Chapter Seventy-one
Within an hour of publication, every news organization on earth was airing the allegations and the photos of Bob and Klaus that were in the articles.
In Bolivia, the story was picked up by Globo Rural, though that’s not where Miguel DeJesus Riviera saw it. He had his satellite dish aimed at CNN International for several reasons. First because his fellow Bolivians were far more interested in Padre Coraje, the telenovela of handsome young Coraje, who moved to Cochabamba from places unknown and, for mysterious reasons, disguised himself as a priest and started working in a local church where he met beautiful Clara Guericco and her wheelchair-bound sister, Ana. He immediately fell in love with Clara, while Ana fell in love with Coraje. In a recent installment revolving around a baptism, Coraje slipped on some holy water, hit his head on the font, got amnesia, and left the nation in a tizzy of anticipation. And Globo Rural wasn’t about to interrupt that for killer bugs or anything else.
Miguel also preferred CNN because they had so far delivered the news about the insect attacks with a lurid pizzazz he found enticing and, because they had an entertainment bureau in Los Angeles, there was a constant stream of interviews with surviving celebrities.
Miguel had been glued to the tube ever since the killing spree began, sprawled on his sofa staring at the plasma screen. He was so fascinated by the story that he failed to make any connection between these deadly insects and his nemesis, the Exterminator.
But that changed as soon as the photos of Bob and Klaus popped up on the screen.
“These two men,” the CNN announcer said, “have been identified by senior intelligence officials as Bob Dillon and Klaus Müller, also known as Bob Landy and Kurt Schickling, and as Javier Martinez and Juan Flores. They are believed to be armed and dangerous and living in the Los Angeles area. Arrest warrants have been issued by the FBI and Interpol.”
Miguel leaned forward, his blood pressure already rising. He mumbled, “Hijo de puta.”
When his rivals saw this, they would know Miguel had not only failed to avenge his brother’s death, but also that he had been conned out of ten million dollars. He would be the laughingstock of Latin America. It was virtual castration. His reputation as a man, ruined.
Feeling a sudden stiffness in his neck, Miguel pushed himself off the sofa, heading for his bar. His phone began to ring, sending a wave of nausea rolling over him. He looked at it but refused to answer. After a few rings, it stopped. As he reached for the scotch, one of his men came into the room and said, “Sir, Hernando Varela is on the phone.”
Miguel knew there was but one thing that would damage his reputation more than his apparent inability to exact revenge on his brother’s murderer. That would be to exhibit cowardice in the face of the inevitable taunting at his failure. Miguel mustered all the machismo he could, snatched the phone, and barked, “What do you want?”
Hernando laughed and said, “Ir por lana y volver esquilado.” Then he started to make some clucking noises.
Miguel felt the intracranial pressure creeping toward a hypertensive crisis. It might well kill him, but he wasn’t going to sit quietly and be told he had gone out for wool and come back shorn. He pulled a spicier idiom from his repertoire, saying, “Chinga tu madre com pan y vinigre!” Even though he had never understood what the bread and vinegar had to do with anything.
Hernando stopped clucking, paused a moment, then shouted, “Concha de tu madre!”
Between each insult, Miguel, who loved his mother, but not that way, took another slug from the bottle. Scotch dripped from his chin as he screamed, “Come verga, pendejo!”
Hernando, who had no intention of eating any such thing, countered with “Vete a la mierda zorra!”
Miguel collapsed on the sofa and took another slug. His chest tight, his skin moist and clammy. He said something about having the fire of the sun in his pants and being as hard as a stick before vowing to kill Hernando and his family as soon as he had taken care of Bob and Klaus. He slammed the phone back in the cradle then took another slug before using his cell to call Marcel Pétain.
The Frenchman said he, too, had seen the news and, sensing how upset Miguel was, suggested that he should see it as a mixed blessing. “It’s true, your secret has been exposed,” he said. “But at least now we know where they are. So I think we should—” He paused, hearing the interruption for call waiting. “Do you need to take that?”
Miguel’s mouth was dry as chalk dust, and his chest was squeezing like a vice. But he managed to say, “Mama pinga.”
Marcel, whose grasp of the romance languages stopped at the French border, said, “I’ll take that as a no.” He could almost hear the tiny blood vessels bursting in the whites of Miguel’s eyes. “In any event, I assume our friend the Mongoose will see this on the news and that should be the end of that.”
“He has had enough time,” Miguel said. “I am tired of waiting. It is now an open contract.”
Chapter Seventy-two
“I think it’s safe to say we’re now officially screwed,” Bob said.
They’d been watching the news on the latest death toll and the troubling increase of end-of-the-world religious fervor while simultaneously discussing how they might stop the transgenic assassins from spreading and how they might pull the con on Riviera, when Katy nodded at the television and said, “Uh oh.”
Their faces splashed across the screen accompanied by the news that they were now wanted as terrorists.
Treadwell had been meeting with reporters to confirm the stories while at the same time going to great lengths to say how disturbed he was that this information had been leaked in the first place. “My office will conduct a thorough investigation to find out who was responsible for it,” he said.
“I can’t believe I ever trusted this guy,” Bob said.
Klaus looked at his credulous friend. “You were the perfect mark.”
“The what?”
“He conned you,” Klaus said.
“He’s right,” Parker said. “He knew your weak spot and he hit it. Terrorists attacked your home town, killed people you knew. You wanted to fight them. He appeared to offer you that opportunity in exchange for your expertise and your loyalty. But he wasn’t going to get that wearing Birkenstocks and Hawaiian shirts. He had to look the part. The respectable suit, the excessive grooming, the pin in the lapel. All designed to inspire con-fidence.”
Klaus said, “He dressed right, said the things he knew you wanted to hear, and he promised a big payoff in the end.”
“Of course, the con’s usually for money,” Parker said.
“Or votes,” Mary added, still bitter about previous elections.
“But in this case, the big payoff was the notion that you could actually help fight the war against the terrorists.”
“You wanted to believe,” Klaus said with a shrug.
Agent Parker gave Bob a slap on the back. “And I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that con happens to be the first syllable in conservative,” he said. “But we’re getting off track. Now that the con’s been exposed and Treadwell’s put in the fix to forestall any legal action you might have taken against him, we’ve got to figure our next step.”
“We have to disappear,” Klaus said as if to end the discussion.
“Worse thing we could do is leave this house,” was Parker’s response. “Landlord thinks it’s me, Mary, Katy, and Uncle Joe. Nobody knows you’re here. This is as disappeared as you’re going to get.”
“Besides,” Bob said. “We have to be here if we’re going to do anything about the bugs.”
Klaus looked at him in disbelief. “Are you under the impression that we will be allowed back at the DARPA labs?”
“We’ll figure something out,” Bob said.
“In the meanwhile,” Agent Parker said. “Let
’s put on our thinking caps, see if we can’t come up with a nice neat con of our own.”
With a scheming glint in her eyes, Katy said, “Isn’t there, like, some drug that, like, paralyzes you and slows your heartbeat and your breathing so you look like you’re dead? What if you, like, went to Bolivia, gave them this drug and—”
Agent Parker shook his head. “I think we’d have problems with airport security, what with your dad and Klaus being wanted terrorists.”
“Guh.” Katy slumped on the sofa, then just as suddenly she brightened up. “Okay, what if we did like a cool disguise, like, I dunno, like, oh, like Mrs. Doubtfire!”
“Yeah,” Mary said doubtfully. “Nobody would notice that.”
“Hey, guys, take a look at this.” Bob was pointing at the television. A helicopter shot above the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica. Tens of thousands of people clogging the wide boulevards for half a mile in all directions.
They cut to a reporter on the ground in the midst of it, “At first glance it looks like a protest march, but these people aren’t protesting or even marching so much as simply gathering and testifying. It all started about an hour ago when a small earthquake shook central Los Angeles. Caltech seismologists say the 4.5 magnitude temblor was centered at the north end of the Newport-Inglewood fault.”
“Earthquake?” Bob looked at Mary. “Did you feel anything?”
She shook her head as Agent Parker shrugged. “I sure didn’t notice.”
“I thought I felt something,” Katy said.
The reporter continued, “With the death toll in the wake of the killer insects passing six hundred and fifty, and with Protestant religious leaders preaching that the end of time is upon us, the 4.5 quake was all it took to unite these believers on the streets of Los Angeles.”
Cut to footage of the crowd with people carrying signs:
“Repent Now!”
“One World Government = Antichrist!”
“Rapture Ready!”
“Jesus Is Coming! Looking Busy Won’t Cut It”
“UPC Barcodes = Number of the Beast!”
Cut to an interview with a guy in his thirties, neat and trim, wearing an Amen, Archer! T-shirt. “It’s all right there in Revelation,” he said with a perky smile. “The four horsemen shall be given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth. Now I don’t know if these insects are a plague or wild beasts, maybe they’re both, but it seems pretty clear the prophecies are coming true. Isn’t it fantastic?”
The reporter continued, “But it’s not all doom and gloom out here. The spiritual fervor that has gripped thousands has also unleashed the spirit of entrepreneurial Angelenos.”
The report went on to show savvy merchandisers hawking T-shirts with catchy slogans: “The Rapture IS an Exit Strategy.” “Someday Soon, My Prince Will Come.” and “Revelation 6: 12-14…Told ya!” Impromptu food booths had popped up as well. Lamb o’ God Ka-bob plates and Jesus’ All-You-Can-Eat Old Fashioned Endless Bread and Fish Baskets.
They cut back to the reporter saying, “Still, while some are trying to keep the tone light for the apocalypse, others prefer sticking to the classics, offering up good old fire and brimstone.”
Cut to a wild-eyed, sweat-soaked, preacher with his sleeves rolled up, waving the Bible and screaming, “The day is coming that the graves will ex-pa-lode as their occupants soar into the heavens!”
Cut back to the reporter nodding at the camera with a grin, saying, “You’ll want to be sure to have your camcorder ready when that happens! For Eyewitness Action News, I’m Gary Rockwell. Back to you in the studio.”
Chapter Seventy-three
Bob was standing by a map of central Los Angeles that was tacked to the wall. The red push pins indicated where the transgenic assassins had killed. Starting with the cluster in West Hollywood, the pattern radiated mostly north into the hills where it began to spread westward more than east. There were a few outliers in Hancock Park but the concentrations were primarily in Beverly Hills, Beverly Glen, and Coldwater and Benedict Canyons. There was also a line roughly along the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains that corresponded with Mulholland Drive.
Bob said, “So we’ve ruled out aerial pesticide spray, natural predators, and—” He noticed Klaus daydreaming. Bob snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Klaus? You still with us?”
He was staring out the window, unable to concentrate any more on the bugs or the con or anything else, save Audrey, whom he hadn’t seen in weeks. Turning to look at Bob he said, “Sorry, what?”
“I was saying that after we rule out these alternatives, the only solution that seems to make any sense are the cockroach pheromone traps, so we need to start talking about design.”
Klaus nodded and said, “I need to call Audrey.” He reached for the phone. “She needs to know what they are saying about us is not true.”
“No can do.” Agent Parker pinned Klaus’ hand to the table. “Her line’s bound to be tapped. We’d be dead or in jail before the five o’clock news.”
Klaus pulled his hand free, stood, and put on his jacket. “Well then, I will go see her.”
“It’ll have to wait,” Agent Parker said. “You can’t expose yourself now. Someone will see you and—”
“I am willing to take that risk.” Klaus crossed the room as if to leave.
“Don’t open that door.”
Klaus was reaching for the handle when he heard Parker rack one into the chamber of his gun. Without turning, Klaus said, “It would be foolish on several levels to pull the trigger.”
“Back away from the door.”
Klaus turned in a smooth motion, simultaneously drawing his own gun, aiming at Parker. “If you kill me without proof,” Klaus said. “You lose ten million. It would be a waste for things to end that way.”
“Doesn’t have to,” Parker said.
“I need to see her.”
“Won’t hurt for her to think you’re a bad hombre for a few days.”
“I think it’s more than that,” Bob said, thrusting his hips to and fro. “He hasn’t seen her in a while, if you get my drift.”
Parker watched Bob’s lewd act for a moment before he turned to Klaus with a look of disbelief. He said, “You’d risk your life just to crash the custard truck?”
Unfamiliar with the idiom, Klaus said, “Crash the custard truck?”
That’s when it dawned on Bob. He slapped a hand to his forehead before slowly wiping it down his face. “It’s one of the primary drives.”
“Of course,” Klaus said, as he lowered his gun. “After food and water.” He shook his head. “What were we thinking?”
“Well, I know what you were thinking,” Bob said. “And it wasn’t about bugs.”
Agent Parker looked back and forth between the two men. “What did I miss?”
“The solution to the assassin problem.”
“Sex?”
“The smell of it,” Bob said.
Klaus smiled. “A few molecules is all it takes.” He told Parker about a study in which a single caged female pine sawfly (Neodiprion sertifer) attracted more than eleven thousand males from the field in four days.
“I knew a girl like that once,” Agent Parker said with a smirk. “Think it’ll work with your bugs?”
“I know it would work,” Bob said. “Only problem is, we need access to the lab to collect the pheromone.”
Knowing he wasn’t going to make any progress on the Riviera scam until Bob and Klaus dealt with the bugs, Agent Parker pulled his CIA identification and said, “Trust me, that’s not a problem.”
Chapter Seventy-four
Watching Leon as he lay there in the bed, Lauren couldn’t help but think about how dreamy his eyes were as
they opened. “Hey,” she said in a tender whisper. “How you doin’?”
Leon blinked, slowly, trying to bring her face into focus. “Still a little woozy,” he said.
Lauren nodded. “It’s going to take a while to wear off. But the doctor said everything went great. Said without any complications, the bandages will come off in a few days.”
Leon tried to smile but the muscle relaxants hadn’t worn off yet, so he was still partially paralyzed. There was also a slight tingling sensation in his jaw resulting from some damage to a motor nerve during the surgery.
It turned out that while Leon’s screen test had gone well, it had revealed a slight imperfection that left him, in the words of Vicki Roberts, half-a-chin shy of George Clooney.
So, after some discussion with Lauren, and a consultation with one of the best plastic surgeons in Los Angeles, who suddenly found himself with a lot of openings on his schedule, Leon had agreed to have a little work done. At the suggestion of a leading casting agent who was a friend of Lauren’s, Leon decided that as long as they were doing the chin augmentation, he might as well get the cheek implants and have a little laser skin resurfacing done.
Lauren picked up an ice pack and held it to the side of Leon’s face. “For the swelling,” she said.
He aimed his bandaged chin at the television. “What’s going on?”
“Oh, well, let’s see. They identified two guys who they said released the bugs.” She flipped channels until she came across the photos of Bob and Klaus. “Here we go.”
“Authorities are still seeking these two men…”
Leon just about popped his stitches. “That’s them,” he said, sluggishly.
“Yeah, that’s them all right,” Lauren said. “Depending on the newscast, they’re either unlawful enemy combatants or innocent citizens framed by the Defense Department in a cover-up.”
The Exterminators Page 24
