The door to her lab was unlocked. Refilling her cup from the coffee pot at the table, Iris listened to the answering machine. After a message from the TV station querying about her analysis, Todd Severyn’s twangy voice came on, stuttering in an attempt to ask her to return the call. She smiled. It must have been hard for the old cowboy to ask her to do that. I wonder what he’d be like in bed….
Sipping the coffee, Iris strode around the gas chromatograph hooked up to the experimental chamber, then slid into the chair and tapped on the keyboard. This would prove once and for all there was no connection between the breakdowns and Prometheus.
A long string of numbers appeared, highlighting an array of expected parameters. Frowning, Iris clicked on an additional data file and compared the two in silence. It didn’t make any sense.
She put down her cup, intently watching the screen. The jagged trace of a spectrograph jittered across the monitor, exactly matching the first.
She ran back her analysis of the Prometheus microbe eating the spilled oil and a sample she had obtained of the supposedly bad gasoline.
No difference.
The Prometheus microbe had infected the gas tanks in the cars that had broken down.
They can’t be the same! she thought. There was no vector. How did the microbe find its way into the gas tanks?
Her hands shook as she ran through her computerized rolodex to find Kramer’s number at Oilstar. First the Prometheus reaction rates were drastically different from what she had observed with her control specimen. Now, the organism seemed to have gotten into automobile gas tanks. Had it found a way to go airborne? Before giving her unofficial OK to the spraying operations, Iris had run numerous tests on the control sample—none of this should have been possible.
Unless Kramer had used two different microbes: one for her initial tests, and a more voracious one to be sprayed onto the Bay… where it would cause all sorts of havoc.
After six rings, a computerized voice instructed her to leave a voicemail message for Dr. Kramer. She hung up and tried again. Who could she call if Alex wasn’t around? She tried to remember—there was that jerk at the party… what was his name, Mitchell Stone? She dialed again, asking the Oilstar operator to connect her. Iris waited impatiently for him to answer, then finally slammed the phone down.
Damn! She brushed her black hair with a quick swipe and reached for her coffee. Draining the dregs, she paced, thinking of Mitch Stone, then Kramer’s party… then Todd Severyn.
It would be an excuse to call him. Otherwise, that Wyoming cowboy would keep bugging her until she went out with him, saying “ma’am” and “aww, shucks” every chance he got. Normally, she wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted by personal affairs, but there was something about him… was it his honesty that attracted her to him, or his naiveté?
She decided to wait before calling Todd to see if he knew how to reach Alex Kramer. She would recheck her work. First order of business. Drawing in a breath, she turned back to the spectrometer. She vowed to watch over every incubation period, recheck every procedure until things turned out right.
Things didn’t turn out right.
Iris watched the screen, at a loss for words. Being overly meticulous, she had taken three hours to go through the two-hour checklist. In the meantime she placed cautious calls to the labs where she had Fed-Expressed blind samples the day before. Her colleagues confirmed her analysis, but she gave them no details.
Kramer’s microbes were breaking down the oil spill, and now they were in the gas tanks. Eating gasoline.
Another quick call to Oilstar confirmed that Kramer was still out. Frustrated, she hung up the phone just in time to have it ring again, startling her. She grabbed the receiver, but it was only the TV news crew bugging her about the analysis. She put them off by using multisyllable technical jargon and saying she needed to recalibrate her results. If she talked now, she would send them into a panic!
Her mind started to reel with the implications of what she had discovered.
No use putting it off anymore; Todd might know how to reach Kramer. Plus, he probably had more common sense than most Oilstar people. Or anyone else, for that matter. She tapped the black lab table for a moment, then returned to the phone.
Rewinding her answering machine, she listened to the message again and dialed Todd’s number.
Chapter 26
Just off the exit ramp Connor Brooks could see the colored lights of BP, Union 76, Shell, Chevron, Texaco, and Oilstar gas stations. If Connor was going to rip anybody off, he decided it should be Oilstar. No question about it. They had already done enough to him.
He had hiked in the breakdown lane from the dead hulk of the lavender Gremlin as traffic whooshed past. Though it was ten o’clock at night, cars pulled in and out of the gas stations clustered in the exit-ramp oasis in a steady stream.
He glanced at the cars at the pumps, but did not see what he was looking for, nothing he could use. The tile-roofed station looked too quaint to be real. He went inside the Star-Shoppe convenience store and, using some of the money Dave Hensch had given him, bought one of the three-foot-long ropes of jalapeno beef jerky. The overweight clod running the cash register looked about as interested in his job as an Army doctor checking a thousand new recruits for hernias. All the better, Connor thought. Then he went out to stand at the pay phone.
Connor chewed on his beef jerky, picked up the phone and pretended to talk into it as he watched the cars come and go.
A mustard-yellow Volkswagen bus, a silver Honda, a red Nissan pickup, a Chevy, another Honda, a Toyota, a big black Caddy, a rusty pickup piled high with old furniture and cardboard boxes, a low-rider El Camino, three Winnebago campers in a convoy. He saw college students in the cars, families with kids, grandma and grandpa with a poodle barking behind a rolled-up window, a group of college girls coming back from a skiing trip.
But Connor saw no opportunities. Still, shit would happen, if he waited long enough.
He hung up the phone, walked around the building, then went back to his vigil. He had eaten all but four inches of his beef jerky by the time he made his move.
An old station wagon with fake wood sidewalls pulled up; it had only one man inside. The driver opened the door and clambered out, dressed in old jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, needing a shave, and stumbling as if he had been driving for the last four years without a break. Like a horse with blinders on, the gangly man headed for the rest room. He left the station wagon’s lights on, the engine running. Perfect.
Connor strode toward the car. Hesitation only wasted time.
By the time the driver had slipped through the battered gray door of the men’s room, Connor reached the station wagon. Not the type of vehicle he would have preferred, but he wasn’t picky.
He opened the driver’s door and slid inside. Connor’s heart pounded. No one had seen anything yet. Maybe this would teach the jerk to be more careful next time.
The seats were worn, and the interior smelled like burned garbage. The ash tray overflowed with crushed-out cigarillo tips. Connor scowled. Slob! But he didn’t care, as long as the car could take him to Flagstaff, Arizona. He adjusted the seat, gunned the engine, then put the station wagon into gear. “Ready or not, here I come!”
Just as the station wagon started moving, the gangly driver suddenly walked out of the rest room. He stopped for a moment, as if astonished to see someone stealing his car. Then he jumped in front of the station wagon, waving his hands for Connor to stop.