"Captain, watch out!"
The warning came almost too late. He felt someone leaning over him and he twisted fast. A pair of teeth chomped down, locking on to the material of his shirt. Captain Spence retreated up the aisle on all fours, dragging the shirt free. It wasn't Alan from tourism but a woman on the opposite side of the aisle. Agnes. From the island public relations administration. She was in her late sixties and her dentures fell out and bounced on the floor.
Spence grabbed his wounded officer's ankles and dragged him to the front, out of the reach of the passengers, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the lunatic face of kindly old Agnes. She used to baby-sit Captain Spence's kids. They called her Grandma Aggy.
She had just tried to chew out his liver.
DIRECTOR OF TOURISM Dawn Summens never went to sleep that night.
She got her first clue of looming catastrophe when she checked her voice mail. There was a message from Grom. "It's me. We've had some problems at this end, and I think it's time to pull the plug on the tour. We'll be heading back tomorrow morning. Let's meet for breakfast and discuss our next move."
Summens had been taking off her earrings when the message started and she stood there now with one of them, a glimmering emerald stud, twirling in her fingers. Then she replayed the message.
No doubt in her mind. Grom was suppressing his excitement-or agitation. Had he achieved success? Or had everything blown up in his face?
Something told her it was bad news, not good. Grom was hiding something, which was a dangerous sign. Summens and Grom had an agreement. Greg was never, ever to hide anything from his right-hand man-bikini model-honesty was the key to their working and personal relationship.
Her apartment was a luxurious penthouse atop the Union Estates building. It was seven stories, the tallest structure on the island, and the surf rolled at its feet with a faint whisper. Summens strolled onto the balcony and regarded the moonlit waves carefully for a moment, looking for her answers there.
Something was afoot. She felt it in her gut. And she was going to find out what it was. Nobody screwed with Dawn Summens's well-laid plans and got away with it. Especially not that pudgy jerk Greg Grom.
She wheeled and headed for the desk in her bedroom. It looked like a very feminine dressing table, complete with a small mirrored tray of the world's most expensive perfumes. Summens sat at the frilly vanity chair, moved the tray aside and swung up the top of the desk. The levers inside lifted the keyboard to working height. She slid the top of the desk out of sight into its wall recess, revealing a twenty-inch flat screen monitor.
She snatched up the phone as she began her on-line search for information. Her first call went to her airport contact. She had a lock on at least one employee on each shift of the airport security staff. Her call automatically went to whoever was currently on duty.
"Ashecroft," he announced. "It's me."
Ashecroft's voice immediately lowered. "I was about to call you, Minister. We just got word about the president's flight coming in."
"What's their ETA?"
"Forty-five minutes," Ashecroft said. That lying son of a-!
"The police are here already," Ashecroft added.
"Yes?" Summens said. Why police?
"They look ready to go to war," Ashecroft said. "But they said they'll enter the aircraft with billy clubs. The guns and stuff are for emergency use only-you know, in case of real trouble."
Summens's mind spun in several directions, but she exercised great control when she spoke. "What do they expect?"
"They haven't told us a thing." The way he said it made it clear he wished Dawn would fill him in.
"Phone the minute you learn anything more. I'll be in touch." She snapped off the phone.
She had just accessed the flight plan for the inbound chartered 747, which was three minutes ahead of schedule and expected to be on the ground at Union Island International Airport before midnight.
She found her next set of answers in the on-line edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Rampage In Pigeon Fudge, the headline read.
She scanned the story and made a quick conclusion. Grom dosed his own tour-bus staff with synthesized GUTX. That was a desperate move even for an idiot like him. He'd been in bad trouble-or thought he was.
But what else had happened? Why was he keeping it a secret from her? When Grom got in trouble, she was usually the first one he turned to. She was the brains behind this outfit; they both knew that.
What was she missing?
She quickly jumped to another conclusion.
Grom was scheduled to take delivery today of a new batch of GUTX synthetic distillates. There was an upstart pharmaceutical specialties lab in Minneapolis. It claimed to have a molecular mapping and replicating technique. Their scientists had promised their synthesis would be as close as was possible to the real thing. But it took a little longer.
Grom was making all the arrangements with the labs. He never entrusted Dawn with the original GUTX except in very specific cases, like the senator who visited in his absence. He wasn't about to entrust her with the synthetic GUTX, either. She never even knew where the deliveries took place.
What if the Minneapolis lab did the job as good as it said it would? What if Grom had tested the Minneapolis GUTX samples and found one that worked without side effects? Crisis averted, he'd start feeling cocky. He'd start feeling like he didn't need a business partner-not one with a will of her own.
That betrayal would violate the terms of their agreement, but the beauty of GUTX was that he could dose her-maybe spike her wine or her bottled water-then simply suggest that she thought he had done the right thing. Then she would agree.
She'd be his little pet. His puppet. She'd follow his every suggestion. She'd perform whatever act he wished her to perform and she'd like it-if he wanted her to like it.
The thought repulsed her.
If only she could have found his stash of GUTX, she could dose him first. As stupid as he was, he somehow managed to keep that one secret from her for almost two years. She had never seen the full supply, so it had come as a complete surprise when Greg announced that his stores were running low.
For months they had contracted all kinds of marine biologists and less scrupulous rare-animal collectors to search the waters worldwide for surviving members of a subspecies of the Blue Ring Octopus that had once existed in small numbers off the shores of Union Island, and, as far as they knew, nowhere else.
The Blue Ring was a small, poisonous octopus today, but the Union Island Blue, as it was known, had been as much as a yard in length and with a greater girth. One preserved specimen was known by the scientific community to exist today-an intact, desiccated mummy found on the island by President Greg Grom himself, back when he was an archaeological student working the local sites on a summer internship.
The truth was, he had found hundreds of Union Island Blue Rings that day, but the specimen now on display at the Union Island Museum of Natural History had been the only one not crushed into powder.
As the sign at the museum explained, the Union Island Blue Ring was described in the surviving writings of the original island habitants. It had great ritual value to them, but was notoriously difficult to catch because of its lethal sting. The sting, the museum display said, contained a poison that was chemically similar to tetrodotoxin, one of the world's most deadly naturally occurring toxins. TTX was also found in several varieties of puffer fish and was famous for being the secret ingredient in Haitian zombie potions. Indeed, the Union Island Blue Ring Octopus appeared to have been used in rituals in which the priests would "kill," then "resurrect" a subject as a demonstration of supernatural power.