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 Rte. 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 red 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.