Mirrors (22 page)

He offered me a stool before pointing to four broad-based jars, each of which held an enormous spider with blue-green hues that moved about in crab-like fashion.

“Hey, how did you get so many of them? I collected only
one
!”

“
That
one,” he agreed, pointing to a Petri dish. “I sacrificed it to study its anatomy. I collected the others from the Indian woman’s house. Glenn Bird sent me there with someone from the UNIT. I’d just returned when you called.”

“Were they under the bedspread?”

“Yes, a number of them.” He frowned. “I feel for them—they didn’t belong there.”

I glanced at the Petri dish. “That one lost its color.”

“Because of changes in oxygenation of its hemolymph,” he explained. He tilted his head as if to test my knowledge.

“ ‘Hemolymph,’ ” I repeated. “The fluid that circulates through a spider’s body?”

“Yes, analogous to blood in vertebrates. Instead of having hemoglobin, as in vertebrate blood, hemolymph holds a copper-based protein called hemocyanin that’s blue when oxygenated—accounting for the color of live spiders—but grey when un-oxygenated.” He looked at the jars. “Those critters have a boatload of hemocyanin.”

He directed me to the table with the Petri dish. Pointing a lamp at the spider, he said, “I think you’ll find this to be a most unusual creature.” He circled a pair of tweezers over the body. “But first, basic anatomy—two major sections: cephalothorax and abdomen.”

He handed me a magnifying glass which I held over the dish.

“
Incredible
!” I whispered, marveling at the complexity and beauty.

He lifted the Petri dish to expose the spider’s underside.

“Got a penlight?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’ll show you.”

He left the table and returned shortly with what I had requested.

I lifted the dish again and directed the penlight at the series of plates along the underside of the thorax that produced the flicker I had noticed at Bhanjee’s condo. Light reflected from the plates to form tiny bars on the table. “See those?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, we’ll discuss the reflective plates shortly, but let me turn your attention to several other features first.” He set the dish down and placed the tip of the tweezers above a cluster of tiny spheres. “Fourteen in all, a very rare finding given that most spiders have eight or fewer eyes. This beast has excellent eyesight which, with its powerful legs, makes it a daunting hunter.”

A telephone rang, but Spilbat ignored it, peering instead at the spider through his magnifying glass. A bead of sweat rolled off his brow and plopped onto the table beside the dish. Nothing, it seemed, could distract him.

“One mean arachnid,” he observed.

He slid the dish under a microscope with two pairs of eyepieces. “Let’s take a closer look.”

I positioned myself to find the spider’s head under the low-power objective.

“Venom’s not the only factor to consider when assessing a spider’s danger,” Spilbat said. “How it
delivers
the venom is equally important.” He flipped the spider over. Pointing to a pair of jutting appendages beneath the eyes, he said, “Those are the jaws, or ‘chelicerae,’ and they’re exceedingly powerful in this case. If you’ve seen tongs used to pick up blocks of ice, you’ll recall they start wide and come in from the sides to snare the ice. That’s how this spider’s jaws work, which allows it to attack large prey before injecting its venom.”

“How large of prey?”

“Small rodents, I suspect.” He lifted his head to engage me. “That’s not unprecedented: tarantulas kill mice.” His eyes widened as if to express a morbid delight. “I’m betting it was this spider that left those marks on Zot in Ecuador.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if it was a spider that attacked Zot, why was XK59 present at the bite-sites?”

“Yes, Glenn Bird told me about your protein.”

“I recovered it from
bark
, not from a spider.” I pointed to the creature. “I assume you’re examining the venom.”

“As we speak.” He peered into the microscope. “I should tell you that I measured the distance of its fully extended jaws and they match the bite marks on Zot. There’s no other spider I know of with a bite so wide.”

“Tarantulas?”

He waved me off. “Their jaws don’t close from the sides as these do. They work like jackhammers, striking their prey from above.”

He moved to a higher objective. “Look at the fangs at the end of the jaws. They’re like hoses, capable of delivering a torrent of venom.”

“You’re impressed.”

“
Awed
; never seen anything like this.”

He brought a section of dissected abdomen into view. “As you can see, prominent silk glands and spinnerets located at the rear. I suspect its webs are vast.”

He shifted to the reflective plates, the largest in the center with smaller ones about it.

“Yes, those,” I said, my interest piquing.

Between the rectangles were patches of reddish brown hair that reminded me of lanugo, the soft, fine hair found on babies at birth.

“That’s gotta be copper of some sort imbuing that color,” he observed.

He went to the window, pulled the curtain, and turned off the lights, felling the alcove in darkness. Sitting again, he pushed the microscope aside and directed the penlight at the rectangles just as I had done earlier. With perfect clarity, the light reflected from the rectangles to create streaks across the ceiling.

“Mirrors,” he said.

I shuddered.

He continued: “Each plate is made of specialized chitin endowed with exquisite reflective capacity.”

I felt a pang of nausea from the repeated encounters with mirrors—one in the galley of Kosta’s boat; another in Bhanjee’s bed; the instructions to
Follow the mirrors
on a sticky in
Theogony
; and now the spider’s.

“I suspect those reflective plates ward off predators,” Spilbat suggested. “Just imagine the spider sitting on its web with sunlight striking the plates; no bird or mammal in its right sense would attack a creature reflecting such a bright light.”

He opened the curtains. “Let’s check the results on the venom.”

He led me out of his office and up a flight of stairs to a laboratory hosting a vast array of instruments. Stopping before one, he produced a graph from a mass spectrometer. “That’s it, the venom,” he said.

“No
way
!” I gasped, studying the results. “That’s almost pure XK59! How can that
be
?”

Spilbat shook his head. “Dunno, but I’m certain spiders killed Zot in Ecuador with their XK59 venom.”

It was early
afternoon when I left the Smithsonian to return to the UNIT. Without a breeze, the air was boggy and stained with exhaust. Honking cars and heat waves rising from the sidewalks made it difficult to concentrate, yet two questions bedeviled me: Was a spider the true source of XK59 rather than bark, and were the mirrors I encountered a cruel play on the chitin plates on the spider’s cephalothorax?

At the base of the steps to the UNIT, I called Eve, concerned that she hadn’t reached me while I was at the Smithsonian. As I waited for her to answer, I bit into a sandwich she had prepared for me before I left the house.

“Where are you?” I asked her. “I expected to hear from you.”

“I’m sorry, I meant to call earlier. Daddy and I are home now.”

“How did the ultrasound go?” I asked.

“Unrevealing except for some swollen lymph nodes in my chest.”

“And the breast mass?”

“Unchanged.”

“Lymph nodes …” I mumbled.

“The doctor said it was a non-specific finding that could have resulted from a number of things.”

Like the spread of cancer, I fretted. I clenched my teeth. “The plan?”

“Wait for the results of urine and blood cultures and take acetaminophen if the fever persists. Since the baby’s fine, the doctor was comfortable sending me home although he wants to see me in the morning again. If I haven’t gone into labor by then, he plans to hospitalize me to induce it.”

“Alright, I’ll come home when I can.”

“Jason?”

“Yes?”

“Have you been gambling?”

My heart leapt. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I just received an email from a bank in Bethesda acknowledging the opening of a new joint account that received a hundred thousand dollar deposit.”

I hurried to
my office in the UNIT to see if I had received a similar email but Eve called me before I could do so.

“Oh my God, Jason! A man just called our land line! It was horrible!

“Who was it?”

“The man who broke into our home last night.”

“Frank Grainger?”

“Yes, he told me to relay a message to you.”

“What was it?”

“I’ll read it …
You have until midnight to make amends. If you haven’t done so by then, there’ll be mass poisonings from
XK59
. You know what you need to do.
”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Yes, although he left a number for you to call.”

“Give it to me.”

She did, and then began to cry. “Why does he hate you so much?”

“He’s deranged. We must be strong, Eve. We’ll get through this. Remember, we’ve got a security detail watching us. I’m going to see Randy Flagstaff right now to tell him what happened. We’ll track the guy down.”

I hurried to Flagstaff’s office where I found him talking with Glenn Bird.

“Grainger’s out of control,” I said. “He threatened to cause mass casualties with XK59.” I told them about the call Eve relayed.

“What does he mean by, ‘You know what you need to do?’ ”

I shook my head. “The guy’s a lunatic. He poisoned people, some fatally. What more proof do we need?”

“We don’t know
he
poisoned the shrimp,” Bird said. “Did he admit to it last night?”

“No, but—”

“He may be a fall guy. Having an arrest record doesn’t mean he poisoned the shrimp.”

“All the more reason for you to stay with us,” Flagstaff added. “We need your help.”

I reached into my pocket for Spilbat’s business card and set it on Flagstaff’s desk.

“You’re with us?” he asked.

I nodded. “I can’t leave with the weight of XK59 on me.”

I’d taken no
more than a step from Flagstaff’s office when Alistair Brubeck rushed me.

“You gotta see this! Come to the lab!”

Once there, we entered a temperature-controlled room with shelves holding agar plates growing various bacteria. Brubeck shut the door and turned off the light, engulfing us in darkness.

“Look around,” he said. “See anything interesting?”

I scanned the area before noticing four bioluminescent circles. “Glowing,” I said.

“Bingo! What do you think it is?”

“Something from the shrimp pond?”

“In part, yes, but what exactly?”

“
Vibrio parahaemolyticus
?”

“No,
Aeromonas hydrophila
! Four plates growing the bacteria—one each from a victim, leftover shrimp,
Electric Jolt
, and shrimp from the round pond.”

Brubeck turned on the light.