Scimitar

by Ed McBain

  If the tiniest bit of sarin fell on the President’s head, it would be absorbed immediately into his scalp. If he brushed at whatever fell onto his hair, it would touch his hand, magnifying his exposure and his vulnerability. Either way, he was a dead man.

  There was just one other thing to check.

  He dialed the 800 number on the plastic bottle, and got a recorded voice.

  “Thank you for calling the Raxon Consumer Research Center. All lines are busy just now. Please hold and our next available representative will help you.”

  He waited.

  A live voice came on the line. A woman.

  “Research Center,” she said, “may I help you?”

  “I hope so,” he said. “I have a bottle of your Raxon Multi-Bug Killer …”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “And I was wondering what the plastic is made of.”

  “In the bottle, do you mean?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Well … I’m not sure, let me check.”

  He waited.

  When she came back on the line, she said, “We don’t have a number on that. I can tell you that the EPA doesn’t recommend recycling of the bottle. What’d you want to use it for?”

  “It’s such a good spray bottle,” Sonny said, “it would seem to have a lot of uses. I’m just wondering if the plastic would be inert to organic solvents.”

  “Well … let me take another look,” she said, and was gone for another five minutes.

  He waited.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting. I would guess the plastic is polyethylene, but we don’t have that information. In any case, we don’t recommend recycling, because traces of the chemical might remain in the bottle and …”

  “Yes, I can understand that. But you don’t know for sure whether it’s polyethylene, is that right?”

  “No. Some of the others are, so I’m guessing this one is, too. What’d you plan to use it for?”

  “Some of the others, did you say?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Are made of polyethylene? The bottles?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “Which ones, can you tell me?”

  “Well, there’s Raxon’s Flying Insect Killer, for one. It comes in a number-two bottle made of hi-density polyethylene. But I can’t say for sure that the Multi-Bug …”

  “Well, thank you very much,” he said, “you’ve been very kind.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, and hung up.

  He dialed the 800 number again.

  Got the same recorded voice telling him that all lines were busy and asking him to wait for the next available representative. If he got the same woman again, he would ask her to repeat the name of the product. But he got a man this time.

  “Research Center, may I help you?”

  “Yes,” Sonny said. “I have a bottle of your Flying Insect Killer. Can you tell me what the plastic is made of?”

  “I know the code doesn’t permit recycling of that bottle, sir.”

  “Yes, but can you tell me what the plastic …”

  “That’s the white plastic bottle, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Sonny waited. All the time in the world. Canada Day was only tomorrow.

  “Hello, sir?” the man said.

  “Yes?”

  “That’s a code-two bottle, hi-density polyethylene.”

  “Thank you very much,” Sonny said, grinning.

  He had his delivery system.

  All he had to do was run to the hardware store again.

  Then he could begin mixing his formula.

  At ten o’clock that morning, Elita tried the number at the beach house and got no answer. Thinking she may have misdialed it, she immediately tried it again, slowly and carefully punching out the numbers this time because sometimes the phone’s computer system or whatever it was didn’t work as fast as you could hit the buttons. The phone rang and rang on the other end.

  She tried her mother again at ten-thirty, wanting to ask if she could borrow her blue Judith Lieber bag with the big mabe pearl set into its clasp; Elita didn’t have anything dressy enough for the formal tonight, and the bag would be perfect with her blue gown.

  She let the phone ring a dozen times.

  Come on, Mom, she thought.

  It was another scorching hot day, she was probably on the beach.

  She tried the number again at eleven.

  Let the phone ring off the hook.

  Still no answer.

  She had once met the man who owned the house next door. Someone named Martin Hackett, who was in the fish business or something. She wondered if she should call him, apologize for breaking in on him, tell him this was something of an emergency and ask if he’d yell down to the beach, if that’s where her mother was, tell her to call her daughter in New York. Sounded like a good idea.

  She looked for her mother’s personal directory, but of course she’d taken that out to the beach with her. She called directory information and asked for a Martin Hackett on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, and lo and behold, the operator came up with a phone number, would wonders never?

  Elita dialed the number.

  The phone on the kitchen counter in the Hackett house rang and rang.

  The extension in the bedroom upstairs rang and rang.

  In the basement, her mother lay unhearing in a shallow grave covered with sand.

  In the kitchen, Sonny did not answer the phone because he was mixing his formula.

  He worked with the kitchen windows open. Sarin evaporated swiftly, and its vapors were deadly. Even though the only truly dangerous chemical he’d purchased—his DF, the dimethylsulfoxide difluoride—was still cooling in the refrigerator, he was nonetheless wearing the yellow rubber gloves he’d bought in the supermarket. The chemistry set had come complete with a pair of eye goggles. He was wearing those now. He had also opened the box of Arm & Hammer baking soda, poured it into a bucket of water, and stirred it until it dissolved. The bucket now stood in preparation on the counter top; in solution, baking soda and water would decompose any sarin accidentally spilled or splashed.

  In preparation for running his reaction, he had emptied the twelve-ounce bottle of Raxon’s Flying Insect Killer into the toilet, flushing the contents out to sea or wherever, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He had then washed out the plastic bottle with some of the isopropyl alcohol he’d ordered from the J.D. Bowles lab in St. Paul, shaking the bottle out and setting it on the sink rack upside down, so that the alcohol vapors would flow out, allowing quicker drying. The empty plastic bottle, uncapped, now sat upright in a bowl of ice cubes and water, cooling. When he began running the actual reaction, he did not want the mixture to heat too rapidly. Heating would cause evaporation. Breathing in the escaping fumes could kill him.

  Into the graduated measuring cup he’d bought on his trip to the supermarket, he poured ten ounces of trichloroethane, the inert cleaning solution that was his solvent. Holding the pouring lip of the cup against the glass stirring rod from the chemistry set, he allowed the liquid to run down into the white plastic bottle.

  The clock on the kitchen wall read 11:22.

  He could not use the measuring cup for his reagents; the lowest graduated marker on it was fifty milliliters. Sticking a strip of transparent tape to one of the glass test tubes from the chemistry set he’d bought, he’d earlier calibrated a one-milliliter setting—twenty-five drops equaled a milliliter—and also a five-milliliter setting. He had twenty grams of DF, which was the equivalent of twenty-five milliliters. To this, he needed to add 16.6 grams each of alcohol and amine. The conversion came to twenty-one milliliters of alcohol and twenty-four milliliters of amine.

  He picked up the jar of anhydrous alcohol. Anhydrous simply meant water-free, unlike the common rubbing alcohol you could buy in a pharmacy, which was only ninety percent alcoho
l and ten percent water—the deadly enemy of sarin. He measured his units and transferred them to the plastic bottle sitting in its bowl of icy water. He measured out his amine and transferred that as well, to bind the formula. It gave off a pungent smell, rather like ammonia. The white plastic bottle sat in its icy bath, the mixture inside it still harmless.

  All that was missing was the DF.

  All that was missing was the ingredient which, when combined with the others, could kill Sonny if he wasn’t careful.

  The clock on the kitchen wall read 11:30.

  In eight and a half hours, the guests at the Canada Day celebration would be called in to dinner from the Baroque Foyer.

  World enough and time.

  He allowed his mixture to cool.

  Lower the vapor pressure. Keep the reaction going at a safe pace.

  He looked up at the clock again.

  He would not hurry.

  At a quarter to twelve, he went to the refrigerator and removed from it one of the sealed ten-gram ampoules of dimethylsulfoxide difluoride. Wrapping a dish towel around the thicker end of the ampoule, holding it so that his fingers were around it and his thumb was erect and facing him, he ran the blade of the glass cutter behind the nipple end of the sealed glass container, and began working it, scoring it, finally putting down the tool and—with a sharp snap—breaking off the end of the ampoule. Despite the hours of cooling, a puff of fume escaped into the air, startling him. He turned his head away instinctively, realized at once that this was merely a reaction with the moisture in the air over the ampoule, and allowed himself a few seconds to collect his wits before he picked up the glass dropper.

  From this moment on, his life was in imminent danger.

  What he was running was technically called the nucleophilic displacement of fluoride by alkoxide, a reaction in which a molecule of alcohol combined with a molecule of DF to produce equal amounts of hydrogen fluoride and the deadly nerve agent known as sarin.

  Drop by careful drop, he dribbled the DF into the white plastic bottle containing his other reagents and his solvent.

  He could not allow any of the product he was making to touch his skin.

  He could not breathe in any of it.

  Ten grams of DF in that ampoule, less than a half-ounce. Drop by drop into the plastic bottle to create his deadly brew. The solution darkening as the reaction occurred. Darkening. Darkening.

  The clock kept ticking behind him.

  In just eight hours, the President of the United States would take his seat on the Baroque Room dais.

  And Sonny would kill him.

  The ampoule was empty now. He dropped it into a plastic bag, and went to the refrigerator for the second ampoule. Patiently, he repeated the procedure until he’d emptied this one as well.

  The plastic bottle now contained sarin.

  Making certain the nozzle tip was turned to the OFF position, he screwed the green cap tightly onto the bottle, and set it down on the counter. Opening the bottle of quick-setting glue, he applied it to the seam where cap met bottle, creating a tight seal. He then cut a strip off the roll of transparent tape and wrapped it around the nozzle, securing it firmly in the OFF position. He set the bottle down in the corner of the counter where the walls joined. He did not think it could now accidentally spill its contents. He hoped not. Because if it did, the released sarin would kill on the spot whoever or whatever it touched—human, animal, or insect.

  He put the second empty ampoule into the plastic bag, together with the stirring rod and the dropper. With his gloved right hand, he peeled the glove off his left hand so that only the fingertips were still covered. Using those fingertips, he peeled off the other glove entirely, dropped it into the plastic bag, and then shook his left hand until that glove fell into the bag as well. He dropped the goggles into the bag, sealed it, and carried it outside to Martin Hackett’s garbage bin.

  When he came back into the kitchen, the clock on the wall read twelve thirty-two P.M.

  He was ready to leave for New York City, where he would welcome whatever destiny God had planned for him.

  At two-thirty that afternoon—while Alex Nichols was reading through a mass of intelligence information about a phony British naval officer the allies had deliberately washed ashore during World War II—Sonny Hemkar was checking into a room at the Plaza Hotel.

  The name he signed to the register was Anthony Logan. The American Express credit card he handed to the clerk was made out to that name. He gave two dollars to the bellhop who carried his bag to his room on the eighth floor, and exchanged only a few words of conversation with him. The bag contained a navy blue tropical-weight suit, a white shirt, a tie almost as dark as the suit, black shoes, blue socks, a white handkerchief, and a clean pair of striped boxer shorts. It also contained a 9-mm Walther P-38 pistol, half a dozen loaded magazines for the gun, and all the fake identity cards McDermott had made for him. The sealed plastic bottle of sarin was nestled in one of his shoes, in a snug corner of the suitcase. Sonny figured he had three hours before he should begin getting ready for tonight’s festivities.

  And a little name plate, the loquacious Miss Lubenthal had told him. White lettering on black plastic. Totally discreet. In this city, in the midtown area alone, there were dozens of shops specializing in the instant manufacture of such things. He would find one of them and have a tag made with the name G. RAMSEY on it—for Gerald Ramsey, the name on his Plaza Hotel security card. Then he would buy a walkie-talkie from the first Radio Shack he passed, and a Walkman radio wherever he could find one.

  Then …

  Ah, yes, then.

  While he was still in medical school and students everywhere around him were studying for finals round the clock, popping pills and drinking coffee in desperate attempts to stay awake, Sonny would go to a movie. He’d walk over to Westwood, spend a few hours in a movie theater, sometimes went to two movies in the same afternoon. Then he’d go back to the dorm and study intensely for five or six hours before taking another break. Went for a hot fudge sundae with strawberry ice cream, his favorite. Almonds on it, too. Then went back to studying again. Paced himself and never panicked. World enough and time.

  Later this afternoon, Sonny just might go to a movie.

  The Secret Service men Dobbs had brought with him from Washington followed him up the fire stairs to the first floor.

  “What we’re doing here is blocking off rear access to the room,” Dobbs told them. “No one in or out without proper ID. Dave, you take the top of the steps here …”

  “See you later,” Dawson said, and hung back from the group already walking toward the elevator at the end of the corridor.

  “You here, Hank,” Dobbs said, “outside the elevator. Rest of you follow me.”

  Dobbs planted another of his men at the top of the steps leading down to the Baroque Room, and a fourth one at the bottom. Two British agents were already there, flanking the doors leading into the room. The men introduced themselves all around. One of the Brits told Dobbs there were two Mexican agents on the other side of the doors, and then wondered aloud if it’d be all right to have himself a smoke before the guests started arriving. Dobbs told the Brit he thought it would be okay, and then led his remaining agent into the pantry, where he planted him at the doors leading to the Baroque Room.

  He felt he had the place pretty well covered.

  Nodding curtly, he told the man in the pantry to keep a sharp eye out, and then went to check the Baroque Room itself, see who else was on the job.

  A limousine was waiting at the curb.

  She was thoroughly impressed. A limo, my, my. The last time she’d been in a limo was when her mother’s sister, Aunt Hildy, got married in Teaneck, New Jersey.

  The chauffeur came around to open the rear door for them as they came out of the building. Geoffrey glanced at her sidelong, gauging her reaction. She turned to him and smiled. A casual, accepting smile, this was a mature young woman who was used to stepping in and out of limousines
wearing an ice blue gown cut dangerously low over the swelling tops of her breasts. Long blond hair piled on top of her head. Pearls her grandmother Constance had given her on her eighteenth birthday. Her mother’s blue Judith Lieber bag with the larger pearl to match, which she’d taken from its flannel pouch on the top shelf of her mother’s closet, even though she’d never been able to reach her to ask permission. There were some things you just did.

  “Thank you,” she said to the chauffeur, using the voice Princess Di might have used to a menial, not even glancing at him as she pulled back the skirt of the gown and stepped into the car. Geoffrey came in behind her, looking quite handsome in a dinner jacket, although the tie was knotted somewhat crookedly.

  “I have to call my mother,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  The chauffeur had come around to the driver’s side now, and was getting into the car. The door eased shut with the solid simple click of luxury. “Excuse me,” Geoffrey said to her, and then leaned forward and said to the chauffeur, “We’ll be going directly to the Plaza now.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the chauffeur said, and eased the sleek long limo away from the curb. Elita felt as if she were inside a tinted glass spaceship gliding soundlessly through the stratosphere, the city far below, obliter …

  “I’m sorry,” Geoffrey said, “you were saying?”

  “I was? Oh, yes, my mother. If you don’t mind, I’d like to try her again when we get to the hotel.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “Well … I just can’t believe she’s still on the beach. Would you like me to fix that for you?”

  “Fix what?” he said, looking alarmed.

  “The tie. It’s a little crooked.”

  “Oh. Yes. Please do.”

  They turned to face each other on the leather seat. She smelled of something wonderful, it reminded him of journeys to the Cotswolds when he was a boy, the hillsides covered with wild flowers, the sky a piercing, aching blue. Her hands were adjusting the tie now. Blue eyes lowered. Intent. He looked at her face and longed suddenly to kiss her.