Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller

by Neal Stephenson

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Neal Stephenson issues from a clan of rootless, itinerant hard-science
and engineering professors. He began his higher education as physics
major, then switched to geography when it appeared that this would
enable him to scam more free time on his university's mainframe
computer. When he graduated and discovered, to his perplexity, that
there were no jobs for inexperienced physicist-geographers, he began
to look into alternative pursuits such as working on cars,
agricultural labour and writing novels. His first novel, The Big U,
was published in 1984 and vanished without trace. Zodiac: The
Eco-thriller is his second novel. On first coming out in 1988 it
quickly developed a cult following among water-pollution-control
engineers and was enjoyed, though rarely bought, by many radical
environmentalists. The highly successful Snow Crash was written
between 1988 and 1991, as the author listened to a great deal of loud,
relentless, depressing music. It was followed by the equally
successful The Diamond Age. Most of his novels are available in Roc.

Neal Stephenson lives in Seattle.


 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

A mere acknowledgment doesn't fully reflect the contribution made by
Marco Paul Johann Kaltofen; a spot on the title page would be more
fitting.

In the category of plain old, but deserved, acknowledgments, it should
be mentioned that the hard-boiled fiction of James Crumley got me
going on this project; people who like this one should buy his books.
Joe King put me on the hard-boiled trail with a well-timed
recommendation. Jackson Schmidt read and corrected the manuscript with
an attention to fine detail I would not have expected even if I had
been paying him. My agents, Liz Darhansoff, Abby Thomas, and Lynn
Pleshette, gave useful suggestions and then scorched the earth with
their zeal, despite blaming me for a sudden aversion to eating
lobsters and swimming in the Hudson. Gary Fisketjon edited it closely
and intelligently, once again proving his more-than-casual
acquaintance with the novel-a 250-year-old art form.

Jon Owens, Jon Halper, Jackson Schmidt, Steve Horst, and Chris Doolan
all said or did things that got blended in. My wife, Dr. Ellen
Lackermann, helped with the medical research, and refrains from
becoming too despondent over my spending eight to sixteen hours a day
welded to a Macintosh. Finally, Heather Matheson read the manuscript
and told me that the main character was an asshole-confirming that I
was on the right track.


 

TO  ELLEN

 

 

 

Down by the river, Down by the banks of the River Charles

That's where you'll find me

Along with lovers, muggers and thieves

Well I love that dirty water,

Oh Boston, you're my home.

 

-THE INMATES

 


 

1

ROSCOMMON CAMEand laid waste to the garden an hour after dawn, about
the time I usually get out of bed and he usually passes out on the
shoulder of some freeway. My landlord and I have an arrangement. He
charges me and my housemates little rent-by Boston standards, none at
all-and in return we let him play fast and loose with our ecosystem.
Every year at about this time he destroys my garden. He's been known
to send workmen into the house without warning, knock out walls in the
middle of the night, shut off the water while we shower, fill the
basement with unidentified fumes, cut down elms and maples for
firewood, and redecorate our rooms. Then he claims he's showing the
dump to prospective tenants and we'd better clean it up. Pronto.

This morning I woke to the sound of little green pumpkins exploding
under the tires of his station wagon. Then Roscommon stumbled out and
tore down our badminton net. After he left, I got up and went out to
buy a Globe. Wade Boggs had just twisted his ankle and some
PCB-contaminated waste oil was on fire in Southie.

When I got back, bacon was smoldering on the range, filling the house
with gas-phase polycyclic aromatics-my favorite carcinogen by a long
shot. Bartholomew was standing in front of the stove. With the level,
cross-eyed stare of the involuntarily awake, he was watching a
heavy-metal video on the TV. He was clenching an inflated Hefty bag
that took up half the kitchen. Once again, my roommate was using
nitrous oxide around an open flame; no wonder he didn't have any
eyebrows. When I came in, he raised the bag invitingly. Normally I
never do nitrous before breakfast, but I couldn't refuse Bart a thing
in the world, so I took the bag and inhaled as deep as I could. My
mouth tasted sweet and five seconds later about half of an orgasm
backfired in the middle of my brain.

On the screen, poodle-headed rockers were strapping a cheerleader to a
sheet of particle board decorated with a pentagram. Far away,
Bartholomew was saying: "Poyzen Boyzen, man. Very hot."

It was too early for social criticism. I grabbed the channel selector.

"No Stooges on at this hour," Bart warned, "I checked." But I'd
already moved us way up into Deep Cable, where a pair of chaw-munching
geezers were floating on a nontoxic river in Dixie, demonstrating how
to push-start a comatose fish.

Tess emerged from the part of the house where women lived and
bathrooms were clean. She frowned against the light, scowling at our
bubbling animal flesh, our cubic yard of nitrous. She rummaged in the
fridge for some homemade yogurt. "Don't you guys ever lay off that
stuff?"

"Meat or gas?"

"You tell me. Which one's more toxic?"

"Sangamon's Principle," I said. "The simpler the molecule, the better
the drug. So the best drug is oxygen. Only two atoms. The second-best,
nitrous oxide-a mere three atoms. The third-best, ethanol-nine. Past
that, you're talking lots of atoms." '

"So?"

"Atoms are like people. Get lots of them together, never know what
they'll do. It is my understanding, Tess, that you've been referring
to me, about town, as a 'Granola James Bond'."

Tess didn't give a fuck. "Who told you about that?"

"You come up with a cute phrase, it gets around."

"I thought you'd enjoy it."

"Even a horse's ass like me can detect sarcasm."

"So what would you rather be called?"

"Toxic Spiderman. Because he's broke and he never gets laid."

Tess squinted at me, implying that there was a reason for both
problems. Bart broke the. silence. "Shit, man, Spider-man's got his
health. James Bond probably has AIDS."

I went outside and followed Roscommon's tire tracks through the
backyard. All the pumpkins were destroyed, but I didn't care about
these decoys. What could you do with a pumpkin? Get orange shit all
over the house? The important stuff-corn and tomatoes-were planted up
against fences or behind piles of rubble, where his station wagon
couldn't reach.

We'd never asked Roscommon if we could plant a garden out here in the
Largest Yard in Boston. Which, because it wasn't supposed to exist,
gave him the right to drive over it. Gardens have to be watered, you
see, and water bills are included in our nominal rent, so by having a
garden we're actually ripping him off.

There was at least an acre back here, tucked away in kind of a space
warp caused by Brighton's irrational street pattern. Not even weeds
knew how to grow in this field of concrete and brick rubble. When we
started the garden, Bartholomew and Ike and I spent two days sifting
through it, putting the soil into our plot, piling the rest in cairns.
Other piles were scattered randomly around the Largest Back Yard in
Boston. Every so often Roscommon would dynamite another one of his
holdings, show up with a rented dump truck, back across the garden,
through the badminton net, and over some lawn furniture, and make a
new pile.

I just hoped he didn't try to stash any toxic waste back there. I
hoped that wasn't the reason for the low rent. Because if he did that,
I would be forced to call down a plague upon his house. I would
evacuate his bank accounts, bum his villages, rape his horses, sell
his children into slavery. The whole Toxic Spiderman bit. And then I'd
have to becomethe penniless alter ego, the Toxic Peter Parker. I'd
have to pay real Boston rent, a thousand a month, with no space for
badminton.

Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the
toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he's a nebbish.
No money, no prestige, no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark
alley, you're meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: "Do those
moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I
have to take as Peter Parker?" In my case, the answer is yes.

In the dark ages of my life, when I worked at Massachusetts Analytical
Chemical Systems, or Mass Anal for short, I owned your basic VW van.
But a Peter Parker type can't afford car insurance in this town, so
now I transport myself on a bicycle. So once I'd fueled myself up on
coffee and Bart's baco-cinders-nothing beats an all-black
breakfast-and read all the comics, I threw one leg over my
battle-scarred all-terrain stump-jumper and rode several miles to
work.

Hurricane Alison had blown through the day before yesterday, trailed
by hellacious rainfall. Tree branches and lakes of rainwater were in
the streets. We call it rainwater; actually it's raw sewage. The
traffic signal at Comm Ave and Charlesgate West was fried. In Boston,
this doesn't lead to heartwarming stories in the tabloids about
ordinary citizens who get out of their cars to direct traffic.
Instead, it gives us the excuse to drive like the Chadian army. Here
we had two lanes of traffic crossing with four, and the two were
losing out in a big way. Comm Ave was backed up all the way into B.U.
So I rode between the lanes for half a mile to the head of the class.

The problem is, if the two drivers at the front of the line aren't
sufficiently aggressive, it doesn't matter how tough the people behind
them are. The whole avenue will just sit there until it collectively
boils over. And horn honking wasn't helping, though a hundred or so
motorists were giving it a try-When I got to Charlesgate West, where
Comm Ave was cut off by the torrent pouring down that one-way
four-Ianer, I found an underpowered station wagon from Maine at the
head of one lane, driven by a mom who was trying to look after four
children, and a vintage Mercedes in the other, driven by an old lady
who looked like she'd just forgotten her own address. And half a dozen
bicyclists, standing there waiting for a real asshole to take charge.

What you have to do is take it one lane at a time. I waited for a
twenty-foot gap in traffic on the first lane of Charlesgate and just
eased out into it.

The approaching BMW made an abortive swerve toward the next lane,
causing a ripple to spread across Charlesgate as everyone for ten cars
back tried to head east. Then he throbbed to a halt (computerized
antilock braking system) and slumped over on his horn button. The next
lane was easy: some Camaro-driving freshman from Jersey made the
mistake of slowing down and I seized his lane. The asshole in the BMW
tried to cut behind me but half the bicyclists, and the biddy in the
Benz, had the presence of mind to lurch out and block his path.

Within ten seconds a huge gap showed up in the third lane, and I ate
it up before Camaro could serve over. I ate it up so aggressively that
some Clerk Typist II in a Civic slowed down in the fourth lane long
enough for me to grab that one. And then the dam broke as the Chadian
army mounted a charge and reamed out the intersection. I figured BMW,
Camaro, and Civic could shut their engines off and go for a walk.

Pedestrians and winos applauded. A young six-digit lawyer, hardly old
enough to shave, cruised up from ten cars back and shouted out his
electric sunroof that I really had balls.

I said, "Tell me something I didn't know, you fucking android from
Hell."

The Mass Ave Bridge took me over the Charles. I stopped halfway across
to look it over. The river, that is. The river and the Harbor, they're
my stock in trade. Not much wind today and I took a big whoof of river
air in my nostrils, wondering what kind of crap had been dumped into
it, upstream, the night before. Which might sound kind of primitive,
but the human nose happens to be an exquisitely sensitive analytical
device. There are certain compounds for which your schnozz is the best
detector ever made. No machine can beat it. For example, I can tell a
lot about a car by smelling its exhaust: how well the engine is tuned,
whether it's got a catalytic converter, what kind of gas it bums.

So every so often I smell the Charles, just to see if I'm missing
anything. For a river that's only thirty miles long, it has the width
and the toxic burdens of the Ohio or the Cuy-ahoga.

Then through the MIT campus, through the milling geeks with the
fifty-dollar textbooks under their arms. College students look so damn
young these days. Not long ago I was going to school on the other side
of the river, thinking of these trolls as peers and rivals. Now I just
felt sorry for them. They probably felt sorry for me. By visual
standards, I'm the scum of the earth. The other week I was at a party
full of Boston yuppies, the originals, and they were all complaining
about the panhandlers on the Common, how aggressive they'd become. I
hadn't noticed, myself, since they never panhandled me. Then I figured
out why: because I looked like one of them. Blue jeans with holes in
the knees. Tennis shoes with holes over the big toes, where my uncut
toenails rub against the toeclips on my bicycle. Several layers of
t-shirts, long underwear tops, and flannel shirts, easily adjustable
to regulate my core temperature. Shaggy blond hair, cut maybe once a
year. Formless red beard, trimmed or lopped off maybe twice a year.
Not exactly fat, but blessed with the mature, convex body typical of
those who live on Thunderbird and Ding-Dongs. No briefcase, aimless
way of looking around, tendency to sniff the river.

Though I rode through MIT on a nice bike, I'd sprayed it with some
cheap gold paint so it wouldn't look nice. Even the lock looked like a
piece of shit: a Kryptonite lock all scarred up by boltcutters. We'd
used it to padlock a gate on a toxic site last year and the owners had
tried to get through using the wrong tools.

In California I could have passed for a hacker, heading for some
high-tech company, but in Massachusetts even the hackers wore shirts
with buttons. I pedalled through hacker territory, through the strip
of little high-tech shops that feed off MIT, and into the square where
my outfit has its regional office.

GEE, the Group of Environmental Extremists. Excuse me: GEE
International. They employ me as a professional asshole, an innate
talent I've enjoyed ever since second grade, when I learned how to
give my teacher migraine headaches with a penlight. I could cite other
examples, give you a tour down the gallery of the broken and
infuriated authority figures who have tried to teach, steer, counsel,
reform, or suppress me over the years, but that would sound like
boasting. I'm not that proud of being a congenital pain in the ass.
But I will take money for it.

I carried my bike up four flights of stairs, doing my bit for physical
fitness. GEE stickers were plastered on the risers of the stairs, so
there was always a catch phrase six feet in front of your eyes: SAVE
THE WHALES and something about the BABY SEALS. By the time you made it
up to the fourth floor, you were out of breath, and fully
indoctrinated. Locked my bike to a radiator, because you never knew,
and went in.

Tricia was running the front desk. Flaky but nice, has a few strange
ideas about phone etiquette, thinks I'm all right. "Oh, shit," she
said.

"What?"

"You won't believe it."

"What?"

"The other car."

"The van?"

"Yeah. Wyman."

"How bad?"

"We don't know yet. It's still sitting out on the shoulder."

I just assumed it was totalled, and that Wyman would have to be fired,
or at least busted down to a position where he couldn't so much as sit
in a GEE car. A mere three days ago he had taken our Subaru out to buy
duet tape, and in a parking lot no larger than a tennis court, had
managed to ram a concrete light-pole pedestal hard enough to total the
vehicle. His fifteen-minute explanation was earnest but impossible to
follow; when I asked him to just start from the beginning, he accused
me of being too linear.

Now he'd trashed our one remaining shitbox van. The national office
would probably hear of it. I almost felt sorry for him.

"How?"

"He thinks he shifted into reverse on the freeway."

"Why? It's got an automatic transmission."

"He likes to think for himself."

"Where is he now?"

"Who knows? I think he's afraid to come in."

"No. You'd be afraid to come in. I might be afraid. Wyman won't be
afraid. You know what he'll do? He'll come in fresh as a daisy and ask
for the keys to the Omni."

Fortunately I'd taken all the keys to the Omni, other than my own, and
hammered them into slag. And whenever I parked it, I opened the hood
and yanked out the coil wire and put it in my pocket.

You might think that the lack of coil wire or even keys would not stop
members of the GEE strike force, Masters of Stealth, Scourge of
Industry, from starting a car for very long. Aren't these the people
who staged their own invasion of the Soviet Union? Didn't they sneak a
supposedly disabled, heavily guarded ship out of Amsterdam? Don't they
skim across the oceans in high-powered Zodiacs held together with
bubble gum and bobby pins, coming to the rescue of innocent marine
mammals?

Well sometimes they do, but only a handful have those kinds of
talents, and I'm the only one in the Northeast office. The others,
like Wyman, tend to be ex-English majors who affect a hysterical
helplessness in the face of things with moving parts. Talk to them
about cams or gaskets and they'll sing you a protest song. To them,
yanking out the Omni's coil wire was black magic.

"And you got three calls from Fotex. They really want to talk to you."
"What about?"

"The guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today."

The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I'd mumbled something
about closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey
tomorrow to close someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping
phenols, acetone, phthalates, various solvents, copper, silver, lead,
mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor to their heart's content, at
least until I got back.

"Tell them I'm in Jersey." That would keep them guessing; Fotex had
some plants down there also.

I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of
the other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken
Zodiac parts, drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:

"500 ppm sounds good to me."

"Don't put us on the back page of the Food section."

"Do those breed in estuaries?"

I wasn't one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange
dye on baby seals in Newfie, or getting beat senseless by Frog
commandos in the South Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for
them while I held down my job at Mass Anal. Partly by luck, I broke a
big case for GEE, right before my boss figured out what an enormous
pain in the ass I could be. Mass Anal fired, GEE hired. My salary was
cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion rings at IHOP
again, but I couldn't afford to.

My function at Mass Anal had been to handle whatever walked in the
door. Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage-peeling apart a
running shoe to see what kinds of adhesives it used-but usually it
amounted to analyzing tap water for the anxious yuppies moving into
the center of Boston, closet environmentalists who didn't want to pour
aromatic hydrocarbons into their babies any more than they'd burn
7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once upon a time, this guy in a
running suit walked in and got routed to me; _ anyone who wasn't in
pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandishing an empty Doritos bag
and for a minute I was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins or
some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably
looked skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an asshole.

"Sorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the
trail."

"What's in it?"

"I'm not sure."

Predictable answer. "Approximately what's in it?"

"Dirt. But really strange dirt."

I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of
the Globe. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and
everyone thinks I'm a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little
snort, like he couldn't believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks
impressive to pour the sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it's
faster to spread it out over Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the
toothpick out of my mouth and began to pop the little clods apart. But
that was just for the hell of it, because I already knew what was
wrong with this dirt. It was green-and purple and red and blue. The
runner knew that, he just didn't know why. But I had a pretty good
idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that
goes into pigments. "You jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?" I
asked. "You're saying this stuff's hazardous?" "Fuck, yes. Heavy
metals. See this yellow clump here? Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium
they tested once as a poison gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a
real low temperature, six or seven hundred degrees. They had some
people breathe that vapor." "What does it do?" "Gangrene of the
testicles."

The jogger inhaled and shifted his pair away from my desk. One of the
problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a
toxic horror story. I've lost two girlfriends and a job by reading an
ingredients label out loud, with annotations, at the wrong time.
"Where?"

"Sweetvale College. Right on campus. There's a wooded area there with
a pond and a running trail."

I, a B.U. graduate, was trying to imagine this: a college campus that
had trees and ponds on it.

"This is what it looks like," the guy continued, "the dirt, the pond,
everything." "Colored like this?" "It's psychedelic."

Despite being a chemist, I refuse psychedelics these days on the
grounds that they violate Sangamon's Principle. But I understood what
he was getting at.

So the next day I got on my bike and rode out there and damned if he
wasn't right. At one end of the campus was this weedy patch of forest,
sticking out into a triangle formed by some of the Commonwealth's more
expensive suburbs. It wasn't used much. That was probably just as well
because the area around the pond was a heavy-metal sewer, and I ain't
talking about rock and roll. Rainbow-colored, a little like water with
gasoline floating on it, but this wasn't superficial. The colors went
all the way down. They matched the dirt. All the colors were different
and-forgive me if I repeat myself on this point-they all caused
cancer.

From my freshman gut course in physical geography at Boston
University, I knew damn well this wasn't a natural pond. So the only
question was: what was here before?

Finding out was my first gig as a toxic detective, and the only thing
that made it difficult was my own jerk-ass fumbling in the public
library. I threw myself on the mercy of Esmerelda, a black librarian
of somewhere between ninety and a hundred who contained within her
bionic hairdo all knowledge, or the ability to find it. She got me
some old civic documents. Sure enough, a paint factory had flourished
there around the turn of the century. When it folded, the owner
donated the land to the university. Nice gift: a square mile of
poison.

I called GEE and the rest was history. Newspaper articles, video bites
on the TV news, which didn't look that great on my black-and-white;
state and federal clean-up efforts, and a web of lawsuits. Two weeks
later GEE asked me to analyze some water for them. Within a month I
was chained to a drum of toxic waste on the State house steps, and
within six, I was Northeast Toxics Coordinator for GEE International.

My office was the size of a piano crate, but mine nonetheless. I
wanted a computer on my desk, and none of the other GEE honchos would
risk sharing a room with one. Computers need electrical transformers,
some of which are made with PCBs that like to vaporize and ooze out of
a computer's ventilation slots, causing miscarriages and other foul
omens. The boss gave me his office and moved into the big barnlike
room.

The same people barely noticed when Gomez, our "office manager,"
started painting the walls of that office. By doing so he exposed them
to toxic fumes millions of times more concentrated than what I was
getting from my computer. But they didn't notice because they're used
to paint. They paint things all the time. Same deal with the stuff
they spray on their underarms and put into their gas tanks. Gomez
wanted to paint my office now, but I wouldn't let him.

Esmerelda, ever vigilant, had shot me a bunch of greasy xeroxes from
the microfilm archives. They were articles from the
Lighthouse-Republican of Blue Kills, N.J., a small city halfway down
the Jersey Shore which was shortly to feel my wrath. It was the kind
of newspaper that was still running Dennis the Menace in the largest
available size. A Gasoline Alley, Apartment 3-G, and Nancy kind of
paper.

The articles were all from the sports section. Sports, as in hunting
and fishing, which take place outdoors, which is where the environment
is. That's why environmental news is in the sports section.

Esmerelda had found me four different articles, all written by
different reporters (no specialist on the staff; not considered an
important issue) on vaguely environmental subjects. A local dump
leaching crap into an estuary; a freeway project that would trash some
swamp land; mysterious films of gunk on the river; and concerns about
toxic waste that could be coming from a plant just outside of town,
operated by a large corporation we shall refer to as the Swiss
Bastards. Along with the Boston Bastards, the Napalm Droids, the
Plutonium Lords, the Hindu Killers, the Lung Assassins, the Ones in
Buffalo, and the Rhine-Rapers, they were among the largest chemical
corporations of a certain planet, third one out from a certain
mediocre star in an average spiral galaxy named after a candy bar.

Each of the articles was 2500 words long and written in the same
style. Clearly, the editor of the lighthouse-republican ruled with an
iron hand. Local residents were referred to as Blukers. Compound
sentences were discouraged and the inverted-pyramid structure
rigorously followed. The PR flacks who worked for the Swiss Bastards
were referred to by the old-fashioned term "authorities," rather than
the newer and sexier "sources."

My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and
decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand,
it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool "sportsman," a type traditionally
long-lived, unless he'd spent too much time sloshing around in a
particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a
xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn't show any changes. The
senior sports editor was Everett "Red" Grooten and the sports-page
editor was Alvin Goldberg.

Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on
Fotex's PR director and shouted "S.T., what are you doing in there?"
Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked
up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. "Fish, marine, sport,
Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on." "Estuaries, waterfowl
populations of, effects of organic solvents on." These were old
boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago. Mostly they referred to
EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a "source"
at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me.
I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change
"source" to "authority."

Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were
pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and
I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the
center of the piece and then composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in
basic Dick-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that
Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the
"growing toxic waste problems" centered on the Swiss Bastards' illegal
dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up
with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the
pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the
well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any
day now.

Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface
that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some
unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard
GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the
Lighthouse-Republican's column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red
Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he
didn't stop by the office all that often. So this fine lady was
lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as
well. We didn't even know who she was.

Normally an Omni is a piece of shit, an econobox with a 1.6-liter
engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which
has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an
Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the
way, stands for Goes Like Hell. Honest. When the blower is singing,
the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing
tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man's Porsche, the
most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure,
spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little
faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that
much? Who'll risk denting it? But if it's an Omni, who cares?

I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated-he
made sure I knew it too-and we blew out of there. First we had to
unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we
were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic
cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and
Everett, I'd have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon
banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra
outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling
chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the
GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big
magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of
Gomez's Impala so we wouldn't have to haul it up to the fourth floor.

We'd hired Gomez after I'd inadvertently gotten him canned from his
previous job as a minimum wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office
buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making
people like him look like jerks. For weeks we'd been trying to make an
appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he
wouldn't even answer our letters.

Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had
Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an
ID card, complete with a mug shot of Saint Nick and an address at the
North Pole, stuffed my Santa sack full of GEE leaflets, and we blew
right past

Gomez; he was really in the Christmas spirit. We hit on an
Untergruppen-secretary who passed us on up to an
Uber-gruppen-secretary, then three floors up to a Sturmband-secretary,
then ten more floors on up to Thelma, the
Ubersturmgruppenfuhrer-sectetary, and that poor lady didn't even
blink. She led us right into Corrigan's office, the place we'd been
trying to penetrate for three months, without even the courtesy of a
nasty letter.

"Ho ho ho," I said, and I was sincere. "Well, Santy Claus!" said
Corrigan, that poor jackass. "What you got there?"

"I've got a surprise for you, you naughty boy! Ho ho ho!" In the
corner of my eye I could see beams of high-energy light sweeping down
the hall as the Channel 5 minicam crew stormed past Thelma's vacant
desk.

"What kind of surprise," he said. I upended my pillowcase and treated
him to a propaganda blizzard just as the cameraman centered his
crosshairs on Corrigan's forehead. We not only got him to agree to a
meeting, but also got the agreement broadcast throughout the
Commonwealth -just about the only way to make an environmental
appointee keep his word. Corrigan hasn't been very nice to me since
then, but I did make Thelma's Christmas card list.

Anyway, Gomez got fired for accepting my fake ID. We ended up hiring
him to do jobs here and there around the office. Nothing illegal. When
it came to finding things that needed fixing or painting he was an
enterprising guy. To watch him find loose stair treads and peeling
paint was to see free enterprise in action. Not unlike my own job.

 

2

WYMAN CALLED. Wyman, the Scourge of Cars. He wanted the keys to the
Omni so that he could drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to see his
girlfriend, who was about to leave for Nicaragua. For God's sake, she
could be bayoneted by contras and he'd never see her again. "Where's
the van, Wyman?"

"I'm not telling you until I get the keys to the Omni." So I hung up
and called the Metro Police, who told me: on the shoulder, westbound
lanes, Revere Beach Parkway, near the bridge over the Everett River.
Due to be towed at any moment. I hung up when they asked for my name,
grabbed my toolbox and headed out.

Gomez heard the wrenches crashing against the insides of the toolbox,
fired the last half of his whole-wheat croissant into the
"noncompostable nonrecyclables" wastebasket, where it belonged, and
intercepted me at the top of the stairs. "Got a job?"

"Sure. What the fuck, come on." 

The van was right where Wyman had left it, in the dirtiest, the most
dangerous, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston. I'm not
talking about crack dealers, tenements, or minority groups here. The
neighborhood isn't Roxbury. It's the zone around the Mystic River
where most of New England's heavy industry is located. It's split
fifty-fifty between Everett and Charlestown. I spend a lot of my time
up here. Most of the "rivers" feeding into the Mystic are drainage
ditches, no more than a couple of miles long. The nation's poisoners
congregate along these rivers and piss into them. In my Zodiac I have
visited them personally, smelled their yellow, brown, white, and red
waters, and figured out what they're made of.

We could see Wyman's footprints wandering out across the mud flats
next to the Everett River, heading for a side street that might lead
him to a telephone. I already knew the name of the street: Alkali
Lane. We could see the place where he got a whiff of something, maybe,
or got close enough to read the name of the street, then spun around
and loped back to the nontoxic shoulder, obsessively wiping his
Reeboks on the dead ragweed. From there, he'd hitchhiked.

Gomez stripped the van in much the same way that a Sioux would
dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off,
with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radials that Wyman was
going to abandon - a free gift from GEE to a randomly chosen junkyard.
I also made sure we got our manhole-lifting tool, which is to me what
a keychain is to a janitor. Gomez got the battery, electronic ignition
box, cassette player, sheepskin, jack, lug wrenches, tire chains, half
case of Ray-Lube, spare fan belt, alternator, and three gallons of
gasoline. He was going after the starter when I officially pronounced
the van dead.

We took the license plates so we could prove to the insurance company
that we weren't driving it anymore, and then I removed the Thermite
from the glove compartment. It's wise to keep some handy in case you
need to weld some railroad rails together. The van's serial number was
stamped on its parts and body in three places, all of which I'd noted
down, so I put Thermite on each and ignited them with my cigar.
Instant slag. Like a Mafia hitter chopping the fingertips off a
corpse.

The identification numbers were still smoking as we climbed back into
the Omni. But immediately a vehicle pulled up behind us, a Bronco II
with too many antennas and a flashing light on the roof.

"Fucking rent-a-cop," Gomez said. From being one himself, he'd become
sensitized to the whole absurd concept.

I walked back so I could read the sign on the Bronco's door: BASCO
SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned everything on Alkali Lane and
most of the Everett River. In fact, if you stepped off the shoulder of
the parkway, you were on their property. Then your shoes would
dissolve.

"Morning," said the rent-a-cop, who, like Gomez, was young and skinny.
They never had the authority belly of a true Boston cop.

"Morning," I said, sounding like a man in a hurry, "Can I help you?"

He was looking at a picture of me from what looked startlingly like a
dossier. Also included were photographic representations of my boss,
and of a jerk named Dan Smirnoff, and one I hadn't seen in a while, a
fugitive named Boone.

"Sangamon Taylor?"

"You got a warrant somewhere. Hey! You aren't a real cop at all, are
you?"

"We got some witnesses. A bunch of us security guards been over there
on the main building, watching you here. Now, we know this van."

"I know, we're old pals."

"Right. So we recognized it when it stopped here last night. And we
watched you stripping it. And maybe fucking with the VIN?"

"Look. If you want to hassle me, just go to your boss and say, 'pH'.
Just tell him that."

"P-H? Isn't that something they put in shampoo?"

"Close enough. Tell him 'pH thirteen'. And for your sake, get a
different job. Don't go out there, into those flats, patrolling
around. You understand? It's dangerous."

"Oh, yeah," he said, highly amused. "Big criminal element down there."

"Exactly. The board of directors of Basco. The Fleshy family. Don't
let them kill again."

Back at the Omni, Gomez said, "What'd you tell him?"

"pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen."

"So?"

"So they're licensed for eight. That means they're putting shit into
the river that's more than two times the legal limit."

"Shit, man," Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing
about Gomez. He never got jaded.

And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of
fiasco's pipe was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was
legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which
meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power-a hundred thousand
times-more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the
time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give
people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You
can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken.
But if I say "More than twice the legal limit," they get comfortably
outraged.

 


 

3

I HAD GOMEZ DROP ME OFF in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and
tofu with a reporter from The Weekly. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in
to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the
manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca
sitting back in the corner.

"How's the Granola James Bond?"

I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that
some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was
through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free
cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked
the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green
eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin.
She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren't
going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time
- oops - more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled
something about beer to a waiter and sat down.

"We have-" the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath.

"Genesee Cream Ale."

"Don't have that, sir."

"Beck's." Because I figured Rebecca was paying.

"The specialty is sparkling water with a twist," Rebecca said.

"I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth."

"Been out on your Zode?"

"Zodiac to you," I said. "And no, I haven't."

We always began our conversations with this smart-assed crap. Rebecca
was a political reporter and spent her life talking to mushmouths and
blarney slingers. Talking to someone who would say "fuck" into a tape
recorder was like benzedrine to her. There was also an underlying
theme of flirtation-"Hey, remember?" "Yeah, I remember." "It was all
right, wasn't it?" "Sure was."

"How's Project Lobster?"

"Wow, you prepared for this interview. It's fine. How's the paper?"

"The usual. Civil war, insurrection, financial crisis. But everyone
reads the movie reviews."

"Instead of your stuff?"

"Depends on what I'm digging up."

"And what's that?"

She smiled, leaned forward and observed me with cunning eyes.
"Fleshy's running," she said.

"Which Fleshy? Running from what?"

"The big Fleshy."

"The Groveler?"

"He's running for president."

"Shit. End of lunch. Now I'm not hungry."

"I knew you'd be delighted."

"What about fiasco? Doesn't he have to put all that crap into a blind
trust?"

"It's done. That's how I know he's running. I have this friend at the
bank."

The Fleshy family ran Basco - they'd founded the company - and that
made them the number one polluters of Boston Harbor. The poisoners of
Vietnam. The avant-garde of the toxic waste movement. For years I'd
been trying to tell them how deep in shit they were, sometimes pouring
hydraulic cement into their pipes to drive the point home.

This year, the Pleshy-in-charge was Alvin, a.k.a. the Groveler, an
important member of the team of management experts and foreign policy
geniuses that brought us victory in Vietnam.

Rebecca showed me samples of his flacks' work: "Many environmentalists
have overreacted to the presence of these compounds..." not chemicals,
not toxic waste, but compounds "... but what exactly is a part per
million?" This was followed by a graphic showing an eyedropper-ful of
"compounds" going into a railway tank car of pure water.

"Yeah. They're using the PATEOTS measuring system on you. A drop in a
tank car. Sounds pretty minor. But you can twist it the other way: a
football field has an area of, what, forty-five thousand square feet.
A banana peel has an area of maybe a tenth of a square foot. So the
area of the banana peel thrown on the football field is only a couple
of parts per million. But if your field-goal kicker steps on the peel
just as time is expiring, and you're two points down ..."

"PATEOTS?"

"Haven't I told you about that?"

"Explain."

"Stands for Period At The End Of This Sentence. Remember, back in high
school the hygiene pamphlets would say, 'a city the size of Dallas
could get stoned on a drop of LSD no larger than the period at the end
of this sentence.' A lot easier to visualize than, say, micrograms."

"What does that have to do with football?"

"I'm in the business of trying to explain technical things to Joe
Six-pack, right? Joe may have the NFL rulebook memorized but he
doesn't understand PCBs and he doesn't know a microgram from
cunnilingus. So a microgram is about equal to one PATEOTS. A part per
million is a drop in a railway tank car - that's what the chemical
companies always say, to make it sound less dangerous. If all the baby
seals killed last year were laid end to end, they would span a hundred
football fields. The tears shed by the mommy seals would fill a tank
car. The volume of raw sewage going into the Harbor could fill a
football stadium every week."

"Dan Smirnoff says you're working together now."

Some beer found its way into my sinuses. I had to give it to Rebecca:
she knew her shit.

Smirnoff was the whole reason for this conversation. All this crap
about Fleshy and tank cars was just to get me loosened up. And when I
went into my PATEOTS rap, she knew I was ready to be goosed in the
'nads. How many times had I given her my patented PATEOTS rap? Two or
three at least. I like a good story. I like to tell it many times. By
now she knew: talk to S.T. about eyedroppers and tank cars and he'll
fly off the handle. Once I got flying on any toxic theme, she could
slip in one tough question while my guard was down, watch my hairy and
highly expressive face for a reaction, and glimpse the truth. Or find
a basis for all her darkest suspicions.

"Smirnoff's one of these people I have to have contact with. Like a
prison guard has to have contact with a certain number of child
molesters."

"You'd put him in that category?"

"No, he's not crafty enough. He's just pissed off and very full of
himself."

"Sounds familiar."

"Yeah, but I have a reason to be arrogant. He doesn't."

"Patti Bowen at NEST says..."

"Don't tell me. Smirnoff went to her and said, 'Hey, I'm putting a
group together, a direct-action group, more hardhitting than GEE, and
Sangamon Taylor is working with me."

"That's what Patti Bowen said."

"Yeah, well Smirnoff got ahold of me the other day - you understand, I
just hung up on the bastard, because I don't want the FBI to even
imagine him and me on the same line - so he tracked me down in the
food co-op when I was cutting fish. And he said, 'Patti Bowen and me
are working together on a hard-hitting direct-action group, nudge
nudge wink wink.' So I waved my boning knife at him and said, 'Listen,
pusswad, you are toxic, and if you ever call me, ever call GEE, ever
come within ten feet of me again, I'll take this and gut you like a
tuna.' Haven't heard from him since."

"Is that your position? That he's a terrorist?"

"Yeah."

Rebecca started writing that down, so I added slowly and distinctly,
"And we're not."

"So he's the same as Hank Boone, in your opinion."

I had to squirm. "Morally, yes. But no one's really like Boone."

Boone had this thing about whaling ships. He liked to sink them. He
was a founder of GEE and hero of the Soviet invasion, but he'd been
kicked out seven years ago. Off the coast of South Africa he had
filled a Zodiac full of C-4, lit the fuse, pointed it at a pirate
whaler, and jumped off at the last minute. The whaler went to the
bottom and he went to hide out in some weepy European social
democracy. But he kept dropping out of sight and whaling ships kept
digging craters on the floors of the seven seas.

"Boone's effective. Smirnoff is just pathetic."

"You admire Boone."

"You know I can't say that. I sincerely don't like violence. Honest to
God."

"That's why you threatened Smirnoff with a knife."

"Second-degree. It's premeditated violence I can't stand. Look. Boone
isn't even necessary. The corporations have already planted their own
bombs. All we have to do is light the fuses."

Rebecca sat back with those green eyes narrowed to slits, and I knew
some sort of profound observation was coming down the pipeline. "I
didn't think you were scared of anything, but Smirnoff scares you,
doesn't he?"

"Sure. Look, GEE rarely does illegal things and we never do violent
things. The worst we do is a little property damage now and then - and
only to prevent worse things. But even so, we're bugged and tapped and
tailed. The FBI thinks I'm Carlos the fucking Jackal. And we never
talk about anything over the phone. 'Regular professionals.' But that
clown Smirnoff is trying to organize an openly terroristic group -
over the fucking telephone! He's about as shrewd as your brain-damaged
Lhasa Apso. Shit! I wonder if we could sue him for defamation, just
for mentioning our name."

"I'm not a lawyer."

"I could definitely see a defamation suit, though, if a news
organization tried to connect us in any way."

She was more amused than furious. I knew she would be; she thinks I'm
cute when I'm angry. After you've fucked a man on a Zodiac in the
middle of Boston Harbor on your lunch hour, it's hard to distance
yourself from him, say what you want about objectivity and ethics.

"S.T., I am stunned. Did you really just threaten The Weekly?"

"No, no, not at all. I'm just trying to express how important it is
that we are kept separate from him and Boone in the public mind. And
as soon as we're done I'm going to drop a dime on one of our earnest
young ecolawyers and see if we can sue the crap out of him."

She smiled. "I don't want to connect you. There is no real connection.
But I am interested in the topic. I mean, the Ike Walton League fades
into the Sierra Club fades into GEE fades into NEST...."

"Right, and then Smirnoff, then Boone, then al-Fatah. And I think
Basco and Fotex are down there somewhere. It's a dangerous premise,
babe. You have to draw a definite line between us and Smirnoff. Or
even NEST."

"You're not allowed to call me babe."

"It's a deal. You can call me anything but a terrorist."

 


 

4

I TOOK THE T into the middle of Boston and cut across the North End to
a particular yacht club. Mostly it was run by lifestyle slaves who
were studying to be Brahmins, but there were a couple of old
vomit-stained tour boats that ran out of there, one fishing boat, and
it was the home base for GEE Northeast's nautical forces. They'd
donated a small odd-shaped berth, a little trapezoid of greasy water
caught between a couple of piers, for the same reason that someone
else gave us the Omni. Upstairs we had a locker for our gear, and
that's where I headed, driving up the blood pressures of all the
deck-shoed, horn-rimmed twits waiting to be let into the dining room.
I cruised past and didn't even turn around when some high-pitched jerk
issued his challenge.

"Say! Excuse me? Sir? Are you a member of this club?" It happens every
so often, mostly with people who've just spent their Christmas bonuses
on memberships. I don't even react. Sooner or later they learn the
ropes.

But something was familiar about that goddamn voice. I couldn't keep
myself from turning around. And there he was, standing out from that
suntanned crowd like a dead guppy in a tropical aquarium, tall and
slack-faced and not at all sure of himself. Dolmacher. When he
recognized me, it was his nightmare come to life. Which was only fair
since he was one of my favorite bad dreams.

"Taylor," he sneered, ill-advisedly making the first move.

"Lumpy!" I shouted. Dolmacher looked down at his fly as his companions
mouthed the word behind his back. Grinning yuppie hyenas that they
were, I knew that I had renamed Dolmacher for his career.

The implications did not penetrate and he sauntered forward a step.
"How are things, Taylor?"

"I'm having the time of my life. How about you, Dolmacher? Pick up a
new accent since we left B.U.?"

His soon-to-be ex-associates began to file their teeth.

"What's on the agenda for today, Sangamon? Come to plant a magnetic
limpet mine on an industrialist's yacht?"

This was vintage Dolmacher. Not "blow up" but "plant a magnetic limpet
mine on." He cruised bookstores and bought those big picture books of
international weapons systems, the ones always remaindered for $3.98.
He had a whole shelf of them. He went up on weekends and played the
Survival Game in New Hampshire, running around in the woods shooting
paint pellets at other frustrated elements.

"Yachts are made out of fiberglass, Dolmacher. A magnetic mine
wouldn't stick."

"Still sarcastic, huh, S.T.?" He pronounced the word as if it were a
mental illness. "Except now you're doing it professionally."

"Can I help it if the Groveler lacks a sense of humor?"

"I don't work for Basco any more."

"Okay, I'm stunned. Whom are you working for?"

"Whom? I'm working for Biotronics, that's whom."

Big deal. Biotronics was a wholly owned subsidiary of Basco. But the
work was impressive.

"Genetic engineering. Not bad. You work with the actual bugs?"

"Sometimes."

Dolmacher dropped his guard the minute I started asking him about his
job. No change at all since our days at B.U. He was so astounded by
the coolness of Science that it acted on him like an endorphin.

"Well," I said, "remember not to pick your nose after you've had your
hands in the tank, and enjoy your lunch. I've got samples to take." I
turned around.

"You should come to work for Biotronics, S.T. You're far too
intelligent for what you're doing."

I turned back around because I was pissed off. He had no idea how
difficult... but then I noticed him looking sincere. He actually
wanted me to work with him.

The old school ties, the old dormitory ties, they're resilient. We'd
spent four years at B.U. talking at each other like this, and a couple
years more on opposite sides of the toxic barricades. Now he wanted me
to rearrange genes with him. I guess when you've come as far as he
had, you feel a little lonely. Way out there on the frontiers of
science, it hurts when a former classmate keeps firing rock salt into
your butt.

"We're working on a process you'd be very interested in," he
continued. "It's like the Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned."

"Dolmacher, party of four?" demanded the maitre d'.

"If you ever want to talk about it, I'm in the book. North Suburban.
Living in Medford now." Dolmacher backed away from me and into the
dining room. I just stared at him.

Up at our locker I picked up an empty picnic cooler. My deal with the
cook was that he'd fill it up with free ice if I told him a dirty
joke, a transaction that went smoothly. Then out and across the docks
to our little grease pit.

The tide was out so I had to use the rope ladder to get down into the
Zodiac. As soon as you drop below the level of the pier, the city and
the sun disappear and you're dangling in a jungle of algae-covered
pilings, like Tarzan sliding down a vine into a swamp.

It's not doing a Zodiac justice to call it an inflatable raft. A
Zodiac has design. It has hydrodynamics. It's made to go places. The
inflatable part is horseshoe-shaped. The bend of the horseshoe is in
front, and it's pointed; the prongs point backwards, tapering to
cones. The floor of the craft is made of heavy interlocking planks and
there's a transom in back, to keep the water out and to hold the
motor. If you look at the bottom of a Zodiac, it's not just flat. It's
got a hint of a keel on it for maneuverability.

Not a proper hull, though. Hull design is an advanced science. In the
days of sail it was as important to national security as aerodynamics
are now. A hull was a necessary evil: all that ship down under the
water gave you lots of drag but without it the rest of the ship
wouldn't float.

Then we invented outboard motors and all that science was made
irrelevant by raw power. You could turn a bathtub into a
high-performance speedboat by bolting a big enough motor on it. When
the throttle's up high, the impact of the water against the bottom of
the hull lifts it right up out of the water. It skims like a skipping
rock and who gives a fuck about hydrodynamics. When you throttle it
down, the vessel sinks into the water again and wallows like a hog.

This is the principle behind the Zodiac, as far as I can tell. You
take a vessel that probably weighs less than its own motor, you radio
the control tower at Logan Airport and you take off.

We had a forty-horse on this puppy - a donation - and I'd never dared
to throttle it up past about twenty-five percent of maximum. Remember
that a VW Bug has an engine with less than thirty horsepower. When you
hit running speed in this Zode, if the water's not too rough, the
entire boat rises from the water. The only wet part is the screw.

It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land, there's the Omni,
but all these slow cars get in the way. There's public transit - the T
- but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles
aren't bad. But on water nothing stops you, and there isn't anything
important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The
Harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of
water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.

Contrary to what every bonehead believes, the land surface has been
stretched out and expanded by civilization. Look at any downtown city:
what would be a tiny distance on a backpacking trip becomes a
transcontinental journey. You spend hours traveling just a few miles.
Your mental map of the city grows and stretches until things seem far
away. But get on a Zodiac, and the map snaps back into place like a
rubber sheet that has been pulled out of shape. Want to go to the
airport? Zip. It's right over there. Want to cross the river? Okay,
here we are. Want to get from the Common to B.U., two miles away,
during rush hour, right before a playoff game at Fenway Park? Most
people wouldn't even try. On a Zodiac, it's just two miles. Five
minutes. The real distance, the distance of Nature. I'm no stoned-out
naturehead with a twelve-string guitar, but that's a fact.

The Mercury was brand-new, not even broken in. Some devious flack at
the outboard motor company had noticed that our Zodiacs spent a lot of
time in front of TV cameras. So we get all our motors free now, in
exchange for being our extroverted selves. We wear them out, sink,
burn and break them; new ones materialize. I hooked up the fuel line,
pumped it up, and the motor caught on the first try. The stench of the
piers was sliced by exhaust. I dropped it to a tubercular idle,
shifted into forward, and started snaking out between the pilings. If
I wanted to commit suicide here, I could just twitch my hand and I'd
be slammed into a barnacled tree trunk at Mach 1.

Then out into a finger of water that ran between piers. The piers were
actually little piers attached to big piers, so out into a bigger
finger of water that ran between the big piers, then into the channel,
and from there to a tentacle of the Harbor that fed the channel.

At some point I was entitled to say that I had entered Boston Harbor,
the toilet of the Northeast. By shoving the motor over to one side I
could spin the Zode in tight rings and look up into the many
shit-greased sphincters of the Fair Lady on the Hill, Hub of the
Universe, Cradle of Crap, my hometown. Boston Harbor is my baby. There
are biologists who know more about its fish and geographers who have
statistics on its shipping, but I know more about its dark,
carcinogenic side than anyone. In four years of work, I've idled my
Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch
of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamn pipe that
empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and
some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their
secrets to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes
that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right
out of a factory, I'm betting that the pumpers have at least read the
EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the water line,
sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before
taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.

In a waterproof chest I keep a number of big yellow stickers: NOTICE.
THIS OUTFALL is BEING MONITORED ON A REGULAR BASIS BY GEE
INTERNATIONAL. IF IN VIOLATION OF EPA REGULATIONS, IT MAY BE PLUGGED
AT ANY TIME. FOR INFORMATION CALL: (then, scribbled into a blank
space, and always the same), SANGAMON TAYLOR (and our phone number).

Even I can't believe how many violators I catch with these stickers.
Whenever I find a pipe that's deliberately unmarked, whose owners
don't want to be found, I slap one of these stickers up nearby. Within
two weeks the phone rings.

"GEE," I say.

"Sangamon Taylor there?"

"He's in the John right now, can I have him call you back?"

"Uh, okay, yeah, I guess so."

"What did you want to talk to him about?"

"I'm calling about your sticker."

"Which one?"

"The one on the Island End River, about halfway up?"

"Okay." And I dutifully take their number, hang up, and dial right
back.

Ring. Ring. Click. "Hello, Chelsea Electroplating, may I help you?"

Case closed.

A few years of that and I owned this Harbor. The EPA and the DEQE
called me irresponsible on odd-numbered days and phoned me for vital
information on even-numbered ones. Every once in a while some agency
or politician would announce a million-dollar study to track down all
the crap going into the Harbor and I'd mail in a copy of my report.
Every year The Weekly published my list of the ten worst polluters:

(1)   Bostonians (feces)

(2-3)   Basco and Fotex, always fighting it out for number two, (you
name it)

(4-7)   Whopping defense contractors (various solvents)

(8-10)  Small but nasty heavy-metal dumpers like Derinsov Tanning and
various electroplaters.

The Boston sewage treatment system is pure Dark Ages. Most of the
items flushed down metropolitan toilets are quickly shot into the
Harbor, dead raw. If you go for a jog on Wollaston Beach, south of
town, when the currents are flavorful, you will find it glistening
with human turds. But usually they sink to the bottom and merge.

Today I was out on the Zodiac for two reasons. One: to get away from
the city and my job, just to sit out on the water. Two: Project
Lobster. Number one doesn't have to be explained to anyone. Number two
has been my work for the last six months or so.

Usually I do my sampling straight out of pipes. But no one's ever
satisfied. I tell them what's going in and they say, okay, where does
it end up? Because currents and tides can scatter it, while living
things can concentrate it.

Ideally I'd like to take a chart of the Harbor and draw a grid over
it, with points spaced about a hundred yards apart, then get a sample
of what's on the sea floor at each one of those points. Analysis of
each sample would show how much bad shit there was, then I'd know how
things were distributed.

In practice I can't do that. We just don't have the resources to get
sampling equipment down to the floor of the Harbor and back up again,
over and over.

But there's a way around any problem. Lobstermen work the Harbor.
Their whole business is putting sampling devices - lobster traps - on
the floor of the sea and then hauling them back up again carrying
samples - lobsters. I've got a deal with a few different boats. They
give me the least desirable parts of their catch, and I record where
they came from. Lobsters are somewhat mobile, more so than oysters but
less than fish. They pretty much stay in one zone of the Harbor. And
while they're there, they do a very convenient thing for me called
bioconcentration. They eat food and shit it out the other end, but
part of it stays with them, usually the worst part. A trace amount of,
say, PCBs in their environment will show up as a much higher
concentration in their livers. So when I get a lobster and figure out
what toxins it's carrying, I have a pretty good idea of what's on the
floor of the Harbor in its neighborhood.

Once I get my data into the computer, I can persuade it to draw
contour maps showing the dispersion pattern of each type of toxin. For
example, if I'm twisting Basco's dick at the moment, I'll probably
look at PCBs. So the computer draws all the land areas and blacks them
out. Then it begins to shade in the water areas, starting out in the
Atlantic, which is drawn in a beautiful electric blue. You don't have
to look at the legend to know that this water is pure. As we approach
Boston, the colors get warmer, and warmer. Most of the harbor is
yellow. In places we see rings of orange, deepening toward the center
until they form angry red boils clustered against the shore. Next to
each boil I write a caption: "Basco Primary Outfall." "Basco Temporary
Storage Facility." "Basco-owned Parcel (under EPA Investigation)."
"Parcel Owned by Basco Subsidiary (under EPA Investigation)."
Translate this into a 35-mm slide, take it to a public hearing, draw
the curtains and splash it up on a twenty-foot screen - wild, an
instant lynch mob. Then the lights come up and a brand-new Basco flack
comes out, fresh from B.U. or Northeastern, and begins talking about
eyedroppers in railway tank cars. Then his company gets lacerated by
the media.

This is the kind of thing I think about when buzzing around, looking
for Gallagher the lobsterman.

Sometimes I had this daydream where a big-time coke runner from Miami
got environmentally conscious and donated one of his Cigarette boats.
It wasn't going to happen - not even coke dealers were that rich. But
I thought about it, read the boating magazines, dreamed up ways to use
one. And right now on the channel between Charlestown and Eastie, two
miles north, I could see a thirty-one foot Cigarette just sitting
there on the water. It's kind of like what my Zodiac would look like
if it had been built by defense contractors: way too big, way too
fast, a hundred times too expensive. The larger models have a cabin in
front, but this didn't even have that comfort. It was open-cockpit,
made for nothing in the world but dangerous speed. I'd seen it
yesterday, too, sitting there doing nothing. I wondered if it would be
terribly self-important if I attributed its presence to mine. The
worst Fotex plant was up that way, and maybe they were anticipating a
sneak attack.

Implausible. If their security was that good, they'd know that our
assault ketch, the Blowfish, was off the coast of New Jersey, homing
in on poor unsuspecting Blue Kills. Without it we didn't have enough
Zodiacs, or divers, to stage a pipe-plugging raid on Fotex. So maybe
this was some rich person working on a suntan. But if he owned a boat
that could do seventy miles an hour, why didn't he take it off that
syphilitic channel? He was on the Mystic, for God's sake.

I caught up with the Scoundrel off the coast of Eastie, not far from
the artificial plateau that made up the airport. These guys were the
first to join Project Lobster, and hence my favorites. Initially none
of the lobstermen trusted me, afraid that I'd ruin their business with
my statements of doom. But when the Harbor got really bad, and people
started talking about banning all fish from the area, they started to
see I was on their side. A clean Harbor was in their own best
interests.

Gallagher should have been extra tough, because I had a tendency to
rag on the subject of Spectacle Island. This was not a true island but
a mound of garbage dumped in the Harbor by an ancestor of his, a
tugboat operator who'd been lucky enough to get the city's
garbage-hauling concession in the 1890s. But, as Rory explained many
times and loudly, those were the Charlestown Gallaghers, the rich,
arrogant, semi-Anglicized branch. Sometime back in the Twenties, some
Gallagher's nose had gotten splintered in a wedding brawl or
something, thus creating the rift between that branch and Rory's - the
Southie Gallaghers, the humble farmers of the sea.

"Attention all crew, we have a long-haired invironmintl at ten
o'clock, prepare to be boarded," Rory called, his Southie accent thick
as mustard gas. All these guys talked that way. Their "ar" sounds
could shatter reinforced concrete.

I'd been to a couple of games with them; we'd sit up there in the
bleachers and inhale watery beer and throw cigars to the late,
lamented Dave Henderson. They couldn't not be loud and boisterous, so
they gave me shit about my hair, which didn't even come down to my
collar. I could take a few minutes of this, but then I needed to go to
a nice sterile shopping mall and decompress.

"Aaaay, we got some beauties for you today, Cap'n Taylor, some real
skinny oily ones.".

"Going to the game tonight, Rory?"

"A bunch of us are, yeah. Why, you wanna go?"

"Can't. Going to Jersey tomorrow."

"Jersey! Sheesh!" All the buys on the boat went "sheesh!" They
couldn't believe anyone would be stupid enough to go to that place.

They tossed me a couple of half-dead lobsters and showed me where
they'd trapped them on the chart. I jotted the locations down and put
the bugs on ice. Later, when I got back, I'd have to dismantle them
and run the analysis.

We traded speculation on what Sam Horn might do against the Yanks.
These guys were Negro-haters all, and their heroes were gigantic black
men with clubs, a contradiction I wasn't brave enough to point out.

I went to handle the most depressing part of my job. Poor people get
tired of welfare cheese after a while and start looking for other
sources of protein. For example, fish. But poor people can't charter a
boat to go out and catch swordfish, so they fish off docks. That means
they're looking for bottom fish. Anyone who knows about Boston Harbor
gets queasy just at the mention of bottom fish, but these people were
worried about kwashiorkor, not cancer. Three-quarters of them were
Southeast Asian.

So a month ago I'd typed up a highly alarming paragraph about what
these particular bottom fish would do to your health, especially to
the health of unborn children. Tried to make it simple: no chemical
terms, no words like "carcinogenicity." Took it to the Pearl, which is
my hangout, and persuaded Hoa to translate it to Vietnamese for me.
Took it to an interpreter at City Hospital and got her to translate it
into Cambodian. Had a friend do it in Spanish. Put them all together
on a sign, sort of a toxic Rosetta Stone, made numerous copies and
then made a few midnight trips to the piers where they like to do this
fishing. We put the signs up in prominent places, bolted them down
with lag screws, epoxied those screws into place and then chopped the
heads off.

And when I came around the curve of the North End, bypassing a few
hundred stalled cars on Commercial Street, riding the throttle high
because I had miles to go before I'd sleep, I saw the same old pier,
all hairy with fishing poles. It looked like one of those shadows you
see under a microscope, with cilia sticking out all over to gather in
food, healthy or otherwise.

Somehow I didn't figure these guys were sportsmen. They weren't of the
catch-and-release school, like those geezers on TV. They were
survivalists in a toxic wilderness.

The old etiquette dies hard. I grew up in a family that liked to fish,
and I couldn't bring myself to break up the party. I backed off on the
throttle when I was far away, and coasted to a safe distance where I
wouldn't scare off any of those precious shit-eaters under the pier.
Circled it slowly, looking at the fishermen, and they looked back at
me. The name of my organization was writ large in orange tape on the
side of the Zodiac. I wondered if they were reading it, and making the
connection with those threatening signs just above their heads.

They were Vietnamese and black, with a few Hispanics. The blacks I
wasn't as worried about. Not because they were black but because they
seemed to fish for recreation. They'd been fishing here forever. You
saw old black guys everywhere in Boston where there was water, sitting
there in their old fedoras, staring at the water, waiting. Never saw
them catch anything. But the Vietnamese went at it with a passion born
of long-term protein deficiency.

There was kind of a ripple of interest up there on a corner of the
pier and the crowd parted, leaving one Vietnamese in the middle. They
were getting their lines and poles out of his way so he could reel one
in. A flopping, good-sized flounder emerged, seeming to levitate
because you couldn't see the line. Headed for a family wok in Boston.
It wouldn't yield much meat, but the concentration of PCBs and heavy
metals in that flesh would be thousands of times what it was in the
water around us.

I glumly watched it ascend, thinking, these guys must use heavy-duty
lines, because they had to support the whole weight of the fish. You
didn't have a chance to net it in the water. The lucky angler made a
grab for his prize and our eyes snagged each other for a second. I'd
seen this guy before; he was a busboy at the Pearl..

What the fuck. Cranked up the Zode, twisted it, blew a crater in the
Harbor and wheeled it around. Flounder be damned. When it came to this
issue, GEE was fucked both ways. Try to stop them from poisoning
themselves, and you look like you're interfering with a band of spunky
immigrants. But now I had a face, at least. There wasn't any reason to
hound this particular busboy, but I had good relations with Hoa and
maybe I could get in touch with these people through him. Maybe GEE
could run a free fishing charter out into the Atlantic, take these
people out where they could catch some real fish. But pause to
consider what the liability insurance would cost on that sucker.

Then, out of nowhere, it hit me: what I needed was some bitterly cold
beer and really loud, brain-crushing rock and roll. Maybe some nitrous
to go with that. I lit a cigar, cranked the Mercury up into one loud,
long power chord, and headed for our naval base.

 


 

5

BARTHOLOMEW WAS LURKING in his van in front of GEE when I got back. He
started leaning on the horn as soon as he spotted me climbing up out
of the T. All around the square, defense contractors flocked to their
metallized windows to see if their BMWs were being violated, then
drifted back, unable to localize the sound. I sauntered on purpose,
pretended to ignore him, climbed the stairs to get my bike. I should
have known that if I wanted recreation, my roommate would be thinking
along the same lines. That is why, despite many kinds of
incompatibility, we lived together: our minds ran in parallel ruts.

"Hey, you!" Tricia shouted, as I unlocked my bike. "That ain't yours."

"I'm fuckin' out of here," I said.

"Jim called," she said coyly, so I stepped just barely inside the
door."What?"

"They're ready and waiting."

"He found a beachhead?"

"Yeah." Reading from a note, now: "Dutch Marshes State Park, ten miles
north of Blue Kills. Take Garden State Parkway south to the Route 88
exit ... well, this goes on for a while. Here you go."

"Don't want it."

"Sangamon," she said in her flirtatious whine, which had been known to
put men in the mind of taking their clothes off. "I spent ten minutes
taking this down. And I don't like taking dictation."

"I'll never understand why people give out directions, or ask for
them. That's what fucking road maps are for."

Outside, Bart blew a few licks on his horn.

"Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's
half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk. I've
got maps of that fucking state an inch thick."

"Okay." Tricia was getting into some serious pouting; I bit the inside
of my cheek, hard.

"Just tell me what time."

"He didn't say. You know, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Just follow the
barbecue smoke."

"Ten-four on that. And now I truly am gone."

"Here's some mail."

"Thanks. But it's all junk."

"Don't I get to kiss the departing warrior?"

"Feels too weird, in a room that's bugged."

Threw my bike into Bartholomew's big black van and we headed west.
Before going to work this morning, he'd had enough foresight to stop
by our living-room canister and fill a couple of Hefty bags with
nitrous, so I moved back behind the curtain and jackhammered my brain.
Bart bragged that he could pass out on the stuff, but when that
happens you let go of the Hefty and it all escapes.

He turned down the stereo a hair and screamed, "Hey, pop those suckers
and we can have another Halloween party."

Last Halloween we had rigged up nitrous and oxygen tanks in one of our
rooms, sealed the doors and windows, and created, shall we say, a
marvelous party atmosphere. That was the first night I ever slept with
a nonprint journalist. But it was an expensive way to seduce someone.

By the time we'd poked through Harvard Square, I was up in the front
seat again, watching the colonial houses roll by.

"Yankees," Bart said.

Translation: "The Yankees are playing the Red Sox on TV tonight; let's
stay at the Arsenal for the entire duration of the game."

"Can't," I said. "Have to do dinner with this frogman at the Pearl."

"French guy?"

"Frogman. A scuba diver. He's going on the Blue Kills thing. Don't
worry, you hold down the fort and I'll ride over on my bike."

"You got a light on that thing?"

I laughed. "Since when are you the type to worry about that?"

"It's dangerous, man. You're invisible."

"I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent
clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver
who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption."

Sometimes it's nice to get away from the East Beirut ethnic atmosphere
of the city and hang out in a bar where all the toilets flush on the
first try and no one has ever died. We go to a place in Watertown,
right across the river from our house, where there's a bar called the
Arsenal. Character-free, as you'd expect in a shopping mall. But it's
possible for a bar to have too much character, and there were a lot of
bars like that in Boston. Right across the mall was a games arcade,
which made the Arsenal even better. Into the bar for a beer, across
the mall for a few games of ski-ball, back for another beer, and so
on. You could eat up a pretty happy, stupid evening that way.

We ate up a couple of hours. I won about three dozen ski-ball tickets.
Checked through the junk mail. I get a lot of junk mail because I own
stock in hundreds of corporations - usually one share apiece. That
puts me on the shareholder mailing lists, which can be useful. It's a
hassle; I have to do it under as assumed name, through a P.O. box,
paid for with money orders, so people can't ambush me on TV for some
kind of conflict of interest.

I leafed through Fotex's annual report; a lot about their shiny new
cameras, but nothing at all about toxic waste.

Also picked up some corporate news from a newsletter: it seemed that
Dolmacher had a new boss. The founder/president of Biotronics had
"resigned" and been replaced by a transplant from the Basco ranks.
There were photos of the founder - young, skinny, facial hair - and
the new guy, a Joe Palooka type in yuppie glasses. Typical story. The
people who founded Biotronics, bright kids from MIT and B.U., were
chucked out to make room for some chip-off-the-old-monolith.

Bartholomew started a long-distance flirtation with some pert little
sociology-major type who'd probably driven her Sprint over here from
Sweetvale College, looking for Harvard students or chip designers, but
that romance died as soon as she noticed he was covered with something
that looked remarkably like dirt. Bart worked in a retread business.
All day long he picked up tires and flung them onto heaps, and by five
o'clock he was vulcanized.

When it was time, I hauled my bike out of Bart's van and crossed the
river into Brighton - a kind of small Irish panhandle that sticks way
out to the west of Boston proper - then followed back streets and
sidewalks due east until I was in Allston, part of the same panhandle,
but scruffier and more complicated. For example, here lived many of
the Asian persuasion. If you judged from restaurants alone, you'd
conclude that the Chinese dominated, that the Thais were catching up
fast and that the Vietnamese ran a distant third. But I don't think
that's true at all. The Vietnamese are just more discriminating when
it comes to starting restaurants. The Chinese and the Thais, and for
that matter the Greeks, print up menus automatically as soon as they
get into the city limits; it's like a brainstem function. But the
Vietnamese tend to be hard-luck cases to begin with, and they have a
fastidious, catlike attitude about their chow. Maybe they got it from
the French. To them, Chinese is gooey and greasy while Thai is
monotonous - all that lemon grass and coconut milk. The Vietnamese
cook for keeps.

Hoa's location was awful. In Boston, where landlords are as likely to
carry gasoline cans as paint cans, all other buildings like this had
long ago been reduced to smoking holes. It was a solo Italianate
monster that rose like a tombstone beside the Mass Pike, facing
Harvard Street. Parking was no problem, though there was some question
as to whether your car would still be there when you got out. The
inside was bare and bright as a gymnasium, containing a dozen
mismatched tables with orange oilcloth thumbtacked onto them. The
decor was beer signs, depressing photographs of old Saigon and framed
restaurant reviews from various newspapers, favoring phrases like
"this Pearl is a diamond in the rough" and "surprising discovery by
the Pike" and "worth the trip out of your way."

For the first couple months I had the feeling I was supporting this
place singlehandedly by insisting that we hold large GEE luncheon
meetings here. Then, after those reviews came out, it was "discovered"
by Harvard Biz hopefuls who came to worship at the shrine of Hoa's
entrepreneurial spirit. So I no longer felt like Hoa's kids would go
hungry if I didn't eat there three times a week. But when people
hemmed and hawed about where to eat, the Pearl was still my choice.

I carried my bike inside the front door, a privilege earned by steady
patronage. Hoa and his brother thought it was outlandish that I, a
relatively well-to-do American, rode around on a bike. I might as well
have insisted on wearing a conical hat and black pajamas. They drove
cars exclusively, scabrous beaters that got stolen or burned several
times a year.

Once through the vestibule, I checked out my fellow diners. The man in
circular glasses, with a one-inch-thick alligator briefcase? No, this
was not the GEE frogman. Nor the five Asians, efficiently snarfing
down something that wasn't on the menu. The three blue-haired Brighton
Irish ladies, still flabbergasted by the lack of handles on the
teacups? Not likely. But the mid-thirties unit, seated under a blurry
photo of the statue of the marine, hair to his shoulders, Nicaraguan
peasant necklace, bicycle helmet on the table, now this was a GEE
frogman. Though at the moment he was interrogating Hoa's brother, in
half-forgotten Vietnamese, about what kind of tea this was.

"Hey, man," he said when he saw me, "I recognize you from the '60
Minutes', thing. How you doing?"

"Tom Akers, right?" I sat down and moved his bike helmet to the floor.

"Yeah, that's right. Hey, this is a great place. You hang out here?"

"Constantly."

"What's good?"

"All of it. But start with the Imperial Rolls."

"Kind of pricey."

"They're the best. All the other Vietnamese places wrap their rolls in
egg-roll dough. So it's just like a Chinese roll. Here they use rice
paper."

"Outstanding!"

"It's so delicate that most restaurants won't fuck with it. But Hoa's
wife has the touch, man, she can do it with her toes."

"How's their fish stuff? I don't eat red meat."

My recommendation - Ginger Fish - got stuck on the way out. It was a
mound of unidentifiable white fish in sauce.

I was ashamed to be thinking this. Hoa, the man who barely broke even
on his egg rolls because of the rice paper, wouldn't serve bottom fish
to his customers. I am, I reconsidered, an asshole.

"It's all good," I said. "It's all good food."

Tom Akers was a freelance diver, working out of Seattle, who did GEE
jobs whenever he had a chance. When I needed some extra scuba divers,
the national office got hold of him and flew him out. That's standard
practice. We avoid taking volunteers, since anyone who volunteers for
a gig is likely to be overzealous. We prefer to send out invitations.

Normally we'd have flown him straight to Jersey, but he wanted to
visit some friends in Boston anyway. He'd been hanging out with them
for a few days, and tonight he was going to crash at my place so we
could get a fast start in the morning.

"Good to see you again," Hoa was saying, having snuck up on me while I
was feeling guilty. He moved soundlessly, without displacing any air.
He was in his forties, tall for a Vietnamese, but gaunt. His brother
was shorter and rounder, but his English was poor and I couldn't
pronounce his name. And I can't remember a name I can't pronounce.

"How are you doing, Hoa?"

"You both ride your bike?" He held his hands out and grabbed imaginary
handlebars, grinning indulgently, eyeing Tom's helmet. Double
disbelief: not one, but two grown Americans riding bicycles.

As it turned out, he wanted to encourage Tom to move his bike inside
where it wouldn't get ripped off. There wasn't room in the vestibule
so Tom put it around back just inside the kitchen door.

"Lot of activity out in the alley, man."

"Vietnamese?"

"I guess so."

"They're always coming to the back door for steamed rice. Hoa gives it
out free, or for whatever they can pay."

"All right!"

We had a five-star meal for about a buck per star. I had a Bud and Tom
had a Singha beer from Thailand. I used to do that - order Mexican
beers in Mexican places, Asian beers in Asian joints. Then Debbie and
Bart and I sat down one hot afternoon and she administered a
controlled taste-test of about twelve different imported brands. It
was a double-blind test - when we were done, both of us were blind -
but we concluded that there wasn't any difference. Cheap beer was
cheap beer. No need to pay an extra buck for authenticity.
Furthermore, a lot of those cheap importeds got strafed in the taste
test. We hated them.

Hoa's brother was our waiter. That was unusual, but Hoa had his hands
full babysitting the three biddies. Also, he had to chew out an
employee in the back room; fierce twanging Vietnamese cut through the
hiss of the dishwashers. Tom liked the food, but got full in a hurry.

"You want doggy bag for that?" Hoa's brother said.

"Aw, sure, why not."

"Good." He eyed us for a minute, fighting with his shyness. "I hate
when people come, eat little, then I got throw food in dumpster. Make
me very mad. Lot of people could use. Like the blacks. They could use.
So I get mad sometime you know, and talk to them. Sometime, I talk
about Ethiopia."

He left us to be astounded. "Man," Tom said, "that guy's really into
it."

The busboy, emerging from the back, had obviously been at the quiet
end of Hoa's tantrum. I guessed he'd spent most of his life in this
country; he had an openly sullen look on his face, and loped and
sauntered and jived between the tables. When he came out of the
kitchen, we locked eyes again, for the second time that day. Then he
glanced away and his lip curled.

There's a certain look people give me when they've decided I'm just an
overanxious duck-squeezer. That was the look. To get through to this
guy I'd somehow have to prove my manhood. I'd have to retain my cool
in some kind of life-threatening crisis. Unfortunately such events are
hard to stage.

We were staging one in Blue Kills, but it wouldn't make the Boston
news. That was part of the GEE image: to take chances, to be tough and
brave, so that people wouldn't give us the look that Hoa's busboy was
giving me.

He didn't know that he was getting fucked coming and going. Basco and
a couple of other companies had rained toxic waste on his native land
for years. Now, here in America, he was eating the same chemicals,
from the same company, off the floor of the Harbor. And Basco was
making money on both ends of the deal.

"What're you thinking about?" Tom asked.

"I hate it when people ask me that fucking question," I said. But I
said it nicely.

"You look real intense."

"I'm thinking about goddamn Agent Orange," I said.

"Wow," he said, softly. "That's what I was thinking about."

Tom followed me back across Allston-Brighton and home. I had to ride
slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I
assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude
is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk
the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a
bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if
you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in
order for you to be safe - to see you, and to give a fuck - you've
already blown it.

Tom mumbled a few things about paranoia, and then I was too far ahead
to hear him. We had a nice ride through the darkness. On those bikes
we were weak and vulnerable but invisible, elusive, aware of
everything within a two-block radius. A couple of environmental
extremists in a toxic world, headed for a Hefty bag and a warm berth
in the mother ship.

 


 

6

WE INVADED the territory of the Swiss Bastards shortly before dawn. At
sea we had three Zodiacs, two frogmen, a guy in a moon suit, and our
mother ship, the Blowfish. We had a few people on land, working out of
the Omni and a couple of rented vehicles. Our numbers were swelled by
members of the news media, mostly from Blue Kills and environs but
with two crews from New York City.

At about three in the morning, Debbie had to shake a tail put on us by
the Swiss Bastards' private detectives. There was nothing subtle about
the tail, they were just trying to intimidate. Tanya, our other Boston
participant, was driving the car and Debbie was lying down in the back
seat. Tanya led the tail onto a twisting road that wasn't sympathetic
to the Lincoln Town Car following them. She thrashed the Omni for five
minutes or so, putting half a mile between herself and the private
dicks, then threw a 180 in the middle of the road - a skill she'd
learned on snowy Maine roads last February while we were driving up to
Montreal to get some French fries. Debbie jumped out and crouched in
the ditch. Tanya took off and soon passed the Lincoln going the other
way. The private dicks in the Lincoln were forced to make an
eleven-point turn across the road, then peeled out trying to catch up
with her.

Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain
bicycle we'd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen
Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. She
rode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country,
until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the
other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss
Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary
that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was
surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big,
heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie
locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss
Bastards' chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates
to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place
on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could
open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We aren't careless
fanatics and we don't like to look as though we are.

I was on the Blowfish, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the
skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.

Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and
forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida,
up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great
Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks
loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break
loose, they'll bring in professional irritants, like me.

Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity
seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the
masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so
that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of
how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot
of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.

Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly
because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing
is toxics, not nukes or mammals. There's no direct action you can take
to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is
just too fucking nasty. I don't want to get beat up over a baby seal.
But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic
criminals. You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated
actions, what the media like to describe as "military precision."

This crew doesn't like anything military. In the Sixties, they would
have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing
bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical
background, not because they're dumb but because they hate rigid,
discipline thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate
tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. They'd survived a
dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their
Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in Antarctica, established a
beachhead on the Siberian coast. They could do anything, and they
would if I told them to; but I'd rather they enjoyed the gig.

"These people here are environmental virgins," I said. We were sitting
around on deck, eating tofu-and-nopales omelets. It was a warm, calm,
Jersey summer night and the sky was starting to lose its darkness and
take on a navy-blue glow. "They think toxic waste happens in other
places. They're shocked about Bhopal and Times Beach, but it's just
beginning to dawn on them that they might have a problem here. The
Swiss Bastards are sitting fat and happy on that ignorance. We're
going to come in and splatter them all over the map."

Crew members exchanged somber glances and shook their heads. These
people were seriously into their nonviolence and refused to take
pleasure in my use of the word "splatter."

"Okay, I'm sorry. That's going a little far. The point is that this is
a company town. Everybody works at that chemical factory. They like
having jobs. It's not like Buffalo where everyone hates the chemical
companies to begin with. We have to establish credibility here."

"Well, I forgot to bring my three-piece suit, man," said one of the
antisplatter faction.

"That's okay. I brought mine." I do, in fact, have a nice three-piece
suit that I always wear in combination with a dead-fish tie and a pair
of green sneakers splattered with toxic wastes. It's always a big hit,
especially at GEE fundraisers and in those explosively tense corporate
boardrooms. "They're expecting, basically, people who look like you."
I pointed to the hairiest of the Blowfish crew. "And they're expecting
us to act like flakes and whine a lot. So we have to act before we
whine. We can't give them an excuse to pass us off as duck squeezers."

There was a certain amount of passive-aggressive glaring directed my
way; I was asking these people to reverse their normal approach. But I
was directing this gig and they'd do what I asked.

"As usual, if you don't like the plan, you can just hang out, or go
into town or whatever. But I'll need as many enthusiasts as I can get
for this one."

"I'm into it," said a voice from the galley. It was Arty, short for
Artemis, author of the omelets, the best Zodiac jockey in the
organization. Naturally she was into it; it was a Zodiac-heavy
operation, it was exciting, it was commando-like. Artemis was even
younger than me, and military precision didn't come with all the
emotional baggage for her that it did for the middle-aged Blowfish
crew.

At 4:00 A.M., Artemis powered up her favorite Zode and prominently
roared off, heading for some dim lights about half a mile away. The
lights belonged to a twenty-foot coast guard boat that was assigned to
keep an eye on us. It happens that boats of that size don't have
cooking facilities, so Artemis had whipped up a couple of extra
omelets, put them in a cooler to keep them warm and was headed out to
give these guys breakfast. She took off flashing, glowing and smoking
like a UFO, and within a couple of minutes we could hear her greeting
the coast guards with an enthusiasm that was obscene at that time of
the morning. They greeted her right back. They knew one another from
previous Blowfish missions, and she liked to flirt with them over the
radio. To them she was a legend, like a mermaid.

That was when Tom and I took off in one of the other Zodes. This one
had a small, well-muffled engine, and we'd stripped off all the orange
tape and anything else that was easy to see in the dark.

The Blowfish was three miles off the coast and maybe five miles south
of the toxic site that had just been locked up by Debbie and Tanya.
Jim waited fifteen minutes, so the coast guards could eat and we could
slip away, then cranked up the Blowfish's huge Danish one-cylinder
diesel: whoom whoom whoom whoom. We could easily hear it from the Zode
and if anyone ashore was listening, they could probably hear it too.
Normally, for environmental reasons, Jim used the sails, but this was
right before dawn and there wasn't any wind. Besides, we were aiming
for military precision here.

Around 6:00 we heard them break radio silence with a lot of fake
traffic between Blowfish and GEE-1 and GEE-2 and Tainted Meat, which
was my current code name, and loose talk about banners and smoke
bombs. We knew that the rent-a-dicks were monitoring that frequency.
Meanwhile, Tanya was in Blue Kills, trailing a parade of Lincoln Town
Cars, rousting the media crews from their motel rooms, handing out
xeroxed maps and press releases.

The import of the press releases was that we were mightily pissed off
about the toxic marsh north of town. You know, the one that two
Zodiacs were converging on at this very moment. I was imagining it:
Artemis undoubtedly in the lead, spiky hair slicing the wind,
thrashing the morning surf at about forty miles an hour, as some
lesser Zode pilot desperately tried to keep up with her. She'd been
through a special GEE course in Europe where she'd learned how to
harass two-hundred-foot, waste-dumping vessels, dipping in and out of
their bow wave without getting sucked under. She knew how to massage a
big roller with her Mercury, how to slide up and down the troughs
without going airborne.

We were listening too, but we already knew what was going on. The
whole flotilla was headed for the estuary. There was nothing the coast
guard could do except watch, because there's nothing illegal about
riding a boat up a river. By now, the Swiss Bastards would have
dispatched all available rent-a-cops and rent-a-dicks to the scene,
ordering them to drive into that toxic waste dump and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder along the shoreline to prevent the GEE invasion
forces from establishing a beachhead.

When they arrived, pushing through the horde of media, they would find
the gate impregnably locked. They would find, as they always did, that
no boltcutter in the world had jaws that opened wide enough to cut
through a Kryptonite lock. They would then find that their hacksaws
were dulled useless by the tempered steel. If they were exceedingly
bright, they would get a blowtorch and heat the metal enough to
destroy its temper; then they could hacksaw it, and, after a few
hours, get inside their own dump. Meanwhile, the cameras would be
rolling, as would the GEE demonstration, unmolested, on the other side
of the transparent fences. Unless, in full view of the NYC minicams,
they wanted to send rent-a-cops clambering over their own fences, or
chop them up with boltcutters.

Tanya and Debbie had parked the Omni right in front and were
propagandizing with a bullhorn. Listening to the radio, I could
occasionally make out a word or two of what they were saying.
Basically they were encouraging everyone to stay cool - always a major
part of our gigs, especially when state troopers were present.

Riding in one of the Zodiacs was a man dressed up in a moonsuit, one
of those dioxinproof numbers with the goggles and the facemasks.
Nothing looks scarier on camera. This Zodiac was about three inches
from the shore - no trespassing had yet been committed. He had some
primitive sampling equipment mounted on long poles, so that he could
reach into the dump and poke around pseudoscientifically.

In the other Zodiac was a guy in scuba gear, who, as soon as they
arrived, jumped into the water and disappeared. Every few minutes he
would resurface and hand a bottle full of ugly brown water to Artemis.
She would take it, wearing gloves of course, and hand him an empty.
Then he would disappear again.

They hated it when we did this. It just drove them wild. From previous
run-ins with me, they knew the organization now had some chemical
expertise, that we knew what we were talking about. Neither the guy in
the moon suit nor the diver ever showed his face, so they didn't know
which one was Sangamon Taylor. This sampling wasn't just for show, or
so they thought. All of this shit was going to be analyzed, and
embarrassing facts were going to be, shall we say, splattered across
the newspapers.

That had started the day before, with an article in the sports section
by well-respected journalist/sportsman, Red Grooten, who detailed,
with surprising sophistication, the effects of this swamp's toxins on
sports fishing. Next to it had been a shocking picture of a dead
flounder. GEE authorities were quoted as speculating that this entire
estuary might have to be closed to fishing.

In half an hour, the Blowfish would pull into view, and earnest GEE
employees would begin examining the river-banks downstream for signs
of toxicity. If they were lucky they'd find a two-headed duck. Even if
they found nothing, the fact that they went looking would be reported.

Tom and I were converging, slowly and quietly, on the real objective.

 


 

7

MUCH OF NEW JERSEY'S COAST is protected from the ocean by a long
skinny barrier beach that runs a mile or two offshore. In some places
it joins to the mainland, in some it's wide and solid, and in other
places (off Blue Kills, for example) it peters out into islands or
sandbars.

"Kill" is Dutch for "creek." What we have here is short, fat river
that spreads out into a network of distributaries and marshes when it
reaches the sea. The kills are braided together along an estuary
that's supposed to be a wildlife refuge.

The estuary was north of us. The town of Blue Kills and the little
principality of Blue Kills Beach were built on higher and dryer ground
on its south side. The whole area was semi protected from the Atlantic
by a dribble of isles and sandbars. We were out on the toxic lagoon
enclosed behind them.

I'd been studying my LANDSAT infrared photos so I knew where to find a
shrub- and tree-covered island pretty close to our target, about a
mile off Blue Kills Beach. We beached the Zodiac among the usual
clutter left behind by teen beer-chugging expeditions. Tom checked his
gear and climbed into the Darth Vader Suit.

Normally divers wear wet suits, which are thick and porous. Water gets
through them, the body warms the water up, they insulate you. But you
wouldn't be caught dead wearing something like that when you are
screwing around with toxic waste. So the Darth Vader Suit was built
around a drysuit, which is waterproof. I'd added a facemask made from
diving goggles, old inner tubes, a patching kit, and something called
Tennis Shoe Repair Goo. When you wrestled it down over your face, the
scuba mouthpiece fit into the proper orifice and there was kind of a
one-way valve over your nose so you could breathe out. When it was put
on correctly, it would protect you from what you were swimming
through, at least for a little while.

Tom didn't like drysuits but he wasn't arguing. Before he put it on,
we protected the parts of his skin that would be uncomfortably close
to leaks or seams in the Darth Vader Suit. There's a silicone sealant
that's made for this kind of thing - Liquid Skin. Smear it on and
you're semiprotected. The suit goes on over that. We equipped him with
a measuring tape, a scuba notepad, and an underwater 8-mm video
camera.

"Just one thing. What's coming out of this sucker?"

"Amazing things. They're making dyes and pigments back in there. So
you have your solvents. You have your metals. And lots of weird, weird
phthalates and hydrazines."

"Meaning what?"

"Don't drink it. And when you're done, take a nice swim out here,
where the water's cleaner."

"This kind of shit always bugs me."

"Look at it this way. A lot of toxins are absorbed through the lungs.
But you've got a clean air supply in those tanks. A lot more get in
through your skin. But there's not enough solvents in that diffuser, I
think, to melt the suit."

"That's what they told us about Agent Orange."

"Shit." There was no reason for me to be astonished. I just hadn't
thought of it before. "You got sprayed with that stuff?"

"Swam through the shit."

"You were a SEAL?"

"Demolition. But the Viet Cong didn't have much of a navy so it was
mostly blue-collar maintenance. You know, cleaning dead buffaloes out
of intake pipes."

"Well, this stuff isn't like Agent Orange. No dioxin involved here."

"Okay. You've got your paranoia and I've got mine."

We were being paranoid. I'd already admitted it. After our midnight
ride through Brighton he had a pretty good idea of how my mind worked.

"I don't care if they see me checking out their pipe on the surface,
Tom. I don't even care if they recognize me. But if they see a diver,
that's a giveaway. Then they know they're in trouble. So just bear
with me."

So he climbed into the water and I towed him, submerged, to a place
where the water turned black. Then I cut the motor. He thumped on the
bottom of the Zode.

I gave him a minute to get clear, then restarted the motor and just
idled back and forth for a few minutes. I already had pretty good
maps, but this was a chance to embellish them, note down clumps of
trees, docking facilities, hidden sandbars, and media-support areas.
About half a mile south was a public pier belonging to a state park;
then, moving north, there was a chainlink fence running down to the
water, separating park land from the Swiss Bastards' right-of-way. A
few hundred feet past that was another fence and then some private
property, some old retired-fishermen's homes.

The Swiss Bastards' right-of-way was deceptively wooded. When the wind
came up a little, the trees sighed and almost covered the rush-hour
roar of the parkway. Just out of curiosity, I took the Zode closer to
shore and scanned the trees with binoculars. One of the rent-a-cops
loitering back there was giving himself away by his cigarette smoke.
Or, knowing the habits of rent-a-cops, maybe it was oregano somebody
had sold him as reefer.

I knew what direction the pipe ran, so I could follow it inland using
my compass, trace its path under some swampy woods and crackerbox
developments, out to the parkway, a couple of miles inland. Then a
forest of pipes rose up behind the real forest. Whenever the wind blew
the right way, I got a whiff of organic solvents and gaseous
byproducts. The plant was just coming alive with the morning shift,
the center of the traffic noise. Tomorrow I'd make a phone call and
shut it all down.

The big lie of American capitalism is that corporations work in their
own best interests. In fact they're constantly doing things that will
eventually bring them to their knees. Most of these blunders involve
toxic chemicals that any competent chemist should know to be
dangerous. They pump these things into the environment and don't even
try to protect themselves. The evidence is right there in public,
almost as if they'd printed up signed confessions and sprinkled them
out of airplanes. Sooner or later, someone shows up in a Zodiac and
points to that evidence, and the result is devastation far worse than
what a terrorist, a Boone, could manage with bombs and guns. All the
old men within twenty miles who have come down with tumors become
implacable enemies. All the women married to them, all the mothers of
damaged children, and even those of undamaged ones. The politicians
and the news media trample each other in their haste to pour hellfire
down on that corporation. The transformation can happen overnight and
it's easy to bring about. You just have to show up and point your
finger.

No chemical crime is perfect. Chemical reactions have inputs and
outputs and there's no way to make those outputs disappear. You can
try to eliminate them with another chemical reaction, but that's going
to have outputs also. You can try to hide them, but they have this way
of escaping. The only rational choice is not to be a chemical crook in
the first place. Become a chemical crook and you're betting your
future on the hope that there aren't any chemical detectives gunning
for you. That assumption isn't true anymore.

I don't mean the EPA, the chemical Keystone Kops. Offices full of
mediocre chemists, led by the lowest bottom-feeders of them all:
political appointees. Expecting them to do anything controversial is
like expecting a hay fever sufferer to harvest a field of ragweed. For
God's sake, they wouldn't even admit that chlordane was dangerous. And
if they don't have the balls to take preventive measures, punitive
action doesn't even enter their minds. The laws are broken so
universally that they don't know what to do. They don't even look for
violators.

I do look. Last year I went on an afternoon's canoe trip in central
Jersey, taking some sample tubes with me. I went home, ran the stuff
through my chromatograph, and the result was over a million dollars in
fines levied against several offenders. The supply-side economists
made it this way: created a system of laissez-faire justice, with
plenty of niches for aggressive young entrepreneurs, like me.

A rubber-coated hand broke the water ahead of me and I cut the motor.
Tom's head emerged next to the Zodiac and he peeled back the Darth
Vader mask to talk. His mouth was wide open and grimacing; he was
surprised. "That is one big motherfucker."

"How long?"

"It's so long I can't swim to the end of it. I'll need a lift."

"And there's black shit coming out of it?"

"Right." Tom placed the little video camera on the floor of the Zode.
I picked it up, rewound the tape, put the camera to my face and
started to replay the tape through the little screen in the
viewfinder. "Some shots of the diffusers," Tom explained. "Each one is
three and a quarter inches in diameter. The crossbar is three-eighths
inch."

"Nice job."

"Wasn't doing much when I showed up, then it started really barfing
that stuff out."

"Morning shift. You missed the rush hour when you were down there.
Let's see."

Through the viewfinder I was looking at the smooth, unnatural curve of
a large pipe on the seafloor. It was covered with rust, and the rust
with hairy green crap. The camera zoomed in on a black hole in the
side of the pipe; understandably, nothing was growing near that.
Cutting across the center of the hole was a crossbar.

"This remind you of anything?"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Looks like the Greek letter theta. You know? The ecology symbol." I
held up a press release bearing GEE's logo and he laughed.

"I guess this means to hell with the secrecy fetish," I said. "Hang on
and I'll take you out farther."

We worked our way offshore about a hundred yards at a time, then, and
when we got bored and started thinking about lunch, a quarter mile at
a time. The slope of the bottom was gentle and the water never got
deeper than about fifty feet. I'd motor him out, following the pipe
with my compass, and he'd drop off and swim down to see if it was
still there. When Tom finally found the end of it, we were pretty
close to our starting place on the little shrub-covered island. The
fucking thing was a mile long.

I hadn't worked with him before, but Tom was good. When you dive for a
living I guess it pays to be precise. I knew some other GEE divers who
would have said. "Whoa, man, it's a big fucking pipe, it's, like,
about this wide." Tom was a fanatic, though, and came up with pages of
measurements and diagrams.

We hung out on the island for an hour, savored a couple of beers, and
talked it over.

"The holes are all the same size," he said. "Spaced a little over
fifty feet apart. That tape measure is just an eighteen-footer, so I
had to be kind of crude."

"All on the same side of the pipe?"

"Alternating sides."

"So if the thing is about a mile long ... that works out to something
like a hundred three-inch holes we have to plug up."

"It's a big job, man. Why did they build it that way, anyhow? Why not
have your basic huge pipe, just barfing the stuff out?"

"They used to think this was the answer. Diffusion. There's a strong
current up the shore here."

"I noticed."

"The same current that created this island we're on, and all the
barrier beaches. They figured if they could spread their pollution out
across a mile of that current, it would more or less disappear.
Besides, a big barfing pipe is mediapathic."

"And you're sure it's illegal?"

"In about six different ways. That's why I want to close it down."

"Think you can bluff them?"

"What do you mean?"

"Call them up, say, 'This is GEE, we're going to shut off your
diffuser, better close down the plant.' "

"Anywhere else I could, but they wouldn't go for it here. They know
how hard this thing would be to plug up. Besides, I want more than a
bluff. I want to stop pollution."

He grinned. So did I. It was a catch phrase we repeated when
frustrated by a hopeless task: "I want to stop pollution, man!"

"So what do we do? Postpone it?"

"Naah." I started to rewind the tape for the third time. "Necessity is
the mother."


 

8

HE DUMPED HIS GEAR into the Zode and we headed up the shore to
rendezvous with the Blowfish. It was easy to find, as it turned out,
since they'd set off some huge military surplus smoke bombs near the
dump. Gluttons for attention, I guess.

I had Tom drop me off. It was time to do some ruminating, and that
wouldn't be possible in the groovy chaos of the Blowfish. They'd all
be exhilarated by the gig, they'd want to talk too much, and I wanted
to think. So we brought the Zodiac right up on the public beach. I
waded to shore in my underwear, the only bather present who was
smoking a cigar, and put my clothes on once I reached the beach.
Normally guys in their underwear attract a lot of attention, but none
of the kids and oldsters who were here noticed. They were all gathered
in a clump a hundred feet down the beach, staring at something on the
ground. I figured someone had stroked out while swimming. It was
ghoulish, but I walked down there anyway to have a look.

But it wasn't a dead person they were looking at. It was a dead
dolphin.

"Hey, S.T., come to help this poor guy out?"

A geezer had snuck up on me. No one I knew. He'd probably seen me at
the civic association meeting I'd attended the month before. A lot of
these retirees keep an eye on the tube, read the papers every day, go
to the meetings.

It seemed an odd thing for him to say, so I moved forward to the front
row and took a closer look. The dolphin wasn't dead, just close to it.
Its tail was oscillating weakly against the sand.

"I wish I knew the first thing about it," I mumbled. A couple of young
muscleheads decided they did know about it. One of them grabbed the
dolphin's tail, hoping to drag it back to the water. Instead, its skin
peeled back like the wrapper on a tray of meat. I turned around and
walked as fast as I could in the other direction. People were
screaming and vomiting behind me.

"Looks like another victim of you-know-what," the old guy was saying.
I looked over to see him matching me stride for stride. There wasn't
much to say, so I checked him out. We were talking appendectomy from
long ago and a fairly recent laparotomy. Exploratory surgery, maybe.
His tubes seemed okay; probably a nonsmoker. I gave him fifteen years;
if he'd worked at the plant, five years.

"Didn't know I had a name around here," I said.

He grinned, shook his head, and converged on me, chortling silently.
He was laughing, but swallowing it. A born conspirator. "Oh, those
guys hate you. They hate your guts up there!" He allowed himself an
audible laugh. "Where you guys have your headquarters?"

Exactly the kind of information I hate to give out. "Somewhere out
there," I said, "on a boat."

"Uh huh. What do you do when someone wants to get a hold of you?"

"Got a cellular phone in our car."

"Oh yeah. For the media. That's smart. You give 'em all your number
then."

"Yeah, you know, on the press releases."

"Hey! You got one of those? I'm kind of a news junkie, you know, get
the Times and the Post every morning; got a satellite dish behind the
house and I'm always following it, got a shortwave....".

I had a few press releases folded up in my pocket, always carried them
with me, so I handed one to the guy and also gave him a GEE button
that he thought was hilarious.

"Where's a good hardware store?" I said. A trivial question for him to
answer, but priceless for me.

"What kind of stuff you looking for?" he asked, highly interested. He
had to establish that I deserved to have this information. Blue Kills
probably had a dozen mediocre ones, but every town has one really good
hardware store. Usually it takes about six years to find it.

"Not piddley-shit stuff. I need some really out-of-the-way stuff. ..."

He cut me off; I'd showed that I had some taste in hardware, that I
had some self-respect. He gave me directions.

Then, what the hell, he gave me a ride to the damn place. Dropped me
off in the parking lot. Drove me in his Cadillac Seville with the
Masonic calipers welded to the trunk lid. This guy was a goddamn
former executive. With an obvious grudge.

"You know Red?" I said on the way over.

Dave Hagenauer (according to the junk mail on his dashboard) laughed
and thwacked his maroon naugahyde steering wheel. "Red Grooten? I sure
as hell do. How the hell do you know Red?"

"Old fishing buddies?" I asked, ignoring the question.

"Oh, hunting, fishing, you name it. We been going out for a long time.
Course the most we do now is a little fishing, you know, plunking off
a boat."

"Not in the North Branch I hope."

He whistled silently and glinted his eyes at me, Aqua-Velva blue. "Oh,
no. I've known about that place for a long time. Shit no."

By that time we were at the store. "Stay out of trouble!" he said, and
he was still laughing when I slammed the door.

Most of my colleagues go on backpacking trips when they have to do
some thinking. I go to a good hardware store and head for the oiliest,
dustiest corners. I strike up conversations with the oldest people who
work there, we talk about machine vs. carriage bolts and whether to
use a compression or a flare fitting. If they're really good, they
don't hassle me. They let me wander around and think. Young hardware
clerks have a lot of hubris. They think they can help you find
anything and they ask a lot of stupid questions in the process. Old
hardware clerks have learned the hard way that nothing in a hardware
store ever gets bought for its nominal purpose. You buy something that
was designed to do one thing, and you use it for another.

So in the first couple of minutes I had to blow off two zesty young
clerks. It's easy for me now, I just mumble about something very
technical, using terms they don't understand. Pretending to know what
I mean, they direct me off toward another part of the store. Young
clerks like to use a zone coverage, whereas the oldtimers prefer a
loose man-to-man, so you can wander and think, pick up an armload of
items, frown, turn around, put them all back and start over again.

I did a lot of that. After half an hour, an old clerk orbited by, just
to be courteous, to establish that I wasn't a shoplifter. "Anything I
can help with?" he asked understandingly.

"It's a long, long story," I said, and that put him at ease. He went
back to coffee and inventory and I took another swing down the
plumbing aisle, visions of theta-holes dancing in my head.

What we had here was your basic hard-soft dilemma. I needed something
soft that would form itself to the gentle curve of the pipe and make a
toxic-waste-tight seal. But it had to have enough backbone that the
pressure wouldn't destroy it. Two laps around the Best Hardware Store
in Blue Kills had demonstrated that no single object would do the
trick. Now I was trying to break it down, one problem at a time.

First, the soft part. And there it was: ring-shaped, four inches
across, rubber. Attractively blister-packed and hanging there like
fruit on a tree.

"How many of these toilet gaskets you have in stock?" I shouted. The
young clerks froze in dismay and the old clerk took it right in
stride,

"How many toilets you got?" he called.

"A hundred and ten."

"Wow!" piped a younger clerk, "Must be some house!"

"I'm a plumber missionary," I explained, wandering toward the front of
the store. "Going down to..." almost said Nicaragua, but caught myself
"... Guatemala next week. Figure the only way to stop the spread of
disease down there is put in modern plumbing facilities. So I need a
whole shitload of those things."

Of course they didn't believe me, but they didn't need to.

"Joe, go see how many," said the boss. Giggling nervously, Joe headed
for the basement. I turned around before they could bother me with
questions and moved on to Phase II: something hard and round that
could hold the pressure, hold those toilet gaskets against the side of
the big pipe. Some kind of disk. God help us if we had to cut a
hundred disks out of plywood. I could see us up all night on the deck
of the Blowfish, running out of saber-saw blades. Somewhere in this
great store there had to be a lot of hard round cheap things.

To summarize: they were having a sale on salad bowl sets in the house
wares department. Cheap plastic. A big bowl, serving implements, and
half a dozen small bowls nested inside. I borrowed a small bowl from
the display set and carried it over to plumbing, where I could hold it
up against the toilet gaskets: a perfect match.

Now I just needed something that would hold the salad bowls with their
rims pressed against the gaskets pressed against the pipe. All along
I'd known that the crossbar running across each hole could serve as an
anchor. In the back they had yards and yards of threaded steel rod,
which would do just fine. Cut it into five-inch chunks, use a vise to
bend a hook into one end, hook it over the crossbar, run it through a
hole in the center of the bowl and use a wingnut to hold the bowl
down. It'd take some work, but that's what nitrous oxide was for.

I bought a hundred and ten toilet gaskets, nineteen salad bowl sets,
fifteen three-foot-long threaded quarter-inch rods, a hundred and
fifty wingnuts (we were sure to drop some), an extra vise, a chunk of
lead pipe (for leverage when bending hooks into the rods), four
hacksaws, some files, some pipe cement, and a couple of spare
5/16-inch drills for drilling through the bottoms of the bowls. Paid
in cash and persuaded them to deliver it to the public dock at Blue
Kills Beach at the close of the business day. Then I walked out into
the bright Jersey sunlight, a free man. It was well past noon and time
for a burger.

This place was a little out of the way, as good stores usually are, so
I found a phone and dialed the number of the phone in our Omni.

All I could hear was Joan Jett, very loud, singing a song about
driving around in New Jersey with the radio on. This was hastily
turned down, then I heard the phone shuffling around in someone's
hand, the roar of the road coming through the tinfoil walls of that
little crackerbox and the coyote howl of the engine, doing at least
five thousand RPM and approaching the redline.

"Shift!" I screamed, "Shift!"

"Shit!" Debbie answered. The phone dropped from her shoulder and
bounced off something, probably the handbrake, then got crushed
against the seat as she rammed the tranny into a higher gear. The
engine calmed down. "Where the fuck is the horn," Debbie said dimly,
then found it and described someone as a "rich bastard." Then, cut off
in traffic, she had to downshift. I rummaged in my pocket for more
change; this might take a while.

"Such a fucking right-handed car!" Debbie said. "The shift lever, the
stereo, now the phone. What's the problem with the horn?"

"The whole middle part of the steering wheel is the horn button," I
said.

"Oh, S.T. Stress. I love it. I adore stress."

"How'd it go?"

"Real fine. They gave up on the Kryptonites. Tried to send some boats
up the channel to get us from that direction, but Jim blocked the deep
part of the river with the Blowfish and they skragged one of their
propellers on an old oil drum. One of theirs, probably."

"Wonderful. Very mediapathic."

"Didn't find any deformed birds but we got some trout with scuzz on
their bodies. What did you find?"

"Toxic Disneyland. Want to come pick me up?"

I stayed on the phone and guided her on a hunt-and-miss expedition
through the metropolitan area; did not hang up until the bumper of the
Omni was in contact with my knees.

The grille was a crust of former insects, and waves of heat issued
from the louver on the hood. As I checked the oil, she emerged to
hover and squint, skeptically, at the engine.

"Master's degree in biology from Sweetvale, and you're driving around
with a dry dipstick."

She couldn't believe what a jerk I was being, but that's okay, I even
surprise myself sometimes. "What kind of macho crap is this?"

"You can call it macho, but if you redline it with no oil, it's going
to go Chernobyl in the middle of the Garden State Parkway and we'll
have to take the Green Tortoise home again."

She laughed. "Oh, fuck." We remembered half a dozen granola Green
Berets, staggering onto a hippie bus at three in the morning wearing
scuba gear and carrying a blown-up motorcycle.

I opened up the back and took out a couple of cans of oil. "You ever
read The Tragedy of the Commons?"

"Environmental piece, I know that."

"Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because
everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive
to maintain it. Like the water and the air. These guys have incentive
to pollute the ocean, but no reason to clean it up. It's the same deal
with this."

"Okay, okay, I can make the connection."

"Putting oil into the Omni is another form of environ-mentalism."

I shoved the oil sprout into the can, immediately making a sexual
connection in my own mind. Then I poked the spout into the proper hole
on the Omni, and looked at her, smearing the oil around on my fingers.
She was looking at me.

The TraveLodge maid barged in and found us dorking each other's brains
out on the rug, right in front of the door. Above us, Debbie was being
interviewed on the telly. For some reason we had turned on all the hot
water taps in the bathroom and the place was boiling with steam;
Debbie's interview, and her other sound effects from below, were half
drowned out by the buzz of the Magic Fingers. She slammed the door on
her way out. What the hell did they expect, giving us the honeymoon
suite?

"If you're planning to stay more than one day, it's traditional to
inform the hotel," I said when we were finished. Debbie didn't answer
because she was laughing too hard.

 


 

9

IT WAS THREE O'CLOCK. Debbie called the front desk and told them we'd
stay another day. Big surprise. We took a shower, then went down and
hauled our CB out of the Omni and checked in with the mother ship. I
told them that I had an idea for tomorrow that I'd like to bring up
with them, and made arrangements to be picked up at the public dock at
five.

Debbie and I had first run into each other when I was doing a full
media splatter number on that toxic pond on the Sweetvale campus. It
stirred up lot of interest among the student body, the idea that the
green ivy of New England academe was just like algae growing on a
rusty drum of industrial waste. They asked me to show up on campus and
I went, foolishly expecting to be treated like a hero.

In fact, most of them were incredibly pissed off. They had pulled some
blame-reversal thing where they felt the existence of toxic metals in
their soil and swimming hole was somehow my fault. That if I'd kept my
mouth shut, it would have been safe. This shouldn't have surprised me,
because the ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in
prestigious universities. We're in the TV age now and people think by
linking images in their brains. That's not always bad, but it led to
some pretty ludicrous shit there at Sweetvale, and when some student
leaders really started getting on my case in the media, I regrettably
had to strip them naked, figuratively, before the toxic glare of the
TV cameras. At some point during all that ugliness, Debbie found
something decent either in me or GEE International and got involved
with one or both of us, I'm not sure. We'd never been in the sack
until now, but we'd both been considering it.

One of the New York City remote crews drifted by in their van,
reminding me: we've got a media apocalypse to run tomorrow, and these
guys don't even know it yet.

For that matter, neither did the victims. They'd been waiting for us
to arrive for a month. Today we'd created a big noise and made them
look like jerks. Now they were sitting back, holding meetings with
their PR flacks, getting started on the damage control. That was
awful, they were thinking, but now it's over, and we can stop the
bleeding and pour some more death into the oceans.

Hardey-har-har. Tomorrow they'd need both hands just to hold their
intestines in place. But we had to prep the media.

"Sangamon Taylor? Quite a show. Were you involved?"

This was one of the local media types, a classic horse's-ass TV
reporter with a pneumatic haircut. He was winking at me, assuming that
I was the man in the moon suit.

"Wait until tomorrow," I said. "Then we'll have some great visuals for
you."

"You're doing something else tomorrow?"

"Yeah. Not one of these media events, you understand. I mean, what we
did today, I'm sure you can see that it was intended just to look kind
of flashy on TV. No real news value."

Shock flashed over his face like a blue beam from a cop car, then he
managed a grin. "I gathered that," he said, a few tones higher than
his baseline anchortone. "You did a good job of it."

"Thanks, but I'm sure a journalist like you can understand there's
more to GEE than just a bunch of clowns waving at the camera. We do
serious work, too. Stuff that'll make for a real story - not just a
piece of fluff."

What could I lose? His piece of fluff was already cued up in a
videotape machine at the station.

"Tomorrow?"

"Yeah. We'll start real early in the morning, but this is going to be
a long operation. All day long."

"Where?"

I told him how to get to Blue Kills Beach and gave him a xeroxed
handout we prepared for the Fourth Estate - tips on how to protect and
use your camera on a rocking Zodiac and that sort of thing. I also
tossed him a videotape, stock footage of GEE frogmen working off of
Zodiacs, plugging pipes.

"Thanks," he said, "I'll copy this and get it back to you."

"Keep it. We've got others."

"Oh, thanks!" He hefted the videotape and did a doubletake on it.
"Jesus! This is three-quarter inch!" Then he gave me a sly wink and
promised to see me tomorrow.

In the Omni, Debbie was on the phone to a reporter who'd been sent
here from one of the New York papers. He'd be more portable than a
minicam crew, shrewder, harder to manipulate and a lot more fun to
hang out with.

We and the reporter - a round grizzled type named Fisk - and the
Blowfish and the truck from the hardware store and a Lincoln with two
rent-a-dicks all converged on Blue Kills Beach. I considered trying to
hide our purchases from the dicks, but even if they saw what we had,
they'd never anticipate our plan.

The driver from the hardware store was severely rattled. He was just a
sixteen-year-old, probably doing his part-time on his way to being an
artillery loader at Fort Dix. His dad probably worked at the plant.
He'd never seen men with hair before.

"You know anything about outboards?" I asked him by way of male
bonding. We got into a long rap about whether I needed to check the
carburetor on one of our Mercs. Artemis got involved and soon the kid
relaxed completely. He allowed as how he'd never seen such big motors
on such small boats and she took him for a ride while we unloaded the
truck. When he came back, half drenched with salt water, phthalates
and hydrazines, he thought we were pretty cool. And that's fine,
because we were pretty cool - Artemis is, anyway - and it wouldn't be
fair for him to go away with the wrong impression. We take people for
rides while the chemical companies lay off their cancerous dads, and
sooner or later they decide on their own who the good guys are.

Several of the Blowfish crew wanted to do laundry and bathe in real
tubs, so Debbie and I handed over the keys to the Omni and the
honeymoon suite, after I talked to them briefly about dipsticks and
redlines. Then we headed out to sea on the Blowfish.

I sat down on the foredeck with Fisk, who accepted one of my illegal
cigars. We smoked and drank beer and traded environmental stories for
a bit, then I showed him the pictures of the theta-holes, sketched the
diffuser, laid out the whole gig.

He was interested, but not overly. "I figured you had something big
planned," he said, "but my main reason for coming was this." "What?"

"This," he said, and swept his arms out wide. Then I noticed that we
were sprawling on the deck of one very fine handmade wooden ketch, on
the open ocean, under a golden afternoon sky, cooled by the breeze and
warmed by the sun, sailing along strongly and quietly, smoking fine
Cuban cigars. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Fringe benefit." Over dinner it
came out that this was Captain Jim's birthday. Tanya had brought out
some kind of politically incorrect cake, buried an inch deep in
frosting, with a crude picture of a ketch on top. Debbie took the
opportunity to give him something she'd been meaning to give him
anyway.

She'd put in a lot of time on banner duty. More time than anyone
should. She had a knack for visual thinking, Debbie did, and we knew
it. These days she just sketched them out and canvassers - our student
gnomes - did the sewing. One of her better efforts was a big square
banner that we shackled to the top of a Fotex water tower one fragrant
spring evening. It was simple: a skull and crossbones with the
international circle/slash drawn over it in red.

Given the same assignment, I would have written a twenty-five-word
manifesto with a little picture down in the corner. Debbie said the
same thing with a picture. I was impressed. When drunk, I referred to
it as the Toxic Jolly Roger. The next time I went down to my Zodiac,
someone had been there and attached a little fiberglass pole to the
transom, a segment of a fishing rod. A little hand-sewn nylon flag was
flying from it: black, with the skull and crossbones in white and the
circle/slash in red. That was when I knew this woman liked me.

Then she came up with the idea of making a big one for the Blowfish.
For some reason, I had to help, so we went to fabric stores and I
loitered among the heavy, manly fabrics in the canvas section and
scared off business while she charged up yards of ripstop nylon on a
credit card that turned out to be mine. Then we laid it all out on the
floor of her living room and drew the patterns. She had to educate me
in basic cloth facts: if you draw the pattern on a chunk of cloth that
is stretched out of shape, the pattern will be messed up. Then we had
to seal the edges against fraying by running them through a candle
flame, filling the apartment with every toxic fume known to man; I
could feel the dissolved brain cells dribbling out my ears. Debbie
insisted that no operation connected with sewing could really be
toxic. And finally we ran it through her fucking Singer. I just went
to the other room and watched the static from the sewing machine tear
across the screen of her television. I don't like sewing machines. I
don't understand how a needle with a thread going through the tip of
it can interlock the thread by jamming itself into a little goddamn
spool. It's contrary to nature and it irritates me.

So when we presented it to Jim, everyone applauded Debbie, and I just
sat there like a turd on a platter. Then it was time for boy stuff. I
cranked on the ship's generator and started ripping open boxes.

We drilled holes in bowls until 11 P.M., when I went to sleep. Debbie
and I crammed ourselves into a berth meant for one. That was okay,
since today was our first time. But in a week or so we'd need a
kingsize waterbed. Fisk hung out on the deck in a sleeping bag,
drinking brandy and making Artemis laugh. Jim just curled up next to
the tiller, looking at the stars and thinking about whatever a
forty-five-year-old sea drifter thinks about. The Atlantic rocked us
to sleep, even as it was killing some more dolphins. The Toxic Jolly
Roger grinned down over one and all.

And I woke up in the middle of the night sweating and panting like a
pesticide victim, Dolmacher's slack skull-face staring at me. It's the
Holy Grail, as far as you're concerned.

"What are you thinking about?" Debbie asked.

I hate that fucking question. Didn't answer.

Up there, a couple hundred miles north of us, Dolmacher was up - I
knew he was still awake, still at the lab at two in the morning -
tinkering around with genes. Looking for the Holy Grail.

I'd never play with genes. Wouldn't touch them. Any molecule more
complicated than ethanol is too scary for me; bigger than that and you
never know what they'll do. But Dolmacher was fucking with them. And
the thing of it was: I always got higher scores on exams than him. I'm
smarter than Dolmacher.

 


 

10

THAT WAS THE LAST SLEEP I got for about twenty-four hours. At four in
the morning, I got up, destroyed the rest of the cake and chased it
down with two cans of Jolt. Got a scuba outfit all ready, tromped
around on top of the boat to get people awake and moving, then got
into the best Zode with Artemis and we took off. At the last minute
Fisk woke up and joined us.

The rent-a-dicks were lurking nearby in an open boat. There was no
need for stealth, so we just warmed up the Mercury and let them eat
our wake. We were quickly out of sight, and it's hard to track by
sound when your own motor is blatting away ten feet behind you. Headed
north, just to give them the wrong idea, then doubled back and homed
in on the end of the diffuser.

I can dive if I have to, but it's not my thing. This time we needed
lots of divers, though, and in any case the principle had to be
tested. Arty saved me from certain embarrassment and possible demise
by pointing out that I'd hooked up my tubes wrong. As we got them
fixed, Fisk winked at me. "From here on out," he said, "I'm an
objective journalist, sort of."

"Funny you should say that, since I'm about to commit a criminal act.
Sort of." And I fell off the Zodiac.

After a certain amount of aimless swimming around, I located the
diffuser. It wasn't putting much out right now, so I couldn't follow
the black cloud. And Tom was right, the current was powerful, and a
greenhorn like me would end up in Newark if he didn't keep swimming
south.

But I had some big old magnets, things that would grip with a force of
a hundred pounds, and I'd brought one along. Once I found the
diffuser, I slapped the magnet on and tied myself to that with some
rock-climbing webbing. This way I could plant my flippers and lean
back against the tug of the rope while I worked.

From here on in it was just a problem of industrial engineering. How
many holes could we plug per diver per hour, and how could we make it
go faster? The key was to assemble the bowl/gasket/bolt/wingnut
contraptions in the Zodiacs and hand them to the divers as they were
needed.

The plug fit better than I deserved. There would be some leakage owing
to the curvature of the pipe, but the diffuser's ability to emit toxic
substances would be cut down to a thousandth of the norm. It was easy
to hook the curved end of the bolt under the crossbar and twirl the
wingnut down to tighten it. I took my time and estimated how far we
could pretighten the wingnuts in the Zodiacs so that the divers
wouldn't have to spend cumulative hours twisting them down.

Then I smeared some pipe cement over the threads. Hopefully it would
harden up and prevent the wingnuts from being removed.

Not bad. I pretightened the wingnut on another assembly, checked my
watch, swam to the next hole, and plugged it. That took five minutes.
Five minutes per hole meant five hundred diver-minutes. They'd spend
half their time farting around with air tanks and other friction, so
we needed a thousand diver-minutes, or something like sixteen
diver-hours. If we wanted to do it in four hours, we'd need four
divers.

When I broke the water, our objective journalist was in a truly
passionate clinch with Artemis. His fault. I'd made a point of waving
my light around to warn them. When making love to granola commandos,
leave your eyes open. They broke apart and I pretended to be looking
the other way.

"I'm in luck," I said. "We only need four divers. And we happen to
have four, besides me - so I can stay on top. Where I belong."

Artemis dunked me for that. Then we went back to the Blowfish, which
blazed with light and cast a heavenly garlic smell across the water.
Jim was up cooking - it had to be Jim, whose passion for garlic was
fine by me.

"I'm not trying to sound, like, militaristic," I announced to the
tofu-eating multitude, "but we have a go, Houston."

Everyone said "all right" and some raised an herbal toast. Now that
these people were used to me, they were getting into the project. The
prospect of destroying a mile-long toxic waste diffuser - hell,
destroying anything a mile long - was a fiendish temptation.

"You want to call the plant, then?" Jim asked.

"I figure, as soon as we're done eating, we go over there and start.
We've got two divers here and two at the TraveLodge and they'll be
meeting us in half an hour. So once we get it working smoothly, get
all those initial bugs worked out-"

"The part of the operation where we look like assholes," Debbie said,
translating.

"-correct, we shut down the plant. That'll take about thirty seconds
on the phone. Then we start the carnival." With Fisk present, I wasn't
going to get any more explicit than that.

It all went pretty well, except that Fisk suddenly admitted, when the
Blowfish was halfway there, that he had a gram of coke in his
photographer's vest. He decided to fess up when he noticed that we all
went through one another's clothing, looking for anything that could
be construed as a drug or weapon; for obvious reasons we always did
this when we were likely to get busted. And once Fisk owned up, I felt
guilty and admitted to a square of blotter acid in my wallet which,
since it was on a Boston Public Library card I didn't think would ever
be noticed. But guilt is guilt.

LSD is a violation of Sangamon's Principle. It's a complicated
molecule and hence makes me nervous. But sometimes you get in
situations so awful, or so physically taxing, that nothing else will
penetrate.

So the library card was burned, its ashes scattered, and Fisk's coke
went up certain noses. We attacked our task with renewed vigor.

The TraveLodge people showed up a little late and we hustled them off
to work. I hung out on shore, watching the media and authorities
gather. They took pictures of me inflating a child's large wading
pool. Hard to look like a commando when you're doing that; we'd have
to get us a pump. I have to get the toxics off the bottom of the sea
and onto the cathode-ray tubes of the public in order for this kind of
gig to work and, because the diffuser was completely hidden, this
wouldn't be easy. All we had to show was a bunch of scuba divers
jumping into the water with salad bowls and toilet parts and coming
back up without them. So about the time all our media were in place, I
took a Zode out and borrowed Tom from the salad-bowl operation. We
went out to the Blowfish, picked up a portable pump and motored back
in toward shore. Tom swam down to the diffuser and put the pump's
intake hose into a diffuser hole, and I hauled the Zode up onto the
beach and dragged the pump's output hose into the wading pool.
Minicams clustered like flies on a muffin. I'd chosen a pool with a
nice bright yellow bottom, so the Swiss Bastards' black sludge hit it
with a nice mediapathic splash.

We ran the pump until the pool was nearly full. Along with Zodiacs and
moonsuits, wading pools are among my favorite tools. We were lucky
here, because the waste looked really bad. Sometimes you get stuff
that's clear as water, and it's hard to convince people that it's
really just as dangerous. After the pool, we also filled a couple of
55-gallon drums - these we'd chain to the doors of the New Jersey
Statehouse in a couple of days-!-and then we were all done with the
pump. I went over to the Omni and picked up the phone. Every large
corporation has its own telephone maze, its juicy numbers and dead
ends, its nickel-plated bitch queens and sugary do-gooders. I'd
already navigated this particular maze from Boston on my WATS line. So
I dialed a particular extension three or four times, until I got the
receptionist I wanted, and she punched me through to the plant
manager.

"Yes?" he said, kind of groggy. I checked the Omni's clock. It was
only 8:30.

"Yes, this is Sangamon Taylor from GEE International. How are you
today?"

"What do you want?"

"I'm fine, thanks. Uh, we've discovered a big pipe sticking out into
the ocean that's putting very large amounts of hazardous wastes right
into the water. In fact, of the six pollutants that EPA has licensed
you to discharge into the water at this point, you're exceeding the
legal limit on all six. And since they're very dangerous substances,
what you're doing is illegally endangering the health and welfare of
everyone who lives in this region, which is a lot of people. So, uh,
we're shutting the diffuser off now, and I'd recommend that you stop
putting wastes into it, for obvious reasons. If you'd like to get in
touch with us, we're down at Blue Kills Beach. Would you like to take
down our phone number here?"

"Listen, buddy, if you think that's just some little old pipe, you're
wrong."

So I gave him a complete description of the pipe and what we were
doing to plug it.

By this time the Omni's window had become kind of a TV screen for all
the media to watch. I rolled the window down and turned the phone over
to the "speaker" setting so that they could hear the whole
conversation. On the whole, it was calm and professional, no
fireworks. I go out of my way to be polite, and people entrusted with
running huge chemical plants, unlike some of their bosses, tend to be
in control of themselves. One techie to another. It's the flacks and
executives who fly off the handle, because they have no understanding
of chemistry. They don't imagine they might be wrong.

Half an hour later, our divers told me that nothing was coming out of
the diffuser any more.

By that time I was the ringmaster of a full-scale media circus. Each
crew had to be taken out on a Zodiac, given a thrilling ride through
the surf, given a chance to videotape our divers and to walk around on
the Blowfish and nuzzle the ship's cat. Meanwhile, Debbie hung out on
the beach to placate those who were waiting their turn, giving them
interviews, telling jokes and war stories - and later, confronting the
small army dispatched here by the corporation. Fortunately she was
well cut out for that; dinky, tough, quick witted and exceedingly
cute. Not the flummoxed rad/fem/les they were hoping for.

For a big outfit, the Swiss Bastards were pretty quick on their feet.
They'd already xeroxed up their press releases, and they always had
reams of prepackaged crap about eye-droppers in railway tank cars and
the beneficent works of the chemical industry. You know: "These
compounds are rapidly and safely dispersed into a concentrated
solution of dihydrogen oxide and sodium chloride, containing some
other inorganic salts. Sound dangerous? Not at all. In fact, you've
probably gone swimming in it - this is just a chemist's way of
describing salt water." This is precisely the sort of witticism that
TV reporters love to steal and pass off as their own, granting their
stories a cheery conclusion on which to cut back to the beaming
anchordroids. It's much more upbeat than talking about liver tumors,
and it's why we have to do this business with wading pools.

When I got back from taking a local TV reporter on his joyride, the
suits were fully mobilized. They'd set up a folding table on the beach
with their nicely forested property as a back-drop. Tactical error on
my part! I should have strung a nice big banner out across that fence
so they couldn't use it. We had a big roll of banner stuff in the
Omni-green nylon cloth on a white backing - so I asked Debbie and
Tanya if they could try to whip something up real quick.

They'd propped one end of their table up on some bundles of press
releases, because the beach sloped toward the water, as beaches do. It
was too much to hope that the incoming tide would undermine and topple
it. I was tempted to speed that process up with the pump, but that
would be openly juvenile and too close to actual assault. Their head
flack was waddling around in the sand, which was pouring in over the
tops of his hand-tooled dress shoes. They even had makeup people handy
to spackle his trustworthy face.

To watch a big corporation throw its PR machine into action can be
kind of imposing. I got scared the first couple of times, but
fortunately I was with some GEE veterans who were old hands at
trashing press conferences. You have to attack on two levels -
challenging what the PR flacks are saying, and at the same time
challenging the conference itself, shattering the TV spell.

I waved Artemis close in to shore. As soon as the Swiss flack started
in with his prepared statement, I nodded at her and she cranked up her
motor pretty loud, in neutral, forcing him to raise his voice. That's
very important. They want to be media cool, like JFK, and if you make
them shout they become media hot, like Nixon. I started thinking about
five-o'clock shadows and how we could cast one on a flack's face. An
idle inspiration that was probably too subtle for us.

The flack unleashed his poster about eyedroppers in tank cars. I ran
to the Omni for my poster about banana peels on football fields. He
talked about sodium chloride and dihydrogen oxide, and I countered
that calling trinitrotoluene "dynamite" doesn't make it any safer. He
showed a map of the plant, then of Blue Kills, showing where the big
pipe ran underneath the city and out to this beach.

That was fine with me. If he wanted to show people how their toxic
waste was passing under their homes, let him.

In fact, I couldn't figure out what the hell he was thinking. Why did
he want to emphasize that? I started flipping through one of their
press packets and found the same map, with their underground pipe
highlighted. Exactly what they didn't want people to know.

Then the bastard drygulched me. He almost nailed me to the wall.

"By plugging up the diffuser at the end of this pipe, the GEE people
are running the risk that the pipe will burst, somewhere back in here
. . ." (pointing to a residential neighborhood) ".. . and release
these compounds into the soil. This should lay to rest any
misconceptions about their concern for the people of Blue Kills. What
these people are, pure and simple, is t-"

"What he's saying," I shouted, stepping up behind him and holding a
salad bowl in the air, "is that this pipeline..."

I pointed to the map "... that's carrying tons of toxic waste under
people's homes, is so fragile, so shoddily made and poorly maintained,
that it's weaker than a contraption made from a salad bowl and a
toilet part that we just whipped up on the spur of the moment."

I could see the guy deflate. He refused to turn around. "And if these
compounds are as safe as he says, why is he worried about them getting
into the soil? Why does he equate that threat with terrorism? That
should tell you how safe it really is."

And, finally, I got to deliver my traditional coup de grace, namely,
handing the flack a glass tumbler full of the awful black stuff and
inviting him to drink it.

Sometimes I feel sorry for flacks. They don't have a clue about
chemistry or ecology or any of the technical issues. They just have an
official line they're told to repeat. My job is to get them fired. The
first few times I did this, I felt great, like an avenging angel. Now
I try to co-opt them. I go easy. I don't blow their brains out
on-camera unless they get sleazy, attacking me or GEE. I've been
responsible for a lot of people getting fired - security guards, PR
flacks, engineers - and that's the most troublesome part of my job.

 


 

11

THE COPS SHOWED UP. All kinds of cops. Blue Kills cops, state police,
coast guardsmen. It didn't much matter because we'd already plugged
ninety-five of the holes.

All the cops stood in knots on the beach and argued about
jurisdiction. What they came up with was this: several state troopers
and Blue Kills policemen took a coast guard boat out to the Blowfish -
which a trooper boarded, just to show the flag - and then their boat
escorted us way around to the north and into a dock that was part of
Blue Kills proper, not Blue Kills Beach.

It was a fun trip. The wind had come up and the Blue Kills cops, on
that dinky CG boat, spent most of it doubled over the side, chucking
their donuts. On the Blowfish, I chatted with Dick, the state trooper,
a pretty affable guy of about forty. He asked me a lot of questions
about the plant and why it was dangerous and I tried to explain.

"Cancer happens when cells go crazy and don't stop multiplying. That
happens, basically, because their genetic code has gotten screwed up."

"Like nicotine or asbestos or something."

I glanced up and saw Tom Akers sidling over in our direction,
listening to the conversation.

"Yeah. Nicotine and asbestos have some way of altering your genes.
Genes are just long stringy molecules. Like any other molecule, they
can have chemical reactions with other molecules. If the other
molecule happens to be, say, nicotine, the reaction will break or
damage the gene. Most of the time it won't matter. But if you're
unlucky, the gene will be changed in just the wrong way...." "And you
get the Big C."

"Right." I couldn't help thinking of Dolmacher - the world's biggest
carcinogen - cracking genes up there in Boston. "The thing is, Dick,
that for a chemist it's pretty obvious, just looking at any molecule,
whether it's going to cause cancer or not. There are certain elements,
like chlorine, that are very good at breaking apart your genes. So if
you're dumping something into the environment that has a lot of
available chlorine on it, you have to be a jerk not to realize it's
cancer-causing."

"But you can never prove it," Tom said, sounding kind of sullen.

"You can never prove it the way you can prove a case in court. That's
why the chemical corporations can get away with so much. Someone gets
a tumor, it's impossible to trace it back to a particular chlorine
atom that came from a molecule that was discharged by such-and-such a
plant. It's all circumstantial, statistical evidence."

Dick said, "So this stuff coming out of this pipe down here-"

"Some of it has chlorine on it. Also there are some heavy metals
coming out, like cadmium, mercury, and so on. Everyone knows they're
toxic."

"So why does the EPA allow these guys to do it?"

"To dump that stuff? They don't."

"What do you mean?"

"The EPA doesn't allow it. It's against the law."

"Wait a minute," Dick said. I could see the methodical cop mind at
work; I could see him writing up an arrest report. "Let's take this
from the top. What these guys are doing is against the law."

"Exactly."

"So how come we're arresting you?"

"Because that's the way of the world, Dick."

"Well, you know, a lot of people around here . . ." he leaned forward,
though nobody was even close to us "... are on your side. They really
like what you're doing. Everyone's known that these guys were dumping
poison. And people are sick of it." He leaned even closer. "Like my
daughter for example. My seventeen-year-old daughter. Hey! That
reminds me! You got any stuff on this boat?"

"What do you mean?" I thought he was talking about drugs.

"Oh, you know, bumper stickers, posters. I'm supposed to get some for
my daughter, Sheri."

I took him down below and we redecorated Sheri's room with big posters
of adorable mammals.

"How about stuffed animals? You got any stuffed animals?" Then his
eyes went wide and he glanced away. "Sorry. I didn't mean that as a
joke."

For a second I didn't catch the reference. Then I figured that he was
talking about an incident a couple of weeks before when a van of ours,
completely jammed with stuffed penguins, had caught fire on the Garden
State Parkway. Our people got out, but the van burned like a flare for
three hours. Plastic is essentially frozen gasoline.

"Yeah, we're a little short."

I got some coffee for Dick and we hung out in the cockpit watching
Blue Kills approach, watching the cops on the CG boat do the
technicolor yawn. "How long you staying in Jersey?" he asked.

"Couple days."

"You know, Sheri just thinks you guys are great. She'd love to meet
you. Maybe you could come by for dinner." We fenced over that issue
for a while - God help me, getting involved with an underage Jersey
state trooper's daughter - and then Dick and his friends busted us and
took us to jail.

We were each allowed one phone call. I used mine to order a pizza.
We'd already notified the national office of GEE, down in Washington,
and they had dispatched Abigail, the attack lawyer. She was on her way
now, probably in a helicopter gunship.

By the time our mug shots and fingerprints were taken and we'd
exchanged business cards with our new cellmates, it was eight in the
evening and I just wanted to sleep. But Abbey showed up and sprang us.

"It's a totally awful, bogus bust," she explained, dragging on a cig
and massaging her aluminum briefcase. "Jurisdiction is totally coast
guard, because it all happened offshore. You were working out of the
town of Blue Kills Beach. But the cops who busted you were from Blue
Kills. So it's just a total fuck-up. And the charges will probably be
dropped anyway."

"The charges are-"

"Sabotaging a hazardous-waste pipeline."

I looked at her.

"Honest to God. That's actually a crime in New Jersey. I do not make
this up," she said.

"Why do you think they'll drop the charges?"

"Because that will force the company to go into court and testify that
this pipeline is carrying hazardous waste. Otherwise, it's not a
hazardous-waste pipeline, is it?"

When I got out to the Omni I sat there for a while with the seat
leaned back, dozing, waiting for them to let Debbie out of girl jail.
The phone rang.

"GEE?" said an old voice.

"Yeah."

"I want to talk to ST."

"Speaking."

And that was all it took. The guy just started to ramble. He talked
for fifteen minutes, didn't even pause to see if I was still
connected. He didn't tell the story very coherently, but I understood
pretty clearly. He'd worked at the plant, or ones like it, for
thirty-two years. Saved up money so he and his wife could buy an
Airstream and drive around the country when they retired. He went on
and on about that Airstream. I learned about the color scheme, what
kind of material the kitchen counters were made of, and how many pumps
it took to flush the toilet. I could have rewired that trailer in the
dark by the time he was done describing it.

Now he had a form of liver cancer.

"Hepatic angiocarcinoma," I said.

"How'd you know?" he said. I let him figure it out.

His doctor said it was a very rare disease, thought it seemed to be
pretty common around Blue Kills. This guy knew three other people who
had died of it. All of them had the same job he did.

"So I just thought you might like to know," he said, when he'd finally
come around to this point, when he was ready to drive the knife home,
"that those bastards have been dumping waste solvents into a ditch
behind the main plant for thirty year. They're still doing it every
day. The supervisors do it now so the workers don't know about it. And
I just know they're scared shitless that someone like you is going to
find out."

A guy in a suit had materialized right outside the Omni. When I
suddenly noticed him it was like waking up from a dream. For a second
I thought he was a hit man, thought I was going to die. Then he
pressed a business card up against the glass. He wasn't a hit man or a
rent-a-dick or a PR flack. He was an assistant attorney general from a
particular state or commonwealth somewhere between Maine and the
Carolinas. His last name wasn't necessarily Cohen, but Cohen is what
I'll call him.

I reached around and unlocked the passenger-side door. Then I tried to
think of a way to end this phone conversation. What do you say to a
guy in those circumstances? He was halfway between this world and the
next, and I was a twenty-nine-year-old guy who likes to watch cartoons
and play ski-ball. He wanted Justice and I wanted a beer.

This assistant A.G. was polite, anyway. He stood outside the passenger
door as long as I kept talking. The old guy gave me exhaustive
directions on how to find this ditch. It would involve sneaking onto
the plant grounds in the middle of the night, avoiding security cops
here and here and here, going one hundred yards in such-and-such
direction, and drilling. We would have to backpack a soil corer all
the way in.

All of this was slightly more illegal than what I was used to.
Besides, that trench wasn't a secret. Others had already spilled the
toxic information to the media. The neighborhood plague of birth
defects and weird cancers had already been noticed; red thumbtacks had
already gone up on the map, splattering away from the trench like
blood from a bullet. In a couple of months the first suit would be
filed. That trench was going to be an issue for the next ten years.
There was a pretty good chance it would drive the corporation into
bankruptcy.

"I just hope you can use this because I want those son of a bitches to
dry up and fall into the ocean." And on and on, more and more profane,
until I hung up on him.

Talking to cancer victims never makes me feel righteous, never
vindicated. It makes me slightly ill and for some reason, guilty. If
people like me would just keep our mouths shut, people like him would
never suspect why they got cancer. They'd chalk it up to God or
probability. They wouldn't die with hearts full of venom.

It is a strange world that Industry has made. Kind of a seething toxic
harbor, opening out on a blue unspoiled ocean. Most people are
swimming in it, and I get to float around on the surface, on my
Zodiac, announcing that they're in trouble. What I really want to do
is make a difference. But I'm not sure if I have, yet.

Cohen rapped on the window glass. I motioned him in, but I didn't move
my seat to the upright position. I just lay there while he got in, and
tried to remember all the crimes I had committed in Cohen's particular
state/commonwealth. None in the last six months.

"Phoning home to Mom?"

"Not exactly. Hey, look, Cohen, our lawyer's inside, okay? I have
nothing to say to you."

"I'm not here to prosecute you."

When I looked him in the face, he nodded in the direction of a
Cadillac that was aswarm with suits from the company. "I want to
prosecute them."

"Shit. Four different kinds of cops, now five, all arresting different
people. I need a scorecard."

"Could you prove in court that someone like that was violating the
law?"

"I can run a chemical analysis that proves it. But any chemist can do
that. You don't need me."

"Why are you laughing?"

"Because this is unbelievable. I just get sprung from jail and
now...."

"You have a pretty low opinion of law enforcement in my state, don't
you?"

A delicate question. "A lot of laws get broken there, let's put it
that way." But that was a dodge. Of course I had a low opinion. I'd
seen this before. GEE draws attention to a problem and suddenly the
cops - particularly the category of cops who have to be reelected -
are on the ball.

"It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used
as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn
furniture."

"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said
that."

"Well, I wouldn't say it in public. But we don't need this image
problem."

"Sounds like strategy and tactics, man, like some important
up-for-reelection type sat down with a chart, in the Statehouse maybe,
and said: 'Item number two, this toilet-of-the-United-States business.
Cohen, get out there and bust some corporate ass.'"

Cohen was nice enough to give me a bitchy little smile. "If that's how
you want to view it, fine. But real life is more complicated."

I just sneered out the windshield. After I've gotten the date and done
the work for them, ecocrats love to give me some pointers on real
life. If it makes them feel better, I don't care.

"We want to prosecute these people," Cohen continued, "but getting
evidence is hard."

"What's so hard about it?"

"Come on, Mr. Taylor, look at it from a cop's point of view. We aren't
chemists. We don't know which chemicals to look for, we don't know
where or how to look. Infiltration, sampling, analysis, all those
activities require specialists - not state troopers. You're very
scornful, Mr. Taylor, because for you - with your particular skills -
for you all those things are easy. You can do them with your eyes
closed." "Holy shit, is this going where I think it is?" It was. Cohen
wanted me to break into a fucking chemical plant in the middle of the
night, with cops! a warrant, in his home state, and get samples. Me, I
was far too tired to hear this bizarre stuff. I desperately needed
cold beer and loud rock and roll. So Cohen went on and on, about how I
should think this over, and then I found myself sitting alone in the
Omni, leaned back in the reclining seat with Debbie's Joan Jett tape
blasting on the stereo - I'm in love with the modem world / I'm in
touch, I'm a modern girl - drawing stares from the company suits,
wondering if I'd just dreamed the whole thing.

 


 

12

BACK IN BOSTON, we worked out a settlement with Fotex. They had just
lost their most vicious negotiator, my oldest and wiliest enemy in
this business, who had toppled off a rusty catwalk into an intake
pond, been sucked into a big pipe, shredded into easily digestible
bits by rotating knives and processed into toxic sludge. I guessed it
was suicide. This Fotex deal was a big hassle since Wes, who runs the
Boston office, was using the Omni for a business trip through northern
New England. I had to ride my bike to and from their goddamn plant,
way up north in the high-chemical-crime district and reachable only by
riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years
ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.

Someone had donated an old computer system, a five-terminal CP/M
system about ten years old. Boston already had a Computer Museum, but
we were neck-and-neck with them as a showcase of obsolete machinery.
Old used computers are economically worthless and we pick them up for
little or nothing. Usually they're good enough for what we want to do:
telecommunications, printing up mailing lists, slowly crunching a few
numbers.

Debbie and I took a vacation up to Quebec City and then over to Nova
Scotia for a couple of days. I had a terrible time.

"If we get up now-" I said one night at about 3:00 A.M., looking at my
digital nerd-watch.

"-and roll up the tent real fast," she continued, and by this time I
was already embarrassed, but she kept going, "and jump into the car
and drive all night, we could reach the ferry that runs down to the
states, and be in Boston, wallowing in sludge, within twenty-four
hours."

"Yeah."

"Instead of being out here on the beach, listening to the waves,
relaxing and screwing," she continued.

"We aren't screwing," I pointed out, but suddenly we were. Debbie
insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer
sex: slow, frustrating, in tune with nature. Fortunately there was a
trawler out there somewhere, maybe a mile out, and when its wake
attacked the beach, the waves started piling in on top of each other,
blending into one fast pounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. I burst the
zipper out of my sleeping bag, Debbie kicked a pot of cold hot
chocolate out into the sand, and for a while we just lay there, half
tumbled out onto the beach, feeling the cold and the warmth on
opposite sides, and I said to hell with the damn ferry. Every so often
I got some hint that this woman really wanted me, and it was scary.
When she wanted other things she was so crafty and effective.

Eventually we found our way back and then didn't see each other for a
while. It was a nice summer and I spent more time at the beach, or
playing ski-ball, than working. Bart had a friend in Tacoma who mailed
us a shitload of powerful fireworks he'd bought on an Indian
reservation. We got arrested shooting them off in a park and I had to
sell off some shares of my old Mass Anal stock to pay the fine. The
guy who arrested us was good - some kind of ex-military man. He waited
until we lit off a whistle, so we couldn't hear his engine, then he
closed on us at some huge speed, with his lights off, stopped right in
front of us, pinning us against a retaining wall, and hit us with all
of his cop lights at once.

Brilliant tactics. I congratulated him heartily; it was useful to
remember that smart cops did exist.

The Blowfish showed up. It was about to turn the corner around Maine
and head into the Buffalo area. But first we took a trip out to
Spectacle Island, a couple of miles off of South Boston. It really
ought to be called Gallagher Tow Island, because it was kind of a
patrimony for that family. The guy who'd founded Gallagher Tow - I
don't know his first name - had held down the city garbage-towing
concession for fifty years. He'd clung to that concession like
something out of an Alien movie; he couldn't be removed without
killing the patient. He'd used everything - graft, blackmail,
bullshit, violence, Irishness, defamation of character, arranged
marriages, the Catholic church, and simple groveling. He'd hung on to
that garbage contract, built up his fleet of tugs from one to fifteen,
created an entire goddamn island out in the middle of the Harbor, and,
like a true magnate, died of a massive stroke. Now his grandson, Joe,
ran Gallagher Tow, and he'd moved on to other forms of envirocide.
They had a brand new behemoth named Extra Stout, a 21,000-horse
tugboat that could probably haul Beacon Hill out to sea if they could
figure out where to attach the hawser. Instead they used it to haul
oilrigs through twenty-foot swells in the North Atlantic.

So the Gallagher garbage-dumping days are over, but the evidence is
still there. You can go walk around on it. Someday, I'm sure, a set of
yuppie condos will spring up on Spectacle Island. The heating bills
would be low, because all that trash is still decaying; if you stick a
probe into its bowels in the middle of the winter, you will find that
the entire island is blood-warm. It just sits there decomposing,
throwing off heat and gases. As far as I'm concerned it kind of sums
up Boston Harbor.

You can dig a hole and sample the blood of Spectacle Island, a
reddish-brown fluid that permeates the entire dump, a cocktail of
whatever's been piled up there, mingled together and dissolved in
rainwater. But once you analyze it, you know there's more to the
island than used diapers, rotting sofas and Sox scorecards. There are
solvents and metals, too. Industry has been out dumping its trash.

Sometimes I got the impression that companies were still coming out
here and unloading difficult pieces of garbage. That was hard to
prove, unless I camped out on the island and waited for them to show
up, and I didn't want to live on a mound of garbage. Roscommon's house
was close enough.

Our Blowfish expedition was an experiment. I'd been reading about a
place in Seattle where they'd constructed houses close to an old
covered-over dump site. The houses started to explode spontaneously
and it was found that methane gas, created by the decay, was seeping
into their basements. So the city sank pipes into the ground to let
the gas escape, and if you lit them they'd make nice flares.

We loaded a number of long pipes onto the Blowfish, rented a drilling
rig, and cruised out there on a sunny Saturday morning. When we got
there, the obligatory crew of under-age shitheels, half a dozen of
them, were throwing a party on the fetid beach. They were all standing
around a bonfire because there's no place on Spectacle Island where
you'd want to sit down. They were drinking Narragansett, which had put
them into kind of a traditional Russian mood; whenever they finished a
bottle, they'd fling it down and shatter it. They were drinking in a
hurry, because it was windy and cool, the place stank and they
probably knew the whole trip was a mistake. The tinkling explosions
were almost nonstop. Gulls circled, hoping some edible garbage would
show up, swooping down to intercept the flying glass.

We anchored a little ways offshore and used a Zode to ferry the
equipment onto the island. The Narry drinkers had come out here in
someone's dad's boat, an open, four-seat fishing cruiser, and had
pulled it up onto the best landing spot. It hurt just to see that,
because the bottom of that nice fiberglass hull had probably picked up
some long, deep scars. We settled for a less-convenient spot about a
hundred yards away, and started piling up our equipment.

I was happy to avoid them. They wore the uniform of the teen
nonconformist: long hair, unsuccessful mustache, black leather. If
Bartholomew were here, he could identify their favorite band just by
looking at their colors. I stayed on shore with the equipment while
Wes ran stuff back and forth. He'd dumped off some pipes and was on
his way back to the Blowfish when he noticed that the partyers had
found a stack of junk tires. They were swarming like ants on candy,
shouting, laughing, calling each other "dude," and throwing them on
the bonfire.

My attitude was, who the fuck cares? That's why I'll never be in
charge of a regional office. Wes was a different type.

To me it was just some black smoke into the air. Kind of unsightly, a
little toxic, but unimportant in the big scheme of things. To Wes it
was a symbolic act, a desecration of the environment. It didn't matter
that, in this case, "the environment" was an immense garbage dump to
begin with. So before I could tell him not to worry about it, he was
drowning out my voice with his outboard, buzzing over there to
intervene.

Once they got over being stunned, they reacted exactly as you'd
expect: went into a blind testosterone rage. "Fuck you! Fuck you!"
"Now listen . . ." "Fuck you!" One of them dragged a strip of burning
Goodyear out of the fire, whirled it up into a flaming spiral, and let
it fly toward Wes, who had to knock it aside with an oar before he had
time to get scared. He shot away, bottles splashing in his wake, and
then, of course, they noticed me.

Standing there with a five-gallon can of gasoline, recalling the Road
Warrior, I could think of a thousand interesting ways to scare these
twits off. Unfortunately, these were the sort who'd be apt to carry
guns. If there wasn't a Saturday Night Special in one of their belts,
you could bet they had one in the boat. So a frontal assault wasn't a
wise idea.

Wes believed anyone could be converted to an environmentalist by
negotiation. It hadn't worked, but at least he had the presence of
mind to see that they were headed my way. Wes was no expert with the
Zodiac, but the water was calm and he could make it faster than the
goons could run. Unfortunately the goons had a head start. I ran away
from them along the shore, and as Wes caught up with me I waded out so
he wouldn't have to pull his motor up, or, worse, forget and skrag the
prop.

When I was up to midthigh, he reached me and I took one last step
forward, half-falling into the boat. My foot came down on a sharp
piece of metal and I felt it slash through the sole of my tennis shoe
and gouge me. Then I was lying crosswise on the Zodiac, random pieces
of Gallagher's trash pile were splashing into the water around us, and
we were headed back to the Blowfish.

We changed course halfway there when Wes noticed that the goons were
trashing the equipment we'd left on shore. They were especially
interested in the drilling rig, which they started wrecking with the
primitive weapons at hand. It was like watching Homo Erectus discover
how to make tools out of flint.

Wes brought us to within about a bottle's throw from the shore and
shouted at them. I don't think they even looked up.

They did seem to notice when they heard the sound of a second Zodiac
motor cranking out some high RPMs. We all looked down the shoreline.
Artemis had taken her Zodiac in to shore, tied its stern rope to the
back of their fishing boat and tugged it off the beach. Now she was
hauling it ass-backwards out to sea.

Later there were loud and long and dull debates about whether this was
consistent with GEE principles. It wasn't exactly violence, but it did
imply a certain willingness to let these guys starve to death on a
pile of garbage, within sight of home. Like most of these debates,
this one never got resolved.

It modified their attitudes, though. They stopped pounding on the
drill motor and ran back to inform Artemis that she was a "fucking
cunt." When this didn't work, they quieted down, watching their boat
go out to sea.

In about five minutes, the jerks had dumped all the Narries out of
their cooler and were using it to haul water up from the surf and dump
it on the bonfire. It never really went out - tire fires never do -
but it stopped billowing smoke.

I asked Wes to take me out to Artemis, then clambered on board their
boat, hopped around leaving bloody waffle prints on the deck and
checked in the glove compartment.

The gun wasn't the little .22 revolver I'd expected, but a big,
chrome-plated cannon, stuck in a stiff new shoulder holster. When I
pulled it out, it took me a minute to untangle the straps.

"All six chambers are loaded," Artemis observed. "Not a great idea
unless you want to shoot yourself in the armpit." When I shot her an
odd look, she shrugged. "My dad was into guns, what can I say."

It looked like someone else had a real jackass for a dad too. I
chucked the weapon into the sea. Then, just for the hell of it, I kept
rummaging. We had all day, we were already into some serious
criminality, and we'd never be prosecuted. But if these pricks gave us
any more trouble, I wanted to know where they lived.

Couldn't find a damn thing. Other than the gun, this boat was eerily
clean. No papers, no registration, no old beer cans. The life vests
were brand new and unmarked. When I climbed back onto the Zode, I had
no information at all, nothing but a chemical trace. There was an odor
about that boat, and it followed me, unwelcome, onto the Zode. It was
on my hand. The smell of some goddamned men's cologne. I'd picked it
up from the revolver.

Artemis mocked me with no mercy. "Shit, I'd rather have PCBs on me," I
said. "PCBs you can wash off; other people's perfume sticks with you
like a bladder infection." I trailed my hand in the water.

We reunited these little fucks with their transportation and they
left, quietly. The injured dignity on their faces was something to
behold. You'd think we'd just busted up a monastery.

They didn't say a word until they were a hundred yards out, almost out
of earshot. Then, I think, they looked in the glove compartment. They
just exploded with more lusty fucks, cunts, and pricks. I could hardly
make it out, and I didn't want to.

Wes turned to me with just a grin on his face. "Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"Satan will get you."

"That's what they said?"

"I think so."

"Shit. Then I'll tell Tricia to expect a call from the Prince of
Darkness."

"She'll probably hang up on him."

We didn't have the stuff we needed to repair the drilling rig. That
was okay, since I didn't really think it would work anyway. It was
made to bore down through reasonably soft dirt, not a pile of trash
that included lots of iron fragments. We had something more reliable:
a couple of sledgehammers. I picked out a promising place on the north
end, visible from both South Boston and downtown, and we started
pounding pipe segments down into the bowels of Spectacle Island.

Ridiculously slow work. We spent about four hours on it, taking turns
on the sledgehammers and keeping an eye out for the goons on the boat.

My foot had a one-inch gash in it, ranging from not very deep to
pretty fucking deep. Back on the Blowfish, I scrubbed it out with soap
and water, taking scientific care to probe the deepest parts of the
cut, squeezing it to make it bleed, the whole bit; disinfected it with
something incredibly painful and wrapped a sterile bandage around the
foot. Walking around was painful, so when I wanted to do a little
investigating I had to go by water, on a Zodiac.

What I wanted to see was near the northeast corner of the island. It
was a huge, rusty, old barge, a piece of shit, but apparently
seaworthy. There was no cargo on it. It looked like it had simply run
aground.

Right now the tide was almost out and about three-quarters of the
barge was high and dry. It was way, way up there; when it had rammed
this island, the tide must have been especially high, or it must have
been going very fast, or both.

Or maybe it had been deliberately abandoned. Maybe Joe Gallagher had
come here and put the nose of the Extra Stout against the ass end of
the barge and just tossed it up onto the rest of the garbage. The
interesting thing was that it was new - it wasn't here three months
ago, the last time I was out - and it must have carved some pretty
deep gashes into the island.

Geologists love earthquakes and other natural upheavals because they
tear things open, providing views into the earth's secrets. I had a
similar attitude about this barge. There was no way to drag it off the
island and then jump down into the cavity it had dug, but I could
skulk around the edges with my sampling jars and see what was coming
out. But I probably wouldn't bother. If I were doing a Ph.D.
dissertation on Spectacle Island, I'd go wild over it. But I know what
Spectacle Island is: a big heap of garbage. As long as there were
bigger issues in the Harbor, no point in getting obsessed with the
details.

But just for the hell of it, because it was new and interesting, I
circumnavigated the barge, partly on the water and partly by foot.
Nothing much to see besides hundreds of feet of vertical, rust-covered
wall. Graffiti was sprinkled near the waterline and on the part that
stuck out into the Harbor. The walls were a natural for graffiti, but
Spectacle Island wasn't accessible to your average jerk with a
spraycan. The SMEGMA man had made it out here - some guy who'd been
wandering around Boston for a couple of years painting the word SMEGMA
everywhere. Super Bad Larry had made it, probably swam one-handed all
the way from Roxbury. Someone in the Class of '87, and VERN + SALLY =
LOVE apparently had had access to a boat. Three-quarters of the
graffiti was in red, though, done by a single group. Besides being
red, it had a distinctive look to it. Most graffitists just scribble
something down and run away, having made their point, but the people
with the red spray-paint were performing black magic, exercising
ritual care. This was most obvious with the pentacles, which were
inscribed in a circle. It's hard to stand on a rolling boat in the
middle of the night and draw a perfect five-foot circle with a spray
can, but the Satan worshippers had done it repeatedly, all around the
barge. Then they drew upside-down stars in the circles, forming your
basic pentagram, and an inverted cross underneath that. Arched over
the top of the circle were the words POYZEN BOYZEN - a heavy-metal
band with a thing about nuns and pit bulls.

They weren't finished with the umlauts, though. They put another in
the center of the pentagram. If you stood back and looked at it the
right way, the inverted star then became a face. The umlaut made two
beady red eyes, the bottom prong of the star made a sharp muzzle, the
top prongs a pair of horns, and the two side prongs a pair of goatlike
ears.

The name of the brand was written a few other places, billboard-sized,
along with a bunch of incantations I didn't recognize. Old magic
symbols cribbed from a book on the occult, I guess: circles and lines
and dots connected in rigid but meaningless patterns. A nonchemist
might mistake them for molecular diagrams.

The Satan worshippers had left a few other symptoms of their presence
scattered around the island. For example, a wrecked toilet with a
cross painted on it, surrounded by the remains of five bonfires. A
mock shrine, I guess. I knocked it apart by throwing football-sized
rocks at it, not because I'm some kind of heavy Christian, but only
because it got on my nerves. Besides, there's no incentive to keep a
garbage pile neat, which was the problem with Boston Harbor to begin
with. I kicked at one of the old bonfires and noticed that they had
been burning old wood that had been pressure treated with some kind of
preservative. That was fine with me. When you bum that kind of wood,
the smoke contains an amazingly high concentration of dioxin. Let's
hope Poyzen Boyzen fans like to roast marshmallows.

A curl of that toxic smoke rose up out of the ashes. This fire was
brand new, left over from last night.

I hadn't seen any boats beached near here, so they must have all gone
home. Hell, maybe it was the same group we'd been arguing with. I went
down to the pseudobeach next to the barge and looked for signs of
activity and, sure enough, a few footprints. This obviously was their
landing zone, and the graffiti was dense. WELCOME TO HELL, it said,
and a few yards after along, written higher than I could reach, a
small pentacle and the word SATAN with an arrow pointed upward.

 

THE  ANTICHRIST  IS

IN

 

That's why the unrusted area caught my eye. It was way up at the top
of the barge, above the SATAN sign. A pair of little spots, a silver
umlaut, where the rust had been worn away. They were a little more
than a foot apart. At first I thought they were paint spots, but then
caught them glinting in the sun.

I went over and stood beneath them. This patch of ground looked
smoother, harder-packed. There were some weak indentations, a little
more than a foot apart. The Poyzen Boyzen people had been using a
ladder to climb up into the barge.

It didn't look like a rusted-out hulk to me anymore. It looked like an
iron-walled fortress, something out of Tolkien. God knows what was
going on inside of it.

I had a pretty good idea: high-school kids came out here to drink
Names and fornicate. Maybe they traded in cocaine, or cheaper highs,
but at any rate the lunatic fringe to this group owned a lot of red
spray paint and had been to some bookstore in Cambridge with an
"occult" section in the back.

There was no reason in the world I would want to discover their
purpose, so I limped back to the Zode and went back to our
pipe-pounding operation.

Frank, the biggest guy on the Blowfish crew, had broken through for
us. Something was definitely escaping from the pipe. If you held your
hand over it, the warm, moist draft made your skin crawl. I had
everyone stand back, lit a 4th of July sparkler, and threw it toward
the pipe from about ten feet away. I didn't see the rest, because I
turned away instinctively, but I heard a large but quiet thwup as a
big ball of gas went up. Then there was a mild roaring sound, like
distant traffic. The crew of the Blowfish applauded and I turned
around. We had a nice flare going, a big raggedy yellow flame.

We lengthened the pipe so that its outlet was about ten feet off the
ground and then we left it there, burning. In my fantasies, I wanted
to encircle Spectacle Island with a blazing corona of yellow flares, a
beacon to ships at sea, a landmark for airline pilots, permanent
fireworks for the yuppies in the new waterfront condos. It wouldn't
really accomplish that much, other than to remind people: Hey. There's
a harbor out here. It's dirty.

 


 

13

WHEN I GOT HOME I washed my foot again, applied vodka (a particular
brand that I keep around strictly as an organic solvent) and
rebandaged. My dreams were hallucinatory nightmares about fleeing from
oversized, heavily perfumed PR flacks with chrome revolvers. I got up
three times during the night to vomit, and when my alarm went off I
couldn't move my arm to hit the snooze button because all my joints
had gone stiff. My vision was blurry and I had a 104° fever. My
muscles and joints were all welded into a burning, smoking mass. I lay
there and moaned "two hundred pounds of tainted meat" until Bart came
in and brought me a Hefty. When I took enough nitrous to get to the
bathroom and finish up with the vomiting and diarrhea, I looked in the
mirror and found that my tongue was carpeted with whitish-brown fuzz.

Bart drove me to the big hospital downtown to see Dr. J., my old
college roommate. He'd gotten his M.D. on the six-year shake-and-bake
program, done an Ivy League residency, and now he worked ERs. Not very
prestigious, but the pay is steady. A fine way to subsidize other life
projects.

When I explained how I'd cut my foot, he looked at me as though I had
just taken both barrels from a twelve-gauge.

"There's some very serious stuff out there in the Harbor, man. I'm not
kidding. All those decay organisms? They work on your body too, S.T.,"
he said, shooting me up with some kind of stupendous antibiotic
cocktail. He gave me more of the same in pill form, but in the end I
was to take only about half the bottle. Whatever those antibiotics
were, they just blew the shit out of whatever, was in my system. That
included the natural bacteria in my colon, the E. coli, so I had
continuing diarrhea. Life is too short to spend on a toilet, wondering
if there's more, so I stopped taking the pills and let my own defenses
handle the mop-up work. And yes, I got a tetanus shot.

"I ran into some people you'd like," I told Bart as he drove me home.
"Poyzen Boyzen fans."

He sniffed the air and frowned slightly. Bartholomew was a sommelier
of heavy metal. "Yeah. Not bad for a two-umlaut band. First album was
so-so. Then they ran out of material - they write maybe two songs a
year. Got into a black magic thing for their videos. Already passé."

"Isn't that the whole point of heavy metal?"

"Yeah. I'm the one who told you that," he reminded me. "Heavy metal
will never leave you behind."

"Where are they from?"

"Long Island somewhere. Not the Brooklyn end." He looked at me. "Who
were these dudes? How'd you know they were fans?"

"Instinct." I told him about the barge.

"Shitty bargainers," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"These people sold their souls to the Devil and all they got was a
rusty old barge? I would've held out for something with a wet bar.
Close to the T."

When we got home, he went to his racks of albums and tried to remember
whether Poyzen Boyzen was filed under P or B. The answering machine
was blinding, so I rewound it, listening to the message fast and
backwards. And when you run it backwards, it's supposed to be
gibberish. But this wasn't. It was a melody, a song with a strong beat
that was compressed into a tinny tik-tik-tik by the machine. And above
that rhythm, a little high-pitched voice was babbling: "Satan is
coming. Satan is coming."

When it rewound all the way, I played it forward. It was heavy-metal
thrash. Bart came running in, amazed. "What the fuck?" he was saying.
"That's on the machine?"

"Yeah."

"That's Poyzen Boyzen, man. Second album. It's called 'Hymn.'"

"Nice song."

They'd left the entire song for us. When it was over, there was about
ten seconds of a woman screaming. And that was it.

It didn't sound like Debbie, really, but then I'd never heard Debbie
scream. She wasn't the type. So I dialed her number and she answered
the phone, sounding fine.

"I'd like to talk to you," she said, and I knew I was in trouble.

"You want to get together?" I said.

"If that's okay with you." Okay, so I was in trouble.

We had dinner at the Pearl. She let me twist for a long time before
she got down to business.

"Are you still interested in seeing me?" she asked.

"Shit, of course I am. Jesus!"

She just fixed me with a big-eyed stare, penetratingly cute, yet one
of keen intelligence.

"I'm sorry that I haven't been calling you enough," I said. "I realize
that I don't call enough."

"How about if I just stopped calling you? Would that give you any more
incentive?"

"Isn't that what you did?"

"Not like that, I didn't."

"You lost me, Debbie. Explain."

"I like you, S.T., and I've tried, a few times, to reach out and get
in touch with you. And now you're addicted to it."

"Howzat?" She was a speck on the horizon.

"We're getting into this shit now where you expect me to follow you
around. To keep track of where you are, pick up the phone and call
you, do the social organizing, set up our dates. And then, when we're
together, you give me this gruff shit."

"I do?"

"Yeah. You make me come on to you, and then you pretend you don't want
it. I had to put up with that once or twice on the Canada trip and I'm
never going to do it again. No way. You want something from me, call
me up - you've got my fucking number - and ask for it."

After that, my eyes didn't blink for about half an hour. It reminded
me a whole lot of being popped by that smart cop when Bart and I were
having our boys' night out. You go around thinking you're cool, a
veritable shadow in the night, and then you find out that someone's
got your number.

Like the Poyzen Boyzen fans. A band of assholes I probably wouldn't
even recognize in civilian dress.

"That reminds me of something," I said. "I'm being kind of threatened,
kind of, by a bunch of Satan worshippers. I want you to look out."

"How the fuck..." she said, then got up and walked out of the
restaurant.

I finished her five-spices chicken and doodled around with my nerd
watch. After a major social fuck-up, it's good to have machinery to
screw around with. I programmed the alarm to go off in ten days. When
it did, I'd give her a call.

Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness
to live, and get nice and shit-eatingly lonesome. And worry about the
Poyzen Boyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played
the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then
erased it.

For cavemen, they were quick on their feet. Was I that easy to track
down?

The thing of it was: nobody had my number. Six months ago I'd gotten
another damn call at 3:00 A.M. from some GEE hanger-on who'd just
landed at Logan and wanted to be picked up and given a free place to
crash. That was enough of that, so I changed to an unlisted number and
didn't tell anybody. Not even my employer. If GEE wanted to reach me,
they had to get clever.

Which brought up another sore point. Usually they called Debbie and
got her to call me, and she had said a few things about not being a
receptionist. Another relationship felony. Just another reason to get
to drinking.

But I still didn't know how the crew from the island had tracked me
down. Maybe one of them worked at the phone company or something.
Maybe one of them knew someone who knew someone who knew Bart.

When my watch alarm went off, I called Debbie, and found out she was
vacationing in Arizona for three weeks. So I set my alarm watch for
three weeks later.

It went off around Labor Day, in the middle of the night. I was deep
in a chemical factory in another state, nestled up against a
fifty-five-gallon drum on a loading dock, doing a bag job for Cohen.
Had to press the damn watch against my thigh to muffle the sound,
unstrap the wristband, pry the back off with a screwdriver, and
scramble the innards. That's the last digital watch I'll ever own.

Despite that, the job was a cakewalk. It was just like being a
criminal, except it was all-pretend. If they caught you, you could
just stand up and show them your warrant. They didn't.

 


 

14

I SENT ESMERELDA a box of Turtles and she went through the Boston
Globe Index and checked out all the entries under Spectacle Island for
the last three months. I was interested in something along the lines
of "Spectacle Island - Abandoned barges running into."

She found it, and I should have figured it out myself. It was
Hurricane Alison, or the last remnants thereof, which had hit us when
we were having an abnormally high tide. Whenever a big, systemic
disaster hit, a blizzard or heat wave, the Globe ran enormous articles
"compiled from reports by" followed by lists of twenty names. They had
to list every single bad thing that had happened to Massachusetts or
else people would call in, claim they'd been neglected and cancel
their subscriptions.

Buried in one of those was a paragraph about an old barge, due to be
scuttled anyway, that had broken loose from Winthrop during the storm
and had been batted around the Harbor all night. It wasn't much of a
problem because no boats were out in that weather. By the time they
even noticed it was missing, the barge had dug itself into Spectacle
Island, which was a fine place for it anyway.

I was throwing a lot of work into Project Lobster. I wanted to get the
damn thing finished, and Debbie was deliberately unavailable, and I
was out of nitrous, and by that point in the summer I didn't have
enough money for anything but newspapers and ski-ball.

All those tainted lobsters had to be run through a pretty complicated
chemical analysis. It required equipment GEE didn't have, so I'd
worked out an arrangement with a lab at a university. Tanya, the Blue
Kills Marauder, who'd been working for GEE since her high school days
in California, was one of their grad students. She helped with various
projects, and in return for "educating" her we got access to nifty
analytical equipment.

This particular university had a glut of it anyway, having been so
successful in attracting the devotion of big Route 128 corporations
that you had to think they'd made their own pact with Satan,
negotiated by their toughest lawyers. The high-tech companies coughed
up gobs of expensive equipment and the university had to hold
hysterical fund-raising drives just to build buildings big enough to
keep it out of the rain. You could wander through the basements and
find analytical devices costing half a million dollars, so powerful,
so advanced that no one was even using them. Once I had gotten access,
I had to go down, study their owner's manuals, take off the plastic,
and calibrate the gizmos.

Then we were in business. Tanya or I, usually Tanya, broke the
lobsters open and located their livers. Whether you're a human or a
lobster, your liver filters the toxins out of your system, so that's
where you find the bad stuff. We checked them for obvious signs, like
tumors or necrosis, and then we ran them through the big machines from
Route 128. We got their levels of various metals and organic bad
things and put it all into our database.

And we stood around a lot, edgy as hell, because Tanya was Debbie's
roommate, and though she was willing to work with me, forgiveness had
apparently not yet been earned.

In the weeks surrounding Labor Day we were working at this for twelve
or fourteen hours a day, I out on the Zodiac nagging my pals for fresh
samples, and Tanya down in the basement cutting bugs. The university
wasn't far from the Charles, so once or twice a day I'd bring the Zode
around - as I said, the fastest Boston transportation - and she'd come
down to the water and we'd make a handoff.

I was a little perturbed when she missed one, but not surprised.
Probably in the middle of something. I hung out on the Zode for maybe
half an hour. Why not? Even if the water below me was dirty, I was in
the middle of a park. But I got sick of waiting, fast - I was tired of
this project and wanted to get on with it. I tied the boat to a tree,
took out the fuel line, and hiked inland, schlepping the beer cooler.
Trotted up out of the water-side park and into the campus.

Our lab was down in a corridor that still smelled like fresh paint and
linoleum glue. One room after another filled with microchips. But the
odor got sharper as I approached our lab. Smells trigger memories, and
this one made me think of building model airplanes when I was a kid.

It was the smell of spray paint. And on the brand-new laboratory door
was some graffiti, still wet, done up in cherry red. A rough
pentagram, the inverted cross below, the staring umlaut in the middle.
Above it: SATAN SEZ: STAY THE FUCK OUT. The laboratory was dark.

Didn't touch a thing. I ran upstairs to the lobby and phoned Tanya and
Debbie's place.

Debbie answered, sounding kind of tense, even though she didn't know
it was me yet. "Yeah?"

"Don't hang up, this is business. Tanya there?"

"She can't come to the phone right now. What the hell have you guys
been doing? What's with her?"

"I was going to ask you."

"Why is she acting so bent?"

"What's she doing?"

"She came home crying, ran into the bathroom. I heard her throw up a
couple of times and now she's been in the shower for about half an
hour."

"Sounds like-"

"No. She wasn't raped."

"You got your door locked anyway?"

"Damn right."

I hung up and ran back downstairs. Call me strange, but I tend to
carry latex surgical gloves around in my pocket, because it's my
business to touch so many nasty things. I put them on before I did any
touching.

Good. She hadn't been too freaked out to lock the door when she left.

No signs of struggle. The gas chromatograph was still turned on. I
could smell organic solvents in here, the same ones we didn't like big
corporations to use, and something else too: an oily, foul odor, mixed
in with the marine stench of the lobsters. I recognized it. Some of
the lobsters I'd gotten off Gallagher's boat had smelled that way. In
fact that was the reason they'd given them to me. Big enough to sell,
but they stank too bad. They had come from the entrance to the Inner
Harbor.

Just for the hell of it, I locked the door. And that made me think,
wait a minute. Tanya had gotten home half an hour ago? And it would
have taken her at least half an hour to get home. So whatever was
bothering her had taken place an hour ago. But the spray paint on the
door was a lot fresher than that.

I opened the door again and checked out the graffiti. It was shitty
work. The stuff on the barge had been carefully done. This was done in
a hurry, and done badly, with lots of drips and runs.

Spray paint is messy. It throws a fog of paint into the air. Standing
in the doorway, I could see a penumbra of paint mist fading out across
the white floor. And right in front of the door the red was
interrupted by a pair of white ovals where no paint had fallen -
shadows cast by the graffitist's feet. The shadows were pointy-toed,
but bigger than a woman's feet.

When he'd walked away, he'd gotten paint mist on the soles of his
shoes, and tracked it down the hallway some distance. They were faint
tracks, but they'd been made by dress shoes.

That was charming. The Poyzen Boyzen now had yuppies working for them.
So that's how they afforded those Back Bay condos.

Just as important, Tanya hadn't left any tracks. She'd cleared out of
there before the graffitist had.

So I went back into the lab. What had freaked her out so bad?
Something she'd seen during the analysis?

I approached the workbench. Slowly. This reminded me of when you hear
a rat trap go off in the middle of the night, and when you go down in
the morning you know you're going to find something really unpleasant.
You just don't know when or where it's going to hit you.

Whatever had set Tanya off wasn't obvious. Not two-headed monsters, no
parasites squirming loose on the bench. Hell, that wouldn't have
bothered her anyway. She was a biochemist, a scientist, and she had
listened to a full recitation of my relationship crimes. Nothing could
gross her out. She was about halfway through dissecting one of
Gallagher's big stinky lobsters. She'd removed the legs and tail and
pried back the shell around the body to expose the liver. The bug was
sprawled out on its back under a hot light, and the odor was billowing
out of it like smoke from a fire. Had she gotten the liver out? Hard
to tell. Something was definitely wrong down in there.

No, she hadn't. There was hardly any liver left. It had necrosed-a
fancy word for died. Rotted away, inside the body, leaving just a
puddle of black stuff. Surrounded by blobs of yellowy material,
vesicles or sacs of something that I'd never seen inside a lobster
before. Some kind of toxin that the liver had desperately tried to
remove from the lobster's system, killing itself in the process. I
found a ballpoint pen and poked one of the sacs; something greasy
poured out and a wave of the oily scent rose up into the light.

There used to be a plant in Japan that made oil out of rice. The oil
had to pass through a heat exchanger to cool it down. In other words,
it flowed over a bunch of pipes that had a colder fluid running
through them. The cold fluid was a polychlorinated biphenyl. A PCB.

If you're an engineer, and you're not very bright, it's easy to love
polychlorinated biphenyls. They are cheap, stable, easy to make and
they take heat very well. That's why they end up in heat exchangers
and electrical transformers. It's how they got into that machine in
Japan and, when the pipes started to leak, it's how they got into a
lot of rice oil. Unfortunately, rice oil is for human consumption, and
as soon as human beings enter the equation, PCBs no longer look very
good. If we were robots, living in a robot world with robot engineers,
we could get away with using them, but the problem with humans is that
they have a lot of fat in their bodies and PCBs have this vicious
affinity for fat. They dissolve themselves in human fat cells and they
never leave. They are studded with loose chlorine atoms that know how
to break up chromosomes. So when that heat exchanger started leaking,
the city of Kusho, Japan started to look like the site of a Biblical
plague. Newborn babies came out undersized and dark brown. People
started to waste away. They developed a fairly disgusting skin rash
called chloracne - the same one Tom had gotten in Vietnam - and they
felt very sick.

Now the plague had come to Boston Harbor.

 


 

15

A PERSON MIGHT WONDER why I, Sangamon Taylor, didn't run out and go
home and scrub myself raw like Tanya did. It had nothing to do with
male/female issues, or personal bravery or any of that crap. It had to
do with how we viewed ourselves. Tanya was pure as the Antarctic snow.
She wore a gas mask when she rode her bicycle. She was born
vegetarian, the child of hippies. She didn't smoke and she didn't
drink; her worst vice was mushrooms - organically grown mushrooms.
When she'd looked down into that puddle of PCBs, she'd gotten the
first whiff of her own mortality, and she didn't like it.

We all owe a toxic debt to our bodies, and sooner or later it comes
due. Cigarettes or a chemical-factory job boost that debt to the sky.
And though Tanya had hardly any debt at all, when she figured out she
was staring at PCBs, smearing them on her skin, breathing them into
her lungs, she probably felt like all her carefulness had been erased.
All that tofu was for nought. Suddenly she was up there with the
I.V.-drug abusers.

I have no illusions about my own purity. I avoid the really bad stuff,
I use common sense. I refuse to work with the nastier solvents and I
don't inhale my cigars. But I could look at those PCBs and say, okay,
I'm poisoned, maybe if I give up cigars and ride my bike a little more
I can pay off this debt.

You don't get PCB poisoning from the air anyway. You get it by eating
the stuff.

When I thought of that, I thought of Gallagher and his crew. Those
bastards lived on lobsters. I had to get in touch with them right
away. Easy enough.

The tough part was this. Where were the PCBs coming from? I was used
to finding trace amounts just about everywhere. Basco had put lots of
them into the Harbor. But I'd never actually seen the stuff before;
just detected it with exquisitely sensitive instruments. To actually
stand there and watch it running through a lobster's viscera like
melted butter - that was a fucking nightmare. Unheard of. Somebody had
to be dumping it into the Harbor by the barrel load.

First things first, so I got myself decently protected and wrapped the
lobsters up in many layers of PCB-proof plastic, marked it as
hazardous waste, and left it there for the time being. I wasn't
normally in the business of disposing of hazardous waste and wasn't
sure how to begin. Scrubbed the counter down and locked the place up,
then went to a different lab and hosed myself off. Finally got Tanya
on the phone; she was jittery as hell, but laughing a little now. I
tried to tell her she was okay as long as she hadn't been licking her
fingers, but with her background she knew more about it than I did. I
asked her to put Debbie on.

"Yeah?"

"We have a big thing coming up. A huge thing. Would you like to work
on it?"

"Sure."

"And sometime, if I can find some time, I would like very much, more
than I can really say here at this pay phone, to, like, take you to
dinner or something of that nature."

"Well, you have my number," she said.

And you've got mine, I refrained from saying. And then what? How could
I explain the Poyzen Boyzen thing?

"Gotten any weird messages on your phone lately?"

"Have you been doing that?"

"What?"

"Putting that awful music on our phone machine?"

"No. That's being done by some - some assholes. Heavy-metal fans."

"What do they want?"

Actually, that was a damn good question. What did these guys want? If
they wanted to scare me, it was working. But what did they want to
scare me into? Thugs can be so nonspecific.

"They're pissed about something. Something to do with Spectacle
Island. And the lab."

"Drugs?"

"There you go." Spectacle Island - specifically, that old barge -
would be a great place to process drugs. A nice, abandoned, lawless
zone, only minutes from downtown.

Bart had said that PCP was very hip among the Poyzen Boyzen drones.
PCP was easy to make - even a metalhead could manufacture it by the
fifty-five-gallon drum. And I could detect it, by the wastes and smell
it generated. No wonder they didn't want me taking samples out there.

"You want to know exactly what happened?" I said. "Those poor idiots
overheard me saying I was hunting for PCBs, and they thought I said
PCP!"

"Great. So you've got a band of dustheads after you?"

"No. We have a band dustheads after us."

"That's great. I'll never take another shower."

I refrained from offering showering privileges at my place. Without
being her official boyfriend, there wasn't much I could do.

Reassuring was my best bet, but I wasn't. I wanted Debbie and Tanya as
scared as I was, because that way they'd be careful. "Watch your ass.
I have stuff to do."

"Going to call the cops?" she asked.

"About what - the PCBs?"

"No, the PCP."

"Uh, no. Look, the angel dust is weird and exciting; the PCBs are ten
times as important. So right now I'm thinking about the PCBs. Sorry."

Went to a bank machine and took out a hundred dollars.

I'm not sure why. Called Bartholomew and told him where I was going,
just in case. And had an idea.

"How'd you like to become a Poyzen Boyzen fan?'

"I have to anyway. Amy is."

"Oh. Is that your woman?" Amy was his new girlfriend. Hadn't met her
face-to-face, but I'd heard her in the next room, late at night; the
second loudest copulater I'd ever heard.

"Yeah. Have you guys met?"

"Indirectly. Well, go hang out with the hard core if you can, okay?
The young ones - teenagers. Shit, I'll even subsidize it."

"But teen Boyzen heads are like two-legged cockroaches or something."

"So bring some Raid. Come on, you're the social critic, right? This is
it, man."

"We'll see."

Then I headed for Fenway Park, only a few blocks away. Everything in
Boston's only a few blocks away. It was approaching dusk and the wind
was coming up, with something cold and wet behind it. The baseball
game probably wouldn't make it to the seventh inning. Tonight it was
going to rain like hell - the first Nor'easter of the fall.

When I was almost there, I walked by another phone booth, saw its
white pages fluttering in the wind and remembered Dolmacher. Formerly
of Basco and presently of Biotronics, a subsidiary of Basco, he was
now my prime suspect. "I'm in the book - look me up," he'd said. So I
did. I knew for damn sure he wasn't about to tell me anything, but if
I hit him with a frontal assault, and he was his emotionally retarded
self, I'd know he was totally ignorant. If he went into adrenaline
overdrive and called me a terrorist, I'd know Basco was involved. So I
dropped a dime on Dolmacher and let the phone ring twelve times.

"Hello?"

"Dolmacher, this is ST."

"Hi!" He sounded terribly cheerful, and a cheerful Dolmacher was
almost unbearable. It meant that his work was going wonderfully. "I
just got in the door from work, S.T."

"Dolmacher, just tell me one thing. Why is the floor of the Harbor,
right off Castle Island Park, a lake of solid PCBs this evening?"

He laughed. "You're taking too many of those hallucinogenic alkaloids,
Sangamon. Better get a real job."

I hung up - he didn't know shit - then I bought a bleacher ticket and
ran around to the dark side of Fenway Park.

A toxic crime had been committed. I had witnesses and an address. The
witnesses were bleacher creatures, and the address was underwater.
First I had to see those witnesses, and it was easy to track them
down. Like dolphins, Townies communicate with high-pitched sonar;
"Heyyy, Maaahk! I'll meet ya at the Aaahk afta da geem!"

"Mr. Gallagher," I said.

"Heyyy, S.T.! Heyyy, guys, look who's here! It's the invironmintle!"

"Heyyy, S.T, how ya doin?"

"Barrett grounded out, Horn flew out, now it's 0 and 2 on Dewey. He's
swinging for the bleachers, that stupid bastard."

"Look. Those oily-smelling lobsters. You haven't been eating any, have
you?"

"Shit no. Tried it once but they taste awful. When you gonna do
something about that, S.T? That whole area there, it's for shit now."

S.T., when are you going to stop pollution? "Which area?"

Gallagher looked around at his buddies and they all threw out rough
descriptions: "Right out there, you know." "South of the airport."
"North of Spectacle Island." "Right off Southie."

"Since when?"

"Month or two."

"Look, Rory. I gotta tell you something. I know sometimes you guys
give me shit, you think I'm kind of flaky, but I'm telling you that
shit is dangerous. I'm not talking about maybe getting cancer in
twenty years, I'm talking about croaking next week. Don't eat those
lobsters. I want you to go find all the other lobstermen and tell them
not to use that area."

Gallagher took me seriously until I got to the last part, then his
face turned even redder and he laughed. "Hell, ST., no one uses it
anyway. They all found the same thing we did. But shit, it's a big
area, I got no business telling people not to use it."

Fenway Park turned on its lights. I knew Gallagher was right. He
couldn't personally embargo half the harbor. Maybe I could get through
to the state authorities. But the last time I'd done that, I had to
dress up in a Santa Claus suit. What was the drill this time, Bozo the
Clown?

I had my back to the field, standing with one foot propped up on the
bleacher. I felt a big guy beside me, trying to get past, so I moved
aside and he scrunched through. It was a hot prestorm afternoon and he
wasn't wearing a shirt. This was kind of unfortunate, since he had a
skin condition.

Now, a lot of people have skin conditions. Especially
fair-complexioned people who work under the hot sun, around salt
water, for a living. This guy who sat down next to Rory was blanketed
by a rash of little blackheads, so small and close together that they
looked like a five o'clock shadow. I was trying not to stare, but
that's no good when the person you're staring at is a little touchy.

"You got a problem?" he asked.

"Nope. Sorry."

What was I going to do, demand a close examination right there under
the lights? The guy was gripping a large, fresh brew in his left hand
and I saw a wedding band.

"Just remember, Rory," I said, real loud, loud enough for even this
guy to understand. "The oily lobsters. Those things are poison.
Especially for kids and pregnant women. Throw 'em away and go eat a
Big Mac or something. Eat too many of those things, you get a skin
rash and it's downhill from there."

I turned around and left. "What was he talking about?" said the guy
with chloracne.

It was time to mobilize GEE's PR machine, phone all my media
connections and make a lot of noise about oily lobsters. Had to
contact some kind of healthy authority too. Maybe Dr. J. could spread
the word. So I phoned the ER.

"What's the word?" he said.

"Chlorachne."

"Whoa!"

"Look out for it. Tell your colleagues. Fishermen, Southeast Asians,
anyone who eats fish from the Harbor."

"What's the source?"

"I don't know. But I'm going to find them, and then I'm going to blow
them away."

"Nonviolently."

"Of course. Gotta run."

"Thanks for the tip, S.T."

Back at the Zodiac I replaced the vital parts and buzzed over to the
MIT docks, where I tied up and jogged over to the office.

No one was around. Probably at the Sox game, in better seats. I got
the Darth Vader Suit and an air tank, a supply of sample containers -
peanut butter jars - and some binoculars with big wide light-gathering
lenses. Until the rain came, the light diffusing off the city should
be enough to navigate by. Took a huge nautical-rescue strobe that we
keep around just because it's powerful and irritating, and on the way
back to the Zode I picked up a couple of gyros and a six-pack.

When I got to the water between Spectacle Island and South Boston -
the address of the crime - the sky was blue in the east and black in
the west. I had no interest in wasting time. I was tired as hell, all
alone, the wind was coming up, the temperature dropping, and below me
was a sea of poison. I struggled into the scuba gear, double-checked
when I remembered that I'd done it wrong once off Blue Kills, peeled
on the Darth Vader mask, turned on the big strobe, and dove.

This kind of work is a pain in the ass, and taking actual samples off
the bottom is a last resort. That was the whole purpose of Project
Lobster. The lobsters, I'd hoped, would tell me where to concentrate
my efforts. This afternoon it had paid off in a big way and now I had
to follow through.

It was hard to figure: how had that lobster found so much PCB on the
Harbor floor, here? If he'd been hanging out along the shore of some
fiasco property, or under one of their pipes, I could understand. But
down here, there was nothing.

When I got to the scene of the crime, though, and flashed my
spotlight, I was reminded that "nothing" is a relative term. Humans
have been flinging garbage into Boston Harbour for three and a half
centuries. I was standing in the foothills of Spectacle Island itself,
staring around at everything from Coke cans to wrecked trawlers.
Maybe, if I spent hours cruising the bottom, I'd find a cluster of
fifty-five-gallon drums, thrown overboard by some corporation with too
many PCBs on its hands. If I could do that, and trace them back to the
owner, I could go ahead and paint their logo on the prow of my Zodiac.
I already had two logos there and was eager to become an ace.

But there were no drums sitting around within ten feet of me, and this
wasn't the time for a full-scale search, so I scooped up some muck
into a peanut butter jar. While I was screwing the lid down I shone my
light into the sample and saw a condom spiraling through it. Reservoir
tip, ribbed and used.

A chunk of latex could definitely queer my sample, so I had to abandon
that one and take another. I swam around for just a minute or so,
hoping I'd get lucky, then headed slowly for the surface. Upstairs the
weather was turning to shit. I'd been out on the water since 7:00 A.M.
and it was time for normal recreation.

One of my uncles grew up in New York and he used to tell me about
diving for condoms in the Hudson. There was one stretch where you
could dive down, holding your breath like a Polynesian pearl diver,
and pick them off the river bottom. They'd dry them out, put them on
broomsticks, dust them with talcum powder, roll them up, and sell them
for a nickel. This was during the war and there were plenty of sailors
in the market.

When I was a kid I'd wondered how those condoms had ended up in the
river. Did the sailors peel off their used condoms, take the bus out
to the West Side and fling them into the water, all in the same place?
No. When I went to my current job I figured it out. The sailors
flushed them down the toilets and into the sewers. In most of your old
cities, you have combined sewers - one system carrying human waste,
rainwater, and industrial crap.

But a sewer is just a collection of tubes that run downhill.

It's an artificial river, with tributaries and out outfall. A tube,
like a river, can only carry so much stuff. Then it overflows.

There's no reason for a sanitary or an industrial sewer to overflow,
because it gets steady, predictable inputs. Storm sewers are totally
different. Take tonight, for example.

When I broke the surface, it was raining. The Zode was flashing and
rocking like mad about fifty feet away. By the time I climbed in,
which is pretty difficult when there's no one on board to hold it
steady, the rain was coming down hard. I stripped naked, turned off
the strobe, and just lay there in the rain until I started to shiver.

Sure, I'm a good environmentalist and I know that this rain was acidic
because of coal-burning plants in Ohio, that it was carrying oxides of
nitrogen because of automotive emissions from the Boston area. Maybe
even a trace of nitrous oxide. But it was easily pure enough to drink.
It was purer than I was, and there was no comparison with the sewage
I'd just come out of. I could let it fall into my open mouth and not
think for a minute about bioaccumulative toxins.

It was falling all over the Boston Basin, running into the sewers and
heading for this Harbor. If enough of it fell, the sewers would
overflow.

Sometimes, geysers of shit arise from downtown-Boston manholes after
heavy rains. That's an example of combined sewer overflow. Normally
it's kept under control. The engineers know that overflows will occur,
so they have CSOs- Combined Sewer Overflows-all along the waterfront.
If the sewers get too much runoff, they overflow directly into the
Harbor and the Charles. What comes out of those CSOs isn't just
rainwater, though. Industrial waste and sewage are running down the
same tubes. It all comes out together. If it's really bad, and even
the CSOs can't discharge enough sewage to empty those tubes, that's
when manholes start to pop.

There was a CSO near Castle Island Park. It explains why I'd found a
condom out in the middle of the Harbor. There was probably a CSO in
the Hudson River, in New York, upstream of my uncle's old
condom-diving beds. Of course, he didn't have scuba gear. He just swam
through the raw sewage with his eyes open. He must have had the immune
system of a junkyard dog.

I cut slowly through the rain back toward the yacht club, chopping
through big rollers the whole way.

The visibility was next to nothing. So I was rather surprised when I
came face to face with something big, shiny and blue, floating about a
hundred yards from where I'd been diving. It was a boat, a good-sized
powerboat, sitting there dark and quiet. And about the time I saw it,
it saw me, and suddenly there was a tremendous whhooos echoed by a
second one as its engines were started; the storm was drowned out by
the sound of about a thousand horsepower digging a hole in the water.
Its nose angled up like the prow of a star-ship, and it vanished into
the night. No running lights. The only evidence it had ever been there
was a clashing, foaming wake that knocked me around for a few seconds,
and a high roar that dwindled to nothing in a hurry.

I realized kind of slowly, on my way back, that it was a thirty-one
foot Cigarette. The same one I'd seen before, up in that channel,
sitting idle on the water. And the son of a bitch was watching me. As
the man says: just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't
really out to get me.

For a second, I wanted to chase it down, try to see some identifying
marks. Then I figured out why they were going to the trouble to use a
hot-rod speedboat, a Miami penis-mobile, up here in this land of
bankers' sloops and wallowing trawlers. Why they'd put nine hundred
horses on its back, when it was only rated for six. They were using a
Cigarette because it was the only boat in the harbor that my Zodiac
couldn't catch.

Or to look at it another way, the only boat I couldn't get away from.
That one didn't occur to me until a few hours later, when I was trying
to sleep.

I took a long shower in the yacht club and then sat out under an
awning, waiting for Bart to pick me up, watching yuppies destroy their
umbrellas in the wind. I was wasted. But I was alert. If some
Satan-worshipping heavy-metal dustheads decided to hurt you, or kill
you, how would they go about it? The old multiple shotgun blasts
probably wouldn't suffice. They'd want to cart me off somewhere, make
a ritual of it. For the nth time in my career I considered owning a
gun. But guns were tricky and hard to aim. I should think in terms of
chemical warfare - something really obnoxious I could use to slow down
whoever came after me.

I had an idea already: 1,4-diamino butane; a.k.a., putrescine - the
distinctive chemical scent given off by decaying corpses. I could whip
up a batch and carry some on me. That would give anyone second
thoughts.

When Bart pulled in, he cranked up a Poyzen Boyzen tape and I
half-breathed all the way home - half a breath of air, half a breath
of nitrous. Phoned Debbie and Tanya to make sure they were all right.
Tanya's boyfriend was holed up there, answering the phone, and armed.
He was into some kind of martial art that involved samurai swords, so
I felt better. I took another shower and then started drinking. Bart
and I sat in the living room watching the Stooges on Deep Cable until
about two in the morning, and I think Amy came over, though I never
heard a single moan, shriek or wail. Roscommon drove through sometime
during the night and sideswiped Bart's van, streaking it with white
paint.

I took the T into the university, ran into the lab, locked the door
behind me, and ran a test on my sample. It was full of PCBs. The
concentration was roughly a hundred times higher than the worst ever
recorded in Boston Harbor. The lobsters and Gallagher and Tanya and I
had discovered a toxic catastrophe.

 


 

16

I THOUGHT, SHIT. The Mafia. I'm fucking around with the Mafia. It
would be just like them to take this blatant approach, just haul a few
barrels of PCBs out into the Harbor and throw them overboard.

For two reasons I didn't want to fuck with the Mafia. The first reason
is obvious. The second reason is that I can't do anything about them.
I pressure large corporations by hurting their image. By making them
look like criminals. There wasn't much point in trying that approach
on the Mafia. Besides, we already have cops to fight them. Not just
ERA officials. Cops with guns. Recently they'd been doing a pretty
good job of it and they didn't need my help.

If it was the Mafia, they were being awfully subtle. The goons in the
Cigarette first had hidden from me, then had run away. I should have
found a horse's head in my bed by now, at the very least. Why so coy?

You had to figure they'd warn me off before killing me. That's what
I'd have to bet on. As soon as I got a warning, I'd forget about it.
Maybe issue some dire warnings about lobsters from the Harbor, but not
cause any real trouble.

If I didn't hear from them, this was going to get interesting fast.

In the early days, GEE didn't play anything close to the vest, they
took what they had and ran with it. But I've got this chemistry
background and it's given me some habits I can't break. I won't go to
the media until I've got lots and lots of information. One shit-filled
Jiffy jar didn't qualify.

What I needed was a lot more samples and a rough plot of the spill's
distribution on the Harbor floor. Then a lot of poisoned lobsters to
freeze for later display. In the meantime I could make a few discreet
media contacts. When the story broke, there was going to be a lot of
background to explain, so I contacted Rebecca at The Weekly, the
Globe's environmental reporter and a local freelancer who had been
eating macaroni and cheese for three weeks.

"I'm kind of busy with your friend, Fleshy," Rebecca told me.

"The big one? Alvin?" I never could keep them straight. For Brahmins
they multiplied quickly.

"Alvin. You know, he's kicking off his campaign...."

"Don't tell me. Faneuil Hall. Shit! I wish I knew about it-"

"Forget it. Look, ST., to you he's just a local hack, but he's
important nationally. He's got Secret Service three deep. You don't
want to get near him."

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe we could borrow a rocket launcher from Boone
- oh, I almost forgot. This line's tapped."

When they first started bugging my phone, I went out of my way not to
use keywords like "ammo" and "detonator." But after a couple of years
I figured, fuck it. The poor bastard who sat there listening to me
talking to Esmerelda about her grandchildren, talking to my roommates
about which movie we should go see, explaining to reporters the
difference between dioxin and dioxane - he must have been bored out of
his mind. So from time to time I'd toss in a reference to an RPG-7 or
a shipment of Soviet plastique, just to spice things up a little.

They say that the people who listen to bugs for a living are all
thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their mothers. That was
the image I kept in my own mind. Some kind of balding, spare-tired
paleface in wirerims, sitting at a desk, monitoring my life and
worrying about the carburetor on his Chevette. I didn't care what he
heard, because if he didn't know by now that I wasn't a terrorist,
he'd never figure it out.

"Anyway, ST., I have a proposal," Rebecca said. "He's supposed to be
the Democrats' Great White Hope, right? But you seem to think his
environmental record is less than clean."

"Got that impression, huh?"

"So I want to borrow you as an expert consultant. Sangamon Taylor on
Alvin Fleshy. Front page of the Politics section. Basically a dossier
piece. You'd look at his career at Basco, then his political career,
critique his work on the environment."

"Very tempting. But I'm skeptical. Because you know what'll happen?"

"What?"

"His Basco career will stink. The Vietnam part, you know, when he was
undersecretary of state for napalm, that'll reek. But that's all back
in the Fifties and Sixties. Then when we get into the political part,
it's going to be straight Democratic party line. Doesn't matter what
he's been doing behind the scenes with Basco. So I'll have to say,
'Uh, well, he voted for the Clean Water Act, that's good. And a
wilderness area in Alaska, that's good.' Very boring."

"If there's that much of a contrast, we can play it up. Say, 'Well, he
votes nice and pretty, but look at what he did to Vietnam.' What do
you think?"

"I'll give it a shot. But I don't have time to research every move he
made back three decades ago."

"You're not supposed to, S.T. I've got an intern working on that. Down
at the library, night and day."

"Oh. Tell him to talk to-"

"Esmerelda. I already did. And it's a she, not a he."

"Excuse my sexist ass. Rebecca, I must be off."

"Bye. And thanks."

I went into the lab and synthesized a few liters of 1,4-diamino
butane. That's too much - you could render Boston uninhabitable with
that much putrescine. But I was imagining possible future uses for it.
I took my time hooking up a reactor that was closed-cycle, or else my
host at the university would have to dynamite the building after I was
finished. Decanted the substance into jars and packed them into a
cheap, sheet metal safe that I kept in my desk. I was praying that the
FBI would break in and go through my stuff again. But for immediate
use, I put a tube of the stuff in my pocket. Would have been more
effective to load it into Bart's enormous battery-powered squirt gun
that looked exactly like an Uzi, but that could be dangerous.

One of the divers from Boston was on vacation, plying his trade in the
Caribbean, so I called down to the national office and they persuaded
Tom Akers to come out again. He was always happy to visit Boston and
was coming east anyway, to work with the Blowfish in Buffalo.

I met him at Logan. In the airport lounge I relaxed for the first time
since the Poyzen Boyzen thing started. No heavy-metal dustheads here.

Then I remembered those footprints in the hallway: dress shoes. The
whole operation couldn't be run by burnouts. It took capital to build
a PCP lab, some chemical expertise. Maybe I had an Evil Twin.
Somewhere there was a higher, suit-wearing echelon. So I couldn't make
assumptions as to what these guys looked like. High-tech yuppies,
maybe. People who knew chemistry. Or Mafia.

We didn't get abducted and mutilated on the way home, though. I took
Tom to our house and we sat down with a six-pack. "There's two ways
you can help," I said. "First, by diving. Helping us get samples off
the floor."

"I thought you already did that, man."

"I got one sample and a bunch of oily lobsters. But if I'm going to
make the kind of noise I want to make, I need more. At least a dozen
samples, preferably forty or fifty, distributed around the area, so I
can show a pattern."

"One time around is enough for me. I don't need no more chloracne."

"That brings me to the second thing. You can be a witness for us. A
victim of the same poisoning."

Tom frowned and shook his head. Then he finished his beer. As soon as
I brought up the subject, his beer consumption jumped to the
chug-a-lug level. "Not the same. Remember? Agent Orange, man. That's
what I have. This is PCBs."

To Tom and most everyone else, Agent Orange was a different thing from
PCBs. But the underlying problem was the same, and I'd have to explain
how in a press release. Just another goddamn thing to get working on.
This was turning into a paper-shoveling operation, more time spent at
my desk than on my Zodiac.

If this was the kind of house that had napkins, I'd have sketched it
out for Tom. But Tess, Laurie, and Ike were all recycling maniacs and
I usually had to wipe up spills with my shirt sleeves. Cloth towels
were very nice if you had someone doing your laundry for you, but they
sucked when all you had was a washing machine with a burned-out
engine, and a landlord who filled the basement with water whenever he
laid hands on a pipe wrench.

"I want you to explain all this shit to me anyway," Tom confessed.

"Okay, first of all, the bad thing about Agent Orange wasn't the Agent
Orange. It was an impurity that got into it during the manufacturing
process: dioxin. That's what you had, dioxin poisoning. But dioxin is
just a shortened version of the full name. The full name is
2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin. Also known as TCDD."

"This doesn't mean shit to me, man."

"Just hang on. TCDD belongs to a class of similar compounds that are
known as polychlorinated dibenzodioxins."

"And that's related to polychlorinated biphenyls?"

"More or less. In both cases you've got a bunch of chlorine atoms,
which is why it's called polychlorinated, and an organic structure
that they're carried around on. In one case it's a biphenyl, in the
other case a dibenzodioxin. You know what a benzene ring is? Ever take
any chemistry?"

"No."

I looked around for six similar objects I could arrange in a ring. Of
course, they were right in front of me. "A benzene ring is a six-pack
of carbon atoms. The six-pack is held together with this little
plastic holder. That's like a benzene ring. It's stable. It's strong.
The six-pack stays together. It takes some effort to pull one of the
cans away. There's a couple different kinds: benzenes and phenyls.
Both six-pack holders, but the phenyl has one less hydrogen atom."

"Okay."

I went and pulled another six-pack out of the fridge. "If you put two
six-packs together, you have a twelve-pack. If the six-packs are
phenyls, then it's called a biphenyl. If the six-packs are benzenes,
it's a dibenzodioxin - because the connection between six-packs is
made by using a couple of oxygen atoms. But it's basically similar to
a biphenyl. So polychlorinated biphenyl and polychlorinated
dibenzodioxin are structurally similar compounds."

"So these six-pack things, they're the toxic part?"

"No. The toxic part is the chlorine. That's what gets you."

"Well, shit, you should get chloracne from being in a swimming pool
then, right? That's full of chlorine. Hell, drinking water's full of
chlorine."

"Yeah. That's why half of the people in GEE drink spring water.
Because they've heard about chlorine and don't know shit about
chemistry."

Tom noticed the saltshaker on our table, laughed, and dumped a little
salt out onto the table. "Shit, man! Sodium chloride, right? Isn't
that in seawater? Hey, maybe that's why I got sick. It wasn't Agent
Orange at all, man, it was the sodium chloride in that seawater."

"Okay, you're asking me: why is chlorine so incredibly toxic in dioxin
and not in table salt?"

"I guess that's what I'm asking."

"Two reasons. First, what it's attached to. That biphenyl or
dibenzodioxin structure - the twelve-pack - dissolves easily in fat.
Once it gets into your body fat, it never leaves."

"That's what they said about the Agent Orange, that it sits in your
body forever."

"Right. That's the first bad thing. The second bad thing is, the
chlorine there is in covalent form, it's got the normal number of
electrons, whereas the chlorine in salt is in ionic form. It's got an
extra electron. The difference is that covalent chlorine is more
reactive, it has these big electron clouds that can fuck up your
chromosomes. And it slips right through your cell membranes. Ionic
chlorine doesn't - the cell membranes are made to stop it."

"So the six-packs are like the vehicle, the gunboat, and the chlorines
are like the soldiers with the machine guns who ride on it."

"Yeah, and the electrons are their ammunition. They ride up and down
the river - your bloodstream - and slip into your cells and shoot up
your chromosomes. The difference between that and table salt is that
table salt is inorganic, ionic chlorine - soldiers without a boat,
with no ammunition - and this other stuff is organic, covalent
chlorine - bad stuff."

Tom sat back, raised his eyebrows. "Well then, if you think I'm going
to go down there, forget it."

"Look, that's fine, and I don't blame you, but let me just say that
I'm as paranoid as anyone and I went down there. I'm pretty sure we
can do this without getting contaminated."

"I'll do other diving but I won't go to the bottom. I got enough of
this shit in my body already."

"Fair enough."

I phoned Esmerelda. After this was over we'd have to give her an
honorary membership in the group. If GEE was like the Starship
Enterprise, then I was Scotty and she was Spock.

We had an extremely pleasant chat about her granddaughter's brand new
pink dress, which had involved roughly a hundred man-hours of
shopping, and about the weather and the Sox. Standing in the library,
she spoke quietly, and I always found my own voice dwindling to a
whisper during these conversations. It was like talking to an
important Japanese warlord. You had to hem and haw and nibble around
the edges for a few hours, just to be polite, before you got to the
point.

"There's some kind of intern working there, a woman, working with The
Weekly?"

"Yes. She had a little trouble threading the microfilm machines but
now she's doing just fine."

"If someone ever invents a self-threading microfilm machine, half you
guys are going to be out of a job. No offense to you."

"How can I help you, ST.?"

"If that woman comes up with anything really interesting, could you
shoot me a copy?"

"About Mr. Fleshy?"

"You know it."

"Anything in particular?"

"Oh, I don't know. Something with photos in it. That always makes them
nervous. Would you mind?"

"Certainly not. Is there anything else?"

"No. Just wanted to see how you were doing."

"Have fun, ST." That's how she always said goodbye to me. She must
have some queer ideas about my job.

The next day we organized, and the day after that we did it. With
another diver from the Boston office I swam around scooping muck into
sample jars. We'd hand them off to Tom, who'd relay them up to the
Zodiac, where Debbie was waiting. That way we wouldn't have to
decompress every time we had a full load of samples. Debbie was our
navigator, using landmarks on shore to judge our position and mark
down roughly where each sample came from. We could plot the results
later on. If the PCB concentration increased sharply in one direction,
that would give us a clue as to where the source was. If we were
really lucky, we'd be able to track it down, probably to a few barrels
on the bottom.

The ultimate success would be to find some barrels with PCB still in
them, and to get some photos. We couldn't salvage them ourselves, but
the EPA probably could and, more important, they probably would. We
could save the Harbor a lot of grief and we might find evidence that
would lead us to the criminals.

I didn't want Debbie sitting out there alone on a Zodiac. We knew the
Poyzen Boyzen people had a boat, and they seemed to know a hell of a
lot about who we were and where we hung out. So we looked through our
donor list and found a couple of yacht owners, then convinced them
that it really would be fun to spend a day bobbing around in the
Harbor, showing the flag. We hoisted another Toxic Jolly Roger,
persuaded Tanya's black-belt squeeze to join up, and ferried a few
media people out from Castle Island Park. Rebecca came, as did the
starving freelancer and the reporter from the Globe. So far it was
background.

We started roughly where I'd taken my first sample and worked our way
outwards, covering about half a square mile of the Harbor floor. We
ended up with thirty-six peanut butter jars full of raw sewage, and
some very sore muscles.

There's one advantage of hanging out with groovsters: they give good
massage. A couple of hours of massage, beer, nitrous oxide, and
Stooges after a day of diving - nothing could beat it.

The next day we began to run the samples and got semi disastrous
results. Disastrous for me - we weren't reading any PCBs at all. This
was unbelievable - there had to be contamination inside the
machine-and the whole operation went on hold for two days while I took
the gas chromatograph apart, piece by piece, cleaned each one, and put
it back together. Pure joy.

Then I started to test the samples again. No one had stuck around for
the two days of cleaning, so by this time I was working alone. No
matter, I got exactly the same goddamn results. The level of PCBs in
these samples was no different from those taken anywhere else in the
Harbor.

As we headed south, in the direction of Spectacle Island, the
concentration dropped rapidly - not what I'd expected - and to the
north of Spectacle we couldn't get any PCB readings at all. It was
totally virgin.

The Granola James Bond, the Toxic Spiderman, had fucked up. I'd
overreacted to some oily lobsters, seen a guy with excema and called
it chloracne. Then I'd gotten a bad sample, or run it wrong, and
rushed the gig.

It was hard to believe, but I had no choice. The only other
possibility was that the culprits had somehow hoovered up the PCBs
while I was shuffling papers. But that kind of a Cecil B. De Mille
operation would have cost billions.

It happens. Seen from the laboratory, the universe looks a lot more
complicated than it does in your neat mental blueprints. But this time
it really burned my ass. Debbie could have helped, but I didn't give
her a chance. To be lonely and pissed feels better. So after I'd gone
through the burning embarrassment, the denial and the anger, I got
down into some serious depression.

It was raining, cool for the season, and I wandered drunkenly until I
hit an obstacle: a huge, overdressed throng in the marketplace. On a
sunny weekend this wouldn't have been unusual, but today it was a
little out of place. Then I saw the banners, the buttons, all the
cheap, shimmering detritus of a political campaign, and heard The
Groveler's voice ringing dingily out of some big speakers.

These were just the groundlings out here. Bostonians practice idolatry
in their politics - Curley, Kennedy, O'Neill, now Pleshy. Inside were
the big shots, the power structure of so-called liberal
Massachusetts's politics. All the people who bleated about cleaning up
the Harbor until they discovered that people like Pleshy were
responsible for making it dirty.

This was too disgusting to witness, so I turned on my heel and headed
across into Government Center. A couple of Secret Service types were
watching me; one had stopped to buy a soft pretzel on the curb, and
when I went past him we nodded at each other.

At a phone booth I called the Boss collect, and told him I had to get
the fuck out of town, that I needed a vacation.

"You deserve it," he said.

"GEE deserves it," I said. "I'm so into my job that I'm fucking up."

Thank God Project Lobster was over with and I could say goodbye to
skeptical lobstermen. They'd never let me forget this one. Busting
into the middle of a ball game in Fenway to give them dire,
unbelievable warnings, then showing up a week later and taking it all
back; exactly the image I'd been fighting all along.

I remembered Hoa's busboy giving me that sneer, that duck-squeezer
look, and decided to eat Chinese for a while.

"Where are you going on vacation?" the Boss asked.

"Shit, I don't know, just hang around town."

"How about Buffalo?"

"Buffalo?"

"Why not?" he said, sounding terribly innocent.

"Let me tell you a story about Buffalo. Last time I drove through
there was in the middle of a windstorm. Huge, record-setting
windstorm. Sixty-miles-an-hour winds in broad daylight. It was clear,
but there was so much dust in the air that the light turned all brown,
you know? And you couldn't even stand outside because the wind was
picking up goddamn rocks, little pebbles, and flinging them through
the air like hailstones. And I got to this place on the way to the
bridge, in between a couple of embankments with big petrochemical
tanks on either side of the road. Your basic industrial Mordor. The
embankments acted like a wind tunnel and they were picking up coal
dust off a huge pile beside the highway and so I was driving downhill
through this thick, black, sulfurous cloud, sticks and stones hailing
down against my windshield, caught between a couple of semis carrying
gasoline, and I said to myself, shit, I accidentally took the off-ramp
to Hell."

"The Blowfish got there ahead of schedule," the Boss said, "and we've
got an extra project that needs doing."

"Forget it."

"It involves plugging a dioxin pipeline."

A good boss always knows how to dangle the right thing in front of
your nose.

"And we'll pay your way. Debbie's going."

That meant I could go on the train, in a sleeper coach, with Debbie in
there too.

I cruised home to pack, only to discover a little display was waiting
for me. Someone had grabbed a stray neighborhood cat who hung around
our home sometimes - Scrounger - and had beaten his skull in, then
wrapped an unbent coat hanger around its neck and strung it up in
front of the door.

I cut Scrounger down, carried him around to the side and threw him
into the garbage, burying the carcass under some other trash so my
housemates would be spared the sight. Out back, I noticed some spots
of blood on the ground, and followed them straight to the murder
weapon: a fist-size hunk of concrete, smeared with blood.

The house had been broken into through the back, and trashed. Not a
thorough trashing, but a decent effort nevertheless. The TV was kicked
in, as was my computer screen.

They'd even yanked up the bottom half of the computer, a separate box,
and stomped on it a few times. A lot of food was strewn around the
kitchen in the messiest way possible, and they'd poked a screwdriver
into the tubes in the freezer and let all the freon evaporate.

And there was a black handprint on the door to my room, at about eye
level.

Fake Mafia or real Mafia, I had no way of knowing. But I was damn
tired and depressed; I just wanted out of town. My big scandal had
turned into a bad joke. And now someone was getting violent. Game
over, case closed.

 


 

17

IONIC CHLORINE'S EASY TO GET. It's in seawater, as Tom Akeis pointed
out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of
industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the
covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.

And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you
put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical
power up between the wires, and current - a stream of electrons -
flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic
chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The
sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium
hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This
process is called Chloralkali.

Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or
solvents, or whatever it is you're shooting for, you need industrial
quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if
you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a
Niagara-sized power source.

Hence Buffalo. Its blessing, the beautiful Falls, was also its curse.
And even though the Falls were getting all broken down and full of
rocks, all those chlorine compounds remained. We call it toxic waste.
Without Chloralkali, toxic waste would hardly exist. The only
hazardous waste that doesn't flow from that fountain is the
heavy-metal variety, and heavy metals are a pretty small trickle in
the toxic stream. Chloralkali, also known as Niachlor (Niagara +
chlorine) is virtually synonymous with toxic waste.

Despite all my moaning and bitching, it's getting tougher to be a
toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially
since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down
by about forty percent. I'm shooting for a hundred.

Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner
Chemicals - which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a
million people stood around cheering you on - and this time it was
going to be even easier. We didn't have to use shotguns on those toxic
ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us
with flamethrowers.

The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to
contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in
Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants
in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these
consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the
catastrophe. They got to raid Boner's files and cart off the relevant
maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your
blood to dioxin.

One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a
geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I
think you know the kind of guy I'm talking about. He got involved with
GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate
a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to
Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a
Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan
Reading.

Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We'd talked
all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so I could read the
last couple of days' Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into
the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We
weren't exactly in a good mood.

We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had
illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner
plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the
public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street
that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then dead-ended. It
was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by
the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole.
There was a sewer line running from the middle of boner Chemical out
to Buffalo's general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the
deadend street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate
to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very
spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers.

"This is great stuff," I told him. "I have something you might want to
read too." And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big
corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner.

"Why on earth would anyone want to own it?" Alan mumbled. "It's a
black hole."

"If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good
investment."

Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and
the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media,
involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in
upstate New York, the Seven Nations, continued to approve of us.

This wasn't always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing
the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most
sacred ceremonies. You couldn't be cool in some GEE circles unless
you'd seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish.
Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before,
I'd been on the computer, poking around in GEE's international message
system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid
City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken
it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm.
Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always
amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in
working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned
by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they
tended to be fishermen or factory workers.

A donated car was waiting for us in Buffalo, a half-devastated Subaru
with loose speakers dangling out of the door panels and ecostickers
all over the windows. I dropped Alan and Debbie off at the marina
where the Blowfish was parked. They were having a party for local
supporters and I couldn't bear the thought of it. Sometimes, actually,
I do feel like having fun, pretending to be charming, putting on my
suit with the toxic tennis shoes, regaling local environmentalists
with war stories, describing the variety of crap they have in their
tap water. But other times, like now, I just wanted to drive around in
the dark and look for trouble.

We were going to be plugging a few pipes here, I knew that much.
Pipe-plugging technology is pretty well established by now. For pipes
less than about four feet across, you just stack bags of cement in
them. The cement swells up and gets hard.

If the pipe gets any larger, you have to plug it with a disk of some
kind. But that's hard to do if any significant amount of crap is
pouring out of the pipe, because it obviously tends to force the disk
out. So you have to use a butterfly plug, which was invented by one of
our people in Boston who has since gone into the computer biz. You cut
the disk in half down the middle and fold the halves together,
pointing them upstream, like the wings of a butterfly. You install it
in that position and then release the sides of the disk. The pressure
hits them and they slam open, sealing against the walls of the pipe.
Then you can add extra devices to complicate removal if you really
want to be an asshole. For example, you can clamp the plug on with
C-clamps, then saw off the screws.

The sewer coming out of the Boner plant was much larger than four feet
across, but we couldn't construct a plate to go across. Why? Because
it would have to go in via the manhole. So we'd have to use lots and
lots of cement. Cement is more permanent anyway, and permanence was
the key to this job. Those butterfly plugs are just media events. You
put one in, with a big GEE logo painted across it, and the minicam
crews hang around and film the seasick plant workers struggling to
remove it. But this was underground and so there was no point in
showing off. And the Boner waste was much too serious. Dioxin, man.
Unacceptable stuff. Dump dioxin, you're playing for keeps, you die.

First I drove up to the Falls and looked for a hotel room. It's funny.
Everywhere I go, I like to rent the honeymoon suite. What the hell,
GEE's picking up the tab. And the honeymoon suite is the best place to
unwind after a rough day of humping cement bags and being hauled
around in manacles. You can sit around in the heart-shaped tub, you
can romp on the waterbed. And now, here I was on the road to Niagara
Falls, where every room was a honeymoon suite. All I had to do was
pick the best one.

Took a while, but I found it: lava lamps, eight-foot water-bed with
fur, mirrored ceiling, view of the freeway. The manager hated my looks
but liked the idea that I was going to stay for a while. I charged up
a few days on the GEE gold card, told her I'd be back later and headed
back toward Buffalo.

Now the only thing on my mind was the pair of suits who'd been tailing
me ever since I'd left the train station. They were driving a Chevy
Celebrity, conspicuous by its very dullness. My Subaru was smaller,
more maneuverable, and probably just as fast, if the tranny didn't
fall out. Once we got back into Buffalo, I got to engage in my
favorite sport.

I topped off the tank first, checked the tire pressure, emptied my
bladder, bought a six-pack of Jolt. Then I headed for the on-ramp and
gave them a chance to line up behind me. They wouldn't follow me
directly onto the ramp because this was a covert tail. So I cruised up
the ramp, cranking it as hard as it would go, then shut off my lights
and braked onto the shoulder, using my handbrake so the taillights
wouldn't give me away.

A few seconds later they shot past me, their brake lights blazing in
embarrassment, and I took off and followed them.

And followed them and followed them. For four hours I followed those
stupid fucks. My car had a shorter range, but I'd just filled it up.

Nothing's more fun than following someone whose orders are to follow
you. I could do it forever: cruising flamboyantly behind them, playing
classic rock on the jury-rigged stereo and flicking cigar ashes out
the window.

They didn't even figure it out for twenty minutes or so. They decided
to play it cool and stay ahead of me for a while before gradually
dropping back. But I wouldn't let them. Finally they came to a full
stop on the shoulder and waited. I stopped behind them and waited.
They started up and pulled an illegal U-turn across the median strip.
Obviously they weren't cops, because cops are trained how to do that
maneuver, and these guys had never done it before. I followed them
through that exercise, after pausing on the shoulder to give them a
little time.

Then they went into the next phase: wondering what to do now. They got
off at the next ramp and I followed them around downtown Buffalo,
listening to three Zevon songs about hapless mercenaries,
back-to-back, no commercial interruptions. I doubt they had classic
rock and roll playing on their stereo. They had a regular discussion
in progress, with lots of hand-waving and glancing back over their
headrests at me.

Finally they pulled off at an IHOP. I watched them through the windows
until they had ordered coffee, then opened my door, peed on the
asphalt, and reclined the seat so I was below window level. They came
out in a few minutes and took off. I gave them a minute to think
they'd finally made it, then pulled in behind them again.

Then they knew they were fucked. They thought: this isn't just a joke.
This guy's going to follow us until we have to report in, and then
he'll know who we are.

Some bad driving ensued as they tried and failed to shake me. It's
hard to shake a tail in a totally deserted downtown. These guys had
learned how to drive by watching "Hawaii Five-O" reruns: if our tires
are squealing, we must be going fast.

So they definitely weren't cops. Cops or G-men would just stop the car
and come up to me and say, "Okay, okay, very funny, asshole, now go
home." And they weren't Mafia, or else I'd be bleeding in the dark.
Some kind of cheap private dicks, or amateurs.

If they were locals, they probably worked for Boner. If they'd
followed me out from Boston, maybe they were connected to the PCP
thing. Maybe we were talking about a drug lab, financed by yuppies,
run by dustheads, and now that we'd gotten into this cloak-and-dagger
stuff, the upper echelons didn't know quite how to handle it.

They realized too late that most of the gas stations in downtown
Buffalo are closed at three in the morning. They ran out of gas right
in the middle of a lane. I came up behind them, bumper to bumper, and
shoved them into a parking space. But at the last minute, thinking of
Scrounger, I downshifted, gunned it and shoved them right through the
space and into the back of a parked car. The Celebrity's power brakes
didn't work when the engine was dead.

They were really ticked. They jumped out of the doors and came after
me. I backed down the street a couple of blocks, letting them chase
me, getting a good look at their adrenalin-flushed all-American faces,
then blew them off and found a phone booth and dialed 911. There had
been a fender bender downtown, I said, and the culprits had abandoned
their car and run away from it, and I suspected that maybe the car was
stolen. Yes, I'd be happy to give my name. Yes, I'd be there to give
the police a statement.

The cops were on the scene within two minutes. We had a huge, fortyish
black cop with a pissed-off demeanor, and his younger, female partner.
The two suits were loitering grimly nearby, huddled together in the
dark like aborigines. When they coughed up their driver's licenses, I
got a peek over the woman cop's shoulder. Massachusetts licenses. The
pissed-off cop got on the radio and was kind enough to speak their
names for me: David Kleinhoffer and Gary Dietrich. A couple of good
Americo-Aryan rent-a-thugs.

That was all I was going to learn out here. I went to a pay phone and
called the car rental company. I used my flack voice.

"Yes, this is Mr. Taylor. We've rented a vehicle from your office,"
and I gave her the description and license plate number, "we've
misplaced the rental agreement, and there seems to be some confusion
as to which account it's being charged to. I'm working in the
accounting department and I need to know. Would you mind reading to me
the impression from the charge slip?"

She did. Turns out Kleinhoffer and Dietrich were working for a company
named Biotronics.

Now that I knew, it made sense. I should have guessed it. First Poyzen
Boyzen, then the Mafia, leaving me threats. And the Mafia thing didn't
start until right after I began worrying about it.

Some assholes in fancy shoes had been trying to scare me. And for the
most part they had done a damn fine job. But this bit with Scrounger
was too fucking much.

The tip was the computer. A Mafia goon would kick in the screen and
say, that's it, that sucker's busted. Actually, monitor screens are
cheap. The expensive part is the box underneath. Whoever trashed our
place had known that much. He'd known about it, and cared. The thing
with the freon, too. That was a pretty suburban way to trash a kitchen
- letting the freon out of your fridge.

Now that I'd seen the faces of the people who were trying to scare me,
I was a lot less scared, and a lot more interested. Maybe they were
really making PCP, or maybe they had some other nasty secret. When I
got back from Buffalo I'd have to find out, and do these people some
damage. In the meantime, I'd have to content myself with charging up
tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lingerie on their credit card
number.

 


 

18

STILL, THE DISAPPEARING PCBS were keeping me awake at night. I'd gone
over the whole thing a dozen times in my head, trying to find my
error. I wasn't even sure which time I'd screwed up - on that first
lone sample or on the whole batch we collected later.

That's the difference between being a toxic detective and some other
kind. You're a regular detective and you find a dead person on the
floor, you know murder's been committed; your eyes tell you. But if
you're a toxic detective, your eyes are a gas chromatograph, not
always as reliable. If that mechanical eye tells you there are PCBs in
this sample, you have to ask: how was the sample taken? Is the machine
okay? Who else has been dicking around with it?

For a second, I had an inspiration. Maybe someone had gotten to our
samples overnight, while I was in getting massaged and drunk. They'd
been sitting out in the back of the Omni, and high-tech goons could be
just clever enough to get in there, dump out the samples, and replace
them with fakes.

But there were too many problems with that. First of all, it was just
too implausible. Second, I remembered seeing a flash of red in one of
my samples - a fragment of a Coke can - which I also saw again later,
the next day. And most conclusive, when we plotted the results on the
map, the samples showed an even, steady pattern of decreasing PCB
levels as we headed toward Spectacle Island. That couldn't be
duplicated with fakes.

My next inspiration: maybe the PCB spill was extremely localized. And
maybe, just by dumb luck, I had come down into a hot spot on my first
trip and gotten a really dirty sample by chance. This was just barely
conceivable. Maybe there was some really big, old shark that had been
hanging out in the Harbor for decades, eating bottom fish, building up
incredibly high levels of bioconcentrated PCBs. Then it had croaked,
settled to the bottom and decayed away to nothing, leaving a puddle of
PCBs behind.

Stranger things had happened. When you're being rational and
scientific, you have to take into account that bizarre events can
throw off your results. That's why good scientists take a lot of
samples and check their numbers before they go public. I could at
least feel good about that.

I snagged a few Z's on the Blowfish and then went out and rented a
U-Haul box truck. Debbie went out on the boat to plan the Niagara gig,
while Alan and I, along with Frank, the largest member of the Blowfish
crew, took the U-Haul outside of town to a big home-and-garden store.
We filled the truck to its limit with hundred-pound sacks of dry
cement and gravel and we also got ourselves some really vicious epoxy
resin glue. Canvas gunny sacks we already had.

We parked the truck near the marina for the time being and then I
drove out to a nearby Indian reservation and met a guy named Jim
Grandfather, whom I'd worked with before. He was shaped like me, in
his forties, lived with his wife and dogs in a doublewide back in the
trees, and drove a big old Dodge pickup with an Indianhead hood
ornament that he'd lifted out of a junkyard somewhere. He had a couple
of years of college and was the tribe's historian, archivist, and
preserver of weird knowledge. Whenever environmental issues came up,
he was the point man for the tribe. I don't know if he had an official
position in the tribal government, or if he was appointed by
consensus, or by himself, but that was definitely his role. When I
showed up, he was out on the front yard throwing sticks and frisbees
for his dogs. There were two dogs and only one frisbee and
consequently I had to sit there and wait while a tug of war was waged
across the middle of the road. Finally Jim shouted something in a
language I'd never know, and they both dropped it simultaneously. He
stalked up to the car with a big grin.

"How's the Granola James Bond?"

"A little more toxic than last time, but good enough. How are you,
dude?"

"Check this out." He opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of
paper. It was a computer printout. A blood test.

"What, they testing you for drugs or something?"

"No, no, this is for cholesterol." He pointed to one line with one of
his stubby fingers. "Low normal." He stepped back and held his hands
off to his sides. "So? Does this look like a body with low
cholesterol?"

"Congratulations, Jim."

"Well, I thank you for it." The last time I'd seen Jim was about a
year ago, and I'd hassled him about the amount of greasy food he ate.
He belonged to some kind of a pig raising and butchering co-op, so he
hit the bacon and sausage very hard. His wife, Anna, started getting
on his case too. He had gone in for a checkup and found out that his
cholesterol level was pretty high. So this was quite a turnaround.

"You been eating a lot of fish?"

"You see any oceans around here?"

"Tofu."

He snorted. He already knew my opinion of that. "Venison, baby. Lean
and tough. Like me. Take some sausage to work every day."

"Why'd you do it?"

"Shut my wife up." Which might give you the wrong impression, because
they loved each other.

I parked my car half in the ditch and let his dogs smell me. At least
I thought they were dogs.

"How can you tell these things from wolves?" I said.

"These have collars," he explained. "Don't worry, they're checking you
for dioxin."

They didn't find any, so we wandered up toward his house.

"Who's this asshole in South Dakota?" he said.

I almost asked how the hell he'd heard about that, but then caught
myself. If we had a computer bulletin board, why couldn't they? I'd
seen this before, though. Go out to Alaska, California, talk to tribe
officials, and it's like they've been poring over my dossier. They
kept in touch.

"I don't know him myself. You can probably expect the national office
will fall all over itself trying to apologize."

"It's no longer necessary. They made their point."

We sat down in his kitchen and he got me some coffee. "Anna's in town
shopping," he said. "Soon as she gets back, we can take off."

"No hurry. I don't have to be back until midnight."

He laughed. "Typical. Most people have appointments at noon. You have
them at midnight."

"That's when all the midnight dumping takes place."

"What's up with you these days? What's shaking in Boston?"

"Who the fuck ever knows?" I explained the PCB/PCP story to him, and
included my speculations from last night. He seemed to favor the grand
conspiracy theory.

"You don't want to fuck around with the Mafia, do you?"

"Not at all. They can do whatever they want. You think it's the Mafia,
Jim?"

"Yeah. Something about the whole style of the operation."

"I disagree. Too wimpy."

He meditated on his coffee for a minute. "Well, look. If they get
after you - if you get in trouble - get your ass to the Adirondacks."

"I don't ski."

"Doesn't even have to be there. Just any reservation. You go there and
ask them for help and I'll make sure you get taken care of."

"Yeah. I guess Sicilians stand out pretty bad on the res."

He let my flip comment sail right out the window. "If they're
suspicious, give them my name, have them call me or whatever. But
don't hang around and let yourself get greased."

I was surprised by his offer, and honored. It's not as though I'd
helped him out all that much. But a reservation would be a great place
to disappear.

We talked about the week's operations, which were going to be split
between grungy mechanic's work and full-splatter media events. For the
time being I was worried about the grungy part, in Buffalo, while Jim
was going to be hanging around up at the Falls, looking noble for the
cameras. Later, after the cement had hardened, I'd join him up there.

While we were waiting for Anna, we wandered around his property a
little. He had a shooting range out back, for both archery and guns,
and we farted around there for an hour or so. "This is what you should
be packing," he recommended, hauling down a huge rifle with lots of
scrollwork on it. "Lever-action. You seem like a lever-action kind of
guy. Look at the size of that magazine."

"What magazine?"

"Jesus, S.T., the tube on the bottom is the magazine. Forget it." He
put the rifle back. "This is more your speed. We'll set you up with a
fucking bow and arrow."

He had a lot of those. He made them in the Nez Perce style, the Lakota
style, the Iroquois style, you name it. He figured the only way to
keep the knowledge from being lost was by using it. He could go into
the woods armed with just a knife and make himself a birchbark canoe
from scratch. "Only did it once, though," he had explained, "took me
two weeks. Anna had to keep coming out with coolers full of baloney
sandwiches. I ended up with viral pneumonia." Which sounded very
humble, but he'd finished the canoe, and he still had it in his
garage. The bows he made in his workshop, and he had no compunction
about shaping them with a belt sander. "The idea," he said, "is to
keep the information in my hand, not to live like a caveman."

I couldn't really use his bows, even if I'd wanted too. I could draw
them but I couldn't hold them steady long enough to sight in on the
target. Also, I was nervous. The bowstrings were made of twisted
horsehair. I was convinced that one of them would snap, and its ends
whip into my eyeball at supersonic speed. Jim killed a few bales of
hay for me, and that was about the time Anna came home.

 


 

19

THE REST OF THE DAY was brute labor. We lined the back of the U-Haul
with plastic and dumped the cement and the gravel in a big mound and
stirred it together. Then I went out and found a bar. Around 11:30 I
tore myself away from a ski-ball game and allowed myself to be picked
up by Alan and Frank in the U-Haul. We drove down to the Boner plant,
found the cul-de-sac, and backed the truck up to the manhole. The rest
was simple, stupid and obvious. We lifted the lid. We didn't have a
manhole cracker, but a big strong guy like Frank can do it with a
prybar and a chisel. We formed an assembly line, shoveling the cement
and gravel mixture into the gunny sacks and stacking them in the sewer
line until it was filled, top to bottom, side to side. Then we did it
again so we had a double-thickness wall. We even pounded a few
segments of rebar into it to make it all the stronger. By that time
the sewer had backed up about halfway and dioxin-laden juices were
oozing out between the sacks. I got sick because I'd had three dozen
red-hot chicken wings in the course of my ski-ball, and I had to toss
them right down the manhole. Probably not the first half-digested load
of hot wings to visit those sewers.

Then we took sandpaper and files and removed all the rust from the rim
of the manhole lid and its iron seat in the pavement. We squeezed the
epoxy glue onto both and glued the lid back in place, then poured a
layer of wet cement over the whole thing and just paved it over. We
threw a sheet of plywood over the wet cement, then parked the truck's
rear wheels on it. We deflated the tires, unscrewed their valve stems,
and removed the distributor cap from the engine, and, for our finale,
secured the gate into the Boner plant with some Kryptonites. The
cement would take three days to set properly and we intended to do a
proper job, so we set Alan up as the night watchman, rolled out
sleeping bags in the back, and went to sleep, breathing mildly
carcinogenic cement dust.

For a night gig, this one turned out to be not bad from the
media-circus point of view. No one knew why we were parked here - we
figured we'd let them puzzle it out for themselves - but Buffalo loves
to see scruffy environmentalists irritate Boner Chemical. A crew came
around with donuts at 7:00 A.M. and interviewed us for a local morning
show. A whole series of panjan-drums from Boner came around and told
us to get off Boner property or we'd be arrested, and we told each one
that we were on a public street, not Boner property. Then they sent
some lawyers around to tell us the same thing, as though the messenger
would make a difference. The cops came around once or twice and we
showed them the official city maps. We also pointed out that there
were no NO PARKING signs in this vicinity. That satisfied them.
California cops would have beat us up and searched our rectums for
crack, but these guys thought we were nice, spunky kids.

Then the citizenry started coming around and bringing us food. Two
layer cakes. A cherry pie. Seventeen bags of chips. Five assorted
six-packs. Six more bags of chips. A total of forty-six donuts. Chips.
Frank was horrified. "This is all junk food," he said, in the privacy
of the U-Haul. But when another lady showed up with a blazing red,
cherry-flavored cake, he thanked her profusely.

Boner stationed security people around us on all three sides. They
hadn't figured out the thing with the sewer yet.

They thought we were using this as a base camp for some kind of
illegal assault. Stupid as this would have been, this is how the
Boners saw the world.

Once it was dark, they wheeled out big spotlights and aimed them at
us. It was very bright. For the people sleeping in back, this was no
problem, but for the person on watch it was irritating. What the hell,
we wore sunglasses. I had Debbie come around with our big nautical
strobe and we set that going on top of the cab. You could see that
thing through a brick wall. The flash was so intense it knocked the
wind out of you. For the person in the cab, it wasn't bad, but for
those security people, staying up all night, staring at us, it must
have been lethal. By sunrise, the words U-HAUL were permanently
chiseled into their optic nerves.

On day two, the Boner people got a little smarter and called the fire
department. This we hadn't counted on. A car pulled up, one of those
station wagons with the red light on top, and a guy who was obviously
the fire marshal got out. Some of the Boner lawyers scurried up again
and flanked him as he approached, as though they were on his side. He
identified himself and I told him I was in charge.

"You seem to be blocking a public street," he pointed out.

"Nobody's using it," I countered, "It's a dead-end; this gate is
locked, and Boner lost the keys."

"Normally I wouldn't care, but every once in a while this factory
catches on fire."

"Goddamn. That must be hell to fight."

"Eh?"

"All those chemicals. You practically need a reference book for each
one."

"Yeah. Let me tell you, when we get a call for this plant, we're not
all that damn happy."

"Time to roll out the Purple K, huh?"

His face crinkled up. "Yeah, exactly."

Purple K is a foaming compound they keep at airports to put out
exploding 747s. Sometimes useful for chemical fires.

He continued, "But anyway, if there were a fire here, we'd have to get
in through this gate."

"No problem. We're here twenty-four hours a day. If there's a fire,
we'll move."

"What about the gate? I'm told that you've locked the gate."

"The key's nearby. If there's trouble, we can have the gate open
within five minutes."

"Too slow."

"Thirty seconds."

"Okay, that's fine then," the fire marshal said, then got in his
station wagon and drove away. True story. The Boner attorneys just
stood with their briefcases twisting in the breeze.

Not much happened on day three. Boner had decided to view the whole
thing with amused tolerance. They still didn't have a clue about the
sacks of concrete. Back in the plant, toxic waste was backing up in a
holding pool somewhere, but they hadn't noticed. Tonight we'd drive
away and, if they were very sharp, they'd notice that a manhole had
vanished.

In the afternoon Debbie and I decamped to the honeymoon suite where we
talked and almost had sex. I refused to leave the bed, just sat there
watching the Home Shopping Network, charging up microwave ovens on the
Biotronics card, sending them to random addresses in Roxbury, and
drinking beer. The three days on the U-Haul had taken a lot out of me.
Jim Grandfather showed up and I put the beer away, because the smell
bothered him, and he and I sat there quietly, watching football with
the sound turned off, listening to Debbie sing in the shower.

In the morning I bathed, borrowed a blow dryer and blew on my hair
until I looked like the tail end of a cross-country motorcycle trip.
Then I slipped into a fairly modest three-piece suit, put on tube
socks, pulled plastic bags on over those and got out my bright-green
high-top sneakers, stained and splattered with various toxic wastes. I
kept them locked up in a small beer cooler until they were ready to be
deployed. Wore a tie that simulated a dead trout hanging from my neck.
Jim drove me downtown in his pickup truck and dropped me off. He went
out to look for a belt for a washing machine and I walked into the
front doors of a large office building.

The security guys were waiting for me and they took me right up to
somewhere near the top floor. We did your basic whisk number, whisking
through the secretarial maze, and then they showed me into a nifty
boardroom where the top-management echelon of Boner Chemical was
waiting for me.

It was all choreographed. There were a dozen rich white guys and one
of me. Actually, I'm a white guy too, but somehow I keep forgetting.
So the white guys were seated in a crescent, like a parabolic
reflector, with a single empty chair at the focal point so that they
could all point inwards and concentrate their weirdness energy on me.
Instead, I wandered over and sat down on an empty chair way off to the
side, over underneath the window. Shoe leather creaked and invisible
clouds of cologne and martini breath wafted around the room as
everyone had to turn around and rearrange. The chairs were massive; a
lot of physical effort was involved. They had no coherent plan, so
things got pretty raggedy, with some execs sitting way off to the
sides and others peering over pinstriped shoulders. All of them were
squinting into the sun - a fortuitous accident. I leaned my chair back
against the windowsill so that my green sneakers rose into the air. I
leaned back there and regarded this nervous phalanx of upper-crusters
and got to thinking about what a twisted job this was. I spend days
living and working with people who would probably be street puppeteers
if GEE didn't exist to hire them. People who keep quartz crystals
under their pillows to prevent cancer, who feel the day is lost if
they don't get a chance to sing a new 2-4-6-8 chant in front of a
minicam. Then I threaten the boards of directors of major
corporations. On off days I go scuba diving through raw sewage. My
aunt keeps asking me if I've gotten a job yet.

They all introduced themselves but I lost track of the names and ranks
pretty quickly. Top execs don't wear "Hello! My name is..." tags on
their charcoal-grey worsted. Most were Bonerites, but there were some
fiasco people there too.

"Sorry about your dioxin outfall," I lied, "but don't worry. It's
nothing that a few hundred pounds of dynamite won't fix."

"If you think you can just plug up a Buffalo sewer line, you're wrong,
mister," said the executive with eyeglasses the size of portholes.

"... and get away with it?"

"Yes."

"Just did. Now, moving on to Item Two," I said, "we're steamed about
your hidden outfall at the base of Niagara Falls. Tomorrow we're going
to reveal its existence to the media."

"I don't know what you're referring to," said an executive I had
mentally christened Mr. Dithers. "We'll have to take it up with
Engineering."

"Item Three: you guys are getting bought out by Basco?"

"The details of that transaction are secret," said a half-embalmed guy
with pale eyes.

"Not totally," I said.

An executive with a hard-on shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "What
exactly are you getting at?"

I whistled. "Insider trading, baby. SEC's number-one no-no."

Actually, I just made that up on the spur of the moment. But I knew
insider trading was going on. There always was. And it would really
scare the shit out of these people if they suspected we had some way
of bringing the SEC down on them.

"Mr. Taylor, I wonder if I could work an item into the agenda," said a
Class-IV yuppie who'd been spending too much time on the Nautilus. He
grinned at me, which was kind of an unusual move in these
surroundings, and there was a little stir of, not exactly laughter,
but a relaxation, a few moments of unlabored breathing around the
room. The air in here was desperately stale and hot.

I threw up my hands and said, "At your service, Mr.-"

"Laughlin. It's kind of hard to remember all these names, I know."

All this groovy informality was calculated, but up here I'd take
informality where I could get it. I dropped the front legs of my chair
to the carpet and crossed my legs in the all-American figure-four
position, letting the shoe dangle way out to the side. I sipped some
of Boner's toxic decaf and stifled a fart. "Okay. What's your beef,
Laughlin?"

He looked almost injured. "No beef. Why does it always have to be a
beef? I'm just interested in talking to you in less ..." he waved his
hands around the room "... claustrophobic surroundings."

" 'Bout what?"

"Well, for one thing, whether Sam Horn's going to be as lucky in a
tight spot as Dave Henderson."

"The world is full of Red Sox fans, Mr. Laughlin, and I only sleep
with one of them."

"Touche. Another thing, then. We've got some work going on at
Biotronics that would interest you."

"The Holy Grail?"

He was a little nonplussed. "I don't know about any Holy Grail."

"Dolmacher's phrase."

"Ah, yes! He mentioned that the two of you had had a little chat."

"Verbal combat is more like it. You work for Biotronics, Laughlin?"

The executives crinkled up and chortled.

"I'm the president," Laughlin said, kindly enough.

Oh yeah. I'd seen his picture in the paper, a couple of months ago.

Thirty floors below, Jim was waiting for me in his rusty pickup,
reading the warranty on his washing machine belt. "This must be
reality," I said, climbing in.

"Take it or leave it."

"Let's go to the Falls," I said, "and raise some hell."

"What happened?"

"Zip. Made an appointment with a young rising star in the cancer
industry."

"To do what?"

"To shop for Grails."

We went to the Falls. Jim stood up near the top, wearing 501s and some
Indian gear, squinting a lot, looking sad and noble for the camera
crews and telling dirty jokes to the print reporters. A bunch of GEE
people had come down from the Toronto office to give us a hand, so
things were well under way by the time we got there. I kept asking
where Debbie was and people kept saying "over there," and eventually I
got pointed over to a heavy railing overlooking the Falls. Three
climbing ropes were tied to it, leading down the cliff, and Debbie was
hanging from one of them down near the bottom, dressed in a stunning
Gore-Tex coverall. She and her Toronto pals had located Boner's hidden
outfall, right where Alan said it would be, and then started driving
pitons into the rock. Toronto had prepared a banner, a forty-foot
strip of white ripstop nylon with a big red arrow blazoned on it. They
nailed that banner to the cliff, pointing right to the outfall. They
took their time, used a lot of pitons and strung eighth-inch aileron
cable around the edge of the banner so that the wind wouldn't stretch
it away from the cliff. Finally, Debbie took a can of
fluorescent-orange spray paint and did what she could to highlight the
outfall, make it visible to the cameras. It wasn't a total success,
since everything was cold and wet, not ideal conditions for spray
paint, but some of it stuck. And if it didn't, well, that's what the
arrow was for.

 


 

20

WHEN I GOT BACK HOME there was the usual post-trip crap to take care
of. Mail and messages. Had to get a birthday present for Auntie. Had
to sign a bunch of papers to continue Tanya's "studies" at GEE. They
shut off our phone service so we all had to sit down and thrash out
about three months' worth of unpaid long-distance bills. In the middle
of a spirited discussion of who had made seven consecutive calls to
Santa Cruz at three in the morning, Ike got up and announced that he
was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and
the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in
while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our
front balcony. That was okay. Ike was a shitty gardener anyway and he
complained when I ran my model trains after bedtime. Tess and Laurie,
the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better
after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it
that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies
before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call
this place a "co-op" or a "commune"? How about calling it a "house"?
Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan?

Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose
hair predominated in the shower drain - the women's, since they had
more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour
bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time?
Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling
box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree
that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or
just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative
toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on
an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from
between the tiles in the bathroom?

They had gone to extreme inconvenience to save a message for me on the
phone answering machine. I had to listen to it three times because I
couldn't believe it. It was Dolmacher. He sounded friendly. He wanted
me to go up to New Hampshire with him and participate in the survival
game - pretending to be a commando in the woods. He was trying to get
more people to come up from Boston, he explained, and - get this - the
people he worked with were "all terrible nerds."

I did have to give him one thing: he had the intestinal fortitude to
go up there every weekend and do combat with those shaggy inbreds from
New Hampshire. They didn't use real bullets, but the dirt and cold
were real.

He sounded so damn happy, that's what bothered me. The Grail project
must be doing well. And later on the tape, he reminded me of my
appointment with Laughlin. What the hell did they want from me?

Shit, maybe they really were on to something. Maybe they'd come up
with a way to clean up toxic waste. If so, wonderful. But for some
reason the thought bugged the hell out of me.

Maybe I was the only one who was supposed to be a hero. Maybe that was
my real problem. If Dolmacher and his grinning, musclebound boss found
a perfect way to clean up toxics while I was still sitting hairy and
grubby in a Zodiac, riding my bicycle to work, where would it leave
me? Left behind and worthless. Meanwhile, Biotronics was pulling some
kind of bad cop/good cop drama on me. Scare me and my friends
shitless, then, when I figure it out, smile a lot and invite me over
for a meeting.

There had also been a series of messages from Rebecca, which they
hadn't saved, but they were all the same: I'm trying to get in touch
with you, asshole, why don't you call back? So the next time I was in
the office I gave her a call.

"How's the wounded warrior?"

Rebecca always had to call me by epithets: the Granola James Bond, the
wounded Warrior.

"What do you mean?"

"Pride, S.T. I'm talking about your pride. Last time I talked to
you..."

"Oh yeah. The Case of the Disappearing PCBs. Yeah, that one still
smarts a little. But I had a good time in Buffalo." I briefed her on
it.

"Been following the Pleshy campaign?"

"That reminds me. They're buying Boner. Big merger, you know. Rumors
of insider trading."

"Let's talk about it. And about the article - remember?"

So we made an appointment. I wasn't sure about the article yet. It
might be some fun, in the fish-in-a-barrel department. But then, every
once in a while I took a shot at political credibility. A couple of
surprisingly well-known local pols have come to me to write policy
statements on hazardous waste issues. If I got in the habit of
banishing The Groveler in the alternative press, they might shy away
from me.

While I was gone, someone had put some clippings on my desk about that
jackass Smirnoff. The Terrorist Boy Scouts had held their first
meeting and invited all the local press, one or two of whom had shown
up. Smirnoff had issued a statement, a rambling statement, just what
I'd expect, alternately heaping shit on GEE's head for being too
conservative and praising our direct-action techniques. One of the
clippings had a photograph, and I could see the back of a member's
head, staring up adoringly at Smirnoff, and I was just positive it was
Wyman, the guy who had shifted into reverse on the freeway. So I tried
to get ahold of him for a while, but he had moved out of his old place
and no one knew where he was.

"He's very secretive," his old roommate explained, "because the FBI is
after him."

"Big fucking deal," I said, miffing the hell out of his unindicted
coconspirator.

I spent the rest of the afternoon writing letters and press releases
denouncing the likes of Smirnoff and his idol, Boone, and explaining,
in very short sentences, the differences between us and them. Then I
trashed them, had the computer wipe them out. They'd never see print,
because we don't talk about people like Smirnoff, we just ignore them.

I did have some fun during that first week back. No big actions on the
way, no court appearances, no wrecked cars. I mixed up a shitload of
papier-mâché and added a new mountain to my train set. I hocked a few
more shares of my old Mass Anal stock and bought an antique
locomotive. Bartholomew and Debbie and Tess and Laurie and I played a
few hundred badminton games after work.

But the most fun of all was when Esmerelda sent me a copy of a photo
from the July 13, 1956, Boston Globe, second page of the Business
section. It was a picture of Alvin Fleshy, back in his squirrelly,
young-engineer days, in fiasco's main facility on Alkali Lane. I
recognized the building just by its size: it was their big Chloralkali
plant. Same process that had ruined Niagara. They made a lot of
chemicals, so they needed a lot of power. They needed equipment that
could handle the power fast. That meant big equipment and lots of it -
huge transformers. Many transformers, each the size of a two-car
garage.

"NEW EQUIPMENT FOR BASCO. Alvin Fleshy, Senior Engineer, supervises as
modern equipment is installed in fiasco's Everett facility. The
equipment will be used in the production of industrial and
agricultural chemicals."

Which will be sprayed over most of Vietnam, I mentally added. But the
caption didn't matter; I was looking at the photo. Anyone could see
that we weren't dealing with just any "equipment" here. We were
talking whopping transformers. They were being lowered through holes
in the roof.

The fact that fiasco bought a bunch of new transformers in 1956 was
not interesting to me. What was interesting was that they had had to
get rid of some old transformers to make room for the new ones. And
all of them had probably been full of PCBs, hundreds of thousands of
gallons of the bad stuff, fiasco had been having PCB problems for
years, but nothing of that magnitude.

Fleshy had stashed away a lakeful of toxic waste somewhere, and he'd
been keeping it under his belt for thirty years. I wonder if he
thought about it at night. I wonder what the stockholders would say
when I informed them of it, sent them copies of this photograph.

Suppose they'd taken those transformers and just dumped them on the
floor of the Harbor somewhere. Or taken them to one of their lots and
covered them with dirt. Sooner or later they'd bust open and then all
hell would break loose. It might take a long time - say, thirty years.
But it would happen.

And they'd know about it. They'd be sitting there, waiting, worrying.
Maybe worrying enough to cover the site with some goons in a
Cigarette.

Pure speculation. But it might explain the lobster. Unfortunately, it
didn't explain the disappearing PCBs.

I looked at the photo again. Fleshy was smiling that big bright smile
that hasn't been seen anywhere since the Fifties. Twelve years later,
when he read about the rice oil in Kusho, I'll bet the smile wasn't
there.

But there were plenty of smiles at Biotronics, at least for the first
ten minutes or so. Laughlin actually sent a car around to pick me up.
He said he'd feel terrible if I got run over riding my bike to their
offices. Either he was indiscreet as hell, or he wanted to let me know
that he knew a lot about me.

So it was high time for me to learn a lot about Laughlin, and I had a
few ways of doing that. Most of them would have to wait until after
the meeting, though, so I rode, relatively ignorant, in a big fat
company car out to a high-tech office building along the river, not
far from Harvard. Not even that for from where I lived. Took the
elevator up to the top floor and found Biotronics easily, by following
its smell. They were using solvents in there, mostly for cleaning and
sterilizing stuff. Ethanol and methanol. Some kind of disinfectant
with an aromatic perfume added to make it smell more impressive.
Whiffs of hydrochloric acid, probably used for heavy-duty cleaning.
Sweet acetone. None of this was unusual, just the basic lab odors. No
wonder they were on the top floor; they'd use hoods to contain the
toxic stuff, and then exhaust it all out vents in the roof.

Laughlin met me at the door, swooped his right hand around like a
Stuka dive bomber and nailed me with a gym teacher's handshake and a
game-show host's smile. And on top of all those other odors, a wave of
familiar cologne rolled up my nostrils.

But he wasn't wearing a shoulder holster at the moment. And you could
buy that perfume at any sufficiently pretentious store. Or, if you had
access to a gas chromatograph, you could manufacture it yourself at a
hundredth the price. So I had to take it easy here and not jump to any
paranoid conclusions. Big guys and big revolvers didn't necessarily go
together. I wiped my hand on my jeans, discreetly, then followed him
past all the smiling secretaries, the cheery bottle-washer pushing a
cartload of glassware, the unresponsive Xerox repairman, the
hale-and-hearty fellow executives, blah blah blah. Being in an office
just makes my skin crawl. All that good cheer. All that fine wool, the
processed air, the mediocre coffee, fluorescent tubes, lipstick,
new-carpet smell, the same fucking xeroxed cartoons tacked on the
walls. I wanted to shout: one Far Side on the door does not an
interesting person make. But somewhere back in here they had a lab,
which made it a little better.

Not much of a lab, as it turned out. They had a gas chromatograph,
sort of a cheapie, and some other analytical machines, and they had
one very odd piece of work, up against a wall, called a Dolmacher. He
held a printout in his hand and was moving his lips.

"S.T.!" he shouted, somewhat too loud, blinking spasmodically as his
contact lenses tried to catch up. "Sorry we didn't see you on
Saturday."

"I was in Buffalo. Did you kill anyone?"

"Yeah! Nailed an R.O.T.C. cadet right behind the ear. From thirty
yards. God, was he embarrassed."

"Yeah. So this is where you work?"

"Part of the time."

"Where's the DNA sequencer? Where are the big bug-growing tanks?
Where's the tobacco that glows in the dark?"

"We're in Cambridge," Laughlin said, managing to crank out a
surprisingly throaty laugh.

"Oh, yeah. And people like me have ruined it for people like you."

"God, S.T.," Dolmacher said, not quite whining, "you guys really made
it tough on us in this town. We can hardly even have offices here."

"Wasn't me," I said. "Genes aren't my bailiwick." Years before,
another bunch of duck-squeezers had rammed through some laws making
life hard for genetic engineers in Cambridge.

"That might be true now, ST.,'" Laughlin said, "but it's about to
change."

"Yeah, I've been getting all kinds of dark hints to that effect."

Laughlin jerked his head toward the exit, letting his politeness drop
for a second. I guessed that meant we were leaving now. Dolmacher
followed automatically.

"Where's the rest of it?" I said, killing time as we wandered down the
hallway.

"Unfortunately we don't have a consolidated facility at this point in
time," Laughlin said. "Depending on various environmental regs, we
have different parts of Biotronics scattered around the area. This is
the headquarters. And as you saw, we have a small analytical lab."

"Small molecules only?"

"Small molecules only," Laughlin said, then turned and fixed me with a
glare over his shoulder. "Sangamon's Principle."

I couldn't believe this fucker. He'd been twisting my dick this entire
time and I hadn't even figured it out until now. He was just begging
me to punch him in the nose so that he could throw all those big
uncoordinated Nautilus muscles into action. And then call his lawyers.

He ushered me into a conference room. I sat down with my back to the
window. Laughlin closed the door and Dolmacher hovered.

"You know, Laughlin, you're the nicest guy who's ever hated my guts,"
I said.

He laughed freely, the laugh of a man with a clear conscience. "I
doubt it."

Dolmacher just swiveled back and forth like a spectator at a tennis
match. Me, I was trying to avoid going into a fight-or-flight
reaction. I drank some of their ice water - natural spring water, of
course - and breathed slow, trying to keep my vocal cords nice and
loose. I was wondering if Laughlin had done it - killed Scrounger - or
those two pricks, Kleinhoffer and Dietrich. Or all three.

"Well! Shall we get started with the presentation," Dolmacher
hollered.

"Got any kids, Laughlin?" I asked.

"I think you're going to find this interesting," Laughlin said.

"Should we tell him about the secrecy thing?" Dolmacher asked.

"This research is not generally known," Laughlin explained, "for
competitive reasons."

"Competing with the police?"

"With all the other players in this industry. Of course, you can say
anything you want about this meeting, after you've left, but we'll
just deny it. And all it will do is give a slight edge to our
competitors."

"Okay," I said. "Let's get this shit over with. We're all busy people.
You guys have been working on some kind of genetically engineered bug
that deals with the organic chlorine problem."

"Actually, yes," said Dolmacher.

"I'd guess you got yourselves some time on a Cray supercomputer, or
something, and did some kind of heavy quantum mechanics, worked out a
rough numerical-solution Hamiltonian for chlorine, devised some kind
of transition state between covalent and ionic, figured out a way to
introduce an electron into those chlorines to make them ionic again.
Some reaction that could be carried out by a string of genetic
material - what do you call it?"

"A plasmid," Laughlin said.

"A plasmid that could be introduced into a bacterium and therefore
reproduced in unlimited quantities. And now you want to get approval
to use this thing to clean up toxic waste spills. Turn all that
covalent chlorine back into salt."

"Sheesh," Dolmacher said, and not for the first time.

"You want a job, S.T.?" Laughlin said.

"I could use one. Need to replace my computer."

"That's a shame."

"Yeah. The' Mafia sent a hardware engineer around to bust it."

For once, Laughlin had nothing to say. He was just a little rattled,
or pissed. Probably thinking that he'd been kind of stupid, here and
there, along the way.

"You should buy one of the new ones," Dolmacher said. "With the 80386
processor. Hottest thing going."

"You bastards. You already did it, didn't you?"

Laughlin checked his Rolex. "Let me see. Two weeks, three days, and
about four hours. It took you that long to figure it out?"

"Took your magic bug and dumped it into the Harbor. Ate those PCBs
right up. Turned them into salt."

Laughlin shrugged. He had his eyebrows way up on his forehead now, up
there in the zone of total innocence. "Is there some problem with
that?"

"Tell me. How long since Dolmacher put this bug together for you? A
month or two? When I talked to him at the yacht club, he wasn't
finished with it yet. He said he was working on the Holy Grail, not
finished with it."

"Something like that."

"Jeez, S.T., chill out."

"How much testing did you do on that bug before you put it into the
environment?"

Laughlin shrugged. "Wasn't necessary."

"I think the EPA would disagree."

"Don't insult my intelligence by talking about them."

I snorted. "Alas, we agree, Laughlin. But didn't you even think about
the dangers?"

He grinned. He had me. "What dangers? The bug eats covalent chlorine
compounds, S.T. That's its food. When it's eaten them all - when the
Harbor is perfectly toxin-free - it starves to death. End of bug."

"Yeah, I get the secret message loud and clear. If I go out there and
try to get evidence - to find some of these bugs and blow your company
away - I won't find zip. They're all dead."

"Which is fine, isn't it? Because we don't want genetically engineered
bugs in the environment."

"And we don't want PCBs either," Dolmacher reminded us.

Laughlin smirked at Dolmacher behind his back.

"You guys went out and stopped pollution, huh?" I said, beating him to
it.

"We stopped pollution. No PCBs left in the Harbor. No bugs either. No
evidence to harm our company. The only person who's screwed is you,
S.T."

Suddenly Dolmacher turned nasty. "Yeah, S.T., you're screwed."

"Everywhere except in bed," Laughlin added.

"Laughlin, my man," I said, "I didn't realize it was going to be that
kind of fight."

He dropped into a boxing stance, waved his guard around, snapped a big
meaty right hook into thin air. "Fight's over," he said. "First-round
knockout. Ever do any boxing, S.T.?"

"Nope. I prefer to kill helpless animals."

Dolmacher cleared his throat with a sound like pebbles rattling in a
can. "What we're hoping is that we can get you on our side."

"That's not what we were going to say, Dolmacher," Laughlin said. "We
were going to say, 'What we're trying to demonstrate is that We're
already on the same side.'"

"You and us," Dolmacher continued, right in stride.

"Lumpy, you ever get your boss up there for the Survival Game?" I
asked. "I could slip you some dum-dums."

"It's a stupid game," Laughlin said. Dolmacher looked a little
wounded.

"All your boss's ammo is on the bottom of the Harbor," I said. "In his
chrome-plated revolver."

"I got a new one," Laughlin said, "even bigger. To protect myself from
terrorists."

"How's your son?" I asked. "The Poyzen Boyzen fan. He been spending a
lot of time on the Nautilus lately?"

"Christopher lacks the maturity for a concerted power-building
program," Laughlin said, showing a little tension.

"I'll say. He and I had a chat, out there on that big mound of garbage
in the Harbor, where he hangs out with the rest of the Junior
Achievement League. How old is he - fourteen, fifteen?"

"Seventeen."

"Oh. Well, I was impressed with him. He throws a mean beer bottle."

"Thank you."

"What's his ambition, then? Arsonist?"

Laughlin started for me, quick little boxer's steps. I just sat there.
Harder to punch a guy's face when it's down around your waist.

"Think about lawyers, Laughlin," I said. He did, and he stopped.

"Let's get to the end of this," I said, "because we're both about to
kill each other. You want me, noted eco-asshole Sangamon Taylor, to
come out and say that your PCB-eating bug is a good thing. That it
should be rushed into general use right away."

"All of which is the God's truth," Dolmacher said.

"Before you ever used that bug, you knew I might fuck it up for you.
You heard from Christopher that I was hanging out on Spectacle Island,
and you were afraid that I'd discover the old Basco transformers
leaking PCBs there."

"Continue."

"The ones buried under the north shore of the island. The ones that
accidentally got ruptured by that old barge during Hurricane Alison,
and spilled a whole lake of PCBs down into the Harbor. You were afraid
I'd figured that all out. Which, actually, I hadn't. As you noticed, I
can be pretty slow sometimes. But you tried to scare me off, to slow
my investigation down, so that you could use the bug to wipe out the
evidence before I went public."

"And it worked."

"It worked fine. The question is: did the bug really eat all those
PCBs? What about deep underneath that old barge? Maybe there's an
unruptured transformer down there. Or maybe there's a pocket of bugs
down there, still working on some PCBs, bugs that I could sample and
show before the public. You're still worried about that. You want me
off your trail, you want me on your side."

"Why shouldn't you be on our side? Dolmacher said. He really meant it.
"S.T., there are no covalent chlorine compounds left in Boston Harbor.
Isn't that what you wanted?"

"Sangamon's Principle," I said. "This plasmid, it's a huge molecule
you're messing around with. You don't know what it's going to do. The
answer is no."

Laughlin didn't bother to show me out. Dolmacher followed me, going on
about the Survival Game, until I body-checked him into a wall. He gave
me a vacant yet somehow piercing look, and as I rode the elevator
down, I got to thinking that Dolmacher was nothing but a big
complicated molecule himself, and you never knew what he'd do either.

 


 

21

REBECCA CAME AROUND for our appointment about half an hour after I got
back. I'd forgotten about it. Damn it, I was still just stewing in my
emotions, trying to wash Laughlin's perfume off my hand. I hadn't had
time to consider anything. I wanted to tell all, but first I had to
come up with a plan. I shoved my clippings under some other crap when
I heard her voice approaching; she walked in and said she had some
interesting stuff for me.

She did, but nothing better than what I'd already seen. There was
another copy of that same picture. The intern had also discovered a
vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put
some "junk machinery" on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual
feeble excuse.

"They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine
life. You don't buy that?"

Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. "Rebecca, goddammit, since
the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of
its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a
habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where
all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for
marine life."

"You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?"

"Nothing compared to those transformers. I've got Basco in my
crosshairs, Rebecca."

"I don't think I can print that in the paper, S.T."

"I just don't have any ammunition in my magazine."

"Look. Do you want to do the article? S.T. on Fleshy?"

"Can't, Not yet. Have to figure out what's going on." I leaned forward
and looked ponderous. "If I seem a little stressed out, well ... the
FBI is after me."

"You're kidding, S.T.!"

"Recess. I'll get back to you when Basco's in the grave."

When I'd gotten back from that lovely chat with Laughlin and
Dolmacher, there'd been a message waiting for me, a worried message
from Gallagher's wife. It was still early enough in the day to catch
him on his boat, and I needed an excuse to get out on the water. I
persuaded Rebecca to drive me downtown, got on the Zodiac, and buzzed
around to Gallagher's berth in Southie. He was still out on the water
somewhere. So I persuaded one of the neighboring boats to hail him on
the CB, and in about twenty minutes I was screaming flat-out across
calm water to intercept the Scoundrel, which was just returning from
the Bay.

They recognized me at a distance, since I'm the only one who travels
in that way, and cut their engines so I could come up alongside.

"Jeez! You guys run into an oil slick?" I said when I got close enough
to talk. Maybe it was the late-afternoon light, but they were all
dark, greyish looking. They mumbled some kind of defiant, bullshit
response. They sounded tired. I tossed one of them my bow line and
then they helped me scramble on board.

They all stood around and stared at me, quieter than they'd ever been,
sunk, depressed. The reason their skin was dark was that they were
covered with chloracne.

"You guys have been into some bad chowder," I said in a weak murmur,
but Gallagher, skipper of the plague ship Scoundrel, held up his hands
and cut me off.

"Listen. Listen, S.T, we stopped setting our traps there. I swear to
God we haven't touched any of them oily lobsters."

When was this damn thing going to start making any sense? Why did I
feel like such an asshole? "You absolutely didn't eat any of those
oily ones?"

"Only Billy. The guy you saw at Fenway."

"How's he doing?"

"Fine. He felt real sick and took a couple days off, stopped eating
lobster."

Billy came up from below decks. He was pristine. A little residual
scabbing from his old case of chloracne.

"But you guys have been eating lobster and you got sick."

"Yeah. Real bad, just in the last couple of days. So we switched to
Big Macs."

"Good."

"But it's getting worse anyway. When I left this morning, S.T, I was
okay, I really was. But now I feel like shit."

"The lobsters that you ate since the last time I talked to you-"

"Goddamn it, S.T, I'm telling you the God's truth. We looked at them
all real careful and they didn't smell oily, they didn't taste oily."

"Where'd you get 'em?"

"All over the Harbor. Mostly Dorchester Bay."

That didn't help me at all. Dorchester Bay was a pocket of water below
South Boston, ringed with sewer overflows - CSOs - but not much
industry. It was three or four miles east - southeast of the area I'd
been concentrating on.

"Have you pulled up any traps that were oily?"

"Yeah. We put one down near Spectacle, just as a test, you know. See,
S.T, we're starting to become invironmintles. Pulled it up this
morning. Check this out, S.T."

I knew it had to be bad because they had just chucked the whole thing
into a Hefty bag and left it out on the fantail. I pulled it open and
looked. There was no lobster in there, but the trap was still
glistening with oil. It had all dripped off the trap and run down into
one corner of the bag where I could grab it and squish it around and
feel it through the plastic. Oily, but transparent. This trap had been
dipped in PCBs.

This was orders of magnitude worse than the lobster Tanya had found -
the lobster had just had a few drops of the stuff, built up slowly
over time.

There was more to this business, but I had no idea what. Each new
piece of evidence directly contradicted the last.

Billy ate oily lobsters and got poisoned. When he stopped eating them
he got better. Fine. But the rest of the crew never did. They got
poisoned anyway. They stopped eating them but it didn't help. Where
were they getting PCBs?

"The only thing I can think is that you're absorbing them from traps
like this one," I said. "You didn't try burning anything, did you? Any
old traps or ropes?"

"Why would we do that?"

"Beats me. But let me just warn you that PCBs don't burn. They just
turn into dioxin and escape into the air." Maybe someone was running a
clandestine toxic waste incinerator in Southie. I just don't know.

"Activated charcoal," I said. "Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal.
Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema."

It took me a while to make them believe that. "Or you could grind up
some briquets very fine. Don't use the self-lighting kind."

"Yeah, we're not dumb micks, S.T."

"Sorry. Ever hear of an activated charcoal filter? The carbon grabs
onto organic molecules, anything that's reactive, and holds it long
enough for your body to get rid of it."

Gallagher laughed. "Okay. I'll tell my wife we're getting an aquarium.
Just what I need, more frickin' fish."

By the time I got the Zode back downtown, filled the gas tanks, made
it back to the office, loaded myself down with diving equipment, got
it all back to the yacht club and hit the water again it was dark and
a little bit foggy. Which was fine by me. I was a little dark and
foggy myself; I didn't even know what I was going to look for, or
where.

The oily trap - now, that was evidence. No gas chromatograph was
needed, just my trusty schnozz. It contradicted the evidence from the
gas chromatograph at the university but, by now, contradictions seemed
par for the course. I was willing to believe the most recent piece of
evidence to drift past me.

I'd gotten Gallagher to show me, on a chart, exactly where he'd pulled
that trap. A quarter-mile north of Spectacle Island, in sort of a
depression in the sea floor. I could go down into it and look for
puddles of oil. For fifty-five-gallon drums or old Basco transformers.
We'd already sampled the area, though, and found nothing at all.

What would that prove anyway? It wouldn't help with the real mysteries
- why my analysis was all fucked up; why Gallagher was sick.

Maybe it wasn't PCBs at all. Maybe some other form of organic
chlorine, that didn't taste oily, didn't show up in our analysis. That
was the only plausible way for those guys to get poisoned. I could be
dealing with two separate problems here: a busted transformer dumped
thirty years ago by Basco, causing oily traps, and some other kind of
subtle, nasty waste-dumping, something really new and vicious. New
technologies were being invented all the time out on Route 128, and
new forms of toxic waste along with them. Maybe someone was using the
CSO system to get rid of their corporate shit - flushing it down the
toilet during heavy rains, knowing it would immediately overflow into
the Harbor and never be noticed down at the sewage treatment plants.
It was coming from one of Dorchester Bay CSOs and contaminating
lobsters in that area.

That was the thing to look for, then. Take a sample from Dorchester
Bay and analyze it. Analyze it every which way, look for every damn
thing under the sun: bromine and fluorine and the other compounds that
could mimic chlorine. If nothing else, it would help me rule out this
new hypothesis. And if I found something, I could trace it to a
particular CSO, and then I had the criminals by the balls. Each CSO
drains a specific set of toilets in a specific part of town. By
lifting the right manhole covers, paying a lot of attention to my
sewer maps, I could trace the trail right back to the perpetrator.

This strategy had another advantage as well: I wouldn't have to dive
as deep. Diving just isn't my thing. Under normal conditions it's
scary enough, but diving at night, in murky water, with no backup -
that was fucking stupid. I was only doing it because I knew I wouldn't
be able to relax until I did something. So I anchored my Zodiac a
hundred feet off the shore and worked from there.

First I just found the bottom and nosed around some. In front of me
was a CSO that had littered the bottom with condoms, toilet paper and
other sewage for at least half a mile out. Behind me, I suspected, was
a huge PCB spill. In between was total confusion: lobsters saturated
with poison, bottom sludge that was utterly clean, clean-looking
lobsters that gave massive doses of chloracne to the people who ate
them.

There was a lobster crawling on an old oil drum right in front of me.
I gave the drum a poke with my knife and it crumbled; there couldn't
be anything in there. Then the lobster and I did hand-to-hand combat.
I pretended it was Laughlin. Couldn't smell it or taste it, but I had
enough time to chop it open and find its liver.

It had no liver, just sacs of oil, like the one Tanya had found. I
scooped its viscera into a jar and took it with me. Maybe it was PCBs,
maybe something completely different. So I swam into the shallow water
and mucked around a little, breaking the water every so often to get
my bearings, until I'd located the CSO pipe. Thank God it wasn't
raining.

Having taken a good jarful of sludge from right under the pipe, I
surfaced, trod water and studied the shoreline. I needed to know which
CSO I was dealing with here, triangulating off the positions of U.
Mass, South Boston High, Summer Street, and other landmarks. When I
was convinced I could pin this place down on a map, I decided to call
it a day.

While I was heading for the Zodiac I heard a propeller, or maybe more
than one, and that bothered me because when I broke the water earlier,
I hadn't been able to see any running lights. Somebody was nearby,
using the fog to hide, and I had to guess he was hiding from me.

So I started one very slow orbit, and that's how I found the
Cigarette. Sitting there with its motor idling, just far enough away
that I couldn't see it from the Zode. It could see me because it was
running dark. But the lights on my boat would splash against the
surrounding fog and make it impossible for me to see them.

What now? I could try to get a close look at them. But they might have
a negative attitude about that. Somehow I didn't relish my chances if
they decided to chase me down. Besides, I was running out of air, and
I couldn't stay underwater that much longer.

I could abandon the Zode and swim to shore on the surface, but why
abandon ten thousand bucks worth of GEE equipment? These guys were
just watching me. And they'd been watching me for a long time. I'd
even provoked them once before, and all they did was run away. I
didn't burn down my house when the FBI bugged it, did I?

So the only sensible idea was to go back to the Zode and proceed
normally. But that's exactly what they were expecting me to do. It
irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to
do exactly what's expected. But when you run out of air, you run out
of air.

The best tactic was stealth. I swam back under the surface, broke the
water on the far side of the Zode, in case they were using infrared,
and started to take my stuff off while remaining in the water. My one
concession to paranoia was dropping some gear: I just let the empty
tank sink to the bottom because hauling it up into the Zode would be
noisy and time consuming. Same with the clanky weight belt. It was
just some chunks of lead and a nylon strap.

The problem was that I had to haul myself up into the boat. I weighed
more than all that other crap together. Getting over the side of the
Zode wasn't like hopping over a fence. It was more like sumo wrestling
in a pool filled with Crisco.

So I tried to be quiet about it until I accidentally made a godawful
amount of noise, and then I just tried to be quick about it. And at
about the same time, I heard the Cigarette's engines rev up, heard it
being thrown into gear. That scared the shit out of me and I waddled
to the back of the Zode and began hauling on the ripcord, trying to
start up the outboard. I hauled on it like a maniac about three times,
felt something pop in my back, and then the Cigarette materialized
like a ghost, shiny and blue and slippery, and I finally got to look
at the owners. They were wearing ski masks. One of them was driving
and the other was staring at me through unnaturally large binoculars.
These were high-tech, Route 128 thugs: they had me on infrared. The
driver's eyes glinted pale blue; Kleinhoffer or Dietrich. The other
one set his binocs down and aimed a gun at me.

I remembered having tried to pistol-shoot at Jim Grandfather's,
noticing how hard it actually was, after having watched TV and movies
my whole life, to actually hit something with a handgun. These guys
were on a small boat and so was I. I didn't figure they were going to
nail me with one shot. Which didn't prevent me from being scared
shitless; when I saw the gun, I fell back on my ass, tipping the whole
Zode up. The Cigarette overshot me and had to turn around for another
pass.

That gave me time to notice a little surprise they'd left behind: a
pair of small darts stuck into the side of my Zodiac, and they were
sputtering at me, throwing off a transparent bluish light. I'd heard
about this from Dolmacher. It was a Tazer. If I hadn't fallen back,
those darts would be stuck in my skin and that electrical charge would
be running through my nervous system. And I'd be unconscious, or
wishing I was, long enough for them to rev up and run over me in their
Cigarette at about eighty miles an hour. Sorry, officer, it was foggy.

The wake of the Cigarette was throwing the Zode around like a
teeter-totter. Something heavy smashed into my foot. It was our big
nautical strobe light. So when the Cigarette cruised by me for the
second attempt, I turned the strobe on, held it over my head like a
basketball, and made a three-point jump shot right into their cockpit.

"Nice second effort, boys!" I hollered. The light had half-blinded me,
too, but I didn't need perfect vision to start the motor. They needed
it to take a shot at me.

Time for another try at the motor. This time I did it right: set the
throttle on START and choked it. Three more hauls on the ripcord and
it started.

Then it died. I put the choke back in and hauled once more, getting a
good start. I had to lean way over to shift it into forward gear and
that's how I got tossed out of the boat.

Kleinhoffer and Dietrich weren't total losers. While they were
clearing the purple spots out of their vision they could buzz me and
throw me around with their thousand-horsepower wake. It had succeeded
beyond their wildest dreams. I had gotten the Zode into forward gear,
but I got tangled up with the throttle handle when I was tumbling out,
so now the motor was cocked all the way over to one side. It was
puttering around in tight little circles, a little faster than I could
swim. The Cigarette came around once more and I had to assume that Old
Deadeye was using his infrared specs. If it had been calm they would
have seen me instantly, but tonight, thank God, it was a little
choppy.

The immediate problem was that my throat and nose were full of water
and I hated to draw attention to myself by coughing and sneezing it
out. So I tucked my head under the surface, blew some of it out and
swallowed the rest. Yummy. Then I didn't have any air in my lungs so I
had to come up and breathe.

My turn for a break. The Zodiac was spiraling in my direction. I just
tried to present a small target, to look like a wave, and to dogpaddle
toward it. The Cigarette was tearing back and forth, trying to locate
my head with its propellers.

This went on maybe ten minutes. Between trying to breathe, trying to
hide, coping with the tsunami wakes of the Cigarette and trying to get
closer to the Zodiac, it was hard to keep track of time.

The Zodiac's bow rope brushed over my leg and I grabbed it. That was a
nice reminder: if I let it trail behind me, it would get caught in the
propeller. What other useful tips had Artemis given me? One thing for
damn sure: take it reasonably easy; don't give it full throttle right
off the bat or it would just do a backflip and toss me into the Harbor
again.

Finally I got the prow of the Zodiac right up in my face, waited for
the Cigarette to overshoot me, then threw myself up over the nose and
into the boat. That was the theory, anyway. In reality it took a
little longer than that so, as I was crawling on my hands and knees
back toward the outboard, I looked up and saw the Cigarette cruising
by me, slow and methodical, and I saw that Tazer gun pointed in my
direction.

The gun didn't make any sound. I didn't even know I was hit until I
felt a hot buzzing sensation in the arm of my wetsuit. But that was
all I felt.

"You assholes," I shouted, "it's a rubber suit!"

Artemis would have been proud: I throttled it up slowly, establishing
a stable attitude in the water. Then I ripped it open and blew right
past the bow of the Cigarette. It was choppy, but not that bad, and I
was aiming for Zodiac nirvana here: the boat airborne, just the screw
in the water. At that speed, the water might as well be asphalt. The
Cigarette slices through it, the Zodiac just skitters - like being
dragged down a cobblestone street by forty rabid mustangs.

If I could just make it out of Dorchester Bay and out toward Castle
Island Park, I could take dead aim at the heart of downtown. Then I'd
cross a small channel, cut past navy territory, and then I'd be
passing the ends of the south Boston piers, all in a nice line. The
worst part was the first, where I had nothing to protect me, but I'd
covered half of it by the time the Cigarette caught up. They came
after me dark, running a zigzag search pattern through the fog and,
when I was almost to Castle Island Park, they found me.

Then it was raw power versus maneuverability. They tried to cut across
my bow and swamp me, but I spun away from them, did a
two-hundred-seventy-degree turn, went airborne off their wake, half
fell out of the boat and cut in behind them, the water clawing at my
right leg. They recovered faster than they wanted to and ended up
ahead of me - shades of Buffalo - so I fell back into the Zode, aimed
for their asshole, and throttled it up. They headed into a turn - a
very fast turn, but slower than me. We turned and turned, me spiraling
round right behind them, sticking to the calm spot in the center of
their wake. They twisted it the other way, trying to shake me, and I
followed them in the other direction until I saw the lights of
downtown swinging past. Time to turn the corner. I broke out of the
curve and drilled the throttle.

They tried to spin, got slapped around by their own wake for a little,
then cranked it up to about twice my speed and came for me like a
Sidewinder missile. They were trying the same attack, but this time I
knew it. Jived left, spun right, cut directly in front of them, just
missed being sliced in two by that samurai sword of a hull, and pulled
the same trick: whipped around and cut behind them. They were trying
to reverse direction so I blew them off and aimed for the skyscrapers.

The assholes should have realized I'd be wearing rubber. It was an
excellent plan, though. Like something I would think up, if I was
Laughlin.

ENVIRONMENTALIST DIES IN BIZARRE HIT-AND-RUN

BOATING ACCIDENT

SELF-STYLED MAVERICK WAS CAVALIER ABOUT SAFETY PROCEDURES

I faked them out by sprinting in the direction of the airport, half a
mile away, and when they bit, I nipped a hairpin turn and shot past
them in the opposite direction, close enough to see the whites of
their eyes. That gave me enough room to make it across the navy
channel, and they almost lost me again in the fog.

I'd made it to the piers of South Boston, goddamn it, and it was low
tide. The low tide was going to save my life. The piers stood up on
piles and I could squeeze between them.

Time for some serious Zodiac abuse. I was hanging onto the Zode in
about six different ways because the piles kept trying to punch it out
from under me. I was flying every which way, like riding a bronco, so
the barnacles on those piles left a nice series of parallel gashes in
my hands and arms. Long years of video-game experience were coming
into play. I just kept worrying about the next set of piles, cutting
and jiving through the gaps, ducking under the occasional strut.
Cigarettes aren't made for that particular kind of abuse, so all they
could do was parallel me and then try to cut me off when the piers
came to an end and I had to emerge into the Harbor again.

But that was like a defensive lineman trying to stand in the way of a
running back. A fake here, a fake there, and there's just no way to do
it. I screamed past with them no more than ten feet away, because it's
harder to draw a bead on something that's going by close and fast -
ask any Indian circling a wagon train - and then I swung around,
heading inland again. I was all done with Southie; downtown was a
hundred yards away.

Paranoia is my way of life, and for a couple of weeks, some creeps had
been shadowing me in a big powerful speedboat. I'd lost sleep,
irritated Debbie and wasted a lot of gasoline because of these creeps.
Instead of sleeping I had sprawled on my bed trying to think of what I
would do if they ever came after me. In other words, I wasn't
unprepared for this. I'd given it some thought.

So I knew exactly how to send these bastards to their graves: lead
them into the Fort Point Channel at high velocity.

Boston used to be just a round island at the end of a sandbar. The
airport, Back Bay, and much of Southie's waterfront are all artificial
land. The bay between Southie and downtown Boston had been narrowed
until it was just a slit - a canal, really - called Fort Point
Channel. It was only a couple hundred yards wide, and it was no place
to race speedboats. It was spanned with several bridges and completely
fouled with old, half-rotten pilings. In its one-mile length it had
more snags and shallows and lurking dangers than any hundred miles of
the Mississippi. Like a riverboat pilot, I knew where all that shit
was. I could navigate this channel at full speed with my eyes closed.
Or so I'd bragged. This was my chance to find out.

First I got them excited, acted like I wanted to head home toward the
yacht club, made a desperate break for the airport, got cut off both
ways. Got them going very fast in the wrong direction, then broke the
opposite way and just headed for the Channel at a flat sprint. Finally
broke the motor in - hit full throttle - never thought I'd be that
scared of anything. So I had a quarter of a mile lead before they even
got turned around. I knew that Deadeye was looking right through the
fog with his infrared specs, zeroing in on the heat signature of my
motor, which must be blazing like a nova. He found me, probably fading
fast, and his partner did exactly the right thing: leaned on the
throttle, asked for all thousand horsepower, and got it. They hauled
ass into the Channel, passed under the Northern Avenue Bridge, and I
led them right through the safe part so they wouldn't even know they
were in mortal danger. They were driving right up my ass when I led
them toward a picket fence of foot-thick pilings next to the Boston
Tea Party ship. I pulled into a violent turn and the Zode went between
them, on its side. Then I got out of the way.

They plowed into the pilings doing upwards of sixty miles an hour.
Their sexy fiberglass hull shattered like a potato chip in a meat
grinder. Those big oversize motors took a lot of gasoline and all of
it exploded at once. I remember one of the big outboards tumbling
through space like a comet, trailing pale blue flames, its screw
cutting on air. The Cigarette was a big boat going fast, and it took a
long time for all that crap to stop moving.

Myself, I crossed the Channel and got onto dry land at the Summer
Street Bridge. I squatted on the shore for a while, watching the
flames coming up off the water. Then I wandered up into civilization,
stood in the road and flagged down a BMW. It overshot me a little bit
so I got to see the SAVE THE WHALES sticker on the rear bumper. A
young guy in a suit climbed out. "What's burning?" he said. "Are you
okay?"

"I am. You got a tire patch kit in that thing?"

"You bet." The guy even knew my full name. We carried his kit down to
the water and fixed the Tazer holes in my Zodiac. Then he got back in
his BMW and drove away. I told him he didn't even have to think about
donating more money to GEE this year.

 


 

22

EVEN THESE PUSSWADS couldn't afford to own more than one Cigarette, so
I figured I was okay as long as I stayed on the water. The yacht club
was definitely not an option, but I could come ashore just about
anywhere else.

So I took the Zode up and out of Fort Point Channel and up to the
Aquarium docks, where I found a pay phone.

"What's up?" Bartholomew asked.

Where to begin? "Well, I just killed some guys."

For once he didn't say anything, just sat there uncomfortably silent,
and I realized that this was a stupid way to commence a conversation.
"Look, how many people are at the house this evening?"

"Just me. Roscommon's banging on something downstairs. Shut off our
water."

"Could you track the others down?"

"I think maybe. Why?"

"Because everyone should stay away from the house for a while.
Somebody's trying to kill me."

"Again?"

"Yeah. But for real this time."

"You call the cops?"

Of course. When people try to kill you, you're supposed to call the
cops. Why hadn't I done that? "Don't let anyone in. I'll get back to
you in a minute."

Then I called the cops. They sent a detective around to the Aquarium
and we sat there beside the Seal Pool for a while. I gave them a
statement. A harbor seal sat behind us the whole time, looking up at
us and shouting, "Thunderbird, Thunderbird!" The bums who hung out
around the Seal Pool were skilled instructors. "Spare change? Spare
change?" But the detective had the courtesy to concentrate on me.
Didn't see much point in trying to explain all the stuff with the
PCBs, since all I had was conflicting evidence. I just told them I was
taking some samples and these guys tried to kill me.

Then I called Bart again. He was still sitting there watching the same
Stooges flick and I could still hear Roscommon's thuds resounding from
the basement.

"I feel like a sap. Why don't I own a gun?" I asked rhetorically.

"Beats me. I don't have one either."

Actually, I knew the answer. I didn't own a gun because then I'd look
like a terrorist. And because, hell, I didn't need one. "You got any
plans for tonight?" I asked.

"No more than usual," Bart said. "Amy's in New York."

"There's a chance that, if I get crazy enough, I'll ask you to drive
me around all night sewer-diving and possibly being chased by amateur
hit men."

"Whatever."

I buzzed off into the darkness again, going a little slower now,
trying to keep my head on straight. Paused at MIT and ran to the
office to get the manhole lifter, a bandolier of test tubes and a
bucket on a rope. Went across the river and re-emerged at the
university. Went straight to the lab and ran a test on the sample I'd
just taken from the Dorchester Bay CSO.

It was stuffed with organic chlorine compounds. Not just PCBs, but a
whole stew of venality. To go back to the gunboat metaphor, what we
had here was soldiers with machine guns, riding not just on patrol
boats, but on surfboards, Zodiacs, water skis and inner tubes. All the
compounds were polycyclic aromatics - carbon atoms in six-packs,
twelve-packs, and cases. Some kind of crap was definitely getting
dumped out of the CSO.

Tomorrow it was going to rain - a big storm coming in from the
Atlantic - and the sewers were going to overflow. If there was any
evidence in them, it was bound to be washed out to sea. So now was the
time for executive-hunting. I called my roommate and asked him to meet
me under the birdshit, then I hung up.

It was a fifteen-minute walk from our house on the Brighton side of
the river to the mall on the other side. Along the way we had to walk
below an overpass, a highway bridge made of metal girders. For some
reason, pigeons happened to like those girders very much, and the
sidewalk underneath was thick with birdshit. This was a reference only
Bart would understand.

For me, it was just a pleasant nighttime cruise on the river. The fog
had cleared off as the wind had risen, and now the air was cold and
smelled cleaner than it was. It was a chance to relax, get my head
clear.

The Charles wasn't as bad as it used to be. From here it seemed like
the Main Street of civilization. Beacon Hill behind me, Harvard ahead,
MIT on one side and Fenway Park on the other. After playing fatal
video games on the Harbor, it was comforting to go for a slow
putt-putt out here, watch the traffic on the riverside boulevards -
comfortable, normal people in nice cars, listening to the radio - and
stare into the lights of the university libraries, and listen to the
Sox hounds celebrating a run-scoring double.

Within a few minutes, Harvard came up on the right, dark and ancient,
with a neon corona rising up from Harvard Square behind it. Then
around a bend, and suddenly the Charles was narrow, just a minor river
surrounded by trees. Past the big cemeteries, then the IHOP reared up
on the left and I tied my Zodiac to a tree. A short hike took me to
the birdshit, and, voila - there was the van, sitting there dark, ZZ
Top rumbling from within. Bart opened the door, which was nice,
because that way I didn't have to wonder who really was inside.

"Anyone follow you?"

"If they did," he said, "they did a good job of it. You have any more
trouble?"

"No."

"Hey. Check this out." He unzipped his leather jacket and pulled it
open to reveal a .38 Special stuck in his belt.

"Where the fuck did you get that?"

"Roscommon."

"Roscommon?"

"Once, when he got really pissed, he started threatening me. Told me
that he had an equalizer in his car. So after you called, I just went
out and busted the window and took it."

"There's beauty in that, Bart."

Call me a fool, but I felt a lot tougher now. We pulled the van onto
the grass along the river beside Soldiers Fields Road, and hauled up
the Zodiac's gas tanks and the outboard motor. We put them in the van
and then put the Zodiac on top and tied it down. We went to the IHOP
and got big fat coffees to go. Then we turned up the stereo and went
out sewer-diving.

This I had done before. Put me in the sewers and I'm in my element.
The tendency of Boston's sewers to gush directly into the Harbor
whenever more than three drops of rain fell made them an ideal place
for companies to dump their hazardous waste without the embarrassment
of a mediapathic pipe. Sometimes I'd discover a bad thing coming out
of a CSO and then I'd have to go on one of these expeditions. Bart
knew the drill.

The principle is simple. If there's poison coming out of a sewer, you
should be able to trace it to its source. It helps to have a map of
all the sewer lines and where they feed into one another. I find the
CSO on my sewer map and, just like that, I know which neighborhood
it's coming from. Once I get to that neighborhood, my map tells me
where the key manholes are and, by running tests under those manholes,
I can narrow it down even further.

Besides a manhole tool, the only requirement is some kind of quick,
simple test for the presence of the toxin you're tracing. Preferably
it's a test you can perform right in your vehicle. I had something
like that for organic chlorine compounds, a test built into small
plastic test tubes. They were about the size of shotgun shells, so
when this whole mess had started I'd made up several dozen and stashed
them in an army-surplus bandolier. With that slung over my shoulder
and my manhole cracker in my hands, I was a toxic Rambo, prepared to
rain media death upon the bad guys. We were all set.

It wasn't that romantic, though. I sat down in the back with my coffee
and a penlight while Bart drove around aimlessly on the Mass Pike,
trying to determine if we were being tailed. I studied my sewer map.
Dorchester Bay had many CSOs and I had to figure out which one of them
I'd been looking at. My technique was kind of like Boy Scout
orienteering. I was about four blocks over from Summer Street, I knew
how a couple of landmarks happened to line up, and that allowed me to
figure my position on the map.

My toxic CSO wasn't just any CSO, certainly not of the neighborhood
variety. It wasn't even a Boston CSO. It was the outlet of a long
tunnel that ran all the way from Framingham, out in the extreme
southwestern suburbs. Framingham had no place to dump its overflow -
they didn't even have a river - and they'd had to construct an
underground river that ran for some twenty miles east-northeast to
Dorchester Bay. Overflow from Framingham and the neighboring town of
Natick ran down that pipe. Somewhere along those twenty miles, someone
was throwing huge amounts of organic chlorine compounds into the flow.

I was tempted to go straight to Natick and start sampling there.
Although it's a little outside Route 128, it is prime territory for
Route 128 corporations. But there was also a chance that someone had
tapped into the line between Natick and the outlet. If we got out that
far, ran a test and found nothing, we'd have wasted an hour driving
out and back. So I traced the tunnel eastwards and picked out a
promising manhole in a Boston street. We would start there.

"Roxbury, James," I said.

"Oh, good. Right near the museum, right?"

"Wishful thinking. It's a mile south of here."

"Oh. You mean for real Roxbury."

"Sorry, that's where the tunnel is."

Let me explain something about Bart: he wasn't as dumb as he sounded.
He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for
him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of
like me.

We didn't know how to get there and had to find it by reputation -
"don't go down that street any farther - it'll take you right into
Roxbury." We had to follow a bunch of that kind of streets.

But eventually we found our manhole. It was in the right land of a
four-lane street. I had Bart pull just past it, then I threw open the
back doors of the van, reached out and snared the lid with my tool and
hauled. It took some doing but I got it off. I climbed down in there
with my bucket-on-a-rope and had Bart back up to conceal the hole. He
closed up those back doors and switched on the emergency flashers.

The main thing was not to act like a pair of scared, lost, white guys.
Bart was pretty good at it. In his black leather and his black van,
with his longish hair and loud music, he clearly was not a lawyer with
a flat tire.

Plus, I had my part of it down to a science. I went down the ladder,
braced myself so my hands were free, lowered the bucket on the rope
and took my sample. Took a leak, too. Twenty seconds' work. Then back
up the ladder. But I could hear the roar of a radiator fan, I could
see headlights in the van's undercarriage. Someone was pulling up
behind us. And until the van moved, I was trapped in the manhole.

Door slam. Footsteps. Knock, knock. Music turned down, window
descended.

"Can I help you officer?"

I didn't know how to take that. Cops.

"You have a problem here?" Old white Townie voice. I could draw you a
sketch of this cop without having seen him: fifty, stubby iron-colored
hair, a big, solid spare tire.

"Stalled the engine and my battery's too low to turn it over now. And
I know this is a bad neighborhood, officer, so I just rolled up the
windows and locked the doors and waited for one of you guys to show
up."

"Good move, son, you did the right thing. Hey, Freddy! Bring her
around here."

Freddy moved the cop car up and they performed the jump-start. I
relaxed. Right above my head was more evidence of Bart's concealed
intelligence: he'd gotten one of those magnetic key holders, and hid
some spare keys in the undercarriage of the van. "Okay, now get out of
here, kid!"

"Okay! I'm just gonna sit here idling for a few minutes and let the
battery recharge, okay?"

"Son, if you don't mind, I'd prefer to escort you right out of this
neighborhood." Wonderful idea from my point of view.

"Hey, I appreciate that, officer, but it's okay. I got an equalizer in
here."

"Okay. Well, don't press your luck. This ain't your part of town."

"Thanks again!" And then, deliverance. Bart pulled the van forward; I
got out and replaced the lid; and we were the fuck out of there. Not a
single gang even looked our way. Bart had to be physically restrained
from stopping at a Louisiana catfish restaurant for a 1:00 A.M.
dinner.

I pointed him west, toward Brookline, and ran my test in the back.
Positive for organic chlorine poisoning. The crooks were west of us.
My prejudices were well-founded.

To be fully scientific I should have stopped at every manhole between
Roxbury and Natick, following the trail, but sometimes you have to
take your science with a grain of salt. First there was Brookline. Not
the scummy northern part of Brookline with its
two-hundred-thousand-dollar condos. The nice part, with its fifty-room
slate-roofed mansions. Then there was Newton, where Roscommon lived,
where every front door was flanked by Greek columns. The folks in
Brookline and Newton weren't dumping organic chlorine compounds into
the sewers; they were making their money from doing it.

We drove straight to southern Newton for another check. Getting
samples was tricky out here because there were even more cops, and
just owning a black van was reason enough for a life sentence. I'd had
success before, though, just on pure balls. "Yes, officer, I'm
Sangamon Taylor with GEE International, we're working on a sanctioned
investigation here [whatever that meant] tracking down illegal dumping
in the [insert name of town] sewer system. You live in this town,
officer? You have children? Noticed any behavioral changes lately, any
strange rashes on the abdomen? Good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, it
looks like my assistant is just about finished, thanks for your help."

We had to check three manholes before we made a bingo. Newton had its
very own sewer system with its own manholes, which made things
confusing. I was forced to deploy the above-mentioned speech while
Bart was checking number two. Usually it was hard to convince them
that you worked for a real environmental group, but the Zodiac on top
of the van, with GEE in orange letters, made it all look plausible.
I'd have to remember that trick. Word got out on the radio, and at
manhole number three, a cop actually stood there and directed traffic
around us while we worked.

Which doesn't necessarily mean we fooled them, but they could see we
weren't out to cause trouble, and things went a lot more smoothly when
they stood there with their flashing lights. And that's mainly what a
cop wants: things to go smoothly.

More organic chlorine. We headed west. Once we got out into Wellesley
we were sampling more often. That got us into the city limits of
Natick, and this was where things got really tricky. Until now, we'd
been following a single line, but here the possibilities were
branching out in every direction and it was necessary to check
manholes at every branch.

My maps didn't run this far out, so things got primitive: drive around
slow, look for manholes in the street, scratch your head. We got lost
immediately, just past Lake Waban, did a lot of U-turns and sketching
of diagrams on the old McDonald's napkins in the back. We sort of
thought that there was a major branch here - a lot of Natick sewer
lines feeding into the big tunnel.

"This is going to take fucking forever," Bart pointed out. By now it
was three in the morning and we had about eight manholes to check.

"Hang on for a sec," I said. There was a 7-Eleven half a block away
and I trotted over and scoped out their phone book.

All they had was a white pages, so it was kind of a random search. I
was trying to think of all the prefixes that high-tech companies give
themselves. "Electro," "Tec," "Dyna," "Mega," "Micro." In ten minutes
or so, I had found half a dozen of those, and the last one had an
interesting address: "100 TechDale."

TechDale had to be some kind of high-tech industrial park. I looked it
up by name: TECHDALE DEVELOPMENTS, followed by an office address in
downtown Wellesley and one for their development in Natick.

And then, gods of Science forgive me, I couldn't help it. It was
biased thinking, but I couldn't help it. I looked up Biotronics
Incorporated. They had a facility in Natick, alright: 204 TechDale.

Inside the 7-Eleven they sold maps of the area. TechDale was so new it
hadn't shown up on the maps yet, but the clerk showed me where it was:
a couple of miles away on Cochituate Avenue, out in the direction of
the lake by the same name. I spread the map out on the counter and
simply traced Cochituate Avenue backwards toward us. It crossed our
path a quarter of a mile away. We'd already driven up and down it a
couple of times, and found a manhole in it.

I got back into the van. "We want the manhole on Cochituate Avenue," I
said. "Over there."

"Why do you say that?"

"Prejudice. Sheer blind prejudice."

"You think black people did it? Is that why we were in Roxbury?"

We checked the manhole. It was the right one. The chlorine was still
there.

Or so I told myself, because I was tired and we were running out of
time. What I had was a substance in a test tube that would turn red in
the presence of organic chlorine compounds. When I used it on the
Dorchester Bay sample, or the Roxbury sample, it came out looking like
burgundy wine. This last sample looked a little more like rose. The
concentration was getting weaker as we approached the source. And that
didn't make a damn bit of sense. Obviously it should've been the other
way around. I could think of a few bizarre hypotheses to explain it,
but they sounded like the work of a pathological liar.

This, friends and neighbors, was depressing as hell. As we moved west
on Cochituate Avenue, the concentration kept decreasing. The toxin was
still there, definitely at illegal levels, but it was doing the wrong
thing.

We tested it on one side of a residential subdivision and it was high
enough to be illegal. We tested it on the other side and it wasn't
there at all. We'd lost the trail.

"So they don't want to dump right from the company property. They put
it into tank trucks. They drive a couple of miles to the subdivision
with the curvy streets. The trucks drive down the streets dumping the
shit into the gutters."

We drove down every street in that fucking division and didn't see
anything. We tested its sewer system and didn't even find a trace.

"Explain that to me, goddammit," I shouted at Bart. "Upstream of the
houses, no chlorine. Downstream, there's chlorine. We check the place
where the houses dump their shit into the stream, and there's no
chlorine there either. So where the fuck does it come from?"

Bart just looked out the windshield and tapped his steering wheel to
the beat of the radio. He was tired.

"Let's see what else is on Cochituate Avenue," I said. He shifted into
gear without a word. We drove one more mile and arrived at TechDale.

I'd seen these things before. They looked just like suburban housing
developments, with the same irritating maze of curved streets, but
instead of houses, they had big boxy industrial buildings, and instead
of lawns, parking lots. We coasted to a stop and read the logos on the
buildings, and about half of them all said the same thing: Biotronics.

"Well, I'll be dipped in shit," Bart said.

"I've already tried that," I mumbled, watching the horizon think about
letting the sun come up.

Instead of cruising around this well-scrubbed development at four in
the morning in our battered black van with an environmental group's
Zodiac strapped to its roof, we pulled in at a gas station-cafe on
Route 9, just a couple of blocks away. We topped off the van and
filled up the Zodiac's tanks with 50:1 mix, all on the GEE gold card.
We went in for more coffee. What the fuck, we scarfed down tremendous
breakfasts and punched some tunes on the jukebox. We struck up a warm
relationship with our waitress, Marlene. We asked her about the
industrial park and she started rattling off the names of the
occupants.

"...and then there's Biotronics. But we don't see much of them."

"Why? What's different about Biotronics?"

"Safety regs. They have to take a shower when they go in every
morning, scrub with disinfectant, and again when they go out. So it's
kind of a hassle for them to come over here for lunch."

"You want to go in there, before it gets light?" Bart said when
Marlene had disappeared. My respect for the man continued to grow; he
was ready for just about anything.

"You'd make a great terrorist," I said, "or criminal."

"Look who's talking."

"No. If we got caught, we wouldn't have any toxic evidence to back us
up. Shit! I can't believe this. I was all ready to phone up all my
media contacts. It's the same thing as with the PCBs in the lobsters.
I have hard evidence, I start tracking it down and it slips through my
fingers. Like picking up a handful of sludge: squeeze too hard and you
loose it."

"That must be nice. Phone up all the newspapers and start a crusade."

"Credibility, my man. Carefully and slowly accumulated through years
of being almost right. If I say anything now, I'll have none at all."

I considered hanging out here and waiting for Dolmacher to drive by,
but it was too much wait for too little gratification. I wanted to see
the look on his face when he saw our van sitting outside his Grail
factory like the Grim Reaper's chariot. But I had nothing to back up
the threat. It was time to get up and beat the rush hour and coast
home.

 


 

23

WHICH IS WHAT WE DID. There was a nice blue heap of shattered safety
glass out in front, where Bart had busted into Roscommon's car. Tess's
car wasn't there, which was good. She was steering clear from trouble,
our house.

I had a little trepidation about finding a bomb or something in there,
but it was paranoia. We'd beefed up all the doors and windows, making
the place hard to break into. Anyone could have broken in, of course,
but they'd have to cause some obvious damage in the doing and there
wasn't any of that. So we went in and filled a couple Heftys. The
answering machine was blinking. We stood around it with our Heftys,
breathing and listening, doing lip-synch impressions of the voices on
the tape.

"S.T., this is Tess. What the fuck is going on? Please call me at
Sal's. The numbers in the back of the phone book."

Beeep.

"Uh ... this is Roscommon. I hate these machines. Don't go into the
basement. It's, uh, dangerous now - got some exposed electrical cables
and there's water on the floor. So I nailed the door shut. Don't try
busting in there, you hear me? Or else you're out of there. You're
fucking out on your ass."

Beeep.

"This is Domino's. Is Bart there? He ordered some pizza and we're
calling to double-check the order."

Beeep.

"It's Debbie. It's about 1:00 A.M. Look, I borrowed the Omni and took
it to a party, and then I drove it home and someone ripped it off. I
can't believe this is happening. I heard something outside, looked out
the window, there was a big guy out there - in a suit - and there was
a big black car waiting next to him, and this guy just got into the
car with keys and started it up and drove away. They already had keys
made."

Beeep.

"Your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now."

Beeep.

"Hi, this is Dolmacher..." but I missed the rest because Bart was
throwing a chair through a window.

About ten seconds later my train set got scattered all over Brighton
and points downward. We were lying down in Boston's largest backyard,
behind a heap of Roscommon's concrete trash. A few pieces of his
stupid vinyl siding fluttered down on our backs, but that was it.

I got an A in chemistry and I could tell it wasn't a gas explosion. It
was high explosives. Planted there the night before. Which meant it
had been done with Roscommon's help. But why would he help? Because
they were big. Big enough to make him an offer he couldn't refuse - a
Basco-sized organization - and because he wanted to get rid of this
house anyway.

 

BRIGHTON BOMB FACTORY EXPLODES, KILLING 2

FBI SAYS TAYLOR WAS ACTUALLY A TERRORIST

"DIRECT-ACTION" CAMPAIGNS A COVER FOR

VIOLENCE?

 

Bart rolled over on his back. "Intense," he said.

I yanked the revolver out of his belt, grabbed it by the barrel, and
laid open his right eyebrow. I grabbed his keys and ran for the van.

"I THOUGHT S.T. WAS MAN OF PEACE,"

SAYS SHOCKED ROOMMATE.

GEE TERRORIST'S DESPERATE ESCAPE FROM BOMB SITE INSIDE: Sangaman
Tayhr: Jekyll & Hyde Personality?

While I was headed crosstown, it started to rain. Downtown there was a
waterfront park and that's where I assembled the Zodiac. Out on the
water, a coast guard cutter was towing an eighty-foot pleasure palace
out away from a yacht club, into the open water.

GEE CAR FOUND NEAR YACHT CLUB

ABANDONED IN MINING ATTEMPT?

I recognized the yacht; Alvin Pleshy liked to go fishing in it. It was
being shadowed by a couple of fireboats and cops were swarming around
on the decks.

PLESHY'S TERROR CRUISE

S.T.'S BOMBS ON EX-V.P.'S YACHT

"He hated Pleshy from the beginning"

I just took it out of there nice and easy, didn't crank up the
throttle until I was out past the airport, and then ran full tilt
until all I could see was waves, and rain, and rain - a Nor'easter
bearing down from Greenland. A big blue nasty-looking son of a bitch.
We had an exposure suit in there, so I pulled it on, then crammed
myself back into my Levi's so I wouldn't be so fucking orange. I
pointed her north, into the storm clouds, into the waves. Nothing
could find me in that. Not Cigarettes, not CG cutters, neither
helicopters nor satellites.

Or so I thought until the helicopter gunship came up on my stern.

This was just what I was afraid of. Once they pinned the terrorist
label on me, they didn't have to screw around with cops and warrants
anymore. Life during wartime.

It was one of the new ones with the incredibly skinny bodies, the
occupants sitting virtually on top of each other. A guy on top to fly
it, a guy on the bottom to manage all those guns, missiles, bombs and
rockets.

They couldn't possibly fly through this shit. The rain was just
starting to come down heavy, we had a forty- or fifty-knot headwind.
But I was remembering a rescue operation in the spring when they
plucked some Soviets off a freighter in weather this bad.

Of course, the freighter had been stationary. I sure as hell wasn't.
I'd long since stopped cutting through the waves and started riding up
and down them. The water doesn't actually move; the surface of it just
goes up and down. So if you're in a Zodiac, and you head into a
thirty-foot roller - like that one, right in front of me - you are
going up, skipper. Fast. And then you're going down, virtually in free
fall. As soon as you bottom out, the acceleration squashes you into
the floorboards again and you're on your way up, leaving your stomach
somewhere down between your testes. If your boat is strong enough to
handle the G-forces, you're fine. Otherwise it just gets thrust
beneath the surface and breaks apart. That wasn't about to happen to
the Zodiac.

First I thought a bolt of red lightning had struck, but actually it
was a river of Gatling gun fire digging a hole in the wave right in
front of me, or was it above me? When there is no horizon, you can
never tell. This was called firing across the bow. A warning.

But it was too kind to call it a river of fire. It was a series of
tentative spurts, all in different places, kind of like my first
orgasm. One of those spurts landed about thirty feet behind/ below me,
and I got to thinking maybe it wasn't a warning at all. Maybe it was
just poor workmanship.

Just for the hell of it, I tried sighting down my index finger, tried
to see if I could keep it aimed at that helicopter. And it was
impossible, I couldn't even keep my eyes aimed at it. Those poor
bastards couldn't shoot straight. They didn't have a hope.

I figured this out as the water was tossing me full into the air, into
free fall off a liquid cliff. A big gust of wind hit me at the top and
almost flipped the boat over. I saw a wall of black rain from that
vantage point, and then all I could see was the next wave; it was
bigger. The chopper was a few yards away; I could look the bastards
right in the goggles. Then it was far above me, twisting in a gust,
and I almost lost sight. Which meant they could lose me. So I tried to
head diagonally away from them.

Anyway, it didn't matter, because they couldn't hit me with any of
that firepower. Not in this. So I flipped them the bird - maybe they'd
pick it up on infrared - and headed for Maine. I had full tanks to run
on, and they'd take me fifty miles. All the raindrops in the sky
suddenly merged. I didn't see the chopper again.

I ran out of gas half a mile off the coast sometime before noon. It
was time to start hitting the LSD. I'd been up for more than
twenty-four hours, I hurt real bad, I'd thrown my back out hauling on
that ripcord and now I had to paddle this son of a bitch through a
rainstorm. Fortunately the swell had gone down to about five feet.. I
was carrying the acid on a sheet of paper in my wallet, a sheet of
blotter paper with a bogus map drawn on it, stuck behind Debbie's
graduation picture. When I took it out, I sat and looked at that photo
for a while and started crying. A poor, utterly fucked, duck-squeezer
castaway, bobbing in the Atlantic, soaking in the rain, sobbing over
his girlfriend.

That went on for about ten minutes and then I put a little corner of
the paper into my mouth and sat down to wait. In about twenty minutes
I was able to paddle the boat without groaning in pain. In thirty
minutes I didn't feel anything. In forty I was enjoying it more than
I'd enjoyed anything since my last time in the sack with this girl, so
I took another half. In an hour, I was ready to take on a Cigarette.
My teeth hurt because I was paddling through the cold rain with them
bared in a huge shit-eating grin. Once every hour or so I actually
remembered to check the compass to see if I was headed for land.

It was stupid for a fugitive terrorist to go to a gas station, but in
order to be a fugitive you have to fuge, and it's hard to fuge without
gas. So I got a refill. The guy running the gas station was a dead
ringer for Spiro Agnew and I couldn't stop laughing. He got pissed off
and told me to hit the road. I did, gladly; if I saw Nixon, I'd shit
my pants.

I guess in order for me to have gone to the gas station I must've made
it to the land, right? Because that's where gas stations are. So I'd
paddled all the way to Maine. To the Maineland. Now it was time to
fuge inland, to ply my fugitive trade on freshwater. Like the Vikings,
whose shallow-drafted ships enabled them to sail up previously
unnavigable European rivers and pillage villages - that rhymed -
previously considered invulnerable to marine forces. The Zodiac was
the modern equivalent of the Viking ship. Someday I'd mount a dragon
on the prow. By God, there was the dragon now! Or was it a seagull?

There was something involving a lake. This led me to a river, and from
there to another, smaller lake. Ran out of gas, deflated the Zodiac,
and sank it, using its own motor as a weight. Threw the gun in there
too; it hadn't worked. Then I was in the White Mountains. Wandered
there for forty days and forty nights. Before the Indians found me.

 


 

24

MY PUNISHMENT:dreams of a silver Indian who stood off in the distance
with a tomahawk face and refused to look at me. Then I woke up in
someone's Winnebago, sick as a dog and weak as a Fleshy handshake.
When I stopped trying to sit up and just lay down again, I could look
straight out a gap between the drapes and see Jim Grandfather's pickup
parked outside the window with that Indianhead hood ornament.

They wouldn't let me look at newspapers for a week. The only
newspapers they had were USA Today, which had dropped the story by
that time, and a local rag that didn't pay much attention to Boston. I
spent a lot of time staring at my exposure suit, which was hanging on
the wall, torn to shreds and covered with muck. Jim didn't have to
tell me it had saved my life.

I was being nurtured by the Singletary family, and indirectly by the
whole tribe to which they belonged. Either they didn't understand how
nasty the U.S. government could get when it thought it was fighting
terrorism, or they didn't care.

Probably the latter. What could the government do to them? Take their
land? Give them smallpox? Herd them onto a reservation?

The first couple days I used all my energy on dry heaves. We worked
our way up to water after that, then Sprite, then duck soup, then
fish. Every so often I'd wake up and Jim would be sitting there,
hunched over a shoebox, making arrowheads. Tick, tick, tick. Little
crescents of volcanic glass ricocheting around as he squeezed them
off. "This one's in the Zuni style. See the detailing around the
base?"

"You should get back to Anna," I finally told him, one afternoon.
"Don't fuck with me, man, I'm poison. I'm toxic waste at this point."

"Welcome to the tribe."

"Have they come looking?"

"They think maybe you went to Canada."

"I thought I did."

"No. You're still in love-it-or-leave-it land. Nominally. Actually
you're in the-" he rattled off a twenty-syllable Indian name.

"That's fine, Jim. Can I buy some fireworks?"

When I succeeded in keeping a Big Mac down for a whole morning, they
pronounced me one healthy white-eye. Jim administered his own exam,
which involved a cigar. When I passed, he let me see the clippings
from the national press.

They'd had all kinds of time for psychoanalysis. I learned many
interesting things about myself. I got to see my high school
graduation photo, in which I truly did look like a budding psychopath.
It seemed that I, Sangamon Taylor, was a man with deep-seated
psychological problems. There was some debate as to whether they were
purely mental problems, or neurological too, caused by the risks I
took with toxic wastes. But they were rooted in my unhappy childhood -
my many moves during the early years, being dragged around by my
father, a troubleshooter for a chemical engineering firm, and then my
unstable home situation as a teenager. My folks had split up and
bounced me around from one relative to another.

This, and my academic struggles, the newspapers said, had given me a
deep-seated resentment of authority. When I'd scored around 1500 on
the SATs, proving that I had near-genius intellect, that resentment
was magnified. These fucking teachers had just been holding me back.
Never again would I respect anyone in a tie. My career at B.U. had
been one scrape after another with the autocratic administration. My
only outlet: hacking up the academic computing system, which I did
"with a kind of savage brilliance." I sort of liked that phrase.

GEE was the perfect way for me to lash out against the chemical
industry, which I saw as responsible for the destruction of my
parents' marriage and for my mother's fatal case of hepatic
angiocarcinoma. But even this had proved too confining. I chafed under
the restrictions of GEE's nonviolent policy. I was a maverick, a
hellraiser. I wanted to take truly direct action, they speculated.

All of these factors became focused in my irrational, all-consuming
hatred of one man: excabinet official, now presidential hopeful, Alvin
Fleshy. As a privileged person, an authority figure from my childhood
and a leader of the chemical industry, he was everything I despised. I
did everything I could to implicate him in chemical scandals, but I
just couldn't pin him down. I was geared up for a media blitz against
him just a couple of weeks before "the explosion," but had to call it
off, sheepishly, when the evidence didn't pan out. Slowly the plan
took form in my mind: employing the commando techniques of the
eco-terrorist Boone (whom I had secretly come to admire), I would mine
Pleshy's private yacht and blow him sky-high, like Mountbatten. Using
my chemical expertise, I constructed a highly sophisticated explosives
laboratory in the basement of a house I was renting from Brian
Roscommon, a hard-working Irish immigrant and upstanding Newton
resident. By purchasing my raw materials, bit by bit, from different
companies, I was able to evade the ATFs monitoring system, which had
been designed to foil plots such as mine. In an ironic twist, I bought
the materials from Basco subsidiaries; they had records to prove it,
which they had readily agreed to turn over to the FBI. I was able to
build an extremely powerful mine in my basement and take it out into
the Harbor on my GEE Zodiac. While I was planting the mine on the
bottom of Pleshy's yacht, I was noticed by a couple of private
security guards patrolling the area in their high-powered Cigarette
boat. Using my commando skills, I slipped into their vessel in my
scuba gear, killed them both and then burned their vessel in the Fort
Point Channel to hide the evidence. I was so cold and calculating, the
more lurid newspapers suggested, that I actually called the police and
gave them an account of the incident.

Unfortunately, the whole plot unraveled when the highly unstable
chemicals I'd (allegedly) stuffed into my basement deteriorated and
touched themselves off. Bartholomew, my roommate, who had been growing
ever more suspicious of my strange behavior, tried to place me under
citizen's arrest, but I knocked him down and stole his van. Then I
escaped, probably to Canada and, with the help of an underground
network of environmental extremists left over from the days of the
baby seal campaigns, eventually to Northern Europe, where I can live
undercover, supported by Boone's clandestine operation.

"What do you think," I asked Jim. "Is it just plain old savage
brilliance, or have I taken in too many organophosphates?"

"What's that?"

"Nerve gas. Bug spray. They're all the same thing."

The clippings taught me one thing for sure: Bart was playing it cool.
I should have guessed it from the way he handled those cops in
Roxbury. He was so full of shit he must be ready to burst. He was
giving out one interview after another, sounding pained and shocked
and kind of sad, and the media were lapping it up, portraying him as
kind of a latter-day flower child in black leather. This man could
survive anything.

"It's time for me to get out of here," I said.

"Why?"

"Because sooner or later they'll track me down. I mean, correct me if
I'm wrong, but I'm an official terrorist now, right?"

"Certified by the U.S. government."

"Right. And they have all these Darth Vader things they can do in the
name of national security, right? They can bring spooks, Green Berets,
rescind the constitution. Federal marshals, Secret Service, all the
Special Forces cops. Sooner or later they're going to find my Zode in
that lake. Then they'll just seal off these mountains and I'll never
escape."

"Seal off the mountains? Don't insult me."

"I tell you, they'll find the Zode."

"Let's check it out," Jim said.

First things first. I shaved off my beard. I'd lost twenty pounds,
which would also help. Jim scraped up some new clothes for me. The sun
was shining, so I had an excuse to wear sunglasses. We borrowed a boat
on a trailer and drove down to a small, clear lake. To the southeast
it ran into a much bigger lake. From the northwest it was fed by
streams falling clean out of the White Mountains. I could have taken
the Zodiac a little farther up one of those streams, but they were
shallow, and without a hole deep enough for a righteous sinking. So
I'd left it in the lake, next to a bent-over scrub pine. Jim found us
a boat ramp and we put in and headed for that pine. But there wasn't a
damn thing. Not that I could see.

It was only twenty feet deep, and we could almost see the bottom from
the boat. Jim went down in a mask and snorkel, looking.

"I wasn't that stoned," I said. "I put it here for a reason. That tree
there, that was my landmark. I'd never forget that tree - there can't
be two like it."

"I'm telling you there's not a damn thing there," Jim said.

I ended up going down myself. Jim didn't want me to, but by now I was
feeling good enough for a short dive. I was nauseous most of the time,
but sheer terror has a way of overcoming most anything. And Jim was
right. The Zode was gone. I'd just about convinced myself that we were
in the wrong place when I noticed a black splotch on the bottom. I
went all the way down and checked it out: Roscommon's revolver.

"If the Feds had found it, they'd have brought an armored division to
pick it off the bottom, right? We'd see cigarette wrappers and
footprints on the shore over there."

There was nothing onshore either. "Except over here, where you tried
to hide your footprints," Jim said.

"Okay, give me a fucking break."

Finally Jim convinced me that there just wasn't anything to be seen.
"Maybe some of the Winnepesaukees found it. It's pretty valuable.
Shit, if I found it, I wouldn't care if the Feds did want it. I'd take
the damn thing and use it myself."

"It's some kind of weird mind game. Now I don't even know if we can go
back. They're back there waiting for us."

"No way, S.T. They're not that subtle. This is more like something
you'd do."

He was right. But I hadn't done it, so that didn't help me much. There
couldn't be that many environmental direct-action-campaign
coordinators running around this neck of the woods.

He persuaded me that I was totally unrecognizable, that it was okay to
go into town and get a cup of coffee. Actually I didn't want coffee
because my stomach was so jumpy. I had some milk. We sat and watched
the traffic coast by. And once, Jim tugged on my sleeve and pointed to
the TV set up in the corner.

My Zodiac was on it. Upside down. Washed up on a beach in Nova Scotia.
No footprints.

Then they cut to a map entitled "Intended Escape Route." It ran from
Boston up the coast, about halfway up Maine, then straight east to
Nova Scotia. But three-quarters of the way there, it was cut, severed
by a question mark and a storm cloud. And then they had the obligatory
footage of coast guard choppers searching the seas, CG boats cruising
along the beach looking for bodies, picking discarded fuel tanks off
the rocks, examining washed-up flotation cushions.

"There was a big storm the day after we found you," Jim said. "Maybe
the Zodiac flipped over in that, and you drowned."

"Look me in the eyes, Jim, and with a straight face, tell me you don't
know anything about this."

He complied. We got back in the truck and headed for the reservation.

"I can only think of one thing," he said when we were almost there.
"And if doesn't really lead us anywhere. It's just an anomaly. After
we found you, a couple of the guys made a little side hike down to the
river to refill our water bottles. They ran into some guys, some
backpackers, who were crouching on the riverbank, running their stove,
drinking some coffee. Hairy-looking guys, bearded, real granola types.
Maybe with accents. And these people said they wanted to get across
the river. They asked where they might be able to find a rubber raft -
you know, had we seen any around here recently."

"Kind of funny. Why didn't they find themselves a bridge?"

"Exactly. Kind of funny, since you were in the area, on a raft. But
our guys didn't tell them anything."

"Special Forces, man. They can wear their hair any way they like.
Shit." I didn't say "shit" because I was worried about them, though I
was. I said it because I was getting hit with some stomach cramps.

When we got back to the Singletarys' trailer, I had to sit in the
truck a while until they subsided. Then we went inside.

There was a white man sitting at the kitchen table, warming his hands
by wrapping them around a hot cup of tea. He had kind of an oblong
face, curly red hair piled on top, a close-cropped but dense red
beard, shocking blue eyes that always looked wide open. His face was
ruddy with the outdoors, and the way he was sitting there with that
tea, he looked so calm, so centered, almost like he was in meditation.
When I came in, he looked at me and smiled just a trace, without
showing his teeth, and I nodded back.

"Who ... you know this guy?" Jim said.

"Yeah. His name is Hank Boone."

"Nice to finally meet you," Boone said.

"My pleasure. How'd you find my Zodiac?"

"We got a sighting of you, we knew the watersheds and we found it by
the oil slick on the water."

"By following my trail of hazardous waste. Nice."

"Oh," Jim said, figuring it out. "That Boone."

Boone gave out kind of a brittle laugh. "Yeah."

 


 

25

WE HAD TO TWEAK IT a little to get the right effect," Boone was
explaining. We were sitting around the fire, Boone and Jim and Tom
Singletary and I. They were drinking hot chocolate and I was drinking
Pepto Bismol. "The tanks he had on there didn't have the range to make
Nova Scotia. So we scattered a few extra tanks down the coast, let
them wash up at random, as though he'd been using them up and tossing
them out." Boone's face suddenly crinkled and he laughed for the first
time. "You made a great escape," he said. He was a peculiar guy. I'd
never met him, just seen his picture and heard tell of him from the
veterans of GEE's early days. They all agreed he was a hothead, out of
his mind. Once, when the Mounties came after him on an ice floe, he
knocked six of them into the water before they took him down. And I'd
seen him on film, doing things that made my blood run cold: sitting
right underneath a five-ton container of radioactive waste, getting
thrown into the sea when it was dropped on his Zodiac then getting
sucked under the vessel, turning up a couple of minutes later in its
wake. And he was like that even when he wasn't working - a drunk, a
bar fighter. But the guy I was looking at was totally different.

Shit, he was drinking herb tea. He talked in a slow, lilting baritone
murmur, he paused in the middle of sentences to make sure the grammar
was right, to pick just the right word. But it wasn't a wimpy Boone I
was looking at. I had to remember the action he'd just pulled off, on
short notice, on my behalf.

"How long you intend to stay," Singletary asked.

"I have a camp," Boone said, "out in the forest."

"No, I don't mean tonight. I mean in the area."

"If you'd like me to leave, I will."

"Not at all."

Boone turned and looked at me with his invisible smile again. "I'm
here to talk to S.T. I'd like to see what he wants. That's my only
business."

That line turned out to be an instant conversation killer. Jim and Tom
took off and left me and Boone sitting there by the fire. We moved to
different chairs, so we were facing each other, and the grey autumn
twilight glowed in Boone's face, seeming to lift his luminous blue
eyes up out of their sockets. We just looked at each other for a
minute.

"What's your plan?" he said.

"You have to give me time to think about that. Until a couple of days
ago, I had what I thought was a stable life in Boston. Now I'm a dead
man, living on nuts and berries."

"You could easily pass for Northern European," he said. "We can set
you up there, if you'd like."

"It's just about the last place I want to live."

He shrugged. "Sometimes we can't help our circumstances."

"Silas Bissel, Abbie Hoffman, they both set themselves up with new
identities."

"Minor flakes. They didn't try to assassinate a future president."

"Neither did I."

"Exactly. They were guilty. You aren't. That's going to hurt."

"How should you know?" I asked. "You're the real thing."

"The real what?"

"A terrorist."

He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them and looked hard
at me. "What makes you think that?"

I groped around for a minute, started to say something, then stopped;
remembered things, then questioned my memory. I thought I knew all
about Boone. Maybe I was just another dupe.

"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 Fleshy 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. Fleshy 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 busboy, 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 Escherichiacoli. 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 bug
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 Fleshy 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.

"In most places the bugs die for lack of PCBs to eat. But some of them
find their way to your huge PCB spill.

"Your plan succeeds brilliantly. The PCBs disappear. The guy from GEE
gives up on it.

"Then the covalent-chlorine level starts to rise. You're not dumping
PCBs, but the levels are rising anyway. It's impossible, it doesn't
make sense. But after some simple tests, one of your genetic engineers
figures it out. Your tank of PCB-eaters got contaminated with a very
small number of bugs that do the opposite thing. They got into the
sewers along with the others. At first, they didn't do very much. The
size of the colony was tiny compared with the size of the PCB-eating
colony. But after a few weeks, they've multiplied. They can multiply
as much as they want. They have an unlimited supply of food - all the
salt in the seven seas."

I drank beer and let them ponder that one.

"And all of that salt could be converted into organic chlorine?" Boone
said, sounding kind of breathy.

"Let's not worry about that right at the moment," I said. Boone and
Jim laughed nervously.

"It's like not worrying about nuclear war," I suggested. "We'll get
used to it."

"How does this lead to Bathtub Man?" Jim said.

"Well, you realize that you're in big trouble. The guy from GEE comes
back and discovers rising PCB levels, tracing them back to your CSO.
He doesn't understand the whole thing yet, but you're in serious
trouble now and you can't take chances. You try to kill him.

"In the meantime, you're going on to Plan B. You knew all along that
your crime might come to light one day. But you're ready for it.
That's why you used the sewers in the first place. You pick out one of
your employees, one who's known to be a zealous worker, a fanatic for
the project, and you put some of the bugs in his food. They take up
residence in his bowel. Whenever he takes a shit and flushes the
toilet, he's sending more of them down to the Harbor. So if the bugs
ever get traced to your company, you just say, 'Well, this employee of
ours got too enthusiastic and violated the extremely rigid safety
procedures we have set up. As a result he got infected, and every time
he used the toilet, spread more of these bugs down toward the sea.'"

"And, in the meantime, the bugs are turning the salt in this guy's
food...."

"Into toxic waste. In his stomach. He gets chloracne and right away he
figures out what's going on. He's being poisoned from within. So are
all the people who've eaten lobsters or fish from the contaminated
zones of the Harbor. Or who were dumb enough to swallow a mouthful of
seawater near the CSO, like me. They're all getting chloracne, they're
all getting organic-chlorine poisoning.

"Time out," Boone said. "I'm no chemist, but I know a little. It takes
energy to convert salt to organic chlorine, right?" "Yeah."

"So where do these bugs - the bad bugs - get their energy supply?"

"Just a hypothesis," I said. "All the stuff I was sampling was
polycyclic. Carbon rings in various numbers and combinations. If our
bugs knew how to make those rings, they could get a lot of energy that
way. It takes energy to break up a six-pack of carbon, right? Which
means that if you make a six-pack, you get some energy out of it. And
if you use that energy to make some organic chlorine, and tack that
chlorine onto the six-pack, you've just made some type of useful, but
toxic, chemical. That's what I was seeing out by the CSO - all kinds
of polycyclic-chlorine compounds.

"Anyway, say you're Laughlin, the guy running this sorry outfit. You
didn't succeed in killing the environmentalist. He got away and he's
been on the phone. The toxic information is spreading. There's no way
to contain it. Your only choice is to destroy the credibility of that
person. You have to put a stain on his character. And what's the worst
stain a guy can have right now? Being linked to terrorism. So you blow
up the guy's house and say it was a bomb factory. You put a mine on
Pleshy's yacht, steal the guy's car, park it nearby and say he was
trying to assassinate Big Daddy. Even if the guy survives, no one will
ever believe him.

"Now let's say you're the infected employee, the zealot who has gotten
infected with the PCB-eating bug. Dolmacher. You're smart, you know
exactly what's happening, because you've been worrying about it. You
tell your company that you've been infected and they say, 'Stay at
home, Dolmacher, and we'll send you some antibiotics.' And they do.
But they don't seem to work. And the company goes along day after day
without announcing the extreme danger to the general public. You
realize you've been set up. They've been sending you placebos. They're
letting you die. And if they're willing to do that, maybe they're
willing to assassinate you. You get intensely paranoid, you arm
yourself. Some guy comes around from the company, God knows what for,
and something goes wrong - he makes the mistake of threatening you and
about a second later, he's wearing half a dozen slugs. So you hit the
road. You get out of your house. You take one of your numerous guns,
your electric Tazer, and start hitting drugstores and stealing mass
quantities of antibiotics off the shelves."

"And then what do you do?" Jim asked, sounding as though he already
knew.

"That, my friends, is the sixty-thousand-dollar question, and I'm not
a good enough detective to predict the answer."

"This guy is a violence freak," Boone observed.

I agreed and told them about the survival game.

"Up in New Hampshire, huh?" Jim said. "Sneaking around shooting at
people. Did it occur to you that Pleshy's stumping New Hampshire at
the moment?"

We just sat there, stunned.

"Time to roll on down that lonesome highway," Boone said.

 


 

27

DOLLMACHER WASN'T THE TYPE to own Tupperware, but he did have a big
half-gallon vat of some kind of margarine substitute in his fridge. I
scooped all this unknown substance out onto his counter, ran the
container under hot water to wash out the remains, sloshed some of his
bleach around in there, and rinsed it. Then I dropped my 501s,
squatted over the thing and deposited a sample. I put the lid on.

Borrowed a razor blade from Dolmacher's medicine chest, sterilized it,
and cut one of my toes. Just a little cut. We got on the highway and
followed the first series of HOSPITAL signs we saw, straight to the
emergency room. I had Jim and Boone carry me in. We waited half an
hour and then they came to look at me.

"Early this morning we were playing soccer down in Cambridge by the
Charles River and I waded in after the ball and cut my foot," I said.
"Tried real hard to keep it clean, sterilized it and everything, but
now, shit, I'm vomiting, got the shakes, my joints hurt like hell,
diarrhea...."

They shut me up by sticking a thermometer in my mouth. The nurse left
me alone for a while so I put the thermometer on the electric
baseboard heater until it was up into the lethal range, then shook it
down to about a hundred and four.

Same as before: they shot me full of killer antibiotics, and gave me
some more in pill form. We went out to the car and I ate some. I'd
borrowed some of Dolmacher's essential supplies: aquarium charcoal and
laxative. I took a lot of both and rode in the back of the truck.
Enough said about that. We drove around to Kelvin's house in Belmont,
a little suburb just west of Cambridge.

Kelvin is a difficult person to describe. We had gone to college
together, sort of. He had this way of drifting in and out of classes.
I'm not sure if he even registered or paid tuition. It didn't matter
to him because he didn't care to have grades, or credits, or a
diploma. He was just interested in this stuff. If one day's lecture
was boring, he walked out, wandered up and down the halls and maybe
ended up sitting in the back of an astrophysics or medieval French
seminar.

Later I found out that he was on a special scholarship program that
the administration had set up to lure in the kinds of students who
normally went to Harvard or MIT. The university waived all tuition and
fees, and set up a special dorm on Bay State Road. It wasn't really an
expensive program because they didn't have to pay any money out. They
just avoided taking any in from these particular students. That was no
loss, because without the program those students wouldn't have showed
up anyway.

Kelvin only showed up when he felt like it. He got in on the first
year of the program, in the stage where they still had a few bugs to
work out of the system. They decided that Kelvin was one of the bugs.
So after the first year they started clamping down, insisting that he
register for some classes and make decent grades. He registered for
freshman gut courses, devoted an hour a week to them and aced them.
The rest of the time he was hanging out in the astrophysics seminars.

The next year they insisted that he show steady progress toward a
specific degree. That was his last year. Subsequently he went out and
started his own company and did pretty well with it. He lived out in
this house in Belmont with his wife, his sister and some kids, I could
never tell exactly whose, wrote highly conceptual software, mostly for
32-bit personal computers and, every once in a while, helped me out
with a problem.

It was past eleven when we got there and the house was mostly dark,
but we could see him up on the third floor in his office, a kind of
balcony surrounded by windows. He noticed us driving up; I stood there
and waved since I didn't want to send the house into a frenzy by
ringing the doorbell. He came down and opened the door.

"S.T.," he said, "what a pleasure." Completely genuine, as usual. His
mutt came out and sniffed my knees. I was about to walk in when I
realized that for once in my life I was in a house where children
lived.

"I'm not sure if I should come in, Kelvin. I'm contaminated with a
form of genetically engineered bacteria."

Kelvin was the only person in the world I could just say that to
straight faced, without giving him prior notice that we were venturing
into the realm of the totally bizarre. He found it unremarkable.

"Dolmacher's?" he said.

Of course. Dolmacher would have done the same thing: thought of
Kelvin.

"It's E. coli, with PCB-metabolizing plasmids, right?" he continued.

"If you say so."

"What do I smell?"

"I unloaded some of it in the back of the truck. Into a bucket."

"Just a sec." Kelvin went into his garage and came out with a can of
gasoline. Taking the shit-filled bucket out of the back of the truck,
he poured gasoline into it, walked about ten feet away and threw a
match at it. We all stood around and watched it for a few minutes, not
saying much. The Fire Department came around; the Alzheimer's victim
across the street had called in a chimney fire. We told them it was a
chemical experiment and they left.

"I'll let you in the back door. We can talk in the basement," Kelvin
said, after it had burned down to ash.

We went into his basement, which was mostly full of electrical and
electronic stuff. We sat around on stools and I put the sealed
margarine tub up on his workbench. There was a naked light bulb
hanging above it which filled the container with yellow light; the
toxic turd cast a blunt shadow against the flower-patterned sides.

"Good. Dolmacher brought me a sample but he'd already weakened it
pretty badly with antibiotics."

"How do you know this one isn't weak?" I asked.

"It's well formed. If you were taking the kind of antibiotics that are
effective against E. coli, you'd have diarrhea."

Boone and Jim exchanged grins. "Looks like we came to the right
place," Boone said.

He was right. When it came to pure science, Boone and Jim had no idea
what I was talking about. But Kelvin was as far ahead of me as I was
of them.

"I'm sorry to come around at this time of night," I said, "but ...
well, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are talking about the end of the
world here, aren't we?"

"That's what I asked Dolmacher. He said he wasn't sure. It may be a
little too simple-minded to make the extremist possible assumption -
that it'll convert all the salt in the earth's oceans to
polychlorinated biphenyls."

"Does Dolmacher know how to kill this bug?"

Kelvin smiled. "Probably. But he wasn't speaking in complete
sentences. Had some undried blood on his pantlegs."

"Damn, Kelvin, you should have made him sit down and talk."

"He was armed," Kelvin said, "and he showed up during Tommy's birthday
party."

"Oh."

"Anything can be killed. You could dump huge amounts of toxins into
the Harbor and poison it. But there's a Catch-22 involved. If you
aren't Basco, you don't have the resources necessary for such a big
project. And if you are Basco, you don't want to use such obvious
methods because ... because of people like you, S.T."

"Thanks. I feel a lot better."

"Of course, now that you're dead, maybe they'll loosen up a little."

"So what did Dolmacher come here for? Just to give you some warning?"

"Yes. And he phoned two days ago, between holding up drugstores. He
managed to find some trimethoprim and that seems to kill the bug
pretty effectively."

"So why not dump a shitload of that into the Harbor?" Jim asked.

"We don't have a sufficient shitload," Kelvin said. "No, I don't think
that antibiotics are the answer. They are large, complex molecules,
you know. Totally against Sangamon's Principle."

"Kelvin, I am honored."

"It's hard to assemble big complicated molecules in Harbor-sized
quantities. The only way to do that is through genetic engineering -
turning bacteria into chemical factories. That is exactly what we're
competing against, an army of little poison factories - but we don't
have an army. There is no rival bug making trimethoprim. So we have to
find the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Something simple and
devastating."

Here, Kelvin seemed to find something interesting in what he'd just
said. "That's actually an idea," he said. "If the infection got
totally out of hand, we might have to save the world by detonating
some nukes in the Harbor. We'd lose Boston but it would be worth it."

At this point Jim and Boone had moved back into the shadows and were
just watching Kelvin's performance open-mouthed. We heard the soles of
someone's Dr. Dentons scraping against the linoleum upstairs, and then
light spilled down the steps from the living room.

"Kelvin?" said a five-year-old kid, "can I have some cranraz?"

"Yes, honey. Use your She-Ra mug," Kelvin said.

"Cranraz?" Boone asked.

"Cranberry-raspberry juice," Kelvin explained. "I like this house, so
let's not think in terms of nuclear weapons right off the bat. That
was just supposed to be an analogy. We need to find some chemical
susceptibility that these things have. And your sample here should
make that a lot easier. I wish I had a better lab, though."

I told him how to get in touch with Tanya and Debbie. That should get
him into the nice labs at the university. Kelvin's kid wandered down
the steps holding the She-Ra mug, and Kelvin had him sit on his lap.
The kid held the mug to his face like a gas mask and made rhythmic
slurping noises, watching us.

"Do those people know you're alive?"

"Probably not. Hey, Kelvin. Did you know that I was? Were you
surprised to see me?"

He frowned. "I was kind of wondering when your body was going to wash
ashore. I didn't think you were that much of an asshole - to go out on
the ocean without an exposure suit."

"Thanks."

"But are Tanya and Debbie to be told that you're alive?"

"Sure, as long as you don't do it over the phone, or in one of their
cars, in their houses, in the lab...."

"If you're worried about electronic surveillance, just say so."

"Fine. I am."

"Okay. I'll hand them a note."

"Kelvin, you are so-" I was going to say fucking, but the kid was
looking at me "-eminently practical."

"Would you like to assist me in this project?"

"I wouldn't be able to go to the lab. Hell, we were sitting in an
alley behind the Pearl and I almost got recognized."

"You're paranoid, S.T.," Jim said.

"I'm alive, too," I said.

Kelvin said, "You've got as much experience with these new species as
anyone."

"You're saying there's more than one?"

"One that binds up oxygen in the water to create an anaerobic
environment. Another that makes benzenes and phenyls, eats salt and
poops toxic waste. The second one is a parasite on the first."

"Dolmacher's not such a dick-brain after all. He's the one we really
need."

"Dolmacher is not available to us."

"We have this crazy idea. We think we can find him. If we can do that,
maybe we can calm him down, get him to cooperate on killing the bug."

"I think he was headed northwards, when I saw him."

"How did you get that, Sherlock? Was he wearing mukluks?"

"He borrowed my map of New Hampshire."

Great. Now Kelvin was going to be a coconspirator in an assassination
attempt. I didn't mention that to him. He probably knew. Dolmacher had
no guile.

"One more thing," Kelvin said, after he'd ushered us out to the
driveway. "Did you blow up that speedboat last week?"

"Yeah, that was me." .

He smiled. "I thought so."

"Why?"

"Because it was right next to the Tea Party Ship. The birthplace of
the direct-action campaign."

"Good luck, Kelvin."

"Happy hunting." He and his kid stood there on their nice Belmont
street, holding hands and waving to us, as we drove away.


 

28

THIS DOLMACHER GUY had no sense of personal responsibility. We needed
him, damn it. Never thought I'd say that about Dolmacher, but we did.
He'd invented the fucking bugs, nursed them, grown them, knew all
about their life cycles, what they needed in the way of food and
temperature and pH. If we made him settle down, if we grilled him, we
could find out a simple way to massacre those bacteria. But no. He had
to go up to the land of orange hats to seek revenge on Pleshy. And
probably get killed in the process.

We headed north. It was 1:00 A.M. on a Friday night. Within a couple
of hours we'd found Survival Game headquarters - a fairly new log
cabin built up against some private forest. As we were pulling around
into a parking space, our headlights swept through the cockpits of
several parked cars, mostly beaters from the Seventies, and we caught
brief silhouettes of men in baseball caps sitting up to look at us.
Jim and I unrolled some sleeping bags on the ground, quietly, and went
to sleep. Boone drove out to scavenge some newspapers and see if he
could figure out Pleshy's schedule for the next couple of days.

I didn't sleep at all. Jim pretended for half an hour, then went over
to a payphone on the wall of the cabin and made a call to Anna.

"How's she doing?" I asked when he got back.

"I didn't think you were asleep," he said.

"Nah. Boone's sleeping bag smells like Ben-Gay and hydrogen sulfide.
So I'm lying here trying to imagine what kind of action he went out on
where he got real sore muscles and made contact with that type of gas.
And I'm waiting for the next bulletin from my colon."

"She's fine," he said. "Went into Rochester today looking for
wallpaper."

"Redoing your house?"

"Bit by bit, you know."

"That leads me to ask why you're here and not there."

"Beats me. This is a white man's screw up if ever there was one. But
you helped me once and now I gotta help you."

"I release you from the obligation."

"You don't have anything to do with it. It's an internal thing, within
me, you know. I have to stay with this a while longer or I won't have
any self-respect. Besides, shit, it's kind of fun."

Boone got back a little before dawn, totally wired. He had hit every
cafe in a twenty-mile radius, drunk a large coffee, and scooped up
loose newspapers off the counter.

"He's at the Lumbermen's Festival," Boone said, "north of here, less
than an hour."

"Staying there tonight?"

"Who the fuck knows, they don't put that kind of stuff in the
newspaper."

"Going to be there all day?"

"Morning. Then to Nashua later. Looking at high-tech firms. With your
pal Laughlin."

"How fitting." I was stirring through his damn newspapers with both
arms. "You asshole, didn't you bring the comics?"

Boone was all hot to go straight to the Lumberman's Festival, but Jim
persuaded him that we couldn't do much when it was still dark. I
thought it was interesting that these Survival Game players went to
the trouble to drive up here the night before and sleep in the parking
lot - they must hit the trail at dawn.

Sure enough, a huge four-wheel-drive pickup pulled into the one
RESERVED space at about 5:00 A.M. It was tall and black and equipped
with everything you needed to drive through a blizzard or a nuclear
war. A guy got out: not the stringy, hollow-eyed Vietnam vet I'd
expected but a big solid older guy, more of the Korean generation. I
heard people coming alive in the cars all around us.

Jim and I caught up with him while he was undoing the three deadbolts
on the front door. "Morning," he said, ignoring me and taking a lot of
interest in Jim. I knew he'd do that. That's why I'd persuaded Jim to
get out of his warm sleeping bag and come up here with me.

"Morning," we said, and I added, "you guys get an early start up
here."

He pressed his lips together and beamed. There are certain people who
are just genetically made to get up at four in the morning and wake
everyone else up. They usually become scoutmasters or camp counselors.
"Interested in the Survival Game?"

"I've got this friend named Dolmacher who's told me all about it," I
said.

"Dolmacher! Hoo-ee! That guy is a demon! Surprised I didn't see his
car out there." He led us into the cabin, turned on the lights, and
fired up a kerosene space heater. Then he hit the switch on his coffee
maker. I caught Jim looking at me wryly. This was the kind of guy who
put the coffee grounds and water in his Mr. Coffee the night before so
all he had to do was switch it on in the morning. A natural leader.

"Is Dolmacher pretty good at this?" Jim said.

The guy laughed. "Listen, sir, if we gave out black belts at this
game, he'd be, I don't know, fifth or sixth dan. He's got me
completely bamboozled." The guy sized Jim up and nodded at him.
"Course, you might have better luck."

"Yeah," Jim said, "my fifteen years as a washing machine repairman
have really honed my instincts."

The guy laughed heartily, taking it as a friendly joke. "You ever done
this kind of thing before?"

"Just bow hunting," Jim said. Which was news to me. I thought he'd
killed all that venison with his big fancy rifle.

"Well, that's real similar, in a lot of ways. You have to get close,
because you're using a short-range weapon. And that means you have to
be smart. Like Dolmacher."

I suppressed a groan. In this company, Dolmacher was probably
considered an Einstein.

"I thought you used guns," Jim said.

"Handguns. And they're all CO2-powered. So the effective range is
pretty short. Here."

He unlocked a gun cabinet full of largish pistols. He showed us where
the CO2 cartridge went in, and then showed us the ammunition: a
squishy rubber ball, marble-sized, full of red paint.

"This thing hits you and ploosh! You're marked. See, totally
nonviolent. It's a game of strategy. That's why Dolmacher's so good at
it. He's a master strategist."

We told the guy that we'd get back to him. When we got back to the
parking lot, Boone was standing in a semicircle of awed survivalists,
explaining how to defeat a Doberman Pinscher in single combat without
hurting it.

"Nice to see you're getting back to your old self," I told him, when
we finally dragged him back into the truck.

"Those guys are troglodytes," he said. "Their solution to everything
is a high-powered rifle."

"Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism."

"Catchy. But if it's not violent, there's no terror involved."

"Boone, you sound like those guys. There's more to life than
firepower. I think it's possible to create some terror just by
confronting people with their own sins."

"What's your problem, you grow up Catholic or something? Nobody gives
a shit about their sins anymore. You think those corporate execs worry
about sin?"

"Well, they've poisoned people, they've broken the law, and when I
show them up in the media, they get real bothered by it."

"That's just because it's bad for business. They don't really feel
guilty."

By now Jim had us out on the highway. He pointed the silver Indian's
face northwards and depressed the accelerator.

"How about Pleshy?" Boone said. "You think he feels guilty? You think
he's scared? Shit no."

"They're still human beings, Boone. I'll bet he's scared shitless. He
created a disaster."

"Yeah, he's showing all the symptoms of a man paralyzed with fear,"
Boone said, consulting one of his newspapers. "Let's see, ten o'clock,
ax-throwing competition. Ten-thirty, grand marshal of log-rolling
contest. He's running sacred all right."

"What do you expect him to do, run to Boston and hide? Look Boone, the
guy is slick. He's got his gnomes working on the problem. Like
Laughlin. Shit, I wonder what that bastard Laughlin's up to. Pleshy's
job is to go around looking brave. But if someone confronted him,
right in front of the TV cameras..."

Boone and I locked eyes for about a quarter of a mile, until Jim got
nervous and started looking over at us. "You guys are nuts," he said,
"you'll get popped. Or shot."

"But at the very least he'd break a sweat," I said.

"I'll buy that," Boone said.

"And we could publicize the whole thing." I was remembering my last
action in New Hampshire - at the Seabrook nuclear site, years ago. We
all got arrested, never made it onto the site. Some of us even got the
crap beat out of us. But we got it on the news. And the reactor was
still sitting there, uncompleted, a decade later.

"You'd have to get real close," Jim said. "Secret Service, you know."

"They'll be totally loose," Boone said. "What do they have to worry
about? A dwarf like Pleshy - nobody even remembers the guy's name -
early in the campaign, at an ax-throwing contest in New fuckin'
Hampshire. Shit, if I was going to assassinate him, this is when I'd
do it."

We found Dolmacher's car easily enough. The Lumbermen's Festival was
staged in one of the many postage-stamp state parks scattered around
New Hampshire, and there just weren't that many ways to get into it.
We knew he wasn't going to park his car conspicuously, or illegally.
He was going to park it like a proper Beantown leaf-peeper and then he
was going to fade into the woods. And that was exactly what he'd done.
We found it at a roadside camping/picnicking area, near the head of a
nature-appreciation trail.

"Very clever," Jim said. "No one would expect him there."

I looked in the windows but didn't see much. One pharmaceuticals
bottle, half-hidden under the seat. No ammo belts or open tubes of
camouflage paint. Dolmacher was taking a remarkably buttoned-down
approach to this totally insane mission.

Maybe the bugs could affect your brain. The media had been speculating
all week that my contact with toxic wastes had fried my cerebral
cortex, turned me into a drooling terrorist. I felt pretty calm, but
Dolmacher had gotten a much worse dose, and was less stable to begin
with. He hadn't turned into a raving maniac. He was acting more like
the psychotics you read about in the newspapers: calm, methodical,
invisible.

Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone
was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and
looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the
seat.

"This is the Nez Perce model," he explained. "See, the limbs are
strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram's
horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds."

"What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?"

"What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.?
Remember? Your gun's on the bottom of that lake."

"Wasn't planning on shooting him anyway."

"You're a real prize, you know that? What do you think we're doing
here? It's my understanding that we're going after a psycho with a
gun."

"Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won't have that if we
fill him full of arrows."

"You underestimate me, S.T" Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from
behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the
back as usual, but without heads.

"Fishing arrows," Boone said.

Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from
the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft
about three inches behind that.

"This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps
it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills
by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But
this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him."

I guess I still looked skeptical.

"Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you
think he's going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out
of his hand, you're nuts."

"Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all
that crap into the bushes."

"Obviously. Hell, this isn't for assassinations anyhow. It's the
equivalent of a CO2 gun with paint pellets."

 


 

29

BOONE INSISTED that he was the one. "Hell, you just tried to blow the
guy up a week ago," he kept pointing out. "Your face is a 3-D wanted
poster. They'll pop you. But everyone's forgotten about me. Unless
Pleshy's secretly in the whaling business."

I couldn't argue with any of that. We agreed that Jim and I were going
to hike up the trail and Boone was going to take the truck. He would
swing around to the site of the Lumbermen's Festival and scope out the
place. There wasn't any point in planning this out, because it was all
random. If Pleshy happened to walk past him, he'd take the opportunity
to stand up and state his case, get some media glare on Pleshy's
reaction. If it was impossible to get near Pleshy, he'd forget about
that, head for the back of the crowd and look for a tall, pale,
psychotic nerd with his hand in his coat.

"Maybe we should call the cops and tell them Dolmacher's out there,"
Jim said at the last minute.

This was not an idea that had occurred to me. Frankly, if Pleshy ate a
few bullets it was okay with me. I was worried about Dolmacher -
probably the only guy in the world who knew how to stop this impending
global catastrophe. He could easily get shot in the bargain. Even if
he didn't, they'd truck him off to the loony bin where he wouldn't be
of any use.

"Screw Pleshy. We have to co-opt Dolmacher."

"If we warn them, they'll step up their security," Boone said. "We
won't be able to get close to Pleshy."

"We have plenty of time to chase down Dolmacher," Jim explained. "And
if we give the cops a complete description, they'll spend all their
effort looking for him. That'll make it easier for anyone who doesn't
look like Dolmacher to get close."

"Jim's right," Boone said. "If this all falls apart and we get popped,
and Dolmacher gets found, they'll want to know why we didn't warn
them. They'll say we're all working together. If we warn them, we're
set up as good guys."

So we drove half a mile down the road to a gas station with a
payphone, and I called the cops. We decided it should be me, because
whatever I said would get recorded, and it would look good if we had
this proof that I was terribly concerned about Pleshy's welfare.

"I can't give my identity because I'm being framed for a crime I
didn't commit," I said, "and which only an asshole would think I
really did-" Boone kicked me in the leg "-but this should help prove
my innocence. I think an attempt is going to be made on Alvin Pleshy's
life today at the Lumbermen's Festival." And I gave a complete
description of Dolmacher, emphasizing all the ways he didn't look like
Boone, and there were plenty of those.

"Uh . . . okay. Okay. Okay," the woman at the police station kept
murmuring, all through the conversation. Definitely the shy type. Not
equipped for presidential assassinations.

Finally, then, Boone dropped us off at the trail and headed around for
the Festival.

Here I was totally incompetent, so I just followed Jim. He was wearing
a kind of bulky, tattered overcoat that he kept in his truck for
purposes like changing the oil. He had his bow underneath. It looked
kind of stupid, but anything was better than brandishing a primitive
weapon around the SS. He was half-running down the trail in kind of a
crouch, keeping his head turned to one side. I was glad he knew bow
hunting, that would help us. But I got to thinking about Dolmacher's
black belt in survivalism, and I wondered just how clever and paranoid
he was. There was only a mile, maybe a mile-and-a-half, of forest
between us and the festival site: across some flats, up a ridge, down
the other side. He had plenty of time. Wouldn't it make sense to go in
a ways, then double back on the trail to see if we were being
followed?

Naah. Who would follow him, why would he worry?

Because he'd been holding up drugstores. Maybe someone had gotten his
license plate number. Maybe - I was just putting myself in his shoes,
here - maybe his car had been noticed and they were sending in the
cops.

How would cops do it? A frontal assault. Dozens of men, spaced a few
feet apart, combing the whole area. He couldn't gun them all down.

Well, maybe he could, if he had a silenced weapon. And I wouldn't put
it past Dolmacher to own a silencer, or even a submachine gun. He'd
always had an obsession for Uzi's and MAC-10s and such in college;
this had clearly continued into his wiser years, and now, God help
him, he had enough income to supply an arsenal.

Poor Dolmacher. All that priceless knowledge, that world-saving
information about the bug, attached to a stunted personality. If we
could stop him - not if, damn it, we were going to stop him - we'd
have to deal with that personality for the next several days. A grim
prospect either way.

Next question: what would he do if a couple of individuals came after
him? First of all, they'd never find him without a dog. Jim knew a few
things about tracking, but I doubted he was that good. If they did
find him, they'd be in danger. Witness Bathtub Man.

Where the hell was Jim, anyway? I'd looked away and then he was gone.
I went on for a few yards and stopped. Wouldn't be very smart to call
out his name. There was kind of a gap in the foliage along the trail,
so I stepped into it, wandered a few yards into the forest, and there
he was, pissing on a tree.

"He probably came this way," Jim said.

"I don't get it. How can you tell?" I've never understood trackers.

He shrugged, continuing what was turning out to be an epic piss. "I
can't tell. But the festival is off in this direction. There's an
obvious opening in the trees here, it's just the easiest way to go.
There are some tracks right there that look pretty fresh."

He nodded and I looked. The ground was wet and kind of muddy.
Someone's size 13s had definitely passed through here. Not that
Dolmacher was that tall. His wrists and ankles were like broomsticks.
But his hands and feet belonged on a pro basketball player. Whoever it
was, he'd been wearing those heavy-duty Vibram-soled running shoes
that affluent people nowadays used instead of ten-ton waffle-stompers.
Good traction combined with light weight.

And either he didn't care about being followed, or else he wanted us
to find these tracks. I looked around at the forest and suddenly it
all looked dangerous. The undergrowth wasn't that thick. If you
squatted down and hid yourself, you could see of a hundred yards, but
you'd be invisible to within ten. It was no fair.

"Change of plans," I said. "What if Dolmacher's waiting for us?"

"You know the guy, I don't."

"He's just the type who would do it. It wouldn't be complicated enough
to just run through the woods and bore a few holes in Pleshy. He'd
have to turn it into a war game."

"So? I thought you said you were smarter than this guy."

"Yowza, Jim! My eyes are watering."

Jim just shrugged.

I said, "Let's just go to the festival site. Let's take kind of an
indirect route. We've still got an hour. We don't have to track the
guy, we already know where he's going, so the only thing we can do by
following his tracks is fall into a trap."

"We can swing way around and avoid the ridge," Jim said.

"Which would put us on the highway."

He sighed. "Or go over the ridge up there."

"Are you up to it?"

"We'll have to hurry."

"You have a watch, Jim?"

"Do you?"

"Shit no."

"Wonderful. We just have to go as fast as we can."

Time stretches out when you're in the woods and in a hurry. What seems
like two hours is actually one. So if you have a deadline, you're
always anxious about it. Usually you get there way ahead of time.

That's what I kept telling myself, anyway. It didn't make me feel any
better. Actually I just felt like an asshole. We'd gone in all hot to
track Dolmacher down and then realized we were in mortal danger.
Meanwhile, Boone was out on his own. He was easily a match for two
dozen SS men, but I at least wanted to see it.

When we got to the place where the ground went from flat to
approximately vertical, we were already hurting. I was sick and
starting to get cramps in the gut, and Jim had stepped in a hole and
twisted his ankle.

I was opening my mouth to suggest that we run back and hitchhike to
the festival when I heard a crinkling noise. Jim was unfolding a
tinfoil packet that he'd taken from his pocket.

"Lunch already?" I said.

"Most people associate hallucinogenic mushrooms with the Southwest,"
he said, "but the Northwest tribes are familiar with fourteen
varieties. I was there last summer."

"Studying their culture."

"That's for whiteys. I was taking my family to Expo in Vancouver. But
I did stop in for a while, and look what I brought home." He popped
something dry and brown into his mouth. "Legal for me, but not for
you."

"What the hell, I can't get much more illegal than I already am."

The shrooms didn't help much on the first part of the climb but on the
last part they did wonderful things. We still felt awful, but we were
thinking about other things. Everything got very bright - of course,
we were gaining altitude - and we believed that our senses were
sharper. We lost track of time. But as I already said, this happens
anyway when you're in the woods, in a hurry. Especially when you have
to keep doubling back and going around obstacles. But eventually we
made it to the top, and then we simply didn't give a flying fuck
anymore. Without the drug, I would have been paralyzed by fear of
Dolmacher. With it, we just started to run. When it got too steep, we
put our feet down and skidded through old, wet leaves. There were a
few short earthen cliffs and we slid down those on our asses.

Finally the ground leveled out, the woods got thick again and we
realized that we were totally lost. Jim stayed cooler than I did and
made us stand there for a while, getting our hearts and lungs under
control. Eventually we were able to hear highway noises, in roughly
one direction. Comparing that with a map and the location of the sun,
we drew an approximate bead on the site of the ax-throwing
competition. We spread out, about a hundred feet apart, and tried to
move forward quietly.

Which is a joke when you're knee-deep in last year's leaves. The wind
was blowing in the treetops, covering our noise a little, but I still
felt kind of conspicuous, as though I was driving a tank through the
woods. But down here the trees were skinny and widely spaced and I was
pretty confident that Dolmacher wasn't lurking anywhere, ready to spin
out from camouflage, both hands wrapped around his pistol, drawing
down on me. I didn't want that to be the last thing I ever saw.

It got worse and worse. We saw brighter light up ahead and we knew
there had to be a clearing. We heard a crowd, heard the cash register
ringing at the concession stand. Dolmacher had to be between us and
that. The undergrowth got a lot thicker and I came across a gully. Had
to slide down one side and clamber up the other, helpless, white and
stupid. I was thinking of those old World War II pictures of captives
standing in the trenches, about to be gunned.

My first handhold ripped loose and I did a semi-controlled plunge back
to the floor of the gully. Now I was ankle-deep in mud, covered with
dirt and leaves, and wet. I moved downstream a few yards, toward where
Jim was supposed to be. But I hadn't heard or seen him in ten minutes.
Finally the walls of the gully opened out a little bit and I found an
obvious way to get out of it.

And Dolmacher had preceded me. I stood there in stoned amazement and
traced his tracks right up to the top. And at the top there was a
wild-raspberry cane sticking out across his path; it was still
vibrating.

Someone was moving around up there. I could hear him underneath the
murmur of the crowd, the drone of the announcer. It was either Jim or
Dolmacher or both. Then the sounds were all drowned out by the
applause of the crowd.

I took that as a free ticket, out of the gully. I clambered most of
the way up, making plenty of noise, and flopped onto my stomach on the
top. No reason to expose myself; if Dolmacher knew I was right behind
him, he'd be waiting.

But he didn't know. I saw the bastard, walking slowly, carefully,
toward the clearing, not more than fifty feet away from me. Through
gaps in the trees I made out an awning over a raised log bandstand and
a waving American flag, and when I climbed up to my feet I could see
the parking lot. That's what I remember, because when you've been
thrashing through mud and leaves for a while, nothing looks stranger
than a bunch of cars glinting in the sunlight.

I couldn't see Jim anywhere. Had Dolmacher already taken him out? I
turned around and checked the length of the gully, but no sign of Jim.
He'd already made it across. He was somewhere out there, off to
Dolmacher's right.

The Groveler was droning on about something through the P.A. system,
but then there was a commotion. Dolmacher turned around and squatted
behind a tree. Out at the edge of the clearing I could see a man in a
trench coat appear from nowhere and run away from us.

Dolmacher saw it too, jumped to his feet, and headed for the clearing
at a dead run. He knew he had his opening. He knew he could make
noise, at least for a minute, covered by the shouting match that was
now going on over the P.A. system.

"Let the man talk! Wait a minute, let's hear what the man has to say,"
Pleshy was shouting. "I have no qualms about my environmental record."

It was Boone. He'd done it. He was engaging Pleshy in mouth-to-mouth
combat. And Pleshy was stupid enough to bite. Everyone remembered
Reagan's performance in New Hampshire years ago: "I paid for this
microphone!" It had won him the election. Anyone with Pleshy's
instincts, and his reputation for being a wuss, would view Boone's
challenge as an opportunity to pull a Reagan on national TV.

I got up and ran like hell. It looked like Dolmacher was making his
move, but he slowed down when he was almost in the open, dropped back
toward his crouch. If he turned around now I was screwed, because I'd
dropped all caution and was just chugging along in the open, thirty
feet behind him.

He turned around. I froze; he saw me.

He did it just like I'd expected him to: reached into his armpit, came
up with the gun, clasped it in both hands, brought it down so all I
could see was the barrel. I threw myself on the ground. But you can't
throw yourself the way you'd throw a baseball. The best you can do is
drop yourself - take your legs out from under and wait for gravity to
pull you down at thirty-two feet per second squared. If you're falling
off a bridge, that seems very fast. But if you trying to dodge a
bullet, it's worthless.

Fortunately, at this point, Dolmacher got an arrow between his
floating ribs; it went in three inches and stuck. He flinched, as
though he'd been kicked, but he clearly didn't really know what it
was. He just turned around, the arrow whacking against a couple of
birch trunks, and strode calmly and purposefully into the open, taking
his knowledge of the toxic bugs with him, stored up there in his big,
unprotected melon.

The trench coat who'd left his position when Boone made his move was
on his way back. Dolmacher nailed him with his Tazer, melted his
nervous system, left him thrashing around quietly on the ground.
Didn't even break his stride. A bunch of folding chairs were set up
for spectators and he stood up on one of those, at the back.

"This is a hypothesis out of science fiction," Pleshy was saying. "To
release genetically engineered bacteria into the environment - why,
that's illegal!"

Jim Grandfather cut off my view by stepping in front of me and drawing
a bead on Dolmacher. The arrow got him in the left kidney just as he
was pulling the trigger.

On TV it's amazing. Pleshy is standing there looking like a possum who
has wandered onto an interstate. His eyes are wide open, his
eyeglasses luminous in the TV lights, sweat breaking through the
powder on his brow. He's looking every which way. Boone is standing
six feet away, a rock, talking calmly and quietly like a nursery
school teacher handling an obstreperous child. They're talking
simultaneously about genetically engineered bacteria. But there's
rising commotion in the background and suddenly the camera swings
drunkenly away from them. It happens just as Pleshy's saying "Why,
that's illegal!" Everything goes dim and grey for a second because we
don't have the TV lights on our subject, but then the camera's
electronics adjust to it and we have Dolmacher, pale and righteous,
standing on a chair, calmly drawing down on Pleshy just the way he
drew down on me.

If they stay on that camera you can actually see the arrow coming into
the last frame. But if they cut to the other camera, the one that's
still on the podium, you see Pleshy looking at something else - he
never even saw Dolmacher - and you see Boone, confused for just an
instant, then focusing in on the man with the gun. And for a second,
he actually thinks. That's the amazing thing: you can see him thinking
about it. Then he's moving forward, he puts up one arm and
clotheslines Pleshy. Pleshy falls away like a tin duck in a shooting
gallery and Boone raises his hands, almost in triumph. Just as he's
turning to face Dolmacher, his face disappears, replaced by an
eruption of red. It splatters everywhere - onto Pleshy's notes, onto
the lens of the camera, onto Pleshy's stupid plaid mackinaw.

Back to the other camera and we see Dolmacher giving himself up, two
arrows still dangling out of his torso; overwhelmed by trench coats so
that there's nothing to see. Then back to the dais and we see Boone
staggering around blind with his hands over his face, everyone up
there standing with the expressions of developing shock you always see
in assassination footage - eyebrows coming up and together, hands
rising up from the sides, mouth forming into an O, but the body still
stiff and unreactive. Boone is lost, out of control. Then he shakes
his head, leans into the body of a local cop who has just ran up to
help him, and asks him for a hanky. He's just been hit in the face by
a pellet of red paint and it's hurting his eyes.

 


 

30

JIM AND I TURNED TAIL AND RAN. First we ran in a state of terror, but
then, when we figured out that we weren't being followed, drew closer
together and started to skip and leap through the air, whooping,
laughing like loons, like high school kids who've just egged the
principal's house. I wasn't thinking, yet, about Dolmacher spending
the rest of his life in the booby hatch, out of reach.

Finally, toward the end, we ran very slowly and made moaning and
puking noises. And when we found our way back to the trailhead, Boone
was waiting for us. In a helicopter.

It was a news chopper from one of the Boston stations. Boone had
agreed to trade an exclusive interview for a lift back down to Boston.

"I'm finished," Jim Grandfather said. "I'm all done with this crap."

He went over to his pickup, leaned against it and breathed. I stood
with my hands on my knees and did the same.

"You know, for ten seconds," I said, "I was sure you had saved my
life."

"So was I."

"Let's just say you did."

"I don't care."

"I have a question for you," I said. "If you'd been carrying a real
arrow - a big-game arrow - would you have used it?"

Jim stood up straight and shrugged. His big coat fell off his
shoulders and his quiver tumbled out of it. All the fishing arrows had
been used, but there were three in there with wide, razor-sharp heads.
"No," he said. "Too dangerous."

I laughed because I thought he was joking, but he wasn't.

"You've drawn my bow. If I used one of these, it would go all the way
through Dolmacher's body, out the other side and kill one or two other
people."

"Well, I'm glad."

"Yeah. Considering that he was shooting blanks, I'd have felt like
kind of a prick."

Jim and I hugged for a while, something I never do with another man,
then Boone came out and they shook hands. Jim got in his truck and
drove away. The copter's engine started to rev up, so Boone and I had
a few private moments while we walked back through the rotor wash.

"What did you know," I asked, "and when did you know it?"

Boone gaped at me for a second, then laughed. "Shit. You don't think
I'd step between Pleshy and a bullet, do you?"

We both laughed. I wasn't really sure. I wasn't convinced that he
could recognize Dolmacher's gun that quickly.

"I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent," he confessed. "Because
then you're the only person in the world who can knock down the
president and get away with it."

We climbed into the chopper and Boone started giving a prolonged,
monosyllabic, "aw shucks" interview about why he had put another man's
life before his own. He was claiming to be a Boston environmentalist
named Daniel Winchester. I seized upon a catnap; it wasn't that far
back to Boston. I was hoping they'd swing over the yacht club, because
I wanted to look down into our slip and see if Wes had gotten out the
other Zodiac yet. If so, I'd probably be ripping it off sometime soon.
I was in luck; they took us back to Logan itself.

That was fine, since the Blue Line took us right in to the Aquarium
stop. I was still too recognizable around the yacht club, so I had
Boone saunter by there while I loitered at a McDonalds. I had one of
those milkshakes that's made from sweetened Wonder Bread dough
extruded by a pneumatic machine. This, perhaps, would serve as a
buffer against the toxic waste inside my system.

When Boone emerged from traffic he wore a grin. The Zodiac was there,
all right, but with a wimpy ten-horse motor, and even that was missing
a few strategic parts. So before we did anything else, we prepared
ourselves. At a marine supply place out on one of the piers we bought
ourselves a fuel line, spark plugs and other small important items
that Wes might have removed to make the Zodiac unstealable. Boone
flaunted his stack of credit cards.

We rode the Green Line to Kenmore Square and hopped a bus out to
Watertown Square. Then it was a two-mile walk to Kelvin's. My pant
legs had turned into stiff tubes from being saturated with mud and
then drying out, and at one point I had to climb down an embankment
into some dead shrubs and broken glass and take a quick squat on the
ground. While I was there I looked through my wallet and realized that
all my credit cards belonged to a dead man. My transformation into a
derelict was almost complete. Jim had been supporting me through that
bad week in New Hampshire, but now I was back in Boston, with nothing
except a wicked case of diarrhea.

"You should bow out too," I said. "Shit, you've got your opportunity
now. You're a national hero. You can rehabilitate yourself, tell your
story."

"I've been thinking about doing that," Boone confessed.

"Well don't be shy. I can get along without you."

"I know. But this is more interesting."

"Whatever." This was a useful word I'd picked up from Bart.

"I'll stick with it a little longer and see what's happening."

"Whatever."

I'd been going through a lot of laxatives, trying to flush out my
colon. It seemed to be working, because the nausea and cramps had
subsided. Maybe I could ease off a little, get a Big Mac or something.
Or if we could get to Hoa's, I could eat some steamed rice.

We got to Kelvin's just about twelve hours after our first, midnight
visit. Since it was daylight, we came in the front door and got the
full family welcome: dogs poking their muzzles into our balls, kids
showing us their new toys, Kelvin's wife, Charlotte, fetching big
tumblers of cranraz. All the kids were running around either naked or
in diapers and pretty soon I joined them as Charlotte wouldn't let me
out of the foyer without removing my pants. All I managed to hang on
to was my colored jockey shorts and my t-shirt. Boone had to give up
his socks and his shirt. All of it went into the laundry. We wandered
half-naked down into the basement.

Charlotte's sister had decorated Kelvin's third-floor office just the
way he wanted it - ergonomic furniture, a couple extra speakers wired
into the main stereo, coffee maker, warm paneling. He went up there
about an hour a week to write letters to his mother and balance the
family checkbook. Then he spent about a hundred hours a week down here
in this dank, dark, junk-filled basement. There was a workbench in the
corner where he made stuff. There was a pool table in the middle where
he relaxed. An old concrete laundry tub against one wall which he used
as a urinal. He'd covered two entire walls with old blackboards he'd
bought at flea markets. That was the only way he could think: on a
blackboard, standing up. Sometimes it was long, gory strings of
algebra, sometimes it was flowcharts from computer programs. Today
there were a lot of hexagons and pentagons. Kelvin was doing organic
chemistry, diagramming a lot of polycyclic stuff. Probably trying to
figure out the energy balance of these bugs.

"Give up already?" he said, without turning around.

For once, I got to surprise him. "No. We found him."

"Really? How is he?"

"Leaking, but aware. I'm not sure what they're going to charge him
with."

"That's for damn sure," Boone said. "They can't call it attempted
murder."

Kelvin stood there watching us, then decided not to clutter his mind
with an explanation. "I have some ideas on this," he said, sweeping
his hand across the blackboards.

"Shoot."

"First of all, have you been following the news?"

"Look who's asking," I said. "You haven't heard about Pleshy?"

"Shit, we've been creating the news," Boone said.

"I mean the Boston news." Kelvin picked up a Herald that was sprawled
on his pool table and flipped it over to expose the full-page
headline.

HARBOR OF DEATH!

MIT PROF: TOXIC MENACE COULD "DESTROY ALL LIFE"

There was a picture of a heavy white man with his shirt off, showing a
vicious case of chloracne.

"So they know about the bug," I said.

"Not exactly," Kelvin said. "A lot of people know of it, but it's not
mentioned in there." He nodded at the Herald. "And in the Globe, as
you might guess, it's just a farfetched speculation. Everyone thinks
it's just a toxic waste spill."

"So why do they say that it could destroy all life?"

"To sell papers. If you read the article, you'll find that the quote
was taken out of context. The MIT prof said it could destroy all life
in Boston Harbor that happened to eat a large amount of it."

"Well, that's good," Boone said. "That's fine, from our point of view.
We don't have to beg the media to cover it. The news is out."

Kelvin agreed. "It's really only a matter of time before the whole
thing is exposed."

"Publicizing it isn't that important," I added. "The catastrophe's
still going on. That's what we should worry about. Publicity doesn't
kill the bug."

"Is that really you talking?" Boone said. "How do we kill the bug,
Kelvin?"

"The chlorine-converting bug is an obligate anaerobe-" Kelvin said,
then added for Boone's benefit, "-that means it has to live in an
environment with no air in it."

"That's impossible," I said. "There's oxygen dissolved in the water.
It wouldn't survive."

"Exactly. So they didn't make just the one bug. They made two of them.
The other is an aerobe - it has to have some air to survive. Its
metabolism doesn't hurt anything - it just uses lots of oxygen and
creates a locally oxygen-poor region where its salt-eating buddy can
live. The killer bug is a parasite on the aerobe. Or symbiotic, or one
of those terms - I hate biology."

"Look, I know I'm no expert here," Boone said, "but every
environmentalist knows that a lot of water doesn't have any air
dissolved in it. Right? Polluted water, anything that's got undecayed
garbage or shit in it, doesn't have air."

"Right," Kelvin said, "because the organisms that break those things
down use up all the air in the process. The more sewage there is in
the water - that is, the higher the Biochemical Oxygen Demand - the
less oxygen is present. When Dolmacher and company designed this bug,
they had a simulated ocean environment for it to work in. They
probably used something like an aquarium full of aerated seawater. The
symbiosis worked just fine in that environment.

"It didn't occur to them that this pair of bugs might end up in an
environment in which there wasn't any air. They probably weren't
thinking of using it in a totally uncontrolled fashion, around raw
sewage - or if they were, they didn't think about the BOD. Even if
they were aware of that problem, it didn't matter because management
got to the bug before they could test it in that situation. It was
released into the Harbor."

"Into a part of the Harbor where there ain't no dissolved oxygen -
because of all the raw sewage," I said.

"And Spectacle Island. That's got to be one big oxygen-sucker," Boone
said.

Kelvin nodded. "Which means that in those bad parts of the Harbor,
most of the aerobes are dead. Nothing to breathe. But the chlorine
bugs, the ones we're worried about, did fine, because they didn't need
the aerobes - in that particular situation. But if a lot of oxygen
were injected into their environment, they'd all die."

"So if the contaminated parts of the Harbor can be oxygenated, the
bugs die," Boone said.

"How do you propose we oxygenate whole, big patches of the Harbor
floor? Get a shitload of aquarium bubblers?" I said. I was tired and I
was wired. I was pissed and bouncing off the walls. Kelvin just stood
there and took it calmly.

"Ozone. They use it at the sewage treatment plant. Put it on boats.
Run tubes from the ozone supply down to the Harbor floor. Bubble the
ozone through the sludge. GEE can't do it, it'll take a big
governmental effort, but it can be done. The Harbor will stink like a
privy for a few weeks, but when it's done, the bugs will be gone."

We enjoyed a moment of golden silence. Boone said, "Not much for us to
do, then, is there?"

Kelvin shrugged. "There doesn't have to be. In this case, the
governmental machinery might actually work."

Boone and I looked at each other and laughed.

"Kelvin," Boone said, "they can't even handle sewage treatment."

"Couple of days ago I called the Centers for Disease Control in
Atlanta," Kelvin said. "This was after Dolmacher had told me
everything. I got through to one of their investigators. He'd heard
all about this epidemic of chloracne in Boston. The local hospitals
had already noticed it, especially City Hospital. So I explained the
whole thing to them, about the genetically engineered bug."

I'm an asshole, I do it for a living, so this shouldn't surprise
anyone: in a way, I resented Kelvin for this. He knew everything
before I did. And he'd made the right phone call. I never thought of
calling the Centers for Disease Control. He'd probably saved a lot of
people. The real reason was probably this: I wouldn't have the chance
to make the Big Revelation, to call the press and inform them, to be
the ecoprophet.

"Every doctor on the Bay knows about it now. They've been treating it
with activated charcoal - in gastric lavage and enemas - and with
trimethoprim. And they just put out an alert late last night, not to
eat any fish from the Harbor. That's what inspired those headlines."

"Doctors can't put out that kind of alert."

"Right. You see, all the state authorities are aware of the problem
now. They're dealing with it. I already called them and told them
about this oxygenation idea. I have the impression they're working on
it."

 


 

31

BOONE AND I SAT DOWN to wait for our laundry to run through the dryer.
Charlotte went out to get some coffee and when she came back into the
room, found us out cold. We woke up about four hours later. Boone felt
spry as a puppy and I felt like someone had stuffed a rancid lemon
into my mouth and flogged me with a hawser.

Kelvin gave us a ride down into Allston. When we walked into the
Pearl, Hoa stared at me for a minute but he didn't say anything. I
guess a Vietnamese refugee has seen it all. He recognized Boone, too,
as the gentleman who'd brought in the message yesterday. Bart had
received it, and he'd left a response: meet me at the Arsenal some day
after work.

It was after work now. I borrowed Hoa's phone and called over there
and asked for the long-haired guy covered with tire dust. The
bartender knew exactly who I was talking about. "He just left," he
said. "He was here with his girl and they took off. I think they're
going to a concert. They were all decked out in leather." That didn't
tell me much; they always looked that way.

We hadn't done any serious newspaper reading in a couple of days and,
as Kelvin had pointed out, we were way behind on our current events.
So I went down the street to a vending machine. I was feeling
impatient so I made myself get up and jog, and about halfway there
decided I wasn't sick, just stiff and tired. The trip to the emergency
room hadn't been a waste of time.

When I went through my pockets looking for change, I found seventy or
eighty bucks in cash. Kelvin and Charlotte had made a donation to the
domestic terrorism fund. But there weren't any quarters, so I jogged
another block to a convenience store and bought my paper there.

They had a TV going behind the counter, showing the seven o'clock
news, and that was my first chance to see Boone's performance on TV. I
couldn't hear the soundtrack, but when they flashed Boone's picture up
over the anchorwoman's shoulder, they had him labeled as "Winchester."
So nobody had recognized him. That was probably good, though I didn't
really know if it mattered. They spent a while on Boone and Pleshy,
then moved onward to Dolmacher, showing a police cordon around his
house, and a closet shot of Bathtub Man being hauled out in a sack.

Then it was Dolmacher's picture, stolen from a frame of the videotape,
above the anchorwoman's shoulder. Why don't anchor people ever turn
around and look at this parade of mugs behind them? I insisted that
the Babylonian behind the counter turn up the sound.

"...found a large number of photographs and documents on Dolmacher's
person which police and FBI agents are currently studying. While no
official statement has been made, sources say that the information may
be an attempt by Dolmacher to explain his reason for the bizarre
assault."

The rest of the broadcast was about chloracne, and I didn't bother to
watch. I brought a Globe and a Herald back to Boone, who had set us up
with some beers. He took the Herald, I took the Globe, and while we
were scanning the columns and pouring back those frosty brews, I told
him about the newscast and what Dolmacher had been up to.

Boone was delighted. "You keep shitting on this guy, S.T., but he's
smarter than you give him credit for."

"Shit, no. He got the whole idea from me. From you and me. I tell you,
Boone, he's been following my career. If you want to get something
covered in the media, do the loudest, most media-genie thing you can
and then you've got your platform."

"Pretty strange way of doing it. Shooting an ex-V.P."

"Pretty strange, hell. That's Dolmacher's way of doing it. He doesn't
even own a Zodiac."

"So maybe the guy's not crazy."

"Let's put it this way. He's not irrational. I'll lay you odds he
never spends a day in jail."

"Maybe all the vital information is in there. The secret of how to
kill the bug."

"You really think so?" God, what a thought. "You think Dolmacher's
that cool?"

"No."

"Neither do I."

"But Kelvin is."

"Kelvin is. Kelvin can handle the bug. We've got to handle Pleshy.
We've got to handle his ass. People need to know about this crime."

"What's your plan?"

"Spectacle Island. Tonight. I'll lay you odds there are still some
PCBs down under that barge. And plenty of bugs, too."

"All we have to do is hire a zeppelin to lift the barge off the
evidence," Boone said.

"Just have to cut through the bottom of the barge. Or something. Have
to go look at it first. Hell, it's not going anywhere. We can take our
time. Shit, I wonder what Laughlin was doing there."

"You never saw Laughlin on Spectacle Island, did you?"

"No, but he had this brand new boat. And he was carrying a gun around
in it. And he knew about the Poyzen Boyzen-barge-Spectacle Island
connection. I'll bet you anything Laughlin's been going out there
regularly."

"Why? He can't move the barge either."

"Basco put him in charge of Biotronics for one reason: to destroy the
evidence under that barge. And he's nothing if not effective. Ever
hear of hands-on leadership? I think Laughlin must have read some
books on the subject. So maybe he has a way of getting through the
bottom of the barge, getting access to the shit down there."

We went through several beers before we thought about ordering food.
I'd eaten enough at the Pearl to earn this privilege, and Hoa seemed
to enjoy playing bartender for a change. As much as he enjoyed
anything, that is. He is always cheerful but I was never sure if he
was happy. Of course, happy is a concept for fat Americans. Immigrants
don't seem to care about happy very much. Healthy, wealthy and wise,
yes, but happiness alone is something their children worry about,
maybe. Now, the surly, toxic busboy, he was unhappy and wanted to do
something about it. He didn't seem to be around tonight.

When we finally ordered some food, I asked Hoa about him. "Where's the
busboy?"

He didn't understand. Since he was obsessed with my bicycle, I tried a
different tack. "The one who rides the scooter?"

Hoa got serious for once, lost that fake pixie smile, and bent forward
just a hair. "Very sick."

"Had a rash on his body and so on," Boone suggested, rubbing his hand
around on his chest.

"We took him to the hospital and now they giving him medicine for it."

"Good, Hoa, they know exactly how to make it better." Which probably
sounded kind of patronizing. But the Vietnamese got a little weird
about their medicine sometimes, tried to cure themselves by putting
containers of boiling hot water on their backs and so on. Which might
work with evil spirits but not with the particular type of possession
that bus boy had.

"What, did he collapse at work, or something?" Boone said.

Hoa didn't understand.

"You said, you took him to the hospital."

"My wife took him. That boy is Tim. Our son."

At which point Boone and I both felt like assholes, apologized and
said all the things one says, wishing Tim well and so on. Hoa was
unruffled. "He going to get better soon, then I bring him back here
and work him nice and hard."

We hung out there, leafing through papers and planning our reentry
into impolite society. Things had to be done in the right order. We
had to get drunk, I had to get in touch with Debbie, we had to tie up
some loose ends on this whole PCB business and then we could make some
noise.

Comics were entertainment and so what I had was the Entertainment
section of the paper. They had a little advance-press article about a
heavy-metal group that was playing a concert down at the Garden
tonight: Poyzen Boyzen. Unfortunately for Boone and me it was sold
out. No Satanic rock for us tonight, but Bart and Amy were certainly
in that number.

Boone was sitting there, going through the fine-print pages. "Hey," he
said, "remember the Basco Explorer?" "Never had the pleasure. But I
know about it." "Big old freighter of theirs," he said, wistfully.
"They use it for ocean dumping, you know." "Yeah, I know."

"Once we were harassing it out off the Grand Banks, and it dropped a
big old drum full of black shit right into my Zode. A direct hit -
snapped my keel. That was back before everything kind of turned sour."

"Back in your salad days. Boone, what is the reason for this
misty-eyed crap about the Basco Explorer?"

He showed me the back page of the Business section, the one with the
bankruptcy notices and exchange rates. They run a column back there
listing what ships are in port now, what's coming in and going out.
The Basco Explorer was going to be arriving in Everett tonight, coming
in from the Basco plant in Jersey and probably going to their main
Everett plant.

"That's pretty routine," I said. "It's almost like the Eastern
Shuttle. It's always transferring crap back and forth."

"You don't think this might have anything to do with the bug?"

"Unless it's full of trimethoprim, no. I mean, what good would it do
them to have the ship there? Use it for Pleshy's escape vessel?"

He shrugged. "I just thought it was an interesting coincidence."

Hoa brought our food, and we hovered, moaning with delight and
breathing through our noses. Once Hoa saw the way we were chowing on
this stuff, he turned away and didn't show up again until we were
picking through the steamed rice.

"You talking about Basco?" he said.

"Yeah, Hoa, you familiar with them?"

"This is the company that poison Harbor?"

"We think so. Hell, we know so."

Hoa took the unheard-of liberty of pulling up a chair. He looked
around the room kind of melodramatically. It would be melodramatic for
an American, anyway. Hoa had spent six years in a reeducation camp in
Vietnam and had led three escape attempts. This wasn't melodramatic
for him.

"What you going to do?" he said.

"Go to the Harbor; get evidence against Laughlin. I mean Pleshy.
Pleshy and the, uh, man who works for him."

"You think Basco - Pleshy - going to be punished? He should go to jail
for long time, man!"

It was a little odd to hear this from Hoa. Hoa was a right-winger and
I couldn't blame him. He had no respect at all for antiwar types. He
thought the U.S. should have stayed in his country.

I was remembering an old black-and-white photo of Pleshy, in Vietnam,
back when he was the world's leading exponent of chemical warfare,
before the Sovs and the Iraqis took over the business. In my
patronizing way, I hadn't imagined that Hoa was much into politics, or
that he'd be aware of who the hell Alvin Pleshy was. That idea was
dispelled by the way he pronounced Pleshy's name, the look in his eyes
when he asked.

"What's your problem with Pleshy? He was on your side."

If it hadn't been his own restaurant, he would have spat on the floor.
"Gutless," he said. "Didn't know how to fight. Thought he could win
war with chemicals. All it did was make him rich. He make those
chemicals in his own company, you know."

"Yeah. Well, we think it's pretty likely that Pleshy will get in a lot
of trouble for this."

"You have to make him pay!" Hoa said.

It reminded me of Hoa's brother, a couple of months ago, when he'd
gotten upset about people who came into the Pearl and wasted food.
Serene and cheery on the surface, but when they got pissed about
something, they really got pissed. They let you know about it. They
had long memories.

"We think we can trace this bad stuff through the sewers, back to a
plant that's owned by Basco," I said, "and the guy who shot at Pleshy
today also has evidence. I would say that Pleshy's in deep shit." But
I didn't believe it for a minute. The man was a vampire. Only the
light of a minicam could hurt him. Boone had winged him earlier today.

Tonight we had to drive a stake through his chest, or he'd recover.
He'd appoint Laughlin his interior secretary, and use Laughlin's magic
bug to bring more covalent chlorine into all of our bodies.

"I can help in any way, you will tell me," Hoa ordered. "This meal is
for free. On the house."

"That's okay, Hoa, I've actually got cash tonight."

"No. Free." And he got up and went away, soundlessly as always,
without displacing any air. For some reason it came into my head to
wonder how many people Hoa had killed.

"Some of these immigrants were actually big honchos in South Vietnam,
you know," Boone said. "I wonder if he knew Pleshy personally?"

"I don't think Pleshy's that hateful in person," I said. "To really
dislike the man you have to be standing under an Agent Orange drop."

"That's right," Boone mused. "He's kind of a wimp in person."

"What did he say to you, anyway? I never got a chance to hear your
conversation. I was too scared of Dolmacher."

"Well, he came right out and challenged me. He said, there's no
bacteria like you describe. Go ahead and test the Harbor. Try me."

"So what do you conclude from that?"

"I conclude he was kept in the dark by his underlings. Like Reagan
back during the contra thing. He didn't know what was going on."

"How charitable you are."

"Otherwise, why would he say something like that?"

I didn't figure Bart would be using his van while he was watching the
concert, so we took a cab out to Boston Garden and cruised the local
parking areas until we found it. I slid underneath and got his spare
key. We got in and did some nitrous. Then we drove out to Debbie's
place in Cambridge, a nice rent-controlled complex between Harvard and
MIT. She wasn't there, so I left a note in her mailbox telling her we
were going out on the water, and if she wanted to get together she
should go out to Castle Island Park and build a fire or something and
we'd circle back and pick her up.

We cut across Cambridge to the GEE office, where they hadn't bothered
to change the locks. We loaded up on any kind of equipment that might
come in handy - scuba gear, sampling jars, giant magnets, strobe
lights, distress flares, radios - and threw it into the van and
cruised back to the Garden. We got there just as the doors were
opening up to spill a plume of black-clad Poyzen Boyzen fans onto the
streets of the North End. Dustheads galore.

Bart's old space had been taken so we just cruised around and made a
nuisance of ourselves until he showed up.

"Hey, S.T., thanks for pistol-whipping me."

"I'm sorry about that, Bart, but-"

"You met my girlfriend, Amy?"

"Yeah, we've met."

"Hi, S.T.," Amy said, popping her gum explosively. Heavy metal, drugs
and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where
she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons.

"Hop in," I said.

Boone introduced himself. They didn't take much notice of him. Amy
wanted to know where we were all going.

"We're going to Spectacle Island," I said. By "we" I meant me and
Boone and just possibly Bart, but Bart and Amy took it the other way.

"Alright!" he said. "That is going to be brutal tonight."

"That's what I was afraid of," I said. "A lot of Poyzen Boyzen fans
out there?"

"Tonight they are, man. It's going to be an all night party. I know
someone who's got a boat." "Christopher Laughlin?" "Yeah, how'd you
know?" "It's okay. We have our own boat."

 


 

32

"ALRIGHT, MAN. A motley crew," Bart observed as we made our way across
the piers to the GEE slip.

He had a point. There weren't deck shoes or yachting cap among us. We
had walkie-talkies and Liquid Skin instead of Brie and baguettes. If
there were any loose cops in the Boston area we'd be arrested on the
spot. Fortunately they were all out in the streets training fire hoses
on Poyzen Boyzen fans.

Amy found the trip down the ladder to the Zode extremely exciting.
Bart had to help her down, using some holds he'd picked up as a high
school wrestler in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Boone and I were down there
operating on the ten-horse. Wes had taken out the plugs. We didn't
know what kind of plugs it took so we'd bought about twelve boxes of
different types. Also we didn't know how to gap them. New plugs have
to be gapped.

"It doesn't matter anyway because we don't have a gauge," Boone
pointed out. But I was already one-upping him by whipping a set of
leaf gauges out of my wallet.

"No wonder your fucking wallet's an inch thick," Boone said. We
guessed thirty-five thousandths on the plug gap and bent the
electrodes accordingly.

The net result is that the motor started on the first pull. By this
time Amy had mounted the prow like a sadomasochistic figurehead and
Bart was thudding up and down the ladder loading the Zode with our war
supplies. This included a nice stack of Big Macs and pseudo-shakes
we'd picked up at the McDonald's. No telling how long we were going to
be out. I shifted into forward and Boone cracked open a Guinness. Bart
leaned back between Amy's thighs and trailed one of his hands in the
black brine. For some reason I felt formidable.

With this worthless motor, the trip from downtown to Spectacle Island
took almost an hour. I was expecting Amy to get bored and petulant, or
at least seasick, but I underestimated her. She actually kind of liked
it out here. She'd never seen Boston from the water, few people have,
so we basically spent half the time telling her where shit was. The
747s were coming down fast and thick at Logan and that was a sight.
Bart had a Walkman with stereo minispeakers that you could plug into
it, so we listened to an old Led Zep tape and later to a Sox game, in
California, on the radio. Boone told some kind of interminable story
about hand-to-hand combat with a Canadian helicopter in Labrador. I
kept an eye on Castle Island Park, hoping Debbie would show up and
give me a sign, but she didn't.

Spectacle Island was easy to find in the dark, because half of it
appeared to be on fire. If I shut off the motor, we could hear the
stereos from a distance of three miles. We had the slowest boat in the
harbor and everyone else had gotten there first. Small boats
occasionally crossed our line of sight and made silhouettes against
the light.

Somehow I doubted they had all brought firewood along. They were
probably burning whatever was at hand. There must be some great toxins
in the air tonight. Before long we smelled them, a profoundly nasty
and foul odor drifting toward us on a southeasterly wind.

"I guess we picked the wrong night," I said.

Amy didn't understand. She thought that I wasn't sufficiently
impressed by this party. Bart finally had to break the news to her:
"They're not coming to party. They're coming to-" his silhouette
turned to look at me "-just why the fuck are you coming?"

"Chris Laughlin ever tell you about his dad?"

"Yeah, he told me all about that fucking bastard."

"Remember my enemy at Fotex? Who fell into the pond?"

"Oh, yeah, the rotating knives?"

"Yeah. That's roughly what we're going to do to Chris Laughlin's dad."

"And what will that involve?"

"Beats me. Boone and I will just have to scope it out."

"Looks like you'll have plenty of light."

Amy was temporarily depressed that we were actually coming out to test
a scientific theory, but she got over it. Meanwhile I was noticing
something interesting, namely a big shadow that was blocking off about
half of our view of Spectacle. We were getting to the point where we
could make out some running lights, and eventually, Boone and I
started aiming our humongous flashlights into that shadow, checking it
out with binoculars. I already had an intuition about it. So did he, I
guess, because we aimed our beams at the same place: high on the bow,
where the name of the ship is written. It stood out nicely in
rust-stained white: Bosco Explorer.

"It's not going anywhere," he said. And when we got a little closer we
could definitely see its anchor chains, coming out the hawsepipes up
on the prow, descending straight into the water. The Basco Explorer,
the toxic Death Star, was anchored about half a mile off Spectacle
Island.

"Poyzen fans," Bart said.

But Boone and I were just looking. He reached over and shut off the
radio, and I dropped the motor to an idle.

"Spray paint," I said.

Boone rummaged through one of our bags and came up with a can of black
Rustoleum we'd picked up with the spark plugs. Bart shook it up and
blacked out the GEE lettering on the sides of the Zode.

Most of those boat silhouettes were heading to or from Spectacle
Island. But when we noticed one that was going sideways, headed for
the Basco Explorer, I cranked up the motor so that we didn't look
suspiciously slow. We buzzed across the ship's bow, giving it a
hundred yards of clearance, and checked out the other side, which was
glowing an almost imperceptible red from the fires on the island. We
had to look straight at it for a minute or two before our eyes
adjusted. We asked Bart and Amy to look the other way, because anyone
might feel nervous if four people on a Zodiac were staring them down.

A small boat, a Boston Whaler, was bobbing alongside. One of the
Brasco Explorer's davits was active, lowering a drum of some godawful
cargo toward the boat.

"Deja vu," Boone said. "Just like the old days. Except the little
boat's on their side."

That any of those Poyzen Boyzen fans could tolerate Spectacle Island
was amazing. The stench nauseated. Maybe the smoke was rising off the
island so they didn't notice it, drifting downwind, hitting an
inversion layer, and spreading out close to the water.

Bart was tugging on my sleeve, pointing in the opposite direction,
toward the mainland. A small strobe light was flashing away on Castle
Island Park.

I turned my back to the Basco Explorer and hunched over our
walkie-talkie. This was just a guess, because I hadn't asked Debbie to
bring a walkie-talkie along. But I thought she might. I switched to
the channel we'd used in Blue Kills and punched the mike button.

"Tainted Meat to Modern Girl," I said. "Tainted Meat to Modern Girl.
You there, toots?"

"This is Modern Girl," Debbie said, quoting the song: "I got my radio
on."

"Nice to hear you, Modern Girl."

"Very nice to hear you, Tainted. Where are you? I can hear the little
Merc."

"Right in front of you. Listen, you driving what I think you're
driving?"

"What else?"

"How'd you get it started?"

"The guy who stole it put in a new coil wire."

I made a mental note of that; just another reason to kill Laughlin. No
one should know that much about me.

"Checked the oil recently?"

"Just had it changed, asshole."

"Listen." This part was going to be tricky; if Basco was listening to
the frequency, they'd get suspicious. "Seen much traffic in your area?
Whalers, maybe?"

"I understand."

That was nice, but I didn't know how much she understood.

"We won't be able to swing by and get you for awhile. Until then, do
you think you can entertain yourself? Go out for a drive and listen to
some tapes, maybe?"

"Yeah. Maybe take some snapshots. Boston at night."

Fantastic. She had a camera. More importantly, she knew how to use it.

"Ten-four on that, Modern Girl. We'll catch you later. Drive safely."

"Always. Bye, Tainted Meat."

The idea of sending Debbie out by herself at night to follow and take
pictures of Basco goons was a little troublesome. But she'd been on
some wild gigs and had always handled herself well. She was good at
this sport. As long as she kept her hot little right hand off the
stereo, off the phone and on the shift lever, nothing was going to
catch her. Besides, she adored stress.

We'd left the Basco Explorer behind. Boone started looking into the
flames again. Amy was facing backwards and she let us know when the
Whaler took off, headed for the shore. Spectacle Island was looking
real big, the line of flames was breaking apart into individual
bonfires, and the music was drowning out our motor.

The final approach was not smooth. Pieces of debris kept fouling our
propeller. Fortunately it was soft, whatever it was, so the prop just
chopped it up, coughed and kept going. Boone was leaning over the back
of the motor to check it out when he almost got thrown out of the Zode
by a boat's wake. Some jerk-offs had just shot by us in a small boat
with a big motor, and now they were swinging around for another pass.

"Hey," Amy shouted, "alright, Chris!"

"Chris is too young for you, and he's actually a jerk," Bart said.

Two or three times a year, I got to hear one of Bart's relationships
fall apart.

"Maybe you're too old," Amy suggested. I was watching that fast boat.
For a second I was afraid it was Laughlin himself. But asshole pere
must have had other items on his dance card this night; Laughlin's
awful son had tracked us down.

He'd brought his pals, maybe the same ones we'd seen before. The roar
of their motor didn't drown out the sound of their laughter as they
saw us wallow around in their wake. That was so much fun they came by
for another pass, and another, and another. I could think of any
number of ways to inflict injuries on them. For example, the Al Nipper
approach: I took an empty Guinness bottle, of which we had several,
wound up and drew a bead on Chris's head. But Boone caught my arm as I
was about to throw.

"Why throw garbage at them," he pointed out, "when we can steal their
motor?"

Within five minutes we were on the decomposing shore, doing exactly
that. Laughlin had bought himself a real nice one, a Johnson
fifty-horse, and also coughed up a couple of full gas tanks for us.
With this rig we could really haul ass. We mounted it on the Zode and
then we left our ten-horse sitting in the bottom of Laughlin's boat.
They'd neglected to bring their oars. I would have been happy to
maroon Dad on this mound of trash, but the son deserved some sympathy.

We did most of this without lights, not wanting to draw attention to
ourselves. So when I was standing thigh-deep in the water, lifting our
old ten-horse off the transom, I could tell that the bottom half of
the motor was greasy and slippery, but I didn't know why. When we
dumped it into the bottom of the other boat, Boone checked it over
with his flashlight and whistled.

Our motor was splattered with a lot of gore that had been thrown up by
the propeller. Wet, fishy-smelling gore. Chopped Up fish, as a matter
of fact.

Once we got it running, we took the Zode around to a deserted stretch
of beach and left it there. No point in allowing these people a
glimpse of a free, fast ride. We went slow, and aimed our lights into
the water, which was full of dead fish. HARBOR OF DEATH. It made
sense. The fish would get the PCB bug in their guts just like humans
did, and they'd get sick and die in the same way.

Boone and I hiked back across the island toward the northern shore,
toward the party. Bart and Amy were already there. It would be
impossible to find them again, but that was okay. Bart was a
survivor.. Finding a way back to Boston would be as easy for him as
getting out of bed in the morning.

We walked slow; on Spectacle Island you never knew what was going to
poke up through the sole of your shoe. Eventually, though, we crested
a junk-heap ridge with a smokey, fiery halo and looked down on the
festival.

Three hundred people, give or take, twenty bonfires and a dozen kegs.
There was also a garbage party - someone had brought a garbage can and
people had dumped into it whatever alcoholic stuff they'd brought with
them, creating a mystery punch. And a fire hazard.

And I finally got to see the Satan worshippers. A dozen of them. Their
black leather was somewhat more bizarre and expensive than that of the
average fan. They were up on the hillside, standing in a circle,
working their way through some kind of ritual that involved torches
and large knives.

The big knives weren't too dangerous compared to the cheap revolvers
that half of the guys on the beach were probably carrying, and a few
spells and incantations didn't worry me as much as the Basco Explorer.
But we swung around them anyhow, since a few grams of PCP could make
anyone feisty.

Sometimes, they said, drugs led to possession. Then you had to get
yourself an exorcist. The exorcist would come and call out the name of
the evil spirit, and that would scare it away. This was all it took -
no surgical operations, no chemicals, not even much of a ritual. I
figured I was in a similar business. I stood in front of the TV
cameras and called out the names of corporations. I lacked the power
to do much more than that, but it seemed to be pretty effective.

Dolmacher had called out Basco's name earlier today. If I could find
some kind of evidence under this barge, it would establish a link in
my theoretical chain of events, and I, too, could call out their name.
It wouldn't bring down Basco, maybe, but it would probably ruin Alvin
Pleshy. And Laughlin would really be pissed.

 


 

33

BOONE AND I WANDERED straight through the party and over to the barge.
Down by the shoreline, Boone kicked a couple of dead fish out of the
way to establish his footing. Then I climbed up on his shoulders and
got a handhold on the top of the barge. That got me over the top and
then I helped him in.

There wasn't much here. The barge was made to carry some kind of dry,
bulk cargo - coal or corn. It was divided up into garage-sized
compartments that were open on top, and you could get around between
them on catwalks that ran on top of the partitions. The Satanists had
been here with their goddamn spray cans and labeled the whole thing
with various kinds of nonsense; there was a HEAVEN sign with an arrow
pointing toward the bow, and a HELL sign pointing to the stern. Right
now we were in the middle, and it was labeled EARTH. Different
compartments had been labeled with the names of different demons, or
something, and little shrines had been put together in some of them,
using household junk gathered from the island.

EARTH or HELL was the place to look. I didn't expect the transformers
to be located in HEAVEN. When Basco had dumped them back in '56, they
wouldn't have had any reason to drag them way up the slopes of the
island. They'd have dropped them at the waterline, or below it, and
covered them up. The impact of the barge might have dragged a few of
them uphill, but not far.

We gave it a once-over to begin with, walked down all of those
catwalks and aimed our flashlights into the compartments. If we were
lucky we'd find something obvious. The Poyzen Boyzen cult had made a
mess of things, covered up a lot of shit, but this was a big barge and
a small cult and they couldn't screw up the whole thing.

A whiff of cool wind came in from the north, bearing that nauseating
smell. I hadn't smelled it since we'd landed. Apparently it wasn't
coming from the island at all. Maybe it was coming from the reactions
going on in the Harbor: rotting fish added to its usual delicacies.
There was a strong overtone of putrescine, which I hadn't noticed
before; maybe someone had found my cache of the stuff and poured it
into the sea.

Actually, it came from the compartment below my feet, where three
mutilated corpses were sprawled on the floor.

They'd been there for a few days. The blood was brownish-black, and
they looked a mite puffy, about to burst the seams of their black
leather pants.

"Boone!" I said. He was with me in a few seconds. We squatted, like
archaeologists looking into a burial pit, and observed in totally rude
fascination. But after a couple of seconds, he began shining his
flashlight on the walls of the compartment.

"Fragged," he concluded. "Check out the walls."

A lot of shrapnel had gone into those walls. The impact points
twinkled on the rust like stars in a shit-brown sky. "Fragmentation
grenades," Boone continued, "or maybe Claymores."

We started beaming our lights at the trash strewn around on the floor.
This wasn't random garbage; it was bright, colorful and interesting.
The remains of a shrine. And a big, rust-free, stainless steel pipe,
maybe six feet long, was toppled across one of the bodies.

"That pipe's weird," I said.

"There's all kinds of shit on this island," Boone said. "Check that
out."

He was shining his light near the feet of a corpse. A wire was
glinting in the light and at one end was a metal ring.

"Grenade."

After that he led the way. Boone knew more about booby traps than
anyone. He searched the barge, one row of compartments at a time, and
I tagged along behind to make sure he hadn't missed anything. When he
said, "Shit!," I hit the catwalk. When he laughed, I got up.

We were a few yards past the shoreline, out in HELL. The compartment
below had been dedicated to some demonic force named Ashtoreth. I'd
already checked it out. There was a shrine here, basically a pile of
junk - the obligatory toilet, some dolls' heads, wind chimes
manufactured from old brake drums, rotating candelabras built on
bicycle wheels. Boone had noticed something I'd missed. The shrine was
built around an axis, a vertical pipe that rose from the floor of the
compartment. The pipe was brand shiny new, not rusty, and it had a
valve on the top. A padlocked valve.

"Laughlin's been prospecting," I said. "Digging down into the PCB
deposits. The Poyzen Boyzen devotees build shrines around the pipes.
Or maybe he built them himself, as camouflage. And then he came around
and booby trapped them."

"Because he was afraid of you."

"Maybe he knows I'm not dead?"

"No," Boone said, "you died a week ago. Those corpses were at least
that old."

"I'll take your word for it. But I know why he was worried. This is
great evidence, man."

"Yeah. Evidence that fights back."

Once we made damn sure there were no tripwires, we lowered ourselves
down there. Then we squatted and investigated the heap of junk from a
distance, saw the grenades, clustered around the pipe like coconuts on
a tree, saw the wires.

Someone landed on my back. I turned my head a little so that when my
face smashed into the floor, I was leading with my cheek and not my
teeth. Whoever had jumped me was drunk and we ended up lying there,
nestled like spoons for an instant, and then I just rolled over on top
because it felt like he or she wasn't as heavy as I was.

I was right. But the second person, standing above me, astride my
body, holding the ceremonial knife in his hands - he was heavy. He was
obese, in fact. His floor-length leather cape spread way out, like
Batman's.

There wasn't much I could do because I still didn't have my breath
back. I gasped and moaned, getting my lungs push-started, but this
didn't do anything about the guy with the knife.

Boone, over in the opposite corner, was giving a better account of
himself. Someone had started by breaking a bottle over his head. She'd
seen a lot of TV shows and thought that this would knock him out.
Instead, Boone got pissed off and punched out her front teeth. Now she
was shrieking like a bad set of air brakes, spinning and bouncing
around the compartment like a top. A guy had gotten Boone in a bear
hug from behind and lifted his feet off the floor, allowing him to
kick with both feet - which isn't normally possible - and so he
inflicted a bit of internal bleeding on a third attacker. I heard the
ribs snap. But he didn't even notice. The person who was holding him
off the ground spun him around and methodically rammed his face
against a rusty wall about half a dozen times. The guy with the broken
ribs was jumping up and down, shouting without using any words,
stabbing at the air with his knife.

I happened to be looking at that person when he got about half his
brains blown against the compartment wall. The obese guy standing
above me stood up straight and I kicked him in the nads. Then I got
showered with blood as he took a bullet in the middle of his back.

He staggered sideways into the shrine, rammed it like a tractor
hitting a Christmas tree, and in the aftermath I heard a little
tink-tink-tink that was probably the sound of a grenade pin bouncing
around on the floor.

When I went over the top of the wall, I ran into Bart and took him
with me; we landed hard on the floor of the next compartment. I was
just starting to think about pain when the blast of the grenade came
through like one beat of a heavy-metal tom-tom. The shrapnel hit the
wall with an overwhelming pulse of static and then I could hardly hear
anything.

Boone was above us, wiping blood out of his face and trying to get
ungrogged. His head had already taken a lot of abuse. Bart was waving
his revolver dangerously. "You better take this gun," he suggested.
"I'm incredibly drunk."

"Lucky it wasn't a Claymore," Boone said, "or we wouldn't have had the
time delay."

"That one seemed like about thirty seconds," I said.

"More like five."

The fragged compartment looked about the way I expected it to. The
silver pipe had been severed halfway up. A golden fluid was welling
calmly out the top, running down to the floor of the compartment. It
wasn't necessary to run an analysis.

We weren't clear about what to do with the dead guys. If it came down
to it, we could certainly defend ourselves in court. But you're
supposed to bury corpses, or put sheets over them or something, not
leave them sitting in a barge compartment that's slowly filling up
with toxic waste.

"On the other hand, why not?" Bart said. "For them, this is like dying
in church."

"That's good enough for me," Boone said, and jogged away down the
catwalk. After about a nanosecond of careful thought, I followed him.

We came down on the opposite side of the barge, in case the Satanists
had decided to bring in reinforcements. Once we hit the ground, I
waded out into the water a little ways, sweeping my flashlight back
and forth across my path. Just before Boone had discovered the shrine,
I'd been starting to put a suspicion together in my mind.

The odor we'd noticed on our way over wasn't coming from Spectacle
Island. It was coming from the water. But we hadn't noticed it in
other parts of the Harbor. Only the part right north of Spectacle
Island - where the Bosco Explorer was anchored.

I scooped half a dozen dead fish out of the surf and tossed them up
onto the land. We squatted around them and checked them over.

If the odor came from the dying of Boston Harbor - if these fish had
died from infection with the PCB bug - they would have died at
different times. Some would be decomposed, some would be fresh. But if
I may be excused another disgusting thought, these fish all looked
good enough to eat. They had died within the last couple of hours.

"There's something new in the Harbor," I said. "Something that stinks
real bad, and is incredibly toxic. And it stinks worst around the
Basco Explorer." "They must do something," Boone said. "We didn't see
any dumping."

"Sure. Years ago, when we started taking movies of them dropping
barrels into the water, they got really shy and came up with a new
system. They've got tanks in there that can be filled from the top and
then drained out the bottom of the hull while the ship is in motion."

"What did Pleshy say to you this morning?" "Make my day!" Bart said.
"It was in the Herald." "That's what he said," Boone said. "Go ahead.
Test the Harbor for PCB-eating bugs. Test the sewers. Make my day. You
won't find anything."

"Say they filled those hidden tanks with some kind of massively toxic,
concentrated stuff, probably an organophosphate, and dumped it into
the Harbor tonight. They'd want to anchor near Spectacle Island - the
center of the infection. They'd dump it into the water. Everything in
the water would die. No one would find it remarkable that fish were
dying - remember, the Herald called it the Harbor of Death. But at the
microscopic level, all those PCB bugs are dying too."

"Just like Kelvin said," Boone said. "If it gets real bad, we might
have to nuke the Harbor."

"Jesus," Bart said, "Isn't that a little overkillish?"

"Not at all. Look. Twenty-four hours ago, these guys were dead. They
had illegally put a genetically engineered bug into the environment
and it was creating a toxic catastrophe. They'd rigged up a scapegoat
- Dolmacher - but he'd gotten wise. A loose waste barrel on the deck.

"Now that's all different. Basco's dropping the bomb. Murdering the
Harbor. Shit, the sewers too. The drums they were offloading into the
Boston Whaler? Probably full of the same stuff. They're probably
dumping it into the gutters right now. Exterminating the bug, covering
up their traces." "Kind of blatant," Bart said.

"Not at all," said Boone. "Shit, Basco's back on its home territory
here. They're old hands at poisoning the water and getting away with
it."

"It can't be traced to the ship, and it can't be traced through the
gutters," I said.

"The bastards are getting off scot free," Boone said. He was just
breathing the words, he was almost inaudible. "Kind of looks that
way," Bart said. "We have to get onto that ship." Boone was in outer
space now, in a kind of trance, staring at the incantations on the
barge. "Before they get rid of the evidence. We have to board the ship
and find the tanks they used."

"What would you do then," Bart asked. "Just getting on board wouldn't
prove anything."

"We'd have to get the media on board," Boone said. "No way to do that
until they tie up somewhere," I said. "The ship is going to be moored
on Basco property, and you can bet they'll have intense security. We
can't even get within striking distance without trespassing on their
property and getting popped."

"Maybe there's something real mediagenic we could do on board the
ship, something the crews could film from a great distance."

"The toxin tanks are way down in the bowels of the thing. There's no
way to make them visible from a distance without blowing the ship in
two."

"We've handled this kind of thing before - remember the Soviet
invasion? We could bring in our own cameras, do our own filming and
distribute the tapes." "That's one option," I said. "One option. You
have another?" Boone said. "Yeah."

"What's that? Blow it up?" "Shit no. This is a nonviolent action, I
think." "And what might it be?" "Steal it. Steal the ship." "Whoa!"
Bart said.

Boone's blue eyes were giving off kind of a Tazer discharge and I felt
the need to scoot away from him. We had found a plan.

"Steal the whole fucking ship?" he said. But he knew exactly what I
meant.

"Steal the whole fucking ship, before they've had a chance to destroy
the evidence - that means tonight - take it out into the Harbor, where
the media will be waiting for us. Better yet, take it to Spectacle
Island. Have the media in place out here. We can turn it into an
all-night minicam slumber party."

"That is just fucking great, man," Boone said, levitating to his feet.
"Let's do it, man. It's time to rock and roll."

 


 

34

BART WENT AROUND to the party side of the barge to find Amy, and Boone
and I cut straight across the island to the Zodiac. We were trying to
figure out a way to steal the Bosco Explorer, but we were clueless.
Our only real chance to get on board was right now, when it was on the
open water. Once it was tied up at a pier, they'd have guards posted
on it, toting machine guns and with every excuse to use them. But we
didn't have a plan, so the only thing we could think of was to have
Boone board it now and leave me on the outside to come up with the
plan later. Boone was enthusiastic; he knew I'd think of something.
Easy for him to say. We'd leave him a walkie-talkie and have maybe a
fifty-fifty chance of being able to communicate with him.

We sat out on the Zodiac and got out two of my big old magnets. I used
duct tape to coat them pretty thickly, so they wouldn't clang, and so
they'd have good friction against the side of the ship. Then I rigged
up little rope stirrups. Boone put on the Liquid Skin, put on a lot of
it, then wrestled into a drysuit. It was black, the proper color for
domestic terrorism during the evening hours, and would protect
everything but his face.

I picked up the walkie-talkie once or twice and asked if Modern Girl
was out there, but got no real answer. A walkie-talkie isn't like a
telephone; you don't have a private line, just a thick chowder of
noise that you try to pick something out of. I tried hard and only got
a hint of Debbie's voice, like a whiff of perfume in a hurricane.

Bart came wandering along after about twenty minutes, alone. We went
in and picked him up.

"Where's Amy," I asked him.

"Back there. We broke up."

He didn't seem too wrecked. "Sorry. We didn't mean to screw up a good
thing."

"She's pissed off because I left her with this guy Quincy when I went
and shot those dudes. But the reason I left her with Quincy was
because I wanted to make sure she was protected."

"Who's Quincy?"

"The guy I stole this revolver from."

"So where's Amy now?"

"With Quincy."

Boone didn't say anything, just handed him a Guinness. Black beer for
black thoughts.

We shoved off, taking it slow because we didn't know what we were
doing. I tried the walkie-talkie again and suddenly Debbie's voice
came through. Sometimes the radio works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Modern Girl here. I think we can pop the Big Suit for public
urination."

The Big Suit had to be Laughlin. She'd never been introduced to him.
But on my answering machine, right before the house blew up, she'd
described the man as he was ripping off the car.

"He's doing it by the Amazing," she continued, "westbound."

Public urination had to mean that Laughlin was dumping something into
the gutters. Just like we thought: the Harbor was dead, now he was
killing the sewers too. The Amazing had to be the Amazing Chinese
Restaurant out in west Brighton. He was heading down Route 9, heading
for Lake Cochituate, for Tech-Dale. Everything between Natick and the
Harbor was going to be antiseptic tonight.

"Can you prove it, Modem Girl?"

"Yup. Losing you, Tainted Meat." And then our transmission got
overwhelmed by a trucker, headed up the Fitzgerald Expressway,
cruising the airwaves for a blowjob.

Boone wrapped up a walkie-talkie in a Hefty bag along with a couple of
Big Macs and a flotation cushion. The two magnets he slung from a belt
around his waist. The cushion balanced out the weight of the magnets
so that he could stay afloat and concentrate on swimming.

With three people and lots of gear, the Zode was near its weight
limit, but fifty horses balanced that nicely. Traveling through the
dark in an open vehicle made me think of biking through Brighton, so I
clicked into my full paranoid mode. Instead of taking a direct route
toward the Basco Explorer, I took us all the way around the south end
of the island, swung a good mile or so out to the east, about halfway
to the big lighthouse at the Harbor's entrance, and approached the
ship from astern.

Boone said something that I couldn't hear fell out of the Zode and
vanished. The boat sped up by a few knots and we just kept going
straight. By now we had nothing to hide, so we just swung right along
the side of the Basco Explorer, checked it out like a couple of Poyzen
fans from Chicopee who'd never seen a freighter before.

It was pretty quiet. Blue light was flickering out of the windows on
the bridge; someone was watching TV, probably the slow-motion replays
of their boss getting chopped in the trachea by Boone. And they
probably didn't realize that the same guy was crawling right up their
asshole at this very moment. We could hear a couple of men talking
above us, standing along the rail.

"Hey! Ahoooy, dude!" Bart shouted, "What's happening?"

I couldn't believe it. "Jesus, Bart! We don't want to talk to these
pricks."

"Boone said we were supposed to create a diversion, didn't you hear
him?" Bart cupped his hands and hollered, "Hey! Anybody up there?" I
slapped my hands over my face and commenced deep breathing. I might
get noticed, but my description didn't match the old S.T. anymore. No
beard, different hair.

The deckhands murmured on for a few seconds, finishing their chat, and
then one leaned over to check us out: a young guy, neither corporate
exec nor ship's officer, just your basic merchant marine, standing on
the rail having a smoke. With the cargo this ship carried, they
probably weren't allowed to smoke below decks.

"Hey! How fast can this thing go?" Bart shouted.

"Ehh, twenty knots on a good day," the sailor said. Classic Jersey
accent.

"What's a knot?"

"It's about a mile."

"So it can go, like, twenty miles in a day? Not very far, man."

My roommate had left me in his dust. I just leaned back and spectated.
Technically he wasn't my roommate anymore, our home had been exploded
by its owner. I guess that meant we were now friends; kind of
terrifying.

"No, no, twenty miles an hour," the sailor explained. "A little more,
actually. Hey. You dudes partyin'?"

Bart was getting ready to say, "Sure!," always his answer to that
question. Then I imagined this sailor asking to go along, and me
spending a couple of hours waiting for them to work their way to the
bottom of that garbage can. So I said, "Naah, the cops came and
started to bust it up, you know."

"Bummer. Hey, you guys know any good bars in this town?"

"Sure," Bart said.

"Are you Irish?" I asked.

"Bohunk," he said.

"No," I said.

"Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check
out your boat?"

"Ship," the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. "I
don't think Skipper'd mind," he concluded. "We're under real tight
security when we get into port. 'Cause of terrorists. But this ain't
in port."

If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this
fashion, I'd have laughed in his face. But that was Bart's magic. The
sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed
up over the gunwhales.

"You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you've got more balls than
I do," I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and
looked mildly bewildered.

The sailor's name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick
orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and
the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic holds.
The whole ship stank of organic solvents.

"Fuckin' water sure stinks tonight," Bart observed. I kicked him in
the left gastrocnemius.

"Yeah, don't ask me about that," Tom said with a kind of shit-eating
chuckle.

After we'd checked out the butt end of the ship, examined the controls
of the big crane, they headed up toward the bow and I couldn't resist
leaning out over the aft rail and trying to nail Boone with a loogie.
He was there, all right, though I wouldn't have seen him if I hadn't
been looking. He was totally black, there weren't any lights back
here, and when he saw someone above him he collapsed against the hull
and froze. I missed by a yard.

I took out a flashlight and shone it over my face for a second. Then I
shone it down on his face. I'd never seen utter, jaw-dropping
amazement on Boone's face before and it was kind of fulfilling. Then I
just turned around and left. He was doing pretty well; he was over
halfway up.

Tom showed us the bridge and the lounge where the rest of the crew was
sitting around watching "Wheel of Fortune" and drinking Rolling Rock.
They all said quick hellos and then went back to watching the tube. We
were in your basic cramped but comfy nautical cabin, with fake-wood
paneling glued up over the steel bulkheads, a semi-installed car
stereo strung out across the shelves, pictures of babes with big tits
on the walls. Up in one corner, a CB radio was roaring and babbling
away for background noise.

We watched the show a little, worked on our beers, exchanged routine
male-bonding dialog about the wild scene on Spectacle Island and the
fact that women were present, some good looking. I let Bart handle
most of that; a cutaway blueprint of the Basco Explorer was tacked up
on the wall and I was trying to memorize its every detail.

The world's strange. You plan something like sneaking onto a ship and
then you get completely paranoid about the chances of being noticed;
you figure watchmen are spaced every twenty feet along the rail. But
hanging out in that cabin, drinking bad beer and watching TV,
surrounded by total darkness outside, I knew these guys never had a
chance of noticing Boone. We might as well have dropped him on the
deck with a helicopter. I just hoped he'd find a nontoxic hideaway.

They say that parents can pick out their babies' cries in the midst of
total pandemonium. Maybe it's true. In Guadalajara, I've seen evidence
to support the notion. Anyway, it seems some of those parental
circuits were wired into my brain, since I caught Debbie's voice right
in that cabin.

My heart was beating so hard it threw me off balance and I had to grab
a bulkhead. I thought she was somewhere on board. I thought they'd
taken her prisoner, then I traced the sound to the CB in the corner.

A powerful transmission was breaking through the clutter. I heard the
sound of an outboard motor, the chuff of waves against a fiberglass
hull and a man's voice, high-pitched and strained: "Explorer . . .
Explorer ... come in." Debbie's voice was in the background, on the
same transmission. I couldn't make it all out, but she was issuing
some kind of death threat, and she was scared.

I took a swig of Guinness to relax, breathed deep and said, "Hey, I
think someone's calling you."

That brought the skipper awake. He was a gleeful, potato-faced
Irishman who'd been lying on a naugahyde bench, dozing through the
tail end of a rough thirty-six hours, probably having been called out
of a bar in Jersey to make an emergency run to Boston. He ambled over
and picked up the mike. "Explorer."

On the other end, a new voice had taken over. "It's Laughlin. We're
coming in," he said, loud and tense and dominating.

"Dogfuckers!" Debbie called in the background.

Withering disgust passed over the skipper's face; he wasn't in control
of his own ship. The world's biggest asshole was running the show.
"We're still out here," he said.

The crewmen turned away from the TV and laughed.

"We have some special cargo to bring on board and we need to do it
quickly and quietly," Laughlin said, "we'll probably need a crane and
a net."

I tried to think of nonviolent ways to torture Laughlin to death.

"I think you guys better go," Tom said.

"That's okay, I feel kind of sick anyway," I said.

Bart shrugged, clueless but cooperative. We cleared out. I remembered
to turn around at the last minute and check the channel they were
using on the CB: Eleven.

On the ladder, I was ready to jump into the water to get there faster.
Then I thought about what was being pumped out underneath us. If they
were unloading enough poison to kill every bug in the Harbor, it must
be incredibly concentrated in the vicinity of the ship. So I took the
slow way down; when you're in a hurry, it takes a hell of a long time
to descend a rope ladder. But by the time Bart got to the bottom I'd
started the motor; by the time Tom had leaned over the rail to wave
good-bye to us, we were a hundred feet away, invisible, picking up
speed.

Next challenge: picking out the boat where Debbie was being held. The
obvious thing was to hang around the Basco Explorer and wait. Then I
got to thinking: what if Laughlin changed his mind and decided to dump
her in the Harbor? I picked up our walkie-talkie to listen, then
realized it didn't even receive channel eleven.

They had to be coming from the mainland. We knew they'd been beaching
their boats somewhere along Dorchester Bay. That still left us with a
lot of water to cover, but with the fifty-horse motor, this Zodiac
absolutely kicked ass. I cranked it up and headed for Southie in a
broad zigzag. I told Bart what we were looking for: a Boston Whaler
ferrying Debbie and a pack of goons.

The bastards weren't using their running lights; we almost ran right
over them. Bart noticed it first and grabbed my arm and then I saw the
side of the boat, white fiberglass with a harpoon logo, right in our
path. Jerked the motor to one side, came very close to capsizing the
Zode, and blew a twenty-foot rooster tail of toxic brine over their
transom.

When I brought it around I was expecting them to be blasting out of
there, trying to get away from us - make my day, Laughlin - but they
were dead in the water, rooting around for flashlights. Bart speared a
beam into the Whaler and blinded some goons, but we saw no signs of
Debbie. She must have seen us, and jumped out, and now she couldn't
call out for help because they'd hear her too. Either that, or her
head wasn't above water.

I picked up a flotation cushion and frisbeed it back into her general
location, then picked a different place and waved the flashlight.
"She's over there!" I shouted, loud enough to be heard, cranked the
Zode and headed out into the middle of nowhere. Within seconds I heard
them behind me. I brought the Zode around to a stop and aimed the
light into the water again as they headed toward us with all the
horsepower they had.

When I knew they were going to overshoot, I twitched the throttle
again and blew out of their path, spun the boat and returned to where
I'd thrown out the cushion.

It was still there, bobbing up and down on the clashing wakes of the
boats, and Debbie was clinging to it.

Laughlin didn't have a chance. Debbie only weighed a hundred pounds
and we had two scared-shitless men to haul her into the boat. We
hardly even had to slow down. Then we were plowing a trench in the
murdered Harbor, heading for the lights.

 


 

35

BEHIND US WE HEARD the asshole emptying his fat chrome revolver in
frustration - kablam kablam kablam.

Debbie was writhing around in Bart's arms. I wanted to take his place
pretty badly, but if he took mine at the tiller we'd all be swimming
within a couple of seconds. She managed to get her face aimed over the
side of the boat and then vomited a couple of times. Probably
swallowed some brine when she jumped overboard.

When she rolled over on her back, her wrists glinted, and I realized
that Laughlin had handcuffed her. I could feel my balls contract up
into my body and then everything went black. It's possible to go into
a drunken rage without even being drunk; it's possible to black out on
emotion. I just sat there, hunched over like The Thinker, not looking
where I was taking us. And I didn't even pay attention to Debbie,
which is what I really should have done. This wasn't for her benefit,
unfortunately, it was for mine. Thank God the gun was empty, because I
was ready to go back, before Laughlin had time to reload, and make the
front page of the Herald: FOUR DIE IN HARBOR BLOODBATH.

Things got a little confusing. Debbie was leaning back between my
thighs and I was kissing her. Bart was reaching out from time to time,
grabbing my arm, steadying the course. I didn't even know where we
were going; certainly not to U. Mass-Boston, which is where we were
headed. We decided to aim for the skyscrapers, maybe to the Aquarium
docks. The people at the Aquarium needed to be warned anyway, since a
lot of their fish breathed water from the Harbor.

"They loaded those drums onto vans," Debbie was saying. It seemed like
she wasn't pissed at all about being kidnapped, handcuffed and almost
killed. She was totally calm. Of course she was totally calm; she'd
made it, she'd survived. "I followed one of the vans out west, across
Roxbury and Brookline and Newton. Every so often they'd stop along the
gutter. I figured out they were dumping into the sewers. The vans had
pipes or something that dumped the wastes out the bottom."

"Did you get..."

"Yeah, I got samples. Scraped them up out of the gutter. Real
bad-smelling stuff. Of course they've got 'em now. The camera too."

"How did they catch you?"

"The car phone rang. Stopped by the curb for a few minutes to talk and
they came from behind and got me with guns."

For a minute I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard.
"Who the hell was it from? You should've told them to call you back."

"Couldn't. It was from Wyman."

"Wyman? What did that silly fuck want?"

"He was tipping us off. He says Smimoff is going to do something
tonight."

"Oh, shit."

"Going to blow up a big ship in Everett. He's got some plastic
explosive."

"A Basco ship?"

"Yeah."

Water was streaming down her face, though by now she should have been
wind-dried. She was sweating and shivering at the same time. In the
dim, grey light coming off the city, I could see a trail of saliva
roll out the corner of her mouth and down toward her ear.

"He's got a navy demolition man," she chattered.

"Debbie," I said, "did you swallow any of that water?"

She didn't answer.

"I love you, Debbie," I said, because it might be the last thing she'd
ever hear.

We weren't going especially fast. I cranked the throttle back up and
asked Bart to put some fingers down her throat. It wasn't necessary,
though, because she was vomiting on her own. By the time we were in
the Charles River Locks, north of downtown, the odor of shit and urine
had mixed with the vomit and the bile, and her wrists were bleeding
because she was convulsing in her handcuffs.

The Zode got us to within a couple hundred feet of the best hospital
in the world, and then I put her over my shoulders in a fireman's
carry and ran with her. Bart ran out onto Storrow Drive and stopped
traffic for me. The Emergency Room doors were approaching, a rectangle
of cool bluish light, and finally they sensed my presence and slid
open.

The waiting room was full. All the benches and most of the floor were
infested with dustheads, half handcuffed, half in convulsions. Someone
had been handing out bad chowder at the Poyzen Boyzen concert.

This was no good. Debbie's nervous system was completely shorted out;
she was thrashing so hard, like a woman possessed by Ashtoreth, that
together Bart and I could hardly hold her.

"Organophosphate poisoning," I shouted. "Cholinesterase inhibitor."

"Drug related," said the nickel-plated nurse receptionist. "You'll
have to wait your turn," she continued, as we blew past her and into
the corridor.

We hauled Debbie from room to room, chased by a cortege of nurses and
security guards, until I found the right one and kicked the door open.

Dr. J. turned around and was amazed. "Alright, S.T.! You have a new
look! Thanks for coming around, man! I'm kind of busy now but ..."

"Jerry! Atropine! Now!" I screamed. And being Dr. J., he had a syringe
of atropine going into her arm within, maybe, fifteen seconds. And
Debbie just deflated. We laid her out on the linoleum because a
two-hundred-fifty pound Poyzen Boyzen fan was strapped to the table.
Dr. J. began to check her signs. A lynch mob of ER nurses had gathered
in the hallway.

"SLUD," Dr. J. said.

"What?"

"SLUD. Salivation, Lachrymation, Urination, and Defecation. The
symptoms of a cholinesterase inhibitor. What, S.T., are you handling
nerve gas now? Working for, like, the Iraqis or something?"

"These guys make the Iraqis look like fucking John Denver," I said.

"Well, that's a real drag. But your friend is going to be physically
okay."

"Physically?"

"We have to check her brain functions," he said. "So I'm going to get
a consult on this."

Pretty soon they brought a gurney and hauled her away to someplace I
couldn't go. "We'll get word on this pretty soon," Dr. J. said, "so
just chill out for a little."

He turned back to the Poyzen Boyzen on the table. Despite his size and
PCP overdose, he'd been pretty quiet. Mostly because he was strapped
down with six-point leather restraints. Not that he didn't want to
kill us.

"Hey, check it out!" Dr. J. was pulling some slips of paper out of the
guy's studded vest. "Tickets to a private party, man! Or ticket stubs,
I should say. Up in Saugus. There's three of them. Hey, I'm off in
fifteen minutes, let's check it out."

The patient protested the only way he could, by arching his back and
slamming his ass into the table over and over again.

"I'll bet his old lady's still up there. Hey, I'll bet she's cute!"

The guy figured out how to use his vocal cords at some preverbal level
and Dr. J. had to shout to be heard.

"Jeez, can you believe I already gave this guy twenty-five mils of
Haldol? PCP is amazing stuff, man!"

"Dr. J.!" a nurse was screaming. "We have other patients!"

"His keychain's right there, man," Dr. ]. said, nodding to a big wad
of chain hanging out of the guy's pocket. "Grab it and we can fuck
around with his Harley."

This room was so loud that we fled into the hallway. "I hate these
dusters," Dr. J. said.

A nurse was bearing down on me with a clipboard. I got to thinking
about the bureaucratic problems that might arise. Which form do you
fill out when a dead terrorist brings a handcuffed, SLUDing
organophosphate victim in off the street? How many hours were we going
to spend plowing through this question if I stuck around? So I didn't
stick around. I told them Debbie had a Blue Cross card in her wallet,
and then I split. Once we were a safe distance away, I called Tanya
and told her to spread the word: Debbie was in the hospital and she
could probably use some visitors. And some bodyguards.

Then I hung up. Bart and I were standing in the parking lot of the
Charles River Shopping Center at three in the morning, in the Hub of
the Universe, surrounded on all sides by toxic water. Boone was on a
ship that was probably headed for Everett right now. When it got
there, my favorite environmentalist, Smirnoff, was going to blow it
up. Laughlin and the other bad guys would die. That was good. Our
sailor friend, the skipper and Boone would probably die too, though.
And the evidence we wanted so badly, the tank full of concentrated
organophosphates down in the belly of the ship, would become shrapnel.
The PCB bugs would be gone from the Harbor, with no way to trace them
back to Basco. Pleshy would become president of the United States and
eight-year-old schoolchildren would write him letters. My aunt would
tell me what a great man he was and military bands would precede him
everywhere. And, what really hurt: Hoa would say, well, maybe Canada
needs some Vietnamese restaurants.

At least that's the way it seemed right then. I might have stretched a
few things, but one thing was for damn sure: we had to stop Smimoff.

"Is this what they call being a workaholic?" I muttered as we jogged
through the North End, heading for Bart's van, chewing on some
benzedrine capsules. "I mean, any decent human should be sitting by
Debbie's bed, holding her hand when she wakes up."

"Hum," Bart said.

"I would give anything to kiss her right now. Instead, she's going to
wake up and say, 'Where is that fucker who claims he loves me?' I'm
out working, that's where I am. I've been working for, what,
ninety-six hours straight?"

"Forty-eight, maybe."

"And can I take time out to hold the hand of a sick woman? No. This is
workaholism."

"Pretty soon the speed'll kick in," Bart explained, "and you'll feel
better."

We found the van where he'd left it, but someone had broken in and
ripped off the stereo and the battery. He'd parked on a flat space by
the waterfront so I got to push-start it. That was fun. The speed
helped there. "I wish we had the stereo," he said.

We headed south along Commercial street, running along all the piers,
and when we looked to the east we could see the Basco Explorer
churning its way northward, blending the poison into the Harbor with
its screws. A major crime was taking place right out there, in full
view of every downtown building, and there wasn't a single witness.
Toxic criminals have it easy.

Eventually we got ourselves to Rory Gallagher's house in Southie. He
was back from the hospital now, healthy enough to threaten us with
physical harm for coming around at this time of night. We got him
calmed down and asked him how we could get in touch with the other
Gallaghers, the Charlestown branch of the family.

Here's the part where I could cast racial aspersions on the Irish and
say that they have a natural fondness for acts of terrorism. I won't
go that far. It's fairer to say that a lot of people have fucked them
over and they don't take it kindly. Gallagher, he loved Kennedy and he
loved Tip, but he'd always suspected Pleshy, who was a Brahmin, who
pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I
told Rory how Basco and Pleshy - to him they were a single unit - had
poisoned his body and many others, he turned completely red and
responded just the right way. He responded as though he'd been raped.

"But we've pushed them," I explained, "pushed and pushed them and made
them desperate, forced them into bigger crimes to cover up the old
ones. That's why we need your brother."

So we got Joe on the phone. I let Rory argue with him for a while, so
he'd be fully awake when I started my pitch. Then I just confiscated
the telephone. "Joseph."

"Mr. Taylor."

"Remember all that garbage your grandpa dumped into the Harbor?"

"I don't want to hear any shit about that at this time of the
morning...."

"Wake up, Joe. It's Yom Kippur, dude. The Day of Atonement is here."

I knew Rory's phone wasn't bugged, so we made all kinds of calls. We
called an Aquarium person I knew and gave her the toxic Paul Revere.
Called all the media people whose numbers I could remember, yanked
them right out of bed. Called Dr. J. for an update on Debbie; she was
doing okay. The Gallaghers made a couple of calls and inadvertently
mobilized about half of the self-righteous anger in all of Southie and
half of Charlestown. When we walked out Gallagher's front door to get
back in Bart's van, we found, waiting in the front yard, a priest with
chloracne, a fire engine, a minicam crew and five adolescents with
baseball bats.

We borrowed a car battery from one of the adolescents and drove
crosstown toward Cambridge, taking the two largest adolescents with
us. Along the way, I gave Bart a brief lesson in how to run a Zodiac -
one of the Townies kept saying "I know, I know" - and then dropped
them all off on the Esplanade near Mass General.

Then I took the van to GEE headquarters. Gomez's Impala was there, and
I met him in the stairway. "Thanks for the warning," I said. I'd had
plenty of time to think about that voice on my answering machine -
"your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"They probably came on to you real nice," I said. "Laughin seemed so
decent. All they wanted was information. They'd never hurt anyone."

"Fuck that, man, you cost me a job. I just didn't want to see you get
killed."

"We should talk later, Gomez. Right now I have business, and I don't
want you to know anything about it." "I'm out of here."

He left, and I stood there in the dark until I heard his Impala start
up and drive away.

Now was the time to use the most awesome weapon in my arsenal, a force
so powerful I'd never dreamed of bringing it out. Locked up in a
cheap, sheet-metal safe in my office, to which I alone had the
combination, were a dozen bottles filled with 99% pure, 1,4-diamino
butane. The stench of death itself distilled and concentrated through
the magic of chemistry.

During the drive here I'd started to wonder whether this was a good
idea, whether this stuff was as bad as I'd built it up to be in my
mind. All doubt was removed when I opened the safe door. None of the
bottles had leaked, but when I'd filled them, a month ago, I'd
unavoidably smeared a few droplets on the lids, and all those
putrescine molecules had been bouncing around inside of the safe ever
since, looking for some nostrils to climb up. When they climbed up
mine, I knew that this was a good plan.

I put the bottles into a box. I took my time about it and packed
crumpled newspapers around the glass. Plastic would have been safer
but the stuff would have diffused through the walls.

Then I grabbed my scuba gear. This was going to involve underwater
work and, once the putrescine escaped, I'd need bottled air anyway. I
got the Darth Vader Suit. I stole someone's SoHo root beer from the
fridge and chugged the whole bottle. It was made from all natural
ingredients.

 


 

36

JUST ON A HUNCH, I took the long way around to Basco. Hopped the I up
into Chelsea and then peeled off on the Revere Beach Parkway, which
runs west through the heart of Everett and just south of Basco's
kingdom. When I saw the Everett River Bridge coming up, I slowed down
a little and flicked on the high beams.

An abandoned van was sitting on the shoulder of the high-way - deja vu
- in exactly the same place where Gomez and I had stripped our old van
after Wyman, the wacky terrorist, had left it there.

From here, you could get on the freeway, or you could slog across some
toxic mudflats and boltcut your way onto Basco property, or you could
go fifty feet up the shoulder, disappear under the bridge and mount an
amphibian operation upstream into Basco's docking facilities. I could
look straight across the flats from here and into the bridge of the
Basco Explorer, now nestled into place in the shadow of the main
plant. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. Park a van on the
shoulder here and you had a command outpost for any kind of attack on
Basco.

What had Wyman been up to when he'd trashed our last van here? Was it
a dress rehearsal, or a failed operation? Or had it been a real
accident, one that had planted the seed of this idea to begin with?

I sure as hell wasn't going to park here. Didn't even slow down. I
drove the van across the bridge until I was out of sight of Basco,
parked it on the shoulder and slogged down to the riverside under the
bridge, carrying half my weight in various pieces of crap. Bart and
his Townie friends were already there, smoking a reefer. They'd been
joined by a couple of black derelicts who evidently lived here. Bart
had fed them all of our Big Macs.

"Haven't you heard, man?" I said, "Just say no!" They were startled.
Pot always made me more paranoid than I was to begin with; I couldn't
understand how they'd want to smoke it here and now.

"Want a hit?" Bart croaked, waving the reefer around and trying to
talk while holding his breath.

"See any action?" I asked.

"Big fuck-up over there," Bart said, waving in the direction of the
flats. "Bunch of cop cars showed up and arrested some guys. Then one
of them got stuck in the mud."

"It was great," one of the derelicts said. "They had to ask the
prisoners to get out so they could push it out of the shit."

"So," Bart said, "I guess we don't have to worry about this Smirnoff
dude any more."

"That was a diversion," I said. "Smirnoff's a jackass, but he's not
stupid. He sent some people in through the obvious route, with
boltcutters. Ten to one they're unarmed and they'll get popped for
trespass. Meanwhile he's got a diver somewhere in this river with the
real package. A navy veteran."

I wondered if the guy was an ex-SEAL. That would be great. What were
my odds in man-to-man underwater combat in a dark sea of nerve gas
with a SEAL? The only option was just to avoid the diver, find the
mine and disconnect it. If Smirnoff had really rigged it up out of
plastique, it had to be something pretty simple and obvious, probably
timed with a Smurf wristwatch. Bart had brought the toolbox from his
van and I grabbed wirecutters and a prybar.

"Did you get ahold of Boone?" I said, nodding at the walkie-talkie.

"Tried. Put out a call for Winchester, like you said, but no answer."

"That's okay. He'll figure it out. Too risky to talk on the radio
anyway." I set down the box of putrescine and lifted the lid. "This is
the bad stuff."

Two bottles went into my goody bag and the rest into the Zodiac. We
all squatted together on the riverbank and went over it one last time,
and then I made myself incommunicado by turning on the air valve and
strapping my head into the Darth Vader mask. Everyone watched this
carefully; one of the derelicts' lips moved and then I could feel them
all laughing. I waded into the river.

First I swam across and checked out the opposite bank. Definite tracks
in the muck here. Big, triangular, flipper-shaped tracks. I started
swimming toward the Basco Explorer.

Technically I was swimming upstream here, but the speed of the current
was zero. There had been a mild smell of the poison, not nearly as bad
as earlier tonight. But I had to figure they were poisoning this river
too, since it led straight to Basco Central and they wouldn't want any
trail of PCB bugs leading in here from the Harbor.

Sometimes I couldn't believe the shit I did for this job. But if I
could pull something off here, I'd have a good excuse for taking a
couple of days off. Debbie and I could climb into a waterbed somewhere
and recuperate together, not get out of bed for about a week. If she'd
have me. Go out to Buffalo, maybe, get back into that honeymoon suite,
buy a shitload of donuts and a Sunday L.A. Times...

About ten seconds of those thoughts and I had got an erection and felt
really drowsy and stupid. Hadn't taken enough speed. I checked the
valve on the tank to make sure I was getting plenty of oxygen. Oxygen,
oxygen, the ultimate addiction, better even than nitrous oxide.
Tonight I needed lots. Had to keep alert, had to watch out for that
SEAL. But it was such a boring trip, swimming through blackness and
murk without a light. Easy to get scared, natural to fall into
paranoia and despair. Every so often I broke the surface to check my
direction and to see how close I was to the prow of the Basco
Explorer. At first it was too far away, then, suddenly, it was much
too close.

If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right
under the big diesels, amidships. Even if it didn't sink the ship,
this would do the most damage.

The docking facilities here weren't huge. Basco owned the end of the
Everett River. That's how rivers worked around Boston Harbor - ran
inland for a mile and then just ceased to exist, fed underground by
sewers and culverts. Basco surrounded the river in a U shape. On one
side of it they had a pier, and the other side was just undeveloped,
basically a siding for a railway spur that ran up into Everett. If
they had guards, they'd be on the side with the pier. So I stayed on
the right, the eastern half of the river, and started to slide on up
the hull of the Basco Explorer.

For the first few yards, feeling my way over the sonar dome at the
bottom of the prow, I had my head above water. Then I had to face the
fact that if I stayed up here, the SEAL could come from below and gut
me like a tuna. Either way, I was in his element. But if I tried to be
half-assed about it, I was in double trouble.

So I dove. I swam straight down to the bottom, which was only about
ten feet below the bottom of the Basco Explorer's hull. I could almost
stand on the bottom and touch the ship with one outstretched hand.
They'd probably dredged this channel out to the Explorer's dimensions.

Then I realized that we were dealing with small volumes of water. I
was used to the open Harbor. This was a lot more claustrophobic. I was
in a space about the size of a couple of mobile homes, and if the SEAL
was still here, he was sharing my space.

The water transmitted a powerful metallic clang. Impossible to tell
direction, but obviously something had struck the ship's hull.
Possibly the magnets on Smirnoff's mine. If I hunkered down, pretended
to be a chunk of toxic waste and waited, the diver would swim away and
I could clip the wires. But I wondered: what was the time delay on the
sucker? It had to be fairly long. The diver had to get away, the
water-hammer effect could kill you from a distance. This was
reassuring.

From using up the compressed air, I'd become slightly buoyant, a
little lighter than the water, and it was hard to stay on the bottom.
So I relaxed and let myself float upwards until I was spread-eagled
against "the bottom of the hull, facing down. I made sure I was a
little east of the keel, so my bubbles skimmed off to the right,
following the ship's curve, and came out on the unwatched side.

Another clang, very close, so close that I felt the vibrations through
my tank and into my back. Then there was a light, coming toward me.
You couldn't see a light more than a few feet in this shitty water.
Then the light disappeared. Whoever owned it had shut it off.

Then another damn light, in front of and below me, almost on the
bottom, cut into thick rays of shadow by the limbs of a diver.

Two divers. One swimming up where I was, his tank clanging against the
hull. The second, the one with the light, heavier, using his weight to
kick his way along the bottom. The one at my level had shut off his
light so he couldn't be seen. The other was chasing him.

The prey almost got face-to-face with me and our masks looked at each
other for just a second, amazed. He was wearing an underwater
moonsuit, like mine, made for diving in a toxic environment.

Why? Smirnoff wouldn't know about the poison coming out of the Basco
Explorer. He'd been planning this action for months. But this diver
knew about it. Working for Basco?

He sank away from me because the other diver, below him, had grabbed
him by the ankle and was pulling him down. He was kicking and
thrashing but that's hard when you're underwater, and maybe a little
tired of running. Steel glinted, and then the light was shining
through a crimson thunderhead.

What was I going to do? All I could hope was that this killer with the
knife hadn't seen me. I wasn't about to out swim him. If one of these
guys was a SEAL, I had to figure it was the live one.

The light had gotten kicked by the victim, flailing around in his own
blood, and the beam was slowly rotating as it sank. It spun by the
killer's head and I saw a bare white face, long brown hair, blue eyes.

Tom Akers was working for Smirnoff. Which meant the dead guy was
Basco's. So maybe Tom wouldn't decide to cut me up. I pushed off
against the hull and began sinking down into his level. He grabbed the
light and nailed me with the beam, paralyzing me, getting a look at
who I was. It was all up to him.

Through my eyelids I saw the light diminish as he pointed it somewhere
else. When I could see again, I wished I couldn't. Tom was curled into
a fetal position in the water, vomiting, groping around for his
mouthpiece.

I was able to get over to him and shove the mouthpiece toward him
again, but he just shot it out on a yellow jet of bile. SLUD. He was
quivering in my arms and I saw him suck in a big bellyful of that
awful black water and swallow it down. Then he looked up into my eyes
- his pupils were dilated so there wasn't any iris left - and held up
two fingers. Which could have meant two, or peace, or victory.

By the time I'd wrestled him up to the east side of the ship, he was
dead. I left him bobbing there, face down, and swam back underneath to
look for the mine.

And I found it - it was easy to look when I didn't have to worry about
other divers - but it wasn't what I was looking for. This was a real
mine, not a homemade one. An honest-to-god chunk of official U.S. Navy
ordnance, stuck to the bottom of the hull, not exactly in the right
place, a dozen yards forward of the engine room.

Maybe Tom had been trying to tell me there were two mines. That would
make sense. Two divers, two mines. I swam back and found another one
under the engine room, this one made from the bottom of a plastic
garbage can and a couple of big old industrial magnets.

To pry it off and find the wires leading to the digital timer was easy
enough. I clipped them off with the wirecutter and let this piece of
junk sink to the bottom.

Now for the second. I swam back for a closer look and noticed a new
fact: it was right in between a couple of vents in the bottom of the
hull. Probably vents for toxic waste. This mine had been planted by a
Basco diver, in protective gear because he knew the water was
poisoned. They were sending their evidence to the bottom.

Laughlin was a goddamn evil genius. Poison the Harbor, kill the bugs,
blow up the evidence, get rid of a rusty old tank, collect the
insurance, blame it on wicked terrorists.

I tried to yank it off, but it wasn't going to come peacefully. Its
magnets were bigger and more powerful than Smirnoff's. Bart's prybar
got under it, but as Archimedes pointed out, the lever's no good
without a place to stand. I had to invert myself and put my feet
against the bottom of the hull. There were three divers down here
tonight - The Three Stooges Stop Pollution - two of us were dead, and
that left me to handle the slapstick comedy. That's probably what it
looked like. But eventually the mine came loose and dropped to the
bottom.

Next question: how much damage could it do from there? As my last
major suicide attempt of the night, I swam down there and dragged it
across the bottom until it was off to the side, maybe forty feet away
from the ship. If it went off there, that was just too bad. The Bosco
Explorer would just have to take it like the sturdy old bucket she
was.

When I paddled wearily away from that mine, I allowed myself to hear
again, and what I heard was diesels. Immense diesels. Didn't need to
break the water to know what it was. I swam under the ship, emerged
under the Basco pier, climbed up a ways into the pilings, and lobbed
one bottle of putrescine up there.

Bart's signal was the sound of projectile vomiting from the security
guards on the pier. He came in fast and loud on the Zodiac, kept the
Basco Explorer between him and the guards, and got his assistants to
lob the rest of the putrescine up onto the ship. He was pretty good at
this; maybe GEE should hire him as my replacement.

I'd always wanted to bomb a toxic waste ship, or a factory, with this
stuff. If you really soaked it, the target would become worthless.
You'd have to tow it out to sea and burn every last bit. That was
going to be the Basco Explorer's fate, but not immediately.

All I could see was the side of the ship and the underside of the
decking on the pier. I had to follow the action by noises. An awesome
mixture of putrescine and vomit was dripping down through the cracks,
raining down around me, and about the time Bart and company made their
attack, I could hear some thudding and clomping as one of the guards
staggered off the pier in the direction of an adjacent building.

There were guards on deck, too, and they didn't last long. The trick
was going to be getting the putrescine below-decks. The crew was
probably out carousing somewhere, but Laughlin might be downstairs
arranging the evidence.

An alarm bell went off. The guards were asking for help. It was time
to get the hell out of here. I'd already kicked off my flippers and
now I worked my way over to a ladder and climbed up to where I could
look out over the surface of the pier.

Three of the guards were doubled over on their sides, writhing around.

Did this count as violence? Assaulting the senses with something
unendurably disgusting?

How about the strobe light on top of the U-Haul, back there in
Buffalo? Same deal. A bunch of security guards had been assigned to
look out for us and we had made life miserable for them.

I guess it all came under the heading of "obnoxious behavior, creative
forms of." One of these days I'd have to work it all out. Someday,
when I had a little free time.

It seemed like these guys weren't going to be shooting at me, but to
make sure I picked up their submachine guns. They looked like Bart's
UZI-replica water pistols but they were much heavier. I spun them off
into the river. Then I ran for the gangplank, carrying my last bottle
of putrescine like a grenade. "Gangplank" is a primitive word; it was
an aluminum footbridge, complete with safety railings and a nonslip
surface. And I was right in the middle of it when the hatch opened up,
right in front of me, and Laughlin stepped out.

The jumbo chrome-plated revolver - the one he'd bought to protect
himself from terrorists - looked a little tacky so close to his gold
Rolex, but that's in the nature of a revolver. He was carrying a
briefcase in his other hand, an executive to the fucking end. And when
he saw me blocking the gangplank, he did a funny thing. He held it up
between me and him, like a shield, and peeked at me over the top. I
got a couple of steps closer. Then he dropped the briefcase.

Which didn't help me a bit. I wasn't here to subpoena the bastard. I
kept moving, trying to decide when I was going to chicken out and jump
off into the water.

Movement on a ship ain't easy. The stairs are narrowed and steep, the
hatches weigh a lot and you have to step over a big ledge when you go
through them. Laughlin was centered in the hatchway, but his right
shoulder, the one attached to the revolver, was interfered with by the
doorframe. When he tried to bring his arm up, he twitched against the
trigger - already had the thing cocked, the guy was a born killer -
and fired off a shot underneath the pier.

I wound up and tossed a kind of weak Bob Stanley palm-ball in the
general direction of his face. The jar described a neat stinky
parabola through space, bounced off the top of his head and exploded
behind him. He fired again and drilled a hole in the Basco factory. I
was scared enough to fall down on my face. Hard to run with an oxygen
tank on your back, damn hard.

He had to be wading through a putrescine sea by now anyway, but he
didn't notice. A good yuppie has no sense of smell. Laughlin's next
shot hit a railing support right next to me and drilled a few metal
splinters in my direction. Some of them stuck in my flesh and one
shattered the face plate on my Darth Vader mask. Laughlin closed in
for a closer shot, made the mistake of stepping through the hatchway
and then Boone nailed him in the ear with the output of a CO2 fire
extinguisher.

I fucked up my hand trying to rip all those little triangles of glass
out of my facemask. Managed to smear a nice gob of blood and
putrescine directly on the bridge of my nose. I could still breathe
bottled air, fortunately.

Several barfing blue-collar gnomes came up from below, stumbled over
the writhing Laughlin and headed toward me, which is to say they tried
to get the fuck out of there. Boone had grabbed Laughlin's revolver
and that scared the shit out of them.

I grabbed the mask and pulled it away from my mouth.

"Take him!" I shouted, pointing at Laughlin. "Get that nicker out of
here. Take him with you."

If we stole the ship with them on board, it'd be kidnapping: a serious
charge. We had to get Laughlin off. But if we dragged him off, that
might be kidnapping too.

They grabbed Laughlin and dragged him down the gangplank. The ship was
empty. Boone had put on an oxygen mask, he'd stolen from a fire box
somewhere.

He was pointing at Laughlin's briefcase. He gave it a kick so it slid
a few feet away, then brought the revolver down and fired at it. The
bullet dug a crater in the fine Moroccan leather, then stopped.
Kevlar-lined. Anti-terrorist luggage for the paranoid executive.

For the first time, I got a chance to look down the river, toward the
Mystic River and the open sea. The megatug, Extra Stout, was crawling
toward us through the blue predawn light, looking like a power plant
on a toboggan, plugging the entire river, kicking out a galaxy of
black smoke. It was atonement time for Clan Gallagher. 21,000 horses
of Irish diesel proceeded ass-backwards, shaking the earth and the
water, rattling the windows of the factory. It almost drowned out the
meaty splash made when we deposited the gangplank into the Everett
River.

We had to get this damn ship disconnected from the pier. That was the
whole objective. It was connected by a bow line, a stem line, and two
spring lines: four lines. Something big and heavy slapped into my
hand. Boone had gotten me a fire ax. He had one of his own.

"This is your only warning," said a voice over some loudspeakers. "Put
your hands in the air now or we will be forced to shoot."

One warning. I was guessing we could each take out a rope during the
one warning. We headed for the stern. There were two ropes attached to
bitts back there.

Ever chop wood? Sometimes if you flail away in a panic, you don't get
anywhere, but two or three solid chops will do the job. I used both
techniques on the spring line, and I didn't chop it through, but I
reduced it to a few shreds of yam that could be relied on to break.
Boone severed the stern line in about four strokes.

The guys with the guns had a basic problem here. The deck was a few
feet higher than the pier. If we stayed on our bellies, they couldn't
see us. So we spent the rest of the gig on our stomachs.

Boone had less stomach than I did, and he knew how to do this GI
crawl, so he traveled about twice as fast as me. He ripped off the
oxygen mask and splashed it.

By the time I made it to the other end, pushing Laughlin's briefcase
in front of me, Boone was way out on the prow, feeding a rope down
through one of the hawse-holes, the tunnels that the anchor chains
passed through. Bart was down below us on the Zodiac, waiting. He was
going to take it out to Extra Stout, now about fifty feet away; they'd
attach it to a hawser, and we'd haul that up here and attach it to the
Bosco Explorer. I was several yards behind Boone, my Swiss Army knife
deployed, sawing through the bow lines strand by strand.

I was lying on the deck with my head sideways, and I noticed that I
could see a Basco water tower a thousand feet away. And I could see
some guys climbing up there. Guys with guns. Three of them.

Something whizzed over our heads and we heard a distant
crack-crack-crack.

"M-16s," Boone said, "or AR-15s, actually."

I slid the briefcase over to him. "I'm done with my part," he
explained, and kicked it back to me.

Sawdust flew and a narrow trench appeared in the deck about four feet
away from me. At this range, the rounds from the rifles had picked up
a vicious tumbling action that would cause them to chew around inside
your body like some kind of parasite from outer space.

My air tank exploded and I felt myself being stabbed in the back.
There was continuing noise; I was hollering but that wasn't just me.
It was the Extra Stout's boathorn, giving us the signal to pull. Boone
was going to need help so I got the briefcase in between my face and
the water tower and crawled forward, toward the hawse-hole.

I found the rope and started pulling on it. Boone didn't seem to be
helping any. There was a lot of slack and then it started pulling
back.

Joe Gallagher had told me to look for the towing bitts - sturdy posts
sticking out of the deck. If I looped the hawser onto anything else,
the Extra Stout would just rip it loose. I found the bitts and rolled
their way, trying to keep that briefcase with me, hauling on that
rope. If I kept hauling, I'd find Gallagher's hawser. A Kevlar towing
line. Kevlar - a wonder material, doubly useful tonight. A product of
America's chemical industry. Helping to keep our nation strong. But it
was heavy. I put a turn of the rope around the bitt so that it
wouldn't slide back on me, and kept pulling on the fucker.

The briefcase jumped into the air as it soaked up a few high-velocity
rounds and landed on the deck, out of my reach. I was judging the
distance to it when everything was drowned out by sound and light.
Maybe they'd thrown up some star flares and started artillery
bombardment. This was deep-shit industrial noise, loud enough to cause
kidney failure, and fulgurating light, brighter than the sun.

Time to surrender. I scooted away from the cleat, waving my hands. I
writhed loose from the remains of the air tank, but it still felt like
someone was standing on my back in hockey skates. That allowed me to
roll over, belly up like every fish in the Harbor, and stare into the
unpolluted heavens. But there was something in the way. Fifty feet
above me, a symbolic eyeball looked down from a halogen tornado: a
chopper from CBS News.

They wouldn't blow us away on national TV, would they? Highly
mediapathic. If they were still shooting, they were missing. I started
pulling on the rope again. Boone wasn't helping me because he'd been
pretty badly shot.

It went on forever. CBS News would have to edit. The viewing public
was sitting around and watching as I endlessly hauled on a fucking
rope. On and on and on. CBS watched, the snipers and the guards
watched, Gallagher's crew watched, Boone kind of watched through
unblinking eyes. No one said anything.

And finally I was holding a big, fat eye splice in my hands, a loop at
the end of the Kevlar line, thick as my wrist. The end of the rope.
The one that's supposed to go over the bitt. Sailors call it the
bitter end. So I tossed it over the bitt, crawled way up to the prow,
pulled myself up to my knees, and gave the Extra Stout the thumbs up.

The navy mine exploded and sent up a waterspout and a shock wave that
nearly swatted the chopper out of the air. Pretty soon the ship
started to list - or was that me? I looked up to wave goodbye to the
snipers, but the water tower wasn't there anymore. The Everett River
Bridge was above me. The derelicts were down there raising a couple of
McDonald's pseudoshakes, toasting my health, cheering me on. Brothers
in arms.

 


 

37

JOE GALLAGHER HAULED US DOWN the river into a sprawling media dawn.
Everyone had come out. Tanya was the first on board; she and Bart
climbed up on top of the bridge and hoisted the Toxic Jolly Roger.
Tanya was perfect because she was a victim, she knew some things about
chemistry, and she was pissed. The putrescine was a definite problem,
but journalists who knew how to hold their noses could get down into
the belly of the Basco Explorer and find incredible things.

It was all tremendously illegal, the evidence would have been useless
in court - if we had been cops. We weren't. And if a noncop gets some
evidence, even through a criminal act, you can use it to prosecute.

Of course, even when you have legally correct evidence, corporations
rarely suffer in this country. Look at any big government contractor
for the Pentagon or NASA. They can get away with murder.

In the media, it's a different story. Three hundred years ago, in
Massachusetts, criminals were put in stocks in the public square and
mocked. Today, we can't send those executives to jail, but we can kick
them out of civilized society, put them through unendurable emotional
stress, and that's just as effective. So Pleshy and Laughlin were
being kicked out of civilized society while Boone and I were being
taken to the trauma center on a chopped ambulance.

I was suffering from several pissant flesh wounds. Dr.J. gave me that
disappointing news. Boone had a sucking chest wound, which I hadn't
noticed because I couldn't hear it, and because I was distracted by
other things. He'd been able to roll onto his back and press the
forearm of his rubber suit against the wound, lubricating the seal
with his own blood. That didn't seal it completely but it got a little
more air into that lung, kept him from passing out. He had to have
half his lung and a good chunk of his liver taken out. No big deal,
livers grow back if you don't booze them to death.

When I woke up, Debbie was sitting there in a bathrobe, holding my
hand. Yes, we were talking guilt. Guilt and happiness. She was doing
pretty well. Organophosphates are not bioaccumulative. If you survive
the dose, they go away and you're back to normal.

The explosion of the mine threw Tom Akers way over to the far side of
the railway and they didn't find him until the next day. They did an
autopsy, because there were so many possible causes of death, and
discovered that he was riddled with cancer. We got in touch with his
doctor in Seattle and found out that he'd known of the problem for a
couple of months; long enough, I guess, to build up a pretty intense
hatred for Alvin Pleshy.

Now we're into the part where we sort out all the legal
responsibility. Maybe I'll go to jail, who knows. Basco would have to
spend lots of money on lawyers to really nail me, and they just
declared bankruptcy.

Which sounds kind of satisfying, but it isn't, because bankruptcy is
just another ploy, a way to get out of their union contracts and
reorganize the company into a lean, mean, litigating machine. I've
bought a lot of BMWs for a lot of corporate lawyers.

On the other hand, they're in huge trouble and eventually they really
are going to pay. Dolmacher's evidence was suppressed for a few days
but now it's out, and it's the mediapathic goods. The attorney general
announced that any corporate execs who participated in the
contamination of Dolmacher's body are going to be charged with
attempted murder. I hear they have lots of weight machines at the
State Penitentiary.

Eventually, Basco's going to eat shit and die. So, when they let me
out of the hospital, I picked up a magic marker at an office supply
store, went down to the yacht club and drew Basco's logo onto the nose
of our new Zodiac. This one was donated by the employees of a software
company on Route 128.

Then I went for a spin around the Harbor. On my way out of the club, I
blew by a nice fifty-foot yacht that was going out for an afternoon
cruise. All the well-dressed people grinned, pointed, raised their
glasses. I smiled, gave them the finger, and throttled her up.

 

 

END