Venom: A Thriller in Paradise (The Thriller in Paradise Series Book 3) by Rob Swigart

Enough throwing time away.
    She picked up a brochure and leafed idly through it. Mark was downstairs at some meeting or other. Radiology and AIDS or Tomography for the Timid or something. He was at the bar, laughing over the latest brain-dead jokes. He was putting his sly moves on that pediatrician from Long Beach. Or something.
    The brochure was colorful, the text crowded in a hodgepodge of typographic styles. Restaurants. Hotel floor shows. Surf contests. Flowers. Exotic plants. Tropical flora in a research setting, she saw. There were daily tours of the Douglass Research Center, a not-for-profit plant and marine research institution with an international reputation. Call for reservations. She picked up the phone. Better than waiting around here for Mark to remember he was still married.
    She looked at herself in the hotel mirror, a slightly stocky blond with the early stages of a very good tan. In her late thirties. Well, mid-thirties. What the hell.
    Her rental car was waiting.
    At the hotel entrance she examined the tourist map. After a moment’s hesitation, she headed up the hill toward Lihue, passed discount stores, a number of small and decaying shopping blocks, a furniture store advertising a perpetual going-out-of-business sale, and the County Building, then turned left onto the Kuhio Highway. Sugar cane laid out its unrealistic green against the red volcanic dirt; the mountainsides that thrust up out of the center of the island were draped in grayish-green vegetation, peaks shrouded in scattered rags of cloud.
    She leaned back as she drove and watched the scenery flow by, a tourist in paradise. Every mile took her further into her escape, a flight into a green freedom unlike any at home. The highway curved along the shoulder of the hills, displaying a continuous panorama of cane and sea, palm and lawn, eucalyptus and volcanic cone. Within the narrow confines of primary colors the variety seemed limitless: bumps and thrusts, smooth contours and sudden surprising geographical leaps, endless variations on the color green, and beyond that the color blue. She was feeling buoyant and a little excited when she turned down the road to the Center.
    A blond guard in a surfing T-shirt leaned out holding a clipboard and asked the purpose of her visit. She told him she had read of the Center’s reputation, its contributions to the world’s understanding of tropical plants and marine biology. She said she was looking forward to this tour.
    “There are ten people on today’s tour,” the guard told her. “Usually we get professionals, botanists and biologists, sometimes amateur horticulturists. Enjoy yourself.”
    He checked her name off the list, handed her a paper badge, and showed her where to park. She wrote “Narni” on the paper and stuck it to her shirt. At the main office she joined a motley collection of middle-aged Americans with sunburns.
    “Are we all here?” asked a very serious if somewhat nearsighted young woman in a short denim skirt, looking down at a clipboard. A mingle of amused voices answered her. She counted myopically, nodded, and smiled briefly. “Right. Then let’s go, shall we?” They trailed off behind her in a ragged line.
    The DRC sprawled over a vast wedge of ground with its base at the sea and its point in the mountains; it included all the island’s types of terrain, microclimate and vegetation. Gardens displayed many kinds of tropical plants and trees, flowers and birds, as well as exhibits of tide pools and smaller marine life.
    “One of the missions of the Douglass Research Center,” the guide announced, “is to investigate potentially useful drugs we might be able to extract from marine plants and animals. We examine everything from sea slugs and puffer fish to sponges and corals. This building is relatively new. The DRC started as a botanical garden then became, because of Mr. Douglass’s bequest, a center for biological research, including molecular and cellular biology. Now