“Yeah, he was the one who caught him breaking into the other truck.”
“Wait a second.” Simmons looked down the street toward the truck stop. “If you hear a gun go off and look out the window and see a man running away from another man with a gun, who do you think the victim is, assuming the guy with the gun isn’t a cop?”
Rios arched an eyebrow.
Simmons continued. “The men in the diner who went outside, automatically, without hesitation, go into vigilante mode and decide to chase after Mitchell Roberts? They ignore the man with the gun and decide they have to murder the guy trying to run away? That’s messed up. It doesn’t make sense.”
Simmons walked over to the hood of the truck. She kneeled down to look at a bloody smear near the driver’s side door. “Did the men who chased him have any injuries?”
“A few. I saw some cuts on their faces and a lot of bloody knuckles.”
“From what?” asked Simmons.
“Trying to get him out of the cab, according to the people in the diner.”
“Who uses their forehead to try to smash open a window?” She pointed to a bloody print on the metal bracing around the windshield. “Or beats their hands into a pulp smashing a steel frame?”
Rios shrugged. “I’ve seen that lots of times.”
“On someone who wasn’t psychotic or on drugs?”
“Well…”
“Me neither. Let me ask you another question. When you saw the men back there, what made you think it was Mitchell Roberts? Was it the statements from the people in the diner? And I’m not talking about the fact that we’re only two miles away from one of the stakeouts.”
Rios got her point. “The injuries on their faces. They reminded me of this morning and the mall.”
“What can we say about the injuries here and at the mall as far as cause?”
Rios nodded. “For the most part, they were self-inflicted while they were pursuing the suspect. He paused for a moment. “So you think the injuries this morning were self-inflicted, as well?”
“It would seem to fit the pattern. All of the injuries were the result of chasing Roberts,” said Simmons.
Rios shook his head. His mind went back to the grisly scene at the escalator and the people who fell off the roof. “You saw what happened back at the mall. Who in their right mind would let that happen?”
“Someone scared, Rios. Someone running for their life who can’t stop to look back.”
Simmons pointed to the bloody knuckle prints on the hood and then took a step back from the wrecked tractor-trailer truck. “These people weren’t chasing the devil. He was running from it.”
31
Steinmetz looked up from the computer display and wiped his eyes. He hoped it was just the fatigue. He knew that was wishful thinking. He looked over at the 30-year-old man with thick dark hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow sitting next to him.
“You’ve double checked these, Nick?” he asked him.
“I checked four times and seven samples. All show the same kind of elevated peptides.” He leaned over and touched the tip of his pen to the screen. “You can see the spike on neurokinin C here.”
Steinmetz took off his glasses and wiped his eyes again, as was his habit when he felt stressed. He’d been doing it a lot lately.
His lab assistant, Nick Arturous, hesitated to speak. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in any longer. “It looks like…”
“I know what it looks like, Nick.” Steinmetz came across much harsher than he meant to.
“But Great Wall was supposed to stop this.”
“Great Wall was rushed.”
“Maybe, this is what it looks like when it works?” asked Nick hopefully.
“Maybe. Maybe. I got to call the big man. Go back and ask Selena to help you run everything through the sequencer. I want to send it through our internal gene bank.”
Nick nodded and then closed the door behind him as he left.
Steinmetz picked up the phone and called Baylor.
After going through a forwarding center, he picked up after two rings.
“What is it, Ari?” asked Baylor.
“It’s not good, Steven.”
“It can’t be Mongolian Flu.”
“It’s not. We couldn’t find any variant there. We’re looking again. It’s just that it shows all the symptoms of Mongolian after it recedes. All the elevated peptides. Neurokinin. It’s all there.”
“Fuck,” said Baylor. “Is it a variant of some kind?”
“We’re looking right now to see if our screener was too imprecise and miss-called it. But I’m skeptical,” said Steinmetz. “We have to consider the possibility that…”
“No,” said Baylor, interrupting him. “That’s technically impossible.”
“Well…”
“Ari, listen to me. That’s not an option. For all we know, this could be Great Wall doing what it’s supposed to do.” Baylor paused. “One of the things we looked into was the possibility of using the same mechanism that Mongolian Flu did in an airborne solution. For crowd control.”
This was news to Steinmetz. “Good lord, Steven, what kind of crowd would you be trying to control?”
Baylor ignored the question. “We have to consider the possibility that someone else had the same idea. You could bypass the virus altogether and create a biological agent that would cause the same reaction as long as people were exposed to it. Turn it off and the reaction stops.”
“Do we tell DHS about this?”
Baylor thought for a moment. “I’m going to send a containment team down there. We’ll hold off for now so we can protect the integrity of Great Wall. Since we have no reason to think it’s an infectious agent, it’s not that serious.”
Steinmetz had seen the news reports of what happened in the mall earlier that day. He was afraid to find out what Baylor thought was “serious.”
“We need to be there when they apprehend this man and make sure the right precautions are taken with whatever kind of dispersant he was using,” said Baylor.
“Is there a chance we could get a blood sample from the man?”
“After we catch him, certainly.”
“No, I mean is there one now?” asked Steinmetz.
“Not that I’m aware of. Why?”
“I just wanted to cross-check something involving Great Wall.”
“Forget about Great Wall, Ari. I need you to look at those blood samples and find some kind of evidence of a dispersant. We need to figure out how it got into their systems. I’ll call back in a couple hours. I’m going to take a jet down there to meet up with the containment team.” Baylor hung up.
Steinmetz put the phone down and walked back into the lab. He called one of the assistants over.
“Selena, can you do a search in the blood database for Mitchell Roberts? I’d like to see if we have access to a sample anywhere.”
“The official one? Or Backdoor?”
The Backdoor database was an index Steinmetz had helped develop for Baylor. Using genetic fingerprinting, it matched blood samples from known donors with anonymous donors and had a prediction algorithm that could calculate the likelihood of someone being related to other individuals in the database. Even if someone had never given a blood sample, they could often trace a drop of blood back to a specific person if their family members had ever donated blood. The database was not only a secret known to just a few people outside the lab, it was highly illegal. Steinmetz only used it sparingly.
“Use Backdoor, Selena.”
32
Mitchell drove the boat for a half-hour up the Intracoastal and then down a canal. He tied it off to a tree next to a highway. He climbed out of the boat and looked over the concrete embankment that separated the highway from the canal. Across the road he could see the 24-hour box store, Super Center, that he was looking for.