by Pike, JJ
For a millisecond Jo was glad she didn’t have kids. If this thing wasn’t stopped there were going to be some devastating consequences. If Baxter was right, a generation (two? three?) were going to be wiped out. Unless, of course, Baxter’s other wild idea had legs: if there was any genetic resistance that would change everything.
“Well, thanks.” Alice was exhausted. Jo had never heard her so flat and depressed. She’d been away from her kids before, when work demanded it of her, but never for so long and never under such circumstances.
Jo’s brain tapped at the edges of her consciousness. Listen, it said. She gave you something useful. She couldn’t let Alice hang up until she worked it out. “How’s Bill? I hear he was injured?”
“He’s a fighter.” Alice might have been crying, Jo couldn’t tell.
“How are the kids dealing with the news?” No one wanted to hear their father had lost an arm.
“They don’t know. Like I said, I haven’t been able to get through.”
Jo almost cheered. There it was. Her subconscious had led her back to the sliver of information she needed. She was delighted that Michael was paying such close attention to the call. “Sorry to hear that. It must be so worrying. When did you last get to talk to them?”
“I haven’t. Last time I talked to them was the day I left for work. The day this began. No, that’s not true.” She sniffed. Paused. Maybe wiped her nose? Was she crying that hard? “I talked to Midge, briefly. I told her I was too busy and had to cut the call short.” More sniffling. “I haven’t talked to any of them since.”
Better and better. No, well. Worse, because Alice’s heart was broken and she hadn’t talked to her kids and things were looking grim up and down the state, but great that she’d drawn a big, solid, red line under the idea that she hadn’t been able to make a call. That worked perfectly for Jo.
“We’ve been having problems with downed lines, too,” said Jo. Best not lay it on too thick. Rayton would smell that a mile off. “But we know your children are all supremely capable. They’ll be taking care of Reggie for me. I bet he’s already moved into your place and made himself at home at the foot of Midge’s bed.”
“God, I wish,” said Alice. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful if their lives were so simple?”
“Look, Alice. I have to go. But stay in touch. You’ve worked wonders with the professor. She’s back on track, buzzing with ideas. And Michael’s all set to help her take them one step further…”
“Michael and Christine are talking?”
The two women laughed.
Michael scowled.
That was good, though. He knew his colleagues—even those who’d been out of touch for over a week—had heard about his missteps. Or bad fortune. She truly didn’t know which.
“Talk soon.” Alice hung up.
Jo pointed at the vehicle where she planned to stage their talk. “If you want to wait here, I’ve got to check on the general one more time. I’ll be right back.” She needed a minute, perhaps less, to get her team on board with the new situation. She was going to have to do some snazzy dance number to get her lies lined up in a way that didn’t trip her, or anyone else, up.
She dialed Alex’s cell phone directly. “Don’t talk, just listen. I have one minute. The general has contracted this disease and it has rattled Rayton. As a result, Rayton has agreed to talk to me and the professor. He’s still not willing to go on the record, so I’m going to need you guys to listen in silently. Deal?”
“Um, deal, I guess. You really think he’s going to talk?”
“We’re about to find out. I’ll keep you in my pocket, line open, but on mute.”
Jo jogged towards the general. He was where she’d left him, by the wheat, talking to his men.
“General Hoyt? If I may?”
He stood several feet away from her. No contact. They just had to hope the disease that was eating into his arm wasn’t airborne.
“Rayton bought it. He knows how sick you are. He’s willing to talk.” The general opened his mouth, but Jo’s colleagues were listening in and she couldn’t have him accidentally spilling the beans. “Don’t ask me why your condition changed his mind. I don’t have an answer for that. Just be grateful it did and follow me. I want you to stand at the back of the truck where you can hear what he has to say.”
By the time they made it back to the truck, Christine was screaming at Michael, even though he’d done exactly what Jo had told him to do and had remained at a safe distance.
“Traitor!” Christine was standing inside the truck, holding onto one of the straps, but swinging in and out, making everyone nervous. Not only was she a couple of feet taller than the rest of them, her voice carried. Fortunately they were in the middle of nowhere, with no one, and her audience was limited. “Loser! Murderer!”
“This isn’t helping, Christine.”
“It’s not supposed to help. It’s supposed to tell him I know who he is and what he did and why we’re in this mess.”
“Do you want to go back to your seat, please?”
“Not really.” Christine had a phone in her hand. Who’d been stupid enough to give her that?
Fran was behind the professor, her arms crossed over her chest, shoulders slumped, hair falling in her face. She’d lost some of the luster she’d had when Jo first met her. Admitting she’d been Michael’s lover and, possibly, his stool pigeon had knocked the stuffing out of her.
Christine shouted into her phone. “He’s been working for the competition. Did you know he’s a CIA agent?”
“Who are you talking to?” Jo reached for the phone, but Christine hoisted it aloft.
“Alice. She needs to know this. Because he said it was her. He said that Alice Everlee was our traitor. I have it from the horse’s mouth.” She pointed at Fran.
Sheesh. Jo had been gone, what, half an hour at most and this was spiraling out of control. “Give me the phone.”
“Shall not. I need to talk to Alice.”
“Alice!” Jo shouted. “Could you hang up with the professor and call me, please?”
Christine threw the phone in the dirt, presumably when Alice hung up.
“Go and sit down and I’ll be right with you,” said Jo. “You can talk to Alice in a minute.”
Jo’s phone rang.
“Is it true? Michael is CIA? I mean…his work was always reliable, but CIA? Really?” Alice paused. “Actually, it explains a lot. I always had a weird feeling about the guy…”
“He’s willing to tell us what he knows. I guess you should listen in, too, in case you need to handle Christine down the line…”
“If you don’t mind?” said Alice. “I’d love to listen in. I know I’m not there and you’re dealing with the madness, but I want to be of use if I can be.”
Jo was caught out. She couldn’t hang up on Alice and go back to her colleagues without any explanation. Shoot. What to do?
“Can I talk to her?” Michael was at her side. “Can I talk to Alice?”
“You know what? I need to keep this line open in case my office comes back online. Why don’t we use Fran’s phone to call Alice and I’ll leave this one free?”
Michael picked the phone up from the dirt, flicked through the contacts list (he smiled; of course he did; he wasn’t in the contacts list; he was taking a look at Fran’s recent calls), then finally called Alice.
Christine hadn’t taken her seat. She was still at the back of the army truck, screaming to be heard. “Don’t be fooled, Alice. He’ll tell you all kinds of lies, but he’s the one who got us into this mess. I’m keeping him with me until I can hand him over to the authorities.”
Jo pulled herself into the vehicle and steered the professor back to her seat. “I get it. We just want to see if there’s anything he knows about MELT that might help us…”
“It’s all lies. I don’t trust a word of it. He’s got this story about the Chinese colluding with our government…”
“Christine? Christine?” Jo
talked over the professor, who was getting herself worked up again. “Let me and Alice talk to him. You can listen.”
Michael climbed in behind them and sat at the far end of the transport, closest to the exit.
“Put Alice on speaker,” said Jo. “We need to hear everything you have to say. Full disclosure, remember.”
As Michael searched for the speaker function on Fran’s phone, Jo felt for her phone in her pocket and tapped what she hoped was the redial button for Alex. He was either there or he wasn’t. She couldn’t look at her phone directly without giving it away. She took her hand out of her pocket and folded it in her lap.
“We’re waiting,” said Christine.
“Alice. Am I glad to hear your voice.” Michael Rayton sounded like he didn’t have a care in the world.
“Michael. Bring me up to speed.” Alice was polite and professional. She’d have made a great agent if she’d ever been inclined to go into the service.
“Christine’s not listening to the whole story,” said Michael. “I am CIA, but that means—as you and I both know—that I work for our side.”
Jo held back a laugh. That’s not what it meant and Rayton knew it. The CIA worked to uncover facts. Their operatives didn’t have “sides” as such. As an organization they might, but the individuals who made up that organization rarely did. They had to be agnostic on the issue of “sides” or they’d never have made it from one administration to the next.
“I want to hear the whole story,” said Alice, “But we’re all on borrowed time here. Highlights?”
Good old Alice, right to the meat of the matter. Jo had always liked her, but she liked her even more now.
“For the millionth time already, I was inserted into K&P to make sure they weren’t being used by the Chinese to create dirty weapons.”
Jo nodded. That matched what he’d said before. He was keeping his story straight, she had to give him that.
“They weren’t.” For a moment, Michael was dead serious. No smiles, no weird laughs, just straight up reporting. Would that all his testimony had been like this. “K&P has never been implicated in anything remotely shady.”
“Okay…” It was an invitation to continue, not any kind of acknowledgement that Alice believed him.
“DOD got wind of MELT.”
This was where the new stuff was going to make or break his credibility with her. Jo itched to hear his next line.
“Our DOD? The Department of Defense?” Alice was good at getting at the facts. Really good.
“Yup.”
“And? So? Then what? The DOD got wind of MELT’s production in China, and…?”
“They boosted MELTs capabilities.”
“What does that mean?” Question of the century. Good one, Alice.
“Exactly what it sounds like. We had a product that was capable of breaking PET plastics down into their component parts so they could be recycled, but the DOD scientists made it both faster and more versatile. MELT wasn’t just breaking PET plastics down, it was capable of destroying all plastic.”
Was that news? Wasn’t that what K&P had claimed they’d achieved? Jo frowned. This wasn’t going the way she’d hoped it would go.
“Did Jake know this?” Alice had picked up on something Jo’d missed. What was it?
“No. Jake was clueless. You were right about him. He was CEO because of daddy dearest and nothing else. He had the intellectual acumen of a bowl of oatmeal.”
“He thought our scientists made these breakthroughs?”
There it was. That was what Jo hadn’t understood. If she was hearing them right, K&P had been fed technology that they hadn’t developed internally. Okay. That was interesting.
“I want to make sure I’m understanding you. Jake did not know that the Department of Defense was responsible for the acceleration of MELT?”
Jo loved Alice in that moment. The circling back, the repeating information, it was all spot on.
“No, the acceleration was a K&P breakthrough.”
Christine and Fran were nodding along behind her. They understood this conversation far better than Jo did.
“Professor Baxter and her team took the DOD compound—something that they believed had been developed in our Chinese labs—and CRISPR’d kudzu in. You’ve read all the papers. This happened in our labs over here. We took something that broke down all plastics and sped it up.”
The vehicle was silent for a minute or more. Jo couldn’t begin to imagine what everyone else had going on in their minds. It all sounded too…what? Too “espionage” meets “biology.” Something wasn’t quite right. They hadn’t heard all the facts. Klean & Pure had a compound, partially developed here, partially developed in China, that broke plastic down fast. Wasn’t that what it was supposed to do?
Alice broke the silence. “But if this is what we were bringing to market, what went wrong?”
“There were two strains of MELT. One that was market-safe and another that was, essentially, a biological weapon. One broke down plastics and was done, the other went a step further. It broke down plastics but lived on. One was a catalyst, the other a living organism.”
“This living organism you’re talking about was the biological weapon?”
“We thought we’d use it in the field. In battle. We could seed the ground with MELT—a bit like Scipio in Carthage, when he sowed the earth with salt so nothing would grow there—and take them down that way. It would demolish tanks, armored vehicles, the infrastructure of surrounding towns.”
“But how did you plan to stop it?” Alice was aghast. But it was a good question. Jo could see why everyone depended on her. She had a brain as sharp as a knife.
“It has a half-life,” said Michael, “of about a week. It was supposed to blaze through enemy territory then peter out.”
“On its own?”
Michael nodded.
“No antidote? No way to stop it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Because we’re past a week…”
“I know. I thought it would stop.” He looked around the back of the truck. He had to see how horrified they all were. He’d known all this, all this time, and said nothing.
“Do you hear what he’s saying?” Christine was screaming; loud enough so Alice would hear her on the other end of the phone. “They did this deliberately. The goal was to obliterate everything, make the ground infertile, drive us out of our homes.”
“That’s not what I said.” Michael sounded exhausted. “This was never supposed to be released here in the States and, in any case there’s obviously another agent in play.”
“You think you’re so smooth, don’t you? Sitting there with your flat face and your dead eyes and your simpering smile and soft words. I don’t buy it for a minute. Our government would never do that to us. You’re the traitor. You’re the one who let this out into the world. You knew it existed and you never told a soul. You’re going to swing, Michael Rayton. Mark my words.”
“Christine?” Alice was shouting, too. “Christine. We’re not done. I need to hear more. I need to know if he knows more…”
“Once she’s like this she’ll go on for an hour,” said Michael.
Jo nodded at Fran. “Take the professor for a walk. Help her calm down.” She took the phone from Michael. “You still there, Alice?”
“I’m here.”
“What do you want to do? Stay on the call with Michael or go with the professor and talk her back down to Earth?”
Alice sighed.
Fran held Christine’s arms at her side as she escorted her off the truck. The professor had already scratched a line in Michael’s face, so it was probably a good move.
“What I want,” said Alice, “and what needs to be done rarely line up perfectly. I’ll go with Fran and Christine. You’re right. We need the professor in working order.”
“Thanks.” Jo leaned over Michael and handed Fran the phone. “Let Alice talk to her. And, Fran? Don’t come back until she’s calm.�
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“That’s going to take a while,” said Michael.
“Right,” said Jo. “What else is in play? You said there’s another compound in play. What is it?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Not knowing what was going on in the front room was a kind of hell for Betsy.
Bryony was screaming. Mimi was shouting. Sean’s voice was in the mix. Aggie came in through the back door and skidded across the kitchen towards the melee.
