Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

"Maybe there's something real mediagenic we could do on board the ship, something the crews could film from a great distance."

"The toxin tanks are way down in the bowels of the thing. There's no way to make them visible from a distance without blowing the ship in two."

"We've handled this kind of thing before-remember the Soviet invasion? We could bring in our own cameras, do our own filming and distribute the tapes." "That's one option," I said. "One option. You have another?" Boone said. "Yeah."

"What's that? Blow it up?" "Shit no. This is a nonviolent action, I think." "And what might it be?" "Steal it. Steal the ship." "Whoa!" Bart said.

Boone's blue eyes were giving off kind of a Tazer discharge and I felt the need to scoot away from him. We had found a plan.

"Steal the whole fucking ship?" he said. But he knew exactly what I meant.

"Steal the whole fucking ship, before they've had a chance to destroy the evidence-that means tonight-take it out into the Harbor, where the media will be waiting for us. Better yet, take it to Spectacle Island. Have the media in place out here. We can turn it into an all-night minicam slumber party."

"That is just fucking great, man," Boone said, levitating to his feet. "Let's do it, man. It's time to rock and roll."

BART WENT AROUNDto the party side of the barge to find Amy, and Boone and I cut straight across the island to the Zodiac. We were trying to figure out a way to steal the Bosco Explorer, but we were clueless. Our only real chance to get on board was right now, when it was on the open water. Once it was tied up at a pier, they'd have guards posted on it, toting machine guns and with every excuse to use them. But we didn't have a plan, so the only thing we could think of was to have Boone board it now and leave me on the outside to come up with the plan later. Boone was enthusiastic; he knew I'd think of something. Easy for him to say. We'd leave him a walkie-talkie and have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of being able to communicate with him.

We sat out on the Zodiac and got out two of my big old magnets. I used duct tape to coat them pretty thickly, so they wouldn't clang, and so they'd have good friction against the side of the ship. Then I rigged up little rope stirrups. Boone put on the Liquid Skin, put on a lot of it, then wrestled into a drysuit. It was black, the proper color for domestic terrorism during the evening hours, and would protect everything but his face.

I picked up the walkie-talkie once or twice and asked if Modern Girl was out there, but got no real answer. A walkie-talkie isn't like a telephone; you don't have a private line, just a thick chowder of noise that you try to pick something out of. I tried hard and only got a hint of Debbie's voice, like a whiff of perfume in a hurricane.

Bart came wandering along after about twenty minutes, alone. We went in and picked him up.

"Where's Amy," I asked him.

"Back there. We broke up."

He didn't seem too wrecked. "Sorry. We didn't mean to screw up a good thing."

"She's pissed off because I left her with this guy Quincy when I went and shot those dudes. But the reason I left her with Quincy was because I wanted to make sure she was protected."

"Who's Quincy?"

"The guy I stole this revolver from."

"So where's Amy now?"

"With Quincy."

Boone didn't say anything, just handed him a Guinness. Black beer for black thoughts.

We shoved off, taking it slow because we didn't know what we were doing. I tried the walkie-talkie again and suddenly Debbie's voice came through. Sometimes the radio works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Modern Girl here. I think we can pop the Big Suit for public urination."

The Big Suit had to be Laughlin. She'd never been introduced to him. But on my answering machine, right before the house blew up, she'd described the man as he was ripping off the car.

"He's doing it by the Amazing," she continued, "westbound."

Public urination had to mean that Laughlin was dumping something into the gutters. Just like we thought: the Harbor was dead, now he was killing the sewers too. The Amazing had to be the Amazing Chinese Restaurant out in west Brighton. He was heading down Route 9, heading for Lake Cochituate, for Tech-Dale. Everything between Natick and the Harbor was going to be antiseptic tonight.

"Can you prove it, Modem Girl?"

"Yup. Losing you, Tainted Meat." And then our transmission got overwhelmed by a trucker, headed up the Fitzgerald Expressway, cruising the airwaves for a blowjob.

Boone wrapped up a walkie-talkie in a Hefty bag along with a couple of Big Macs and a flotation cushion. The two magnets he slung from a belt around his waist. The cushion balanced out the weight of the magnets so that he could stay afloat and concentrate on swimming.

With three people and lots of gear, the Zode was near its weight limit, but fifty horses balanced that nicely. Traveling through the dark in an open vehicle made me think of biking through Brighton, so I clicked into my full paranoid mode. Instead of taking a direct route toward the Basco Explorer, I took us all the way around the south end of the island, swung a good mile or so out to the east, about halfway to the big lighthouse at the Harbor's entrance, and approached the ship from astern.

Boone said something that I couldn't hear fell out of the Zode and vanished. The boat sped up by a few knots and we just kept going straight. By now we had nothing to hide, so we just swung right along the side of the Basco Explorer, checked it out like a couple of Poyzen fans from Chicopee who'd never seen a freighter before.

It was pretty quiet. Blue light was flickering out of the windows on the bridge; someone was watching TV, probably the slow-motion replays of their boss getting chopped in the trachea by Boone. And they probably didn't realize that the same guy was crawling right up their asshole at this very moment. We could hear a couple of men talking above us, standing along the rail.

"Hey! Ahoooy, dude!" Bart shouted, "What's happening?"

I couldn't believe it. "Jesus, Bart! We don't want to talk to these pricks."

"Boone said we were supposed to create a diversion, didn't you hear him?" Bart cupped his hands and hollered, "Hey! Anybody up there?" I slapped my hands over my face and commenced deep breathing. I might get noticed, but my description didn't match the old S.T. anymore. No beard, different hair.

The deckhands murmured on for a few seconds, finishing their chat, and then one leaned over to check us out: a young guy, neither corporate exec nor ship's officer, just your basic merchant marine, standing on the rail having a smoke. With the cargo this ship carried, they probably weren't allowed to smoke below decks.

"Hey! How fast can this thing go?" Bart shouted.

"Ehh, twenty knots on a good day," the sailor said. Classic Jersey accent.

"What's a knot?"

"It's about a mile."

"So it can go, like, twenty miles in a day? Not very far, man."

My roommate had left me in his dust. I just leaned back and spectated. Technically he wasn't my roommate anymore, our home had been exploded by its owner. I guess that meant we were now friends; kind of terrifying.

"No, no, twenty miles an hour," the sailor explained. "A little more, actually. Hey. You dudes party in'?"

Bart was getting ready to say, "Sure!," always his answer to that question. Then I imagined this sailor asking to go along, and me spending a couple of hours waiting for them to work their way to the bottom of that garbage can. So I said, "Naah, the cops came and started to bust it up, you know."

"Bummer. Hey, you guys know any good bars in this town?"

"Sure," Bart said.

"Are you Irish?" I asked.

"Bohunk," he said.