Warren Murphy: Scorched Earth

"Is the habitat environment contaminated?" he was asked.

"No. Just refortified. It was either this or start over. Since oxygen is a pure and natural gas, we thought it acceptable to introduce a fresh supply. It's organic, you know."

"What about pizzas? Are you introducing more of those?"

"That story is a fraud," Bulla snapped indignantly.

In the end, the reputation of the BioBubble was tainted, and once the first blot had appeared, the press went scurrying for more.

They found plenty. Falsified resumes. Drug use. Financial diversions.

Despite the rain of discredit, the lame jokes and talk-show ridicule, and every attempt to expose the BioBubble as a glorified tourist trap, it refused to burst. It remained unburst for so long that people forgot their expectations.

The project lumbered on, and the press moved on to the O.J. story and never looked back.

Until the night the BioBubble became a smoking, stinking heap of blackish brown silicon-and-steel trusswork whose pristine white paint framework turned black and bubbly as hot tar.

Nobody saw it happen. Not exactly. The only witnesses were calcified by the tremendous heat that melted them inextricably into the viscous glass-and-steel bubble.

It was after sundown. There were no tourists. And no press.

The BioBubble sat in the red desert, burnished by silver moonlight and looking as dignified as a child's cluster of bubbles. The internal lights were off. The inhabitatants-as they were called-were fast asleep, from the tiniest songbird to Project Director Bulla in his mobile home a quarter mile away.

Only the cockroaches, imported from many parts of the globe to ingest vegetable waste, were awake. In the three years the BioBubble had been operating, they had managed to flourish, proving that the scientists who predicted cockroaches would one day inherit the earth were, for once, correct.

The roaches crawled along the inside of the tempered glass panes as if they owned the project. By night, they did. Nobody was brave enough to stay up after lights out.

No one witnessed the event because nighttime visitors were distinctly prohibited. The official reason was to allow the inhabitatants to get their proper rest. They went to bed at dusk and rose with the sun.

The unofficial reason was nighttime was when the catering truck usually arrived.

This was an off night. There was no catering truck.

So there were no witnesses other than the roaches and the inhabitants of the nearby artist's colony of Dodona, Arizona, some of whom later swore they saw a white-hot column of light sizzle down from the clear, star-dazzled sky for the briefest of seconds.

A crack like thunder sounded, waking others, who also swore they saw the beam of light once they understood it was a sure way to be interviewed on national TV. The pale mushroom cloud of moonlight-illuminated smoke was sighted by several people as it drifted and billowed up from the desert floor.

Since it sounded like the thunder accompanying a lightning strike, no one bothered to check the BioBubble until the next morning. That's when the brown slag heap of vitreous, rehardened glass and steel was discovered and people started to tell their stories-true or otherwise.

The first thing people realized was that the thunder followed a lightning strike. It never preceded it.

And no one had ever heard of lightning that could reduce a project the size of the BioBubble to slag, cooking all its eco-dwellers to burned pork chops.

This once, even the cockroaches didn't survive.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was trying to make liver pate.

The trouble was the livers on the menu of the day were not being cooperative. Their owners wanted to keep them-preferably in their bodies and functioning normally.

Remo had other plans.

It was a simple assignment, as assignments went.

For two years now, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, had succumbed to a triple-digit annual homicide total, fueled by the simple mathematics of the drug trade. In the process, it acquired the disreputable nickname of "Moneyapolis."

At least, that's how Remo's employer, Dr. Harold W Smith, explained it to him when Remo had blurted out, "Minneapolis?"

"An ounce of crack cocaine that sells for five dollars in Chicago and other cities fetches twenty on the streets of Minneapolis. This has attracted drug traffickers in unusually high numbers. Consequently there is a drug turf war going on."

"You want me in the middle of it?" asked Remo.

"No. I want you to neutralize the next round of players. A rising Mafia group, the D'Ambrosia crime family."

"Didn't I nail one of their soldiers a while back?"

"I do not keep track," Smith said with lemony disinterest. "They operate out of San Francisco. But they see an opportunity in Minneapolis. If we interdict them now, the D'Ambrosias may decide to remain in San Francisco, where local law-enforcement agencies can contain them without our intervention."

"Gotcha," said Remo, who was in a good mood because it had been over a year since he'd gotten a simple in-and-out assignment.

"The D'Ambrosia Family is convening a meeting with a local supplier at the Radisson South Hotel, adjacent to Twin Cities Airport," Smith continued. "See that their meeting adjourns permanently. Arrangements have been made for you to join the wait staff."

"Why do I have to go undercover for a simple massacre?" Remo wondered aloud.

"The usual reason-security," said Smith, then hung up.

Since he was in a good mood, Remo didn't rip out the pay telephone at Logan Airport. Instead, he went to catch his flight, knowing that the superefficient Smith had already booked him on the cheapest air carrier known to man.

Presenting himself at the Friendly Air reservations desk, Remo said, "I'm Remo. You have a ticket for me?"

The clerk looked him up on his monitor, and asked, "Remo Bozzone?"

"If that's what it says," said Remo, who often got his cover surname from people not in the loop. He had been Remo Williams most of his life. Until the electric chair.

"What was that?" asked the clerk.

"Remo Bozo. That's me."

"Bozzone."

"That's me, too," said Remo cheerfully, fishing out a driver's license at random and flashing it with his thumb over the last name.

The clerk saw that the face matched and the first name was the same, so he didn't push the issue. "Good news, sir," he said brightly.

"I have a crash-proof plane?"

"No. We're bumping you up to first class."

Remo's face fell. "No way. Stick me in coach."

"But there's more leg room in the first-class cabin."

"My legs fold just fine."

"It's free."

"I'm not paying for this. My employer is."

"Complimentary drinks," the clerk coaxed.

"I can get distilled water in coach. Alcohol and I parted company a million years ago."

Remo now had the bored reservation clerk's interest.

"What's wrong with first class?"

"The stewardesses have way too much time on their hands," said Remo with a straight face.

The clerk looked at Remo as if Remo was John Wayne Gacy come back from the grave. Remo looked back as if he were John Wayne come back from his grave to deal harshly with his namesake.

In the end, the clerk sniffed and said, "We have no seats available in coach. Will you take a later flight?"

"No time. Is there a place that sells luggage in this terminal?"

"Try the main concourse."

"Fine. Give me the ticket."

Boarding pass in hand, Remo went to a gift shop, picked through the luggage until he found a tan leather carryon with a tiny, keyed padlock and purchased it using his Remo Itri credit card.

"It's one of our finest bags," the gift-shop manager said, handing back the card and receipt.

"1 only care about the lock," said Remo, taking the padlock and the tiny wire keyring with its two flat keys and walking out.