Chapter 7

Waipaka Arboretum 28 October, 3:00 p.m.

The taxi drove away from the ocean, and soon was climbing steeply into the hills. Broad acacia trees shaded the road.

“That’s the university, on both sides,” the driver said. He pointed to featureless gray buildings that looked like condominiums. Peter saw no students.

“Where is everybody?”

“Those are dorms. They’re at class now.”

They passed a baseball field, a surrounding residential area, small homes, bungalow-style. But as they drove on, the houses thinned and the trees grew larger. Now they were heading toward a green mountain wall, heavily forested, rising two thousand feet into the air in front of them.

“That’s Ko‘olau Pali,” the driver said.

“No houses up there?”

“No, you can’t build nothing there, that’s straight-up, crumbly volcanic rock, can’t climb it or nothing. You come way back here like we do now, you leave the city, you in wilderness now. Too much rain mauka side, near the mountain. Nobody live back here.”

“What about the arboretum?”

“Half mile up this road,” the driver said. The road was now a single lane, dark beneath a heavy covering of towering, dense trees. “Nobody come here, neither. Folks go to Foster or the other pretty arboretums. You sure you want come here?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

The road narrowed and climbed, zigzagging along a steep, jungle-clad mountainside.

A car came up behind them on the twisting road, and honked, and roared past them, people in the car waving and yelling. He blinked: the grad students from the lab were crammed into the car, a midnight-blue Bentley convertible sedan. The taxi driver muttered something about crazy lobsters.

“Lobsters?” Peter asked.

“Tourists. Way they burn.”

Soon the road arrived at a security gate, steel, massive, new. It stood open directly in front of a tunnel. A sign warned unauthorized persons to keep out.

The driver slowed the taxi, brought it to a stop before the gate and tunnel. “They’ve been doing some changes up here. Why you want to go in this place?” he said.

“It’s business,” Peter said. Even so, looking at the tunnel, he got an uneasy feeling. With the steel gate in front of it, it seemed like a tunnel of no return. Peter wondered if the gate was to keep people out-or was it to lock people in?

The driver sighed, and took off his sunglasses, and drove into the tunnel. It was a narrow, single-lane passage cored through a shoulder blade of the mountain. The road emerged into a pocket valley. The valley was deeply forested and walled in by the slopes and cliffs of the Ko‘olau Pali. Waterfalls trailed from misty jungle mountains. The road descended, and they came into a clearing, dominated by a large, glass-roofed shed. In front of the shed were a few parking spaces in a muddy area. Vin Drake and Alyson Bender were already there, standing next to a red BMW sports car. They both wore boots and hiking clothes. The students were piling out of the Bentley. They became less boisterous when Peter stepped from the taxi.

“Sorry, Peter…”

“Sorry about your brother…”

“Yes, sorry…”

“Any news?” Erika kissed his cheek, took his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

“The police are still investigating,” Peter said.

Vin Drake shook his hand with a firm grip. “I don’t have to tell you this is a great, great tragedy. If it proves true, and I hope to God it does not, it’s a dreadful loss to all of us personally. To say nothing of a terrible setback to our company, which Eric was such a part of. I am so sorry, Peter.”

“Thank you,” Peter said.

“It’s good the police are investigating.”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“They haven’t given up, lost hope…”

“Quite the contrary,” Peter said. “It seems they’re taking a new interest in Eric’s boat. Something about a missing cell phone? One that may have broken up inside the engine compartment? I didn’t really follow what they told me.”

“A cell phone in the engine compartment?” Vin frowned. “I wonder what that could-”

“As I said, I didn’t really follow,” Peter said. “I don’t know why they would think there was a phone there. Perhaps my brother dropped his…I don’t know. But they’re also going to check phone records.”

“Phone records. Ah yes. Good, good. No stone unturned.”

Had Vin turned paler? Peter couldn’t be sure.

Alyson licked her lips nervously. “Were you able to sleep, Peter?”

“Yes, thanks. I took a pill.”

“Oh good.”

“Well.” Vin Drake rubbed his hands, turned to the others. “At any rate, welcome to the Manoa Valley. What do you say we get to the business at hand? Gather round, people, and I will give you your first insight into how Nanigen works.”

Drake led them from the parking lot toward the forest. They passed a low shed housing earth-moving machinery, although, as Drake said, “You’ve probably never seen machines like this before. Notice how small they are.” To Peter, the machines looked like tiny golf carts fitted with a miniature backhoe, with an antenna drooping over the top. “These diggers,” Drake went on, “are specially manufactured for us by Siemens Precision AG, a German company. The machine is able to precision-dig soil with millimeter accuracy. Which is then placed in the flats you see in the back of the shed. Those flats are thirty centimeters square-about a foot square-and either three or six centimeters deep.”

“And what about the antenna?”

“As you see, the antenna hangs directly over the backhoe. The antenna enables us to locate precisely where to dig and to keep a record in our data files of the exact place where the sample of soil came from. This will all be clear as the day goes on. Meanwhile let’s look at the site.”

They plunged into the forest itself, the ground suddenly uneven beneath their feet, the trail narrow and twisting among the giant trees overhead. The massive trunks were wrapped with broad-leaf vines; the ground was covered with plants and bushes to knee height, and the overall impression was of a thousand shades of green. The light filtering through the tree canopy overhead was pale yellow-green.

Drake began, “This may look like a natural rain forest…”

“It doesn’t,” Rick Hutter said. “And it’s not.”

“That’s correct. It’s not. This area has been cultivated since the 1920s, when it was an experimental station for Oahu farmers, and more recently for ecological studies run by the university. But in recent years nobody has bothered with this tract, and the land reverted to a more natural state. We call this area Fern Gully.” He turned and walked down the trail while the students followed him, going slowly and looking at things, occasionally stopping to examine a plant or flower.

“Moving along now,” Drake went on, speaking briskly, “you’ll notice a profusion of ferns. Prominently around us you see the big tree ferns, Cibotium and Sadleria, and lower down to the ground, the smaller Blechnum, Lycopodium, and of course-” he indicated the mountainside with a swipe of his hand-“up there, the uluhe ferns, which cover the mountain slopes over much of Hawaii.”

“You missed that uluhe fern right at your feet,” Rick Hutter broke in. “It’s called Dicranopteris, also known as false staghorn.”

“I believe so,” Vin Drake said, barely concealing a flash of irritation. He paused, and bent down on one knee. “The pe‘ahi ferns line this path, the larger ones are maku‘e ferns, which spiders like to live on. You will notice the large number of spiders here. Some twenty-three species, in all, are represented in this small area alone.” He stopped in a clearing, where trees opened into views of the mountainsides around the valley. He pointed up to a peak on a ridge overlooking the valley. “That peak is called Tantalus. It’s an extinct volcanic crater that looks down on this valley. We’ve been conducting research at Tantalus Crater, as well as here in the valley.”