CHAPTER 89
Thomas was exhilarated. Even the tranquillity of the Minobu temple complex couldn’t mute his enthusiasm.
“Some biblical scholars,” he said, “have speculated that the plague of Egypt that turned the Nile to blood was the earliest documented instance of red tide, the massive blooming of microscopic algae or phytoplankton that can turn the water red. There are lots of different kinds. I think we’re looking at something called Alexandrium tamarense.”
“Which does what?” said Kumi.
“It’s a dinoflagellate that causes PSP,” said Parks, pacing the gravel forecourt. “Paralytic shellfish poisoning. It affects mussels, scallops, clams, and so on. Eating contaminated shellfish can shut down your respiratory system completely in bad cases: death within twenty-four hours.”
“Giovanni caught it the day before Ed left Italy,” said Thomas. “A mild case, but enough to get Ed thinking.”
He had called the Italian priest to confirm his hunch before rejoining the others. Giovanni had been surprised to hear from him, but not hostile, and he did not blame Thomas for Pietro’s death. Thomas’s relief had fed his current euphoria.
They had taken the train up to Minobu and climbed the two hundred eighty-seven sheer, broad steps up to the temples. It had been Kumi’s idea: a break, she said, a change. They needed to get out of Kofu, put some distance between them and the body of Thomas’s attacker, a body to which there had been no reference in any of the local news media. Kumi seemed to find this silence disquieting. Murder, particularly so strange a murder, should dominate the news for days in a place like Kofu.
The Yoshino cherries were in flower, a pale, fragile pink against the stark tree limbs and deep blue of the sky. The trip was, more importantly, a reenactment of a visit she and Thomas had made together years before, and as such it represented a truce, albeit a cautious one, frail as the cherry blossoms.
Parks, who seemed curiously immune to the ageless beauty of the mountain retreat and its ancient wooden temples, had come up separately from wherever he was staying in Kofu.
“PSP doesn’t just kill people,” he said. “It affects the whole food chain. Anything that eats the dinoflagellate becomes toxic to whatever then eats it. It doesn’t just shut down a few restaurants in Maine; it can wipe out whole fish populations.”
“Unless the fish is unusually equipped to find a new food source,” said Thomas.
Parks stared at him. “Oh, that’s good,” he said.
“What is?” said Kumi.
“Our fishapod,” said Parks. “It spends almost its entire life in the water, probably in caves, swimming about, using its rudimentary legs to move around, catching fish. But if the environment changes suddenly and its usual food source disappears . . .”
“Wiped out by HABS,” Thomas chimed in.
“. . . then it has something the other fish don’t have: legs, and a way of breathing air at least for a little while. It climbs out of the water and eats something else until the sea has returned to normal.”
“It fits our Paestum painting,” said Thomas, “which is the only image we have of the fish actually coming out of the water. This is what Ed guessed. The red water in the painting isn’t just apocryphal symbolism, as the fish isn’t merely a Christological icon. It was a real fish. Real crimson water. The legged fish came ashore when the sea turned red.”
“Life out of death,” said Jim. “No wonder Ed thought he had hit the symbolic mother lode. It’s the perfect image of Christ transcending the cross.”
“Ed used the satellite imagery to track current outbreaks,” said Parks, brushing the theology aside. “He was matching environmental data—water temperature, depth, subterranean topography—from what he knew of the Naples sites to other locations in the world that shared outbreaks of the Alexandrium dinoflagellate. Then he watched for repeat occurrences and went hunting.”
“Do you know where?” asked Kumi. It was a cautious question, and her glance at Parks let Thomas know what she was really asking: If you know, will you tell him? Do you trust this man who has attacked you twice before?
Thomas met her gaze, then looked past her to the temples nestled in the rich green of the hills.
“If I try to leave the country by conventional means,” he said, “I’ll be stopped and turned over to either the Italians or some antiterrorist division in the U.S. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days waiting for a trial at Guantanamo.”
“What about going to Devlin?” said Jim.
Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but he caught something in Kumi’s face, a shadow, maybe a memory or a realization. He looked at her, but she just shook her head fractionally. She wanted something kept to herself, for now.
Parks was watching Thomas, smirking with anticipation.
“Come on, Tommy boy,” he said. “Share.”
Kumi turned away, staring out across the wooded valley. Thomas slowly drew the papers from his jacket pocket and spread them out. He had plotted the satellite image coordinates onto a map of the Philippines.
“The day before Ed left Japan,” he said, putting his finger on a tiny island in the remote Sulu Archipelago, “a red tide bloom began here. It lasted almost a week. By the time the seas returned to normal, my brother was dead.”
For a long moment they all stared at the map. Then Parks flexed his fingers back, one hand at a time, till the knuckles cracked, and grinned.
“Anchors away,” he said. “All aboard that’s going aboard.”
“Not me,” said Kumi. “You might have found something and you might not, but I think you should hand it off to the authorities before other people get killed. You should call the embassy, tell them what you know, and stay out of it.”
“Oh,” said Parks, “like we can trust them.”
“Jim?” said Kumi.
“I came to help,” said the priest. He shook his head, thoughtfully, wrestling with something. “I owe it to Ed. If there’s something I can do . . .”
“Thomas?” she said, suddenly seeming very tired and small.
“Sorry,” he said. “I have to. Till I know. Till it’s over.”
She nodded, resigned, but said nothing.
“Guys’ trip!” said Parks. “All right! Get the beer and I’ll see that we score some hookers. Except for Joe Celibate, here.”
“Wait,” said Thomas. “There’s something else you might want to look at before you start volunteering for this particular cruise.”
The others looked at him.
“Thanks to Matsuhashi and the NHK meterological office we got some other images, satellite photographs taken at thirty-six-hour intervals of about a half-mile stretch of beach in the center of the red tide outbreak.”
He laid each picture out in turn.
“This is the first one,” he said.
“Looks idyllic,” said Kumi, scanning the pale sand of the palm-fringed beach viewed from above. “Apart from the red water, of course. What are these?”
“Fishing boats,” said Thomas, “pulled up onto the shore. And here are the huts of the village just beyond the tree line. Now, here’s the second image.”
It was almost impossible to make out anything except the red water. The land was blotted out by a thick gray cloud.
“Is that a storm?” said Parks.
“I thought so, at first,” said Thomas. “But the larger-scale images show no significant weather in the area.”
“So it’s . . . ?” Kumi faltered.
“Smoke,” said Thomas.
“You can’t be sure,” said Parks, looking uneasy.
“Here is the third image,” said Thomas.
The sea was blue and sparkling, the beach as idyllic as before, except for some dark smudges close to the trees.
“Where are the boats?” asked Kumi. The question had been casual, but when no one answered she followed it with another, and this time her voice was full of dread. “Where is the village?”
“Gone,” said Thomas. “It’s all gone.”