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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 hisbeer. 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."