Killer Dust

by Sarah Andrews

  “But if it’s self-defense?”

  “If you shoot him coming over the threshold, drag him inside. At least then your sentence will be shorter.”

  The exchange had continued, relentless in its loss of hope: “So what do you recommend I do?”

  “How old is he?”

  “About my age.”

  “About forty. These guys usually burn out by then. If he’s still active at this age, he’s outside the FBI profile. Less predictable. And don’t just hope he finds someone else to bother. They don’t do that. They just add another victim to the list.”

  Silence had settled on the room like snow falling without wind, covering the desk, the chairs, and Lucy with its ice.

  Then Lucy asked her question again: “What do you recommend I do?”

  “Leave town. Your life as you know it here is ended. Leave no forwarding address. Start over somewhere else. Keep a low profile. Consider changing your name; there’s no real privacy anymore.”

  Lucy forced the memory of that conversation out of her mind. She snapped her attention back to the present moment, her hand growing cold on the doorknob that would twist and open out into the garage. Even as the lawyer had spoken, she had known that his plan was in no way compatible with her own. Even now, she laughed bitterly, a quick huh. A low profile? That she would love, but NASA and the space-hungry American public had other ideas.

  She looked down at her hand, and at the door that stood like fragile armor between her and the world. At least this was the last talk she must give before the launch. Even with the weather delay, it was just a matter of a few days or a week before she’d be back at the Cape, tucked carefully into the safe house, guarded around the clock by the nation’s finest. How she hungered for that moment. How she cursed the fact that this filthy concern for safety in the mundane reaches of her daily life had, at this time of all times, asserted itself as a greater preoccupation than her lifelong hunger to hurtle into space.

  Hissing with rage, she tapped the security system control box to make sure it was armed. She set the program to allow her to pass through, get into her car, open the roll-up door, and drive away before it automatically armed itself again. Then she turned the knob and walked out into the dark night of human frailty.

  – 12 –

  The pounding of the fast boat across the waves hammered at his spine, but it suited him. Sixty miles per hour across the darkening sea, the damp wind whipping around him like jealous snakes. He knew he should have waited for the cover of total darkness before leaving the coast, but he had felt the pressure to leave, leave, leave. He had felt eyes watching him, like insects crawling over his body.

  The Coast Guard probably had him on radar by now, but he was the cat and they were his mice when it came down to cases. The thugs he ran with had them under greater surveillance than they had on him. That was what was so sweet about the whole deal.

  Another half hour and he’d be at the island. A ration of their strange food and then some sleep. Sleep. Sleep, God damn it, if he could get the worms of Lucy’s deceit out of his intestines he would sleep! She had used him. Used him! Cast him off like a dirty sock, like a used fucking condom. Women. You shoot your life force into them, and they bite off your cock! The fucking Arabs were right, they should be kept in cages, and only let out to be fucked, and even then only when tied down and gagged. Fucking shoot them when you’re done.

  The boat jumped an especially large wave, and slammed down hard, almost toppling his hulking form over the steering wheel. A chunk of trim snapped free and pinwheeled off into the night. He laughed. His “employers” knew so little of who he truly was. It had been so easy to delude them. Make them think he sympathized with their bullshit. And through them, he had access to such excellent equipment, this boat the least of it. In this boat, he looked like an ordinary drug runner. No one would guess what he had buried in the beach! No one would know until it was too late!

  He tapped the control panel quickly to check his course. Made a minor correction in the automatic pilot. Damned thing was always off just a hair, pulled to starboard. His hand itched to switch on the radar to see if it yet painted the island where he was headed, but his instructions had been to run quiet as much as possible. Quiet, hell; this can roared like an F-14. His employers were a crazy bunch, but very useful. What idiots, they thought they had recruited him, but it was he who was using them. All their fundamentalist shit about the Satan America stepping on the throats of the true believers. They were rough sons of bitches, running around with their high-powered rifles and night-vision goggles, practicing their little raids, but he knew how to avoid them, just do his little errands for them, and slip a hand into their supplies for whatever little goodies he needed. Fucking shitheads couldn’t count. And they needed a white boy like him to run their errands, any one of them would stand out like a sore thumb, even on the island, if any of the tourists saw them. Hah! They ran for cover like so many cockroaches when the boats showed up. As long as he sang their little songs and ran their loads back and forth, they foolishly took him for granted.

  But there were two other Americans on the island, and one seemed to have him under a watchful eye. The professor, they called him, crackling over his little laboratory projects, patting him on the back and saying yes, you’re on the right path, the righteous path. Everybody stroking everybody else, a fucking circle jerk. They all watched him. He did his “stupid” act. He had them fooled.

  Eyes on him. His mind bounced randomly from their dark-lashed eyes to Lucy’s to the eyes of the clerk at the motel. He had felt the eyes of the clerk boring into him. He’d deal with him another time, get even, perhaps wire his car with a little device the boys on the island had. That would please them probably. Treachery was their name, disruption their game. Best to leave for now anyway. The launch was delayed. Why pay their rates when he had a bunk with his employers for free, damn their feral eyes. He’d wait there on the island and zip back in plenty of time to dig up his prize and ready it for the launch. With luck the new launch window would come at night, when he could move under cover of darkness and she would make a nice, bright target.

  Too bad he’d missed her little talk this evening, a perfect chance to show her how far her precious superiority could really take her. He’d had the flight to Houston all scheduled, but his fucking employers had told him to come back and run a load of the white stuff to shore for them. Missing tonight’s opportunity to show Lucy who was in charge couldn’t be helped. How ironic to use drugs as a cover! He grinned into the flying salt and night air. It was enough that she’d be watching for him, afraid.

  – 13 –

  After the tension of the cocktail hour, Guffey prepared the fish for the barbecue. “I speared this myself,” he said. “Guess an old fart can still hunt somethin’ to go with what the wife gathers.”

  Dinner was delicious, the fish grilled to tender, moist perfection. I discovered that I had a taste for grouper, and the salad was fine as well. But the conversation didn’t help my digestion.

  Miles managed to stretch a teasing preamble to his dissertation on the relevance of his missing microbiologist to threats to homeland security clear through barbecuing the fish, tossing the salad, and calling everyone to the table. Thus Faye and Nancy were there to hear what he had to say.

  Which was not much. Basically, he thought something was up. He had a hunch, but no hard evidence. But his hunches had borne fruit in the past, he asserted, so this one was probably good, too.

  The whole performance had me on edge. I didn’t like being strung along, particularly where it came to a discussion of a project that might in some way connect to the horrifying condition in which I had just seen my lover that afternoon. But I held back and let Tom work over our host.

  “I tell you, the threat is real,” said Guffey.

  Tom arranged his features to indicate waning interest.

  Guffey offered to top up his glass of wine.

  Tom declined. “I’m good for now.” />
  Guffey shrugged his shoulders. To his wife, he said, “What’s for dessert, hon?”

  “Peaches. And I hope they aren’t mealy.”

  Fuck the peaches, I thought. Stick with the dust.

  Tom said, “A hunch is all very well, but …” and let his words trail off.

  I draped a hand over my mouth to cover my amusement. They were really getting into it now, playing a game of liar’s poker, each one tried to engage the other to spill his information first. I expected that at any moment, Tom would have to pull on the brass knuckles and really go to work, because this time, he was up against world-class talent charading as a Southern good old boy.

  Guffey swirled the wine in his own glass. “You know what I been talking about,” he said suggestively, trying in turn to get Tom to say the word first.

  Tom slipped an artistically furtive glance at his watch. “Well, this anthrax threat is a real problem,” said Guffey.

  Tom folded his hands on the table edge, indicating polite interest. “Mm?”

  “Well, you know our missing man, Calvin Wheat?”

  “I’ve not met him, no.”

  Ignoring that bit of polite insolence, Guffey said, “He did his doctorate at a place where some folks were interested in all that, see.”

  “Ah. Then he has experience in handling and refining Bacillus anthracis?”

  “Oh, no. Not Cal, not directly. But he knew people there, see, and one of them was, well …” He twirled one index finger around an ear. “These guys get competitive sometimes, and other times they think they’ve done a great service to humankind and ought to be rewarded with fat research contracts. They get bitter, y’know? Kinda makes them slide off their moorings a bit, lose their ethical center.”

  Faye said, “And other times they think the government isn’t taking proper precautions, and decide to show us all just how scary biological weapons can be.” She shot a look at Tom, who studiously avoided making eye contact with her.

  Guffey said, “Yeah, well, Cal said this one guy, name of Ben Farnsworth, got real bent out of shape, and was last seen taking his football and heading out to play health clinic manager for some outfit offshore. I don’t like that. My personal opinion? He’s got a lab going out there. He’s got to be stopped. That shit’s bad enough in our hands. I don’t want it in anyone else’s.”

  Bacillus anthracis. Was this the killer dust that Jack had gone looking for? I didn’t like this, not one bit. It didn’t matter how well-trained or how well-vaccinated Jack was, the stuff was lethal, particularly if they were talking about a new strain.

  Tom tented his fingers. It took someone who knew him as well as I did to know that he was now as tense as a bird dog that has a pheasant in sight. “Where offshore?”

  Guffey said, “The Bahamas. Damned islands start only fifty-five miles east of the Atlantic coast here.” He shook his head. “I used to like going out there. Thought it was a piece of paradise. Now I wonder.”

  Tom said, “Which island, precisely?”

  “Don’t I wish I knew. But any one of ’em is too close for my comfort, let me tell you. And Cal, he predicts—” Here he paused for dramatic effect. “Predicted that he’d be finding something pretty damning when he compared dust samples collected at open sea with those collected onshore in certain islands in the Bahamas, and in Florida.”

  Tom shifted in his chair. “But he had yet to collect those data?”

  “Correct. Or at least, he did not yet have the bit that would clinch his theory. He needed samples from open ocean and from downwind of various islands. Unless I miss my guess, he was about to get the pristine upwind sample he needed. He had all the others sitting right there in his stateroom.”

  I asked, “Has anyone looked through his stateroom to see if anything’s missing?”

  Miles smiled his approval at me. “No. The cruise line’s official position is that he must have gotten off the ship in Barbados. And it’s not back to Port Canaveral yet, so we haven’t been able to check.”

  Tom looked blank. He had withdrawn inside his head to cogitate.

  Guffey eyed Tom with apparent satisfaction. He knew he’d hit his mark.

  Faye shifted the conversation from the specific to the general. “This terrorism really screws with our lives, doesn’t it? It’s a whole ugly new world. When I first got my pilot’s license, it was considered a basic freedom that I could fly my plane anywhere I wanted. Now we’ve had crazies flying jets into tall buildings, and the White House can close the skies at a blink.”

  “You got a better way of handling this?” Tom inquired.

  “Yes. I say we start thinking straight about things. There’s the whole discussion now about whether the pilots on commercial airlines should carry guns. Some Congress people argue that we shouldn’t allow that, because they might shoot a passenger by mistake. So instead, we have an executive order that permits a guy in an F-16 to shoot down the whole plane. That’s crazy. I say arm the pilots.”

  Tom said, “And if the terrorists shoot the pilots?” “Then bring out the F-16,” she muttered. “The politicians want to ground all the private pilots, as if we’re the threat. I didn’t see them grounding all the Ryder trucks after Oklahoma City or that first attempt on the World Trade Center.”

  Miles said, “The rental-truck lobby must be stronger than you pilots.”

  “There are no perfect answers in the security business,” Tom said soothingly. “It’s a complex world, so there are no simple solutions.”

  Faye was not in a mood to be mollified. “If women ran this world, things would be different. Back in the Stone Age, we had it right. God was female. Women had high status. They raised the babies and gathered eighty percent of the food. The men just lolled around, and once in a while went and hunted for a little meat.”

  Tom said, “I guess you women raised too many babies, because now we’ve got runaway overpopulation.”

  Faye’s face stiffened. “You’re blaming this on women? Statistics show, Tom, that in countries where women have control over their reproductive capacities, there is no runaway population boom. It goes quickly toward zero population growth.”

  Tom caressed her arm. “So you’re in control, are you?”

  Faye’s jaw muscles bunched with rage.

  Miles Guffey stuck his oar back into the conversation. “I’ve been reading a book that agrees with your sentiments, Faye. It’s called The Garden of Their Desires. It advances the theory that back at the end of the last Ice Age, when the climate was wetter and cooler, the big desert belt that runs from the Sahara through the Middle East and up into China was much more hospitable.”

  I said, “Molly Chang was calling it the ‘green Sahara.’”

  Miles leaned back in his chair. “It was probably never Eden, but it was a lot friendlier place than it is now. And God was feminine, because the earth was perceived as generous and hospitable; you know, fecund. Women raised babies and a few crops, and maybe a couple baby goats that the men brought home alive from the hunt. Then along comes the warming trend, and the land got to be a bit more forbidding. The pasture dries up, so the men start taking the goats up the hill for the summer, and that’s one job status the women lose. It gets drier and drier, the goats eat everything that’s holding the soil down, and you get desertification. Before long, life’s so tough the men start raiding each others’ camps, and we start selecting for just that: raiders. The biggest interloper gets the most status. And the women are reduced to camp followers, with no status expect as breeders.”

  Nancy said, “Nowadays we have corporate raiders. I guess we’re still living in a cultural desert.”

  Miles grinned.

  Tom said, “We’re living in a time of enormous change, fraught with rage and uncertainty, and that leaves us open to the worst kinds of opportunism. We have corporate greed buying everything up to and including the White House. The common citizen no longer has a true voice in government. The damned White House is run by opportunists.”

  P
amela Guffey narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, Tom?”

  “Hell, those jets crashed into those buildings, and the administration lost no time sending our boys into Afghanistan.”

  “You call that opportunism? I call that sacrifice.”

  Tom said, “Oh, there’s a sacrifice being made there, alright. All those servicemen giving up being home with their families, that is a sacrifice. And I believe in what they’re doing there, just as they do. But I don’t for a minute believe that the administration gives a shit whether we get the terrorists, except as is expedient for their ultimate goals.”

  Pamela said, “Which are?”

  “Getting an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea down to the ocean. Look who’s in office: a bunch of oil barons.”

  By this point, I was ready to puke up my grouper.

  Faye’s eyes were brimful of tears. She said, “Here we are sitting around enjoying the good life while people are dying of malnutrition and leftover land mines in war-torn third-world countries. How in hell are we supposed to bring babies into a world like this?”

  Tom put a comforting hand over hers. “Sorry to go off like that on politics, Faye. Bringing babies into this world is precisely what we need to do,” he said. “We need to birth them kindly, and love them, and educate them to the best of our capacity, and help them grow up into citizens who can lead this world out of the mess it’s in. But that will take many generations. In the meantime, we need to deal with things as we find them. We need to strengthen our security, toughen our nerves, and, every once in a while, we need to go out there and get proactive.”

  Faye’s lips tightened. “You mean fight.”

  Tom nodded. “Yes, let the world know we don’t lie down for the schoolyard bully. I mean go out there and stop the killing where it starts. And I know what you’re going to say next: We’re a bunch of self-satisfied, imperialist, hypocritical assholes who ought to be shot ourselves. You’re right, we have to clean house right here at home and get over this greed shit. You think I’m the sourest old pessimist that ever lived but let me tell you, I believe in this country and the principles it runs on. We’ve got a Constitution that works provided we pay attention and keep the right people defending it. Our Founding Fathers were some smart sons of bitches.”