Next Victim (22 page)

Tess almost had to admire him for that. He had not survived three decades in the bureau by playing cover-your-ass politics, at any rate.

There was silence for a moment, and then Tennant went on.

"Pierce was not reacquired until early this morning, by which time she was dead. Evidently she had some very bad luck. She appears to have allowed herself to be picked up by a locally active serial killer who previously operated in Denver, killing four people there. He uses the name Mobius. He took her to his hotel room, which he’d charged to a phony credit card. He had sex with her, and he killed her—his usual MO. Then he left, and now he’s in the wind.

"So Pierce is dead, another notch in Mobius’s knife. Which we might say was just as well—even that he did the world a favor this time—except for one thing.

"In order for Pierce to establish her bona fides and seal the deal, she was supposed to hand over a sample of the VX produced at the Oregon lab. The lab had earlier confirmed to us that seven hundred and ten ccs, or twenty-four ounces, of the nerve agent were unaccounted for. It’s a safe assumption that Pierce smuggled out this quantity of VX, probably in its original packaging—a metal canister approximately ten inches long and two inches in diameter. The total package—cylinder and contents—would weigh two pounds. When she traveled to LA, she would have brought it with her, most likely in her suitcase."

"You could have intercepted this woman at any time," the mayor interrupted to ask, "isn’t that correct?"

"Yes, sir. We were holding off until she met with her contact. We wanted to collar them both."

"But you didn’t, and now she’s dead, and the VX…?"

"Is gone."

"Taken by this man Mobius?"

"We think so, yes."

"A serial killer."

"Yes."

"A serial killer who’s now armed with a weapon of mass destruction. A weapon that can kill ten thousand people."

"That’s it in a nutshell, sir."

The county sheriff put in a word. "Have you considered the possibility that her contact killed her and made it look like the work of this Mobius just to throw us off?"

Tennant hesitated. For the first time he was stumped.

"It was Mobius," Tess said from the back of the room. Heads turned. "I’ve worked the case for years. The signature of the crime scene is distinctive. There are details that couldn’t be copycatted, because they were never made public."

"Details like what?" a councilman challenged.

She could have answered:
Like the fact that the carotid arteries were not cut…that the victim’s wrists were taped to the headboard…that duct tape was applied to her mouth…

But she said only, "Details that have to remain undisclosed for the sake of the investigation."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s as much of one as you’re going to get."

Suddenly everybody was talking at once. The room seemed hotter and more crowded than it had been a moment earlier. People were talking back now, unwilling to yield the floor any longer. Tess had seen this behavior in every briefing she’d attended. Powerful people would not stay quiet for long.

"Folks," Tennant yelled over the clamor, "we need some order here. Chief Florez has to discuss the details of the counterterror procedures that are already under way."

The room quieted down as Sylvia Florez outlined the emergency plans.

"In the event of a mass-casualty situation, an emergency broadcasting system alert will notify area hospitals storing antidotes to biochemical weapons. Additional meds are being flown in from federal stockpiles. Medical strike teams will be mobilized to set up decontamination showers and other mobile facilities. We estimate that one hundred twenty nurses and fifteen doctors can process and decontaminate up to one thousand victims per hour.

"The efforts of the forty-nine thousand first responders in LA County will be coordinated with those of the Department of Public Services, the Departmental Operations Center, and Emergency Network Los Angeles.

"The LAPD’s antiterrorism division has been mobilized. The department’s response plans for a terrorist threat, available on the LAPD intranet, call for heavy deployment of LAPD undercover and uniformed units, concentrating on likely targets—sports venues, federal buildings, amusement parks, and so on.

"In compliance with Presidential Decision Directive Thirty-nine, federal assistance has been requested. National Guard units trained in WMD crisis management and U.S. Army chemical defense units are now on alert. Another available resource is the U.S. Marine Corps Chemical-Biological Incident Response Force—three hundred seventy-five men trained in NBC incident containment.

"Health and Human Services, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the EPA have been notified. As you’ve seen, the FBI is on the case."

Someone muttered audibly, "And doing a bang-up job."

Tess sucked in a hard breath. She didn’t like having the bureau dumped on. But the fact remained that the FBI had lost Amanda Pierce—and now the FBI had to find Mobius and stop him before it was too late.

When the presentation was over, Florez asked for questions. Tess raised her hand, but Florez wasn’t looking toward the back of the room and Tennant ignored her. Finally she stood without being recognized.

"When do we go public with this?"

"Never," Tennant said.

Tess wouldn’t accept that answer. "It’s Saturday. People will be going out to ball games, concerts, all sorts of crowded places. You already said that sports arenas are possible targets. So are theaters and shopping malls. People need to know."

"So they can panic?"

"So they can take precautions."

"What precautions, exactly, can the general public take against a psychopathic serial killer with a terrorist weapon?"

"Maybe we need a curfew."

The mayor waved off the idea. "There will be no curfew. We’re not throwing this city into chaos."

"I don’t think there’ll be chaos," Tess persisted. "We’ve had government alerts periodically since the World Trade Center attack."

"And most of those alerts," Tennant said, "have been false alarms based on unsubstantiated information."

"This one isn’t."

"We don’t know that, Agent McCallum. Suppose Mobius doesn’t even know what the hell he’s got. Then he hears about it on the TV news. Then we’ve given him the information he needs. We’re aiding and abetting."

"He won’t need our help. He’s smart enough—"

"I know, I know, he’s an evil genius who never makes mistakes. So let’s say we do it your way. We hold a press conference at two o’clock. Guess what the situation is as of two-oh-five. Every freeway is jammed bumper-to-bumper with people trying to hightail it the hell out of town."

"That’s ridiculous. If the information is presented the right way—"

"The right way? What precisely is the right way to tell ten million people that a nutcase is running around with enough nerve gas to depopulate an entire neighborhood? You’ll have mass panic, mass evacuation, breakdown of order, looting, riots, the whole nine yards."

"People are better than that," Tess said. "They’ve proven it in the past. Give them a chance, and they’ll prove it again. And they deserve to be told."

"Well, thank you, Agent McCallum, for airing your uplifting view of human nature. We can all benefit from your wisdom and perspective. But just in case you happen to be wrong, there will not be any public announcement."

The mayor seconded this, as did all the city council members.

Tess sat down. "What do you think, Gerry?" she asked Andrus in a low voice. "Am I crazy?"

"Probably." But he said it with a smile.

"So you wouldn’t announce it?"

"No. I wouldn’t."

"Suppose you had a wife or a son—"

"I’d tell them."

"So they get to know, and other people don’t?"

"Life isn’t fair, Tess." Andrus sighed. "I thought you already knew that."

She did. But she just kept learning it all over again.

24

Tess was walking on the palisades, the high bluffs that towered over the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach beyond. The salt air blew through her hair and caressed her cheeks. The sun was high in the sky, bright but cool, a California sun.

She wasn’t sure how far she had walked. Looking back, she saw the MiraMist in the far distance, its tiered balconies gleaming. A mile away, she guessed.

After the ATSAC briefing, she had lined up with the others to receive packets of pyridostigmine bromide—"a single thirty-milligram pill every eight hours," Dr. Gant said, "starting now." The medicine was a prophylactic that would enhance the effectiveness of antidotes to VX, if and when they were used.

The antidote kits were passed out next. Gant spent some time demonstrating how to unclip and use the two self-injector syringes. "Carry this pouch with you at all times," he said. Tess thought he was being a little melodramatic. Even so, she had put the kit inside her purse, which she intended to keep on her person until Mobius was caught.

After that, she had found herself excluded from the activity around her. She was not part of any squad or task force. Tennant didn’t want her there, and Andrus was preoccupied with a hundred logistical and bureaucratic priorities.

No one was willing to talk to her, anyway. She was the crazy bitch who wanted to open up the investigation to media scrutiny and start a panic and get all the incumbent politicians recalled in a special election. She was persona non grata.

So she’d left. Andrus’s driver had chauffeured her back to the MiraMist, where her car was parked. She’d thought about revisiting the crime scene, but there was nothing for her to do up there.

So she had gone for a walk along the bluffs, wondering what to do next. She thought about informing Michaelson of the ATSAC meeting. It was an act of insubordination, but at least it would piss off Tennant. Unfortunately, she disliked Michaelson even more than she disliked Tennant. Besides, there was no wiggle room in her orders—Michaelson and the rest of the RAVENKIL task force were to be kept in the dark. They were out of it.

Effectively, so was she. She knew what was going on, but she’d been frozen out.

"Then go it alone," she murmured to herself.

She had threatened Andrus that she would investigate on her own. Big words, but what sort of investigating could she do without resources in an unfamiliar city?

She stopped at a railing and gazed at the blue mist of the ocean’s horizon.

An unfamiliar city. No Rockies here, a sheer granite wall rising out of the mile-high plateau. No crisp winter mornings when new snow crunched underfoot and the only colors were the achingly pure blue of the sky and the flit of red as a robin hunted for seed. No summer rodeos, no autumn hayrides.

She didn’t know this town.

But she did know
him
.

Mobius. Her nemesis. The man who had taunted her, hounded her, taken over her life.

In the surveillance room she’d bragged that she had some insight into Mobius’s mindset, that she knew what he was like when he was being himself.

Now was the time to prove it.

Mobius had taken the VX from Amanda Pierce’s suitcase. How had he known about it? Had Amanda told him? Had he tortured the truth out of her?

Unlikely. A room with thin walls in a crowded hotel was not a place for torture. And Amanda Pierce, even in death, had not looked cowed or broken. Tess remembered the glare fixed on her face, the anger in her dead eyes.

Mobius must have taken the canister of VX merely on a hunch. Perhaps he’d felt its liquid contents sloshing inside. Perhaps he’d guessed that Amanda Pierce was not an ordinary tourist.

But there was no way for him to guess what the liquid was. He would need to find out. How?

Taste it, sniff it? If so, he was dead. But he would not be so stupid. Mobius might be insane, but—

Mobius.

That name. A reference, it was thought, to the Möbius strip. Something that a person trained in math or science would know about.

She had been going about this all wrong. She should not ask what a serial killer would do. She should ask what a scientist would do.

Faced with an unknown substance, a scientist would have it analyzed.

A sailboat drifted past, but Tess didn’t see it.

After a long time she turned away from the railing and headed back toward the MiraMist and her car. She knew what she had to do.

There might be no need to run, but she found herself running anyway, as she retraced her route along the bluffs.

25

The body lay on a steel table under a fluorescent light. Dodge looked at the skin, charred and blackened, and thought about a roast duck he’d ordered in Chinatown. There was the same crinkly quality, the same translucent sheen.

"Something’s up today," Winston said as she prepped the X-ray machine.

Rachel Winston was a brisk, careful woman who eschewed the crude humor indulged in by most of her colleagues at the Los Angeles County Morgue. She was good-looking in a severe, ice-princess sort of way, and still young enough that her tits were more horizontal than vertical. Dodge had her pegged as a dyke, because he’d asked her out and she’d rebuffed him.

Fuck her, anyway. She probably got off on dead bodies.

"Yeah?" Dodge said. "Like what?"

"Lot of activity around City Hall. Cars going in and out. Looks very official. Started around ten-thirty this morning." She glanced at him. "You don’t have any inside info?"

"Not a clue," he said, though now that she mentioned it, the West LA station had seemed unusually active when he’d stopped there at one-thirty, an hour ago, and on the drive to downtown LA he’d noticed a surprising number of patrol units on the streets.

"Well, the toilers in the trenches are always the last to know." Winston nodded at her assistant, a pathology technician with cornrowed hair. "Guess we’re just about ready."

They were standing together in the morgue’s radiography room, conveniently down the hall from where the dead bodies were stored. In the movies, the dead were always filed away in cabinets, but in actuality they were more likely to be stacked on gurneys or piled up in corners, awaiting inspection. There was a lot of death in LA County, and the cabinets were all full.