Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

Between now and then I could drink a lot, meditate on my own unfitness to live, and get nice and shit-eatingly lonesome. And worry about the Poyzen Boyzen thing. When I got done wandering home slowly, I played the tape backwards again, listened to the backwards message, then erased it.

For cavemen, they were quick on their feet. Was I that easy to track down?

The thing of it was: nobody had my number. Six months ago I'd gotten another damn call at 3:00 A.M. from some GEE hanger-on who'd just landed at Logan and wanted to be picked up and given a free place to crash. That was enough of that, so I changed to an unlisted number and didn't tell anybody. Not even my employer. If GEE wanted to reach me, they had to get clever.

Which brought up another sore point. Usually they called

Debbie and got her to call me, and she had said a few things about not being a receptionist. Another relationship felony. Just another reason to get to drinking.

But I still didn't know how the crew from the island had tracked me down. Maybe one of them worked at the phone company or something. Maybe one of them knew someone who knew someone who knew Bart.

When my watch alarm went off, I called Debbie, and found out she was vacationing in Arizona for three weeks. So I set my alarm watch for three weeks later.

It went off around Labor Day, in the middle of the night. I was deep in a chemical factory in another state, nestled up against a fifty-five-gallon drum on a loading dock, doing a bag job for Cohen. Had to press the damn watch against my thigh to muffle the sound, unstrap the wristband, pry the back off with a screwdriver, and scramble the innards. That's the last digital watch I'll ever own.

Despite that, the job was a cakewalk. It was just like being a criminal, except it was all-pretend. If they caught you, you could just stand up and show them your warrant. They didn't.

I SENT ESMERELDAa box of Turtles and she went through the Boston Globe Index and checked out all the entries under Spectacle Island for the last three months. I was interested in something along the lines of "Spectacle Island-Abandoned barges running into."

She found it, and I should have figured it out myself. It was Hurricane Alison, or the last remnants thereof, which had hit us when we were having an abnormally high tide. Whenever a big, systemic disaster hit, a blizzard or heat wave, the Globe ran enormous articles "compiled from reports by" followed by lists of twenty names. They had to list every single bad thing that had happened to Massachusetts or else people would call in, claim they'd been neglected and cancel their subscriptions.

Buried in one of those was a paragraph about an old barge, due to be scuttled anyway, that had broken loose from Winthrop during the storm and had been batted around the Harbor all night. It wasn't much of a problem because no boats were out in that weather. By the time they even noticed it was missing, the barge had dug itself into Spectacle Island, which was a fine place for it anyway.

I was throwing a lot of work into Project Lobster. I wanted to get the damn thing finished, and Debbie was deliberately unavailable, and I was out of nitrous, and by that point in the summer I didn't have enough money for anything but newspapers and ski-ball.

All those tainted lobsters had to be run through a pretty complicated chemical analysis. It required equipment GEE didn't have, so I'd worked out an arrangement with a lab at a university. Tanya, the Blue Kills Marauder, who'd been working for GEE since her high school days in California, was one of their grad students. She helped with various projects, and in return for "educating" her we got access to nifty analytical equipment.

This particular university had a glut of it anyway, having been so successful in attracting the devotion of big Route 128 corporations that you had to think they'd made their own pact with Satan, negotiated by their toughest lawyers. The high-tech companies coughed up gobs of expensive equipment and the university had to hold hysterical fund-raising drives just to build buildings big enough to keep it out of the rain. You could wander through the basements and find analytical devices costing half a million dollars, so powerful, so advanced that no one was even using them. Once I had gotten access, I had to go down, study their owner's manuals, take off the plastic, and calibrate the gizmos.

Then we were in business. Tanya or I, usually Tanya, broke the lobsters open and located their livers. Whether you're a human or a lobster, your liver filters the toxins out of your system, so that's where you find the bad stuff. We checked them for obvious signs, like tumors or necrosis, and then we ran them through the big machines from Route 128. We got their levels of various metals and organic bad things and put it all into our database.

And we stood around a lot, edgy as hell, because Tanya was Debbie's roommate, and though she was willing to work with me, forgiveness had apparently not yet been earned.

In the weeks surrounding Labor Day we were working at this for twelve or fourteen hours a day, I out on the Zodiac nagging my pals for fresh samples, and Tanya down in the basement cutting bugs. The university wasn't far from the

Charles, so once or twice a day I'd bring the Zode around-as I said, the fastest Boston transportation-and she'd come down to the water and we'd make a handoff.

I was a little perturbed when she missed one, but not surprised. Probably in the middle of something. I hung out on the Zode for maybe half an hour. Why not? Even if the water below me was dirty, I was in the middle of a park. But I got sick of waiting, fast-I was tired of this project and wanted to get on with it. I tied the boat to a tree, took out the fuel line, and hiked inland, schlepping the beer cooler. Trotted up out of the water-side park and into the campus.

Our lab was down in a corridor that still smelled like fresh paint and linoleum glue. One room after another filled with microchips. But the odor got sharper as I approached our lab. Smells trigger memories, and this one made me think of building model airplanes when I was a kid.

It was the smell of spray paint. And on the brand-new laboratory door was some graffiti, still wet, done up in cherry red. A rough pentagram, the inverted cross below, the staring umlaut in the middle. Above it: SATAN SEZ: STAY THE FUCK OUT. The laboratory was dark.

Didn't touch a thing. I ran upstairs to the lobby and phoned Tanya and Debbie's place.

Debbie answered, sounding kind of tense, even though she didn't know it was me yet. "Yeah?"

"Don't hang up, this is business. Tanya there?"

"She can't come to the phone right now. What the hell have you guys been doing? What's with her?"

"I was going to ask you."

"Why is she acting so bent?"

"What's she doing?"

"She came home crying, ran into the bathroom. I heard her throw up a couple of times and now she's been in the shower for about half an hour."

"Sounds like-"

"No. She wasn't raped."

"You got your door locked anyway?"

"Damn right."

I hung up and ran back downstairs. Call me strange, but I tend to carry latex surgical gloves around in my pocket, because it's my business to touch so many nasty things. I put them on before I did any touching.

Good. She hadn't been too freaked out to lock the door when she left.

No signs of struggle. The gas chromatograph was still turned on. I could smell organic solvents in here, the same ones we didn't like big corporations to use, and something else too: an- oily, foul odor, mixed in with the marine stench of the lobsters. I recognized it. Some of the lobsters I'd gotten off Gallagher's boat had smelled that way. In fact that was the reason they'd given them to me. Big enough to sell, but they stank too bad. They had come from the entrance to the Inner Harbor.