Watermind Page 4

  For an instant, she wanted to throw on the brakes, nuzzle into his arms, and make love right there on the leather seat. The thought of traipsing through Devil’s Swamp in the dark terrified her. Especially after reading the EPA report. But if she hesitated, Max would try to talk her out of going—and he might succeed. She was already second-guessing the whole venture.

  After all, the ice didn’t belong to her. Quimicron employed dozens of scientists—real ones, not college dropouts. Probably, they’d already analyzed the ice and filed for a patent on the chemical reaction. That’s what she hated most, that they would keep the process a secret and claim they’d invented it.

  “Sell it for money,” she muttered.

  Her fingernails sank into the leather steering wheel. If the ice could transform poisonous swill into safe drinking water, that could benefit millions of people around the world. Quimicron didn’t have a right to profit from that. She shoved hair out of her eyes. But who was she to stop them? The whole system was bogus. She had half a mind to turn her car around and get on a plane to Mexico.

  A raccoon scurried through her high beams, and she swerved and splashed through a pothole to miss it. Somewhere in the darkness ahead lay the pond. She could almost see the blue-green light again, ranging just beyond her periphery. What chemical effect could produce luminous ice that pulsed in time to music? Deep in her brain, nerve endings prickled with curiosity. She kept driving.

  Squish

  Wednesday, March 9

  11:33 PM

  A cold front moved through the swamp, and the warm sloughs respired a malodorous fog. CJ coasted the last hundred yards and parked against a barricade of palmettos. Max opened his door, and cold mist wetted their faces. When they climbed out, the ground felt spongy underfoot. CJ shimmied into her coverall, and Max shouldered the heavy bag of tools. They trudged through dew-drenched grass up the sloping ring levee.

  From the top, they could see Quimicron’s mercury floodlights gleaming across the canal water, and far in the distance, boat traffic winked along the river. But the two hundred-acre swamp lay in cold darkness. Max and CJ slid down the levee bank into the pitch-black undergrowth, covering their flashlights with their fingers to damp the light. Not far away, they heard the voices of the guards.

  “Ouch!” CJ tripped and fell. Something sharp prodded through her glove. It was a piece of rusting concertina wire. When she tried to pull away, it tangled around her arm.

  “Ceegie, you hurt?” Max helped her work loose from the coiling wire, but its razor barbs tore holes in her glove and grazed her palm.

  “We should both think about tetanus shots,” she said.

  After that, she moved more cautiously, creeping on bent knees, holding her muffled light near the ground and vividly recalling the symptoms of tetanus: muscle spasms in the jaw escalating to full body convulsions powerful enough to break bones.

  Under the moonless sky, her flashlight caught the glowing red eyes of a baby alligator. Bullfrogs bayed rumbling choruses, and tree frogs crooned. Grasses rustled with movement. An owl screamed. Sawbriars chewed at her boots, and heavy dew soaked her gloves. Max stayed close. Even with his compass, it took them an hour to find the northern end of the canal.

  Across the water, mercury lamps brightened Quimicron’s dock like a surreal apparition in the black landscape, and loading cranes hovered like giant insectile arms. Three barges bobbed in the ebony water, moored by heavy cables. The chain-link fence glittered with moisture, and behind the fogged upper windows of Building No. 2, people were working late.

  They skirted along the canal. Mosquitoes swarmed thicker near the water, but at least the rippling reflections helped them see their way. “It’s through here.” Max pointed into the dark swamp, then rechecked his compass. “I’m pretty sure.”

  CJ studied her electromagnetic field finder. Nothing yet. An impulse of affection made her squeeze Max’s hand. “Lead on, Ranger Joe.”

  As he angled through the rasping dewy palmettos, she realized how confidently she trusted him to find the path. She wouldn’t have dared this escapade without him. Max didn’t want to do this. Yet here he was, loyally guiding her through the dark. She followed close and touched his back for comfort.

  Technically, they were breaking the law, but CJ wasn’t worried. No one would ever know. Besides, they were employees, weren’t they? And she was good at talking her way out of complex situations. She played her flashlight over Max’s square shoulders. With another impulse of guilty fondness, she hugged him and made him stumble.

  “Lamie child, you afraid of the boogie man?”

  “Hell, yes.” She found his mouth and kissed him. Max was a kind, good man. Life would be so peaceful if she could only decide to love him.

  “Who’s there?” A white beam spotlighted them, and they froze. “Stop, or I’ll shoot,” said a gruff male voice.

  Branches snapped as the man approached, then something yanked her arm. It was Max. He switched off her flashlight, and they sprinted blindly through the swamp. They blundered over sodden grass clumps, slipped in mire and splashed through puddles of unknown liquid. Lights shafted around them.

  “Stop!” the guard yelled. Gunshots exploded.

  Max caught CJ’s waist and pulled her down hard. They crouched in a foot of cold soupy muck, surrounded by tall dripping grass, and CJ feared her breath was roaring louder than a hurricane. Surely, the guards would hear and fire their guns again. Guns! Of all the scary things in the swamp, she’d never imagined guns.

  When her breathing calmed down, she whispered, “Which way is the pond?”

  “Ceegie, we gotta lay still.”

  Behind them, boots trod through sucking mud, and flashlight beams wavered in the glistening grass stems to their left. CJ caught the faint shape of tupelo trees just ahead. She gripped Max’s shoulder. “It’s that way, isn’t it? Behind the trees?”

  He touched her lips to make her be quiet.

  “Max, we’re this close. I have to get that sample.”

  She heard him inhale. The lights and footsteps were circling farther away to the left. “Wait a little,” he said.

  After ten minutes, they crept toward the trees, half-squatting so the grasses would screen them. They moved deliberately, trying not to make noise. The frogs and birds had fallen silent, and every time CJ broke a stem or heard the mud belch under her foot, she froze in midstride, expecting an explosion of bullets. When they reached the grove, her muscles ached with cramps. The air felt wintry. And there was no mistaking the silver crescent of frost that glimmered through the tree trunks. They felt their way through slick wet roots to the edge of the pond.

  Cupping her flashlight behind her hand, CJ took a quick peek at her field finder. Condensation fogged the screen, so she wiped it with her glove. Yes! A highly energetic field radiated from the pond. It was EM—electromagnetic. Her instrument showed a frequency slightly higher than FM radio. She wanted to laugh out loud. “Look, Max!”

  “Shhh.” He switched off her light again. “You watch for the guards. I get your sample.”

  From his tool bag, he brought out an ice pick, a cordless drill, a chisel, and a mallet. CJ lined up three sterile plastic sample jars in the mud and twisted off their lids. Then she crawled up the clammy bank and lay prone at the base of a tupelo sapling. Flashlights twinkled through mist on both sides of the pond. Half a dozen guards were searching in a grid pattern. She lay in the waterlogged brush, wondering about the source of that EM field. The sudden chatter from Max’s cordless drill on the ice rang like a Klaxon.

  “Over there!” the guards shouted.

  Lights converged toward CJ. She half-crawled, half-rolled down the bank to the pond. “They’re coming.”

  Max dropped the drill and got up to run. But CJ seized the first tool she could find, the mallet, and started banging away at the ice. She no longer cared about noise. After coming this far, she didn’t intend to leave empty-handed.

  Max gripped her wrist. “We gotta parti vite.”<
br />
  “One more minute!” She held the chisel against the ice and tried to drive it into the pond with the mallet. But her hand slipped, the mallet banged her fingers, and the chisel skittered across the pond out of reach.

  “Please, child.” Max’s voice broke. “They gonna shoot us.”

  “Go then. I’m staying.” With aching fingers, she searched in the dark for the chisel. Close to panic, she leaned out over the freezing cold ice and felt blindly along its surface. She didn’t want to leave the bank. That ice had swallowed her. As she slid forward a few inches, she remembered the throes of suffocation.

  Max’s long arm circled her waist. He was kneeling beside her on the ice, holding on to her for safety. “I won’ let you go, lam.”

  At last, her fingers closed on the chisel. Then she felt it sink. Under her warm hand, a small circle of ice softened to slush. She held fast to the chisel, but the cold numbing slush closed around her forearm.

  “It’s happening,” she whispered through a throat constricted with terror. For some reason, only a small circle of ice had thawed to slush, and it was not refreezing as quickly as before. She held her arm rigid, afraid to move. “Max, turn on your flashlight.”

  Max fumbled in his pocket, and when the light came on, they saw the chisel eighteen inches down and CJ’s arm sunk above the elbow in a column of slushy ice. The slush measured only six inches across, but instead of refreezing, it was very slowly widening.

  “There they are,” shouted one of the guards.

  Max clicked off the flashlight. “Can you lift your arm outta that mess?”

  “I’m fine. Get my sample jars,” she whispered.

  “I’m not leaving you, girl.”

  “Do it!”

  Too late, she realized how accurately she had reproduced Harry’s caustic tone, the tone she hated—but it worked. Max slid over the ice on his knees and returned with one of the jars. Flashlight beams flickered through the trees, then closed in, drenching the two of them in a pool of light. “Stop whatever you’re doing,” said the hoarse voice.

  “Dip as much as you can. I’m all right,” she whispered, trying to hide her stampeding fear. Sunk to the armpit, her skin burned with cold. To the guard, she said, “We’re not doing anything wrong. Give us a break.”

  Max shielded her with his broad back. He reached around her and scooped up half a jar of the milky slush.

  “Good. Seal it,” she whispered.

  “Stand up,” said the guard. “Turn around and face me.”

  CJ said, “We were making love, okay? I have to button my blouse.”

  Max twisted the jar lid tight and quietly stuffed it down CJ’s shirtfront. Then, nervous with concentration, she eased her arm out of the slush. They both let out a tense breath when her dripping hand came free. As the melting circle continued just perceptibly to widen, they eased away from the bank where the unseen guards waited with blinding flashlights.

  “Stand up. I’m drawin’ a bead on you right this minute.”

  “When I say go, run like hell,” Max whispered.

  “I can talk to them,” she whispered back, watching the circle of melting ice. “Oh. Oh God, Max!”

  The melted area instantly expanded in all directions, and they plummeted into a bath of glacial Jell-O. Under the surface, CJ screamed and choked. When she felt Max’s leg lashing out, she grabbed his ankle. Faster than she could comprehend, the slush liquefied completely, and they surfaced together, splashing and gasping for breath. They were yards away from where they’d gone under. Bullets popped like firecrackers.

  The frigid temperature caused CJ’s chest to contract. She couldn’t get her wind. Violently she groped for Max’s arm, and when he recognized her hysteria, he dove and came up behind her, then caught her chin in the crook of his elbow. More bullets popped. The guards were firing into the air, but Max didn’t know that. With powerful sidestrokes, he hauled the panicked girl to the far edge of the pond, dragged her from the water and shoved her into a willow thicket. He put his hand over her mouth to hush her noise. Only then did he comprehend his own shock.

  “Lie still,” he whispered, pressing her struggling body into the mud. Amid a snarl of willow shoots, he lay on top of her and kept her from moving while the guards crashed through the brambles, calling to each other and cursing. Their flashlight beams roved around the pond, but Max lay still, crushing CJ beneath him. He could feel her heart thumping, and when he moved his hand away from her mouth, she kept silent.

  Max would have lain in the mud till dawn if necessary. But ten minutes later, inexplicably, the guards called off their search and withdrew. Their grumbling voices faded into the distance. Max and CJ listened until they could no longer hear briars rasping against wet coveralls or heavy boots squishing through mire.

  “We’re safe.” CJ twisted beneath him, clamped her legs around his body and drew his face down for a kiss. “You saved my life,” she said, trembling in his arms. She almost said, I love you.

  As she nuzzled against him and licked his ear, only then did she see the faint outline looming against the mist, not two yards away, like a terrible horned beast transmogrified from a nightmare. Its single eye burned scarlet. Before she could speak, the monster made a hideous noise, like the sliding click of metal against metal.

  Max rolled over and switched on his flashlight. There stood Ron Moselle, wearing infrared night-vision headgear and covering them with his Ruger semiautomatic. He’d been dogging their steps all evening.

  “Y’all are under arrest for trespassing,” he said. Gene Becnel had finally given him the go-ahead.

  Ripple

  Thursday, March 10

  9:00 AM

  There are places on the globe where currents coalesce. Call them strange attractors—crossroads, melting pots, deltas of convergence and recombination. These focal gathering points exert a stronger gravitational pull than ordinary places. You know them. Certain cities, islands, coasts. They collect not only physical sediments but also tides of history, drifting languages and arts, the flotsam of our hopes and fears. Their slow pickling eddies stir and coddle until the diverse elements merge into something novel and unforeseen. Something like zydeco.

  Dan Meir, Quimicron’s plant manager, turned up the radio on his desk. The local station was playing “Paper in My Shoe” by accordionist BooZoo Chavis. Meir needed the music to calm his nerves. He’d just had a call from FOWL—Friends of Wetlands in Louisiana.

  “Damned bird lovers wanna send in an inspection team.” He shook his head and chuckled. “They must think they’re the United Nations.”

  He rocked back in his chair and squinted out his fifth-floor window at the barge canal. Steady drizzle roughened the gray water and drenched the workers on the dock. His workers, his dock, that’s how Meir thought of the plant he’d managed for seventeen years. His gray buzz cut glistened with hairspray. He tugged at his collar, hating the tie. Lately, he’d gotten used to golf shirts. A former marine sergeant, his aging body still rippled with hard muscle, but creases patterned his neck, and wrinkles rayed outward from the corners of his eyes. Although the morning had dawned cool and rainy, Meir felt like steamed beef. Raindrops pooled and slid down his office window, and he thought about the man who had died yesterday.

  Across the desk, Gene Becnel rubbed the rash on his forearm. His short blond hairs stood up like sewing pins across the top of his head, and his obese buttocks lolled off both sides of the narrow chair seat. Gene’s field of interest did not include bird lovers or employee funerals. He had two terrorist prisoners cooling their heels in a basement locker room—prisoners he’d incarcerated on his own authority. Gene didn’t doubt he’d acted in the right. The yankee flag-burner and her pothead boyfriend were dangerous malcontents, but here was Mr. Meir diddling over whether to contact the parish sheriff. If Gene were in charge, he would call Homeland Security.

  The third man in the room, the brown-skinned Miami honcho in the three-piece suit, lurked in a corner, and Gene felt his prese
nce like a neck itch. He twisted to see what the guy was doing, and the stranger glanced up briefly from his work. He sat with one thin ankle crossed over his knee, balancing a laptop and gripping a cell phone between his ear and shoulder. Gene noticed his fancy silk socks, the airy-fairy kind that went all the way up his calf. Now and then, the guy mumbled something foreign into the phone.

  Gene squared up his stack of collated reports, still warm from the copier. “The girl’s from up Noth, Mr. Meir. You wanna see her file?”

  “I’ve seen it.” Meir chewed his Oliva cigar, and the Miami guy said nothing. Gene found their indifference shocking.

  The door opened, and Ron Moselle ushered in the female perpetrator. She still wore her muddy coverall, though she’d unzipped it and knotted the sleeves around her waist. She looked sleep-deprived. Good. Gene had ordered his men to keep both prisoners awake all night—to soften them up for interrogation.

  CJ, however, felt anything but soft. Her pelvis blazed with cramps, and her bloated brain wobbled in her skull. She wore the expression of a ballistic missile. She didn’t see the stranger in the corner, and she didn’t know the obese blond security chief, but she recognized Dan Meir, the plant manager.

  She went straight for him. “Meir, you’re going to wish you never heard my name.”

  “Take it easy, Miz Reilly.”

  “Screw easy. Eight excruciating hours you’ve kept me sitting on that bench, shining a light in my face and not even a cup of water. I’m going to sue this company all the way to the Supreme Court. I’m going to put your face on CNN. You’re going to rue the day you held Max and me at gunpoint. I’ll never stop. I’ll—”

  “You’re a consultant, yes?”

  CJ whipped around and faced the stranger who had spoken. She hadn’t noticed him sitting there in the corner. He was the good-looking manager who’d used his badge to unlocked the lab for her. Caught in a lie already—her face grew hot.