The Meyersco Helix

THE MEYERSCO HELIX

‘How the hell did we come to where the President of the United States has two minutes to decide whether he will nuke Boston or kill the world instead?’ The Meyersco Helix traces the frighteningly plausible accidents by which the casual killing of a near-extinct mole escalates inexorably towards where an anguished President’s must choose either to let a self-propagating bio-war substance kill the world’s population — or to destroy a major American city by nuclear blast.

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

K116 is the top secret US chemical weapon that spells instant agonizing death to mankind. Self-generating in water, only a nuclear blast can stop the deadly dust expanding.

But when a lethal cloud of K116 escapes from a military research lab, one man survives. Charged with nightmare energy, Ribicoff becomes a walking carnage-machine.

Alive Ribicoff is a lethal liability — but dead his K116-glutted body will unleash chemical slaughter on a scale that will make the Black Death look like a summer cold.

Pursued by the massed might of US security forces, Ribicoff acts with the desperate, ruthless bloodlust of an animal at bay — until they corner him in Boston. Where his fiancé, the biochemist Stella Christopher, certain that he will come to her, is desperately working on a cure, despite the agents of her own government trying to kill her.

But will an American President act with equal ruthlessness? There is only one way to cauterize the city of America’s Founding Fathers, and it will be no tea party...

General Editor: André Jute

THE MEYERSCO HELIX

by Andrew McCoy

CoolMain Press

Copyright © Andrew McCoy 1988, 2011

The author has asserted his moral right

First published in the UK

by Grafton Books 1988

This revised edition published

by CoolMain Press 2011

at Smashwords

ISBN 978-1-908369-02-4

General Editor: André Jute

Copy Editors: Beth Burns, Claudine van Wyk, Mark Ryan,

Peter Allen, Sheyenne Seely, Sue McLarty

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Contents

Cover

THE MEYERSCO HELIX

The Author — More Books by Andrew McCoy

Reviews from the International Press for Andrew McCoy

STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress

Cover & Sample Chapter

With grateful acknowledgement

for help with chemical,

biological and medical technicalities

to Breeda Michael

THE MEYERSCO HELIX

by Andrew McCoy

As a machine for living the White House is not much of a house. The building is elderly, successive modernizations have not all been compatible or successful, the rooms are oddly proportioned even for such ‘living’ as incumbents manage to do, heating the structure evenly is impossible — the list continues. Without its symbolic status the White House would long since have been torn down to make way for a more rationally defensible building. If the White House fails as a house, as a home it is a nonstarter: by day many of its rooms are open to the curious public, by night they may be used for occasions of State, but in any case all echo eerily when inhabited merely by the nuclear family — yes, even in the days of large Kennedy families. By contrast, the rest is impossibly cramped for so important a public building, not only in the rooms where public duties are performed but also in those set aside as the Presidential family’s ‘private quarters’. The First Lady was a light sleeper disturbed by the inevitable nighttime business of the most powerful man in the world, so the President shared her bed only on Saturday nights when, to his pride at sixty-four, he still regularly conjugated their marriage. In the sometime dressing room used as the President’s bedroom there was space for little more than the iron-framed single bed, a bedside cupboard and an oak wardrobe. The walls were painted plain white and without a single painting. On the small expanse of polished floorboards before the bed lay a plain burgundy rug to match the curtains; the coverlet folded at the bottom of the bed also complimented the curtains. On the rug stood the President’s carpet slippers and from the knob of the wardrobe hung his dressing gown, a disreputable old terry-toweling affair; the knob was so low the dressing gown dragged the ground. There was no chair and the shelves and drawers of the wardrobe were bare; the President always changed in an adjoining bath-cum dressing room several times the size of this little room. Against the bedside cupboard stood the President’s cane and on top of it rested a red file of bound dispatches he read the night before, a metal gooseneck lamp in a shade of aquamarine that clashed with everything in the room, a plain glass jug half-full of water (the President suffered a kidney complaint for which the specialists at Walter Reed prescribed a gallon of water every day) with a glass, a small prescription bottle of pills, a stainless steel ball pen, a small reporter’s ring bound notebook — and the telephone.

It was simply a standard-issue telephone, white, but to the President, as to eight of his predecessors, it was a malevolent instrument of terror which could one day invite him to destroy the world. As a politician, he knew in his bowels that could in time always became would. As a man living in a nuclear age, that single thought, more than any other, induced in him a desperate unease. It seemed to him no great epitaph to claim as his main achievement that by application and wit he postponed the inevitable some little while, yet did Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, another Bush, Obama, really achieve anything greater? True, they all entertained dreams of social and foreign policy, as he did, but what did they achieve of lasting value? Only escape from annihilation in their time. The man who thought these terrible thoughts — some on the Hill might call them treasons, he once thought — now knew that the Presidency did not expand a man’s strength but brutally limited his scope precisely because he disposed of final power. Yet he remained an optimist: he believed in a strong America, in moral leadership, in minimum force only as the last resort, in the goodness of most if not all men — and thanked God that the Russians shared his fears.

He once said, ‘I do not believe it is possible for an evil man to reach the White House. The American people won’t allow it. If once in the White House a man became corrupt, American democracy will remove him peacefully.’ He was, by all accounts and on all counts, a good man: not just well-intentioned but strong enough to do what required to be done for the greater good. It helped that he was in his second term of office and could not run for reelection.

This was the time for his doctor-ordered siesta. He lay awake in near-darkness — he no longer worried about his insomnia: it was an asset of his office not to need too much sleep — with his eyes turned in the direction of the unseen telephone. His mind occupied itself with the dispatches in the file: a resume of international attitudes to an arms control treaty he held high hopes for: if it cleared a few relatively minor points, which he hoped could be settled by compromise or postponement, it seemed likely both the Kremlin and the Senate would ratify the treaty. That would guarantee, if not peace, at least a relaxation of nuclear anxiety and could, if exploited cautiously, perhaps lead to a reduction in nuclear stockpiles. It would be a fine bequest to his children and everyone’s children.

The phone purred. He unerringly put his hand on it in the dark and picked it up before it rang a second time. ‘Yes?’

‘Mr. President, General Haldane says it’s urgent.’

The voice on the telephone really believed in that urgency, the President thought. But he would: the switchboard is manned by the military and to a lieutenant the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff must seem a God. ‘Put him on.’ While he listened to the clicks on the phone, the President found the light switch, also without fumbling, and turned it on. He blinked in the glare. ‘General, what can I do for you?’

‘Mr. President, it’s the K116.’ General Haldane’s voice sounded as if he spoke from the bottom of a well. He enunciated each word separately, clearly, which irritated the hell out of the President because he resented being treated like a child. But Haldane was a competent and dedicated officer and the President always tried conscientiously to put policies before personalities.

The President stiffened but did not speak. The sudden cramp in his chest was not wind.

‘It is in the water at a Boston marina,’ General Haldane said.

The President shot up in bed and swung his legs over the side. He ignored the bedclothes cascading to the floor. ‘God damn it, man!’ He paused for a moment to lower his voice. ‘You assured me all K116 was destroyed.’

General Haldane replied immediately, not a shadow of apology in his voice, ‘A regrettable error. Those responsible will be disciplined. The point is—’

‘Then burn it, man, like you burnt the same filthy stuff at Dureville. You didn’t ask my permission then.’

‘That’s the point, Mr. President. We can burn as much water as there is in Boston Bay only one way.’

‘Oh my God!’ Immediately the President recovered himself: now was not the time for vacuous horror. ‘How long do I have to decide?’

‘In two minutes twenty seconds we progress from a one kiloton solution to a five kiloton situation and so on geometrically. One minute fifty-five seconds and counting.’

Progress?

For this he would break Haldane but the General knew that already; there was no need to express the threat.

Time. I must to have time!

‘How the hell did we ever come to where the President of the United States has two minutes to decide whether he will nuke Boston or kill the world instead?’

THE MEYERSCO HELIX

‘...adoption in 1925 if a protocol banning bacteriological methods of warfare. This has now been signed by 123 states, including all members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It is a no-first-use provision with states maintaining the right to retaliate and therefore to hold stockpiles. In 1972 a convention was signed banning biological and toxic weapons. Efforts to ban chemical weapons, which have more serious military uses, have continued, so far in vain. The main problems are definition and verification.’

— Professor Lawrence Freedman in Atlas of Global Strategy

‘Chemical warfare is a growth industry because of the near-impossibility of political control and because it is totally impossible for third parties to subject it to the same objective verification procedures by on-site inspection or satellite surveillance as conventional and nuclear weapons.’

— Professor Seymour Rankin in A Bigger Buck for the Bang

‘Ambitious young colonels no longer read Clausewitz, they study Chomsky. A program Congress ordered terminated back in 1972 is still in the process of wind down prior to windup. We can keep that up indefinitely. In the same way, the congressional intent to level-peg bottle-war second-strike reaction capability to a long-gone point in time is in practice beneficially mutated by careful phrasing like positive unit replacement, result optimization substitution, negative volume design enhancement and qualitative defensive maximization, all of which mean more bang per bottle. The premise is that, if you show the auditors the same number of containers as last year and don’t explain too carefully how many more megadeaths this year than last in each bottle, the Congress can’t find out diddledy-shit. To go beyond chemical weapons, we [at the Pentagon] don’t need to break the rules. Say we were to want a weapon as clumsy as botulinus, we can throw money at it to develop a chemical workalike but under another name to keep the nut splitters on the oversight committees from nadering us to death. If you collected a big enough stockpile of tobacco to burn upwind of Russia, you’d give a lot of Ivans lung cancer, a biological disease, from the chemicals in the smoke. It’s all a matter of definition.’

—Unnamed Procurement General quoted in Newsdesk International

1

Stella rose and stretched. She took her purse in one hand and the last files in the other. A quick look around her office: nothing she should still attend to on her desk, on the long table for meetings at the far end of the office, on the coffee-table in the center of a group of easy chairs in the corner. One of her professors told her that a tidy mind makes a good doctor. ‘A neat desk also helps,’ she said aloud. She walked out into her secretary’s alcove.

‘Did you call?’ Joan asked.

‘No. I was talking to myself. The top file should go to Alfred Hochstetter. Ask his secretary to make sure he reads it fairly soon. The rest you can file.’

‘Okay. Have a good vacation.’

‘Thanks.’ At the door, Stella turned. ‘Oh. If a Dr. Clyde Davison calls, don’t put him through to Mark or any of the others. It’s personal for me.’

‘That Dr. Davison. Are you...’ Joan sketched a bulging gesture in front of her stomach.

Stella smiled at the vulgarity. But she appreciated the delicacy of not mentioning a pregnancy until it was confirmed for fear that speaking of it may bring bad luck. ‘I sincerely hope so. But don’t tell anyone.’ She waited for Joan to nod. ‘Ask Dr. Davison to leave a message on the answering machine at the apartment.’

Stella walked down the passage and turned into the laboratory. It was not a large lab; the corporation owned several large research labs both here and in other states for the discovery and development of ethical pharmaceuticals. Stella’s division, concerned with the clinical testing of drugs on live human patients in cooperation with large hospitals, needed very little lab space to conduct tests that merely served to confirm what the hospitals reported. The main work in her lab was done not at the benches but in the sixteen large cubicles around the walls where her chief assistants sat correlating and weighing the evidence coming in from the hospitals, and preparing the thesis-standard reports Stella insisted on before she would agree that Legal could register the drug with the FDA. She stopped at Mark Forrest’s cubicle. ‘You want to use my office while I’m away?’

He swung around in his chair to grin at her. ‘No. I might become too ambitious for my own good. I’ll drive from the engine-room.’ When she moved up, he would inherit her job; Mark Forrest was brilliant. He was also that rare human being, a genuinely nice person.

Stella raised her voice as she stepped out of the cubicle. ‘See you all three weeks from today.’ A chorus of goodbyes followed her out. She walked back past her own office and near the front door popped into Ignatius Meyers’ office. Stella raised an eyebrow at the secretary, who nodded. Stella tapped on the door and opened it.

Ignatius Meyers was already known as a pharmaceutical genius in 1963 when he emigrated from his native Germany to escape the memories of the concentration camp in which he survived his childhood. Now he was a very old man who ascribed his good health and mental alertness in old age to never eating red meat, abstaining from tobacco and spirits (like many chemists, he believed a very little wine was beneficial to the digestion), and brisk daily five-mile walks. He looked and acted like a man in his early sixties: he was seventy-nine. He sat upright in a straight chair before an absolutely bare desk, his hands neatly folded on the edge of the desk. His office was smaller than Stella’s because he abhorred large meetings; he claimed he hired competent executives, gave them generous budgets to choose their own personnel and therefore expected answers, not discussions and multiple choices. He was the cleverest man Stella had ever met; she described Meyers to Ribicoff as ‘a Good Man, with capitals’. She waited until the old man finished his train of thought and looked up.

‘Stella! Come in.’

‘I’m just away on vacation.’

‘Ah, yes. Camping with your young man.’

‘I’ll call in once a week or so, in case there’s anything Mark Forrest can’t handle, but I don’t expect any problems. He’s a good man.’

Meyers rose and walked around his desk. As always Stella was surprised at how small he was. Somehow she expected the giant intellect who built the largest ethical pharmaceuticals company in the world to be a physical giant as well. It made her uncomfortable — as with few other men these days — to look down on him from her own six feet. He took her elbow and walked her to the front door. He said nothing on the way but at the door he held her a moment.

‘Are you happy here, Stella?’

‘Yes, Mr. Meyers, I’m happy.’ That was another thing: though often invited to do so, she could not call him Nate.

‘If ever there is anything I can do, talk to me, eh.’

Stella was vaguely uncomfortable. Meyers practiced a paternal attitude not only to her but, proving his interest to be neither prurient nor patronizing to her as a female, to all his employees. No matter that she knew he was utterly sincere, it rang oddly in the twenty-first century. Stella imagined that was how European employers behaved perhaps sixty years ago. She nodded. ‘Thank you, Mr. Meyers.’

‘Enjoy your vacation.’

He held the door for her and then stood looking through the glass at her until she climbed into her car in the reserved space six away from the front door. As always she felt a frisson of pride when her eye fell on the board nailed to the white wall: Dr. Stella Christopher, Vice-President, Clinical Testing. She waved to Meyers and drove to the security gate where she showed her pass despite the fact that the guard knew her well: ‘Leaving early for your vacation, Dr. Christopher?’ She dropped the top and let the wind rustle her hair as she drove into Boston. On the Expressway the fumes became too much and she put the top back up, closed all the windows and switched the air conditioning to recycle; she left work earlier than usual but the rush hour was already in full noxious charge.

Stella hated the city — not just Boston, which was better than some, but all cities — though she realized that she was conditioned by the happenstance of birth and childhood on a Wyoming farm, and the quiet campuses, hushed offices and labs to which her chosen career led her. The most turbulent years of her life were spent as an intern at Massachusetts General in order to qualify as a general practitioner before she specialized in the clinical testing of ethical drugs. Rib brought into her life all the excitement she wanted.

She stopped her car at the pedestrian crossing and looked left at the condominium and then right at the marina. She lived in downtown Boston — how much further downtown can one go in any city than onto the old docks from the loins of which the city sprung and spread? — because it was convenient to the marina where she kept her thirty-foot sailboat. On summer evenings she would often sail for two or three hours after work. But there was too much to do if they were to leave first thing in the morning.

She punched the button to open the door to the condo parking basement and drove forward but immediately braked when she saw the pedestrian on the crossing. His face was obscured behind the tall bag of groceries in his arm but she recognized him from his bearing. She wound the window down.

‘Is your mother better, Jake?’

Jake put his groceries on the hood of her car and leaned on his arms on the windowsill. He was thirty-one, two years younger than Stella, but sun and wind had weathered him until he looked much older, except when he smiled boyishly. He lived aboard his forty-five foot powerboat. Jake claimed (though Stella no longer believed this) that his knowledge of the US coastline north of New York and his photographs of it would one day make a book. He was nuts about ships, the sea and photography, in that order, and he was not short of money to support his interests. In a way, Stella thought, it was a shame that a free spirit like Jake should feel constrained by society even to pretend that his enthusiasm would ever be put to productive use.

‘Don’t know. Couldn’t speak to her this morning. She was all doped up to keep the pain down. I’ll call again later. Are you sailing tonight?’

Stella shook her head. ‘I have to pack. Will you check my boat every now and again? Security at the gate there is rotten.’

‘Froggie Appleton’s ship was trashed over the weekend.’

‘They didn’t steal anything?’

‘Nothing. Just smashed everything. Shit, when I was a juvenile delinquent and we took cars for joyrides, we always put them back where we found them.’

Stella chuckled.

‘True,’ Jake said earnestly.

The driver behind sounded his horn. Jake took his groceries and ducked across the road, calling over his shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after your boat.’

Stella shouted ‘Thanks!’ and drove into the garage, punching the button again to let the door down. As she climbed out of the car, Jablonsky, the janitor, and the boilerman came from a storeroom, carrying the heavy hardtop for her Mercedes.

‘Hi,’ Stella said to them. ‘That’s mine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

She had not asked them to put it on. ‘Did Mr. Ribicoff ask—’

‘No. But you’re going away for three weeks, aren’t you?’

‘Yes. It seems hardly worthwhile, what with the security door.’

‘Better safe than sorry. Any kid with a ten dollar electronics kit can open that door. Last month Mr. Rado’s brand-new Cadillac was stolen from here.’

‘All right then.’ Stella opened her bag to look for her purse but the janitor said, ‘No, that’s all right, Miss, you see us right at Christmas.’

‘Thanks.’ Last Christmas Stella won an office raffle of a hamper so big it was packed in a cart on its own castors; it also contained expensive crockery and cutlery for twenty-four persons. The whole thing being an obscene embarrassment — what would she and Rib do with three monstrous turkeys while people starved in Africa? — Stella was hugely relieved when in casual discussion with Mrs. Jablonsky she discovered that the whole Jablonsky clan, numbering nineteen, including two great-grandchildren, were all celebrating Christmas together; Stella promptly gave them the lot. The expensive crockery and cutlery was too ornate for her taste, which ran to plain Corning glass and satin stainless steel.

Instead of riding the elevator, Stella ran up the twelve flights of stairs. That was her minimum daily exercise for days when she could not sail or when work at the office pressed so that she was forced to cancel her twice-weekly squash sessions with Rib. She noted that she started perspiring near the top floor. Inside her apartment she dropped her bag and keys on the stainless steel platter on the spindly writing desk that served as a telephone table near the door. Rib’s keys were already there and his briefcase stood on the floor but she did not call out to him. She ran into the bedroom, dropped her clothes into the hamper and stepped under the shower, as hot as she could stand, then icy cold. She towelled herself dry with a coarse Scandinavian towel, returned to the bedroom to dress in a fresh skirt and blouse, then went barefoot into the kitchen. She poured a quart of Heineken from the fridge into a huge pewter stein inscribed to Ribicoff by a home for handicapped children in gratitude for funds he raised on their behalf. She poured a glass of white wine from an opened bottle and recorked it before replacing it in the fridge. Carrying the glass and the stein, pressing one against each cheek for the delicious chill, she walked to the spare bedroom. Rib would be in his ‘zoo’.

She stood for a moment inside the door to let her eyes accustom to the dim red light pervading the room. All the furniture had been removed and replaced by a huge glass case standing on legs in the exact center of the floor. It was filled with earth, oddly tunneled through. Grass grew on top and an industrial-specification sunlamp with a 24-hour timer hung over the case.

Ribicoff did not look up as she entered. He was bent over, closely studying a burrow behind the glass. Stella folded his left hand around the stein. His other arm sought her and hugged her close.

‘He’s restless,’ Stella said of the mole Ribicoff was studying. The furry animal marched purposefully to the wall of its burrow, then turned and marched back again as far as the other wall. It was only after the motion was repeated several times that it became obvious the animal was not purposeful but frantic.

‘In two weeks his mating season ends. His strongest urge is being frustrated.’ Ribicoff put his face even closer to the glass. ‘Don’t worry, my furry friend, Stella and I will catch you a mate.’

‘Don’t bet your heart on it, Rib.’

He rose to his full six and a half feet to look down at her. Alexander Ribicoff was a very big man; Stella never passed a day without being grateful to the gods for bringing him to her. Other tall women made do with shorter partners who felt resentment at looking ridiculous beside them or hooked up with men their own size but otherwise unsuitable. Rib was perfect for her in every way; until she met him she never considered that others might think her life lonely.

‘You know something I don’t?’ Ribicoff touched his mug lightly to her glass and drank deeply but Stella knew he was greatly interested in her answer. Ribicoff recently started going into his zoo directly from work, postponing his shower and without making the drinks which was his contribution to their comfortable routine.

‘No. But that man from Chicago did say yours is the last Gillian’s Redhair alive anywhere. And you told me he is the world’s top expert.’

‘Oh, him.’ Ribicoff chuckled and turned to wrap both arms around her, lifting her bodily off the floor to hug her to him. Against her hair, he said, ‘He claimed there were none anywhere in the world. We found one. We’ll find another. I grew up in those woods.’ He sniffed. ‘You smell good. I’ll just shower and then, do you think it would be awfully selfish if we... considering the little fellow’s state?’

Stella had to laugh. ‘Well, it would if we did it on the floor here. But if you can restrain your natural urge until the bedroom... And never mind the shower.’

He swung her up with an arm under her knees. Though she took only a sip or two of wine she felt pleasantly flushed. One of the great things about Ribicoff was that everything including sex was fun rather than a deadly earnest contest to prove superiority, conquest, something, anything. Incongruously she noted that he spilled no beer from the mug still in his hand or wine from the glass still in hers. Rib possessed such perfect reflexes and coordination that not only did he never do anything clumsy nor awkward but he was never less than graceful, something she long since ceased to find surprising in a man of his bulk. She tipped the door handle with her toe and hooked the door open with her foot. As she pulled it closed after them with her free hand, she saw the solitary animal pacing in its burrow behind the glass.

In the bedroom, as he put her on the bed, his arm rucked up her skirt. He looked, looked again, then firmly pulled the skirt up to her middle. ‘You,’ he said in his sternest courtroom voice, ‘aren’t wearing panties.’

Stella giggled. She did not even mind blushing. ‘I was hot when I came in.’

He bent to kiss her gently at the junction of her thighs, then pulled off his jacket and vest and tie and flung them at a chair. He undid two buttons of his shirt. ‘A pox on undressing,’ he said, and ripped open his belt and fly and pushed his trousers and shorts down.

‘A minute while we run the flag up your erection and salute it,’ Stella said, giggling again.

‘Ha! You can be patriotic later.’ Ribicoff put his hands under her bottom, raised her and slid into her. She clamped her legs around him and raised herself on her shoulders, arching her back. He pushed her blouse up to bare her breasts and squeeze them gently. She shuddered and cried out softly. In a while, she said, ‘Lie on your back.’ Ribicoff picked her bodily from the bed and sat down on the edge with her still joined to him. She squirmed gently in his lap.

‘Stop that and let me undress.’

‘It’s deliciously degenerate making love to a man wearing not only his socks but his shoes as well.’ She pushed him back onto the bed by his shoulders, then reached behind her to unclip the skirt. She pulled the blouse over her head and dropped it on the skirt beside the bed.

How could she ever thank him for liberating her to enjoy her own passion?

But of course there was more to it than that. Until she met Rib, she simply never clicked with anyone. She met him three days after her twenty-eight birthday. Ribicoff made her feel beautiful, helped her forget that she was a clever six-foot tall freak, awakened her pride in her body and her achievements. Stopped her sneaking around in flat shoes, hunching her back and keeping her knees bent. Sometimes she could cry for all those wasted years, but never when she was with him.

‘A torrent of nature flowed through me,’ she murmured in the angle of his neck and shoulder.

2

When Stella turned from settling their soft bags of clothing on top of the camping equipment Rib already packed in the back of his SUV, he stood behind her with the little trap-cage of wire he had spent many nights building on the kitchen table. Stella took it and held it up to the light.

Ribicoff, always quick to sense the moods of others, asked, ‘Something wrong with it?’

‘Isn’t it a bit bright? Maybe you should paint it matt green. No mole will walk into something so obviously made of metal.’

‘It’s all right. It will be dark and grass and twigs will cover the bare metal. Moles can smell fresh paint better than they can see moonlight reflecting from shiny metal.’

Stella wedged the trap-cage carefully where it would not be squashed by heavier gear shifting around. ‘I hope it comes back full. It’s wretched to be the last of your species.’

‘It will,’ Ribicoff said with absolute conviction. ‘You think hamsters are enthusiastic humpers? Wait till you see our little friend with the mate we’ll find him. He’ll soon hump up a whole population explosion of Gillian’s Redhair moles.’

Stella closed the hatch. ‘Shall I drive the first stretch?’ Stella held out her hand for the keys. Unusually for an athlete, Rib disliked driving — more precisely, he was bored by hour after hour at 65mph on the highway, though he enjoyed off-road driving and twisting side roads that would test his skill without exceeding the speed limit. Stella considered speeding fines and a license permanently one moving violation away from suspension merely a cost of living in an overpopulated world. She lacked sympathy with Rib’s belief that, as a lawyer, he should obey properly constituted laws no matter how inconvenient or demonstrably stupid he found them. She found his attitude incomprehensible specifically in Massachusetts, where most of the speed limits are posted by local politicians in contravention of State law, a circumstance that Rib once used to get a corporate client off speeding charges.

Rib shook his head. ‘It’s a long way. You can drive the middle shift.’

Out on the street, Stella looked towards the marina, as she always did. In the cockpit of his ship, Jake waved his arms wildly above his head and ran up the ladder to the fly bridge to blow three long blasts on the foghorn.

‘I think Jake wants to tell us something,’ Stella said dryly. Ribicoff pulled in to the curb and they watched Jake jog along the wooden boards towards them. ‘Up before dawn, shaved and dressed,’ Stella said to Jake when he arrived at her window. ‘You reforming yourself again?’ His Californian penchant for weird and wonderful religions, self-betterment schemes and diets amused her. Unlike most yachtsmen, Jake disliked rising early and when tied up at the marina rarely rose before ten or sometimes noon.

‘No joke. They’re operating on Mom. I’m on the 10 o’clock plane for the Coast. Don’t know how long I’ll be away. When will you return?’

‘A week or whenever we catch a mate for my Gillian’s Redhair mole, whichever comes sooner,’ Ribicoff said precisely. ‘Sorry to hear about your mother.’

Jake nodded his thanks for the sympathy. ‘If you’re back before me, check on my ship sometimes. Use her if you want, anytime. But run her up at least once a week for long enough to charge the batteries, okay?’

‘Sure,’ Stella said. ‘Stay with your mother as long as you like. We’ll look after your ship.’

Jake took a gold chain with a key on it from his neck and hung it around