"You hired me to find, not acquire. That's why I only charged a finder's fee."
Swindell fingered the cap off the pen. Instead of a nib, a slim hollow-nosed needle gleamed in its place. And in the clear reservoir tube, a vile yellow liquid sloshed.
"So anyway," he said absently, "seein' as how he was makin' blackmail noises, I gave him a little squirt of gas. Got me a pen tricked out to deliver it. I just shoved that sucker up the other sucker's nostril and gave him what-for. Answer your question?"
"It does."
The line went dead.
Connors Swindell hung up the phone. He exhaled a hot breath. This was getting deeper. First murder, then dealing in nukes, now kidnapping, but if he was going to survive the real-estate slump of the nineties, he had to take steps.
And hell, it wasn't that much worse than some of the things he had pulled in his used-car days, rolling back odometers and selling cars with defective brakes. A few more folks died, was all.
He capped his custom Waterman and returned it to his inside jacket pocket. He was down to his last squirt of Lewisite. No telling when he might have to fall back on it.
Chapter 19
Don Cooder entered the network studio in lower Manhattan wearing the same unflinching expression that stared down ninety million American TV viewers each weeknight at seven o'clock--six-thirty central time.
The program director met him, waving a sheaf of papers and shouting at the top of his lungs.
"Don! Where on earth have you been? The brass want to know what's going on with tonight's Twenty-four Hours installment, and I don't know what to tell them."
"Tell them," Don Cooder said forcefully, "we're working on the most explosive edition ever."
"But the promos!" the program director moaned, hurrying after him. "We don't have any promos to air!"
"That's what I came down for," Cooder bit out.
"What about the script?"
"No script. It's all live, all spontaneous, in the Don Cooder tradition."
That comment stopped the program director in his tracks. Although the highest-paid anchor in the business, Don Cooder was not renowned for his smooth extemporaneous delivery. In fact, without a script his demeanor was closer to that of a pregnant bride walking down the aisle.
Visions of sixty minutes of impending prime-time disaster flashed through his mind as he followed Cooder to the familiar Evening News with Don Cooder set. Cooder signaled a cameraman and the set became active. Lights blazed. Cameras dollied in.
Cooder marched over to a stool and perched on it. He was into stools this year, his previous attempt to be different-standing before a global map like a wrapped-too-tight geography teacher-had flopped worse than the much-ridiculed sweater-vest gimmick.
Taking a deep breath, the program director threw him a cue. The red light went on. Don Cooder gave the camera lens a challenging look.
"Tonight on Twenty-four Hours," he intoned, "you will see, live for the first time on network television, an armed neutron bomb capable of obliterating New York City. And, too, you will meet the high-school girl who built it. Are our high-school students building deadly nuclear devices under our very noses? The answers tonight, on Twenty-four Hours. Be there. Or be square."
The program director wore shock on his face like baby powder.
"Don," he gasped. "Say it's a joke. Please, Don. I know you don't have a sense of humor, but lie if you have to."
"Don Cooder never jokes," Don Cooder growled.
Without another word, he left the studio and the building, confident that by the next rating book he would be the top network anchor in the universe.
The Twenty-four Hours promotion was aired four times that day. Twice during the local evening news, once during the Evening News with Don Cooder, and again in the dead half-hour before local programming gave way to eight o'clock and the start of prime time.
All across the nation, millions of people saw that promo.
Calvin Taggert, in a New York bar, where he had followed an intricate trail to Sky Bluel's current whereabouts, was the first. Unable to locate Bluel, Taggert had bugged her parents' telephone. From the cryptic twice-daily calls the girl had made, he figured out she was somewhere in Manhattan. So he had caught the red-eye and hit the bricks.
Sky Bluel had let slip something about a very important national TV news appearance. Taggert swiftly cased the various network headquarters buildings without result. So he had repaired to a bar for a quick J ocks before resuming the search.
There Don Cooder's hard-bitten voice jumped out of the bar TV like a western gunfighter calling on an owlhoot to draw.
"There is a God," Taggert breathed, finishing his drink in a gulp. Slapping down a generous tip, he rushed outside to hail a cab.
Barry Kranish, sipping a jagua-juice cocktail after his second visit to his urologist, also caught the promo.
He lay in bed, propped up with five pillows-sore from the flexible scope the urologist had burrowed into his tender urethra in a futile search for bloodsucking catfish-and watched local news recaps of the decimation of Dirt First!!
The urologist, who had assured Kranish there were no candiru lurking in his gallbladder, had prescribed two Valium and a month's rest.
"I am not overworked," Kranish had protested.
"Once these candiru get into the gallbladder, there's almost no way to dislodge them. I don't want to end up as a catfish's last meal. The rain forest needs me."
"I can understand your concern," the doctor said soothingly. "Your fine organization decimated, naturally you'd be depressed, overwrought. Take the Valium. "
"I only use natural antidepressants," Kranish spat, storming out. He bought a five-gallon can of double-chocolate ice cream on the way home.
As he watched TV, licking chocolate off a natural wood spoon, he wondered why his mood hadn't improved. Chocolate had never failed him before. Maybe it was artificial.
Kranish perked up at the stentorian blare of the Twenty-four Hours promo. He had always liked Don Cooder, especially after he had saved the humpback whale. Too bad the guy came across as such a stiff, always trying to sound hip when he wasn't.
Kranish absorbed the promo in stony silence. When it was over, he looked like a poster boy for the genetically stunned.
His mouth opened. "Neutron bomb?" he croaked.
His mind went back to the events of the last five days. The attack by those crazed would-be infiltrators. He knew now they were government plants. Even if the Asian one didn't exactly affect the button-down look. But the skinny guy had had pig written all over him.
That experience was shocking enough, but when the FBI later showed up at his door, spattered with pigeon guano, demanding to know about the Dirt First!! protest at Connors Swindell's Condome construction site, Kranish angrily got into the agents' collective faces.
"I happen to be Dirt First's legal counsel," he had told them indignantly. "And I deny any specific knowledge of any organized Dirt First!! protests. And even if I did, I claim client confidentiality. So just tell me where I go to bail them out."
"The morgue," he was told. The oinker FBI agent seemed almost pleased to relay the terrible news.
Woodenly Barry Kranish had gone to the morgue. He emerged shaking with the realization that he was a general without soldiers. And all-at least if the FBI could be believed-because the noble ecowarriors of Dirt First!! had attempted to save the oppressed desert scorpion and its precious abode.
After bailing himself out, Barry Kranish had returned to Dirt First!! headquarters and his private digs to avenge their deaths.
He had had no idea how to pursue vengeance. He was, after all, kind of a mellow guy. Managing finances was more in his line.
But as he watched the Twenty-four Hours promo, it all came together. Whatever had gone awry, it all started with that upstart girl Sky Bluel and her environmentally reckless neutron bomb. Kranish knew all about the horrors of the neutron bomb. He had voted for Jimmy Carter. Twice.