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Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead. —Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac (1735)
Plum Island was actually the product of my joining together of two unrelated themes that had always interested me—buried treasure and biological warfare.
And who is John Corey? Well, as I said, he’s decidedly politically incorrect, which still resonates after all these years. He’s also a lovable rogue who is a man’s man but also a ladies’ man.
I’ve always introduced strong and smart female characters who challenge Corey’s craziness. In Plum Island I have two such characters: Beth Penrose, a Suffolk County, New York, homicide detective; and Emma Whitestone, a very sexy and smart lady who lives on the North Fork of Long Island where the story takes place.
It occurred to me that the problem with doing nothing is not knowing when you’re finished.
About this time of day you can start to hear crickets, locusts, and who knows what, but I’m not a big fan of nature noises so I had a portable tape player beside me on the end table with The Big Chill cranking, and the Bud in my left hand, the binocs in my lap, and lying on the floor near my right hand was my off-duty piece, a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel which fit nicely in my purse. Just kidding.
So you don’t think I’m a paranoid citizen, I should mention that I was convalescing, not from the mumps, but from three bullet wounds, two 9mm and one .44 caliber Magnum, not that the size of the holes matters. As with real estate, what matters with bullet holes is location, location, location.
Nassau Point is still home to a number of scientists; some work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a secret nuclear something or other about thirty-five miles west of here, and some scientists work on Plum Island, a very top secret biological research site which is so scary it has to be housed on an island. Plum Island is about two miles off the tip of Orient Point, which is the last piece of land on the North Fork—next stop Europe.
I reminded her, “Last time I took your hand, I lost my gun and my manhood.” She smiled. “Come on, shake.” I shook hands with her. Her skin was warm. My heart was on fire. Or maybe the nachos were causing reflux. It’s hard to tell after forty.
I was starting to feel forty-something, starting to feel my mortality. Sometimes in my sleep, I remember lying in the gutter in my own blood, lying on a storm drain and thinking, “I’m circling around the drain, I’m going down the drain.”
I recalled a cartoon I’d once seen in The Wall Street Journal where a school guidance counselor says to two parents, “Your son is vicious, mean-spirited, dishonest, and likes to spread rumors. I suggest a career in journalism.”
I remarked, “I never realized the Department of Agriculture was involved in national security. Do you have, like, undercover cows?” Mr. Nash gave me a nice fuck-you smile and said, “We have wolves in sheep’s clothing.” “Touche.” Prick. Mr. Foster butted in before it got nasty and said, “We’re here as a precautionary measure, Detective.
I’d be less than truthful if I didn’t say that biological warfare specialists sometimes visit the island to be briefed and to read reports on some of these experiments. In other words, there is a crossover between animal and human disease, between offensive biological warfare and defensive biological warfare.”
With biological warfare or biological terrorism, it was imaginable. And if the right plague got loose, it was lights out world, and not in a quick incandescent flash, but slowly, as it spread from the sick to the healthy, and the dead lay rotting where they fell, a Grade B movie coming to your neighborhood soon.
“I can’t believe we never thought of that. Not death. Life. Not disease, but a cure.” “Vaccine,” said Dr. Zollner. “A preventive. Not a cure. There’s better money in vaccines. If it’s a flu vaccine, for instance, then a hundred million doses are dispensed each year in America alone. The Gordons were doing brilliant work with viral vaccines.”
Present antiviral drugs are not very effective, and so the key to avoiding a future worldwide catastrophe is antiviral vaccines, and the key to the new vaccines is genetic engineering.”
A good day for the bio-warfare gentlemen is a day when their scientists can genetically engineer the FMD virus to infect humans. But worse, I think, some of these viruses mutate on their own and become dangerous to people.”
I mean, whatever was going on here, this was not the time or place to yell bullshit or liar. Beth and I made eye contact, and as usual I couldn’t tell if she was amused by me or if she was annoyed. The way to a woman’s heart is through her funny bone. Women like men who make them laugh.
The house, the yard, the lady in the long cotton dress, the willow tree, the rusty swing set, and the old tire hanging by a rope from the oak tree—all of this had a 1940s or 1950s look, like an old photograph that had been color-tinted. Truly time moved more slowly here. There was a saying that in Manhattan the present was so strong, it obscured the past. But here, the past was so strong, it obscured the present.
Regarding the paint streaks on Mr. Tobin’s sign, I concluded that this was art. It’s getting harder to tell the difference between art and vandalism.
That’s my girl. Loyal and true. Won’t drink her ex-lover’s wine in front of the new beau. I’ll tell you, the older you get, the more baggage you have to carry, and the less you’re able to lift it.
America is a country of second and third chances, a place of multiple resuscitations, so that, given enough retakes, only a total idiot can’t eventually get it right.
It was actually safer to ride out the storm in the open sea as long as you had fuel or sail left. But we didn’t even have that option because we had a guy with a rifle and radar on our ass. We had no choice but to press on and see what God and nature had in store for us.
You’re not very diplomatic, are you?” “Diplomacy is the art of saying nice doggy, until you can find a rock.”
A century ago, people occasionally came to a crossroads in their lives and had to choose a direction. Today, we live inside of microchips with a million paths opening and closing every nanosecond. What’s worse, someone else is pushing the buttons.
