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?”
br /> 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.
Zodiac
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. The
y 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?”