"What's that mean?" he whispered.
"What's any of it mean? Those equations look formidable," she said. "A lot of very fine print. Whoever wrote them must be a math or chemistry person."
"Why do chemistry people take bat photos?" he said.
"Or write stuff about bat neurons," she said, holding up an equation with an explanation related to brain activity and consciousness. "We better get the hell to the other side of that wall before they find out we know about this."
"I'd like to know what it is that we know," Dan said. "Let's take one bat photo and these pages of chemical equations."
"I wish we knew what we were doing," she said, sliding the drawer closed. Dan was still rifling through another. "You wanna die in here? Come on." She opened the door a crack. "Shhh!" She closed the door quietly. "In here, quick."
"What? Why?" he whispered as she shoved him in the bathroom.
"We have been crapped on by the gods, that's why," she said, opening the shower. They both stepped in and quietly closed the frosted-glass door. "The white-haired guy is at the other end of the hallway talking to the thugs. Listen."
The outer office door opened and closed, then silence for a moment.
''Let me talk to Hans." There was a pause. ''Hmm. Hmm. They're in one of the supply rooms.'' After a time he cleared his throat. "I've already called the cops. They're trespassing." A long silence. ''You do that and they could never leave here, Hans. No way. And even if we did, we don't know for sure whether anybody knows they're here.
"I know all about the division of labor." More silence. "Well, you can damn well do as you please next time. But the cops will be here in half an hour." Sounds of the chair rolling on plastic and a deep sigh punctuated the silence.
"I don't want to know. That's your deal. Your department.. " There was a solid smack on wood, then the sound of liquid pouring and the clink of a crystal decanter. ''Yeah? Well, fuck you too, Hans." He slammed the phone.
After a few minutes the office door closed again.
"Let's go," Maria said.
"I don't need any encouragement."
The hallway was empty. They rushed through the office door and down the hall to the pass-through, their bare feet whispering over the linoleum.
"Let's get back in there," she said, prying it open.
While she was crawling through, he went to the cupboards in the hallway but was only finding more meaningless computer printouts. He wished they had found something he could understand, something in plain English.
"Will you come on?" she pleaded.
With one photo and five pages in Maria's purse, they lay on the cots and tried to look as calm and bored as possible.
8
The eighteen-foot mahogany table was inlaid with redwood burl and cherry, exquisitely made with feet capped in heavy brass and with fine carvings down the legs. There was a distinctly Asian flavor to the design in keeping with the preferences of the man who sat at its head. The Amada regional headquarters, about fifteen minutes outside of Palmer and forty-five minutes from the redwood-forest research compound, was second only to the San Francisco offices in grandeur and opulence.
Kenji Yamada had married Micha Asaka Yamada, the third daughter of Yoshinari Asaka, one of the ten wealthiest men in Japan. The Asaka family's corporate holding company, Kuru, was heavily invested in the wood-fiber industry, manufacturers of fine paper, pencils, wooden blinds, wooden windows, medium-density fiberboard, and a host of other derivative products.
Kenji had been relegated to the U.S. subsidiary, Amada, which was not a Japanese name but sounded so to the Western ear and was very pronounceable to the Western tongue. Among Amada's chief assets was one million acres of timberland in the United States and Canada. About 250,000 of those acres were located on the north coast of California not far from the Oregon border. Since it was substantially north of San Francisco, not many even knew that this wild area existed.
Kenji devoted every waking moment to furthering Amada's business. At age forty-nine he worried that life was passing him by, and that if he didn't have some outstanding success in the near future his father-in-law would die not realizing that his third son-in-law brought him the most honor. Today he stood on the brink of greatness, thwarted only by some legal technicalities and a stubborn mystery that seemed to defy resolution.
Kenji sat in an ornate chair differing from the others both in the detail of its carvings and its mass. His face remained impassive as he listened to the other three men. Only occasionally did he let his fingers run lightly over his close-cropped jet-black hair-an expression of his annoyance at what he was being told. To his right sat Hans Groiter, his chief of security, a Caucasian man whose skin was deeply freckled and nearly hairless. To Groiter's left sat his bespectacled lawyer.
''I am disappointed Herschel would bring them into the compound without consulting us,'' Kenji said.
"Well, now they're about to leave," Groiter said. "We'll never know what they know or what they suspect unless we do something, and fast."
"You have this Dan Young's address?"
"If I get your drift, we can start planting bugs tonight."
Kenji merely nodded, dismissing him. The ride from the Amada office to Palmer was short. With luck Groiter would get his work done before Dan Young arrived home.
"Why are the damned bats going crazy?" Kenji asked Kim Lee. "In this country that kind of thing could attract more curious biologists."
"We know they are an undiscovered subspecies," his attorney answered. "And I think we're getting them all killed off."
"Oh yes, and to find that out, we had to kill a goddamned snoopy biologist who asked too many questions?"
"It was a heart attack."
Kenji didn't bother replying. It had been stupid to bring in a man they couldn't control. The second week on the job the man had wanted to bring in an army of his brethren. Another one of Herschel's mistakes.
"So when do we know something?"
"About the bats? About our problem in the mine?"
''How about the railroad?" Kenji asked, shifting his attention to a topic only slightly less vexing.
"They won't sell."
"Why not? For good money they should."
"If we go to them and hint at big money, what do you suppose they will think?" Kim Lee tried, and failed, not to sound condescending to his boss.
"They'll think we have found something of value. So how much should we offer?"
"Ten dollars per acre."
"And why should they take that?" Kenji asked.
"It's a place to start negotiating, but I don't hold out much hope. The railroad always keeps the mineral rights."
"Why we didn't buy everything when we bought this land is a mystery to me."
The exasperation showed on Kim Lee's face, but he remained silent.
"I know I don't have to remind you of the money that each of you will make if this project is a success."
Following a helicopter ride to the police station, Dan and Maria had arranged for the recovery of the ruined rental car and for the borrowed truck to be returned to their' 'benefactor." Then they were ticketed for a trespassing infraction and sent home. After a taxi ride back to the pub, they retrieved Dan's car and drove through Palmer past darkened houses made quiet for the night.
For the hundredth time Maria wondered aloud what secret the men at the compound could be guarding so carefully.
"No clue," Dan said, "but Hans, whoever he is, wanted some creative persuasion, and our buddy was pointing out they'd have to kill us if that happened."
"Maybe we should have told the cops."
"No. We've got nothing. Nothing that couldn't be explained away. This way we can talk to our clients, get clearance, find some experts, maybe make something of the bats or the equations. Then, if appropriate, convince the cops to go out with a search warrant without warning."