[2001] Public Enemy Zero

by Andrew Mayne

  “Heading northbound on U.S. 1,” said the deputy. He zoomed in on the map. “Heading toward Route 401.”

  “Going to intercept,” called the pilot. He turned the stick to the left and flew the helicopter over the highway at over 100 miles per hour.

  The deputy in the back of the chopper looked at his console and then at a video screen showing the ground below. There were a handful of cars on the highway but few clusters. He clicked a button and the mapping system superimposed what the camera underneath saw and the tracking point from the phone.

  “Three miles and closing,” said the deputy. “Still heading northbound toward 401.”

  Five sheriff’s cars heading southbound crossed the Route 401 intersection and created a barricade with their cars. Two deputies ran out in front of the wall their vehicles made and threw a metal track across the highway. If the car kept going, it would rip the tires to shreds, making it a very short chase.

  The deputy on board the mapping console watched as the helicopter headed right over the blip. “Bingo,” he shouted over the microphone. “Looks like last night was just a test run.”

  The pilot swung the helicopter in a wide arc. He turned on the bullhorn and spoke. “Driver of the tractor-trailer truck, pull over and turn off your engine.”

  The truck came to a screeching halt. The helicopter pilot lowered the helicopter so that he was almost eye level with the driver. Diesel exhaust stopped spewing from the mufflers.

  “Throw your keys out the window.”

  There was a pause and then a key ring flew onto the street in front of the cab.

  “Place you hands against the front windshield,” instructed the pilot.

  The driver placed the palms of his hands against the window.

  Three northbound police cars caught up with the rig. Two cars pulled in front of it while the third guarded the rear, boxing the truck and trailer in.

  Two deputies ran over to the truck cab with their guns drawn. One pulled the door open while the other kept his gun pointed through the window at the driver.

  The truck driver was pulled out of the cab and asked to lie down flat. He was quickly handcuffed and searched. Finally, he was rolled over.

  The arresting deputy looked at a printout and back at the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Michael Holland,” said the scared 42 year-old.

  Then deputy spoke into his radio. “The driver isn’t our suspect.”

  The deputy on the circling helicopter looked at the overlay on the computer screen. “The signal is coming from within the truck.”

  The arresting deputy looked down at Holland. “We have probable cause to search your truck. Do you have the key to open it?”

  The man looked up at him. “No. Of course not. You have to ask the postmaster for the key.”

  Twenty minutes later, a police escort brought the nearest United States postmaster with a key to unlock the trailer. When Simmons and Rios arrived, the sheriff’s deputies were going through bins of mail in the middle of the highway under the postmaster’s supervision.

  “I can tell you how this is going to end,” said Simmons as she watched from the driver’s side of her SUV.

  “You think we should tell them what we told Brooks?” asked Rios.

  “Yeah, but it’s not going to matter right now.”

  The deputy from the pursuit helicopter was walking around with a laptop with a 3G connection. He moved toward one of the bins and pointed it out. Two deputies ran over and turned it over, spilling a pile of mail onto the highway.

  The deputies quickly sorted the mail into a pile of letters and a pile of packages. A bomb tech walked over with a handheld scanner and waved it over the packages. He pulled three from the pile and set them on the highway.

  The deputies cleared away the other mail while the bins were loaded back into the truck.

  A bomb-sniffing dog was brought over to inspect the packages. He sniffed at them and then looked up bored. The dog was walked back to a car.

  The county chief of detectives walked over and looked at the packages. He picked up one and walked it back to where Brooks and several other higher-ups had parked their cars. He set it on the hood of an SUV.

  Simmons and Rios walked over to get a look as a technician with rubber gloves slit open the small box. He reached inside and pulled out Mitchell’s iPhone. The lock screen had a screen grab of a page from the notepad app as its background image.

  The technician held out the iPhone for everyone to see what the note said.

  “When I think you’re serious about helping me, I’ll send up three flares so you can find me. Until then, no surrender. Mitch.”

  37

  After helicopter footage of sheriff’s deputies searching through mail on the highway aired on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, another shoe dropped. Someone had leaked footage of the mall incident and the Super Center robbery to the major networks. Although the footage was being held for release by the city police department, it had been passed around to so many different agencies, there was nowhere to point a finger.

  To the general public and news pundits, Mitchell’s claims that something odd was happening to him gained much more credibility when they could see for themselves how strangely people behaved in the footage.

  The “contagious hysteria” meme was quickly dropped. Talk shows began using terms like “rage virus” and “zombie gas.” Mitchell had gone from being called a public menace to a one-man WMD.

  Baylor got the news in the middle of a conference with Homeland Security’s South Florida emergency response coordinator. He went through the roof. He left the room to make a phone call.

  “I thought I asked you to keep the footage from being released!” he shouted at the man on the other end of the phone.

  “We tried. But there were too many copies out there. It was going to happen sooner or later,” said the man.

  “Damn it. I wanted this contained before this got out.”

  “Wanted what contained, Baylor? Is this one of your projects?” asked the man.

  “No. Of course not.” Baylor hesitated. “From what we’ve seen in our lab, we have reason to believe that this may be the work of a foreign power.”

  “When did you learn this?”

  “Twenty minutes ago. I was just sent the results from our blood work on the mall victims. We found evidence of an aerosol in the lungs that was used as a dispersant.” Baylor lied through his teeth.

  “How do you want to proceed?”

  Baylor ran his fingers through his hair. He needed a way to call the shots on the matter behind the scenes. If it was still handled by local authorities, he wouldn’t have as much influence. If it went to a federal level, he had the connections to make sure that he and his group wouldn’t be in the line of fire. “We need to elevate this to a federal matter.”

  “On what basis?” asked the man.

  “On the belief that this man has in his possession a chemical agent that induces panic. Most likely supplied by a foreign power or terrorist group.”

  Baylor had thought about saying that he actually believed that Roberts was infected with a form of weaponized Mongolian Flu, but that was too close to what the actual truth was. If he could get Roberts into custody, the right custody, he wouldn’t have to worry about suspicion falling onto project Great Wall.

  “You think this man is a terrorist?”

  Baylor paused. Saying yes brought in a whole new set of problems. The FBI and CIA would start digging around for any kind of connection between Roberts and foreign groups, a connection Baylor knew didn’t exist. If Roberts had been Muslim and traveled overseas in the last ten years, any kind of connection could be made. Unfortunately, he was a white man with no strong religious beliefs. If any of the Aryan supremacist groups could put together something more sophisticated than a fertilizer bomb, he might be able to make a compelling case for Mitchell being part of one of them but, sadly no, he thought.

  “Do you think this man is a terrorist?” asked
the voice again.

  “No, I don’t think he’s willingly part of any terror groups.” Baylor thought briefly about saying Mitchell was acting alone but knew that wouldn’t wash. A weaponized version of Mongolian Flu wasn’t a kitchen table project. “I think he may unwittingly or under the threat of coercion is carrying a dispersant on his person.”

  Baylor thought of the footage he’d seen. In the mall he had on a backpack. In the Super Center he was wearing a large coat. The idea that Mitchell had a device on him that sprayed a chemical agent was starting to gain traction in his mind.

  “Do we need to apply containment to all of the locations where the dispersant was used?” asked the voice.

  Containment meant sealing the mall, the Super Center and everywhere else Mitchell had been. It also meant other agencies looking for evidence of the dispersant. A dispersant that Baylor only half believed could actually exist.

  Saying no would attract suspicion that he knew more than he let on. He decided to hedge his bet.

  “Although we think the agent would most likely break down in direct contact with oxygen and UV light in the open air, we think it’s prudent to seal the affected areas,” said Baylor. This was going to cause a bigger lockdown than the anthrax scares from a decade back.

  “All right,” said the voice. “I’ll go across the hall and inform the vice president.”

  The line went dead. Baylor stepped out of the empty office where he had been talking on his cell phone and looked down the hallway of the Homeland Security building as people went about their work. He’d just manufactured an entire account about a WMD. Charitably he could say that he misinterpreted the information he had. But there were no domestic or foreign intelligence agencies he could point out and say that they’d reached the same conclusion as he had.

  There were no dissident scientists claiming it existed. He didn’t even have a madman dictator to single out. When the search for a physical WMD came up short, everyone would look to him for an explanation.

  It would be much better if they found something. He walked back into the empty office and made another call.

  The line made a click as it was routed through a secure connection.

  “Hello,” a precise and almost eloquent voice answered.

  “Mr. Lewis, I have another favor to ask,” said Baylor.

  “Is this a personal favor?” asked the voice using “personal” as a code word for something else.

  “No. I need to get a gift for someone. I’ll have a friend supply the bow.”

  An hour after Baylor got off the phone, the South Florida director of Homeland Security and the FBI’s district supervisor called a press conference.

  They announced that Mitchell Roberts was now believed to be in contact with a dangerous chemical agent and that he shouldn’t be approached by local authorities without proper protective gear. They explained that the Park Square Mall was going to remain closed until further notice and that the Super Center was going to be placed under containment while the FBI conducted its investigation.

  Despite the fact that they carefully avoided using the term WMD or terrorist, the press had no such restraint. The largest manhunt in the nation’s history began with Mitchell Roberts at the center of it.

  38

  After driving all night, Mitchell arrived at the small island in the Intracoastal before dawn. He’d pulled the boat as far ashore as he could and covered it with palm fronds and branches. From just a few feet away, the boat blended into the thick brush.

  The island was a one-acre dense tangle of mangrove trees, palm trees and various shrubs. To move more than a few feet required climbing over and stepping through a labyrinth of vegetation. Inside there he felt safe. He would be able to hear anyone coming and have time to move away from them as the island slowed them down.

  His camp was a green tarp he’d stolen from the Super Center laid across the ground. That morning he’d used a life preserver from the boat as a pillow, wrapped part of the tarp over himself like a blanket and slept.

  The island was filled with a hundred different sounds from small insects to larger things rooting around. Despite the surroundings, the exhaustion and stress washed over him and he slept for six hours.

  He awoke to the sound of something moving through the brush near his encampment. His body jerked upright while his hand grabbed the hilt of the baseball bat he’d slept next to all night.

  The masked face of a raccoon looked back at Mitchell, trying to figure out what he was doing on his private domain.

  “Sorry, pal,” said Mitchell. “You’re going to have a guest for a little while.”

  The raccoon seemed placated enough with the answer to wander off. Mitchell pulled an energy bar from the duffle bag and turned on his radio to listen to the news.

  His original plan was to keep going up the Intracoastal during the day when all the other boat traffic was on the water and make camp at night. He’d figured that hiding in plain sight was better than getting caught by Marine Patrol alone at night.

  After driving the boat that night, he’d seen that there was more traffic than he’d expected late at night and early into the morning as different boats headed out to go fishing or came back from late-night expeditions. Traveling by night seemed like a better option. He could run without his running lights and stick close to shore by the small islands that dotted the waterway and be invisible to anybody looking out across the water.

  He was certain that Marine Patrol had night vision and could spot a small boat trying to go by unnoticed. But seeing him meant looking for him in the first place. As far as he knew, nobody had made the connection between him and a missing boat.

  Until the event with the Postal Service truck made news, the big talk was still on the events of the mall, the tractor-trailer truck crash and his YouTube video. Everyone seemed very confused by what was going on.

  Mitchell didn’t fit into anyone’s profile of a mass murderer or master criminal. The YouTube video increased demand from the media that authorities release the surveillance videos. People were having a hard time trying to understand what it was that Mitchell was supposed to have done.

  His heart skipped a beat when he heard a reporter interrupt a discussion with a legal expert to say that they’d gotten word that authorities had pinned Mitchell down and were about to make an arrest. When Mitchell heard a helicopter fly overhead, he dropped the radio and scrambled through the brush to look out onto the waterway.

  All he could see were a couple of leisure craft. The helicopter blew right by the island and kept heading north. A half-hour later the news reported that police had stopped a tractor-trailer truck on the highway and were searching it. Mitchell hadn’t realized how closely the path of the mailed iPhone would match his. He’d addressed it to the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, for lack of a better idea.

  Mailing it seemed like a better way to put some distance between himself and the phone. The onscreen note about using three flares to signal them was an afterthought when he realized that without the phone, he’d have no way to tell police he was ready to surrender.

  Mitchell knew that it was only a matter of time before they caught up with him. The best he could hope for was to make sure that when they did, they understood that something was wrong with him and took the right measures to make sure nothing bad happened to him.

  The police told news agencies that the phone had a note on it but left out the part about three flares to avoid having pranksters send them on false leads. Interesting and frustrating to Mitchell was that they were calling his request for medical containment a “demand,” like he was a terrorist asking that they let his friends in prison go free.

  From what he could make of the coverage of the mail truck incident, it didn’t sound like the arresting police were using protective gear of any kind. He was certain that if he had been driving the truck or hiding in the back, he’d be dead by now.

  News reports were still calling it “contagious hysteria” until th
e surveillance video footage was scrutinized. A retired Army chemical and biological weapons expert speaking on Fox News pointed out the reactions of people who didn’t have Mitchell in the line of sight. The idea that there was something actually causing people to behave this way besides Mitchell’s actions was gaining traction.

  When the FBI and DHS held their press conference, Mitchell felt good to hear them finally say they thought there might be some kind of chemical agent involved. The idea that he had something on him was ridiculous, though in a fit of paranoia, he searched through the duffle bag and his backpack again for anything strange. He, of course, came up short. Mitchell was certain that when he surrendered the authorities would see that something was wrong with him and then they’d understand. He was one of the few people, if any, who was relieved to find out that he’d gone from a local fugitive to the target of a federal manhunt.

  To Mitchell that meant agencies like the FBI and Centers for Disease Control taking what happened more seriously than a local police department that wanted to charge him for shouting “fire” in a crowded movie theater.

  Mitchell began planning how he would surrender. He wanted to wait another day to make sure that the authorities had the right precautions in place. In Mitchell’s mind that meant men wearing hazardous-material suits and some kind of hermetically sealed chamber in the back of a truck where they could take him to a special hospital and find out what was wrong.

  He was ready to be treated like a patient and not a criminal. As soon as he knew they were going to do that, he’d walk right into their hands. Mitchell was confident everyone would understand his actions once they could see for themselves what was going on.

  39

  Instead of moving on, Mitchell decided to stay put on the island until he had reason to believe he could surrender without harm. He listened to news reports throughout the day, waiting for information indicating it would be safe to turn himself in.