This time the silence was much longer.
“How come you ask, Alex?”
“No reason in particular. I just remembered that you never let go of the place. Must have a sentimental attachment after all those good times you had there in the heyday of your bachelorhood.” It was Nordstrum’s turn to pause. “But listen, you can forget about my request. I know you’re under constraints. I’ll try some of my old pressroom cronies at the Washington Post instead. You never know, they might have something for me. With them, it’s always give and take.”
“Alex—”
“I need to hang up—”
“Alex, wait, damn it.”
He waited.
“Give me that fax number at UpLink,” Blake said.
In his Sacramento office, Eric Oh listened intently as Todd Felson, his colleague at Stanford, offered him the details of the initial tests he’d performed on the food samples taken from Roger Gordian’s office.
“You know those wafers we found on his desk? Three of them are impregnated with polymer coacervates in the fifteen to twenty-micron range,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of the stuff.”
For the third time in a seventy-two-hour period during which he’d been swept along like a man on a whitewater run, Eric was caught breathless.
“Microencapsulation,” he said. “Todd, I think we’ve found our activator.”
“Looks like it,” Felson said. “The particle walls are an ethyl cellulose/cyclohexane gelatin. Highly soluble in liquids at body temperature. And very susceptible to breakdown under the high pH levels in a person’s digestive system. Or mucous membranes, for that matter.”
“Have you gotten to examine the core material at all?”
“Coming up next.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning, just two hours after the closed conference room meeting adjourned, when Megan answered her office phone to hear Alex Nordstrum’s excited voice on the line.
“Meg, I’ve got news,” he said.
She sat up straight behind her desk
“I’m waiting,” she said.
“I can lay out the paper trail for you later, but the main thing now is that there’s a private outfit in Ontario, west of the Hudson Bay, that fits the bill for our germ factory in every way. Uniquely. The flow of bioprocessing equipment to it is incredible. I’ve got listed purchases of regulated biological cultures and growth media, freeze drying and containment equipment, recombinant gene tech… it goes on and on. This is a soup-to-nuts bioprocessing facility, and one that was built at great expense. I’d guess the initial cost would total a hundred million dollars. You won’t find any other operation like it in Canada, and only a few comparable facilities exist here at home.”
Megan took a breath.
“You mean to tell me that nobody in Washington has deemed it in our national interest to investigate what’s being developed at this place?”
“I’ll share a bit of irony, Meg. We do business with these folks. Loads of it. They own agricultural patents that have scored them numerous federal contracts. And they recently won the bidding competition for a huge deal to develop genetically modified strains of Fusarium oxysporum—a fungus that’s proven to be wholesale murder on coca plants.” He paused. “The State Department’s been trying to persuade the Columbians and Peruvians to use it against their narco farmers, and it looks like it’s going to happen. Chew on that one for a second. Given this company’s presumed ties to the Quiros family, which derives its income primarily from the cocaine trade, it’s conceivable they’re creating a fungus that’s specially adapted to wipe out the crops of competing growers. And all on our government’s tab.”
Megan was silent a moment, thinking, the receiver held tightly in her hand.
“Tell me the name of the firm, Al,” she said at last.
“Earthglow,” he said. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
TWENTY-FOUR
Remote was a relative term nowadays, paul “Pokey” Oskaboose was saying as he dipped his single-prop Cessna 172 from the cloud rack. “I read some magazine article by somebody a while back, and I think it said there are something like six, maybe eight places left on the planet where you can spend an hour — or maybe it’s a night, I forget — without hearing an engine noise of some kind or other.” He banked sharply toward the bunched, snow-draped hills to port.
Seated on his right, Ricci watched the world slant down and away. “How long till we’re over the plant?” he asked, his stomach lurching.
“Should be any minute.” Oskaboose pointed out his window. A Cree-Ojibway Indian with a wide, bony face and dark hair worn in a buzz cut, he was on loan to Ricci from the Sword watch quartered amid the radomes and communications dishes of an UpLink satellite ground station to the southwest, located midway between the Big Nickel Mine in Sudbury and Lake Superior. “You see the twin rises over there, sort of rounded, got all those wrinkles in them?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The local tribes call them Niish Obekwun. Means Two Shoulders. Past them’s a gap where a stream slices down to the White River. And then that third taller slope. Goes up pretty steep.”
Ricci nodded.
“Far side of it, on the west face, is our spot,” Oskaboose said. “Go ahead and check the moving map on the instrument panel. Groundhog like you, it’ll help with your orientation.”
Ricci glanced at the nonglare video display, where a Real Time Geographical Information System map overlaid a live image of the rough, frozen vista below, plotting the airplane’s course with a series of flashing red dots, and enclosing Earthglow’s position in a bright green square. It was helpful, he thought. And precisely matched his recollection of the Hawkeye-I photos he’d seen back in San Jose. With a zoom resolution of under three centimeters, they had afforded detailed aerial close-ups of the custom biological facility and its perimeter defenses. But Ricci had wanted to get a visceral feel of the land that for him would only come with firsthand observation.
Oskaboose leveled the aircraft. “In today’s world, Tarzan wouldn’t have to worry about being raised by apes,” he said. “You’ve got, what, a couple thousand gorillas left in Africa, that’s counting all five subspecies. And they’re more used to having their pictures snapped than models and movie stars. Some British kid in knickers being nursed at the breast of a furry mama would be spotted in no time by rich tourists on photo safaris. And brought back to civilization, heaven help him.”
The guide’s apparent non sequitur drew a puzzled glance from Ricci.
“Another instance of how the wilderness isn’t wilderness like it used to be,” Oskaboose said, noticing his expression.
Ricci grunted.
“Give you one more example,” Oskaboose continued. “People hear the name Tibet, they think robed Buddhist mystics levitating and astral-projecting in transcendental bliss. Or at least I do. But you know, it’s become just another getaway for Hollywood stars with personal problems. Donate a million bucks to the temple chest, they’ll issue you a wallet card listing the chakras, declare that you’re pure of spirit, and initiate you as an honorary monk of the order. I kid you not.” He made a sad tsking sound and motioned out the window again. “We’re about to head over the basin. You might want to take a peek.”
Ricci looked downward. The folds of the rise they were overflying were thick with pine forest. On the almost perpendicular uplift at the basin’s far side, the growth was sparser, clinging to the rock face in stubborn, woolly tufts between wide, white expanses of snow. Directly below them now, the tributary was a crystalline blue ribbon in the midday sunlight.