“Wow,” said Heat. “The Great Ralini sees all.”
“Building a paper trail?” asked Rook when she hung up.
“He’s scrubbing the video anyway.” Nikki didn’t know what felt worse, sneaking a check on one of her own detectives or having to because that’s what happened when you lost confidence in a team member.
A whispered intensity crackled in the DHS basement bunker as Detective Heat and Jameson Rook stepped off the elevator and were met by their uniformed escort. Clearly the mode had shifted down there from serious to urgent. More personnel filled the darkly lit cavern than before, some squeezed double in the cubicles, scanning e-mail traffic, tracking suspects on the Watch List, and networking informants. Others monitored JumboTron displays of the power grid, reservoirs, and nuclear plants, as well as live cams of bridges, tunnels, airports, and harbor ship traffic.
Rook said, “If I ever buy a house in the burbs, I’m going to have a man cave just like this in my basem-”
A screeching, pulsing alarm broke the hush of the control center and a blinding light strobed above the two of them. Glass doors automatically slid shut in the offices lining the perimeter. A rolling metal shudder descended, sealing the door to the Situation Room. Inside its window, Nikki could see Agents Callan, Bell, and other members of the task force get up from the conference table and stare out. A squad of four personnel in moon suits and gas masks rushed out of nowhere, grabbed Heat and Rook, and scrambled them to a small room beside the elevator. Two of the moon suits waited outside; the other pair stayed in with them. One pressed a button that created a vacuum around the door seals they could feel in their ears, as if the room were an airliner gaining altitude.
“What’s happening?” asked Nikki. They didn’t answer, just separated her from Rook and began scanning both of them with sensors that resembled microphones on the ends of yellow garden hoses attached to whirring filter machinery.
“Nikki,” said Rook. He tilted his head to a sign on the door that she had to read backward: “Contamination Quarantine.”
Then one of the machines began to chirp and blink an array of yellow lights. The word “POSITIVE” flashed on the monitor.
The positive reading came from the machine testing Heat.
FOURTEEN
“You set off our sniffer.” Agent Callan held open the door to Quarantine, and Nikki emerged in a borrowed DHS hoodie and mismatched sweatpants. As he walked her to the Situation Room, he said, “But I like the style. You can keep that while we test your clothes and find out exactly what bioagent you had on them.” He gestured to the robotlike air sampling machine she had set off. “This here’s the li’l guy that busted you.” Heat had seen versions of these bioaerosol monitors throughout Manhattan, part of the city’s-and Homeland’s-attempt to get early warning of a dirty bomb or bio strike. “You aren’t, by chance, moonlighting in a terror cell, are you?”
“Right. In all my spare time.”
While Nikki changed, Rook had found a seat at the conference table-right beside Yardley Bell, who was deep in conversation with him until Callan and Heat came in and all eyes turned their way. “Prelim from the lab is some kind of trace material on her blazer,” announced Callan as he took his spot at the head of the table. “Whatever set it off, it’s not in sufficient quantity to be harmful, but at least we know the air sampler works.”
“Great. Maybe we can wheel it person-to-person around New York City during the next few days and find out who’s planning the attack,” said the professorial man in the bow tie. His crack was no joke, but an acerbic snarl of frustration. “I would be curious to know where you picked up this virus or bacteria, Detective.”
Callan asked, “You didn’t have any physical contact with Salena Kaye, did you?”
“No. Not today, anyway.”
“Tough one,” said Yardley Bell, sounding baldly condescending. “Don’t feel too bad. Sometimes they just get away from you.”
“Even the good ones.” Nikki didn’t need to toss a glance at Rook. Yardley was smart enough to get it. Heat chided herself for stooping to soap opera-even though it felt good on a primal level; oh-snaps were a trashy seduction. She redirected herself to the bow tie man.
“I could have picked something up at the place I just came from. The motel room where Salena Kaye has been hiding out.” Nikki felt that announcing her rogue mission would be an unpopular bit of information, and she wasn’t wrong. Throats cleared, butts shifted, faces grew taut.
“You mounted a raid on our suspect without notifying us?” asked Callan.
Rook jumped in, blurting, “There wasn’t time,” then shrank back in his chair after the looks he got.
Nikki explained the course of events, from finding Kaye’s shoulder bag, to tracking down her gym, to the lead on her SRO and the bomb materials she discovered there. “Sometimes you have to make a command decision in the field. Given the fluidity of this situation, mine was to act with all speed rather than stop and wait for protocols.” McMains, the NYPD counterterrorism unit commander, caught her eye; his alone twinkled in unspoken agreement. Callan asked her the name of the place then picked up his Bat Phone to dispatch a DHS swab team to the Coney Crest.
In this most uncomfortable moment, while Bart Callan made his call and Nikki felt the judgmental stares of the task force, a curious sense of ease cloaked her. Because even with all the tension and scrutiny coming her way, at least she felt a respite from the two killers hunting her. Down in that stress-filled bunker, Nikki felt safer than she did on the streets of New York. Then she wondered, What does that say about my life?
Her reflection got interrupted by a text from Lauren Parry at OCME. “I suppose there’s one other possible source of my contamination,” Heat said after Callan hung up. “I just learned the body we exhumed-Ari Weiss, the man who was my mother’s informant in the terror cell-contained residue of a biological toxin. Ricin.”
Agent Callan pressed another line and told someone on the other end to test Heat’s blazer for ricin first. Putting the phone back in the cradle, he asked, “Is there anything else you’re not telling us?”
Instead of rising to his bait, Heat stayed on point. “The significance of the new autopsy on Weiss is that his COD wasn’t a blood disease, but a knife wound.”
“Same as your…” Callan didn’t finish, and took the silent interval to switch gears. “We can discuss protocols and team sharing later. Let’s move forward. Dr. Donald Rose is here from CDC in Atlanta to brief us. Don?”
The expert from the Centers for Disease Control, a tall, lean support system for a walrus mustache, appeared more like an aging rodeo cowboy than a research chemist. He poured a glass of ice water from the pitcher in the middle of the table. “Thanks, Bart, appreciate it.” Nikki wondered if the drink would wash the gravel out of his voice, or if he’d just down it and say, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.”
“I’m here to bring you up to speed on what’s out there in terms of biological agents,” he began. “Down in Atlanta, I coordinate prevention and preparedness in the event of a bioterror strike.” He smiled. “I tell my wife, If I do the first part right, the second part’s a breeze.” Not one chuckle. Instead of soothing, his laconic approach made his content all the more frightening. “Through our syndromic surveillance unit, we collect data on patients and symptoms at hospitals and walk-in clinics nationwide. We survey the size, spread, and tempo of viral and bacterial outbreaks. The idea of this is to track risks so we stay on top of them. Think of it like the Doppler radar you see on your TV news, except instead of sniffing out storms, we search for signs of an outbreak.
“What are we looking for? Lots. Let’s start with anthrax. We all remember the anthrax incidents of 2001. It’s on our danger list but-not to minimize it-anthrax is statistically inefficient for widespread dissemination in a big event scenario. We do stockpile ciprofloxacin, doxycycline, and amoxicillin to treat it, though.