Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Jürgen nodded.

  “And then,” Venom said, “that refined plutonium is shipped back the same way, all that distance, mislabeled as who-knows-what, through some of the world’s most crowded sealanes, and across the Atlantic, where the currents would carry this material, if it leaked, halfway around the world before anyone knew. Killing everything in the water where the concentration exceeded a part per billion in the seawater. But then, back to Europe—and someone in Europe is getting significant amounts of plutonium, ‘unmarked’ as it were, leaving no records with the various atomic energy commissions of the countries which deal in such things. And there it vanishes.”

  Venom grinned, leaned even closer. “Into the hands of… Well, there are too many people who would pay good money for untraceable weapons-grade plutonium, here and there. Very slick indeed. And then your bank launders the payments for these services. Isn’t that how it works?”

  Mute, Jürgen nodded, took another drink of iced tea.

  Venom stood up. Jürgen cowered down against the table, covering his head. If he was going to die now, he didn’t want to see it coming. From above him, the dark, deep, smiling voice said, “You’ve been fairly helpful. We won’t kill you just now. That might suggest to your bosses that someone’s getting too close to them, and they would attempt to elude us. We don’t want that. Anyone so careless with the lives of billions of innocent people deserves to be caught totally by surprise—by me. So, no warnings. You will speak of this meeting of ours to no one. Anything that makes us think that you have spoken, and we’ll be back.” Venom chuckled. “No one will be able to stop us. No one will be able to get to you in time to stop what will happen, or even to cut it short. All you need to do is be quiet.”

  A long silence ensued. It was nearly twenty minutes before Jürgen dared look up. That dark presence was gone. The city, unconcerned, glittered across the bay.

  Jürgen staggered to his feet, then fled back toward the house, ran into the bathroom, and threw up.

  EIGHT

  “TWO more days down in Cocoa,” MJ’s voice said.

  Peter sighed. It was the next morning, and he was just out of the shower again, getting ready to go meet Vreni before she retreated into her room to write for the day.

  “So you’re not going to be up to Kennedy for the launch tomorrow?”

  “No,” MJ said, “I don’t think so. Maurice isn’t a big fan of early mornings anyway, and the Shuttle goes up at—I think it must be seven-thirty.”

  “That’s right,” Peter said. “So you’re not going to do the Rocket Garden after all.”

  “Maybe the day after. He does keep changing his mind. The other production staff, the AD and the wardrobe people, they’re going crazy. No sooner are they ready for one shot, everything set up and the lighting right, than he changes his mind and wants to do something else.”

  Peter shook his head and reached over to the table for the top contact sheet of many on the pile he was looking through. “Sounds like you’re beginning to think it would have been smarter not to take this job at all.”

  “Pleeease,” MJ said, and she sighed too. “I thought we were going to see each other every night.”

  “Oh, I know. But look, I appreciate what you’re doing.”

  “I know you do, Tiger. At least the clothes are nice. And the swimsuits are really lovely.” Peter could hear the wicked smile in her voice even though he couldn’t see it. “You’d like the swimsuits.”

  Peter secured the phone between shoulder and head while he riffled through the contact sheets again. “Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, huh?”

  “Not quite that high quality, maybe, but pretty neat anyway. The only problem is, we can’t swim in them.”

  “Why not? Will they shrink?”

  “No, that’s not the problem. They’ve been having shark alerts all up and down the coast.”

  Peter came up with one sheet, the pictures of his first fight with the Lizard, and put it aside. “Don’t let me hear that you’ve been trying to lure Maurice near the water,” he said. There was a pause, and then MJ chuckled.

  “Don’t tempt me. Still, if I got a nice big bucket of low-calorie tofu and threw it in.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said. “Always assuming the AD is expert enough to take over.”

  “Oh, she is. It’s amazing she hasn’t already tried to electrocute him. I’ll tell you, though, I’ll be glad to be done with this.”

  “What? You’re shooting on the beach! That should be wonderful!”

  “Oh, please. Between coating ourselves with sunscreen and getting sand in every orifice, we all look like a bunch of jelly doughnuts by the end of the day.” Peter burst out laughing. “It’s easy for you to laugh, buster! Miss one spot, and it burns! Being out in the sun all day is no joke. And we don’t even have a tent or a marquee to shelter under. Maurice decided we wouldn’t need it. It’s the only permanent decision he’s made all this week.”

  “Well, you make sure you cover up as well as you can. I don’t like jelly doughnuts when they’re overdone.”

  “Trust me, it’s on my list. How’re you doing?”

  Peter laid one hand on the pile of contacts as if to hide them from himself. “Officially I’ve got another quiet day,” he said. “Vreni’s writing.”

  “That’s ‘officially.’ But…” MJ trailed off.

  “Oh, of course,” said Peter. “I have other business to attend to.” He had grown cautious about saying anything out loud or in the clear, since it had occurred to him the other night that it was possible the hotel operators could occasionally listen in on their clients’ conversations. “I have to go looking for our missing friend this evening.”

  “He’s still missing, is he?”

  “Uh-huh. But I think I may have a slightly better idea of where to look for him.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Well, while I was swinging through town the other day—” MJ giggled a little “—I met a gent who’s been able to help me cut through some red tape. I’ll tell you all about him when we get around to seeing each other. But he’s really been extremely useful, and he’s given me some equipment that’s going to be very handy for what I’m doing.”

  “What, better than that big goggle-eyed thing you’ve got?”

  “Please!” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’ve done some nice wildlife photography with it, but nothing much else. Not so far, anyway. Tomorrow morning I think I may do better.”

  “Going to take it up to the launch, then? I wish I could be there.”

  “You’ll be close enough; you’ll be able to see it go up. It’ll take off right over your head.”

  “Assuming the woodpeckers don’t get it,” MJ said.

  Peter laughed. A lot of people at Kennedy still hadn’t gotten over the embarrassment of the aborted STS-68 launch, when it was discovered, just a week before launch date, that the insulation cladding of the main fuel tank had nearly a hundred holes drilled in it by woodpeckers—one of the local varieties of flicker, actually—and Discovery had had to be moved back inside the VAB so that the damaged fuel tank could be swapped for a new, unpecked one. The Wildlife Management people had put up decoy owls and broadcast flicker distress calls in an attempt to drive the birds away. It seemed to have been successful so far, but the Kennedy Center falconers had been standing eighteen-hour watches for the past three days, with instructions to get rid of any flicker that showed its beak around 39-A—with extreme prejudice, if necessary, but at least to run them well downrange. Local radio stations had been getting a good deal of mileage out of the story over the past few days; for Peter’s part, he doubted he would have been quite so lenient with the woodpeckers.

  “Look, honey, I’ve gotta go—or I’m gonna be pecked to death by angry reporters. She wants a look at the contacts to pick the best one for her story, then I’m going to have to run and find a processor who’ll do me some reasonable prints for less than an arm and a leg. The people who did these contacts were really t
errible.”

  “That’s funny. I would have thought with all the modeling shoots around Miami, you could have found people who’d do decent prints.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Peter said regretfully. He had tried to travel light on this trip, and now he was wishing desperately that he had brought his entire darkroom setup with him. “They seem a little slipshod down here, at least by New York standards, but never mind, look, I’ll probably be in and out for most of the day. You can safely try to reach me until, oh, mid-afternoon, but after that…”

  “I won’t call you,” she said, more or less in the voice of an annoyed child forbidden to play with a new and favorite toy. “But if you don’t call me, I’m going to get worried.”

  “You’re just going to have to be worried, then. MJ, I’m doing all right.”

  “No you’re not,” she said. “Venom is in the neighborhood. ‘All right’ is at best an inadequate description. I don’t like the thought that he might get anywhere near you.”

  “Don’t worry. If he does. I’ll kick sand in his face. Or something.”

  “Promises, promises,” MJ muttered. “You call me tonight.”

  “I will.”

  * * *

  PETER spent all that morning and the better part of the early afternoon going over the contacts with Vreni. She was in a bad mood, and she didn’t like any of them. The angles were wrong, the lighting was poor, they were underexposed or overexposed, they included more material than she wanted or excluded things that she claimed would have made a better shot, they were badly composed, they had too many verticals or too few…

  Peter sat and listened to her carping criticisms and wondered if this was the kind of thing that MJ was putting up with from Maurice. Maybe I should offer to introduce them. About twenty minutes into the critique session, Peter looked thoughtfully at Vreni and said, “How’s the article coming?”

  She fixed him with an unfriendly stare. “Better than these pictures.”

  “Now, Vreni.” Peter smiled at her and he meant it. She sagged back in the chair on the other side of the table in her hotel room, and sighed.

  “All right,” she admitted, “I’m not happy with it. Not at all. There’s material about this whole mess that I’m missing. I’ve found a lot of guns, but none of them are smoking. Lots more interlocking company registries, and shell companies, linking CCRC and the German merchant bank. Public records seem to indicate that they’ve been selling these shell companies back and forth as a way to launder money. But no one seems any too sure where the money’s coming from.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Peter said. “The information got lost when their computer had its little fit.”

  Vreni nodded. “That seems to be the story. And the information on where that money is coming from is really the heart of the whole business. As for the security situation at Kennedy, I haven’t been able to find out any more than we already know. Whatever happened, whatever was taken, everyone is stonewalling.”

  Peter sat quiet for the moment. He found himself wondering if his meeting with Murray was an example of the Old Boys’ Network in action—with the emphasis on the “boys.” It would be annoying if it were. Then again, his connection with Murray seemed to stem from Murray’s excitement at working with a real-live super hero, gender notwithstanding. Still, he could see how frustrating this must be for her. “Vreni,” he said, “I don’t know what to tell you. You’re the reporter, and I’m sure you’ll find out what you need somehow in time for Kate.”

  Vreni looked at him blearily. “From your mouth to God’s ear,” she said.

  “Meantime,” Peter said, spreading the contact sheets across the desk again, “you’re going to have to make some kind of choice from these. I’ve got to go to the processor and try to beat some kind of decent results out of them. Look here…”

  They spent the next half hour or so with their heads bent over the contacts, until finally Vreni came up with five or six shots that she liked for the feature, and four or five second-string photos as standbys. Peter jotted down the exposure numbers, but looked up at one point to find Vreni gazing thoughtfully at one of the shots of the Lizard.

  “Anything more on why he’s here?” Peter said.

  Vreni shook her head. “Some of my sources think that there’s some connection with Venom.” She was ticking off the exposures one by one, and her pen paused by one exposure number, the picture of Spider-Man and Venom which had been taken by his little camera. “That Questar,” she said, impressed, “does get some brilliant results. I could swear you were right on top of them.”

  “It’s a good piece of equipment,” Peter said, which was undeniably true.

  “Okay,” Vreni said. “Take that last one, that should hold Kate. Could you have this stuff ready by—” she looked at her watch “—six o’clock? That’s the latest the courier company can pick up.”

  “I’ll have them for you then.”

  * * *

  AT something like ten of six, Peter came tearing back into the hotel again with an envelope under his arm. He was suffering from a case of extreme annoyance. It had taken him most of the afternoon to find a processor who would even admit to being able to produce professional-quality color stills before the end of the business day. It had taken the rest of the afternoon to bludgeon them into doing the prints correctly, sending one picture back four times because the developer kept pushing it too hard. It’s a pity, he had thought at the time, that I can’t just get these done at Kmart. But it’s too late now. Even Kmart needs a couple of hours.

  He took the elevator up to Vreni’s floor and jog-trotted down the corridor to her room. When he knocked on the door, she snatched it open at the first tap. There was a Federal Express envelope already in her hand. “Are those them?” she said ungrammatically. “Here. Hold this.” She shoved the FedEx wrapper at him, grabbed the prints, sat down at her desk, and started to leaf through them. “Yes,” she said “yes, yes, yes, yes—no!”

  “What d’you mean, ‘no’? It’s just the way you wanted it.”

  She groaned and put her head in her hands. “It’s so underexposed!”

  “You should have seen it before I made them redo the print. Four times.” Peter glanced around. The room looked very much as if a small localized hurricane had passed through it, littering the floor with pages torn from notebooks and crumpled bits of paper, and her laptop computer was standing open on the table, beeping a plaintive complaint about low batteries.

  “All right,” Vreni said finally. “It’ll have to do.” She squared the photos’ edges and slid them back into their manila envelope, grabbed the FedEx pack from Peter and jammed the manila into it, and sealed the whole thing up. “There,” she said. “Let’s get it down to the front desk and meet the courier. And then I am going out.”

  “For a night off?” Peter suggested.

  She looked at him sardonically. “Not a chance,” she said. “I have a date with a cop, whom I intend to question thoroughly. What are your plans for the evening?”

  “I’m going to call MJ and let her harangue me about her work conditions,” Peter said, “and then I’ve got an old friend to look up out of town.”

  Vreni locked her room and they made their way down to the front desk together, where Vreni broke into a run and did a good imitation of someone trying to qualify for the hundred-yard dash. She caught up with the FedEx courier just as he was walking out the front door of the hotel. Airbills were exchanged, the package was taken away, and Vreni came back sighing with relief. “That’s something, anyway,” she said. “The story’s already up in the Bugle’s computer, so Kate will have the hard copy and the comp boys will have the electronic. And here comes my date!” Peter turned, and was very hard put not to react. It was Murray Anderson.

  “Peter, this is Murray Anderson. Murray, this is Peter Parker, the photographer who’s riding shotgun with me on this jaunt.”

  “Pleased,” Peter said, and shook Murray’s hand. He glanced from him to Vreni. “Where�
��d you two meet? Have you known each other a while?”

  “Since yesterday afternoon,” she said. “We ran into each other downtown.”

  Murray smiled slightly. “Rear-end collision,” he said. “Fortunately, not too serious.”

  “It seems to have turned into a beautiful friendship,” said Vreni, “even if he did give me a ticket. The swine.” She managed to both smile and glower at him; it was an amusing effect. Vreni took Murray by the elbow and steered him away from Peter, then paused and looked back at him. “If you want to join us…”

  “Thanks, but no. Other plans, remember? And that friend of mine is expecting me. But have a good time.”

  * * *

  ABOUT two hours later, darkness had fallen almost completely in Big Cypress, and a silent figure in red and blue was webswinging through the trees, intent on picking up a trail that had gone cold. But now, at least, he was better equipped for cold trails—or for hot ones. When he had spoken to Murray the second time, the policeman had sounded thoughtful. “Can’t be easy,” he had said, “chasing people around in the ’Glades with just your naked eyes.”

  “Well,” Spider-Man had said to him, “what are you recommending I use?”

  “Can you meet me down at Bayfront Park in, say, about an hour?”

  “No problem.”

  Spider-Man had met Murray there, the cop having taken the precaution of slipping into a private little space created by a stand of sword-leaf palm. Spidey, webbing in, had joined him there and found Murray holding something that looked like a cross between a pair of binoculars and a VR eyeset.