Eye of the Whale Read Online Free PDF Page B

whaler, Nilsen needed work. Kazumi was willing to put up with the man’s arrogance because he needed both his skills and his lack of moral qualms. Nilsen lit another cigarette and took a long drag.
    “Take a look through the glass,” Kazumi said. Their common language was English, although Kazumi emphasized his Oxford-educated accent to reinforce his superior position. Nilsen stepped up to look, and Kazumi winced at the smell of liquor, sweat, and old cigarette smoke that seemed to ooze from the whaler’s every pore.
    “What do you want me to do to him?” Nilsen said, referring to the local in the boat.
    “Not him. Her.”
    “Her?” Nilsen’s sneer had turned into a snicker.
    “Elizabeth McKay is a marine biologist who thinks whales are smart—smart enough to use language.”

    “So can parrots.”
    Kazumi rolled his eyes. “We’re not trying to convince the world to eat parrots, now, are we?”
    “So what?”
    “So we only have a few months before the vote. We can’t afford to have a public relations disaster.”
    It had been over two decades since America and other cultural imperialists had forced the rest of the world to stop commercial whaling. Kazumi took great pride in the fact that a few nations like Japan, Norway, Iceland, and some island nations had managed to continue whaling through various means. They took several thousand a year, but that was a fraction of the whales being taken before the ban. Japanese scientists had shown that whale populations had recovered significantly. Kazumi was certain there were plenty of whales to support whaling in larger numbers, and he was leading an effort to overturn the out-of-date ban. Yet any vote at the International Whaling Commission was highly sensitive—people seemed to care more about whales than other seafood—and this American’s research was politically explosive.
    Established by whaling nations to regulate whaling, the IWC had become quite political and many member nations increasingly obstructionist. Fortunately, Kazumi and his allies had found a way to bring in new island nations that were supportive of his goals. At approximately 10,600,000 yen per whale, billions of yen were at stake. And then there was the matter of Kazumi’s retirement, which was not too far off, and his “descent from heaven.” He had been assured a lucrative board position by the whaling industry if everything went according to plan.
    “What do you want me to do?” Nilsen asked with a smile. Kazumi knew Nilsen was always happiest when he had something to do.

    Kazumi’s face was impassive. “We’re going to stop her from proving anything to anyone.” He saw three blows from the whales that Elizabeth had been studying. The Japanese did not yet have permission to whale in these waters—but the local whalermen did. “Don’t you think that Captain Teo would be interested to know about whales so close in?”

FOUR
    5:20 A.M.
Next day
Sunday
La Pompe, Bequia
    E LIZABETH WAS STARTLED AWAKE by the cacophony of rain on the corrugated metal roof. The air in the one-room house she rented from Milton’s family was thick and moist, and the blades of the wooden fan did little to cut through the heat. The blue walls were peeling, perspiring as everything did in the tropics. Only briefly, after a cold shower or the rare and welcome rain, did she ever get the layer of sweat off her skin.
    She could smell the pungent smoke of the green mosquito coil that had long burned itself out. There was something about being stalked by a blood-sucking creature that robbed sleep of its rest. Fragments of dreams still flashed in her mind like scattered snapshots. She blinked, and recalled an image of a birthday cake floating on the water with burned-out candles.
    She shook her father’s voice from her head. Dreams were not messengers from the spirit world. They were simply the detritus of the brain’s random firings during REM sleep. She was just feeling guilty about arriving back home