"Don't forget I get first choice."
"Glad you mentioned that," Swindell said breathily, leaning into the phone. "I saw the cutest French Colonial you ever did see. You like it, it's yours."
"Don't forget my Condome unit too. When do I get the tour?"
"Soon, soon," Swindell said vaguely. "I got a great bottom-floor unit with your name on the door. You can see it as soon as we pump-"
"Pump?"
"I mean finish it off. Now, listen. Taggert, you can find anything, right?"
"I found you all that poison gas."
"That you did. Listen. I had me a kinda setback. I lost something mighty valuable to me."
"Describe the item."
"Spoken like a true private detective, which you are," said Swindell heartily. "But the item I have in mind got damaged. It's no good to me anymore. I need another."
"So what is this item?"
Swindell swiveled in his chair. Beyond the window, stands of twisted Joshua trees rippled magically. They repeated in a nearby wall-length mirror, a nice touch, he thought.
"A neutron bomb," Connors Swindell said softly.
"Are you crazy? What do you want with a neutron bomb?"
"Same thing I wanted with all that damn gas. To shake some dinks loose of their prime real estate. You know, there's lots of folks holding on to property these days instead of trading up and fueling the real-estate sector of the economy. It's downright un-American."
"I was lucky to find the gas. A neutron bomb may be out of my league."
"Probably. But a tall hank of a hippie girl ain't."
"Come again?"
"There's this girl name of Sky Bluel. Must come from a long line of hippies or something with a name like that. She built a bomb. I ended up with it, but the CIA took it away from me."
"CIA!" Taggert exploded. "Christ, Swindell, what if this line is bugged? We'll both be doing federal time in Atlanta."
"No chance. The CIA blamed those Dirt Firsters. They happened to be in two inconvenient places in one day, like they was following me. Not that they were. The thing of it is, I got hold of their neutron bomb and they got the blame."
"That's convenient."
"But then one of them jerks stole my helicopter, which had the bomb in it. Crashed it good. I lost the bomb and the helicopter both."
"You're lucky to be alive."
Connors Swindell examined his pinkie diamond ring. He blew on it.
"Naw. Bomb didn't have a core."
"What good was it, then?"
"Reason I called you in the first place was, I wanted you to scrounge me up a core."
"Somehow, I don't think 'scrounge' is quite the word for it," Taggert said dryly.
"Never mind that. Look, you find this Sky Bluel. Kidnap her and I'll have her build me a new neutron bomb. It'll be better than poison gas."
"What do you have in mind?"
"I was kinda thinking of clearing those filthy-rich snowbirds outta Orlando and snapping up what the heirs don't get, just like I'm trying to do in La Plomo. "
"If you nuke Orlando, Florida, I guarantee you the heirs will sell out to you for ten cents on the dollar."
"I figure a nickel. Times are tough. I can't afford ten. Then I'm gonna rename the place Swindellburg. Catchy, huh?"
"That's your business," Taggert said flatly. "What's in it for me?"
"I got this here industrial park just sitting out in New Jersey, on the banks of the Hudson, without any tenants," Swindell said, thinking of a property he had acquired in boom times, unaware the ground was contaminated with PCB's. "I'll sign title over to you. And you do with it what you want-rent, sublease, subdivide, name your poison."
"Sounds fair. You know, this is better than taking cash."
"It's called trading up, and it's how I made my empire."
"So where do I find Sky Bluel?"
"She made the news the other night. That's your lead."
"Got it. One last thing."
Swindell smiled into the phone. With his free hand he eased a silver Waterman pen from his inner jacket pocket.
"You're about to ask me about poor, departed Horace Feely," he suggested smoothly.
"Departed?"
"He helped me with the bomb, just like he did my dirty work buyin' all that poison gas. Which is more than I can say for some."
"You hired me to find, not acquire. That's why I only charged a finder's fee."
Swindell fingered the cap off the pen. Instead of a nib, a slim hollow-nosed needle gleamed in its place. And in the clear reservoir tube, a vile yellow liquid sloshed.
"So anyway," he said absently, "seein' as how he was makin' blackmail noises, I gave him a little squirt of gas. Got me a pen tricked out to deliver it. I just shoved that sucker up the other sucker's nostril and gave him what-for. Answer your question?"
"It does."
The line went dead.
Connors Swindell hung up the phone. He exhaled a hot breath. This was getting deeper. First murder, then dealing in nukes, now kidnapping, but if he was going to survive the real-estate slump of the nineties, he had to take steps.
And hell, it wasn't that much worse than some of the things he had pulled in his used-car days, rolling back odometers and selling cars with defective brakes. A few more folks died, was all.
He capped his custom Waterman and returned it to his inside jacket pocket. He was down to his last squirt of Lewisite. No telling when he might have to fall back on it.
Chapter 19
Don Cooder entered the network studio in lower Manhattan wearing the same unflinching expression that stared down ninety million American TV viewers each weeknight at seven o'clock--six-thirty central time.
The program director met him, waving a sheaf of papers and shouting at the top of his lungs.
"Don! Where on earth have you been? The brass want to know what's going on with tonight's Twenty-four Hours installment, and I don't know what to tell them."
"Tell them," Don Cooder said forcefully, "we're working on the most explosive edition ever."
"But the promos!" the program director moaned, hurrying after him. "We don't have any promos to air!"
"That's what I came down for," Cooder bit out.
"What about the script?"
"No script. It's all live, all spontaneous, in the Don Cooder tradition."
That comment stopped the program director in his tracks. Although the highest-paid anchor in the business, Don Cooder was not renowned for his smooth extemporaneous delivery. In fact, without a script his demeanor was closer to that of a pregnant bride walking down the aisle.
Visions of sixty minutes of impending prime-time disaster flashed through his mind as he followed Cooder to the familiar Evening News with Don Cooder set. Cooder signaled a cameraman and the set became active. Lights blazed. Cameras dollied in.
Cooder marched over to a stool and perched on it. He was into stools this year, his previous attempt to be different-standing before a global map like a wrapped-too-tight geography teacher-had flopped worse than the much-ridiculed sweater-vest gimmick.
Taking a deep breath, the program director threw him a cue. The red light went on. Don Cooder gave the camera lens a challenging look.
"Tonight on Twenty-four Hours," he intoned, "you will see, live for the first time on network television, an armed neutron bomb capable of obliterating New York City. And, too, you will meet the high-school girl who built it. Are our high-school students building deadly nuclear devices under our very noses? The answers tonight, on Twenty-four Hours. Be there. Or be square."
The program director wore shock on his face like baby powder.
"Don," he gasped. "Say it's a joke. Please, Don. I know you don't have a sense of humor, but lie if you have to."
"Don Cooder never jokes," Don Cooder growled.
Without another word, he left the studio and the building, confident that by the next rating book he would be the top network anchor in the universe.
The Twenty-four H
ours promotion was aired four times that day. Twice during the local evening news, once during the Evening News with Don Cooder, and again in the dead half-hour before local programming gave way to eight o'clock and the start of prime time.
All across the nation, millions of people saw that promo.
Calvin Taggert, in a New York bar, where he had followed an intricate trail to Sky Bluel's current whereabouts, was the first. Unable to locate Bluel, Taggert had bugged her parents' telephone. From the cryptic twice-daily calls the girl had made, he figured out she was somewhere in Manhattan. So he had caught the red-eye and hit the bricks.
Sky Bluel had let slip something about a very important national TV news appearance. Taggert swiftly cased the various network headquarters buildings without result. So he had repaired to a bar for a quick J ocks before resuming the search.
There Don Cooder's hard-bitten voice jumped out of the bar TV like a western gunfighter calling on an owlhoot to draw.
"There is a God," Taggert breathed, finishing his drink in a gulp. Slapping down a generous tip, he rushed outside to hail a cab.
Barry Kranish, sipping a jagua-juice cocktail after his second visit to his urologist, also caught the promo.
He lay in bed, propped up with five pillows-sore from the flexible scope the urologist had burrowed into his tender urethra in a futile search for bloodsucking catfish-and watched local news recaps of the decimation of Dirt First!!
The urologist, who had assured Kranish there were no candiru lurking in his gallbladder, had prescribed two Valium and a month's rest.
"I am not overworked," Kranish had protested.
"Once these candiru get into the gallbladder, there's almost no way to dislodge them. I don't want to end up as a catfish's last meal. The rain forest needs me."
"I can understand your concern," the doctor said soothingly. "Your fine organization decimated, naturally you'd be depressed, overwrought. Take the Valium. "
"I only use natural antidepressants," Kranish spat, storming out. He bought a five-gallon can of double-chocolate ice cream on the way home.
As he watched TV, licking chocolate off a natural wood spoon, he wondered why his mood hadn't improved. Chocolate had never failed him before. Maybe it was artificial.
Kranish perked up at the stentorian blare of the Twenty-four Hours promo. He had always liked Don Cooder, especially after he had saved the humpback whale. Too bad the guy came across as such a stiff, always trying to sound hip when he wasn't.
Kranish absorbed the promo in stony silence. When it was over, he looked like a poster boy for the genetically stunned.
His mouth opened. "Neutron bomb?" he croaked.
His mind went back to the events of the last five days. The attack by those crazed would-be infiltrators. He knew now they were government plants. Even if the Asian one didn't exactly affect the button-down look. But the skinny guy had had pig written all over him.
That experience was shocking enough, but when the FBI later showed up at his door, spattered with pigeon guano, demanding to know about the Dirt First!! protest at Connors Swindell's Condome construction site, Kranish angrily got into the agents' collective faces.
"I happen to be Dirt First's legal counsel," he had told them indignantly. "And I deny any specific knowledge of any organized Dirt First!! protests. And even if I did, I claim client confidentiality. So just tell me where I go to bail them out."
"The morgue," he was told. The oinker FBI agent seemed almost pleased to relay the terrible news.
Woodenly Barry Kranish had gone to the morgue. He emerged shaking with the realization that he was a general without soldiers. And all-at least if the FBI could be believed-because the noble ecowarriors of Dirt First!! had attempted to save the oppressed desert scorpion and its precious abode.
After bailing himself out, Barry Kranish had returned to Dirt First!! headquarters and his private digs to avenge their deaths.
He had had no idea how to pursue vengeance. He was, after all, kind of a mellow guy. Managing finances was more in his line.
But as he watched the Twenty-four Hours promo, it all came together. Whatever had gone awry, it all started with that upstart girl Sky Bluel and her environmentally reckless neutron bomb. Kranish knew all about the horrors of the neutron bomb. He had voted for Jimmy Carter. Twice.
A plan began to form in his mind. One that would avenge his fallen comrade, protect the scorpion, and reclaim the desert from selfish, sand-disturbing, encroaching humanity.
Leaping out of bed, Barry Kranish hopped into his jeans. He left the tub of double chocolate melting on the bedclothes.
Let the bull cockroaches have it, he thought. They deserved some happiness too. Bless their endangered little feelers. Someday, after they had inherited the planet from doomed humankind, they would remember him.
Dr. Harold W. Smith had the soul of an accountant.
He believed in a place for every paper clip, and every paper clip in its place. He swore by the bottom line. "Two plus two equals four" was an article of faith with him. These were just the least of the reasons a young President had, many years ago, selected him to head CURE.
Frowning before his Folcroft computer, Smith realized things were not adding up.
It had been five days since Remo and Chiun had returned from California with the harmless beryllium-oxide tamper. The FBI investigation of Dirt First!! had continued to progress slowly.
Backtracking to La Plomo, they had taken possession of the half-naked corpse found beside Sky Bluel's pickup truck, with its puzzling headband imprint.
The official autopsy report had come in. According to an FBI forensics team, the still-unidentified man had been killed by a tiny but lethal exposure to Lewisite-the same deadly gas that had killed the inhabitants of La Plomo, Missouri. Oddly, only one lung was affected. But it had been enough.
Yet the time of death had been several weeks after the La Plomo incident. The very day Remo had found the body, in fact.
It was a troubling anomaly, Smith decided. It meant the architects of the La Plomo massacre had not exhausted their poison-gas supply, as Smith had assumed. And hoped.
Why, then, had Dirt First!! gone to such lengths to acquire a neutron bomb? And why had they taken it, of all places, to the Condome construction site?
Smith had done a background check of the Condome project. He uncovered very little he had not already read in the papers. The papers were full of the project, which had been greeted with general derision as the crackpot scheme of a desperate developer.
Connors Swindell was very close to bankruptcy, Smith learned after infiltrating the bank computer records of his primary lender. Sixty days away from default at the very most. And Connors Swindell had been personally besieged by countless lawsuits. Their exact nature was unclear. Probably environmental-impact nuisance suits, he decided.
This much did add up. A stop-work decree was imminent. The Condome project was doomed.
So why had Dirt First targeted Swindell? Smith wondered once more. The question nagged him.
It was still nagging him when the call came in from Reno.
"Smitty, I think we have trouble."
"What's this?" Smith asked.
"I have the TV on right now. Listen to this."
Over the phone Harold Smith heard the tinny voice of Don Cooder babbling about a live neutron bomb. That was all he needed to hear.
"Remo, come back," Smith said urgently. "Explain this."
"Remember Sky Bluel?" Remo asked.
"Of course. I have had the FBI looking for her all week."
"They should watch more TV. She's going to be on Twenty-four Hours tonight, showing off her latest toy. She built another one, Smitty. "
"Disturbing, but not critical. The last one had no core."
"According to Cooder, this one is live and he's gonna broadcast it live. Everyone knows the guy's desperate for ratings. He might just detonate it, too. "
"Preposterous, Remo. But for the good of the country,
Sky Bluel must not go on the air tonight."
"I'll get on it," Remo said. "I thought this assignment was all over with. I just hope Swindell doesn't show up again."
"Connors Swindell?" Smith inquired. "Why would he?"
"Well, he was at La Plomo and again at the Condome site."
Smith's voice became sharp and tangy. "Remo. You never told me you met Connors Swindell in Missouri."
"Sure, I did. He was the condom salesman who talked like a realtor. I mentioned him."
"Not by name."
"Pardon me for losing my scorecard," Remo said acidly. "This hasn't exactly been an uncomplicated assignment."
"What was Swindell doing at La Plomo?"
"I think he saw it as a chance to make a big killing, real-estate-wise."
"How odd," Smith said slowly.
"I don't think so. He goes to Missouri to grab some bargains. Dirt First!! was there, too. They get upstaged by Sky Bluel and her traveling nuclear device, and since Swindell was throwing his business cards in everyone's face, they get the idea to give him some grief. Kinda like a consolation prize. It fits."
"Possibly," Smith said distantly. "Remo, take charge of Sky Bluel and the device. I will work on other scenarios."
"What other scenarios? I solved the mystery. End of story."
"Later," Smith said, hanging up. He returned to his computer.
A new anomaly had been introduced into the equation. Whether it would cause the equation to balance or force Smith to rewrite the entire formula depended on what else his computers unearthed on Connors Swindell.
In his Rye, New York, home, Remo Williams hung up the telephone.
He padded over to the big-screen TV before which the Master of Sinanju sat, eating cold rice from a wooden bowl and watching a taped British soap opera. He wore a royal purple kimono.
"Smith wants me to collect Sky Bluel and her latest bomb before New York is turned into a ghost town," Remo said solicitously. Then he made one of the most costly mistakes of his life. "Why don't you just sit this one out? Until you're feeling better?"
The Master of Sinanju tapped the remote control. The picture froze, flickering in distortion.
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