Last Gasp (29 page)

“How do you know that?” his wife asked sensibly, pouring his coffee. She returned the pot to the stove and sat down opposite him. “Did he tell you that in so many words?”

“Tell me what?” Lucas asked irritably.

“That he didn’t trust them?”

Lucas sighed and absently tugged at his moustache. Liz didn’t understand. She still had a touching faith in authority, still believed that for people to have achieved high office they must, by definition, be steadfast, loyal and true. Boy scout mentality; or in this case, girl scout.

He shook more pepper over his eggs and Liz said sharply, “Gene, you’re spoiling it!”

Seeing what he had done he forked the pepper into the eggs. There was no doubt in his mind. Lebasse had been murdered. And if they (whoever “they” were) could get rid of the secretary of defense, they could certainly get rid of him.

He laid his fork down. He had to talk about this to
somebody.
He said, “This concerns a secret military project called DEPARTMENT STORE, devised by a special Pentagon agency by the name of Advanced Strategic Projects, which is planning to put this thing into operation—they could even be developing it right this minute for all I know.”

“Yes, dear,” Liz nodded, buttering a piece of toast. “You explained it to me before. Eat your eggs before they go cold.”

“Elizabeth, do you understand what I’m talking about?” Lucas tapped the table in time with the words. “They are deliberately and cold-bloodedly going to alter the ecological balance of this planet. They intend to fill a huge fleet of supertankers with herbicides and wipe out all the phytoplankton in the oceans. They plan to replace missile warheads with payloads of herbicides and drop them into equatorial forests, killing off all the trees and plants. By destroying all the green plants in the oceans and on land they mean to upset the oxygen balance of the atmosphere. It’s all part of some insane strategy to
protect
this country. They’re crazy, mad as hatters, the whole bunch of them!”

“Is it possible to do that?” Liz asked, scooping up a forkful of scrambled eggs. She chewed and swallowed. “Could they affect the oxygen in that way?”

Lucas nodded wearily. “Yes.” Was she being obtuse or had he failed to explain it properly? “Yes, they can do it. Given sufficient quantities of herbicides over a period of time. Months or years, it’s hard to know for sure how long it would take.” He leaned over the table, a lock of graying hair falling across his puffy eyelids. “Liz, we depend on the plants and once they’re gone our supply of oxygen is gone too— forever. Without oxygen we’re finished, and every other living creature with us. Not just in one country or on one continent but everywhere, all over the world.”

The motion of her jaws slowed, became mechanical. “But that would be committing suicide.”

“That’s
exactly
what it is!”

“You mean they’re really planning to do that?”

Lucas sipped his coffee and looked at her over the rim of the cup, haunted. “They can do it—and will—now that Lebasse is out of the way.”

Liz swallowed and dabbed her lips. “What do you mean, out of the way?” she said slowly.

Lucas put his cup down very gently. “Lebasse stood in the way of DEPARTMENT STORE. He wanted it stopped. So they had to find a way of shutting him up, getting rid of him. It wasn’t an accident, Liz. It wasn’t suicide. He was murdered.”

“But on TV it said he—”

“What did you expect them to say? The fact that he was dying of cancer made it all very convenient for them. He had a motive, or if that didn’t quite fit they could say ‘while the balance of mind was disturbed.’ Everything neatly tidied away and no awkward questions asked.”

“Gene, if they know that you have the dossier ...” His wife’s voice trailed away into silence. She sat staring at him, the neatly brushed hair like two apostrophes on either side of her plain shiny face. “Do they know? Did Lebasse tell them?”

“They. Them. Who are we talking about?” Lucas said, a ragged edge to his soft Texan drawl. “Somebody in the Defense Department? One of the Joint Chiefs? Somebody in the White House?” His small hands curled into fists on the tabletop. “I don’t know whom I can trust and whom I can’t. I don’t know who ‘they’ are!”

A splash of morning sunlight made a bright rectangle on the wall. In the center of it a Norman Rockwell calendar showed a small boy sitting alongside a huge policeman at a drugstore counter; at the boy’s feet lay a red-spotted bundle tied to a stick.

Liz got up silently and poured fresh coffee. When she sat down her face was paler, her eyes clouded. “Gene, you must go to the president. You’re his scientific adviser; he’ll have to listen to you.”

“It isn’t that easy to arrange. It could take weeks.”

“Not if you tell them it’s urgent, a matter of—of—”

“National security,” said Lucas dully.

“Yes, you must, you have to!” she insisted.

Lucas pushed his untouched breakfast aside. “If only I could get to him directly, not through intermediaries. But you’re right, I have to try.” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “You know something? Seven or eight years ago when I was on the Presidential Advisory Committee a marine biologist called Theo Detrick submitted some research he’d spent years working on. According to him the phytoplankton in the oceans was declining, and he’d reached the conclusion that within a few years, perhaps by the end of the century, the world would be gasping for breath. Well, I did a terrific demolition job on him and his report. Ridiculous. Impossible. Science fiction. And you want to know something? He could have been right all along. Detrick could have been right, damn him.”

“Would it help if you talked to him now?”

“He died a few years ago. Nobody took him seriously. His daughter is still pushing his work. She’s on television now and then and writes a lot of stuff on the environment.” Lucas was gazing at the calendar in the bright rectangle. “You know, that might not be a bad idea. She’s at Scripps in California. I could send her the dossier. Sharon or something. No, Cheryl. She’s well-respected by a lot of people, scientists, people active in the environmental lobby.”

He looked up at his wife, who was stacking the dishes and carrying them to the sink. She suddenly looked much older, her face cruelly caught in the shaft of sunlight.

“That’s what I’ll do,” Lucas said, trying to sound cheerful and decisive. Liz was hunched over the sink, her shoulders shaking. Damn, why had he told her? Why hadn’t he kept it to himself?

Joseph Earl Gelstrom took the call in his office suite in the JEG Tower, which was situated next to the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange on the corner of Pine and Green; like most of downtown San Francisco the building had miraculously escaped damage in the 1989 earthquake, and nearly all the major corporations had stayed put.

Gelstrom had just finished a workout in the gym on the floor below and his long sun-streaked hair was damp and straggly from the shower. He had a white terry towel around his neck and stuffed into his blue silk robe. “One moment.” He touched a button on the console and told his secretary to find Sturges and then turned back to the vidphone where Madden was watching him, his sharp features blurred by the color relay. It put Gelstrom in mind of a TV commercial portraying a man with a Technicolor hangover.

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Is this channel secure?”

“Yes.”

Madden’s lips thinned and he glanced out of shot, a look that could kill. His eyes flicked back. “I’m at the Bakersfield plant, Mr. Gelstrom. We’ve had a visit from a Dr. Gavin Chase, a British marine biologist who tried to pass himself off as David Benson of the Scripps Institution. Tried and succeeded. I think we ought to do something about it.” With a lazy gesture Gelstrom combed back his hair. His tanned handsome face remained composed. “Is that it or is there more?”

“Merrik and Dr. Hilti showed him around the place, including the marine experimental chamber. He had what appears to be a bona fide Scripps ID in the name of Benson.”

“So how do you know he’s Chase?”

“I recognized him.”

“You know him?”

“I met him once, when he was with Professor Banting at Hailey Bay Station.”

“Is Banting there with you now?”

Madden nodded. “Do you want to speak to him?”

“No. What did Chase want?”

Madden’s tongue flicked out to moisten his lips. “We don’t know.” He looked away and back again, fighting to control his anger. “Professor Banting thinks—that is, he’s almost certain—that Chase is a freelance journalist now. He’s seen articles by him in the British scientific press—”

“One moment.” Gelstrom held up his finger and in the same movement beckoned to Sturges, who closed the door and came to stand behind the contoured velvet chair and folded his arms, gold glinting on his hairy wrists. “Go on.”

“Chase has worked for the BBC, so Banting says. In view of the fact that he thought it necessary to use a false name we can assume that he was hoping to dig up something. He also told Merrik that his head of department at Scripps was Dr. Detrick.”

“Really? That was stupid of him,” Gelstrom remarked languidly.

“Did he give a reason for his visit?”

“He said they needed a new kind of marine herbicide for a deepwater expedition. He wanted to satisfy himself about the R and D backup here and Merrik believed him.”

“That was stupid of him, too,” Gelstrom said. There was a silence through which Madden waited, a muscle moving in his cheek. Gelstrom said, “Could he have seen anything? What was happening in the chamber at the time, anything that could have made him suspicious?”

“Dr. Hilti thinks not. The tanks were being prepared for a new series of tests, which aren’t scheduled to start until tomorrow. He couldn’t have seen anything.”

“But you still think he’s dangerous. A threat.”

“Let’s say a risk, and one we don’t have to run,” Madden said. “He’s heard something, a rumor, or there’s been a leak, otherwise why come to the plant in the first place and under a false name? And Detrick is somehow involved. Maybe she put him up to it. That absolutely seals it as far as I’m concerned. We have to do something.”

“What do you recommend?”

“I leave that to you. But something terminal.”

Gelstrom massaged both temples and turned his head fractionally. “Anything else you need to know?”

“No,” Sturges said, unfolding his arms. “That’ll be enough.”

The voice of the switchboard operator said, “Mr. Bryant of the American Press Association is on the line. Will you take it?”

“Yes, all right, put him on.” Standing at the wall phone in the lab Cheryl wiped her fingers down the side of her white coat, thinking, Bryant? Bryant? She shook her head, puzzled.

There was a click and a hale and hearty voice boomed, “Hello! Dr. Detrick! Pat Bryant, APA. You won’t remember me, but I was at the conference in Washington earlier this year. You answered a couple of my questions.”

“The NOAA conference,” Cheryl said. “When was it, February, March? No, I’m sorry, Mr. Bryant, I don’t remember you.”

“That’s by the by,” breezed Bryant, making Cheryl grit her teeth. She
hated
that phrase. “I don’t know if you can assist us, Dr. Detrick, but we’ve been asked by the New York representative of the British Press Association to help in locating a British journalist, a Mr. Gavin Chase. He’s been in the States for several weeks and apparently the BBC want to reach him urgently. You don’t happen to know his present whereabouts?”

“Well, not precisely, Mr. Bryant. You see, Mr. Chase is on his way back to England right now via New York. He took an early flight from Los Angeles.”

“You mean today? He left this morning?”

“That’s right.”

There was a pause, buzzing on the line.

“I guess in that case it doesn’t matter,” Bryant said with a slight hesitancy. “Do you happen to know whether he’s making a direct connection at New York or staying overnight? Maybe I could get a message to him there.”

“I think he’s transferring directly.” Cheryl frowned, trying to recall Gavin’s schedule. She remembered. “Yes, he complained about having a three-hour wait at JFK, which wouldn’t give him enough time to go into Manhattan, so he’d have to wait at the airport.”

Bryant boomed a chuckle. “I don’t envy him.”

“No,” Cheryl agreed.

“Thanks for your help, Dr. Detrick.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Bryant. Good-bye.”

She was about to hang up when he said, “Was it the eight o’clock flight out of Los Angeles, would you happen to know?”

“The nine-fifteen.”

“Thanks again. I appreciate it. ’Bye.”

Cheryl hung up and walked across the lab and stood unseeingly at the bench, conflicting emotions rising inside her, struggling to keep them quiet and dormant. Of course he had to leave, what was she thinking of? He had professional commitments and personal ties back home. But acknowledging this didn’t make her feel any better.

In the office suite in San Francisco Sturges put the receiver down with his right hand while with his left he leafed through the United Airlines timetable. His finger traced a line and stopped. He looked up at Gelstrom behind the desk in the contoured velvet chair and nodded his blond crew cut.

“Take one of our aircraft,” Gelstrom said.

“No, I can make it.” Sturges smiled coldly. “Plenty of time.”