kiDNApped (A Tara Shores Thriller) (40 page)

The kidnapper followed him into the frigid water, jumping on top of him and forcing his head underwater by placing a knee on his neck.

Then he aimed a pistol point blank at the back of Lance’s head and cocked it.

...ACAC
73
GAGT...

8:15 P.M.

Kristen screamed as she heard the shot. Her guard quickly moved to cover her mouth, but by the time he realized, as did Kristen, that the shot had not come from his fellow kidnapper’s gun, it was too late.

Tara rose from where she had been hiding in the lake—snorkel still in her mouth and a mask on her face—firing her Glock at the kidnapper standing on Lance. He was not more than ten feet away. The intense rain splashing into the lake had kept her from being seen as she lurked just below the surface, only the tip of her snorkel protruding from the water.

Then, to everyone's surprise and astonishment, Dave stood up directly next to Tara, also lying in wait in the freezing lake where the two had been buddy breathing from the same snorkel.

Dave fired the kidnapper's gun that they had found in Lahaina—two shots into the kidnapper’s head, then quickly blasted off one round each into three more.

Tara also continued to shoot, now from a crouch stance in the water.

The distraction was all Kristen and her father needed.

While Kristen’s kidnapper was squinting out onto the lake, trying to figure out what had happened, Kristen wrenched his gun from him and shot him in the throat. He dropped like a lifeless sack, not even clutching his ruined windpipe.

Kristen didn’t wait around to gloat over her victory. She rolled to the ground in case she was about to be fired upon. Then she got off two quick shots from her dead assailant’s gun at one of the other kidnappers. One round blew apart his right knee and the second grazed his face as he fell.

William Archer now grappled with two kidnappers. Tara was walking out of the lake, shivering from the cold and clearly unable to aim her weapon with confidence at the sparring bodies. Lance’s hands clawed at the shallow lake bed, locating the gun of the man Tara had killed. He ran to his father.

As he approached, one of the assailants whirled around and shot Lance, striking his rib cage on the left side. Lance stumbled and returned fire, missing. Then William Archer picked up a football-sized chunk of jagged, volcanic rock and slammed it into the temple of the gunman shooting it out with Lance. That man teetered and dropped.

Dave staggered from the lake. He nearly collapsed from weakness due to hiding for so long in the frigid water, but Kristen caught him, holding him up until he was steady enough to regain his own footing. Tara remained apart and alert, slowly turning a circle with her pistol in a two-handed grip, ready for anything, trusting nothing.

Then Lance struggled to his feet and limped to each kidnapper in turn while Tara watched, relieving them of any weapons in case they were not dead. It was difficult to be sure in the wet darkness. As Lance approached the third fallen assailant—the kidnapper who lay farthest away on the edge of the group—the motionless form stirred.

A groaning sound escaped from the kidnapper’s lips. Then he reached into his parka.

Tara fired her Glock—

—and Lance fired the last remaining round from one of the kidnapper's pistols. Tara's arm was shaking so badly from the cold that her shot went wide right, thudding harmlessly into a volcanic rock pile. Lance's shot found its mark, the kidnapper's body convulsing for a moment from a shot through the skull before succumbing to a permanent stillness. Then Lance, too, slumped to the ground, clutching his left side where the previous kidnapper's shot had pierced his ribcage.

Tara ran to the kidnapper to check the body for weapons. She found none. Tara made a point to relieve Lance of his weapon, but she soon realized that Lance was no longer conscious. She put two fingers on his carotid artery, feeling for a pulse. Looking at Dave, she shook her head.

They called Kristen and the senior Archer over.

Kristen gasped upon seeing Lance dead. She fell to the earth, hugging her dead brother's body. After a few minutes, she felt her father's arms pulling her up. She looked at her father, then back to the
woman
Lance had just shot to death. Her parka hood had slipped off, revealing the fact that she was in fact a woman as well as Caucasian.

“Is this one of your kidnappers?”

Archer wiped a string of mucousy blood from his right eye. “Yes, the lead scientist. Very intelligent. A shame she had to end up like this.”

“What’s her name?” Kristen asked.

Dr. William Archer looked up at the blanket of stars as the rain began to lighten.

“I don’t know,” he said, wiping a tear from his face that was indistinguishable from the rainwater. He shook his head.

“I don’t know who she is.”

Tara looked into Dr. William Archer's eyes, knowing he was lying, but understanding that he wanted to protect Kristen from more pain. She doubted the secret would remain so in the weeks to follow, as the media picked up the scent of the violent spree across the Aloha state, but she herself would say nothing. Kristen has been through enough, she thought, watching the microbiologist's face turn ashen, eyes wide with incomprehensible fear and disbelief at the sheer scale on which things had gone wrong.

But it was William Archer’s face that Tara would never forget—his tortured expression as he held his dead son's hand while gazing at the stars. That he could understand so much and yet so little in the world must be unbearably frustrating, Tara thought. She left him to reconcile his keen understanding of genetics with his inability to comprehend his own son, the product of his very own genes.

FURTHER READING / SUGGESTED RESOURCES

Books

Fielding, Ann, Robinson, Ed.
An Underwater Guide to Hawaii.
University of Hawaii Press, 1987.

Keller, Evelyn Fox.
The Century of the Gene.
Harvard University Press, 2000.

Scientific Literature
Heider, D., A. Barnekow. 2007, DNA-based watermarks using the DNA-Crypt algorithm.
BMC Bioinformatics
8:
176
.

Wong, et al. 2003. “Organic Data Memory Using the DNA Approach,” Technical paper,
Communications of the ACM
.

Yamamoto, et al. 2008. Large-scale DNA memory based on the nested PCR.
Natural Computing: an international journal Volume 7 Issue 3
.

Other

J. Craig Venter Institute’s Sorcerer II Expedition:
http://www.sorcerer2expedition.org/version1/HTML/main.htm

 Photo credit: Tabbatha Chesler

Rick Chesler holds a Bachelor of Science in marine biology and has had a life-long interest in the ocean and its creatures. When not at work as a research project manager, he can be found scuba diving or traveling to research his next thriller idea. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, son and some fish.

Don’t miss the next Tara Shores thriller, SOLAR ISLAND, coming in December 2012 from Seven Realms Publishing. Please enjoy the following sneak preview:
                                                                                    

A madman uses a floating energy production platform as an opportunity to establish his own rogue nation. After the FBI receives an alarming and unusual call for help originating from the artificial island, Special Agent Tara Shores goes undercover as a reporter in the South Pacific. Once there, she uncovers a tightly run dystopia reflecting the distorted visions of the island’s reclusive creator. As a powerful hurricane bears down on the island, cutting her off from support, Tara must find a way to bring a murderer to justice while saving herself and averting an international energy crisis.

SOLAR ISLAND

Chapter 1
 

Pacific Ocean, southeast of Japan, 8:30 AM local time

"It won’t hurt that much. Let’s just get this over with so we can leave this godforsaken island, alright?" One man addressed another as they stood huddled together in conference, eyes alert for unseen peers while the tropical sun rose in the open blue sky.

Only one thing stood in the way of the wild, unrestrained energy from the sun on its way to the depths of the sea. A floating island marred the unending expanse of water--a sprawling artificial construction whose sole ostensible purpose was to control a tiny fraction of that radiant energy--to harness a timeless force.

On this island, Bernard Riley studied a stencil he held in his hands. His associate, Chris Tenner, was losing patience with his stall tactics. “Bernie?”

Bernard looked up from the stencil. "As long as you think it’ll work, Chris. If Lightner catches us--”

“Don’t worry, it'll work! We've got the schematic. The hard part's over. Now all you need do is get some sun for a few hours."

"This is really going to hurt, isn't it? How come you can't do this part?"

"We've been over this! You've got the day off. I have to be at my station in sixty minutes. That's not enough time to let the stencil set."

"You mean burn."

Chris said nothing. They both knew
set
was a euphemism. At length Chris joked, "You look like you could use some color, anyway."

Bernard looked up from the stencil. "You know damn well after twenty minutes I’ll be red as a lobster."

"Use the sunscreen on your arms, legs and neck so it's not obvious you've been tanning. Stick to the plan."

Bernard removed his shirt, a polo bearing the Solar Island logo: a circular raft of solar panels on shimmering blue water reflecting back a blazing ball of light. He tossed the shirt on the "ground," as residents of Solar Island were used to calling it, even though this section was functionally and materially closer to a ship's deck. Now clad only in a pair of khaki shorts and sunglasses, Bernard shoved the intricate stencil into Chris' hands.

"Tape it on."

Chris looked at the stencil to make sure he had it aligned properly. Its convoluted cut-outs had been painstakingly done by hand with a precision blade during several sessions over the course of two tension-fraught months. During this time, the two men had maintained constant vigilance in order to access a secure area of the island normally off limits to them.

And now that watchfulness was about to pay dividends.

Solar Island's Energy Transfer Station (ETS) was the most critical piece of technology aboard the facility. The solar collectors, although a new design with increased efficiency compared to the clunky, thick panels in use since the 1970’s, were useless without the ability to transfer the power they generated to somewhere it could be used. The inefficiency in directing the flow of solar energy had long been the alternative power’s weak point, along with storing the power produced for nights and cloudy days.

But the owner of Solar Island had made great strides in both of these problem areas. Media reports claimed many in the energy industry were eager to talk with Dr. Jacob Lightner about the technology employed in his so-called “pilot project,” but thus far he had not returned any phone calls, allegedly becoming something of a hermit on his private island of industry. Chris Tenner and Bernard Riley, however, decided that their technician’s salaries were worth risking for what would amount to a stunning windfall, were the technology to be presented to the right hands. This led them to repeatedly visit the ETS. They pried panels open. Identified the unique proprietary circuit board that made it work. Left no trace of their activities, mentioned it to no one.

The job would have been relatively simple had it not been for Dr. Lightner’s extraordinary security measures. This was the first clue to Tenner and to Riley that their fate would not be kind should they be discovered. Sure, they had signed the standard non-compete clauses and non-disclosure agreements upon hiring, but Lightner refused to depend solely on the legal workings of what he considered to be his former country. Solar Island, after all, when afloat in international waters, was not officially part of any existing nation, and while no other country would formally recognize Lightner’s attempts at nationalization, Solar Island was recognized as an area of special sovereignty by the United Nations.