Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  Freddy moved the cop car up and they performed the jump-start. I relaxed. Right above my head was more evidence of Bart’s concealed intelligence: he’d gotten one of those magnetic key holders, and hid some spare keys in the undercarriage of the van. “Okay, now get out of here, kid!”

  “Okay! I’m just gonna sit here idling for a few minutes and let the battery recharge, okay?”

  “Son, if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to escort you right out of this neighborhood.” Wonderful idea from my point of view.

  “Hey, I appreciate that, officer, but it’s okay. I got an equalizer in here.”

  “Okay. Well, don’t press your luck. This ain’t your part of town.”

  “Thanks again!” And then, deliverance. Bart pulled the van forward; I got out and replaced the lid; and we were the fuck out of there. Not a single gang even looked our way. Bart had to be physically restrained from stopping at a Louisiana catfish restaurant for a 1:00 A.M. dinner.

  I pointed him west, toward Brookline, and ran my test in the back. Positive for organic chlorine poisoning. The crooks were west of us. My prejudices were well-founded.

  To be fully scientific I should have stopped at every manhole between Roxbury and Natick, following the trail, but sometimes you have to take your science with a grain of salt. First there was Brookline. Not the scummy northern part of Brookline with its two-hundred-thousand-dollar condos. The nice part, with its fifty-room slate-roofed mansions. Then there was Newton, where Roscommon lived, where every front door was flanked by Greek columns. The folks in Brookline and Newton weren’t dumping organic chlorine compounds into the sewers; they were making their money from doing it.

  We drove straight to southern Newton for another check. Getting samples was tricky out here because there were even more cops, and just owning a black van was reason enough for a life sentence. I’d had success before, though, just on pure balls. “Yes, officer, I’m Sangamon Taylor with GEE International, we’re working on a sanctioned investigation here [whatever that meant] tracking down illegal dumping in the [insert name of town] sewer system. You live in this town, officer? You have children? Noticed any behavioral changes lately, any strange rashes on the abdomen? Good. I’m glad to hear it. Well, it looks like my assistant is just about finished, thanks for your help.”

  We had to check three manholes before we made a bingo. Newton had its very own sewer system with its own manholes, which made things confusing. I was forced to deploy the above-mentioned speech while Bart was checking number two. Usually it was hard to convince them that you worked for a real environmental group, but the Zodiac on top of the van, with GEE in orange letters, made it all look plausible. I’d have to remember that trick. Word got out on the radio, and at manhole number three, a cop actually stood there and directed traffic around us while we worked.

  Which doesn’t necessarily mean we fooled them, but they could see we weren’t out to cause trouble, and things went a lot more smoothly when they stood there with their flashing lights. And that’s mainly what a cop wants: things to go smoothly.

  More organic chlorine. We headed west. Once we got out into Wellesley we were sampling more often. That got us into the city limits of Natick, and this was where things got really tricky. Until now, we’d been following a single line, but here the possibilities were branching out in every direction and it was necessary to check manholes at every branch.

  My maps didn’t run this far out, so things got primitive: drive around slow, look for manholes in the street, scratch your head. We got lost immediately, just past Lake Waban, did a lot of U-turns and sketching of diagrams on the old McDonald’s napkins in the back. We sort of thought that there was a major branch here—a lot of Natick sewer lines feeding into the big tunnel.

  “This is going to take fucking forever,” Bart pointed out. By now it was three in the morning and we had about eight manholes to check.

  “Hang on for a sec,” I said. There was a 7-Eleven half a block away and I trotted over and scoped out their phone book.

  All they had was a white pages, so it was kind of a random search. I was trying to think of all the prefixes that high-tech companies give themselves. “Electro,” “Tec,” “Dyna,” “Mega,” “Micro.” In ten minutes or so, I had found half a dozen of those, and the last one had an interesting address: “100 TechDale.”

  TechDale had to be some kind of high-tech industrial park. I looked it up by name: TECHDALE DEVELOPMENTS, followed by an office address in downtown Wellesley and one for their development in Natick.

  And then, gods of Science forgive me, I couldn’t help it. It was biased thinking, but I couldn’t help it. I looked up Biotronics Incorporated. They had a facility in Natick, alright: 204 TechDale.

  Inside the 7-Eleven they sold maps of the area. TechDale was so new it hadn’t shown up on the maps yet, but the clerk showed me where it was: a couple of miles away on Cochituate Avenue, out in the direction of the lake by the same name. I spread the map out on the counter and simply traced Cochituate Avenue backwards toward us. It crossed our path a quarter of a mile away. We’d already driven up and down it a couple of times, and found a manhole in it.

  I got back into the van. “We want the manhole on Cochituate Avenue,” I said. “Over there.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Prejudice. Sheer blind prejudice.”

  “You think black people did it? Is that why we were in Roxbury?”

  We checked the manhole. It was the right one. The chlorine was still there.

  Or so I told myself, because I was tired and we were running out of time. What I had was a substance in a test tube that would turn red in the presence of organic chlorine compounds. When I used it on the Dorchester Bay sample, or the Roxbury sample, it came out looking like burgundy wine. This last sample looked a little more like rosé. The concentration was getting weaker as we approached the source. And that didn’t make a damn bit of sense. Obviously it should’Ve been the other way around. I could think of a few bizarre hypotheses to explain it, but they sounded like the work of a pathological liar.

  This, friends and neighbors, was depressing as hell. As we moved west on Cochituate Avenue, the concentration kept decreasing. The toxin was still there, definitely at illegal levels, but it was doing the wrong thing.

  We tested it on one side of a residential subdivision and it was high enough to be illegal. We tested it on the other side and it wasn’t there at all. We’d lost the trail.

  “So they don’t want to dump right from the company property. They put it into tank trucks. They drive a couple of miles to the subdivision with the curvy streets. The trucks drive down the streets dumping the shit into the gutters.”

  We drove down every street in that fucking division and didn’t see anything. We tested its sewer system and didn’t even find a trace.

  “Explain that to me, goddammit,” I shouted at Bart. “Upstream of the houses, no chlorine. Downstream, there’s chlorine. We check the place where the houses dump their shit into the stream, and there’s no chlorine there either. So where the fuck does it come from?”

  Bart just looked out the windshield and tapped his steering wheel to the beat of the radio. He was tired.

  “Let’s see what else is on Cochituate Avenue,” I said. He shifted into gear without a word. We drove one more mile and arrived at TechDale.

  I’d seen these things before. They looked just like suburban housing developments, with the same irritating maze of curved streets, but instead of houses, they had big boxy industrial buildings, and instead of lawns, parking lots. We coasted to a stop and read the logos on the buildings, and about half of them all said the same thing: Biotronics.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped in shit,” Bart said.

  “I’ve already tried that,” I mumbled, watching the horizon think about letting the sun come up.

  Instead of cruising around this well-scrubbed development at four in the morning in our battered black van with an environmetal group’s Zodiac str
apped to its roof, we pulled in at a gas stationcafé on Route 9, just a couple of blocks away. We topped off the van and filled up the Zodiac’s tanks with 50:1 mix, all on the GEE gold card. We went in for more coffee. What the fuck, we scarfed down tremendous breakfasts and punched some tunes on the jukebox. We struck up a warm relationship with our waitress, Marlene. We asked her about the industrial park and she started rattling off the names of the occupants.

  “… and then there’s Biotronics. But we don’t see much of them.”

  “Why? What’s different about Biotronics?”

  “Safety regs. They have to take a shower when they go in every morning, scrub with disinfectant, and again when they go out. So it’s kind of a hassle for them to come over here for lunch.”

  “You want to go in there, before it gets light?” Bart said when Marlene had disappeared. My respect for the man continued to grow; he was ready for just about anything.

  “You’d make a great terrorist,” I said, “or criminal.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  “No. If we got caught, we wouldn’t have any toxic evidence to back us up. Shit! I can’t believe this. I was all ready to phone up all my media contacts. It’s the same thing as with the PCBs in the lobsters. I have hard evidence, I start tracking it down and it slips through my fingers. Like picking up a handful of sludge: squeeze too hard and you loose it.”

  “That must be nice. Phone up all the newspapers and start a crusade.”

  “Credibility, my man. Carefully and slowly accumulated through years of being almost right. If I say anything now, I∈ll have none at all.”

  I considered hanging out here and waiting for Dolmacher to drive by, but it was too much wait for too little gratification. I wanted to see the look on his face when he saw our van sitting outside his Grail factory like the Grim Reaper’s chariot. But I had nothing to back up the threat. It was time to get up and beat the rush hour and coast home.

  23

  Which is what we did. There was a nice blue heap of shattered safety glass out in front, where Bart had busted into Roscommon’s car. Tess’s car wasn’t there, which was good. She was steering clear from trouble, our house.

  I had a little trepidation about finding a bomb or something in there, but it was paranoia. We’d beefed up all the doors and windows, making the place hard to break into. Anyone could have broken in, of course, but they’d have to cause some obvious damage in the doing and there wasn’t any of that. So we went in and filled a couple Heftys. The answering machine was blinking. We stood around it with our Heftys, breathing and listening, doing lip-synch impressions of the voices on the tape.

  “S.T., this is Tess. What the fuck is going on? Please call meat Sal’s. The number’s in the back of the phone book.”

  Beeep.

  “Uh … this is Roscommon. I hate these machines. Don’t go into the basement. It’s, uh, dangerous now—got some exposed electrical cables and there’s water on the floor. So I nailed the door shut. Don’t try busting in there, you hear me? Or else you’re out of there. You’re fucking out on your ass.”

  Beeep.

  “This is Domino’s. Is Bart there? He ordered some pizza and we’re calling to double-check the order.”

  Beeep.

  “It’s Debbie. It’s about 1:00 A.M. Look, I borrowed the Omni and took it to a party, and then I drove it home and someone ripped it off. I can’t believe this is happening. I heard something outside, looked out the window, there was a big guy out there—in a suit—and there was a big black car waiting next to him, and this guy just got into the car with keys and started it up and drove away. They already had keys made.”

  Beeep.

  “Your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now.”

  Beeep.

  “Hi, this is Dolmacher …” but I missed the rest because Bart was throwing a chair through a window.

  About ten seconds later my train set got scattered all over Brighton and points downward. We were lying down in Boston’s largest backyard, behind a heap of Roscommon’s concrete trash. A few pieces of his stupid vinyl siding fluttered down on our backs, but that was it.

  I got an A in chemistry and I could tell it wasn’t a gas explosion. It was high explosives. Planted there the night before. Which meant it had been done with Roscommon’s help. But why would he help? Because they were big. Big enough to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse—a Basco-sized organization—and because he wanted to get rid of this house anyway.

  BRIGHTON BOMB FACTORY EXPLODES, KYILLING 2

  FBI SAYS TAYLOR WAS ACTUALLY A TERRORIST

  “DIRECT-ACTION” CAMPAIGNS A COVER FOR

  VIOLENCE?

  Bart rolled over on his back. “Intense,” he said.

  I yanked the revolver out of his belt, grabbed it by the barrel, and laid open his right eyebrow. I grabbed his keys and ran for the van.

  “I THOUGHT S.T. WAS MAN OF PEACE,“; SAYS SHOCKED

  ROOMMATE.

  GEE TERRORIST’S DESPERATE ESCAPE FROM BOMB SITE

  INSIDE: Sangaman Taylor: Jekyll & Hyde Personality?

  While I was headed crosstown, it started to rain. Downtown there was a waterfront park and that’s where I assembled the Zodiac. Out on the water, a coast guard cutter was towing an eighty-foot pleasure palace out away from a yacht club, into the open water.

  GEE CAR FOUND NEAR YACHT CLUB

  ABANDONED IN MINING ATTEMPT?

  I recognized the yacht; Alvin Pleshy liked to go fishing in it. It was being shadowed by a couple of fireboats and cops were swarming around on the decks.

  PLESHY’S TERROR CRUISE

  S.T.’S BOMBS ON EX-V.P.’S YACHT

  “He hated Pleshy from the beginning”

  I just took it out of there nice and easy, didn’t crank up the throttle until I was out past the airport, and then ran full tilt until all I could see was waves, and rain, and rain—a Nor’easter bearing down from Greenland. A big blue nasty-looking son of a bitch. We had an exposure suit in there, so I pulled it on, then crammed myself back into my Levi’s so I wouldn’t be so fucking orange. I pointed her north, into the stormclouds, into the waves. Nothing could find me in that. Not Cigarettes, not CG cutters, neither helicopters nor satellites.

  Or so I thought until the helicopter gunship came up on my stern.

  This was just what I was afraid of. Once they pinned the terrorist label on me, they didn’t have to screw around with cops and warrants anymore. Life during wartime.

  It was one of the new ones with the incredibly skinny bodies, the occupants sitting virtually on top of each other. A guy on top to fly it, a guy on the bottom to manage all those guns, missiles, bombs and rockets.

  They couldn’t possibly fly through this shit. The rain was just starting to come down heavy, we had a forty- or fifty-knot headwind. But I was remembering a rescue operation in the spring when they plucked some Soviets off a freighter in weather this bad.

  Of course, the freighter had been stationary. I sure as hell wasn’t. I’d long since stopped cutting through the waves and started riding up and down them. The water doesn’t actually move; the surface of it just goes up and down. So if you’re in a Zodiac, and you head into a thirty-foot roller—like that one, right in front of me—you are going up, skipper. Fast. And then you’re going down, virtually in free fall. As soon as you bottom out, the acceleration squashes you into the floorboards again and you’re on your way up, leaving your stomach somewhere down between your testes. If your boat is strong enough to handle the G-forces, you’re fine. Otherwise it just gets thrust beneath the surface and breaks apart. That wasn’t about to happen to the Zodiac.

  First I thought a bolt of red lightning had struck, but actually it was a river of Gatling gun fire digging a hole in the wave right in front of me, or was it above me? When there is no horizon, you can never tell. This was called firing across the bow. A warning.

  But it was too kind to call it a river of fire. It was a series of tentative spurts,
all in different places, kind of like my first orgasm. One of those spurts landed about thirty feet behind/below me, and I got to thinking maybe it wasn’t a warning at all. Maybe it was just poor workmanship.

  Just for the hell of it, I tried sighting down my index finger, tried to see if I could keep it aimed at that helicopter. And it was impossible, I couldn’t even keep my eyes aimed at it. Those poor bastards couldn’t shoot straight. They didn’t have a hope.

  I figured this out as the water was tossing me full into the air, into free fall off a liquid cliff. A big gust of wind hit me at the top and almost flipped the boat over. I saw a wall of black rain from that vantage point, and then all I could see was the next wave; it was bigger. The chopper was a few yards away, I could look the bastards right in the goggles. Then it was far above me, twisting in a gust, and I almost lost sight. Which meant they could lose me. So I tried to head diagonally away from them.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter, because they couldn’t hit me with any of that firepower. Not in this. So I flipped them the bird—maybe they’d pick it up on infrared—and headed for Maine. I had full tanks to run on, and they’d take me fifty miles. All the raindrops in the sky suddenly merged. I didn’t see the chopper again.

  I ran out of gas half a mile off the coast sometime before noon. It was time to start hitting the LSD. I’d been up for more than twentyfour hours, I hurt real bad, I’d thrown my back out hauling on that ripcord and now I had to paddle this son of a bitch through a rainstorm. Fortunately the swell had gone down to about five feet. I was carrying the acid on a sheet of paper in my wallet, a sheet of blotter paper with a bogus map drawn on it, stuck behind Debbie’s graduation picture. When I took it out, I sat and looked at that photo for a while and started crying. A poor, utterly fucked, duck-squeezer castaway, bobbing in the Atlantic, soaking in the rain, sobbing over his girlfriend.

  That went on for about ten minutes and then I put a little corner of the paper into my mouth and sat down to wait. In about twenty minutes I was able to paddle the boat without groaning in pain. In thirty minutes I didn’t feel anything. In forty I was enjoying it more than I’d enjoyed anything since my last time in the sack with this girl, so I took another half. In an hour, I was ready to take on a Cigarette. My teeth hurt because I was paddling through the cold rain with them bared in a huge shit-eating grin. Once every hour or so I actually remembered to check the compass to see if I was headed for land.