Public Enemy Zero

44

After he heard the latest press conference announce that they took Mitchell’s claims seriously, Mitch had spent the night going over every police standoff he could remember. The first goal was to not get shot by some police sniper ordered to take him out if he looked like he was going to do something threatening to anybody else. Given that Mitchell’s own body could be considered a threat, this was going to be a little problematic. He had to make sure that proper distance was going to be kept from him.

To do that, he needed some kind of threat he could use that wouldn’t pose a risk to anybody else. When the location came to him, he thought of a way to make only himself vulnerable to the threat. Hopefully that would keep trigger-happy police from offing him.

Another contributing factor for the location was proximity to television news cameras. Mitchell didn’t want to get caught in some remote place like the little island he hid out on the day before. Rookman had made him paranoid enough to think that there might be some greater conspiracy going on. He stood no chance against anything like that. All he could do was look as much like a victim of circumstance as possible.

The next morning, Mitchell docked his johnboat on a seawall below the South River drawbridge. He waited until the morning rush hour was over and then climbed the stairwell that led up to the pedestrian walkway. Mitch took four road flares from his bag, lit them and then used them to block traffic coming from one side of the bridge.

He walked to the other side and did the same. Before the last road flare was lit, Mitch could hear sirens. He walked toward the middle of the bridge and shot three flares into the air before pulling one more thing out of his bag and then tossed the bag over the side. Mitch looked up at the bridge tender’s control room and waved his hands at the man to stay away.

When the bridge tender saw the crazy man in his underwear walk across the bridge and start throwing flares onto the road, he immediately called the police before he realized he was looking at Mitchell Roberts. He pressed the button that lowered the barriers that told traffic not to cross and then locked the door to his control room. He’d wait for the police to tell him what to do next.

Mitch hopped up on the railing and waited. It was embarrassing being in his underwear, but it seemed like the only way to convince people that he didn’t have a weapon. He knew it made him look like a loon, but he could explain afterward why he did it. It made sense to him, at least. He tried to put the idea out of his mind that governments had a habit of humiliating dictators and terrorists with leaked photos of them in a state of undress.

The other precaution made him look unstable, but it was the only way he could think of to make everyone stay clear. If he could have climbed to the top of a building and have a practical escape route, he might have done that. But he didn’t. He had to improvise.

A sales manager for Channel 8 heard the sirens and looked out his eighteenth-floor window that overlooked the South Bay bridge. “Holy cow,” he exclaimed. He shouted to the rest of the office to come look. “Hey guys, check this out!”

Half a dozen people rushed over. A minute later the newsroom upstairs was notified. A camera was aimed out the window down at the bridge. Mitchell was live on the air five minutes after the first police car arrived. The feed went national three minutes later when people realized the man on the bridge in his underwear with the orange electrical cord tied around his neck like a noose was Mitchell Roberts.

Mitch had no intention of snapping his neck with the noose he’d tied to the bridge. It was a desperate measure, but he needed a way to make himself look as vulnerable as possible. If the police stepped past his perimeter, he would threaten to jump.

He knew that in situations like that, where the only person at risk was the suspect, police had a lot more patience. The only life they had to protect was his. Or at least he hoped.

He left three conditions for turning himself in on his iPhone notepad. The first was that the arresting team wore the proper hazmat gear so they didn’t kill him in the act of apprehension. The second was that they show him that they had a means of transportation for him that would keep him isolated from everyone else. The third was that no one single agency would have access to him. He wanted to make sure that there would be some kind of oversight. If he was the victim of a conspiracy, he didn’t want to fall into the hands of the people who were responsible for it.

The first police officer to arrive on the scene had received the briefing to stay well clear of Roberts under the suspicion that he might have a chemical weapon on him.

He parked his car across the entrance to the south side of the bridge while another police officer did the same on the north side. Their instructions were to contain him until federal officials arrived and under no circumstances to engage him directly.

As an added precaution, the officer stretched a line of crime scene tape across his side of the barrier as if it would form some magical barrier between everyone on the outside and whatever was wrong with Mitchell Roberts.

Mitch held up his hands when the first two police cars arrived to tell them to stay back. He didn’t even have to show them the noose around his neck to threaten them. He leaned back on the railing and waited for the people in funny-looking blue spacesuits to arrive.

He cast a glance up at the Channel 8 building and could see crowds gathered around the windows. He spotted one of the cameras aimed at him and gave it a wave and a nod. If he acknowledged them, he at least felt it would look like he was partially in control of the situation.

For the millions of people watching at home, it was a different sight than the usual police standoff. Mitch wasn’t waving his hands around in the air. He didn’t have any weapon other than the noose around his neck. Standing in his underwear, his lean physique made him look more like a college swimmer waiting for his swim match.

While news commentators waited for a response from the federal officials who were arriving on the scene, the biggest topic of conversation was the state of Mitchell’s body. One of the Channel 8 cameras zoomed in and revealed the various scratches, bite marks and bruises all over his body.

One female CNN correspondent trying to buy time while they waited for more information put it succinctly. “This man doesn’t look like a terrorist. He looks like a rape victim.”

The confused and afraid public didn’t know what to believe. Mitch’s YouTube video had played over and over again the previous day while amateur and professional sleuths looked at his online footprint for any kind of insight into Mitchell. His playlists were scrutinized and his broadcast archives were listened to for anything that would give them a reason to think his behavior was somehow premeditated or the final chapter of a bizarre life.

The search came up with a relatively normal man a few years out of college trying to make his way in broadcasting. His friends described him as an affable guy with the same interests as everyone else. He had no political agenda and not a single person could recount a violent thing he’d said or done prior to two days ago.

The sincerity of Mitch’s YouTube video had won a lot of people to his side. The experts on talk shows who explained the sheer difficulty of trying to make the chemical weapon that he was rumored to be in possession of made the WMD storyline difficult for people to swallow.

Talk of a rage virus or “reverse rabies” seemed equally difficult to accept, but people found themselves divided into two groups. There was the WMD camp and the patient zero camp. The lack of any apparent agenda on Mitchell’s part made many of the WMD group suspect that maybe he was an unwitting pawn.

Thirty minutes after Mitch had arrived at the bridge, the first person in a hazmat suit approached the outer barrier. Other people in suits were moving the barrier even farther back and clearing all the roads another block back. Mitchell thought this was a hopeful sign.

The man in the spacesuit waved at Mitch and motioned that he wanted to walk toward him. Mitchell nodded and felt a wave of relief that this nightmare was about to be over.