Gregg Loomis - Gates Of Hades

As though reading his thoughts, she pointed to the only wooden door he had seen in the building. "Go right in."

He knocked briskly, the comparatively mellow thump of wood somehow soothing after all the steel, and the door opened.

On the other side, the office was as lavish as Miss Tyson's space was spartan. Jason stepped onto the muted blues and reds of an antique Khurasan that cost more than most houses. The rug's colors were softly repeated in four original Renoirs whose gilt frames hung on fabric wall covering. An Edwardian breakfront occupied most of the far wall, behind its rippled glass a collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century first editions. Floating on the rug's center medallion like a ship adrift, a mahogany partners' desk was topped with hand-tooled, gold-edged

Behind the desk sat an enormous black woman clad in a flowing caftan with an African print. With a hand the size of a catcher's mitt, she held the receiver of the telephone that was the only item on the desk. With the other, she motioned Jason into one of four Scalamandre silk wing chairs arranged in a semicircle in front of her.

He was unable to understand the language she was speaking, but, from the rare familiar word and hand gestures that accompanied each utterance, he guessed it was some dialect of Arabic or Farsi. He sat and waited.

Jason had to smile as he watched her, the ultimate minority-business-program beneficiary. An emigre from Haiti, she was simultaneously black, female, and non-Christian, embracing a belief in the African gods of voodoo and Santeria. She was the poster girl for politicians espousing egalitarianism above all. Unlike many such recipients of government largesse, however, she had qualifications beyond race, sex, and religion. As former second in command of her native land's Tonton Macoute, she was skilled at interrogation, torture, assassination, and manipulation of the political process, a resume the awareness of which no elected official could admit. Had anyone demurred at the government doing business with a person previously associated with an organization whose brutality made Hitler's Gestapo look like Boy Scouts, he would have been denounced not only as a racial and religious bigot, but sexist as well.

She served her only client well and was generously compensated for taking on unsavory tasks to which no democratically elected government could admit, but which no government, democratic or otherwise, could do without. Any scruples she possessed related only to her "boys" and to the proper preparation of the fiery Creole cuisine of her homeland. Dealing with the nation's enemies of today required an unrelenting barbarity that made congressional stomachs churn. Narcom, Inc., provided the political antacid of deniability.

It was a marriage made perhaps not in heaven, but strong nonetheless.

In less than a minute she hung up and came around the desk. Jason stood to receive a hug that might have crushed the lungs of a man less fit.

"Jason! Good to see you again; always good to see one of Mama's boys!"

Mama's boys, the name she gave all her operatives, although Jason had met very few. By its nature, Narcom's business was strictly compartmentalized.

She relaxed her embrace, allowing Jason to draw a breath before he sat down. She returned to her chair behind the desk before speaking.

"How you doin' on that island of yours?"

"I'm not there anymore. I had some visitors."

As he related what had happened, she nodded. "Uh-huh. You stirred a stick in a bees' nest when you did Alazar down there in St. Bart's."

"You know that wasn't my fault. Whoever mixed the tranquilizing solution overdid it."

"I know, but somebody doesn't. Not that it matters. One less of those animals. I would have liked to ask him a few questions, though."

Alazar was fortunate, Jason thought, to be dead.

Mama continued. "Sounds like six bad guys won't be a problem anymore."

"At the cost of a damn nice house," Jason grumbled.

"With what you get paid, you can afford it," she said amicably. "But that's not why I invited you here."

She reached into a desk drawer and handed him a sheet of paper. On it was a series of lines in what Jason recognized as Russian. "This came off the computer you sent me, the one you took from Alazar."

Jason stared at the paper, unable to even guess what it was. "I speak a little Russian, but I don't read it."

Mama took the paper back. "Appears to be some sort of shopping list, an order for something that he supplied that was successfully used by the customer; refers to a type of new weapon. From the context, military intelligence thinks it's some sort of biochemical warfare, since it refers to 'containers.'" She wrinkled a brow. "Also talks about 'keeping it healthy,' like some sort of microbe."

The most oxymoronic of all government bureaucracy: military intelligence.

Right up there with legal ethics.

Jason leaned back in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankles. "And?"

The woman on the other side of the desk shook her head reproachfully, sending gold chandelier earrings flashing with reflected light. "I'll get there, Jason; just show me the courtesy of listening. Thing that got the attention over to Langley was the date this new whatever-it- is was used, last June."

Jason swallowed the urge to ask a number of questions, knowing Mama would answer most of them in her own way and in her own time.

"Last June, one of our coast guard boats in the Bering Sea found a Russian trawler, one of those supersize fishing boats. The whole crew had had their throats cut."

Jason hunched forward in his chair, impatient to get to the point. "So? We're not in the business of protecting foreign fishing boats, particularly those poaching in our waters like I'd bet that one was."

Mama nodded, multiple chins shaking. "Jason, you just won't wait, will you? Whatever happened to manners? Anyway, this Russian trawler was just the beginning. Since then, there've been loggers in Georgia, a team of geologists looking for possible oil off Florida's west coast, an Indian chemical plant executive and his whole family, a Polish coal mine owner and…" She stopped and took a deep breath. "You get the idea. All found with their throats cut, no sign of any resistance."

Jason leaned back, letting the chair's softness envelop him. "Overfishing, timber cutting, petroleum exploration… All ecological hot buttons. We've seen people chain themselves to trees, lie down in front of earth movers, even blow up some labs where animal experimentation is going on. But murder?"

"Not the first time. There've been occasional acts of violence by the lunatic fringe. This time, though, it looks like a well-organized, concerted effort."

"And why does the client want to dump this in our lap?"

"I don't ask questions, Jason. I just take the money and perform the service. That's part of the company's success. If I had to guess, though, I'd say the present administration doesn't want to get involved with anything looks like opposition to environmental causes, even violent ones. This is, after all, right before an election year, and the president isn't the tree kissers' hero. On the other hand, the Feds can't just sit by while people get killed."

Jason thought that over. Made sense. "And none of them seemed to put up a fight? I mean, someone was trying to give me that close a shave, I'd at least try."

"That's part of the problem."

"Or a clue." Jason uncrossed his legs and sat up straight. "Any idea why they didn't put up a fight? Drugs, poison?"

Mama placed the report on her desk, sausagelike fingers squaring the edges. "Not a glimmer. Autopsies on the Russian crew and the loggers were no help. Only thing unusual was that each person had a slight amount of sul- fates in the lungs and bloodstream, probably less than they would have inhaled from auto exhausts in any large city. And ethylene gas in the lung tissues."