A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  Yeah, Staff Sergeant Butler and his men. Here again was a twist of fate confirming my opinion that fate was one twisted son of a bitch. Why me? I didn't get it. In three days, fate was going to send me up in a plane and then he was going to make me jump out of it into the Pakistan night with the very same guy I was investigating for possible murder. Ruben Wright, his wrecked parachute harness, and his even more wrecked remains flashed through my head. Then I thought about Butler's smashed flashlight and broken ribs. Howerton had told me to trust Butler. But, with all the doubt still swimming around the Ruben Wright case, could I do that? Seriously?

  * * *

  The temperature dropped through the floor as I closed in on the exit. I had a few things on my mind jostling for attention with the impending mission: the hit on the Transamerica and Four Winds buildings; Al Cooke; Dr. Freddie Spears's resignation from Moreton Genetics and then her presence in heavyweight Pentagon meetings; the charred corpse; Boyle's wallet… all of it swirled through my brain like snow flurries.

  If I was right about the wallet, and I believed I was, that meant it had to have been planted, only the people who detonated the truck bomb and set the device in the basement of the Four Winds wouldn't have had the opportunity to do that. So who did?

  Outside, the snow was still falling, playing havoc with the traffic. Vehicles were sliding around on the ice and slush. I made my way to the cab rank and joined the line. I looked down the length of it, trying to judge the wait, when I saw Doc Spears climb into a cab at the head. And suddenly I was running, weaving through the crowd of people coming and going. Spears's cab was pulling forward, sliding around. I jumped off the curb and half-stumbled as I landed in a ridge of knee-high brown-and-black icy crud pushed to the side of the road. Ahead, Spears's cab had stopped, waiting for a gap in the stream of slow-moving traffic. I got up and sprinted. I dived for the rear passenger door handle and pulled it open, just as the cab began to move. I hauled myself inside and the driver jammed on his brakes, shouting, “Hey!”

  I pulled the door shut with a thud. “Jesus, it's cold out there,” I griped.

  “Cooper!” exclaimed Spears.

  “Everything all right, ma'am?” asked the driver, a skinny black guy in a leather hat with woolly flaps that covered his ears. From behind, he looked like a cocker spaniel.

  “Er… y-yes,” she said, not a hundred percent certain about it.

  He shrugged, muttered something, and turned back to get on with the driving.

  “So,” I said, “what's it all about?”

  “What's what all about?”

  “I don't know. Start wherever you like. Tell me what you know about Tanaka and Boyle. Tell me what they were working on. Tell me about the DVD you slid under my door. Tell me why you resigned from Moreton Genetics after I interviewed you. Tell me when you think the weather will clear up. Your call. Where are we going, by the way?”

  “My hotel.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Sofitel.”

  “That's on Lafayette Square, isn't it?”

  She nodded.

  “Nice.” Nice was an understatement. The Sofitel had a view across the square into the front sitting room of The White House. “You've lost weight, Doc.”

  “I've been under a lot of stress.”

  “I would, too, if I had to pay for a room at the Sofitel.”

  She gave me the thinnest of smiles. The cold had burned red circles into her cheeks. “Care to unburden yourself?” I asked.

  “I can't,” she said.

  “OK, well, I'll go first. Let me tell you how your friend died.”

  “That's not necessary,” she said.

  I ignored her. “The weather was calm and it was a moonless night. It was peaceful out on the Natusima's deck. There was a party going on below deck, celebrating the end of a successful expedition. Nearly everyone was there. Your friend Hideo had drunk too much. You can thank the guy who kept filling his glass for that—Professor Boyle. Feeling queasy, Hideo went out on deck to get some air. Big mistake.”

  Doc Spears wasn't looking at me, but I knew she was listening. The cab pulled onto the 359, heading toward D.C. over the 14th Street Bridge. Our speed went down to a crawl as the weather worsened.

  “He might have been leaning over the side of the boat,” I said. “Perhaps he was puking because of the alcohol, but then a guy by the name of Al Cooke came up behind Hideo, lifted him up over the gunnel, and threw him overboard. He did this for two reasons: He was a sadist who just wanted to see what would happen; he was also paid to throw him overboard. Exactly what happened next, who can say? The water was cold, Doc. You ever been in water that cold?”

  Dr. Spears didn't respond to the question.

  “It would have been a few degrees below freezing. The gag reflex produced by the sudden cold would have forced Tanaka to take a breath underwater. If he was lucky, he'd have drowned right then and there. But let's say he didn't. Let's say he fought his way up to the surface, treading water, the cold knifing into his skin. He would have called out. Maybe he called out a few times for help. None came. But then something else arrived, brought by the vomit and the urine and the fear. It was a great white shark that had been trailing the boat for days. From the tooth found in what remained of Hideo Tanaka, the giant fish was between nineteen and twenty-two feet long. A fish that big weighs over two and a half thousand pounds, and has one seriously healthy appetite. The coroner believed it took Hideo—all of him from the neck down—in a single bite. We know this because Hideo Tanaka's head ended up being sucked into the ship's engine-cooling system.”

  Freddie Spears turned toward me, her eyes wet.

  “Doc, I need to know why it happened. It has something to do with what they were working on. What was it?”

  “I can't tell you.”

  “Jesus, Doc, you can and you will. Goddamn it, it was you who slid that DVD under my door. You did that because you wanted me to know something important. Something relevant to your friend's death.”

  “The people at the Pentagon—Defense, CIA. They know.”

  “Yeah, but they won't tell me. So you tell me, Doc. There's no one following us in this weather, no helo overhead keeping an eye on us. And no undercover agent would be seen dead in a hat like that one.” I nodded at the driver.

  “You sure you're all right, miss?” he said, glancing over his shoulder at his paying passenger, who was now sobbing.

  “She's fine,” I said. “Tears of release.”

  The driver glanced at me next, unsure. I gave him a big smile to keep him that way. Doc Spears blew her nose and regained some composure while I looked out at the highway. A horse and cart could have moved faster. I'd pushed the doctor as far as I could. She didn't have to tell me anything, would be breaking a federal statute or two if she did. But I was getting close to panic. Some military planning committee was fixing to have me jump out of a plane and it was all somehow connected to the murder of Hideo Tanaka. If I could figure it out in time, maybe the mission would get canceled.

  “Do you know what Mad is?” I heard her say into her tissue. At least, that's what I thought she said—the sentence didn't seem to make sense.

  “Do I know who what is?” I asked.

  “Mad. Do you know what Mad is?”

  Maybe I'd pushed Doc Spears a little hard, after all, and she was just a touch unhinged. I said, “Mad—yeah, sure. Alfred E. Neuman. A great magazine. You gotta love their movie spoofs. They did such a number on Schwarzenegger in Terminator 3. Did you—”

  Spears looked at me with her red-rimmed eyes like I was mad. “No, the acronym: M-A-D.”

  All I could think was that the military was acronym-mad. I shook my head.

  “M-A-D. Mutually Assured Destruction.”

  “Oh, right, you mean that MAD. Yeah, I remember. It was a Cold War thing, right?”

  “Mutually Assured Destruction was peace by stalemate back when the world was divided into armed camps: Communism versus the West. It was the theor
y of nuclear deterrence—that if you launched a nuke at me, I'd massively retaliate. Things would escalate and we'd all die, so what would be the point?”

  Spears gave a final sniff and put away her tissues. “MAD prevented that first strike. Whether anyone believed in the theory or not, something worked because we're all still around, even if the Soviet Union isn't.” She glanced out the window, collecting her thoughts, carefully wiping the mascara on the bottom of her eyes with a finger.

  After a handful of impatient seconds, I said, “So here we are, Doc, both with our fingers on the big red button…”

  Spears took a breath. Then she continued. “Hideo was an expert on deep-sea environments that technically should not have been able to support life. He was searching for a particular form of extremophile—”

  “A what-o-phile?”

  “An extremophile. An organism found in a hostile environment at great depths. Hideo isolated an extremophile—a bacterium—in the gut of a particular worm that could digest human feces. He—”

  “What?”

  “The environment around a hydrothermal vent is rich in hydrogen sulphide. Hydrogen sulphide is extremely caustic, poisonous, and is one of the toxic components of human sewage. Hideo was searching for an organism that would consume it.”

  “He was looking for a bug that would eat shit?”

  “You have a way with words, you know that?”

  Now I really had heard everything. I must've appeared skeptical because Spears said, “Think about it. Something like that would be worth millions, even billions. The sheer volume of human waste is a huge problem. Have you any idea how much sewage a city the size of New York alone produces in one day?”

  I visualized eight million New Yorkers sitting down at the beginning of the day with their newspaper. “Lots?”

  “In layman's terms, Professor Boyle's role was to look at the organism's genetic makeup, to manipulate it to see if it could be made to live in nonpoisonous environments.”

  “But something went wrong.”

  “Or went right, depending on your point of view. Boyle created an ionized bacterium that actually secreted hydrogen sulphide.”

  “In layman's terms, you've lost me.”

  “The DVD you saw was the result of one of Boyle's experiments. He modified the organism so that the airborne bacterium was attracted to electric fields. Where you find an electromagnetic field, these days you'll eventually find computer chips. Once this organism gets onto a printed circuit board, it secretes hydrogen sulphide that literally eats the chip away. The bacterium got into the air-conditioning and shut the building down—every computer chip in MG was turned to mush.”

  I got it. “In the wrong hands, that would be some weapon—a biological computer virus.”

  “A virus is not a bacterium,” she informed me.

  “Whatever.”

  “Once the potential of this weapon became apparent, our government became interested. Even if only to make sure no one else got the technology. On the battlefield, if you had the delivery system sorted out and ensured your own systems were hardened against attack, you could win without a shot being fired.”

  “A war where no one died. That wouldn't be such a bad thing, would it?”

  “You're looking on the bright side, Special Agent. I didn't take you as a glass-half-full sort of person.”

  “I'm not,” I said. Pakistan had Boyle, which meant it also had this meltdown bug. “So, Islamabad is lining up India for an atomic weapons strike? That's what all this is about?”

  I didn't need to see Spears's nod to already know the answer. That was where Butler and I supposedly came in. “So, this bug—it's ready to go?”

  “We don't know. Boyle took everything when he left. But I do know that the delivery system was always going to be difficult. The bacterium was highly successful at digesting our computer systems because, when it got into our air-conditioning, its lethality was pretty tightly directed and controlled. When the NLW is released into the atmosphere, control is lost.”

  “Did you just call this thing a nonlethal weapon?”

  “Um, yes … why?”

  “Something that lets one side launch nukes against another is a nonlethal weapon? That doesn't sound a little oxymoronish to you?”

  “That's what the DoD was calling it.”

  And all this time I'd been thinking the DoD didn't have a sense of humor.

  “A quick lesson in geopolitics, Agent Cooper. Asia is unstable. Not only is there the standoff between Pakistan and India, there's the Korean Peninsula, with the North and South still deeply mistrustful of each other on many levels. There's the considerable friction between the two Chinas—the People's Republic and Taiwan. And then there's the Muslim world to consider. Like Iran and Syria, for example. What would the reaction be if Pakistan attacked India with nuclear weapons?”

  “Most likely plenty of back slapping from other Muslims.”

  Doc Spears had her face turned toward me. I could see this was one deeply concerned former CEO.

  “What's your security like at MG?” I asked her.

  “Are you going to question me about those Tasers again?”

  “No, but given what I now know was being developed at MG, the fact that your people weren't armed with something that made a more permanent point now seems just a tad restrained. Also, I was wondering how Boyle got the bacterium out of MG.” I knew it was a dumb question as soon as I asked it. “He got it out the night he let the bug loose, didn't he?”

  Spears nodded. “I think he let it loose with the intention of knocking out the security. With all our systems down, he could have just walked out with it on a petri dish. And there's another possibility, something no one wants to think about.”

  “This can get worse?”

  “The genetic changes Boyle made allowed the bacterium to reproduce—multiply. There's the possibility that, released into the atmosphere, the bacterium could rapidly find its way around the globe.”

  “And… ?”

  “Well, that could put every computer chip in the world at risk.”

  “Oh, you mean like Y2K?” If the rest of it wasn't so serious, I'd have stifled a yawn.

  “No, Y2K was a great marketing exercise—it sold a lot of computers and helped a load of companies sell a mountain of dusty stock. If this does get into the atmosphere… worst-case scenario? It'll take the world back to the age of steam.”

  The cab pulled up at Spears's hotel in Lafayette Square and a porter in a monkey suit ran to hold open the car door. “Good afternoon, Dr. Spears,” I heard him say.

  I watched as she said hello back and climbed out onto the sidewalk. She and the doorman knew each other.

  “You've got the gist of it now,” Spears said, paying the driver through his side window—too much, from the look of the wad she pressed into his gloved hand.

  Something occurred to me. “Doc… the CIA man—Chalmers. Do you know how he happened to break his leg?”

  “Yeah, I heard someone say it happened aboard the Natusima. He slipped on a pile of soggy cigarette butts, or something. Seemed unlikely to me.” Spears shrugged.

  “Well, you know smoking—dangerous habit.”

  The monkey suit slammed the door. I gave the driver directions to my apartment. Then I made the guy wait while I changed out of the Class As, and had him drive me across to Andrews AFB.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  By the time I made it back to Bragg, my nerves felt like they'd been rubbed with crushed glass. I'd bought a fifth of single malt to keep me company on the return flight, but I left it unopened in my carry-on. Instead I found myself churning over the past few weeks, the brief investigation into Tanaka's murder, and the equally brief inquiry into the death of Ruben Wright. Neither investigation had been concluded satisfactorily. Time was proving to be my biggest enemy. I hadn't had enough of it to resolve my caseload. And now the world was under the gun. If Boyle had perfected his biological weapon, a nuclear war was imminent. Boyle had to be stop
ped. Only, I was having trouble dealing with the irony that Butler and I were the ones who were going to be working together to stop him. I recalled the phone conversation I'd had with Arlen, the one where he'd sounded out my view on whether Butler was guilty or innocent of murder. I'd told Arlen that doubt about him being the perp had crept in. Had that been enough to clear Butler for this operation?

  I picked over the investigation into Tanaka's death. That case might have been easier to resolve—a hell of a lot easier—if I'd been cleared to know exactly what Tanaka and Boyle had been working on. If I'd been aware they had something so valuable, and as relatively easy to sell as a biological weapon, that would have been a plausible motive for Tanaka's murder right there. Boyle wouldn't have been able to move with his research partner hanging around, so he had thrown him to the sharks. I could have—would have—seen it from the start. I might even have been able to nail Boyle before the people paying the bills in Pakistan had pulled off his vanishing act in downtown San Francisco, an act which had cost hundreds of lives. But that was the problem with hypotheticals. Stewing over what might have been did no one any good—not me, and least of all the family and friends of the people who had died in the explosions at the Transamerica and the Four Winds.

  I mulled over the Ruben Wright investigation some more. If I'd had another couple of days, I'd have paid Amy McDonough another visit, even if just to ask her the same questions over again to see if she gave the same answers. And there was Ruben's lawyer, Juan Demelian. He seemed about as straight as a paper clip. Something was going on there that didn't ring true. Demelian's answers seemed to be more like deflections. Maybe it was my gut talking, and not just because it was churning with the start of the descent to Pope AFB, Fort Bragg.