Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “Yeah. Maurice told me later that he’d been having dealings with the smugglers on and off for a long time, under cover of the agency, and that he was tired of it but didn’t dare stop. Now, though, he can take advantage of the city’s witness protection plan. They’ll get him out of the area and see him set up somewhere else in the country. He’ll be okay. He was pretty grateful, actually.”

  “That’s a relief. So where do you go next?”

  “Nowhere.” She smiled.

  “Today was the last day?”

  “Uh-huh. And then I’m going home with you—when was it the Bugle booked your flight for?”

  “Tomorrow. They’re pleased, apparently—Kate says she has something else in the pipeline she wants me to work on, which suits me fine. But MJ, if there’s more work here for you, you should—”

  “No. Honey, this is no kind of life, you running all over the landscape, and me doing the same, and us never being together. The agency down here will refer me to some of their correspondent agencies and former clients up in New York. We’ll see what that brings. But I’d rather starve with you than make tons o’ bucks without you.”

  “We might starve yet,” Peter said. “Granted, these AP royalties are nice, and the next couple of months will be okay because of them. But later in the year—”

  “Let’s see what the future brings,” MJ said. “Finish your salad. I want my main course, and the nice lady is waiting for you to stop fiddling. Are you ever going to eat those greens?”

  Peter smiled and applied himself to what remained after the tomatoes were gone. After the waitress took their plates, he found MJ looking at him speculatively. “So what did he have to say for himself?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “That boy with the big teeth. You remember the one.”

  Peter raised his eyebrows. “He was argumentative,” he said, “but we parted friends.”

  “Oh, I believe that!” A steak arrived, which MJ promptly started to demolish. “Tell me another.”

  Peter shrugged. “He didn’t bother trying to kill me after Curt took off,” he said, “so either he’s decided to let me be for a while longer, or he got killed in that blast.”

  “I don’t believe the second in the slightest,” MJ said. “As for the first—I don’t trust his reasons.”

  “I don’t know if I trust them either,” Peter said, “but I think Curt shamed him into it, somehow. It was an odd moment—but I’m glad I saw it.”

  “Question is,” MJ said, “how long will it last?”

  Peter shook his head, then reached out across the table to take her hand. “I don’t know. And I have a feeling that whatever Curt’s tangled up in is going to resurface eventually, more complicated than ever. But for the moment—”

  “For the moment,” MJ said, squeezing his hand, “you’re here. And I’m here. And tomorrow, we’re going to say bye-bye to Aunt Anna, and catch a plane and go home and get on with our lives in a place with lower humidity. And I will be blessedly relieved! Now eat your pasta before it gets cold, or MJ will be very cross.”

  Peter looked at her and made an eager face. “Promise?”

  Her smile promised a whole lot more.

  Peter ate his pasta.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MANY thanks to Jim Dumoulin of Kennedy Space Center, maintainer of the Center’s home pages on the WorldWideWeb, for much useful information.

  Thanks also to Paul McGrath for technical assistance, and to Peter Morwood for advice on militaria, and for secretarial and catering services.

  THE VENOM FACTOR

  Book Three

  THE OCTOPUS AGENDA

  Diane Duane

  In memoriam

  Veronica Guerin

  Ace investigative journalist for the Irish Independent

  The pen is mightier than the sword…

  That’s why they shot you.

  Requiescat in pace.

  PROLOGUE

  IT was 2:30 in the morning near Dolgeville, New York—which meant it was the middle of the night in the back end of nowhere, and Jim Heffernan was deadly bored.

  Jim Heffernan was forty-five years old, not a tall man, yet a fairly cheerful one given the kind of life he’d lived so far. Everyone told him he looked like a pudgy version of Sam Neill, the actor. That was all very nice to hear, except that he would have much preferred to hear that he had Sam Neill’s bank balance, pudgy or otherwise. He didn’t let the discrepancy in their earnings bother him too much, though; it wouldn’t really have helped if he did.

  Jim had once been a miner. Most of the people around here had once been miners, or the wives and children of miners. That was when Jim was in his twenties, at a time when there had actually been another small town near Dolgeville, called Welleston after some Welles or other who had actually started up the coal-mining industry.

  That had been a long time ago, near the end of the last century. The town and the industry had been very successful, and for many years the town’s people had come to depend on “Welleston money” for their livelihoods. But things shifted. Things always shifted.

  And that was why Welleston spent thirty years as a crumbling ghost town, and another thirty as the memory of a ghost town. And why Jim was now sitting in a tacky little box of a portable guardroom at 2:30 in the morning. Once again he was blinking in the harsh, faintly flickering glare of fluorescent light, trying to do a crossword puzzle that didn’t interest him, trying to stay awake. Trying to be a security guard for something which was no longer a coal mine.

  The room was just slightly larger than a walk-in closet. It had walls the color of adhesive tape, and no floor except the plain, poured-concrete base that it had been plumped down on. It was damp; even on a hot summer’s night it was damp, and the screens on the window, though they looked effective, weren’t quite fine-meshed enough, or well enough fitted to the windows, to keep out the blackflies. The insects happily descended on Jim as a kind of movable feast, and left itching red welts on any part of him that wasn’t covered (as well as some that were). So, for most of the night, Jim tended to sit with the light turned off, to avoid attracting them. Should one or another of his bosses turn up (one of the rarest of occurrences, particularly after they had met the blackflies) his excuse came easily: having that fluorescent tube turned off helped his night-vision, and made it easier for him to see what was going on outside. Not that anything much ever did go on outside here, except for the sound of the occasional crazed moose or deer crashing through the woodland surrounding the place.

  The quiet was endemic in Dolgeville and its environs. The township was a remote place, buried well away from any really big town. Nestled deep in the foothills at the southern end of the Adirondacks, it sat in an undulating landscape of granite-boned hills clothed in conifer and hardwood forest. Even when the coal mining had been at its height, very few people had ever come there except on business. Since that business had mostly involved coal in one form or another, society had been limited to those who dug the coal and their families, those who maintained or replaced the machinery for those who dug the coal, and those who came to truck the coal away. There had been a constant grubbiness about everything and everybody, a fine black dust that got under your nails and into your pores and into the grooves of your fingerprints. In those days, the whole world had looked the same: gray and dingy, with the exception of a brief period in autumn when the trees flamed through the coal dust and then dropped their leaves to stand bare and clean against a clear blue sky.

  Now, at least, you were free of the coal dust, and you got to see the occasional unfamiliar face, especially with the new industry coming in. Jim Heffernan sighed. It was always the way: some big company got you and everybody in the area all excited, got the local government to put up money to help them move in—and then when they did move in, they always managed to claw back as much of that money as they could for themselves. But at least he had this job; better than nothing, something to feed Flora and the kids, something to
make him feel even a little bit useful. He was luckier than many who had been waiting for jobs and never got them.

  Even if this job was, in essence, no more than watching a large hole in the ground to make sure nobody ran off with it in the night. Yeah, he thought, and maybe someday I’ll move up to watching the Brooklyn Bridge in case one of these super-criminals from the papers tries to steal it. Think big, fella. He grunted with amusement at the thought, and turned his attention back to the crossword puzzle. Yet another desperate attempt to keep himself awake. He hated the night shift, but the night shift was what they had been hiring for, and there wasn’t much he could do about it, not with the mortgage to take care of, and the kids needing new clothes for school in the fall. He stared at the much-corrected puzzle and tried to think.

  Seven down, dockside security, six letters, ends with e-r.

  “Hawser,” he muttered, not exactly sure what a hawser was, but knowing it was something nautical. Except that, like most crossword answers, though the word fit seven down, it made nonsense of nine across. And, of course, he had left the crossword-puzzle dictionary that Flora had given him on the kitchen table at home.

  Then he heard a soft, quick shuffling right outside. It was way too loud for blackflies.

  Jim Heffernan froze for an instant. Then he quietly laid the puzzle book aside, reached out to snap off the light, and even more quietly undid the flap of his holster. He hadn’t been issued an automatic pistol, but his big Ruger Security Six revolver held half a dozen very good arguments against any casual intruder doing something stupid. He sat very still for a few seconds, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness and listening to a silence that wasn’t so much a lack of sound as someone—or something—carefully making no noise.

  “It’s okay, Jim,” came a voice from outside. “It’s me.”

  Jim let out a breath he hadn’t noticed he was holding, but didn’t bother turning the light back on again. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a guy like that, Harry!” he said. “What if I made a mistake one night?”

  “You?” There was laughter like a rusty saw in a log as Jim stepped out through the door. In the light of a bright half-moon, he could see where Harry Pulaski, the other guard on this shift, was leaning against the wall of the guard hut. He was grinning. “We both know you’d sooner pick your nose with that cannon than fire it at anybody.”

  “Yeah, well.” Jim hated guns. According to his supervisor, that made him one of the safest kinds of people to use them. He wasn’t too sure about that. Being safe around yourself and your coworkers was one thing; being safe up against some young punk with state-of-the-art firepower and no scruples about using it was something else. “Quiet round?”

  “What else?” Pulaski shrugged. “Still, it’s an ill wind, ya know? I’m set to lose another two, three pounds this week walking around in this heat, if it keeps up.”

  The site lay spread out before them, monochrome in the moonlight. Not that there was much color about it even in full daylight. All but a few of the security lights had been turned out this late at night. Only the big floods around the graveled area where the heavy machinery was parked were still on.

  Forty years ago this had been the biggest of several strip mines in the area, a huge concentric ulcer burrowing into the countryside, surrounded by heaps of spoil. Over the years since the supply of coal ran out and the mining company went out of business, the local county government had made several sporadic, halfhearted attempts to re-landscape the place, but Nature had proven more effective. Weeds and scrub plants that didn’t mind the local coal-dust-laden soil had moved in and made a great green terraced garden of it, where at least the various wild grasses seemed to prosper.

  Much of that green covering had been scraped away now as the digging started again. The site was easily half a mile from one rim of the hole to the other, with the guard hut perched high up on one side. Jim often wondered how quick their reaction was supposed to be, if something started happening clear across the crater. All around the edges of that crater were Detex watch clocks, and a rough, graveled road that would have served a better security purpose if the guards had some sort of vehicle. As it was, once every hour one or the other of them had to leave the relative comfort of the hut and walk around the site, swiping his electronic key card at each of the clocks—and, naturally, keeping an eye open for anything suspicious.

  What they were watching most carefully was the wire fence around the facility, which had been cut months ago. Three heavy trucks and two wheeled diggers had been stolen from the vehicle park by the time the next guard made his round. Jim was grateful it had happened on his weekend off, because the guards on duty that night had been fired at once.

  Pulaski yawned, stretched, then leaned back against the wall of the hut. “Almost makes you wish for the good old days, when there was nothing here but wilderness,” he said.

  “No jobs, either,” said Jim sourly. “I like it just the way it is, thanks very much.”

  What had happened to the town was nearly miraculous. A company that specialized in manufacturing artificial composite “marble” and “granite” had come to survey the old mine site. They had been specifically looking for quartz. From what Jim could gather, they powdered it, mixed it with resins, then turned it out as slabs of high-quality fake Carrara marble for tiles and countertops. They had found a rich seam of the stuff running underneath the depleted coal veins, and it had looked like this would provide the town with at least some jobs. After years when up to eighty percent of the population had been out of work, it was better than nothing.

  The company, Consolidated Quartzite, moved in, hired a couple of hundred local people as both full-time and part-time labor, and began clearing the site and sinking boreholes to find the best—and most economical—way of extracting the quartz. The process had gone on without much fanfare for several months, and the town began to take on a slight sparkle of life. People started to eat out more than they had for a long time, the bar began to fill up again in the evenings, they even began talking cautiously about a return of the good times. Or at least, as good as times were likely to get these days.

  And then it happened. There was a morning when one of the Consolidated site engineers came running from the site up to the main office so fast that his helmet fell off halfway and he didn’t even stop to pick it up and put it back on. And this was the man who chewed out at least three workers a day for similar infringements of the safety regulations. He shot into the site office like a rabbit down a burrow, dumped a pocketful of something indeterminate all over the table, grabbed the phone, and began babbling to someone at the head office in Nevada.

  There were some abortive attempts to hush up what had happened, but in a small town on a worksite where everyone knew everyone else—and more or less trusted everyone else as well—the truth came out fast enough. They had struck gold.

  All over the world, gold and quartz are often found together—but no one had ever expected to find it here. Consolidated’s chief geologist flew in from Nevada to look over the site for herself, and walked away shaking her head and muttering, “Anomalous, very anomalous.”

  But she had been smiling. Everyone was smiling. There had been the usual talk of how much fallout from this find—nobody was calling it a strike, at least not yet—would fall out onto the workers and the local economy, and for a change the result was better than anyone expected. To their credit, Consolidated took on as many more local employees to run the extraction machinery as they could. It was mostly heavy boring and digging equipment for which people had to be trained, and since they were paid while they were being trained, no one particularly minded. It was a skill that would be useful later.

  In any case, by the time the quartz dust had settled, about a month after the initial find, many more people were employed, and nearly everyone was pleased. Except for the ones who had to stay up until 3:30 in the morning, or five or six, walking around a great big hole in the ground and hoping that no more machinery wou
ld go missing. Especially on their shift.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t complain,” Pulaski said. “There’s a lot of worse things we could be doing.”

  Jim rubbed his eyes. The brief adrenaline rush of Pulaski’s arrival had worn off, and the night shift was beginning to weigh heavily again. His eyes felt grainy. “Right now, I can’t think what. I’m going crazy just trying to stay awake.” He knuckled his eyes again. “‘Dockside security,’ six letters, ends in e-r,” he muttered.

  “Hawser,” said Pulaski at once.

  “Won’t fit.” Jim glanced at him. “What is a hawser, anyway?”

  “Dunno. Some sort of small boat, I think.”

  “Lot of help you are. I’m falling asleep here.”

  “You want to stay awake? Just start your round early.”

  Jim shook his head. “It’d show on the time clocks. And you know how they hate that. I could use a snack, though. Want a Three Musketeers?”

  “No. I’m trying to knock the sweet stuff. The wife says she likes how I’m losing weight.”

  Jim laughed, barely more than an intake of breath. He had been walking around this site just as long as Pulaski, and was beginning to doubt he would ever lose weight by any means short of industrial-level liposuction. He gazed thoughtfully down toward the center of the site and the deepest of the boreholes sunk so far. “I heard they got half a ton of ‘reef’ out of that last week,” he said.

  “I heard it too.” Pulaski frowned slightly. “Thing is, the more of the gold-bearing ore they pull out of there, the less they’re talking about how much it is, or how rich it is, or how much more might be left. Guys coming off the dig have to change their work clothes, get searched as they come out. It’s getting to be like those big mines in South Africa.”

  “I thought those were diamond mines,” said Jim.

  “Gold too. I read all about them once. All the ways you can sneak gold out.”