Zodiac

by Neal Stephenson

  Then I hung up. Bart and I were standing in the parking lot of the Charles River Shopping Center at three in the morning, in the Hub of the Universe, surrounded on all sides by toxic water. Boone was on a ship that was probably headed for Everett right now. When it got there, my favorite environmentalist, Smirnoff, was going to blow it up. Laughlin and the other bad guys would die. That was good. Our sailor friend, the skipper and Boone would probably die too, though. And the evidence we wanted so badly, the tank full of concentrated organophosphates down in the belly of the ship, would become shrapnel. The PCB bugs would be gone from the Harbor, with no way to trace them back to Basco. Pleshy would become president of the United States and eight-year-old schoolchildren would write him letters. My aunt would tell me what a great man he was and military bands would precede him everywhere. And, what really hurt: Hoa would say, well, maybe Canada needs some Vietnamese restaurants.

  At least that’s the way it seemed right then. I might have stretched a few things, but one thing was for damn sure: we had to stop Smirnoff.

  “Is this what they call being a workaholic?” I muttered as we jogged through the North End, heading for Bart’s van, chewing on some benzedrine capsules. “I mean, any decent human should be sitting by Debbie’s bed, holding her hand when she wakes up.”

  “Hum,” Bart said.

  “I would give anything to kiss her right now. Instead, she’s going to wake up and say, ‘Where is that fucker who claims he loves me?’ I’m out working, that’s where I am. I’ve been working for, what, ninety-six hours straight?”

  “Forty-eight, maybe.”

  “And can I take time out to hold the hand of a sick woman? No. This is workaholism.”

  “Pretty soon the speed’ll kick in,” Bart explained, “and you’ll feel better.”

  We found the van where he’d left it, but someone had broken in and ripped off the stereo and the battery. He’d parked on a flat space by the waterfront so I got to push-start it. That was fun. The speed helped there. “I wish we had the stereo,” he said.

  We headed south along Commercial Street, running along all the piers, and when we looked to the east we could see the Basco Explorer churning its way northward, blending the poison into the Harbor with its screws. A major crime was taking place right out there, in full view of every downtown building, and there wasn’t a single witness. Toxic criminals have it easy.

  Eventually we got ourselves to Rory Gallagher’s house in Southie. He was back from the hospital now, healthy enough to threaten us with physical harm for coming around at this time of night. We got him calmed down and asked him how we could get in touch with the other Gallaghers, the Charlestown branch of the family.

  Here’s the part where I could cast racial aspersions on the Irish and say that they have a natural fondness for acts of terrorism. I won’t go that far. It’s fairer to say that a lot of people have fucked them over and they don’t take it kindly. Gallagher, he loved Kennedy and he loved Tip, but he’d always suspected Pleshy, who was a Brahmin, who pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I told Rory how Basco and Pleshy—to him they were a single unit—had poisoned his body and many others, he turned completely red and responded just the right way. He responded as though he’d been raped.

  “But we’ve pushed them,” I explained, “pushed and pushed them and made them desperate, forced them into bigger crimes to cover up the old ones. That’s why we need your brother.”

  So we got Joe on the phone. I let Rory argue with him for a while, so he’d be fully awake when I started my pitch. Then I just confiscated the telephone. “Joseph.”

  “Mr. Taylor.”

  “Remember all that garbage your grandpa dumped into the Harbor?”

  “I don’t want to hear any shit about that at this time of the morning… .”

  “Wake up, Joe. It’s Yom Kippur, dude. The Day of Atonement is here.”

  I knew Rory’s phone wasn’t bugged, so we made all kinds of calls. We called an Aquarium person I knew and gave her the toxic Paul Revere. Called all the media people whose numbers I could remember, yanked them right out of bed. Called Dr. J. for an update on Debbie; she was doing okay. The Gallaghers made a couple of calls and inadvertently mobilized about half of the self-righteous anger in all of Southie and half of Charlestown. When we walked out Gallagher’s front door to get back in Bart’s van, we found, waiting in the front yard, a priest with chloracne, a fire engine, a minicam crew and five adolescents with baseball bats.

  We borrowed a car battery from one of the adolescents and drove crosstown toward Cambridge, taking the two largest adolescents with us. Along the way, I gave Bart a brief lesson in how to run a Zodiac—one of the Townies kept saying “I know, I know”—and then dropped them all off on the Esplanade near Mass General.

  Then I took the van to GEE headquarters. Gomez’s Impala was there, and I met him in the stairway. “Thanks for the warning,” I said. I’d had plenty of time to think about that voice on my answering machine—“your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “They probably came on to you real nice,” I said. “Laughlin seemed so decent. All they wanted was information. They’d never hurt anyone.”

  “Fuck that, man, you cost me a job. I just didn’t want to see you get killed.”

  “We should talk later, Gomez. Right now I have business, and I don’t want you to know anything about it.”

  “I’m out of here.”

  He left, and I stood there in the dark until I heard his Impala start up and drive away.

  Now was the time to use the most awesome weapon in my arsenal, a force so powerful I’d never dreamed of bringing it out. Locked up in a cheap, sheet-metal safe in my office, to which I alone had the combination, were a dozen bottles filled with 99% pure, 1,4-diamino butane. The stench of death itself, distilled and concentrated through the magic of chemistry.

  During the drive here I’d started to wonder whether this was a good idea, whether this stuff was as bad as I’d built it up to be in my mind. All doubt was removed when I opened the safe door. None of the bottles had leaked, but when I’d filled them, a month ago, I’d unavoidably smeared a few droplets on the lids, and all those putrescine molecules had been bouncing around inside of the safe ever since, looking for some nostrils to climb up. When they climbed up mine, I knew that this was a good plan.

  I put the bottles into a box. I took my time about it and packed crumpled newspapers around the glass. Plastic would have been safer but the stuff would have diffused through the walls.

  Then I grabbed my scuba gear. This was going to involve underwater work and, once the putrescine escaped, I’d need bottled air anyway. I got the Darth Vader Suit. I stole someone’s SoHo root beer from the fridge and chugged the whole bottle. It was made from all natural ingredients.

  36

  Just on a hunch, I took the long way around to Basco. Hopped Rte. 1 up into Chelsea and then peeled off on the Revere Beach Parkway, which runs west through the heart of Everett and just south of Basco’s kingdom. When I saw the Everett River Bridge coming up, I slowed down a little and flicked on the high beams.

  An abandoned van was sitting on the shoulder of the highway—déjà vu—in exactly the same place where Gomez and I had stripped our old van after Wyman, the wacky terrorist, had left it there.

  From here, you could get on the freeway, or you could slog across some toxic mudflats and boltcut your way onto Basco property, or you could go fifty feet up the shoulder, disappear under the bridge and mount an amphibian operation upstream into Basco’s docking facilities. I could look straight across the flats from here and into the bridge of the Basco Explorer, now nestled into place in the shadow of the main plant. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. Park a van on the shoulder here and you had a command outpost for any kind of attack on Basco.

  What had Wyman been up to when he’d trashed our last van here? Was it a dress
rehearsal, or a failed operation? Or had it been a real accident, one that had planted the seed of this idea to begin with?

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to park here. Didn’t even slow down. I drove the van across the bridge until I was out of sight of Basco, parked it on the shoulder and slogged down to the riverside under the bridge, carrying half my weight in various pieces of crap. Bart and his Townie friends were already there, smoking a reefer. They’d been joined by a couple of black derelicts who evidently lived here. Bart had fed them all of our Big Macs.

  “Haven’t you heard, man?” I said, “Just say no!” They were startled. Pot always made me more paranoid than I was to begin with; I couldn’t understand how they’d want to smoke it here and now.

  “Want a hit?” Bart croaked, waving the reefer around and trying to talk while holding his breath.

  “See any action?” I asked.

  “Big fuck-up over there,” Bart said, waving in the direction of the flats. “Bunch of cop cars showed up and arrested some guys. Then one of them got stuck in the mud.”

  “It was great,” one of the derelicts said. “They had to ask the prisoners to get out so they could push it out of the shit.”

  “So,” Bart said, “I guess we don’t have to worry about this Smirnoff dude any more.”

  “That was a diversion,” I said. “Smirnoff’s a jackass, but he’s not stupid. He sent some people in through the obvious route, with boltcutters. Ten to one they’re unarmed and they’ll get popped for trespass. Meanwhile he’s got a diver somewhere in this river with the real package. A navy veteran.”

  I wondered if the guy was an ex-SEAL. That would be great. What were my odds in man-to-man underwater combat in a dark sea of nerve gas with a SEAL? The only option was just to avoid the diver, find the mine and disconnect it. If Smirnoff had really rigged it up out of plastique, it had to be something pretty simple and obvious, probably timed with a Smurf wristwatch. Bart had brought the toolbox from his van and I grabbed wirecutters and a prybar.

  “Did you get ahold of Boone?” I said, nodding at the walkie-talkie.

  “Tried. Put out a call for Winchester, like you said, but no answer.”

  “That’s okay. He’ll figure it out. Too risky to talk on the radio anyway.” I set down the box of putrescine and lifted the lid. “This is the bad stuff.”

  Two bottles went into my goody bag and the rest into the Zodiac. We all squatted together on the riverbank and went over it one last time, and then I made myself incommunicado by turning on the air valve and strapping my head into the Darth Vader mask. Everyone watched this carefully; one of the derelicts’ lips moved and then I could feel them all laughing. I waded into the river.

  First I swam across and checked out the opposite bank. Definite tracks in the muck here. Big, triangular, flipper-shaped tracks. I started swimming toward the Basco Explorer.

  Technically I was swimming upstream here, but the speed of the current was zero. There had been a mild smell of the poison, not nearly as bad as earlier tonight. But I had to figure they were poisoning this river too, since it led straight to Basco Central and they wouldn’t want any trail of PCB bugs leading in here from the Harbor.

  Sometimes I couldn’t believe the shit I did for this job. But if I could pull something off here, I’d have a good excuse for taking a couple of days off. Debbie and I could climb into a waterbed somewhere and recuperate together, not get out of bed for about a week. If she’d have me. Go out to Buffalo, maybe, get back into that honeymoon suite, buy a shitload of donuts and a Sunday L.A. Times… .

  About ten seconds of those thoughts and I got an erection and felt really drowsy and stupid. Hadn’t taken enough speed. I checked the valve on the tank to make sure I was getting plenty of oxygen. Oxygen, oxygen, the ultimate addiction, better even than nitrous oxide. Tonight I needed lots. Had to keep alert, had to watch out for that SEAL. But it was such a boring trip, swimming through blackness and murk without a light. Easy to get scared, natural to fall into paranoia and despair. Every so often I broke the surface to check my direction and to see how close I was to the prow of the Basco Explorer. At first it was too far away, then, suddenly, it was much too close.

  If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right under the big dieseis, amidships. Even if it didn’t sink the ship, this would do the most damage.

  The docking facilities here weren’t huge. Basco owned the end of the Everett River. That’s how rivers worked around Boston Harbor—ran inland for a mile and then just ceased to exist, fed underground by sewers and culverts. Basco surrounded the river in a U shape. On one side of it they had a pier, and the other side was just undeveloped, basically a siding for a railway spur that ran up into Everett. If they had guards, they’d be on the side with the pier. So I stayed on the right, the eastern half of the river, and started to slide on up the hull of the Basco Explorer.

  For the first few yards, feeling my way over the sonar dome at the bottom of the prow, I had my head above water. Then I had to face the fact that if I stayed up here, the SEAL could come from below and gut me like a tuna. Either way, I was in his element. But if I tried to be half-assed about it, I was in double trouble.

  So I dove. I swam straight down to the bottom, which was only about ten feet below the bottom of the Basco Explorer’s hull. I could almost stand on the bottom and touch the ship with one outstretched hand. They’d probably dredged this channel out to the Explorer’s dimensions.

  Then I realized that we were dealing with small volumes of water. I was used to the open Harbor. This was a lot more claustrophobic. I was in a space about the size of a couple of mobile homes, and if the SEAL was still here, he was sharing my space.

  The water transmitted a powerful metallic clang. Impossible to tell direction, but obviously something had struck the ship’s hull. Possibly the magnets on Smirnoff’s mine. If I hunkered down, pretended to be a chunk of toxic waste and waited, the driver would swim away and I could clip the wires. But I wondered: what was the time delay on the sucker? It had to be fairly long. The diver had to get away, the water-hammer effect could kill you from a distance. This was reassuring.

  From using up the compressed air, I’d become slightly buoyant, a little lighter than the water, and it was hard to stay on the bottom. So I relaxed and let myself float upwards until I was spread-eagled against the bottom of the hull, facing down. I made sure I was a little east of the keel, so my bubbles skimmed off to the right, following the ship’s curve, and came out on the unwatched side.

  Another clang, very close, so close that I felt the vibrations through my tank and into my back. Then there was a light, coming toward me. You couldn’t see a light more than a few feet in this shitty water. Then the light disappeared. Whoever owned it had shut it off.

  Then another damn light, in front of and below me, almost on the bottom, cut into thick rays of shadow by the limbs of a diver.

  Two divers. One swimming up where I was, his tank clanging against the hull. The second, the one with the light, heavier, using his weight to kick his way along the bottom. The one at my level had shut off his light so he couldn’t be seen. The other was chasing him.

  The prey almost got face-to-face with me and our masks looked at each other for just a second, amazed. He was wearing an underwater moonsuit, like mine, made for diving in a toxic environment.

  Why? Smirnoff wouldn’t know about the poison coming out of the Basco Explorer. He’d been planning this action for months. But this diver knew about it. Working for Basco?

  He sank away from me because the other diver, below him, had grabbed him by the ankle and was pulling him down. He was kicking and thrashing but that’s hard when you’re underwater, and maybe a little tired of running. Steel glinted, and then the light was shining through a crimson thunderhead.

  What was I going to do? All I could hope was that this killer with the knife hadn’t seen me. I wasn’t about to outswim him. If one of these guys was a SEAL, I had to figure it was the live on
e.

  The light had gotten kicked by the victim, flailing around in his own blood, and the beam was slowly rotating as it sank. It spun by the killer’s head and I saw a bare white face, long brown hair, blue eyes.

  Tom Akers was working for Smirnoff.

  Which meant the dead guy was Basco’s. So maybe Tom wouldn’t decide to cut me up. I pushed off against the hull and began sinking down into his level. He grabbed the light and nailed me with the beam, paralyzing me, getting a look at who I was. It was all up to him.

  Through my eyelids I saw the light diminish as he pointed it somewhere else. When I could see again, I wished I couldn’t. Tom was curled into a fetal position in the water, vomiting, groping around for his mouthpiece.

  I was able to get over to him and shove the mouthpiece toward him again, but he just shot it out on a yellow jet of bile. SLUD. He was quivering in my arms and I saw him suck in a big bellyful of that awful black water and swallow it down. Then he looked up into my eyes—his pupils were dilated so there wasn’t any iris left—and held up two fingers. Which could have meant two, or peace, or victory.

  By the time I’d wrestled him up to the east side of the ship, he was dead. I left him bobbing there, face down, and swam back underneath to look for the mine.

  And I found it—it was easy to look when I didn’t have to worry about other divers—but it wasn’t what I was looking for. This was a real mine, not a homemade one. An honest-to-god chunk of official U.S. Navy ordnance, stuck to the bottom of the hull, not exactly in the right place, a dozen yards forward of the engine room.