Chapter Thirteen
12:45 a.m., March 28th
“You didn’t blow anything up,” River told Ava. “In fact, the situation could have been much worse if we hadn’t gotten most of the residents out of the building. Remember that.” He nodded at Henry. “See you in a few.”
Henry saluted, then hurried off with Ava’s sample container held firmly in both hands.
When River glanced at Ava again, he didn’t like the deep furrows on her forehead. “What’s up, doc?”
She didn’t even smile. “I’m tired, hungry, and frustrated, because it doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere.” Her hands tightened into fists. “It seems like we’re eight steps behind the bad guys and losing ground.”
“It’s not as terrible as all that. We’ve got a trail to follow, and it’s going to lead us where we need to go. The worst thing you can do at this stage is get impatient.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the male decontamination tent. “Is that where I’m going?”
“Yes, standard procedure.” She led the way.
Despite washing their hands in three different kinds of solutions, they kept their respirators on.
After they were finished, they walked to Henry’s mobile lab-in-a-box, but neither Henry nor Rodrigues was visible.
Ava sighed, then sat down on the pavement and leaned against the metal outer wall of the lab. “I could sleep right here,” she muttered, closing her eyes.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I learned to take catnaps whenever I had a chance when I was working the Ebola outbreak. I thought residency was hard.” She cracked her eyes open and shook her head. “There were a couple of weeks during the outbreak where there was a gap in having enough healthcare workers. Many of the ones who’d worked through the initial few weeks had died, and no new people were arriving to take their places.”
She sighed, stopped talking, and closed her eyes again.
He could imagine her working for days without much sleep or food. She was one of those people who didn’t give up when the situation got difficult. She’d have found a way to get around it. That was seriously hot.
“Quit flirting with me, Mouse.”
She cracked one eye open to glare at him. “What?”
“Catnapping is a skill all elite soldiers learn. We might have to be awake for days at a time. Short power naps are the only way to function when shit’s going down.” He winked at her. “You just proved you’re a badass mentally, as well as cuter than fuck.”
She snorted and closed her eyes again. “No one in this outfit is cute.”
“Are you kidding me? You’re totally banging.”
She cracked that eyelid open again. “You must have a respirator fetish,” she said in the same get-real tone, but the corners of her eyes wrinkled in a smile; he’d gotten the response he wanted. Just enough silliness to lighten her mood, without making it awkward. Because after all this was over, his mouse was going to find herself in a very personal, private, intimate mousetrap with him.
A half-dozen individuals came toward them from the direction of the hospital. Half of them were in hazmat suits, and the other three were wearing respirators. One of those was Dr. Rodrigues.
“Incoming,” he said to Ava as he got to his feet.
She pushed herself up to stand next to him.
“Dr. Lloyd, Sergeant River,” Dr. Rodrigues began before she’d even come to a stop. “This is Fort Bliss Base Commander Major Ramsey, FEMA Assistant Director Sanderson, Homeland Security Supervisory Special Agent Marble. We need your debrief regarding the university dorm explosion. We’ve gotten some details from some of the Homeland Security agents that accompanied you, but, quite frankly…” She stopped to take in a breath. “I’m not sure I can believe their report.”
“Who gave you the report, Agent Dozer or Agent Toland?” River asked
“Toland,” one of the men wearing a respirator said.
“I’m afraid Agents Geer and Toland had different priorities than Dr. Lloyd and myself.” River paused for a moment to let that sink in. “Instead of complying with Dr. Lloyd’s orders to leave the building once we discovered two corpses and six live and primed to go off fragmentation grenades, Agent Geer remained to search it. He declined to share with us what he was searching for, but he did say he had orders.” River put air quotes around the word orders. He looked at Marble, dressed in a hazmat suit so clean it had to have just come out of a box. “What orders do your people have here, sir?”
“They’re to find the terrorist cell and assist the CDC.”
“They sure have a funny way of going about all that,” River said.
The Homeland agent’s face didn’t change or move one iota when he said, “Agent Toland reported that you and Dr. Lloyd ignored his concerns and suggestions as well as opportunities to gather evidence.”
River opened his mouth to refute that crap when Ava stepped on his foot and moved to stand a step in front of him.
“With all due respect, Agent Marble, Agents Geer’s and Toland’s demands to investigate the dorm and identify and arrest suspects before the building had been properly cleared put many people at risk. I explained the protocol, but the moment those orders became inconvenient, they ignored them.”
“We are in the midst of an ongoing terrorist attack on United States home soil,” Marble countered with a cold, self-righteous tilt to his mouth. “Ending this attack must be everyone’s top priority. In order to apprehend the people responsible for that explosion, the one at Fort Bliss and other places today, some law-enforcement individuals may be required to take additional risks. My people are prepared and willing to do that. Are you willing to give your life in service to your country?”
Dr. Rodrigues stared at the agent as if he’d punched her in the stomach.
Ava stood a little taller, and River took a half-step closer to her. A silent way to say he had her back.
“I am, and I do it every day,” she said, her voice steady. “But I don’t think you realize the true scope of the risks I’m talking about.”
“Please,” Marble said, his cold smile turning lethal. “Educate me.”
River had to work to keep his face immobile, when he really, really wanted to smirk at the other man. His mouse was about to school Homeland Security.
“Even in the face of an armed man, a law-enforcement professional might take risks to draw the shooter out so someone else could attack from a different direction.” She paused. “Would you agree with that?”
“Yes.”
She tilted her head to one side. “But that assumes you know who your enemy is, where he is, and what weapons he might have. Biological terrorism doesn’t work that way. You could be carrying the pathogen right now in your nasal passages. One sneeze could infect several other people, because all they have to do to be hit by the weapon is stand within five feet of you and breathe.”
Listening to her lecturing the asshole made River hard. He had it bad.
Ava’s voice turned stern. “You and your people are unqualified to make a risk assessment in this kind of battle, Agent Marble. In Agent Geer’s rush to find evidence, he may very well have infected himself and contaminated his clothing with the pathogen. Anyone else touching his suit could infect themselves if they so much as rub their eyes before washing their hands.”
“She’s correct,” Dr. Rodrigues put in. “The hardest part of controlling any outbreak of any infectious disease is compliance with isolation and prevention procedures. Because people can’t see the danger, they seem to unconsciously assume one of two things: that everyone is infected, or no one.”
Marble’s lips twisted as if he were eating something distasteful.
Ava looked at Dr. Rodrigues. “Thirteen of the students living in that dorm are showing symptoms. The rest have been sent to the location you set up for asymptomatic isolation until they can be cleared.”
Fort Bliss Commander Major Ramsey took a short step toward them, his gaze on River. “Tell me about the grenades.”
“Military issue. Six of them. They’d been piled in a pyramid, with one or more of the pins gone from the three on the bottom.” The major had maintained a calm expression until River mentioned the placement of the grenades, and then he winced.
“Why is that important?” Ava asked.
“Military training,” River muttered.
“How could they have gotten get them?” Dr. Rodrigues asked.
“Black market. Arms dealing,” Major Ramsey said.
“Grenades weren’t the only things we found,” Ava said to her boss. “There was also a large number of unmarked substances in the same room as the grenades. Some of them appeared to be cultures, but I wasn’t able to get any samples of them before we discovered the grenades and evacuated.”
“Did you get samples from other areas close by?”
“Yes, ma’am, but not as many as I would have liked.”
“That will have to do.”
“Dr. Rodrigues,” River said. “I’d like permission to continue investigating the Roger Squires connection to the attacks.”
“His family and home have been cleared by the CDC and Homeland. Nothing was found.”
“I’d like to widen the search to his friends and acquaintances, fellow students, and teachers at the university.”
“Background checks have been done on all of his known associates,” Agent Marble said. “We haven’t had the manpower available to investigate in person yet.”
“That young man looked me in the eyes, no farther away from me than you are now,” Ava told the agent, her voice rising. “And threatened harm if the United States government didn’t do what he wanted. He had a bomb in his backpack and another one strapped to his body. He was willing to kill himself for whatever cause he was involved with.” She swallowed. “Something, or someone, convinced him that his own country was so awful he felt he had to give his life to make a point. That something or someone is still out there. I’d like to stop them.”
“We’ve seen student radicalization in other countries,” River said. “Just not too often here in the USA.”
“I’m well aware of the possibility, Sergeant,” Marble said. He turned to look at Dr. Rodrigues. “I asked for the same investigation an hour ago, but was denied.”
Did every smug asshole work for Homeland Security?
“We didn’t have the information an hour ago that we have now,” Dr. Rodrigues said with a lift of her chin that said she didn’t care if Homeland was unhappy. “Now that Dr. Lloyd and Sergeant River are available, they can take on that task.”
“I’d like to talk to Squires’s roommate,” River said.
“He’s being questioned now,” Marble said.
River shrugged. “Not by me or Dr. Lloyd.”
“He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense when I left.” Marble sighed. “He appeared to see things in the room that weren’t there.”
“Shit.”
“Where is he now?” Ava asked. “I’d like to examine him and take some samples.”
“We talked to him in one of the family conference rooms near the ER. A nurse brought in a cot for him to lie on. We stationed a police officer outside his room.” Marble didn’t seem too pleased to be leading their merry band, but he would look like a dick if he said no. The whole group went back into the hospital.
“Have you released the pathogen to the public yet?” Ava asked.
“Yes. Neisseria Meningitidis.” Dr. Rodrigues said. We’ve confirmed it’s a new strain and it’s resistant to every antibiotic we’ve got. It seems to prefer brain tissue most of the time, but if it does get a foothold in the lungs, it’s proving to be deadly there, too.”
“Any idea why this one seems so easy to transmit?”
“Not yet. It’s going to take more time before we have the genetic details.”
A few steps ahead of them, Marble paused to open a door. He went inside.
River followed him in, Ava right behind him.
There was no one else in the room.
No one at all.