He drummed his fingers on the wheel for a second, then said, “It’s in the box in the trunk. Just pull the wire poking out of the lock hole.”
I rummaged through the box of canned goods and found the can opener, then slipped it into the valise beside Rob’s papers. I shut the trunk, slamming it twice before it caught.
“Found it,” I said. “Thanks.”
He rolled up the window and pressed down on the accelerator. The Plymouth chugged north and turned the corner.
Lissa drove us past the airport, heading south, it didn’t seem to matter where. For twenty minutes it was enough to be in the car and going. If we started asking questions, the tough decision would be, where to begin? Pull on this thread, would it come out short and loose, or would it unravel the whole mystery? So far, every pulled thread had revealed nothing but fuzz.
“Someone pretending to be Rob called me last night,” I said.
“Rob is definitely dead,” she intoned, as if repeating a mantra. “They were messing with you.”
“Who?”
“Whoever.”
“That’s why Banning was so glad to leave. He thinks I’ve been tagged.”
“All right, being tagged, what does that mean?”
“Slipping bacteria or something in your food. Mind control.”
“That’s Banning’s craziness. Banning drove Rob to think such things.”
“Did he? Rob wrote about what he learned in Siberia, and it’s pretty damned scary.” I opened the valise and lifted the envelope. “There was a Russian program in the 1930s to develop bacterial brainwashing. Certain kinds of special bacteria, laced in your food, could change your behavior or make you suggestible. Someone could then run you. Control your mind. You’d be tagged.”
“Do you think they control your mind now?”
“No.”
“Why not? They—whoever they are—sound ever so powerful. They scared Mrs. Callas.”
“I’m on antibiotics,” I said. I’d been mulling that over for a couple of hours. As a hypothesis, it was definitely interesting, but it didn’t cover any number of details—my trancelike state the night before—and it didn’t explain how I’d escaped the madness on board the Sea Messenger.
“Antibiotics? That’s all it takes to escape from the grip of Dr. Mabuse?”
“Who?”
“Dr. Mabuse,” Lissa said. Mah-`boos-ah. “Fritz Lang made a movie about an evil criminal mastermind named Mabuse. Supposed to be a symbol for Adolf Hitler.”
“Oh.” Clearly, I had spent too much of my life buried in journals and lab manuals.
“Wouldn’t these masters of the universe have thought about antibiotics?”
“There were very few antibiotics in the twenties and thirties. Just sulfa drugs.”
“So Dr. Mabuse has this little trained flea circus of master spies, except they’re bacteria,” Lissa said. “And antibiotics knocks them for a loop-the-loop on their little trapeze. They shout ’Mein Gott’ and their eyes—do bacteria have eyes?—turn to little x’s. How convenient.”
I smiled. “’Bozhe moi’, if they’re Russian. We’ll see, after another eight days,” I said. “I’ll run out of pills by then.”
The conversation was so desperately loopy that it couldn’t help but cut some ice. Lissa raised her arms and stretched as much as holding the wheel allowed, then yawned conspicuously, not tired, but to relieve stress.
“Rob gave the envelope to Banning, to give to you?” Lissa asked suspiciously.
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure it’s Rob’s?”
“I know his handwriting. You can read the papers if you want.”
“You’ve decided to trust me?” Lissa asked, her expression somber. She kept her eyes on the road. The traffic was bunching up and getting herky-jerky, requiring her full attention. A red Honda with tiny tires carrying three young men in reversed ball caps zipped in front without signaling. She tapped the brakes and the horn at the same time.
“Trust doesn’t amount to a hill of peanut shells,” I said. “If what he wrote about happened, if I’m putting two and two together properly, if what Banning says makes any sense, or what AY said—”
“AY?” Lissa asked.
“Rob didn’t tell you much about his work, did he?”
“Not at the end. I just couldn’t stand watching him fall apart. What kind of antibiotic?” she asked.
“Integumycin. It’s new.”
“I’m surprised any antibiotics work now. So many resistant germs. It’s like they have it in for us.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Where are we going?”
