Zodiac

25

WE HAD TO TWEAK IT a little to get the right effect," Boone was explaining. We were sitting around the fire, Boone and Jim and Tom Singletary and I. They were drinking hot chocolate and I was drinking Pepto Bismol. "The tanks he had on there didn't have the range to make Nova Scotia. So we scattered a few extra tanks down the coast, let them wash up at random, as though he'd been using them up and tossing them out." Boone's face suddenly crinkled and he laughed for the first time. "You made a great escape," he said. He was a peculiar guy. I'd never met him, just seen his picture and heard tell of him from the veterans of GEE's early days. They all agreed he was a hothead, out of his mind. Once, when the Mounties came after him on an ice floe, he knocked six of them into the water before they took him down. And I'd seen him on film, doing things that made my blood run cold: sitting right underneath a five-ton container of radioactive waste, getting thrown into the sea when it was dropped on his Zodiac then getting sucked under the vessel, turning up a couple of minutes later in its wake. And he was like that even when he wasn't working-a drunk, a bar fighter. But the guy I was looking at was totally different.

Shit, he was drinking herb tea. He talked in a slow, lilting baritone murmur, he paused in the middle of sentences to make sure the grammar was right, to pick just the right word. But it wasn't a wimpy Boone I was looking at. I had to remember the action he'd just pulled off, on short notice, on my behalf.

"How long you intend to stay," Singletary asked.

"I have a camp," Boone said, "out in the forest."

"No, I don't mean tonight. J mean in the area."

"If you'd like me to leave, I will."

"Not at all."

Boone turned and looked at me with his invisible smile again. "I'm here to talk to S.T. I'd like to see what he wants. That's my only business."

That line turned out to be an instant conversation killer. Jim and Tom took off and left me and Boone sitting there by the fire. We moved to different chairs, so we were facing each other, and the grey autumn twilight glowed in Boone's face, seeming to lift his luminous blue eyes up out of their sockets. We just looked at each other for a minute.

"What's your plan?" he said.

"You have to give me time to think about that. Until a couple of days ago, I had what I thought was a stable life in Boston. Now I'm a dead man, living on nuts and berries."

"You could easily pass for Northern European," he said. "We can set you up there, if you'd like."

"It's just about the last place I want to live."

He shrugged. "Sometimes we can't help our circumstances."

"Silas Bissel, Abbie Hoffman, they both set themselves up with new identities."

"Minor flakes. They didn't try to assassinate a future president."

"Neither did I."

"Exactly. They were guilty. You aren't. That's going to hurt."

"How should you know?" I asked. "You're the real thing "

"The real what?"

"A terrorist."

He closed his eyes for a second and then opened them and looked hard at me. "What makes you think that?"

I groped around for a minute, started to say something, then stopped; remembered things, then questioned my memory. I thought I knew all about Boone. Maybe I was just another dupe.

"The first one," he said, quieter than ever, but filling the room with his voice, "the first one was real. Off South Africa. Pirate ship. We'd seen them wing a baby whale with a nonexplosive harpoon, tow him around so he'd squeal and make noise. The other whales came to help. First the mother. They blew her away before she'd gotten to see her child. Then the others. A whole pod, a huge pod of them, and they just kept firing, kept slaughtering them, more than they could ever use. We sent out some Zodiacs and they fired on us. They killed one of our people."

"With a-"

"Nothing that mediapathic. Not a harpoon. Just a rifle shot. Drilled her through the ribcage. When that happened we all pulled out.

"We were totally insane. It was pure blood lust. We were going to board them and take revenge with our bare hands. Berserk, literally.

"We had this Spanish guy on the boat. Remember, this wasn't GEE, it was a European outfit, much less principled, and they didn't really check out their people. This guy suddenly reveals that he's actually Basque. He was also into whales, but his main thing was the Basque insurgency and he was on this trip as a cover. We'd stopped in for a while in Mozambique and he'd picked up a suitcase full of plastique. He was bringing it back to Spain to blow up God knows what. But he had a thing for Uli, this woman we'd lost that day, and so..."

"Boom."

"Boom. We gave them plenty of warning. Half of them got off on life rafts and the other half stayed aboard and died. It wasn't an environmental action at all. It was a bar fight."

"And then you turned it into a career."

He laughed and shook his head. "Let's say you own a whaling ship that needs a total overhaul. It's insured for three times its value. You've been thinking about getting out of the business. The bank has turned you down for a loan and your five-year-old granddaughter has a whale poster on her bedroom wall. What do you do?"

"Put a limpet mine on it and send it to the bottom of the harbor. Then say you'd been getting threats," I offered.

"From the well-known terrorist. And after it's happened several times, this Boone gets quite a reputation, it gets even easier to pull off that kind of a scam. So you see, S.T., I've sunk one boat with my hands and a dozen with my reputation. The new Boone is just a media event."

"Exactly how much have you really done?"

"I just told you the whole thing. Now I've got an organization with a grand total of five people in it, all people like you and me. Antiplumbers. We do a nonviolent action maybe once a year. Usually something technically sweet, like your salad bowl thing-we read about that. Laughed our heads off. The rest of the time we're looking for what to do next. Picking only the best projects."

"No media contacts?"

"Hell no. Media pressure doesn't work that well in Europe anyway. It's kind of sick. They expect criminal behavior."

"And I could be the sixth member of this group."

"It's not a bad life, S.T. I've done some good work. Some unbelievably satisfying work." He grinned. "I saw the kills painted on your Zodiac. I've got four on mine."

What it came down to was: I was tired, I felt bad and I had to sleep on it. He could relate, so he got up and vanished into the trees and I fell into bed.

I didn't feel much better when I woke up, but I felt itchy and got to thinking about how long it had been since I'd bathed, and about that lake water dried onto my skin. So I kind of staggered into the bathroom, squinting against the light, and took a shower. Washed my new short hair, felt soap on my whisker-free cheeks for the first time, started to wash my torso and noticed it felt kind of bumpy. Poison ivy, maybe, from my escape through the woods.

When I got out and looked at myself in the mirror, though, it wasn't that. It was a whole lot of little dark pimples, emerging together into a shadow. Chloracne.

I ate a breakfast of charcoal briquets and went through the Singletarys' deep freeze, checking the fish they'd been feeding me. All freshwater stuff, all caught locally. They ate more of it than I did and they weren't having any problems. I had brought the poison with me. Which was impossible, because I hadn't eaten any seafood since this thing had started. So how had it gotten into me?

The same way it had gotten into the Gallaghers? They hadn't eaten any tainted lobsters. I hadn't believed that, but now I had to.

During my dive to the CSO? Maybe it was a kind of toxin that was absorbed through the skin. But it seemed to have time-release properties, hitting me a week later.

I couldn't help remembering that sewer tunnel from Na-tick to Dorchester Bay. There was a similarity here. I'd thought the source of the chlorine was Biotronics, but it didn't show up right away. It showed up gradually, as it headed down the pipe. Time-release toxicity.

What had Biotronics wrought? Something new and strange. And at the very end, Dolmacher had been trying to get in touch with me.

I was a sick dude. My identity may have died, swept overboard into the Atlantic, but my body lived on, tied to Boston, to Biotronics and Dolmacher and Fleshy by a toxic chain.

Mrs. Singletary was up and about and I asked her if she had any enema stuff around the house. She went into her root cellar and came out with a hollow, long-necked gourd. I thanked her profusely and decided to forget about enemas for the time being.

Boone was sitting out in front of his tent, frying a trout. When he saw me, he gave me the biggest grin I'd seen from him yet, a genuine, unrestrained, shit-eating beamer. "I'd forgotten about this country, S.T. Ten minutes ago this fish was swimming through a stream that's clean enough to drink. And we're, what, a couple of hours away from Boston, is all?"

"Yeah. Welcome home. Let's work together."

"You're joining me, then?"

"No. You're joining me, unless I'm totally wrong."

I sat down and told him about everything. Was going to show him the chloracne, but no, he'd seen it in Vietnam. He asked me all the right questions. He tried to explore all the blind alleys in the problem that I'd already explored. The only alley that wasn't blind led to Boston.

"Since the sinking," he said, "I haven't done an action in the U.S."

"Time to get on the stick."

"My people have all gone back to Europe."

"What am I, dog meat? Look, Boone, this could be the biggest action of all time. We know who the target is, don't we? Our probable next president. How are you going to feel if you go home and let this guy become the leader of the Free World?"

"Very risky. And my setup in Europe is too sweet to risk."

"Yeah, yeah. You see, Boone, that's exactly why I don't want to move to Europe. Because it's dirty everywhere. Because nobody has idealism, nobody gives a shit when you expose a toxic criminal. And because after six months there, I won't have any balls left. Geographic castration."

He tossed his trout on the ground and came after me with both hands. I'm no boxer, so I just get in close, too close to punch, and use my weight. A little of that and we were rolling around in the leaves together. Then I curled up with stomach cramps and he took pity on me. He just rolled over on his back and lay there, the first yellow leaves of the New Hampshire fall spinning down into his face. "I feel alive," he said.

"I feel like I'm dying," I said, "and we both have something to prove."

"The Groveler, man. His ass is grass."