“You’re enjoying this too much,” Christina said as Mickey whipped the X-car up one sidewalk and down another, twisting and weaving like a stunt driver.
“Anybody behind us?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
The tremor was over. She estimated it was no more severe than the previous one. Maybe the worst of the seismic activity was over. L.A. sat atop petroleum deposits, but they weren’t famously large. Perhaps the underground Syntrophus activity had maxed out.
“I’ll call Trinley. Hopefully he hasn’t reached the rendezvous yet.”
Trinley answered immediately. “I’m on my way,” he said. “Are you there yet?”
“We have to change the location,” she said. “The police are there.”
“Miss Gonzalez, you were right that we must start work on the antibiotic at once. I just learned from the mayor that your Syntrophus bacteria may have escaped the quarantine to the north. So we have little time. Please, meet me at the designated spot. This cure is far more important than a citation for violating curfew.”
“It’s not a curfew violation I’m worried about.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I think the police are looking for me.”
“Paranoid delusions? Are you cracking?”
“No, I’m fine. I have valid reasons for wanting to avoid an encounter with the authorities,” she said, growing assertive with aggravation. “Just tell me where you are and we’ll come to you.”
“I’m almost at the rendezvous, meet me there.”
“I won’t do that. Give me an alternative—“
She froze in mid-sentence. Trinley was right about one thing: she was cracking. If those policemen were indeed waiting for her, how did they know she was coming? She was distracted, traumatized, stressed out—but how in the world had she failed to see it before?
“You bastard,” she said. “You killed Dr. Chen.”
Mickey swerved the X-car hard to the left.
“You wanted to destroy his antibiotic work so Bactofuels could sell solar isobutanol at an exorbitant price. You borrowed my keys and tampered with the liquid nitrogen tanks at the lab. And now,” her voice quivered with rage, “you’ve framed me for murder.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You sound very disturbed,” Trinley said in an impassive tone. “Meet me—“
“At the ambush you arranged? Yeah, I’ll just walk right up and introduce myself. Then you can destroy these specimens and act like Bactofuels’ product is the city’s only hope.”
“Miss Gonzalez, if you don’t surrender those oil field samples, it will look very bad.”
“It’s going to look a lot worse when I take them out of the quarantine zone,” she said.
“Hang up,” Mickey shouted. She’d forgotten he was even there.
He reached over, snatched the phone, and disconnected the call.
“Take out the battery,” he said, tossing the phone in her lap as he hit the brakes to navigate a particularly narrow gap.
Christina stared at him.
“Do it now!”
She fumbled with the handset as the car lurched forward.
“They can track your location through your cell phone,” Mickey said. “Don’t turn it on again.”
Her anger dissolved into despair, and she cried while Mickey drove. Somehow, crying helped her to regain control. From under the seat she extracted a small Styrofoam box marked with bright orange biohazard symbols. Inside the box were the oil samples that she fervently hoped contained the secret of the petroplague antibiotic.
“What am I going to do with this?” she said.
Keeping both hands on the steering wheel, Mickey shrugged his shoulders.
“Forget about it.”
“Is that an option?”
“Looking out for number one is always an option.”
His choice of words rubbed her the wrong way. She’d been raised a good citizen among upright, God-fearing people. She believed in moral obligations, in self-sacrifice, in service to the community. The solution to the city’s problem—the world’s problem—lay useless in her lap, like the biblical lamp under a bushel basket. She wanted to help, but her hands were tied by Trinley’s terrible treason.
“No, it isn’t an option,” she said, “not if Trinley is telling the truth about the petroplague being in Kern County. Do you know what that means? It means the quarantine failed. It means the rest of the country will eventually become like L.A. The petroplague will spread until there’s no oil left.”
“Chen wasn’t superhuman. Another scientist will figure it out eventually.”
“He was an expert on Syntrophus. No one else has a collection like this,” she said, holding up the box. “Other scientists won’t figure it out in time.”
“In time?”
“This antibiotic might work as a fuel additive to keep the petroplague out of our petroleum infrastructure. But if the bacteria get established in big underground oil fields outside of L.A., there’ll be no way to stop them.”