by Pike, JJ
Rayton kept talking. MELT was accelerating. They’d been shoveling plastics into its path, but that was only helping it move further and faster. No, he wasn’t suggesting it had a mind of its own, that would be ludicrous, but it was driven to seek out and destroy as much plastic as possible.
“I was sent to Klean & Pure’s labs in China.”
The interesting stories were coming right up. This was where they were all going to need to pay close attention.
They’d be able to check out the dates. That was the easy part. They’d be reading his reports, talking to his colleagues, drilling down into everything he’d ever told his bosses and handlers. There was a wealth of information out there. They just needed to find it and compare it to every word he uttered in their presence.
Jo felt herself slipping into Baxter’s corner, metaphorically speaking. He was too smooth and plausible, as Baxter had said many times. The problem with that point of view was that if he was telling the truth he would sound plausible. She didn’t envy his position at all. It’s impossible to prove a negative.
She thought through all the times he’d pressed her to be his eyes and ears in meetings he was not permitted to attend. That could be innocent—the request of a loyal company man—or it could be the opposite. Until she’d known about the China connection she’d read him as loyal.
Now? Now she was on the fence. Michael Rayton might, in effect, be the world’s most successful mass murderer. Thousands had been rounded up and sent to specialized camps to be treated for their infections, but most of those poor souls weren’t going to make it out alive. MELT was the disaster that kept on giving.
“My job was simple,” he said, “I was to investigate K&P to make sure they weren’t creating anything that could be weaponized.” He laughed.
Jo leaned forward. Laughs were complicated. They came from all kinds of different places. Was he laughing because he was nervous? Excited? It wasn’t because he was amused. No one could be amused in this moment.
“Everything can be weaponized. Sugar can take your car out if it’s poured into your gas tank. Too much water can poison a man. Pure oxygen can kill a diver.”
That was disingenuous and insulting. He had to know they’d know he was talking bullshit.
He was looking directly at Professor Baxter. Okay. That might explain why he was being facile. He was tired of being labeled the bad guy as well as being exhausted like the rest of them. Still, it was not a good move to laugh at his own orders and point out that he’d been sent on a fool’s errand.
“K&P were, as their name suggests, clean.”
Someone needed to take this guy aside and train him on the good and bad uses of sarcasm and snark. Did he think he was funny?
“They were smart, hardworking, and a pleasure to be around. I figured I’d fallen on my feet.”
Yeah? Buttering up the professor was a bit late now. If her face was anything to go by, she was furious. Baxter wasn’t their saboteur, Jo was certain of that. Professor Christine Baxter couldn’t have lied her way out of a wet paper bag. What she thought of Rayton was written all over her in scowling lines, flaring nostrils, a tight jaw, and clenched fists.
“Instead of pulling me out of K&P and sending me elsewhere they altered my mandate.”
Here was the heart of the matter. Jo had to close out all other stimuli and concentrate her energy on what came next.
“I was ordered to befriend an academic, Dr. Xiao-peng Zhang of Xi’an Jiaotong University.”
Jo nodded. It was involuntary. She couldn’t let that kind of overeager response slip out of her. He had enough encouragement to talk with the entire intelligence community listening to the slightest sniff or snort or sigh coming out of him. This debrief was going to be listened to a hundred times by a hundred analysts (supposing they could find a hundred analysts in the immediate future) for clues.
“Zhang was easily one of the brightest minds I’d ever been exposed to. Brighter than my Oxford dons and Harvard professors combined.”
Jo had to smile to herself. There was his weak point: pride. He had to get the fact that he’d been to not one, but two elite institutions, in there somehow. You’d think with all the training he’d undergone he’d know his own flaws, but no, they always emerged eventually. She knew Sandra Walt would be grinning over in her office in Virginia. No, they wouldn’t be in their VA offices…wherever her office had been relocated to. They’d been scattered to the four winds; if the four winds were any place outside the exclusion zone that had been drawn around New York City.
“Zhang understood the capacity of MELT immediately.” Rayton sat back in his seat. There was no comfortable angle you could manage in this Army vehicle, but he stretched his legs out and took up a smidge more space. Was it a ploy? Was he making himself look bigger so they took him seriously? If she’d been in his shoes, Jo would have gone for straight talk and no tricks. No way you’d get anything past this mix of experts.
“When I told my handlers that Zhang was interested, my time was split between K&P and the University.” Rayton paused. “You know what I’m going to say next.”
Jo’s heart rate increased. They’d gotten all the way down to the meat of his confession and he’d pulled up short. Well played, sir. Well played indeed. He was right: she knew what he was going to say. He was going to insist on blanket immunity from prosecution.
“I want immunity. In writing.”
Goddammit. It was going to take an age to get the legal team to agree to terms. Jo pulled the laptop around to face her and locked eyes with Alex Acron. “There you have it, gentlemen. A true patriot in action.”
“Why did he stop talking?” Professor Baxter hadn’t understood the move Rayton had just pulled.
“I don’t want to put words in his mouth,” said Jo, “but he’s held off on telling us the good stuff on the record until he’s sure that his part in this mess can’t be prosecuted.”
Baxter launched herself at Rayton, screaming.
Jo and the general pulled her off him, but not before she’d scratched his face and drawn blood.
“We were trying to do something good. Something noble. We were trying to save science from the hole of rampant capitalism that it fell into in the last half of the last century and put it to good use. You were on the inside. You were supposed to do good. You weren’t supposed to work for a foreign power, thwart our efforts, turn MELT into an agent of destruction.”
Jo hadn’t heard the professor talk politics before, but her outburst wasn’t wholly surprising. Baxter was a true believer. She understood what plastic was doing to the planet and wanted to halt its progress before they passed the all-hallowed “tipping point.” She’d lectured Jo on it many times in the last few days.
“Did you do it for money? I would have given you money. I have no use for it.”
Rayton didn’t answer. He folded his arms over his chest.
“Glory? Fame? What? Were you brainwashed? Ideologically sold out? What? What made you do it? Tell me.”
Still nothing from Rayton.
“You’re a coward and a blaggard,” she said.
Jo had to hide a smile. She’d never heard anyone called a blaggard in real life. Professor Baxter was from another time and place.
“I worked at the behest and in the interests of my own government,” said Michael. “I don’t expect you to understand, but once I’ve laid it all out before you, I believe you will acquit me of cowardice, greed, and cruelty.”
The general strapped Professor Baxter back into her seat belt. “Stay put,” he said. “Don’t make me manhandle you again.”
They’d been flirting, off and on, the general and the professor, so perhaps he was the right one to calm her now.
Jo typed a couple of lines to Acron. It was in their court now. They needed to talk their way up the chain and see what kind of deal they might offer Michael Rayton in exchange for information that might help them halt MELT. Baxter in particular was eager to talk about the science behind the
altered compound.
“I know what he said,” Fran whispered.
“Speak up,” said Jo.
Fran shook her head. “Not in front of him.” She shot Rayton a look. That was more than disgust. That was fear. What was she afraid of?
“Pull over,” said Jo. “Get them to pull over. I can’t hear her with all this racket.”
The general rapped on the window between them and the driver’s compartment.
It took several minutes to relay the orders through their convoy, but they were able to stop and hear what Fran had to say.
“I can’t talk in front of Michael,” she said, “but I heard him talk to the Chinese professor and I can tell you what each of them said.”
“Why would you do that?” said Rayton. “I’m not holding out because I did anything wrong. You know what this looks like, don’t you? You make it sound like I did something nefarious and I didn’t.”
The general gave the orders and Michael Rayton was escorted from their vehicle to a waiting Jeep.
“Can I stay?” said Professor Baxter. “I’m eager to hear what Fran has to tell us. If there’s science involved it might help me work faster.”
Jo looked to Fran, who nodded.
“First up…” said Fran.
“Hang on.” Jo interrupted Fran with an upturned hand while she twisted the laptop to face her. It was clumsy, but it was better than nothing. She needed her guys to hear this.
“You need to know that Michael Rayton and I were lovers.”
Baxter gasped. “He’s old enough to be your father.”
Fran blushed. “He went out of his way to court me. I was flattered. He’s charming, intelligent, good looking, unmarried. I fell for him hook, line, and sinker, as they say.”
“For how long?” said Jo.
“About four months.”
“I never saw you together. I didn’t see any signs.”
Jo wasn’t surprised. The professor didn’t have an eye for people. They could have been having sex in the lab closet and she wouldn’t have noticed.
“We mostly met off campus, away from you guys. He didn’t want anyone to know.”
“He said that? That you should keep it a secret?” said Jo.
Fran nodded. “Many times. He wanted it to be totally off the record. He was mostly worried about what Alice would have to say.”
He was right to worry. Alice Everlee, who’d been Fran’s boss before she went missing, wouldn’t have allowed a young woman like Fran to be exploited by a man twice her age.
“He asked me to hack her laptop and find documents for him.”
“Michael? Michael Rayton asked you to spy for him?” Jo was blown out of the water. Not that he’d recruited a young woman. That was standard operating procedure for a spy who was willing to do that kind of thing. She wasn’t which was why she’d stayed away from the Firm and stuck with the Bureau. She had never been called on to engage in Pillow Work. But he’d gone there: recruited a young woman under the guise of romance and used her to do his dirty work.
Man, had she ever gotten him wrong.
“What did Alice have access to that Michael didn’t?”
“She was the Head of Marketing,” said Christine. “That doesn’t sound like a sensitive position, but Alice was different. She was the beating heart of the company. Jake told her everything.”
“Jake? The CEO?”
Christine and Fran nodded in unison.
“The one who’s MIA?”
“No, he’s dead,” said Fran. “He died in the first fall in. When our headquarters started to implode, he was on the inside.”
“Back to my question,” said Jo. “What would Alice have known that Michael did not?”
Fran dropped her head. “I’m not going to be much use. I’m sorry.” Tears dripped from her face onto her hands. “I hated spying on Alice. I only did it because he convinced me that she was doing something wrong.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Baxter. “He used you. You don’t need to feel bad. You’re the victim here.”
Jo didn’t want Baxter running her interrogation. She needed to hear what Fran had to say, compare it against Michael’s story, then come back and hear it all again. “Did he tell you what he was looking for, specifically?”
“He said she was a traitor and was selling Klean & Pure’s proprietary information to the competition.”
“Okay.”
Fran stole a look at Jo. “I never read anything I downloaded, honest.”
Jo had a flicker of doubt. There were two problems with what she’d just heard: 1) who stole data and didn’t read it? and 2) why did Fran protest so much? In her experience, it was the people who said “honest” who weren’t.
“Hold that thought,” she said. “General? Is there somewhere private I can go? I need a place to talk to my team.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Indian Point? The nuclear power station? On fire? Now?” Betsy kept her voice flat, even as her heart raced in her chest.
“I don’t believe it,” said Mimi. “That’s not possible.”
“How’s it not possible, Mimi?” Aggie wasn’t shouting exactly, but she wasn’t her usual calm self. “Manhattan is one big sink hole. There are fires in New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. We have this stuff—this MELT or whatever—in our own garage eating through the floor. Of course it’s possible.”
“Where did you hear that?” Mimi didn’t sound like herself either. She wasn’t drunk exactly, but she wasn’t sober either.
Betsy found herself both disappointed and disgusted. Shouldn’t Mimi be leading by example, rather than giving in to her worst impulses?
“Widget says it’s on fire.” Aggie wasn’t backing down. Whether the reports were true or not, Aggie believed them.
“Oh, that fraud.” Mimi laughed. “I thought we’d decided that he wasn’t to be trusted. You agreed with me, didn’t you, Betsy? That Widget fellow was talking up the threat just to get people all riled up?” She pulled herself up to her full height and tried to imitate a sober speaker, overshooting in both pitch and meter. Her voice was too high, too clipped; her consonants too hard-edged and distinct. If anyone had been in any doubt as to her level of inebriation before, they wouldn’t be now. If Betsy didn’t do something soon, the old woman would be about as useful as a bag of turnips.
Betsy made her way to Mimi, removed the brandy glass from her hand and returned it to the drinks trolley. “Listen to your granddaughter.”
“Mimi. I know you’re not feeling well, but this is serious. He’s not making this stuff up.” Aggie fished inside her backpack.
Petra had stopped crying and Sean was standing to attention. At least they were taking Aggie seriously.
Betsy wasn’t sure where to start. How far was Indian Point? Further than the fifty mile exclusion zone? She and Jim had looked at the maps when they were buying the house to make sure they weren’t too close to anything potentially toxic. Jim would never have allowed them to be in that kind of danger. Fifty-five miles? Sixty miles? Seventy? What did it matter when the wind could turn any moment? If it was true—if Indian Point was leaking radioactive waste—they were going to need to decamp immediately.
Aggie had Alice’s wind-up radio tuned to Widget’s station. Had she been carrying that around with her all this time? What an interesting child she was. She cranked the handle and the static buzz gave way to his signature opening:
This is Widget and Goobz coming to you at the top of the hour and the top of the dial from an undisclosed location with The Raw Truth.
Leave everything. Don’t look back. If you’re within 100 miles of New York City, I want you to stop what you’re doing right now and get the hell out. Because Indian Point is on fire and there’s a warm front hovering over Baltimore…
Betsy shouted over the top of Widget’s voice. “Potassium iodide pills. You know where they are?” She was directing her question to Nigel, but he was the wrong person. He’d just arrived, relatively spea
king. She needed a member of the family.
“I’ll get them.” Aggie was already out the door, taking Widget and his broadcast of doom with her.
“Get the sled,” said Betsy. “We’re taking Midge first. She’s the more stable of our two surgical patients.”
No one moved.
Fred the pediatrician-slash-medical-assistant as she’d come to think of him stepped through the doorway and into the front room. “I’m done. I’m out of here.”
Nigel shook his hand. “Midge needs you more than she needs me. You’re the expert when it comes to kids.”
