Old Poison (30 page)

Gill turned to the title page, back to the
map I had shown him, and then looked up at me with far too much
understanding in his expression. In almost a whisper, he asked,
“These calculations can really identify specific spheres as
specific planets?”

I nodded.

James expression indicated he hadn’t a clue
what this meant or why it was important. I had to keep in mind,
however, that this was the man who did such a good job of playing
it dumb on the night I met him.

Gill’s reaction however made me realize he
had to have read more of Evelyn’s documents than just the Blue
Morpho file. As Gill knowingly examined the document before us, I
was sure he had read the
Martian Diary
and had now guessed,
as I had, where Evelyn had hidden the file. That should have
forewarned me of what was to come.

* * * * *

As soon as Gill understood where we were
going and why, he said the drive over the Cordillera de Talamanca
and down the Pacific side would take too long. He went off to make
calls and came back with SANSA Air tickets from San Jose to Palmar
Sur and a reservation in Palmar Sur for a four-wheel-drive rental
car.

For such a small country, Costa Rica has
amazing climatic changes in surprisingly few miles. When we stepped
onto the plane in San Jose, it was seventy degrees, with scattered
clouds and a pleasant light breeze. When we stepped off in Palmar
Sur, the humidity and mosquito factors were way up, and a
torrential downpour started before we finished renting the car.

At the Palmar airport, we loaded our
equipment and rain gear into the Range Rover, and Gill drove south
through banana plantations toward the river port town of Sierpe. To
my dismay, we left the paved road almost immediately. We bumped
down a muddy dirt road, through cattle pastures and forests and
over a one-lane suspension bridge so narrow I would have sworn the
Rover was too wide to cross it. Though San Jose had been perpetual
spring since I arrived, rain had been falling on the Diquis Delta
for days. In addition, the area is circled by rivers and mangrove
swamps, washed by the Pacific, and receives runoff from the
mountains to the east.

As we left the better maintained roads near
the banana plantations, the mud became several inches thick, and we
passed two cars that had landed in the ditch and were abandoned
with mud up to the doors. Traveling under a heavy blanket of
clouds, on roads that were not on the map, I guided Gill by relying
on our GPS receiver. I had programmed it to guide us to the
coordinates that Hamerstat’s calculations identified as a sphere
representing the planet Mars.

Almost an hour later we reached a spot where
the only track going in the direction we needed to go was a
footpath through the forest.

“Stop here, Gill. This looks like it will be
as far as we go by car, but we are within one kilometer of the
site.”

Gill brought the Rover to a slushy, skidding
stop. We put on our bright blue rain parkas and grabbed the folding
shovels. As a precaution, I programmed the current location of our
Rover into the GPS memory.

James watched me and smiled. “That gadget
beats the hell out of bread crumbs.”

We stepped carefully along the slippery path
that ran under a claustrophobic ceiling of tangled forest and
followed the GPS steering arrow toward the coordinates for our Mars
sphere,

The granite globe, about five feet in
diameter, was set on a slight rise on the eastern side of a small
clearing. In the light of the clearing, with the rain pounding on
its polished surface, the sphere seemed almost luminescent.

They both watched as I surveyed the ground
around the sphere. On high ground on the north east side, I saw it.
It might not have been obvious to the casual glance, but to someone
looking for it, it was as plain as a doorway. There was a circle,
about two feet across, where a shovel had cut into the ground. The
Earth and plants had been carefully removed and carefully replaced,
but roots had been cut so that dead plant material made a brown
outline just beneath the green grass and vines. It was slightly
sunken as it had resettled into less firmly packed soil.

I unfolded the shovel and began to dig,
first removing the same section of ground that had been taken out
before. Three shovels full of soil down I found the case buried
partially under the sphere. As I tried to dislodge the case and
pull it out, James appeared at my side to help. As the case came
out of the ground, I had hold of the handle but James did not let
go of the far edge.

“I’ll be damned,” said James. “How did you
know?”

By his question I knew that James had never
read the
Martian Diary
. To answer I would have to tell him
the story of Antia and how she had hidden the final documents under
a similar monolith on Mars. The one Antia had chosen represented
Earth. Evelyn chose Mars.

Many things made sense now, like my card,
still in Evelyn’s bra so long after I had given it to her. She had
put it there when she knew her death was near. She knew I would be
called and come to Arizona. The note to High Pockets that she had
left in Jim’s house would mean nothing to anyone who hadn’t read
the diary. But what a chance she took. She gambled that I would
come, that Jim would give me the note and that, against all odds,
that note would bring me here. All of that was a part of the story
James didn’t need to know, and telling it seemed like a betrayal to
Evelyn.

“Oh, just something Evelyn said to me
finally clicked into place,” I lied. As I finished speaking, I
happened to catch Gill looking at me intently. His face held a hint
of a smile, but I couldn’t read his expression.

James was not really interested in how I had
done it. He was concentrating on the case we held between us. “OK,
Diana, good work. I’ll take it from here.”

He tried to take the case and my anger
flared. I clung to the handle and grabbed the other side with my
free hand.

“So you really are with Woods after
all.”

He looked surprised. “How can you say that?
My people are arresting Woods and his men as we speak.”

“Your people? You mean the people that Woods
said are no longer making the decisions about Hyacinth Red?”

“Look, Woods may have his little military
clique, but we have people who can go directly to the President of
the United States.

“Remember Duffy’s three P’s, James. Hyacinth
Red is the ultimate ring of power. You take this back to them and
they will bury us and anyone else who objects to using it.”

He took a firmer hold on the case and
prepared to yank it from me. “What do you think you can do with it?
You going to chain yourself to the gate and wait for the press to
plead your case? Evelyn tried that. You going to try to publish
these papers? If you succeeded, and you would probably be killed
before you did, but if you succeeded, all you would do is give away
the formula. If this stuff will really destroy the atmosphere, it
would be like publishing instructions on how to build a hydrogen
bomb.”

The distinctive clicking of semiautomatics
chambering bullets came from three sides and effectively ended both
our wrestling match for the case and our debate on the fate of its
contents. We looked up to see Gill and two other men who had
appeared from God knows where, all pointing guns at us.

“Ms. Hunter, Mr. Nolan—kindly set the case
down on the ground and back away from it.”

With no real option to do otherwise, we did
as we were ordered. Gill walked over and picked up the case.

“Now, kindly place your hands on Mars.”

As we leaned over the sphere, Gill
instructed his friends to search us for weapons. I had slipped my
little Walther into the cargo pocket of my pants. James was packing
a nine millimeter, for what good weapons did either of us.

“Thank you. Now, shall we go back to the car
where we can get out of this rain?”

As we started to walk toward the car, James
asked, “You working with Woods?”

“If you recall, I am the one who urged
Interpol to bring Woods to your attention, Mr. Nolan.”

“Who, then? Russians, Chinese, French,
Israel? Who is trying to get control of this?”

“I work for no foreign power. I am simply
trying to reclaim something that Evelyn had taken from my
friends.”

“What? The Morpho files?”

Gill did not answer and I didn’t need him
to. I had finally figured him out, just a little late.

* * * * *

When we got back to the road we found a
second car there. Obviously, when Gill made our travel arrangements
he had also managed to have his companions follow us. In Spanish,
Gill asked his friends to take James to the second car, then
changing to English, he instructed me to get into the back seat of
our Rover. He put his gun away in its holster and climbed in beside
me.

“Now shall we see what we have here?” He
opened the watertight case and found several paper files and two
compact discs. The first disc was labeled:

15643-9-23

(47th language translation-English)

(Copy 2,783) (Caretaker-Nosha)

This one he placed in his coat pocket and I
asked the obvious question to which I already knew the answer.

“You’re one of the Caretakers of the diary,
aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did Evelyn know that?”

“Not at first, but by her last visit,
yes.”

“So you didn’t just accidentally get
acquainted with her, did you? You were keeping an eye on someone
who might betray the cause.”

He hesitated a moment, but made no answer.
Then he handed me the second, unlabeled disc. “I believe that if
you put this in your laptop and pull it up you will find it
contains the data that Evelyn wanted to submit to world opinion. Am
I correct in assuming that you have the transmission program she
had created for this task?”

I nodded.

“Then I’ll set up the satellite phone, and
you get ready to transmit.”

He reached into the cargo space behind us,
handed me my laptop case, and put the case with the satellite phone
in his lap. I sat watching as he opened the case and began to set
up. He looked at me, his expression curious.

“You have another concern?” he asked.

“What if James is right? What if it is like
publishing instructions for a hydrogen bomb?”

He shook his head. “The formula for Hyacinth
Red is not in here. It never was. Todd didn’t give her that part.
What is in this file is pure science, showing the electrical and
chemical reactions of certain elements with the upper atmosphere
and demonstrating why the release of these elements in quantity
into the atmosphere would result in the depletion of the
atmospheric envelope around our globe. This disc also lacks the
copy of the
Martian Diary
, which Evelyn wanted to publish.
We convinced her that the world was not yet ready for that
revelation.”

“I see.”

I loaded the transmission program that would
send data to every government, every university, every
environmentalist, and every scientific institution, newspaper, and
journal that Evelyn’s German programmer had been able to find. It
would then raid their mailing lists and also send copies to all of
their correspondents. Then I inserted the Hyacinth Red data into
the transmission program, and Gill connected the laptop to the
phone. The phone found the satellite, and we connected to the web.
Hand on the send button, I hesitated.

“Gill, you are a bright, trained
investigator, experienced in looking empirically at evidence. Do
you really believe the
Martian Diary
is a true history?”

“Which part of that story do you find
unbelievable, the fact that mankind could travel across space and
colonize a nearby planet or the fact that mankind could be so
stupid, greedy, and short sighted as to completely destroy the
planetary environment?”

Bewildered by the thoughts his question
raised, I sat silently and he answered for me.

“There are scientists, right now, in your
country associated in an enterprise to colonize Mars. They believe
they can make an inhabitable colony within one to two hundred years
by a process that I believe they call
terraforming
. They
believe they can create the water, air, plant life, shelter, and
fuel necessary to survive on this now barren planet. Do you believe
that?”

He waited for my answer. I nodded. “I have
read about it, and I even know one person who is working on
it.”

“Why is it so much harder to believe that
mankind could have colonized a lush and abundant planet like
Earth?”

I found no answer.

“As to environmental destruction, just look
around you. Right now our Earth is experiencing the greatest rate
of extinction since the death of the dinosaurs, and this time it
cannot be blamed on a great cataclysm. It is due directly to human
overpopulation, pollution, and wanton destruction.”

“OK, I grant you that both ideas are
possible, but if a society advanced enough for space flight had
been on Earth at some time in the past, wouldn’t there be some
evidence of it left around for us to discover?”

He began to laugh.

“My question wasn’t intended as a joke.”

“I am sorry. But the real question is, would
we recognize such evidence if we laid our hands upon it? About a
half an hour ago you placed both of your hands on a sphere which
none of the sciences of our great modern world can satisfactorily
explain. They know of no people who could have made them, have
found no tools to carve them, and have only recently begun to find
clues as to their possible astronomical significance. What has
establishment science said of these mysteries? They have simply
dismissed them as ‘out of context’ with known civilization. They
have simply shrugged and ignored them.”