Zodiac Page 22

  “The first one,” he said, quieter than ever, but filling the room with his voice, “the first one was real. Off South Africa. Pirate ship. We’d seen them wing a baby whale with a nonexplosive harpoon, tow him around so he’d squeal and make noise. The other whales came to help. First the mother. They blew her away before she’d gotten to see her child. Then the others. A whole pod, a huge pod of them, and they just kept firing, kept slaughtering them, more than they could ever use. We sent out some Zodiacs and they fired on us. They killed one of our people.”

  “With a—”

  “Nothing that mediapathic. Not a harpoon. Just a rifle shot. Drilled her through the ribcage. When that happened we all pulled out.

  “We were totally insane. It was pure blood lust. We were going to board them and take revenge with our bare hands. Berserk, literally.”

  “We had this Spanish guy on the boat. Remember, this wasn’t GEE, it was a European outfit, much less principled, and they didn’t really check out their people. This guy suddenly reveals that he’s actually Basque. He was also into whales, but his main thing was the Basque insurgency and he was on this trip as a cover. We’d stopped in for a while in Mozambique and he’d picked up a suitcase full of plastique. He was bringing it back to Spain to blow up God knows what. But he had a thing for Uli, this woman we’d lost that day, and so …”

  “Boom.”

  “Boom. We gave them plenty of warning. Half of them got off on life rafts and the other half stayed aboard and died. It wasn’t an environmental action at all. It was a bar fight.”

  “And then you turned it into a career.”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Let’s say you own a whaling ship that needs a total overhaul. It’s insured for three times its value. You’ve been thinking about getting out of the business. The bank has turned you down for a loan and your five-year-old granddaughter has a whale poster on her bedroom wall. What do you do?”

  “Put a limpet mine on it and send it to the bottom of the harbor. Then say you’d been getting threats,” I offered.

  “From the well-known terrorist. And after it’s happened several times, this Boone gets quite a reputation, it gets even easier to pull off that kind of a scam. So you see, S.T., I’ve sunk one boat with my hands and a dozen with my reputation. The new Boone is just a media event.”

  “Exactly how much have you really done?”

  “I just told you the whole thing. Now I’ve got an organization with a grand total of five people in it, all people like you and me. Antiplumbers. We do a nonviolent action maybe once a year. Usually something technically sweet, like your salad bowl thing—we read about that. Laughed our heads off. The rest of the time we’re looking for what to do next. Picking only the best projects.”

  “No media contacts?”

  “Hell no. Media pressure doesn’t work that well in Europe anyway. It’s kind of sick. They expect criminal behavior.”

  “And I could be the sixth member of this group.”

  “It’s not a bad life, S.T. I’ve done some good work. Some unbelievably satisfying work.” He grinned. “I saw the kills painted on your Zodiac. I’ve got four on mine.”

  What it came down to was: I was tired, I felt bad and I had to sleep on it. He could relate, so he got up and vanished into the trees and I fell into bed.

  I didn’t feel much better when I woke up, but I felt itchy and got to thinking about how long it had been since I’d bathed, and about that lake water dried onto my skin. So I kind of staggered into the bathroom, squinting against the light, and took a shower. Washed my new short hair, felt soap on my whisker-free cheeks for the first time, started to wash my torso and noticed it felt kind of bumpy. Poison ivy, maybe, from my escape through the woods.

  When I got out and looked at myself in the mirror, though, it wasn’t that. It was a whole lot of little dark pimples, emerging together into a shadow. Chloracne.

  I ate a breakfast of charcoal briquets and went through the Singletarys’ deep freeze, checking the fish they’d been feeding me. All freshwater stuff, all caught locally. They ate more of it than I did and they weren’t having any problems. I had brought the poison with me. Which was impossible, because I hadn’t eaten any seafood since this thing had started. So how had it gotten into me?

  The same way it had gotten into the Gallaghers? They hadn’t eaten any tainted lobsters. I hadn’t believed that, but now I had to.

  During my dive to the CSO? Maybe it was a kind of toxin that was absorbed through the skin. But it seemed to have time-release properties, hitting me a week later.

  I couldn’t help remembering that sewer tunnel from Natick to Dorchester Bay. There was a similarity here. I’d thought the source of the chlorine was Biotronics, but it didn’t show up right away. It showed up gradually, as it headed down the pipe. Time-release toxicity.

  What had Biotronics wrought? Something new and strange. And at the very end, Dolmacher had been trying to get in touch with me.

  I was a sick dude. My identity may have died, swept overboard into the Atlantic, but my body lived on, tied to Boston, to Biotronics and Dolmacher and Pleshy by a toxic chain.

  Mrs. Singletary was up and about and I asked her if she had any enema stuff around the house. She went into her root cellar and came out with a hollow, long-necked gourd. I thanked her profusely and decided to forget about enemas for the time being.

  Boone was sitting out in front of his tent, frying a trout. When he saw me, he gave me the biggest grin I’d seen from him yet, a genuine, unrestrained, shit-eating beamer. “I’d forgotten about this country, S.T. Ten minutes ago this fish was swimming through a stream that’s clean enough to drink. And we’re, what, a couple of hours away from Boston, is all?”

  “Yeah. Welcome home. Let’s work together.”

  “You’re joining me, then?”

  “No. You’re joining me, unless I’m totally wrong.”

  I sat down and told him about everything. Was going to show him the chloracne, but no, he’d seen it in Vietnam. He asked me all the right questions. He tried to explore all the blind alleys in the problem that I’d already explored. The only alley that wasn’t blind led to Boston.

  “Since the sinking,” he said, “I haven’t done an action in the U.S.”

  “Time to get on the stick.”

  “My people have all gone back to Europe.”

  “What am I, dog meat? Look, Boone, this could be the biggest action of all time. We know who the target is, don’t we? Our probable next president. How are you going to feel if you go home and let this guy become the leader of the Free World?”

  “Very risky. And my setup in Europe is too sweet to risk.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You see, Boone, that’s exactly why I don’t want to move to Europe. Because it’s dirty everywhere. Because nobody has idealism, nobody gives a shit when you expose a toxic criminal. And because after six months there, I won’t have any balls left. Geographic castration.”

  He tossed his trout on the ground and came after me with both hands. I’m no boxer, so I just get in close, too close to punch, and use my weight. A little of that and we were rolling around in the leaves together. Then I curled up with stomach cramps and he took pity on me. He just rolled over on his back and lay there, the first yellow leaves of the New Hampshire fall spinning down into his face. “I feel alive,” he said.

  “I feel like I’m dying,” I said, “and we both have something to prove.”

  “The Groveler, man. His ass is grass.”

  26

  As for Jim Grandfather, I didn’t want him along. I wanted him back with Anna. Everything I said just rolled off his back and he ended up driving the car.

  Boone knew all about this identity-blurring stuff, to the point of knowing which brand of hair dye was the best. Before we left that reservation we were both brunettes. I was Tawny Oak and he was Midnight Ebony. Jim loitered outside the bathroom, loudly wondering if he should dye himself blond. “Greg Allman, man!”

  We hit
Boston around five in the evening. For the last half of the trip we were getting Boston radio stations and Boone went nuts. It was like he’d been on a desert island. The man was a Motown freak. He sat in the center of the seat with both hands on the radio, punching up and down the dial, hunting the beat.

  Sometimes he had to settle for a news broadcast. They had pretty much stopped talking about me since my death. GEE was still in the news, repudiating my actions, covering its ass. That was fine, they had to do that. But Debbie, bless her, had come out in public, pointing out a few holes in the FBI’s story, disputing my terrorism. Pleshy was on the prowl, visiting organizations in New Hampshire and, as always groveling. And then there was the usual crap: apartheid demonstrations downtown, murders, arson and some demented bandit who was stealing prescription drugs from pharmacies. His trademark was a Tazer gun. When the electrocuted druggists woke up, their shelves had been ransacked.

  The first thing I wanted to do was get a message to Bart, so I wrote it down and gave it to Boone. We dropped him off near the Pearl and then pulled around to the alley in back to wait. He was going to give the note to Hoa and ask him to relay it to Bart the next time he came in, which, knowing Bart, would probably be within twelve hours. It was a pretty vague note. Hoa wouldn’t understand it, but Bart would.

  While we were waiting, watching the Vietnamese people come to the back door to buy cheap steamed rice, a motor scooter stopped next to us, by the dumpster. In the corner of my eye I saw the rider bending over on his seat and figured he was undoing the lock. Then the smell of vomit drifted past me. I glanced over; it was Hoa’s bus-boy, doubled over, barfing in the alleyway.

  Couldn’t look any more than that because he might recognize me. I sank down in the seat and turned away. “Jim. That guy on the scooter, can you see if he’s got a rash?”

  “He’s wearing clothes, S.T. Nothing on his face.”

  Boone, coming out the back door, noticed him. The guy was slowly getting off his scooter, looking pale and sick of the whole business. Boone started talking to him in Vietnamese, then switched to English. Then he got into the truck.

  “He’s got it,” Boone said, and that was all we needed.

  So we had another spill. This thing just kept getting more involved. The Dorchester Bay CSO couldn’t possibly account for contamination under the public fishing pier.

  What I wanted, real bad, was to have my maps of the sewer system. Then I could locate CSOs near the pier. Since I still had a few test tubes with me, I could trace them out and find the source of the spill.

  But I’d done enough of those traces to have a rough idea. If there really was organic chlorine coming out near that pier, the source had to be up north.

  We were driving past a pay phone when I remembered Dolmacher for the nth time. “The Holy Grail… I’m in the book.” I’d looked in the book once before and I knew where he lived: up north. Vague evidence, but visiting the poor fuck was high on my list anyway. We stopped at the booth long enough for me to get his exact address, and then we headed across the river.

  To find his place we had to drive down some pretty dark and quiet streets, and the temptation was almost too much. I still had my bandolier, had worn it all the way to the Singletary residence and brought it back to Boston. I started looking around for manholes.

  Then I remembered that the simple approach didn’t work with this toxin. If it was the same thing we’d seen in Natick, the concentration would be zero up here in his neighborhood, and much higher downstream. Maybe we could check that out later.

  Jim dropped me and Boone off in various places, then parked somewhere, and we all converged separately on the house. The lights were off in Dolmacher’s place; this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you needed to leave them on when you went out. Not that it was ritzy, just nice, out of the way and homey. The only criminals around here were us.

  As evidenced by the fact that we broke right into his house through a basement window. I was wearing surgical gloves and the others kept their hands in their pockets. We didn’t want to turn on all the lights, and it looks suspicious to beam flashlights around the inside of an empty house, so we just stumbled around in the medieval glimmer of my Bic.

  The basement was true to form: a big war game was spread out on the ping-pong table. The U.S. was being invaded through Canada and Dolmacher was doing a great job fighting the red bastards off. And he had an active model-building studio down here.

  We went upstairs to check out his collection of electronic toys and military-power books. Jim noticed a nightlight on in the bathroom and went to look at that. Boone and I checked out the living room, done up in classic Dolmacher Contemporary, now full of empty pizza boxes and used paper napkins.

  “Holy fucking shit, I can’t believe this,” Jim said from the bathroom, and we convened. On my way, I tripped over something that fell over and scattered across the floor: a half-empty sack of aquarium charcoal. It goes without saying that Dolmacher didn’t own any fish.

  We went and gazed at the bathroom in the brown gloom of the nightlight. It stank. The first thing my eye picked out was the half-dozen used syringes scattered across the counter. Then the bottles, many bottles of pills. I started reading the labels. Antibiotics, each and every one. The place smelled like death and chlorine; there was a half-empty jug of laundry bleach on top of the toilet and an empty in the garbage. I bent over, bless my scientific heart, and sniffed Dolmacher’s toilet. He had dumped a bunch of bleach into it. This was inorganic chlorine, the safe kind, not the bad covalent stuff we were looking for. He was using it to disinfect his crapper.

  Dolmacher was real sick. He had a problem with some bacteria, a problem in his bowel. He knew it was a problem and he was desperately trying to deal with it.

  Maybe I had a problem too. I went through Dolmacher’s supply and scarfed some pills.

  Boone and Jim were doing some mumbling, bending over the bathtub. “… or maybe buckshot,” Boone was saying.

  “No way, 9mm semi,” Jim said.

  “What are you guys …” I said, and then, for the first time, noticed the corpse in the bathtub. It was a guy in a suit.

  “Your dude’s a good housekeeper,” Jim said. “Puts his bodies in the tub to drain.”

  “Should’ve recognized the smell,” I said. “Putrescine.”

  “Say what?”

  “Putrescine. The chemical given off by decaying bodies.”

  Dolmacher had already gone through the guy’s wallet and tossed it on his chest. I picked it up, being the only one here with gloves, and checked it out. Basco Security.

  “Nice grouping,” Jim observed. The dead guy had six holes in his chest, all within six inches of one another.

  Boone and I got beers from the fridge, Jim got water, and we sat around in the living room. I was thinking.

  “You guys know anything about quantum mechanics? Of course not.”

  They didn’t say anything, so I kept thinking out loud. “Any reaction that can go in one direction can go in the other direction.”

  “So?”

  “Okay. First of all, here’s what we know: Basco, thirty years ago, dumped some whopping transformers on the north side of Spectacle Island. Covered them with dirt and forgot about them.”

  “In about ’68, they started to worry, because they knew there was a lot of toxic stuff in those transformers. But there was nothing they could do about it until recently—the Age of Genetic Engineering. They bought out the best and brightest such company in the Boston area and told them to invent a PCB-eating bug.”

  “So they did. Put together some chlorine-processing plasmids and implanted them in a particular bug called Escherichia coli. It’s a bacterium that lives in everyone’s bowels, helps digest food. A good bug. A very well-understood, well-studied bug, ideal for these purposes. It’s what all the genetic engineers use.”

  “It worked. But it just barely worked in time. An old barge came along and ripped the transformers open. So they had to release the b
ug quickly, before they’d had a chance to test it in the lab, to clean up that mess before yours truly noticed it. And that all worked just fine. The PCBs went away.”

  “That’s what we know. Now, from here on out, it’s just my theory. Like I said, any reaction that goes one way can be reversed. Now, somewhere along the line, when these guys were trying to design a plasmid to change covalent chlorine to ionic, they had to consider the possibility of making it go the other way. Ionic chlorine, like in seawater, to covalent, like in toxic waste.”

  “Oh shit,” Boone said.

  “Once they considered that, they’d never forget it. Because a whole industry—most of the chemical industry—is founded upon a single reaction: the Chloralkali process—turning salt water into covalent chlorine. Using a very old process that takes up a hell of a lot of electrical power. It’s an industry that’s been on the skids for decades. But if you could design a bug that would do the same process, with no electricity, think what a kick in the ass it would be for Basco and Boner and all those other old, decomposing corporations. Suddenly, everything they wanted to make would be ten times cheaper. The environmental regs wouldn’t matter, compared to that. It would be so fucking profitable. …”

  “Okay, we understand why they’d want such a bug,” Jim said. “You’re saying they’ve got it?”

  “They’ve got it. In two senses of the word. They own it, and they’re infected by it. Someone screwed up. Someone at Biotronics picked his nose at the wrong time, or forgot to scrub beneath his fingernails, or something, and that wonder bug—the one that converts salt water to toxic chlorine—got into the wrong tank.”

  “But how did it get into that sewer line?” Boone said.

  “You’re Pleshy or Laughlin. You’re a crafty guy. You’ve learned a few things since 1956 when you openly dumped your transformers on the island. This time you’re going to be subtle. When it’s time to eat up those PCB-eaters on the Harbor floor, you’re not going to take the bacteria out in big drums and pour them into the water in broad daylight. You’re not going to go out there at all. You’re going to let the primeval Boston sewer system do it for you. It’s full of E. coli already. You flush the bugs down the toilet at the place where they were made, out in Natick. You pick an evening when it’s starting to rain heavily. That night the sewer overflow tunnel carries your bugs twenty miles under the city and dumps them into the Harbor through a CSO in Dorchester Bay, a CSO that happens to be right near Spectacle Island.