Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller

by Neal Stephenson

  First I got them excited, acted like I wanted to head home toward the yacht club, made a desperate break for the airport, got cut off both ways. Got them going very fast in the wrong direction, then broke the opposite way and just headed for the Channel at a flat sprint. Finally broke the motor in - hit full throttle - never thought I'd be that scared of anything. So I had a quarter of a mile lead before they even got turned around. I knew that Deadeye was looking right through the fog with his infrared specs, zeroing in on the heat signature of my motor, which must be blazing like a nova. He found me, probably fading fast, and his partner did exactly the right thing: leaned on the throttle, asked for all thousand horsepower, and got it. They hauled ass into the Channel, passed under the Northern Avenue Bridge, and I led them right through the safe part so they wouldn't even know they were in mortal danger. They were driving right up my ass when I led them toward a picket fence of foot-thick pilings next to the Boston Tea Party ship. I pulled into a violent turn and the Zode went between them, on its side. Then I got out of the way.

  They plowed into the pilings doing upwards of sixty miles an hour. Their sexy fiberglass hull shattered like a potato chip in a meat grinder. Those big oversize motors took a lot of gasoline and all of it exploded at once. I remember one of the big outboards tumbling through space like a comet, trailing pale blue flames, its screw cutting on air. The Cigarette was a big boat going fast, and it took a long time for all that crap to stop moving.

  Myself, I crossed the Channel and got onto dry land at the Summer Street Bridge. I squatted on the shore for a while, watching the flames coming up off the water. Then I wandered up into civilization, stood in the road and flagged down a BMW. It overshot me a little bit so I got to see the SAVE THE WHALES sticker on the rear bumper. A young guy in a suit climbed out. “What's burning?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  “I am. You got a tire patch kit in that thing?”

  “You bet.” The guy even knew my full name. We carried his kit down to the water and fixed the Tazer holes in my Zodiac. Then he got back in his BMW and drove away. I told him he didn't even have to think about donating more money to GEE this year.

  Zodiac

  22

  EVEN THESE PUSSWADS couldn't afford to own more than one Cigarette, so I figured I was okay as long as I stayed on the water. The yacht club was definitely not an option, but I could come ashore just about anywhere else.

  So I took the Zode up and out of Fort Point Channel and up to the Aquarium docks, where I found a pay phone.

  “What's up?” Bartholomew asked.

  Where to begin? “Well, I just killed some guys.”

  For once he didn't say anything, just sat there uncomfortably silent, and I realized that this was a stupid way to commence a conversation. “Look, how many people are at the house this evening?”

  “Just me. Roscommon's banging on something downstairs. Shut off our water.”

  “Could you track the others down?”

  “I think maybe. Why?”

  “Because everyone should stay away from the house for a while. Somebody's trying to kill me.”

  “Again?”

  “Yeah. But for real this time.”

  “You call the cops?”

  Of course. When people try to kill you, you're supposed to call the cops. Why hadn't I done that? “Don't let anyone in. I'll get back to you in a minute.”

  Then I called the cops. They sent a detective around to the Aquarium and we sat there beside the Seal Pool for a while. I gave them a statement. A harbor seal sat behind us the whole time, looking up at us and shouting, “Thunderbird, Thunderbird!” The bums who hung out around the Seal Pool were skilled instructors. “Spare change? Spare change?” But the detective had the courtesy to concentrate on me. Didn't see much point in trying to explain all the stuff with the PCBs, since all I had was conflicting evidence. I just told them I was taking some samples and these guys tried to kill me.

  Then I called Bart again. He was still sitting there watching the same Stooges flick and I could still hear Roscommon's thuds resounding from the basement.

  “I feel like a sap. Why don't I own a gun?” I asked rhetorically.

  “Beats me. I don't have one either.”

  Actually, I knew the answer. I didn't own a gun because then I'd look like a terrorist. And because, hell, I didn't need one. “You got any plans for tonight?” I asked.

  “No more than usual,” Bart said. “Amy's in New York.”

  “There's a chance that, if I get crazy enough, I'll ask you to drive me around all night sewer-diving and possibly being chased by amateur hit men.”

  “Whatever.”

  I buzzed off into the darkness again, going a little slower now, trying to keep my head on straight. Paused at MIT and ran to the office to get the manhole lifter, a bandolier of test tubes and a bucket on a rope. Went across the river and re-emerged at the university. Went straight to the lab and ran a test on the sample I'd just taken from the Dorchester Bay CSO.

  It was stuffed with organic chlorine compounds. Not just PCBs, but a whole stew of venality. To go back to the gunboat metaphor, what we had here was soldiers with machine guns, riding not just on patrol boats, but on surfboards, Zodiacs, water skis and inner tubes. All the compounds were polycyclic aromatics - carbon atoms in six-packs, twelve-packs, and cases. Some kind of crap was definitely getting dumped out of the CSO.

  Tomorrow it was going to rain - a big storm coming in from the Atlantic - and the sewers were going to overflow. If there was any evidence in them, it was bound to be washed out to sea. So now was the time for executive-hunting. I called my roommate and asked him to meet me under the birdshit, then I hung up.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk from our house on the Brighton side of the river to the mall on the other side. Along the way we had to walk below an overpass, a highway bridge made of metal girders. For some reason, pigeons happened to like those girders very much, and the sidewalk underneath was thick with birdshit. This was a reference only Bart would understand.

  For me, it was just a pleasant nighttime cruise on the river. The fog had cleared off as the wind had risen, and now the air was cold and smelled cleaner than it was. It was a chance to relax, get my head clear.

  The Charles wasn't as bad as it used to be. From here it seemed like the Main Street of civilization. Beacon Hill behind me, Harvard ahead, MIT on one side and Fenway Park on the other. After playing fatal video games on the Harbor, it was comforting to go for a slow putt-putt out here, watch the traffic on the riverside boulevards - comfortable, normal people in nice cars, listening to the radio - and stare into the lights of the university libraries, and listen to the Sox hounds celebrating a run-scoring double.

  Within a few minutes, Harvard came up on the right, dark and ancient, with a neon corona rising up from Harvard Square behind it. Then around a bend, and suddenly the Charles was narrow, just a minor river surrounded by trees. Past the big cemeteries, then the IHOP reared up on the left and I tied my Zodiac to a tree. A short hike took me to the birdshit, and, voila - there was the van, sitting there dark, ZZ Top rumbling from within. Bart opened the door, which was nice, because that way I didn't have to wonder who really was inside.

  “Anyone follow you?”

  “If they did,” he said, “they did a good job of it. You have any more trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Hey. Check this out.” He unzipped his leather jacket and pulled it open to reveal a .38 Special stuck in his belt.

  “Where the fuck did you get that?”

  “Roscommon.”

  “Roscommon?”

  “Once, when he got really pissed, he started threatening me. Told me that he had an equalizer in his car. So after you called, I just went out and busted the window and took it.”

  “There's beauty in that, Bart.”

  Call me a fool, but I felt a lot tougher now. We pulled the van onto the grass along the river beside Soldiers Fields Road, and hauled up the Zodiac's gas tanks a
nd the outboard motor. We put them in the van and then put the Zodiac on top and tied it down. We went to the IHOP and got big fat coffees to go. Then we turned up the stereo and went out sewer-diving.

  This I had done before. Put me in the sewers and I'm in my element. The tendency of Boston's sewers to gush directly into the Harbor whenever more than three drops of rain fell made them an ideal place for companies to dump their hazardous waste without the embarrassment of a mediapathic pipe. Sometimes I'd discover a bad thing coming out of a CSO and then I'd have to go on one of these expeditions. Bart knew the drill.

  The principle is simple. If there's poison coming out of a sewer, you should be able to trace it to its source. It helps to have a map of all the sewer lines and where they feed into one another. I find the CSO on my sewer map and, just like that, I know which neighborhood it's coming from. Once I get to that neighborhood, my map tells me where the key manholes are and, by running tests under those manholes, I can narrow it down even further.

  Besides a manhole tool, the only requirement is some kind of quick, simple test for the presence of the toxin you're tracing. Preferably it's a test you can perform right in your vehicle. I had something like that for organic chlorine compounds, a test built into small plastic test tubes. They were about the size of shotgun shells, so when this whole mess had started I'd made up several dozen and stashed them in an army-surplus bandolier. With that slung over my shoulder and my manhole cracker in my hands, I was a toxic Rambo, prepared to rain media death upon the bad guys. We were all set.

  It wasn't that romantic, though. I sat down in the back with my coffee and a penlight while Bart drove around aimlessly on the Mass Pike, trying to determine if we were being tailed. I studied my sewer map. Dorchester Bay had many CSOs and I had to figure out which one of them I'd been looking at. My technique was kind of like Boy Scout orienteering. I was about four blocks over from Summer Street, I knew how a couple of landmarks happened to line up, and that allowed me to figure my position on the map.

  My toxic CSO wasn't just any CSO, certainly not of the neighborhood variety. It wasn't even a Boston CSO. It was the outlet of a long tunnel that ran all the way from Framingham, out in the extreme southwestern suburbs. Framingham had no place to dump its overflow - they didn't even have a river - and they'd had to construct an underground river that ran for some twenty miles east-northeast to Dorchester Bay. Overflow from Framingham and the neighboring town of Natick ran down that pipe. Somewhere along those twenty miles, someone was throwing huge amounts of organic chlorine compounds into the flow.

  I was tempted to go straight to Natick and start sampling there. Although it's a little outside Route 128, it is prime territory for Route 128 corporations. But there was also a chance that someone had tapped into the line between Natick and the outlet. If we got out that far, ran a test and found nothing, we'd have wasted an hour driving out and back. So I traced the tunnel eastwards and picked out a promising manhole in a Boston street. We would start there.

  “Roxbury, James,” I said.

  “Oh, good. Right near the museum, right?”

  “Wishful thinking. It's a mile south of here.”

  “Oh. You mean for real Roxbury.”

  “Sorry, that's where the tunnel is.”

  Let me explain something about Bart: he wasn't as dumb as he sounded. He had a sense of irony that ruled his life, made it impossible for him to use his considerable brains in any kind of serious job. Kind of like me.

  We didn't know how to get there and had to find it by reputation - “don't go down that street any farther - it'll take you right into Roxbury.” We had to follow a bunch of that kind of streets.

  But eventually we found our manhole. It was in the right land of a four-lane street. I had Bart pull just past it, then I threw open the back doors of the van, reached out and snared the lid with my tool and hauled. It took some doing but I got it off. I climbed down in there with my bucket-on-a-rope and had Bart back up to conceal the hole. He closed up those back doors and switched on the emergency flashers.

  The main thing was not to act like a pair of scared, lost, white guys. Bart was pretty good at it. In his black leather and his black van, with his longish hair and loud music, he clearly was not a lawyer with a flat tire.

  Plus, I had my part of it down to a science. I went down the ladder, braced myself so my hands were free, lowered the bucket on the rope and took my sample. Took a leak, too. Twenty seconds' work. Then back up the ladder. But I could hear the roar of a radiator fan, I could see headlights in the van's undercarriage. Someone was pulling up behind us. And until the van moved, I was trapped in the manhole.

  Door slam. Footsteps. Knock, knock. Music turned down, window descended.

  “Can I help you officer?”

  I didn't know how to take that. Cops.

  “You have a problem here?” Old white Townie voice. I could draw you a sketch of this cop without having seen him: fifty, stubby iron-colored hair, a big, solid spare tire.

  “Stalled the engine and my battery's too low to turn it over now. And I know this is a bad neighborhood, officer, so I just rolled up the windows and locked the doors and waited for one of you guys to show up.”

  “Good move, son, you did the right thing. Hey, Freddy! Bring her around here.”

  Freddy moved the cop car up and they performed the jump-start. I relaxed. Right above my head was more evidence of Bart's concealed intelligence: he'd gotten one of those magnetic key holders, and hid some spare keys in the undercarriage of the van. “Okay, now get out of here, kid!”

  “Okay! I'm just gonna sit here idling for a few minutes and let the battery recharge, okay?”

  “Son, if you don't mind, I'd prefer to escort you right out of this neighborhood.” Wonderful idea from my point of view.

  “Hey, I appreciate that, officer, but it's okay. I got an equalizer in here.”

  “Okay. Well, don't press your luck. This ain't your part of town.”

  “Thanks again!” And then, deliverance. Bart pulled the van forward; I got out and replaced the lid; and we were the fuck out of there. Not a single gang even looked our way. Bart had to be physically restrained from stopping at a Louisiana catfish restaurant for a 1:00 A.M. dinner.

  I pointed him west, toward Brookline, and ran my test in the back. Positive for organic chlorine poisoning. The crooks were west of us. My prejudices were well-founded.

  To be fully scientific I should have stopped at every manhole between Roxbury and Natick, following the trail, but sometimes you have to take your science with a grain of salt. First there was Brookline. Not the scummy northern part of Brookline with its two-hundred-thousand-dollar condos. The nice part, with its fifty-room slate-roofed mansions. Then there was Newton, where Roscommon lived, where every front door was flanked by Greek columns. The folks in Brookline and Newton weren't dumping organic chlorine compounds into the sewers; they were making their money from doing it.

  We drove straight to southern Newton for another check. Getting samples was tricky out here because there were even more cops, and just owning a black van was reason enough for a life sentence. I'd had success before, though, just on pure balls. “Yes, officer, I'm Sangamon Taylor with GEE International, we're working on a sanctioned investigation here [whatever that meant] tracking down illegal dumping in the [insert name of town] sewer system. You live in this town, officer? You have children? Noticed any behavioral changes lately, any strange rashes on the abdomen? Good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, it looks like my assistant is just about finished, thanks for your help.”

  We had to check three manholes before we made a bingo. Newton had its very own sewer system with its own manholes, which made things confusing. I was forced to deploy the above-mentioned speech while Bart was checking number two. Usually it was hard to convince them that you worked for a real environmental group, but the Zodiac on top of the van, with GEE in orange letters, made it all look plausible. I'd have to remember that trick. Word got out on the radio, and
at manhole number three, a cop actually stood there and directed traffic around us while we worked.

  Which doesn't necessarily mean we fooled them, but they could see we weren't out to cause trouble, and things went a lot more smoothly when they stood there with their flashing lights. And that's mainly what a cop wants: things to go smoothly.

  More organic chlorine. We headed west. Once we got out into Wellesley we were sampling more often. That got us into the city limits of Natick, and this was where things got really tricky. Until now, we'd been following a single line, but here the possibilities were branching out in every direction and it was necessary to check manholes at every branch.

  My maps didn't run this far out, so things got primitive: drive around slow, look for manholes in the street, scratch your head. We got lost immediately, just past Lake Waban, did a lot of U-turns and sketching of diagrams on the old McDonald's napkins in the back. We sort of thought that there was a major branch here - a lot of Natick sewer lines feeding into the big tunnel.

  “This is going to take fucking forever,” Bart pointed out. By now it was three in the morning and we had about eight manholes to check.

  “Hang on for a sec,” I said. There was a 7-Eleven half a block away and I trotted over and scoped out their phone book.

  All they had was a white pages, so it was kind of a random search. I was trying to think of all the prefixes that high-tech companies give themselves. “Electro,” “Tec,” “Dyna,” “Mega,” “Micro.” In ten minutes or so, I had found half a dozen of those, and the last one had an interesting address: “100 TechDale.”

  TechDale had to be some kind of high-tech industrial park. I looked it up by name: TECHDALE DEVELOPMENTS, followed by an office address in downtown Wellesley and one for their development in Natick.

  And then, gods of Science forgive me, I couldn't help it. It was biased thinking, but I couldn't help it. I looked up Biotronics Incorporated. They had a facility in Natick, alright: 204 TechDale.