David Dun - The Black Silent

Rossitter had their Judas on the speakerphone. Sanker was listening for more than could be heard, hunched over his bar where the speakerphone was mounted. He normally used it to settle bets and the like, or check the stables before post time at the racetrack, especially on weekends. Sanker owned racehorses and had done rather well at them, like everything else that he undertook. This weekend's particular permutation of corporate life at Sanker was fast becoming a notable exception to his usual success.

"How do you know that Sarah James is in danger from Frick?" Rossitter asked.

There was a pause, as if the Judas were thinking over the answer.

Sanker's mind worked feverishly trying to imagine what was at risk, whether they might even be taped by the authorities in some sort of sting operation. Not likely, but then again his sons would swear he was over at the stables at this very moment. Hanging it on Rossitter was a last resort, but necessary, in case of disaster.

"Giving you my sources of information," their Judas continued, "won't help me or you.

So let's stick with the current events. I believe he has her. If Frick were to torture her, that means he'll have to kill her. Eventually. You see? I'm telling you that this result could be very bad for you. You need to act."

"It should be obvious to you that anyone associated with Sanker Corporation is not going to be kidnapping people," Sanker replied, "and if they were to commit such incomprehensible evil, they certainly are not going to tell us or anyone else about it.

Men of this ilk don't go explaining their activities. On the other hand, your allegations are extraordinary, and if you have information, you should do the right thing with it. Tell the state or federal authorities."

"Get off this crap. You're not speaking into a microphone. It's a little late to get paranoid. You're in this too deep. You know there is no way to call the state and stop something that's happening at this very moment at an unknown location."

"We don't know what you're talking about," Rossitter insisted. "You're not telling us anything we can use."

"Well, you better figure it out if you want Ben Anderson's secrets after he's gone. You better get off your ass and stop Frick."

The Judas hung up.

"He's desperate," Sanker said. "This isn't good. He's more concerned about Sarah James than he is about getting us the secrets. I can hear it in his voice. Then again, maybe she is the key to the secret."

"Should we call Frick?"

"Certainly not," Sanker said. "The minute we get involved in the details, we're culpable.

We'll just have to trust Frick to extract what we need." The old man thought for a minute. "You know, it may be much better for us if Frick denies any knowledge of her whereabouts. If he has her, he'll never admit it. Never. Without revealing it to Frick, put a private investigator of impeccable reputation on the phone with you and Frick-he'll be a witness to Frick's denial."

Haley worried that Sanker's men would be at Ben's beach house and she worried that Sam was in no shape to fight anybody or even run away. She optimistically argued to herself that maybe there wasn't a lot wrong other than his bad knee and hip and a multitude of cuts, scratches, and near-hypothermia. At times it seemed he could barely walk, and then when he had to move, he somehow managed to hobble along in a sort of spastic lope.

"We've got to get out of here," he said.

"I know, I know, but this is so pertinent."

She was flipping through pages with one ear out for Frick's men, concerned that at any moment they would come knocking at the door, but literally unable to stop reading. She had found some fairly analytic text and proceeded to a page that seemed out of place: The gene holding the secret to the marvelous paradox between duplication and re-creation and how to control the benefits of each.

"Here it is. He is talking about the fact that DNA needs to excel at both duplication and re-creation. The incredible beauty of DNA is that it is changeable in sexual reproduction and we make babies. What is more awesome than a baby? A mixing of two people-

Nature at Her most creative."

"God at His most creative."

She smiled. The "he vs. she" joke was not lost on her.

"Anyway, this is profound, what he's saying. DNA's strength in sexual reproduction is also its greatest weakness. It comes apart and changes. But when our body replaces old, worn-out cells, they're supposed to be exact duplicates. In duplication, DNA's changeability is a problem. The copies get blurred, like copies off a bad copy machine. I wonder if Ben's solved that problem somehow. He's hinting at it."

"We really need to go," Sam said. "I'm impressed, but we gotta go."

She took one last look through the papers while Sam gathered his semidry clothes and erased all possible traces of their presence from the Williamses' house.

"Here's another reference to Sargasso stew. I think he's talking about the Sargasso Sea, and I think I know what he means."

Sam had everything together and cleaned up. He was checking the windows for the arrival of any unwanted guests. Or hosts.

"Tell me, but let's get out of here soon." "We looked at an article at the open-air mausoleum near the old Del Haro Hotel."

"The McMillan family ashes are in the marble seats in this shrine in the forest and old graves mark the path. Hard to forget," Sam said.

"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.