Old Poison (3 page)

Finally I called the Wedgeworth Clear Sky
Foundation. I am not usually shy about asking questions, but then I
normally feel comfortable with my reason for asking them. By the
time I dialed Wedgeworth, I was beginning to feel both foolish and
frustrated.

Steven W. Wedgeworth had been one of the
first chemists to accept and verify the work of Nobel Prize winners
Rowland and Molina. Their research had determined chlorinated
chemicals were eating a hole in the ozone shield.

Wedgeworth had not waited for the idea to
gain acceptance and the prize to be awarded. Though he was at the
time a junior chemist for GarlChem, Inc., he had boldly gone where
no industrial establishment chemist had gone before. He’d conducted
research which damned products manufactured by his employer. When
he couldn’t get them to make changes in the polluting products, he
had the study published in a respected peer-reviewed journal. He
was promptly fired and blacklisted. What else? That’s the American
way. Wedgeworth might have found a position in academia but chose
instead to devote his life to the cause of saving the planet. He
lived like a church mouse and used every bit of his resources to
set up a foundation. On the Internet that morning I had learned
that this foundation had the world’s largest database for
atmospheric studies. If they didn’t know about Red 19, no one
did.

I expected to get a secretary or
receptionist and at least three lines of defense between me and the
Man. When Wedgewood answered the phone himself, I felt guilty for
taking his time to ask him about a fictional substance.

He hesitated a long time before answering.
Then in slow, carefully measured words he replied, “What you
describe to me does not sound like anything currently known to
science.”

I thanked him and was about to hang up when
he added, “Of course, the entire idea of ozone depletion was
unknown to science a very short time ago, so one does not wish to
make absolute statements. But at this time, no.” Embarrassed at
taking the man’s time for this fiction, I thanked him and quickly
hung up the phone.

I was studying my notes to see if there was
any other useful place to check when the phone rang. It was Mike
Shelley at SDS, Inc. Without even the preamble of a hello, he
shouted at me: “Hunter, don’t you ever pull shit like that on me
again. I haven’t had a dressing down like that since boot camp. I
don’t know what sort of fringe element freaks you’re dealing with
these days, but don’t ever use me as the patsy again. Hear?” He
slammed down the receiver before I could respond.

I listened to the dial tone a while,
depressed the button a moment, and called him back. His phone just
rang. He did not want to talk with me.

“Yeabot, send this note to Mike Shelley’s
email: ‘Dear Mike, whatever happened, I am sorry it put you in a
bad spot. We’ve known each other a lot of years, and I hope you
know I wouldn’t do such a thing on purpose. Maybe I don’t know what
sort of fringe element freaks I’ve gotten into either. It would
really help me if you could enlighten me on that subject.
Diana.”

The damned
Martian Diary
CD lay on my
desk, taunting me while I debated what to do next. The answers I
had gotten so far indicated that establishment scientists had no
knowledge of anything looking or acting like Red 19, at least
nothing accepted and proven. But someone, somewhere, must have been
talking about it or Mike wouldn’t have gotten the response he did.
Some “fringe element freaks” must have tried to tell the tale of
the
Martian Diary
to the team planning the exploration of
Mars.

Enough! It was time I found out who the hell
I was really working for. I instructed Yeabot to scan my
description of Red 19 and search for any information on any persons
or organizations associated with such a substance. His search
brought up thousands of hits, so I helped him define the search a
little better.

Eventually we got the results down to three
articles reported in a community weekly in Paso Nuevo, California,
a small mountain community about forty miles outside of
Bakersfield. These three chronicled a protest attempt by a young
woman named Professor Evelyn Lilac. It crossed my mind that with
that name she might have escaped from a game of
Clue
. She
had chained herself to the gate of the Blue Morpho Petroleum
research laboratory and refused to leave until press and television
reported her statement. She wanted the world to know that Blue
Morpho was experimenting with a new red-colored fuel that she
called
Red 19.
She claimed it would be disastrous to the
environment. It appeared that the only press she got was the local
weekly, and even there she was written up as a total nut case.

“Hell, Yeabot. I think we just identified
the mysterious author of the
Martian Diary
. It seems Mr.
Borson has us working for a crackpot . . . I think.”

“Crackpot is unknown reference.”

“Means she’s crazy. Yeabot, this article
says she got full television and press coverage. Check for other
stories on this event.”

He whirred and clicked and reported, “Zero
hits.”

“Zero? No one else wrote anything about this
event. Scan these stories and check every name, date, fact, and
location.”

“Zero hits on this event. Twenty-two stories
from Costa Rica on Evelyn Lilac, environmentalist, president of the
Lilac Environmental Institute. One article from the Long Beach
Press Telegram on the environmental expo.”

“No other paper even covered the story. That
is strange. The Paso Nuevo paper even ran a picture of the
reporters surrounding her. Maybe she’s not a nut. Maybe it’s Mr.
Jordon time.”

“Mr. Jordon reference unknown.”

“Movie reference, Yeabot.
Heaven Can
Wait.
Mr. Jordon said, ‘The probability of a person being right
increases in direct ratio to the number of people trying to prove
him wrong.’ Think I need to talk with this lady.”

Yeabot translated the Spanish articles and I
read through the rest of the clippings. In addition to picking up
bits and pieces of information on Evelyn Lilac and the Costa Rican
environmental movement, I learned one very interesting fact.
Professor Lilac was in the United States for appearances at public
conferences on global warming. The first was held two days ago in
Chicago, Washington, D.C. would host the last and largest event at
the end of the week, but one was scheduled in Long Beach in two
days. Bingo! I would meet this lady before I filed any report or
spent any more of that retainer.

* * * * *

I turned my bike over and popped off the
front wheel with its flat tire. Nine years of riding this trail and
never a flat. Murphy’s corollary I guess. If it’s going to go wrong
it will be at the worst possible time.

Professor Evelyn Lilac had graciously
granted me an interview, but her only available time was during her
morning bike ride. I was to meet her at the beach entrance to the
river bike trail at precisely eight a.m., and if I was late by one
minute, she would leave without me. Even getting this concession
out of her had taken hours of calls and call-backs from myriad
intermediates associated with the upcoming environmental
conference.

After chaining my bike to the nature center
fence, I picked up the tire and took off at a run down Fall Avenue.
As I ran, I tried to figure my chances of making it. At my normal
cruising speed of ten to twelve miles an hour, it took me
twenty-five minutes to ride down the trail from Fall Avenue to Seal
Beach. It was 7:30. That gave me five minutes to fix the tire. It
took four of those minutes just to get to the station.

I ran up to the lone attendant and plunked
down the tire and a twenty-dollar bill. He was a very young,
good-looking kid, with brown eyes and long naturally blond hair
tied back in a pony tail. Breathlessly I said, “There’s a ten-buck
tip in it if you can do me a rapid pit stop and change this tube in
two minutes.”

He eyed my twenty and with a smile replied,
“Cool.” With no wasted motion he pulled the old tube, popped in a
new one and pumped it up to seventy psi. As he finished, he put his
hands in the air like a rodeo cowboy after tying off a calf. With a
beautiful, good-natured grin, he called, “Time! Did I make it?”

I actually hadn’t even looked at my watch,
but I replied, “With twelve seconds to spare.” I thanked him,
handed him the extra ten bucks, and ran toward the river.

By the time I had the wheel back on, I had
lost fifteen minutes. That meant I had to make up ten minutes on my
usual time. I had recently replaced my beach cruiser with a
ten-speed and today I pushed my speed to eighteen miles per hour. I
was feeling smug until a voice behind me said, “On your left.” With
that, two tall lean bikers in matching “real” biking attire swept
past me like I was standing still. I wondered if I could go faster
if I changed my blue jeans for a pair of those brightly striped
spandex pants.

Just before the Cathedral Street overpass, I
heard a noise that was closer and different from the steady traffic
sounds on the overpass above. The trail at this spot dips sharply
downhill, so that when you go through the underpass, you are within
two feet of the river. Then the trail climbs up again on the far
side and angles to the left. Because of this configuration you
can’t see the bottom of the underpass until you ride into it.

The noise, which I realized was the thrum of
an idling boat engine, grew louder, and as I rode into the
underpass I saw a shallow draft motorboat sitting at the edge of
the water.

Cathedral Street is supported by several
cement columns, which are two or three feet thick and run the full
width of the roadway. The first of these is about ten or fifteen
feet into the river, and from the bike trail it looks like a cement
wall. The boat was about eighteen feet long and wide enough that it
did not have a lot of leeway between the edge of the trail and the
cement support.

The man at the wheel turned his face from
view as I rode by. As I pumped up the far side of the underpass, I
looked back at the boat and he again turned his face.

As I rode out of the underpass, my
peripheral vision caught a biker, dressed in sweats and a stocking
cap, sitting at the edge of the northbound lane, huddled over the
handlebars of an old bike. He looked like he was poised to lunge
into motion, like a participant waiting for the start of a bike
race. As I did a double take and looked directly at him, he too
averted his face from my view and pulled the cap a little
lower.

My mind tried to go in about three
directions at once. At such times I like to imagine that there are
different personalities on my internal board of directors. Though
my friend Jenny thinks this is bordering on a serious mental
disorder, I have a shrink friend who actually uses this as a method
of therapy. For me it is a way to bring order out of chaos.

For instance, as I considered the guy
hunched over his bike, and the boat strangely parked under the
overpass, one member of my board wanted to play though a number of
scenarios and speculate on what they were doing there. This member
is always suspicious and is capable of finding possible villains
and conspiracies everywhere. The investigator on my board suggested
stopping to chat them up and see if there seemed to be any real
problem here. My ever vigilant manager, however, reminded me that
it was now eight a.m., I was still five minutes from the beach, and
my bike speed had slowed to nine miles per hour. Concentrating on
my bike pedals, I was soon picking up speed.

A short way down the trail I saw a woman
riding toward me. I had passed several people on the busy bike
trail, but this one caught my attention because of her clothing.
Though it was a clear, sunny fall day, she wore a broad-brimmed,
plastic-coated rain hat and a rain jacket brightly emblazoned with
a flag. I had ridden several yards past her before the inspiration
hit me.
I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that was a Costa Rican
flag on that jacket.

As I attempted to execute a sudden stop and
U-turn, I lost my balance and almost landed on the huge rocks that
made up the riprap at the edge of the trail. By the time I got
turned around, Professor Evelyn Lilac was well on her way north and
going like a bat. I pumped hard and was gaining on her when she
rode into the turn and descended into the underpass. The biker
sitting at the edge of the trail lunged after her, his front tire
inches from her back tire. “I told you so,” gloated my suspicious
board member.

The professor’s scream echoed out from the
underpass, rising over the constant noise of the traffic on
Cathedral Street. By the time I could see down the trail, I had
more speed than I’d dreamed I could muster. As my eyes adjusted to
the shadow of the underpass, I saw two bikes lying in a pile
blocking the northbound lane. Lilac and her assailant were locked
together in the southbound lane as he struggled to pull her toward
the river and the waiting boat.

There was no way around them. I started to
hit the brakes, though I knew I would never be able to stop in
time. Then Lilac landed a fairly well-placed knee, dropping her
assailant to the rocks at the water’s edge. She tried to turn and
run but tripped and tangled herself in the fallen bikes. Her
assailant was getting up slowly from the side of the path. The guy
in the boat was yelling something in Spanish.

Seeing a narrow opening between Evelyn and
her assailant, I let go of the brakes. Hunching down over the
handlebars, I lowered my head, keeping the back of the helmet
toward the assailant, and peddled like hell. I know I was going
thirty miles per hour when I hit the sucker because my nose was
only about two inches from the computer on the handlebars.
Fortunately for me, he stepped backward when he saw me almost on
top of him, so I only hit him a glancing blow. His own loss of
balance and the rocky bank did the rest. He stumbled backward,
falling with his upper body in the boat and his legs in the
water.