Capitol Punishment

ONE First Light

You would have thought that the Super Bowl was being played just two miles from 1212 Riverside by the number of satellite trucks lining Avenue B.

“The vultures are out,” Frankie observed as she eased the Bureau Chevy along the crowded roadway.

“They smell flesh,” Art said, regretting his words as they became prophetic. “Damn.”

“You’re the one with the high-profile face,” Frankie said, just before the first mic-wielding reporter reached Art through the passenger-side window.

“You’re Agent Art Jefferson, aren’t you?” a harried female reporter asked. Asked, really, didn’t fully convey the force of her demand.

Well, if they could exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech. Art could use his to push a few buttons. “What is it?” he asked, looking at his watch. “About eleven o’clock? Hey, the news starts in a few minutes. Got anything good?”

The reporter’s face switched from that of a determined professional to that of a teenager in disbelief at the lame comment her parent had just made. “Come on, Jefferson. Give us a statement.”

The “us” had pressed up behind and around her. Cameramen circled to the front of the car and the sides, bathing it in a dazzling glare.

“Watch your toes!” Frankie cautioned the news crews as she crept through the pack. “Feral dogs. Man.”

“No statement yet,” Art informed them.

“Is it true there’s a spill of a chemical used in military weapons research?” a reporter asked.

“We’ll have a statement later.” They hated this, Art knew, being told no! like children. And, of course, they would react as such. But he really couldn’t give them much more than they already knew. His and Frankie’s quick stop at the L.A. office hadn’t yielded much information, and the news they’d listened to on the drive north only mentioned a major chemical accident, possibly involving hazardous materials stolen from an Army depot in New Mexico. What really was going on was yet to be discovered.

“Why are there Army personnel here?” the closest reporter asked, pressing the attempt for information.

“Later.”

“Jefferson! Come on!”

Early in his career with the Bureau, contact with the media had infuriated him. Now he knew how to play the game, and how to win. It was time for the trump card. “No comment. Let’s get in there, partner.”

Frankie gave the Chevy a bit more momentum and pressed through the pack, stopping at the first roadblock a hundred yards ahead. There, their identification was checked by the four sheriffs deputies manning that checkpoint. After being allowed in they drove another half-mile on Avenue B to the intersection of Riverside. Where the roads met, a sheriffs department patrol car sat blocking the streets’ north and west lanes of travel. A deputy, windmilling his arm as he stood in mid-intersection, directed them right onto Riverside. Heading south now, they could plainly see the glow from the incident command post ahead. Far ahead.

“This isn’t like any perimeter I’ve ever seen,” Frankie commented. “It’s got to be two miles as the crow flies.”

A chemical accident, Art thought. Must be some nasty stuff if it’s true.

“Slow down, partner,” Art said, seeing the orange-vested deputies standing at roadside. The lights of the Chevy painted them as the agents neared, causing the wide reflective stripe on the vest’s front to fluoresce and mark their positions. There were a half-dozen visible, spaced fifty or so yards apart, each holding a road worker’s sign that read SLOW. To that admonition they added hand gestures, pressing downward on the air before them. The message was clear.

Frankie slowed the car to under fifteen miles per hour and continued on to the incident command post. What had been just a half dome of light on the horizon became much more as they neared. Portable light standards, their self-contained generators humming, ringed an area about a quarter the size of a football field. Two trailers were nose to rear on one side, one each from the sheriffs and fire departments. A dozen fire engines lined Riverside opposite the trailers, and, parked in the trampled sage off the road were more vehicles, including several with the familiar G plates assigned to government agencies. These also had the mark of the United States Army stenciled on their doors.

When you were a cop, parking was no problem. Frankie simply pulled across Riverside into the empty oncoming lane and stopped, leaving her flashers on.

“There’s Lou,” Frankie said.

Lou Hidalgo, the assistant special agent in charge of the L.A. office, saw their arrival and broke away from a small group he was part of to greet them.

“Lou, how are you?”

“Art.” The A-SAC, his face drawn, met the two agents at the front of the Chevy. “We’ve got a bad one.”

Agents, especially those in command, usually referred to situations as “tough” or “sticky.” For the A-SAC to call this one otherwise set it apart more than just descriptively.

“How so?” Art asked.

“You heard the chemical spill story, right?”

“On the way up,” Art replied.

“And the reporters asked us when we pulled up,” Frankie added.

“Some road worker who dropped off a bunch of signs overheard something and then shot his mouth off,” Hidalgo explained. “Fortunately he only heard part of a conversation.”

“So, was Allen cooking up some more explosives?” That would explain the massive perimeter, Art theorized, and Freddy had certainly shown a fondness for things that made noise.

“I wish,” Hidalgo said honestly.

Wish? “What was he doing, Lou?”

Hidalgo looked over his shoulder to a spot of light a mile off in the distance. “Somebody over there was making nerve gas.”

Frankie looked to her partner just a second before he did the same. “Nerve gas?” she said. “What do you… Like the military stuff?”

Lou nodded. “There’s an Army guy here who knows the technical stuff, but, from what this cop brain of mine can figure, yeah. Like the military stuff.”

“Jesus,” Art said softly. He shivered briefly, wishing it was from the chill in the night air. “So there must have been an accident.”

“That’s what I gather, but only some Army guys and a couple of firefighters have been up there. The Army is keeping a tight seal on the whole area, and on the site in particular.” Hidalgo paused for a second. He was shaken by all this, the agents could see. Very shaken. “Art, there are more dead in there than just Allen.”

“Who?”

“Some cops. Paramedics. Someone else in the house. From what we can piece together no one knew what was going on when they showed up on-site,” Hidalgo explained. “There was a nine-eleven call about someone collapsing outside the house. Two deputies were first on scene. Then another arrived and saw his buddies down. He went in. Then a county fire rig and a paramedic unit pulled up together. One of the paramedics and a fire captain went to help them, then they went down. Thank God the other paramedic sounded a warning. He had haz-mat training and held the others back.”

Art saw that Lou was emotional. “Are you okay, Lou?”

“Yeah. I’m all right.” Hidalgo sniffled, then continued. “County fire got a haz-mat team out and they detected something nasty, then they asked for help from the Army. They brought in a gas detector and got a positive. Then all this happened. Three-mile perimeter. Reporters. This is big.”

“But how did they ID Allen?” Frankie asked. “He wouldn’t have been running around with anything that had his name on it.”

“His face,” Hidalgo answered. “The haz-mat team ran a cable from a camera at the scene to a truck a quarter-mile out. They did a tape of everything, all the victims, and then brought it to the ICP so they could identify the bodies.”

“So they called you down to ID Allen,” Frankie said. She watched a single tear roll down from Hidalgo’s eye.

“No. They called me down here because one of the firefighters that went down was my son.”

“Oh my God, Lou,” Art said. Frankie could only bring a hand up to cover her mouth.

“I saw Luis lying there, and I recognized Allen on the ground next to him.” Hidalgo stopped for a moment to regain his composure. He was a senior, Luis, his oldest boy, being his namesake. Now that was all gone. “Luis was trying to help that scum when he died. Can you believe that?”

“Lou, I’m so sorry,” Frankie said, stepping closer and placing a hand on the A-SAC’s back.

“Yeah. Me too.” Hidalgo took a handkerchief out and wiped his nose. “Jerry said to get you guys up here since Allen was yours.”

Jerry Donovan, the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office, had proven one thing in the time Art had worked with him: he didn’t like Art. But he also didn’t let that prevent him from assigning the more difficult cases to him. Maybe it was Donovan’s form of quiet warfare against him, but Art had learned to live with it since William Killeen, the former SAC, had packed it in for a retirement consisting of trout-filled Montana streams.

“God, Lou, is there anything we can do?” Art asked. Actually it was a plea from a man feeling helpless. You could shoot a bad guy, but what could you do for another man’s pain?

“No. It’s had a while to sink in now,” Hidalgo said. “I’m almost glad Marie isn’t here anymore. Luis was her favorite. I’d never tell any of my others that, but I knew. You could see it when they were together.” Again he paused. “I guess they are again.”

Breast cancer had taken his wife two years earlier. Now this. “Lou, you should go home,” Art suggested. “What about your kids?”

“My sister is with them. They don’t know yet.”

“We can get someone to drive you home,” Frankie offered.

“I can drive myself. I just wanted to wait until you got here.”

“Then go now, Lou,” Art said. “Go to your kids. We can take it from here.”

“All right,” Hidalgo agreed. “Up in the forward trailer is the guy you need to see. He’s Army. I can’t remember his name.”

“Okay. Go home. We’ll call you later if there’s anything you need to know.”

“Thanks, Art. Frankie.” Hidalgo gave her hand a squeeze before walking away to his car.

“I can’t believe this, Art. First his wife, and now his son.” Frankie’s mind flashed the face of her little girl briefly. How would she survive losing Cassie? How?

They could stand there, watching the taillights of Lou’s car fade as he drove away, and dwell on the pain and sorrow. But there was a job to do. That there was now a very personal element attached only made it more important to get to it.

“Come on, partner.”

The agents went to the forward trailer, a solid white rectangle on wheels that was still attached to the sheriffs department pickup that had towed it there. They walked up the foldout steps into the trailer. Four people were inside, two at a communications console and two standing at a wall-mounted map. One of the latter wore an olive-drab jumpsuit with rank insignia stitched on the epaulets.

“Excuse me,” Art said. Only the two men at the map turned. “Agents Jefferson and Aguirre from the L.A. FBI.”

“One minute,” the military officer — a captain, Art thought — said, then turned back to the sheriffs department captain he was standing with. “If the wind gets past fifteen knots you’re going to have to evacuate this area.” A finger tapped on the map. “Remember: fifteen knots and that area gets cleared. Don’t wait for my word. Just do it.” The officer turned back to the agents. “Sorry. It’s been pretty busy around here.”

“That’s what we gather. I’m Art Jefferson. This is Frankie Aguirre.”

“Hi,” Frankie said.

“I’m Captain Orwell. Don’t ask the first name; my parents were cruel.”

Captain George Orwell? That must have been hell for him during basic, Art thought. “We just sent our boss home.”

“I’m sorry about his kid,” Orwell said. “He never had a chance.”

“That’s what we gather,” Frankie said. “Nerve gas?”

“The worst kind. You want to take a look?”

“You mean…”

Orwell looked to Art. His face might be a chocolate brown, but it was a shade lighter than the second before. “It’s safe. At least as safe as it can be. We’ll get you suited up. Come on.”

Art and Frankie followed the captain to an Army vehicle parked a hundred feet up on Riverside. It was a modified Humvee with what could only be described as a large box affixed behind the driver’s compartment. A door faced to the rear of the vehicle, and small fold down steps spanned the gap between the opening and the ground.

“After you.” Orwell held the door open for the agents, climbing in after them. “Take your jackets off, and anything sharp or metal. Belts, watches, earrings.”

Art slowed as he slid out of his blazer and looked down to the Smith & Wesson on his hip.

“Guns, too,” Orwell said. “They’ll be locked in here.”

Art unclipped the holster and spare magazine and laid it on a table that folded down from the wall. He didn’t like the feeling, and it showed.

“There aren’t any bad guys up there, Jefferson. At least no live ones.”

Frankie removed the locket from around her neck, kissing it lightly before setting it aside.

“You can stay back, partner,” Art offered sincerely. He knew whose picture was in the locket, and that little girl needed a mommy. “I can check it out.”

“Thanks, but no. Allen is mine, too, remember.”

“Okay,” Art said. It was just an offer, but he knew she wouldn’t take it. In a way, though, he wished she had. The mix of him, his partners, and dangerous situations had often resulted in harm coming to the person paired with him. But that was the past. He repeated that until he almost believed it.

“All right.” Orwell took three hooded camouflage jumpsuits from a cabinet and handed two to Art and Frankie. “These are MOPP suits. That stands for ‘mission-oriented protective posture.’ “

Frankie noticed the odd texture of the material. “What is this?”

“It’s a synthetic material impregnated with activated charcoal,” Orwell explained. “This is the same thing troops in the field would wear in a chemical environment. For us, though, it’s secondary protection.” He pulled three other garments from a separate cabinet. These were white, and had a more solid feel to them. “These are containment suits.”

Art noticed the resemblance to the “moon suits” the Bureau EOD teams wore.

Orwell lifted the head of one suit to show. A clear, rigid plastic faceshield covered the front of the head portion, and inside a suspension system similar to those in hard hats helped the bulbous space maintain its shape. “This will go over the other suit, then we’ll walk down to the gear area and have one of my team put the air packs on us and seal us up.”

“Getting in sounds easy,” Art observed.

“You’re right. It’s the getting out that can kill you.” Orwell smiled. “When we come away from the site we’ll be covered with the nerve agent. All that will have to be cleaned off before we can even think of getting out. The joy of decontamination. It can take some time, so if either of you have to take a leak, now’s the time to tell me. Otherwise it’s in your pants later.”

“I’m dry,” Art said. “How about you, partner?”

“As a bone.”

“Then let’s get suited.”

Orwell started, the agents following his lead, stepping into the MOPP suit, zipping up its front closure and cinching all the flex points. They left their hoods hanging loose. Next it was into the containment suit. Large, thick boots were at its base, big enough to fit anything but the largest foot size. The trio stepped into these up to their waists and let the upper half droop over one arm in front of them. Then it was out into the night once again.

“These are warm,” Frankie commented.

“You wouldn’t want to do any prolonged fighting in them,” Orwell said. “That’s why a chemical environment is a bitch to fight in. You get hot, tired, and dehydrated awful fast with any kind of activity. Fortunately we’ll have some relief from that.”

“How so?” Art asked.

“Inside the containment suit, besides the air supply, we’ll each have a small cooling system. It’s a miniature air conditioner that will circulate cool air around the head. The downside is that it only lasts for an hour; it’s a major power hog. But it is relief.”

The three walked for a minute more until they were at a vehicle identical to the one they had just left. Waiting outside, with three sets of gear resting against the vehicle body, was a soldier in a MOPP suit.

“Sarge, get us set,” Orwell directed.

“Okay, sir,” the middle-aged NCO said. “Everyone, turn away from me. Let your suits drop and bring your arms back like I’m gonna cuff you, but farther apart.”

That had a very unappealing sound to it for the agents, but the position was meant only to facilitate putting on their air supplies. The shoulder straps of the tank harness rode up their arms as the sergeant lifted the forty-pound packs onto their backs. “Cinch up your straps and I’ll check ‘em.”

“Sarge, give them the rundown on the rebreather,” Orwell requested. His familiarity with the routine put him three steps ahead of the agents.

The sergeant circled around to the front of his neophytes. He checked their harnesses with a few tugs and then took the full face-mask breathing rig from Frankie’s setup in hand. “This isn’t like a normal air supply that you might see a fireman or a scuba diver use. This is a rebreather. What that means is that whatever you breathe out after inhaling is directed through a chemical scrubber at the base of the air tanks on your back. About eighty percent of that gets fed back into your air supply. The other twenty percent is pumped into the waste tank. That’s why you have two tanks on. One is usable air, and the other is waste. You see, if this was a conventional breather the waste you exhaled would fill the containment suit and you’d blow up like a balloon. And keep blowing up until you popped. So you’ll hear the scrubber running, and you’ll hear the cooling system—”

“I already filled them in on that, Sarge.”

“Very well, sir. So you’ll hear sounds, but if you hear a repeated beeping that means the scrubber has failed. In that case you’ll have ten minutes to get to decon down the road before you start venting through tears in your suit. That doesn’t mean you’ll be contaminated right away, because the pressure outflow from the holes will prevent any infiltration…for a while.”

“That sounds real comforting,” Art said.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Orwell said, trying to reassure the agents. But anything with a “yet” attached at its end could not fully alleviate natural fears.

“Okay.” The sergeant went to the rear of his charges and activated the cooling systems, scrubbers, and air supplies on each setup. “Masks on.”

Orwell slid his on easily. Art and Frankie had more difficulty, but the sergeant made sure they were properly fitted and sealed before pulling the MOPP suit hood over their heads and sealing it to the mask’s synthetic frame with a heavy tape.

“Duct tape?” Art asked, hearing the familiar tearing sound.

“Too porous,” the sergeant answered. “This has a zero air transference rating. Nothing in, nothing out.”

“That’s how we like it,” Orwell said to the agents, his voice booming through the mask’s built-in amplifier.

“Getting air okay?”

Art and Frankie nodded to the sergeant.

“Okay, sealing you up now.” He pulled the containment suits up and over, directing them to adjust the bubble-faced top on their hooded heads.

“I feel like a damn tamale,” Art said.

“A chili tamale?” Frankie ribbed him.

“I wish.”

The sergeant pulled the open back of the suits closed and zipped them down. Gravity would not make these zippers come undone. Next he ran multiple strips of tape over the closure and to each side. This he spent a good deal of time on. It was not the place to make a mistake.

“Here,” Orwell said, handing each agent a battery-powered lantern.

“And here,” the sergeant said, taking his turn and affixing a small object to the single Velcro strip on Art’s and Frankie’s chests. “Remember that beeping sound I told you about? Well, if you hear a steady high-pitched screeching that means gas has gotten into your suits. If that happens, or if you feel any of these symptoms — dizziness, sudden extreme dryness in the mouth, blurring or double vision, sudden nausea, or a headache building rapidly — take the injector I just put on the Velcro and jab it into your thigh like this.” He made a downward stabbing action. “The action is automatic after that. It’ll put a massive dose of adrenaline into your system which may keep you alive.”

“But I’ve got to be honest,” Orwell said. “Don’t count on it.”

“Well, partner, I’m about ready for this ride,” Art joked dryly. “How about you?”

Frankie looked to Art through the faceshield that slightly distorted his appearance around the edges. Blurry vision? she thought. “I prefer stuff I can see, partner. Stuff I can shoot at.”

“I hear you.”

“Sarge, let the decon crew know we’re coming through,” Orwell directed. “Is anyone on-site right now?”

“Sergeant Fuller just pulled back through decon.”

“Then it’ll just be us.” Orwell took a belt from the ground and snugged it around the added girth of two protective suits. To this he clipped a handheld radio. “We’re off.”

Art saw the captain take a few steps toward the roadway. “We’re walking?”

“A half-mile,” Orwell responded. “We can’t drive in. Too much of a chance of transferring the agent from the site out here. Plus the motion of a vehicle could kick up particles from the roadway that have been contaminated. You saw the orange signs coming in, didn’t you?”

“Now I know what they were for.” Art turned to Frankie. “Time to hike.”

The trio walked onto Riverside Drive’s hard surface and moved abreast at a good pace toward the lights in the distance. Two hundred yards down they moved through the decontamination area. Multiple showers were set up, their feed hoses snaking to a water truck a few yards distant. Actually the compound filling the tank was more exotic, a combination of water, detergents, and chemical neutralizers. At the bottom of each shower a separate hose ran to a series of pumps. From those a single hose went to another truck.

“You don’t take any chances,” Art observed, pointing to the second truck.

“That stuff will be burned on-site eventually,” Orwell informed him. “On our way out we’ll shower off and get swept for traces of residue. If there is any left we go through the process again. We have to leave this spot absolutely free of contamination. Then halfway back to where we suited up we dump the containment suits in that bin by the road.”

“To be burned later,” Art said, parroting what he’d heard from the captain.

“Correct”

“This stuff is that bad?” Frankie asked, a slight puffing coming through the amplifier. She was a sprinter in high school, not a distance runner, and the combination of additional weight on her back plus the heavy clothing was already taking a toll.

“O-ethyl S-2-disoprylaminoethylmethylphosphonothiolate. That’s the chemical name,” Orwell said, as if he’d simply rattled off a cookie recipe. “The common name is VX. It’s the deadliest thing we have in our inventory.”

“That’s an awful complicated name for something that you say was cooked up out here,” Art proposed, his own stamina tested after only three-fourths of their walk.

“Complicated?” The laugh mixed with feedback static from the amplifier. “Anyone can buy the necessary chemicals to manufacture any number of nerve agents. Tabun, sarin, soman. You name it, it can be made by a kid with high school chemistry, some money, and a brave streak a mile wide.”

“Or a stupid streak,” Frankie added.

“Like our friends up here,” Orwell said. “Something went wrong. From what I could tell it was just in time.”

“How so?” Art asked.

“The fellow in the house looked like he was carrying the canister that had the VX in it,” Orwell said, recalling the scene from one of his three visits to the site. “About ten feet inside the door and around a corner is where we found him. The canister is right next to him on the floor. Allen is outside. I’m no cop, but it looks to me like there might have been a transfer of the VX about to go down when they had a spill. Totally unexpected, and totally irreversible.”

“I thought this stuff was a gas,” Frankie said. “How do you spill a gas? Wouldn’t it just leak out?”

“Gas really isn’t the proper term. Especially for VX. The correct nomenclature is ‘nerve agent.’ The gas misconception dates back to the mustard gas days of World War One. What you actually inhale if you are unfortunate enough to breathe in some VX are droplets. Tiny particles that are airborne because of dispersion — usually by spray canisters or warheads of some sort in wartime — or disturbance. That’s our concern with motion in the area.”

“So this is a liquid,” Art said.

“A thick liquid,” Orwell expanded. “VX has the consistency of a thin motor oil. That gives it usefulness in the battlefield because it sticks to everything.” The captain pointed toward the site. “That’s why we’re doing that.”

They were just a hundred yards away now, and from this point twin streams of water were visible arcing high into the air near 1212 Riverside. After apogee the torrents dispersed into a wide spray that fell upon the house and its surroundings like a heavy rain. Backlit by a portable bank of floodlights, the deluge was comparable to that of a mild hurricane, less the wind. Thankfully less the wind.

“That is one place I want any contamination in the ground,” Orwell said. “Water helps dilute the agent and prevents it from getting airborne. If it were possible, the best thing would be to just lift the whole house up and set it in a vat of water. But a wish is just that.”

“So this washes it all into the soil,” Art said, the first droplets of mist beginning to reach his faceshield. He prayed silently that it was only water.

“Exactly. Then all we have to deal with is the interior.” Orwell reached up and wiped his faceshield. They were literally walking into a stationary rainstorm. “That’s going to take weeks to clean up enough to dispose of.”

“The house?” Frankie inquired.

“The whole thing. Piece by piece, sealed tight. We’ll take it out in the clear somewhere and burn it. Incineration is the only real way to get rid of VX quickly. Over time it will degenerate into its base elements. But that’s too long to wait.”

They were very close now, coming upon the American LeFrance fire engine abandoned by its L.A. County Fire Department crew. Ahead of that, closer to 1212 Riverside, was the empty paramedic unit from the same station as the engine. To its side was the backup sheriffs unit that had heeded a call for help. Then, stopped cautiously just shy of the house was the black-and-white that had been first on-scene, its front doors still open, the radio continuously spewing calls as dispatched by the sheriffs communications center.

“What about these vehicles?” Frankie asked.

“We’ll burn them eventually,” Orwell answered, slowing the pace now. “Watch your step all around here. Try not to trip.”

“Religiously,” Frankie assured him.

The agents rounded the front of the sheriffs car and slowed even beyond their guide’s suggestion at the sight before them. It was as if they were on a movie set, observers of an eerie production that looked too real to be. The man-made rain fell steadily and danced upon the cement walkway to the front of the house. On that walkway and on the lawn were the bodies.

“This is unreal,” Frankie commented.

“It’s too real,” Art said, adding his own correction to her words.

They continued carefully up the slick walkway, the constant downpour drumbeating on the heads of their containment suits. At the jumble of bodies they stopped.

“How long have they been out here?” Art asked, looking down upon the lifeless forms. They appeared waxen, the water cascading off their faces.

“Fourteen hours,” Orwell answered.

Frankie squatted down next to the single body not in a uniform. “Can I touch him?”

“Go ahead.” The captain certainly didn’t relish putting his hands on the departed.

Frankie reached over and unzipped Frederick Allen’s jacket. She checked his shirt pockets, then his front pants pockets. “Just car keys. Art, you want to help me move him.” With her partner’s help Frankie lifted Allen from the right and rolled him onto his side, his body resting upon that of Luis Hidalgo, Jr. His soaked jacket clung to his body, the back of which was caked with mud from the wet ground.

“Wallet,” Art said.

“Got it.” Frankie removed the bulge from Allen’s back pocket and looked through it. “License. He’s using the Sam Toomy alias again. A few bucks. No credit cards.” She picked through the recesses. “That’s it.”

Art shook his head and looked to the faces of the dead cops at his feet. He noticed something on the lip of one. “Look at this.”

Orwell knelt with Art.

“That’s a pretty nasty gash,” Art observed.

“Look.” The captain used a gloved finger to pry the officer’s cut lip up to reveal a shattered set of teeth. “The result of convulsions and tremendous spasms in the jaw muscles. See the jagged remains? That’s what caused the cut. If you could look inside the mouth you’d see worse.”

“The ME is going to have a job with these,” Frankie said.

“The medical examiner is never going to see them,” Orwell informed her. “These will be burned on-site.”

“What?” Frankie stood. “What about their families?”

“Look, the human body is a perfect host for this agent. We can’t decontaminate the insides, the lungs, the digestive tract. There’s no way to make these corpses safe for removal.” Orwell eased his tone. “I understand your feelings, but there’s too much of a risk. We can’t take that.”

“I still can’t believe that someone could make this stuff,” Art said. The sight of a man’s body assaulted by an unseen killer infuriated him. Cancer was the same way. He remembered the experience of watching his grandmother succumb to that invisible killer. But that was natural. Almost expected as one progressed in years. This…this was created by men, and unleashed here by those who obviously had had bigger plans than what he now looked upon.

“Jefferson,” Orwell began, sliding frustration aside. Making people understand the potential danger of these weapons was never easy. They weren’t nukes, after all. Nowhere near as sexy as a mushroom cloud, but every bit as deadly. “Do you know where the technology to make VX came from? To make most nerve agents, in fact?”

“Where?”

“Pesticides. Because that’s basically what nerve agents are: pesticides for humans.” Orwell briefly recalled a poster from a class some years earlier depicting a cartoonish bulldog in an Army uniform utilizing an old pump fogger to spray retreating mice wearing Red Army uniforms. The caption below read It’s that simple. “Think of what happens to a bug when you zap it with an insect killer. It becomes confused. Falls over. Twitches. Then it dies. See the similarity? All VX is, is a very potent pesticide designed to exploit the weaknesses of the human nervous system. What it does is attach itself to an enzyme our central nervous system relies on to maintain our basic life functions. It cuts off the transfer of necessary neural information. Without that control you get the spasms and the collapse of the respiratory functions.”

“You’re telling me this stuff is a bug killer?”

“No, but that’s what British chemists were looking for when they stumbled upon VX in the fifties. And that is precisely why it is so easy to manufacture.”

“But how does someone know how to do it?” Art pressed, still incredulous that anyone not connected with making these agents for military use could do so.

“Organophosphorous chemistry,” Orwell said. “That’s a sub discipline of organic chemistry that deals with chemicals and their effect on life forms. Take that one step further and you know how to make chemicals that affect life forms. Plus the general formula has been published quite a number of times in journals over the years. If you’re a good chemist you can figure out how to make VX without the formula. If not, you can just look it up.”

How could anyone do that responsibly? Freedom of speech, maybe? Bullshit, Art thought. It was worse than publishing the designs for a nuclear bomb, even. You couldn’t readily get plutonium or uranium, but you damn sure could buy any chemical you wanted. Even those who made narcotics illicitly bought their bulk chemicals from reputable supply houses. Idiocy!

“Hey, I agree with what you’re thinking,” Orwell said. The agent’s reaction to the revelation was quite clear through his faceshield.

The heavy release of breath crackled through the amplifier in Art’s mask. “Well, Allen may have known how to make C4 or Semtex, but I doubt he could have either dreamt this up or carried it out himself.”

“No noise factor,” Frankie said in agreement. But why was Allen involved in this then?

“Where’s the other guy?” Art asked.

“Come on.” Orwell led them into the blacked-out house.

Art followed the captain’s lead and turned on his flashlight, as did Frankie. They turned right at the first hallway and immediately came upon the body.

“Do you have a name on him?” Frankie asked.

“I’m too busy worrying about the contamination,” Orwell answered. “Maybe the sheriffs department does.”

Art sidestepped by the captain and knelt next to their one unknown victim. Next to the fiftyish male body was a stainless-steel cylinder about a foot long and two inches across. Both ends were rounded, with a squarish valve assembly at one. “This is it, right?”

“From what I can tell it has to be,” Orwell said. “There’s a lab set up in one of the back bedrooms, but I haven’t been able to find any other signs of the agent. No other containers. Just supply bottles and condensers with residue. I’ll have those analyzed by morning to be sure that this was it, but best-guessology is yes, that’s it.”

“Did you see anything else of interest?” Frankie asked.

Orwell’s head moved up and down behind the face shield. “A bunch of cash in a bedroom. One of my men did a quick count — twelve thousand.”

“I’m not surprised,” Frankie said.

There was no need being delicate now, Art figured. He rolled the man sideways in the cramped hallway, but found nothing in his pockets. Easing him back, Art next picked up the cylinder, testing its weight with small tossing actions, “This thing is small.”

“It doesn’t take much,” Orwell commented.

Art thought on that for a moment, looking around the confined hallway. “How did all this happen?”

“An accident,” Orwell said. “It has to be. Probably when this guy was handing it off to your fugitive. That valve on top probably also activates the mixer.”

“You say ‘probably’ a lot,” Frankie said from behind the captain.

“We prefer absolutes,” Art said. “It makes the report writing a whole bunch easier.”

“What else could it be?” Orwell wondered. “This guy here prob — makes a batch of VX for Allen, then, when he’s giving it over something goes wrong. It makes sense.”

Art nodded halfheartedly and set the cylinder down. He could feel the sticky liquid even through the sensation-numbing gloves. “Probably.”

“Can we get a forensic team in here tonight?” Frankie asked.

“Sure, but they won’t be able to take anything out. We’ve got a camera the haz-mat team set up that can feed pictures back to the van. That’s about the extent of what they’ll be able to take — pictures.”

“We’ll take that,” Art said, standing and pulling back.

“Ten minutes’ lead time,” the warning came over the radio on Orwell’s belt.

“Sarge is on top of the time,” Orwell explained. “Time to start heading back.”

This time Frankie was in the lead as they left the house, but Art and Captain Orwell almost ran into her as they came through the door.

“What is it, partner?” Art asked, knowing Frankie’s I see something posture even through the added layers of protection.

“Allen’s waistband,” she answered, walking toward the fugitive as the artificial rain pelted her from above.

Art came around the captain and joined his partner once again next to Allen’s body, still rolled on its side. That had not changed. But something had. The thoroughly soaked jacket, which had clung to his body, had slid under the weight of the continuing downpour to the ground, revealing the back of Frederick Allen’s waist.

Frankie eased the pistol from its place tucked in the small of Allen’s back. It was a .380, she saw. Then she saw its other distinctive feature.

“A silencer?” Art said, cocking his head to look at Frankie. “Why the hell…”

“Maybe he was planning to use it,” Frankie suggested. “Freddy liked noise, but maybe this needed to be used quietly.”

“Against John Doe inside,” Art added. “He makes the stuff, then when Freddy comes to pick it up he also plans to cut the trail off by killing him. But the guy decides to use the stuff on Freddy when he gets wise to what’s going to happen.”

“That makes more sense than an accident, considering Freddy’s nature,” Frankie said. Allen was a thug, pure and simple, and he preferred to solve situations with force. That fit the scenario they were envisioning, but not his involvement in the bigger picture. There was almost too much finesse in all this. Too neat for Allen.

“A gun,” Orwell said, looking over their shoulders.

Art stood up again. “I think your accident theory needs reworking. But we may be glad Freddy acted true to form.”

Even Frankie didn’t follow Art’s line on that comment. “How do you figure?”

“If he had just been an honest thug the transfer might have gone down without a hitch,” Art posited. “Then this shit would be out there somewhere. And I gather from what you’ve said, Captain, that he could have killed a hell of a lot more people than we lost here.”

Orwell nodded. “Many more.”

“Let’s hope this was all they were able to make,” Frankie said.

“It probably is,” Orwell semi-assured her.

“Make sure,” Art said. “Allen may be dead but he hung with some folks who wouldn’t hesitate to use any weapon they could get their hands on. I want to be damn sure none of this stuff got into the wrong hands.”

“I’ll know by tomorrow afternoon,” Orwell promised.

“Good.” Art looked down at the grouping of bodies one more time, focusing on the youthful face of Luis Hidalgo, Jr. He saw a bright, smiling, eager expression that practically screamed at the world to Watch out, I’m coming! That was the day of the young man’s college graduation, Art remembered. That face now was locked in a grimace, its mouth, eyes, and nose blotched with purple discoloration around their edges. But that was not how Art wanted to remember him. Unfortunately, it was probably all that Luis Hidalgo, Sr., was able to think of right now.

“Let’s get out of here,” Art said, taking the lead this time. Frankie and the captain immediately had trouble matching his pace.

Bud DiContino pulled the mouthpiece of the phone away and sipped his coffee from the mug emblazoned with the unit flash of the 358th Tactical Fighter Wing. The reunion of his old buddies from those “interesting” days flying suppression in Nam was four months past now, but he still felt a grin coming whenever the mug they’d presented him neared his lips. Awarded to him for being “Most Likely to Suck Seed,” it was ostensibly an informal commendation for being remembered as the lowest of the low when it came to flying, precisely where the Wild Weasel pilots had to drive their Thuds. Bud thought there might be something else in the wording of the award, though. Something to do with his present position in the West Wing. Something much less flattering.

Position did have its price. Ribbing from former buddies who had been with him in his paddy-pounding days he would accept any day as atonement for the “sin” of reaching the West Wing. Brass heaven, they called it. A job, Bud knew it truly to be. National Security Adviser to the President of the United States. He chuckled softly. Brass heaven, indeed.

“Did I say something funny?” FBI Director Gordon Jones asked over the phone.

“Not you,” Bud said, continuing the mild laugh. “It’s this cup my old unit gave me last summer.”

“The ‘sucking seed’ trinket?”

“Yeah. Damned nostalgia.” Bud set the mug aside and tore the top sheet off his legal pad. “So this chem thing looks wrapped up?”

“Jerry Donovan in L.A. thinks so,” Jones said. “Everything points to a botched transfer of goods.”

“Greed paid off in our favor this time,” Bud observed.

“Freddy Allen played the game that way. We’d been on him for a while. He killed a Treasury agent a year and a half ago.”

Bud swiveled his chair to look out toward Old Executive. “Nothing on the other guy yet?”

“Later today, but, like the brief from CIA said, it does not take a rocket scientist to make this stuff.”

“Then why hasn’t anyone until now?” Bud asked.

“Someone did, five years ago,” Jones revealed.

“I didn’t hear about that.”

“Good. This is the kind of thing that is better kept in the dark. Can you imagine the copycats we’d have trying to cook up nerve gas in their basements and their garages if this was all general knowledge?”

“It is in the open,” Bud pointed out.

“So are the plans for H-bombs,” Jones countered. “But your average Joe can’t get the stuff to make it work. In this case, your average Joe can get the stuff but he’s more likely to kill himself than anyone else. That’s what happened five years ago. Some stupid college kid thought it would be neat to make some VX. He decided to do it small, just an ounce or so, and before he knew he’d done it he was flopping on the ground like a fish. Dead by the time a buddy who’d been helping him got up the nerve to call the authorities. They did the smart thing and sealed it all off until the Army could get some people there. Stupid kid.”

Bud could imagine the FBI director rubbing his temples as he shook his head. “It’s still scary that someone could produce this stuff if they wanted to.”

“I know. But the genie is out of the bottle, Bud. We just have to make sure no one without any real compunction to use it ever gets near it.”

“Sounds more like a hope than a plan,” Bud said.

“We have to start somewhere.”

The NSA tapped his pen on the blank legal tablet and turned back to his desk. “Well, the president will be glad to hear that everything is under control.”

“Is he getting any more sleep?” the director inquired.

“With a baby that just started crawling?” Bud asked rhetorically. “You should see it sometimes, Gordy. The little guy is scooting around the Oval Office like there’s no tomorrow, all while the man running our country is on the phone with Konovalenko or some other world leader. It makes for some interesting background noise.”

“I bet.”

“Anyway, thanks for the update. If anything new comes up let me know right away.”

“Will do.”

Bud placed the handset back in its cradle and brought both hands behind his head. He leaned back and turned again to gaze upon the gray monolith across Executive Avenue. The faded light of the late autumn morning was not flattering to the old building. Some days it looked quite nice; others, like this, it was a drab reminder of what was possible.

So similar to the way the political landscape appeared, Bud thought. His position did not normally lend itself to internal punditry, but no one in the West Wing could deny that the president was suffering from being cast in an unflattering light, much like Old Executive. The vibrancy of a new baby in the White House aside, there was trouble on the homefront. The economy was still sluggish. Jobs had not materialized fast enough for those who were planning to challenge the president in the election the following year. And increasingly the media was focusing on those efforts that were directed at dealing with issues on the international stage and asking, Why not focus on what needs attention at home?

As if the world would just wait until everything improved at home, Bud thought. Still, the president was in a precarious position to begin in earnest his campaign for reelection. He needed to convince the American public that he was making significant strides in putting the domestic economy on a track of long-term growth. The problem with that was that it would yield little in the way of tangible results to hold before the voters as proof. Image and snippets drove elections now. And too often the voter was the recipient only of a filtered, packaged view of what was really happening on the political playing field. That was the way the pendulum had swung, Bud admitted reluctantly.

“Thank God this thing didn’t blow up in our faces,” the NSA said to the empty interior of his office. All the president needed was a crisis in the states. He would have dealt with it, and the media would have crucified him for spending too much time doing so. It was a no-win situation that they would not have to live through now. Bud had no doubt the West Wing was going to be breathing a little easier because of a crisis that entered the arena stillborn. This one was dead on arrival.

Captain Orwell finished decontaminating for the second time since leading the guided tour for Art and Frankie. An hour after their departure it had been for a two-man FBI forensic team, and this last time to finish the work he needed to complete. He stepped out of the containment suit that was like a sauna under the noontime sun and was checked by one of his team for any residual contamination. With a clean bill of health, and still in MOPP suit and breathing gear, he trekked a quarter-mile more to the set of Humvees.

“Damn, it’s hot in this,” he exclaimed as the mask finally came off.

“Just think what it would be like here in summer,” the sergeant said.

“Did you get a good download?” Orwell asked. He had just completed sampling residues in the containers that had once held several dozen chemicals using a remote analyzer. That information was then fed to a computer via a landline stretching more than a half-mile from the lead Humvee to 1212 Riverside.

“Perfect. She’s crunching the numbers right now.”

Orwell pulled his legs out of the MOPP suit and stuffed the sweat-soaked garment into a sealed drum adjacent to the Humvee. “Let’s take a look at what we’ve got.”

The two men climbed through the rear door into an electronics-crammed workspace smaller than the dressing facility of the Humvee one back. Several banks of computers and their associated equipment were mounted against one wall, with two chairs facing them. Orwell took the one with best access to the keyboard.

“She’s done,” the sergeant observed.

“Let’s print some hard copy while we see what we found,” Orwell said. A few keystrokes sent a report to the printer, which began spitting the pages out with just a whisper. The captain, meantime, pulled the identical data up on the screen for viewing.

“Diisopropylamine,” the sergeant read from the screen, noting the presence of the colorless, ammonia-smelling chemical. “There’s the base ingredient for the base of the binary.”

“So it was made as a binary,” Orwell commented. “Interesting.” He looked back to the screen. “Ethyl alcohol, dipropylene glycol monomethyl ether, and phosphine. There’s the whole base.”

“The guy was able to process it?” the sergeant wondered. “I would have bet he’d skipped the phosphine and used the extrusion method. This guy took risks.”

He sure did, Orwell agreed. Using phosphine, a gas that had the potential to spontaneously ignite on contact with air, put their man a step above advanced chemist. You had to have balls to play with this stuff in a crude environment. Balls and confidence. Strange. He chose to use a more difficult method of making the VX binary base. The only reason to do that was…quality control? The simpler method sometimes yielded inferior, even ineffective product because of the potential for poor manufacturing of the several reagents. Processing with phosphine was more dangerous, but it gave the chemist more control over the finished product. Very strange, Orwell thought.

“Did you get any quantity readings for the base?”

“Too much evaporation to tell,” Orwell answered, shaking his head. He scrolled further through the data. “Here’s our activator reagents.”

The binary chemical weapon consisted of two parts, separated until mixed for use: the base and the activator. The base, which was a sort of generous chemical receptor, mixed with the more important activator. This activator gave the weapon its “personality.” Several variations of known agents were possible depending upon how much one “tweaked” the activator, which made identification of its precise ingredients necessary in order to determine its lethality.

“Dimethyl sulfate, sulfur dioxide, ethyl — ethyl?”

The reading caught Orwell’s eye as well.

“This says ethyl mercaptan,” the sergeant said. “That should be methyl mercaptan.”

“I know.” Orwell was already reading the rest of the data on-screen, his heart rate rising.

“Sulfur dioxide,” the sergeant continued. “That’s right. Ethy—” He stopped, staring at the screen.

“Ethylene glycol dinitrate,” Orwell said, finishing the sergeant’s words.

“That’s got to be wrong! It has to be!” The sergeant took the printout and read the hard copy to confirm that what he saw on the screen was not some anomaly. It wasn’t. “It isn’t.”

“Dammit.”

“Did you get a quantity on this?” the sergeant asked.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

Orwell didn’t answer with words. His expression said Enough.

“Dear God.”

“Finish that sentence, Sergeant, and ask for His help,” Orwell said. He stood and slid by his subordinate, heading for the door. “We’re going to need it.”