Killer Dust Read online

  “Maybe I should talk to his mother. What’s her number ?”

  Tom shook his head. “Stop! Jack told me nothing of any substance that would help you find him, and if you value your relationship with him, I—as your friend—urge you to stay out of this.”

  My mouth flapped open and shut a few times. “Well, what about this ‘killer dust’ business? Doesn’t that tell you something? I mean, what kind of dust? Drugs? Anthrax?”

  Tom threw down his fork and grabbed my wrist. “Anthrax? Where’d you get that idea?”

  I froze. Tom was gripping my arm hard. I had hit a nerve. Jarred and confused, I threw out the few connections that had occurred to me during the night. “Florida. Dust. Killing. That’s anthrax. It’s a spore, or a bacillus or something, but it’s deadly. And you FBI guys have been trying to find the guy who put it in the letters and killed that guy down there in Florida. And the letters that came through the post office up in New Jersey, and the Senate building. So I figured Jack must be assigned to something so deep that even Tanya at the office wouldn’t know about it. You keep me guessing, Tom, and I’m going to do just that: guess.”

  Tom opened his hand and let go of me. I could see that it was taking conscious intent on his part to calm down. All he said in reply was, “Jack’s been vaccinated. So have I, and so have you, Faye. But not you, Em.”

  Faye threw her hands up. “So that was the inoculation you insisted I have. Thanks for telling me!”

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  Quick, before they got into another tiff, I said, “Tom, can we go see Jack’s mother?”

  “He didn’t go to his mother’s. She hadn’t—no, Em, let’s stay on the straight and narrow here. There are plenty of airports in Florida: Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Miami … .” He looked back and forth between Faye and me. “You fur balls are really going to go there, aren’t you!”

  Faye nodded. “I just need a break, Tom. I called my aunt. She’ll foot the bill for the fuel, so it really won’t hurt our budget. Promise. This business with Jack is nothing, right? He’ll surface again any day now, and when he does, Em will be right there to greet him.”

  Tom looked from her to me and shook his head. “That’s nuts.”

  I turned my palms upward. “Probably. But in the meantime, I’ve kind of gotten into this dust thing, and my professor has made a contact for me at the USGS there in St. Pete. She’s thinking I might get a thesis project out of this.”

  Tom put a hand on Faye’s. Almost tenderly, he said, “Is it really okay if I come along?”

  Faye’s face sagged. She had wanted a girl’s road trip, not another round of dealing with Tom. But she squeezed his hand and said, “Of course, dear; I would in fact prefer you come.”

  “Okay then, lay in your flight plan.”

  “I’ve done that already. We lift off at four A.M.”

  Tom gaped. “Four A.M.? Tomorrow?”

  “It’s hurricane season down there. There’s one cooking along the southern Caribbean, and even if it’s no influence yet, the clouds build all morning and by afternoon, it’s the land of the thunderstorm. I want to get down there before the storm gets close to Florida and kicks up winds and rain. And Em has an appointment tomorrow afternoon with some science geek.”

  I said, “Hurricane? You didn’t tell me about no hurricane !”

  “Weenie. I’ll have you there well ahead of it.”

  Tom said, “Have you forgotten what Hurricane Andrew did to light aircraft, Faye? As in, even the ones that were chained down?”

  Faye glared at him, but said, “Em, are you packed?”

  “Gear’s in the truck, right outside.”

  Tom groaned. “I suppose you have a kit ready for me, too.”

  Faye nodded. “I packed your usual field gear: laptop, extra batteries, .45 automatic, extra clips, change of skivvies. I found a pair of swim trunks in your bottom drawer—très antique, Dude, get with modern fashion—and check this out!” She got up from the table, opened the coat closet, pulled out a suitcase, and flipped it open. A brilliant red fabric glared from the top, all crazy with parrots and tropical leaves.

  Tom’s eyes went round with horror. “What,” he said, gasping between each few words, “in God’s name—is that?”

  Faye gave him a grin that would have lit Los Angeles. “It’s a luau shirt! If you want to blend in with the natives you’ve got to dress the part. There’s a swell golf shirt in here, too. And honey, don’t you even worry about the cost. I got them at the Salvation Army!”

  – 7 –

  The Floridian night was as warm and close as a lover’s kiss, but the man at the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach was oblivious to outward signals of reality. All that mattered was the chaos inside, and that mattered, mattered, mattered. She was the cause of that chaos. He was ready to burst again, big and turbulent as a thundercloud, and it was all her fault. Her fault. It didn’t matter what anyone said, she was the cause, and she had to pay. It was payback time, and she was going to pay big. BIG. Yes, Lucy had to pay.

  Waiting, waiting, waiting … why did he have to wait! Damn the delay! He’d been so close!

  Dinner at the Denny’s on the strip had been the usual shit. The waitress had stuffed the plate in front of him as if he had worms crawling on him. Another one of those bitches. They all knew each other and whispered about him. The greasy hamburger sat like a brick in his stomach. Sleeping was not an option, he knew. He knew. To fix the hell of sleeplessness, it was necessary to fix its cause.

  He looked up and down the row of motel rooms, counting lights. Only two people awake. Probably men married to bitches that slammed doors when they saw them coming. He’d show them how to deal with bitches who slammed doors.

  Time to go.

  He strolled along the walkway in front of the rooms and across the parking lot, hands in pockets, real casual. He chuckled to himself. Just another tourist out for a stroll. He stretched, for the moment feeling the strength of his long, muscular arms, enjoying the sense of power he felt even thinking about what he was going to do. At the far side of the parking lot, he crossed through a narrow wooden walkway that led to the beach. Once on the beach itself, he shambled slightly as his large frame adjusted to the loose sand. Just another tourist out for a midnight walk.

  Except that it was two A.M. No sleep. Fucking Lucy. Time for her to pay. Big-time.

  The surf rolled up to a clutter of shells. He strolled onward. North. Toward Cape Canaveral. Toward Kennedy Space Center. He knew he could not walk all the way to it. It was twenty miles along the sand to the shuttle launch pads—fifteen miles as the crow flies—but even if he could get across the inlet of the Banana River, the ground up there on the Cape was rotten with runways and lesser launch pads and crazy hero boys with rifles. But no matter, his little firecracker would jump those miles in a blink. And no one would be looking for his kind of trouble as far south as Cocoa Beach. Fuck the flyboys in their helicopters, making their puny sweeps!

  A crooked grin spread across his face as he played the movie in his head: Fire boiling out from under space shuttle Endeavor as tons of fuel were ignited to take fucking Lucy skyward. The bitch thought she could get away from him, but she would not, because the next fire would be his as he triggered his little love message. He would trigger it and watch it go. It would blaze through the sky, accelerating to Mach 2 much faster than the shit Lucy was riding, and then, in another glorious moment of fire, his little firecracker would find hers and the big, dumb boosters would explode and that would be that for little Lucy’s tour of the heavens. Fuck her. Fuck her. Fuck her!

  And then she would flutter down like a little moth … .

  And he would be there to catch her … .

  Only he would understand what she needed. Only he would understand what it meant to lose so much. Only he could console her.

  And she would turn to him then, and throw herself at his feet in anguish.

  She would marry him. Bear his children. It would all b
e as it was supposed to be.

  He checked his digital wristwatch, poking the button that made the date flash green, just as he had done every ten minutes for the past week. He would get the new schedule somehow. Just a few more days to endure until the launch … .

  Just a few more days to hide in plain sight.

  Lucy sat at her desk at Johnson Space Center in Houston trying to look like she was working. That was difficult, because of late she had had trouble sitting with her back to the door, and she didn’t dare rearrange the furniture for fear someone might ask her why she had done it. She knew intellectually that there was no way he could get this far into the building without someone stopping him and asking for his identification, but rational knowledge did little to calm her limbic system. Security had risen astronomically since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, so surely he couldn’t get through, even with his connections, but still every atom of her skin scanned the air for danger.

  She tried to focus her attention on the page in front of her, a briefing sheet for a proposed project she hoped to support during her upcoming space flight. She had done her doctoral dissertation on desert sediments, and had hoped to connect that work with observations from space. In the abstract, the idea had great merit. Her dissertation had taken her out into the dry lands, where she had observed at close range the migration of desert sediments. There she had collected samples of these sands and silts and clays and had made detailed analyses using first her unaided eye, observing millions of grains at a glance. Next, she had moved the samples closer to her eye and had used her hand lens, which narrowed the field of view to a few hundred grains magnified by a power of ten. Back at the university, she had gone even closer, using a petrographic microscope, and finally, she had climbed right down to the world of the single particle, claiming the fantastic imaging powers of scanning electron microscopy, where one single grain filled the screen with astonishing detail, enlarged thousands of diameters. Each step tighter in observation had given her a factor of ten or one hundred or even a thousand times greater resolution. Now, she wanted to move the other direction, and take her observation to the level of the gods.

  The paper in front of her proposed that she do exactly that. It was perfect for her, a project already supported by NASA, tracking the migration of desert dust over the surrounding oceans. Lucy turned back to the first page of the proposal. The author’s name was Miles Guffey. The project seemed quite interesting, dealing with sediments blown off Africa into the Caribbean. It suggested, among other things, that the storm winds carried pathogen-laced dust clear over the Caribbean reefs, and that the reefs were dying.

  Dying. Death. The word took her mind straight back to the thoughts she was trying to force from her mind. He can’t possibly make good his threat, can he? No, she told herself firmly. He cannot. She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. For perhaps the thousandth time, she reminded herself, He’s a little boy in the body of a man. Boys say ‘kill’ all the time. It means nothing. He’s crazy. He only wants to play mind games. He can’t really stop me. And I’ve taken care of all that.

  But still, the whirl of worry spiraled inward, making her almost dizzy.

  A sudden sound behind her made her jump, but she managed to restrict the motion to her forearms and hands. She turned quickly in her chair.

  Len Schwartz stood in the doorway. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course. Fine. What’s up?” She gave him her best smile, her warm, “meet the public” smile, even though he was another scientist like herself, a member of her crew, after all their training almost an extension of her own brain and body.

  He raised his eyebrows in further question, but he said, “I just came by to see if you wanted to join me for lunch. Got to keep the calories up, with all that extra training you’ve been doing.”

  “I already ate,” she lied. Lately the idea of food had begun to make her nauseated.

  Len stepped inside her office and lowered his voice. “Everything okay, Lucy?”

  “Yes,” she said again, too quickly this time. “Sure. Why?”

  Len folded his arms across his chest.

  Lucy read his body posture. A show of shoulders and biceps, chest shielded. Meant to appear strong but subtly defensive, she decided.

  He said, “Come on, you can tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” Lucy fought an urge to run her hands over her face. Oh God, does it show? Have I lost weight? Do I look thin, or worn? Has the lost sleep etched my face?

  He said, “You just seem kind of tense. The launch delay has been tough on all of us, but it seems like it’s gotten to you the worst. Please excuse me if I’m being too blunt.”

  You’re not being blunt, you’re being self-preserving, Lucy thought, with brutality aimed as sharply at herself as at him. You’re going up into space, where your ass is on the line every second, and you don’t want to go with someone who can’t hold up her end of the job. Even as she made this analysis, Lucy’s mind went into high-speed forward gear, searching for the appropriate response to Len’s question. She knew that, as a scientist, he was as highly observant and analytical as she was, so she couldn’t just bullshit him as she would the fighter jocks on the crew. Who would have been too insensitive to ask me the question in the first place, she thought acerbically. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, buying herself time. In the next three seconds, she considered denial, misdirection, and outright deceit, and then ran a quick risk analysis to compare these options. That done, she realized that none of these solutions appealed to her, as none would work on Len. Instead, she cobbled up option number four, simply agreeing with him. She smiled. “Well, Len, I guess no one is as observant as you are. I suppose you’re right, I’m so gung-ho that if the weather keeps us waiting much longer, I’m going to blast into space without a ship.” She quit rubbing her nose and watched his reaction. He was still just observing her. “Sweet of you to notice,” she added, hoping to engage his masculinity and thereby befuddle his intellect.

  Len just stood there. Didn’t blink.

  Lucy said, “What do you need, Len?”

  Len shifted his weight to one foot.

  Typical male, she noted. Bowels turn to mush the instant you mention anything as touchy-feely as needs. Well, best not to play that card too strongly, or I breach the team’s sense of trust. Can’t risk that. But why is he just standing there? Is he hoping to see me crack? Wait, that’s paranoid! Len’s a good guy. He’s only trying to help! But he doesn’t know I need help, does he? And she quickly reminded herself, I don’t need help!

  Lucy stood up from her desk in an attempt to focus her mind on present circumstances: her office, deep inside stringent security perimeters; a crew member, her colleague of many years and a proven team player; the comfort of a casual pair of slacks and good shoes. Once up, she had to act. “What the hell,” she said, managing to sound almost bored. “A little dessert can’t hurt. Lead on. We’ll get some chow and then it’ll be time for more drills.”

  She took one last glance at her desk, checking to make certain that she had left nothing in sight that would betray her trouble. Her eyes swept the phone to make certain that she had left no messages on it, even though he had (unfortunately or not?) never been so stupid as to leave one there (but still she worried: Is my phone being monitored? Might someone from security listen in one day and hear the veiled threats, the edge of madness in his voice?) She checked her desktop to make certain that she had left no evidence of the work she was doing to document his movements. No, that list is at home, well hidden, she assured herself. She opened a desk drawer and pulled out her purse, automatically weighing it to make certain that nothing had been put into it since she had seen and lifted it last.

  Len led the way out through the maze of corridors, past security, and into the parking lot. Here Lucy’s eyes began their scan, checking each place—each tree, each minivan—behind which he might be hiding. Managing to make it sound casual, she said, “Oops! Forgot my keys.
Can we take your car?”

  “Sure. Right over here.”

  The knots in Lucy’s shoulders relaxed just a little. She had seen no sign of him. She hadn’t expected to, because if he had been telling her the truth during last night’s fuck-with-Lucy’s-head-so-she-can’t-go-to-sleep call, he was in Florida. Waiting for her big debut, he had told her—or told her answering machine, because she never answered the phone anymore without first screening the call—but still, it was best to ride in someone else’s car, just in case he had slipped in on an early flight and done something that would show, like the slashed tires that had greeted her ten mornings prior when she left her house. How had he gotten inside her garage without being noticed?

  Lucy blinked, trying to escape this negative fantasy that kept cropping up in her brain. She had analyzed the data a thousand times, and each time had arrived back at the same explanation for the telephone calls, the slashed tires, the little clues he left around her house so she’d know he was watching while she tried to sleep: He would not hurt her, not physically, because more than anything he wanted her alive and suffering. Domination, that was the game. Extortion. Extortion of control. He just wants to scare me, put me on edge. Steal my sleep. Get me kicked out of the astronaut corps so I’ll need him, of all things. Need him, of all people. Forgetting where she was, and who she was with, Lucy snorted.

  Len glanced sideways at her. “Something funny?” he inquired.

  Lucy felt the blood drain from her face. “Just a joke.” “Let me in on it.”

  “Ah—” Her mind raced, searching for some tidbit to fill her lapse. “A friend told me about all those pervert priests.”

  Len nodded. “Give it here.”

  “Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers.”