'Ben and I had walked there while we were waiting for more dinner guests at the McMillan House restaurant and Ben had gene-sequencing data to go over at dinner.

They had used some of Venter's method with help from Venter's lab for analyzing octopuses' genome sequences. It got dark and we were sitting on the family's ashes in the marble seats around the marble table. Anyway, they pulled up on the computer this little article about Venter. Some kind of a voyage on his yacht.'

Haley glanced at the computer on the desk in the nearby study.

'I wish I knew the password. We could search for it.'

'You probably don't need to. Many home computers don't use a password,' Sam said.

Sam turned it on and a password dialogue box came up.

'Oops.' Sam fished around in the desk drawer and found the Windows install disk. He put the CD in the computer and then unplugged the computer. Immediately he plugged the computer back in and hit the escape key and F2 key simultaneously.

'What are you doing?'

'Getting into BIOS. We've been here this long, I guess we can gamble on a few more minutes and hope it doesn't kill us.'

Another dialogue box came up asking for a password. In about one minute Sam had the back of the computer off and he pulled a pin disconnecting the jumper. Pushing the computer reset button put him into the BIOS. In BIOS configuration he directed the computer to look at the CD before it went to the hard drive, thereby changing the booting sequence.

'I've effectively told the computer to boot off the CD. Voila. No password needed.'

Sam installed the new system and used the new system to access the Internet.

'I'd love to know how you used this in your former life.'

'Any computer tech could do this, no problem,' Sam said. 'It's nothing.'

'So passwords are baloney.'

'You could say that. Especially on home applications.'

They found a number of articles. Then they found the one that discussed the Sargasso Sea:

Venter is a pioneer in gene sequencing first on the human genome, when he beat the federal

Government, and now in beginning to catalog the diversity of the seas. He's on a round-the- world voyage with a yacht equipped with gene-sequencing computers. To prove that human genes (some 25,000 of them in all) are a tiny minority among millions of other genes on the planet, Venter pulled up water samples from the Sargasso Sea. It was thought to be a relatively unproductive ocean. Using his advanced gene-searching techniques, Venter isolated 1.2 million genes from no more than a few buckets of seawater. He discovered 1,800 new microbes.

'See that's Sargasso stew. Venter's sequencing methods applied to a random mix,' Haley said.

'Why specifically would that be of interest to Ben?'

'You saw something in all these papers about looking for a gene?'

'So I did.'

'This is a way to look. Only maybe you look in deep-sea sediment. But I don't think we've figured out the Sargasso stew.' Haley sighed. 'Maybe the reference is to something else. We'd better go to the beach house. Maybe the rest of his files will tell us something.'

CHAPTER 31

She put the papers back into Sam's bag. It was cloth, not designed for papers, and it tended to bend and mix the already damp documents. Thinking about the problem, she went into a study, found a big briefcase, stuffed them all inside, and crammed the lid down. It was a wooden briefcase. A little unusual, but it would work.

'I wonder about driving to Ben's,' Sam said. 'By now they may have heard about the Blazer and there are liable to be cops on the roads, roadblocks.' He paused to let that sink in. 'How else can we get to Ben's?'

She thought for a moment. 'If we want to try hiking the forest at night, we can walk. It's about a mile through the forest along Aleck Bay. There's forest everywhere on the way, with houses intermixed, especially along the beach.' Then she paused again, an idea having obviously crossed her mind. 'I think there's a boat here we could use.'

'We could hide the Blazer down the way from here and walk back,' Sam said.

They walked through the living room, passed the table where they had eaten a little ham, to the side of the house. Sam watched her smile when she led him right to the boat.

'They have a beautiful dory. We can put it in, row out of the bay, down the coast a bit, and around the point, down the beach, and we're there.'

Sam had had enough time in the ocean for one night, but he agreed that the sea approach would be best. It was turning into an unusually calm night, if the present lack of wind was any indication. Earlier, the wind had been building from the southwest but now was calm out of the northwest, unusual for this time of year, so the sea in this area at the southern end of the islands might have calmed outside the bay. If it hadn't, this dory idea would not work.

The Williamses had a well-constructed steel track to get the dory to the beach. Once at the beach they would have to take the boat from its cradle and carry it.

They carefully turned off every light, leaving the place just as they had found it. They needed to get the Blazer well down the road and completely hidden. Haley drove.

They put a blanket between Sam and the wet seat. Haley imagined Sam's hand touching her, rubbing her back in reassurance. She groped for an excuse to touch him over the center console, but wouldn't allow herself.

He turned and looked at her. For a second she switched on the interior light, then turned it off. His eyes were amber and earnest, keeping with the rock-solid nature of him.

'You okay?' he asked.

'Fine.' She started the truck.

Frick had ruined or threatened all she knew. Maybe she saw Sam as the human embodiment of desperately needed proof that she really was okay, even desirable. She wanted to believe there was more than that behind her feelings, but life at the moment was such a tumbled turmoil that she couldn't think clear thoughts, much less feel unadulterated emotions.

She still felt the great sense of caution, but now she wanted to overcome it. Precisely because he seemed unreachable, because he had gone away, because of the summer of

'94, because he had married Anna Wade, and even more important because her whole life had seemed designed to prove that she was a born loser-Haley had been angry.

Now, at least, she could look at all that, even if she wasn't over it. Maybe this thing with Sam was something so boring as having to prove herself, and in this condition, how could she discern love from desperation? It was a question that she had begun asking herself.

Abruptly she realized that she was perhaps, on top of everything else, struggling with falling in love. People who thought this way got soft in the head and interpreted every little gesture as proving some great attribute in the beloved. But history was intervening.

Her emotions were twisting in the wind.

Oh, my God, this is confusing.

Then her mind returned to the problem at hand. 'These people are gone for the entire winter, normally,' she said. 'Can't quite think of their names.' She pulled into a driveway, drove back past a shed, past the house, and on a narrow grass strip drove behind a woodshed. They seemed to be well hidden under a tree.

They were quiet for just a moment, and Sam was acutely aware of her hand, of her body. He thought about taking her hand, but didn't. They had to go. Without speaking, they each hurriedly exited the Blazer. Walking in the dark and talking were not mutually conducive. They forced themselves to jog back to the house along the road. Fortunately, they saw no cars and did not have to jump in the bushes.

The calm in the weather seemed to be holding. Sam was grateful but still worried about the wind resuming a strong southerly or blowing in a westerly direction in the midst of their short voyage. He was acutely aware that

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