The Bad Place Part 26

"It's big but not that big." Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from the stone and looked up at Bobby.

"You don't understand. Until now, there were only seven known red diamonds in the world. This is the eighth. And when it's cut and polished, it'll be one of the two largest. This comes as close to priceless as anything gets."

OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire's small shop, where heavy traffic roared past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight flas.h.i.+ng off the chrome and gla.s.s, it was hard to believe that the tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were just beyond the building far side of the street. In a sudden moment of enlightenment Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly every one else's) was like this street at this precise point in time: all busy and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of the herd, to achieve something and transcend the whirl of commerce, thereby giving respite for reflection a shot at serenity-when all the time serenity was only a step away, on the far side of the street, just out of sight.

That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the Pollard case was somehow a trap-or, more accurately, a squirrel cage that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a footing on its rotating floor.

Bobby stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling ensnared, caged. At that moment he was not sure why, even with the obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank's problems and put all that he cared about at risk. He knew that the reasons he had quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the excitement of a wildly different kind of job-were merely justifications, not reasons, and his true motivation was something he did not yet understand. Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as Clint started the engine.

"Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in that mason jar? A hundred?"

"More. A couple hundred."

"Worth what-hundreds of millions?"

"Maybe a billion or more."

They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke. It wasn't that no words were adequate to the situation instead, there was too much to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.

At last Bobby said, "But you couldn't convert the stones into cash, not quickly anyway. You'd have to dribble them onto the market over a lot of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but also to avoid causing a sensation by drawing unwanted attention, and maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions."

"After they've mined diamonds for hundreds of years, over the world, and only found seven red ones... where in the h.e.l.l did Frank come up with a jarful?"

Bobby shook his head and said nothing.

Clint reached into his pants pocket and withdrew one of the diamonds, smaller than the specimen that Bobby had brought for Archer van Corvaire's appraisal.

"I took this home to show it to Felina. I was going to return it to the jar when I got to the office, but you hustled me out before I had a chance. Now that I know what it is, I don't want it in my possession a minute longer."

Bobby took the stone and put it in his pocket with the larger diamond.

"Thank you, Clint."

DR. DYSON MANFRED'S study, in his house in Turtle Rock, was the most uncomfortable place Bobby had ever been. He had been happier last week, flattened on the floor of his van, trying to avoid being chopped to bits by automatic weapons fire than he was among Manfred's collection of many-legged, carapaced, antenna-bristled, mandibled, and thoroughly repulsive exotic bugs.

Repeatedly, in his peripheral vision, Bobby saw something move in one of the many gla.s.s-covered boxes on the wall, but every time he turned to ascertain which hideous creature was about to slip out from under the frame, his fear proved unfounded. All of the nightmarish specimens were pinned and motionless, lined up neatly beside one another, none missing.

He also would have sworn that he heard things skittering and slithering inside the shallow drawers of the many cases that he knew contained more insects, but he supposed that those sounds were every bit was imaginary as the phantom movement glimpsed from the corners of his eyes.

Though he knew Clint to be a born stoic, Bobby was impressed by the apparent ease with which the guy endured the creepy-crawly decor. This was an employee he must never lose. He decided on the spot to give Clint a significant raise in salary before the day was out.

Bobby found Dr. Manfred nearly as disquieting as his collection. The tall, thing, long-limbed entomologist seemed to be the offspring of a professional basketball player and one of those African stick insects that you saw in nature films and hoped never to encounter in real life.

Manfred stood behind his desk, his chair pushed out of the way, and they stood in front of it. Their attention was direct upon a two-foot-long, one-foot-wide, white-enamel, inch-lab tray which occupied the center of the desktop and over which was draped a small white towel.

"I have had no sleep since Mr. Karaghiosis brought this me last night,"

Manfred said, "and I won't sleep much tonight either, just turning over all the remaining questions in mind. This dissection was the most fascinating of my care and I doubt that I'll ever again experience anything in my I to equal it." The intensity with which Manfred spoke-and the implication that neither good food nor good s.e.x, neither a beautiful sunset nor a fine wine, could be a fraction as satisfying as ins dismemberment-gave Bobby a queasy stomach.

He glanced at the fourth man in the room, if only to divide his attention briefly from their bugophile host. The guy in his late forties, as round as Manfred was angular, as pi as Manfred was pale, with red-gold hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He sat on a chair in the corner, straining the seams of gray jogging suit, with his hands fisted on his heavy thigh looking like a good Boston Irish fellow who had been trying to eat his way into a career as a Sumo wrestler. The entomologist hadn't introduced or even referred to the well-padded server. Bobby figured that introductions would be made who Manfred was ready. He decided not to force the issue-if on because the round man silently regarded them with a mixture of wonder, suspicion, fear, and intense curiosity that encouraged Bobby to believe they would not be pleased to hear who he had to tell them when, at last, he spoke.

With long-fingered, spidery hands-which Bobby might have sprayed with Raid if he'd had any-Dyson Manfred moved the towel from the white-enamel tray, revealing the mains of Frank's insect. The head, a couple of the legs,of the highly articulated pincers, and a few other unidentified parts had been cut off and put aside. Each grisly piece rest on a soft pad of what appeared to be cotton cloth, almost a jeweler might present a fine gem on velvet to a prospective buyer. Bobby stared at the plum-size head with its small reddish-blue eye, then at its two large muddy-yellow eyes that were too similar in color to Dyson Manfred's. He s.h.i.+vered. T main part of the bug was in the middle of the tray, on its back. The exposed underside had been slit open, the outer layers of tissue removed or folded back, and the inner workings revealed.

Using the gleaming point of a slender scalpel, which he handled with grace and precision, the entomologist began by showing them the respiratory, ingestive, digestive, and excretory systems of the bug.

Manfred kept referring to the "great art" of the biological design, but Bobby saw nothing that equaled a painting by Matisse; in fact, the guts of the thing were even more repellent than its exterior. One term-"polis.h.i.+ng chamber"-struck him as odd, but when he asked for a further explanation, Manfred only said, "in time, in time," and went on with his lecture.

When the entomologist finished, Bobby said, "Okay, we know how the thing ticks, so what does that tell us about it that we might want to know? For instance, where does it come from?"

Manfred stared at him, unresponding.

Bobby said, "The South American jungles?" Manfred's peculiar amber eyes were hard to read, and his silence puzzling.

"Africa?" Bobby said. The entomologist's stare was beginning to make him twitchier than he already was.

"Mr. Dakota,"

Manfred said finally, "you're asking the wrong question. Let me ask the interesting ones for you. What does this creature eat? Well, to put it in the simplest terms that any layman can understand-it eats a broad spectrum of minerals, rock, and soil. What does it ex-"

"It eats dirt?" Clint asked.

"That's an even simpler way to express it," Manfred said.

"Not precise, mind you, but simpler. We don't yet understand how it breaks down those substances or how it obtains energy from them. There are aspects of its biology that we can see perfectly clearly but that still remain mysterious."

"I thought insects ate plants or each other or... dead meat," Bobby said.

"They do," the entomologist confirmed.

"This thing is not an insect or any other cla.s.s of the phylum Arthropodan for that matter."

"Sure looks like an insect to me," Bobby said, glancing dow at the partly dismantled bug and grimacing involuntarily.

"No," Manfred said, "this is a creature that evidently e through soil and stone, capable of ingesting that material i chunks as large as fat grapes. And the next question is, that's what it eats, what does it excrete?" And the answer, M Dakota, is that it excretes diamonds." Bobby jerked as if the entomologist had hit him.

He glanced at Clint, who looked as surprised as Bobby t The Pollard case had induced several changes in the y and now it had robbed him of his poker face.

In a tone of voice that suggested Manfred was playing the for fools, Clint said, "You're telling us it turns dirt into diamonds?"

"No, no," Manfred said.

"It methodically eats through vein of diamond-bearing carbon and other material, until it find the gems. Then it swallows them in their encrusted jackets minerals, digests those minerals, pa.s.ses the rough diamond into the polis.h.i.+ng chamber, where any remaining extraneous mortar is worn away by vigorous contact with these hundreds of fine, wirelike bristles that line the chamber." With the scalpel he pointed to the feature of the bug that he had just describe "Then it squirts the raw diamond out the other end." The entomologist opened the center drawer of his desk,moved a white handkerchief, unfolded it, and revealed three red diamonds, all considerably smaller than the one Bobby had taken to van Corvaire, but probably worth hundreds of thou sands, maybe millions, apiece.

"I found these at various points in the creature's system.

The largest of the three was still partially encased in a mottled brown-black-gray mineral crust.

"They're diamonds?" Bobby said, playing ignorant.

"I've never seen red diamonds."

"Neither had I. So I went to another professor, a geologist who happens to be a gemologist as well, got him out of be at midnight to show these to him." Bobby glanced at the would-be Irish Sumo wrestler, but the man did not rise from his chair or speak, so he evidently was not the geologist.

Manfred explained what Bobby and Clint already knew that these scarlet diamonds were among the rarest on things earth-while they pretended that it was all news to them.

"This discovery strengthened my suspicions about the creature, so I went straight to Dr. Gavenall's house and woke him shortly before two o'clock this morning. He threw on sweats and sneakers, and we came right back here, and we've been here ever since, working this out together, unable to believe our own eyes." At last the round man rose and stepped to the side of the desk.

"Roger Gavenall," Manfred said, by way of introduction.

"Roger is a geneticist, a specialist in recombinant DNA, and widely known for his creative projections of microscopy genetic engineering that might conceivably progress from current knowledge."

"Sorry," Bobby said, "I lost you at 'Roger is..." We'll need some more of that layman's language, I'm afraid."

"I'm a geneticist and futurist," Gavenall said. His voice was unexpectedly melodic, like that of a television game-show host.

"Most genetic engineering, for the foreseeable future, will take place on a microscopic scale-creating new and useful bacteria, repairing flawed genes in the cells of human beings to correct inherited weaknesses and prevent inherited disease. But eventually we'll be able to create whole new species of animals and insects, macroscopic engineering-useful things like voracious mosquito eaters that will eliminate the need to spray Malathion in tropical regions like Florida.

Cows that are maybe half the size of today's cows and a lot more metabolically efficient, so they require less food, yet produce twice as much milk." Bobby wanted to suggest that Gavenall consider combining the two biological inventions to produce a small cow that ate only enormous quant.i.ties of mosquitoes and produced three times as much milk.

But he kept his mouth shut, certain that neither of the scientists would appreciate his humor. Anyway, he had to admit that his compulsion to make a joke of this was an attempt to deal with his own deep-seated fear of the everincreasing weirdness of the Pollard case.

"This thing," Gavenall said, indicating the deconstructed bug in the lab tray, "isn't anything that nature created. It's clearly an engineered life form, so astonis.h.i.+ngly task-specific in every aspect of its biology that it's essentially a biological chine. A diamond scavenger." Using a pair of forceps and the scalpel, Dyson Man gently turned over the insect that wasn't an insect, so he could see its midnight-black sh.e.l.l rimmed with red markings. Bobby thought he heard whispery movement in many pa of the study, and he wished Manfred would let some sun into the room.

The windows were covered with interior shutters, and the slats were tightly shut. Bugs liked darkness and shadows, and the lamps here seemed insufficiently bright to dissuade them from scurrying out of the shallow draw over Bobby's shoes, up his socks, and under the legs of pants.

Hanging his pendulous belly over the desk, indicating crimson edging on the carapace, Gavenall said, "On a few Dyson and I shared, we showed a representation of this pattern to an a.s.sociate in the mathematics department, and he confirmed that it's an obvious binary code."

"Like the universal product code that's on everything you buy at the grocery store," the entomologist explained.

Clint said, "You mean the red marks are the bug's number?"

"Yes."

"Like... well, like a license plate?"

"More or less," Manfred said.

"We haven't taken a chip the red material for a.n.a.lysis yet, but we suspect it'll prove be a ceramic material, painted onto the sh.e.l.l or spray-bonded in some fas.h.i.+on." Gavenall said, "Somewhere there are a lot of these thing industriously digging for diamonds, red diamonds, all of them carries a coded serial number that identifies it whomever created it and set it to work." Bobby grappled with that concept for a moment, trying find a way to see it was a part of the world in which he lived but it simply did not fit. "Okay, Dr.

Gavenall, you're able envision engineered creatures like this-"

"I couldn't have envisioned this," Gavenall said adamant "It never would've occurred to me. I could only recognize it for what it was, for what it must be."

"All right, but nevertheless you recognized what it must which is something neither Clint nor I could've done. Sotell me-who could make something like this d.a.m.ned thing Manfred and Gavenall exchanged a meaningful look and were both silent for a long moment, as if they knew the answer to his question but were reluctant to reveal it. Finally, lowering his game-show-host voice to an even more mellifluous note, Gavenall said, "The genetic knowledge and engineering skill required to produce this thing do not yet exist. We're not even close to being able to... to ... not even close.

" Bobby said, "How long until science advances far enough to make this thing possible?"

"No way of arriving at a precise answer," Manfred said.

"Guess."

"Decades?" Gavenall said.

"A century? Who knows?" Clint said, "Wait a minute. What're you telling us? That this thing comes from the future, that it came through some...

some time warp from the next century?"

"Either that," Gavenall said, "or... it doesn't come from this world at all." Stunned, Bobby looked down at the bug with no less revulsion but with considerably more wonder and respect than he'd had a moment ago.

"You really think this might be a biological machine created by people from another world? An alien artifact?" Manfred worked his mouth but produced no sound, as if rendered speechless by the prospect of what he was about to say.

"Yes," Gavenall said, "an alien artifact. Seems more likely to me than the possibility that it came tumbling back to us through some hole in time." Even as Gavenall spoke, Dyson Manfred continued to work his mouth in a frustrated attempt to break the silence that gripped him, and his lantern jaw gave him the look of a praying mantis masticating a grisly lunch. When words at last issued from him, they came in a rush: "We want you to understand, we will not, flatly will not, return this specimen. We'd be derelict as scientists to allow this incredible thing to reside in the hands of laymen, we must preserve and protect it, and we will, even if we have to do so by force." A flush of defiance lent a glow of health to the entomologist's pale, angular face for the first time since Bobby had met him.

"Even if by force," he repeated.

Bobby had no doubt that he and Clint could beat the c.r.a.p out of the human stick bug and his rotund colleague, but the was no reason to do so. He didn't care if they kept the thing in the lab tray-as long as they agreed to some ground rules about how and when they would go public with it.

All he wanted right now was to get out of that bughouse into warm sunlight and fresh air. The whispery sounds from the specimen drawers, though certainly imaginary, grew louder and more frenzied by the minute.

His entomophobia would soon kick him off the ledge of reason and send him screaming from the room; he wondered if his anxiety was a parent or if he was sufficiently self-controlled to conceal it.

felt a bead of sweat slip down his left temple, and had the answer.

"Let's be absolutely frank," Gavenall said.

"It's not only obligation to science that requires us to maintain possession of this specimen. Revelation of this find will make us, academically and financially. Neither one of us is a slouch in his field but this will catapult us to the top, the very top, and we're willing to do whatever is necessary to protect our interests here His blue eyes had narrowed, and his open Irish face had closed up into a hard mask of determination.

"I'm not saying I'd k to keep that specimen... but I'm not saying I wouldn't, their." Bobby sighed.

"I've done a lot of research for UCI into backgrounds of prospective faculty members, so I know the academic world can be as compet.i.tive and vicious and dirty dirtier-than either politics or show business. I'm not going to fight you on this. But we've got to reach an agreement about when you can go public with it. I don't want you doing anything that would bring my client to the attention of the press until we've resolved his case and are sure he's... out of danger.

"And when will that be?" Manfred asked.

Bobby shrugged.

"A day or two. Maybe a week. I doubt it drag on much longer than that." The entomologist and geneticist beamed at each other, obviously delighted. Manfred said, "That's no problem at all. We need much longer than that to finish studying the specimen and preparing our first paper for publication, and devise a straight way to deal with both the scientific community and the media." Bobby imagined that he heard one of the shallow drawers sliding open in the case behind him, forced outward by the weight of a vile torrent of giant, squirming Madagascar roaches.

"But I'll take the three diamonds with me," he said.

"They're quite valuable, and they belong to my client." Manfred and Gavenall hesitated, made a token protest, but quickly agreed. Clint took the stones and rewrapped them in the handkerchief. The scientists'

capitulation convinced Bobby there had been more than three diamonds in the bug, probably at least five, leaving them with two stones to support their thesis regarding the bug's origins and purpose.

"We'll want to meet your client, interview him," Gavenall said.

"That's up to him," Bobby said.

"It's essential. We must interview him."