Darkness Falls (9 page)

Teague turned away, starting for the hallway but then pausing at the threshold. In the end, it wasn't a difficult question to answer. "No. Not yet. First, she'll try to find Erin Neal."

Chapter
10.

At two in the morning, the temperature was still above a hundred in the loft of Erin Neal's barn. It had taken almost an hour to find the boxes he wanted amidst the useless junk he'd collected over the years, and now they surrounded him, torn open and empty.

He let the stack of papers fall from his hand and leaned back against the wall, staring at the yellowing notebooks and loose pages piled next to him. He hadn't thought he'd ever have a reason to look at all this old stuff again, but like everything else in his past lives, he'd never found the strength to just throw it away.

There was little question anymore that the bacteria had been engineered and that the design was based on work he'd abandoned years ago. His goal, though, had been to create a versatile, durable, and effective creature that could be deployed to clean up oil spills.

Because of the sensitivity of the environmental movement toward genetic engineering, he hadn't talked to many people about his ideas, and the only person who had ever looked at his research was Jenna. Ironically, it was on a trip to her beloved Alaska wilderness that she'd convinced him to give up on the project.

"Jesus Christ, Jenna," he whispered to himself as he slid an as-yet-unopened box toward him. It was essentially her tomb or at least the best facsimile he'd been able to come up with. Her body had sunk in thousands of feet of dark, freezing cold water, as had most of her possessions. With the exception of the pictures he had hanging in his house, this single box contained everything that was left of her.

He tore open the top and pulled out some clothing she'd forgotten when she left, a few photo albums, and a stack of stale-smelling letters. At the bottom he found what he was looking for -- the clippings about her death.

Her ship -- actually Michael Teague's ship had gone down with more than just her. Teague had died, as had Udo and Jonas Metzger.

He'd known Teague pretty well, though he still couldn't think of anything positive to say about him even now that he was dead. His ego had eclipsed everything, creating its own constantly shifting reality with no regard to fact or for the opinions of others. He'd been the ultimate scare monger, never missing an opportunity to absolutely guarantee that exhausting the planet's oil supply would leave the earth a lifeless wasteland. A tortured leap of logic that Erin had gleefully shredded in a number of papers and articles.

The German brothers he didn't know as well. Udo was a biologist of moderate gifts, and Jonas was . . . what? A creepy thug as near as he could tell.

Erin leaned back again, the relative cool of the adobe wall seeping through his sweat-soaked shirt. It had always perplexed him that Teague had suddenly shrunk down the large environmental organization he'd started, and that had provided him so much notoriety, to a core group that consisted only of Jenna and the Metzgers. Now it was crystal clear.

Jenna had dumped him and more or less immediately disappeared with Teague, leading Erin to partially convince himself that she'd developed a romantic attachment to the man. But even in his darkest moments he'd never really been able to believe that. Now it seemed fairly certain that she'd had other things on her mind -- namely, developing the bacteria he'd theorized and modifying it to destroy oil reserves in the ground.

After another hour of riffling through boxes, the answers he thought he'd found began to turn into questions. Why had she left him? Was it really because she didn't love him anymore, or was it because she didn't want to involve him in what she was going to do? When she went under for the last time in that cold water, did she --

He shook his head violently. No, this went against everything he thought he knew about Jenna. Sure, he could see ANWR. She could be a little nuts sometimes, and when drilling had been approved there, she'd reacted as though someone had authorized bizarre medical experiments on her dog. Besides, ANWR was nothing more than a government publicity stunt that produced a completely insignificant amount of oil, most of which was sold to the Chinese.

Ghawar, though? That wasn't a little nuts, it was bat-shit insane. You were talking about virtually shutting down Saudi Arabia's already shaky economy and sending economic ripples -- tidal waves, actually throughout the world. One way or another, if Ghawar went down, people were going to die -- maybe in a civil war in the Middle East, maybe from the United States falling back on military power to replace the lost oil, maybe from poorer countries being cut off by higher bidders. The bottom line was that this went way beyond a little overly passionate environmentalism.

So he had to ask himself again: could these bacteria have evolved naturally?

And again he had to answer that it was one in a billion. Could someone else have come up with it without having seen his notes? The chances were better, but still only one in a million.

No matter how the facts were twisted and turned, Jenna remained at the center.

He began flipping through a photo album full of pictures of her as a child, stopping at one depicting her sitting in an open field when she was about three. The color was faded, but her eyes were still bright and full of the wonder that hadn't dimmed in adulthood. What would she have thought if she'd lived to see her bacteria succeed?

The sound of an approaching engine wasn't exactly unexpected, and he hastily began refilling the boxes and slapping tape across the tops.

"Dr. Neal!"

With the last box sealed, he descended the ladder and paused in a deep shadow at the entrance to the barn. There were four men in all, one standing by a stereotypically black Suburban, two disappearing into his house, and one coming his way.

Erin held his hands up and stepped out of the shadow. "Peace, guys. I'm sorry about the plane, okay? Just a little joke, you know?"

They didn't handcuff him, which he figured was a good sign, but they weren't gentle when they shoved him into the back of the SUV. He found himself crammed between two sizeable men in dark suits, and the driver stared at him in the rearview mirror as though he thought Erin was going to jump through one of the closed windows.

The man in the passenger seat was silently dialing a cell phone, but instead of putting it to his ear, he held it back over the seat.

Erin took it. "Uh, hello?"

"Quite a stunt," Mark Beamon said. "You'll notice I'm not laughing, though."

"We need to go back to Saudi Arabia," Erin replied.

It obviously wasn't the response Beamon had been expecting. "What?"

"Get us a plane. We need to go to Saudi Arabia right now."

"Why?"

"I'll explain later."

"Getting in there would be kind of complicated. You got us deported, remember?"

"I'll deal with the Saudis. You deal with the plane."

There was a long silence. Finally, "Okay."

The line went dead and Erin dialed a number into the phone from distant memory. The connection failed, but on his third try it rang.

The greeting was in Arabic and it cut out a few times, but it was still intelligible. "Mohammed! It's Erin Neal."

"Erin!" came the lightly accented reply. "It is wonderful to hear your voice. I'm sorry that I could not see you when you were here. And about the problems you had."

"Then you'll be happy to hear I'm coming back." He had to shout to be heard.

"That could be difficult," came the hesitant reply. "The approvals would be --"

"I also need unlimited access to your imaging computers."

"Erin, you know full well that no one gets

"I'm not bullshitting here, Mo. I'm going to be there in a few hours. You know me, and I'm telling you that this is important."

There was a long silence and then a resigned sigh that was difficult to differentiate from static. "Let me know when you're landing. I'll send a car."

The headlights of the Suburban turning onto the road made the night-vision scope on his rifle useless and Jonas put it down in the dirt next to him. The vehicle's windows were opaque, making it impossible to see whether Erin Neal was inside. His instincts said he was.

Jonas slid forward on his stomach, enjoying the sensation of the jagged rocks beneath him, and focused his binoculars on the vehicle's license plate before it sped out of sight.

He'd parked behind a low ridge a few hundred meters from the entrance to the dirt road leading to Erin Neal's house, and he expected to be there for the foreseeable future. So far, there was no sign of Jenna, but while Michael Teague had many limitations, he was usually right about these kinds of things. Jenna would come. And when she did, she would be dealt with the way she should have been long ago.

He went back to his vehicle and slid into the driver's seat, gunning it over a small rise and pointing it toward Neal's house. There was no telling how long he'd be gone, and Jonas knew this might be his only opportunity to gain a better surveillance position. He dialed Teague's number and listened to it ring in his ear piece as he bounced up the road.

"Did you find her?" Teague said in the way of a greeting.

"No," Jonas answered, concentrating on making his English understandable over the phone. "She hasn't come. But there was a car here. A government car. It's gone now."

"A government car? Did Neal leave with them?"

"It is impossible to be certain yet, but I believe so."

"How long was it at his house?"

"About fifteen minutes."

"There's no reason to drive out there for fifteen minutes other than to pick him up," Teague said, more to himself than to Jonas. "He's gone with them."

"Yes," Jonas agreed. "This has just started and already Neal is working for them. He knows a great deal."

"Do you have a point, Jonas?"

"I can take care of him when Jenna comes."

"That wouldn't be suspicious, would it? A scientist investigating a bacterial infestation that people still believe is natural turns up murdered. How does that help our cause exactly?"

Jonas didn't answer. Teague was right when he said that he was the one who had made this possible. But as far as Jonas could see, it was simply because he easily could. He'd sacrificed little and was, in his soul, a weak man enslaved by his own cravings --for superiority, for power. Jonas would not stand by and allow those failings to jeopardize what they were so close to accomplishing.

"He is dangerous, Michael."

"Don't think, Jonas. Do you hear me? Just take care of Jenna like you should have in Montana."

Chapter
11.

"It's good to see you, Mo," Erin said, shaking hands with the balding Arab over a set of concrete barricades intended to separate suicide bombers from the towering glass building behind. He was tall -- probably six foot six -- and the stoop he used to compensate seemed more pronounced than Erin remembered.

"Mark, this is Dr. Mohammad Asli. He is Saudi Aramco's chief geologist."

Beamon climbed out of the limousine and thrust out a hand, which Asli took with reluctance. "Your reputation precedes you, Mr. Beamon."

Asli didn't elaborate, but Erin noticed that he seemed to hold the government agent's hand a little too long -- a brief battle of wills that Beamon obviously didn't want to fight.

"Please come with me inside where it's cool."

Erin had taken a sleeping pill on the flight over to shut off his head and, amazingly, it had worked. He'd slept almost the entire way and now was able to put together a few coherent thoughts as they crossed the lobby to an elevator. Interestingly, Beamon hadn't tried to wake him or press him with questions. For now, at least, he appeared satisfied to sit back and watch.

It was a little unnerving, really. Although he didn't look all that bright, Erin was starting to think his demeanor was calculated that the man understood more than he let on.

Asli inserted his ID card into a slot and they began dropping beneath the Aramco building to the chambers that held a computer system that Erin had never actually laid eyes on, but supposedly it rivaled the one used by America's National Security Agency.

"Now that you're here, perhaps it's time you tell me what is so important?" Asli said.

"How many more rigs have gone down since I left, Mo?"

"What makes you think we've had more problems? It was an isolated incident and we've closed the affected area." His tone suggested that he was reading from an unseen cue card.

"I imagine it wasn't easy for you to get me in here after your government was so anxious to get me out. Why would they change their minds?"

"Because, like me, they were intrigued," Asli said, leaning against the back of the elevator and focusing on Beamon. "You and I have a relationship based on trust, Erin. Is that not right? But -- and I don't mean to offend -- Mr. Beamon here is a well-known former FBI official with undeniable connections to the Central Intelligence Agency and rumored connections to Eastern European organized crime."

"No way," Erin said, genuinely surprised.