Viable Threat

by Julie Rowe

  “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.”

  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 Ma
rble, 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.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1:10 a.m.

  Ava stood in the doorway of the small room, staring at the empty cot. “Where is he?”

  No one had an answer for her.

  “Fuck,” River spat. “Where’s your guy?” he asked Marble. “The one who’s supposed to be questioning the ki
d?”

  “I don’t know.” Marble’s cheekbones were slashed with red. “But I’m going to find out.” He charged out of the room, punching in a number on his cell phone as he went.

  “Ethan Harris is likely infected,” Dr. Rodrigues said. “He’s supposed to stay in isolation. If he goes anywhere outside the hospital, he could easily infect anyone he comes in contact with. We need to find him.”

  Energy drained out of Ava, leaving her exhausted and shaky. “I don’t even know where to start looking.”

  River cleared his throat. “I may be able to help with that.” He opened the tool pouch attached to his belt, then strode over to the small coffee table and laid a cell phone and a notebook on it. “These came from Roger Squires’s dorm room. Agent Geer had them on him when he collapsed.”

  “He gave them to you?” Ava asked. She couldn’t see him cooperating that way.

  “Not exactly.”

  “You took them from Geer without his knowledge?” Dr. Rodrigues asked.

  “He wasn’t awake for me to ask him,” River said, his tone unapologetic. “I did ask if he found anything before he collapsed. He said he hadn’t.”

  “He lied.” What was wrong with these people? How was she supposed to work with people who refused to understand how dangerous the situation was?

  “Whatever is in these was worth him risking a lot of lives,” River said. “Including his own.”

  “You waited until Marble left before mentioning these. Do you have a reason for that?” Dr. Rodrigues asked.

  “I don’t think most of the Homeland Security agents involved in this disaster are playing with the same rule book as the CDC,” he answered. “Out of all the agents I’ve met since I arrived, only one has shown any respect for your authority and orders—Agent Dozer.”

  Dr. Rodrigues gave River a sharp look. “I’ve worked with him before, so perhaps he has a better understanding of what we do.” She muttered something else under her breath Ava didn’t catch, then ordered, “Give me the phone.”

  River handed it to her, then handed the notebook to Ava. Now he had a smile that was all I’m sorry and it was for your own good.