John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

What were the odds, Wilson wondered, that a security guard would be paying attention to the camera covering slot 952 during the five minutes Wilson needed to deploy the weapon? And what, in any case, would the guard see? Surveying equipment, or something like it, in the back of a Cadillac Escalade.

He took the elevator to street level and crossed to the Philip Burton Federal Courthouse. It was a huge structure. He’d read that there were eighty assistant U.S. attorneys, six federal magistrates, and thirteen district judges walking its halls. Fed Central, in other words.

One of the district judges was former U.S. Attorney Joe Sozio, who had brought the solicitation of murder charge against Wilson. Sozio had been appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. He was currently presiding over a case in Courtroom 3.

Wilson signed in, and showed his ID. He placed his jacket and hat on the conveyor belt, and put his wristwatch and change in a plastic bin. The guard waved him through.

The case in Courtroom 3 seemed to involve a Central American gang. Wilson scanned the crowd. The benches closest to the defense side of the courtroom were packed with Salvadorans. At least, he thought they were Salvadorans. Their skin was darker than Wilson’s own, and they had the distinctive features of the region. Wilson noticed that the older observers – parents, aunts, and uncles, he supposed – were modestly but respectably dressed, while the younger males wore the big shirts and droopy pants of gangbangers.

Like Wilson, they were Indians or, what was more likely, mestizos – a mixture of Indian and European blood.

“All rise.”

Wilson got to his feet with the others while the bailiff called the court to order. He took a GPS reading from his wristwatch, and noted it on a pad. It was nine thirty-two.

Wearing his robes, Judge Sozio entered the room with the air of a celebrity, striding to the thronelike chair on which he sat in judgment on mere mortals. He was the patriarch, and it was only when he had taken his seat that the rest of them were allowed to do the same.

Wilson watched him with a cold eye. His hair had thinned and gone to gray, and his chin was beginning to sag. But, otherwise, he looked much the same. His light brown eyes still had the predatory gaze of a raptor. For a moment, they flicked Wilson’s way, and Wilson felt his heart do a little dance in his chest. But there was no gleam of recognition in Sozio’s eyes.

One of the Salvadoran kids was sworn in. “I do,” he said in a high-pitched whispery voice, following the bailiff’s bored recitation.

The prosecutor, a Latina in a pale blue suit, got to her feet at Sozio’s prompt and swerved toward the kid like a cruising shark.

Wilson didn’t want to call attention to himself. He waited until the court went into recess, and returned to his hotel.

There, he typed the GPS coordinates that he’d taken into his ThinkPad. Then he set about logging in the equations that defined the beam.

This was one of the amazing things about the weapon, something Wilson had learned from a marginal note of Tesla’s. The beam was versatile, capable of emitting paired waves from any part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In one manifestation, it caused total destruction of the target mass – Tunguska, in other words. But with a relatively simple focal adjustment, he could unleash an electromagnetic pulse like the one over Culpeper.

For Sozio, however, Wilson had something else in mind. With a tweak, he could irradiate the courthouse with energy from a different part of the spectrum, one that had much longer wavelengths and lower frequencies than gamma rays. Microwaves, in other words.

He was a kid when microwave ovens first became popular. People hadn’t understood how they worked. Not that they understood them now, but at least they knew enough not to put poodles in them to dry after a shampoo. Most people also realized that positioning was critical in a microwaved environment. For even cooking, you had to rotate the dish, or place it on a revolving turntable. Volume was important, too. The more you had in the oven, the longer it would take to cook. And metal was out: Even little kids knew that it would blacken, pop, and burn if you microwaved it.

Like poodles, people are mostly water. Put water in a microwave, and it will boil.

Or at least some of it will. Because of the building’s structural complexity and the nature of microwaves, the damage to people in the courthouse would not be uniform. Some would get a sunburn, probably a bad one. But others would be hit harder. They’d see their skin split open like the casing of a steamed hot dog. It would be terrible. And it would be even more dramatic in Courtroom 3, where everyone, but most especially his Honor, Judge Sozio, would explode like so many balloons.

He got up early the next morning and exercised for an hour in the Nikko’s gym. After he showered, he put on the hotel robe. Out of habit, he picked up the sewing kit and dropped it into his suitcase. In the old days, he used to save that sort of thing for Mandy. Her eyes had been starting to go and she loved the little plastic containers: the prethreaded needles lined up in an array of colors.

Mandy. She had been the hardest one to turn his back on, harder than Sharon, even. A couple of times he’d been tempted to drive out to the trailer and see her. He could imagine her, sitting outside in the white Adirondack chair he’d given her on her birthday. Iced tea perched on the armrest. A book in hand.

Forget it, he told himself, and called down to the front desk for his car. Then dressed and packed his bag, left a tip for the maid and headed out.

It was one of those quintessential California days, sparkling and clear, the air rinsed clean by yesterday’s rain. He drove to the garage on Turk Street and made his way to the roof.

His was the only vehicle there. He backed into the chosen slot and with the engine running, unsnapped the cover, pulled aside the Styrofoam that held the weapon in place, and attached it to the laptop. Then he waited for the barrel to telescope into position. When the green diode began to blink at its base, he took a deep breath, and flipped the toggle switch.

That was that.

Thirty seconds later, he toggled the switch a second time. The light blinked off, and the barrel telescoped into itself. He reset the Styrofoam blocks, buttoned the cover over the Escalade’s little bed, and got back in the truck. Then he wound his way down to the ground floor of the garage, forcing himself to drive slowly so his tires wouldn’t squeal on the floor.

This was the one drawback to parking on the roof. It took a while to get down and, when he did, he was hyperventilating. There were two cars in front of him, waiting to pay, and they took their time about it. When he finally pulled out of the garage into the street, people were staggering out of the federal building in droves, hysterical and screaming. Some fell to the ground and rolled. Others stutter-stepped, first one way, then the other.

Their flight was pointless and reflexive, like insects sprayed with poison. There was no escaping what had happened to their bodies, but escape they must, so flee they did. It was useless, of course. And these were the survivors! (At least, for now.) The scene inside the courthouse would be unimaginable.

Wilson turned toward the corner, only to find himself at a red light. He was desperate to get away. In a minute or so, the area would be in gridlock as emergency vehicles rushed to the scene and passersby panicked at what they were seeing. Wilson watched in horror as a sightless woman with suppurating skin ran blindly into the Escalade, then reeled away in the other direction, her mouth open in a silent scream.