Frick began looking for the papers from the model blue whale. It took about ten seconds to realize that they were gone.
He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. Sparks, like fireworks, streaked across the inside of his eyelids. He felt a sort of anger like he hadn't felt since the day he'd beaten the commissioner with a baseball bat. As the commissioner writhed on the floor, in his bloody gray suit, Frick had turned him into a bag of broken bones.
Frick heard himself cursing, then bit his tongue to stop himself. He realized he was becoming incoherent in his rage. His eyes were wide open, but only now was he seeing.
He'd moved down the hall from Anderson's office. For a moment he had to remind himself that he was a person very much in control. He was deliberate. He was strong. He was intelligent. He had been a detective. He was the most formidable industry security man in the country. He could put it all back together.
Christ, his face hurt.
Just then Ranken walked back in and came up the stairs.
'I want to register an objection here,' the detective started. 'I don't think you should be leading the hunt for Chase and Walther, and I don't think we should be searching the doctor's office or wall safe without a warrant. The whole thing looks bad. We don't even know that Ben Anderson's-'
Ranken stopped as Frick's eyes sank into him. 'What exactly are your concerns?'
'I just told you. And this Chase or Sam fellow or whatever? He apologized to me on the way back out after spraying me. I mean, I'd like to kick his ass personally, but he wasn't acting like a cold-blooded murderer. Maybe we're talking about manslaughter here.'
Ranken fidgeted under Frick's cold stare. 'I don't know. Maybe we're pushing this thing too hard. We don't want more people getting killed needlessly.'
'Robert Chase made an ass of you. He went right around you and stole the papers that were in the whale.'
Ranken didn't respond.
Still holding Ranken with his gaze, Frick swept up the giant tweezers from the surface of Ben's desk. His hand was gloved. 'I need to show you something else. It's down in the workshop in the basement.'
Fifteen minutes later, Frick walked back to the conference room near his office in the Sanker Main Building. The expansive conference room, which overlooked Friday Harbor from the northern rim, had the best water-view seats in the house.
Frick dialed the phone.
'This is Doris,' came the familiar voice from Vegas.
'Garth Frick. Give me Strope.'
'Just a minute.'
It took her about thirty seconds.
'Give me a number where Strope can call you,' she said.
A few moments later, the phone rang.
'You must have a problem.'
Typical Strope-already starting to gloat.
'I do,' said Frick. 'I want them now. Khan, Rafe, and the others, like we talked-ten crude, ten smooth.'
'Yeah, yeah. I got eight crude, nine smooth for you. They're on your island as of yesterday. I'll call Khan and-'
'That wasn't our deal,' Frick interrupted.
'Take it or leave it. I can't control when guys get sick or leave town. You're only down three. I'll make the price thirty grand less.'
'Get me Khan now,' Frick said, 'and we're good.'
'He'll be there within the hour,' Strope said. 'Two days max on location, right?'
'That's right.'
Frick hung up, thinking about the total price. He would need more money. Except for Rafe Black and Khan himself, Strope's people didn't whack anybody as part of the plan.
The deal was that Khan could kill and Rafe could kill, but he had to make a separate deal for that with Khan. The only exception was self-defense and, of course Frick would label any inadvertent gunplay as just that: self- defense.
In addition to the basic fee of $350,000, actual dead bodies were $100,000 per head for the first two and $50,000 thereafter, regardless of who killed them or why. Any dead body that made it into the press added to the fee. He'd have to raise the price with Nash.
Frick shook his head. That meant another call to Sanker Corporation.
'I need more money,' Frick opened with Nash. All negotiations regarding the project went through Nash.
'I'm afraid that's not possible,' Nash said.
'Making sure Ben Anderson is safe is costly. Finding a kidnap victim is always costly. I don't have time to argue. Either you're with me or I have to resign.' Frick reminded himself that it was necessary to maintain the fiction that any kidnapping that might occur would be done by someone else-certainly not Frick and certainly not Sanker.
'We already paid one hundred thousand to protect Ben Anderson.'
Frick knew that saying nothing was the quickest way to end this session. He rubbed his sore jaw, but didn't speak. After a long pause he heard a sigh.
'All right,' Nash said. 'I suppose the one hundred grand was just to get people in place.
How much?'
'One million.' Frick said it as if there were no room for negotiation. He wanted plenty for dead bodies, if it came to that. Already there were two-thankfully not on Khan's bill
— and more were likely on the way.
This time the sigh was bigger.
Frick placed his next call to Griffith, one of two men already on Frick's personal payroll. Grif had no formal connection to the sheriff's department except that he'd been arrested plenty in his life.
'Go to Ben Anderson's. Wait there for me. If the fellow Sam or the woman Haley shows up, call me immediately and stay out of sight. Got it?'
'I got it.'
Frick slammed the handset down. All the talking had his jaw throbbing and the job had turned bad. His life was on the line and there wasn't enough money in Nash's coffers for that kind of risk.
There was no way this would end cleanly. His only hope of ending it quickly was finding Ben Anderson's secret in the safe-and then finding Ben Anderson.
Sam made his way toward Haley's place by a circuitous route, starting on Beaverton and then cutting down to San Juan Valley.
Haley had stopped crying, but she hadn't said a word for several minutes.
'If you're ready to look at this,' he said, handing her a piece of paper, 'I found something interesting that Frick and his men never saw.'
The message, in Ben's writing, was cryptic:
Together they make more than they consume and they waste very little. We do the opposite and we are inefficient to boot. It's the by-products of inefficiency that they avoid and that we do not.
There is a reason Mother Nature has not given us the same gift and in due course I will reveal it. If we take a lesson and get the gift for ourselves, we 'II have a rain check on individual deaths, save ourselves collectively, and solve the biggest problem of our discovery.
Perhaps the second phase of 'creation,' if you will, is for intelligent life to make choices that supercede natural selection. Intellectual life wants to preserve consciousness as an end in itself. Now there's a thought. Check where the ocean cleanses itself.
'I think he wrote it for you,' Sam said. 'Someone he trusts and who knows something about science. At the end he seems to be telling us where to look. Does it mean anything to you?'
Haley thought for a moment. 'He's discovered a creature, something amazing, apparently. The 'cleansing' thing rings a bell.'
Sam was glad her mind was off Crew's death, for the moment at least. 'How so?' he asked.
