Fire in the Sky Page 9

She turned slowly, her eyes unreadable as she looked at him. "It's hard to make stew just for one." She then held his eyes, something indescribably sad oozing from her and crossing the distance between them.

  He felt the jolt of their unspoken contact, felt the sadness and retreated to the kitchen.

  "I appreciate it."

  Bolan removed the pot of stew from the refrigerator and set it on the burner of the gas stove. "Will you join me?" he called, turning on the burner.

  "No," she called back. "I've already eaten."

  "Suit yourself." He felt bad about having walked out on her as he'd done. He stood watching the stew bubble in the pan. After stirring it for a moment he let it boil again, then took it off the stove.

  Julie moved to the kitchen doorway and leaned against it, staring as Bolan took down a plate and ladled some food onto it.

  Aware of her eyes on him, he walked to the table and sat facing her. He smiled uneasily, then took a bite of the food. "It's good," he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. Then, with more admiration, "You're a good cook."

  "Have you ever considered the possibility that your friend, Hal, could have planted that device in your desk?" she asked softly.

  He put the fork down and stared at her. "No, I haven't. And if I had, our conversation today would have dispelled any doubts."

  "You talked to him today?"

  Bolan nodded and picked up his fork again.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded.

  "I hadn't gotten around to it yet."

  She sat beside him at the table. "Well, did he have anything interesting to say?"

  "A little. It seems that Colonel Kit Givan has received a presidential citation for fighting a certain Mississippi forest fire…."

  "Where does that leave us?"

  "In pretty bad shape in comparison. Also, Hal thinks he's being followed, but doesn't know by whom."

  "Did he try to do anything with Givan's file?" she asked.

  Bolan nodded. "He tried. Got into his file, but has so far been unable to update beyond two years ago."

  "Why?"

  "Givan's been put into a top-secret project for the Pentagon. Hal hasn't yet been able to obtain the authorization to crack it."

  "How convenient. Is that all?"

  Bolan frowned. "Yeah. So far. I don't suppose you've ever heard of Project GOG."

  She laughed. "Gog? You mean as in the biblical Gog?"

  "I'm not sure I follow you."

  She relaxed, sitting back. "Here's where a Jewish education and a photographic memory can help you out. The legend of Gog appears twice in the Bible, once in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel, and once in the New, in Revelation."

  "And what's it about?"

  "War, basically," she replied. "And the coming of a Messiah."

  "War," he repeated.

  "Ezekiel foretells a great war, where Gog will come from the north, from the land of Magog, and fight a war with Israel that will decimate it. But after the conflagration, a Messiah will come and destroy Gog and bring about a new age of peace and prosperity to all of Israel."

  "Fascinating."

  "In the New Testament, I think the concept was reworked into a showdown between God and the Devil…."

  "You mean the Second Coming?" She nodded. "Let me quote a little Ezekiel for you," she said, closing her eyes for a second and nodding. When she spoke her voice was low and forceful. " 'I will punish him with pestilence and with bloodshed; and I will pour torrential rain, hailstones and sulfurous fire upon him and his hordes and the many people with him.' "

  Bolan stared hard at her. "Pretty strong stuff." She nodded. "Many fundamentalist Christian sects interpret the threat from the north to mean Russia."

  Bolan pushed the bowl away from himself. He wasn't hungry anymore.

  Chapter Nine

  Mack Bolan stared intently at the squirming white mouse he held by the tail, its little body twitching madly as it squeaked in terror.

  "Come on, Hershel," he said. "Be a man about this. It's not even going to hurt. And I promise it won't kill you."

  The mouse seemed to squeak even louder, its voice like oil-hungry door hinges.

  Bolan thinned his lips in exasperation. "You'll probably enjoy it."

  While holding the mouse in a rubber-gloved hand, he picked up the small atomizer that lay on the long lab table and sprayed a fine mist onto the animal's haunches, being careful not to let it breathe any of the ketamine mixture.

  There was a knock on the lab door.

  "Coming!" Bolan called, and set Hershel into the mouse cage along with his other cronies. The little guy hurried to his exercise wheel to run out his frustrations.

  Bolan watched him for a second, identifying with the frustration. It was his fourth day at the institute, as everyone called it, and he was beginning to think that he could stay there forever without discovering anything useful on the Butler killing.

  The man's name came up very seldom in casual conversation on the fifth floor, and there were few avenues Bolan could take to bring up the name without arousing suspicion. The "head people," as Julie called them, were too smart to be taken in by any trickery he could devise to draw them out. It became clear that it could take months for them to accept him enough to talk candidly. Then, it was probable that they'd have nothing to open up about. The institute could be a total dead end or it could provide all the answers. Only time, a great deal of time, would tell; and it was quite possible that he didn't have a lot of time to play with. What he needed was a way to juice things and hurry them along. He just didn't know how to do that. He'd spent the past three days going over the office and the lab, hoping that Butler had left something, some clue, behind. The search had been fruitless.

  He needed, in the jargon of his research field, a catalyst to speed up the process.

  He moved across the large room and opened the door to Robbie Hampton's smiling face. The man carried a mug of coffee and wore his usual flannel shirt buttoned to the neck.

  "Hope I'm not bothering you," Robbie said.

  Bolan smiled, moving aside so Hampton could enter. "You're my guru, Robbie. You could never be a bother."

  "Guru, my ass." Hampton walked in and headed directly to the mouse cage. "It looks like you're doing just fine without my advice."

  "Fine, you say?" Bolan replied, and pointed to Hershel on the wheel. "By now he should be zonked out on the cage floor in a state of total incapacitation. Does this look like a mouse with a disassociation problem?"

  "Just moderately," Robbie said, leaning down close to the cage. "Look at his right leg."

  Bolan looked. Hershel's right leg twitched slightly and kept slipping off the wheel. The drug had some localized effect on the area sprayed, but apparently hadn't made it into the bloodstream.

  "Close," Bolan said, "but no cigar."

  Robbie straightened. "The problem with trying to make ketamine into a nerve gas is obviously going to be a problem of the delivery system, not of the drug itself."

  Bolan thought hard, trying to bring the real researcher's notebook to mind. "The nerve gases are derivatives of phosphoric acid and destroy the nervous system by inhibiting certain enzymes," he said, trying to sound as if he knew what he was talking about. "Ketamine, on the other hand, stimulates the nervous system while at the same time causing a dissociation in the relay center to the cerebral cortex."

  "But ketamine doesn't reach the bloodstream through osmosis like nerve gas," Robbie put in. "So you're trying to compound the two."

  "I want something that can't be shut out with a respirator, but not something that will kill or harm a human being."

  "The peace bomb," Hampton said dryly, smiling. "Even if you can bind the molecules to get the desired effect, how will you minimize the danger of the phosphoric acid?"

  Bolan was in deep water already. How the hell did Robbie know so much about everything? The mixture used in the atomizer was one of the previous failures of the real researcher. A word popped into his h
ead that he remembered from the notes, and he decided to use it, hoping for the best. "I'm cutting the whole thing with atropine."

  "Of course!" Robbie said, and Bolan figured he must have found the right word. "The atropine will counteract the nerve gas before it damages the system irreparably."

  Bolan fell into it then, realizing on his own why this particular experiment had failed. "The problem becomes one of keeping the nerve gas active long enough to get the whole mess into the body."

  Hampton stared at the mice again, quietly rubbing his chin. "I'll think some about this," he said after a moment. "Maybe I can help."

  Bolan pulled off one of his rubber gloves and dropped it on the table. "You amaze me, Robbie."

  "How so?" the man asked as he took his pipe out of his breast pocket and stuck it in his mouth.

  "Everybody else here has an area of study that they've devoted their lives to," Bolan said, removing the other glove. "But you seem to be fluent in everyone's language."

  "I appreciate the compliment," the man answered, "but it's really no mystery. I don't know so much about anything except the thinking process. You see, when researchers get heavily involved in a problem, they tend to develop a sort of tunnel vision that renders them incapable of looking at the broader implications of their research. I was a writer in my younger days, and writers have to be able to extrapolate and look at the consequences and possibilities in all directions. It's an acquired habit, really. No big deal. I usually supply continuing data and possibilities to people who are experts in a given topic. They listen, then take it from there. It's all very symbiotic."

  He took hold of the pipe as if he were taking it out of his mouth, but instead, he simply lapsed for a moment, his brows knitted in thought.

  "At least that's how it usually works," he said finally. "With Jerry Butler, it worked just the opposite. The more advanced his research became, the less he'd open up to me."

  "I wonder why?"

  Robbie slapped his forehead, coffee sloshing in his cup. "God, silly me. I forgot why I came down here. Yuri wants everyone to come to his lab. I think he's made some sort of a breakthrough."

  "Anything interesting?"

  Robbie smiled. "I never steal my collaborators' thunder. I'll let Yuri tell you himself. Can you drop what you're doing?"

  Bolan looked at the mouse cage and frowned. "It doesn't look as if Hershel is going to cooperate." He took off his lab coat. "Why not?"

  "Good." Robbie led Bolan toward the door and when they reached the hall he turned, his face serious. "It was odd about Jerry. He knew me, I mean, he knew me well. But he seemed to slowly cut everyone off from his life.

  We'd been having dialogues about the possibilities of his research…"

  "Which was?"

  The man smiled. "Of course," he said. "You have no idea what I'm talking about. Sorry. Jerry was involved with liquid electricity, and his problem was in some ways similar to yours... he needed a vehicle, something that would hold a charge indefinitely — a delivery system. Anyway, I think he was approaching a breakthrough, which is usually when the researchers want me the most so I can give them possibilities. But Jerry just cut me, and everyone else, off. He even began working hours when no one else was here."

  "You think he found the breakthrough, then simply guarded it?"

  They were moving along the hall, closing in on Bonner's door.

  "I think that's possible, yes," Robbie replied. "For all the good it did him. He left on the sly. After his death, government people spent weeks in his lab, trying to piece together notes or ideas or anything."

  "But they found nothing," Bolan concluded.

  This time Robbie did take the pipe out of his mouth. "How did you know?"

  Bolan smiled. "I extrapolated."

  The man chuckled gently. "You've almost got too good a sense of humor to be in this business," he said, then stopped walking. They were in front of Bonner's door. He raised a fist to knock. "Shall we?"

  "A question first. If you are involved in everyone's project, how do they know that you won't give their secrets away?"

  "Everyone wonders about that eventually," Robbie replied. "The answer is simple — give secrets away to whom? Everyone here is ultimately responsible to the government, in our case the Department of the Air Force, so nothing belongs to any of us individually. The other thing is, I don't know how things work, just what you can do with them when they do work. It would be tough to sell my fiction writer's mind to... say, the Russians."

  That made sense to Bolan. Robbie knocked on the door.

  Ike Silver responded. "Well, the latecomers," he said, opening the door wide. "Yuri has just solved the greatest problem facing man on Earth today."

  Robbie held up his cup. "And I brought my own coffee."

  "Well, aren't you the clever one," Silver declared. "Always on top of things."

  They entered the room, a lab and office set up just like Bolan's — with an incredible exception. Plants filled the entire lab, huge plants with mammoth leaves and fruit, genetic hybrids developed by the Soviet scientist. The ceiling had been reconstructed as a skylight, bright sunshine pouring in. Bolan saw wheat that rose in thick stalks to the ceiling and a row of corn with ears almost as big as footballs, which had been cut back to keep them from growing through the ceiling.

  A lab table was cleared in the center of the room, over-hanging branches shading it like an outdoor picnic table. Everyone from the fifth floor was there, as well as Dr. Smyth in the guise of his robot, Arthur, and Floyd Bacon, who hadn't been to Five in two years. They were all sitting around the table drinking coffee and eating what appeared to be chocolate cake. Arthur was wheeling around the lab, looking at all the plants and trees. Yuri was on his feet, nervously pacing and chain-smoking.

  Bolan and Dr. Hampton approached the table, Ike Silver ambling at his own pace just behind. Lab stools were lined around the table, and Bolan took a seat across from Fred Haines and Margaret Ackerman, who seemed to spend a great deal of time listening to any conversation Bolan was involved in. Howard Davis sat several stools away from everyone else, lost in his own world, eating cake with his fingers. His mouth and chin were covered with chocolate. The director occupied the head of the table. He sat stoically, staring down at a tiny sliver of cake set on his plate. Even Chuck was there, serving coffee to anyone who wanted it.

  Robbie took the seat next to Bolan and reached to cut a slice from the cake in the center of the table. He handed it to him.

  "No, thanks," Bolan said. "It's a little too early for me to…"

  "You must," Robbie interrupted. "It's important."

  "Important," Bolan repeated, and let the man put the plate before him. He looked up to see everyone staring at him. Even Yuri had stopped pacing and was standing behind Haines.

  Bolan was beginning to suspect that something was wrong with the cake.

  "Eat, my friend," Yuri urged. "We don't have all day."

  "All day for what?" Bolan asked.

  Robbie handed him a plastic fork. "Go ahead."

  Bolan put the fork to the cake and cut into it. It felt like real cake. He brought it to his lips, hesitating slightly.

  "Would you please eat, Dr. Sparks," Floyd Bacon ordered, his voice brittle like old paper. "We're on a tight schedule."

  Bolan bit into the cake tentatively, letting the piece sit for a moment in his mouth until the proper signals had registered in his brain and he tasted it. "Good," he said, chewing. "Excellent!"

  The entire room burst into spontaneous applause, Ike Silver walking over to pat Yuri Bonner on the back as everyone talked excitedly.

  "What's going on?" Bolan asked, puzzled. Haines smiled at him through a mouthful of prison dental work.

  "That cake you're eating is made from a genetic hybrid of the cocoa bean," he announced.

  "Improved chocolate?" Bolan asked.

  "I'll say," Peg Ackerman answered. "No calories."

  Bolan was amazed. "None?"

  The woman circled t
humb and index finger. "Zero."

  Bolan held up his plate. "Then I'll have another piece!"

  Everyone laughed, except for Peg, who simply scowled, as usual, in Bolan's direction.

  Yuri waved them all to silence. "I want you to know," he said, "that this is simply...an offshoot — is that how you say? — of main work. Mr. Bacon says we need to...to..."

  "Justify our existence," the director said slowly. "And this should do quite nicely. The government and the public likes to know that their money is being well spent, and to the millions of overweight people out there, this will be the most well-spent money in history. It's even good PR for the Air Force, who'll let Yuri keep the patent."

  "You'll be rich," Haines put in.

  Bonner frowned deeply. "Money," he said, and spit on the floor. "In America, we have ninety percent of the world's resources and money, yet millions starve. What's the good?"

  "Yuri is trying to save the world through food," Ike Silver said, and it sounded like an insult. "For what reason I couldn't imagine. I see nothing about the world worth saving."

  The robot wheeled up to face Silver. "You're an elitist, Ike," it said. "If we're not here to help our fellow man, what are we here for?"

  "You're a good one to talk about human values," Silver told the robot, "after the way you screwed me with that transformer."

  "Gentlemen..." Floyd Bacon said, his already pale face losing what little color it possessed.

  "What do you mean by that?" the robot countered, rolling up until it was nose to nose with Silver. "I gave you that transformer out of the goodness of my heart."

  "Yeah," Silver responded, "then turned around and put in a requisition for an even more powerful one by saying that I commandeered yours, which effectively cuts me out of next year's budget."

  "I don't want to hear this," the old man muttered, pushing slowly away from the table.

  The robot reached a metal hand to tug on Silver's string tie. "Elitist."

  "And why not?" Silver queried. "There's no intelligent life on this planet. Why should I be dragged down by the ignorance of its inhabitants?"

  "Hear, hear," Howard Davis said through a mouthful of cake.