Authors: Neal Stephenson
“Yeah. Welcome home. Let's work together.”
“You're joining me, then?”
“No. You're joining me, unless I'm totally wrong.”
I sat down and told him about everything. Was going to show him the chloracne, but no, he'd seen it in Vietnam. He asked me all the right questions. He tried to explore all the blind alleys in the problem that I'd already explored. The only alley that wasn't blind led to Boston.
“Since the sinking,” he said, “I haven't done an action in the U.S.”
“Time to get on the stick.”
“My people have all gone back to Europe.”
“What am I, dog meat? Look, Boone, this could be the biggest action of all time. We know who the target is, don't we? Our probable next president. How are you going to feel if you go home and let this guy become the leader of the Free World?”
“Very risky. And my setup in Europe is too sweet to risk.”
“Yeah, yeah. You see, Boone, that's exactly why I don't want to move to Europe. Because it's dirty everywhere. Because nobody has idealism, nobody gives a shit when you expose a toxic criminal. And because after six months there, I won't have any balls left. Geographic castration.”
He tossed his trout on the ground and came after me with both hands. I'm no boxer, so I just get in close, too close to punch, and use my weight. A little of that and we were rolling around in the leaves together. Then I curled up with stomach cramps and he took pity on me. He just rolled over on his back and lay there, the first yellow leaves of the New Hampshire fall spinning down into his face. “I feel alive,” he said.
“I feel like I'm dying,” I said, “and we both have something to prove.”
“The Groveler, man. His ass is grass.”
As for Jim Grandfather, I didn't want him along. I wanted him back with Anna. Everything I said just rolled off his back and he ended up driving the car.
Boone knew all about this identity-blurring stuff, to the point of knowing which brand of hair dye was the best. Before we left that reservation we were both brunettes. I was Tawny Oak and he was Midnight Ebony. Jim loitered outside the bathroom, loudly wondering if he should dye himself blond. “Greg Allman, man!”
We hit Boston around five in the evening. For the last half of the trip we were getting Boston radio stations and Boone went nuts. It was like he'd been on a desert island. The man was a Motown freak. He sat in the center of the seat with both hands on the radio, punching up and down the dial, hunting the beat.
Sometimes he had to settle for a news broadcast. They had pretty much stopped talking about me since my death. GEE was still in the news, repudiating my actions, covering its ass. That was fine, they had to do that. But Debbie, bless her, had come out in public, pointing out a few holes in the FBI's story, disputing my terrorism. Pleshy was on the prowl, visiting organizations in New Hampshire and, as always groveling. And then there was the usual crap: apartheid demonstrations downtown, murders, arson and some demented bandit who was stealing prescription drugs from pharmacies. His trademark
was a Tazer gun. When the electrocuted druggists woke up, their shelves had been ransacked.
The first thing I wanted to do was get a message to Bart, so I wrote it down and gave it to Boone. We dropped him off near the Pearl and then pulled around to the alley in back to wait. He was going to give the note to Hoa and ask him to relay it to Bart the next time he came in, which, knowing Bart, would probably be within twelve hours. It was a pretty vague note. Hoa wouldn't understand it, but Bart would.
While we were waiting, watching the Vietnamese people come to the back door to buy cheap steamed rice, a motor scooter stopped next to us, by the dumpster. In the corner of my eye I saw the rider bending over on his seat and figured he was undoing the lock. Then the smell of vomit drifted past me. I glanced over; it was Hoa's bus-boy, doubled over, barfing in the alleyway.
Couldn't look any more than that because he might recognize me. I sank down in the seat and turned away. “Jim. That guy on the scooter, can you see if he's got a rash?”
“He's wearing clothes, S.T. Nothing on his face.”
Boone, coming out the back door, noticed him. The guy was slowly getting off his scooter, looking pale and sick of the whole business. Boone started talking to him in Vietnamese, then switched to English. Then he got into the truck.
“He's got it,” Boone said, and that was all we needed.
So we had another spill. This thing just kept getting more involved. The Dorchester Bay CSO couldn't possibly account for contamination under the public fishing pier.
What I wanted, real bad, was to have my maps of the sewer system. Then I could locate CSOs near the pier. Since I still had a few test tubes with me, I could trace them out and find the source of the spill.
But I'd done enough of those traces to have a rough idea. If there really was organic chlorine coming out near that pier, the source had to be up north.
We were driving past a pay phone when I remembered Dolmacher for the
n
th time. “The Holy Grail⦠I'm in the book.” I'd looked in the book once before and I knew where he lived: up north. Vague evidence, but visiting the poor fuck was high on my list anyway. We stopped at the booth long enough for me to get his exact address, and then we headed across the river.
To find his place we had to drive down some pretty dark and quiet streets, and the temptation was almost too much. I still had my bandolier, had worn it all the way to the Singletary residence and brought it back to Boston. I started looking around for manholes.
Then I remembered that the simple approach didn't work with this toxin. If it was the same thing we'd seen in Natick, the concentration would be zero up here in his neighborhood, and much higher downstream. Maybe we could check that out later.
Jim dropped me and Boone off in various places, then parked somewhere, and we all converged separately on the house. The lights were off in Dolmacher's place; this wasn't the kind of neighborhood where you needed to leave them on when you went out. Not that it was ritzy, just nice, out of the way and homey. The only criminals around here were us.
As evidenced by the fact that we broke right into his house through a basement window. I was wearing surgical gloves and the others kept their hands in their pockets. We didn't want to turn on all the lights, and it looks suspicious to beam flashlights around the inside of an empty house, so we just stumbled around in the medieval glimmer of my Bic.
The basement was true to form: a big war game was spread out on the ping-pong table. The U.S. was being invaded through Canada and Dolmacher was doing a great job fighting the red bastards off. And he had an active model-building studio down here.
We went upstairs to check out his collection of electronic toys and military-power books. Jim noticed a nightlight on in the bathroom and went to look at that. Boone and I checked out the living
room, done up in classic Dolmacher Contemporary, now full of empty pizza boxes and used paper napkins.
“Holy fucking shit, I can't believe this,” Jim said from the bathroom, and we convened. On my way, I tripped over something that fell over and scattered across the floor: a half-empty sack of aquarium charcoal. It goes without saying that Dolmacher didn't own any fish.
We went and gazed at the bathroom in the brown gloom of the nightlight. It stank. The first thing my eye picked out was the half-dozen used syringes scattered across the counter. Then the bottles, many bottles of pills. I started reading the labels. Antibiotics, each and every one. The place smelled like death and chlorine; there was a half-empty jug of laundry bleach on top of the toilet and an empty in the garbage. I bent over, bless my scientific heart, and sniffed Dolmacher's toilet. He had dumped a bunch of bleach into it. This was inorganic chlorine, the safe kind, not the bad covalent stuff we were looking for. He was using it to disinfect his crapper.
Dolmacher was real sick. He had a problem with some bacteria, a problem in his bowel. He knew it was a problem and he was desperately trying to deal with it.
Maybe I had a problem too. I went through Dolmacher's supply and scarfed some pills.
Boone and Jim were doing some mumbling, bending over the bathtub. “⦠or maybe buckshot,” Boone was saying.
“No way, 9mm semi,” Jim said.
“What are you guys ⦔ I said, and then, for the first time, noticed the corpse in the bathtub. It was a guy in a suit.
“Your dude's a good housekeeper,” Jim said. “Puts his bodies in the tub to drain.”
“Should've recognized the smell,” I said. “Putrescine.”
“Say what?”
“Putrescine. The chemical given off by decaying bodies.”
Dolmacher had already gone through the guy's wallet and tossed it on his chest. I picked it up, being the only one here with gloves, and checked it out. Basco Security.
“Nice grouping,” Jim observed. The dead guy had six holes in his chest, all within six inches of one another.
Boone and I got beers from the fridge, Jim got water, and we sat around in the living room. I was thinking.
“You guys know anything about quantum mechanics? Of course not.”
They didn't say anything, so I kept thinking out loud. “Any reaction that can go in one direction can go in the other direction.”
“So?”
“Okay. First of all, here's what we know: Basco, thirty years ago, dumped some whopping transformers on the north side of Spectacle Island. Covered them with dirt and forgot about them.”
“In about '68, they started to worry, because they knew there was a lot of toxic stuff in those transformers. But there was nothing they could do about it until recentlyâthe Age of Genetic Engineering. They bought out the best and brightest such company in the Boston area and told them to invent a PCB-eating bug.”
“So they did. Put together some chlorine-processing plasmids and implanted them in a particular bug called
Escherichia coli
. It's a bacterium that lives in everyone's bowels, helps digest food. A good bug. A very well-understood, well-studied bug, ideal for these purposes. It's what all the genetic engineers use.”
“It worked. But it just barely worked in time. An old barge came along and ripped the transformers open. So they had to release the bug quickly, before they'd had a chance to test it in the lab, to clean up that mess before yours truly noticed it. And that all worked just fine. The PCBs went away.”
“That's what we know. Now, from here on out, it's just my theory. Like I said, any reaction that goes one way can be reversed. Now, somewhere along the line, when these guys were trying to design a plasmid to change covalent chlorine to ionic, they had to consider
the possibility of making it go the other way. Ionic chlorine, like in seawater, to covalent, like in toxic waste.”
“Oh shit,” Boone said.
“Once they considered that, they'd never forget it. Because a whole industryâmost of the chemical industryâis founded upon a single reaction: the Chloralkali processâturning salt water into covalent chlorine. Using a very old process that takes up a hell of a lot of electrical power. It's an industry that's been on the skids for decades. But if you could design a bug that would do the same process, with no electricity, think what a kick in the ass it would be for Basco and Boner and all those other old, decomposing corporations. Suddenly, everything they wanted to make would be ten times cheaper. The environmental regs wouldn't matter, compared to that. It would be so fucking profitable. ⦔
“Okay, we understand why they'd want such a bug,” Jim said. “You're saying they've got it?”
“They've got it. In two senses of the word. They own it, and they're infected by it. Someone screwed up. Someone at Biotronics picked his nose at the wrong time, or forgot to scrub beneath his fingernails, or something, and that wonder bugâthe one that converts salt water to toxic chlorineâgot into the wrong tank.”
“But how did it get into that sewer line?” Boone said.
“You're Pleshy or Laughlin. You're a crafty guy. You've learned a few things since 1956 when you openly dumped your transformers on the island. This time you're going to be subtle. When it's time to eat up those PCB-eaters on the Harbor floor, you're not going to take the bacteria out in big drums and pour them into the water in broad daylight. You're not going to go out there at all. You're going to let the primeval Boston sewer system do it for you. It's full of
E. coli
already. You flush the bugs down the toilet at the place where they were made, out in Natick. You pick an evening when it's starting to rain heavily. That night the sewer overflow tunnel carries your bugs twenty miles under the city and dumps them into the Harbor through a CSO in Dorchester Bay, a CSO that happens to be right near Spectacle Island.
“In most places the bugs die for lack of PCBs to eat. But some of them find their way to your huge PCB spill.
“Your plan succeeds brilliantly. The PCBs disappear. The guy from GEE gives up on it.
“Then the covalent-chlorine level starts to rise. You're not dumping PCBs, but the levels are rising anyway. It's impossible, it doesn't make sense. But after some simple tests, one of your genetic engineers figures it out. Your tank of PCB-eaters got contaminated with a very small number of bugs that do the opposite thing. They got into the sewers along with the others. At first, they didn't do very much. The size of the colony was tiny compared with the size of the PCB-eating colony. But after a few weeks, they've multiplied. They can multiply as much as they want. They have an unlimited supply of foodâall the salt in the seven seas.”
I drank beer and let them ponder that one.
“And all of that salt could be converted into organic chlorine?” Boone said, sounding kind of breathy.