GEE was the perfect way for me to lash out against the chemical industry, which I saw as responsible for the destruction of my parents' marriage and for my mother's fatal case of hepatic angiocarcinoma. But even this had proved too confining. I chafed under the restrictions of GEE's nonviolent policy. I was a maverick, a hellraiser. I wanted to take truly direct action, they speculated.
All of these factors became focused in my irrational, all-consuming hatred of one man: excabinet official, now presidential hopeful, Alvin Fleshy. As a privileged person, an authority figure from my childhood and a leader of the chemical industry, he was everything I despised. I did everything I could to implicate him in chemical scandals, but I just couldn't pin him down. I was geared up for a media blitz against him just a couple of weeks before “the explosion,” but had to call it off, sheepishly, when the evidence didn't pan out. Slowly the plan took form in my mind: employing the commando techniques of the eco-terrorist Boone (whom I had secretly come to admire), I would mine Pleshy's private yacht and blow him sky-high, like Mountbatten. Using my chemical expertise, I constructed a highly sophisticated explosives laboratory in the basement of a house I was renting from Brian Roscommon, a hard-working Irish immigrant and upstanding Newton resident. By purchasing my raw materials, bit by bit, from different companies, I was able to evade the ATFs monitoring system, which had been designed to foil plots such as mine. In an ironic twist, I bought the materials from Basco subsidiaries; they had records to prove it, which they had readily agreed to turn over to the FBI. I was able to build an extremely powerful mine in my basement and take it out into the Harbor on my GEE Zodiac. While I was planting the mine on the bottom of Pleshy's yacht, I was noticed by a couple of private security guards patrolling the area in their high-powered Cigarette boat. Using my commando skills, I slipped into their vessel in my scuba gear, killed them both and then burned their vessel in the Fort Point Channel to hide the evidence. I was so cold and calculating, the more lurid newspapers suggested, that I actually called the police and gave them an account of the incident.
Unfortunately, the whole plot unraveled when the highly unstable chemicals I'd (allegedly) stuffed into my basement deteriorated and touched themselves off. Bartholomew, my roommate, who had been growing ever more suspicious of my strange behavior, tried to place me under citizen's arrest, but I knocked him down and stole his van. Then I escaped, probably to Canada and, with the help of an underground network of environmental extremists left over from the days of the baby seal campaigns, eventually to Northern Europe, where I can live undercover, supported by Boone's clandestine operation.
“What do you think,” I asked Jim. “Is it just plain old savage brilliance, or have I taken in too many organophosphates?”
“What's that?”
“Nerve gas. Bug spray. They're all the same thing.”
The clippings taught me one thing for sure: Bart was playing it cool. I should have guessed it from the way he handled those cops in Roxbury. He was so full of shit he must be ready to burst. He was giving out one interview after another, sounding pained and shocked and kind of sad, and the media were lapping it up, portraying him as kind of a latter-day flower child in black leather. This man could survive anything.
“It's time for me to get out of here,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because sooner or later they'll track me down. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm an official terrorist now, right?”
“Certified by the U.S. government.”
“Right. And they have all these Darth Vader things they can do in the name of national security, right? They can bring spooks, Green Berets, rescind the constitution. Federal marshals, Secret Service, all the Special Forces cops. Sooner or later they're going to find my Zode in that lake. Then they'll just seal off these mountains and I'll never escape.”
“Seal off the mountains? Don't insult me.”
“I tell you, they'll find the Zode.”
“Let's check it out,” Jim said.
First things first. I shaved off my beard. I'd lost twenty pounds, which would also help. Jim scraped up some new clothes for me. The sun was shining, so I had an excuse to wear sunglasses. We borrowed a boat on a trailer and drove down to a small, clear lake. To the southeast it ran into a much bigger lake. From the northwest it was fed by streams falling clean out of the White Mountains. I could have taken the Zodiac a little farther up one of those streams, but they were shallow, and without a hole deep enough for a righteous sinking. So I'd left it in the lake, next to a bent-over scrub pine. Jim found us a boat ramp and we put in and headed for that pine. But there wasn't a damn thing. Not that I could see.
It was only twenty feet deep, and we could almost see the bottom from the boat. Jim went down in a mask and snorkel, looking.
“I wasn't that stoned,” I said. “I put it here for a reason. That tree there, that was my landmark. I'd never forget that tree - there can't be two like it.”
“I'm telling you there's not a damn thing there,” Jim said.
I ended up going down myself. Jim didn't want me to, but by now I was feeling good enough for a short dive. I was nauseous most of the time, but sheer terror has a way of overcoming most anything. And Jim was right. The Zode was gone. I'd just about convinced myself that we were in the wrong place when I noticed a black splotch on the bottom. I went all the way down and checked it out: Roscommon's revolver.
“If the Feds had found it, they'd have brought an armored division to pick it off the bottom, right? We'd see cigarette wrappers and footprints on the shore over there.”
There was nothing onshore either. “Except over here, where you tried to hide your footprints,” Jim said.
“Okay, give me a fucking break.”
Finally Jim convinced me that there just wasn't anything to be seen. “Maybe some of the Winnepesaukees found it. It's pretty valuable. Shit, if I found it, I wouldn't care if the Feds did want it. I'd take the damn thing and use it myself.”