Michael Prescott - Next Victim

"And most of those alerts," Tennant said, "have been false alarms based on unsubstantiated information."

"This one isn’t."

"We don’t know that, Agent McCallum. Suppose Mobius doesn’t even know what the hell he’s got. Then he hears about it on the TV news. Then we’ve given him the information he needs. We’re aiding and abetting."

"He won’t need our help. He’s smart enough-"

"I know, I know, he’s an evil genius who never makes mistakes. So let’s say we do it your way. We hold a press conference at two o’clock. Guess what the situation is as of two-oh-five. Every freeway is jammed bumper-to-bumper with people trying to hightail it the hell out of town."

"That’s ridiculous. If the information is presented the right way-"

"The right way? What precisely is the right way to tell ten million people that a nutcase is running around with enough nerve gas to depopulate an entire neighborhood? You’ll have mass panic, mass evacuation, breakdown of order, looting, riots, the whole nine yards."

"People are better than that," Tess said. "They’ve proven it in the past. Give them a chance, and they’ll prove it again. And they deserve to be told."

"Well, thank you, Agent McCallum, for airing your uplifting view of human nature. We can all benefit from your wisdom and perspective. But just in case you happen to be wrong, there will not be any public announcement."

The mayor seconded this, as did all the city council members.

Tess sat down. "What do you think, Gerry?" she asked Andrus in a low voice. "Am I crazy?"

"Probably." But he said it with a smile.

"So you wouldn’t announce it?"

"No. I wouldn’t."

"Suppose you had a wife or a son-"

"I’d tell them."

"So they get to know, and other people don’t?"

"Life isn’t fair, Tess." Andrus sighed. "I thought you already knew that."

She did. But she just kept learning it all over again.

Tess was walking on the palisades, the high bluffs that towered over the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach beyond. The salt air blew through her hair and caressed her cheeks. The sun was high in the sky, bright but cool, a California sun.

She wasn’t sure how far she had walked. Looking back, she saw the MiraMist in the far distance, its tiered balconies gleaming. A mile away, she guessed.

After the ATSAC briefing, she had lined up with the others to receive packets of pyridostigmine bromide-"a single thirty-milligram pill every eight hours," Dr. Gant said, "starting now." The medicine was a prophylactic that would enhance the effectiveness of antidotes to VX, if and when they were used.

The antidote kits were passed out next. Gant spent some time demonstrating how to unclip and use the two self-injector syringes. "Carry this pouch with you at all times," he said. Tess thought he was being a little melodramatic. Even so, she had put the kit inside her purse, which she intended to keep on her person until Mobius was caught.

After that, she had found herself excluded from the activity around her. She was not part of any squad or task force. Tennant didn’t want her there, and Andrus was preoccupied with a hundred logistical and bureaucratic priorities.

No one was willing to talk to her, anyway. She was the crazy bitch who wanted to open up the investigation to media scrutiny and start a panic and get all the incumbent politicians recalled in a special election. She was persona non grata.

So she’d left. Andrus’s driver had chauffeured her back to the MiraMist, where her car was parked. She’d thought about revisiting the crime scene, but there was nothing for her to do up there.

So she had gone for a walk along the bluffs, wondering what to do next. She thought about informing Michaelson of the ATSAC meeting. It was an act of insubordination, but at least it would piss off Tennant. Unfortunately, she disliked Michaelson even more than she disliked Tennant. Besides, there was no wiggle room in her orders-Michaelson and the rest of the RAVENKIL task force were to be kept in the dark. They were out of it.

Effectively, so was she. She knew what was going on, but she’d been frozen out.

"Then go it alone," she murmured to herself.

She had threatened Andrus that she would investigate on her own. Big words, but what sort of investigating could she do without resources in an unfamiliar city?

She stopped at a railing and gazed at the blue mist of the ocean’s horizon.

An unfamiliar city. No Rockies here, a sheer granite wall rising out of the mile-high plateau. No crisp winter mornings when new snow crunched underfoot and the only colors were the achingly pure blue of the sky and the flit of red as a robin hunted for seed. No summer rodeos, no autumn hayrides.

She didn’t know this town.

But she did know him.

Mobius. Her nemesis. The man who had taunted her, hounded her, taken over her life.

In the surveillance room she’d bragged that she had some insight into Mobius’s mindset, that she knew what he was like when he was being himself.

Now was the time to prove it.

Mobius had taken the VX from Amanda Pierce’s suitcase. How had he known about it? Had Amanda told him? Had he tortured the truth out of her?

Unlikely. A room with thin walls in a crowded hotel was not a place for torture. And Amanda Pierce, even in death, had not looked cowed or broken. Tess remembered the glare fixed on her face, the anger in her dead eyes.

Mobius must have taken the canister of VX merely on a hunch. Perhaps he’d felt its liquid contents sloshing inside. Perhaps he’d guessed that Amanda Pierce was not an ordinary tourist.

But there was no way for him to guess what the liquid was. He would need to find out. How?

Taste it, sniff it? If so, he was dead. But he would not be so stupid. Mobius might be insane, but Mobius.

That name. A reference, it was thought, to the Mobius strip. Something that a person trained in math or science would know about.

She had been going about this all wrong. She should not ask what a serial killer would do. She should ask what a scientist would do.

Faced with an unknown substance, a scientist would have it analyzed.

A sailboat drifted past, but Tess didn’t see it.

After a long time she turned away from the railing and headed back toward the MiraMist and her car. She knew what she had to do.

There might be no need to run, but she found herself running anyway, as she retraced her route along the bluffs.

The body lay on a steel table under a fluorescent light. Dodge looked at the skin, charred and blackened, and thought about a roast duck he’d ordered in Chinatown. There was the same crinkly quality, the same translucent sheen.

"Something’s up today," Winston said as she prepped the X-ray machine.

Rachel Winston was a brisk, careful woman who eschewed the crude humor indulged in by most of her colleagues at the Los Angeles County Morgue. She was good-looking in a severe, ice-princess sort of way, and still young enough that her tits were more horizontal than vertical. Dodge had her pegged as a dyke, because he’d asked her out and she’d rebuffed him.

Fuck her, anyway. She probably got off on dead bodies.

"Yeah?" Dodge said. "Like what?"

"Lot of activity around City Hall. Cars going in and out. Looks very official. Started around ten-thirty this morning." She glanced at him. "You don’t have any inside info?"

"Not a clue," he said, though now that she mentioned it, the West LA station had seemed unusually active when he’d stopped there at one-thirty, an hour ago, and on the drive to downtown LA he’d noticed a surprising number of patrol units on the streets.

"Well, the toilers in the trenches are always the last to know." Winston nodded at her assistant, a pathology technician with cornrowed hair. "Guess we’re just about ready."