David Dun - The Black Silent

"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.

Haley explained that deep in the sea, oceanologists had discovered that the oceans did have a sort of self-cleansing mechanism. Miles below the surface, fracture lines occurred on the ocean floor, where the earth's crust's tectonic plates rammed each other like slow-motion bumper cars. The collision of the plates created geographic features like the mid-Atlantic ridge. They also created cracks, which allowed seawater to flow down into the earth's crust. Water forced into the crust was superheated to seven hundred degrees or more, then returned, under great pressure, back into the ocean through vents. Over the course of 6 to 8 million years, every molecule of seawater would have traveled, at least once, down into the earth and back out into the oceans.

"Okay," Sam said. "Where would that mean he's leading us?"

"I don't know. Vent sites are found a mile beneath the sea and lower. We won't be seeing them any time soon, so he must either be referring to studies or photos of the fissures or vents. He has plenty of pictures."

"Where?"

Haley took a moment to think about it. "One of his friends was on the team that took the deep-diving submersible Alvin down to the Snake Pit. A couple of miles deep, if I recall.

The pictures would be in his house."

"We've got two things to do," Sam said. "Ditch this car, and send Frick some place other than Ben's house. Did Ben have a safe-deposit box or any place a person might logically keep papers?"

"He had a box at the local bank," Haley said.

"We need to talk with Sarah. She'll be frantic about Ben." He thought for a moment.

"Maybe we can tell Sarah to let Frick know about the bank."

Haley grasped the idea immediately. "Okay."

Sam hastily outlined a plan. They would have Sarah call on the phone and ask Frick about Ben's disappearance. When Frick asked the obvious questions, she would tell him about the safe-deposit box. Then she would disappear to ensure her safety.

They were proceeding along the water on the south side of the island while Haley called Sarah on her cell. Sam's own cell rang in the middle of the conversation. It was Ernie, of the FBI.

"I have a new boss and he's not real into meddling in your situation," Ernie began. "I guess he's impressed that Frick's an eyewitness to the murder of Officer Crew Wentworth. I told him that was bunk and that you would murder no one, and that sort of moved him back to center on the thing. Just to let you know the situation, I still can't be real aggressive on this like I could if the boss really believed your side of this. I gotta work with it, you know. I called the state police and it's a damn holiday, but they will get an assistant attorney general, they say. By Monday they'll be in full swing. They've called deputies on the island that they know and they say you killed Wentworth. And uh…"

"What?"

"You met my boss once in New York," Ernie said. "I guess you were trying to get some movement by the bureau on something. Anyway, you'd recall him as Special Agent Arnold Cross."

"Say no more. I understand," Sam said. "Does he still go around with a telephone pole up his alimentary canal?"

"Pretty much. And his daddy is a senator, so that doesn't hurt. If you were still in business, you'd be using 'Big Brain,' I suspect."

"I suspect you're right," Sam said. Ernie was talking about a supercomputer that Sam had used frequently in his previous life.

"So I, ah," Ernie's voice went quieter, "sort of ignored the boss

… insubordination really… and got Grogg on a conference call. He connected to Big Brain remotely and we did a lot of checking real fast."