Chapter Twelve
11:16 p.m.
Behind River, light bloomed, followed almost simultaneously by heat and an invisible kick, knocking Ava backward off her feet. Airborne and out of control, fear had enough time to yank out the bottom of her stomach before she hit the ground.
Something grabbed her, so she landed only partially on the unforgiving pavement, her left elbow and hip cushioned on the resilient elastic of muscle and man.
River.
He simply didn’t know when to quit, did he?
The heat wave continued to roll over them, the force of the blast tossing smaller objects like paper and soda cans through the air.
River covered her body with his, tucked her head into his chest, and held it there protectively.
She wanted to punch him for taking all the risks and wiggled to get free. He released her far too slowly.
“Are you okay?” he asked as he finally allowed her to inch out from the shelter of his body.
“I’m fine.” She had to work to unclench her teeth. “For someone who’s been blown up twice today.” She got to her feet and brushed herself off.
His gaze searching, he took a step toward her, his hands reaching for her.
She waved him off. “No, no, I’m fine. You, however…” She looked him over. He’d taken the brunt of the blast for her. “Are you injured?”
“I don’t think so.” He spun around and showed her his backside. “Anything?”
“No, you appear to be completely intact.” She looked past him at the obliterated building. A ring of fires burned in a wide circle around what used to be the home of over fifty people.
The total devastation sent a shiver over her. River had been right about how large a blast those grenades would cause.
“That,” she said, her voice rising, “is how I define ‘unacceptable.’” She smacked him on the side of his head. “If you’d taken just a minute or two longer, you’d have been in there.”
He stared at the remains of the building.
The roof was completely gone, most of the walls, too. All that was left were bits of the steel rebar used in the support beams and framing. “That explosion was way more powerful than it should have been.”
His observation stopped her from ranting further. “What do you mean?”
“I only saw six grenades. Even if they all went off at the same time, they wouldn’t have been able to cause an explosion that big. Destroy the apartment they were in and maybe the ones surrounding it, but not the whole building.”
“Are you suggesting something else caused the explosion?”
“Or added to its power.”
“Like gas? I didn’t smell any, did you?”
“No.”
“What does that leave us with?”
“Deliberate sabotage with either additional explosives or some other flammable something extra.”
Someone planned this? “Why would anyone want to blow up a dorm?”
“I can think of two reasons.” He turned to regard her. Gone was the joker, the good old boy who didn’t take anything too seriously. In his place stood a confident, experienced soldier capable of doing whatever it took to reach his mission goals.
Lord help anyone who got in his way.
“What two reasons?”
“The main reason terrorists attack—to inspire fear and panic. Secondly, to destroy evidence of whatever they’re doing and who might be involved.”
She glanced at the burning debris. “I’d say they accomplished all of that.”
“Maybe not.” His eyes narrowed in a way that changed his face from dangerous to outright scary.
“You found something?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“I found Geer,” he corrected. “Before I handed him over to medical, I may have helped myself to a couple of items from his tool bag. Things I think he found in Squires’s apartment.”
“Things Homeland Security is looking for?”
“Probably, but I’m not feeling the need to share at the moment. I’m not sure their goals are the same as ours. They seem pretty tight-lipped about too many things, and they’re more uncooperative than usual.”
“That’s an understatement,” Ava agreed without reservation. Geer and then Toland had both become pretty big pains in the ass very quickly.
The wailing of fire trucks and police vehicles blared, getting closer and closer.
“Oh no.” She sighed. “What are the chances all these people have the proper infection control gear on?”
“Not a fucking chance in hell.”
She glanced around, looking for the law-enforcement members of her team. “We don’t have enough people to keep all these students separated from the incoming personnel and the sick ones from everyone else.”
“I’ll see if I can talk to the fire captain,” River said in a tone that made it a suggestion rather than an order. “You worry about the students and the sick. Broadcast what you want everyone to do. Make your orders simple, and solve one problem at a time. In a situation this fluid, it’s a bad idea to try to assume how things are going to go.”
She nodded. “Be ready to zig, not zag.”
His grin bolstered her flagging confidence. “Exactly.”
“Okay,” she said, not entirely sure she was, in fact, okay. “Let’s go.”
She didn’t see him again for thirty-five minutes.
During that time, Ava managed to get all the students sorted out into three separate camps.
One, the obviously sick. Thirteen men and women sent to the hospital in a transit bus commandeered for that purpose.
Two, the largest group, forty-seven people with direct contact with the sick, but showing no symptoms. They were in the process of being sent to one of the university’s gymnasiums, where they would stay under observation for the next twenty-four hours. Minimum.
Three people under suspicion of being involved in the terror plot. They were rushed off by two of the Homeland Security agents. Ava didn’t get their names, but she did take a couple of pictures of the group with her phone.
River kept most of the newly-arrived fire and police personnel from coming into contact with any of the students. The firefighters working to put out the fire put on their sealed facemasks and breathed oxygen from tanks. Had River suggested that?
The biggest nuisance now was the media, TV crews, journalists, and photographers. They started showing up only minutes behind the fire trucks, getting in the way, asking everyone questions, and trying to physically investigate what remained of the dorm.
Ava hadn’t spoken with any of them yet, but she’d seen River and a couple of their policemen herding them away. Somewhat forcibly, with his rifle held in such a way that no one could mistake his willingness to use it.
With the last of the students getting on to the bus, she’d better check in with River. Before he shot someone.
She found him with a man wearing a respirator—Homeland Security Agent Dozer. The two were talking quietly about twenty feet away from them, but keeping an eye on the gathered media people.
She approached River, the clipboard she had been using to keep track of people in her hands. She needed to find someone with a complete list of who lived in the building that no longer existed.
He caught sight of her and waved her over. “Agent Dozer has information for us.”
The bald man resembled a rough-cut granite boulder and looked just as friendly.
“Agent Dozer,” Ava said.
“Doctor.” The agent nodded respectfully to her. His voice was deep, but had a sharpness to it that told her something was wrong.
“Dozer was just telling me that he’s unaware of any orders Geer had specific to searching Roger Squires’s apartment,” River said quietly. “Geer, Toland, and the other two guys were supposed to look for any terrorist connections, but only if it was deemed safe by the CDC to do so.”
“Unaware?” Ava asked. “Could he have gotten orders you weren’t aware of?”
The agent shrugged. “Geer has political connections here in Texas. It’s possible someone called in a favor.” He said it like it happened often and wasn’t a concern, as if it were nothing more than a simple annoyance.
“A favor?” Ava asked, enraged at the stupidity of it. She wanted to kick someone, punch and scream and shout, but she could do nothing with more than a half-dozen TV reporters watching. Even at a distance, body language spoke volumes.
So did shouting profanities at the top of her voice.
No. No shouting profanities while the media was watching. She could wait until later and attempt to calm down. Then she would tear a strip off several people.
She pasted a smile on her face and said in a suitably professional tone, “Does that burning building behind you look like something that should have resulted from a mere favor? This situation isn’t a simple biology experiment gone wrong or the result of a couple of students attempting to make rocket fuel in their room. None of this was an accident.”
Dozer tilted his head to one side and bowed slightly to her. “I agree. Unfortunately, we can’t ask Geer what he was doing. He hasn’t regained consciousness. He’s at the hospital now, but with the number of sick continuing to rise, every hospital in the city is damn near overrun. We don’t have the people to station someone at his bedside waiting for him to wake up.”
“What about the other agents he was with?” River asked. “Toland has been a pain in the ass, too.”
“He claims he was just following Geer’s orders. Geer was senior. He told him the CDC was trying to cover up the real cause of the outbreak and blame it on a bunch of stupid, but innocent, students.”
“But we didn’t even know about the student connection until Roger Squires showed up at the coffee shop this afternoon.”
“Yeah,” Dozer said, with a weak smile. “I didn’t believe that story, either.”
She glanced at the smoldering building. “And now we’ll never know Roger Squires’s role in all of this.”
“His roommate might have information that can tell us quite a bit,” Dozer said. “I’m going to interview him now.”
“Please let me or Sergeant River know if you find out anything useful.”
“Will do.” He left them.
River glanced around. With the students gone, some of the emergency crews were leaving. Firefighters were still soaking down the remains of the building, but the fires were out.
“I have something to show you, but not here,” River told her softly. “We need a place to examine what I found and talk in private.”
“I also need to talk to Dr. Rodrigues and deliver the samples I took.” Ava’s shoulders slumped. “She isn’t going to be happy with me. This”—she gestured at the smoking ruins—“was not what she wanted me to accomplish.” She’d be lucky if she didn’t lose her job.
“We learned quite a bit before it blew up,” he said. “We now know that Squires was more than peripherally involved in today’s attacks, but finding grenades and a mad scientist’s beaker collection in there wasn’t something anyone saw coming. I think your boss is going to be fine with the headway we’ve made on the investigative side.”
“My job was to track down the source of the outbreak. I have some samples, sure, but I doubt it’s going to be enough. Our only suspect is dead, and there’s probably not enough left of the corpses we found in the apartment to figure out their identities.”
“Listen, Squires and probably a few others were up to their eyeballs in antiestablishment, antigovernment, anti-America shit. We’re lucky we didn’t find a lot more dead bodies.” He looked around, then added, “Let’s see who’s left of our team.”
Ava sent out a text message to everyone and got four responses from the El Paso police.
“If you need a local for anything, a ride to a location, anything,” Officer Palmer said, “call me.”
“Thank you.” It was refreshing to have someone eager to help rather than getting in the way. “Do you mind if I mention your offer of assistance to Homeland Security and the FBI? They may need the same kind of help.”
“Absolutely.” He saluted both of them, then went to his own vehicle and drove away.
“Good man there,” River said. “Didn’t panic, didn’t need orders to get the roommate out of the apartment. As soon as he heard the word grenade, he hustled the kid out of there.”
“I wish we had ten more of him.”
Ava and River took their CDC van back to the hospital. He drove while she texted and tried to call Dr. Rodrigues, but she got no response.
When they arrived back at the decontamination area at the hospital, it was to see several military vehicles and camouflaged soldiers wearing respirators and gloves along with their weapons.
“The National Guard?” Ava asked.
“No,” River said. “These are all medical. They’re from Fort Bliss.”
“Oh. Dr. Rodrigues probably asked for more help.”
“That’s not good news, is it?”
“No, not really.”
He parked, and they made their way into the decontamination area.
Henry must have been on the lookout for them, because he met her outside the decontamination tent and took her samples. “You can tell me more about these when you’re done here,” he said, patting the sample case.
“Do you know where Rodrigues is?” Ava asked.
“Giving a press conference,” he answered, walking backward away from her, “but she should be finished soon. She wants to talk to you. You’re supposed to meet her at my home away from home.” Henry stopped walking for a moment. “Is it true you blew up an entire building?”
Ava rolled her eyes and glanced at River. “I told you she wasn’t going to be happy about that.”