Gargantua (14 page)

Hale’s eyes widened. “How the hell’d you manage that one?”

Paul grinned. “Friends in low places. C’mon.”

Still carrying the container—Jack said it contained fish and soil samples from Iozima—they walked at a brisk pace to Paul’s office. Paul sat at his computer—which he never turned off—and tapped the mouse button, clearing the screensaver of a nude centerfold, then clicked over to his web browser. Jack rolled his eyes at the screensaver; Hale just grinned. The pair of them flanked Paul as he said, “Okay, shoot.”

Jack gave him the URL, which Paul dutifully typed in. Within seconds, he was looking at pictures of mutated frogs.

“Yuck,” was Paul’s first comment.

“Mutated frogs,” Jack said, “with extra eyes and extra limbs. Discovered in contaminated ponds—first in Minnesota, then in Vermont, California, Québec . . .”

Hale rubbed his chin. “So our poor big friend could be some kind of mutation?”

Jack shrugged. “Frogs and salamanders are part of the same biological order. Which means they could have similar biochemical reactions to ingesting pesticides.”

“I can do a preliminary analysis,” Hale said, looking down at the container. “Enough to detect chemical traces, anyhow.”

Jack blinked. “You have that kind of equipment?”

“Mostly. Between my gear, and the stuff Alyson’s got in her lab at the clinic, I should be able to do it.”

“Okay. Hey, Paul, where’s Brandon? He’d enjoy being part of this.”

Paul shrugged. “I haven’t seen him. Been cooped up here all day.”

“All right—I want to take a shot at feeding the beast with what we collected. Once the good doctor takes his sample, you wanna give me a hand with the feeding?”

“Sure,” Paul said with a smile.
What the heck,
he thought,
it’s a photo op.

Within half an hour, Paul and Jack had rigged a metal trough full of what Jack said was a representative sample of the general vicinity of Iozima to a pulley. “In theory,” Jack said, “it should treat this stuff like a home-cooked meal.” He sighed. “Certainly, it hasn’t liked anything else we’ve thrown at it.”

Placing the pulley by the shark cage, the two of them carefully lowered the trough into the cage. The big lizard remained submerged up to its neck, leaving plenty of room for the trough to swing on the pulley as they lowered it.

Once the trough was about halfway down the abovewater part of the cage, Jack said, “Okay, let’s hold it there.” They secured the rope.

The creature then rose up out of the water slowly. Paul swore the thing looked like a vulture as it arced up and over the trough. It smelled the contents for a moment, then shoved its snout in. Within seconds, it was hungrily devouring the contents.

“It recognizes the taste,” Jack said. He pumped his fist and said, “Yes! Finally!”

“Nice work,” Paul said.

“Well, the Iozima Ridge is its home.”

Hale approached just then. “Found the right diet, yeah?”

“So it would seem,” Jack said proudly.

“Well, I’ve got news. It looks like your suspicion was right, Jack. I found traces of DDT in the water sample.”

Paul frowned. “Meaning?”

“DDT accumulates in the fatty tissues of organisms,” Jack said, “and becomes more concentrated as it works its way up the food chain.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “Meaning?” he repeated, more forcefully.

“It means that this creature is not a biological anomaly. It was mutated by a concentrated diet of artificial chemicals.”

Jesus Christ, what is it about scientists that they can’t speak English?
For a third time, Paul said, “Meaning?”

“Meaning, we created a monster,” Jack said, “and it’s probably not the only one of its kind.”

Paul decided he liked the scientific gobbledygook better.

SEVEN

P
ierce Askegren reached up as high as his right arm would go and pressed the button on his Nikon just as the five men entered the hotel lobby and went out of sight. He sighed, hoping that he actually got one of the band members in the shot and not just a piece of ground or the wall of the hotel’s second floor or something.

Pierce made his living as a freelance photographer, specializing in candid photographs of celebrities. Unfortunately, thousands of others made their living the same way. If you weren’t lucky enough to be at the front of the throng when a particular group of celebrities made their appearance, you had to count on unreliable shots like the one he just took.

He lit a cigarette, then stared at the light flickering from his Zippo. For a minute, he imagined Marissa Michaels, his editor, standing on the flame, her feet burning in agony.
Damn her anyway,
he thought with a snarl as he blew smoke into the South Seas air.
Okay, so George Clooney got that restraining order against the paper. Is that my fault?

According to Marissa, it was, and as punishment, he got saddled with following around the hot new rock band, a group with the semi-ironic name of the Don’t Quit Your Day Job Players, on a world tour promoting their album
TKB.
As far as Pierce was concerned, they were just a bunch of white guys with long hair—except for the drummer, who was a white guy with a buzz cut.

Ah, well,
he thought,
it could’ve been worse. She could’ve given me the Spice Girls.

Pierce took another drag on his cigarette, then wiped the sweat from his bald pate. A Washington, D.C. native, he hated the humidity of this insipid little tourist trap of an island. But the Don’t Quit Your Day Job Players had a stop in Kalor—to be followed by dates in Manila and Tokyo—and so he was stuck here until they left.

A voice with a thick Italian accent said from behind him,
“Ah, bello!”

Sighing, Pierce turned around to see Marcello Silverio. Pierce first met the
paparazzo
when they both had the David Hasselhoff beat three years earlier. They re-encountered each other on the plane to Kalor—apparently the DQYDJPs were huge in Italy.

“Hi, Mark,” Pierce said with a dearth of enthusiasm.

Marcello winced. He hated being called Mark, which is why Pierce kept it up. “I got a lovely shot of the band.
Perfecto.”

Pierce sighed.
Days like this, I think I should’ve listened to Ma and become a plumber.

“Lads!” came another voice, this one belonging to John Hawkins. Pierce had known and respected Hawk for years. The man always managed to get the most amazing shots. He also had a handsome face and was eloquent as hell. As a result, he was perfect for playing the public face of celebrity photographers whenever there was a backlash of some sort against the practice. After Princess Diana’s death, Hawk had gone onto some BBC news program or other and carried on for half an hour about the dignity of the press and the necessity for freedom of expression, and various other bits of bullshit. The next day, he was hiding in Fergie’s bushes, trying to get a shot of her sunbathing.

“I just overheard a couple of tourists who’ve been on Malau,” Hawk was saying. “Some kind of creature was captured over there.”

Hawk may have been a master, but he tended to let his imagination run away with him. For years, he had insisted that he had genuine Loch Ness Monster pictures—“Not fakes like those other johnnies, this was the goods, pictures of the whole bleedin’ Loch Ness Monster family!”—so Pierce couldn’t help but say, “Yeah, right. Elvis’s alien baby.”

“No, this is legit. They both saw it. A nine-foot lizard that can walk on its hind legs.”

Pierce scratched his ample belly. “How much you have to pay for this ‘legit’ sighting?” he asked, sarcasm still lacing his tone.

Hawk looked indignant. “Please. I am a member of the free press. I have standards. I overheard it like any proper journalist.”

Lightning arced in the twilight sky, followed moments later by a thunderclap.

Pierce sighed. “All right, fine, a couple guys in Hawaiian shirts with disposable cameras in their khaki shorts pockets think they see a big lizard—”

“Actually, they were dressed in T-shirts and denim shorts, and one of them wore a Harvard ring. Class of ’88.”

Marcello frowned. “How close
were
you?”

Hawk shrugged. “Good ears and a telephoto lens. Look, do you want to sit around waiting for a bunch of rock stars to resurface from their drunken orgies long enough to pose for a bad picture, or do you want a scoop?”

Pierce had to admit to himself that Hawk had a point. But, as another bolt of lightning struck, a thought occurred. “Since when does John Hawkins offer to split a scoop?”

“Ah yes, well, you see, in order to find the thing, we’ll need to rent a boat.”

“Find it? You said it was captured.”

Hawk rolled his eyes. “You’re being too bloody linear, me old mucker. Remember my Loch Ness photos? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and where there’s one big lizard—”

Marcello smiled. “There’s got to be a
famiglia. Excellente!
So where is the boat?”

“Ah, yes, well, that is the problem, my dear old friends and colleagues, you see—I’m a bit strapped for cash at the moment, and—”

“Strapped?” Pierce said, incensed. Hawk always wore the most expensive clothes, had top of the line camera equipment, and threw money around like he had it to burn.

Marcello asked, “What happened to
Signor
‘Hello Ladies, I Have a Full Expense Account, Come Have Sex with Me,’
hanh?”

Hawk at least had the good grace to look abashed. “Well, er, you see, I’m afraid that my full expense account is all, as it were—filled up. Cutbacks, you know.”

“If we split the boat three ways down the middle,” Marcello said, “I will go along.”

“Fair enough,” Hawk said.

“Look,” Pierce said, not bothering to point out that a three-way split by definition couldn’t be down the middle, “there’s no way in hell I’m paying money to go out in the rain and look for a hypothetical monster. It just ain’t gonna happen.”

“Oh, come now, Pierce, that lightning doesn’t mean anything. And we can rent a motorboat for next to nothing. Come now, what do you say?”

“I say forget it. No way.”

Two hours later, Pierce sat in a motorboat for which he’d paid a third of the rental cost. The rain was coming down in buckets.
How the hell do I let myself get talked into these things?

“Quite invigorating, isn’t it?” Hawk said with the kind of grin that you just want to punch. “Why, all we need is a dog, and we’d have a Jerome K. Jerome book.”

Pierce blinked. “What the hell’re you talking about?”

“Oh, yes, I forgot, they don’t read in your country, do they, Pierce?”

Snarling, Pierce said, “Yeah, well, we ain’t got rulers who’re inbred mutants, either.”

“Nor do we, old chum. The royal family are simply a distraction to keep the general public from realize that the country is run by incompetents.”

Shaking his head, Pierce said, “This is nuts. We should turn back.”

“Niente,”
said Marcello, “I have sailed in worse.”

“Of course
you
have,” Pierce said, “you’re insane.” Marcello got his start by hanging upside down from the roof of a very famous—and very reclusive—Italian actress and getting pictures of her changing clothes, then walking into a local newspaper with the photos. Said roof was two hundred feet off the ground, as the actress lived in a villa in the Tuscan hills.

Marcello let loose with a string of Italian curses, which Pierce couldn’t understand a word of, and so wasn’t insulted by.

“Lighten up, lads. We’re about to be famous.”

Yeah, right, sure,
Pierce thought.
What the hell am I doing here? This is nuts. This is absolutely, positively, cuckoo-bird—style nuts. I should—

He cut his thought off when he heard a sound in the water.

“What was that?” Marcello asked, relieving Pierce, as that meant that someone else heard it, too.

Pierce leaned forward, trying to filter out the sound of the rain coming down on the motorboat’s canopy and the
rrrrrrrr
noise of the motor.

Suddenly, for the first time, it hit him.
We’re out here looking for the relatives of a nine-foot lizard. This is nuts. This is dangerous.

“A porpoise, maybe?” Hawk ventured.

“Can we just get the hell out of here?” Pierce said, suddenly nostalgic for the humidity of Kalor and the monotony of chasing rock stars around the world.

Marcello shushed him and cut the motor.

Great. Now we’re sitting ducks.

Pierce heard the sound again.

Then something bumped the boat.

Oh hell . . .

Marcello tried to start the motor, but it just coughed and died. Pierce pushed him out of the way. “Move it, Mark, you couldn’t flush a toilet if instructions were written on the handle.”

Pierce tried desperately to get the motor to turn over, but the thing just sputtered and died.
The points are probably all wet. Why the hell did that jackass turn the motor off?

Before he could try again, he heard the noise again, this time accompanied by the boat rocking severely. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement. He whirled around to see a massive, green, scaly head break through the water. The head looked to be at least seven feet from neck to top, with tiny, beady eyes, a huge snout, and what looked like razor-sharp teeth.

Pierce had never seen anything like it in real life. It looked like some kind of weird dinosaur.

Faced with a creature whose head was as big as the boat he sat in, a monster with teeth the size of Missouri, a big lizard that could probably eat Pierce alive without even having to chew—Pierce did the only thing he could do.

He took its picture.

Next to him, Hawk and Marcello did the same.

Damn, Hawk was right,
Pierce thought, all thoughts of recalcitrant motors and certain death banished from his mind, replaced with the image of showing these pictures to Marissa and seeing the look of abject gratitude on her face as she begged to pay him three times his usual fee.
We are going to be famous!

Two huge arms broke through the surface only a few feet from the boat, causing it to rock even more. The arms moved up to shield the creature’s eyes from the three flashes that probably seemed like a strobe light.