Wendell Black, MD

by Gerald Imber, M. D.

  I guess I was disappointed not to find anything out of order, and maybe a little relieved not to have to confront it if I had. On the way back to the Homeland station, we stopped at both the arrivals hall and baggage. Agents were everywhere. There were at least half a dozen whose faces I recognized, and I don’t know how many others that I didn’t. They no more than glanced at us, gave no sign of recognition. It was clear that we were meant to do the same. That much even I knew. Same as every prior flight today. Our presence seemed gratuitous, at least mine did, but I needed to stay and watch for a while. I tucked my ID into my shirt and did my job. I saw nothing out of the ordinary beyond generally eccentric human behavior. People are weird and annoying as hell. From outside looking in, they made a zoo seem dull.

  Back at base, the crowd around the CCTV screens had thinned. Most of those remaining had been assigned to the task. I got a cold Diet Coke from the mini fridge and a water for Alison. I handed it to her without speaking.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling. I wanted to smile back, but I was still pissed. She rolled the wet, cold plastic bottle along her forehead, then wiped the moisture into her hair with her right hand. She struggled with the twist-off cap but got it opened before I offered to help. She took a long, exaggerated slug and replaced the cap. We watched silently. Nothing happened. Twenty minutes later, the arrivals hall was empty of all but agents and employees. A Delta flight was expected in less than half an hour, and the same coverage was in effect. Panopolous had agreed that the attempt would be on Virgin, but he refused to take the risk of ignoring the others. At least, I think he agreed. On the other hand, he still believed the terror attack was going to play out in the watershed. Different strokes. I stared at the screens, hoping they would show me something special for believing, but I was losing faith. Finally, the four cleaners exited the aircraft door. They tossed the bags of refuse out onto the tarmac and followed down the stairs with their equipment. That was it. The plane was empty, arrivals had been cleared, and only baggage claim remained. Damn. It had to be today. There was no second chance.

  I turned to Alison. We hadn’t actually spoken since the pistol incident. “Let’s look at baggage—this is done.”

  “I know. Sorry. I thought we were on it, but when the cleaners left the aircraft, it was a big letdown. Like ‘Ciao, it’s over.’ ”

  “Right,” I said. Then, “The cleaners. Alison . . . how many cleaners were on the plane with us?”

  “Three.”

  “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “Four cleaners just went down those stairs.”

  “Are you certain?” she asked. “Let’s have them play back the last couple of minutes.”

  “No time. I’m sure. Shit. Let’s go.” I tossed my Coke into the wastebasket and started out. Then stopped and called to the agents manning the screens, “Call Philos. Tell him to keep an eye on me and send a team.”

  Before they could ask questions, we were out the door.

  54

  I ran blindly through baggage claim, slipping on the first turn around the carousel and landing hard on my left knee and hand. I was up again and running before anyone could assist, and by now we were attracting attention. I didn’t bother signaling the agents. It would take forever to get them to leave their stations, but for sure someone would see what was going on and report it. And it was on CCTV. I kept running for the door. Alison was nowhere to be seen, but in truth I didn’t look back. I slid my ID through the sensor and opened the door to the arriving baggage area and the tarmac just as Alison caught up. A few men were working. Most were waiting. I stopped, looked around, no cleaners.

  “Anyone see the cleaning crew?” I shouted at two men sitting on the edge of a cart looking out onto the field.

  “Which cleaning crew?” a tired-looking, middle-aged black man asked, as he wiped perspiration from his brow with a bandanna pulled from his back pocket.

  “Off 009. Just now.” He looked out onto the tarmac.

  “No, man. I wasn’t looking.”

  I waved and ran out in the direction of the big plane. Alison followed. It was still light, but only just, and I had difficulty adjusting from the brightly lit terminal to the autumnal dusk. We stopped running when we arrived under the wing, just short of the mounting stairs. The area was deserted, at least at ground level. The 747-400 was grounded by wheel chocks hoses and huge electrical cords, and looked eerie in the twilight.

  “Check every door to the terminal. You go left. Use your card. Just check. Nothing else. Call me if you see anything. You have your phone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Do you have me on speed dial on that thing?” I indicated the mobile phone she had in her hand. Alison nodded. “Call me for anything. You have to keep in touch. Understand?” She nodded again. I ran to the right. I ran hard for about fifty yards and found myself facing the back wall of the terminal. Back where I started. Farther to the right was the massive industrial piping of the HVAC building. Beyond that was the tower. It wasn’t going to be the tower. Too much security.

  The HVAC building. HVAC and anthrax. My imagination soared. Oh my God! That was it. For starters they could kill every person in the airport. Everyone breathing airport air. Every breathing thing. Shit. I wheeled and headed for the building. I remembered the general position of the door and saved seconds of searching. It was no longer obvious in the early evening, and when I found it, it was secured. There was no way to know whether the dead bolts had been thrown. Steel molding prevented slipping a credit card along the jam to check. I leaned forward and angled the bar-coded end of my ID into the scanner. Ratchets clicked and the tongue of the automatic lock retracted. I took a deep breath and pulled the handle down. The door moved noiselessly inward for an inch or two. Time was pressing, but I was not ready to enter. A hum—or maybe it was a vibration—came from within. I eased the steel door closed until it reseated firmly in its frame. I stepped around with my back to the building. I took my phone out of my pocket, hit the A key for Alison, and was shocked as the musical calling tones began to sound. The noise surprised me. I hit the end button quickly and scrambled to silence the tones and redial. I wasted ten precious seconds. The first call must have alerted Alison because she answered before I heard the phone ring.

  “Why did you hang up?”

  “Call Philos and tell him to bring people over to the HVAC building near the tower. Tell him to get here quickly. Very quickly, stat.” I ended the call before she could ask questions, for fear of being overheard, and turned toward the door again. They had to be in here. Just the fact that the dead bolts on the second lock hadn’t been thrown meant someone was in there. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and eased the door open enough to slip in. It was dark. The floor was hard and smooth. A few searing shards of light appeared like crossed swords from left and right, where rooms came off the entry foyer. I closed my eyes tight and stood still against the closed door, waiting for my vision to accommodate to the dark. I waited several seconds, then looked away from where I remembered the light sources to be. The room was large and sharp-sided, possibly square. It was tall and both deep and wide, but the center was consumed by enclosed machinery giving off the rhythmic hum I had felt, more than heard, outside. Coming from the top of the box were the huge turned pipes that I had seen hugging the outside walls of the building after they exited the box. I could not make out where they breeched the walls. That had to be part of the air-conditioning apparatus. As I approached it, with my hand against the steel container for stability, it was cold to the touch, and I could identify the hum as rushing water, part of the straining apparatus that kept the water in the system clear. Behind it were the first three steps of a wide steel staircase. The wedges of light had nothing to do with doors or windows, and I could see they were white, pinpoint safety lights identifying the edges of the steel landing.

  Making my way along the wall and heading for the staircase, I took exaggerated strides—high-stepping, slow steps—trying to avoid unnecess
ary noise. Nearing the corner, I extended my upper body to sneak a look, but as I did, my right foot lost its purchase and slipped forward. It was all I could do to avoid falling against the wall. My hand slapped the steel, but there was no noise beyond the continuous, muffled rush of water. The oil or grease underfoot was unexpected. The place felt surgically clean. I heard nothing unusual. Two more careful steps and I rounded the corner, then I lost footing again and my right foot shot forward. My arms were flailing, and I was about to complete a full split when my right foot wedged under something solid and I fell forward, my fall broken by another person.

  My hands were suddenly wet, and I pushed forcefully against the bulk. I tried to get up. I wanted to apologize, but the person didn’t move. I was on top of a body, a recently dead body. Still warm and covered in fresh blood, the same blood that I had slipped on seconds ago. I got to my knees and took stock. It was a man’s body. About my size, maybe an inch or two shorter, and beefy. A working man in a baggage-handler’s uniform. All but the very side of his reflective vest was covered with blood. I touched the pooling blood again. It was warm and not coagulated. He could not have been dead for more than minutes. I quickly tried to feel for his carotid pulse to be sure. There was none. His head was bent away at a grotesque angle, almost gone. His throat had been severed with a very sharp blade wielded with the force of a powerful butcher. Ear to ear. Both carotids and his jugular veins were laid open. His trachea was cut through, and the bones of his neck were shining through the gaping muscles. It would have taken no more than a minute for him to bleed out, seconds to lose consciousness.

  My fingers were stuck together with blood. I stood up and wiped my hands on my pants. I spread my fingers and wiped between them, one after another, again and again. I tried to think. How many were there? I had no idea. There was no way to know. They were in the building, that was certain, and the best I could figure they would probably sacrifice the mule—this wasn’t going to be a surgical implant removal. It would be fast and dirty and inhumane. And then the real damage would be done. One death, two deaths, ten thousand here, and maybe the watershed next. There was enough anthrax in those implants to cripple the entire metropolitan area.

  I took the metal stairs two at a time. Twelve long strides and the wall of steel doors appeared at the landing. I listened at the first and heard nothing. There were four in all, and something inside me didn’t want to find the one that opened to the mayhem that was in store. Then there was a noise. It sounded loud and disturbing, and for a moment I thought the man at the foot of the stairs was moving. I looked for cover, but there was none. Instead, I held fast to the darkest spot along the wall. I tried to see what was going on, but it was too dark. The ambient light up here had reversed my night vision. I was blind to what was going on beneath me, but I wasn’t deaf. Whoever was moving down there was doing nothing at all to mask the noise. All I could think of was to wait at the top of the stairs, then spring from the dark, hit him with my shoulder, and hope he went down the stairs. But then I would have to run. No chance of going undiscovered with the noise of a body bouncing down twenty-four steps. Two, three, four footfalls on the stairs. The sound of metal against metal. The sounds were very close. I bent into a football lineman’s position, balanced on the fingers of my right hand, and prepared to launch myself. And then a barely audible “Wendell? Wendell, are you here?”

  I stood. “Shh. Up here.” I listened to, more than watched, Alison as she approached. She had the Beretta in her right hand and still held the metal railing with her left. That much I could see.

  “Did you see the body?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re up here,” I said, edging toward the doors, when a single, terrifying scream filled the cold space. Then it went quiet again. Dead quiet for seconds before I could make out muffled male voices. No need to guess about what was happening. “Let’s go in. You cover me.” I didn’t wait for an answer. There was no time. No time at all.

  I lifted the heavy metal lever, and the locking mechanism disengaged smoothly. Despite what we had heard, I managed to maintain some caution and entered slowly. The industrial space was well lit by gangs of fluorescent bulbs hanging ten or twelve feet above the floor. The long wall across from the entry housed evenly spaced louvered metal fins, behind which mechanical elements were visible. The floor between where we entered and the wall was clean and clear of debris. It was painted light gray, and the reflection of the lights was dazzling. I took a second to squeeze my eyelids closed, then reopened them, squinting against the light. There was a neat tool station along the left wall, and a clean metal worktable was bolted to the floor a few feet in front of it. The room echoed the lower floor and bent around the central condenser. I motioned Alison to stop, and I tried to look around the corner without being seen, which didn’t matter. The carnage in front of us had run from the work-height metal table onto the floor. A figure, nude from the waist, was fastened to the surface by encircling coils of gray duct tape. The head was extended at an unnatural angle over the end of the table, and the neck had been brutally slashed, like that of the body downstairs, No more than a minute had passed since we heard the scream, and the arterial spurts of blood had already stopped. Two slash wounds were on the chest where the breasts had been. Bright blood painted the flanks, and darker red pools were forming on the steel.

  Even without the implants, the body could just as easily be assumed to be a female as a hairless, slight male. A fast glance at the ghostly face didn’t offer a clue, and it didn’t matter. They had the anthrax, and they were about to use it. Alison and I were icily clinical regarding the body and did not even utter any of the very human clichés. Instead, we bolted through the open door at the other end of the room and started to mount another tall flight of steel stairs. An orange reflecting vest flashed around a corner at the top of the stairs and disappeared.

  “There,” I said, and began running up the stairs. There were two of them in reflective vests. They moved purposefully to the face of a vibrating sheet-metal duct that consumed the entire wall. They were not yet aware of us, and neither looked back. When they did turn, the reality of the situation became clear. Both were wearing gauntlet-type rubber gloves covering their arms to the elbows, and re-breathing masks. They faced each other, and we could see them clearly in profile. Their faces were science fiction anteaters with plastic eye shields. The man on the left was working a heavy-duty electric bolt wrench, removing the fifth of a series of ten screw-fasteners holding the six-foot metal door in the duct. The other held the breast implants, one in each outstretched palm, in the manner of an offering in a pagan ritual. I didn’t see a bloody knife or a pistol. They held nothing dangerous except five hundred grams of the deadliest bacterial weapon known to man.

  55

  The man holding the anthrax-filled implants turned to face us with robot-like movements. He moved his head as though the re-breathing device had fixed it in place. He stepped forty-five degrees to his right before alerting his companion to our presence, all the while holding the implants out and away from his body. He did not threaten us with them. He did nothing but stare at us. When the other man saw us, he looked away, then at us again, then at the anthrax, as if to be sure we got the picture, and resumed removing the last fastening bolts from the window in the duct.

  Weighing the odds of stopping the attack, or even surviving this confrontation, was paralyzing. I froze. They froze. The whole ballet could not have taken ten seconds, but it was a lifetime. Then the sheet metal door from the duct crashed to the floor. The racket was deafening. Everything was back in motion, but the speed was wrong. We had forever to make our moves. They were going to break open the implants and dump the infectious powder into the air-distribution ducts. The window in the main duct was well beyond the HEPA filters and the cleansing system. Nothing could stop it. Huge volumes of forced air would carry the spores through miles of ductwork, contaminating every cubic millimeter of air in the entire airport complex. Mothers and children,
bartenders and pizza-makers, cops, customs agents, voyagers, welcomers, ticket sellers and taxi hustlers, every person who breathed the comfortably climate-controlled air was doomed.

  I turned to Alison and pushed her back to the staircase. “Go. Go,” I shouted. “Let’s get out of here. Hurry.” I had the framework of a plan, but I had surprised her and she did not know how to respond. I forced her back, and she hesitated, trying to regain her footing while backpedaling onto the first step. I grabbed the handrail and flew downward past her. I looked up to see that Alison had dropped to her left knee and smoothly brought the Beretta to combat position in both hands. She fired off two rapid series of three shots each. The deafening noise made me stop in my tracks. I was halfway down the stairs, but it was easy to see what had happened. The first volley blew away the entire skull-cap of the man holding the anthrax. The shots instantly splattered the remains of his brain onto the bright steel wall. She pumped a second close grouping into the chest of the other man as he struggled to free a large knife from his belt. He went down to his knees, and then onto his face, with the knife handle still in his fist. It was good shooting.

  Alison remained in the firing position staring at what she had done. I stumbled back up to her. I could see one implant on the floor. It appeared intact. The other had to be under the body. Maybe broken open, maybe not. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet.

  “Now! We have to leave now. Listen to me, please,” I said loudly, almost unable to coax her from the scene. “Come on. Don’t breathe. Exhale only; don’t inhale. Hold your breath and run.” When she was halfway down the first flight, I released her hand and hurtled downward as fast as I could, falling down at least as many steps as I navigated. Alison was right behind me. We ran around the body on the floor, and just inside the door, I threw the light switch, opened the door, and pushed Alison to safety. I was beginning to feel the need to breathe. I could hold out for another fifteen seconds, but my mind was playing panic games. Then I saw it, right where I remembered it to be: chest-high on the tool wall. I ran to the far side of the bench. My lungs were exploding. I flipped the steel safety door open, grabbed the horizontal handle, and threw the main power switch down. The quiet was instant, the compressors and fans stopped humming, the sound of running water ceased, and the air stopped blowing. The room was dark again. Lights from the terminal twinkled through the open door. I followed the lights and ran outside, pulling the door closed behind me.