Samir nodded, clearly not pleased but amenable. Weapons carried by Samir’s men were hidden only in a crude fashion. There were obvious lumps in their clothes.
They went down long halls, and finally emerged into the main molecular biology lab, but this time Chellis led him to a different door. It was metal and heavy.
“What is this?” Samir asked.
“We go through an air lock. An anticontamination measure.”
They walked to a second heavy metal door that said: AIR LOCK. CLEAN ROOM.
Chellis removed a plastic card and inserted it into a shiny stainless box. As if to ease Samir’s mind, he explained:
“We have to keep out foreign bacteria. Ordinarily we wouldn’t traipse through with street shoes on, but today it’s okay.”
With a sucking sound the heavy door opened to reveal a three-meter-by-five-meter chamberlike area with all-metal walls and to the left, hanging on the wall, heavy white suits looking rather like astronaut garb. They approached an even more massive door. Chellis determined that Samir was perfectly placed between the two gas nozzles.
Chellis took a deep breath and held it. A whirring could be heard as the sliding door began closing behind them. There was a loud pop and rushing gas. Samir, startled, took a breath, then began to look wildly about, gasping. Within ten seconds he began to stagger and to lose motor control. Chellis grabbed his own throat and swayed as if drunk, turning to look in Samir’s alarm-filled eyes as he fell to the floor. Chellis stepped back to the door through which they had come. A crack remained to allow his exit; then the door closed. By the time Samir’s eyes had rolled back in his head, Chellis was outside the chamber with the door closed.
Two hours later Chellis, as was his custom when under stress, went on a ten-minute screaming tirade. Jacques, appearing pale, began to stare down at his shoes, and Chellis realized that he was repeating himself badly. “You never said he would get uncontrollably angry.” Jacques blinked his irritation but said nothing. “Answer me! I had Samir Aziz in the lab. We gassed him. How could you screw this up?”
“There is no indication that we screwed anything up. He is angry. He probably always gets mad when he feels powerless. Mad is different from aggressive. Aggressive means killing people; it comes from phase two, and he received no phase-two-vector particles. No receptors for those areas of the brain. You watch, the fear will increase, but he won’t become more hostile or aggressive. When you have had a chance to introduce him to a masseuse, the massage oil will work perfectly. He will calm himself temporarily with each introduction of the hormone. More than that, he will crave it once he tries it.”
At that moment Benoit arrived with Jacques’s right-hand man, a bearded fellow with a round face and stomach. He stood back and nodded toward Chellis, who looked at Benoit as she put a hand on Chellis’s arm.
“I am sorry. I wondered if I might interrupt.”
“I want it working,” Chellis said, no longer yelling but ignoring Benoit. “I’m going to see him in a few hours and he’s mad as hell.”
Chellis escorted Benoit down the hall, knowing he should not have alluded to the Samir situation in her presence. He kept her out of such things.
It was a short walk to her comfortable six-bedroom home, a small mansion set carefully at the jungle’s edge with lush gardens and a ten-foot brick wall to ensure privacy. Benoit held his arm as they came up the walk and he nodded at the servants whose names he could never remember. Benoit seemed to know them all. It bothered him that she held his arm, as it gave the appearance of impropriety.
In the study he found a bottle of Glenlivet. After the first sip he turned his attention to Benoit. She was dark- haired and with the same stark-white unblemished skin as her sister Marie, his wife, but with large, doelike, brown eyes. She was slightly more squared in the shoulders than Marie, which he liked, and unlike Marie she was petite in the torso with a small bust.
Two years younger than Marie, Benoit looked more like five years her junior; at forty-one she looked to be in her early thirties. While Marie was a witty observer, an arranger of things, passively inviting sexually, and generally warm to everybody, Benoit was calculating and aggressively sexual, a small tigress with a killer instinct. In his most private thoughts it seemed to Chellis that they were two halves of a marvelous whole: sweet and succulent but tart and nourishing; luxurious and classy but practical and gritty. Where Marie was sexual creme brulee, Benoit held the hot tang of his favorite chutney. Together they had it all, and which of them he wanted in his bed depended on whether he wanted to rhapsodize or sweat.
He made sure the shades were drawn and the door locked. Although he was still not quite in the mood, he gave Benoit a long, slow kiss, very carefully, with enough of his tongue to warm the heart but not so much as to move over the line to disrespect. If he hadn’t made it right, she would be a bitch for a while. It was one of the few concessions he made to another person playing with his carefully spun reality. Never would he tolerate diffidence from a man, but the two women in his life were different.
Benoit gave him a good smile. She was pampering him. And he knew it was because she had a strong opinion about Jacques and his value and she felt the need to manipulate his mood any way she could.
“It will be fine. Give it time and it will work just like it did with Jason. You know I would never tell you your business, but it strikes me that Jacques is very capable. Perhaps we should not unfairly blame him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“DuShane, darling. I know what you tried with Samir.”
“How do you know these things?”
“I snooped in your briefcase on the jet when you went to sleep.”
“There was nothing in my briefcase.”
“There was a planned experiment for this afternoon on a macaque with a body weight of 240 pounds.”
“Maybe a young gorilla.”
“Okay.”
“You knew it was Samir Aziz?”
“Of course.”
“Just how did you know?”
“Jacques’s secretary booked a hotel reservation for him. He weighs about 240 pounds. We don’t have any young gorillas. They don’t stay in hotels.”
The phone rang.
Even in Kuching there was a screening computer on his phone system that would not allow a call unless the computer recognized the phone number of the caller or unless the caller knew a code. He picked up the phone.
“Yes.”
It was Roberto, insisting that Chellis hear the story of Anna Wade’s tumble into the saltwater rapids. Chellis could feel himself being dragged into something and he didn’t like it.
“Are you certain the scrambler is on?”
“Yes, we checked.”
Roberto told the story twice, repeating each and every detail and taxing Chellis’s patience.
“Get the CD back or make sure it’s gone for good.” Chellis interrupted when Roberto tried to respond. “If she had an accident, that would be…”
“Yes, an accident,” Roberto said.
“And don’t forget who you are dealing with here. Even in Canada this won’t go away quickly if something else happens to her.”
“The currents here are fierce.”
Immediately after he hung up Chellis knew he had made a mistake. This was happening too fast. He shouldn’t be involved directly with this.
Four
While fidgeting for the want of another smoke and on the verge of surrendering to Anna temporarily, Sam heard the splash-a body hitting the water? He ran to the stateroom and tried the door. Locked.
