Running Dark (2 page)

CAMERON SUMNER STOOD NEXT TO A LOUNGE CHAIR ON THE
deck of the Kaiser Franz cruise liner and stared at the horizon, waiting. The chair was one in a long row of chairs, all occupied by passengers clad in swimsuits, baking in the sun. The woman to Sumner’s right, noticing his preoccupation with the horizon, did her best to capture his attention.

“I see you watch the ocean every day after your workout. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” the woman, an American, said. Sumner eyed her. She wore a string bikini on a figure with full hips, fake breasts, and striking, artfully streaked hair. Her lips were painted a bright coral, and her forehead didn’t move when she spoke. Her husband, a good ol’ boy from Texas who owned a string of car dealerships, spent his days in the ship’s casino drinking gin and playing blackjack. His wife spent her days watching Sumner swim laps in the pool or run on the track. The woman’s question marked the first time she’d worked up enough nerve to speak to him.

“It is beautiful,” he said. He grabbed a towel and dried his dripping body, while the American woman looked at him with bright, avid eyes.

“So what brings you on a cruise ship alone?”

“I work for the company that owns the
Kaiser Franz.
” Sumner kept his answers short to discourage more conversation.

“How
interesting.
” The woman breathed the words.

Sumner did his best to contain his annoyance. His patience ran thin these days. He slipped on a pair of track pants, sank into a
nearby lounge chair, and thought about Caldridge. He’d been having dreams of her, some so vivid that he thought he might be able to touch her, some so frightening that when he would reach her after a slow-motion chase, he would find himself to be too late and his anguish at her death would overwhelm him. He pulled up a mental picture of her: light brown hair a little past her shoulders, green eyes, a straight nose with no upturn, and a lithe, athletic runner’s body. He sighed and kept his eyes on the water.

The ship’s sundeck ran the width of the foredeck. In the center was the rectangular lap pool. Lounge chairs, each with a bright blue cushion, filled the rest of the available space. A small walkway ran along the railings. Sumner spent much of his time on the sundeck, because it allowed him to view both sides of the vessel.

The ship itself was smaller, more intimate, and much more luxurious than the larger cruise liners out of Miami. It boasted mahogany-paneled staterooms with flat-screen televisions, marble bathrooms, and thick Persian carpets. Each room had a private butler assigned to it. They’d embarked from Dubai, passed through the Arabian Sea, and were deep into the Indian Ocean on their way to the Seychelles Islands. It was ten in the morning. Only half the sundeck chairs were taken.

The woman shifted in her chair to lean toward him. Her blond, highlighted hair and overly manicured nails were the antithesis of what Sumner liked in a woman. He said nothing as he finished drying off. He grabbed a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and stretched out on the lounge chair, basking in the sun while he continued to keep watch.

“Are you working on this trip?” The woman interrupted his reverie. It was all Sumner could do not to sigh out loud.

“I’m headed to the Seychelles to check on our land-based operations.”

“How
interesting,
” the woman said again.

Sumner continued to scan the area, his eyes hidden behind his sun
glasses. The ocean swelled in calm, regular waves. A waiter worked his way through the lounge chairs, handing out complimentary juices to the sunbathers. Another employee followed, offering a spritz of mineral water to cool them.

The German family walked along the deck rail toward Sumner. He felt a prickle of awareness shoot down his spine. Sumner worked for the Southern Hemisphere Drug Defense Agency and had been hired out to the
Kaiser Franz
in response to a vague piece of intelligence suggesting that trouble sailed with the ship. The trouble was thought to be drug-related, but nothing in the communiqué detailed the precise nature of the problem. An assignment off the coast of Africa carried the added benefit of getting Sumner as far away from the Southern Hemisphere as possible. His last assignment had disrupted a major drug cartel in Colombia, and his employers feared retaliation.

Sumner reviewed the ship’s manifest and had settled on three potential groups of passengers as the ones he would watch: a Russian traveling with his mistress, a Frenchman traveling with two other businessmen, and this German family—two parents with their grown daughter. The father, a businessman in his late fifties, had the build of a steelworker. His large stomach hung over his expensive pants, throwing a shadow across his black loafers. His face bore the bright red hue of a man whose skin was unaccustomed to the outdoors. He held the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
newspaper in his hands and looked surly.

His wife, also somewhat north of fifty, was as thin as he was wide. Her blond hair—her natural color and none of it highlighted—ended at her ears in a blunt cut. Her blue eyes and cool, superior attitude telegraphed that she was from Hamburg, where blond hair and cool eyes abounded. Her manner telegraphed her dislike for her husband.

The daughter, a shy beauty with blond hair and a fresh, almost translucent complexion, was twenty-four. Six years younger than Sumner and light-years more innocent, she, too, would cast glances
at him whenever their paths crossed, but she hadn’t yet gotten up the courage to talk to him.

The father turned his head to gaze at the horizon. The woman next to Sumner was speaking again.

“Harry says we don’t need to travel anywhere, that there’s nothing to learn. But I think you should always see how the other half lives, don’t you?”

Sumner refrained from commenting on the fact that she was unlikely to see “the other half” while sailing on the sea in a yacht with massive suites and private butlers, but he assumed the woman meant well. Before Sumner could respond, Harry himself walked up to his wife.

“Whatcha doin’, sweetheart?” He boomed the question at his wife, towering over her in her lounge chair. He thrust his hand out at Sumner.

“Harry Block. Pleased to meet you.”

“Cameron Sumner.”

Sumner rose to shake Block’s hand. Based on his own six-foot-two-inch height and weight of 175, Sumner estimated that Block stood a full two inches taller and weighed an easy 300 pounds. He was built like a linebacker, with a doughy face, hair just starting to gray at the temples, and shrewd eyes, despite his easygoing exterior. Sumner watched Block size him up.

“No need to stand. Didn’t mean to bother you.” Block shook Sumner’s hand in a vise grip.

Sumner squeezed back. Block’s wife sat up.

“This is Harry, my husband, and I’m Cindy. Harry, hon, he works for
Kaiser Franz.
”

“You a cabin boy?” Block hollered at Sumner.

“Harry!” Cindy hit Block on the arm.

“What’s wrong with that? It’s honest enough work, ain’t it?” Block turned innocent eyes on Sumner. Sumner hid his amusement.

“I’m not a cabin boy, no,” he said.

The German family was upon them, walking along the rail. Sumner felt the father’s presence at his right, then behind him. He heard the wife speak to the daughter in German. Since Sumner spoke fluent German, eavesdropping came easy.

“Americans are so loud,” she said. Sumner kept his eyes on Block while he strained to hear the German girl’s response.

“But friendly, I think, Mother.” She spoke in low tones.

Don’t be fooled by Harry, Sumner thought.

The father stepped past him. Out of the corner of his eye, Sumner could see that he continued to stare at the ocean. Sumner redirected his attention to Block, who was speaking.

“What’s the point of all this ‘cultural differences’ mumbo jumbo? Folks from Africa to Mexico count their money the same as us, is what I say. So what do you do for
Kaiser Franz
?”

Sumner glanced back at the water. He saw the dot speeding toward them. He felt a surge of adrenaline that made his scalp tighten and his fingertips tingle.

He slipped a black T-shirt over his head. The dot grew larger every second. Soon it was joined by another. Sumner heard the distant roar of the cigarette boats’ engines. The craft hurtled toward them at an impressive speed.

“Block, get Cindy and the others off the deck. Tell the waiters to move everyone below.”

Block looked shocked. “What?”

“Mr. Block, do it. Now.”

“Well, I never been ordered around like that,” Block said.

Sumner didn’t stay to see if Block obeyed. He sprinted across the deck to the stairs that led to the bridge, clambered up them, and burst onto the small walkway that surrounded it just as Captain Joshua Wainwright stepped out.

“Pirates,” he said.

Sumner nodded. “Coming fast. Use the LRAD.”

Wainwright, a competent, friendly man in his early forties, snapped an order to his second-in-command. They pointed a large gun in the direction of the cigarette boats, now well within a mile of them.

“Hit it,” Wainwright said.

The Long Range Acoustic Device released a beam of high-pitched sound at the boats. Over 150 decibels of concentrated noise blasted through the air, like a sonic boom. Sumner winced as the sound assaulted his eardrums. He saw the driver of the lead cigarette boat clap a hand over one ear.

They continued to hurtle toward the
Kaiser Franz.

“Again,” Wainwright said. He watched the cigarette boats through binoculars.

The LRAD blared again. When the sound faded, Sumner could hear the tourists screaming on the deck. Still the cigarette boats kept coming. Sumner grabbed a second set of binoculars. The pirates looked like Somalis, dark-skinned and thin. They stared at the cruise ship with undisguised greed in their eyes. He watched one of them hoist a large gun to his shoulder.

“They’ve got RPGs,” he said.

“What the hell is that?” Harry Block’s loud voice echoed on the bridge.

“Sir, you don’t belong here. Please get belowdecks.” Wainwright waved at an underling, who stepped up next to Block.

Block shook off the crew member’s grip on his arm like a horse shaking off a fly. “I said, what the hell are RPGs?”

Sumner lowered the binoculars to glance at Block. “Rocket-propelled grenades.”

“Holy shit,” Block said.

EMMA SAT UP. A HEAVY CLOUD OF ASH HUNG IN THE AIR, BLOTTING
out the sun. She flinched as people hurtled past her going in every direction, some coming so close that she put her arms up to protect herself. Sirens howled far in the distance. Downed runners lay all around her. Three behind her were moving, though they remained on the ground. Several others staggered to their feet. One man drew a deep breath, inhaled the lingering ash, and began a violent coughing fit.

She took stock. Her back from neck to tailbone ached where she’d landed in the dirt, her arms, previously wet from sweating, were caked in dust that clung to the moisture, and an eighteen-inch scrape of road rash covered her right leg and throbbed. She glanced at her feet and was surprised to see only filthy socks. At mile thirty her feet had ballooned in response to both the extreme heat and the long, pounding distance, and she’d retied her running shoes loosely in order to accommodate the swelling. At mile thirty-three, even the loose shoestrings had hurt, and she’d opened the laces as far as she could without losing the shoes entirely.

She sat in the dirt on the side of the path, twenty feet from the asphalt. The blackened hull of the vehicle smoldered while a small group of onlookers huddled fifty feet away, watching.

Emma felt her skin begin to crawl. Whatever medication the man had pumped into her was taking effect. She took a quick glance at the trail. The competitors flowed off the road and onto the shoulder
to avoid getting anywhere near the burning car, then reentered and continued forward, using their feet to put distance between them and the site of the carnage. More than twelve thousand runners attempted the Comrades each year, a grueling eighty-nine-kilometer race between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. One had to qualify for the Comrades. Many competitors had successfully completed races like Hawaii’s Ironman and so were made of tough stuff. It was a “gun to gun” race, meaning that the competitors were required to complete the distance within eleven hours or be disqualified. When the clock struck twelve, the race was over. The bulk of the competitors passed the finish line between hours ten and eleven. Emma’s qualifying time put her in one of the fastest groups, a good thing in this instance, because the ten/eleven athletes hadn’t yet come this far. The bomb could have hit many more.

Now these experienced ultra runners took one look at the gaping crater twenty feet from the course and broke into a sprint, running away as fast as their trained legs could take them. There was no stopping the herd without creating an even more dangerous situation, and the few handlers that worked the course at this mile marker didn’t even try. They watched helplessly as the athletes stampeded past them.

Emma’s heart began to gallop, and a strange euphoria overwhelmed her. Jumbled thoughts ping-ponged through her head, ranging from crazy paranoia to calm scientific logic. Her mind screamed, Go, go! Run away! Then, Oh, God, what the hell did he inject into you? and next, Get to your hotel room and close the door—they’re coming! Somewhere in it all was another thought, born from her chemist’s experience, that calmly informed her, If it’s a chemical weapon, there’s nothing the hospital can do for you now. What sent her fear spiking was the sound of a helicopter, coming closer. Her mind flashed onto a scene from her ordeal in Colombia just a few months before. Panic gripped her.

Before she knew what she was about, she stood up and looked for her shoes.

She squinted in the sun, putting her hand to her eyes to stop the glare. The smell of burning rubber filled the air, and bits of ash blew in circular eddies, brushing across the dry, packed earth. She skirted the burning vehicle and spotted her shoes fifteen feet behind her on the side of the course. She sat down to put them on, but before she did, she took a look at her feet. They were far less enlarged. In fact, they were back to their normal, pre-race size. The effect was almost like a cartoon, where a balloon deflates with comic speed. This, the panic, and the otherworldly high told her that the medication was making a circuit through her body. She put the shoes back on with shaking hands, retied them tighter than before, reentered the path at the location where she’d been ejected, and started once again to run.

Her feet felt feather light, her heart continued to pound, but her breathing settled into a rhythm that she usually achieved at the start of a race, not at the finish. Her legs flew with renewed energy fed by a jagged anxiety. Emergency vehicles coming from the opposite direction screamed past her, not using the road where the racers were but driving in the dirt culvert on the side, kicking up clouds of dust as they did. She swept past runner after runner, catapulting herself down the path. Her head ached with the precursor of a headache, but the pain was nothing compared to the exhilaration she felt since being stuck with the pen. She moved faster and faster, reaching per-mile speeds that were a personal best for her this late in the game, yet still she felt no real strain from the blistering pace.

She blew past the other competitors, all of whom were showing the extreme fatigue that was common in the last few miles of an ultra and for some was magnified by the pace they drove themselves to maintain since coming upon the burning vehicle. Some stopped to throw up on the shoulder of the road as their stomachs rejected the combination of runner’s gel and liquids that constituted the whole of their sustenance, while others subsided to a dejected walk, their bodies curving from the waist up like a question mark, the result of their muscles’ weakening strength. Some fell on the side of the path and
lay there, taking shallow breaths. For them the race was over. This was what the Comrades could do to a runner.

Half an hour later, Emma still ran at breakneck speeds. Several police vans drove up next to the course, heading in the same direction as the runners. One pulled parallel to Emma, and she watched as a race official leaned out of the back window. He placed a bullhorn to his lips.

“Keep going straight! Do not deviate from the path for any reason. Avoid all cars parked on the roadside. Emergency personnel are assembled at the finish, and fire-department crews are checking every vehicle for suspicious cargo. Any runners who wish to stop should step to the side and wait. A rescue bus has been dispatched that can drive you to a safe location.”

I’ll be damned if I’ll stop, Emma thought. Rather than calming her, the sight of the officials elicited a paranoiac’s reaction. Emma wanted to get away from the truck. It took all her willpower to stay on the course and allow it to pace her. She kicked up her speed, running faster.

Two and a half hours later, she crossed the finish line. Her legs still felt powerful, but the paranoia had decreased to manageable levels. Along with the receding terror came the return of rational thinking. Now a secondary type of fear gripped her, because she realized that she should have left the course two hours earlier and headed straight to a hospital for testing. The risk she’d taken in waiting was astronomical. Even so, she realized that whatever had been pumped into her was clearly not designed to kill her immediately. In fact, she had never felt stronger at the end of an ultra than she did at that moment.

Ambulances lined the corral set up to cordon off the finishers from spectators. Runners milled around, some shaking, others crying, and the rest standing in numb silence. Media trucks, their roofs covered with satellite dishes and bristling with antennas, were parked in a crazy-quilt fashion on the outside of the gated area. The reporters leaned over the temporary fence, holding their microphones aloft as
they attempted to interview the runners. Paramedics worked on several people who had collapsed, from either the heat or fear, or both.

The Comrades maintained a fully functional mobile ICU manned by doctors and nurses and prepared to assist any runners who fell into distress during the competition. A quick glance told Emma that she would not get anywhere near it in the time she needed to. At least fifty stretchers containing downed runners lay in a widening circle around it, while triage nurses worked through the injured.

Emma handed her timing chip to the attendant waiting to accept them, veered away from the ICU, and headed to the tent erected by Price Pharmaceuticals, a client of hers and the entity charged with post-race drug testing. She walked with a grim determination. She needed to know what had been pumped into her, and she needed to know it fast. Who better to check for a performance-enhancing drug or an illegal substance than the drug testers themselves?

A young woman guarded the door to the VIP area. Emma flashed the red wristband that showed she was a Price-sponsored athlete and stepped inside. Tables set up at the back held large water bottles, bowls of fruit, bagels, and a caterer’s carafe of coffee and tea. Nurses staffed a makeshift lab in the right corner. One, named Karen Stringer, spotted Emma. She closed her eyes briefly, as if in relief, and hurried over. Karen and Emma knew each other from the work that Emma’s company, Pure Chemistry, did for Price. When she reached Emma, Karen threw her arms around her.

“Thank God you’re all right! We’ve been wrecks around here since hearing the news of the bombing.” Karen pulled away to take a look at Emma. Before she could speak, Emma interrupted her.

“I know. I’m a mess. I was near the car when it exploded.” Emma displayed the road rash on her leg. “Compliments of flying into the dirt. Can I get it cleaned and a bandage? And if I give you a urine sample, can you test it for any banned substances? I need a drug test right away.”

Karen frowned at her. “Actually, you look better than anyone I’ve
seen so far, even the winners. You’re not limping? I swear you’re the only one. We’ve had a wave of injuries, heat prostration, and dehydration. And why in the world do you need a drug test? We only test the medalists.”

Emma took a deep breath. “The bomb blew me off the path. While I lay there, a man walked up to me and injected me with something.”

Karen’s face took on a horrified expression. “Injected you? That’s awful! Forget the drug testing, you need to go to ICU or the hospital right now.”

“No! That won’t work. People are lined up ten deep in front of the ICU, and the local hospital will take hours, probably even days, to obtain lab results—and that’s assuming they even have the necessary equipment.” Emma waved a hand at the nurses’ station. “You can test me right here, use Rapidtest.”

Rapidtest was an investigational new test that Price was developing, able to provide preliminary results in thirty minutes. It was not approved by any racing body as yet, but Emma thought it would give her some quick answers. “Whatever additional testing I need, I can handle at the Price offices.”

Karen looked dubious. “Rapidtest can only test you for performance-enhancing drugs, not for anything life-threatening. You should talk to the police right away.”

Emma nodded. “I know that, but whatever it was, it doesn’t
seem
life-threatening. It sent me flying down the path and gave me an extremely paranoid reaction, but that seems to be all. Even so, I could be wrong. You’ll be able to narrow it down a bit. At least tell me what it isn’t, if not exactly what it is. Please, test me
now.
”

Karen stared at her a moment, then handed her a sterile collection cup. “I’ll have to draw blood as well. It’s going to take me some time, and you shouldn’t hang around here waiting. When you’re done, give this to me and go straight to the police. Write your name and cell number on the label. I’ll call you with the results.”

Emma provided Karen with a sample before heading to the op
posite corner of the tent, where the Price athletes kept their gear. She pulled out her cell phone and powered it up. Dialed the number she was told she could dial anytime, day or night.

“This is Banner. Leave a message.” The beep came after.

“Mr. Banner, it’s Emma Caldridge. I’m sorry to have to call you so soon after Colombia, but I need your help. Something strange is happening here.”

She left her cell number, then hung up. As she walked out of the tent toward the van that would take her back to the hotel, she felt her head pound. That pain had remained constant, but a new pain was growing. The pain of knowing that someone was after her.