Ark (15 page)

“Why should I? Because I’ve taken Henry’s shilling?”

Melissa looked at the ceiling and let her breath out between her teeth in a long half whistle of exasperation. I was crossing the line again, pushing her, being insistent. Stealing her act.

She said, “No. But let me tell you one reason why. After the two of you came back from the Little Gobi Desert last time, Henry asked me to check out Bear Mulligan. On the basis of what you told me years ago, I thought I knew all about the case, but I put a couple of bright young associates on it and they came back with all the details. Some of these were new to me.”

“Like the baby.”

“Yes. But other things, too. Pictures, police reports, medical reports. I hadn’t realized how really bad it was, how brutal.”

Nor would she ever, I hoped. I said nothing.

Melissa said, “Henry saw all the evidence. He was revolted. Some of the police photographs are very graphic. Plus you’re five foot four and Mulligan is six eleven. And you were so young when it happened. Henry is fond of you, so his emotions were engaged. He’s a very decisive person. He severed all connections with Mulligan. The Chinese evicted him and his crew from their dig in Hsi-tau and prohibited them from removing any fossils from China. They kicked Mulligan out of the country. His grant was canceled. He’ll never get another one from anybody. His career is over.”

“That won’t be the end of it,” I said.

“That’s exactly what Mulligan said,” Melissa said. “He said he knew you were responsible for it all. He made threats.”

“Like what?”

Melissa hesitated, but not for long. “That’s not something you need to know,” she said.

I already knew. Terror picked me up and shook me.

Melissa left. I went into the bathroom and vomited.

I also knew I was now bound to Henry for life. Nobody else in the world could guarantee my safety. Knowing Bear as I did, I wasn’t entirely sure that even Henry and his watchmen could keep me alive and whole. True, they’d be able to see Bear coming from a long way off, but could they get between us in time, and if they did, what good would it do? This monster used to throw three-hundred-pound football players around as if they were Kewpie dolls. There was no doubt in my mind that he could still fight his way through ten ordinary men to get to me and then tear my arms off like a fly’s wings, leaving me to bleed to death. Twenty years of bad dreams about Bear congealed into a single clot of dread.

A life of fear stretched before me, a great lion-brown Hsi-tau of emptiness. I could respond to nothing. My brain switched off, function after function, until nothing remained but the pain, the smell, the weight of Bear. The great paintings with which I lived hung on the wall like so many calendar pages. I tried to write. I ended up with two pages of gibberish. I read for a while, or tried to read, but the words did not register. In my subconscious, I was fifteen again, back in the hospital in the Berkshires with a child of the monster growing inside me. I gave birth under anesthetic. They took the child away while I was unconscious. I never saw it. I was told nothing about it, nor did I ask. To this day I didn’t even know which gender it was. In my imagination, though, it was a redheaded boy, sixteen years old now, his dementia mistaken for charm, making his adoptive parents proud by breaking the bones of visiting football quarterbacks in some shady village in the Midwest.

When the doorbell rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It had never rung before. Henry and Melissa, my only previous visitors, had spare remotes that unlocked my door. I activated the camera outside the door. Daeng, the faithful steward, was smiling into it. I opened the door.

Daeng said, “Henry would like you to join him. He said you should pack a bag for two or three days.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “What kind of weather?”

“Very warm.”

Two hours later, I was flying near the speed of sound at forty thousand feet, out of Bear’s reach.

~ * ~

2

THE AIRPLANE LANDED
AS THE
sun came up on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. Mountains wreathed in cloud, green forest, pounding surf, shimmering bays. But where were the canoes filled with dusky maidens and muscular lads in crowns of frangipani that should be paddling out to meet us?

“There is Henry’s house,” Daeng said over the loudspeakers.

I could see its glass parts winking down below. Tinted pink by the sunrise, it clung to the edge of a cliff.

“Paul Gauguin and Jacques Brel are buried in the Marquesas,” Daeng said. “According to Google, the Marquesas are considered the most beautiful of all the Pacific islands.”

Ah, so I wasn’t the first to notice.

Henry’s house was what you would expect—filled with light and dazzling art. I was given a bedroom overlooking the ocean. From its balcony I could see surf splashing twenty feet above the lip of the towering cliff. The surf, Henry told me later, was caused by the South Equatorial Current, which had been smashing into these islands for more than a million years. It had excavated deep caves in the volcanic stone of the cliffs.

There was no sign of Henry. Nothing stirred. I took a nap and went downstairs around noon. Henry, Amerigo, Ng Fred, the English engineer, and an Englishwoman of a certain age whom I had not met were drinking sparkling wine on a terrace. All except the impeccable Ng Fred, who wore a blazer and cravat, were dressed in resort clothes. They had been snorkeling, and could talk of little else. All were pinkened by their morning in the sun. Amerigo was extravagantly glad to see me. Ng Fred smiled in his friendly way. The Englishwoman—big-boned and meager of flesh, sharp Norman nose, sharper eyes, unstraightened working-class teeth, wispy gray chignon in the process of escape from its rubber band—looked me over as if she thought she recognized me from a Wanted poster. Had she been a man she would have been ugly-handsome. She wore perfume that smelled something like witch hazel. Henry introduced her as Clementine Machen.

He said, “Clem is our chief of security. She was in MI5.”

Changing the subject as I suppose MI5 people are trained to do, Clementine asked me if I had heard that the Pacific Ocean had been invaded by floating islands of plastic trash—those abominable water bottles mostly—which, if lashed together, would create a single island of debris the size of the United States of America and thirty meters deep.

I said, “No. Somehow I missed that.”

We ate lunch. Clementine sat next to me. She commanded many anecdotes, and every story she told me reminded her of something that was even more interesting. She talked, she
looked
like a character out of Oscar Wilde. Her diction was flawless, her delivery fluent, her accent homogenized. Her gruff voice chopped up sentences into words and words into syllables. Her commas, semicolons, and periods were as detectable as the words were audible. On my left sat Amerigo, who filled me in, in whispers, on Clementine’s past. Before retiring from MI5 and joining up with Henry, she had had a long career in which she protected her country’s secrets and exposed those of her country’s enemies. She had outwitted some of the most slippery spies of our times. Her feats and her honors, if lashed together, would probably have been the size of the Shetland Islands. She was a Dame Commander of the British Empire, addressed in Britain as Dame Clementine, though she was just plain Clementine when abroad.

Clementine did not speak of herself or pepper me with personal questions as the Brits are wont to do. She spoke instead of the thing we had in common, i.e., the work. She thought—as did Henry, as would any reasonable person—that there was reason for concern about the security of the operation. It amazed her that we had gotten away with our activities as long as we had. This would not last much longer, in her opinion. We had too much to hide—more than any other conspiracy in history, surely—and every single bit of it was explosive. How, for example, could we possibly keep it a secret that we were going to take off in a spacecraft with tens of thousands of frozen human embryos in the hold, even in the unlikely event that it didn’t become known that we had genetically altered those embryos?

If I had come here to escape my anxieties, I had come to the wrong place.

I said, “You seem to know a lot of things. How is it we’ve never met?”

“I’m the hush-hush department,” she said. “Unseen.”

“But all-seeing.”

“Not quite. But that’s the goal.”

“How does one go about being all-seeing?”

Clementine neither smiled nor answered. She was the one who had been following me around in Manhattan. Not Clementine in person, of course—her gumshoes. She knew all about Bear, all about Adam, all about everything.

I said, “Are your files going to be encoded in the sphere?”

“What sphere might that be?” she asked.

After lunch we all went upstairs for a nap. Apparently Henry had no urgent work for us to do today. This was a U-shaped house with a courtyard in the middle, two stories high and just one room deep, so that every upstairs room had a view of the sea from the front windows and, from the rear, a view of Tekao, a cloud-ringed peak on the other side of the island. Clementine appeared on the veranda. Her room was next door to mine.

“Lovely mountain,” I said.

“Quite,” Clementine said. “I understand you like pictures.”

She waited to see if I would confirm this report. I nodded.

“There’s rather an interesting watercolor of Tekao in my room,” Clementine said. “Come over and have a look, if you like.”

“Another time, maybe,” I said. “I’m worn out.”

Clementine raised her eyebrows. Clearly she thought I had misunderstood her invitation. She vanished.

We met again at cocktail time. I drank water, which came in one of Henry’s ever-present plastic bottles, and ate some nuts while gazing out over the empty and apparently boundless sea. We seemed to be standing on the only firm ground in the entire world.

I realized that Clementine was standing beside me—that scent of witch hazel again.

“The Marquesas are the most remote islands in the world,” she said, “farther from any continental mass than any others.”

I said I was not surprised to hear that.

Clementine said, “You played lacrosse for your university, I’m told.”

“Ages ago.”

“What exactly is lacrosse? Is it like our field hockey?”

“Not really,” I said. “It originated as an Iroquois game, very warlike. The ball is in the air all the time. It’s yellow and made of hard rubber. You pass it to one another and catch it with a stick called a crosse that has a small net pocket at one end. The players run a lot. It’s good exercise, very slimming.”

Clementine looked interested. I doubted that she really was. I thought this conversation was a pretext. No doubt she had boned up on lacrosse before she approached me and already knew the answers.

“I gather that lacrosse is quite violent,” Clementine said.

“The men’s game is very rough. They beat the stuffing out of each other, like the Iroquois used to do. The rules for the women’s game were drawn up when ladies still existed. Theoretically, it’s a noncontact sport.”

“You won some sort of prize or honor for your play, I understand.”

“Yes. Nastiest girl.”

Clementine guffawed. She laughed like a man who has had a drink or two—loudly and heartily and somewhat longer than necessary.

We remained on Nuku Hiva for five days. Henry had decided that it was time for a tour of the horizon, so the entire enterprise was on the table.

“Our purpose is to simplify,” Henry said. “So resist your education.”