Neal Stephenson - Zodiac. The Eco-Thriller

Then I hung up. Bart and I were standing in the parking lot of the Charles River Shopping Center at three in the morning, in the Hub of the Universe, surrounded on all sides by toxic water. Boone was on a ship that was probably headed for Everett right now. When it got there, my favorite environmentalist, Smirnoff, was going to blow it up. Laughlin and the other bad guys would die. That was good. Our sailor friend, the skipper and Boone would probably die too, though. And the evidence we wanted so badly, the tank full of concentrated organophosphates down in the belly of the ship, would become shrapnel. The PCB bugs would be gone from the Harbor, with no way to trace them back to Basco. Pleshy would become president of the United States and eight-year-old schoolchildren would write him letters. My aunt would tell me what a great man he was and military bands would precede him everywhere. And, what really hurt: Hoa would say, well, maybe Canada needs some Vietnamese restaurants.

At least that's the way it seemed right then. I might have stretched a few things, but one thing was for damn sure: we had to stop Smimoff.

"Is this what they call being a workaholic?" I muttered as we jogged through the North End, heading for Bart's van, chewing on some benzedrine capsules. "I mean, any decent human should be sitting by Debbie's bed, holding her hand when she wakes up."

"Hum," Bart said.

"I would give anything to kiss her right now. Instead, she's going to wake up and say, 'Where is that fucker who claims he loves me?' I'm out working, that's where I am. I've been working for, what, ninety-six hours straight?"

"Forty-eight, maybe."

"And can I take time out to hold the hand of a sick woman? No. This is workaholism."

"Pretty soon the speed'll kick in," Bart explained, "and you'll feel better."

We found the van where he'd left it, but someone had broken in and ripped off the stereo and the battery. He'd parked on a flat space by the waterfront so I got to push-start it. That was fun. The speed helped there. "I wish we had the stereo," he said.

We headed south along Commercial street, running along all the piers, and when we looked to the east we could see the Basco Explorer churning its way northward, blending the poison into the Harbor with its screws. A major crime was taking place right out there, in full view of every downtown building, and there wasn't a single witness. Toxic criminals have it easy.

Eventually we got ourselves to Rory Gallagher's house in Southie. He was back from the hospital now, healthy enough to threaten us with physical harm for coming around at this time of night. We got him calmed down and asked him how we could get in touch with the other Gallaghers, the Charlestown branch of the family.

Here's the part where I could cast racial aspersions on the Irish and say that they have a natural fondness for acts of terrorism. I won't go that far. It's fairer to say that a lot of people have fucked them over and they don't take it kindly. Gallagher, he loved Kennedy and he loved Tip, but he'd always suspected Fleshy, who was a Brahmin, who pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I told Rory how Basco and Fleshy-to him they were a single unit-had poisoned his body and many others, he turned completely red and responded just the right way. He responded as though he'd been raped.

"But we've pushed them," I explained, "pushed and pushed them and made them desperate, forced them into bigger crimes to cover up the old ones. That's why we need your brother."

So we got Joe on the phone. I let Rory argue with him for a while, so he'd be fully awake when I started my pitch. Then I just confiscated the telephone. "Joseph."

"Mr. Taylor."

"Remember all that garbage your grandpa dumped into the Harbor?"

"I don't want to hear any shit about that at this time of the morning...."

"Wake up, Joe. It's Yom Kippur, dude. The Day of Atonement is here."

I knew Rory's phone wasn't bugged, so we made all kinds of calls. We called an Aquarium person I knew and gave her the toxic Paul Revere. Called all the media people whose numbers I could remember, yanked them right out of bed. Called Dr. J. for an update on Debbie; she was doing okay. The Gallaghers made a couple of calls and inadvertently mobilized about half of the self-righteous anger in all of Southie and half of Charlestown. When we walked out Gallagher's front door to get back in Bart's van, we found, waiting in the front yard, a priest with chloracne, a fire engine, a minicam crew and five adolescents with baseball bats.

We borrowed a car battery from one of the adolescents and drove crosstown toward Cambridge, taking the two largest adolescents with us. Along the way, I gave Bart a brief lesson in how to run a Zodiac-one of the Townies kept saying "I know, I know"-and then dropped them all off on the Esplanade near Mass General.

Then I took the van to GEE headquarters. Gomez's Impala was there, and I met him in the stairway. "Thanks for the warning," I said. I'd had plenty of time to think about that voice on my answering machine-"your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"They probably came on to you real nice," I said. "Laughin seemed so decent. All they wanted was information. They'd never hurt anyone."

"Fuck that, man, you cost me a job. I just didn't want to see you get killed."

"We should talk later, Gomez. Right now I have business, and I don't want you to know anything about it." "I'm out of here."

He left, and I stood there in the dark until I heard his Impala start up and drive away.

Now was the time to use the most awesome weapon in my arsenal, a force so powerful I'd never dreamed of bringing it out. Locked up in a cheap, sheet-metal safe in my office, to which I alone had the combination, were a dozen bottles filled with 99% pure, 1,4-diamino butane. The stench of death itself distilled and concentrated through the magic of chemistry.

During the drive here I'd started to wonder whether this was a good idea, whether this stuff was as bad as I'd built it up to be in my mind. All doubt was removed when I opened the safe door. None of the bottles had leaked, but when I'd filled them, a month ago, I'd unavoidably smeared a few droplets on the lids, and all those putrescine molecules had been bouncing around inside of the safe ever since, looking for some nostrils to climb up. When they climbed up mine, I knew that this was a good plan.

I put the bottles into a box. I took my time about it and packed crumpled newspapers around the glass. Plastic would have been safer but the stuff would have diffused through the walls.

Then I grabbed my scuba gear. This was going to involve underwater work and, once the putrescine escaped, I'd need bottled air anyway. I got the Darth Vader Suit. I stole someone's SoHo root beer from the fridge and chugged the whole bottle. It was made from all natural ingredients.

JUST ON A HUNCH, I took the long way around to Basco. Hopped Rte. I up into Chelsea and then peeled off on the Revere Beach Parkway, which runs west through the heart of Everett and just south of Basco's kingdom. When I saw the Everett River Bridge coming up, I slowed down a little and flicked on the high beams.

An abandoned van was sitting on the shoulder of the high-way-deja vu-in exactly the same place where Gomez and I had stripped our old van after Wyman, the wacky terrorist, had left it there.

From here, you could get on the freeway, or you could slog across some toxic mudflats and boltcut your way onto Basco property, or you could go fifty feet up the shoulder, disappear under the bridge and mount an amphibian operation upstream into Basco's docking facilities. I could look straight across the flats from here and into the bridge of the Basco Explorer, now nestled into place in the shadow of the main plant. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. Park a van on the shoulder here and you had a command outpost for any kind of attack on Basco.