kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (3 page)

That Spare Air thing…

Whenever he was on the boat, Dave had noticed that Johnson always had a small, yellow emergency air canister tucked into his waistband, semi-concealed under his loose fitting Hawaiian shirts. Dave had guessed that the old man couldn’t swim, and so carried the device as a precaution. He hadn’t wanted to embarrass his new boss if that was the case, so Dave had never asked about it.

Dave had hoped for many things in his life—
please let me pass this class, please let me get a date with this girl, please let me get this job
—but he had never, ever hoped for anything so much as this moment, when he prayed with every fiber of his being that the little yellow bottle of air would still be tucked into old Johnson’s waistband.

His hand was reaching out to the body…touching it…the sand cloud reducing his visibility to near zero, so that he couldn’t tell which part of the dead body his hands were on.

The urge to breathe was painful now. Dave knew that the first craving was only a warning—that the human body could endure considerably more than what the brain said was enough. But if there was no air source here, he would not have enough time. There were biological limits which could not be exceeded, physical thresholds that could not be crossed.

Dave fanned at the corpse with one hand, hoping to push suspended sand out of the way and gain water clarity. After a moment he saw a swatch of Johnson’s red shorts—purple now due to the color filtering at depth.

He grabbed the shorts with one hand and used his other hand to feel along the waistband.

Nothing.

Think!

Dave knew that the emergency air source was sold with a holster that could be strapped to a calf or thigh. He ran his hands along the length of Johnson’s legs.

Denied, again!

True panic welled up within the marine biologist. The first sense of,
This time I’ve really gotten myself into something I can’t get out of…

He gripped at one of his boots, its tightness making him want to scream. It would probably take less than a minute to get out of it, but he did not have even thirty seconds per boot plus the ascent time.

How could I ever have agreed to this?

Clutched in Johnson’s right hand was the slender yellow cylinder that right now represented nothing less to Dave than life itself.

Of course! If Johnson had the Spare Air he would have tried to use it himself as long as he was alive,
Dave thought as he scrambled for the life-giving object.

But this brought up a new fear:
What if Johnson had already sucked all the air from the damn thing?

Dave knew the reputation that the Spare Air’s had: better than nothing in shallow water situations, but don’t take it too seriously. Filled to capacity at this depth, the little bottle would only provide about three or four breaths of air.

But what he wouldn’t give for even one of those now…

He had a few more seconds before his body lost all control…

He was prying the gas container loose from Johnson’s hand…
Literally from his cold, dead hand
, Dave somehow managed to think through the fog of his suffering.

And then he had it.

He brought it to his lips.

He had to rip the full facemask part of the way off of his face to be able to insert the Spare Air’s mouthpiece between his lips, which caused the mask to flood. But he didn’t care about being able to see.

Please let it have at least one breath
.

Dave held the device firmly in his mouth and inhaled.

… CGAC
4
CGGC...

Los Angeles International Airport

6:57 A.M. local time, Sunday, June 14

“There hasn’t been a trace of him for three months, Kristen. He’s gone. At some point you’ve got to accept it.”

“He’s missing, Lance. Not gone. Please observe the distinction,” his twin sister said.

Lance let out an exaggerated sigh as he resigned himself to the long check-in line leading to the Hawaiian Air counter. The din of LAX in full swing for the summer travel season assaulted his senses. People everywhere, loudspeakers blaring. He ran a hand through his thick head of short, curly brown hair, as if massaging away the pain of what he was about to say.

“Hey, I know you’re the smart one, you’re the successful one, you’re the one Dad would put in charge of looking for him if he had a choice, but remember that I’m doing the best I can, and that I think we’re wasting our time. Honolulu police have called off their search,” Lance said coldly.

“So what? That just means they couldn’t find him within the limited allotment of resources they have to operate with. They admit that they don’t actually know what happened to him. And the FBI case is still open, at least for another day or two.”

Lance rolled the steel blue eyes that he knew women found so attractive.

“And spare me the pity trip,” Kristen continued. “Is it my fault you got caught cheating on your wife? That your personal life has gotten in the way of professional success? But forget about all that for now, Lance. In two more days, Dad is going to be declared legally dead. This trip is our last chance to try and do something for him while he’s still...alive,” she finished, lower lip trembling, visibly upset.

“That’s fine, Kristen,” Lance said, seeing that his suggestion that their father might not be found was too much for her. “I just don’t want you to get your hopes up too much. There aren’t many leads in his case.”

Kristen whirled around to face him as the line came to a halt. “I hope you don’t think I’m that stupid, Lance. You’re only coming with me—and on my dime, at that—to keep up appearances until you get your fair share of the estate. That’s the only hypothesis that fits your behavior.”

Lance made a spitting noise. “
Hypothesis
? Will you listen to yourself?” His sister reminded him so much of their missing father. Ever the scientist, only believing in what she could prove through empirical evidence or direct observation.

A professor of microbiology at a California State University, Kristen had achieved neither the level of fame of their esteemed father, nor the level of zeros in his bank account. Not many people had, however, and at twenty-eight, she was already much more established than Lance, both career-wise and financially. He knew that most of her paychecks had been funneled into safe conservative investments. She’d much rather spend an evening alone peering into a microscope than a night out on the town with the girls, Lance knew. He, meanwhile, had lost his house, car and what little savings he’d managed to accumulate to his wife in the divorce.

And so here he was, in the distasteful position of having the untimely demise of their wealthy father represent the only prospect of money anytime soon.

Lance continued to address his sister. “What is it that you hope to accomplish over there? You know something that the police, the FBI and Dad’s business partners don’t?” He grudgingly used his foot to slide his designer suitcase, bought during better times with credit cards he was now unable to pay back, a few inches forward on the floor.

“Look, Lance, you don’t have to go with me. Stay here if you want.”

“I can’t let my little sister go traipsing off to Hawaii to look for our missing father alone. Halfway to Asia…”

They both knew that was a joke. She was the one who had offered to pay for both of their expenses. It was at Kristen’s insistence that they venture out to look for their father, to at least make a token appearance in the last city he was known to have visited before dropping off the face of the Earth. Lance’s struggling software sales business, combined with steep alimony and child support payments every month to his ex-wife, meant that he could not have afforded the cost of the Hawaii trip on his own.

Kristen said nothing. She only narrowed her eyes at him while hefting the small backpack that was her only piece of luggage before following the line a few steps closer to the counter.

“Besides,” Lance pressed, “if you had someone else to go with you, like maybe a
boyfriend
or a
husband…
then maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to accompany you.”

Kristen felt her cheeks burn. Damn her brother. He always had to remind her of the one area of her life that wasn’t going so well. Wasn’t going at all, she forced herself to admit.

Kristen’s professional success had come at a price. Throughout college she had spent her time studying, working challenging intern positions, and writing theses. Although not unattractive, her mousy appearance—stringy, shoulder-length brown hair and average figure which was never clothed in the latest fashions—had not exactly been a guy magnet in college. Her social life had primarily revolved around study sessions with fellow overachievers from her science classes. She was embarrassed to admit that at the age of twenty-eight, she had still had only one serious boyfriend. And that relationship had ended years ago when she had switched schools to begin her PhD, the young man deciding to finish out his degree at Berkeley, where they’d met.

The check-in line moved again. A gaggle of tourists ahead of them realized they were in the wrong line and left, and Kristen was walking up to the counter. She turned around to face Lance as a ticket agent called for her to step up.

“Last chance for a free, semi-working Hawaiian vacation, brother. You coming?”

… TTGG
5
TTCA...

10:01 A.M
.,
FBI Field Office, Honolulu

Tara shut the door to her small but blessedly private office. After years of government cubicles, being assigned a private workspace was not only a creature comfort, but a clear indication that she was moving up. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Tara Shores, the nameplate read.

Tara had come here immediately after reporting the jumper to police. They had blocked off the street to traffic and sheeted what was left of the body, telling her that the man was no longer even remotely recognizable and that most of his teeth had been shattered, making identification by dental records impossible. They would try DNA, but that would take a while. In the meantime, two tourists who were close enough to the impact zone to be splattered with the jumper's blood were threatening to sue the hotel, the security company that contracted with the hotel, the real estate company selling the unit, and the city of Honolulu. Tara had turned over the jacket and the lapel pin to the cops and wished them luck.

It was a sad fact that suicide jumpers were not uncommon in Waikiki—it happened at least once or twice a year, Tara knew, sometimes more. A month after she'd arrived a couple had jumped from a 19th floor lanai together. Suicide pact? A fight gone horribly wrong? It was never determined. But these deaths almost never made the local news, and hundreds of people would be trooping over the dried bloodstains the next day on the way to the beach, Tara thought. The party must go on.

She kicked her shoes off, sat behind her desk and put her head in her hands. She couldn't shake the image of the Asian man falling to his death. Those eyes. Her fellow agents were unsympathetic, not that she expected otherwise.

“
It's not the fall that kills you,” a rookie agent had joked in response to Tara’s recounting of the event, “it's the whole hitting the ground part.”

“
Shut your mouth, Chavez, or I'll assign you to the city cleanup crew and you can personally scrub the blood off the street.” I'd like to see him joke about it after he let the guy drop. More death. Follows me everywhere.

Tara had lost both of her parents to a car accident as a young girl. Their car had plunged into a Florida canal one evening during heavy rains. Her father had been able to push Tara to safety, but could not free himself and Tara’s mother in time. The accident had also given Tara a severe case of hydrophobia. She had finally managed to control her fear of water sufficiently to be an effective agent in and around the ocean, but the move to the islands had brought some of her old fears to the surface.

It also didn’t help that Tara found it a bit lonely in Hawaii—not overwhelmingly so, but she had discovered living so far from the mainland on a small, oceanic island where she had no acquaintances outside of work to be isolating. She had been seeing an FBI diver back home, as she thought of L.A., but it wasn’t a serious enough relationship to survive the long distance her transfer demanded. She maintained contact with her friends on the mainland via the Internet, but it was not the same. How lucky she was to live in Hawaii, they exclaimed, but she found it difficult to convey that it was much different than being here on vacation. Then there was the local culture, a hodgepodge of Asian and Pacific island countries where no single race constituted a majority. Almost like living in a foreign land, Tara thought.

With a sigh, Tara averted her glance from the calendar, whose pages had patiently ticked off another year off her life, to the stack of case files on her desk. She picked up a folder festooned with Post-it notes, the most prominent of which read: “6/16 PENDING.”

Frowning, Tara uncapped a marker and drew a line through PENDING. She picked up a rubber stamp which would print the word INDETERMINATE, but paused, holding the stamp over the folder.

In FBI speak, “indeterminate” was the designation for cases that were unsolved. This case was the most interesting Tara had come across since relocating to the islands, and yet it was set to go officially unsolved in two more days. As ice-cold as the case had become, she was not expecting any breakthroughs.

Tara flipped open the case folder even though she knew there was nothing in it she had not already seen. She was glad to have something to take her mind off the Asian man. A missing person case where the individual was both wealthy and well known, if not exactly famous. Furthermore, the missing subject was to be declared legally dead in two more days, official cause of death: “Unknown, presumed lost at sea.” She and a small platoon of agents under her command had been working on this case over the past three months, yet nothing had come of it. Tara spread the contents of the folder over her desk, reflecting on the case. Three months earlier,
Dr. William Archer, a highly successful biotechnology researcher and businessman,
had gone missing aboard his mega-yacht. More specifically, Tara noted with distaste, the entire yacht and crew had simply vanished as if it had been plucked from the ocean by an invisible hand. Perhaps it had sunk, but the weather and sea conditions were calm around the time of the disappearance, so why not a single radio call, emergency beacon or some kind of S.O.S.? Coast Guard searches had turned up nothing.
Harbor master alerts had been issued in case the yacht should turn up with a new name and paint job in a marina somewhere, but these too had produced nothing.