Free Cold Frame by P. T. Deutermann Page A

feet, from the sound of them. Same deal: matching his pace, their footfalls distinct but not closing in.
    His cop sense was definitely aroused now. Two guys ahead of him, two more behind him, and all of a sudden no other runners around in either direction. He was approaching Georgetown proper so he decided to fake a cramp where the canal bridged a stream that tumbled down to the river. As he came abreast of the bridge wall, he cursed and grabbed at his left hamstring, then stopped and hobbled over to the stone wall, where he sat down. This gave him a good look at the two runners behind him.
    Two large black men this time, dressed a lot like the first two runners: floppy cloth hats, the same sunglasses, different-colored shirts and shorts. Av pretended not to look at them as they trotted by, but once they passed, he saw one thing different about these two: they were carrying, their weapons clearly outlined in kidney-bean-shaped black fabric pouches down low just above their hips. He wondered if they’d spotted his own groin pouch when he sat down, but his tee should have covered it pretty well. His weapon was half the size of what they were carrying. They didn’t look at him as they went by, their legs keeping perfect time with each other. Definitely military, he thought. Into that left-right-left shit.
    He waited until they were out of sight and two more runners, both attractive young women, had come by, and then he got up and walked the rest of the way back to his building.
    So what was all that about? he wondered.
    Absolutely nothing. But when he came out later to go to work, he found a pair of cheap reflective sunglasses that looked a lot like his folded over the waist-high cast-iron picket fence that fronted his building. They’d been bent in half—for a better purchase on the iron picket?
    He looked at them for a moment. A message? Or someone found glasses and hung them on the fence for whoever might come back for them? No—they’d been mangled. Once again he felt his Spidey sense tingling.
    *   *   *
    Hiram settled back in his chair and watched the screens come to life with his partners in science, if not, occasionally, crime. Giancomo had called for the teleconference. He announced in his mangled English that he’d made a breakthrough regarding signal transmission paths in a monkshood plant. Then, mercifully, he turned it over to one of his assistants, a very pretty young Italian lady whose English was very good indeed. She gave them a highly technical PowerPoint presentation on what they’d come up with, and Hiram was impressed. So was Archie Tennyson, who commented that if this was true, it might now be possible to manipulate these chemical signals to affect the flow and strength of the plant’s infamous toxin, aconite, or aconitine as it was sometimes called. Hiram observed that the monkshood alkaloid toxin hardly needed amplification. As they all knew, just touching the plant put an animal or a human in jeopardy of death.
    â€œYes, of course,” Archie said. “But remember, there are circumstances where one would want to concentrate it—because a concentrate takes up much less volume.”
    And, Hiram thought, that makes it a much better agent for use as, say, a directed poison. He immediately thought of Kyle Strang and his fanatical boss, Carl Mandeville. Giancomo had also recognized the potential for deadly mischief, and commented that this discovery would be better kept “in the book,” as they called it.
    â€œBut that’s a major breakthrough, Giancomo,” Archie said.
    â€œWe know, we know,” Giancomo said. “So maybe now we reproduce the experiment, okay? In something not so bad as monkshood. See if some of the other plants can do the same thing, yes?”
    They kicked that idea around, but Hiram thought it was wishful thinking. It was the deadly plants—monkshood, belladonna, death cap mushrooms, castor bean