Killer Dust (18 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Killer Dust
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Tom’s fingers turned white at the knuckles. “Right … but it also makes the job of searching for the enemy different. If you’re looking for an organization, there are all sorts of trails that cross and cross again and lead you right to the source of the stink, but an individual is a solo act, much tougher to catch.”
The waitress brought our burgers. When she was out of earshot, I said, “But how’d an individual get hold of a SAM-7? Surely that narrows the search.”
“You would think.”
“How much does something like that cost?”
“Hundreds of thousands. A million, with a rocket.”
“Shit! That’s one wealthy stalker!”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Right. But doesn’t this tell us something about this guy?”
“At first Jack didn’t think the guy could make good his threat. But he didn’t know who he worked for. He has access to equipment. Think drugs, Em. Think people who want to be able to shoot a Coast Guard plane out of the sky if they want to.”
“But Tom, people like that wouldn’t be taking a shot at the shuttle.”
“I agree. But they do hire some very crazy people to run errands for them, and it seems that one of those nasty little errand-boys has become fixated on an astronaut. So he stole an antiaircraft missile from his boss. But first we have to
find
the damned thing.”
Now the reasons for Tom’s anger at Jack were becoming clear: Jack had found evidence of an
intended
crime and had chosen to leave it in place so that he could catch the monster at his mania. “Well,” I said. “We’ll find it then. Won’t we?”
Tom did not answer.
 
 
The second Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach, Florida, was a splashy tourist resort replete with fantasy swimming pools and whirlpool spas. We parked the Mercedes in the back parking lot as if we were checking into a room, went down a wooden walkway, and found ourselves on the beach, again just a couple hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. The wind was fierce, whipping my hair around my face. For the first time since I had arrived in Florida, I was chilled.
Greater hope that we were in the right place had made us more cautious, and we put on the front that we were a courting couple looking for a place to neck. We twined our arms and leaned into each other, smiling and making little giggling sounds. I sauntered along in Tom’s embrace, fighting down a sense of near panic.
What if I’m wrong?
my brain kept asking me.
We could be wasting time. Tom can’t read that map, and maybe I can’t either
. But instead of giving in to panic, I let the anxiety speak to me, letting it guide me. Threaded into this crosscurrent of love and fear, I mentally reviewed the inscriptions on Jack’s map and whispered, “‘Upper swash.’ That would mean the highest point on the beach the waves reach.” I gave Tom a little hug around the waist, a faint armor against the risk he was taking.
Tom squeezed me back.
We walked out across the sand, its looseness slowing our progress. The beach was much as it had been farther north, a long pale sweep of quartz sand catching the scudding moonlight. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, willing them to adjust to see more in the low light.
Forty or fifty feet off the boardwalk, we came to a line of broken seashells and wrack left by the passing hurricane, and my anxiety peaked as I thought of Jack out in the wind that would have driven waves that far up the beach.
“Mira, aquíí està.
Upper swash line. Now we turn left.
Izquierda. Vamanos en la playa.”
Feeling my suppressed excitement, Tom gave me an encouraging hug. It was making me slightly giddy to be so close to him. With that distraction, I almost missed the next clues. As we left the beachfront building that marked the territory of the Holiday Inn, we passed into the one stretch I could see where a solid wall of foliage came right down to the beach. Here suddenly were cabbage palms and sea grapes, just as Scott Thomas had shown me; the correct and native vegetation for this area. And right there sticking out of the jungle were five boardwalks, pointing east like fingers, like the five lines on Jack’s map. “This is it,” I whispered.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I’m as sure as I can be, in the dark. I have a flashlight in my pocket, but I don’t want to turn it on.”
“Keep moving. Don’t stop on top of it.”
“Right.”
“How do you know?” he whispered hungrily.
Now that I had found the spot, I felt like I was standing on a hot griddle. I forced my body to continue the sensuous show of a woman caught in the nectar of the moment. As we shambled along, painfully doing our burlesque of courting tourists, I contemplated his question. How
did
I know? Call it a matter of geologist’s intuition, something in the gut, a flash of recognition. It was a compass of the mind, a little needle that knew how to find true north.
But there was another part to this reckoning process, a part that came before the needle swung, a feeling that was a compass of another sort, and that feeling was anxiety, plain and simple. It is the curse of the intuitive mind to grapple with ambiguity: incomplete data, crudely sketched maps, hunches, a sense of pattern that wants just a few
more variations before the theme is clear. To embrace the rigors of ambiguity, one must be willing to suffer the anxiety such dissonance and fragmentation spawns. When I was first beginning as a geologist, I had misunderstood that feeling. I had thought it meant I was on the wrong trail. But as the sequence of anxiety and recognition came again and again, experience increasing with layer upon layer of observation, I had come to recognize that the intensity of the anxiety increased until the exact, exquisite moment when knowing came, and vanished into the ecstasy of the
aha
!
But how did I know
this
time? I thought of Scott Thomas, and his subtle reading of the landscape. “I know because Jack took the trouble to mark a significant feature of the beach geometry, and relative to that geometry, these proportions are right. The upper swash. This is where the storm waves reach. See? And there are your ‘streets’: one, two, three, four, five. They fit perfectly, and make the scale correct. Jack did a damned good job. So this,” I kicked the sand where the line of wrack and shells were totally absent, “is a break in the pattern. And the slope of the beach changes ever so slightly. There’s a slight hump, as if the sand was replaced over an additional volume. It’s not much, but just enough that I can see it even in this little light. In that way,” I said, now realizing why I knew what I knew, “he felt the map to be complete. He marked the Holiday Inn, its wooden walkway, the upper swash line, and these five boardwalks coming out of the palm trees; nothing else was necessary. The scale is much tighter, see? In fact, the lines marking the Atlantic and the Banana River, even the shuttle at the Cape were gratuitous, and not to scale.”
“Good eye, Em.” For the first time that day, Tom sounded truly happy. He gave me a hug borne of delight.
“And it makes sense,” I said, still whispering. “It’s above the saturated part of the beach, so what’s buried here is less likely to corrode. And if you think about it, Jack would look at a beach this way.”
“Why?”
“Because he grew up here. He likes sports. He’s really good at them. He would have been a surfer. And here there is surf.” I pointed out to sea. The breakers were coming in like white panthers, the cresting foam glowing in the light from the moon, which had for the moment broken free of the clouds.
“That’s some big surf,” Tom said. “I’d hate to see what it takes to come all the way up the beach.”
“The storm surge from the hurricane?” I conjectured. “That’s why the damned wrack is here. I’ll bet with all these motels there’s so much foot traffic here that if we’d waited a few more days, we’d have seen nothing. But screw it. How are we going to get the damned thing out?”
“For that,” Tom said, “we are in fact going to need some help. We’ll need shovels, muscle, and some cover, in case we’re being watched.”
“Where are we going to find that at this hour?”
“That’s the question I was just asking myself.” As we had begun to discuss the logistics of the extraction, we had unconsciously gravitated apart, and now Tom put an arm around me and reeled me in close, again playing the lover. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
He led me back down the beach. My back crawled with the sensation that someone was watching us. I wanted to get away. I wanted to run back home to the Rockies where I could get my bearings, where I knew my way around, and where there were mountains and valleys I could hide in. After what seemed ages, we finally reached the car and got in. Settling in the leather seat, I said, “So what are we going to do?”
“We have time, but not much. The launch has been rescheduled.”
“It takes a while to roll it back out. Then they have to refuel it. And the wind is still blowing.”
“It’s been tailing off all day. I think the winds are passing.”
“You could try one more time to reach Jack. Maybe he has the guy under surveillance.”
At the mention of Jack’s name, Tom lapsed into another of his long silences. Then he said, “Em, how well do you really know Jack?”
Something in the tone of Tom’s voice put me on red alert. And it made all the other little doubts that had been piling up in my mind about Jack—about his sudden disappearance, and a hundred little dots of peculiarity that had been trying to connect themselves to that one point—began to tumble down on me, and I felt the need to defend myself. I wanted to say, “How dare you! I’ve
slept
with him! I’ve made
love
with him! I do not do that casually!” but instead, I said, rather stiffly, “Why do you ask?”
Tom stared out through the windshield for a while, as if the conversation he had started had wandered from his mind. I had time to wonder if I had imagined it. Then he spoke again, his voice like lead. “I mean how much do you really
know
about Jack?”
“What does it matter? We’ve been through—”
Tom cut across my words. “Yes, Jack knows how to be there for you. I got it. But what do you
know
about Jack?”
“I …”
“How old is Jack?”
“Oh … I always figured a couple, three … maybe four years older than I am. That would make him forty.”
Tom’s face was hard as rock. “When’s his birthday?”
“His … birthday?”
“He was born, wasn’t he? Then he has a birthday.”
“I … I don’t know. I haven’t known him a full year. That means it’s sometime in the next few months.”
“It was last week.”
“
What?
” I pulled away from him.
“The day you first loved each other. It was his birthday present to himself.”
I balled my fists up against my eyes. “How dare you! How dare you know that and not me!”
Tom caught me by the shoulders again, but now he spoke with a voice full of tenderness. “
I
know it because I had his personnel file. I’m just trying to illustrate a point.
There’s just a whole lot you don’t know about Jack Sampler.”
I began to shake. A little whimpering voice came out of my throat. “Are you going to tell me?”
“No,” he whispered. “There are things that none of us know, things even Jack doesn’t know about himself.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s time you met his mother. If anyone can explain Jack, it’s her.” He brushed my cheek with the back on one hand, then started the car.
His heart pounded with fear and anticipation as he watched the specialist stand up from his desk, stretch, and wander off to find dinner. Here it was, his chance to get onto the computer and find out when the shuttle launch had been rescheduled. The days of outwaiting the high winds and waves had ended, and his plan could once more go forward. Time to make the bitch Lucy pay him back for everything she had done to him. All the nights of lost sleep. The insult of spurning him burned in his gut like a hot iron.
He looked both ways. No one coming, no one to see what he was doing. What fools they were that they thought he did not know about their setup. They thought him stupid; well, that was handy to let them think so, and he did nothing to change their impression of him. They came and went from the airstrip with the shadow of night, just as he came and went on the boat that they had so foolishly given him to use. He was the pale face they kept around to run errands to the mainland, while the big black Bahamians handled the unwitting slobs from Middle America whose lolling visits made the operation seem legitimate.
He swept down on the machine, hacked into the system, got his information. Lucy would launch at dawn in three days. Three days. Three days! Perhaps it was time to take the boat now, before his swarthy employers had any chance
to block his transit. He would have to lay low, wait near the motel, but he had waited before … .
He moved quickly, backing away from the machine, out of the room, out of the building so cleverly decorated to look like a quaint Bahamian beach shack. Little did the pigs from Ohio know what was kept in here, or in any of the others along this row. He hurried away through the trees, and was almost to the dock when he heard his name called. Mispronounced, as usual.
“Yeah?” he answered, sliding seamlessly into his stupid dolt act.
“You are needed at the command center. Move!”
His stomach tightened. “Yes, well, I was about to run some errands across at the mainland. Will I be going soon?” he said, hoping he had shown the correct mixture of initiative and obsequiousness.
“No. This boat is needed. You will stay on this island until it returns.”
“How long will that be?” he inquired anxiously.
“At least until day after tomorrow,” the man said. “And then you must hurry, we will have many errands for you then.”
Don’t worry,
he thought.
I will fly like the devil himself. For I have an errand of my own
.

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