Arthur faces the cameras. “To save this island from the depredations of a soulless mining corporation.”
“Are you prepared to resist arrest?”
Arthur suppresses an impulse to make light of the matter, to jest about how he’s been arrested before — twice for contempt of court. But the impromptu interview is cut short as the staff sergeant returns to address the thirty remaining protesters. “Ladies and gentlemen, you are blocking a highway. That’s an offence under the Criminal Code, section 423. You could do up to two years.”
Quickly their numbers are halved, down to a brave baker’s dozen. “Everyone sit,” Al calls. Arthur squats, trying to avoid a puddle.
The senior officer glumly reads them their rights. Handcuffs are clicked open. A pair are snapped onto Arthur’s wrists. He feels ridiculous.
“Let’s help you up, old-timer,” says a husky female officer, grasping him under the armpits, raising him to his feet. Only Cud Brown and Hamish McCoy resist, and are limply carried off, protesting police-state tactics.
“I think we can do this in two trips,” Dugald says as he fetches his Ford Explorer SUV from the drop-off lane.
One by one, the handcuffs are removed as Arthur squeezes into the back of the SUV with six others, so tight with Taba that he can’t find a place for his arm, and it ends up awkwardly around her shoulders, hovering above her breast. Both are soaking wet.
“Well, isn’t this cozy,” she says. “They can’t keep us locked up through the weekend, can they?” She whispers, “You up for Saturday?” A tremor of arousal as she squeezes his thigh. “Come by a little late if you like, after dusk.”
Arthur removes Taba’s hand. He feels ridiculous, afflicted by lust amid despair. As the SUV jolts ahead, he hears the TexAmerica trucks grinding off the ferry. What a shambles.
* * *
Arthur sneezes. “Excuse me.” He sneezes again. He has changed into dry clothes, and is sitting by his blazing fireplace as he chats on the phone with Margaret.
“Don’t tell me you’ve also caught a cold.”
“I’m fine.”
“You looked awfully miserable on the evening news. How come you’re home? Didn’t they arrest you?”
“They just wanted us out of the way. Irwin Dugald drove us all to our homes. He handled the situation with remarkable aplomb, I have to say.”
Ulysses makes a lunge for the hem of his robe, takes a mighty tug, nearly causing Arthur to eject from his club chair. “Down, boy!” The pup stares at Arthur with seeming disappointment: Why doesn’t his master want to play? How come no afternoon walk? What’s with the bad vibes?
“Ulysses is full of energy.”
“I thought Stefan was training him.”
“He may have met his match.”
“Has he been talking to any more wild animals?”
Arthur looks out the window. “As we speak.” Stefan is out in the rain, ambling along on the rock beach, in apparent conversation with two ravens walking beside him. All three pause occasionally to examine a shell or some wiggling thing in a tidal pool.
“I think that was a very brave thing you did, Arthur, if that’s any consolation. Is there any recourse?”
“Hamish and Mattie may have an action in nuisance. A dim hope, but nothing ventured.” He scribbles one of his notes, adds it to his pile: “Research law of nuisance.”
Margaret has to get back to planning her fundraising event, set for this weekend. They sign off with long-distance kisses.
Ulysses stares at him expectantly, his tail wagging.
“All right, all right, let’s go.”
Arthur puts on a rain poncho and snaps on the leash. Ulysses gives him a wet kiss and pulls him out the door.
Chapter 5: Rivie
1
Monday, September 10
So we’re all still revved up from Saturday’s brilliant Save-the-Bees funder that a bunch of leading greenies put together. A Bee-In, they called it, an open-air event at Ontario Place emceed by David Suzuki. Six name bands headlined by Blue Rodeo and Broken Social Scene. Guest spot by Neil Young! Sixty dollars a pop, six thousand bums on chairs and more standing, plus thirty grand for the silent auction and forty-five more from outside donors.
A big chunk of which will go to Brazil’s bee defenders, but there’s surplus booty to help out with protests breaking out all over the freaking planet, now that Chemican is starting to be seen as an international pariah.
Lucy and I kind of paid our way by volunteering backstage. Personal highlight: Selwyn Loo intro’d me to Margaret Blake, who is a good hugger and radically cool.
And so now it’s the turn for us eco-guerrillas to show our stuff. It’s Bee-Day, or at least late evening, and here we are, the partisans of Operation Beekeeper, all in a nervous tingle, standing in a patch of woods, on the fringe of what city planners like to call, oxymoronically, an industrial park. It’s south of the busy border town of Sarnia, and from between the trees we can glimpse the St. Clair River and, on the other side, a rural snapshot of the thumb of mitten-shaped Michigan. Detroit is a hundred kilometres downriver, and its lights suffuse the southern horizon as the last rays of sunset dim into a mauve wash.
The day had been hot, the air’s still heavy. The woods sparkle with fireflies but annoy with mosquitoes. We are six: Doc, Joe, Lucy, Rockin’ Ray, Chase, and the imperious Jewish princess who whined and bitched when they tried to leave me behind. Chase and I scoped out the scene a few days ago, tenting here in the woods, about which I’ll spare the details except we didn’t get much sleep.
Doc drove us in Ivor’s big unmarked van, the rest of us splayed on foamies and mattresses in the seatless back. The old fossil burner is parked a hundred metres down the street that borders this area of scraggly forest, which surveyors’ ribbons have earmarked for a warehouse site. Across the way, and fifty metres down, is the entrance gate of the Chemican plant.
Its compound is surrounded by a three-metre-tall fence of thick woven wire. Several transport trucks and vans are parked in there. A rail spur with two tanker cars.
Okie Joe has all the codes. Everything else that I poached from Howie’s war room has either been erased from his computers or stored in the Cloud with a password as long as his arm that he snail-mailed to his girlfriend in Oklahoma.
I pass Doc the high-powered binocs. “Take a boo at the guardhouse.” A glassed-in shelter, maybe two metres square. “That paunchy guy in the grey uniform pretty well stays put, but wanders out for an occasional smoke or piss.”
“Irwin Fleiger,” says Doc. “Suspended for a week in May for drinking on the job.” Doc must have memorized the relevant employee records. He’s so sharp. “Age forty-one, five years with Chemican. After secondary school, he did a six-month course in security work.”
I direct his attention to the character coming around the corner of the sprawling two-storey structure. “That’s got to be the temp they’ve got doing ground patrol.” In a uniform, like Fleiger, but baggy, a couple of sizes too large. His flashlight does a full arc, and we duck.
“Archie Gooch, thirty-three, single, had to repeat grade nine, spotty work record, three arrests — shoplifting, hit and run, dealing amphetamines. Apparently that doesn’t disqualify him from guarding a top-secret chemical lab. His ex-girlfriend sought and got a no-harassment order.”
Gooch checks a ground-floor window, finds it secure, casts his light around, sends a beam at Fleiger in the guard shack, who calls out something joshing or profane. Gooch shuffles up to the front door, buzzes, bringing out the third member of this stellar team, the inside man. They confer.
“Barney Wilson,” says Doc. “Twenty-eight. Eighteen months on the job. Took some kind of surveillance training. Also a Boy Scout leader.”
“Every hour or so he comes out for a smoke,” says Chase.
On cue, the Boy Scout leader tamps out a pair of cigarette
s and he and Archie Gooch light up. After a minute of chit-chat, Gooch carries on, then stops to shake something out of an envelope, a pill or capsule that he pops into his mouth. Could be a cough drop. Could be his daily multivitamin. Could be dope of some kind. Speed, for which he already has a sheet.
Or maybe it’s one of the drugs du jour, a high-test opiate like Oxycodone. That’s what Rockin’ Ray is guessing: “Oxy, maybe fentanyl, dope for dopes. Dangerous and disgusting, man.” Even Ray has limits. “Hey, Doc,” he says, “are we sure none of these bubbas are armed?”
“This isn’t America,” Doc says. “Yet.” He takes a turn with the binocs, wiping the germs off first with a wet wipe.
“Average time of a circuit was seven and a half minutes for the regular guy, the dental patient,” Chase says. “But this Gooch dude is no Speedy Gonzales.”
Ten minutes and forty seconds later Gooch reappears, joins the guardhouse guy for another gasper — these boys are total chimneys — then checks the parked trucks before beginning another tour. Again he pauses, tongues another small item from his envelope.
Doc goes, “Let’s give it another hour, say about midnight, less ambient light.” The main sources of illumination will be a street lamp, four yard lights, the glow from the guardhouse, and a dimmer glow from the barred windows of the plant. Its laboratory is on the second floor, and totally dark.
We hunker down, swatting mosquitoes, praying for a breeze. I pull my black jacket over my head — we’re all wearing dark clothes — and squat under a poplar tree with Lucy and Ray. For about the fifth time I check my phone, my regular one, to make sure it’s on mute. I scrapped the Becky phone after texting Howie a couple of days ago with, “Sorry missed your call. Mom needs total rest. Back Sun for Sox game. Jays need our help!!” A grinning emoji.
Bummer. I really wanted to catch that series.
Lucy has a cap on, with flaps, to cover her magenta hair. She’s leaning against Ray, who is crouched over a lit cigarette, trying to shield it from view. From its glow I see him slipping something into his mouth.
I go, “Tell me that’s some kind of vitamin supplement.”
“Waker-upper. I didn’t sleep all day.”
“What was it, Ray?”
“Fank you, little darlin’, for being so concerned about my habits and needs. It was just a dot, a cursmidgen. Not more than a hundred micros.”
Lucy goes, “Oh, shit. Houston, we got a problem.”
“Acid? You just did a hit of acid?” Keeping my voice low, though I want to scream. Doc and the others are out of earshot.
“Chill. Hey, ladies, it’s a picayune hundred micrograms. To tune me up, heighten the awareness. A little lightness of being, man.”
“Shut up,” Lucy says. “Now what? Doc will go ballistic.”
“You sure it’s just a hundred?” I’ve done a few trips, one with double that, and managed okay.
“Absotootly.”
Lucy curses. I clap my hand over her mouth. “How do you know it’s not four hundred?”
“I was told.”
“Who, by the guy you scored it off?”
“Totally chill dude who looks after the band.”
“T. J. Gully.” Lucy groans. “A drunk. A garbage head.”
“Never done me wrong. He deals pure.”
Lucy hushes him again and we do a feverish tête-à-tête. Do we tell Doc? But we don’t want him calling this off, we’re too ready, too primed. Do we leave Ray behind? What if he goes bizarro? Mind you, Ray is almost always on some kind of dope and never seems to lose it. But he has a role in this caper. He’s supposed to hide downstairs, below the second-floor lab, with a view of both doors, send a text alert if anyone enters. A hundred micrograms might not impair that simple function — we’ve practised it a dozen times. But can we take that chance?
“Okay, let me babysit,” Lucy says. “I’ll text the alerts. We’ll tell Doc that Ray is so bagged he could fall asleep.”
So Lucy and I find Doc, both of us feeling crappy for leaving out one little detail. Doc thanks us. He’d seen Ray yawning with fatigue.
2
“Phones on vibrate,” Doc says. “Gloves on.” And he leads us across the road while Fleiger, the guardhouse guy, is focussed on taking a piss into a bed of nasturtiums.
We crawl on all fours to the fence, Chase taking up position there with a pair of industrial wire cutters. We stay low while Archie Gooch, taking a break from his labours, perches on a ramp at the back door of the plant and pulls from his cigarette pack not a straight but a spliff. We can smell it from fifty metres away, a billowing of smoke — he almost disappears in the fog of his exhaust fumes.
He takes a couple more hits, dinches the roach, flicks it, gets up, steadies himself, aims for the corner of the building, and weaves off around it.
Lucy can’t help herself: “And the employee-of-the-year award goes to . . .” Almost too loud, and there is choked laughter and, from Doc, “Shush. Let’s move it.”
Chase clips the bottom two strands, then we scurry into the compound, dart behind a tanker truck, then lope to the back entrance. The ramp where Gooch had been smoking his face off leads to a loading bay and a wide steel gate, and a regular door next to it, accessed by a keypad.
Okie Joe opens his notebook, a pen flashlight between his teeth, and he clicks a couple of multi-digit codes that he has assured us will unlock the door and disarm the security system. Open sesame. We are in. Noiselessly.
Barney Wilson, the inside guy, is presumably parked at his desk near the front door, out of view, a hundred metres away. A light glows from that direction. He has a radio tuned to a country music station, a distant complaint of sliding guitar. Assuming he follows protocol he won’t be doing his next walkabout for half an hour, at midnight.
A few windowed offices, a coffee lounge, otherwise it’s all open space. Massive tanks, tubes, conduits, crates, an assembly line for packaging Vigor-Gro in ten-litre containers. Cranes and hoists, fork stackers. A wall of shelves with hand tools: drills and bits and clamps and crowbars. Conveniently close to our back door is a wide staircase to the chemical lab. No surprises, all according to the diagrams and photos in Howie’s files.
There’s a dark recess behind the metal racks of protective gear — that will be Lucy’s and Ray’s lookout. So far, Rockin’ Ray is fairly dormant, not tripping but he’s only an hour into it. But then as the rest of us race upstairs, there’s a clatter and a soft curse, and it looks like Ray has tipped something over, a helmet maybe or ear protectors.
He emerges on knees and elbows to retrieve a hard hat, and I get this wiggle of worry over his playful act of strapping it on and saluting like a soldier. He’s too close to the rack, the whole thing could go down. But he crawls back safely.
We wait in silence until we’re sure the guard, Wilson, heard nothing over the hillbilly lament on his radio, and then we carry on up to the lab, which is thick-walled but with two high windows cracked open, maybe because it gets hot in there. Again, a keypad lock, and again Joe does his magic. Totally dark except for various LEDs, some blinking, and dim light from windows. Doc does a survey by pen flashlight: long metal tables, beakers, flasks, tubes. Lockers, refrigeration equipment, machines for mixing, I guess, or analyzing or quality control or whatever they do.
An interior door, unlocked, takes us into Chemican’s records storage and library. Several computers. Shelves with manuals and texts, cabinets and drawers, folders of multicoloured files. As Doc dives into those, Joe hacks the computers, gets them regurgitating data into his externals. I return to the front door of the lab, where I’ve been assigned to watch for activity below.
Everything is cool for about half an hour, then my cell wobbles, and I duck as Barney Wilson appears below. The guys in the lab got Lucy’s alert too, because the computer fans stop whirring. An overhead light goes on. I find a hidden corner and listen to Boy
Scout leader Barney Wilson hum-sing “Oh! Susanna” as he does the rounds, probing with a flashlight.
After several minutes, I hear him closer, climbing the stairs, coming from Alabama with his banjo on his knee. A rattle of the door handle. But he leaves it at that and returns downstairs and I breathe out slowly. The front door clicks open. Wilson has gone out for his hourly smoke.
Another couple of hours pass. The same routine: going into suspended animation as Wilson walks about singing Boy Scout campfire songs. Occasionally we spot Archie Gooch from a rear window, a lighter flaring, sucking up tobacco or more reefer, topping off with one of his mystery pills.
I hate this spooky lab, this Vigor-Gro death house, its poisons. Not touching anything though still wearing my clammy rubber gloves. So far, no activity from the acid freak below, though he must be squirrelly with the silence and darkness. Unless he’s so bagged he couldn’t stay awake, or maybe the LSD hasn’t kicked in.
Finally, Doc motions me over to the library to confer. He’s got a full backpack of files. The copying of hard drives is complete, everyone’s packing up their gear, pen lights, cameras, external drives.
“Get anything good?” I ask.
“Suspicious test results for starters. At least one blatantly made-up survey, so there’s likely more. Some junk science. It’ll take a day or two to sort it out for the media.”
The material is to be bundled out over the net to major dailies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, plus the TV networks and progressive journals and webzines.
“We’ll wait for Wilson to make another pass,” Doc says. “As soon as he’s out the front, we’re out the back.”
We return to our stations. I’m ecstatic. This has gone like silk.
* * *
The minutes creep by. It’s three a.m. Finally, Wilson reappears again. Phones vibrate. We hide.
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