John Abbott - Scimitar

“Well... let me take another look,” she said, and was gone for another five minutes.

He waited.

“Hello?” she said.

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Sorry to keep you waiting. I would guess the plastic is polyethylene, but we don’t have that information. In any case, we don’t recommend recycling, because traces of the chemical might remain in the bottle and...”

“Yes, I can understand that. But you don’t know for sure whether it’s polyethylene, is that right?”

“No. Some of the others are, so I’m guessing this one is, too. What’d you plan to use it for?”

“Some of the others, did you say?”

“Pardon?”

“Are made of polyethylene? The bottles?”

“Oh. Yes.”

“Which ones, can you tell me?”

“Well, there’s Raxon’s Flying Insect Killer, for one. It comes in a number-two bottle made of hi-density polyethylene. But I can’t say for sure that the Multi-Bug...”

“Well, thank you very much,” he said, “you’ve been very kind.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, and hung up.

He dialed the 800 number again.

Got the same recorded voice telling him that all lines were busy and asking him to wait for the next available representative. If he got the same woman again, he would ask her to repeat the name of the product. But he got a man this time.

“Research Center, may I help you?”

“Yes,” Sonny said. “I have a bottle of your Flying Insect Killer. Can you tell me what the plastic is made of?”

“I know the code doesn’t permit recycling of that bottle, sir.”

“Yes, but can you tell me what the plastic...”

“That’s the white plastic bottle, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Just a moment, please.”

Sonny waited. All the time in the world. Canada Day was only tomorrow.

“Hello, sir?” the man said.

“Yes?”

“That’s a code-two bottle, hi-density polyethylene.”

“Thank you very much,” Sonny said, grinning.

He had his delivery system.

All he had to do was run to the hardware store again.

Then he could begin mixing his formula.

At ten o’clock that morning, Elita tried the number at the beach house and got no answer. Thinking she may have misdialed it, she immediately tried it again, slowly and carefully punching out the numbers this time because sometimes the phone’s computer system or whatever it was didn’t work as fast as you could hit the buttons. The phone rang and rang on the other end.

She tried her mother again at ten-thirty, wanting to ask if she could borrow her blue Judith Lieber bag with the big mabe pearl set into its clasp; Elita didn’t have anything dressy enough for the formal tonight, and the bag would be perfect with her blue gown.

She let the phone ring a dozen times.

Come on, Mom, she thought.

It was another scorching hot day, she was probably on the beach.

She tried the number again at eleven.

Let the phone ring off the hook.

Still no answer.

She had once met the man who owned the house next door. Someone named Martin Hackett, who was in the fish business or something. She wondered if she should call him, apologize for breaking in on him, tell him this was something of an emergency and ask if he’d yell down to the beach, if that’s where her mother was, tell her to call her daughter in New York. Sounded like a good idea.

She looked for her mother’s personal directory, but of course she’d taken that out to the beach with her. She called directory information and asked for a Martin Hackett on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, and lo and behold, the operator came up with a phone number, would wonders never?

Elita dialed the number.

The phone on the kitchen counter in the Hackett house rang and rang.

The extension in the bedroom upstairs rang and rang.

In the basement, her mother lay unhearing in a shallow grave covered with sand.

In the kitchen, Sonny did not answer the phone because he was mixing his formula.

He worked with the kitchen windows open. Sarin evaporated swiftly, and its vapors were deadly. Even though the only truly dangerous chemical he’d purchased — his DF, the dimethylsulfoxide difluoride — was still cooling in the refrigerator, he was nonetheless wearing the yellow rubber gloves he’d bought in the supermarket. The chemistry set had come complete with a pair of eye goggles. He was wearing those now. He had also opened the box of Arm & Hammer baking soda, poured it into a bucket of water, and stirred it until it dissolved. The bucket now stood in preparation on the counter top; in solution, baking soda and water would decompose any sarin accidentally spilled or splashed.

In preparation for running his reaction, he had emptied the twelve-ounce bottle of Raxon’s Flying Insect Killer into the toilet, flushing the contents out to sea or wherever, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He had then washed out the plastic bottle with some of the isopropyl alcohol he’d ordered from the J.D. Bowles lab in St. Paul, shaking the bottle out and setting it on the sink rack upside down, so that the alcohol vapors would flow out, allowing quicker drying. The empty plastic bottle, uncapped, now sat upright in a bowl of ice cubes and water, cooling. When he began running the actual reaction, he did not want the mixture to heat too rapidly. Heating would cause evaporation. Breathing in the escaping fumes could kill him.

Into the graduated measuring cup he’d bought on his trip to the supermarket, he poured ten ounces of trichloroethane, the inert cleaning solution that was his solvent. Holding the pouring lip of the cup against the glass stirring rod from the chemistry set, he allowed the liquid to run down into the white plastic bottle.

The clock on the kitchen wall read 11:22.

He could not use the measuring cup for his reagents; the lowest graduated marker on it was fifty milliliters. Sticking a strip of transparent tape to one of the glass test tubes from the chemistry set he’d bought, he’d earlier calibrated a one-milliliter setting — twenty-five drops equaled a milliliter — and also a five-milliliter setting. He had twenty grams of DF, which was the equivalent of twenty-five milliliters. To this, he needed to add 16.6 grams each of alcohol and amine. The conversion came to twenty-one milliliters of alcohol and twenty-four milliliters of amine.

He picked up the jar of anhydrous alcohol. Anhydrous simply meant water-free, unlike the common rubbing alcohol you could buy in a pharmacy, which was only ninety percent alcohol and ten percent water — the deadly enemy of sarin. He measured his units and transferred them to the plastic bottle sitting in its bowl of icy water. He measured out his amine and transferred that as well, to bind the formula. It gave off a pungent smell, rather like ammonia. The white plastic bottle sat in its icy bath, the mixture inside it still harmless.

All that was missing was the DF.

All that was missing was the ingredient which, when combined with the others, could kill Sonny if he wasn’t careful.

The clock on the kitchen wall read 11:30.

In eight and a half hours, the guests at the Canada Day celebration would be called in to dinner from the Baroque Foyer.

World enough and time.

He allowed his mixture to cool.

Lower the vapor pressure. Keep the reaction going at a safe pace.

He looked up at the clock again.

He would not hurry.

At a quarter to twelve, he went to the refrigerator and removed from it one of the sealed ten-gram ampoules of dimethylsulfoxide difluoride. Wrapping a dish towel around the thicker end of the ampoule, holding it so that his fingers were around it and his thumb was erect and facing him, he ran the blade of the glass cutter behind the nipple end of the sealed glass container, and began working it, scoring it, finally putting down the tool and — with a sharp snap — breaking off the end of the ampoule. Despite the hours of cooling, a puff of fume escaped into the air, startling him. He turned his head away instinctively, realized at once that this was merely a reaction with the moisture in the air over the ampoule, and allowed himself a few seconds to collect his wits before he picked up the glass dropper.