The Trikon Deception

17 AUGUST 1998 FLORIDA

The day felt and looked exactly like the aftermath of a storm. The sky was a brilliant clean blue, the highway was littered with debris left by Caroline— branches, palm fronds, Spanish moss, even a mailbox still attached to its post. The rented Rover sped south, its balloon tires whining on the macadam. The thick palm and mangrove forest that swept past in a blur plunged the highway into complete shadow. The air was cool, almost frigid.

Aaron Weiss gripped the dashboard with one hand and pressed his Donegal walking hat to his head with the other. He hated open cars, hated convertibles of any sort. If he ruled the world, or at least that portion of the world responsible for overland travel, every motor vehicle would have a roof reinforced with a roll bar and a governor to prevent it from exceeding fifty-five miles an hour. But there was a story beyond that mangrove forest, and he knew that speed was essential.

“Can’t you go any faster?” he screamed over the rush of wind.

Zeke Tucker glanced at him, then looked back at the littered highway. He said nothing, but nudged the accelerator slightly. He smiled enough to reveal the gap in his front teeth. He was amused by Weiss’s consternation.

Tucker and Weiss had worked as a team for seventeen years, since the Reagan assassination attempt. He had seen the reporter annoy thousands of people, from headwaiters to heads of state. When it came to aggravation, Aaron Weiss was a true egalitarian. And Zeke Tucker was the ideal cameraman to team with him: lanky, slow-drawling, absolutely unflappable.

Tucker slowed and squinted at the hand-drawn map Weiss had taped to the dashboard. He swerved off the highway and punched the Rover through a screen of brush and young palmetto, engine growling, camera gear jouncing on the back seat. Beyond the brush, two slender trails of sand curved through the trees. The makeshift roadway was not exactly wide enough for the Rover; Weiss was stuck several times by overhanging palmetto spines. He grumbled curses each time. Eventually the trees and bushes thinned enough to reveal the glare of the sun reflecting off the ocean. The Rover broke out onto a beach. Tucker let it roll to a stop on the white sand.

“Great,” Weiss snapped. “Now where the hell are we?” All he could see was a ridge of sand and, beyond that, the glittering water stretching to the horizon.

“Not far now,” said Tucker, a long bony finger tapping the map. “If you want to, Aaron, we can sit here and watch the shuttle launch.” The gap-toothed grin came back to his long-jawed face.

“Fuck the shuttle. Nobody wants to hear about shuttles anymore, only when they blow up. The big news is right here.” Weiss pounded the dashboard to signify the surface of Planet Earth.

Nodding, Tucker released the clutch and the Rover churned through the loose sand. Weiss leaned over the windshield and shaded his eyes against the sun. As the Rover crested the ridge, he saw them. They were about half a mile to the north, several huge gray slabs lying in pools left by the outgoing tide.

“There they are,” said Weiss, pointing.

“My God,” Tucker whispered. “My God.”

“I count twelve,” Weiss said.

“Yeah,” said Tucker. “Looks like nine adults and three calves.”

The Rover descended the ridge, then sped along the hardpan close to the water. No one except the police seemed to be there. A group of sheriffs deputies were pounding stakes and stringing bright orange tape between them.

“They’re treating this like a crime scene,” said Tucker.

Weiss noticed a van marked Sea World of Orlando approaching from the opposite direction.

“Maybe it is,” he said.

They stopped the Rover at the police line. Weiss and Tucker showed their press badges to a deputy and swung under the tape.

“Christ, you boys are here before the gawkers,” said the deputy.

“It pays to pay your sources,” Weiss answered. He signaled for Tucker to follow.

“Damn,” said Tucker, fanning his free hand in front of his face. The other held a Mini-cam.

“Here.”

“Suntan lotion?”

“Smear it on your nose. Shit, Zeke, after all this time I still have to mother you. The ozone layer’s shot to hell. Remember? We did a story on it last year.”

The first carcass they inspected was a calf. It lay on its side, its one visible eye the color of milk, its skin sunk between its ribs in deep troughs. Seaweed clogged the strips of baleen in its open mouth.

Weiss paced it off, ignoring the ankle-deep water that sloshed over his Hush Puppies. Eight paces, plus. Twenty-five feet.

“Make sure I’m in the frame for perspective,” he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Tucker. Weiss constantly harped at him, but rarely about something as elementary as perspective. This whale beaching bothered him.

“These are the same kind we saw in San Diego last week,” said Weiss. “Right whales. You can tell by the curving mouth and the callosities on the adults’ faces. The old Nantucket whalers used to call them right whales because they didn’t sink when you harpooned them; they were the right whales to go after.”

“Since when did you become an expert on whales?”

“Since last week.”

Weiss waved Tucker over to a full-grown bull. This one was fifty feet long and, flat on its belly, was twice as tall as Weiss. Its baleen plates splayed out from its mouth like the bristles of a worn-out broom. Weiss pressed between two ribs. The rubbery skin yielded easily and did not bounce back when he released his hand.

“I’ll be a sonofabitch,” said Weiss. He grabbed Tucker by the shoulder. “You shoot every one of these babies. I want to look around.”

Weiss slogged from carcass to carcass, borne by a sense of unreality. The dead white eyes, the sunken flesh, the tattered baleen, even the symmetry with which the ocean had coughed up its victims smacked of a dream. But it was real; something strange was happening. He had felt it a week earlier when he and Tucker chanced upon the pod of right whales stranded on a beach north of San Diego. He felt it again that morning when word of a drunken beachcomber’s find reached the motel. Now, seeing huge carcasses for the second time in eight days, he was convinced. Animals as large as whales did not die en masse without there being something very wrong with the world.

The Sea World van had multiplied into four. A swarm of employees, all young enough to be summer help, were unloading gear and fanning out among the carcasses. Weiss approached the only employee who was not moving at double-time, a young woman securing her long red hair with a pin.

“Do you have a boss?”

“Professor Adamski.”

“Ted Adamski?” asked Weiss.

The woman nodded. She had a pert little nose sprinkled with freckles. Photogenic. She pointed toward a man leaning into the back of one of the vans. As Weiss moved closer, he recognized the bald spot and the leathery skin set off by the scraggly white beard. He called the professor’s name. Adamski straightened up as if his back ached.

“Weiss,” he said. “You are like a bad dream.”

“I guess that’s better than being a bad penny.” Weiss reached for Adamski’s hand but the marine biologist did not reciprocate.

“Are you following me?”

“Pure coincidence, Professor. I’m actually covering the human-interest story of the first legless man being hurled into space.”

“And in San Diego you allegedly were covering the senatorial primary,” said Adamski. “You don’t stick to your assignments very well.”

Weiss laughed. “Lemme tell you how this business works, Professor. If a flying saucer landed on this beach, do you think I’d still be interested in the whales?”

Adamski was not amused. “Is this more important than your legless astronaut?”

“I would say that twelve whales washing up dead in Florida one week after eight washed up dead in San Diego is news.”

“But not exactly a scandal.” Adamski leaned back into the van and fiddled with the hasps of a metal box.

“Scandals used to put a lot of bread and butter on my table.”

“And when they didn’t occur spontaneously, you invented them.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Some of us have longer memories than others.” Adamski opened the box, revealing a set of glittering surgical tools. He selected an assortment of scalpels, scissors, and tubes and placed them carefully on a towel.

“Are you preparing to perform an autopsy?” Weiss asked.

“Maybe.”

“What would you say killed them?”

“It would be inappropriate to venture a guess.”

“Don’t guess, Professor. Hypothesize, theorize. Take a look at that adult there. What do you think killed it?”

“Weiss, I don’t give a damn about your new legitimate journalistic career. I’m not telling you a goddamned thing.”

“Pretend you’re not talking to me.”

Adamski looked at the whale lying in a tidal pool twenty feet past the front of the van, big as a cross-country bus or a tractor-trailer rig. A wrinkle crossed his brow, then faded.

“The storm,” he said.

“Bullshit the storm,” said Weiss. “I inspected each one of these whales and they look emaciated, just like the ones in San Diego.”

“Thank you for your observation, Mr. Weiss. You have just cut my workday in half.” Adamski rolled the instruments in the towel and stuck it under his arm.

“Not so fast, Professor. You performed an autopsy last week on those San Diego whales. You must have the results by now.”

Adamski turned away and slogged into the tidal pool. Weiss was right at his heels.

“Is that a yes? Is that a yes, Professor Adamski? Or are you going to tell me that a storm killed those whales, too?”

Adamski put his nose an inch from Weiss’s.

“I have been quoted by you for the last time,” he said, baring his teeth and enunciating each word very carefully. “Now you either leave me to my work or I’ll ask one of those police officers to eject you.”

Weiss backed off. As soon as Adamski disappeared behind the first carcass, he set out looking for the young redhead he had spoken to earlier. He found her scraping green gunk from an adult’s baleen into a plastic container.

“Hi, remember me?” he said.

“You were looking for Professor Adamski,” she said. “Did you find him?”

“Yes, thank you. Nice guy. Do you work with him often?”

“First time. He flew in from San Diego to review our marine mammal protection project. Then this happened.”

“He didn’t exactly have the time to talk to me, but he did say all of you fine young people would cooperate. I wonder if I could ask you some questions.”

“Who are you?”

“Sorry. I’m Aaron Weiss. The Aaron Weiss TV Tabloid. Remember?”

“Oh God, you’re right!” The young woman’s sudden smile crossed the line from charmingly cute to downright goofy. She said her name was Sandy. Weiss immediately knew that he had an ally.

“Do you know much about whales?” he asked.

“Not really. I’m an English major at Florida State and I’m working at Sea World for the summer. But I did write a bio paper last semester on the diets of several species of baleen whales.”

“Great,” said Weiss. “Are you familiar with the whales that were found off San Diego?”

“Sure am. That’s all we talked about this week.”

“Isn’t it true that they were thousands of miles from where they should have been?”

“That’s right,” said Sandy. “Right whales ordinarily spend their summers off the Alaskan coast.”

“What about these whales?”

“They’re far from home, too. I can’t say exactly, but generally the right whales of the North Atlantic should be up around the mouth of the St. Lawrence this time of year.”

“What are they doing here?”

“They could have been sick and the sickness disoriented them.”

“What about the hurricane?”

“I don’t know. I guess it could have killed them.” Sandy scraped more gunk into a separate container.

“What’re you doing there?” Weiss asked.

“Different species of whales eat different types of food,” said Sandy. “Grays prefer small, schooling fish. Blues prefer small crustaceans. Right whales and bowheads feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton. They siphon water through their mouths and their baleen plates catch the plankton. This green stuff looks like seaweed. They can’t eat that.”

“Why are you interested?”

“It’s Professor Adamski’s orders.”

“Why is he interested?”

“Could have something to do with the autopsies of the San Diego whales.”

“The autopsies.” Weiss drew out the words in a knowing tone. “What were the results again?”

“I’m not exactly sure of the technical conclusion,” said Sandy. “But everyone around here is pretty sure those whales starved to death.”

“In the ocean?” Weiss couldn’t contain his surprise. “Those whales starved to death in the Pacific Ocean?”

“That’s the rumor.”

“And Adamski wants to see if these did, too,” said Weiss.

“I guess so,” Sandy said.

Weiss looked down at his feet. Wavelets lapped against his jeans. A single minnow darted around his shoes. Something big was happening. Something bigger than politics, bigger than war, bigger than any scandal he ever had uncovered. He thanked Sandy for her help and rushed around the carcasses until he found Tucker.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing the cameraman by the collar.

“I’m not finished.”

“Fuck ’em. We’ve learned all we can from here for now.” He started back toward the Rover.

“Where’re we going?” asked Zeke. He had to run to keep up.

“Remember a few years ago,” said Weiss, ignoring the question because he had no real answer, “NASA had all those wigged-out ideas for manufacturing oxygen for long duration space flights. Remember what they were going to use?”

“Plants.”

“Not exactly plants. Plankton. Phytoplankton. Microscopic bugs that’re the most efficient oxygen-producing organisms on the planet. Better than trees.”

“So?”

“These whales eat plankton. They also look like they died of starvation, along with the ones in San Diego.”

“What’s that add up to?”

“Damned if I know,” Weiss said, puffing now, sweating as he scurried across the hot sand toward the waiting Rover. “But it’s something big. I can feel it in my bones.”

Tucker made no reply. He knew that an Aaron Weiss hunch meant there was a story waiting to be uncovered. Besides, Zeke had that same quivering feeling along his spine.