End Time
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“Guess we’d better check in then,” she knew better than to argue with his professional enthusiasm as she reached for the door handle.
“Gwen, we could secure our retirement in comfort with what we’ll be making on this case,” he sighed, pleading with his eyes, “We could have a nest egg to cover any and every contingency.”
“You could retire tomorrow, Mark,” Gwen gave him a mock angry smile, “You’ll never retire because you can’t not be a detective. We have investments. Good life insurance and medical coverage. IRA’s, T-Bonds, our own house free and clear, two independent children. There’s not enough money in the world to cover every ‘contingency’.” The bigger our nest egg, the more contingencies you find that we can’t cover. That’s how it always goes.”
“I’ve always believed in an active retirement,” Mark frowned, “I wouldn’t last five years hanging around the house, puttering at one or another hobby. Investigation always kept my blood circulating. Kept the arthritis away.”
“I just wish we could do some traveling now and again,” she shrugged in resignation, “Maybe you don’t have to retire. Fully retire. But you could take some time off. Europe might be nice. Or the south Pacific.”
“Aha,” Mark’s eyebrows faked an inspiration, “Marcus I. Dimapopulos, international private eye.”
He barely ducked the wadded up napkin she tossed in getting out of the car. They rented a cottage for February, paid for phone service for that time, and brought in their suitcases. Gwen unpacked their clothes and other personal items while Mark set up, first their security box in the frame of one of the twin bed’s box springs, and then the OXO communications center connected to the telephone line. Mark sent a fax to Neal’s answering service in order to test his hookups, with confirmation in the reply, then called Sampson’s office to leave the message he would be around the next day for the case report.
“How about checking out whether this ‘berg’ has any good restaurants,” Mark smiled when they were settled. “Maybe a little Italian?”
“Now we’re talking vacation,” Gwen said.
THIRTEEN
BBC World Service Special Report
“Modern Counterinsurgency: The Weapons of War”
BBC Reporter: Nijal Thomas [1-13-2007]
(Electrostraca #: RNB/GM-113007-375-789-0376)
CG30 is called shudder gas because of the epileptic-style seizures that it produces in its victims. This gas is considered a fast liquid. To understand this, consider that glass is a slow liquid. Glass appears solid, but the fused combination of silicates in a window, for instance, will puddle over several thousand years.
CG30 is created by the initial combination of precipitants sprayed from B-52 delivered cluster bombs. Detonated one hundred meters above the ground, the cluster bombs spread their extremely reactive compounds over wide areas, falling as a thick, wasabi-green fog to pour through the Yucatan rain forests. Heavier than fog, it behaves in most respects like an atmospheric liquid, pooling in the lowlands. It has a distinct honey-bitter smell, maintains a measurable surface tension in “flood” or “pool,” and carries a sapient specific neurotoxin in its loose waves and currents that immobilizes humans and many types of monkeys for six to eight hours.
A person walking through a CG30 puddle sublimates enough fast liquid into gas to have an immediate effect. Because CG30 as a liquid is lighter than water yet only minimally soluble, it hangs about the wet Yucatan lowlands often for days, only gradually biodegrading into harmless compounds. Only two to four percent of those immobilized by the gas die of complications, according to Pentagon sources, so it is ideal for sweeps into territory firmly held by the guerrillas, or frequently traversed by them, as a “humane” form of “mopping up.” It is not effective in the mountainous strongholds of the ZLF, and the insurgent peasants in the lowlands are finding ways to counteract the gas using trenches and elevated dwellings.
FOURTEEN
Greg returned home with the riemanium and pictures.
“I’ll have to think it over,” Greg said to Larry before leaving.
He placed the case and the Polaroids in the locking cabinet beneath his laser lathe. Then he drank a beer before a quick shower and a change of clothes. Larry’s parties were famous in Alabaster’s youth folklore. Beyond rage, rave and ragga, his parties qualified as masqs; slang from the word masquerade for monster events incorporating several youth scenes and strains of youth counterculture. Thus his parties required that he partly disarm his security and entirely lock down his dope operation, so Greg returned early to help with the task. Other things needed attending to as well. Joints needed to be rolled from Larry’s party stashes, the music had to be lined up, the munchies needed preparation, and all other non-crop, yet unauthorized areas needed to be battened down. Kitchen, bathrooms, living room, dining room, porches and the great outdoors not fenced in for gardens were the party territories, as well as one bedroom, a “back room” for esoteric drug use. Even the music, Larry’s semi-automated home entertainment complex, he locked behind his bedroom door. Larry had the system on the radio, tuned to Liberation Station Afrika for DJ Elijah’s Blues Hour, while the two worked. About fifteen minutes before the party’s official 9 p.m. start, some of the MDRG boys showed up with four kegs, and about fifteen minutes after the hour, the first partygoers arrived.
Greg did a lot of beer and smoke first off as anesthetic, and kept his level of intoxication plateaued just shy of severe memory loss thereafter. Simply, he felt miserable, unsociable and awkward. His friends were often Janet’s friends, and as he helloed some of them on their arrival he wondered who knew. Who had Janet told over Christmas? He tended to withdraw as the party progressed, to nurse his own wounds, ultimately taking over the task of sustaining the music level with the key to Larry’s bedroom. He would stack up the next sequence of multi-media selections, and feed the home entertainment computer the program card Larry had imprinted. Then he would retire to one of the couches in the living room with beer and smoke until the music needed him again.
The south end of the living room had been rebuilt with glass walls and partial glass roof so that it overlooked the creek through a tattered line of planted eucalyptus at the end of Larry’s lot. Heavily ferned and exotically house planted, much of the floor at that end of the room was a dark green pond. His fish farm was perfumed with water lilies, crossed with narrow wooden catwalks, festooned with hanging vegetation, bird cages and candles, and occasionally sparkled with the scales of a languid fish or two. Incense roped the air, and a parrot squawked from a ribbed cane cage. The pond extended beneath the glass and out into the yard, where botanical garden landscaping complimented the affect of bridges and fronded, horse tailed islands. The couch inside next to the pond was more often Greg’s choice as the evening deepened.
“You’re in Students for Peace,” a cute girl said, sitting next to him on the couch, a wine cooler poised before full, kissable lips. She was perhaps a quarter Asian, her eyes and hair black and her figure petite. He had seen her before, probably at school. “My name is Margaret. Did you go to the peace demo in the city yesterday?”
“Greg,” he said, accepted a joint from the crowd, hit it, and then passed it to Margaret, chasing the smoke with a long swig of Elephant malt liquor. “Yah. There was over a half million people. The street fighting got pretty radical.”
“You were in on that?” her eyes widened. She was dressed Mod, with an emphasis on black and white, her hair smartly bobbed.
“Some of it,” Greg stood, looked about to see who might be listening. A pair of parakeets in a bamboo cage above the pond chirped. “Gotta set up some more music. Come along?”
She did.
“Yah, the Hooligans were real aggressive,” Greg fabricated as he opened Larry’s door. “I didn’t have a mask, so mostly I just hung out on the sidewalks. Got in a few good hits though. Broke a Chase Manhattan glass front door. Also slammed down a cop trying to subdue a Hooligan girl.”
“Weren’t you a
fraid of getting arrested?” she gave him a sideways look.
“A little,” he faked it, “But there was too much happening. The Hooligans had the cops preoccupied. They busted the bystanders only when they got too frustrated from not being able to take out the street fighters.”
“I think I’d be too scared to do anything like that,” the girl looked down, fidgeted with her hands. “Probably couldn’t join in. Besides, I’m not sure that the Hooligan stuff is such a good idea. Its not a very peaceful way to get peace.”
He pointed out Larry’s vast collection of tapes, records, CD’s, DATs, videos and holos and she was snared. She had better taste in music than her retro clothes suggested. Besides the ska, funk and punk he had expected her to pick, she also chose some quality Spook, Null and Raspie, with some precursor source music to all three. She was particularly excited with a “best of compilation by Tit Wrench with Bob Barley called “Baseball Cards, Sex & You,” including songs such as “Pit-Bull with AIDS,” “Life Sucks, Do Me,” “Reh-Reh,” “White Punks On Rap,” “Revenge of the Partridge Family,” “Violet Flame,” and “Go Back To Europe,” among others.
“I know this guy,” Greg mused, speaking the truth now.
“Yeh?” she looked up at him, skeptical.
“Cowboy Bob, the Chula Vista Commie?” he laughed, “Sure I do. I attended the ‘Death of Gilman’ show in ‘97 when he played. My very first show. Also, he played at my house in ‘98 on their reunion tour, just before Bob went off to live in Ireland. The show thrashed two garage walls and the washer/dryer.”
Actually, he had been a scruffy SxEx skate punk at the time, part of punk’s last gasp, wearing his backwards baseball cap and his baggy shorts cut down from pants, as was the style. He had actually gotten to know Bob Barley through the mail as both had been avid baseball card collectors.
“That’s roots,” she exclaimed, “Want to smoke some Kajan?”
“Sure,” he said, and started to stack his and her selections into Larry’s servo mechanisms. Greg punched up a sequence into the computer, and things were ready for another hour plus of music through automated DJing. Borneo grass was legend, and Kajan weed was God. She pulled a symmetrically rolled joint from her blouse sleeve.
“Match?”
Greg produced a lighter. The resins spluttered violently, attacked his lungs with his first hit. He coughed, trying to hold it in. The high pierced through the murky beer/street grass sludge consciousness as had no other grass he had smoked that evening. They talked about music some but Greg knew what she was interested in. Knew what she was offering and, with Janet firmly in mind, he took Margaret’s offer. He leaned over and kissed her. They sat in Larry’s bedroom for a half hour making out, steaming each other up.
“Will anyone walk in on us?” she whispered.
“My dad’s not home,” he breathed, “Want to have breakfast at my house?”
“If you help me work up an appetite,” Margaret smiled coyly.
The two stumbled back into the party.
“Larry, you’ll have to find someone else to tend the music,” Greg said, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder.
“Oh?” Larry glanced away from his conversation, caught Margaret on his arm, and winked at Greg, “That was a quick recovery. Guess its good night.”
“Guess so,” Greg grinned. Emboldened with Margaret at his side, in fact intoxicated by the evening’s turn of events, he suddenly pivoted back to Larry. “And about what we were talking about earlier, why don’t you put out some feelers’ to the right people and see if there’s any interest in our idea.”
The two then careened, giggling, out of the house and into the Spitfire, kissing and feeling each other up shamelessly along the way. Greg drove to his house in lightning time, and she pulled him down onto the hall rug when they entered the door. Greg barely managed to kick the front door closed with his foot before she started tearing off his clothes.
“Condom?” he asked.
“I’m on Time Release,” she said.
Their sex could hardly have been called lovemaking; raw, unfamiliar, clumsy and rough it was instead. Greg intended this for Janet, to get back at her as he pawed Margaret’s smaller breasts and larger nipples, and slipped his other hand down her pants and panties into the wet-ness between her legs. There was little tenderness or grace involved, only a need for revenge. He was not very gentle. Above her, pounding into her, he thought: “Fuck you, you bitch,” thinking of Janet with each aggressive thrust. Margaret groaned, wrapped her legs around his back and dug into his ass with her fingernails, and he came.
They fucked all around the house, in a half dozen rooms and a dozen positions, two young animals in heat to make even a Feral blush. Finally, several climaxes later and scraped raw, Greg collapsed in his bed, Margaret in his arms.
She woke him playing with his morning hard on. Before he could protest, she mounted him and rode him hard. Sunrise sprayed up into his window, silhouetted her grunting, shaking form, and illuminating his shelves of books, transparent computers, mounted circuit boards, a half dozen signed baseballs, and pictures of him and Janet, or just Janet. There was something missing. He was missing, or rather, he was a distant observer to Margaret’s buckling orgasm. Yet, he did come.
“Morning,” she said.
They quickly showered, and went down to the kitchen, by which time Greg thawed a little. He cooked breakfast, scrambled eggs with onions and cheese, bacon, buttered toast, orange juice and coffee as they chatted on the courses and instructors for which they had signed up.
“Thanks,” Margaret said, accepting an aromatic plateful, “I got a class at ten this morning.”
“Got one at eleven myself,” Greg said, “Need a ride home?”
“If you could,” she kissed him, and let her hand wander into his pants.
“Keep that up,” Greg returned her kiss, “And you’ll miss that class.”
She laughed and they unclinched. Both hurried through breakfast. Greg not only drove her to her apartment for her books and a change of clothes, but also to ASU.
“Call me tonight,” she blew him a kiss and walked away, around a statue of wildly welded thin blue metal poles that imitated the shape of the Cat-In-The-Hat’s hat.
FIFTEEN
BBC World Service Special Report
“Modern Counterinsurgency: The Weapons of War”
BBC Reporter: Nijal Thomas [1-13-2007]
(Electrostraca #: RNB/GM-113007-375-789-0376)
A conventional surface-to-surface, or air-to-surface missile delivers the Zeus over its target. As the Zeus payload detaches from its rocket, stubby wings emerge for its descent, giving the smart “hive” bomb the measure of maneuverability in pinpointing its precise attack zone. Between three and two hundred meters from impact the Zeus splits along precise fracture lines, cleaving cleanly over and over until a total of five hundred “boomerwings” shave off.
The Zeus is a puzzle-fitted bomb. It descends like a shot and forms into a vicious cloud of flying microwings, each the size of an old fashioned gold dollar. Each individual razor edged, aerodynamic boomerwing is equipped with optical gestalt targeting, microfoil maneuverability, and a gram of CTX-X plastique. Enough explosive to take out a large tank, a medium sized boat or building, or a small government. Each boomerwing has a share of the overall bomb’s momentum and intelligence, and as a total swarm, the microwings are capable of networked guidance and a limited, coordinated attack. Singing through the rain forests like a fevered, golden metallic horde, the Zeus Cloud is a terrifying weapon.
The Zeus can be used with effect against a concentrated objective in jungle low lands and against dispersed targets in highland or mountainous terrains. The Zeus’s swarm can be focused or allowed to shotgun. And, as the guerrillas become more expert in building decoys, the U.S. military continues improving the visual targeting of each boomerwing and the collective intelligence of the entire cloud.
SIXTEEN
“I had a long talk with Darby Hol
bin yesterday,” Edward Sumner said, making himself comfortable in a chair in Captain Sampson’s San Francisco office early on the week’s first working morning. “He said I could depend on the full cooperation of the Highway Patrol in my work. He also informed me that you were managing the investigation for the department.”
“Yes I am Mr. Sumner,” Brian said, hefting his mug for the necessary working coffee. He chose to ignore the FBI agent’s mention of his boss, as he chose to ignore the not-so-subtle ranking it implied. What was the new FBI West Coast Field Office Director’s purpose in checking up on the Patrol’s street-level investigation? “Care for some coffee? Fresh pot.”
“No thanks,” Sumner waved away the offer, “I’ve been up since 4:30. I’m afraid I’m already swimming in it. By the way, call me Ed.”
“I have an up-to-date report on the case,” the Captain did not feel comfortable with such instant familiarity, not with Sumner at least. Instead, he handed a thick manila folder across his desk to the young suit. “You’ll notice I’ve also tried to collate other reports from the other police agencies working on the case. They’re appendixed, in the back.”
Sumner thumbed through the file, stopping now and then to read.
“You see this as a jewel theft,” the agent finally said, closing the paperwork. “With the riemanium figuring in as an afterthought. A complication.”
“That’s the simplest explanation,” Sampson poured himself a refill. “At the end of the report, I go into a list of possibilities. This department’s working assumption is that the Diamotti gang either tossed or stashed the riemanium, and that it either hasn’t been found yet, or our fifth suspect has recovered it. On an outside chance, someone else has found it, and for one reason or another, hasn’t yet brought it to the attention of the authorities. Occam’s Razor.”