Doc - 19 - Chasing Midnight Read online

  I had watched his eyes move to the padlocked cabinet where I keep the Schedule III drugs sometimes used in my work. Then I listened to Tomlinson ask, “You got some human growth hormone stashed in there or something? Raw pituitary extract from unborn chimps? I’ve been wanting to try something like that, but I’m not sure of the side effects, so—”

  “You lecturing me on the dangers of drugs,” I had interrupted, “carries about as much weight as you preaching the value of sexual fidelity. I’m fit because I work at it seven days a week.”

  My friend was still eyeing the drug cabinet as he offered, “Then you can afford one day off.”

  “That’s one of the few lies I don’t let myself believe. You coming or not?”

  Tomlinson had exaggerated my level of fitness, although I am in the best shape I’ve been for many years. I had cut way back on alcohol and carbs—carrot cake the occasional exception—refined my workouts to eliminate injuries and doubled my cardio time on a ball breaker of a machine called a VersaClimber. It meant a lot more surfing and swimming and less joint-jarring sprints on hard sand.

  As a result, I’m in better overall shape, but I can no longer talk and run sub-eight-minute miles at the same time. So it wasn’t until almost sunset, sitting at the West Wind pool bar, that we had touched on the subject of Internet isolation again. But not for long, because I did most of the talking.

  During the mile swim, I had settled into an automaton rhythm—stroke-stroke-breathe-kick—that allowed my brain to drift free of the responsibilities associated with survival. It wasn’t really freeing, though, because at first I stupidly fixated on personal problems. Nothing serious, but irritating.

  My sixteen-year-old son, who lives in Colombia with his regal, bipolar mother, was already being recruited by the Military School of the Americas—Military School of Assassins, as it was known when the institute was based in Panama. That was unsettling in itself, considering my background, but he’d also decided to give up baseball to play soccer.

  It was a trivial disappointment compared to the problems I’d been having with women.

  The previous afternoon, the smart lady biologist I’d been dating, Emily Marston, had asked to have a “serious talk”—among the most chilling phrases in the female vocabulary. She said that our marathon lovemaking was as stimulating as our mutual interests, but, frankly, she’d begun to question my ability to make a lasting commitment.

  I had been tempted to point out her concern was based on a flawed premise. I didn’t want to make a lasting commitment. Not yet, anyway. I was also tempted to mention that she had told me, from the start, that she was too recently divorced to get into a serious relationship. But isn’t that what women always say?

  “Maybe we should take a month off and think about it,” I had suggested. I didn’t want to take a month off—we’d been having too much fun—but I was trying to behave like a sensitive, modern male.

  Sensitive, modern males are dumbasses, apparently. Five minutes later, Emily Marston, the handsome lady biologist, was out the door, and maybe out of my life.

  I had other relationship problems, too.

  My workout pal and former lover, Dewey Nye, had decided that she, her new love interest and our toddler daughter were better off living in Belgium, where same-sex marriage is legal. I am all for same-sex marriage—what gives government the right to spare us from our own mistakes or happiness? But Dewey marrying a twenty-two-year-old female golf phenom? And in Belgium, for Christ’s sake?

  Maybe on one distant day, at a soccer match in Brussels, I would get to see my son and daughter again.

  As I swam along the beach, though, I’d finally realized I had been swept into negative channels of thought. So I had consciously shifted to an unemotional topic. Tomlinson’s theory was fresh in my memory, so I had spent the rest of the swim scanning for Darwinian parallels.

  There were many.

  Later, sitting at the West Wind pool bar, rehydrating with soda water and lime, I had bounced my conclusions off my pal, who had switched from beer to a Nicaraguan rum, Flor de Caña.

  I had told him, “You’re right, I’ve been thinking about it. Our reliance on a tool, any tool, increases our vulnerability as a species.”

  “Damn right.” Tomlinson nodded, as he signaled the bartender for another drink.

  “Clothing is a tool. Supermarkets, leakproof roofs, Bic lighters, they’re all tool related. Our lives wouldn’t be the same without them. But ‘reliance’ isn’t the same as ‘dependence.’ See what I’m getting at?”

  “No,” Tomlinson had replied, but he was interested. “Just for the record, I prefer kitchen matches to lighters. Call me old-fashioned. Plus, I like the smell.”

  “I’m talking about the paper you’re writing,” I had replied, then explained that “dependence” implied a behavioral shift. “Specialization is a form of adaptation that results in dependence. A specialist species can thrive, but only in its environmental niche. Remove ants from the landscape and an anteater’s nose becomes a liability. Does it make sense now?”

  Tomlinson was with me again. “The more specialized the tools, the more vulnerable their dependents. Wireless technology—bingo! Doc, you just gave the first line of my introduction.”

  A few minutes later, sipping my first beer, I had asked the bartender for a piece of paper. Instead, she had given me a cloth napkin, and said, “I was going to trash it, anyway. See the stain?”

  I had told Tomlinson, “Use this any way you want,” and then concentrated for a couple of minutes as I wrote:

  Adaptation funnels some species into ever-narrowing passages of specialization that ensure their success. For a time. In the Darwinian exemplar, specialization is always associated with dependence. Dependence is always associated with risk. There is an implicit fragility, no matter how large and powerful the animal. Specialization can elevate a species to a genetic apex—but the apex inevitably teeters between godliness and the abyss.

  “Godliness and the abyss.” Tomlinson had repeated the phrase several times, a genial smile on his face. “Your spiritual side is starting to overpower your dark side, Dr. Ford.”

  I had countered, “I used the word metaphorically, Professor Tomlinson, as you well know.”

  End of discussion, and we had moved on to more compelling topics—Vision surfboards made by Buddha Bonifay, women and torn rotator cuffs.

  It hadn’t crossed my mind there was a connection between Tomlinson’s Sudden Internet Isolation theory, the party-crashing eco-activists and the events now taking place on Vanderbilt Island. Not until I had listened to Vladimir, anyway.

  Now, though, as I swam through darkness toward the marina, I realized the oversight was a gross lapse on my part. In fact, I had received an advance warning, of sorts, from Tomlinson himself. He had referenced the subject obliquely a day or so later, while on a rant about environmentalism and the Caspian Sea.

  The linkage was there. I had missed it. But I couldn’t be too hard on myself. Not many people would make a connection between hashish brownies, caviar and hijacking an island.

  Hash brownies—they were in the paper bag Tomlinson had been holding when he appeared on the stern of Tiger Lilly, the floating home of two Dinkin’s Bay icons, Rhonda Lister and JoAnn Smallwood. On his face was a tranquil grin and his eyes were glazed. The marina’s resident cat, Crunch & Des, was cradled in his free arm.

  This was more than a month ago, a Saturday evening, after he had returned from the post office with mail that included his invitation to Vanderbilt Island.

  As I’d watched Tomlinson exit the boat, I doubted if he was grinning because he’d just enjoyed the favors of one or both ladies, although it was possible. Anything is possible at Dinkin’s Bay, particularly after sunset, when Mack, the owner, locks the parking lot gates, barring prissy, judgmental outsiders from the marina, along with the rest of the world.

  As it turned out, though, Tomlinson’s grin had more to do with the brownies the ladies had fed him before p
acking the rest into a to-go bag.

  “They made the classic Betty Crocker one-cubed-squared recipe,” he had explained, still holding the cat and the paper bag as he followed me down the boardwalk toward my lab.

  I’d replied, “Like a mathematical formula, you mean?”

  “Even better. A mathematical double entendre. One egg, one great big cube of primo hash resin, one box of brownie mix, baked, then cut into squares. The resin was made with my own brownie-loving hands. You want one?”

  Hashish, he meant. Which makes him even more talkative than grass, as he admits. And why I had tuned him out even when he got onto the subject of caviar and Vanderbilt Island, which somehow transitioned into a monologue on yet another environmental group he had joined—Third Planet Peace Force—which was obvious only in hindsight. He hadn’t mentioned the group by name. Not even once, until they had appeared at the fishing lodge.

  I vaguely remembered him saying that he suspected one of the group’s officers was a fan of his writing—Winifred Densler, as it turned out.

  “We’ve been trading rather formal e-mails,” he had explained, “but all the evidence is there. There’s a lot to learn from a woman’s choice of verbs. Freudian stuff, you know? Adverbs, the same thing. Adverbs reveal passion… sometimes deep hostility, too. Verbs reveal sexual interest or sexual frustration. Doesn’t matter a damn what she’s writing about. Modifiers and verbs, man—and don’t forget exclamation points and smiley faces. They are the Internet’s truest windows to a woman’s soul.”

  The hostility line had stuck with me. Thinking about it now, alone in black water, swimming beneath stars, that phrase—deep hostility—suddenly prodded another detail free. Tomlinson, days later, had mentioned he had sent the first few hundred words of his Internet isolation theory to a member of the group—Densler, probably. She had shared it with other key members, and then Tomlinson had given his permission to post it on the organization’s private web page. Members’ reactions, my pal had told me, had been enthusiastic, but in a way that had struck even him as abnormally angry.

  “What bothers me,” he had said, “is they seem eager for the Apocalypse. Punish man for all our sins against nature. Me, I’m not into the whole punishment deal. It’s bad juju, karmically speaking.”

  Punish man for our sins against nature.

  There! It was the connection I’d been searching for. At the time, it had been a snippet of meaningless conversation. Now, though, Tomlinson’s words provided a key part of a disturbing picture.

  Possibly.

  Verifying that the linkage was real, not fanciful, was so important that I stopped swimming and treaded water for a few seconds to confirm the details in my head.

  I could picture Tomlinson following me into the lab and placing Crunch & Des on the dissection table as he told me, “A couple of the members wrote they’re all for the Internet crashing. See what I mean? They copied me, of course, and everyone else—members of this group I’m talking about share everything. Very communal in an Internet sort of way, which I find cool.”

  They share everything—another important point.

  Tomlinson had continued, “What they’re hoping is, when the Internet finally crashes, it’ll give us a taste of what’s gonna happen if the industrialized nations don’t stop abusing Mother Earth. A microcosmic taste, you know, when the kimchi really hits the fan.”

  Tomlinson’s dreamy idealism can be almost as irritating as his self-righteous certitude, but I hadn’t called him on it. I had been busy watching the cat. Tail twitching, Crunch & Des had been eyeing a half dozen fingerling tarpon that I’d recently transferred to a fifty-gallon aquarium near the dissection table. Because I was duplicating a procedure done in the 1930s by biologist Charles M. Breeder, I hadn’t covered the tank. Even fingerling tarpon require surface air to survive—which Breeder had proven and the cat now realized.

  Crunch & Des was getting ready to attack. I had seen the warning signs before.

  Before the cat could pounce, though, I had crossed the room while listening to Tomlinson say, “See why I became a dues-paying member? They’re hardasses, man! A group of highly educated, well-informed Greenies who aren’t content to sit on their dead butts while the environment collapses around us. You want some examples of how they operate?”

  No, I didn’t. Which is why I had paid more attention to the cat than to Tomlinson as I returned to my desk. Even so, I remembered the man telling me that the group was made up of true activists, not run-of-the-mill do-gooders and talkers. And they had more than just passion. They had enough financial backing to purchase a commercial trawler in Iran and refit it as a mother ship, from which they launched their fast rigid-hulled inflatable boats onto the Caspian Sea. Members were watermen who knew their way around a wheelhouse. For the past year, Tomlinson had said, they had been manning the trawler with crews of six, systematically harassing sturgeon fishermen at sea and on the docks. Same with the shuttle boats that hauled workers to and from oil rigs in the Caspian.

  No… I had the wording wrong, probably the result of my own bias. As I continued swimming the last forty yards toward the marina’s docks, and No Más, I decided Tomlinson had probably said confronting fishermen, not harassing.

  He approved, of course.

  “How else are you going to deal with international outlaws? My God, look what they’re doing to the whales on this planet!”

  With a wave of his hand, my strange friend had dismissed all governing bodies—the International Whaling Commission, among them—as if useless, before adding, “If a few tough, smart activists don’t organize internationally to stop this rank bullshit, we’re going to be the death of our own species—and we’ll take a lot of innocent species with us.”

  I don’t have much patience with doomsayers, people who are secretly eager for the Apocalypse to cleanse the Earth of human sloth. Tomlinson knows it, which is probably why he had focused on a subject of mutual interest: whales.

  “Just as an example, Doc. What’s happening to our sea mammals is a perfect inverse mirror that reflects man’s greed, our bloodlust… the whole negative karma thing that’s going to turn around and bite us on the ass one day.

  “It’s all about rhythm. Synchronicity is another way of viewing the problem. Crystals, for instance, are repeating three-dimensional realities—but look what happens if just one molecule is removed from what’s call the ‘lattice parameter.’ Trust me, amigo. I think you know where I’m headed with this.”

  Nope, not a clue, but I let it go.

  Tomlinson had compared the group’s efforts with the campaign against the Japanese whaling fleet by another organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Over the last several years, Sea Shepherd activists had hurled stink bombs, snared propellers and even collided with opposing vessels in their efforts to disrupt Japan’s annual “harvest” of open-ocean whales.

  “It’s the illegal, cold-blooded murder of a fellow warm-blooded species—it’s mammalicide,” my pal had said—which also stuck in my memory, because the word “mammalicide” was so unusual. “This is one of those rare cases when a passive response is actually an active form of violence. How? Because it guarantees more bloodshed. That’s why I’m helping our environmental warriors in every way I can.”

  Those weren’t Tomlinson’s exact words, of course. It was possible he had said, “I’m backing our environmental warriors,” or that he was “supporting” them—subtle differences, true, but both suggested a more hands-on commitment to… to what? Proactive intervention? Or was he tacitly endorsing violence?

  Truth was, either one was a possibility, considering Tomlinson’s past.

  Though few on Sanibel Island would believe it, Tomlinson had spent time in jail because of his associations with radical groups. In South Dakota, he had been arrested at an American Indian Movement rally demanding the release of Leonard Peltier. He had also been a suspect in a terrorist bombing that had killed two people at a San Diego naval base.

  But that
was many years ago. Had I not been convinced that Tomlinson, while not blameless, wasn’t guilty of murder, we certainly wouldn’t be friends today. Tomlinson, in truth, wouldn’t be alive today—something I knew for certain and he probably suspected.

  Was it possible that the guy had turned radical again?

  Maybe, I decided. Anyone who lives on the water is an environmentalist by obligation, if not choice. What better cause could there be?

  Tomlinson and I seldom agree on anything that has to do with religion, politics or has boundaries that exceed the perimeter of Dinkin’s Bay. But he was right about Japan’s slaughter of whales. It’s illegal and outrageous. Not only does the “fishery” kill more than a thousand whales yearly, the nation shows its contempt for world opinion (and the ocean’s resources) by insisting that the butchery is actually a “whale research program.”

  With a similar research program, the Japanese have destroyed the bull shark population in Lake Nicaragua and continues its assault on a global scale using nets, longlines and factory ships.

  Yet, Japan’s atrocities are eclipsed by the world’s foremost environmental outlaw, China. I had collected some unsavory details while researching one of that country’s foremost offenders, Lien Hai Bohai.

  China recognizes no international sea boundaries but its own, plus those of countries that have prostituted their futures by selling China all rights to their fisheries. Cuba may be the saddest example—its citizens are legally forbidden from eating shrimp, lobster and pelagic fish caught in their own waters.

  Chinese ships catch, kill, process and blast-freeze every living thing in their paths. Floating factories, like the fleet owned by Lien Bohai, destroy a hundred cubic miles of sea bottom daily, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year. The countries of the former Soviet Union do less damage, but only because they have limited resources.

  Tomlinson had every reason to support environmental activists in the Caspian Sea. But violence with lethal intent? No… I knew the guy too well to believe it. I just couldn’t. With him, the lines of morality are often blurry, but no way would he associate with anyone crazy enough to shoot or gas innocent people.