Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight Read online

  I had spoken with Talas twice that day—the second time when I had surprised him and Armanie arguing about something near the swimming pool. In our first discussion, Talas had shown more interest in what I’d learned from Kazlov than discussing the Caspian Sea. But he had, at least, been charming in the way some fat men are: laughter, and sly references to food and drink and women. When I had entered the dining room, though, stony looks from Talas’s bodyguard told me I wasn’t welcome, so I didn’t bother stopping.

  Only Lien Hai Bohai had bothered to stand as I approached his table. The man resembled a Chinese Colonel Sanders, in his white linen suit and billy goat beard, but looked younger for the two women who sat at his side. Maybe his granddaughters or trusted secretaries—or his trusted courtesans. Impossible to know for sure when it comes to aging rich men.

  Both women wore sleek silk dresses, and one was a truly stunning beauty. She had implausibly long legs and a world-class body, which I’d confirmed earlier that day when she was at the pool. By candlelight, in the dining room, I had added tannin skin, breasts of marble and Anglo-Malaysian eyes to the list.

  Bohai’s second escort was also stunning in her way—stunningly plain. Square face framed by black hair; a short, thick body, but a fit-looking woman who had the shoulders of a competitive swimmer. Of the two women, I found her oddly more appealing. More interesting, at least—but then, I prefer female jocks to beauty queens, and I’m always on the hunt for swim partners.

  I had been tempted to linger at the table, hoping for an introduction. Instead, I was dismissed by Bohai after only managing eye contact with the tannin-skinned beauty, so I had continued toward the bar to find Tomlinson.

  The bar was where the strays gathered. They included a woman restaurateur from nearby Captiva Island and her two lady friends—all late thirties, early forties. Smart, successful and attractive women who radiated a confidence that was spiced with an eagerness to make the most of their bachelorette weekend.

  Tomlinson was there, too, but he wasn’t sitting with the ladies from Captiva, as expected. He was with his eco-elitist friends, including Densler, the group leader.

  It had been my first look at the party crashers, although it had taken me a while to confirm they were on the island without Kazlov’s knowledge. Densler was outspoken, loud and a little drunk, which had provided me yet another reason to escape the reception in favor of a solitary night dive. When the lights went out, Tomlinson and his new Third Planet friends had probably still been in the bar.

  It was a volatile mix that included a couple of armed bodyguards from three competing organizations, plus an unwelcome group of antagonistic outsiders. The chaos that followed was starting to assume order as Vladimir continued to describe what happened when the power went out and after guests realized their cell phones weren’t working.

  “That is when people start to get scared,” the man told me. “All over lodge, I hear them talking, saying, ‘Try reception outside, try near window.’ I hear people bang into chairs ’cause not enough candles. Everyone nervous. Then in loud voice, a man—someone in bar, I think—this man, he yell, ‘Hey, Internet is out, too! What hell shitty trick is Kazlov playing?’ What if emergency? Someone could die.”

  It was then that a single shot was fired. The shot came from nearby, maybe outside, but more likely from one of the lodge’s guest rooms. A pistol, Vladimir told me. Small caliber.

  I waited while the bodyguard took several seconds to catch his breath before he added, “That is when whole night go to shit. People start yelling, they go crazy. They panic, they run. How many people left lodge, I don’t know. Mr. Kazlov disappear just before hippie group arrive—important business. It take me a while to know he still not return to dining room. That when I go little crazy, too.”

  Looking at me through shadows, Vladimir sat straighter to make his point. “See why I call it ‘crazy’? Power out, phones not working. Of course everyone is afraid. This is not accident. Hear what I say? It is not accident! I should have understood sooner, but… but…”

  Vladimir was beginning to pant, and I noticed he no longer bothered to slap at the horde of mosquitoes—one of the first symptoms of shock in Florida on a summer night. So I torqued the bandage tight, knotted it and helped the man lie down.

  I was thinking that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to isolate Vanderbilt Island from the outside world. Was the perpetrator so brilliant that he had anticipated the hysteria he had created? Vladimir had implied as much. Or had he just gotten lucky?

  The word “brilliant” didn’t fit the gunman who was now getting impatient. I could tell because he was using the flashlight again to search the tree canopy above us. I watched the angle of his light change as he shifted positions. The gunman was coming toward us, I realized.

  As I got to my feet, Vladimir said, “Can’t move yet. Lose too much blood. I rest, maybe sleep. Then go.”

  The man was lying on his back, knees drawn up. I knelt and touched my fingers to his neck. His pulse was rapid and weak. He was shivering, too, on a night so warm the air had weight, like steam.

  I said, “If you go to sleep, you’re not going to wake up.”

  Vladimir made a vague reply with his hand. “Five minutes,” he said. “Too tired. Bring me water. I am very thirsty. Bring doctor, too.”

  The man was drifting into delirium, so I tried one more time. “How do you know there’s a bomb? Someone told you. Goddamn it, there are innocent people in the lodge who have nothing to do with your little war.”

  The man made a grunting sound of impatience. I had to ask the question again before he finally admitted, “A few minutes after Mr. Kazlov leave party, he send me text. He say someone he know intercept e-mails. There may be device on island that kill everything at midnight—”

  I interrupted, “Midnight? You’re sure?”

  The man nodded. “Information, he say, come from close friend, but not confirmed. This just before jamming start.”

  “Which friend? The same one who told you Kazlov had been shot?”

  “We have many intelligence sources. No need to say name of his friend.”

  It was someone on the island, apparently, or the man would have no reason to conceal the identify.

  I said, “Damn it. Why didn’t you tell me this right away?” because it was ten p.m.

  Vladimir stirred for a moment and lifted his head to look at me. A moment of clarity, it seemed.

  “Does not matter intelligence source. But was your longhair friend who tell me Mr. Kazlov was shot. Why you think I come straight to marina to kill you if you don’t tell me where bomb is hidden?”

  He said it as if I should have already known.

  A moment later, Vladimir held up a warning hand and shook his head—Enough—then lay back as if sleeping.

  The man was lying on his side in a fetal position when I turned and retraced my path through the mangroves, toward the water. I stayed low, ducking limbs, peeling spiderwebs from my face as the muck, ankle-deep, tried to suction off my shoes. Something the man had said banged around in my head, signaling for special attention. It had to do with isolating people from the outside world.

  “This is no accident!” Vladimir had told me, referring to the sudden power outage, then the loss of wireless reception. “I should have understood sooner.”

  That’s when it dawned on me that I should have understood sooner, too. His words had stuck in my subconscious for good reason. A few weeks or so before, I’d discussed this very scenario over beer in my lab back on Sanibel. How would people react if an enemy suddenly jammed public cell phone networks and cut off all Internet service?

  “It’s inevitable. It’ll happen one day. And we should be preparing the same way we plan for a natural disaster. Hurricanes, tornadoes, same thing—only the panic will be ten times worse because the damage will be psychological, and without precedent. It’ll be unlike any previous hell storm nightmare our country has ever experienced.”

  Those were Tomlinson’
s words, Tomlinson’s predictions. I hadn’t taken the discussion seriously because it was all hypothetical, plus we had been ping-ponging the idea back and forth for years.

  But, now, here we were. And it was real.

  Was there a connection?

  I didn’t like the way my brain was linking events. Didn’t like it one damn bit because, in most of the scenarios, Tomlinson provided the only hub in a multi-spoked wheel.

  As I waded into the water, like it or not, I no longer felt so certain of my old friend’s innocence.

  7

  On a yellow legal pad, Tomlinson had written Sudden Internet Isolation Response, then placed the thing in front of me as I hunkered over the sink in my little laboratory, cleaning an aquarium.

  This was almost a month before we’d sailed for Vanderbilt Island, not two weeks before as I’d first thought. I became sure of the timing when I remembered that Tomlinson had received his invitation from Kazlov’s staff the next day. It wasn’t until a week or so later that we’d even discussed the caviar party at length.

  No wonder the details had faded.

  As I swam away from the mangroves, where I’d left Vladimir, toward the marina where Tomlinson’s sailboat was moored, I replayed the scene in my head, hoping to cull some key bit of data I had forgotten.

  I had been wearing elbow-length rubber gloves and a lab mask. On the counter, to my right, was a beaker filled with muriatic acid, and the fumes were getting to me.

  “You mind opening those?” I had responded, nodding toward the windows along the south wall. “There’s a fan next to my bed. Maybe put it on the lab cart—you’ll have to unlock the wheels first. I’m about to pass out.”

  The University of Northern Iowa’s science department had ordered four dozen spiny sea urchins, an order which I had shipped that afternoon. Because I had done the collecting gradually, over a period of ten days, the acrylic walls of the tank were scarred with calcium buildup. Sea urchins are echinoderms, a family of complex, specialized animals that use thousands of tiny adhesive feet to transport themselves over the bottom. I was guessing the adhesive substance had bonded with calcium carbonate in the water and attached itself in random streaks to the glass.

  Tomlinson had nudged the legal pad closer to me, saying, “I’m finally assembling data to write a paper on the damn subject—after all the times we’ve talked about it, about time, huh? Trouble is, there’s no quantitative data available. And the qualitative knowledge base is, like, zero, zilch, nada, because it’s never happened before—thank this nation’s lucky stars.”

  Over his shoulder, he had added, “Try to come up with a good acronym. Even behavioral scientists go goofy for a sexy acronym—probably because we’re too introspective to get reliable hard-ons. Present company excluded, of course.”

  I didn’t bother replying.

  “Something spelled close to the word ‘serious’ because it’s, you know, a damn serious subject. I’m getting close with Sudden Internet Isolation Response. Just need a couple of more bell ringers. Words that fit without straining—you’re familiar with the drill.”

  I had sniffed, squinted acidic tears from my eyes and looked at the legal pad. Tomlinson’s penmanship is unusual. After all the acid he’s dealt with over the years, you’d expect spidery impressionism. Instead, his writing reminds me of the eloquent calligraphy that I associate with previous centuries—beautifully formed and slanted loops and swirls. Spenserian script, he calls it, and credits his writing hand to a former life in which, he says, he worked as a shipping clerk, eighteenth-century London, on the Thames River.

  After he’d left the room, I mumbled the title aloud, then experimented with variations because I couldn’t help myself. I’m obsessive, which I have no problem admitting. I’m also a linear thinker who follows avenues of thought as if they were tunnels. By blindsiding me with the problem, Tomlinson had successfully elbowed me into a new tunnel.

  As he returned to the lab, and plugged in the fan, I was saying, “Sudden Internet Isolation Response. Uhhh… Sudden Isolation Reaction… After… After Undetected Electronic Sabotage? No, that stinks. Sudden Isolation Response to… to… ?” I looked at him and shrugged. “I’ve got work to do. Write your own damn paper.”

  Tomlinson had snapped his fingers, grabbed the legal pad and found his pencil. “How about this?”

  I watched him write Sudden Internet Isolation Response In an Unsuspecting Society.

  “‘Unprepared Society’ is better,” I told him. ‘It’s stronger than ‘Unsuspecting.’ More accurate, anyway.”

  The man thought about it, then nodded as he made the change. “When you’re right, you’re right. Let’s see how it looks on paper: S—I—I—R—I—U—S. Sweet, hermano—perfect. Serious—” He grinned. “Now I’ve just got to do the mule work. Write the intro. Put together my materials and methods. I’ll have to slip through a few time barriers, take a peek into the future to assemble data. A couple of hash brownies should do the trick. But this’ll get me to the starting gate.”

  Marijuana-laced brownies and time travel—standard equipage for academic research in Tomlinson World. I knew better than to ask questions.

  It kept Tomlinson quiet for all of ten minutes, during which he had found a stool and sat at the stainless steel dissecting table, scribbling, erasing, then scribbling some more. He had stopped only once to go to the galley and grab a fresh quart of beer.

  I finished cleaning the tank, and had moved to my desk where there was a file labeled Mote/Sturgeon Farming/Caviar. Even though it was four weeks before Kazlov’s party, I was already well into my research. In the file were the notes I’d made in Sarasota while touring Mote Marine Lab’s aquaculture facility. There were also articles and research papers on sturgeon.

  I had been reading an article about the Caspian Sea’s black marketeers when Tomlinson returned to the subject of Internet isolation. “Wireless communication is our new tribal lifeline, man. It worries me. Like, obsessively worries me. Have you noticed that I rarely carry my cell phone anymore?”

  “Maybe they’ll start making sarongs with pockets,” I had replied. “I don’t carry mine unless I’m away from the lab for more than a day. It’s like being on a leash.”

  The man’s expression had read Good! “But we’re the exceptions, hermano. The majority of people are so dependent, it makes us vulnerable as an Oklahoma trailer park. Sure, we can survive without cell phones and Internet, but we can no longer function without them.”

  It was an interesting premise. There were Darwinian implications that I would have offered, but Tomlinson had been into the subject, so I let him talk.

  “Internet and cell phones have morphed from simple conveniences into human sensory devices. No… sensory apparati, because they have unseated our own five senses in importance. As well as our reliance on humans to provide—well, let’s face it—actual human contact. Shut down those two electronic senses without warning, man, it’ll be like… almost like…”

  I had offered, “Sudden blindness—the psychological response would be similar. Shock, disbelief, denial and then panic. It depends on the person, of course. And how long the system was down. Which is probably an exaggeration, but—”

  “That’s my point,” Tomlinson had interrupted. “No one will know how long the systems will be down. How can we? Combined with a simultaneous power outage and it will be the demon mother of all uncivil chaos. Coast to coast, rumors will spread like butt cheeks at a chili festival. There’ll be talk of a terrorist attack. Of government conspiracies. Of the CIA taking control of the White House—not that those bastards aren’t above trying. Rumors and disinformation will spread like crabs at low tide, from neighborhood to neighborhood. No… I’ve got that wrong.”

  As he considered alternatives, Tomlinson had tugged at his hair so hard that, for a moment, I saw the little lightning bolt scar on his temple.

  “Nope… I was right the first time. Rumors will travel from house to house. Of course they will. But the only re
al news we’ll get will come from fishermen and truckers, because they still communicate by radio. Some of them, at least. It’s been a while since I’ve done any hitchhiking, so I’ve lost track of my eighteen-wheeler brothers. Do they still use CBs?”

  Taking off my lab coat, I had told him, “Truckers might do a better job than newscasters. Less biased, and they probably have better bullshit detectors. But you’re getting spooked for no reason. To use a Tomlinson phrase: ‘Shallow up, man.’”

  My pal had given me an impatient look, meaning the subject was too important for him not to be upset.

  I had closed the Mote file and put it away. This was on a Friday afternoon. That morning, I’d had a huge breakfast at the Over Easy Café, just down the road from Dinkin’s Bay Marina. The night before, I’d eaten a mammoth piece of Drunken Parrot Carrot Cake at the Rum Bar. Which is why I’d felt as if a slab of lead had been strapped to my butt.

  The best way to treat a caloric hangover, I have discovered, is to bludgeon the offender with exercise. That’s precisely what I had intended to do: go for a run, then do an hour of serious cross-training—PT, my friends call it.

  As I headed out the screen door to change clothes, I had said, “You mind taking your empty beer bottles to the recycle bin? A marine lab isn’t supposed to smell like a brewery. Not my lab, anyway. But it does way too often. And don’t think I don’t know it when you smoke dope in here, too.”

  Because that sounded harsher than I’d intended, I added, “I’m going to jog Tarpon Bay Road to the Island Inn. Nicky Clements just installed a pull-up bar. Twenty minutes there, and I’ll swim the no wake buoys to the West Wind. You could pace me on your bike during the run. I want to keep it under eight-minute miles, then we could meet at West Wind pool later. How’s about it?”

  Tomlinson had turned and studied me for a moment. “Dude, you are about as ripped as I’ve ever seen you. Seriously—you’ve got the veins popping. The whole gaunt predator thing going on. Man, it’s like you’re getting younger and younger while everyone around you ages.”