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"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 i
"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, ST., 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 gri
"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 die 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. "ST., 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 begi
"You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?"
"Nothing compared to those transformers. I've got Basco in my crosshairs, Rebecca."