The Exterminators

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “For now.”

  “Here’s what I think,” Katy said, pointing her fork at Bob. “Just tell your boss you need at least 5K a month, otherwise you’re outta there.”

  “We’ll see, sweetie.”

  Mary asked how the research was going on the airborne assassins.

  “Great,” Bob said. “Turns out the giant robber flies are exactly what we—”

  A loud knock at the door froze everyone for a moment. Then, with a flurry of hand signals, they pushed silently away from the table and ripped into action, scattering in different directions, arming themselves, taking defensive positions, and dousing the lights.

  Another loud knock was followed by a woman saying, “Here’s a hint. Don’t turn the lights out if you’re pretending not to be home.”

  Bob thought he recognized the voice. Being nearest the door, he looked out the peep hole. He recognized her immediately and sounded oddly pleased when he said, “Oh, my God.” With his gun behind his back, he opened the door and stood there smiling like a guy who expected to be told that he’d just won the Publisher’s Sweepstakes. He turned on the light, pointed at her and, blanking on her name, said, “It’s…you.”

  Traci Taylor, impressive in a fitted black linen suit with pale pink pinstripes, smiled at the recognition and said, “Why, yes, it is.”

  Watching unseen from the shadows of the kitchen, Mary sensed an unacceptable level of familiarity between Bob and the attractive and slightly younger visitor. She stepped into view with a gun in her hand and said, “Bob, who is this woman?”

  He turned, revealing to Traci the gun behind his back. Bob looked at Mary in disbelief. “Uh, honey?” His tone seemed to suggest she wasn’t supposed to be using his real name.

  From behind the sofa came: “Guh, way to go Mom.” Katy stood up, her gun in plain sight, her eyes rolled back for effect.

  In her years as a reporter, Traci had interviewed the leaders of notorious street gangs, organized crime figures, and dangerous gangsta rappers without seeing this many weapons. She held her hands up. “I’m Traci Taylor,” she said, leaving off the Eyewitness Action News, assuming her name and face would be enough to trigger recognition. When that didn’t seem to impress the pistol-wielding woman with the jealous tone, she said, “I don’t know this man.”

  “He seems to know you,” was Mary’s response.

  “She’s on TV every day,” Bob said. “She’s a reporter.”

  “Really?” Katy pointed her gun at Traci’s outfit and said, “I love what you’re wearing.”

  Hands still in the air, Traci said, “Okaaay, thanks. Anyone else behind the sofa with a gun?”

  “No, just me,” Katy smiled.

  “Is there something we can do for you?” Bob asked.

  “Not if your name is Bob,” Traci said. “I’m looking for Javier Martinez and Juan Flores.”

  Bob just kept staring at her. She assumed he was star-struck. In truth he’d forgotten his new identity, though the two names did sound familiar to him.

  Finally, Klaus stepped out of the darkness of the hallway, gun in hand, and said, “I am Juan Flores.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Traci looked at the handsome man with the European accent and said, “You’re Juan Flores?”

  Klaus produced an awkward smile which he hoped would convey a south-of-the-border flavor.

  Traci looked at Bob. “And that would make you Javier Martinez?”

  “We were adopted,” Bob said, unconvincingly.

  “Both of you.”

  “Sí.” Bob smiled. “By different families. Obviously.”

  “Obviously.” She looked at Katy. “So let me guess, you’re little Maria Flores?”

  “Nope. Rrrosa Marrrrtinez,” Katy said, rolling her R’s excessively. She nodded toward Mary. “Mi madrrrre, Senorrrra Lucida Marrrrtinez.”

  Bob glared at Katy, then turned back to Traci. “What can we do for you?”

  She assumed this guy wasn’t going to explain why the Lucinda woman had called him Bob, so she said, “I got your names—and by that I mean Juan and Javier—from a Professor Harmon at UC Riverside.”

  “Harmon?” Bob looked at Klaus who gave a convincing shrug. He looked back at the reporter, shaking his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “He told me you two are entomologists working at the DARPA facility in Van Nuys.”

  “No, I think you’ve made a mistake. You know, there are a lot of Martinezes in Los Angeles. Flores too. We’re in landscaping.”

  “Uh huh.” As Bob continued spinning his landscaping story, Traci looked around the apartment. On the bookshelf to her left she noticed some titles that she read aloud. “Perspectives in Urban Entomology; Breeding Habits of Phymata Erosa; Invertebrates of North America.” She turned to Bob for his explanation.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Landscape work is a lot more than just mow-and-blow these days. You need to know your pests.”

  The bullshit was knee deep at this point. Traci had no idea why and she didn’t particularly care as long as it turned out they knew about bugs. She leveled her eyes at Bob and said, “Okay, Juan, as long as you’ve got a professional interest in insects, I think you’ll want to see this.” She pulled out the video tape, then pointed at Katy. “But I wouldn’t let her watch.”

  “Guh,” she said, managing to wedge a tone of betrayal into the syllable.

  Katy retired to the guest room where Agent Parker was keeping Father Paul from yelling for help. The others sat at the dinner table where Traci Taylor explained how she’d ended up at their place.

  “The medical examiner told me—off the record—that Innish and Novak died of acute spider venom poisoning. That led me to UC Riverside where I talked to Professor Harmon, a venom specialist I know from a black widow story I did last year. He said the DOD was doing what he characterized as interesting invertebrate research through the DARPA program, said they’d offered him a position which he’d turned down because of the commute, though he did a little consulting now and then and even supplied a few varieties of spiders. When I asked who was running the project he told me it was Juan Flores and Javier Martinez. So here we are.” She snapped her fingers over her head once and said, “Cha, cha, cha.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” Bob said, “But you know, spiders are arachnids, not insects.”

  “Exactly,” Traci said. “More interesting still is that the venom that killed Innish and Novak came from a spider that not only isn’t native to California, it’s not even native to this hemisphere.”

  “That’s bizarre, but—”

  “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the bizarre part yet,” Traci said. “After seeing this video, Professor Harmon said the spider venom was delivered by insects.” She held her hand up, palm out to forestall objections. “Wait,” she said. “There’s more. And not just any insect. We’re talking about insects bigger than any found outside the Amazon River Basin. Insects Professor Harmon said he’d never seen, or heard of, before.” She leaned forward onto her elbows and said, “Now, you two wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  There followed a pause after which Mary pushed one of the Styrofoam containers toward Traci and said, “Would you like some pad thai?”

  “Maybe later.” She stood and gestured toward the living room. “Right now, what do you say we just watch the video?”

  Chapter Fifty-one

  There were no close-ups, dolly shots, or special effects. Just a continuous wide shot of an actress trying to move her career along. Traci had the tape cued past most of the foreplay which consisted of a tedious exercise involving fresh produce which she assumed was an homage to Mr. Innish’s first feature-length film, “How Green the Zucchini.”

  It made Klaus think of Audrey and their time in and around th
e bedroom. Unfortunately she’d been on location in Spain for a couple of weeks, leaving Klaus itching for her.

  A minute into the action, Traci pointed at the screen and said, “Now watch the side of the bed.” On cue, a series of dark images crept in from the bottom of the frame. Traci hit the pause button and pointed again. “Obviously the focus was set for the middle of the action, but these things climbing up the bedspread are clearly not spiders.”

  She noticed Bob and Klaus exchanging a look which she interpreted as what-the-Hell-are-those-bugs-doing-there? Then she hit Play and the action continued.

  As Innish and Novak came down the backstretch of their zesty union, the bugs spread across the bed, forming an irregular circle around the couple. “He’s almost done,” Traci said, managing to refrain from a joke about submitting the video for Best Short Feature.

  A moment later, the lusty on-screen couple collapsed in apparent satisfaction (his real, hers less so). For a moment the only sound on the tape was heavy breathing and a car alarm going off somewhere in the distance. Then the woman said, “Oooo, that tickles.”

  “Hmmm?” Innish replied, already half asleep.

  “Ouch! That hurt!”

  He sat up and said, “What the…Jesus!”

  “Ohmigod, get ’em off!”

  Bob, Klaus, and Mary watched as the bodies began moving again, this time frantic and desperate as they grew tangled in the sheets. But the frenzy was short lived. The paralytic venom disrupted their synaptic transmissions in a few terrible moments. In the stillness that followed, Traci pointed out how the bugs were apparently feeding on the couple. “Professor Harmon said they looked like some sort of new or mutant species of assassin bug injecting a predigestive enzyme into its prey. But he pointed out that the prey was usually another insect, not humans.”

  Traci popped the tape from the deck. “They feed for a while before climbing down from the bed and disappearing. Of course the camera’s static so we don’t see anything else.” She wagged the tape at Bob and Kluas. “So, now what do you have to say?”

  “We are not at liberty to discuss our work,” Klaus said. “National security.”

  “And the boys at the DOD don’t take that lightly,” Bob added. “I wouldn’t mess with them if I were you.”

  “Those goons don’t scare me,” Traci sneered. “The only thing I’m afraid of is ending up as the noon anchor in Modesto. This story is huge. It’s my career, and I’m not going to let that slip away.”

  “How do you even know about the DARPA facility?” Mary asked. “Isn’t that classified?”

  “They don’t make a secret about who they are,” Traci said. “Just about what they’re up to inside. That’s why I need your help. Now I don’t think you two had anything to do with the deaths of Innish and Novak, but I suspect you know something that will help me break the story.”

  “We’d like to help,” Bob said. “Really would, but the penalties for breaching national security are…unpleasant. I’ve seen a partial list.”

  “I understand,” Traci said in her most conciliatory tone. “Really do.” She rubbed her forehead and gave it a moment’s thought. Finally she took a deep breath and said, “Okay. Juan, Javier, Juanita—”

  “Lucinda.”

  “Sorry. Lucinda.” She offered a sympathetic look and said, “You guys are obviously hiding something. Maybe you’re just hiding yourselves. Maybe you’re in witness protection on top of working for DARPA. I don’t know. I don’t care. But you know more about this than you’re letting on and I want to know—I have to know—what it is. So here’s the deal.” Her look of sympathy dissolved into something more reptilian. “If you don’t help me find the connection between DARPA and the deaths of Innish and Novak, I’ll see to it that your faces are splashed across every television screen in the world. After that, you’ll find it extremely difficult to hide from anybody.”

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Traci Taylor left them to nibble on cold Thai food while considering her offer.

  “It’s a lose-lose,” Bob said for the benefit of anyone not paying attention. “If we don’t help her, every assassin on earth is going to know where to start looking for us. And if we get caught helping…” The sentence was too depressing to finish.

  “Okay,” Agent Parker said. “If you’re sure the things in the video are your bugs, then the first obvious question is who took them out for a spin. The second question is why Innish and Novak?”

  “Treadwell seems to be the obvious answer to the first,” Klaus said. “He is the only other person with access to the transgenics, the Ro-bugs, and the controlling pheromones.”

  “And the only one with security clearance to remove them from the labs,” Bob added.

  “But what’s his motive? Why Innish and Novak?”

  “Maybe he didn’t care who he killed,” Parker said. “Maybe he was just field testing the weapon.”

  “In the middle of Hollywood?”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s crazy,” Mary said. “Why would he endanger citizens?”

  Agent Parker looked at her as if she were a child. “I take it you not familiar with DOD directive 5141.2.”

  Mary shook her head.

  “Directive 5141.2 states that one of the duties of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation within the DOD is to designate selected special interest weapons, equipment, and munitions as major defense acquisition programs. And every time somebody proposes a potential weapon, someone else has to go test it.”

  “But on U.S. citizens?”

  “Three words for you,” Parker said. “Tuskegee syphilis experiments.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mary said, remembering only vague details. “But that was a long time ago.”

  “Went on for forty years,” Parker said. “Didn’t stop until the early 1970s, and then only because they got caught.” He ticked off some of the other examples: the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital case, the Willowbrook studies, and the BZ tests.

  “All that was military research?”

  “Ultimately,” Parker said, “everything is military.”

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Based on personal experience and a cursory review of the past few years, it didn’t take the group long to reach the conclusion that professional hit men in pursuit of twenty million dollars were far more likely to get their shit together and cause trouble than the U.S. intelligence community, so Bob and Klaus agreed to do some poking around at the DARPA labs.

  The only problem was they didn’t know what they were looking for. Traci Taylor said she wanted to know about the various projects Treadwell was funding, hoping something might help her develop a theory to connect to the Innish and Novak murders. “But,” she said. “I don’t want you to reveal anything that might be considered a threat to national security. Just tell me if any of the projects seem out of the ordinary.”

  To which Bob had said, “As compared to transgenic insects that follow robots around and deliver deadly spider venom?”

  She flashed her meat-slicer smile and said, “It’s like pornography. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  At lunch the next day, Bob and Klaus marched into Joshua Treadwell’s office without an appointment. Bob held up an official-looking document and said, “We need a minute.”

  Treadwell glanced at his watch. “That’s about all I’ve got.” He pointed at the document. “What’s this about?”

  “Office pool,” Klaus said.

  Treadwell looked at his calendar. “It’s too early for the basketball tournament, isn’t it?”

  “Academy Awards,” Klaus said.

  Bob pointed at the form. “We’re just doing the top seven categories. Best film, actor, actress, director, supporting roles, and best original screenplay. Ten bucks a head. Whoever gets the most rig
ht wins the pot or splits it. You in?”

  “Sure, what the heck.” Treadwell slipped ten out of his wallet and traded it for the form.

  Klaus put the cash in an envelope and said, “Get that back to us before Sunday.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon collecting money from the other researchers while checking out their projects. They started in Unit D, their own building. In addition to the lab where they created the transgenic assassins, there was another for breeding the bugs. So far they had nearly a thousand of each type. There was another lab used for the large-scale manufacture of synthetic pheromones. Unit D also housed the Micro-Air Vehicle project, as well as related research programs, including the nanotube sheets and the artificial muscles.

  Next door, in Unit A, was a research group dedicated to advanced tactical high-energy chemical lasers, and the platforms to house battle management and beam control subsystems. Two floors up from that was the Pulsed Energy Projectile Project.

  After kicking in ten bucks apiece and complaining about Star Wars losing to Annie Hall in 1977, the researchers explained that they were looking into the sensory consequences of electromagnetic pulses emitted by laser-induced plasmas. “It’s designed to produce pain and temporary paralysis,” one of them said. “It’s an electromagnetic pulse produced by the expanding plasma which triggers impulses in nerve cells. We’re looking for the optimal pulse parameters to evoke peak nociceptor activation.” No amount of thoughtful nodding could hide the dumb-as-a-sack-of-hammers expression on Bob’s face, so the scientist said, “In other words, to cause the maximum pain possible.”

  Unit B was known as the Directed Energy Project, a group working on explosively pumped flex compression generators, or more simply, a device that fired man-made lightning bolts. The thing was designed to take the energy of high explosives and convert it into bursts of electromagnetic energy sufficient to disrupt electronic devices.

  Unit C was home to several projects related to the creation and application of what they referred to as metamaterials, substances designed to bend electromagnetic radiation, radio waves, and visible light. Stealth fabrics engineered at the submicroscopic scale so they neither reflected light nor cast a shadow. Several of the labs in Unit C were clean rooms, so Bob and Klaus had to don the requisite white coveralls before passing through the air locks. It was like stepping into an olfactory void. The highly filtered atmosphere was constantly recirculated through high efficiency particulate air and ultra-low penetration air filters so there were virtually no odors in the labs. It took forty-five minutes to collect two hundred dollars in this hyper-clean environment, after which they removed their coveralls and stepped back outside with a member of the metamaterials research team who was taking the rest of the afternoon off.