Michael Prescott: Next Victim

"This is an emergency," a recorded voice was saying in waves of amplified distortion. "Exit the station immediately."

Other cops were shouting above the loudspeaker’s repetitive message, telling the passengers that extra MTA buses were being requisitioned to get them where they needed to go. "Head to street level and you’ll be taken care of," the cops were saying.

He’d made it past the first hurdle, but there would be police at the main exit, checking every passenger. They might identify him. He couldn’t take the risk.

But he also couldn’t stand around on the platform, drawing attention to himself.

Things were getting unexpectedly complicated. But he would handle it.

Nothing worried him any longer. Not even Tess McCallum would be a problem now. She might have seen his license plate during the chase-but it didn’t matter.

He couldn’t be stopped. He had the power. A power he would unleash-soon-and with it, kill them all.

Tess hadn’t known what to expect as far as traffic was concerned. Of course she’d insisted at the ATSAC briefing that the city could cope with news of a crisis, but maybe she’d been wrong.

Or maybe not.

Because amazingly the freeways and the surface streets were clear. If anything, there was less traffic than usual for a Saturday night, and the drivers who were out here showed no signs of panic. They braked at stop signs and traffic lights, they signaled before changing lanes, they drove within the speed limit-or at least didn’t exceed the limit any more than on any other night.

At first she thought maybe they just hadn’t heard. They could have been at a party or a movie, insulated from the news. But idling at a red light, she clearly heard the radio from the minivan beside her, a newscaster’s voice talking about the threat of chemical attack. There was no anxiety in the newscaster’s tone or in the expression of the woman driving the van.

Down the street she saw a crowd of people gathered around a big-screen television in a bar. As she passed the plate-glass windows, she saw the image of Myron Levine switch to a basketball game. Someone had changed the channel.

There were more LAPD units on the street-black-and-white patrol cars, and detectives’ cruisers in the same color scheme, but lacking rooftop emergency lights. Plenty of cops, but nothing much for them to do. The streets were quiet. She passed a woman carrying a bag of groceries from a corner convenience store, a man walking his dog, kids skateboarding in a parking lot. There was no fear here.

When she shot onto the Ventura Freeway, speeding east to Universal City, she saw only a light stream of traffic moving at a steady pace.

She had been more right than she knew. The news hadn’t panicked the city. Its citizens were stronger, calmer, saner than the political leaders had been willing to admit. A degree of risk was part of the package of urban life-of all life these days.

If Mobius had hoped to terrify the city, he’d misjudged matters. Although, she had to add, if he succeeded in pulling off an attack, if the theoretical risk became real and tangible, the city’s sea walls against panic still might crumble.

Well, it was up to her and Andrus and Tennant and all the others to make sure that didn’t happen.

She parked near the Universal City Metro station, at a red-painted curb below a stern NO PARKING sign.

Let Dodge get a ticket. He wouldn’t be paying it.

Crowds milled around outside the station, apparently waiting for MTA buses to take them to their destinations. Some passengers were still filing through the doors, each one briefly stopped by uniformed police officers on a pretext of directing them to the waiting area. Tess knew they were actually checking each face and comparing it with William Hayde’s driver’s license photo.

Even here she saw no panic, not even any unruliness or complaining. Word of an emergency situation had spread throughout the trainload of riders, and they were responding calmly and reasonably-more calmly, in fact, than the bulk of the attendees at the ATSAC meeting.

Tess approached one of the patrol officers and showed her bureau creds.

"Sorry," the cop said. "No one gets in without Stage One clearance."

"Stage what?"

"Stage One," a voice said from behind her. She turned and saw Jack Tennant. "It’s a new wrinkle the Emergency Management honchos dreamed up. Basically you need one of these."

He fingered a laminated card hanging from a strap around his neck. The cop glanced at it and gestured to let him go through.

Tess thought Tennant was going to abandon her, but instead he jerked a thumb in her direction and said, "She’s on my dance card."

The cop let her pass.

She accompanied Tennant to the lower level of the station, past a few stragglers ascending from the platform. Every face that slipped by received her close scrutiny. But Hayde’s face was not among them.

"Thanks for getting me in," she told Tennant.

He shrugged. "I hear he went after you."

She nodded. "I guess you weren’t the only one who wanted me off the case." This was a cheap dig, but she felt entitled.

"I was wrong about that."

This surprised her. "Were you?"

"Never should’ve kept you off the task force. Tell you the truth, it wasn’t because I doubted your competence." He looked away, then seemed to realize this was cowardly and turned to meet her gaze. "In the LAX fiasco, one of my agents nearly got killed. A female agent."

"You weren’t trying to protect me because I’m a woman?"

He smiled. "What can I say? I’m a male chauvinist. At least I own up to it. How’d he try to take you out?"

"VX in the air conditioner of my motel room. I don’t suppose there’s any chance he used it all up."

"No way. He wouldn’t have needed more than a few drops. It was sort of a test run."

Tess thought it was a test she’d nearly flunked.

Tennant was looking her over. "Have you received medical attention?"

"Only the antidotes I self-injected."

"You should be at a trauma center, under observation."

"I’m fine."

"You don’t know that. Those the same clothes you were wearing during the attack?"

"Yes." They were, in fact, the same clothes she’d been wearing for the past thirty-six hours.

"You should’ve changed. Droplets of nerve agent can get trapped between your clothes and skin. You could be outgassing right now."

"Sounds more like a problem you’d encounter after a quick meal at Taco Bell."

"I’m serious."

"I think I’m okay. I got pretty thoroughly aired out over the last hour."

"If you feel any symptoms, report it immediately."

The evacuated train was sitting at the station platform, six cars, fully lighted, completely empty. There was something eerie about seeing it there, as if it were the last train still running in a depopulated world. Mobius’s kind of world. A world of the dead.

"I’m checking out the train," Tennant said.

"Not alone."

"My guys aren’t here yet."

"I’m here. Let’s go." She saw Tennant hesitate and added, "You really don’t have to protect me. Even though I’m a woman."

At the entrance to the subway train, Tennant asked Tess if she was carrying a cell phone or a pager. "Cell," she said. She had Dodge’s phone in her purse.

"Turn it off."

"Okay. Why?"

"We don’t need any extra radio signals in there." He didn’t explain further.

Tess killed the phone, then followed Tennant into the first car. She’d never ridden the LA subway, and she was surprised to find the car clean and bright, almost untouched by the etched graffiti-scratchitti, she believed it was called-that infested most public transit systems. The seats were upholstered in red, presumably color-coded to the Red Line. In the hasty evacuation, a few newspapers had been left behind, along with someone’s vinyl jacket. Tennant lifted the jacket, checking for a package underneath, but there was none.