On the Fifth Day (41 page)

ter of days he had found it. What did he know? What had he figured out that led him right to a creature no one else has ever knowingly found?"

"It looks like a fish market," said Kumi, still staring at the picture.

"Bingo," said Parks. "Which, incidentally, was how the In

donesian coelacanth was first discovered. Some random biol

ogist on his honeymoon, wandering through a village market, 307

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spotted it on a stall. A local fisherman had pulled it in and didn't know what else to do with it. I'm guessing someone did the same with this."

"Where?" said Thomas again. "How did you get this?"

"Your brother sent it to Satoh two days before he died,"

said Parks. "E-mailed. We tried to track the location of the originating computer, but got nothing."

"Was there a message with it?" said Thomas, urgent now.

"Two words," said Parks.
"Found it."

"It's amazing," said Kumi, studying the picture, unable to keep the awe out of her voice.

"You know what it looks like to me?" said Parks, his eyes aflame.

"What?" said Jim.

"The death of God," he said. "For real this time."

CHAPTER 87

Pestilence had taken only ten minutes to move from the Kofu railway station to the alley where Famine's body had been concealed. It was still dark, but she had moved as if she knew the city inside out, checking her GPS only when she came to a junction. Famine had turned his phone on as a precaution, it seemed, right before staging whatever Halloween treat he had planned for Knight. Obviously it hadn't gone so well. The phone, still switched on, was under a bundle of clothes he must have taken off in preparation for his theatrics. It sat behind an air-conditioning unit only yards from the Dumpster containing its owner's corpse and the weapon that had killed him.
Goddamned amateur-hour freak.

The sword was familiar. She weighed it in her hand thoughtfully.

She called War and gave him the short version: yes, he was 308

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dead, for sure this time. No, no one had found the body. Yes, she needed him there immediately with a van to help get rid of the body. They didn't want the police involved. She could add stuff to the Dumpster that would conceal the corpse for a little while.

"Any sign of Knight?" said War.

"No," she said. "But he was here only a few hours ago and he can't have gotten far. I'll find him."

CHAPTER 88

"I really appreciate this," said Thomas.

"No problem," said Matsuhashi. He seemed more relaxed, more assured since the Watanabe story had settled some. His colleagues, even the faculty who were directing his work, treated him with a certain deference, and though some of that was surely just the political caution of people who had already backed the wrong horse once, some of it was just as surely ad

miration. He had bucked the system in daring and dramatic fashion, and emerged not only unscathed, but looking like a rising star whose work was rivaled only by his ethics. But if he was on the path to celebrity, Thomas found he was handling it quite differently from his former mentor. He was more confident, more content, than he had been, cer

tainly, but there was none of Watanabe's flash, his disingenu

ous self-deprecation, or his love of the media's attention. He had matured, it seemed, and though the press clearly admired him and what he had done, they were losing interest in him as an icon. That, Thomas thought, was probably for the best. Still, at the Yamanashi Archaeological Insititute, doors opened for Matsuhashi that would not have opened for other graduate students, and the red tape that would ordinarily have bound Thomas's requests to see any computer records of what his brother had been working on during his stay were sharply 309

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cut. Japanese organizations could have endless protocols that would hamstring any unconventional inquiry, particularly if it inconvenienced or embarrassed other people, but with Mat

suhashi in his corner it seemed there was nothing that he would not be granted.

"He worked here for two days?" said Thomas.

"Apart from meals and a couple of meetings with Watanabe

san,
he was here almost all the time. I should be able to pull up most of what he was looking at on the university's satellitededicated system unless he purged the cache completely."

"What makes you think he was using that?" said Thomas.

"Couldn't he just have been surfing the web or writing docu

ments?"

"He could have done that," said Matsuhashi, his fingers flashing over the keys with incredible speed, "but he got Watanabe-
san
to give him password clearance for accessing the satellite data."

"What do you use it for?"

"The equipment was set up for topographical scanning and detection of burial mounds throughout the country."

"Using satellite images?"

"Yes," said Matsuhashi. "As with the site we eventually ex

cavated, the visible part of the mound was only a fraction of the actual burial site. We were attempting to use synthetic aperture radar--SAR--to detect shapes under the earth."

"That's possible?"

"Oh, yes. It is sensitive to linear and geometric features on the ground, particularly when different radar wavelengths and combinations of horizontal and vertical data are employed."

Thomas gave him a blank look.

"Sorry," Matsuhashi said, looking up from his typing.

"The point is, it works. SAR beams energy waves to the ground and records the energy reflected. It's not even new technology now. In 1982 radar from the space shuttle revealed ancient water courses below the sand of the Sudanese desert. Airborne radar has been used to track prehistoric footpaths in Costa Rica."

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He paused and frowned as a new page of data scrolled down the screen.

"What?" said Thomas.

"These coordinates are odd," said Matsuhashi. "They are not in Japan."

Thomas felt it again, that quickening of his pulse. "Where are they?"

The student pulled up one image after another and his frown deepened. The pictures showed what looked like irreg

ular crenulations of coastlines, white against a black back

ground, with large areas of each picture awash in vivid colors, green edging into yellow, into orange, into red, magenta, and brown. Each image was marked with a date and time, and the file was labeled "SeaWiFS chlorophyll produce and wind field from SAR."

"What the hell is that?" said Thomas.

"I have absolutely no idea," said Matsuhashi, "but it's not burial mounds."

The next set of images again seemed to show coastline marked in vivid green, blue water, and a scattering of irides

cent magenta paling to white. The file was marked "AVHRR: visible, near and thermal infrared composite." Then there were charts of numbers, graphs, and clusters of coordinates.

"Could this be measuring underwater caves?" Thomas ven

tured.

Matsuhashi shook his head.

"This data seems largely surface focused," he said. "It may penetrate a few feet down, but no more. And measuring caves wouldn't necessitate these multiple passes. See? We have a se

ries of images of the same locations taken over the space of several days. Caves don't alter unless there is massive seismic activity, so why the repeat imaging? And this set of images seems to be taking into account wind direction, which wouldn't be relevant for undersea structures."

"What about this reference to chlorophyll?" said Thomas.

"That's plants, right?"

"It's what plants use for photosynthesis, yes."

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"I don't get it," said Thomas.

"Me neither," said Matsuhashi, looking less sure of him

self. "This is a long way from archaeology. Let me make a call. I'm very popular at NHK right now," he added with a rueful smile.

They printed a selection of the images and drove over to the TV station. Thomas hung in the background as the staff fawned over their local hero, but drifted back into range as they sat down with the station's chief meteorologist, a scholarlylooking man with salt-and-pepper hair and a neat mustache who, of all the people at the station, seemed ignorant of or unimpressed by Matsuhashi's celebrity status. He was, Mat

suhashi assured Thomas, an expert on satellite imaging, partic

ularly if they involved weather as these pictures seemed to. He peered at the images, nodded gravely, and uttered his verdict in Japanese.

Thomas followed as best he could, but the man seemed to be complaining about what was on offer at his local restau

rant.

"What is he saying?" he asked.

"He's saying that this is why he can't get sushi-grade fish for the second time this year," said Matsuhashi, simultane

ously amused and bemused.

"Habzu,"
said the meteorologist to Thomas.

"I'm sorry?" said Thomas.

The weatherman took a pen from his desk and wrote on a notepad:
HABS.
He repeated the letters carefully.

"I don't know what that means," said Thomas.

The meteorologist spoke quickly, Matsuhashi rushing his translation to keep up. "Little plants in the water," he said, typing
HABS
into his computer search engine. "Dangerous. Poison all the fish." The meteorologist indicated the computer screen.
"Habzu,"
he said again, with a told-you-so air. The picture showed a sunlit beach, idyllic except for some

thing strange that made the brain retreat and adjust, something that skewed reality, made it dreamlike. The sea had turned to blood.

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"HABS: Harmful algae blooms," Matsuhashi read. "Also known as . . ."

"Akashio,"
said the meteorologist.

Thomas didn't need the translation.

"Red tide," he whispered.

It was as if turning the key he had been trying had not just worked, it had released a dozen other locks, and suddenly Thomas's head was filled with the booming clang of a dozen doors swinging open.

CHAPTER 89

Thomas was exhilarated. Even the tranquillity of the Minobu temple complex couldn't mute his enthusiasm.

"Some biblical scholars," he said, "have speculated that the plague of Egypt that turned the Nile to blood was the ear

liest documented instance of red tide, the massive blooming of microscopic algae or phytoplankton that can turn the water red. There are lots of different kinds. I think we're looking at something called
Alexandrium tamarense.
"

"Which does what?" said Kumi.

"It's a dinoflagellate that causes PSP," said Parks, pacing the gravel forecourt. "Paralytic shellfish poisoning. It affects mussels, scallops, clams, and so on. Eating contaminated shellfish can shut down your respiratory system completely in bad cases: death within twenty-four hours."

"Giovanni caught it the day before Ed left Italy," said Thomas. "A mild case, but enough to get Ed thinking."

He had called the Italian priest to confirm his hunch before rejoining the others. Giovanni had been surprised to hear from him, but not hostile, and he did not blame Thomas for Pietro's death. Thomas's relief had fed his current euphoria. They had taken the train up to Minobu and climbed the two 313

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hundred eighty-seven sheer, broad steps up to the temples. It had been Kumi's idea: a break, she said, a change. They needed to get out of Kofu, put some distance between them and the body of Thomas's attacker, a body to which there had been no reference in any of the local news media. Kumi seemed to find this silence disquieting. Murder, particularly so strange a murder, should dominate the news for days in a place like Kofu.

The Yoshino cherries were in flower, a pale, fragile pink against the stark tree limbs and deep blue of the sky. The trip was, more importantly, a reenactment of a visit she and Thomas had made together years before, and as such it rep

resented a truce, albeit a cautious one, frail as the cherry blossoms.

Parks, who seemed curiously immune to the ageless beauty of the mountain retreat and its ancient wooden tem

ples, had come up separately from wherever he was staying in Kofu.

"PSP doesn't just kill people," he said. "It affects the whole food chain. Anything that eats the dinoflagellate becomes toxic to whatever then eats it. It doesn't just shut down a few restaurants in Maine; it can wipe out whole fish populations."

"Unless the fish is unusually equipped to find a new food source," said Thomas.

Parks stared at him. "Oh, that's good," he said.

"What is?" said Kumi.

"Our fishapod," said Parks. "It spends almost its entire life in the water, probably in caves, swimming about, using its rudimentary legs to move around, catching fish. But if the environment changes suddenly and its usual food source disappears . . ."

"Wiped out by HABS," Thomas chimed in.

". . . then it has something the other fish don't have: legs, and a way of breathing air at least for a little while. It climbs out of the water and eats something else until the sea has re

turned to normal."

"It fits our Paestum painting," said Thomas, "which is the 314

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only image we have of the fish actually coming out of the wa

ter. This is what Ed guessed. The red water in the painting isn't just apocryphal symbolism, as the fish isn't merely a Christological icon. It was a real fish. Real crimson water. The legged fish came ashore when the sea turned red."

"Life out of death," said Jim. "No wonder Ed thought he had hit the symbolic mother lode. It's the perfect image of Christ transcending the cross."

"Ed used the satellite imagery to track current outbreaks,"

said Parks, brushing the theology aside. "He was matching environmental data--water temperature, depth, subterranean topography--from what he knew of the Naples sites to other locations in the world that shared outbreaks of the
Alexan