Zodiac (37 page)

“Lucky it wasn't a Claymore,” Boone said, “or we wouldn't have had the time delay.”

“That one seemed like about thirty seconds,” I said.

“More like five.”

The fragged compartment looked about the way I expected it to. The silver pipe had been severed halfway up. A golden fluid was welling calmly out the top, running down to the floor of the compartment. It wasn't necessary to run an analysis.

We weren't clear about what to do with the dead guys. If it came down to it, we could certainly defend ourselves in court. But you're supposed to bury corpses, or put sheets over them or something, not leave them sitting in a barge compartment that's slowly filling up with toxic waste.

“On the other hand, why not?” Bart said. “For them, this is like dying in church.”

“That's good enough for me,” Boone said, and jogged away down the catwalk. After about a nanosecond of careful thought, I followed him.

We came down on the opposite side of the barge, in case the Satanists had decided to bring in reinforcements. Once we hit the ground, I waded out into the water a little ways, sweeping my flashlight back and forth across my path. Just before Boone had discovered the shrine, I'd been starting to put a suspicion together in my mind.

The odor we'd noticed on our way over wasn't coming from Spectacle Island. It was coming from the water. But we hadn't noticed it in other parts of the Harbor. Only the part right north of Spectacle Island—where the
Basco Explorer
was anchored.

I scooped half a dozen dead fish out of the surf and tossed them up onto the land. We squatted around them and checked them over.

If the odor came from the dying of Boston Harbor—if these fish had died from infection with the PCB bug—they would have died at different times. Some would be decomposed, some would be fresh. But if I may be excused another disgusting thought, these fish all looked good enough to eat. They had died within the last couple of hours.

“There's something new in the Harbor,” I said. “Something that stinks real bad, and is incredibly toxic. And it stinks worst around the
Basco Explorer.”

“They must do something,” Boone said.

“We didn't see any dumping.”

“Sure. Years ago, when we started taking movies of them dropping barrels into the water, they got really shy and came up with a new system. They've got tanks in there that can be filled from the top and then drained out the bottom of the hull while the ship is in motion.”

“What did Pleshy say to you this morning?”

“Make my day!” Bart said. “It was in the
Herald.”

“That's what he said,” Boone said. “Go ahead. Test the Harbor for PCB-eating bugs. Test the sewers. Make my day. You won't find anything.”

“Say they filled those hidden tanks with some kind of massively toxic, concentrated stuff, probably an organophosphate, and dumped it into the Harbor tonight. They'd want to anchor near Spectacle Island—the center of the infection. They'd dump it into the water. Everything in the water would die. No one would find it remarkable that fish were dying—remember, the
Herald
called it the Harbor of Death. But at the microscopic level, all those PCB bugs are dying too.

“Just like Kelvin said,” Boone said. “If it gets real bad, we might have to nuke the Harbor.”

“Jesus,” Bart said, “Isn't that a little overkillish?”

“Not at all. Look. Twenty-four hours ago, these guys were dead. They had illegally put a genetically engineered bug into the environment and it was creating a toxic catastrophe. They'd rigged up a scapegoat—Dolmacher—but he'd gotten wise. A loose waste barrel on the deck.

“Now that's all different. Basco's dropping the bomb. Murdering the Harbor. Shit, the sewers too. The drums they were offloading into the Boston Whaler? Probably full of the same stuff. They're probably dumping it into the gutters right now. Exterminating the bug, covering up their traces.”

“Kind of blatant,” Bart said.

“Not at all,” said Boone. “Shit, Basco's back on its home territory here. They're old hands at poisoning the water and getting away with it.”

“It can't be traced to the ship, and it can't be traced through the gutters,” I said.

“The bastards are getting off scot free,” Boone said. He was just breathing the words, he was almost inaudible.

“Kind of looks that way,” Bart said.

“We have to get onto that ship.” Boone was in outer space now, in a kind of trance, staring at the incantations on the barge. “Before they get rid of the evidence. We have to board the ship and find the tanks they used.”

“What would you do then,” Bart asked. “Just getting on board wouldn't prove anything.”

“We'd have to get the media on board,” Boone said.

“No way to do that until they tie up somewhere,” I said. “The ship is going to be moored on Basco property, and you can bet they'll have intense security. We can't even get within striking distance without trespassing on their property and getting popped.”

“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 around to 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
Basco 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, Modern 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 blow job.

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 Pöyzen 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 belowdecks.

“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 partyin'?”

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.

“No,” I said.

“Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check out your boat?”

“Ship,” the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. “I don't think Skipper'd mind,” he concluded. “We're under real tight security when we get into port. 'Cause of terrorists. But this ain't in port.”

If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this fashion, I'd have laughed in his face. But that was Bart's magic. The sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed up over the gunwhales.

“You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you've got more balls than I do,” I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and looked mildly bewildered.

The sailor's name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic holds. The whole ship stank of organic solvents.