by Diane Duane
“I still think I should kiss it and make it better,” said Peter. “Or at least, kiss something and make it better.”
MJ reached out and touched his cheek, smiling. “Your kisses always make it better,” she said. “Why do you think I married you?”
“I thought it was all my other sterling qualities; my wit, my savoir faire—”
MJ just laughed, then got up and stretched. “I’ll go down to the Baja,” she said, “and hang out there until after lunchtime, then pick up a few things to bring home. I take it you don’t know what time you’ll be in tonight?”
“I have no idea what sort of business hours Russian gangsters keep, but I think you can take it that I’ll be late.”
“The burden of the hardworking super hero’s wife; or in this case, the investigative photographer’s wife.”
“Something you can actually talk about, for a change.”
“Well, listen, if you’re not here when I get back, and if you’re not going to be back before you go to this interview with Ahrens and his Russian friend,” she said as she took his head between her hands, “you be careful. Be nice to these people. They have weird cultural differences.”
“Ours are probably pretty weird to them, but yeah, I’ll be nice.”
She pulled his face close and kissed him, then picked up her keys and headed out the door.
Peter listened to the sound of her footsteps going down the hall, then slid down into a chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. His mind turned back to the Consolidated Chemical Research Corporation. CCRC, he thought, had seemed quite innocent to start with. Just one more merchant bank and its associated business concerns among the horde of them in New York. But a series of accidents—including a most unusual one involving an alien creature that actually ate fissionable material—had revealed that CCRC and the companies connected to it had been storing barrels filled with toxic waste in and around their buildings in the city.
More investigation, including an early evening Spider-Man had spent going through the files in their CEO’s office, had shown that the company appeared to be involved in the transfer of transuranic elements from the Eastern Bloc. In earlier years, East Germany had been the usual doorway through the Iron Curtain, but later on, as walls came down and frontiers opened, the access routes moved slowly back into what had once been Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe. It was material that had originated in Russia; and the reason why so much of it was being channeled into the States hadn’t been immediately obvious, even from files far more detailed than they should have been.
What was really disturbing was the casual way that storage areas had been established in the center of one of the world’s most densely populated cities, and the equally casual means of transport from one point to another. The drums were simply relabeled as something innocuous with no apparent concern for the consequences of an accident or leak.
And there was another person—or persons, really, if you counted his symbiotic “other”—who was also very interested in this transit of lethal radioactives across the oceans of the world and up and down the roads of America and Europe as if it were no more hazardous than sugar.
He—they—knew that no precautions were taken, and why: because it would have attracted too much attention. And knew, too, that if anything had happened, it would have been the innocents who suffered most.
The innocents. They had always been Venom’s great concern, or so he constantly claimed. But interference from that quarter was one factor this equation didn’t need right now. Peter tore off the topmost sheet of the pad he had been scribbling on while dealing with CellTech, and started scribbling again.
CCRC had come under investigation fairly quickly after the revelation of toxic waste stored in its properties all over New York City. After a while, the DEA had become involved as well, though entering the investigation from another angle entirely. Questions were asked about large amounts of money being channeled through CCRC’s Miami branch. At first the suspicion had been that this was plain old garden-variety drug money; but then a connection to some German banks was established. A lot of Deutschmark transfers had been linked to the movement of radioactive material inside and across Europe, and the investigation had widened at an exponential rate.
Shortly afterward, the German banking consortium sold all their shares in CCRC—or were told to sell them. No one was clear on the details. Spider-Man had been following up on the case during his Florida trip and had been bemused to learn that, despite this massive vote of no-confidence by their European stockholders, CCRC was still very much a going concern.
He had thought that Hobgoblin had been mostly behind its operation, but Hobby was now snug in the Vault after his failed attempt to blow New York into the Atlantic. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that a company kept going very-nicely-thank-you while its boss cooled his heels in prison, but it hadn’t been Hobby behind it after all. The true mastermind remained obscure.
More investigation had suggested that CCRC was behind the biggest shipment of nuclear waste that anyone had ever seen. The stuff was being shipped in under fake invoices from Eastern Europe to Brazil, then north across the Caribbean—past some of the most delicately balanced island ecosystems in the world—and into Florida. There it was stored in great quantities, secretly refined, again mislabeled as who-knew-what, and finally returned to Europe, where someone was recovering significant amounts of unmarked and untraceable weapons-grade plutonium without the knowledge of half a dozen national Atomic Energy Commissions. After that, who knew where it went?
CCRC had been making vast amounts of money—and the possibilities as to where they then channeled it were fairly horrific. Countries a little east, a little south, who would be only too glad to get their hands on already-refined plutonium, for example. Peter was sure that the bottom of this particular barrel hadn’t been plumbed yet. Perhaps this evening’s conversation with Mel Ahrens’s Russian contact might throw a little more light on it.
And maybe the man could illuminate an even worse possibility, one that even now Peter was reluctant to consider: that for all the shipping of nuclear waste one way, and refined material the other, a lot of that refined plutonium was staying right here, in the continental U.S., waiting to be used for God alone knew what purpose.
Peter got up, switched on the TV, and turned to WNN, the news channel. After about ten minutes the headline news came around again, and he found himself looking at a video shot—taken from what he hoped was a safe distance—of a flat, shallow crater maybe half a mile across. It was smooth-sided, looking as if it had collapsed from the bottom instead of being dug out from the top. Peter had seen that shape of crater before, in footage of underground tests from the American West, and more recently mainland China.
Government agencies had been queuing up to take CCRC apart; he knew that much. The corporation was under too close scrutiny right now to even risk playing with cherry bombs, never mind nukes. So who was doing this? Was there somebody, somewhere, watching him tie himself in knots of wrong theory and mistaken supposition while they quietly got on with their own agenda?
Peter didn’t know; and like Mel Ahrens, knowing that he didn’t know was starting to drive him crazy. He got up and set about getting ready to go out to do a couple of errands.
* * *
ELSEWHERE in the city, someone else was busy with an errand of his own.
The Corporate Registry Office of the New York State Bureau of Records is a granite-fronted building. One might call it plain, especially when compared with the more classical architecture of the oldest parts of New York. Professional people, mostly lawyers and accountants, are in and out of its doors all day, so nobody paid any attention to the tall, harsh-faced man with the blond brush-cut hair and immaculate suit and tie, carrying a briefcase so thin that he appeared to deal with only the most important paperwork, summarized and refined for his convenience by a legion of subordinates.
He paused for a second to study the front of the building, then
walked up the flight of ten steps into the bureau’s front lobby. If he looked a bit more brutal than the normal run of professionals, well, the more rarefied levels of corporate affairs had always been something of a cutthroat business.
It was just that this man looked all too ready to take that part of it quite literally.
He stepped up to the counter and handed a letter to one of the clerks. They conversed pleasantly for a few minutes, then the clerk excused himself and went off, returning shortly with a small printed map, a set of file envelopes, and a card with a magnetic strip to allow the man to operate the Xerox machines. The man in the dark suit thanked him, then walked up the broad stairs to the right of the reception area, heading for the stacks.
These were not stacks such as might be found in a library. Instead, they contained row upon row of filing cabinets, some tall enough to need the ladders that ran on rails across the face of the stacked files. The visitor made his way to one of the polished wooden tables set in a double line between the cabinets, opened one of the file envelopes, and fanned its contents across the surface of the table like a cardsharper playing with a new deck.
He opened the briefcase, removed several freshly sharpened pencils, set them on top of the papers, and then went across to the files and began systematically going through them. Every movement was quick, economical, and without wasted effort. He carried himself like someone who knew exactly where he was going, exactly what he was looking for, and exactly where he stood in his personal scheme of things: right at the center.
He was there for several hours, reading some files on the spot, carrying others to the table for closer scrutiny, taking still others to the Xerox machine and putting the copies carefully into his briefcase. None of the other accountants or attorneys who were using the place paid him any heed, except in a general sort of way, admiring the expensive cut of his suit, wondering why they hadn’t seen him before, since he was so evidently a highflier—or, more straightforwardly, trying to guess which legal firm had started insisting that its partners spend so much time in the gym.
None of them saw him go, because he was the last one—apart from the staff—to leave the building. He packed his briefcase, closed it, then strode down to the reception desk and returned the map, the file folders, and the Xerox card. When his copy charges were totaled, he paid in cash, thanked the clerk, and left.
The Wall Street area gets fairly quiet after business hours, but there are still some good restaurants an easy walk away. The dark-suited man made his way to one of these on Duane Place and ate a leisurely supper of veal saltimbocca with peppers, washed down with half a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. He considered the tiramisu, then declined in favor of a double espresso-corto, paid again with cash, and finally stepped out into the cool of the evening and the yellow glow of the streetlights.
He looked up and down the street, then headed east and north. Again, his path was very direct and he seemed to know exactly where he was going, even if that was right into one of the less savory parts of town. The streets where he walked now didn’t have boutiques and shops and restaurants in them, or even the heavier frontages of banks and accountancy firms. Instead they had shutters rolled down over warehouse garage doors, boarded-up windows, garbage in the streets, cracked curbstones, and broken streetlights.
A voice spoke to him from the shadows. “Hey, Suit,” it said.
The man paused, half-turned, and stared into the darkness. “Were you speaking to me,” he said softly, “or to my clothing?”
Three men materialized in the alleyway, emerging from the shadows or stepping in from either end to block the exits. One was short and dark, wearing leather and an incongruous knitted hat with a bobble on top. It might have been funny, except that his face was not one that would take kindly to jokes.
Another was tall, fair, and shaggy, in hole-riddled jeans; a younger man than the others, with a face that looked oddly young and innocent on someone carrying such a large knife.
The third was of medium height, very pallid, his hairstyle a Medusa nightmare of dreadlocks so tangled that it was hard to tell where his hair started and his head left off. He was wearing denims and a pair of the trendy sneakers that lit up with each step.
The man with the knitted hat wasn’t wearing shoes that lit up, but as he stepped forward, he produced a large, shiny semi-automatic pistol with the same self-satisfied air of a cheap conjuror performing a cheaper trick.
“Desert Eagle,” said the man in the dark suit. He sounded amused instead of frightened. “My, what a great big expensive gun for such a little punk. You know, if you had bought a cheaper gun, you could afford some better clothes—and even get rid of that stupid hat.”
“You got a smart mouth, Suit,” snarled Hat. “Maybe you like another mouth.” He gestured vaguely with the gun barrel. “Jus’ ’bout behind your belt buckle.”
“Maybe I like the mouth I’ve got.”
“’Nough talk,” said Dreadlocks. “Briefcase is worth about five hundred. Just take the bag and waste him.” The blond youngster with the knife swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his throat, and the man with the suit watched it move up and down with the same sort of savoring expression he had earlier given to the saltimbocca as it arrived on his table in the restaurant.
“If you want some advice,” he said gently, “I don’t think you should do that.”
“Don’t remember askin’ for any,” said Dreadlocks. “C’mon—let’s see if his fancy suit’ll stop a Teflon tip. I said waste him, man!”
Even though Hat was standing no more than eight feet away, he went through an elaborate performance of taking careful aim before he squeezed the trigger. The boom of his gun’s heavy Magnum load was deafening in the confined space of the alley, its muzzle blast a stab of yellow-white flame almost a yard long. In the clanging silence that followed the shot, all of them heard the tiny tinkle of the spent cartridge-case hitting the street. But none of them really noticed.
Because this suit, at least, did stop Teflon tips.
Hat and Dreadlocks stood with their mouths hanging open, but the blond man with the knife took a step backward, and then another to where his companions couldn’t see.
“Yes,” said the man in the dark suit, watching him. “You were beginning to suspect as much, weren’t you? And so only you alone shall come away alive to tell the tale. Watch, now.”
The suit stopped being a suit. It boiled away from its wearer’s powerful body in a whirlwind of strand and threads and ribbons that flashed and hissed as they cut through the air. Then they contracted again, snuggling close, weaving and knitting until the harsh face and the cropped hair and any semblance of a well-dressed corporate lawyer had completely disappeared, and nothing showed but the jagged, angular design of a stylized white spider across his massive chest.
Two huge pallid eyes studied them, while an impossibly wide mouth crammed with jagged fangs gaped wide, and a tongue the size of a boa constrictor came drooling and coiling out at them from between the picket fence of teeth.
“Mouth…” said Hat.
“Mouth,” said the dark shape, taking a step forward. “Yes, indeed. And as you can see, we don’t need another. We already have one.” It grinned, and the fangs dripped slime as the grin went right around, and no matter how broad the grin became, there were always more teeth behind it.
Ribbons of ferocious darkness came swirling like tentacles from the black costume that the man was wearing, and grabbed Hat around the chest and neck, lifting him up without the slightest trace of effort until his feet dangled clear of the ground. One more tentacle reached out playfully to pull off the knitted hat, then flicked it away. Under it, on Hat’s shaven skull, was an impossibly elaborate tattoo, all Celtic knotwork and tangled animals.
Dreadlocks tried to run, but another half-dozen tentacles lashed out at his legs, wrenching them from under his body so that he came splatting down full-length on the filthy pavement. The tentacles wrapped around Dreadlocks’s leg
s tightened, dragging him closer, and then lifted him clear of the ground to dangle beside Hat. “You didn’t ask for any advice before,” said Venom, “but we’ll give you a little more. No charge. Just remember, next time, not to attack an attorney going about his legal occasions. Everybody knows how nasty lawyers can be. And there’s always the chance they might be someone even nastier. Like us.”
The blond man with the knife knew that he could run now, should run, but he didn’t dare to move. Instead he just stood and stared, too frightened to even drop the knife in case its clatter on the ground attracted Venom’s attention.
“My word,” said Venom, lifting Hat even higher and then tilting him upside-down to look at the tattoo, “that must have hurt. Not, however, as much as this.”
The next few minutes were noisy and unpleasant for almost all concerned, a nightmare blur of tentacles and pseudopods that was far worse for being mostly lost in shadow. Finally Venom raised the two limp, barely breathing bodies even higher, and dropped them like so much garbage into the gutter at the side of the alley.
“These streets haven’t been kept too clean recently, but that will change,” he said. “Don’t forget what we told you.” Then he turned to the blond youngster. “They roped you into this, didn’t they?”
The blond nodded his head, a tiny movement that looked more like a tremor, and let the knife slide at last from between his fingers.
“So we thought. Well, we have other business this evening, so you just run along and tell your other friends that we’re back in town. Tell them that we’re after one of our own this time. There’s a super villain busy in town and we want him. If someone helps us, then we’ll help them. And in the meantime, those of you who prey on others should stop. Take our advice. No charge.”
That terrible grin spread right around Venom’s face again. “Because until we find the one we’re looking for, we’ll keep ourselves busy with you. And after we find that one, then there are other pleasures, long deferred. There’ll be time to take care of it now. So go on now—and spread the news.”