The Serpent's Kiss

7

Derek took in the scene before him. The Detroit Fire Department had set up a red inflatable tent as their transition area for the hazard site. The Detroit P.D. had shut down the street. The FBI HMRU guys were trailing ahead of him into the tent. Walter Zoelig, the head of the HMRU, was conferring with somebody he figured was the SAC for the local FBI field office. Derek pointed to Zoelig. “Who’s he talking to?”

Jill said, “Matthew Gray, the SAC.”

Derek nodded. “I’m going in.”

“The tent?”

He turned to face her. “I’m going into the tent and then into the scene. Unless you’re coming in, too, find me after I come out.” He hesitated, then handed her his backpack. “I don’t want this in the tent. You keep an eye on it for me, okay?”

She opened her mouth to protest, but he had already turned away and headed for the tent. Derek met a Detroit fireman at the sealed entrance. He was a large, angry-looking black man with massively wide shoulders, a narrow waist and a gold tooth. “This is for authorized personnel only,” he growled.

Derek held out his DHS ID. “I’m authorized,” he growled right back.

The fireman looked at it, nodded and peeled open the doorway. Derek ducked inside with his duffel bag, took in the agents from the HMRU in one corner stripping down and climbing into their hazardous materials suits. Derek joined them, tossing his bag down next to a lanky agent named Andrew Calloway. Calloway looked at him and said, “Not a false alarm this time.”

The HMRU spent most of their time chasing down false alarms for biological and chemical terrorist attacks. Typically, Derek or some other DHS troubleshooter tagged along.

“I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about that,” Derek said, stripping off his clothes and hauling his hazardous materials suit from the bag. It crinkled. It was a baby blue Chemturion protective suit manufactured by ILC Dover in Delaware, the same company that made spacesuits for NASA. He spread it out on the ground, unzipped it and slithered awkwardly into it.

“You’re happy some fifty people got killed with sarin gas?” Calloway asked.

Sitting up, Derek said, “You know what I mean. I’m happy we’re not wasting our time. I’m not at all happy this happened.”

“You should get out of this business.”

Derek struggled to his feet and zipped the suit up to his neck. “We should all get out of this business. Got the tape?”

Calloway handed him a roll of duct tape.

“You first,” Derek said.

Calloway pulled his square plasticized-face mask over his head. Derek sealed the zipper, then tore off pieces of duct tape and sealed Calloway’s ankles, wrists and neck. He helped put a single air tank on Calloway’s back and hook it to the intake port. He turned the knob on the regulator and tapped Calloway’s shoulder. Calloway turned around. Through the mask Derek saw the agent’s face was already covered with sweat. He shouted, “I’ll check for leaks.”

He examined the suit. Everything seemed okay. He gave him a thumb’s-up. Calloway helped him seal his suit and checked for leaks, then the two men headed out of the tent toward the crime scene.

It was a short, cordoned-off walk to the restaurant. Inside the suits, it was noisy and hot and claustrophobic. Derek followed Calloway through the door and felt the sense of claustrophobia get even worse. Like so many inner city businesses, the windows were covered with metal bars, as if they were all prison cells. Just inside the entryway was the cash register and a diner counter. Off to the right were four booths all crammed in front of the main window. Derek quickly counted eleven dead bodies.

Straight ahead, parallel to the counter, was what should have been a clear walkway, though it wasn’t very wide. Along the wall on the left were two-person booths. The problem was that there had been seven people sitting at the counter eating breakfast, perched on stools. When they died, they fell to the floor into the aisle. At the back of the aisle was the kitchen. Before you hit the kitchen the restaurant angled to the left. There were bathrooms and the main dining area. But getting there would require negotiating over or around the dead, tangled on the black and white linoleum in pools of vomit and excrement.

“This is such a glamorous job,” Derek muttered.

Calloway turned awkwardly back to him. Through the clear helmet Derek could see how chalky white the agent’s face had become. “What?” he shouted.

“I said ‘I love my job.’” Derek had to shout to be heard over the fan in the suit.

“Fuckin’ A,” Calloway shouted. “Five years till retirement.” He turned around and began to stumble over the corpses. Waiting for a little space, Derek followed.

The main room was worse. There must have been thirty people in this part, and they were all dead. He stood next to the chalkboard listing the day’s specials — farmer’s omelet, Texas bacon cheeseburger, chicken gyro, each one came with a bowl of soup for $5.99—and took it all in. Cheap vinyl seats or black metal and plastic chairs. Plastic flowers and vines. A mirror on one wall.

The damned place was crowded with Detroit firemen in hazardous materials suits. The addition of five FBI agents and one DHS troubleshooter didn’t help. They were practically tripping over each other, trying to get organized. At least they were photographing and videotaping the scene, he thought.

But Derek wasn’t seeing what he was looking for. He shuffled over to one of the HMRU FBI agents, Leon LaPointe. He put his face place close to LaPointe’s, point-man for the HMRU. “What’s the source of the sarin?”

“Beats the fuck out of me.” LaPointe had curly black hair and an angular pointed face, and sweat was dripping into his eyes, causing him to blink repeatedly as he shouted.

A firefighter stomped over. “Who’re you?” Through his mask Derek saw the firefighter was an older black man, his skin pocked and scarred.

LaPointe made introductions. “Who’re you?”

“Thomas Fitzgerald,” the firefighter shouted. “That’s Captain to you guys. I’m the head of this unit. Come over here.”

They followed him to the center of the room. There was some sort of quasi-divider there, with a row of padded bench seats on both sides. It looked like it might have been some sort of internal support for the building, but it was hard to tell. There were poles that went up into the roof, but otherwise the divider seemed to hide plastic plants and be a space for large clear-plastic covered menus. Fitzgerald pulled back a panel to reveal several small red metal cylinders, about the size of propane canisters for camp cookstoves. Each of them was aligned to a single nozzle and regulator, which had been hooked to a radio receiver.

“Shit,” said LaPointe. He turned to make eye-contact with Derek. “That’s not exactly lunch boxes and umbrellas, is it?”

“No,” Derek said, expression grim. Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that had unleashed sarin gas on a Tokyo subway in 1995, had filled lunch boxes with sarin, worn masks onto the subway, punched holes in the boxes with umbrellas and left. It had been a primitive, largely unsuccessful way of distributing the gas — that nonetheless killed a dozen and “wounded” over a thousand. This device in front of them was something entirely different. If this device had been used in Tokyo the numbers would have rivaled the attack on the World Trade towers.

Derek looked around, heart racing, then focused on the group of people who had been closest to the device. The group facing the front of the restaurant appeared to be three separate parties at three separate tables, two people each. The group on the side facing the back of the restaurant appeared to be nine people together sitting at tables pushed side-by-side.

“Captain,” he said. “Once you get the pictures and video, you need to get the names of everybody before you move the bodies.”

LaPointe had managed to cross his arms over his chest in the bulky suit. He was watching Fitzgerald closely. Fitzgerald looked outraged. “You nuts? How we going to do that? Let’s get these poor people off to the morgue.”

“No,” Derek shouted. “ID them in place. I want a drawing of every single body with a name attached to it.”

Fitzgerald thumped Derek on the chest with one heavily-gloved hand. “You some kind of ghoul? You do it. That’s way outside what I’m going to do today. You do it.”

Derek stared at him, then said, “I need a clipboard, paper and pen. And I need somebody who can write, because I’m going to be the volunteer who gets to go through the bodies looking for driver’s licenses. Or are you going to assign someone. Captain.”

Fitzgerald said, “I’ll get you a the clipboard, paper and pen. I’m not assigning any of my men to work for you.”

“Fine.”

LaPointe said, “I’ll do the writing.”

Derek turned to him. “Thanks.”

“I hope you’re wrong, Stillwater.”

Fitzgerald, who had been striding away, turned back and leaned toward them. “What? What did you way? Wrong about what?”

Derek didn’t answer. LaPointe said, “Dr. Stillwater’s got a theory, don’t you?”

Derek shrugged. It was a largely wasted gesture in the Chemturion.

“What? I didn’t hear him offer no theory. This is the work of some crazy dudes. Terrorists.”

“Maybe,” Derek said.

“Maybe? What else could it be?”

“A murder,” Derek said. “That’s just one option. But if it’s targeted, it was targeted at someone — or something — specific. So we need to know who’s here and where they were so we might be able to narrow things down. That’s why I want the names.”

Fitzgerald scowled. “What you’re sayin’ is you think some whacko killed fifty-two people using sarin gas because he wanted to murder one person?”

“It’s one theory to work with,” Derek said.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you think that?”

Derek hesitated. Then, “Because the Boulevard Café is a weird-ass target for a bunch of terrorists, don’t you think? Some greasy-spoon café during the breakfast rush in Detroit.”

“So. That cult hit a subway.”

“I know.”

“So you could be wrong.”

“Always a possibility.”

Fitzgerald stared.

“I need that clipboard and stuff, Captain,” Derek said.

“Yeah. I’ll get right on it.” Fitzgerald stumbled off.

LaPointe tapped Derek on the shoulder. When Derek turned, LaPointe said, “This is a weird target. Why not the hospital across the street?”

“Why not anyplace else? Terrorists hit discos and subways and restaurants and businesses. This could just be another target,” Derek said.

“But it doesn’t feel high-profile enough. Does it?”

Derek shook his head. It didn’t. It felt wrong and it felt worse-it felt expectant. Like the other shoe was waiting to drop. Whoever had done this had done it for some reason. Derek built a career on that, on studying the why’s and how’s of biological and chemical terrorism and warfare. Terrorists had an internal logic to what they targeted. It wasn’t always obvious to the observer until later, but there was always some sort of warped, bent logic to their decisions.

To Derek, something about this attack felt strange. It was just intuition, but he had relied on that intuition over the years to keep his ass intact in some extremely hairy situations. He didn’t ignore his intuition, especially when it came to biological and chemical weapons.

His intuition told him the Boulevard Café was chosen for a reason.

And his intuition told him that the attacker wasn’t done yet.