by Alan Gold
“Why link it with CHAT? What’s the advantage?”
“Who’s under police scrutiny? Who got it right up their arrogant, useless ass when the media was on a witch hunt for somebody responsible for the old guy’s death? Who’s the focus of public attention? CHAT, that’s who! When we off DeAnne Harper and her family, we’ll leave a tiny bit of evidence which won’t be easy to find. And when some forensic hotshot finds it, it’ll be traced back to CHAT. It won’t stick, but it’ll be a nice red herring. Enough of those and it’ll point to a probability that CHAT has been somehow involved.
“Me and you? We’ll be covered by alibis. I’ll be giving a lecture on the immorality of species extinction at New York University, you’ll be lecturing in control of insect pests, or something, and everybody else associated with WEL will be publicly engaged in an official activity, far away from Washington. The Feds will have no way of connecting the . . .”
“Her family? Did you say we were going to off her family?”
Irritated, Stuart hissed, “Jim, this is war. If we don’t protect the earth and its creatures, nobody else will. This is a case of survival. If we have to rid the world of a destroyer of the ecology and her family, so be it. Get used to it, buddy, or get out.”
A silence again descended on the two tables as Stuart was brought his meal. It was mushy, unappetizing. Nobody except a specialist knew how to prepare vegetarian food. Ordinary chefs who thought they’d make a profit out of vegetarians simply took the quickest and most obvious route to its preparation; few realized that cooking vegetarian was totally different than cooking meat and fish.
“So when are we going to do this thing?” asked Jim.
“Much sooner than they’d realize,” Stuart told him. “I’ve arranged a lecture at NYU for next Monday. I’ve checked your schedule and you’re giving a talk here. So are most of the others. On the assumption that she doesn’t suddenly change her schedule and that she remains in Washington, that’s when it will be.”
“And how do you know that she’ll be there?”
Stuart smiled to himself. “Trust me. I have very good information.”
“You’ve got somebody on the inside?” whispered Jim.
Again, Stuart remained silent and finished his meal stuffed with rice. He was no longer thinking about continuing the conversation with Jim Towney; he was wondering how to phrase the warning he was going to give to the FBI . . . a story about CHAT’s plans to assassinate a high government official. Maybe he’d even say cabinet secretary, just to scare them; and provided his anonymous call from the disposable cell phone he’d buy later that day was made only an hour or two before Noah blew up the house in Washington, the Feds wouldn’t have time to react. Yes. That was the way to go. All he had to do now was to work on the text of what he was going to tell them.
9
HENDERSONVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA
Little Jessie Marquis turned right out of the school gates and, under strict instructions from her mom, walked home along the pavement and well away from the roadside toward her home on Wilmont Drive in Hendersonville, a township in the eastern part of North Carolina.
She looked around to see who else from her class was walking in her direction. Most were met by their moms or older sisters, even a grandma or grandpa, but Jessie’s mom and dad were working and so she had to walk home alone from school. Not that she minded because unless it was raining, she loved the ten-minute walk and used her imagination to peer through the hedgerows and try to see what lay behind in the hidden garden.
She was deep in her imagination, flying around a garden holding hands with a beautiful fairy, when suddenly she felt something real fly into her head. For the first instance she was unsure of whether she imagined it or whether it really happened, but when she felt something twisting and turning in her hair and scratching her scalp, she reached up to her head, felt something warm and furry, and screamed.
The little eight-year-old’s hysterical screams of distress attracted a small group of parents who were holding hands with their children as they, too, walked home. Mothers ran over to Jessie to see why she was panicking. There were no strangers about, no cars or motorcycles, because this was a quiet part of town, and people helped other people when there were problems. And suddenly, for no visible reason, a little girl was standing on the pavement, frantically flicking her hair and screaming as if she’d been stung by a bee.
“What is it, honey?” asked a mother, looking anxiously around. The child didn’t answer but frantically pulled at her hair trying to dislodge something. The mother looked closely at Jessie’s head, and then she too screamed as a small Indiana bat dropped out of the girl’s hair and onto the ground.
Horrified, mothers hid their children from the bat as it lay on the ground, squirming, struggling to flap its wings and eventually hiding its body in the flaps of its arms until it lay silent and barely moving other than an odd twitching.
Jessie stamped her feet in horror as she looked at the bat and wouldn’t stop her screaming. The mother put her arm around the little girl but try as she might, the mother couldn’t comfort her, and Jessie continued to look in terror at the bat twitching on the pavement. Other mothers, equally horrified, gripped their children and pulled them away so they couldn’t see the bat in its death throes.
Marlene Devoss bent down and held her arms tighter and tighter around Jessie to comfort her and asked, “Darlin’, how’d you get the bat in your hair?”
Crying and still distressed, Jessie sobbed, “I don’t know. It just got there. I was just walking and then I felt it. It was so horrible.”
“Okay, darlin’. First thing I’m going to do is to call your mommy. Then I’m going to take you to my house just down the street and drive you to the hospital, just so’s the doctors there can make sure you’re fine and all right.”
“Hospital?” asked one of the other women. “It’s only a bat.”
Marlene turned and whispered, “Ain’t you been reading the papers? These damn things got all sorts of diseases. You get you kids home,” she said to the group, “and stay indoors. If there’s one, there’ll be plenty others.”
As if prophetically, three other bats suddenly dropped from the sky not a hundred yards from where the group was standing. “I’m gonna call the cops,” said a mother. “This ain’t funny.”
By the time the Hendersonville patrol car arrived, there were dead bats all over the road, pavement, in gardens, on roofs. There must have been hundreds. The patrolman who’d taken the call and who initially thought it was a hoax, called back to his base for instructions. His sergeant called Police Central in Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, and they immediately contacted the Department of the Interior. Within minutes, the call had been routed to the Department of Health near the White House, where Debra Hart had her offices and staff.
It took just five hours from Jessie’s initial hysterical outburst for the area to be cordoned off and for hazmat teams to arrive. Exercising emergency protocols, the blood of the dead bats was extracted, sent to a nearby laboratory, and examined, but no unusual diseases or viruses were found to be present. Debra read the report and demanded further tests to be done immediately. An entire forensic battery of blood, tissue, and organ tests were done, but except for rabies that was common in many bat species, no other viruses could be identified.
The director of the pathology lab who had conducted the tests was quite pointed when he said to Debra, “Doctor Hart, you can look and look, but you’re not going to find anything which killed these bats. I could do a full postmortem that would give me the cause of death, but I assure you that they weren’t killed by anything alien in their blood or body tissues. This could have been an external agent, a poison, or a neurological disturbance of some sort. What I can assure you is that their blood and other tissues are normal for bats.”
Next morning, Debra and Daniel Todd flew to Raleigh, North Carolina, and then by helicopter via Charlotte to land in a field close to where the previous day l
ittle Jessie had encountered the bat. Residents looked out of their windows at the commotion but remained indoors, as though under curfew. Debra and Daniel were met by the chief of police for the area, who escorted them to the nearby police precinct.
Over a cup of coffee with his senior officers, Daniel asked, “Where is the closest bat population?”
A local sergeant answered, “Since the poor little girl had her encounter yesterday afternoon, we’ve been speaking to rangers and guides and folk like that. Most likely, the bats came from the Asheville area in Henderson County, a place called, appropriately enough, Bat Cave. It’s fifteen hundred feet above sea level, and from what we’ve learned, that’s where the Indiana bats go to hibernate over winter. We’re told that there’s a population of some twenty thousand of them in the cave. We haven’t been up there to investigate because your instructions were to stay well away.”
Debra nodded. “Right. We have no idea why the bats died or left the cave during the day, but because of all the other problems we’re having with bats, it’s best if you guys leave it up to us. No sense in you risking your lives without the special equipment you’ll need to go in there. Okay, can you get somebody to drive us to the Bat Cave?”
The sergeant shook his head. “Best off to go there by helicopter. The terrain isn’t all that good, and it’ll take hours for you to drive.”
***
Daniel and Debra donned their full-face masks, breathing apparatus, and gloves as they walked into the cave. They hadn’t gone more than three or four hundred feet when Daniel turned to Debra and said, “This is all wrong.”
Their flashlights revealed no bats in the roof or walls of the cave, but as they walked further and further away from the narrow entrance, they shone their flashlights on the floor and revealed tens of thousands of dead bats, piled high in a huge area.
“Goddamn it,” said Daniel. “They’ve been poisoned. Some bastards must have filled the cave with poison gas.” He whipped off his mask and smelled the air. “Chlorine. These bastards have made a chlorine bomb and set it off down here in the cave. The bats wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
“A chlorine bomb? Dear God, do you think the locals would know how to make chlorine?” she asked.
“You don’t have to be a chemical genius. Just hydrochloric acid and manganese dioxide. The acid you can get from anywhere and the manganese dioxide is used in dry cell batteries, or somebody around here will sell the stuff. Put the two together with a bit of knowledge of chemistry, and you’ll get enough chlorine gas to fill this chamber and kill every goddamn bat. It’s criminal. Thousands of innocent bats, killed just because people were scared.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Debra, also taking off her mask. “Chlorine is heavier than air. How could they have killed the bats on the ceiling?”
Daniel shrugged. “The initial reaction of the acid with the dry chemical would have sent out plumes of the gas. It would have filled the chamber before settling back down to the ground . . .”
“But how could bats have escaped out of the cave?” she asked. “How could they have flown to Hendersonville all those miles away?”
Daniel shrugged his head. “They might have just been irritated by the initial gas and managed to escape. But if they’d just breathed it or if some of the gas had got on the skin of their wings, the irritation and damage it would have done certainly would have been enough to have caused what happened back there yesterday.”
They turned to leave the cave, having seen all that they needed. They walked toward the outside in silence. Once there, they took off their protective masks and faced the three local police who’d joined them but remained outside while the scientists did their work. Daniel explained what they’d seen within.
One of the officers, young and inexperienced, said, “Shame about the bats, but if they’re the cause of all these deaths of folk, maybe whoever did this was saving us a lot of problems.”
“If people are going to become vigilantes and take on the war against bats without any scientific rationale, then I think our problems are just beginning,” said Daniel.
“I don’t follow,” said the police officer.
“Today it’s bats . . . tomorrow birds . . . then some other species. The problem isn’t the animals; the problem is humanity’s inability to live as part of nature. We’re stealing their habitats, we’re changing the environment of the planet . . . this is a result of what we’re doing and not what they’re doing. If we keep on driving species to extinction like this, there’ll be nobody left on earth but us. Our success depends on biodiversity. Get rid of the diversity and you’ll get rid of us,” Daniel said. He turned to Debra, who nodded in agreement. What was obvious to them as scientists wasn’t so obvious to lay people.
The police officer remained silent, but just looking at his face, Daniel and Debra realized that he and his colleagues weren’t convinced. It was a Darwinian case of survival of the species, and dominant humanity had just shown how they were going to survive, regardless of the costs.
The group packed up in silence and entered the helicopter in preparation for their return to civilization.
WASHINGTON AND NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
The news of the slaughter of the North Carolina bats was on the front page of every newspaper in the United States. The line taken by most editorial writers was that the killings were wrong in principle, wrong environmentally, and wrong ethically . . . but completely understandable. The lead writer for the San Francisco Chronicle captured the mood of Americans by asking:
Deplorable as the slayings were, who among us—mother or father—wouldn’t have done precisely the same after witnessing the heartbreaking grief of the parents of the children in Newton, NJ, whose precious lives were cut short because of viruses caused by bats. While we must retain a sense of our humanity, surely it’s this very humanity itself that caused the good people of North Carolina to want to protect their families by killing these flying death machines.
In the Great Hall of New York University, Professor Stuart Chalmers was talking animatedly in an early evening lecture to nearly three hundred students, faculty, and media, holding up the New York Times and reading aloud the opinion of the newspaper.
“Understandable?” he said, sarcasm oozing from his voice. “Understandable? Why should we understand the killing of animals completely innocent of any crime against humanity? Laboratory tests have proven that these bats were healthy, safe, and posed no risks whatsoever to people. This was vigilantism of the very worst kind. This was . . .”
“Bullshit,” shouted somebody deep in the audience. “People before animals. Always was, always will be, asshole.”
Many in the audience laughed. Some applauded.
“With that attitude, friend, the world’s six and a half billion bipedal apes are in real trouble . . .”
People in the audience who’d come to the public lecture to agree with Stuart burst out laughing and many applauded. But Stuart wasn’t having any of it.
“Before the rest of you guys feel too much pride in your efforts to save the planet, who here only eats free-range eggs?”
Half the audience put up their hands.
“Okay, you think you’re doing something for the animals, but have you seen the condition of free-range chickens? Before you start criticizing guys like him who promote people before animals, why not look at how we’re treating the very animals we’re using for our food and clothing. There’s nothing free-range about free-range chickens. You think I’m talking bullshit, friend? The poultry companies want you to think that their products are free range or free roaming because their chickens spend their lives in the sunshine, warm country air, and scratching up worms in a huge field full of grass and wheat. That’s bullshit, friend. Research in the United Kingdom shows that less than 15 percent of chickens are able to get out into the farmyard. They’ve been bred to be almost incapable of walking. They’re just huge egg-producing, meat-making, genetically engineered freaks, created like
Frankenstein, to feed our emotional and physical needs . . .”
“Maybe so, but what am I going to eat with my bacon if not eggs?” shouted the same man, turning to the audience and encouraging them to join in his ridicule of the lecturer.
This time, nobody in the audience laughed.
***
While Stuart was lecturing in New York City, a meeting was being held in the Oval Office of the White House. Present were the president, at his desk, and sitting opposite him were the secretaries of agriculture and health and Debra Hart. Deputy secretaries and spokespeople sat against the walls on the periphery of the room, listening and taking notes. Daniel Todd, assisting Debra, sat alongside people furiously writing down whatever was said, wondering whether or not he too should be taking their thoughts down.
“Okay,” said President Thomas, “as I see it from listening to you all, we’ve got three things to do immediately. The first is to reassure everybody that not every bat is deadly, and it’s up to the government to examine the blood of every bat colony to see which, if any, need to be destroyed. The second is to mobilize every animal laboratory in the nation to capture and test the colonies near to them, inform us of the results, and in the case where bats harbor dangerous viruses, to destroy their colony. And the third is a public information campaign on television about the possible, if remote, dangers of bats and how to avoid them at all costs until we know that they’re safe. Is that right?”
“Yes,” said the secretaries of health and agriculture. Debra remained silent.
A low voice from the rear of the Oval Office muttered, “No, that’s just so wrong.”
In surprise, people turned to identify who’d just spoken. It was Daniel.
“Sorry, folks, but that’s wrong. Dead wrong. You put out warnings like that on television, Mr. President, and you’re going to have every jumped-up wannabe scientist publicity hound screaming doom and destruction from the rooftops.”
