Alone. “Fine, thanks. You stay out late?”
“No. Bradley had to get home. One of his kids was having a birthday.” She shrugged as if to say, Shit happens. It did and, no thanks to her, a good chunk of it was happening to Chalmers's family. And sooner or later it would blow back on Michelle Durban. Her situation vaguely reminded me of my own marital gumbo. In the sober light of day, the CIA woman had lost a lot of her gloss, but I wasn't here to moralize, let alone judge, so I put her private life out of my mind.
We meandered through the brown slurpee that the streets of Tokyo had become, pushing through the combination of snow-melt and grit, the tires throwing up a bow wave of slush. And then we were on the freeway between Tokyo and Yokohama, an impressive multilane strip of concrete seemingly held aloft by the roofs of the development that filled the space between the two cities. Whoever coined the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum” must have seen this place.
Our cop chauffeur settled down to a cruise below the speed limit, I assumed to avoid any ice patches. Our speed must have annoyed the surrounding traffic, none of which passed us or honked. All super polite. Durban and I sat in silence. I watched the urban sprawl roll by when the opacity of the window cleared enough to allow it, and listened to the incomprehensible chatter coming over the comms. It occurred to me that there weren't many countries left in the world untouched by the English language, but this was one of them. The only words I recognized here were familiar brand names paraded on endless billboards. Like Durban, these signs didn't seem to hold the same attraction when they weren't all lit up for the night.
The port of Yokohama appeared suddenly when the curtain of mist parted in front of a sky of beaten lead. The water beneath it had the color of wet coal. Durban passed a yellow Post-it note through the steel mesh to the cop and the two exchanged a bunch of staccato words that sounded like the linguistic equivalent of carpet burn. I assumed the Post-it held our intended destination, because the driver checked it several times before punching buttons on the vehicle's navigation system. We turned off the main road and into the docks, reduced to a crawl because of ice. A car had fishtailed off the road and had somehow come to rest with the front end hanging out over the water. It teetered back and forth, balancing unsteadily. Emergency vehicles clustered around it, their strobe lights bouncing off the surrounding concrete like little electric shocks. Uniformed people waved their arms around, small white clouds in front of their mouths. Our driver ignored the scene and drove slowly on. We eventually pulled onto a pier and slid sideways down a small incline, the wheels losing traction on the ice, before pulling up next to a ship. It moved ever so slightly beside the pier like it was alive, breathing, the movement only perceptible against the stillness of a vast gray warehouse on the far side of the bay.
I stepped out of the vehicle and felt my scrotum contract, testicles beating a strategic withdrawal into the warmth of my guts. I reached for my jacket. I was right about needing it. The uniform stayed with the vehicle, stamping his feet and clapping his hands, making little bows while Durban and I walked carefully across the ice to the gangway. The tips of my ears and nose already burned with cold, and my breath steamed. I pulled a pair of leather gloves from a side pocket and put them on.
Durban took the gangway first, steadying herself on the incline with a gloved hand on the railing. Two black shapes met her as she stepped on deck. Introductions were well under way when I caught up.
“Professor Sean Boyle,” said a man I knew from briefing notes to be fourteen years my senior. The cold burnished perfect pink circles on his shaved cheeks.
We shook gloves and I said, “Special Agent Vincent Cooper.”
A second man said, “Moritzio Abrutto, ship's master.” According to those briefing notes, he was American, as were most of the crew. The ship was leased to Moreton Genetics, the large U.S. firm which employed Professor Boyle and the late Doctor Tanaka. Abrutto was blond and fair-skinned. “Come inside,” he said, leading the way through a hatch, warm yellow light beckoning from within.
The air inside the ship smelled of diesel and bacon. We followed the ship's master and Professor Boyle into a reasonably large area with bench seats on either side of a couple of tables. The mess. Photos on the walls showed various people, mostly men and mostly bare-chested, proudly holding various objects for the camera that could have been anything from offal to placenta. Life recovered from the deepest oceans, I assumed. Nearly all the photos were signed. I recognized the subjects in one as being Boyle and Tanaka. Boyle was bearded, and they stood together on the ship's rear deck in tropical sunlight. Both men had their hands on their hips, ready for action. I bent toward the photo to take a closer look.
“A great man,” said Professor Boyle behind me. “I'm missing him already.” He peeled out of his jacket. “That photo was taken a year and a half ago, cruising up the southern tip of the island of Honshu. We were heading for the Trench.”
“The Japan Trench?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the professor. “Our first expedition to these waters.”
“The one just concluded was your second?”
“Third.”
Three times. I hadn't known that. Perhaps the fact that Boyle and Tanaka had been on the Natusima several times before wasn't significant, but it reminded me that while the brief I'd been given was pretty good, there were still holes in it.
“Can I offer you people anything to eat or drink?” Boyle inquired.
“Not for me,” I said, having eaten twice my body weight for breakfast.
“No thanks,” said Durban.
“Take your coats off and have a seat. Get comfortable,” said the master, taking his own advice. The rest of us followed his lead.
“So, Agent Cooper,” said Boyle as he slid in behind the table, “how can we help you with your investigation?”
“I'm not really investigating,” I replied. “I'm just prepping the DoD's files for closure.”
The professor locked his fingers in front of him. “Well, then, what would you like to know?”
“Before you start, if you have no objection…?” I placed a digital recorder on the table and switched it on. Its red LED winked, letting me know it was recording.
“No, that's fine,” said Boyle with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“I've already read your statement, Professor,” I said. “Is there anything you could add to it? Anything that has come to mind since you made it?”
The professor shook his head. “The truth is, Agent Cooper, I've tried my best to forget about the whole unpleasant episode. So, the answer to that is no, nothing.”
“If you don't mind, would you go through events on that night again, anyway?”
The professor glanced at his watch. “If you think it'll help.”
I nodded, fixing an expression of understanding on my face to put him at ease. Boyle didn't look much like a professor, but only because I believe all professors should look like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day. Boyle's, by the way, was thick and straight, and it was also unnaturally blue-black. Dyed. I guessed he was more self-conscious about gray hair than he was about appearing to wear a mixing bowl on his head. He had the appearance of a severe monk, the Spanish Inquisition kind, and I could easily imagine him lighting bonfires. But, as I said, first impressions can be misleading.
The written brief told me Professor Sean Boyle was forty-eight and that his parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland when he was four. His face was intelligent and his dark eyes glittered with intensity beneath bushy black brows. His skin was pale all over, except for the glow on his cheeks induced by the cold. His lips were on the thin side, and there were vague acne scars on his neck. At a guess I'd have said he spent more time peering through microscopes than he did power-lifting and drinking protein shakes. He was also a valuable defense asset, according to Captain Schaeffer, and I had been ordered not to piss him off. I was to tread lightly, which I had every intention of doing.