Will thrust an open file folder into Larabeth's hands and she silently blessed him.
“As these data show, Consolidated's outfall was sampled three weeks ago by EPA personnel and analyzed in their labs. Their effluent meets all applicable laws, standards, and regulations.”
She handed the reports to the reporter, angling them toward the camera so that the EPA letterhead was clearly visible. The reporter thanked her and went away to find someone willing to say something more sensational.
Guillaume's male companion struck a small, handheld gong. Its amplified boom electrified the crowd and they rushed over to the canal to get a look at GAIA's “dramatic presentation.” Larabeth and Will followed them.
“When Odysseus sailed the wine-dark sea,” trumpeted Guillaume over the bullhorn, “its waters were pure. He cast his nets into the sea for fish to feed his crew. We commemorate their valor with a glass of blood-red wine. This wine, like their blood, will mingle with the water, then it will be no more.”
The young man ceremoniously cast a net overboard, pulled it up empty and threw it behind him. The young woman held up a silver goblet and slowly poured its contents overboard. The drum boomed and the crowd cheered.
Guillaume sat on a low seat by the raft's rudder. His barrel chest, broad shoulders, and sturdy legs were deeply tanned and glistening with sweat. He looked like an earthy Zeus.
Will nudged Larabeth. “This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen,” he said, a little too loudly. A cluster of onlookers glared at him.
“In war after war, the rivers of our Mother Earth ran red. But again, the blood mingled with the water and was no more.” The woman poured a second goblet of wine into the canal. The drum boomed and the crowd, on cue, cheered again.
“But now,” he said, “now, we throw our refuse into the wine-dark sea.” The young man ripped open three fifty-pound bags sitting in the center of the raft and thrust a shovel into the nearest one. He heaved shovelfuls of a white substance overboard, casting it into the water with a flourish that sent a cloud of fine particles rising above them. The young woman turned her head and coughed.
“We cast our waste on the land.” Guillaume's voice was rising. He rose, opened the wooden box at his feet, and removed an ornate cloak. The young woman thrust both hands into one of the bags and cast the powder toward the grassy levees. It fell short and cascaded into the water. She looked down at her hands and arms and began wiping them on her robe as Guillaume went on.
“We have devised ways to cast our refuse into the very air, the breath of Gaia,” he thundered, throwing the cloak over his shoulders and tying it at the throat. All three thrust their arms up to the shoulders into the bags and threw white powder into the air over their heads. It rained down over them.
Suddenly, the young woman screamed, clutched her hands to her eyes, and screamed again. She dropped to her knees at the side of the raft and reached overboard, bringing handfuls of water to her face and moaning. The young man was ripping at his toga and rubbing the skin beneath with one hand as he clutched his throat with the other. He jumped or fell out of the raft and into the canal.
Guillaume extended his arm, palm up, toward the crowd on the levee and cried, “Something has gone terribly wrong. Help us. Help my friends.” His richly colored cloak flowed in the wind. His black eyes glittered. His legendary charisma had never glowed so brightly as it did for the cameras in that moment.
The crowd began to yell for an ambulance. Will snatched the walkie-talkie clipped to his pocket and radioed the plant's emergency response team. Larabeth sat down and started ripping off her steel-toed boots. If she tried to swim in them, they would take her straight to the bottom.
* * *
Yancey's arms were pinned to his sides by a crowd that couldn't decide whether it wanted to rush to the riverbank to watch three screaming people suffer or whether it wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.
He blew his cover, but he didn't care. He yelled, “FBI! FBI! Let me through!” but he couldn't free a hand to reach for his badge or his weapon. He hoped Lefkoff was having better luck.
Yancey was standing on top of the levee and, when the struggling crowd parted enough to give him a view, he could see the whole ugly scene. Langlois and his friends were on the raft and in the water, crying for help, and an emergency team was rowing an inflatable emergency craft out to them.
Yancey was worried about Lefkoff. The man should have gotten to Langlois by now if it meant he had to walk on water. He could see J.D. Hatten struggling toward Dr. McLeod through the crowd below. He was no help to her, but at least he hadn't been trampled.
And Dr. McLeod herself, goddamn her, was sitting at the waterside yanking off her boots as if she were planning to take a swim. If this woman didn't develop some common sense, she was going to get him fired.
* * *
Larabeth grunted as she tugged at her boots and wished she could look away from the horror in the canal. She could see Babykiller's twisted mind in action, right in front of her eyes. He would find nothing so amusing as attacking an environmental leader in front of his tree-hugging followers.
She tried to ignore her guilty suspicion that she had dragged Guillaume into Babykiller's web. Could Babykiller possibly know that she had been passing tapes to the FBI through Guillaume?
Guillaume rose from his seat and fell, entangled in the wet heavy net the young man had thrown across his feet. With one big arm, he pushed the woman overboard. With the other he groped for the rudder, but succeeded only in knocking it further out of reach. The raft careened slowly to the left, toward the water rushing out of the three culverts.
Guillaume was still struggling to free himself when the raft floated under the biggest pipe. The water flushed over him and his cloak burst into flames.
“It is the Greek fire! The fire that lurks in sulfur!” he roared, tearing at the burning cloth. Water filled the three bags in the center of the raft and they slumped over, releasing a thick white slurry. The cloak continued to burn as the slurry flowed over Guillaume's legs and torso and splashed onto his face.
Larabeth started to throw her hardhat down, reconsidered, and put it back on. She held onto it as she jumped into the canal. She was a strong swimmer and the current was with her. Now if Guillaume could just hang on.
The emergency personnel had paused to pull Guillaume's injured friends from the water when Larabeth reached the GAIA craft. She used her hardhat to bail canal water over the raft, flushing the caustic powder away, then she hauled herself onboard.
Guillaume looked bad. The incendiary chemicals had burned themselves out, but the white caustic powder was still caked in his wounds. It had been a quarter-century since she tended wounds like that. She swayed on her feet for a moment, then her instincts kicked in.
She checked his airway. His breathing was labored, but okay. His pulse was fast and thready, but at least he had one. Now she had to get the caustic off him before it did even more damage. She dipped her hardhat in the canal and gently poured water over him. He stirred and groaned, but she spoke his name and he quieted. She thought he recognized her voice. There was no way to tell, but it gave her something to think about other than Guillaume and his wounds.
Bail. Pour. Bail. Pour. Flushing with copious water was the standard treatment for emergency injuries by caustics. Bail. Pour. The emergency team arrived only a few moments behind her, but it felt like more.
* * *
After Guillaume was stabilized and brought ashore, Larabeth allowed the emergency team to spray disinfectant on her mildly burned palms. The medicine was cold, it stung, it felt good. She stood silent and let her clothes drip as she watched the paramedics flush the young couple's damaged eyes with a portable eyewash setup and apply antiseptic spray to their burns.
The young man kept saying, “It was supposed to be sugar. Sugar, for God's sake.”
The emergency team had done a good job with Guillaume, too. Larabeth blessed every cent Consolidated had spent on their training. When
the paramedics arrived, they complimented the first responders' work as they rushed Guillaume into an ambulance equipped with emergency equipment to support his faltering breathing.
Larabeth watched them load Guillaume's stretcher. His entire body was an angry, blistered, red-and-white. His eyes were burned and swollen shut.
Her anger was a real, solid thing. It had hands and it was shaking her into action, but there was nobody to slap, nobody to grab, nobody to punish. Babykiller had no face, no form. He was only an abstract someone that she had no choice but to hate.
As the ambulance pulled away, sirens wailing, Will turned to Larabeth. “What could have done that to him?”
She listened to her own voice, calm, controlled, precise. “I would say the white stuff was a corrosive of some kind. Maybe something common, like caustic soda. Something that doesn't hurt much at first, tingles a little maybe, until it mixes with water. It could be the water in your skin or your mucous membranes or just canal water. It doesn't matter. A strong enough caustic solution, given enough time, could flay the flesh from your bones.”
Her knees didn't want to support her. She kept talking, thinking they might quit wobbling if she ignored them.
“And the fire—Guillaume called it the Greek fire—” Larabeth was finding it hard to catch her breath. “Are you old enough to remember Vietnam? I wish I could forget what napalm can do. But napalm wasn't a new concept, you know. The Greeks used to mix petroleum and quicklime and sulfur. They were famous for it. Quicklime gets hot in contact with water, igniting the petroleum. The petroleum makes flames that water can't quench. Sulfur makes the fire burn hotter and releases sulfuric acid. Charming inventors, those Greeks.”
Willie's dark face had gone gray. “Who would be capable of such a thing?”
“Lots of people are capable.” Larabeth concentrated on putting one wet shaky foot ahead of the other. “We did it to the Vietnamese. The Byzantines did it to the Moslems. Heracles' wife did it to him. The question is this: What inhuman bastard did it this time?”
Larabeth's breath caught in her throat. She could get nothing out, no more words, just a heaving sob. Her knees were buckling. She felt herself going down, not quickly, just a slow sinking as the sobs kept coming. She clutched her arms to her breasts. Nothing was going to keep her from falling.
Then, before she hit the ground, she felt herself grasped in two strong hands and hauled gently to her feet. She couldn't see through her tears but the voice telling the reporters to get back, that Dr. McLeod had no statement to make at this time, was J.D.'s.
* * *
To hell with this undercover business, Yancey had decided. One look at Lefkoff's face as he watched Guillaume Langlois fry was enough. The Bureau said that Dr. McLeod was safe for the time being; their psychologists said that this Babykiller joker wouldn't harm the object of his affections.
Bullshit. Every ounce of him cried out that Dr. McLeod was the next target and if he lost his badge for disobeying orders, it was better than having an innocent woman's death on his head. He'd been an offensive lineman in college and, when necessary, he could by God open a hole in an onrushing crowd. He had put his head down and done just that.
He was a few yards away when J.D. Hatten did precisely what he had planned to do—grab Dr. McLeod with both arms and bull his way through the crowd to comparative safety. This was a positive turn of events.
He had checked into Hatten two days before, as soon as he discovered the man was working for Dr. McLeod. The private detective was apparently unmotivated by money—his parents had bundles, yet he lived well below his means. Many men in his profession routinely skirted the laws in the course of serving the client, but there was no sign that J.D. Hatten had succumbed to the temptation.
There appeared to be no dirt to be found on Hatten. Heaven only knew how hard the Bureau had tried to find some. Yancey felt fairly comfortable letting him take charge of Dr. McLeod's safety. Following at a cautious distance, he made sure they were safely away, then he turned around and looked at the mess behind him. People were still tripping over each other trying to get away. He would lay odds that someone had been trampled to death in the melee.
His guts said that Larabeth McLeod was the key to the weird goings-on of the past week. Maybe he and J.D. Hatten could keep her alive long enough to find out which lock the key fit.
* * *
Larabeth leaned her forehead against the passenger window. She needed to thank J.D. He'd just saved her from public embarrassment and maybe, though even now it was hard to absorb the idea, maybe he'd saved her from Babykiller, too. For she was sure, so sure, that Babykiller had maimed Guillaume. Her dear friend Guillaume. Could she have saved him?
If only she'd tried harder to convince the FBI, the police, somebody, to take Babykiller seriously. Maybe they would have—what? Put all fifty Bambi-slasher victims under constant, indefinite watch? Would the FBI have really thought to check three harmless bags of sugar? Would the Feds have been able to convince Guillaume to cancel his hullabaloo? Not bloody likely.
Babykiller had threatened her, her daughter, the world. How could anyone have defended her friend against a monster whose weapons looked so innocuous? And how could they hope to protect her?
Nevertheless, she had to let them try. Her audiotapes of Babykiller's calls were in her purse. She had fetched them out from under Guillaume's seat during the confusion and secreted them under her hardhat. She would risk no one else's safety; she would take these tapes to the FBI herself and ask them to hide her and Cynthia, to protect them until this dreadful thing was over, but for no longer. She had a life to live and a company to run. The Witness Protection Program was not an option.
This attack on Guillaume should notch the FBI's investigation into overdrive and Larabeth intended to use her clout to oversee their every move. She hadn't come this far to calmly hand her fate over to someone else.
* * *
Agent Chao swallowed hard as he watched news coverage of the attack on Guillaume Langlois. He had made a mistake that would haunt him for a long while.
He had agreed to let Lefkoff help Yancey because the young man asked for Lefkoff and because he thought Yancey was barking up the wrong tree. Lefkoff was an incompetent traitor, but how much harm could come from letting him accompany an enthusiastic young man on a fool's errand?
All these years, the only thing that had kept Chao from packing Lefkoff off to the penitentiary was the slender hope that the traitor would lead him to the nameless head of the shadowy organization that had bought Lefkoff. Now that Yancey's messenger had suffered a spectacular and public “accident”, the pieces fell into place. Babykiller, the villain Yancey kept squawking about, had eliminated Langlois very efficiently.
Chao considered the situation. Precisely who knew that Langlois was helping the FBI? Langlois himself, Larabeth McLeod, Agent Yancey...and Agent Yancey's partner. Yancey was trustworthy. That meant that Lefkoff was the one who betrayed Langlois. And it meant that Babykiller and Lefkoff's criminal contact were one and the same.
Chapter 16
J.D. parked in the hospital lot and pocketed his keys. Larabeth made no move to get out of the car, so he just cracked the door open to catch a breeze. This visit to Guillaume was going to be hard for her.
“Did you see everything that happened? I mean Guillaume and the fire and all,” she said, breaking the silence.
“I didn't miss a thing.”
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” she said again. “I would hate for people to see me like that.”
There was no breeze and the car was stifling. J.D. cranked the engine and turned on the air conditioner. “I might have been too late. I had to jostle a couple of photographers to get to you. I'm pretty sure one of them was the woman from Time. You'll probably be on the cover.”
“Well, thanks for being my lookout and my protector. Did your highly trained detective's eyes notice anything we can use to nail Babykiller?”
“Not yet,” J.D. said.
“But we can watch it again. I made a videotape of the whole proceedings.”
“We should make a copy for Yancey,” Larabeth said as she glanced in the backseat. “I don't see a video camera.”
J.D. smirked. “The camera, my dear, is under this good-looking hat,” he said, gesturing to a Tulane baseball cap. “The recorder is in a waist pack under my shirt and the tiny little cables connecting them are threaded through these.” He fingered the cords that dangled from his sunglasses and fell casually inside his shirt collar. “You'd be amazed at the picture quality I can get with this thing.”
“I thought you were looking remarkably like a fashion victim today.”
J.D. looked hurt. “The guy at The Spy Stop told me I'd blend right in with the crowd.” She didn't respond.
He handed the cap to her, and she glanced half-heartedly at the hidden camera. He stated the obvious. “You're worried about Guillaume.”
She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I just this minute realized that he's my oldest friend. We've been trading insults since I got back from Vietnam, even before you and I met.”
“Do you think they'll let you in to see him? The nurses in intensive care are usually pretty. . .uh, intense.”
“For the afternoon, I am Eugenie Langlois, Guillaume's sister. They'll let me in.”
“This may be a stupid question, but what if his real sister shows up?” J.D. asked.
“She lives in Montreal and they don't speak. Ever. He has no other family in town to make sure he gets proper care, so I intend to take care of things. Now. Because tomorrow I expect to be in the merciful hands of the FBI.”
J.D. watched for another panic attack, but the only sign of her distress was the trembling in the hands she clasped tightly together in her lap.
* * *
Babykiller was so amused by his little prank. Guillaume Langlois was a dramatic creature. First, he heroically threw the girl overboard to safety, then he had the presence of mind to rave on about the Greek Fire—all while being burned alive. There were so few worthy adversaries in the world. Too bad this one was hovering near death in the burn unit. This was going to be hard on Larabeth, but she was strong. She was the worthiest adversary of all. He thought he would wait until Langlois died before he called Larabeth again. It shouldn't be too long.
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