Read Online Doc Ford 19 - Chasing Midnight by Randy Wayne White - Free Book Online Page B

source. But was your longhair friend who tell me Mr. Kazlov was shot. Why you think I come straight to marina to kill you if you don’t tell me where bomb is hidden?”
    He said it as if I should have already known.
    A moment later, Vladimir held up a warning hand and shook his head—
Enough
—then lay back as if sleeping.
    The man was lying on his side in a fetal position when I turned and retraced my path through the mangroves, toward the water. I stayed low, ducking limbs, peeling spiderwebs from my face as the muck, ankle-deep, tried to suction off my shoes. Something the man had said banged around in my head, signaling for special attention. It had to do with isolating people from the outside world.
    “This is no accident!”
Vladimir had told me, referring to the sudden power outage, then the loss of wireless reception. “I should have understood sooner.”
    That’s when it dawned on me that I should have understood sooner, too. His words had stuck in my subconscious for good reason. A few weeks or so before, I’d discussed this very scenario over beer in my lab back on Sanibel. How would people react if an enemysuddenly jammed public cell phone networks and cut off all Internet service?
    “It’s inevitable. It’ll happen one day. And we should be preparing the same way we plan for a natural disaster. Hurricanes, tornadoes, same thing—only the panic will be ten times worse because the damage will be psychological, and without precedent. It’ll be unlike any previous hell storm nightmare our country has ever experienced.”
    Those were Tomlinson’s words, Tomlinson’s predictions. I hadn’t taken the discussion seriously because it was all hypothetical, plus we had been ping-ponging the idea back and forth for years.
    But, now, here we were. And it was real.
    Was there a connection?
    I didn’t like the way my brain was linking events. Didn’t like it one damn bit because, in most of the scenarios, Tomlinson provided the only hub in a multi-spoked wheel.
    As I waded into the water, like it or not, I no longer felt so certain of my old friend’s innocence.

7

     
    O n a yellow legal pad, Tomlinson had written
Sudden Internet Isolation Response
, then placed the thing in front of me as I hunkered over the sink in my little laboratory, cleaning an aquarium.
    This was almost a month before we’d sailed for Vanderbilt Island, not two weeks before as I’d first thought. I became sure of the timing when I remembered that Tomlinson had received his invitation from Kazlov’s staff the next day. It wasn’t until a week or so later that we’d even discussed the caviar party at length.
    No wonder the details had faded.
    As I swam away from the mangroves, where I’d left Vladimir, toward the marina where Tomlinson’s sailboat was moored, I replayed the scene in my head, hoping to cull some key bit of data I had forgotten.
    I had been wearing elbow-length rubber gloves and a lab mask. On the counter, to my right, was a beaker filled with muriatic acid, and the fumes were getting to me.
    “You mind opening those?” I had responded, nodding towardthe windows along the south wall. “There’s a fan next to my bed. Maybe put it on the lab cart—you’ll have to unlock the wheels first. I’m about to pass out.”
    The University of Northern Iowa’s science department had ordered four dozen spiny sea urchins, an order which I had shipped that afternoon. Because I had done the collecting gradually, over a period of ten days, the acrylic walls of the tank were scarred with calcium buildup. Sea urchins are echinoderms, a family of complex, specialized animals that use thousands of tiny adhesive feet to transport themselves over the bottom. I was guessing the adhesive substance had bonded with calcium carbonate in the water and attached itself in random streaks to the glass.
    Tomlinson had nudged the legal pad closer to me, saying, “I’m finally assembling data to write a paper on the damn subject—after all