Watermind (36 page)

She'd been sleeping fully dressed in a chair, but the cabin felt icy. She could see her breath. Liquid beads condensed on the metal ceiling, and droplets crashed against the small round window at her shoulder. In the lower bunk, Roman lay cocooned in a gray blanket. Last night, he'd been ill. Dan Meir had helped her put him to bed.

A phone was ringing—that's what woke her.
Max.
She dug in her jeans pocket and tugged out the cell phone she'd borrowed from Peter. “Max, is that you?” She cupped the phone to her ear, but there was only cellular static, like the white noise in a seashell, or the rush of her own blood.
“Max,” she said again. But the call was coming from elsewhere.

She found Roman's ear loop ringing in the pocket of his windbreaker. It was Peter Vaarveen calling from the
Pilgrim.
His thick-tongued New York accent sounded churlish and hungover.

“Where's Sacony? Your electronic pal just divided again. I guess our ray guns showed it how.”

“Divided?”

“Yeah, ten pieces. Like, you know, asexual reproduction.”

“We're on our way.”

She draped the windbreaker around her shoulders, then shook Roman to wake him. But he wouldn't wake. She pressed an ear to his chest, and a strong rhythmic heart beat pulsed against her cheek. She drew back. His hair looked grayer, thinner, his face more heavily seamed. He was nearly fifty. Harry's age. She felt tempted to let him rest. But who would command this operation in his place? Not the bickering bureaucrats. Not Dan Meir or Peter Vaarveen.
Not me.

“Wake up.” She yanked off his bedcovers.

Fully clothed except for his shoes, he lay curled in a tight fetal knot with his hands folded between his knees. She winced. He looked too vulnerable that way. His folded hands embarrassed her. She wanted him to sit up and snarl so she could snarl back.

Her feelings for this impossible man changed like weather. She ran a fingertip over his eyebrows to smooth out the stress lines, the way she used to do for Harry. Then she dumped a bottle of water in his face.

“Wake up, you bastard.”

“Lo hace terminar?”
He opened his eyes, sputtering and blinking. Droplets clung to his hair. “Reilly?”

She tossed his shoes on the bed. “You're wanted.”

 

Saturday, March 19

9:02
AM

 

Elaine gave the interview to CNN. Mounting fatalities qualified the Baton Rouge refrigerant spill for nationwide coverage, and the Atlanta-based reporter had been badgering them since midnight to present their side of the story. Elaine Guidry looked fresh and perky, standing on the cold Plaquemine pier. Between takes, she rubbed her arms and joked with the cameraman about the cold weather.

Dan Meir watched from the sidelines as she enlightened the TV audience about Quimicron's goodwill. In her honeyed drawl, she described their philanthropic efforts to clean up a pollution slick that didn't even belong to them. It migrated downriver from the
Noth,
she confided, leaning intimately toward the camera lens. She characterized the gas line explosion as tragic bad luck. “An act of
Gawd,
” she said. When the reporter asked more questions, she offered motherly reassurance to the residents of Louisiana.

“You all can rest easy. We've got the finest people working on this, and it's about ninety percent contained. We're just asking everybody to stay away from the river till you hear the all clear.”

Dan Meir believed in what Elaine was saying. The two of them had talked it over. Though the words weren't strictly honest, their intention was to protect people, and Dan believed that was the best they could hope for. This episode had muddied his sense of truth but not his humanity. He blew Elaine a kiss.

While she talked, Dan thought about the algae juice Peter Vaarveen had showed him through the microscope. Peter said the juice was mutating really fast. “Like a nuclear explosion,” he said. Dan didn't know much biochemistry, but he could see the glib young scientist was scared.

While Elaine did her job, Dan watched a group of dirt bikers tearing up and down the levee across the river. Kids having fun. Was it fair to deceive them? He thought of his son, little Danny, already getting married. The world was changing. Sometimes, Dan didn't recognize it anymore. He watched the kids on their dirt bikes. He would give anything to protect them, if only he knew how.

Before the reporter could ask Elaine any more questions, Dan whisked her into the Quimicron speedboat and accelerated downriver, throwing up a rooster tail of spray. Squeezing each other to warm up, they raced to catch the
Chausseur.

By the time they rendezvoused, the colloidal fragments had rounded the sharp bend at College Point—barely sixty river miles from New Orleans.

 

Saturday, March 19

11:42
AM

 

On the chilly
Pilgrim
bridge, Ebbs, Jarmond, and Roman Sacony stayed glued to the computer screen. The colloid had divided again. The satellite image showed twenty cold plumes zigzagging downriver. Their combined volume now equaled the colloid's size before Manchac Point. And they were still growing. They moved like a pod of blue whales.

“The thing's metastasizing,” Jarmond said, “like cancer.”

Roman studied how the plumes changed places. One would take the lead, then rapidly fall back so another could move ahead. They seemed to be drafting in each other's wake. He timed them through a full rotation—just ninety seconds.

The
Chausseur
and
Pilgrim
tracked close behind the
plumes. Sometimes they streaked downriver at a speed of fifteen knots. Sometimes they slowed to a stop to feed on submerged trash along the riverbed. At each pause, the crew deployed a gangway so personnel could pass more easily from one vessel to the other. Couriers came and went. Messages were exchanged in hard copy. The governor kept an open fax line.

Now and then, news boats broke from the trailing flotilla and darted forward like piranhas nibbling at a carp—till Rory Godchaux herded them back with his megaphone. In the sky, CNN's helicopter turned wide circles, keeping a wary distance. CNN had heard about the chopper crash at Port Allen.

The farther south they traveled, the more docking facilities they encountered. Behind the levees, they could see rooftops and parking lots, tank farms and refinery towers, outliers to the once-flourishing sprawl of New Orleans. But in the nippy gloom, the buildings slumped and sagged like stacks of old newsprint. The great city itself—repeatedly flood-ravaged and rebuilt—lay only a few river bends downstream, and on the
Pilgrim
's bridge, Roman felt its nearness pressing on his mind.

He had flown into New Orleans after the first big hurricane strike, the one called Katrina. Without fuss or publicity, he'd deployed tons of equipment and scores of Quimicron employees to help with that first cleanup. Wading the streets, he'd seen the brown, black, and pale white people left behind like trash. Ravenous children, mothers bawling profanities, hollow-eyed fathers stunned to silence. And he'd found, in ways he couldn't articulate, that the discarded souls in those inner-city wards reminded him of himself.

Mar del Plata, his city by the sea—even now he could hear its clean surf breaking on the sand. How comfortably he had brooded away the long afternoons, sheltered in his mother's yellow porch, reading his hoard of
Time
magazines and watching the acacia trees slowly drop their leaves.
Yet, like the throwaway poor of New Orleans, he'd felt left behind, irrelevant, hungry, though not for food.

His eyes focused again on the map of Louisiana, and with a manicured thumbnail, he traced the blue vein of this North American river through the heart of the many-hued city. Nearby, Ebbs and Jarmond traded
Anglo
river terminology which Roman did not trust and only half understood. They, too, were poring over river charts, searching for another place to ambush the multiplying plumes of colloid.

“No more delays.” Roman thumped the map at random. “We'll trap them here.”

“Here where?” Ebbs chomped his mustache. “Do you see any inlets or tributaries? No, sir. From this point on down, it's solid riprap levees running right next to the river on both sides.”

“Maybe we should evacuate New Orleans,” Jarmond said.

Roman raised his fist, and the young man flinched backward, showing the whites of his eyes. From the way the others gawped, Roman knew he'd allowed himself to lose control. Jarmond gave him a wounded look.

Roman lowered his hand, straightened his cuff, then spoke in a restrained hiss. “I will not let that
violador
reach New Orleans. Choose a place to make a stand. Choose now.”

Jarmond fingered his Adam's apple and eyed Roman warily. “What about the Bonnet Carré Spillway?”

Again he pointed out the narrow green strip of marshland that lay just above New Orleans. Again he told them how the Corps had built the Bonnet Carré Spillway to shunt Mississippi floods through Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf. He said they hadn't opened it in years.

Roman measured the map with his knuckle. The spillway carved a long green path from the river to the lake. The map showed it railed on either side by guide levees and bisected by a small meandering stream. Around it lay
thickly settled suburbs. It was too close to the city. If word leaked out, the repercussions would be disastrous. Roman didn't like it. He gave Ebbs and Jarmond a cool frown.

Ebbs shook his shaggy white head. “The river's high enough to spill through, once you open the control weir. We would need to throw up a catch dam inside. Question is, how can you drive all twenty plumes through the weir?”

“Well, if we get them close enough, gravity will pull them through. Won't it?” Jarmond clicked his ballpoint pen like a repeating rifle.

The three men eyed each other. Ebbs frowned. “We sure as hell need to keep this quiet. If people find out . . .” He shook his white head again.

Roman took another hard look at the map. He counted the colloidal masses on the computer screen. He counted the clicks of Jarmond's pen. “All right, call your boss. We'll do it.”

Jarmond broke into a wide boyish grin. “The last time they opened the Bonnet Carré, I was just a kid. Man, it was awesome.”

As Jarmond punched his phone to call the spillway office, none of them noticed the FedEx guy with copper hair who listened unobtrusively at the door. Dressed in a borrowed uniform, Hal Butler had slipped aboard with one of the couriers from the governor's office. His skin was sunburned, his nose swollen with insect bites, and his lips contorted with secret rejoicing. He'd just overhead a piece of intelligence juicy enough to interrupt prime time. Without attracting anyone's notice, the ace journalist-illustrator-blogger-soon-to-be-multimedia-star turned on his heels, wriggled his fingers, and tiptoed away.

 

Saturday, March 19

12:15
PM

 

A red-tailed hawk glided under a ceiling of cold gray clouds above the Bonnet Carré Spillway. With uncanny focus, it scanned for rice rats, mink kits, and baby loons. Eight thousand verdant acres spread below its glittering eyes, a marsh flourishing with life, uninhabited by man. The hawk's wetland kingdom extended six miles from the mighty Mississippi all the way to Lake Pontchartrain.

Where the marsh bordered the river, a concrete weir grinned like a long flat mouth full of wooden teeth. From the weir, the marsh sloped down through sparse woods and boggy fields to the lake shore. Guide levees as straight as rules confined it on the East and West, and a shining blue stream sluiced down its center. Only a handful of times had the weir opened to divert the flooding river through Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico. When that happened, the stream morphed into a ruddy torrent. But today it fluttered and gleamed like a blue satin sash.

The hawk's faint shadow rippled over the blue stream, the brown canals, and the green ponds of the marsh. It flowed across picnic tables and model airplane fields. The bird's keen gaze roved through mixed wild grasses washed in from Michigan and Nebraska. A lone pelican observed the predator's progress, and migrant songbirds scattered at its approach. A flock of nervous egrets stepped nearer to the water's edge. Suddenly the raptor dove, swift as a jet, and speared a rabbit. Wailing screams, flashes of talon, fur and blood, a fight to the death, a meal. Robert Dréclare watched through binoculars from his office window.

Ranger Dréclare patrolled the Bonnet Carré Spillway alone on Saturdays, and usually he didn't get much time in his office. He took a bite of his fried oyster sandwich
and watched the hawk lift off, clutching its prey. Ranger Dréclare spent most days driving his Corps of Engineers Jeep through the marsh, chasing illegal dumpers or busting kids for smoking pot or rescuing drunks after they crashed their four-wheelers. More than once, he'd recovered murdered bodies.

Besides law enforcement, Dréclare answered questions for tourists: What type of duck is that? What is this wild-flower? How many wooden pins in the Bonnet Carré dam? It's not a dam, he would patiently explain, it's a control weir. And it's not pronounced that fancy French way. It's the Bonnie Carrie, plain and simple.

Ranger Dréclare had done hazardous duty in Bosnia and Iraq, but his job at the Bonnet Carré entailed its own class of perils. He stood at the window in his olive green uniform, resting one hand on his gear belt. This afternoon, someone had radioed that an abandoned car was burning on the east guide levee, and Dréclare could see the pillar of black smoke rising in the distance. Pretty soon, he would jump in his Jeep and race over there to deal with it. But for a moment, he wanted to finish his lunch and enjoy the poetry of the hawk.