Scorched Earth Chemical—Never Any Evidence to Find.
Hydrogen—Chapter One
PlanetChem Laboratories, Monday, 9:00 AM
Real chemists wash their hands before they use the toilet. They also spell phenolphthalein correctly. An hour from now the four chemist wannabes who had infested my lab for the last five minutes wouldn’t be able to spell their own names.
I had followed them up the hall to my lab door—four men dressed for a parade in matching white lab coats and safety glasses over their eyes. Green straps held black respirators hanging from their necks. They had marched through my door while I stopped and watched. They had ignored me and began taking inventory of my equipment and glassware. They shouldn’t have. They had violated my turf.
Now I wondered who these yahoos were—government agents, corporate buffoons or idiots? If they were idiots, they had penetrated my lab when others couldn’t and nothing was worse than idiots with clout. I had left my terrain unguarded while I went to pee. Maybe I should install a porta-potty to minimize my time out of the lab.
My windowless sanctuary measured twenty feet on a side, surrounded by counters with black laboratory surfaces—their ebony perfection marred by permanent chemical scars. Four thousand watts of illumination kept shadows out of my world. Equipment, glassware and chemical solutions I had in development shared space with hundreds of product samples from varied chemical suppliers. I didn’t have anything particularly hazardous mixing at the moment unless you counted the really raunchy emulsion of turpentine and acetic acid cooking in the isolation hood. One whiff of that concoction would set King Kong on his butt.
A storage safe for flammables and one for corrosives bracketed the hood, which was next to the door. My desk sat between the hood and an island with lots of counter space, a sink, and outlets for power, gas and water—my idea of the perfect kitchen.
My name and occupation: Preston Charles, chemist. My laboratory was my sacred space. Some visitors condemned what they didn’t understand. If anyone caught me staring into space I was working out a problem and could do it better without their interruption. Some people called me anti-social. I didn’t care. I worked for PlanetChem Laboratories, a private industrial chemical company. I did research to develop odd compounds that we could manufacture and sell at a profit. Put the emphasis on private. Nobody knew about all of my activities, nobody—especially my employers. I gave the company the research it demanded and kept my extracurricular activities to myself. So what were the invaders looking for?
If you called me before your visit, showed your credentials, stated your intentions honestly and asked permission before you touched anything I’d give you a pair of gloves and welcome you as if you were in your grandma’s kitchen. My attitude was both reasonable and generous. If you didn’t call ahead and you didn’t show respect, I’d always get even.
These four jerks in my lab had been there for only five minutes and had violated a number of my rules without asking if I had any. They ignored my warning sign and ignored me as well. I had endured this situation before. As a preparation for the next invasion I had booby-trapped a few pieces of non-essential glassware. By now each of them had covered his hands with a film of sodium hydroxide—also known as caustic soda or lye–that in an hour would set fire to their souls if they had any. They would suffer no long term harm, but the next time they trooped into my lab they wouldn’t presume they were in charge.
I pointed my purple-gloved hands to the big sign by my flat screen monitor on the wall to the left as you entered. It read, “Do Not Touch ANYTHING.” The sign spoke my message clearly enough. Maybe the ambiance of a working industrial research lab distracted them.
“Can’t you read?” I asked.
“Take down the sign,” Bean Counter told me, “if you don’t like what we’re doing.” I called him “Bean Counter”—the definitive association for accountants everywhere—because his plastic ID badge gave that as his name—along with his fellow yo-yos as “Salem,” “Sonoma” and “Seattle.” Bean Counter added, “We are here to save your life.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” I asked.
He ignored me. I should reserve a clean lab coat to wear on occasions when my visitors showed insufficient respect. The one I wore daily exhibited a multitude of bright and colorful stains. I’d wash the coat, but the chemicals that caused the stains also reacted with water and would eat holes in it. I wasn’t slovenly, merely frugal.
Bean Counter passed off an empty glass beaker to one of his buddies who stared at it as if an original thought would pop into his head. They worked in teams of two. One man would pick up a piece of glassware, examine it for type and size and punch in data on a pocket recorder. The next confirmed the data and replaced the item. They didn’t touch the spectrophotometer or anything else electronic. Maybe they were afraid to. I leaned on my desk in the center of the room and watched them at play.
I stared down to Bean Counter from 6’2” to his 5’10”. He carried a full head of styled brown hair and a wispy waist from many treadmill hours. He looked like 30 going on 15. He might be the boss, but he would never look authoritative without a few battle scars. Time in the chemical business would furnish wounds to him free of charge.
Their behavior was insulting to all of the PlanetChem people. “I see the name tags,” I said, “but why use such obvious fake names?”
“National security and self preservation,” Bean Counter answered.
“You aren’t old enough to know any secrets worth dying for,” I said.
“You’re the one with the secrets worth dying for,” Bean Counter said.
My back stiffened. What did he mean by that remark? I tossed that thought aside and returned to the fact that I was dealing with trespassers. I was pissed, and angry people never asked the right questions. So I asked, “What are you doing in my lab?”
“We have been hired by PlanetChem’s Board of Directors,” Bean Counter said, “to prepare your company for sale.”
“Get in line,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This is the third time in 18 months that someone has prepared us for sale,” I said.
“The last team to do so did not have our authority.”
This conversation was not going well. “Explain?” I asked.
“Delete all unnecessary expenses from your itinerary,” Bean Counter said. “You have a new hiring freeze and no overtime for the rank and file. Raises are cancelled.”
“Is that all?”
“No,” he said, “All informal promises are null along with any other handshake agreements.”
This fellow would get his first lesson within the hour about not messing with me. “You are too full of yourself,” I said.
Bean Counter put down a graduated cylinder and stared at the magnetic stirrer. He had no idea what it was and he was too arrogant to ask. He turned and looked straight at me. “A death squad has targeted you, Sir. We may have to move you.”
Oh, Holy Shit! I asked a simple question and he gave me a straight answer. I still didn’t know what company he represented. Move me? That statement might answer why they were taking the inventory. On the other hand, I thought, slow down, be calm. Maybe the boy has ingested too much TV.
“Move me?” I asked.
“We are charged with protecting company assets.”
Maybe they had a nice cottage on the coast. “Where would I go?” I asked.
“We have refurbished five abandoned missile silos in North Dakota. I’m sure you will find one of the decorative themes to your satisfaction.”
“Themes?” I was reduced to nearly stuttering.
“We have Old West, Modern New York, Hawaii, Star Wars and Dr. Seuss.”
I needed to get some air space. I needed time to think. I needed to distract them—give them something to do while I thought. I dropped a one-inch long Teflon-coated magnet into a beaker of water, set it on the flat plate of the magnetic stirrer and twisted the dial below to a setting of 6 out of 10. The magnet spun in place and the water swirled, making an eddy in the middle. The four dipsticks huddled around my display and scribbled notes. Seattle took a picture. Then they looked at me as if I’d solved the ultimate riddle of time and space.
“Who has me targeted?” I asked. “Who is we?”
Bean Counter gave me a card with a real name and company, Wade Brennan, Mygenesis Corporation, Security Advisors for Industry. Great, I thought, how wonderful. I knew the name of a person and a company and I still didn’t understand squat. The silence in the room could have killed a lightning storm.
Brennan hadn’t answered my question so I tried another approach. “You four made a point of secret identities. Now you tell me who you are. Why?” I demanded.
“Because your demo showed us who you are better than any ID ever could,” Brennan answered. “We weren’t sure you weren’t posing as a chemist and we need you to trust us.”
This crew had taken one look at water rushing in a circle and identified me as a fellow scientist. We lived in different worlds. Brennan’s team looked as out of place as a for sale sign on the White House lawn. I had to let them know they were busts as secret agents in a lab setting. I didn’t want them to get too mad, yet—I had to find out about their mysterious death threat.
“You guys are too cute for words,” I told them.
“Meaning what?” Brennan asked. The other three had resumed their tasks but stopped in mid-motion, each of them holding a piece of my glassware and staring at me. I was tempted to smash a volumetric cylinder and disrupt their count.
I stood by my desk and waved my gloves in a sweeping arc and they still didn’t get the hint that their hands were dirty. To hell with them. “Look in a mirror,” I said. “You have matching white lab coats, brand new safety goggles and pretty black respirators hanging from color-coordinated corporate straps, but if we had a real emergency you wouldn’t know which end of the respirator to grab.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Brennan answered. “We can handle ourselves.”
“Then why are you passing that glassware around with bare hands?” I asked them.
Brennan set down a two-liter beaker and looked at his hands. Like sheep following a Judas goat, Seattle, Sonoma and Salem did the same. Odorless, colorless and invisible—my little treatment remained undetected. They would learn soon that chemistry defined a ‘latent period’ as the amount of time between initial contact and the first symptom of the problem. I should send them a bill for their education.
The 3 second-bananas resumed their inventory procedure while Brennan came over to talk to me. “Settle down, Sir,” he said. “We need each other.”
“Like hell.” Why did I give cranky answers when I should shut up and listen? I put Brennan’s card in my pocket. The man thought he had serious business with me concering a death threat. Brennan might have something on his agenda I should listen to.
“Our country needs specil fuel for the next generation of supersonic fighters,” Brennan said, “and you can create it for us.”
You’re too late, Sonny, I thought. I already have the formula. Check the stoppered jug hidden in plain sight on my desk. A few liters of what’s in there will take your jet from mach 3 to mach 5—or it ought to. I wouldn’t know for sure until I duplicated the lab results a dozen times or more. My first test could have been a fluke. As for wanting to kill me, had somebody tumbled to the research I thought I’d kept secret? A feeling located somewhere between nervousness and anxiety crept through me. No fear—not yet.
Something was not right. The cold war had ended when I was a kid. Why had the four of them travelled to PlanetChem Laboratories in Vancouver, Washington? Bureaucrats in Washington DC couldn’t find Washington the State let alone PlanetChem. I toiled so far under the national radar they’d need a tunnel-machine to find me.
“Tell me again why I need you?” I asked him.
I realized Brennan still had not answered the big question, What were they doing at PlanetChem and more particularly, my lab? How had he known to ask about fuel additives?
“You made it past the front gate,” I said, “and the meanest receptionist in North America. You blew off my warning, rifled my lab, implied we are being sold and told me I have an assassination threat. I don’t trust you.”
Brennan looked to the door. “That old woman in the wheelchair is mean?” he asked.
MS had reduced Petra’s physical presence from upright to wheelchair. She handled the infirmity with the grace that I would wish to own if her lot in life ever descended on me. “Shut up and show some respect,” I said. “I knew her when she could walk.”
“What’s so mean about her?”
I toggled the intercom on my lapel. “Petra, why didn’t you shoot these assholes at first sight?”
“We just repainted,” she spoke through the speaker on the wall. Three words only. Petra wasn’t big on chit-chat. Our combination secretary and arms dealer spoke clearly but with a hint of Slavic heritage.
“Petra keeps a loaded double-barreled twelve-gauge shotgun for swatting flies,” I said.
My visitors looked at each other, their hands and finally at me. Sonoma shrugged as if he was adjusting a bra strap. I glimpsed a shoulder holster. I suspected they were fresh out of the secret agent training school. I had an awful thought: Brennan’s team believed my problems were real and already here.
“Are you sure?” Brennan asked. “Where is it? Why a shotgun?”
My world came back into focus—barely. I couldn’t stop watching Sonoma. He was practicing a fast draw from under a lab coat, an optional class he had skipped in the school for those who learned how to be a chemist in a day. I couldn’t see from my angle whether he pulled a real gun or not. Brennan didn’t want to answer my questions, so why should I jump to help him? “Where’s what?” I asked.
“The shotgun,” Brennan said, “and you still haven’t told me why she picked a shotgun.”
“The reason she has a gun is simple,” I said. “Management felt we needed security but they were too cheap to hire a guard and build a fence.”
“So they armed the receptionist?” Brennan asked.
“Petra receives an extra hundred a month for providing security.”
“Why did she pick a shotgun?” Brennan asked the question and I wondered if he was concerned about a disabled woman with a gun.
“I’m really not sure,” I said, “because one time she told me she selected the twelve gauge because she feared her eyes might fail from old age and she didn’t want to miss the target and another time she said she didn’t really want to hurt anybody and planned to close her eyes when she pulled the triggers but she didn’t want to miss either. Take your choice.”
I didn’t mention the Daisy Air Rifle or the pellet pistol or the rounds of BBs I kept in the secret compartment attached to the back of my desk. A cabinet manufacturer had modified my old wooden desk in exchange for five gallons of the world’s best paint stripper.
“I believe you,” he said. “Where is it?”
What is it with you guys? I wondered. Is it because I wear a white coat that you’ll believe whatever I tell you? My line happens to be the truth but I wouldn’t buy it if you were selling it to me.
“Ask Petra to show you her baby when you leave. She’ll demonstrate the business end.” I pointed to the door, hoping they’d take the hint and leave. The four jokers ignored me and resumed counting. They might be ordinary empty suits, but I’d never met any packing guns. An “Empty Suit” was generally defined as an executive of limited brainpower, a ton of authority and no accountability.
I sneaked a peek at the isolation hood and the flask half-full of boiling turpentine and acetic acid. Good, it stood ready and waiting. My blend was an aromatic cocktail that would disable anyone exposed to its fragrance. The effects were temporary but memorable. All they had to do to avoid the consequences from not heeding my warning was to leave the hood undisturbed. I wondered if my new friends would remember the purpose for the respirators.
Brennan blinked several times, cleared his throat, squared his shoulders and spoke to me formally. I thought he might die of fright. Maybe I scared him. Nonsense, I scared nobody.
“Mr. Charles, you don’t understand.”
Brennan’s nervousness triggered my gut. I was out of my league. “Understand what?”
“The United States has received a major terrorist threat to our chemical industry,” he said.
“To PlanetChem?” I asked. Would the son-of-a-bitch ever tell me the truth?
“Yes, you are on the list,” he answered. He put both hands out, palms facing me, and pushed his problem my way. “We don’t know who they’ve set their sights on but we believe the first attack will be executed by the end of next week.”
Our taxpayers paid for Homeland Security, the Border patrol, the Coast Watch and suitcase-sniffing dogs. I was not going to dive into an old missile silo on their say-so. “So? Find the bad guys and stop them,” I said.
Brennan opened his laptop and connected it to my wall monitor. I didn’t object—that’s why I’d had it installed. He brought up a video of a thousand-acre chemical processing plant surrounded by a chain link fence and jungle. I recognized steam lines, reactors, pumping stations and million-gallon holding tanks. The factory was in the background of the video.
Three men worked on a mobile platform in the foreground. One of them typed something on a keyboard and all three ran off-camera. A few seconds later a rocket fired and zeroed in on one of the million-gallon tanks. The explosion threw workers into the air and flames engulfed the factory.
Brennan turned the video off. “That attack was broadcast by terrorists last week from Venezuela.”
Watching real people die made me ill but I couldn’t do anything to help them. Terrorists blew up something somewhere every day of the week, but they didn’t in the USA. We didn’t allow them access.
