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CHAPTER 047

There was no moon and no sound, except the booming of the surf in the darkness and the whine of the damp wind. Tortuguero beach extended for more than a mile along the rough Atlantic coast of Costa Rica, but tonight it was no more than a dark strip that merged with a black, starry sky. Julio Manarez paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. A man can see by starlight, if he takes the time.

Soon he could make out the palm trunks and debris scattered over the dark sand, and the low, scrubby plants whipped by the wind off the ocean. He could just see whitecaps in the churning seas. The ocean, he knew, was filled with sharks. This stretch of the Atlantic coast was bleak and inhospitable.

A quarter mile down the beach he saw Manuel, a dark shape hunched beneath the mangroves. He was keeping out of the wind. There was no one else on the beach.

Julio started toward him, passing the deep pits dug by the turtles in previous days. This beach was one of the breeding grounds for leatherback turtles, which came up from the ocean in darkness to lay their eggs. The process took most of the night, and the turtles were vulnerable-in the old days, to poachers, and now mostly to the jaguars that roamed the beach, black as the night itself. As the newly appointed conservation chief of the region, Julio was well aware that turtles were killed every week along this coast.

Tourists helped prevent this; if tourists were walking the beach, the jaguars stayed away. But often the cats came after midnight, when the tourists had gone home to their hotels.

It was possible to imagine an evolutionary selection pressure producing some defense against the jaguar. When he was in graduate school, in San Juan, he and the other students used to joke about it. Were tourists agents of evolution? Tourists changed everything else about a country, why not its wildlife? Because if a turtle happened to possess some quality-perhaps a tolerance for flashlights, or the ability to make a plaintive, pained mothering sound-if they had something that drew tourists and kept them hanging around into the night, then those turtles would be more likely to survive, and their eggs more likely to survive, and their offspring more likely to survive.

Differential survival that resulted from being a tourist attraction. That had been the joke, in school. But, of course, it was theoretically possible. And if what Manuel was telling him was true…

Manuel saw him and waved. He stood as Julio approached. “This way,” he said, and started down the beach.

“You find more than one tonight, Julio?”

“Just one. Of that kind I was speaking of.”

“Muy bien.”

They walked down the beach in silence. But they had not gone far-perhaps a hundred yards or so-when Julio saw the faint purple glow, low to the sand, and pulsing slightly.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Manuel said.

She was a femaleof perhaps one hundred kilos, a meter and a quarter long. She had characteristic shell plates, about the size of his palm. Brownish, streaked with black. She was half buried in the sand, digging a pit at the rear with her flippers.

Julio stood over her and watched.

“It starts and stops,” Manuel said.

And then it began again. A purple glow that seemed to emanate from within the individual plates of the shell. Some plates did not have the glow and were dark. Some glowed only occasionally. Others glowed each time. Each pulse seemed to last about a second, rising quickly, fading slowly.

“So how many turtles like this have you seen?” Julio said.

“This is the third.”

“And this light keeps the jaguars away?” He continued to watch the soft pulsing. He felt that the quality of the glow was oddly familiar. Almost like a firefly. Or a glowing bacterium in the surf. Something he had seen before.

“Yes, the jaguars keep their distance.”

“Wait a minute,” Julio said. “What is this?” He pointed to the shell, where a pattern of light and dark plates emerged.

“It only happens sometimes.”

“But you see it?”

“Yes, I see it.”

“It looks like a hexagon.”

“I don’t know…”

“But it is like a symbol, wouldn’t you say? Of a corporation?”

“Perhaps, yes. It is possible.”

“What about the other turtles? They show this pattern?”

“No, each one is different.”

“So this might be a random pattern that just happens to look like a hexagon?”

“Yes. Julio, I believe it is. Because you see the image on the shell is not so good, it is not symmetrical…” Even as he spoke, the image faded. The turtle was dark again.

“Can you photograph this pattern?”

“I already have. It is a time exposure, without the flash, so there is some blurring. But, yes, I have it.”

“Good,” Julio said. “Because this is a genetic change. Let’s review the visitor log, and see who might have done this.”