business. That was about as good as anything I ever felt." "I have some good memories and I want at least a few people to be grateful that I lived."

"I want to make bad days for others before they make bad days for me. Now how can I take you in a bathtub?"

Unable to think of anything else, she slipped away into her we pac maw, and after sometime she heard him say "shit" and leave.

Gaudet had left the hotel by the time she dressed. Trotsky and the guards had replaced him in her room.

"He wants you when he gets back," Trotsky said. "If I were you, I'd stop toying with him."

Later, when the maid came, Trotsky disappeared into Gaudet's room. The two guards remained while the woman cleaned. All of a sudden, Benoit was shocked to see a hand emerge from under a linen drape covering the side of the cart. It waved. Glancing at the guards, she could tell that one was absorbed with his sporting magazine and another with pornography. She rose and walked to the desk, picked up a pad of message paper and a pen. One of the guards looked at her and at the paper. She ignored him. Promptly she wrote the following:

Escrow closes at 4:00 P.M.. Cordyceps in three days. French believe five. Gaudet's men to release vec tor with fake police helicopters. NY, Chicago, Wash., LA. Computer virus at same time.

Then she walked past the cart back to the desk, dropping the paper on the floor. The cart stood between the paper and the two guards. In a flash the hand snatched the paper and dropped another on the floor. When she went to the desk, she picked up the TV remote, turned, and dropped it by the cart, scooping up the paper when she knelt.

Do you want out? it read.

Trotsky walked into the room. "Gaudet wants you now."

"You're just in time. We should be getting the e-mailed closing statement any moment."

"Never mind that. We're leaving." He shooed the maid and her cart out into the hall. "The escrow closed. You think we would sit around waiting for an e-mail? Devan has been on the phone with Credit Suisse. We're out of here. Now."

Trotsky grabbed her arm and rushed her into Gaudet's room. They put her in a trunk and two big men wheeled her out.

Baptiste was sweating as he stared at the screen. Escrow was to close in minutes. The admiral had retired to his office to await Baptiste's call. Apparently he couldn't wait because Gaudet's phone buzzed and the electronic readout indicated it was the admiral.

"Just about to close," Baptiste said.

"The scientists are screaming that they didn't have ade quate time to verify Chaperone. Raval's lab notes don't reveal the source of the Chaperone molecule. Apparently, Northern Lights kept that a secret. Bowden's journal shows a salamander discovery of all things and Gaudet says the Chaperone molecule came from this salamander. I'm sure he's relying on Benoit. Apparently, Raval told Bowden and Benoit which of his submissions yielded the molecule, but we have nothing in writing from Bowden. There is a lot of puzzlement among the scientists," the admiral concluded.

"Well, it's too late to worry about it now. E-mail just arrived this second; it's closed."

"It's done then."

"Yes. Our money is gone and we have the goods."

"But verification of Chaperone's nowhere in sight. It could take days, or if we have shitty luck, it could take weeks! This thing is like a runaway train. We just better be right" The admiral slammed a fist into his open hand.

"Benoit is betting her pardon on it," Baptiste insisted.

"We've got to inform the Americans in enough time," the admiral said.

"It's five days. Let's warn them in four or sooner if we can verify that we have Chaperone. By that time we may know for sure."

"What if we find out tomorrow that we don't have it?

Then what?"

"We still have a card to play with Gaudet and Benoit. We tell the U.S. about Cordyceps immediately if Gaudet and Benoit don't get us Chaperone."

"But then maybe Gaudet pulls the trigger early anyway," the admiral said.

"Maybe he does. But we lose all of our leverage with Gaudet once we tell the U.S. All hell will break loose and he'll know we've told them."

"So, it's really a matter of French national security that we verify Chaperone before sharing our theories with the Americans, and that's all they are… theories… about Cordyceps."

"Exactly," Baptiste agreed.

"When, ah… the financial arrangements… Gaudet's, I mean-"

"Of course if the Americans stop Cordyceps as they surely will, there won't be much of a drop in the market. I guess maybe just a small drop because of the scare," Baptiste said.

"Maybe no drop if the Americans stop it completely."

"Absolutely. No question. We're working hard to verify that Cordyceps is real and to determine how the plan would be carried out. So far, I must admit, we have been unable to gather any information on that aspect"