Dance of Death

by John Case

  He considered it. He could spray-paint the lenses. Or he could go with the probabilities. There were four cameras on each level. That made twenty cameras in all. There was probably a bank of monitors somewhere on-site. But most of the time, absent a disturbance, no one would be looking at the feed from the surveillance cameras. The footage was primarily for later use, if there was a theft or some other crime.

  What were the odds, Wilson wondered, that a security guard would be paying attention to the camera covering slot 952 during the five minutes Wilson needed to deploy the weapon? And what, in any case, would the guard see? Surveying equipment, or something like it, in the back of a Cadillac Escalade.

  He took the elevator to street level and crossed to the Philip Burton Federal Courthouse. It was a huge structure. He’d read that there were eighty assistant U.S. attorneys, six federal magistrates, and thirteen district judges walking its halls. Fed Central, in other words.

  One of the district judges was former U.S. Attorney Joe Sozio, who had brought the solicitation of murder charge against Wilson. Sozio had been appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. He was currently presiding over a case in Courtroom 3.

  Wilson signed in, and showed his ID. He placed his jacket and hat on the conveyor belt, and put his wristwatch and change in a plastic bin. The guard waved him through.

  The case in Courtroom 3 seemed to involve a Central American gang. Wilson scanned the crowd. The benches closest to the defense side of the courtroom were packed with Salvadorans. At least, he thought they were Salvadorans. Their skin was darker than Wilson’s own, and they had the distinctive features of the region. Wilson noticed that the older observers – parents, aunts, and uncles, he supposed – were modestly but respectably dressed, while the younger males wore the big shirts and droopy pants of gangbangers.

  Like Wilson, they were Indians or, what was more likely, mestizos – a mixture of Indian and European blood.

  “All rise.”

  Wilson got to his feet with the others while the bailiff called the court to order. He took a GPS reading from his wristwatch, and noted it on a pad. It was nine thirty-two.

  Wearing his robes, Judge Sozio entered the room with the air of a celebrity, striding to the thronelike chair on which he sat in judgment on mere mortals. He was the patriarch, and it was only when he had taken his seat that the rest of them were allowed to do the same.

  Wilson watched him with a cold eye. His hair had thinned and gone to gray, and his chin was beginning to sag. But, otherwise, he looked much the same. His light brown eyes still had the predatory gaze of a raptor. For a moment, they flicked Wilson’s way, and Wilson felt his heart do a little dance in his chest. But there was no gleam of recognition in Sozio’s eyes.

  One of the Salvadoran kids was sworn in. “I do,” he said in a high-pitched whispery voice, following the bailiff’s bored recitation.

  The prosecutor, a Latina in a pale blue suit, got to her feet at Sozio’s prompt and swerved toward the kid like a cruising shark.

  Wilson didn’t want to call attention to himself. He waited until the court went into recess, and returned to his hotel.

  There, he typed the GPS coordinates that he’d taken into his ThinkPad. Then he set about logging in the equations that defined the beam.

  This was one of the amazing things about the weapon, something Wilson had learned from a marginal note of Tesla’s. The beam was versatile, capable of emitting paired waves from any part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In one manifestation, it caused total destruction of the target mass – Tunguska, in other words. But with a relatively simple focal adjustment, he could unleash an electromagnetic pulse like the one over Culpeper.

  For Sozio, however, Wilson had something else in mind. With a tweak, he could irradiate the courthouse with energy from a different part of the spectrum, one that had much longer wavelengths and lower frequencies than gamma rays. Microwaves, in other words.

  He was a kid when microwave ovens first became popular. People hadn’t understood how they worked. Not that they understood them now, but at least they knew enough not to put poodles in them to dry after a shampoo. Most people also realized that positioning was critical in a microwaved environment. For even cooking, you had to rotate the dish, or place it on a revolving turntable. Volume was important, too. The more you had in the oven, the longer it would take to cook. And metal was out: Even little kids knew that it would blacken, pop, and burn if you microwaved it.

  Like poodles, people are mostly water. Put water in a microwave, and it will boil.

  Or at least some of it will. Because of the building’s structural complexity and the nature of microwaves, the damage to people in the courthouse would not be uniform. Some would get a sunburn, probably a bad one. But others would be hit harder. They’d see their skin split open like the casing of a steamed hot dog. It would be terrible. And it would be even more dramatic in Courtroom 3, where everyone, but most especially his Honor, Judge Sozio, would explode like so many balloons.

  He got up early the next morning and exercised for an hour in the Nikko’s gym. After he showered, he put on the hotel robe. Out of habit, he picked up the sewing kit and dropped it into his suitcase. In the old days, he used to save that sort of thing for Mandy. Her eyes had been starting to go and she loved the little plastic containers: the prethreaded needles lined up in an array of colors.

  Mandy. She had been the hardest one to turn his back on, harder than Sharon, even. A couple of times he’d been tempted to drive out to the trailer and see her. He could imagine her, sitting outside in the white Adirondack chair he’d given her on her birthday. Iced tea perched on the armrest. A book in hand.

  Forget it, he told himself, and called down to the front desk for his car. Then dressed and packed his bag, left a tip for the maid and headed out.

  It was one of those quintessential California days, sparkling and clear, the air rinsed clean by yesterday’s rain. He drove to the garage on Turk Street and made his way to the roof.

  His was the only vehicle there. He backed into the chosen slot and with the engine running, unsnapped the cover, pulled aside the Styrofoam that held the weapon in place, and attached it to the laptop. Then he waited for the barrel to telescope into position. When the green diode began to blink at its base, he took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.

  That was that.

  Thirty seconds later, he toggled the switch a second time. The light blinked off, and the barrel telescoped into itself. He reset the Styrofoam blocks, buttoned the cover over the Escalade’s little bed, and got back in the truck. Then he wound his way down to the ground floor of the garage, forcing himself to drive slowly so his tires wouldn’t squeal on the floor.

  This was the one drawback to parking on the roof. It took a while to get down and, when he did, he was hyperventilating. There were two cars in front of him, waiting to pay, and they took their time about it. When he finally pulled out of the garage into the street, people were staggering out of the federal building in droves, hysterical and screaming. Some fell to the ground and rolled. Others stutter-stepped, first one way, then the other.

  Their flight was pointless and reflexive, like insects sprayed with poison. There was no escaping what had happened to their bodies, but escape they must, so flee they did. It was useless, of course. And these were the survivors! (At least, for now.) The scene inside the courthouse would be unimaginable.

  Wilson turned toward the corner, only to find himself at a red light. He was desperate to get away. In a minute or so, the area would be in gridlock as emergency vehicles rushed to the scene and passersby panicked at what they were seeing. Wilson watched in horror as a sightless woman with suppurating skin ran blindly into the Escalade, then reeled away in the other direction, her mouth open in a silent scream.

  His own vision was beginning to fray at the edges. It was just a flicker at the side of his eye, but he knew where it was going. The pattern was intricate and beautiful, scalloped and ir
idescent. In a couple of minutes, he’d be half-blind.

  He heard sirens now, wailing in and out of harmony with the quavering cries of those who’d fled the courthouse. Already, traffic was grinding to a standstill as people got out to help, slowed to gawk, or succumbed to fender benders. On impulse, Wilson, turned the Escalade into the entrance to an underground parking lot that served the Civic Center.

  Grabbing a ticket, he spiraled down to the third floor, pulled into a space, and sat, waiting for his sight to come back. It didn’t seem like a good idea to sit in the truck so close to the scene. Even in the garage, under tons of concrete, he could hear the sirens, a layered wailing effect that sounded like women ululating.

  He stayed in the Escalade for what seemed like a long time, although he couldn’t be sure of the duration. Neither his watch nor the digital numbers on the dashboard were legible to him. A waterfall of light danced in front of him.

  Taking out his wallet, he fumbled for the picture of Irina that he carried. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he tried to focus on it.

  At first, he couldn’t be sure if he was looking at the picture, or at its back. But then, her face began to appear, almost like a simulacrum. Finally, it snapped into focus. The almond-shaped eyes, her bright smile.

  When he looked at his watch, he almost laughed. He’d been disabled for less than ten minutes. Even so, he’d hoped to be on his way to the airport by now, the idea being to abandon the Escalade in a satellite lot and rent something else for the drive to Vegas.

  That was out of the question now. Traffic would be frozen for hours around the courthouse and Civic Center. The best thing to do, he decided, was to leave the Escalade right where it was. Walk to the BART station, and get to the airport that way.

  On foot, there was nothing to incriminate him. His laptop looked ordinary enough, and his suitcase could stay where it was, locked in the truck.

  Plan B, then, Wilson thought, and walked quickly to the elevator.

  Once outside, he kept going, head down, walking quickly. It was hell on a beautiful day. At the BART station, a red-haired woman was babbling about “a freak fire at the courthouse – they say a boiler blew, and lots of people were burned.”

  A black man in a Zegna suit and Hermès tie nodded knowingly: “Superheated air.”

  At the airport, people were clustered around television monitors, shaking their heads incredulously. On-screen, a platinum blonde reporter stood in front of the Civic Center, commenting on the scene in a smaller screen that showed people in spacesuits, or what looked like spacesuits, toddling in and out of the courthouse. The reporter was doing her best to keep her composure, but she was breathless and obviously rattled by what she’d seen. “No one – I can’t find anyone – with any idea about who, or what, is responsible for this.”

  Forty-five

  STILL WEARY WITH jet lag, Burke decided to spend the night in Fallon. He took a room at the Holiday Inn Express and ate dinner at a Mexican joint called La Cocina. Returning to the motel, he went to bed at ten, thinking he had traveled thousands of miles to see Mandy Renfro. For nothing.

  He didn’t have a clue as to what he was going to do in the morning. Go to the casino. Put whatever he had in his wallet on red, and watch the ball go around and around. Or maybe he’d just play blackjack until the world came to an end. That would be a plan.

  As it turned out, he slept nearly twelve hours, waking up a little before ten. When he stumbled downstairs to see if he could still catch the free continental breakfast, he knew right away that there had been another event. Despite the lateness of the hour, a dozen people were still in the breakfast room, clustered around a television.

  On the screen, figures in HazMat suits were carrying stretchers to a fleet of ambulances standing haphazardly at the curb, while police kept a crowd at bay in front of what looked like a government building. Paramedics were treating people on the sidewalk.

  “Where is that?” Burke asked. Never taking his eyes from the screen, the man next to him replied, “Frisco.”

  “What happened?”

  The man just shook his head. “A lot of people are dead.”

  The screen shot changed to a press conference, where the city’s mayor, standing next to the chief of police, was insisting earnestly that there was “no evidence of biological agents.”

  A reporter asked: “Was this a terrorist attack?”

  The chief of police rambled through a series of evasions.

  An elderly woman close to the TV spoke up. “Someone said the temperature went through the roof. They said it happened all at once. What’s that all about?”

  Burke poured himself a cup of coffee. He’d just taken a sip when a plume of sensation shot through his chest. The federal courthouse in San Francisco was where Jack Wilson had been tried.

  Later that day, Burke sat at a booth in the Cowboy Diner, drinking coffee from a thick mug and looking at his notebook. A television droned above the bar.

  The authorities in San Francisco were leaning toward an explanation that involved a malfunction in the building’s heating system. So far, no one had connected the event with Culpeper.

  Burke flipped through the pages of his notebook, searching for leads that he might have overlooked. In the end, he found only one. A scribbled note that read

  Ukrainebrides

  There was a telephone number next to it, and it took him a moment to remember how he’d come up with it. The hotel clerk in Belgrade. For another twenty euros, Burke thought, I could probably have gotten a DNA sample.

  He went back to his room around eight, stopping to buy a phone card at a convenience store. God only knows how much it would cost to call Ukraine from a Holiday Inn.

  Sitting on the bed with the phone, he punched in about twenty numbers and listened to the recorded message. Finally, he went for Option 5: talk to a representative.

  Five minutes of Europop ensued, while Burke stared at the screen on the muted television. Stretchers and gurneys in the hallways of a hospital. Harried doctors coming out of a burn ward. Body bags and hapless officials.

  He was tempted to hang up. Five minutes of Europop was a lot, especially when he didn’t think anything was going to come of it. He was just basically crossing his t’s and dotting his i’s. He wasn’t expecting the call to go anywhere.

  Finally, a voice interrupted the music. “Yes, hello? This is Olga Primakov.”

  “Hi –”

  “I am sorry to make you wait, but it is very late here.”

  Burke hadn’t even thought about that. “I’m really sorry –”

  “Is better the website, yes?” Olga said. “You can see pictures of brides. But maybe … you don’t have computer?”

  “That’s right,” Burke told her. “I don’t. Not where I am.”

  “Perhaps the library –”

  “Actually, I got your number from a friend. Jack Wilson?”

  “Oh yes, I’m meeting him at Romantic Weekend. Of course.”

  Burke sat up straight, and snapped off the television with the remote. “He told me about that!”

  “So Jack Wilson gives you this number. Wonderful! You are also looking for a pretty bride?”

  Bride? Had Wilson married one of these women? Where did he find the time?

  “The ring he’s giving Irina – oooooh, is super-fantastic,” Olga gushed.

  “Yeah,” Burke agreed, “it’s a great ring.” He pounced on the name. “Irina’s thrilled with it!”

  “So big!”

  “Well, that’s Jack. He never does anything halfway. But that’s why I’m calling. I wanted to give them a present, you know, and I was wondering where I should send it.”

  Olga hesitated. “But you can take it to the wedding,” she told him. “Is soon, I think. Tomorrow or next day.”

  “Ri-iighht,” Burke replied, “but … where is it, anyway?”

  There was a long silence, and then: “You don’t be … invited?”

  “Oh, yeah, of course I was, but �
�� I’m on the road, and I left the invitation at home, so –”

  “I’m sorry,” Olga told him, “I am not permitted to provide this … information. Only Madame Puletskaya can give this. And like you, she’s traveling. But I know she calls Wednesday.” She paused. “You’re in U.S.?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your time zone?” she asked crisply.

  “Rocky Mountain.”

  “Oh yes? Then I arrange she calls you – Rocky Mountain, eight to noon. Yes?”

  “Yeah, sure, but –”

  “Please? Your number? I am giving it to her on Wednesday.”

  Burke recited the telephone number of the motel, and said, “The problem is … that’s a week! And –”

  “Sorry. Is best I can do!” Then she thanked him. And hung up.

  Forty-six

  London | June 15, 2005

  SEATED AT HIS desk, Ray Kovalenko shook his head and swore quietly to himself, then threw his hands in the air and half growled, half shouted, “Shit!”

  He’d turned his office upside down, and checked the clothes he’d been wearing. To no avail. The index card was nowhere to be found.

  As for Burke, he was MIA. It wasn’t just that he didn’t answer his phone. The Garda was looking for him, and no one had seen the man for days.

  The father-in-law, Aherne, was about as much help as a dose of the clap. Feck off!

  Kovalenko had gone to the trouble of locating and contacting Burke’s family in Virginia, but they seemed genuinely surprised to learn that their son wasn’t in Dublin. (And that the FBI was looking for him.)

  So he had racked his brain, trying to remember what Burke had said about d’Anconia – and who he was. He’d been to Belgrade. He’d been in Allenwood. He’d gone to UCLA. Or USC. One of those places. None of it was any help without a name, a real name, and Kovalenko didn’t have a clue. Sounds like … It was on the tip of his tongue, and then it was gone. Williams …

  Meanwhile, Andrea Cabot called twice a day, once in the morning and again in the afternoon. He was dodging her.