Zodiac

17

IONIC CHLORINE'S EASY TO GET . It's in seawater, as Tom Akeis pointed out. But if you want to manufacture a whole stinking catalog of industrial chemicals, you have to convert ionic chlorine into the covalent variety. You do that by subtracting an electron.

And it's just about that simple. You take a tank of seawater and you put a couple of bare wires into it. You hook a source of electrical power up between the wires, and current-a stream of electrons-flows through the water. The molecules get rearranged. The ionic chlorine turns into the covalent kind, which is what you want. The sodium joins up with fractured water molecules to form sodium hydroxide. Or lye or alkali, depending on how educated you are. This process is called Chloralkali.

Simple enough. But to make industrial quantities of DDT, or PCBs, or solvents, or whatever it is you're shooting for, you need industrial quantities of chlorine. That takes a lot of electrical power. And if you want to manufacture a Niagara of chemicals, guess what? You need a Niagara-sized power source.

Hence Buffalo. Its blessing, the beautiful Falls, was also its curse. And even though the Falls were getting all broken down and full of rocks, all those chlorine compounds remained. We call it toxic waste. Without Chloralkali, toxic waste would hardly exist. The only hazardous waste that doesn't flow from that fountain is the heavy-metal variety, and heavy metals are a pretty small trickle in the toxic stream. Chloralkali, also known as Niachlor (Niagara + chlorine) is virtually synonymous with toxic waste.

Despite all my moaning and bitching, it's getting tougher to be a toxic polluter in this country. In the last three decades, especially since about 1974, the Chloralkali business has taken a nosedive, down by about forty percent. I'm shooting for a hundred.

Going after the chemical industry in Buffalo meant going after Boner Chemicals-which was like shooting ducks in a barrel while half a million people stood around cheering you on-and this time it was going to be even easier. We didn't have to use shotguns on those toxic ducks anymore, because a friend of ours in Albany was providing us with flamethrowers.

The EPA is so anemic, and this country so dirty, that they have to contract out a lot of their work. After the toxic catastrophe in Buffalo, they farmed some work out to a group of chemical consultants in Albany, similar to Mass Anal. In effect, that gave these consultants subpoena power over Boner, the sole cause of the catastrophe. They got to raid Boner's files and cart off the relevant maps and documents. They learned toxic secrets that would turn your blood to dioxin.

One of the consultants resigned because he wanted to build a geodesic-dome house and start his own computer software company. I think you know the kind of guy I'm talking about. He got involved with GEE. He no longer had any secret documents, but he knew how to operate a Xerox machine. When my train pulled into Albany on its way to Buffalo, he joined Debbie and me in our sleeper coach; we poured him a Screwdriver and talked about things to come. His name was Alan Reading.

Debbie and I had kept the bunks fastidiously folded away. We'd talked all the way from Boston to Springfield, paused so

I could read the last couple of days' Wall Street Journal, and were just getting into the terrible subject of Commitment when we pulled into Albany. We weren't exactly in a good mood.

We sat in the coach and studied a bunch of documents that Alan had illegally xeroxed. One was quite interesting: a map of the main Boner plant, showing in detail the boundary between Boner property and the public streets. There was an indentation in the boundary: a street that ran for half a block into Boner territory and then dead-ended. It was still public property, though it was surrounded on three sides by the plant. The only reason it existed was as a place to put a manhole. There was a sewer line running from the middle of boner Chemical out to Buffalo's general sewer system. This line ran along underneath the deadend street; at the end of that street, right up against the gate to Bonerland, was a manhole. Alan happened to know that at this very spot, Boner Chemical was dumping dioxins into the sewers.

"This is great stuff," I told him. "I have something you might want to read too." And I showed him the Journals. Seems as though another big corporate merger was in the offing. Basco was buying out Boner.

"Why on earth would anyone want to own it?" Alan mumbled. "It's a black hole."

"If it makes money on paper, for the first year, it must be a good investment."

Debbie had other things to concentrate on. Up at the Falls, she and the Blowfish people had some big splashy affair planned for the media, involving Canadians and Indians. It appeared that the Indians in upstate New York, the Seven Nations, continued to approve of us.

This wasn't always the way it worked. GEE scouts were always pursuing the Indians, asking to sleep in their teepees and groove on their most sacred ceremonies. You couldn't be cool in some GEE circles unless you'd seen the inside of a Lakota sweat lodge; it was like a fetish. Usually the Indians were tolerant, but not always. The night before, I'd been on the computer, poking around in GEE's international message system, and learned that one of our boys was in the hospital in Rapid City. He had been smoking the peace pipe with some Sioux and had taken it upon himself to put in some marijuana. So they broke his arm. Little misunderstandings like this were common, and I was always amazed when the Northeastern tribes showed any interest at all in working with us. They had as much to lose from being slowly poisoned by large corporations as anyone, I guess. Maybe more, since they tended to be fishermen or factory workers.

A donated car was waiting for us in Buffalo, a half-devastated Subaru with loose speakers dangling out of the door panels and ecostickers all over the windows. I dropped Alan and Debbie off at the marina where the Blowfish was parked. They were having a party for local supporters and I couldn't bear the thought of it. Sometimes, actually, I do feel like having fun, pretending to be charming, putting on my suit with the toxic tennis shoes, regaling local environmentalists with war stories, describing the variety of crap they have in their tap water. But other times, like now, I just wanted to drive around in the dark and look for trouble.

We were going to be plugging a few pipes here, I knew that much. Pipe-plugging technology is pretty well established by now. For pipes less than about four feet across, you just stack bags of cement in them. The cement swells up and gets hard.

If the pipe gets any larger, you have to plug it with a disk of some kind. But that's hard to do if any significant amount of crap is pouring out of the pipe, because it obviously tends to force the disk out. So you have to use a butterfly plug, which was invented by one of our people in Boston who has since gone into the computer biz. You cut the disk in half down the middle and fold the halves together, pointing them upstream, like the wings of a butterfly. You install it in that position and then release the sides of the disk. The pressure hits them and they slam open, sealing against the walls of the pipe. Then you can add extra devices to complicate removal if you really want to be an asshole. For example, you can clamp the plug on with C-clamps, then saw off the screws.

The sewer coming out of the Boner plant was much larger than four feet across, but we couldn't construct a plate to go across. Why? Because it would have to go in via the manhole. So we'd have to use lots and lots of cement. Cement is more permanent anyway, and permanence was the key to this job. Those butterfly plugs are just media events. You put one in, with a big GEE logo painted across it, and the minicam crews hang around and film the seasick plant workers struggling to remove it. But this was underground and so there was no point in showing off. And the Boner waste was much too serious. Dioxin, man. Unacceptable stuff. Dump dioxin, you're playing for keeps, you die.

First I drove up to the Falls and looked for a hotel room. It's funny. Everywhere I go, I like to rent the honeymoon suite. What the hell, GEE's picking up the tab. And the honeymoon suite is the best place to unwind after a rough day of humping cement bags and being hauled around in manacles. You can sit around in the heart-shaped tub, you can romp on the waterbed. And now, here I was on the road to Niagara Falls, where every room was a honeymoon suite. All I had to do was pick the best one.

Took a while, but I found it: lava lamps, eight-foot water-bed with fur, mirrored ceiling, view of the freeway. The manager hated my looks but liked the idea that I was going to stay for a while. I charged up a few days on the GEE gold card, told her I'd be back later and headed back toward Buffalo.

Now the only thing on my mind was the pair of suits who'd been tailing me every since I'd left the train station. They were driving a Chevy Celebrity, conspicuous by its very dullness. My Subaru was smaller, more maneuverable, and probably. just as fast, if the tranny didn't fall out. Once we got back into Buffalo, I got to engage in my favorite sport.

I topped off the tank first, checked the tire pressure, emptied my bladder, bought a six-pack of Jolt. Then I headed for the on-ramp and gave them a chance to line up behind me. They wouldn't follow me directly onto the ramp because this was a covert tail. So I cruised up the ramp, cranking it as hard as it would go, then shut off my lights and braked onto the shoulder, using my handbrake so the taillights wouldn't give me away.

A few seconds later they shot past me, their brake lights blazing in embarrassment, and I took off and followed them.

And followed them and followed them. For four hours I followed those stupid fucks. My car had a shorter range, but I'd just filled it up.

Nothing's more fun than following someone whose orders are to follow you. I could do it forever: cruising flamboyantly behind them, playing classic rock on the jury-rigged stereo and flicking cigar ashes out the window.

They didn't even figure it out for twenty minutes or so. They decided to play it cool and stay ahead of me for a while before gradually dropping back. But I wouldn't let them. Finally they came to a full stop on the shoulder and waited. I stopped behind them and waited. They started up and pulled an illegal U-turn across the median strip. Obviously they weren't cops, because cops are trained how to do that maneuver, and these guys had never done it before. I followed them through that exercise, after pausing on the shoulder to give them a little time.

Then they went into the next phase: wondering what to do now. They got off at the next ramp and I followed them around downtown Buffalo, listening to three Zevon songs about hapless mercenaries, back-to-back, no commercial interruptions. I doubt they had classic rock and roll playing on their stereo. They had a regular discussion in progress, with lots of hand-waving and glancing back over their headrests at me.

Finally they pulled off at an IHOP. I watched them through the windows until they had ordered coffee, then opened my door, peed on the asphalt, and reclined the seat so I was below window level. They came out in a few minutes and took off. I gave them a minute to think they'd finally made it, then pulled in behind them again.

Then they knew they were fucked. They thought: this isn't just a joke. This guy's going to follow us until we have to report in, and then he'll know who we are.

Some bad driving ensued as they tried and failed to shake me. It's hard to shake a tail in a totally deserted downtown. These guys had learned how to drive by watching "Hawaii Five-O" reruns: if our tires are squealing, we must be going fast.

So they definitely weren't cops. Cops or G-men would just stop the car and come up to me and say, "Okay, okay, very funny, asshole, now go home." And they weren't Mafia, or else I'd be bleeding in the dark. Some kind of cheap private dicks, or amateurs.

If they were locals, they probably worked for Boner. If they'd followed me out from Boston, maybe they were connected to the PCP thing. Maybe we were talking about a drug lab, financed by yuppies, run by dustheads, and now that we'd gotten into this cloak-and-dagger stuff, the upper echelons didn't know quite how to handle it.

They realized too late that most of the gas stations in downtown Buffalo are closed at three in the morning. They ran out of gas right in the middle of a lane. I came up behind them, bumper to bumper, and shoved them into a parking space. But at the last minute, thinking of Scrounger, I downshifted,-gunned it and shoved them right through the space and into the back of a parked car. The Celebrity's power brakes didn't work when the engine was dead.

They were really ticked. They jumped out of the doors and came after me. I backed down the street a couple of blocks, letting them chase me, getting a good look at their adrenalin-flushed all-American faces, then blew them off and found a phone booth and dialed 911. There had been a fender bender downtown, I said, and the culprits had abandoned their car and run away from it, and I suspected that maybe the car was stolen. Yes, I'd be happy to give my name. Yes, I'd be there to give the police a statement.

The cops were on the scene within two minutes. We had a huge, fortyish black cop with a pissed-off demeanor, and his younger, female partner. The two suits were loitering grimly nearby, huddled together in the dark like aborigines. When they coughed up their driver's licenses, I got a peek over the woman cop's shoulder. Massachusetts licenses. The pissed-off cop got on the radio and was kind enough to speak their names for me: David Kleinhoffer and Gary Dietrich. A couple of good Americo-Aryan rent-a-thugs.

That was all I was going to learn out here. I went to a pay phone and called the car rental company. I used my flack voice.

"Yes, this is Mr. Taylor. We've rented a vehicle from your office," and I gave her the description and license plate number, "we've misplaced the rental agreement, and there seems to be some confusion as to which account it's being charged to. I'm working in the accounting department and I need to know. Would you mind reading to me the impression from the charge slip?"

She did. Turns out Kleinhoffer and Dietrich were working for a company named Biotronics.

Now that I knew, it made sense. I should have guessed it. First Poyzen Boyzen, then the Mafia, leaving me threats. And the Mafia thing didn't start until right after I began worrying about it.

Some assholes in fancy shoes had been trying to scare me. And for the most part they had done a damn fine job. But this bit with Scrounger was too fucking much.

The tip was the computer. A Mafia goon would kick in the screen and say, that's it, that sucker's busted. Actually, monitor screens are cheap. The expensive part is the box underneath. Whoever trashed our place had known that much. He'd known about it, and cared. The thing with the freon, too. That was a pretty suburban way to trash a kitchen- letting the freon out of your fridge.

Now that I'd seen the faces of the people who were trying to scare me, I was a lot less scared, and a lot more interested. Maybe they were really making PCP, or maybe they had some other nasty secret. When I got back from Buffalo I'd have to find out, and do these people some damage. In the meantime, I'd have to content myself with charging up tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lingerie on their credit card number.