Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Spider-Man shook his head. “I would bet that those barrels, and those other shipments you’re discussing, have something to do with radioactives. Probably toxic.”

  “There’s a nasty logic to it,” Murray said. “After all, the channels for smuggling the stuff are already in place. The handoff points, the clandestine transport, everything’s ready. But then—” It was Murray’s turn to shudder. “The thought of toxic waste getting loose in the Aquifer…” he muttered. “The whole state would be glowing in the dark in a matter of days. And it would take centuries to get rid of it.”

  “We’ll just have to make sure it doesn’t happen,” Spider-Man said, somber-voiced. The thought haunting him at the moment was not of CCRC specifically, but of Hobgoblin. He’d thought Hobby had been the major mover behind much of the business that CCRC had gotten itself involved with. But Hobby was in jail now, and those illegal operations had been shut down—he thought.

  Someone else is managing this, Spidey thought. Not Hobgoblin. Who?

  “Murray,” Spider-Man said, “would you be willing to help out a guy in need of some information?”

  Murray laughed. “I thought I had been.”

  “You have… and I’m grateful. But I may need some more. Is there somewhere I can reach you privately? There may be some info I’ll need badly in the next few days. It may make a difference either to the Kennedy problem or to the Lizard situation. Or the one with Venom.”

  Murray fished out a business card from his jacket pocket. “That’s my home machine. You leave a message on that, tell me where to call you, and I’ll call you back as fast as I can. My pager number’s on there, too.”

  Spidey pocketed the card. Murray said, “Anytime, you let me know. I’ll do what I can for you.” And he grinned like a little kid. “I don’t often get to deal with super heroes, after all.”

  “Aw, shucks,” said Spidey.

  Murray smiled and started the car. “They used to tell me, you stay in Miami long enough, you’ll see every kind of person there is. Now I believe it.”

  * * *

  SPIDER-MAN webbed his way back to the Omni, back to his car, and had changed back to Peter Parker with no hassles. Peter drove back down to his own hotel, checked in, and found messages from Vreni and MJ waiting for him.

  “Call me,” MJ’s said simply. Peter, bemused, took out the phone—which he had been carrying with him that morning—and turned it on again, half expecting it to ring instantly, then glanced at the other message. It said, “Interesting high-finance connection. Meet me Howitzer’s, Miracle Mile…” and an address.

  Peter looked at it and tried to see the map in his head again. That was over toward Coral Gables, he thought. More interestingly, that was where Regners Wilhelm, that German investment bank, had its main offices. The message had come in about twelve-thirty; it was one now. Peter got moving.

  Howitzer’s was a little coffee bar in the Mile, in the shadow of yet another tall, handsome, concrete-and-steel confection: though it was not as huge and obvious as some of the buildings downtown. Vreni was waiting for Peter with a cup of coffee in front of her, and was scribbling furiously on a notepad.

  “How are you holding up?” she said.

  “Pretty well. I’m about to go find a developer for most of my film. If you have any requests, I’ll take care of them today before I drop the stuff off.”

  “That’s exactly what I was calling for. I need you to get me some of that building over there.” She pointed at it with her chin.

  “Got a hot tip?”

  “As hot as any so far. I finally made some police connections down here. Why are you smiling?”

  “Nothing, just a passing thought. Sorry. What did you find?”

  “Well.” Vreni sat back. “That bank over there—very respectable for a lot of years—has more rumors going around about it than any other bank in this town, I think. Mostly regarding money laundering.”

  “Oh, really?”

  She nodded. “So far, only one genuine conviction—a very very junior accounts executive, fired about a year and a half ago. But there are persistent reports of illicit funds transfers, stolen and counterfeit cashier’s checks, money going missing. And then something very strange happened in their computer department, just a little while ago. An employee was fired. A virus invaded their accounting computers, trashed everything. The usual thing: a grudge, the employee left a Trojan, as they call it, in the system where it would go off if he didn’t deactivate it periodically. Sort of a computer version of a nasty dead-man’s switch.”

  “Bad,” Peter said. “But you can always restore from the backups.”

  “Not if the building containing the backups is torched the same night,” said Vreni. And she got that feral grin.

  “Tell me,” Peter said. “This was just before some kind of investigation happened?”

  “Federal,” Vreni said. “RICO.”

  Racketeering as well, he thought. It was all getting very tangled.

  “The destruction of the backups was complete,” Vreni said. “The destruction in the computer itself was a little more selective. What the virus ate seems mostly to have been material pertaining to a company called CCRC.”

  Peter’s eyes widened. “What are they up to?”

  Vreni shook her head. “I hope to find out. This story is a lot bigger than even Kate thinks—that I’m sure of. I have a suspicion that the whole Cape Canaveral story is going to come in second to this.” She finished her coffee, closed her notebook. “Come on, let’s go get your pictures.”

  Peter went out with her and snapped the exterior of the building, then got some long-lens expose-type shots of the building’s reception area and of a guard glowering at them through the half-mirrored glass of the entrance. “This is all we’re going to get from these guys,” Vreni said. “Once they realized what I was interested in, they very politely threw me out. I’ve got stills of their executives from one of the corporate yellow pages sources, though. They’ll do all right.”

  Peter shot the end of his last roll and got it out of the camera. “What’s next, then?”

  “I’m going to go interview that junior executive who got fired,” Vreni said. “He’s out on bail, somewhere in the area. Meanwhile, the Shuttle launch is getting closer.” She looked suddenly tired. “And my sources don’t seem able to tell me anything about what’s going on at Kennedy.”

  Peter stood still and quiet for a moment, considering. Finally he said, “I had a favor that I was able to call in.” He told her, without attributing the information, what Murray had told him about the Kennedy situation. Vreni produced her pocket recorder and listened to what he had to say, then looked at him sharply when he finished. “Is this source reliable?”

  I only met him this morning, Peter thought. It’s a fair question. But aloud he said, “In my opinion, yes. I could be wrong—”

  Vreni looked at him. “I think your judgment is trustworthy. I wish I knew what to make of it all. I thought the Lizard was just—” she shrugged “—sort of a crazy thing running around, not something that you could order to do things. But if he’s actually committing thefts… How is he doing it?”

  Peter shook his head. Vreni smiled again. “This story is not only resisting being investigated,” she said, “it’s damn well taking the Fifth. I love it.”

  Peter was glad she was enjoying herself so. His problems were unfortunately not quite so abstract.

  “All right,” Vreni said, as they walked away from the Regners Wilhelm building together. “I’ve got some more interviews today, then starting this evening, I’ll be in the hotel. We’re getting close to our first deadline. I suspect I’ll spend the afternoon hunting down this Jürgen Gottschalk, our fired exec.”

  “Right,” Peter said.

  * * *

  THE Intercoastal Waterway runs up between Miami Beach and Miami proper, starting at the Port of Miami and flowing up past the opulent houses and hotels of Miami Shores and Bal Harbour. Between Biscayne Bouleva
rd on the “mainland” side, and Collins Avenue on both sides of the Waterway, many a beautiful house leans down to a private pier or a dock. The palms around them sway and glitter when the sun hits their polished leaves, the landscaping looks pincushion-perfect, and an odor of exclusivity clings to white houses and pink bungalows and mansions done in peach stucco and glass brick. Here and there such houses rise above a strip of private beach.

  One such house, shaded by palm and bougainvillea, perched by the bay shore, lights gleaming from inside as the dusk settled in. By a blue pool surrounded by pink paving, raised above the line of the waters of the bay, a man sat at a white cast-iron table, drinking an iced tea and staring out at the water.

  He was quite young, blond, with a thin, fine-featured face, and very blue eyes. He had been sitting by this pool, staring at that bay, for almost three weeks now.

  House arrest was a polite name for it, but that was what it was. There were police outside his front door, police outside his side doors, police staked out in boats down by the water. Some of them were not police officers per se, but federal agents of one kind or another. If he put a foot outside his property, they all went with him—and they let him know that they didn’t like him to go outside, not for very long. So mostly he didn’t bother going out. If the phone rang, he didn’t answer it because he knew it was bugged—a friend on the force had tipped him off before the court order went through, and he had had just time enough to slip out and make a few vital calls from a pay phone before the house arrest started as well.

  He sat still and did nothing, because others had told him to. It would all be straightened out in a while, they’d said. Be patient. The heat will come off. The feds will get off your case. He had not inquired how, or why—he was sure that money was changing hands somewhere. Money always changed hands. Not even the feds were invulnerable to that.

  Evening was fading into night. He looked at the glitter of lights across the Bay Causeway and thought how very much he just wanted to get onto the Causeway, drive until he got down to the airport, catch a Lufthansa flight home to Munich… But there was no point in it. Even if he could get away from the house without his watchdogs—highly unlikely—even if he managed to successfully exit the country with one of several spare passports the others had given him, the German government would only extradite him right back here again. They were entirely too willing to show cooperation to the U.S. in these matters.

  No, better to sit still. He got up, strolled over to the edge of the terrace, and leaned on it. Twenty feet straight down was the water, and not too far away was the police boat. He gave its occupants an insouciant wave and strolled back to the table, sat down again. He lifted his iced tea.

  Under the nearby bougainvillea there was a rustling. Palm rats, he thought, exasperated, and turned to look.

  The breath caught in his throat. His mouth dried. From the darkness under the big spreading tree came something darker: a man’s shape, tall, broad in the shoulders, wearing some kind of dreadful-eyed mask, horribly fanged. A white design was plastered across the front of him. A spider—

  The mask smiled, and a long, slime-dropping tongue flicked out. Jürgen Gottschalk gulped, and choked, dry. He watched the news. He knew who this was. More, he knew what had happened to his colleague in the Miami satellite office of Regners Wilhelm just the other day.

  Slowly, Venom advanced on him. He stood up.

  “No point in running, Mr. Gottschalk,” said that soft, deep voice, a voice with teeth in it.

  Jürgen’s mouth worked, but no words came out. The blank eyes, the awful grin, transfixed him as if he were a spotlit deer, with someone sighting down a rifle along the beam. “Some people we know,” Venom said softly, “suggested we go talk to your friend Mr. Harkness the other day. He told us some things we needed to know, but not as much as we had in mind. We had to check some of his files before we left his office, just to reconfirm some of the things he didn’t tell us. And your name figured very prominently. We think we should have a talk.”

  “Aba… ba… bout what?”

  Venom sat down very casually in the other white iron chair at the table, picked up the iced-tea glass, and sniffed it. “No alcohol,” he said. “That’s good. We like people who have their wits about them when we talk to them.” Those blank eyes fastened on Jürgen’s. “Those files,” Venom said conversationally, “indicated times and dates for some very interesting meetings out in the water which have been taking place of late. We attended one of those meetings the other night. It was fascinating.”

  Jürgen swallowed. He had seen the news report. Fascinating was not the word he would have chosen.

  “Now,” Venom said, leaning in, and a pseudopod rippled out of his upper arm and patted Jürgen on the cheek, while Venom leaned his chin on his hand, “we’re afraid we weren’t able to get those people to deliver the message we gave them. We suppose it’s better to do such things oneselves, after all. We were going to tell their boss to cut it out.” He smiled more widely yet. “It was rather distressing, though, that we couldn’t get them to tell us anything about the source of the barrels they were handling that evening. And the people who had come to pick them up couldn’t help us very much—well, we gave them a chance, but it’s the usual problem: keep the lower echelons in the dark and they can’t spill too much information. They may spill something else, of course…”

  That grin spread wider, until it seemed to have more teeth in it than a museum of dentistry. “We weren’t able to investigate those barrels too closely,” Venom said, “but we want you to tell us everything about what was in them, and where it comes from, and where it goes.…”

  Jürgen shook all over. “Now, we know what you’re thinking,” Venom said. “You’re thinking that if you tell us, the people who you’re involved with in this business will kill you. And so they probably will, eventually. At least they’ll try. What you need to know, though, is that if you don’t tell us, right now, we will kill you.” The pseudopod, wavering in front of Jürgen’s eyes, sharpened itself into a thin stiletto, and delicately, delicately traced a line across the front of his throat, just enough to let him feel the nick of the razor’s edge.

  “We can make it take quite a while,” Venom said. “You won’t be able to yell for help, because your larynx is one of the first things we’ll cut out. After that—” Venom shook his head and shrugged. “We could be here all evening, couldn’t we? The people in the boat down there won’t come up here unless they see or hear some reason to. Your guards out in the street won’t bother coming in—they know there’s no way out except by the front or side doors, and they checked those long ago. No, we’ll just have a lovely evening together. The longest one of your life.”

  “It’s ruh… ruh… ruh—” Jürgen’s mouth was just too dry to get anything out.

  “First word?” Venom said helpfully. “Sounds like? Here.” He pushed the iced tea toward Jürgen.

  Jürgen clutched the glass and drank. When he set it down a moment later, gasping, it hadn’t helped all that much, but he was able to croak. “Radioactives.”

  “What kind?”

  “Transuranics.”

  Venom waved that knife-pseudopod casually in front of Jürgen’s face. His eyes fixed on it as if it were a snake about to strike. “Do be a little more forthcoming, or we’ll start getting the idea that you’re being purposely obstructive.”

  “Oh, no, no!” Jürgen said,“nein! Ich weiss nicht—”

  “English, please,” Venom said gently. “We never did finish that last Berlitz course. Life got too busy.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You’d better. What kind of radioactives?”

  “It’s waste of some kind. Radioactive waste.”

  “You’re telling us,” Venom said gently, and a bit of deadly edge was beginning to show in his voice, “that someone in Florida is shipping toxic radioactive waste out of the United States in those little barrels? Not a very cost-effective way to do it. Where is it goin
g?”

  “No, it comes in—”

  “Where is it coming from?”

  “Eastern Europe. I don’t know where, exactly. Russia, maybe.”

  Venom’s blank eyes narrowed a little. “And they’re shipping it to Florida?”

  “Brazil first.”

  “From Brazil to Florida. And then what’s happening?”

  “Then it gets shipped back.”

  “Not as toxic waste, surely.”

  “No. Treated—reclaimed—refined somehow.”

  Venom nodded. “We only know of one plant that does that kind of work,” he said. “It’s in Europe, in England, at Sellafield. The THORP facility. Nasty filthy thing,” he said softly. “Think of all the fish in the Irish Sea that one can’t grill without counting their heads first, because of the waste from that place. But never mind that for the moment. You’re telling us that there is a nuclear waste reprocessing plant. A secret one, for no government would be so stupid as to try to site such a thing here openly—”

  “I didn’t tell you that.”

  “Oh, but you implied it. Clever, to let me draw the conclusion, so that you can truly tell your masters, when they catch up with you, that you didn’t tell the main part of the secret.” Venom leaned closer. That pseudopod rippled out again, forked, grabbed a pinch of Jürgen’s cheek in it, and wiggled it back and forth playfully. “Very clever indeed. You may survive this. So. Toxic waste is shipped from Eastern Europe, heaven only knows how many miles overland, and then to some seaport, and then is shipped thousands of miles to Brazil in those drums—labeled as what? Industrial oil? Fertilizer? And then shipped again, from Brazil up through the Caribbean past the Leewards and the Windwards, some of the most delicately balanced ecosystems in the world, and up to Florida—and then stored here. In what have to be fairly significant quantities, to produce—what? Plutonium, surely, is what would be extracted if there was enough waste of the right kind. And no one would bother for anything less. It’s much too much trouble.”