I pulled the door shut with a thud. “Jesus, it's cold out there,” I griped.
“Cooper!” exclaimed Spears.
“Everything all right, ma'am?” asked the driver, a skinny black guy in a leather hat with woolly flaps that covered his ears. From behind, he looked like a cocker spaniel.
“Er… y-yes,” she said, not a hundred percent certain about it.
He shrugged, muttered something, and turned back to get on with the driving.
“So,” I said, “what's it all about?”
“What's what all about?”
“I don't know. Start wherever you like. Tell me what you know about Tanaka and Boyle. Tell me what they were working on. Tell me about the DVD you slid under my door. Tell me why you resigned from Moreton Genetics after I interviewed you. Tell me when you think the weather will clear up. Your call. Where are we going, by the way?”
“My hotel.”
“Which one?”
“The Sofitel.”
“That's on Lafayette Square, isn't it?”
She nodded.
“Nice.” Nice was an understatement. The Sofitel had a view across the square into the front sitting room of The White House. “You've lost weight, Doc.”
“I've been under a lot of stress.”
“I would, too, if I had to pay for a room at the Sofitel.”
She gave me the thinnest of smiles. The cold had burned red circles into her cheeks. “Care to unburden yourself?” I asked.
“I can't,” she said.
“OK, well, I'll go first. Let me tell you how your friend died.”
“That's not necessary,” she said.
I ignored her. “The weather was calm and it was a moonless night. It was peaceful out on the Natusima's deck. There was a party going on below deck, celebrating the end of a successful expedition. Nearly everyone was there. Your friend Hideo had drunk too much. You can thank the guy who kept filling his glass for that — Professor Boyle. Feeling queasy, Hideo went out on deck to get some air. Big mistake.”
Doc Spears wasn't looking at me, but I knew she was listening. The cab pulled onto the 359, heading toward D.C. over the 14th Street Bridge. Our speed went down to a crawl as the weather worsened.
“He might have been leaning over the side of the boat,” I said. “Perhaps he was puking because of the alcohol, but then a guy by the name of Al Cooke came up behind Hideo, lifted him up over the gunnel, and threw him overboard. He did this for two reasons: He was a sadist who just wanted to see what would happen; he was also paid to throw him overboard. Exactly what happened next, who can say? The water was cold, Doc. You ever been in water that cold?”
Dr. Spears didn't respond to the question.
“It would have been a few degrees below freezing. The gag reflex produced by the sudden cold would have forced Tanaka to take a breath underwater. If he was lucky, he'd have drowned right then and there. But let's say he didn't. Let's say he fought his way up to the surface, treading water, the cold knifing into his skin. He would have called out. Maybe he called out a few times for help. None came. But then something else arrived, brought by the vomit and the urine and the fear. It was a great white shark that had been trailing the boat for days. From the tooth found in what remained of Hideo Tanaka, the giant fish was between nineteen and twenty-two feet long. A fish that big weighs over two and a half thousand pounds, and has one seriously healthy appetite. The coroner believed it took Hideo — all of him from the neck down — in a single bite. We know this because Hideo Tanaka's head ended up being sucked into the ship's engine-cooling system.”
Freddie Spears turned toward me, her eyes wet.
“Doc, I need to know why it happened. It has something to do with what they were working on. What was it?”
“I can't tell you.”
“Jesus, Doc, you can and you will. Goddamn it, it was you who slid that DVD under my door. You did that because you wanted me to know something important. Something relevant to your friend's death.”
“The people at the Pentagon — Defense, CIA. They know.”
“Yeah, but they won't tell me. So you tell me, Doc. There's no one following us in this weather, no helo overhead keeping an eye on us. And no undercover agent would be seen dead in a hat like that one.” I nodded at the driver.
“You sure you're all right, miss?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at his paying passenger, who was now sobbing.
“She's fine,” I said. “Tears of release.”
The driver glanced at me next, unsure. I gave him a big smile to keep him that way. Doc Spears blew her nose and regained some composure while I looked out at the highway. A horse and cart could have moved faster. I'd pushed the doctor as far as I could. She didn't have to tell me anything, would be breaking a federal statute or two if she did. But I was getting close to panic. Some military planning committee was fixing to have me jump out of a plane and it was all somehow connected to the murder of Hideo Tanaka. If I could figure it out in time, maybe the mission would get canceled.
“Do you know what Mad is?” I heard her say into her tissue. At least, that's what I thought she said — the sentence didn't seem to make sense.
“Do I know who what is?” I asked.
“Mad. Do you know what Mad is?”
Maybe I'd pushed Doc Spears a little hard, after all, and she was just a touch unhinged. I said, “Mad—yeah, sure. Alfred E. Neuman. A great magazine. You gotta love their movie spoofs. They did such a number on Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3. Did you—”
Spears looked at me with her red-rimmed eyes like I was mad. “No, the acronym: M-A-D.”
All I could think was that the military was acronym-mad. I shook my head.
“M-A-D. Mutually Assured Destruction.”
“Oh, right, you mean that MAD. Yeah, I remember. It was a Cold War thing, right?”
“Mutually Assured Destruction was peace by stalemate back when the world was divided into armed camps: Communism versus the West. It was the theory of nuclear deterrence — that if you launched a nuke at me, I'd massively retaliate. Things would escalate and we'd all die, so what would be the point?”
Spears gave a final sniff and put away her tissues. “MAD prevented that first strike. Whether anyone believed in the theory or not, something worked because we're all still around, even if the Soviet Union isn't.” She glanced out the window, collecting her thoughts, carefully wiping the mascara on the bottom of her eyes with a finger.
After a handful of impatient seconds, I said, “So here we are, Doc, both with our fingers on the big red button…”
Spears took a breath. Then she continued. “Hideo was an expert on deep-sea environments that technically should not have been able to support life. He was searching for a particular form of extremophile—”
“A what-o-phile?”
“An extremophile. An organism found in a hostile environment at great depths. Hideo isolated an extremophile — a bacterium — in the gut of a particular worm that could digest human feces. He—”
“What?”
“The environment around a hydrothermal vent is rich in hydrogen sulphide. Hydrogen sulphide is extremely caustic, poisonous, and is one of the toxic components of human sewage. Hideo was searching for an organism that would consume it.”
“He was looking for a bug that would eat shit?”
“You have a way with words, you know that?”