Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

  “Dave Roberts,” Clarissa, her voice barely louder than the plane’s engines just assumed Mandy was listening.

  She closed the file and slouched down in her seat to listen as Clarice continued studying her computer.

  “Screen name Chef Julio-Julio, late of the Bronx, died from bad shellfish. It appears that the coroner’s initial report about shellfish toxicity is being reinvestigated. Neither Julio nor his guest had ever had a bad shellfish reaction prior. Both his body and that of the audience member, Jennifer Matheson of Cleveland, Ohio, have been cremated. Her parents have filed suit against the New York coroner’s office and against the network. Cremation is apparently against their religion, though it appears the daughter was estranged from them and the suit isn’t expected to amount to much. The lab is reporting that the initial tests revealed the presence of the toxin Genyavlax. No detection level was quantified. When they tried to retest, the samples were gone, apparently cremated along with the bodies.”

  “No trace.” Mandy chewed on her lower lip. Not the sort of follow-up some serial killer would or even could do. She was liking this less with each passing moment.

  “Not a shred.” Clarice continued to punch at the keys.

  “What about the other one?” Someone was hunting television chefs. Two may be a coincidence, perhaps a disgruntled wannabe TV chef. But not three. Inadvertently, Phillip had saved Jeffrey. And thanks to Master Sergeant Shelley Thomas, he was now safely underground where they weren’t going to find him.

  “Maggie Hadderly, really Marta Schlosser, was torched with napalm. Two others were burned fatally when they attempted to rescue her. The three fire extinguishers closest to the studio kitchen had been, oh God, filled with gasoline.”

  Her face was pale when she looked up at Amanda who wasn’t feeling too well herself.

  “They, uh, have a video link.”

  “That’s okay. I think we can pass on that.”

  That’s what Jeff and the Assistant Director had been discussing. No seafood, not even an oven.

  Jeff and Phillip must have talked about it the night before. And Jeff had brought in all of his own supplies in his bag and cooler. Wisely not trusting anyone. Yet someone had gotten to his water, made it into potassium cyanide, or perhaps precipitated it as a salt in the bottoms of the glasses. His Grey Goose water would then put it into solution, a very high dose to kill so fast.

  And Phillip had pieced together that he might be in danger after they were in the studio. So he’d been a target as well.

  There was only one thing the two men had in common, EMS. Someone was hunting chefs and EMS. There was no way to connect the two other than Jeff. The only question was had she moved them in time?

  She could still kill Phillip for not telling her more.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Vultures! Worse than goddamn paparazzi.”

  He stared out the helicopter’s window at the lawn, his perfect Aquiline profile silhouetted like the movie star he’d wanted to be. Still the handsomest man Lindsey Grant had ever seen.

  Two in the morning. Pouring rain. A freakish, early cold snap down to the thirties.

  Yet dozens of reporters and photographers, the lowest of the low on the White House Press Corps pecking order, huddled under their umbrellas. Anyone with any pull was home sleeping in their warm beds, leaving the grunts to the slight chance of even a single moment of news.

  “Remember. Your image.”

  “Screw my image,” the President of the United States shrugged off her placating hand. “Fucking vultures. I’d stage a coup if I could get rid of them.”

  “Don’t let anyone hear you say that out loud.”

  “Which? Fuck or coup?”

  “Either. And especially not together.”

  That got a laugh. “A good fucking coup, just what we need. I can always blame it on the Tourette’s.”

  “Which you don’t have.”

  “Details. You always bother me with details. Bitch.”

  He said the last in what he surely thought was a gentle, affectionate tone. Instead it made her count the days, just forty-three to election day. Please let him lose. Then seventy-six lame-duck days.

  She’d file for divorce the day after the inauguration, once he was divested of the Presidential powers he’d otherwise use to make her life even more hellish.

  But he wouldn’t lose. Top of the polls by a huge margin. Could she add four years to her plan and not kill him herself? Justifiable homicide of your spouse? Wouldn’t fly in any court, but it might be worth the risk. No, killing an insane, power-mad husband was one thing, killing the President of the United States was something else again.

  The rotors spun down to a full stop before a young marine opened the steps to the helicopter and let them out of one prison into a larger one. She was confined with an egotistical lunatic.

  Hand in hand, the most popular President in history and his lovely wife, often called the Californian Jackie O., paraded across the soggy grass beneath umbrellas they hadn’t needed to think about in three and a half years. They simply appeared when needed. She wondered if there was some weather interns who spent their lives making sure the proper protection from sunscreen to sou’westers was always available.

  Her husband waved to the crowd with a cheerful glad hand that had nothing to do with Chinese trade negotiations or his fake Tourette’s. Her smile at least was genuine, though she no longer knew how to read his, if she ever had. The girl inside her loved this bit of pomp. The Marine guards at perfect attention. The key staff waiting at the entrance despite the hour. The Press Corps shouting their names.

  It might make her shallow, but she didn’t care. For this brief instant, this momentary crossing from one threshold to another, she was the most glamorous woman in the world.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What the hell do you mean he’s gone missing? Who the fuck took him?”

  “Mr. Pr— Pr— President—”

  “Don’t ‘Mr. Pr— Pr— President’ me from up in your goddamn plane.” Tom Grant grabbed the phone from the cradle, rocked back in the chair and set his feet on the Resolute desk. Long damn day to now be faced with this shit.

  “I need results, Stephen, and if I can’t get them from you, I’ll put someone else in your fucking wheelchair, if I have to break his back to do it.”

  Calm.

  Gotta keep calm or Stephen would get all tongue-tied and incomprehensible. He’d always had the stammering problem, ever since they were kids. He could hide it from most, but not when he was really stressed.

  “Stephen, buddy mine, only friend of my childhood, I’m sorry. It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m pissed. How can he be friggin’ gone? The fucking chef was supposed to go down on show night along with Peterson. I thought the Israelis were running cover on this one for us.”

  “They were.”

  “Then why did you grab him? I saw it on fucking national TV. Those were your goons, weren’t they? On CNN in living Technicolor?” He stared up at the ceiling of the Oval Office and counted to ten while Stephen struggled. Reports were that his high-flying aide de camp had shaken the stammering problem with all his staffers, so why was the President of the United States the only one stuck with it.

  “I-, i-, it wasn’t our boys.”

  “Then whose were they?”

  “No I.D. when we took them down. SAS is our best guess, the Special Air Service. But we took them down a little hard, so we can’t be sure. Whoever they were, they were dressed like ours, right down to the radios and brand of socks.”

  He was getting better control of his voice.

  “So the Brits are in on this too? What the hell are you doing up there? Where are you anyway? It’s about time we met again.”

  There, that threw him into unrecoverable stammer. Stephen hated coming to ground. Worth the price of scaring him to make a moment to
think.

  The Israelis had offered a trade. We’ll take the blame for some of your domestic dirty work if you take the blame for some of ours. Plausible deniability. He could use US Special Operations Forces to clean up thorny domestic issues then blame the Israelis. Their government would refuse to comment on something so outrageous and the whole thing would fade away in the inscrutable world of international politics. And he could offer the same sanctioned “no comment” to them.

  President Tommy Grant looked good to the public for complaining bitterly to the foreigners, even if they refused to respond just like foreigners always did. And he looked good to the Israeli government by giving them the space to clean up some of their own problems, though gunning down the opposition party leader had been a bit extreme even by his standards. Thankfully they’d decided to blame that on Sudan, part of some aid package for a Sudanese drought.

  Win-win, Tommy. That was his magic.

  “Now, Stephen, where’s my win-win in this situation?”

  “Un- Un- Until we find Jeffrey Davis, there isn’t much I can do.”

  He knew they were both in deep, too deep to not be helping each other.

  “What do you need, Stephen? We have to make this guy gone very fast. He could create a real stink for some of our corporate pals. Remember who told me about the problem with him in the first place?”

  Stephen kept quiet. He’d damn well better remember making the suggestion just three weeks ago. He’d had all the details worked out right down to airing out a couple of other chefs to make it look like a pattern killer.

  A pattern killer who’d screwed up on the only one that mattered.

  CHAPTER 33

  Amanda was back in the old offices, the original home of EMS where the whole thing had begun, the house Mandy and Phillip had grown up in. They’d bugged out shortly after Jeffrey had left EMS. Too much history, too many paths leading back to them. Leaving here had been the first step in her itinerant lifestyle. Every six months to two years since, they’d moved the headquarters. Four years in Maine had been the longest, overlong in retrospect.

  Clarice had the place airing out. The old farmhouse was fusty after all these years. Engineering’s cleaning crew had done a fine job, but the air was still twenty-five years old. It kept catching in her throat no matter how wide open the windows were.

  Perhaps this wasn’t the best idea. The rambling farm house perched high on the hill on the outskirts of Franconia, New Hampshire. An old hay barn stood farther down on the property, a scenic buffer from the lower road. The rustic red siding and old shake roof still in decent repair. Was the hay loft still filled? Were the old blankets she and Jeffrey had used so often still stashed behind the last row of bales? Or had they rotted away along with so much else over the last quarter century?

  Turning away from the window was no better. The living room furniture was grouped around a massive hearth of fieldstone. Phillip’s ratty armchair still looked partly crushed, “a study of furniture in agony” he’d always called it. He’d often threatened to write a scientific paper investigating time/pressure dynamics on residential furnishing.

  The long couch where she’d spent how many hours leaning back against Jeffrey, watching the flames in the quiet of the evening. And the old hearthrug was still there. The one Ashlyn had slept on so many times with, what was the dog’s name? Mr. Peabody? Mr. Stretch? Mr. Paws. That was it. A black, mostly poodle mutt with cream-colored paws.

  Coming back here was definitely a bad idea. But she couldn’t make the others bug out again simply because she was being chased by ghosts.

  Through the kitchen and into the back bedroom, she reached the two desks facing each other from opposite sides of the room. A couple of chairs were set between them which could be turned to face either way. The sun shone in the back windows through lace curtains. The heavier winter curtains, done in a hunter green velvet, were tied back to either side.

  “Do you have the blasted office set up yet?”

  Clarice jerked upright from beneath the far desk as if she’d been stuck with a cattle prod.

  “Ooo. We’re grouchy, aren’t we? I like the place. And yes, Your Highness, the equipment is all running and secure. Though Engineering is grousing about the primitive power supply here. I think we’re getting a solar-electric system tomorrow or something. Either that or he was serious about rigging us with a couple of bicycles with generators attached to the wheels.”

  “Sorry.” Amanda thudded into her chair. “Too many memories.”

  “Hunh? I guess. Sure. Why not? I mean I wasn’t even born when you guys bailed from this place. So I know all about that, don’t I? Know to pussyfoot around Miss Grumps when she finally comes home?”

  Amanda held up her hands in defeat. “Okay, abuse given. Tongue-lashing received. Sorry. There, apology forwarded. What’s on the roster?”

  Clarice threw a switch somewhere deep in her brain and the sunny personality returned as if it had never been gone.

  “Well, your crew is so efficient…”

  Okay, so she wasn’t off the hook yet.

  “That there are no outstanding issues from the move other than power. Security is all the way in. And a Mrs. Clark stopped by with a pie, I put it in the fridge, and she left a message.” Clarice referred to a pad on her own desk. “Here it is. ‘Glad to have you back, honey.’ Nice lady.”

  “She must be a hundred.” “Tene” Clark had been her babysitter an unimaginable time ago. Christena had been too much of a mouthful for a young Amanda and the name had stuck.

  Clarice dropped a white envelope on her desk. “Here’s an invitation to her ninety-seventh birthday party at the Grange Hall next Thursday. This is so country, I love it. Can I come too, assuming you don’t have a date?”

  The girl made it sound as if she had to beat the men off with a stick. There hadn’t been many men since, well, since Jeffrey. Raising her daughter had occupied her and by the time she was grown and gone, running EMS had required every waking moment.

  Jeffrey wouldn’t recognize the operation.

  They’d started it in a casual way out in the living room, almost as something to keep them all out of trouble after the war and the breakup of the Beatles. Soon it was a dozen like-minded scientists. Now they were thirty-four separate divisions scattered over eleven countries. Their total staff was nearing the thousand mark.

  “What’s next?”

  “One file. One envelope.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Clarice turned her attention back to organizing her own desk quickly and efficiently. Mandy noticed that her own desk was already set up, right down to a coaster for her daily Coke, caffeine-free, diet. Definitely not the real thing, but at least it still said Coca-Cola on it and it wreaked less havoc on her system.

  File first.

  Phillip’s second and final Crash Code.

  “Desertification.” Again no cover sheet. A gentle breeze through the back window riffled the pages. Oak and pine and the cool upper reaches of the White Mountains drifted in the back window. Beyond the lawn, beyond the forest that snuggled so close about the old farm, the rock and scrub ridges she knew so well sent their clean scent down to her. Maybe being back here wasn’t such a bad idea. Life had been good here, the memories were easy. At least until Jeff had gone.

  Phillip’s file. Focus.

  Nearly a hundred pages of disappearing wetlands and modern-era dustbowls where there had once been lush fields. Under three percent attributed to the natural, slow shift of weather patterns. Almost wholly attributed to global warming.

  The warmer the atmosphere, the more water the air could hold. The world was half a degree warmer than a hundred years ago. Sounded piddly. Phillip had the data to make it a little more worrisome. Half a degree meant five percent more moisture could be held in the atmosphere. The air was literally sucking the water off the land and the land was changing.
Forest to scrub, fields to steppes, steppes to desert.

  Now at least his first file made sense. One of his ag teams had developed breeds of exceptional crops that consumed less water in their total lifecycle without significant detriment to the harvest’s yield. And global warming was going to, already had, created a demand for them. A new black market was forming. In Australia they weren’t just selling water rights, for the first time in history they were selling water on the black market. If the crops were really good, they were worth a fortune to whoever controlled them.

  But that wasn’t within the parameters of EMS’s mandate. The Enclave of Mad Scientists weren’t insane, they were angry. Angry at the way corporations ran the world to maximize their own profits. Some DOW or Burpee or the American government would take these plants and bury them, or sell them to the highest bidder. It was the lowest bidders who were starving and would continue to do so.

  Logistics was her part of the job. Technology transfer. It was up to her to figure out how to disperse the knowledge EMS uncovered and make sure it was distributed as widely as possible. There weren’t many issues here. At least not to her untrained eye. She knew far more about physics than botany, but the solutions seemed obvious.

  Both files were interesting, now that she read them as a pair, but not a crash priority. She set them to the side and told herself to start thinking production and distribution, as soon as she could think at all. She’d trust that Big Bro had felt it was urgent and think about it sooner rather than later. But first she had to figure out who was killing chefs and brothers.

  One envelope.

  “Last Will and Testament of Phillip Peterson.” Deep breath, Mandy. Deep breath and just do it.