Strain Two was the Ambush Bug/Spined Assassin mix, a bug with an intelligent killing pattern. Several of these hybrids would work together to pile small amounts of food in an opening and then hide, waiting for a victim to ambush. Bach morning after snacking on duped vermin all night these hybrids would eat their pile of bait food like so much dessert before calling it quits.
A totally unexpected characteristic that appeared in this hybrid was its mating drive. This was the randiest of the mutant insects, attempting copulation with everything it encountered, including inanimate objects. Naturally, Bob was enthusiastic about these little buggerers.
After getting a feel for the floor plan of the building, Bob determined where he would begin. He went into a large, windowed apartment halfway down the hall on the second floor and drilled a hole near the baseboard of one of the load-bearing walls. He pulled a length of three-quarter-inch clear plastic tubing from his tool kit and secured it into the hole in the wall.
He carefully opened the top of one of the boxes marked “Assassins, Strain Two” and took one of his modified Assassin Bugs out. It made a squeaking noise with its stridulating organs as Bob quickly closed the box to prevent a mass escape.
Bob looked the killer bug squarely in the segmented antennae. “Go get ’em, tiger,” he said earnestly.
He jammed the length of clear plastic tubing into the side of the box and fed the remaining bugs into the hole in the wall. He patched the hole and then repeated the procedure throughout the building until 500 Strain Two Assassins were belligerently patrolling the wall spaces in search of sustenance.
Chapter Thirty-six
Gate 47 at JFK’s international terminal was bustling. Passengers poured off the rampway and past the reader board indicating the arrival of Flight 354 from La Paz, Bolivia. Among the crowd was a man with a horribly scarred face.
As it happened, the seat belt sign had just been turned off on the TWA flight at Gate 34, just in from Athens.
Ramon retrieved his luggage from the spastically rotating conveyor which dispensed Samsonite bags like a giant staggering Pez dispenser.
Three carousels away, Klaus gathered his hanging bag and his small brown suitcase.
The fight for cabs was furious by American standards, but for those from large European and South American cities, it was a cakewalk. Klaus found one quickly but as he approached the door Ramon stepped up, thinking it was his. Klaus, ever the diplomat, did not express revulsion at the sight of Ramon’s grotesquely disfigured face.
“I am sorry,” Klaus said, “I think this one is mine.”
“No, I believe I was first,” Ramon replied.
Klaus graciously waved a hand. “My mistake. Please take it, there will be others.”
“Hey, yo! Is one of ya getting in the goddamn cab or what?” the native cabdriver asked. “I ain’t got all goddamn day.”
Ramon eyed Klaus up for a moment, decided the handsome European was okay, then mentioned he was going to the West Side.
“I am going to Midtown,” said Klaus.
“Would you consider sharing the cab?” Ramon agreed. So they tossed their bags into the trunk and slid into the back seat.
“Yo! It’s about goddamn time,” the cabbie said.
Klaus and Ramon rode in silence for a while. But Klaus felt awkward sitting so close to someone without acknowledging his presence.
“Were you on the flight from Athens?” Klaus asked.
“No, I have come from Bolivia.”
“A beautiful country. I especially love the Andes. Have you come on business or pleasure?”
“You might say both,” Ramon said. “I enjoy my work. I am in…plastics. And you?”
“Strictly business, I’m afraid,” Klaus explained to the disfigured Bolivian face. “I no longer enjoy what I do.”
The gnarled face nodded and the two assassins rode in silence for the remainder of the trip.
They arrived at Klaus’ hotel first, the Rihga Royal, an elegant yet relaxed hotel located midway between Central Park and the Theater District. Klaus liked the first-class service and the excellent water pressure in the showers. Thanking Ramon, he got out and disappeared through the gold revolving door as the cab screeched back onto the streets.
Safely ensconced in his suite, Klaus opened his suitcase and checked the contents. Inside were several exotic handguns as well as components for an explosive device. So much for international airport security.
Klaus closed the case and slipped it under the bed.
He grabbed the remote control and flipped on the television tuning to ESPN to catch some scores. Klaus always had several wagers going in whatever sports were in season, so he liked to keep abreast of his situation. Midway through the NBA Eastern Conference scores someone knocked on Klaus’ door.
Klaus was calm, as if expecting a visitor. He opened the door to find a sloe-eyed man in a dark suit carrying a briefcase. They exchanged almost imperceptible nods and Klaus let him in.
“Do you have what I requested?” Klaus asked the dark suit.
The man produced a file from the briefcase and waited as Klaus flipped through the contents: photos of Bob taken under surveillance, a birth certificate, a wedding license, a TRW report, and federal tax returns. Klaus looked at the 1040s and saw that Bob listed his occupation as “Professional Exterminator.” He certainly was a cheeky bastard.
Satisfied, Klaus closed the folder and handed the man an envelope. “Two thousand?”
The man nodded, slipped the envelope into his suit pocket, and left without ever saying a word. Klaus locked the door.
As private investigators go, this guy was among the best and he was reasonably priced to boot. He supplied Klaus with all there was to know about one Robert Dillon of Queens, New York. It turned out that every source of public information had a file on him. The sheer volume of information would indicate that Bob Dillon was John Q. Public. But Klaus wasn’t so sure.
Klaus sat at the small table by the window and poured over the contents of the file. In killing, just as in gambling, information could give you an edge. It saved time, was fairly cheap, and could prevent big mistakes. It didn’t guarantee success, but it was a good way to hedge your bet.
Klaus read through the file twice. He looked at detailed street maps of the five boroughs and marked with a red felt pen all the locations where the sloe-eyed man indicated he had followed Bob. The red marks corresponded with the locations of the four Silverstein buildings where Bob’s experiments were ongoing, though the investigator indicated he was unable to determine exactly what Bob had been doing in the buildings.
The investigator had also compiled a chronology of Bob’s movements to help ferret out any patterns. After four hours poring over the material, Klaus still wasn’t sure whether Bob Dillon was a threat to his life or just a schmuck who didn’t qualify for a Visa Card. Tomorrow he would do some investigating of his own.
It was one a.m. when Klaus closed the folder and returned to ESPN hoping to catch the final scores of the West Coast games.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The big brown UPS truck came up Bob’s street in the morning sunshine and parked in front of his house as it had before.
After attempting his delivery at Bob’s, the UPS guy left one of his friendly yellow notes explaining the fate of the package, crossed to Pratt’s house, and rang the bell.
“Whaddya want?” Pratt yelled through the door.
The UPS guy yelled back, “Another package for Mr. Dillon. He’s not home, can I leave it with you again?”
Pratt threw open his door. “What am I, a friggin’ post office box?” He grabbed the package. “Givitame.”
The UPS guy thanked Pratt without the slightest bit of sarcasm and bounded back to his big brown truck.
Inside, Pratt tossed the new package down next to th
e first one. Now the clever landlord had two hostages to hold against his 320 dollars in back rent.
You had to get up pretty early in the morning to fool old Dick Pratt.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The UPS guy was right, Bob wasn’t home right then. In fact, at that moment, he was walking down Sixth Avenue preoccupied with an unusual thought.
Minutes earlier, coming through Times Square, he had been propositioned by two leather-clad women of the domination persuasion who were standing outside a retail bondage emporium called Street Legal B & D.
“Hey sugar,” one of them said. “I’ll be your baby tonight.” She snapped her whip.
Not being the overly submissive type, Bob had declined her offer as tempting, but financially impossible at the moment. The woman told him to come back if he ever got a better job.
Ever since encountering the two disciplinarians, Bob had been trying to figure out the plural for dominatrix. Dominatri? Dominatrixes? Maybe he’d write to William Safire who seemed to know about these things.
As Bob contemplated a potential draft of his letter to the language maven, he was totally unaware that Klaus was watching him through binoculars from a covered position on the third floor maintenance roof of the Atlantic Bank of New York.
The information Klaus had purchased proved to be good; Bob appeared to be headed again for the abandoned 16-story building. Klaus wondered what went on in there.
As he watched, Klaus noticed someone following Bob, and it wasn’t the sloe-eyed man in the dark suit. It was someone else; someone Klaus had seen before, someone he wouldn’t forget. It was Ramon, the man with the hideous face with whom he had shared the cab ride from the airport.
“Plastics, huh?” Klaus chuckled; he knew the truth. And the truth, which had suddenly dawned on him, was that the “plastics” man was another hired killer.
Klaus knew that Miguel Riviera had sent a hit man to New York to ice the Exterminator, who, Riviera alleged, had killed his brother Ronaldo in fulfillment of a CIA contract. Klaus’ CIA contacts denied any involvement in the matter. As a matter of policy Klaus took that denial as a confirmation. Finally, why else would this repugnant man from Bolivia be following Bob, the man so many people believed to be the Exterminator? He had to be Riviera’s hit man.
Klaus had to make some decisions. First, he had to decide whether Bob was really an assassin. If he decided Bob was a professional killer, then he had to choose whether to wait for Ramon to do the job or whether he should do it himself. Klaus was inclined toward the latter. He disliked uncertainty—he was something of a control freak that way—and the best way for him to know when the Exterminator was going to be exterminated was to do the deed himself.
However, since (A) Klaus wasn’t sure about Bob (B) there was no money in this for Klaus and (C) the disfigured Bolivian was already on the case, Klaus decided to hold off for a moment. No need to get dirty if someone else is willing to do it, and Klaus reasoned, anyone as ugly as Ramon had to be good.
Besides, while Klaus’ philosophy prevented him from killing anyone he didn’t think deserved to die, it didn’t require him to intervene if someone else was about to commit murder.
Being a consummate professional, Klaus believed it was good to watch a colleague at work. You never knew what you might learn. He watched Bob disappear into the abandoned building and saw Ramon walk slowly past, then stop. Ramon checked his watch, then made an entry in a notebook.
Inside, Bob wandered around examining his handiwork and checking for any developing problems. He found a few dehydrated roach carcasses—which was an encouraging sign—but he wasn’t about to celebrate just yet.
Ramon waited patiently on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue. Klaus spent the day peering into the building with his binoculars, trying to figure out what Bob was up to. Since Bob was crawling along the baseboard most of the time, Klaus didn’t see much.
What on earth did an assassin do all day in a vacant 16-story building? Perhaps he stored weapons there and perhaps the basement had been turned into a firing range for target practice. Regardless, if this was all the Exterminator was going to do Klaus could not confirm the rumors that brought him here in the first place. And if he could not confirm those rumors, Klaus would not be able to kill the man.
Late that afternoon, as Bob locked up the building on his way out, Ramon checked his watch and made another notation in his notebook. He was compiling the information Klaus already had.
When Bob was safely down the street, Ramon went to the door, picked the lock, and disappeared into the building.
Klaus searched the windows until Ramon appeared on the second floor. Ramon placed his briefcase on a table and opened it, revealing several blocks of what Klaus recognized as everyone’s favorite plastic explosive, C-4.
“Ahh, plastics…very cute,” Klaus said to himself. Ramon was going to blow Bob to kingdom come.
Klaus preferred his high-powered rifle to other methods, but a good killer went with his strength, and Ramon’s was apparently explosives.
Ramon removed six blocks of the putty from his briefcase and attached detonators. Klaus, who was handy with a wide variety of explosives, thought that six was overkill, but then again it was better to be safe than sorry, especially when trying to kill a killer…if that’s what Bob really was.
Next Ramon removed six small, bowl-shaped objects and stuffed explosives into each of them. When he turned them over, Klaus saw they looked like wall-mounted thermostats. Klaus silently approved of the masquerade. Ramon then attached the thermostat-bombs to six structural columns in the building before going to his briefcase and flipping a switch on a digital transmitting device. An LED readout lit up.
Finally Ramon flipped one more switch and closed the briefcase. Moments later, Klaus watched as Ramon left the building and headed up Sixth Avenue toward Greeley Square.
Because Klaus already knew Bob’s schedule and since he understood Ramon’s strategy, he knew when to return—there was no need to follow either Bob or Ramon around that night. Klaus decided to go to the Knicks-Pacers game at the Garden—an early season match-up. Surely the odds would be heavy against Indiana and Klaus could get some good action.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Mary stood in the hallway halfheartedly trying to talk herself out of it. But after all this time away from Bob and all the soul-searching she couldn’t really help herself; she had to do it. She reached up and took a hold of the dangling rope and pulled hard, testing its strength. Then, resolved to her task, she doubled her purchase on the rope and pulled it toward her head and past her neck until the staircase came down from the ceiling. She climbed into the spooky attic where the trunk of her memories sat covered with dust and anchoring cobwebs.
The combination was easy to remember because it was Bob’s birthday, March 12. She wrestled the rusted tumblers to 3-1-2 and creaked the old trunk open. The smell of memories rushed into her nose, causing her to sneeze. There were embarrassing old photographs, high school yearbooks, and knickknacks whose significance had long been forgotten. What, for example, was the meaning of the mismatched jigsaw puzzle pieces? She couldn’t remember, but she couldn’t throw them out either. She dug deep into the trunk, a curator poking through a back room, and there among the artifacts of her little museum, were the collected letters and poems of one Bob Dillon. Had they belonged to the other Bob Dylan, these missives would have been worth a small fortune. As it was, their value was incalculable.
She savored the old addresses and old stamps and Bob’s familiar handwriting on the occasional “P.S.” scrawled on the envelope after the fact. She smiled as she flipped through the funky postcards. Finally she opened one of the letters and read it:
My dear, beautiful, sweet Mary—
I was in the middle of writing a paper for my comparative entomology class (a critical look at Stanbrick’s classic, Sowbugs and Pil
lbugs—Is Carbazole the Answer?) But I couldn’t stop thinking about you, so I had to stop and write lest my affections creep into my paper. I don’t want to come off as a passionate pro-carbazole knucklehead.
Remember last week at the bar when you asked who my favorite band was? If you recall, before I could answer, that fight broke out at the jukebox.
The answer is—big surprise—the Beatles.
And if you were to ask me to name my favorite Beatle, I would have to say—Dynastes tityus.
See, Rhinoceros Beetles are among the largest of the Coleopterans (from the Greek, meaning sheath-winged) and, for reasons I can’t explain, I think they are also the most romantic. They’re massive bugs that reach nearly seven inches in length in the tropics.
To me, they’re the V-8 engines of the insect world with 454 cubic inches of buggy power—and at the same time, I see them as big lugs, awkward and sentimental, just trying to impress their sweethearts. You just have to love them the way I love you.
Now, not that you would ever ask—but if you did, I would have to say my second favorite beetle is the Bombardier Beetle (Brachinus americanus). These guys are dark metallic blue and dangerous, just like your eyes. When attacked they discharge a spray of blazing hot quinic acid which will cause blisters on human skin and, needless to say, will scare the shit out of frogs and ants.
This beetle produces the acid by mixing hydro-quinone and hydrogen peroxide which, until needed, are kept neatly stored in separate glands in their cuticle-lined abdominal chamber. The constituent chemicals are discharged on demand into a separate sac, where they react with the enzyme peroxidase. The reaction results in quinones and a significant amount of heat. The introduction of oxygen allows the quinones to be expelled with great force and an audible “pop” from a nozzle at the tip of the beetles’ abdomen (something John, Paul, George and Ringo could never do). The heat converts the acid to a gaseous cloud which looks like a puff of smoke. And, as if that weren’t enough, their aim is fantastic!
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