A War of Shadows

TWENTY-FOUR

“I think Sam’s right,” one of the women, Miriam, said. There were other nods of agreement.

Suzy was furious. “Damn it! What do you want me to do? I say the things don’t leak.”

“But they’ve been in the ground for a pretty long time, Hon,” he pointed out for the hundred time. “Besides, we’ll have to transfer the stuff this week to the spray bottles from the cellar. There’s real danger and you know it.”

“And Sam’s right about things smelling funny,” a man named Harry put in. “From the Camp on, a lot of stuff hasn’t made sense. I, for one, don’t want to come down with the disease.”

“Easiest way to get rid of us,” Sam said. “Once we’ve done the job, well, we spread it some more. I remember the one in the papers where everybody lost their memory. It’d be a perfect end for our mysterious chiefs to plan for us. I tell you we have to know if that vaccine works.”

“It works, it works!” Suzy protested for what she prayed would be the last time. “Look, at the Camp we had a demo chamber to check out the effects of some of the new strains. I had the vaccine, so did all the others working there. It worked then, it’ll work now.

“You lose, Suzy,” Harry said. “We all agreed.

We’re not gonna touch that stuff until we know.”

She gave up. “All right, all right—but how can we know? We can’t just walk into a chemical lab in Westminster, say, and tell them, ‘Pardon me, this is supposed to be Wilderness Organism vaccine, but we don’t dare spread it to major cities until we know we’re safe!’ ”

“I think we’d be satisfied to be told it’s either a biosolvent or contains dead bacteria,” Sam said. “They can do that in a hurry. Just a quick report on what it is, roughly. We don’t have to make it, only know it’s a complex chemical and not just tap water.”

Defeated, Suzy agreed that she and Sam would go into town. They walked down to Route 30 and waited for the bus, a bottle of the stuff in her bag. She didn’t say a word to him the whole time, and pulled away when he tried to put his arm around her.

“Look, I’m doing this because I love you,” he told her seriously. “We have something going now, something good. I don’t want either of us to lose that it we can avoid it.”

She melted a little, looking resigned. “I know, Sam. I know. It’s just…”

“Just what?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “Nothing,” she said. The bus’s arrival cut short his argument, and they rode in silence to the county seat.

There were two chemical labs in the city, which surprised them. It was a gigantic small town, really, only a half-hour from Baltimore. It had grown with the county, but never quite to true city status. Everybody went to Baltimore for the rare stuff.

The lab wanted them to leave it overnight, but they refused, and offered to pay quite a bit for it if done fast. “We don’t have to know what it is, just if it looks like it’ll hurt us,” Sam told the woman at the desk. “It’s an additive to our water supply and we’re a little concerned about the well.”

Finally she agreed and took it back into the hack room. “Only a real quick check, though,” she warned.

Suzy decided to pick up some things she wanted. She was particularly interested in a purse and a couple of wigs; the purse she needed would handle a small spray bottle, and the wigs would help in the disguise, even if bought off the shelf.

Sam found himself alone in the office. The woman obviously was part of the lab establishment—it was a small affair, a second-story place run by a couple of former college teachers as a sideline. They mostly handled water questions; a lot of homes in Carroll County still had wells and septic tanks, and there was always a demand to test for hardness, pollution, and the like.

Sam was sitting next to the woman’s desk, and for a little while he stared at the touch-tone phone there.

Somehow, he knew, things were going wrong. Everything was too easy, too slick. All the little nagging inconsistencies came to the fore.

Somehow, he was certain, they were all being had.

His concern over the vaccine had been genuine, a part of that feeling. Now, though, here it was, the final question at last.

What the hell, he thought. A little penance, a payback for those hundreds on the airliner. Suzy had been taken alive before; that phony trooper, if he was a phony, might as well have been real. And the others—perhaps one or two might fight, but most weren’t really willing to die in the cause any more or they wouldn’t have backed him on this panic trip.

He reached over, lifted the phone off the hook until he heard the dial tone, and, holding it poised just above the two plungers so he could drop it in a second to rest, he reached over with his left hand and punched a number.

And a lot of numbers.

He’d thought about it a lot, worked it out again and again in his mind, until he knew the numbers by heart.

He dialed the special “500” number the FBI had given him, heard it click over, ring, then stop. He punched the touch-tone keys.

Three-4-7-3-6-8-8-3-6-8-7-3-2-8-4-8.

He slowly lowered the phone back onto its cradle.

He felt no sense of victory or accomplishment; in a way, he felt himself a traitor. And yet, and yet, deep down, something far in the back of his mind seemed to relax and and whisper that he’d done a good thing this time.

The woman returned before Suzy. The speed of it surprised him.

“I can’t do any more with this. It’ll take days to get a more thorough analysis, but—you say this was in your well water, or was your well water?”

He nodded. “You mean there’s something wrong?”

She shook her head from side to side. “No, but as far as I can tell from my and my husband’s quick look, I’d swear it was distilled water. I’d love to know how you can get distilled water in a well.”

A sense of satisfaction flooded through him. It was the justification for his phone call. All feelings of being a traitor vanished. They—they were trying to kill him, all of them. He’d just caught them at it, and he no longer felt he owed anything to them.

“Well, frankly, we’ve had an older dry well on the place,” he lied, “and I went to check it yesterday and got this out of it with a siphon. It kinda surprised me. I think maybe now I understand. They been dumping the stuff from the dehumidifier down the old pipe.”

It was an outrageous explanation, and if only for that reason the woman accepted it completely.

“Forty dollars,” she told him. He paid it and walked out to the stairs and down them to the street below.

Distilled water, he thought bitterly. Sure. All those elaborate places to be, places to spray, in the instructions. Bullshit. They were to be the primary carriers. Just riding into D.C. on a train would do it, as the orders called for. Mix with crowds. Maybe a special strain, this, that stayed communicable for several days but delayed its effect longer.

As he’d understood it, the bacteria in the body somehow transmitted instructions to selected brain cells, causing them to produce an acidic substance instead of the normal enzymes for a period, an acidic substance that would literally burn out predetermined centers in the brain.

Anybody who could build a germ that could do that could give it any time schedule, any time frame they wanted.

He saw Suzy coming toward him with a bunch of boxes. She saw his expression and knew at once it was bad news.

“Distilled water,” he told her.

She just nodded and didn’t say a word. They caught the bus that would take them back to Mt. Venus Road, got off at the intersection, and walked back up the hill to the house. She’d asked and he’d offered to carry the packages, although he couldn’t see to what purpose, now.

They were almost to the front door when she said, softly, “Sam?”

He stopped. “Yes, Hon?”

“You understand I do love you?”

He frowned. Now what the hell? “Yeah, sure, but… ?”

“But I have one thing I live for, Sam. One thing only. All else pales before it. I believe in the cause, Sam. I know you don’t, not deep down. Most of them don’t. But we all do what we have to do.”

The tenor of the conversation disturbed him, and he turned. Suddenly he felt an exploding pain go through his jeans to his rump and felt a needle enter.

He stood there, dizzy and confused, for a moment, then toppled, packages flying. He was out so fast he never saw her put the gas-injector syringe back into her purse.

A couple of people inside the house witnessed it and ran outside.

“What the hell?” Miriam demanded. “Why?”

Suzanne Martine sighed. “Sam was never a revolutionary. He just was a sort of revolutionary groupie. He wanted the vaccine to be just water, and when it wasn’t he started talking all crazy.”

“You mean it’s really vaccine?” Harry asked, relieved.

She shook her head. “At least it’s a thick egg-based compound with suspended bacteria in it, all dead. All the way back he kept saying as how it’d kill us anyway, that he couldn’t go through with it. Many years ago he bugged out when our group downed a plane. He just doesn’t have the guts to be a revolutionary.”

They were disturbed. “So? Now what? Do we kill him?”

“No!” she almost shouted, then caught herself and softened. “Look, I’m still in love with him. He’s just too nice for our kind of business. Solid, though. Even when he bugged out on the plane deal he didn’t stop us, and afterwards, when he ran, he never copped or finked. No, he’s just not right on the raid.”

“But what do we do with him, then?” Harry asked. “Hell, it’s only the tenth.”

“So we change things a little,” Suzy said. “I got the word from The Man. We go tonight. We’ll do the transfers of what we can this afternoon. Sam? Well, tie him up so he doesn’t wander off again and leave him here. We’ll be back, let him go, and live happily ever after.”

Miriam was suspicious. “When did you call The Man?”

“From town,” she lied glibly. “I had to report the uneasiness in this unit and the testing. I was told to go at once.” She looked down at Sam, knelt down beside him, and kissed him on the forehead.

“Help me get him inside,” she said.