Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  “How do you know about Y. pestis?” Pinsen demanded.

  “Oh, please. It’s not a secret. Dr. Hitchcock is at the Cleveland Clinic, fighting for his life. It’s not what killed Dr. Roque, but he was infected—one of you heroes stabbed him before the pneumonia became full-blown.”

  The trio were momentarily quiet, and then Roswell said to Pinsen, “You were right about her—she’s much too nosy. Better leave her here.”

  “I wanted to do that all along,” Pinsen said, “but you thought she’d lead you to the actress and her sidekick.”

  “Have you found them?” Colonel Baggetto asked me.

  I laughed. “Is that the best question army intelligence can come up with? Maybe you need to go back to that fancy army college and take Interrogation 102. If I found Ferring and Veriden, why would I tell you? But here’s something I’ll let you know for nothing: I found the object that you or your minions have been tearing the country apart looking for.”

  “What’s that?” Baggetto asked.

  “I kept stumbling on things that people might want to keep secret.” I leaned against the wall, staying near the doorway. “A baby’s hand, for instance, or the fact that Doris McKinnon had sent soil samples to Dr. Roque for analysis. When I saw the destruction in August Veriden’s home and in the locker rooms at the gym where he worked, I knew you were seeking something small. I found a thumb drive with photos of the night McKinnon was digging on the Sea-2-Sea land, and I wondered if that was what you were looking for. It included footage of Sonia Kiel, and I knew the night she almost died outside the bar last week came from a deliberate attempt on her life.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” Pinsen said. “She’s been an alcoholic and a drug user for thirty years. No jury would ever believe she hadn’t OD’d on her own.”

  “I’m not a jury, but I have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. You were outside the Lion’s Pride the night she collapsed. By the way, is your name really Pinsen? Are you really at that college in Fort Leavenworth?”

  “What business is it of yours?” he said sulkily.

  “I’m your boss,” I said. “You work for me.”

  The men stared at me, bug-eyed, until Pinsen sputtered, “You are not here undercover. I have your complete life story laid out—every protest march, every parking ticket, every two-bit case you’ve worked. You have never been on the federal payroll.”

  “I wish you’d looked into my four-bit cases as well,” I complained. “I’m a taxpayer. You and the colonel are both servants of the republic, not its masters. We citizens pay your bills. You work for me. Do you have Cady Perec here? She could explain it to you—she’s used to trying to get twelve-year-olds to understand how the government works.”

  Pinsen made a gesture of contempt and walked to the window and back.

  Baggetto said heavily, “His name really is Marlon Pinsen. He works for Homeland. Homeland Security. Monitoring WMD activity in the heartland.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said sarcastically. “Those spent fuel rods. Get people afraid of nuclear explosions and they’ll give you a wide berth.”

  Baggetto flushed but said, “What makes you think Pinsen poisoned Sonia Kiel? If he was at the Lion’s Pride the night she almost died, so was half of Lawrence from what I can make out.”

  “When you guys were confabbing at the Oregon Trail bar the next night, I thought Pinsen looked familiar—and then I saw him in the background of one of the pictures I’d snapped while I was waiting for the cops. But you and he both pretended he was a cadet listening to you lecture. I still don’t understand the point of that charade.” I looked at Pinsen. “What did you do—pay those college boys to doctor Sonia’s drink? The clincher, of course, was the attempt to suffocate her on Sunday. Who did you hire to do that?”

  Pinsen scowled, but Roswell said, “You can’t prove that.”

  “The hospital staff found fabric threads in her nose. They thought it warranted providing Sonia with a security detail.”

  “What did you find that you think I wanted?” Baggetto said.

  “Right. That would be the movie the air force shot of the criminal use of Y. pestis on the missile protesters in 1983.”

  “You have it?” Baggetto jumped from his chair. “Hand it over, Warshawski. It’s military, top secret, not for civilian use. And no crap about you being my boss.”

  “I’ve watched it,” I said, “and I can see why the military wants to keep it secret, but it’s too late. It’s in production, and by this time tomorrow it will be all over the World Wide Web.”

  Baggetto leaned over me, hands against the wall next to my head. “You could spend the rest of your life at Fort Leavenworth, Warshawski. You have committed a very serious crime.”

  My heart started beating unpleasantly fast. He had six inches and forty pounds on me, not to mention all kinds of military combat training.

  “Who has it?” Pinsen was behind him. “That lab in Deerfield you use?”

  I ducked under Baggetto’s left arm to glare at Pinsen. “You bug my car, my phone, and even my mail? I’ll put it in my ad copy. ‘Warshawski Investigations: So Successful Even Homeland Security Tracks Her.’ I obviously solve problems that are too big for you.”

  “You don’t run ads,” Pinsen said.

  “Marlon, she’s baiting you,” Baggetto said gently. He backed away from the wall and turned to look at his teammates.

  “Can you trace where she’s been today?” Roswell asked. “That’ll tell you where she put the film. Unless she shipped it.”

  “If I could have traced her today, I’d have been on her already,” Pinsen said. “But I know she didn’t leave the county. Her car is still at the library, so she had to have picked up some other transport in this area.”

  “Hitchhiked,” I said. “I can walk every place I need to be in Lawrence, but I hitched a ride out K-10 to get here.”

  “We’ll do a sweep,” Pinsen said. “In the meantime she stays here.”

  “You know I’m opposed to that,” Baggetto said. “I’m opposed to your leaving the Perec woman here as well. Torture never produces reliable results. There’s ample proof of that. All we want is the film, and once we have that—”

  “I’m not risking any more damned leaks!” Roswell said. “That Kiel creature recognizing Fleming almost did us in.”

  “Fleming?” I asked. “Magda Spirova’s witness name was ‘Fleming’? What, she saw herself as a spy, like Ian Fleming?”

  “Alexander Fleming,” the colonel said stiffly. “She wanted to create something as memorable as discovering penicillin.”

  “Weapons-grade plague is a universe away from penicillin,” I said.

  “She started work on bioweapons hoping to find cures for them,” Baggetto said.

  “That was her propaganda,” Pinsen snapped. “You fell for it, and it made you a questionable colleague.”

  “If you don’t have a vaccine for your bug that you can give your own team, you’ve created a weapon that’s a nightmare,” Baggetto said. “I’ve been telling you that from the get-go, but you’re so intent on your patriot games that—”

  “They’re not games. We are serious about getting this country back on the right track.”

  “I am the only person in this room with field combat experience,” Baggetto said. “If you can’t pay attention to what I have to say—”

  “I am not going to have my work jeopardized any further,” Roswell said, “and that’s final.”

  “Roswell. Enough,” Baggetto said, but Roswell blew a short tweet on a whistle, and the room suddenly filled with men in black.

  I spun around, sprinted down the hall. I was almost at the exit when my body seemed to catch fire. I tried to keep to my feet, but my legs convulsed and I fell to the floor, writhing. Black-clad arms scooped me up, as easily as if I were a bouquet of prairie grasses.

  I thought I heard Baggetto protest, but my ears were ringing, the men were all shouting, I couldn’t sort one sound from another.

&
nbsp; The man in black carried me down a ladder. Fifteen rungs, I counted, and then I was flung to the ground.

  56

  Snake Eyes

  I was lying on concrete. It was cold but soothing to my burning skin. My legs and arms kept twitching, as if I were a frog someone was running an electric current through. Tased, my groggy mind thought. The men in black had tased me. I could feel the pulsing where the darts had struck. My arm muscles were still hard to control, but my fingers found the wires trailing from the barbs. Five of them. Three people must have fired at me.

  I smelled something familiar, acrid, musty—couldn’t remember what I knew it from. Light glowed dimly behind me, showing that the ladder I’d been carted down ended in a concrete anteroom. I was facing a closed door. With an effort I turned my head. The lights were coming from behind a partly open door about ten feet away.

  I shut my eyes and felt a wave of nausea sweep through me. I needed to sit up. I tried for deep breaths that would feed my quivering arms and legs, but deep breaths pushed the points of the darts against my skin.

  When I exhaled, the darts released. I was wearing a windbreaker over my sweater; my clothes had protected me from the fullest force of the tase. I worked an arm out of the sweater. Bare arm and breast on freezing concrete: an ice bath. It roused me into a frenzy of action—namely, I forced myself to sit up. Shrugged myself free of the jacket. Pulled off the sweater.

  Good job, Vic. You’re ready for the Olympics. I still had my flashlight and my phone. I shone the flash on the jacket. Five darts. I pulled them out, dropped them on the floor, and worked my arms back into the sweater. I tried my phone, but the concrete bunker blocked any hope of a signal.

  I grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder and pulled myself to standing. Walked on unsteady feet toward the lighted doorway, supporting myself by leaning on the rough concrete wall.

  The musty, tangy smell grew stronger. When I pushed the door open all the way, I saw why: I’d found a lab, which looked and smelled like Dr. Kiel’s. I’d smelled it the first time I came to the silo but hadn’t connected the scent to Kiel. Another demerit on the detective’s performance review.

  A countertop held a dozen canisters—fermenters, like Kiel’s—with hoses that snaked into a hood where an exhaust fan ran. A cylindrical machine against the facing wall was rotating slowly, making a clacking sound as an external set of rods moved up and down.

  Three computers stood on the countertop near the door. Two seemed to be logging what the fermenters and the clacking machine were doing. The third monitor showed what was happening in the world aboveground. The room where I’d been talking to Baggetto and Roswell appeared in one quadrant, empty now except for one of the men in black, who was playing with his phone. The other quadrants showed the entrance to the silo grounds, the exterior of the launch-control support building, and a view of the Sea-2-Sea fields. I’d never had a chance of getting out of the building unscathed.

  Since I could see the control room upstairs, the man in black could probably see me, if he looked up from his device. I craned my neck and saw two cameras in the corners, tracing an arc across the room.

  A twittering and squeaking came from the far end of the room. When I shone my flash, red eyes reflected back at me. Cages full of rats. This time I couldn’t fight the wave of nausea; I threw up the yogurt I’d eaten earlier.

  It was then, bent over and panting, that I saw Cady Perec curled on the floor near the canisters. I shuffled to her, quickly, like a snail. Knelt down. She was alive, her breath coming in shallow puffs.

  I shone my flash over her and saw the trailing wires to the darts in her body, one in the back, one in the shoulder, two in the hips. I pulled them out, and she whimpered, her eyes fluttering open. She looked at me in terror and tried to move away.

  “Cady, it’s V.I. Warshawski. We’re inside the missile silo. We need to find a way out.”

  “V.I.? Vic?” She seized my arms in a fierce, convulsive grasp and burst into tears. “You found me. Thank God!”

  “I was tased. Just like you. Where’s Bernie?”

  “I don’t know.” Her teeth were chattering. “We tried to sneak into the field, but I was wrong. The place I used to use—everything was like you said, covered in alarms. Soldiers showed up, it was like they were waiting for us. Bernie, when I screamed, she lay flat in a furrow. I don’t know where she is now.”

  I had to hope Bernie had run to safety. She was small enough that she could have slipped away while men in black were torturing Cady. I hoped. I begged.

  Even if Bernie summoned help, we couldn’t count on its arriving—Baggetto would block any military response. Sheriff Gisborne would keep the local cops at bay. Cady and I had to save ourselves.

  Bram Roswell and his band of patriots thought we would die in here, in the lab where they were growing pneumonic plague. They thought we would contract the disease. They imagined us choking to death. Then they could bury us in the experimental field.

  “We have to find a way out of here.” I pulled Cady upright and propped her against a cabinet door. “We cannot sit around feeling sorry for ourselves while we wait to die.”

  “I should have listened to you,” Cady whispered. “When they brought me down here, they kept asking me insane questions about a movie the colonel wants to watch. It didn’t make any sense. All the chemicals down here have made them crazy.

  “They wanted to know where you were and where was your dog—they shot me again when I said I didn’t know. Where was August Veriden, where was Emerald Ferring? If I’d known, I would have said. I told them you would be here if you weren’t at the B and B—don’t hate me, but they hurt me too much.”

  She started to weep, wrenching sobs like those that had racked her grandmother earlier in the day. I slapped her roughly.

  “Listen, Cady, it’s not like the action-hero movies. In real life, no one stands up to torture. You’ve done nothing that could possibly make me hate you. You’ve done nothing for which you need to feel ashamed. You’re resourceful, you’re a problem solver. And we have a major problem to solve. We need every skill set we possess to get out of this hellhole.”

  She stopped crying but looked at me apathetically. She needed more than a pep talk from me to summon the energy to save herself. I felt panic rising in me and swallowed it down, bile leaving a raw, bitter place in my throat.

  Think for two, think for two, how do you do, I’m feeling blue, because now I must think for two. I needed someone to slap me.

  “I’m going to go up the ladder,” I said loudly. “You have to hold my flashlight so I can see what I’m doing.”

  She didn’t respond. My own arms and legs were still quivering, but they were going to have to go to work. I hoisted Cady to her feet. Draped her right arm around my neck, put my own hand on her waist, and pushed her across the room. There was a sink by the door; I took a chance on the water and washed my face and rinsed my mouth, wet a paper towel and wiped Cady’s face.

  When I put my arm around her again, she was steadier. She gave a last gulping sob but stayed with me to the ladder, which was actually just steel rungs bolted into the wall. I thrust my flashlight into Cady’s hands and ordered her to keep shining it on the ladder. I wrapped my clammy, twitching hands in my jacket sleeves and grabbed the rung above my head, pulled myself up, feet on the bottom rung.

  Cady’s arms were wobbly, and the light jiggled around, but she didn’t drop the flash, and I could make out the rungs as I slowly climbed up. A hatch was almost directly overhead.

  “Get me light right on the top here. I need to see this thing.”

  Cady tried, but she couldn’t manage it. When she started to cry in frustration, I leaned against the wall, took my phone out, used the flashlight to inspect the hatch cover.

  Reinforced steel from the days when a nuclear warhead sat nearby. A thick rubber seal fitted the hatch tightly into place. I turned the latch and pushed upward. It was clamped from the outside.

  I climbed back dow
n. Not a hard climb if I hadn’t just been electrocuted and wasn’t terrified in the bargain. Instead I was as winded as if I’d finished an Iron Woman. I squatted, panting, the pill bottle digging into my thigh.

  “We’re trapped, aren’t we? We’re going to die here.”

  Cady’s dull, helpless tone so echoed my own mood that I became angry.

  “These men are not going to manage our fate in the way that they did Doris McKinnon’s or Dr. Roque’s. We will survive and thrive,” I said fiercely.

  I pulled out the pill bottle and stared at it. I’d taken two tablets last night and three today. That left twenty-five, fifteen for Cady, ten for me. Three days’ protection, maybe more if the pills took hold before the infection began, but I was damned if I’d sit down here checking my breathing and temperature every half hour.

  I explained the situation to Cady. “I need you to take two of these right now to counteract what you’ve been breathing in here. They’ll make you feel sick on an empty stomach, but that’s better than what could happen to you without them.”

  “We could get a soda out of there.” She pointed to the far wall, at a vending machine I hadn’t noticed. “If you have any money. I left my purse in the trunk of my car.”

  I found a hammer in a drawer in the lab, which I gave to Cady, telling her to hit the lock as hard as she could. She gave it a few tentative blows and then swung her arm back and started whacking the machine. The lock broke, glass splintered from the front of the case, and cans rolled out around us, but she kept pounding until I grabbed her arm.

  “That felt good!” She picked up a can of Sprite, handed me a Coke, and started a little victory dance in front of the vending machine. I high-fived her and handed her two of the antibiotic tablets to swallow.

  I gave a hysterical laugh, thinking we were like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, shooting out the Coke machine to get coins for a phone call: now we had to answer to the Coca-Cola Company.

  Faded black paint on a closed door by the machine announced it as the launch-control center. I switched on the lights and saw that Roswell had fixed it up as a kind of common room for his research team. There were couches, a couple of small tables where people could eat or talk or inject themselves with germs. A door in the corner opened onto a bathroom with a decontamination shower.