~*~
But there were other interests. Keith Aarons acquired two possessions that he took everywhere he went, that remained permanent no matter how often his identities changed. The first was a small, hardcover copy of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, which had been his favorite book in college and had remained so; the second was a print by a man named Kowalski, a copy of which had hung in his parents' living room.
It was of a wolf standing on a hill in the snow at night, looking down on several lit cabins. He had been fascinated by it when he was a child, and when he had seen it on the wall of a pawn shop, he bought it immediately. He took little else with him on his frequent moves. Some of his weapons he dismantled and destroyed when certain jobs were completed. Others he left, without fingerprints, at the scene. He did not drag around things. He did not trust things. Things could be traced.
One other interest was classical music. He quickly tired of rock in the early seventies, and found that the music of Beethoven reflected his passion, Bach his desire for precision, Mozart and Haydn his need for order, and Mahler his neuroticism and complexity of moral thought. Upon moving to a new location, he always bought a portable stereo and a number of records, tapes, and later, CDs. He also bought computers.
He had started to study computer languages and programming in 1976, thinking that the information to be derived through modems might be of some benefit. That thought was the single greatest understatement of his life. After a few years of study, he found that the keyboard had become an extension of his mind. Since he was hacking from the beginning, he found it possible to follow the logic of those who were developing ever more complex security systems. Bypassing the systems was difficult, but Keith was patient and purposeful, and devised several programs to automatically enter passwords until the right one was found. When passwords became too long and complex for the program to work, he developed ways to bypass the locks entirely, essentially reconfiguring the security system itself.
He found that smaller financial institutions were relatively easy to invade, so money eventually ceased to be a worry. His procurements were made from many different companies, and no single theft exceeded three figures. Most of the time he withdrew only $500, an amount that could be excused by one faulty autoteller transaction. When laptops became available, he ceased to use his own temporary phone lines, and instead broke into previously surveyed houses in stable, working class suburbs.
During the day, both husband and wife were at work, and he was able to connect his modem to their phone lines and complete several thousand dollars worth of transactions. When he was finished, the only evidence of his presence would be the slightly higher phone bill from calls to numbers of which his victims had no knowledge.
The computer was useful for other jobs as well. It made acquiring identities far easier, and made finding things, even things that were intended never to be found, possible. It was how Keith Aarons had found the lab.
Chapter 16
A month had passed since Keith drove into Bone, Texas. In that time he had established Pete Sullivan as Bone's numerouno chili cook, had made the evening crowd far larger at Red's Tavern as a result, and had formed a relationship with Sally, one of the waitresses.
The relationship consisted of her occasionally grabbing his ass as she came into the kitchen, and sleeping with him two or three times a week. Sally was divorced, had no children, and lived in a trailer on the outskirts of Bone. When they slept together, it was always at her place.
It was the kind of relationship Keith liked. There was nothing of the mind in it. She gave him what he needed, and he reciprocated. There was no dominance, only an exchange of pleasures. It was fair, non-sexist, and as much fun as he allowed himself to have. He had long passed the self-imposed state of celibacy that he had thought necessary to revolutionary ideals, and had learned that his fear of talking in his sleep was groundless. He had formed a number of these relationships of sexual convenience over the years, and was grateful that he had had to kill only one of the women in all that time.
Keith had also established a friendship with Bob Hastings. He found out a lot about the man by talking to him, and what he couldn't find out quickly he learned from Sally. Among the information she shared was that, "He got a lot less dick'n he thinks he has . . ."
Although that sentiment might have been shared by Hastings's wife, who had divorced him five years before, Hastings blamed the split on other reasons. "That bitch," he had said during one of their first conversations, shaking his head and lowering his filmy gaze to his glass of Lone Star. "She had no goddam idea of how important my work was . . . hell, is. She wanted to get outta Texas, go up north, be I don't know what. Met her at A&M, I was majoring in bio, wanted to be a dang high school teacher, but then I found about this G.E stuff, and well I just went apeshit." He looked up at Keith. "That's not General Electric, that's—"
"Genetic engineering," Keith said.
"Well, I'll be go to hell, you ain't as dumb as you look, Cookie."
"What about your wife?" Keith said, not wanting to rush things.
Hastings snorted. "Pretty as a speckled pup under a red wagon, and she knew it. She was in the theater department, wanted to be an actress or something, and knew she wasn't gonna do that in Bone. You know what she's doin' now, Pete?"
Keith shook his head.
"She got her teaching certificate, and she's teaching English in some high school in New York state. Directs the senior class play. Married a fuckin' gym teacher. That's what become of her." He finished his beer. "Mae!" he called toward the kitchen. "Gemme another beer—and a bowla red, hold the fartnuts!"
Mae, Red's wife, who was thirty years older than Sally, stuck her head through the window. "Yore mama didn't teach you to talk like that," she said, and her head disappeared.
"Aw, piss on the fire and call in the dogs," Hastings muttered. "Dang women all alike. You ever married, Pete?"
Keith shook his head. "Never had time for it. Always too busy."
"Busy? Doin' what?"
He shrugged. "Studyin'. Workin'."
"You ain't a queer, now?" Hastings asked. Keith felt the question was serious, even though Hastings tried to make it sound like he was joking.
"You go ask Sally about that." Keith shook his head and made his face go grim. "Makes me sick just to think about queers, what they do and all. Gay people." He paused at the word as if it made his mouth hurt. "Don't know what they got to be so gay about, droppin' dead with AIDS every time you turn around." Then he chuckled. "Best damn disease to come along since sickle cell."
"Think so, do ya?" Hastings grinned slyly.
"Finer'n pubic hair on a pope. Not only got the fags, it gets the junkies too. God himself couldn'ta made a better plague on purpose."
Mae tossed a bowl of red on the table. "Pot's almost empty," she told Keith. "And your break's almost over."
"I'm goin'."
"Where's my beer?" Hastings asked.
"Oh, gimme a break," said Mae. "I ain't even had a chance to piss tonight."
"Always wondered how you filled them kegs," Hastings said, then howled at his joke.
During Keith's first week in Bone, Hastings came into Red's Tavern every night, ate chili and burgers, and drank beer. Some nights he came in alone, and other nights with Al Freeman and Ted Horst, the two men Keith had first seen him with. Although they weren't nearly as talkative as Hastings, they were nearly as friendly. They were married and had children, which accounted for their occasional desire to spend an evening at home.
Keith was glad when he could get Bob Hastings alone. Hastings's tongue was freer about his work when his two older friends weren't there. Too, Keith suspected that Hastings was somehow subordinate to Freeman and Horst. Although he joked with them, he always seemed careful not to push things too far.
The last night before Hastings went back on his two week shift, Keith finally managed to work the conversation around to what he (or what Peter Sullivan) had done before he had come back to T
exas. He leveraged the talk so that by the time he told Hastings, the younger man was grateful to learn the secret.
"Biochem," Keith said. "I spent a couple years in the service, then went to Cornell when I got back, did my grad work at M.I.T., then worked at Wyeth-Ayerst for eight years, and at Rider till last year."
"You're not funnin' me now."
"God's truth."
"Where'd you learn to cook?"
"How I paid my way through school."
"Well, I'll be switched. You quit at Rider or get fired?”
“Quit."
"Whycome?"
Keith looked away. "Like I said before, somebody ate my lunch, and I didn't like that. Didn't work all these years to have some damn slant walk in and . . ." He shook his head. "What's done's done. Bitchin' don't change the weather."
When Keith looked at Hastings again, the man was looking at him appraisingly, almost coldly. "That why you come to Bone?"
"What, Goncourt? I thought about it maybe. Night after you mentioned G.E., I called personnel out there, but they're not lookin'. Said I could send a resume when I offered to, but that was all. Right in the old round file." He shook his head. "Nah, fuck it anyway. I'm not up for kissin' any Jew asses or nigger asses or Mex asses—"
"Especially with them beaner farts," Hastings said, and laughed.
"Seriously, I couldn't stand it," Keith said. "Big organization like that, gotta be your minority hiring, huh?"
Hastings's face got smug. "Ain't no niggers workin' at Goncourt. No Jews or Mexes neither. Not even to clean the crappers.”
“Bullshit."
"What?"
"If that was true, the EEO'd be over you like flies on a runover armadillo."
"Ways of gettin' around that kinda shit."
"Yeah?" Keith let his voice get more intense. "What makes you so different from Rider? They hadda hire these fuckin' niggers and slants, even though they didn't know near as much as us white guys. We carried 'em, and they're the ones that get the credit when somethin' good comes out of our work—'credits to their race' and all that. So what makes Goncourt so damn special?"
Hastings gave a shrug and shook his head, as if he couldn't say any more. Keith wanted to be careful not to push too far too fast, but at the same time he wanted to seem natural, and any natural man would have been curious at this point. "Y'all doin' government work out there?" he said softly, as though not wanting anyone to overhear.
Hastings shook his head again. "I said enough. But send 'em your resume. They won't toss it, you got my word. Now. How 'bout another beer?"
"Might's well," Keith said. "Cause I can't dance and it's too wet to plow."
The next day Bob Hastings went back to Goncourt for two weeks, and Keith Aarons lived the life of a chili cook in a cheap bar. He filled his days with sleep, classical music, and a strict regimen of exercise, and his nights with beef, chilies, and, afterwards, Sally. Though he passed the time with the customers at Red's, he was unable to establish any relationships that told him more about Goncourt Labs. Those who worked there were reluctant to discuss it, and those who didn't knew nothing, though they implied the opposite.
When Keith was alone with silence, his own thoughts assailed him as they never had before. He had been able to think of little else since he heard about the lab.
His was not an altogether solitary life. There were armorers, craftsmen of the underground, forgers of documents, purveyors of forms, and others, many of whom knew far more than what one could read in newspapers. It was from one of these that Keith had acquired the clues that brought him to Bone.
Four years before, and two months after the Valdez incident, Keith had used the services of an underground gunsmith to design and build the weapon with which he later assassinated the president of Exxon. The armorer, who lived in Atlanta, had also been a white supremacist. Sadly, it was hard to find weapons men who were true professionals, in the game for profit alone. Most had causes now, and often causes meant vocality, vocality meant official surveillance. This particular man was one of the most vocal Keith had met.
"So who's this for?" the man, who called himself Brown, had asked Keith when he ordered the weapon. Keith had looked at him coldly and not answered. It was not a question men of sense asked. "Don't blame you for not telling me," Harris said. “Just hope it's a nigger." Keith clenched his jaw. Next to despoilers of the earth, he hated bigots most. They despoiled mankind in their own twisted way.
But he didn't display his loathing to Brown. Instead he hinted that his vendetta was in some way connected to "the efforts of white Christians to liberate themselves from the domination of the mongrel races." The absurd phrase had been music to the gunsmith's ears.
When Keith had checked on him partway through the construction, the man had mentioned the lab, not by name, but as a place where "things were being done, the one place on the earth where everybody saw the danger and was ready to do something about it." When Keith acted sincerely interested, Brown went on, telling him about the virological research being done, genetic engineering to create microbial weapons capable of extinguishing entire races. "In fact," Brown said, "they got a virus you breathe in and out that'll wipe out everybody. The trick is to get it to wipe out the niggers and chinks. But they'll do it, you betcherass."
"I've heard about this before," Keith lied, "but then I heard it was all bullshit, just rumors."
The gunsmith shook his head. "Not rumors. I talked to a guy worked there, and he told me all about it. It's real all right. Real as the American flag."
"How could anything like that stay a secret?"
The gunsmith shrugged. "How do you and me stay secret, pal? There's money there too. Lots of it. Gotta have money today to fight the race wars, do the research. The government gives the blacks money and they fight the whites with it, so thank God that there are white people with money ready to give it to help fight the damn blacks."
"So where is it?" He tried to make it sound as offhand as possible.
"That's what a helluva lot of people'd like to know, isn't it?" The man who called himself Brown smiled, as if he knew but wasn't telling. Keith didn't know if Brown really knew, but he thought he knew more than he was telling. The supremacists were loose-lipped with the generalities of their hatred, but tight with details.
When, a week later, Keith returned to pick up the weapon and pay the second and final installment, he said nothing about the lab. But three hours later, after he had cached his new weapon, he returned to the gunsmith's shop and interrogated him for what further information he might have.
It wasn't much. Brown had met his informant at a white supremacist rally in Florida a year before, but had not learned his name, and knew nothing more about the lab other than that it worked in conjunction with a legitimate chemical laboratory. Brown didn't even know if it was located in the United States.
Keith believed him implicitly. The man's pain threshold was very low, and Keith killed him quickly, before he could come out of shock again. He did not go through the gunsmith's files, for any information Brown had on Keith could not be traced to the next person Keith would become.
A legitimate laboratory. It had not been much to go on, for there were thousands of such facilities in the country. Keith knew of many of them, since among his successful targets had been several executives of companies that had violated DER ordinances. But at least it was something.
Still, he had shuddered at the thought of beginning the search, as he shuddered now, lying in his bed in Bone, Texas, waiting for morning to come. If what the gunsmith had said was true, and if he was able to join the lab and breach the security, then the decision would be his to make, the most important decision that any man had ever made.
For once an airborne virus was free, you could no sooner call it back than you could catch the wind.
Chapter 17
The breakthrough came on the 28th of June. At last it was the chance for Keith to indicate in action what he had only said before.
; It was the second full week that Keith had spent with Bob Hastings. Tonight Ted Horst and Al Freeman had come in with him, and the four of them were sitting together at a table near the front during one of Keith's breaks. At nine o'clock a black man walked into Red's Tavern, an event that didn't happen very often. Keith had only seen two blacks inside the bar in the four weeks he had worked there, and they had just bought a six-pack to carry out.
It wasn't that black people didn't live in Bone, it was just that they lived in one part of town, and didn't mingle much with the whites. Even in a town as small as Bone, they had their own bars and restaurants, their own churches, their own stores. So to have a large, young, and handsome black man come into Red's Tavern, sit at the bar, and order a beer and a bowl of chili brought a moment of disbelieving silence to the place. Keith felt like rejoicing. The man was big, but he had taken big men before. In a way he hated to do it. The black, sitting there with a quiet arrogance and pride Keith admired, looked like an ebony god among the leather thin and pasty whites. But it was his chance, and he didn't know when he might get another.
"Look at that," said Al Freeman. "You don't see that very often."
"Looks like that guy in the Rocky movies," Ted Horst said. "Not from Bone anyhow. Bone darkies wouldn't come in here and sit."
Bob Hastings made no attempt to conceal his aversion. "Stranger or not, who the fuck does that nigger think he is?"
The words were loud enough for the black man to overhear a few of them, and he turned and looked at the men at the table with a pleasant smile, as if to give them an opportunity to retract, if not the words, then their attitudes.
"He's lookin' at you, Bob," Al Freeman whispered.
"Mmm." Ted Horst nodded. "I think he likes you, Bob. Think he'd like to get into your pants."
"Wouldn't be surprised," Keith said loud enough to carry. "Hear black studs'll stick their dicks near anywhere."
The black man lost his smile, and looked at Keith for a long moment. Keith looked back, expressionless except for a gentle smile that curved the corners of his thin mouth. The black man took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to his chili.
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