Micro

Rick answered her with a grim smile. “Look straight ahead.” The hexapod stood crookedly on top of a mound of moss. Rick leaped into the vehicle. A moment later a body was flung out, spinning through the air, and landed with a crash at Karen’s feet. She saw the man’s armor, the dart embedded in the man’s chin, the eyes bulging…the foamy tongue, thrust out…

She drew in her breath. There had been two snipers. Rick had said nothing about it until now. “You killed-this man…”

“Get in,” Rick said, busying himself with the controls. “We’re driving to Tantalus. And we’ve got a gun.

Chapter 28

Manoa Valley 30 October, 1:45 p.m.

The pickup truck wound up the single-lane road leading to the Manoa Valley. It was a beat-up Toyota, spray-painted several different colors, with a surfboard rack and fat tires that seemed affected by elephantiasis. It arrived at the gate in front of the tunnel and stopped, and a man got out. He walked up to the gate and read the sign: PRIVATE. NO ADMITTANCE.

“Shit.” Eric Jansen rattled the gate. He examined the lock. It was a keypad. He tried some corporate codes, but nothing worked. Fucking Vin had changed the code on the lock, for sure, Eric thought.

He backed around and drove down the road a short distance, to a turnout, where he rammed the truck into the undergrowth. If anybody from Nanigen noticed it, they’d assume he was a pot farmer gone off to tend his crop on the mountain. Not a vice president of the company, looking for his brother.

He put on a knapsack and hurried down the road, slipped underneath the gate, jogged down the tunnel. Beyond the tunnel, in the valley, he went off the road and into the forest, out of sight, where he opened the knapsack and took out a laptop computer and complicated-looking box of electronic circuits. It had a homemade look: soldered boards, an antenna. He put on a pair of headphones and began to listen, scanning around the seventy-gigahertz band. He heard nothing. He switched frequency, checking the band of Nanigen’s private wireless communication network, and heard a garbled hiss. He always heard it. Intracompany chatter. The problem was to decipher it.

He waited three hours, listening, until the battery began to run down. He packed up the gear and hurried down the road, through the tunnel and back to the truck, and drove off. Nobody had noticed him; nobody had been around, anyway. He would be back tomorrow to listen again. Just in case Peter and the others were somewhere in the valley. He didn’t know where they were, only that they had gone missing.

Chapter 29

Honolulu 30 October, 1:00 p.m.

In his windowless office, Dan Watanabe called an officer in the Missing Persons Detail. “Let me know if any new information about those students comes up.”

“Funny you should ask. You want to call Nanci Harfield. She’s out in District 8 right now.”

Sergeant Nanci Harfield was in the Traffic Division; District 8 covered the southwest side of Oahu.

“I’m at Kaena,” she said to him. “We’ve got a luxury car upside down in the tidal inlet below the 1929 Bridge. The vehicle is registered to one Alyson F. Bender slash Nanigen MicroTechnologies. There’s a body trapped under the vehicle. Female, by appearance. No other bodies visible.”

“I’d like to have a look,” Watanabe said.

He got in his brown unmarked Ford Crown Victoria and drove it at an easy ninety along the freeway around Pearl Harbor. He continued into Waianae, a town that lay on the southwest coast of Oahu. This was the leeward side of the island, dry and sunny, where the beaches were lapped by gentle waves and the smallest keiki s could play and paddle. It was the rougher side of the island in terms of law enforcement, though. Lots of car break-ins and petty thefts, but little or no violence, anyway. Back in the 1800s, in the days of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the leeward side of Oahu had been a violent place, a haven for bandits, who robbed and murdered people who ventured there. Now it was mostly property crimes.

At Kaena Point, a car rested upside down in shallow water. The police department’s heaviest winch truck was parked on the road. A cable ran from the truck down through hau tangle to the car; it had been a nasty job getting the cable down through the brush. The car tipped as the cable yanked on it, and it flipped over, landing right side up. A dark blue Bentley convertible. Its soft top torn and crushed. Sand and water streamed out of the car, and a dead woman sat in the driver’s seat, creepily upright.

Watanabe made his way down the slope. He tore his slacks, and slipped and skidded, regretting that he wore street shoes.

By the time he reached the car, the cable had winched it out on the rocks. The dead woman wore a dark business suit. Her hair swirled around her face and clogged her mouth. Her eyes were gone: reef fish had eaten them.