Micro. Michael Crichton

      “Well, no…”

      “Sorry. That’s a crime scene, like I told the young guy.”

      “Where is this guy?” she asked.

      “He was coming down the ladder. Probably still on the other side of the boat. He’ll be along. Want to come inside the office?”

      “Why would I do that?”

      “We can call the police, see if they’ll give you a waiver to get your stuff off the boat.”

      “That seems like a lot of trouble. It’s just my, well, it’s my watch. I took it off my wrist…”

      “No trouble.”

      “I guess I could buy another one. It did cost a bit—”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “I thought it would be easy.”

      “Well, suit yourself. But you still better sign in.”

      “I don’t see why.”

      “You’re supposed to.”

      “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t want to get mixed up in any police thing.”

      Peter waited a few minutes, then heard the man say, “You can come out, son.”

      He came out from behind the hull. There was no sign of Alyson in the yard. The heavyset man looked at him quizzically, head cocked to one side. “Didn’t want to run into her?”

      “We don’t get along,” Peter said.

      “I figured.”

      “You want me to sign in?”

      The man nodded slowly. “Yes, please.”

      So Peter went into the office and signed in. He couldn’t see what difference it made. Alyson Bender already knew he had gone to the boat, and therefore she already knew he suspected something. From this point on, he would have to move fast.

      By the end of the day, he thought, he had to be finished.

      He went back to his hotel room, where he found an e-mail from Jorge on his laptop, with no text. Instead there were three .wav files, sent as attachments. One was a recording of Alyson Bender’s call to Vin Drake. And there were two new files. He listened to them. They were recordings of two phone calls Alyson had made from her cell phone in the hours after Eric had disappeared. Both calls seemed fairly routine. In the first call, Alyson had phoned somebody, perhaps in a Nanigen purchasing department, and asked for a new budget breakdown. In the second call, she had spoken briefly with another person, a man, perhaps an accountant, on the subject of expenses.

      ALYSON: Omicron has lost two more, uh, prototypes.

      OTHER PERSON: What happened?

      ALYSON: They didn’t tell me. Vin Drake wants you to account for this as an ordinary research expense, not a capital write-down.

      OTHER PERSON: The loss of two Hellstorms? But that’s a big cost—the Davros people—

      ALYSON: Just call it research, okay?

      OTHER PERSON: Of course.

      Peter saved the files after listening to them, but they didn’t make sense or reveal anything he could use. He also saved the telephone conversation between Alyson and Vin, however, which would be very useful. He downloaded it onto a flash memory stick and slipped the stick into his pocket, and then burned a CD of the same conversation. Then he took the CD to the hotel business center and had them print a professional label that said “NANIGEN DATA 5.0 10/28.” When he was finished, he checked his watch. It was shortly after eleven in the morning.

      He went down to the terrace to have a late breakfast and sit in the sun. Over coffee and eggs, he realized he was making a lot of assumptions. The most important assumption was that Nanigen would have a conference room equipped with the usual electronic equipment. That seemed a safe enough bet. All high-tech companies had such rooms.

      Second, he assumed that the tour would move all the graduate students together en masse, instead of breaking them into smaller groups or taking them around individually. But he suspected that Vin Drake would give the tour himself, and Vin liked an audience—the bigger the better. Also, if everybody stayed together, it would be easier for Nanigen to control exactly how much information they were given.

      For Peter, it was important that the students be kept together, because he felt he needed as many witnesses as possible for what he was planning to do. Or should he try to stage it in front of just one or two witnesses? No…his mind raced…no, try to provoke a blowup in front of many people. That might be the best way, he thought, to get Drake’s façade to crack, and perhaps reveal what Drake and Alyson had done to his brother. Finally, he had to hope that Drake would lose his cool, or at least that Alyson would, especially if they were primed in a way that made them nervous. And he thought he knew how to do that. If he pulled it off, Drake or Alyson might get very upset in front of the grad students. And that was what he wanted.

       Chapter 7

      Waipaka Arboretum

      28 October, 3:00 p.m.

      The taxi drove away from the ocean, and soon was climbing steeply into the hills. Broad acacia trees shaded the road.

      “That’s the university, on both sides,” the driver said. He pointed to featureless gray buildings that looked like condominiums. Peter saw no students.

      “Where is everybody?”

      “Those are dorms. They’re at class now.”

      They passed a baseball field, a surrounding residential area, small homes, bungalow-style. But as they drove on, the houses thinned and the trees grew larger. Now they were heading toward a green mountain wall, heavily forested, rising two thousand feet into the air in front of them.

      “That’s Ko‘olau Pali,” the driver said.

      “No houses up there?”

      “No, you can’t build nothing there, that’s straight-up, crumbly volcanic rock, can’t climb it or nothing. You come way back here like we do now, you leave the city, you in wilderness now. Too much rain mauka side, near the mountain. Nobody live back here.”

      “What about the arboretum?”

      “Half mile up this road,” the driver said. The road was now a single lane, dark beneath a heavy covering of towering, dense trees. “Nobody come here, neither. Folks go to Foster or the other pretty arboretums. You sure you want come here?”

      “Yes,” Peter said.

      The road narrowed and climbed, zigzagging along a steep, jungle-clad mountainside.

      A car came up behind them on the twisting road, and honked, and roared past them, people in the car waving and yelling. He blinked: the grad students from the lab were crammed into the car, a midnight-blue Bentley convertible sedan. The taxi driver muttered something about crazy lobsters.

      “Lobsters?” Peter asked.

      “Tourists. Way they burn.”

      Soon the road arrived at a security gate, steel, massive, new. It stood open directly in front of a tunnel. A sign warned unauthorized persons to keep out.

      The driver slowed the taxi, brought it to a stop before the gate and tunnel. “They’ve been doing some changes up here. Why you want to go in this place?” he said.

      “It’s business,” Peter said. Even so, looking at the tunnel, he got an uneasy feeling. With the steel gate in front of it, it seemed like a tunnel of no return. Peter wondered if the gate was to keep people out—or was it to lock people in?

      The driver sighed, and took off his sunglasses, and drove into the tunnel.