22
When Mitchell saw the SWAT van, he knew his only choice was to wait it out. Besides the hovering helicopter, he would guess that there were several police cars at the entrance and exit to the development blocking anybody from entering or leaving. The entire neighborhood was on lockdown. Running or surrendering was suicide for him. He had to just lie still.
He had an uneasy feeling about the house once he decided it was going to be his hideout. The problem was that it was the best choice he could think of but not the best possible choice. The difference being his total lack of experience in being a fugitive from justice.
After he had put away the map and come up with a tentative next step, he decided the best place to wait was the attic. It was hot but tolerable. He could also look out through a vent and see the street outside.
The SWAT van seemed inevitable to him once he realized how eager the intern was going to be to make the police happy. From there it was only a matter of time before they followed up on the lead and showed up on the doorstep of the house. Fortunately for Mitchell, his heightened paranoia paid off.
While Mitchell was waiting for night to come in the living room, he kept obsessively checking the street in front. That’s when he noticed the house across the street. It looked a lot like the house he was in, as did most of the other houses in the neighborhood, but it also had several newspapers piled up on the porch. Someone lived there, but they had been gone for the last few days. To Mitchell, it seemed like a safe bet they were going to be gone for a while longer. At least the next few hours.
It was impulsive, but he figured his odds were better waiting there than in Mike’s grandparents’ house. Plus, he could find things like food in there, as well. Mitchell decided it was a good idea to move across the street.
He’d gone over there and did a quick check for a hidden key underneath a rock or along a ledge. When he couldn’t find one, he went around the back of the house and looked for a way to get into it from there. That’s where he noticed the sliding glass doors like his parents used to have. Whenever they would get locked out, his father would just grab one end of the door and give it a tilt. The door would slide open from there.
Before trying the trick on the door, he did a quick search for an alarm system and found none. Few of the homes had them in that area since they were mostly summer homes with little in them or houses put up for sale.
After he got the door open, he checked to make sure the garage was empty (it was) and moved the car and removed all traces of himself from the first house. He then locked up that house and abandoned it for good.
The new house was sparsely furnished, but he found some plastic cups of applesauce that he wolfed down. In the bedroom closet he saw several blouses and skirts. It looked liked an older woman lived there by herself. Remembering that old people tended to use things like calendars, he went back and looked at the kitchen refrigerator. Sure enough, there was one. There was a long line going from four days before to the day after tomorrow. Mitchell’s best guess was this was how long the woman would be gone. Although he didn’t plan on staying more than a few hours, it was comforting to know he wouldn’t be found out right away.
Having accepted the fact that this was his second breaking and entering, he did a search for anything useful that he could take with him.
In a drawer by her bed he found an old iPod Touch that was completely drained. While not as powerful as his iPhone, he was confident he could take it and it would never be missed. That way he could surf the web or make a phone call using Skype if he found WiFi somewhere.
The mere possibility of being able to connect with the world electronically made him feel immensely better. The first thing he did when he climbed into the attic was look for a place to plug it in and charge it. It was only a few minutes after that when the SWAT van pulled up.
Up there in the attic, he couldn't see much of what was going on because the SWAT van was blocking the front door. As he watched the masked men jump out of the van and enter the house, he got a perverse thrill. He knew they could only be seconds away from finding him but watching them go into the wrong house gave him the feeling on the back of the neck after you realize the car heading for you didn’t hit you or when you really were about to see her breasts. Mitchell was confused by the feeling to be sure, but it made him feel better knowing that deep down he could be motivated by something other than pure fear.
His gut impulse to get out of the house had proven right and confirmed for him that he needed to move quickly when his instincts told him to. He knew that now was not the time to run, but as soon as the pressure slackened enough for him to leave, he’d have to get on it.
The SWAT team commander walked around the living room and looked at the floor. There were impressions on the carpet where it looked like the furniture had just evaporated. He looked for any footprints, but the carpet fiber was too resilient to hold them for very long. There was a dime in the middle of the floor. He bent down and picked it up. He tossed it into the air and caught it.
He checked all the bedrooms and the kitchen for any sign that somebody had been there. There was nothing. He walked into the master bathroom and looked around the sink and into the toilet.
He called one of the men over. “Gentry.”
Gentry, the red team leader, walked into the bathroom. He still had his helmet and gear on. “Yes, sir?”
The commander pointed at the toilet. It was an easy thing to overlook.
“
Huh,” Gentry finally noticed it too. In a house that was unoccupied, the water in the toilet bowl would evaporate over time. This bowl looked like it might have been flushed in the past few days. The water level was still high.
“
What do you think? Was he here?” asked Gentry.
“
I dunno. We’ll tell the detectives it was possible someone was here in the last few days. They can decide what to do with that. Either way, he’s not here now.”
The commander walked back outside the house and looked at the neighborhood. There were a lot of empty houses. There were dozens of places for Mitchell to hide. Getting search warrants on all of them would be impractical. The best they could do would be to keep at least one marked car in the area to look for anything suspicious. Maybe Mitchell would come back or do something stupid.
From his hiding place, Mitchell got his first clear view of the SWAT team commander as he walked out the front. Over six feet tall, with a bald head, he looked like a former college linebacker. Pure testosterone.
The commander looked at the house across the street and walked over to it. Mitchell tried not to piss himself when he looked right in his direction. He slowly leaned back from the vent and remained still.
He heard the doorbell ring. Mitchell slowed his breathing. There was a knock. Mitchell almost passed out from not breathing at all. He allowed himself a slow breath. He became suddenly aware of every itch and sore muscle. The doorbell rang again. Mitch tried to ignore the feeling as sweat tickled the back of his neck. He focused on just breathing slowly. He tried to ignore everything else.
The commander pulled his business card from his pocket and scribbled a note for the occupant to call him or one of the detectives. They needed to let them know that there was a possibility Mitchell might be in the area and could be coming back. A tip from a neighbor could be all that it took to get the guy. He turned back to the van and went to see what they needed to finish up.
Mitchell watched the commander walk back into the street and then stop.
Halfway to the van, the commander felt something strange. It was a flash of anger that just lasted a millisecond. He looked down and his fingers were curled up in claws.
What the hell was that?
He wondered to himself. He guessed he was more pissed about not getting the guy than he realized.
As soon as he saw the man turn, Mitchell pulled away from the vent and swore at himself silently. Just because people couldn’t see him, he realized, didn’t mean they couldn’t smell him or be affected by whatever was going on. For a moment, the commander looked like he was going to hulk out in the middle of the street.
Mitchell wondered what would happen if the man had full-out freaked out. While Mitchell was nowhere to be seen, he feared that when that animal side of people took over, deeper senses were used. If dormant instincts involving scent and sound took hold, nothing would help him.
The commander’s hands relaxed and he felt his head clear.
23
Steve Baylor, PhD, looked out the eighth-floor window of his office located in an industrial park on the outer edge for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. His employer, Athena Biomedical, was ostensibly one of scores of satellite businesses that provided services to the agency that was the United States’ front line against infectious disease. The truth was a little bit murkier. The company was a de facto government agency unto itself. Created under a presidential order that had been renewed under the last three administrations, the purpose of its charter, the actual one kept inside a locked safe no one saw, was to take proactive measures against the creation and distribution of biological agents that may pose a threat to the citizens of the United States. Those proactive steps included everything from developing rapid vaccines outside the normal channels of government approval to recommending targets for predator drone strikes. As Baylor liked to described it, it was the medical equivalent of a SEAL team.
He was in the middle of typing his comments concerning a research paper on which he’d been asked to be an anonymous referee. Baylor had convinced himself the reason he was asking the journal to reject the paper wasn’t because he was co-author of a forthcoming paper dealing with a similar subject but because the evidence was lacking. Petty, perhaps, but when he controlled the largest off-the-books budget for biomedical research, he was entitled to some of the privileges that came with that. Besides, he told himself, if he spent less time dealing with the political side of science, he’d have more time to do actual research.
When he clicked send, one email in his flooded inbox caught his eye. It was from a mailing list with only a few dozen recipients, all of them involved in different agencies that dealt with biological and chemical warfare threats. The purpose of the list was to bring potential “patient zero” incidents to their attention. If a Pakistani man checked into the hospital after arriving at JFK with strange spots on his body that looked infectious or an elementary school in Chechnya came down with an extremely virulent form of the flu, these cases would be forwarded to the list if they had a friendly health worker on the scene. The CDC had official channels for those kinds of reports. This list was a back channel one.
It was the headline that grabbed his attention first. “Rigor mortis symptoms similar to Factor 9.”
Baylor opened up the email. An attachment contained several cell phone images of people who were killed earlier that day in a riot at a shopping mall in South Florida. There were close-ups of their hands and faces.
The peeled-back lips baring teeth like fangs and the hands curled into claws sent a chill down his spine. He’d seen lots of horrific imagery, on an almost daily basis; bodies didn’t concern him. He’d lost any fear of that after his first dissection. What worried him here was the familiarity of it all. He’d seen those expressions and the twisted cruel fingers before.
He read the rest of the email. It was sent by a doctor who was a first responder for the Department of Homeland Security. The responder thought the circumstances of the riot were unusual and the physical condition of the deceased worth passing on to the list. He didn’t know what Factor 9 was other than a few slides he’d been shown at a seminar on different things to look for in the field.
Factor 9 was a code word for the symptoms of a condition caused by what was known to only a few people as the Mongolian Flu.
But it couldn’t be that
, thought Baylor. They made sure of that. He’d pushed for extraordinary measures to be taken to prevent an outbreak of Mongolian Flu. He looked at the images again. They were identical to Mongolian Flu.
Baylor had read the report of the mall riot as it went national. Nothing about it sounded like what an outbreak of Mongolian Flu would cause. He’d just dismissed it as panic and ignored it. He opened up his web browser to read the latest reports and made a note to ask his assistant for the field reports as soon as possible.
Ten minutes later, he’d read enough to know this wasn’t Mongolian Flu or at least not exactly the same thing. For starters, the crowd in the mall didn’t attack the first responders. The deaths appeared to have been caused by people getting trampled and not intentionally. He couldn’t find any examples of direct violence between the crowd. It was just a violent outcome.
Baylor felt relieved. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window again. Mongolian Flu was one of the many nightmare scenarios he had to deal with on a daily basis. It was horrific in that it affected a lower part of people’s brains and switched on the fight reflex. It was dangerous because all evidence indicates it was manmade.