"They look ready to go to war," Ashecroft said. "But they said they'll enter the aircraft with billy clubs. The guns and stuff are for emergency use only-you know, in case of real trouble."
Summens's mind spun in several directions, but she exercised great control when she spoke. "What do they expect?"
"They haven't told us a thing." The way he said it made it clear he wished Dawn would fill him in.
"Phone the minute you learn anything more. I'll be in touch." She snapped off the phone.
She had just accessed the flight plan for the inbound chartered 747, which was three minutes ahead of schedule and expected to be on the ground at Union Island International Airport before midnight.
She found her next set of answers in the on-line edition of the Knoxville News Sentinel.
Rampage In Pigeon Fudge, the headline read.
She scanned the story and made a quick conclusion. Grom dosed his own tour-bus staff with synthesized GUTX. That was a desperate move even for an idiot like him. He'd been in bad trouble-or thought he was.
But what else had happened? Why was he keeping it a secret from her? When Grom got in trouble, she was usually the first one he turned to. She was the brains behind this outfit; they both knew that.
What was she missing?
She quickly jumped to another conclusion.
Grom was scheduled to take delivery today of a new batch of GUTX synthetic distillates. There was an upstart pharmaceutical specialties lab in Minneapolis. It claimed to have a molecular mapping and replicating technique. Their scientists had promised their synthesis would be as close as was possible to the real thing. But it took a little longer.
Grom was making all the arrangements with the labs. He never entrusted Dawn with the original GUTX except in very specific cases, like the senator who visited in his absence. He wasn't about to entrust her with the synthetic GUTX, either. She never even knew where the deliveries took place.
What if the Minneapolis lab did the job as good as it said it would? What if Grom had tested the Minneapolis GUTX samples and found one that worked without side effects? Crisis averted, he'd start feeling cocky. He'd start feeling like he didn't need a business partner-not one with a will of her own.
That betrayal would violate the terms of their agreement, but the beauty of GUTX was that he could dose her-maybe spike her wine or her bottled water-then simply suggest that she thought he had done the right thing. Then she would agree.
She'd be his little pet. His puppet. She'd follow his every suggestion. She'd perform whatever act he wished her to perform and she'd like it-if he wanted her to like it.
The thought repulsed her.
If only she could have found his stash of GUTX, she could dose him first. As stupid as he was, he somehow managed to keep that one secret from her for almost two years. She had never seen the full supply, so it had come as a complete surprise when Greg announced that his stores were running low.
For months they had contracted all kinds of marine biologists and less scrupulous rare-animal collectors to search the waters worldwide for surviving members of a subspecies of the Blue Ring Octopus that had once existed in small numbers off the shores of Union Island, and, as far as they knew, nowhere else.
The Blue Ring was a small, poisonous octopus today, but the Union Island Blue, as it was known, had been as much as a yard in length and with a greater girth. One preserved specimen was known by the scientific community to exist today-an intact, desiccated mummy found on the island by President Greg Grom himself, back when he was an archaeological student working the local sites on a summer internship.
The truth was, he had found hundreds of Union Island Blue Rings that day, but the specimen now on display at the Union Island Museum of Natural History had been the only one not crushed into powder.
As the sign at the museum explained, the Union Island Blue Ring was described in the surviving writings of the original island habitants. It had great ritual value to them, but was notoriously difficult to catch because of its lethal sting. The sting, the museum display said, contained a poison that was chemically similar to tetrodotoxin, one of the world's most deadly naturally occurring toxins. TTX was also found in several varieties of puffer fish and was famous for being the secret ingredient in Haitian zombie potions. Indeed, the Union Island Blue Ring Octopus appeared to have been used in rituals in which the priests would "kill," then "resurrect" a subject as a demonstration of supernatural power.
A chosen subject was fed a crumb of octopus flesh. The poison, dubbed guaneurotetrodotoxin, or GUTX, probably had an effect similar to TTX, slowing the metabolic rate to a point of near-death unconsciousness. Outward signs of life were suppressed until no heartbeat or respiration could be detected. Days later, the GUTX would wear off and the body's metabolism would speed up again. The benevolent priests would restore life to the "corpse."
Most of those who were exposed to TTX today, often through consuming puffer fish, received a dose far larger than what the Union Island priests used. Victims could die in as little as twenty minutes. From the written records found on the island, GUTX was just as dangerous.
"No Union Island Blue Ring Octopus has been seen in at least four centuries," the museum display concluded. "Have no fear of swimming in the beautiful waters of Union Island-this poisonous marine dweller is extinct!"
Their hunt confirmed that.
After months of failure, Grom and Summens had even risked a little publicity and offered a substantial reward for anyone locating a recent specimen. The word was circulated among fisherman throughout the Caribbean. The specimens that came in bore no resemblance to the Union Island Blue Ring. More than one marine biologist and rare-marine-animal collector shipped them hopeful-looking samples, but in all cases the pickled octopus were proved to be simply uncommonly large standard Blue Rings. DNA testing proved they weren't from the same subspecies as that of the mummy in the Union Island museum-and more tests showed that these standard twentieth century Blue Rings produced no GUTX.
Thus they embarked on the effort to analyze and create GUTX synthetically.
Easier said than done. Every lab they approached was able to make something very similar to GUTX and none had so far produced an identical molecule. The synthetic versions didn't work on the human metabolism in the same way, either. They found out the hard way when Grom tested a batch on a honeymooning couple from Portland.
The couple was flattered to have the island's president stopping by their restaurant table to chat. They were honored when he bought them a bottle of fine wine and decanted it himself. They never saw the extra ingredient he slipped into the wineglasses.
After drinking their wine, Grom suggested to the couple that they were having a fabulous honeymoon and they absolutely loved everything about Union Island.
The GUTX synthesis seemed to be working fine at first, then the newlyweds became agitated. Grom left, feeling the first twinges of alarm, and watched what happened next through the restaurant's front picture windows.
The couple began jumping around, boisterously conversing with other diners. Grom learned later that one of the other patrons mentioned that, while Union Island was indeed wonderful, the beaches could stand a little less litter.
That was all it took to set off the honeymooners. "It's perfect!" the blushing bride screeched at the naysayer. "Do you hear me! Do you understand, bitch?" The lady who had complained about the trashy seaside understood nothing except that she was being slashed to pieces by a maniac with a steak knife.
It wasn't easy downplaying the only murder in Union Island's recent memory. Reporters made much of the island's increased tensions resulting from its exploding tourism business. There were a few damaging "indepth" investigations by reporters who had never even been to the island.
Summens knew how to take care of assholes like that. She hurt those reporters in the worst possible way-by compromising their credibility. She invited them to the island personally, turning on her feminine charms full blast. "All I ask is that you join the president and myself for a welcome dinner," she explained. "After that you can spend as much or as little time as you like on the island and really get to know what it has to offer."
"What's your angle?" a Washington Post reporter demanded warily.
"My angle is that I believe you will see that most of what you wrote about is untrue," she said matter-of-factly. These hard-nose reporter types liked you to be straight with them.
"What if I think I was exactly right?" he probed.
"Then you let your first article stand," she said simply.
"What if I think it's even more of a shit hole than I wrote about the first time?" the Post reporter said with a sneer.
"You write whatever you think is true," Summens said, putting a smile in her voice. "We'll trust your judgment." It took a lot of persuasion, but persuasion was what Dawn Summens did best. Once she got two high-profile yeses, the other reporters fell in line.
As promised, she and Grom hosted a private dinner party at the presidential beach house. Oh, how smug that bunch had been when they arrived, just brimming with journalistic integrity.
"Giving journalists a dinner with the president is not going to influence our reportage," said one blackhaired woman from some big East Coast newspaper, then added, after an insulting pause, "Ms. Tourism Minister."
"Is 'reportage' a word?" Summens replied innocently. The newspaper bitch and her colleagues left the dinner with a new frame of mind, thanks to a healthy dose of GUTX-real GUTX, not the synthesized junk. They all wrote retractions and self-condemnations for their irresponsible and inaccurate earlier reports on the problems at Union Island.
The black-haired bitch was writing for the police beat now, from what Summens heard. Good riddance. All the others had suffered similar career disasters.
But that was enough trouble at home. Summens and Grom decided to take the testing abroad and arranged a PR tour for the president that would take him to some of the hottest vacation spots in the U.S., where he could test the GUTX samples on unsuspecting tourists. If the subjects went amok, it wouldn't be Union Island's problem.
Grom had taken delivery of more than thirty sample types from eight labs, and surely one of them would do what original GUTX did. One of them had to work, because their original GUTX supply was down to the dregs. However, each and every formula had ended with the subjects running amok. Grom created a swath of violence and insanity across the south-central United States. Now, if Dawn Summens was reading the clues correctly, Greg had finally found a formula that worked. Now he would betray her.
Summens's notebook computer was a sort of cybernetics nerve center for most of the systems on the island, and she tapped into the security cameras at the airport, witnessing the police preparations for the arriving 747. Grom and his dippy secretary were the first off. Even the small, grainy image from the security camera showed Greg looking haggard and nervous. His dippy secretary Amelia was a different story. Walking with confidence and a slight, assured smile, her eyes never left Greg Grom, and she never left her proper place-to his left and two steps behind him.