Fires of Midnight

by Jon Land

  Thurman fidgeted impatiently, trying to relax. He was tall and broad, too packed with muscle for suits to ever fit comfortably. The back of his neck was laced with knobby swirls that folded up every time his face changed expression. His head was square and angular, its size exaggerated by the stubbly, blond crew cut that adorned his scalp. But the feature that defined him most was an ugly scar that ran down the left side of his face from cheek to jaw.

  “You see, Thurman,” continued the fat man, thick wisps of hair bulging out from the sides of his head beneath a bald dome, “we experimented with pigeons; sparrows, too. Wondered if we had happened upon the perfect delivery system for isolated biological warfare. Imagine the possibilities! But the bastards proved unreliable. Decided to fly away and never come back.” He tossed some more feed the way of the birds before him. “These could be their offspring.”

  “Trying to get on their good side, then.”

  “They’re quite a delicacy, you know,” the fat man said, settling back slightly with a contented sigh. “Not at this age, of course. No, they have a wondrous flavor only when they’re squabs, too young to fly. They can be stuffed and roasted. Especially appetizing when cooked in a Madeira sauce with their livers. But don’t forget to truss them. Can’t trust butchers anymore to handle that chore. And the real key is to serve them on toast. Only the best chefs remember to do that. Soaks up all the juices. Then you have something simply delightful, young offspring gone to a good cause.”

  “Speaking of offspring …”

  “Cambridge is being labeled an accident, just as we knew it would. We have nothing to fear on that end. Now, what of yours?”

  “McCracken is still on the trail,” Thurman reported.

  “Are we keeping tabs?”

  “If we wandered too close, he’d pick us out in an instant.” He fingered his scar, remembering. “That risk is unacceptable.”

  “Yet one we tacitly accepted when we elected to utilize his services.”

  “A rushed decision. We didn’t think it out long enough, the potential downside.”

  “If he fails, you mean?”

  “No,” Thurman told the fat man. “If he finds out what’s really going on.”

  2

  OPERATION OFFSPRING

  PHILADELPHIA, WEDNESDAY, 7:00 A.M.

  TWELVE

  Are you sure you don’t want me to put that up top for you?” The flight attendant’s question jolted Joshua Wolfe from his daze and he twisted toward her nervously.

  “Your bag,” she continued, eyeing the black backpack that protruded slightly out from the seat in front of him. “You might be more comfortable.”

  “No,” Josh said, clearing his throat. “It’s okay.”

  The woman smiled and was gone. Josh lowered himself and squeezed the backpack farther beneath the seat. He had placed the test tube in the center, protected by notebooks and what few clothes they left room for. He couldn’t feel its contours through the fabric, but he tried nonetheless.

  He had spent Sunday night at a hotel in Boston before moving on to New York Monday. A train had brought him to Philadelphia and another hotel on Tuesday, the Airport Hilton in this case, to allow him to catch the first flight out for Miami this morning.

  On the move, stay on the move …

  Three hotels in three cities in three days with nothing to do but think, his eyes poised on the door, certain it would come crashing in at any moment. Sleep should have brought respite, but it didn’t. It came instead in fits and starts, each brief slumber lasting only as long as it took for the pictures from the Cambridgeside Galleria to return to his mind. They came the same way he had seen the tragedy unfold on Sunday: lined up in rows, stacked atop each other.

  It didn’t make sense.

  All his studies had checked out. Never in any of his laboratory experiments had any of the lab animals shown so much as an uneasy breath when exposed to CLAIR. Newspaper accounts, attributed to “unidentified sources,” claimed the victims’ bodies had been drained of blood. To Josh this meant CLAIR had somehow confused blood for its targeted molecules. It shouldn’t have, of course. But the problem was that he must have made CLAIR too smart, too efficient. He had programmed it to reproduce itself by ingesting nitrogen in a specific chain. Surely it would have recognized the difference, however subtle, between human blood and sulfates/ nitrates. Once the identification had been made, though, CLAIR could not turn away in the face of its own demise. It continued doing exactly what it was supposed to, straying only slightly beyond its prescribed parameters.

  But why hadn’t it behaved that way during his testing phase?

  “Excuse me,” said an overweight woman holding a boarding pass, her eyes on the window seat next to him. “I’m in there.”

  Josh rose and stepped into the aisle to let her pass. One of her sneakered feet brushed up against his backpack as she shuffled her way in. He felt his heart stumble a bit. When the fat woman had at last claimed her seat, he used the opportunity to lean over and remove a notebook from the pack’s front zippered compartment.

  The notebook was full of impressions and analyses he had begun writing out in search for the answer to what had gone wrong. But no amount of figuring could change the conclusion already obvious: getting CLAIR finished had become more important than getting it right. He was too sure of himself, too obstinate in his approach, too desperate to succeed. But nothing had ever gone wrong for him before. The leap from theoretical concept to finished product had always been a smooth and uncomplicated one so far as Joshua Wolfe was concerned. So why bother with the normal procedure of submitting a paper and requesting a sanctioned study? It would have taken years, if it had ever been granted at all. Bureaucracy moved like a train chugging uphill. Pollution would have overrun the entire planet before the top was even in sight.

  All he wanted was to do something wonderful, to prove the worth of his meritorious discovery so no one could sweep it aside. Conduct his own study, obtain proof, and submit the results as part of an official paper, simultaneously released to the media.

  Josh had gotten the idea years before, after performing an in-depth study on a designer enzyme created in the lab to eat the bonds which held oil together on the molecular level. The use of that enzyme had greatly advanced the fight against oil spills, saving countless wildlife in disasters in the North Sea as well as Alaska, and had him wondering why the same principle couldn’t be applied to air pollution and water later as well.

  Josh started with air.

  Two years it had taken him to come up with his discovery, two years on top of all his other course work. He was obsessed, cared about nothing else, was never sure how he so easily breezed through advanced classes he paid virtually no attention to. The truth was, once he was finished, Josh couldn’t make himself wait. He had to try it, had to know, had to … succeed.

  He wanted to be a hero. And if things had gone differently at the Galleria, if only they had …

  He had unlimited access to most of Harvard’s most advanced research labs, located in the Science Center. And in the summer the wait for the most prized equipment was considerably shorter. Josh had been concentrating solely on the final round of testing and production of his organism since the end of the second semester. And when all his stages of lab testing on CLAIR checked out, he couldn’t resist a larger-scale study of the organism’s capabilities inside the Galleria.

  Things had gone off without a hitch at first. He had lured the on-duty physical plant technician out of the boiler room, accessible via a set of stairs off the bottom floor of the Lechmere electonics store, by sending him a message on his digital readout beeper: NEED YOU ON THE THIRD FLOOR NOW!

  The man had left immediately, the latch on the boiler room door not engaging all the way thanks to a piece of steel Josh had wedged between it and the jamb when the technician had last entered. His first step was to activate the security monitors on the wall. Then he placed his backpack on the desk and removed from it a vial that was a twin of the o
ne he had with him now. He had learned from the Galleria’s final construction plans the kind of air-conditioning compressors that would be down here and studied identical models for weeks. Eventually he rehearsed the process of gaining access through a six-inch-square hatch with his arm and pouring the vial’s liquid contents into the start of the airway.

  He had wedged the empty vial in his pocket and turned his attention to the screens. He pictured the freshly cooled air whisking his nowgaseous CLAIR up through the system, where it was free to multiply to the nth degree and spread through the Galleria. Forty seconds passed and then it began.

  Josh shivered in his seat as the plane hurtled into the air at takeoff. The fat woman next to him cast a sidelong glance his way, then returned to her magazine. He tried to settle himself but the memories were too strong, chilling him.

  The same chill had struck when he had watched the first of those on the mall’s third floor stagger. They clutched for their throats before a series of horrible spasms racked their bodies, making them look like marionettes controlled by drunk puppeteers. It spread downward like a wave, Josh watching it all descending across the screens as it descended through the Galleria. A few of the patrons on the first and second floors had enough time to try for the exits before they were cut down in midstride, the floor yanked out from under them.

  Josh’s teeth had sliced his tongue. He felt his own breath fleeing and feared his own creation was about to claim him as well. He rushed from the boiler room into the corridor.

  Josh had passed several people after crashing into the parking garage on Level C. He didn’t warn them and wouldn’t have been physically able to had he tried; terror had stolen his voice and his breath was coming in great gasps. He knew everyone was dying. He knew he was responsible. He was a murderer.

  And no one would understand when he explained it to them; he had never been understood and now his desperate attempt to change that was going to accomplish quite the opposite by branding him an outcast. He was a block from the mall when he realized he’d dropped his backpack somewhere in the parking garage. Knowing he couldn’t retrieve it, he had returned to Weld 21 and started stuffing all he could squeeze into a second backpack, the one that now lay wedged beneath the seat in front of him. But he didn’t want to be caught carrying the final formula for CLAIR in it, either hard copy or disk. Both represented evidence and both had to be destroyed. To lose the formula now, though, was to lose it forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. So he had faxed it to Harry Lime’s paperless machine in Key West, knowing it would be stored in the machine’s memory, waiting there for him to retrieve.

  Since no one was looking for him, fleeing was not difficult. His concerns that the backpack he had abandoned at the Galleria might betray him melted away when he recalled that he had not written his name on a single item of its contents. They might track him to Harvard, but if nothing else he had bought himself some time.

  His credit card had a three-hundred-dollar cash advance limit. Automatic teller machines, though, were easily fooled by someone who knew how to manipulate the electromagnetics that controlled them. Kindergarten stuff for Josh. He’d walked away from a Cambridge ATM with three thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills instead.

  The money had paid for the trains to New York and Philadelphia, a hotel room in each city, as well as today’s plane ticket to Miami. The closest he came to leaving either of the hotel rooms was opening the door for the arrival of room service. When the food was gone and there was nothing else to look forward to, Josh found himself doodling with words in his notebook instead of pictures. His mind was spent. Nothing was coming and, for the first time in a long while, he began a poem. He’d used poetry to express his frustrations and inner rage as a child, when he first began to stand out as different from his peers. It was how he worked to resolve things, grew to understand them and himself. He had never discarded a single one and had eventually transferred the collection of works onto disk, where he could feel better about forgetting them.

  Josh had remembered suddenly what it had been like to be three and four and five, and on. The poetry brought it back to him. The old rage was gone now, replaced by concession to who and what he was. The words stretched across the page, taking up space and little more. He couldn’t make them work.

  The plane settled into an even flight pattern and Josh felt himself relax a bit. The fat woman next to him was doing a crossword puzzle, doing it badly. He gazed at the clues and the boxes and had the entire thing mentally solved in less than a minute. He ran a hand through his long brown hair and left it there, returning his eyes to his notebook. Perhaps the backpack he’d lost had been discarded already, erroneously thought to have belonged to one of the victims or unclaimed by one of those first on the scene. Somehow, though, he didn’t mind the fear for the attention it took from the guilt. He could live with fear; fear made him feel like a victim, the pursued, the hunted. Guilt reminded him that he had taken victims, hundreds of them, before becoming one himself. He deserved whatever happened to him because he was a …

  Go ahead, say it! Think it!

  … murderer. He could turn himself in, confess. What would they do to him? Josh was no expert in the law but he’d read about it as he’d read about everything. They had to prove intent, he thought. Without that there could be leniency, a suspended sentence. His punishment would be disgrace.

  Could he make them understand the wonder of what he was trying to do, the importance of it? Could he convince them of the accuracy of his exhaustive studies on the state of the world a generation into the future if something wasn’t done to improve air quality? Would they believe he had taken every possible precaution before letting CLAIR loose in the mall?

  “But why, Mr. Wolfe, would you take such a responsibility upon yourself?”

  “Because, because …”

  “Go on, Mr. Wolfe. The State eagerly awaits your answer.”

  “Because I want …”

  “Want WHAT?”

  “I want to be accepted.”

  Josh would try to tell them what it had been like all his life, feeling forever out of place. The stares children older by five or six years cast his way when he was seated in their class, always in the front so he wouldn’t have to worry about seeing over their larger frames. The Galleria could have changed all that. He could have been a hero, his formula hailed as one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time.

  Now he would be hailed a murderer, by everyone except Harry Lime, of course. Harry would understand. Harry would help him.

  But Harry hadn’t been answering the phone. Or maybe he was away from the apartment, the one in Key West where he had been placed after Josh had been taken away for the last time. Josh wasn’t supposed to know what they’d done with Harry, but he’d gotten into the proper data banks months before and discovered where they’d moved him.

  After the phone rang unanswered, he had sent the fax of the formula for CLAIR over the line. Now he was going down there in quest of the chip it was stored upon. Hopefully Harry would be home by then.

  Josh felt himself nodding off and snapped alert suddenly, the indelible feeling of something terribly wrong plaguing him. He gazed to his right.

  The fat woman was snoring next to him, one of her huge legs stretched out under his seat, foot pressed against his backpack. He saw the darkening splotch spreading across the fabric and realized the test tube inside must have broken just before the first of the plane’s passengers began to gasp.

  He leaped up to warn the rest, but his breath had been choked off, too. Nothing he could do but watch while their flesh paled and shriveled, eyeballs bulging outward as the skin around them receded. They just withered away, like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, their clothes suddenly robes over the shapeless masses puddling into the aisle as Josh watched it all …

  “Excuse me …”

  … wondering why he’d been spared. Wishing he hadn’t …

  “Excuse me.”

>   He came awake with a start, to something like a persistent dog nuzzling his leg.

  The fat woman loomed over him, trying to get by. Josh pulled his legs in tight.

  “Thanks,” she said, not smiling.

  And Josh slumped back in his seat, shivering, the nightmare snatched from sleep not too far away at all.

  THIRTEEN

  “Right through that door.”

  “Thank you,” McCracken said to the escort who had guided him to the Bryant Park stack extension on a sublevel of the New York Public Library’s main branch on Forty-second Street.

  Gloria Rendine served as chief assistant to the curator for Rare Books and Manuscripts. She had been more than happy to schedule an appointment with him on the pretext of his donating a rather large collection of historical materials. Blaine wondered how she would respond upon learning he was here to dredge up her past instead.

  McCracken entered and found Gloria Rendine in the midst of a pageby-page scrutiny of an elegantly bound, oversized volume.

  “Excuse me.”

  “I’m sorry,” the old woman replied, slightly startled. “I didn’t hear you come in. You must be”—she consulted a pad on her right—“Mr. McCracken.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Please, sit down.”

  Gloria Rendine rose and offered him a chair in front of her desk. She was wearing a light sweater over a simple print dress. Her silvery hair was tied up in a bun, but as he approached Blaine could see the stubborn vitality in her watchful eyes. Her skin looked to be unmarked by age or the environment. Different hair color and a fresh coiffure and she could easily have looked twenty years younger.

  “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your generosity.”

  Blaine approached the desk but remained standing. “I’m afraid it comes with a price. You see, actually I’m here in search of something rare.”

  The old woman looked confused. “I don’t see how I—” “Specifically, a woman. On display for years before she removed herself from circulation. Catalogued under the name Gloria Wilkins-Tate.”