The naked edge

11

"Remember almost the first thing I told you when I brought you to our training camp?" Carl asked Raoul.

They paused outside the warehouse. Insects swarmed around the overhead light. A tugboat sounded from the Mississippi's gloom.

"I told you rest was the operator's friend, that you should take advantage of it whenever possible. You put in a good day, Mr. Ramirez."

Raoul stood straighter in response to the term of respect.

"You did what you were instructed. You executed your orders perfectly. Now it's time to reward yourself with sleep. It'll be difficult. Plenty of exciting things going on. But tomorrow's where we're headed, and the most important thing you can do now is stretch out. Even if all you manage to do is keep your eyes shut, you'll still get the benefit. Clear?"

"Yes, Mr. Bowie."

"Okay then." Carl slapped him on the back and gave an approving nod to guards near the door. Then he opened it and ushered Raoul inside.

The warehouse was in shadow, only a few dim lights near the lavatories. A male smell filled the area, the musky odor of men primed for action. Bodies shifted on cots, occasionally snoring and coughing.

Carl gave Raoul another reassuring slap on the back and watched him go to his cot, where the young man obediently closed his eyes. Carl surveyed the other men, then switched his attention to the knapsacks against the wall to his right. Sixty of them.

*

"Nerve gas," Carl had told the swarthy man weeks earlier. Blazing noon. They were at the training camp, far from the shots and explosions of the conditioning exercises at the main part of the facility.

Sweating from the heat and humidity, his suit sticking to him, the man peered into a corrugated metal structure large enough to hold one hundred chickens. The birds clucked, pecked at each other, and scratched the dirt floor, looking for food.

"I got these from a farm-supply outlet a hundred miles from here," Carl explained. "Just another customer. Nobody paid attention."

Stepping among the chickens, sending them scurrying noisily, Carl set a knapsack in their midst. "As you know from your experiences in Iraq, detonation devices of this sort require a two-step process, one to arm them, the other to set them off. The two stages guarantee that the devices won't go off prematurely-in our hands, for instance."

The man eyed the knapsack and took several steps back from it.

"After all, we want to make sure the detonations occur at the scheduled time and place. So this is step one." Carl pulled a cord on the side of the knapsack. Then he made his way through the clucking chickens, emerged from the structure, and shut the door. He walked around the building and lowered metal panels over the screened windows.

The van was a hundred yards away through ferns and weeds. Some of the ground was spongy and caused the man to look annoyed at the seeds on his pants and the mud on his dress shoes.

Carl opened the van's side hatch and indicated a television that received signals from a camera in the concrete-block structure. The image came from high in a corner, angling down toward the chickens.

"The pull-cord on the knapsack activates a radio receiver attached to the detonator," Carl said. "On the day of the event, all the receivers-sixty of them-will be calibrated to a common frequency used by law enforcement. God knows, there'll be plenty of law enforcement in the area, all of them eager to stay in radio contact with each other. One of them will inadvertently set off the detonators. But just in case, I'll send a radio signal of my own. For the safety of this demonstration, I chose an uncommon frequency so a radio broadcast from a police car that happens to be in the area won't get us killed. Ready?"

The man nodded.

Carl pressed a button on a transmitter and drew the man's attention toward the television.

A black cloud billowed from the knapsack. Ominously silent, it filled the structure so thickly that the chickens could no longer be seen.

"Of course, the nerve gas is colorless," Carl said. "The smoke is for dramatic effect. For the TV cameras. Otherwise, all the viewers at home would see is people falling down. Terrifying enough. But this way, the cameras will see mysterious black clouds spreading and joining. The viewers will watch with rapt attention as the clouds clear, and then the thousands of corpses will slowly come into view. Bear in mind, there won't be any on-site announcer to describe what's happening. Everybody in the area will be dead."

On the screen, the black cloud continued to be all that was visible.

Carl pressed another button. At the distant structure, metal clanked. The window coverings opened. The black cloud emerged from the gaps. On the TV screen, daylight struggled through the black haze.

"The gas kills only when breathed," Carl said. "This particular batch isn't full strength. It'll lose its potency by the time it disperses this far. Even so, you might want to put on this."

He gave the man a gas mask. Then he too put on a mask.

A bird flew over the structure. Skirting the edge of the dispersing black cloud, it folded and fell, crashing onto the building's roof.

Another bird fell.

Then another.

"As you see," Carl said, pointing toward the screen, where the black cloud dispersed enough to reveal that all the chickens were dead, "it's extremely effective."

Another bird plummeted.

*

In the warehouse, Carl glanced from the knapsacks and made a final assessment of the men on the cots. They slept restlessly, primed for the morning. Satisfied, he took his own advice and left the building. He closed the door and went down an alley to a parking space where he entered the van Raoul had used to transport the six men who'd chosen not to participate. Crawling into a sleeping bag, he reviewed what needed to be done the next day. His knife in one hand, his pistol in the other, he practiced hard-learned bio-feedback techniques and drifted off to sleep. The last thing his mind considered was the end of the conversation at the training camp.

"For the actual event," the man asked, "the gas will be full strength?"

"Absolutely."

"How much area will it cover?"

"Spreading the men out, arranging them in a strategic pattern? All of downtown New Orleans."