Exposed

by Alex Kava

  Ganza had set aside the test tube and was poking around the box again. With long metal forceps he pinched what looked like microscopic pieces, and was putting them into a plastic evidence bag. He pushed up his glasses and dived the forceps in, suddenly getting excited.

  “Might be his,” Ganza said, showing Tully the half-inch black hair now clenched at the end of the forceps.

  Tully caught himself before he winced. So much for craving any of those doughnuts.

  Ganza placed the hair on a glass slide and slid it under a microscope. “Got enough of a root for DNA.” He twisted the focus and swooped down to the eyepiece for a better look. “At first glance, I’d say he’s not Caucasian.”

  “Also could be someone at the doughnut shop,” Tully said.

  Tully looked at the note and envelope again. “So how many people would know how to do an old-fashioned pharmaceutical fold like this?”

  “He may have read about it somewhere. Could be showing off,” Ganza answered.

  Tully lifted the envelope and piece of paper higher so that the lab’s fluorescent light shined through both. That’s when he saw it, almost invisible in the corner on the back side of the envelope. Sometimes you didn’t need a forensic documents expert to catch stuff like this.

  “We might have something here,” Tully said, continuing to hold the plastic bag to the light, waiting for Ganza to leave behind the microscope and come around the table.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ganza said before Tully could point out the subtle indentations on the envelope. “Bet he didn’t plan on leaving that behind.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  Elk Grove, Virginia

  Maggie tried to keep Mary Louise from seeing the Smith & Wesson gripped in her hand and down by her side. Cunningham moved the little girl to the corner behind him, shielding her from whatever they were about to find.

  “Backup is at the front door,” Maggie heard in the earbud. She avoided glancing over her shoulder. “Bomb squad is scanning outer perimeter. They’re ready to go in. Are you coming out?”

  Maggie looked to Cunningham.

  “Negative,” he said, barely audible while he smiled at Mary Louise. The little girl was chattering to him about eating a whole bag of M&Ms which she really, really loved and was probably the reason her tummy hurt.

  Maggie knew they were out of time, yet Cunningham was hesitating. She watched him scan the door frame again and again. Nothing looked out of place. Not on this side. Cunningham cocked his head as he listened for any sound behind the door. His right hand clutched the doorknob. His body kept close to the wall. His left hand stayed open and ready in front of Mary Louise like a traffic cop holding her back.

  In an ambush situation they’d kick in the door, weapons drawn. But the threat of rigged explosives with hidden trip wires warranted slow and easy. Maggie knew they should let the bomb squad take it from here.

  Cunningham wasn’t budging. Another victim, Mary Louise’s mother, was on the other side. If they picked up the little girl and ran, would it set off a panic? Was someone watching the house with a detonator, waiting for them to do exactly that?

  “Ready?” he asked Maggie.

  She wanted it over with. They had already wasted too much time. Yes, she nodded, and he eased the door open.

  There was no click. No sizzle. No bang.

  Nothing.

  Except for an unnerving rasping sound. Someone inside the room was having trouble breathing.

  Mary Louise swept past both of them while Cunningham grabbed and missed. She bounded up onto the bed where it looked like a pile of bedding had been dumped in the middle. The SWAT team swarmed the outside room, moving so quietly Maggie didn’t even notice them brush behind her, already in the bedroom.

  “Mommy, Mommy, someone came to help,” Mary Louise sang out to the swaddled bundle.

  Cunningham rushed over and he swooped the girl into his arms, cradling her close to his chest. But then he stopped dead in his tracks, and turned back to Maggie. There was a flicker of panic in his eyes, but his voice remained calm and soothing as he said, “There’s blood.”

  A pause and another glance, then, “A lot of it.”

  Maggie came in closer. She could see only the woman’s head, matted hair sticking to her forehead. She was gasping, almost a gurgle. Blood spurted from her mouth and nose onto a stained pillowcase. There was blood all over the bedding. But she couldn’t see any external wounds.

  Then Maggie remembered the note’s warning. She realized it was too late. There was no bomb. There were no explosives.

  “We may have expected the wrong kind of crash,” Maggie said. Instead of relief, her stomach took a plunge.

  “What are you talking about?” Cunningham tried to get a closer look while the little girl squirmed in his arms.

  “Instead of a bomb squad we should have brought a hazmat team.” She could feel everything around her grind to a halt. The bomb squad and SWAT team were frozen in place by her words.

  That’s when Mary Louise started throwing up. Her upset tummy spewed up red and green all over the front of Cunningham, spraying Maggie, too.

  “Christ!” he muttered as he wiped vomit and spittle from his face.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Quantico, Virginia

  R. J. Tully watched Keith Ganza process the envelope with the indentation using an ESDA (Electronic Detection Apparatus). He remembered as a kid rubbing the side of a number-two pencil over indentations in a notepad to reveal what had been written on the page that used to be on top. He probably read how to do it in Encyclopedia Brown. He was crazy for those books when he was about nine or ten, long before he even knew what an FBI agent was or did. They had an influence. Made him realize how much he loved solving puzzles. If only Emma read something more than Bride and Glamour. He had no clue what she was interested in these days, although if text messaging became a career skill she’d have that mastered.

  It amazed him how much that generation depended on computers. Kids knew how to access e-mail and create MySpace profiles, but logic and ingenuity, even puzzle solving, were foreign concepts. As Tully watched Ganza he couldn’t help but think that a lead pencil would do the trick and be quicker. At least they would have known already whether there was something to process. But the expensive equipment didn’t destroy the evidence. And that was important.

  Ganza adjusted the light on the ESDA. He had the envelope sandwiched between the metal bed and a Mylar overlay. When he was ready he’d pour a mixture of photocopier toner and tiny glass beads over the Mylar. The machine created an electric static charge with the glass beads scattering the toner and attaching it to the indented parts of the paper, almost like inking an embossed image. At least that’s how Tully understood it. With the image visible they could then take a picture of it and enlarge it.

  Sometimes the images appeared to be only scribbles. But this time it looked like they had more. The envelope had definitely been underneath a piece of paper that someone had written on, pressing hard enough to leave indentations. The solution almost seemed too easy. But even criminals, especially cocky ones, got sloppy. Could they be that lucky?

  “You think it’s his handwriting?” Tully asked, meaning the guy who left the bomb threat. “Or just some accident? Maybe someone at the bakery?”

  “He’d never let the note out of his sight or put it in the doughnut box until he was ready to unload it.” Ganza handled the transparency with gloved fingertips, placing it on a light box gently as though it would shatter.

  He fidgeted with some buttons and suddenly the impression grew and darkened. There would be no further tests needed. The letters looked as if they had been jotted quickly, but they were easy to decipher. The note read:

  Call Nathan R.

  7:00 p.m.

  All the periods and the colon were especially indented from extra pressure.

  Tully held up the plastic bag with the original note, trying to make an amateur handwriting comparison.
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br />   “Block printing, but not all caps like in the note,” he said.

  “Almost as if he didn’t think he had to disguise this.”

  “Because he didn’t think we’d ever see it.”

  Just then Ganza’s cell phone started ringing. He yanked off his latex gloves and flipped the phone open while walking to the other side of the lab. Ganza barely said hello and Tully’s cell phone started chiming like a Chinese dinner bell. He’d hit the button yesterday and accidentally changed his ring tone. The damn thing drove him crazy. He was constantly screwing up settings in his search for missed calls or voice messages. And now he’d have to make up with Emma long enough to get her to fix it.

  “R. J. Tully,” he said after three chimes.

  “We’ve got a problem.” He recognized Maggie O’Dell’s voice without an introduction.

  Before she could explain the problem, Ganza was rushing across the lab, his eyes locking onto Tully’s. Into the phone he said, “We can be there as soon as I get packed up.” To Tully, he said, “We’ve got to go now, before the military gets their hands on the evidence.”

  “Oh, good,” Maggie said in his ear. “You’re with Ganza.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked, but Ganza was headed in the other direction again, gathering equipment, the cell phone still pressed to his ear, his long strides almost wobbly like he was hurrying along on stilts.

  It was Maggie who finally answered, “We’ve got a real mess here.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases

  Fort Detrick, Maryland

  Colonel Benjamin Platt, M.D., didn’t question Commander Janklow’s order. He was used to taking orders whether they included jumping out of an aircraft into the Persian Gulf while wearing full scuba gear or organizing a biocontainment team and heading out to suburbia. Although back in his jumping days he was a bit younger and much more idealistic. Still, he wouldn’t question his orders. Instead, he hurried down the hallways, his stride confident, the heels of his spit-n-polish shoes clicking hard against the tiles, the only indication of nervous energy.

  Platt wouldn’t question the commander’s orders, but he couldn’t help wondering if the man might be blowing this situation out of proportion. New to his post with less than three months under his belt, Commander Jeremy Janklow was an outsider, a political appointment that most everyone viewed as a favor rather than a competent leader of USAMRIID (pronounced You-SAM-Rid), one of the most respected research facilities in the world. Platt worried that Janklow had spent too much of the last decade behind a desk. Was it possible the commander was simply looking for a crisis? A fire to put out that might boost his reputation?

  One of the lab doors opened before Platt got to the end of the hallway and the stocky, bearded man who emerged waved Platt to the office next door. Neither said a word, not even a greeting, until they were inside and the door closed.

  Michael McCathy slipped off his lab coat and exchanged it for a navy cardigan, cashmere and not a speck of dust on it. McCathy was older and bigger than Platt. Any signs of his long-ago days as a linebacker had been replaced by pale skin, sagging jowls, a slight paunch and tired deep-set eyes, magnified by wireless eyeglasses. Platt, on the other hand, was lean from a daily workout that included running five miles and a half hour of lifting weights. His summer tan was only now beginning to fade, his brown hair still lightened by hours in the sun coaching Little League and now soccer. Platt had a frenetic energy about him, almost a complete opposite to McCathy who always moved with slow and deliberate motions.

  Even now McCathy was arranging his crisply pressed lab coat on a hanger, placing it on the coat tree in the corner as though he had all the time in the world. Platt watched McCathy’s methodical gestures, each grating on his nerves. The man was obsessive-compulsive about everything. He was egotistical, and annoying as hell. Platt could only take him in small doses. But the new commander, Janklow, thought McCathy was a genius and insisted he be included in this mission.

  A law enforcement dropout, somehow McCathy had ended up at USAMRIID as a civilian microbiologist, a biohazard expert, apparently content to spend his days with test tubes and microscopes, concocting and speculating terrorist scenarios that might include biological warfare.

  Platt and McCathy had little in common except for a shared fascination of biological agents, particularly viruses and filoviruses. Platt had held Lassa, a Level 4 virus, in his gloved hands while inside a makeshift medevac tent outside of Sierra Leone. McCathy had been a bioweapons inspector in Iraq who claimed to have seen and handled canisters filled with biological soup. He insisted there were hundreds more just waiting for a weapons delivery system. He and his team were the last ones that Saddam Hussein threw out before the war and their testimonies were part of the argument used to go towar. Platt respected the work McCathy had done. It didn’t mean he liked the man.

  “I thought you said your team would be in civilian clothes?” McCathy gave Platt’s uniform an up-down glance like a disapproving headmaster.

  “Civilian clothes and civilian vehicles, except for the panel truck.” Platt tried to contain his impatience. He didn’t need to explain himself to McCathy. It’d take him five minutes in the locker to change into jeans, a T-shirt and his leather bomber jacket. “They’re almost ready at the loading dock. Do you have everything you need?”

  McCathy nodded but now was taking off his rimless eyeglasses and cleaning them with absolutely no sense of urgency. “It’ll be tight if we have to change in the truck. And slow going. Probably only one at a time with a two-man support team. You sure there isn’t someplace on-site we could use for a staging area?”

  Platt hated this, McCathy questioning him, second-guessing him. McCathy constantly reminded everyone that as a civilian he didn’t have to take orders from anyone except his boss, the commander.

  “It’s residential,” Platt explained, even though he’d already told McCathy this on the phone.

  “What about a house next door?” McCathy asked, pulling a small bottle of disinfectant from his trouser pocket and squirting some in his hand.

  “Orders are to not evacuate. We don’t want a panic.”

  “You’ve got to be pulling my leg,” McCathy said under his breath to emphasize his disgust. “What if it’s something?”

  “Then we’ll be prepared to contain and isolate.”

  McCathy smiled at him and shook his head. “We both know that won’t be enough if this ends up being anthrax or goddamn ricen.”

  “Evac team is on standby.”

  “Standby.” McCathy repeated with another smile. No, this was a smirk. And Platt recognized it and the tone. McCathy used it in meetings to show his disdain for authority and for rules in general. Platt wondered why McCathy would want to work at a military research lab. He carried himself like a man with some special entitlement, smug in his cashmere cardigan, as though he was the only one brilliant enough to see incompetence, and he seemed to see it running rampant all around him.

  McCathy was older than Platt and had been at USAMRIID for much longer, reasons enough in the scientist’s mind to dismiss Platt. Also, as a civilian, McCathy didn’t have to adhere to a rank-and-file hierarchy. It didn’t make a difference to him if Platt was a sergeant or a colonel. He still wasn’t going to take orders from him. To top things off, McCathy had managed to draw the attention and favor of Commander Janklow.

  None of that mattered to Platt. McCathy didn’t intimidate him in the least. Platt had seen things and done things that would shock the fluorescent-skinned McCathy who, outside of his stint as a weapons inspector, was used to living in his sterilized, controlled lablike world. No, men like McCathy didn’t intimidate Platt. They simply annoyed him. He was in charge of this mission and he wasn’t going to be lured into a pissing contest, especially with someone like McCathy.

  “I’ll meet you on the dock in ten,” he told McCathy and he didn’t wait for a response.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER

  11

  Elk Grove, Virginia

  Maggie had a premed background only because once upon a time her father had encouraged her to become a medical doctor. However, after a sideswiped childhood that drop-kicked her into the role of caretaker for her alcoholic suicidal mother, Maggie discovered she was more interested in what made the mind tick rather than the heart.

  Still, she studied premed out of a sense of obligation to her dead father. Eventually she ended up in psychology and then forensics. Her premed training allowed her to assist at autopsies and sometimes came in handy at crime scenes. This time it helped her recognize that Mary Louise and her mother had not been poisoned. Instead, they’d been exposed.

  If the threat in the note proved true, that there was going to be a “crash,” then Mary Louise and her mother had not only been exposed to some biological agent but it was now trying to live inside them. Maggie recognized the term, often used as “crash and bleed out” when military and medical personnel spoke about biological agents. The crash would come when the biological organism ended up destroying its host, and it usually did so from the inside out.

  The SWAT team had recognized the term, as well. It had taken little to convince them to leave, even though they all wore gas masks and would have, most likely, been safe. At first Cunningham had ordered Maggie to leave with them. It didn’t take long for her to see the realization in his eyes. There was a combination of regret and guilt, maybe a bit of fear when it finally hit him. He couldn’t let her leave. He couldn’t let either of them just walk out.