Strawman Made Steel (10 page)

He was an old-looking fifty-something. The
feet poking beneath his desk were sheathed in argyle socks and shod in oxford
wingtips. But somewhere above his ankles and below his breastbone, he’d lost
the formal urge. His restless hands poked from the sleeves of a threadbare
tweed jacket. Bright purple suspenders peeked from beneath his suit lapels as
he swung off his chair.

His large head was made to look pointy by a
fringe of black hair laced with silver that circled his bald dome like the
arboreal zone of a mountain. Wrinkles gathered over the entire surface of his
face as though he’d been slowly tapped of vital juices by daily labor, a prune
drying in the sun.

But when he rounded his desk, which held a
maze of paper columns, his eyes were quick, and his movements lithe.

He smiled and said, “You’re the man from
Dupont?”

I smiled and said, “And you’re the
Thanksgiving turkey.”

His smile got the quivers, threw its legs
in the air, and died. “You’re not the man from Dupont.”

I said nothing about a turkey. I hadn’t
made my mind up yet.

Then he fell back on territorial rights. “I
have an important meeting. With whom do you wish to speak?”

“Someone who splits his infinitives and
burns his interrogatives.”

His pruney eyes blinked once before he
replied, “Grammar is not my forte.”

“What is your forte?”

He decided then that I might be yanking his
chain. “I’m a biologist.”

“What do you biologer?”

“I run many projects. Most target
antivenins.”

“Toxicology?”

He spread his hands. “Of course. Target
practice is more fun with live birds.”

“Would you show me some of these birds?”

“Our poisons?” He got all patrician and
shook his head. “I’m afraid―”

“Mr. Speigh would appreciate your showing
me.”

That name had a visible impact on the good
doctor. His stance lost its bullocking cant. Doubt filled his eyes.

He said, “Which Mr. Speigh?”

Now it was my turn to be confused. “How
many do you keep around here?”

“Mr. Eustace Speigh holds the executive
office, but his younger brother, Mr. Eutarch Speigh, manages a number of
programs.”

“Yours one of them?”

He nodded.

“Good boss?”

He gazed at the wall and tugged at his chin
with thumb and forefinger.

“I wouldn’t say he has the managerial
touch.”

“What’s that in English?”

He let go his chin and returned my gaze.

“He often mistakes his employees for
something stuck to the bottom of his shoe, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

I hunted my pockets for a cigarette before
remembering I was on the wagon. I settled for plucking a card from the pack in
my pants pocket. I handed it over.

“You’ve a nice place, Doc, but I don’t
fancy growing old and dying in it. Here’s the beef: I’m a private investigator,
here with the blessings of your boss, hunting a murderer who looks like he made
hay with one of your fancy poisons.”

The good doctor paled. The wrinkles made
his face look like an arty line drawing by Giacometti,
Portrait de l’Academic
Spooked
or something.

Anger flushed his face red again in no
time. “If you’re suggesting―”

“No suggestions, Doc. Straight up: you guys
cook up death elixirs for the almighty dollar, then get worked up when someone
points out the bleeding obvious: put a loaded gun in a room and sooner or later
it’ll go off.”

“Come,” he said, and strode from the room.

I followed him along a corridor, then
another, then up a flight of stairs. At the head of the stairs was a pair of
heavy white doors inset with a pair of small, square viewports. The doctor
pushed the doors open and went through.

I followed, and a smell like ether tickled
my nose. The doors closed noisily behind me and cut-off the sunlight from the
corridor. From the gloom emerged a lab, a dimness pocked by gaslights. At
benches spread through the lab, half a dozen men and women were hunched in
different postures of concentration.

“Hydra,” said the doctor. “One of my
projects.”

I patted my pocket again for a cigarette
before giving it away.

“Why’s it so dark in here?” I said.

“Sunlight kills things,” the doc said.

“I thought that was the point.”

He gave me a look that said ‘get an
education.’

“Do you know how much legacy military
biotechnology leaked into native fauna after the Event?”

“No idea,” I said. “A little of it leaked
into me a couple days back.”

His brow worried at that before he said,
“Too much.”

He walked me over to a bench where a man
was staring down a microscope. He was pale, and his white lab coat was stained
brown where the sleeves swept the bench.

The doctor spoke to the man. “Are these the
Macaque biopsies?” The man lifted his eyes far enough away from the microscope
to nod.

The doc gestured for me to look. The man
backed away from the microscope, looking at me like I was a medic about to
palpate an organ he cared about.

I had a time seeing down both lenses. I was
bigger than the guy, and had to squint down one. What I saw looked like a jar
of red and green jellybeans.

“Thanks, but I had lunch already,” I said.

“You’re looking at a piece of monkey. It
has been stained to mark poisoned tissue green.”

“Okay. Not a happy monkey―not even before
you carved a hole in it.”

“The poison in question came originally
from a rare octopus that lives off the western coast of Australia.”

“The monkey got around.”

The doc smiled tightly. “Were that were
so.”

I withdrew and let the pale man look at his
jellybeans again.

“Why don’t you connect the dots for me,” I
said.

“This toxin was co-opted for military use a
long time ago. Now, by the same means with which it was transcoded and smuggled
into new species, it has spread to five native species in the North American
continent. Five at last count, that is.”

“Are you telling me the next bunny I meet
could turn killer?”

The doc tucked his thumbs under those
purple braces. “I’m telling you we do good work here.”

“Good work that requires plenty of poison
and plenty of monkeys.”

He shrugged―yes and proud of it.

In a corner of the room, one of the
labcoats plugged a machine into the pressure line driven by a boiler. A valve
opened with a hiss, and the innards of the machine began to spin noisily.

I said, “So where do you link this stuff to
a fuse? Have the bunnies got that working too?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Police forensics said the poison was most
likely inert until the victim was given a catalyst to wake it up.”

I watched the doc. Cogs were winding way
back behind his eyes. I could hear them.

I said, “You’re familiar with that kind of
kit?”

“I’m familiar with the delivery mechanisms,
yes.”

“Something you guys could knock up?”

He shook his head. He still looked like he’d
fallen off this conversation, and was a few miles back down the road, dusting
himself off.

He said, “Not Hydra. Not in any of my
projects.”

“Another project then?”

“It wouldn’t be illegal,” he hedged.

I waited for him to answer the question.
His gaze touched various objects in the room as if cataloguing them for the
first time.

“I’m not privy to the goals and materials
of every project conducted at Alltron.”

“That’s wonderful.”

His pruney forehead puckered in a frown. “Mr.
McIlwraith, I think I’ve been very patient and accommodating, but I have work
to do.”

He held the door open for me. On the walk
back to his office I made conversation for the both of us.

“I guess breaking work into chunks, keeping
groups blind to each other, encourages innovation and removes distraction.
During World War II the same policy did a great job of quashing niggling doubts
about the moral dilemma of building a nuclear bomb. Maybe you had a
great-great-great grandfather working on a harmless little timer circuit.”

The doc entered his office and sat. His
gaze got lost in a photo of a lady I assumed was his wife.

He said drily, “So you’re a student of
history too, Mr. McIlwraith?”

“It’s the only topic.”

I’d almost had enough of riding the good
doctor. Maybe he’d indulge me one more question.

“What’s your opinion of the Event?”

A twinkle returned to his eye, even as it
stayed fixed on his wife.

“I’m a biologist. Why would I have one?”

“Everyone does. What’s the water cooler
gossip? You’ve got physicists and mathematicians here. I noticed them moping
about the joint, guys with rugged, dented foreheads and noisy demons.”

He smiled, looked at me, and ran a hand
over his smooth, pointed head. “Have you ever heard of the god particle, Mr. McIlwraith?”

I shrugged. “No, but I get the idea.
Deities are a dime a dozen these days.”

“Well, I believe on the day of the Event we
found the god particle. We woke it. And, Mr. McIlwraith―” He lifted his palms
and read a message in their too-wrinkled skin. “―It was an angry god.”

— 8 —

On the north boundary of Alltron’s
campus lay a branch line, and on the south a taxicab rank. I flipped a coin and
headed north, stopped, thought about it some more, then went south.

It was getting near home time and already
there was a queue swelling for the taxicabs. I bought a coffee and a puzzle
book from a streetside vendor, and sat on a stained wooden bench twenty feet
back from the curb.

The cabs were a wall of yellow metal,
constantly flowing to the right and splintering into the rush of general
traffic. The motion helped to keep the queue queue-like and the expletives to a
minimum. Diesel fumes hung heavy in the air.

I drank coffee and did magic squares. In my
peripheral vision, Alltron employees spurted past in homogenized blobs of
middle management or grousers, oil and water.

I was joining the dots in my puzzle book on
what could’ve turned out to be a Speigh, when I heard Dr Lucius Arnold’s voice.
His overly enunciated syllables were woven with a higher-pitched Bostonian
chatter. I searched the crowd and caught a glimpse of him hand in hand with his
wife.

I decided I liked Dr Arnold.

They embarked near the head of the queue. I
got another coffee. The guy who sold it gave me a toothy smile, and I
considered telling him his teeth were wasted on a captive market.

An hour later and the queue was beginning
to show breaks. A chill was starting to rise up my legs, but any more of the
dirty water the guy was calling coffee and murder might look good.

That’s when I saw him. One of Dr Arnold’s
staff. One of the anonymous few assigned to Hydra. He’d doffed his lab coat and
was getting about in a brown single-breasted suit that looked like velvet in
the failing light. He toted a briefcase, and the way he held it made it seem
naked without a set of handcuffs.

I pocketed my puzzle book and joined the
queue.

When he got into the back seat of a cab,
which lurched into the traffic, I slipped past a cluster of men and women
standing at the open back door of a cab deciding how to split across cabs. I
slid onto the back seat, and shut the door. The smallest guy in the group swore
at me with his arms.

I thrust cash through the grill to the
driver. “Tail job. That cab,” I said, pointing at the back of the cab the
Alltron man had taken, which was already shrinking with distance.

The engine kept humming. We went nowhere.

The driver, a kid of no more than eighteen,
sucked his teeth and gazed sleepily at me in the rear-view mirror.

I poked more cash through the hole. He
counted it, and stowed it in a shirt pocket. Then he planted his foot, and the
cab leapt forward, pushing me against the abraded leather seat.

“Your lucky day, mister,” the kid said. “I
chase tail like no one.”

“Save the bragging. Stick to that cab and
you’ll get a bonus.”

My cab was the typical New York Sherman
Tank but the kid rode it like a go-cart. The engine growled up and down as the
traffic locked up and came loose like an avalanche of shale. The kid worked with
a margin of inches. We moved in a cocoon of deep-throated horn blast.

Time and again I thought he’d given the
prey too much lead, but we’d turn a corner and I’d see it easing along, four or
five cars ahead.