Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight (10 page)

I vaguely remembered him saying that he suspected one of the group’s officers was a fan of his writing—Winifred Densler, as it turned out.

“We’ve been trading rather formal e-mails,” he had explained, “but all the evidence is there. There’s a lot to learn from a woman’s choice of verbs. Freudian stuff, you know? Adverbs, the same thing. Adverbs reveal passion… sometimes deep hostility, too. Verbs reveal sexual interest or sexual frustration. Doesn’t matter a damn what she’s writing about. Modifiers and verbs, man—and don’t forget exclamation points and smiley faces. They are the Internet’s truest windows to a woman’s soul.”

The hostility line had stuck with me. Thinking about it now, alone in black water, swimming beneath stars, that phrase—
deep hostility
—suddenly prodded another detail free. Tomlinson, days later, had mentioned he had sent the first few hundred words of his Internet isolation theory to a member of the group—Densler, probably. She had shared it with other key members, and then Tomlinson had given his permission to post it on the organization’s private web page. Members’ reactions, my pal had told me, had been enthusiastic, but in a way that had struck even him as abnormally angry.

“What bothers me,” he had said, “is they seem eager for the Apocalypse. Punish man for all our sins against nature. Me, I’m not into the whole punishment deal. It’s bad juju, karmically speaking.”

Punish man for our sins against nature.

There! It was the connection I’d been searching for. At the time, it had been a snippet of meaningless conversation. Now, though, Tomlinson’s words provided a key part of a disturbing picture.

Possibly.

Verifying that the linkage was real, not fanciful, was so important that I stopped swimming and treaded water for a few seconds to confirm the details in my head.

I could picture Tomlinson following me into the lab and placing Crunch & Des on the dissection table as he told me, “A couple of the members wrote they’re all for the Internet crashing. See what I mean? They copied me, of course, and everyone else—members of this group I’m talking about share everything. Very communal in an Internet sort of way, which I find cool.”

They share everything
—another important point.

Tomlinson had continued, “What they’re hoping is, when the Internet finally crashes, it’ll give us a taste of what’s gonna happen if the industrialized nations don’t stop abusing Mother Earth. A microcosmic taste, you know, when the kimchi really hits the fan.”

Tomlinson’s dreamy idealism can be almost as irritating as his self-righteous certitude, but I hadn’t called him on it. I had been busy watching the cat. Tail twitching, Crunch & Des had been eyeing a half dozen fingerling tarpon that I’d recently transferred to a fifty-gallon aquarium near the dissection table. Because I was duplicating a procedure done in the 1930s by biologist Charles M. Breeder, I hadn’t covered the tank. Even fingerling tarpon require surface air to survive—which Breeder had proven and the cat now realized.

Crunch & Des was getting ready to attack. I had seen the warning signs before.

Before the cat could pounce, though, I had crossed the room while listening to Tomlinson say, “See why I became a dues-paying member? They’re hardasses, man! A group of highly educated, well-informed Greenies who aren’t content to sit on their dead butts while the environment collapses around us. You want some examples of how they operate?”

No, I didn’t. Which is why I had paid more attention to the cat than to Tomlinson as I returned to my desk. Even so, I remembered the man telling me that the group was made up of true activists, not run-of-the-mill do-gooders and talkers. And they had more than just passion. They had enough financial backing to purchase a commercial trawler in Iran and refit it as a mother ship, from which they launched their fast rigid-hulled inflatable boats onto the Caspian Sea. Members were watermen who knew their way around a wheelhouse. For the past year, Tomlinson had said, they had been manning the trawler with crews of six, systematically harassing sturgeon fishermen at sea and on the docks. Same with the shuttle boats that hauled workers to and from oil rigs in the Caspian.

No… I had the wording wrong, probably the result of my own bias. As I continued swimming the last forty yards toward the marina’s docks, and
No Más
, I decided Tomlinson had probably said confronting fishermen, not harassing.

He approved, of course.

“How else are you going to deal with international outlaws? My God, look what they’re doing to the whales on this planet!”

With a wave of his hand, my strange friend had dismissed all governing bodies—the International Whaling Commission, among them—as if useless, before adding, “If a few tough, smart activists don’t organize internationally to stop this rank bullshit, we’re going to be the death of our own species—and we’ll take a lot of innocent species with us.”

I don’t have much patience with doomsayers, people who are secretly eager for the Apocalypse to cleanse the Earth of human sloth. Tomlinson knows it, which is probably why he had focused on a subject of mutual interest: whales.

“Just as an example, Doc. What’s happening to our sea mammals
is a perfect inverse mirror that reflects man’s greed, our bloodlust… the whole negative karma thing that’s going to turn around and bite us on the ass one day.

“It’s all about rhythm. Synchronicity is another way of viewing the problem. Crystals, for instance, are repeating three-dimensional realities—but look what happens if
just one
molecule is removed from what’s call the ‘lattice parameter.’ Trust me,
amigo
. I think you know where I’m headed with this.”

Nope, not a clue, but I let it go.

Tomlinson had compared the group’s efforts with the campaign against the Japanese whaling fleet by another organization, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Over the last several years, Sea Shepherd activists had hurled stink bombs, snared propellers and even collided with opposing vessels in their efforts to disrupt Japan’s annual “harvest” of open-ocean whales.

“It’s the illegal, cold-blooded murder of a fellow warm-blooded species—it’s mammalicide,” my pal had said—which also stuck in my memory, because the word “mammalicide” was so unusual. “This is one of those rare cases when a passive response is actually an active form of violence. How? Because it guarantees more bloodshed. That’s why I’m helping our environmental warriors in every way I can.”

Those weren’t Tomlinson’s exact words, of course. It was possible he had said, “I’m
backing
our environmental warriors,” or that he was “supporting” them—subtle differences, true, but both suggested a more hands-on commitment to… to what? Proactive intervention? Or was he tacitly endorsing violence?

Truth was, either one was a possibility, considering Tomlinson’s past.

Though few on Sanibel Island would believe it, Tomlinson had spent time in jail because of his associations with radical groups. In South Dakota, he had been arrested at an American Indian Movement
rally demanding the release of Leonard Peltier. He had also been a suspect in a terrorist bombing that had killed two people at a San Diego naval base.

But that was many years ago. Had I not been convinced that Tomlinson, while not blameless, wasn’t guilty of murder, we certainly wouldn’t be friends today. Tomlinson, in truth, wouldn’t be alive today—something I knew for certain and he probably suspected.

Was it possible that the guy had turned radical again?

Maybe,
I decided. Anyone who lives on the water is an environmentalist by obligation, if not choice. What better cause could there be?

Tomlinson and I seldom agree on anything that has to do with religion, politics or has boundaries that exceed the perimeter of Dinkin’s Bay. But he was right about Japan’s slaughter of whales. It’s illegal and outrageous. Not only does the “fishery” kill more than a thousand whales yearly, the nation shows its contempt for world opinion (and the ocean’s resources) by insisting that the butchery is actually a “whale research program.”

With a similar research program, the Japanese have destroyed the bull shark population in Lake Nicaragua and continues its assault on a global scale using nets, longlines and factory ships.

Yet, Japan’s atrocities are eclipsed by the world’s foremost environmental outlaw, China. I had collected some unsavory details while researching one of that country’s foremost offenders, Lien Hai Bohai.

China recognizes no international sea boundaries but its own, plus those of countries that have prostituted their futures by selling China all rights to their fisheries. Cuba may be the saddest example—its citizens are legally forbidden from eating shrimp, lobster and pelagic fish caught in their own waters.

Chinese ships catch, kill, process and blast-freeze every living
thing in their paths. Floating factories, like the fleet owned by Lien Bohai, destroy a hundred cubic miles of sea bottom daily, fifty-two weeks a year, year after year. The countries of the former Soviet Union do less damage, but only because they have limited resources.

Tomlinson had every reason to support environmental activists in the Caspian Sea. But violence with lethal intent? No… I knew the guy too well to believe it. I just couldn’t. With him, the lines of morality are often blurry, but no way would he associate with anyone crazy enough to shoot or gas innocent people.

Lien Bohai was a different story. A man who could rationalize a scorched-earth policy at sea was capable of just about anything. The same was true of the Eastern Europeans. Armanie and Darius Talas were Viktor Kazlov’s associates, Vladimir had told me, but also his enemies. Any of those men might be behind what was happening tonight, yet my focus kept returning to the members of Third Planet. They had already shown their indifference to the law by trespassing, and only they had been privy to Tomlinson’s Internet isolation theory.

As badly as I wanted to dismiss it, though, I couldn’t disassociate Tomlinson from what was happening tonight on Vanderbilt Island. Even if he was the unknowing contributor to someone’s lunatic plan, the man was too damn perceptive not to suspect he was being used.

As I swam the last few yards to Tomlinson’s sailboat, Vladimir’s words continued to bang around in my head.

“Your longhair friend told me,”
he had said, as if I should have already known.

Maybe he was right.

I
was in the water, hanging off the stern of Tomlinson’s boat, when I heard a gunshot from somewhere near the mangroves. Then a second shot.

Vladimir.
It was the first explanation that came to mind.

After so much wild gunfire, the two shots, spaced seconds apart, sounded workmanlike and purposeful. They were of similar caliber as the rounds that had chased the bodyguard and me from beneath the dock. A semiautomatic 9mm or something close.

After the second shot, I spun around and took a look. The mangrove point was an elevated darkness backdropped by stars and the silence of empty houses. There was no telltale corona from a flashlight, no streak of a red laser.

Even so, I guessed that Vladimir had been found and executed. Soon, the gunman would be looking for me. Before that happened, I wanted to get what I needed from Tomlinson’s boat and be gone.

Because I couldn’t risk showing myself on the dock, it took more time than it should have to get aboard.

When it comes to utility, sailboats present too many design challenges to name. High on my list of dislikes is, they are pains in the ass to board from the water. Tomlinson’s old Morgan is rigged for single-handed blue-water passages to Key West and the Yucatán. When the skipper of a vessel is often drunk and/or stoned, safety gear must be rigged accordingly.

In the case of
No Más
, it means the deck is fenced with lifeline cables, three high, on thirty-inch stanchions. Less chance of the man tumbling overboard in a heavy sea. So I grabbed the lowest cable, did a pull-up, then slapped a hand around the top cable. I hung there for a moment, then managed to get my left foot through the lifeline gate onto the deck—not easy when you’re wearing swim fins.

A minute later, I was aboard, swinging down the companionway into the heat, the darkness and familiar odors of the vessel’s cabin. Tomlinson’s floating Zendo, his students call the boat. The space smelled of kerosene, teak oil, electronics, sandalwood and the musky odor of marijuana. I reached, closed the hatchway, then pulled the curtains tight before I found a jar of wooden matches above the stove and lit a lamp.

First thing I did was open the icebox and chug a bottle of water. I was trembling from dehydration. I also forced myself to chew a handful of dried apricots even though I wasn’t hungry.

With a second bottle of water, I sat for a few seconds at the settee table, then went to the VHF radio mounted above the navigation station and quarter berth. I switched the radio on, reduced squelch, and a familiar warble told me that a jamming device was, indeed, somewhere on the island. Even so, I switched to channel 16 and transmitted a series of Mayday calls, complete with location.