Stephen Coonts - Combat

She was as good as her word, looking as frazzled as she’d sounded earlier but even more interesting, which irked me. No Feeb had the right to look that good. She took the perimeter footpath and we caught up to her, two visitors hitting on a cutie. When we found a park bench, she plopped her shoulder bag next to me. “If that specimen’s bagged, stuff it in here,” she said.

“And if not, where do I stuff it?”

She simply looked toward my partner. “While he figures out the answer to his own question, Quent: We’ve still drawn blanks at every bus terminal, airport and rail connection between Vallejo and Santa Clara. What’s your best guess on Park?”

Quent told her while I put my evidence in her bag. At his bidding I let her review the video I’d made. He described the timing of the connections we’d made and blunted the conclusions he and I had reached together. “Wherever Park is, and for whatever reason, I just have a suspicion he won’t surface again in the Bay Area,” he said. Then he described the Chinatown lead and told her flatly why he believed it was fugazi, a false trail.

She turned to me. “You’re uncharacteristically silent. What do you think?”

“Much the same. And I think Quent ought to borrow your spectral analyzer, if it’s small enough to put in a Bianchi rig.”

“Mine won’t fit in any shoulder holster I’ve seen,” she said, “but some will. The covert units are slower, though. Encryption-linked to a lab in Sunnyvale, which is why they can be so small. I’ve seen one implanted in a LOC-8. And they are very, very expensive,” she added. A LOC-8 was one of the second-generation GPS units with two-way comm and a memory just in case you wondered where you’d been. Combined with a linked-up analyzer it would be worth a new Volvo.

“You want me to ship out on the Ras Ormara or something,” Quent said to me, amused.

Dana turned to him again. “Better you than King Kong here. You look the part, and you could talk with the crew more easily.”

Quent: “You’re not serious.”

Dana: “Not actually shipping out, but you might try getting aboard while the new cargo is being loaded. A spectral analyzer needs no more than a whiff to do its job, and I’d hate to try to guess all the ways a cargo can be falsified.”

Quent was silent for a time. Then, “I’d never get aboard without the rep’s authorization, or the captain’s. There goes one layer of our deniability but yes, I could try it. Or Harve could, in a pinch.”

We kicked the idea around a bit, and then she excused herself and walked off a ways to use her phone while Quent and I watched boats slice the lake’s surface under psychedelic bubbles of sail. When she turned back, she was nodding. “You’ll need to learn how to use it,” she said.

Quent said if it was anything like the one she carried, she could show us using the specimen I’d collected. She simpered for him and said she should’ve thought of that herself. We found a picnic table and, sandwiched between me and Quent, Dana pulled a grey, keyboard-faced polymer brick from her bag and opened my evidence baggie next to it.

She stuck her forefinger into a depression labeled CRUCIBLE in the brick and pressed the CRU key. When she withdrew her finger its tip was covered by a filmy shroud, which she quickly stuck into my soggy tissue. Then she pushed the fingertip into another depression and pressed SAMPLE, and the brick whirred very faintly for an instant. Dana withdrew her finger, stripped the film off, and let it drop to the tabletop, an insubstantial wisp. Then after a silence, the brick’s little screen began to print gibberish at a rate too fast to follow.

“Essentially, a carbon ribbon wipes a bit of the specimen off the film — don’t ask me why it’s called a crucible — and analyzes it,” Dana murmured.

“What if you’re testing the air,” Quent asked.

“Wave your finger around for a moment. They say the crucible has microscopic pores on its surface,” she explained.

“And how many of those little mouse condoms are inside,” I asked, unrolling the discarded wisp for a better look.

“Rackham, you are a piece of work,” she said under her breath. Then more loudly, “A hundred or so. By that time the battery needs replacing.” When the little screen quit printing Martian, it showed a line with several numbered pips of varied height. She showed us how to query each number, which could be shown as chemical symbols or in words.

The biggest pip was for water, the next was for a ketone solvent, then cellulose, then something called Biopol.

I put my finger out and touched the screen. “Bad actor?”

“No. A polymer from genetically altered canola,” she said.

“How in the hell would you know that,” I demanded.

She let me stew for a moment. Then, “Customs. Biopol was the plant extract on the manifest. Quent would’ve figured that out and told you anyway,” she added grudgingly.

The trace of C 10H 18O, according to the screen, was eucalyptol. Dana pointed out that the heavily aromatic tree hanging over us was a eucalyptus. “So you see it’s pretty accurate.”

I said no it wasn’t, or it would’ve told us what the little condom was made of. She said yes it was and positively beamed, explaining that the analyzer knew to ignore the crucible’s signature. I gave up. The damned thing was pretty smart at that.

“At least we know the cargo was as advertised,” Quent said.

Dana nodded. “Including those pallets of wood. We ’scoped enough of it. So now we focus on the next cargo because no one has come ashore with sizable contraband, and the incoming cargo was clean.”

“Unless they’d already pumped it out into those trucks I saw,” I said.

“They didn’t,” said Dana. “One of the cleanout crew is one of ours. You don’t need to know which one. The Ras Ormara crew are watching him carefully enough to make us even more suspicious.”

“I wasted my time then,” I said.

“You proved the wharf isn’t all that secure,” Quent mused, and checked his wrist. “If you’re going to spring for a couple of those analyzers, ma’am, we should get to it.”

She reminded him that it was a loan, and there’d be only one. Thinking ahead as usual, he said as long as we were going to show our hand overtly as a P.I. team, he’d feel better going aboard if I went along. That meant I could contact the Sonmiani rep myself for the authorization and save some time.

“If you drop me off at my Toyota right away,” I said, “I might catch this Goldman guy before he leaves his office.”

We quick-marched back to the Volvo and Dana agreed to meet Quent back at the Sunnyvale lab in the South Bay.

I knew I was cutting it close for normal working hours but StudyBimbo found the Sonmiani number while Quent drove me to my pickup. I was in luck; better luck than Quent would find. One Mike Kaplan answered for Sonmiani Shipping, and put me through without rigamarole. That’s how my brief platonic fling began with my friend, Norman Goldman.

When you first meet someone of your own sex that you like right away, no matter how hetero you are, you tend to go through something resembling courtship. When the other guy is equally outgoing, ordinary things sink into a temporary limbo: time, previous appointments, even mealtimes.

That’s how it had been with me and Quent, and it happened again with Norm. The reason he and his staff assistant had still been at the office was that the Goldman suite and Sonmiani’s office were over-andunder, in one of the smaller of those old Alameda buildings respiffed in the style they call Elerath Post-Industrial. I guessed that Sonmiani did a healthy business because the whole two-story structure was theirs.