[2001] Public Enemy Zero

by Andrew Mayne

  “I’m going to tell DHS and the FBI to go out of their way to tell Roberts that they’re ready to go along with him. That should bring him in faster. When he surrenders, I want you to put that somewhere on his person or his belongings.” He looked at the ID Mr. Lewis was wearing.

  “When he surrenders, I’ll tell them to keep a 500-foot perimeter and to only approach him using hazmat suits. Once you’re in a suit, you should be able to move about the perimeter freely. Try to put it in a bag or a pocket if possible.”

  “I can put a strap around it so it’ll look like he wore it under his clothes slung from his shoulder,” said Mr. Lewis.

  Baylor nodded. Mr. Lewis was a practical man. “Very good.” Baylor pointed to the towel with the cylinder inside. “Is that a functional device?”

  “Functional enough. Do you want me to use it?”

  Baylor shook his head. “Good lord, no. What’s inside of there isn’t quite the same as what I think is wrong with Roberts.” Baylor paused. “It’s not as discriminating.”

  Baylor wasn’t sure what the canister would do if unleashed in a crowded area. The most likely scenario was the Mongolian prison experiment but this time on hundreds of police and rescue personnel. He decided to stay well clear of the location for the surrender.

  Of course, if the material in the glass vial were released, it would solve the problem -- at least partially -- of the lack of evidence of aerosols at the other locations. If the object found in Roberts’ possession was shown to cause the rage on a large group of people, it would make a much stronger connection between him and the device.

  “I might have you solve two problems at once. If it’s possible to spray it on Roberts and then get him in proximity to someone without a suit, I want you to take the initiative. If you can end-of-life him on the scene, we can clean things up more easily.

  “Also, as a backup, keep a set of respiratory gear with you at all times in case we do need to activate it.” Baylor reminded himself to ask for a hazmat suit to keep in the back of his car if need be.

  “Anything else?” asked Mr. Lewis.

  “One more thing after this. I’ll send you the information. I’m going to need you to take the other two cylinders to Los Angeles. I have an Estonian post-doc working at UCLA in a lab theoretically capable of this. I think he would make a good point of origin.

  “We’ve already got evidence of him soliciting the Chinese for certain things from the lab. I just don’t know yet if we want to go with a Chinese connection or a Middle-Eastern one.”

  After Mr. Lewis left, Baylor walked over to a group of vans and trucks parked in the middle of the parking lot. The regional FBI director was talking into his cell phone while trying to get information and give orders to a dozen people. He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and looked at Baylor.

  “I think you need to tell the press that you’re willing to meet Roberts’ request.” For Baylor’s plan to work, he needed to convince them that they were putting on a show for a man who wanted to believe he was contaminated, while making sure that they took the precautions they needed to avoid actually getting exposed to Mitchell.

  “I’m with you,” said the director. He tilted his head toward the Super Center. “One more day of this and people aren’t going to want to leave their homes.”

  “How’s the search going?” asked Baylor.

  “We still haven’t found any cars with the license plates he stole last night. We’re trying to figure out why he’s still in South Florida if he has a car. We think he may have an accomplice that’s driving him around.”

  Baylor knew that was an almost impossibility but nodded his head. There was still a possible third person in the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI was never fully clear on who was responsible for the anthrax scare. The Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph, also had supporters who were never charged. There was a precedent there. The more they bought into the idea that he was involved in a conspiracy, the less he would look like a victim.

  Baylor told the director he would be available if he was needed and then walked back to his car to call Steinmetz back at the lab.

  “Ari, I need you to come down here.”

  “What’s going on? Is it ...” asked the concerned scientist.

  “We don’t know yet. But I want you to be on the scene so we can take possession of the body.”

  “Body? What body?”

  Baylor backtracked. “Sorry. It’s chaotic here. I mean when Roberts comes into custody I want us to run some tests on him.”

  Baylor hung up the phone. It was stressful keeping track of who needed to know what. But that was the burden he had chosen.

  44

  After he heard the latest press conference announce that they took Mitchell’s claims seriously, Mitch had spent the night going over every police standoff he could remember. The first goal was to not get shot by some police sniper ordered to take him out if he looked like he was going to do something threatening to anybody else. Given that Mitchell’s own body could be considered a threat, this was going to be a little problematic. He had to make sure that proper distance was going to be kept from him.

  To do that, he needed some kind of threat he could use that wouldn’t pose a risk to anybody else. When the location came to him, he thought of a way to make only himself vulnerable to the threat. Hopefully that would keep trigger-happy police from offing him.

  Another contributing factor for the location was proximity to television news cameras. Mitchell didn’t want to get caught in some remote place like the little island he hid out on the day before. Rookman had made him paranoid enough to think that there might be some greater conspiracy going on. He stood no chance against anything like that. All he could do was look as much like a victim of circumstance as possible.

  The next morning, Mitchell docked his johnboat on a seawall below the South River drawbridge. He waited until the morning rush hour was over and then climbed the stairwell that led up to the pedestrian walkway. Mitch took four road flares from his bag, lit them and then used them to block traffic coming from one side of the bridge.

  He walked to the other side and did the same. Before the last road flare was lit, Mitch could hear sirens. He walked toward the middle of the bridge and shot three flares into the air before pulling one more thing out of his bag and then tossed the bag over the side. Mitch looked up at the bridge tender’s control room and waved his hands at the man to stay away.

  When the bridge tender saw the crazy man in his underwear walk across the bridge and start throwing flares onto the road, he immediately called the police before he realized he was looking at Mitchell Roberts. He pressed the button that lowered the barriers that told traffic not to cross and then locked the door to his control room. He’d wait for the police to tell him what to do next.

  Mitch hopped up on the railing and waited. It was embarrassing being in his underwear, but it seemed like the only way to convince people that he didn’t have a weapon. He knew it made him look like a loon, but he could explain afterward why he did it. It made sense to him, at least. He tried to put the idea out of his mind that governments had a habit of humiliating dictators and terrorists with leaked photos of them in a state of undress.

  The other precaution made him look unstable, but it was the only way he could think of to make everyone stay clear. If he could have climbed to the top of a building and have a practical escape route, he might have done that. But he didn’t. He had to improvise.

  A sales manager for Channel 8 heard the sirens and looked out his eighteenth-floor window that overlooked the South Bay bridge. “Holy cow,” he exclaimed. He shouted to the rest of the office to come look. “Hey guys, check this out!”

  Half a dozen people rushed over. A minute later the newsroom upstairs was notified. A camera was aimed out the window down at the bridge. Mitchell was live on the air five minutes after the first police car arrived. The feed went national three minutes later when people realized the man on the bridge in his un
derwear with the orange electrical cord tied around his neck like a noose was Mitchell Roberts.

  Mitch had no intention of snapping his neck with the noose he’d tied to the bridge. It was a desperate measure, but he needed a way to make himself look as vulnerable as possible. If the police stepped past his perimeter, he would threaten to jump.

  He knew that in situations like that, where the only person at risk was the suspect, police had a lot more patience. The only life they had to protect was his. Or at least he hoped.

  He left three conditions for turning himself in on his iPhone notepad. The first was that the arresting team wore the proper hazmat gear so they didn’t kill him in the act of apprehension. The second was that they show him that they had a means of transportation for him that would keep him isolated from everyone else. The third was that no one single agency would have access to him. He wanted to make sure that there would be some kind of oversight. If he was the victim of a conspiracy, he didn’t want to fall into the hands of the people who were responsible for it.

  The first police officer to arrive on the scene had received the briefing to stay well clear of Roberts under the suspicion that he might have a chemical weapon on him.

  He parked his car across the entrance to the south side of the bridge while another police officer did the same on the north side. Their instructions were to contain him until federal officials arrived and under no circumstances to engage him directly.

  As an added precaution, the officer stretched a line of crime scene tape across his side of the barrier as if it would form some magical barrier between everyone on the outside and whatever was wrong with Mitchell Roberts.

  Mitch held up his hands when the first two police cars arrived to tell them to stay back. He didn’t even have to show them the noose around his neck to threaten them. He leaned back on the railing and waited for the people in funny-looking blue spacesuits to arrive.

  He cast a glance up at the Channel 8 building and could see crowds gathered around the windows. He spotted one of the cameras aimed at him and gave it a wave and a nod. If he acknowledged them, he at least felt it would look like he was partially in control of the situation.

  For the millions of people watching at home, it was a different sight than the usual police standoff. Mitch wasn’t waving his hands around in the air. He didn’t have any weapon other than the noose around his neck. Standing in his underwear, his lean physique made him look more like a college swimmer waiting for his swim match.

  While news commentators waited for a response from the federal officials who were arriving on the scene, the biggest topic of conversation was the state of Mitchell’s body. One of the Channel 8 cameras zoomed in and revealed the various scratches, bite marks and bruises all over his body.

  One female CNN correspondent trying to buy time while they waited for more information put it succinctly. “This man doesn’t look like a terrorist. He looks like a rape victim.”

  The confused and afraid public didn’t know what to believe. Mitch’s YouTube video had played over and over again the previous day while amateur and professional sleuths looked at his online footprint for any kind of insight into Mitchell. His playlists were scrutinized and his broadcast archives were listened to for anything that would give them a reason to think his behavior was somehow premeditated or the final chapter of a bizarre life.

  The search came up with a relatively normal man a few years out of college trying to make his way in broadcasting. His friends described him as an affable guy with the same interests as everyone else. He had no political agenda and not a single person could recount a violent thing he’d said or done prior to two days ago.

  The sincerity of Mitch’s YouTube video had won a lot of people to his side. The experts on talk shows who explained the sheer difficulty of trying to make the chemical weapon that he was rumored to be in possession of made the WMD storyline difficult for people to swallow.

  Talk of a rage virus or “reverse rabies” seemed equally difficult to accept, but people found themselves divided into two groups. There was the WMD camp and the patient zero camp. The lack of any apparent agenda on Mitchell’s part made many of the WMD group suspect that maybe he was an unwitting pawn.

  Thirty minutes after Mitch had arrived at the bridge, the first person in a hazmat suit approached the outer barrier. Other people in suits were moving the barrier even farther back and clearing all the roads another block back. Mitchell thought this was a hopeful sign.

  The man in the spacesuit waved at Mitch and motioned that he wanted to walk toward him. Mitchell nodded and felt a wave of relief that this nightmare was about to be over.

  45

  Special Agent Joseph Merritt, the FBI’s designated negotiator, walked toward the man in his underwear with the orange electrical cord around his neck standing in the middle of the bridge. DHS and his district supervisor had given him specific instructions on what to tell Roberts. He was to not contradict Roberts’ claim that he was somehow infected, and he could promise him anything within reason if it could get him clear of the bridge and the noose.

  At the outer edge of the perimeter, an FBI SWAT team watched as the negotiator approached Mitchell Roberts. They had been informed by DHS that it was likely a chemical agent that Mitchell had been using. When it was obvious that he wasn’t concealing anything on his body that fit the profile, their commander gave the order for them to use gasmasks instead of the more cumbersome tactical nuclear/biological/chemical suits they had in their truck.

  Mitch held up his hand for the agent to stop when he was 15 feet away. Mitch could make out the man’s face through the glass on the helmet. He had a broad grin and thinning red hair.

  “Hello, Mitchell,” said the agent. He used the informality as a way to put Mitchell at ease. “I’m not used to talking to people with a spacesuit on. I feel like I should be asking you to take me to your leader.”

  Mitch stared at the man for a moment. He was about to ask if the corny jokes were a tactic to wear him down but thought better of it. “I’m not used to negotiating in my underwear.” Mitch paused. “Begging, yes.”

  Agent Merritt smiled. Through his earpiece he could hear one of the people listening in on the microphone let out a muffled laugh.

  “My name is Special Agent Joseph Merritt. You can call me Joe. My job is to negotiate with you and listen to your demands. I’m empowered to make anything happen that we think is reasonable.”

  “Wait a second,” interrupted Mitch. “Demands? Demands are what bank robbers and terrorists have. I don’t want anything. I just want to know that if I surrender I won’t be torn to pieces. And that I’ll be safe from whoever is responsible for this.”

  “Who do you think did this to you, Mitchell? I’d like to help.”

  The question was posed with the calm sincerity of a parent talking to a child about monsters.

  It took every bit of Mitchell’s willpower not to react sarcastically or get angry. Acting defensively in either way would make him look paranoid and unbalanced. “Look, Joe, I don’t know what’s happening to me. I hear all the crazy things that people say on the radio. I see firsthand what happens when people come near me.” Mitch looked down at his body. “Look at me, man! This is real. Those bite marks and scratches happened. I want an explanation for all of this.” Mitch looked at the crowd of law enforcement officials on either side. “We need answers for all of the people who got hurt.”

  “Let me help you get some answers. What do you need?”

  “I need to know that anyone who comes near me is going to be wearing proper protective equipment.”

  “Protective of what?” asked Merritt.

  Mitchell blinked. The question came out sounding like a probe. “Protective of me. My scent. Maybe I’ve got some kind of rage virus like they said.”

  “Who said?”

  “Talk show hosts. People on the radio filling airtime. I don’t know who, man. It’s just one of those things that come up when people are looking for
an explanation.”

  “What else do you need?” asked Merritt.

  “I need to know that you have a safe way to transport me from here.”

  “A vehicle to keep you from getting attacked?”

  “Yes,” said Mitchell.

  Merritt held up a finger as he was getting instructions through his earpiece. He looked at Mitch and nodded. “That’s not going to be a problem.”

  “OK ....”

  “We’re going to transport you in an armored truck. That way nobody can get at you and hurt you. Does that sound good?”

  Mitch shook his head. “No, it does not. Ask the people on the other end of your radio how an armored truck is supposed to keep people from smelling me or getting wind of whatever makes them attack.”

  Merritt held up his finger again as he got more instructions. “They’re designed to withstand tear gas attacks and are sealed tight.”

  Mitchell felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He realized that it wasn’t just the negotiator acting in a patronizing way, the people he was dealing with really didn’t think there was anything wrong with him. They had bought into some other theory about a weapon. Mitchell had to call the bluff. He leaned back on the railing and looked over the edge of the bridge for a moment.

  “Joe. Special Agent Merritt,” said Mitch. “I’m sure the people you’re talking to will promise me the world if you think it will get me away from the edge of the bridge and this stupid thing off my neck while a thousand cameras are on us. The one thing I am asking for right now is the truth. An armored truck is designed to keep things on the outside from getting in like people and tear gas. Air may be filtered on its way in but not on its way out.

  “Either the people you are talking to know that and are just trying to bullshit me because they’re under some false pretense that I’m up to something or they’re incompetent and can’t be trusted with my life.” Mitch waved his arm at the buildings and pointed at the Channel 8 camera. “Or the lives of everyone else around me. A truck that’s not airtight is a menace to everyone we drive past.”