Detailed History
Setting:: Sangamon is taken from a little over a month after the end of Zodiac. I've placed that arbitrarily but precisely at September 22nd, 1988, in this comment. (The 22nd was the one that was Thursday.) This is based on two somewhat-contradictory things -- the book takes place over somewhere around six months of realtime, but ALL of it has summer-ish weather. And it's during the presidential election season, but the political stuff near the beginning seems to be at the very beginning of the presidential primary season, while the later stuff has to either be the main campaign or put most of the book back to 1987, which doesn't feel right either. So I've started it in January 1988 and assumed it was a warm spring, putting the finale in the summer, and that Pleshy's New Hampshire visit is for the general election, not the NH primary.
History: Sangamon, or S.T. (he uses both to refer to himself), was born in 1969 (extrapolating backwards from the setting and his age, which is given as 29). Where he spent his childhood is unclear, though he moved around with his father and bouncing between relatives as a teenager. As he doesn't specifically call out any other home than Boston, and he really knows the city, I'm assuming he's from the area originally. He was a bright kid, simultaneously irritating and impressing his teachers, and earning a 1500 on the SAT. At some point his parents divorced, and at some later point his mother passed away from liver cancer. The press has speculated that this was one of his reasons for going into eco-activism, though S.T. never brings it up. (He never avoids the topic; it just never comes up, not even when he's dealing with cancer victims. His motivations, at least as he tells himself in a few rare moments of introspection, are more from optimism and a desire to help people in general.)
He went to college at Boston University, graduating in a normal span of four years with a degree in Chemistry. There he met Dolmacher, a fellow chemist, and generally uninteresting-to-Sangamon guy, as he's a wanna-be yuppie who doesn't actually have the social skills to fit in anywhere, though money helps. Dolmacher stuck with the traditional career path of a bright biochemist -- making six figures tweaking genes for a biotech corporation; Sangamon has nothing but scorn for him, especially when his grades were always better than Dolmacher's anyways.
Sangamon headed into that sort of career initially, working for biotech firm Massachusetts Analytics, which he not-so-affectionately calls Mass Anal whenever he looks back on it. He gained a reputation as a free spirit, but was generally tolerated there because he produced results. That is, until a jogger jogged in one day with a bag full of technicolor dirt and got routed to his desk. The dirt turned out to be highly contaminated, Sangamon investigated, and uncovered a massive chemical spill (and botched cover-up) at a nearby suburban college. He called in GEE (Global Group of Environmental Extremists), International, a fictional organization modeled after Greenpeace, except more successful. One thing led to another, and and one thing led to another, and S.T. went not-for-profit (and gave up any hopes he might have had of personal financial success). During his first case as a Toxic Detective (as he styles it himself), he also met a young woman named Debbie, who went to the college and who later joined him at GEE.
When the book starts, S.T. has been at GEE for several years, and he runs the Boston office; they've settled into a comfortable routine. Just don't call them eco-terrorists, and everyone gets along grand. They pursue non-violent ways of making big corporations lose face and money by plugging pipes with cement, running media campaigns, and generally trying to convince the world that pollution is bad. Every time they snag another major company, S.T. paints another logo on their Zodiac -- a rubber boat he uses to get around Boston like a Venetian uses a gondola.
We see S.T. in a "standard operation" as the book opens; he drives down to New Jersey to do a major media "splatter" on a company that's dumping carcinogens into a river in Blue Kills. Through a variety of misdirection, MacGuyver-esque stunts, and a lot of pandering to the press (a favorite pastime of his -- when they're cute, it can get quite literal, though he can apparently sweet-talk just about any journalist into running the story he wants run), he plugs up a pipe and humiliates a major corporation. They do get thrown in jail overnight; S.T. uses his one phone call to order a pizza, and by next morning the prosecutors are asking him for help setting up the suit against the corporate boys as they let him out.
Oh, and he finally lands Debbie in his bed on that trip, starting an on-and-off relationship that gets more serious as the book progresses.
It's a good gig, being a hero, even if S.T. isn't quite sure he's ever really made a significant difference (and he really wants to be able to point to something and say yes, he made a difference). But this easy life starts to fall apart as several major incidents collide.
First, there's the lobsters he's been pulling from the Boston Harbor as a means of checking up on how bad the water really is. The initial results: there's more PCBs than he expects; someone has started some illegal dumping, or so he expects.
Second, on one of his lobster trips, he runs into a bunch of metalheads who think that he's looking to bust a PCP lab, not trying to find the source of PCBs. While they're mostly harmless (drunk off their asses at a seemingly never-ending bonfire on Spectacle Island), they do smash up his office and leave creepy voicemails.
What he doesn't know is that one of the metalheads is the son of one of the muckety-mucks at Basco, the biggest, baddest polluting corporation in the area. So there are also real hitmen chasing him after that, who know exactly what he is looking for, and that he will find it if he looks hard enough. He's not sure who's after him -- maybe the Mafia, may be from any one of the corporations he's busted, or they may be stooges of a local politician to ties to Basco, who thinks he's going to wreck his bid for the Presidency. (Which, to be fair, Sangamon is entirely intending to do. He's just planning to do it via press release, not violence.) He doesn't know the real truth, but he knows enough to know that they're serious, and to be afraid.
The harassments and incidents keep ramping up, but S.T. tries to ignore it and keep on going. A side-trip to Buffalo for a "normal" job of stopping up a pipe with concrete goes smoothly, except for the goons tailing them. And he meets Joe Grandfather, a Native American guy who ends up rescuing him later.
Then the lobster project goes from bad to worse, with several fishermen showing serious symptoms of PCB poisoning. But the PCB readings keep disappearing every time he tries to confirm them. It's enough to have him doubting his own abilities, and that takes a lot. He's assuming that the barge that ran into Spectacle Island (and which the metalheads are using as a party zone) unearthed some old dumped transformers from Basco, and that the problem was just very localized. But then another pocket of it turns up, and he renews the search. Finally, he starts getting close enough that he ends up in the office of Laughlin, the Basco higher-up with the metalhead son. Laughlin connects the dots for him -- S.T. is kicking himself the entire time for missing it. Basco was trying to create a genetically-engineered bug to convert PCBs into non-polluting salts. They succeeded, but they also managed to create the reverse one: a bug that could turn all the oceans of the world into PCB stew. And both of them have gotten into the harbor.
S.T. runs, ending up out in the harbor on the Zodiac, gunning the engine and trying to run for Maine. He makes it, eventually, and comes ashore only to find that he's gotten himself infected with the salt-to-PCB bug. Joe Grandfather and Hank Boone, a "real ecoterrorist" for whom S.T. has public scorn and private admiration, take him in and help him recover. And then it turns out that Dolmacher also got infected with his own bug, and has been left out to dry by Basco. So he's headed north, gunning for revenge on Pleshy, the politician, because of his Basco connections. S.T. and Boone end up simultaneously protecting him and destroying his image -- while S.T. tries to catch Dolmacher, Boone gets a microphone and asks difficult questions. Then Dolmacher evades S.T. and attacks with a paint gun rather than a real one, Boone keep it from hitting Pleshy, and it looks like two "eco-terrorists" just tried to take a bullet for a man they hate. And Pleshy still doesn't have any answers, so he ends up completely embarrassed.
Then everything else comes down to one over-the-top action-filled finale out in Boston Harbor, where Basco is killing off the bioengineered stuff by dumping massive amounts of poison (which, admittedly, is probably the only solution at that point, but they're also destroying all the evidence). S.T. and company are headed out to make sure they can't destroy it all. After some boat-capture shenanigans, one underwater knife fight, some fragmentation grenades, and one diversion to take Debbie to the E.R., it's all over. The corporate goons mostly end up dead, the bioengineered beastie is destroyed, the metalheads mostly don't notice (except for the few caught in the crossfire), and the evidence is gathered. So the rest of the Basco brass ends up in jail, and S.T. is the hero of the hour.
After that, it's back to more of the same. Just with another corporate logo painted on the stern of the Zodiac to commemorate another successful job.
Since his apartment is completely blown up near the end of the book, I've taken the liberty of giving him a new one for the brief period between the end of canon and when he appears in Landel's. I don't expect to mention this beyond his initial confusion over where he is.
Cheat sheet of people from home he might mention (or monologue about):
- Debbie: His girlfriend, and fellow GEE activist.
- Dolmacher: College acquaintance. Stereotypical geek.
- Bart: His roommate and friend.
- Hank Boone: Another eco-activist, works mostly in Europe after he was branded a terrorist in the US. S.T. looks up to him a lot.
- Jim Singletary, aka Jim Grandfather:Native American community organizer who takes care of S.T. and helps out on occasion.
- Rebecca: Boston reporter. S.T. has slept with her in the past.
- Alvin Pleshy: Corrupt Democratic politician from MA. Sort of a very-corrupt version of Dukakis -- presidential candidate in 1988, until S.T. exposed that he was involved with the Basco scandal.
- Laughlin: Basco higher-up. Tried to kill S.T., and generally slimy. Now in jail.