Red Tide

by G. M. Ford

Both young men looked frightened and tentative. Wesley was playing with something in his pocket. Nathan’s hands trembled slightly.

  “It’s all right to be afraid,” Holmes said in a low voice. “We’ve been afraid for years. Afraid to go outside. Afraid to breathe the air. Afraid that someday we might wake up and it would happen all over again.” He made a rude noise with his lips. “We know all about afraid. Fear has become our friend.”

  They nodded without conviction.

  “Come on. Time to get going,” Holmes said.

  Jim Sexton was stiff and cold. The forensics team had been in and out of the house for an hour and a half. Darkness had begun to settle on the street like a mantle. Last week’s rain had leached up through the beauty bark, dampening him to the bone. He smiled to himself and shivered slightly in the breeze. They had some great exclusive footage. The SWAT team busting into the place. The haz-mat team arriving. The EMTs and the bodies coming out on gurneys. The crowd of uniforms milling around in front of the place. The arrival of the feds and the heated argument that followed. All of it was great. Pete was right. He was definitely on a roll. All he needed now was to get this stuff on the air.

  Jim was weighing the merits of returning to the station with the footage, when the phone in his pocket squawked. He grabbed it quickly and jammed the speaker hard against his ear.

  “According to Canadian Immigration, they’re all from something called Madhya Pradesh,” the woman’s voice said.

  “From what?”

  “It’s an Indian state.” When Charly Hart didn’t respond, she added, “Somewhere out in the middle of the country is what they told me.”

  “Thanks. Anything else?”

  “The card found on Mr. Bohannon’s body is a key card. The lab says it could be used to open a dock gate or a garage door or the doors in any one of a dozen local hotels. The only prints on it are his own.”

  He thanked her again and must have neglected to remove his finger from the SEND and RECEIVE button because a third voice could suddenly be heard coming from the speaker.

  “Where did she say they were from?”

  Charly Hart mimicked the sounds he’d heard.

  “Madhya Pradesh,” voice three corrected.

  “Something like that. What about it?”

  “Bhopal is the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh.”

  “So what?”

  “So Bhopal is the one place in India where you just might find a bunch of people who have a score to settle with the United States.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Union Carbide.”

  Jim Sexton rolled over onto his dry side. “Holy shit,” he whispered to the wind.

  “December second, 1984. I remember the date because it’s my sister’s birthday and the year because it was the first time I ever saw my work on the front page of a newspaper,” Corso said. “I was fresh out of college and green as cabbage. Working for the Atlanta Constitution. They gave me the assignment of collecting all the Bhopal information off the AP and Reuters wires and compressing it into two columns a day. I didn’t get a byline or anything. It was strictly wire service attribution, but for me it was a big deal. Up until then I’d never done a story more urgent than a charity flower show.”

  Two houses up, a trio of yellow-jacketed forensic technicians appeared on the front porch carrying an assortment of evidence bags and boxes. “Looks like they’re finishing up in there,” Charly Hart said. He began to move slowly up the street as Corso continued to talk. “So anyway…” Corso went on, “Union Carbide has this big pesticide factory out in the middle of India. It’s in India because there’s no way the EPA or any other government agency lets them put anything like that here. Way too dangerous to put near white folks.”

  “I remember now. There was a leak or something.”

  “Or something. Forty tons of methyl isocyanate leaked from the Bhopal factory. Five hours later an area of forty square kilometers with a resident population of almost half a million people was covered with a cloud of lethal MCI gas. People woke up with their eyes burning out of their heads. With their lungs full of fluid. Within three days, eight thousand people died…mainly of cardiac and respiratory arrest. Another twenty thousand suffered permanent chronic injuries.”

  Charly Hart looked over at Corso. The strain of the day had etched deep lines at the corners of his mouth. “That many?”

  “That was just the beginning,” Corso said. “When the smoke clears, the Indian government sends in teams of police and bureaucrats and scientists to get things cleaned up. Within two years, they’re dying at a rate fourteen times the national average. Cancer is everywhere. Women are giving birth to stillborn children who don’t even look like human beings. Different skull shapes. Extra fingers, extra eyes. You name it and they’re giving birth to it.”

  Charly Hart stepped on an uneven piece of concrete and stumbled. Corso put a restraining hand on his elbow. “Next thing you know the Indian government finds itself every bit as liable as Union Carbide, so they agree to some shitty settlement with the company…works out to less than five hundred dollars a victim…doesn’t even begin to cover medical expenses let alone damages. Then, before you know it, Dow buys Union Carbide and the whole company just disappears down the corporate gullet…leaving absolutely nothing that anybody can sue. Dow says it’s not responsible for Union Carbide. The government blames Dow. Just as neat as can be.”

  In the gathering twilight, the neon yellow coat stood out like a beacon. She was maybe forty, with a handful of stiff brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and a look on her face said she didn’t want to dance. “Two dead. One of each. Multiple stab wounds. The woman…name’s Patricia Mitchell…lives next door.” She caught the question on Corso’s face. “She was wearing a medic-alert tag. The male works for the Seattle Times. Name’s Jeffrey Unger. He’s a route manager.”

  “Anything else?” Charly Hart asked.

  “Looks like anywhere from six to eight people’ve been living in there for three or four days,” she said. “We lifted a truckload of prints. Anything that looked new enough…we took a picture of.”

  “So.”

  “E-mailed the prints to the FBI. Got a special priority. Over a hundred prints we got only one hit.” She shook her head. “These people must have been living in a cave or something.”

  “Whatdya get?”

  “Came from the FBI print link with Interpol. Name’s Rodney Holmes. Used to be an Indian cop.” She stopped for a moment and read to herself from the card before going on. “He’s the chief suspect in the murder of a police captain he used to work for. You read between the lines it says they know he did it but just can’t make a case.” She read some more. “Says here he blames the death of his family on some kind of chemical spill or something.” Hart and Corso exchanged looks. “He’s been arrested half a dozen times for assaulting government officers. Arrested again in 2001 by the French police in the town of Toulouse. Demonstrating against a chemical spill that killed thirty people there.” She made eye contact with Corso. “Dipped under the radar early last year and hasn’t been seen since.”

  A car alarm began to honk in the distance. Nobody paid any attention.

  “That’s it? All those prints?”

  She shrugged and made a face. “What can I say? It’s statistically aberrant. You’d think they’d be in somebody’s computer somewhere.”

  “Yeah…you would,” Charly Hart agreed.

  She turned to leave. “We come up with anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  Charly thanked her, watched her amble off and then turned away. He pulled off his shattered glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. “None of this—” he started to say and stopped. “None of this amounts to a damn thing,” he said finally. “We can’t even tie Bohannon to the house, let alone to a terrorist plot.”

  “We’ve got the Indian connection.”

  “Yeah and there’s an Indian restaurant up the street, but that don’t help us either,�
� Charly Hart said disgustedly.

  “What if…” Corso said.

  The detective waved his glasses in frustration. Engines were starting all around them. Shouts flew through the air. The techies and the haz-mats were gonna have to move before the SWAT team could get out, but nobody was going anywhere until the cruisers angled across both ends of the street were moved.

  Corso went on. “If I’m planning this thing, there’s a Plan B.” He jerked a thumb at the house across the street. “Someplace to go if the house gets too hot. Someplace close to the target. Someplace where I can go through the final preparations for whatever it is I’m planning to do.”

  “Gotta be the germ doctors down at the Weston,” Charly Hart said. “Nothing else makes any sense.” He looked to Corso for agreement but didn’t get it.

  “Did I hear Bohannon was carrying a key?” Corso asked instead.

  “Electronic. Could open anything.”

  “A room at the Weston?”

  Charly Hart set the glasses back on his nose. He hesitated and then pulled the phone from his pocket. “Hey…ah…hello…” he said.

  “Can I help you?” Same woman’s voice.

  “Who’m I talking to?”

  “Jamie Celestine,” she said. “I work in the chief’s office.”

  “I need the chief.”

  “Can’t be done. He sent all nonessential personnel home. The chief and the rest of the bigwigs are down at City Hall putting together an evacuation plan.”

  “Was that you earlier…about the Indian information.”

  “The chief wanted you kept informed.”

  “They tell you which hotels that key could be from?”

  “Just a sec.” Papers rattled. “It’s a Texas Instruments key code system. Used locally by…the Airport Hilton, the Airport Marriott, the Airport Holiday Inn, the—”

  “Downtown,” Charly Hart interrupted.

  “The Camlin, the Vintage Park and the Pioneer Square Hotel.”

  “Not the Weston?”

  “Nope.”

  “Damn,” slipped out. “Oh…sorry,” he said.

  “And the Edgewater, but that’s not downtown.”

  “Say again?”

  “I said the Texas Instruments system is also used at the Edgewater.”

  Charly Hart looked out over the tops of his glasses at Corso.

  “All of a block and a half from where we kissed the train,” Corso said.

  “But nowhere near the Weston.”

  “I’m like our boss,” Corso said. “I don’t believe in coincidences either.”

  “Sergeant Nance,” Charly Hart hollered.

  The SWAT cop had one boot in the street and the other in the black armored van. He stopped his upward motion, put both feet on the pavement and stepped around the open door. He removed his baseball cap and raised his eyebrows.

  “Don’t run off quite yet,” the detective said.

  39

  Samuel made a noise like a bird.

  “Me too,” Paul answered.

  Nearly twenty years ago, on a cloudless night in the week before his sixth birthday, the MCI gas had seared Samuel’s larynx, burning the vocal cords from his throat, leaving his voice little more than an odd collection of clicks and whistles. Since that day, only Paul had been able to make out what he was saying. Samuel leaned his arms on the roof of the car and squawked again.

  “We’ll do it just like we practiced,” Paul said.

  Samuel swallowed in that noisy way of his and slid into the driver’s seat. His movements were slow and deliberate. Before today, his only experience driving a car had consisted of a couple of hours tooling around a deserted British Columbia parking lot early one Sunday morning, with Holmes talking him through it from the passenger seat.

  His hands shook slightly as he turned the key and started the engine.

  “Seat belts,” Paul reminded.

  They buckled up. Samuel took a deep breath, dropped the car into reverse and backed slowly out of the parking space. He shifted gears and, with a lurch, they rolled across the parking lot toward the street.

  Traffic was light. Tourist season was over. The waterfront had taken on the forlorn look of an abandoned amusement park. As they bounced into the street and started south, the squeal of tires suddenly filled the air. Paul turned his head in time to see a huge black police van slide around the corner, light bar blazing, the roar of its engine getting louder and louder as it swallowed the distance between the two cars.

  “Watch where you’re going,” Paul admonished his cousin, whose eyes now bounced frantically between the rearview mirror and the street in front of the car. He made a noise in his throat that others would have taken to mean he was going to spit.

  “The others will take care of themselves,” Paul said. “Go.”

  “I don’t know, Officer…I mean the privacy of our guests…I’m going to have to call my supervisor.”

  “We don’t have time for that.” Charly Hart clapped his hand on the desk hard enough to bounce the brochures and then slid the sheet of paper closer to the kid. “Are any of these people registered here?” he growled.

  “I can’t…” the kid stammered. “My boss would…” When he lifted his hands from the computer terminal in a show of helplessness, Corso slapped the computer around in a circle and used his forearm to drag the keyboard and mouse across the desk.

  “Hey now,” the young man pleaded. “You can’t be—”

  The sight of the SWAT team entering the lobby froze the words in his throat. Using only his hands Sergeant Nance directed three of his men to cover the rear stairs and another trio to stand by. The six or eight guests in the lobby backed themselves up against the walls, palms flat, eyes wide. The front door opened. A middle-aged couple dragging a pair of flowered suitcases stepped inside, took one look at the unfolding scene and, without a word, beat a stiff-legged retreat back outside.

  “All of them,” Corso said. “Singh and Kimberly in two forty-one. Holmes and Darling in three fifteen and Rishi and Singleton in two hundred.”

  “Unless you’ve got some sort of official paperwork…I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to—” That’s when the kid noticed the huge guy with the battering ram and again his words caught in his throat. “Oh no…you…”

  Rather than drive all the way down to the waterfront, where they would surely be spotted by subsequent waves of police cars and given the boot, Jim Sexton had opted for a left turn onto a narrow section of railroad right-of-way running parallel with the street. The venue looked good when they started down, but the narrow lane got thinner and thinner as they moved along. Now the KING-TV remote truck was stuck. Wedged between the slumping railroad grade and the white wall of the parking garage. The van had slid downhill and now had its side pressed directly against the cinder blocks at an angle which prevented the passenger door from being opened. “Get us out of here,” Jim shouted from across the front seat.

  “Gonna tear it up,” Pete countered. “We better call a tow truck. You know how the brass are about damaging the equipment.”

  “Get us out of here,” Jim shouted again.

  Pete shook his head. Lifted his hands from the wheel in refusal. “Not me, man…No way I’m gonna…”

  Jim stuck out his left leg. Put his foot on top of Pete’s and forced the accelerator to the floor. The van first began to vibrate and then to move haltingly forward with a metallic scream, the tires throwing up great hunks of gravel as they dragged the side of the vehicle along the uneven bricks for twenty yards before popping back out into the light, where they teetered on two wheels for a second as the van decided whether or not it was going to fall all the way over onto its side, wavering in the wind before coming to rest at such a precarious angle they were both afraid to move.

  Holmes fed his final pair of quarters into the machine and pushed the button. Two dollars for water. He shook his head. In his mind, he began to recite his oft-repeated litany about how these depraved and degenerate people dese
rved whatever happened to them. How they were users and spoilers. How their own uncaring arrogance would be the instrument of their doom. How he was merely the arrow loosed from the bow of atonement. How…how…He stopped and cocked his head. His ears took in a sound he hadn’t heard in years but would never forget. Deep and rhythmic. The sound of good leather. The squeak of gear, of rivets and straps and the tink of metal against metal. He recognized the sound at once. The sound of soldiers moving fast. His head began to throb.

  He stepped over to the edge of the mezzanine and looked down into the second-floor hallway just in time to catch a glance of a black-visored trooper jogging down the hall with an automatic weapon slung around his neck. Without willing it so, the two bottles of water slipped from his hands and landed soundlessly on the carpet.

  He turned and ran. Sprinted up the three stairs, around the corner and down the hall. He jabbed the plastic card into the door lock but got only a red light for his trouble. He tried again. Another red light. He heard shouts and the splintering of wood. Then a moment of silence before the sounds of boots could be heard on the stairs. He forced his hands to work…to slowly swipe the card…to wait for the green light, before bursting into the room and slamming the door behind himself…before grabbing the wing chair from the desk and jamming its padded back beneath the doorknob in the second before the door bent inward from the force of a blow. And another and another as he dragged Bobby Darling across the room to the sliding door and the balcony beyond.

  The cold night air washed over his skin as he grabbed Bobby around the waist and lifted the struggling bundle above the rail.

  “Oh…no…” Bobby cried. “I cannot…”

  Holmes watched the door begin to disintegrate…watched the wing chair fall to the carpet, watched a black visage fill the gap and then, with Bobby Darling pressed hard to his chest, he threw himself off the balcony into the rushing darkness below.

  40

  Overhead, the banks of mercury vapor lights rained an eerie glow onto the five acres of tarmac below, bathing the scene in an ungodly purple radiance which was neither light nor dark but merely a respite from the night.