There was no hurry now. Mobius was gone in the night. She took her time easing the sedan into reverse, backing and filling until she found the tracks made by her own tires and was able to slowly climb the hill and regain the road. Layers of foliage brushed the car, clinging briefly and pulling free, leaving twigs and briers and leaves behind. Her hair was full of the stuff.
Once on the road, she made a U-turn. The sedan was making a variety of unsettling noises, several warning lights were glowing on the dash, and the left front tire seemed to be going flat. Even so, she made it back to Dodge’s house.
A brief stagger brought her to his front door, still open as she’d left it.
She entered, turned on the lights, found a phone. She had Andrus’s number on speed-dial on her fried cell phone, but she couldn’t remember it offhand, so she called the field office’s switchboard. Larkin answered.
"It’s McCallum," she said. "I just had a run-in with Mobius."
"You’re kidding me."
She ignored this. "And I got his plate number."
"Tess, if this is some kind of gag—"
"It’s no joke, Peter. I’m goddamn serious. I need you to run a trace on Mobius’s license plate. Right now."
She recited the plate number, which she’d memorized just before losing the coupe on the switchback curve.
"I’m putting it through," Larkin said. "Christ, what the hell happened?"
"He killed a cop. Tried to kill me. I didn’t get a look at him, but I know what he’s driving. Blue Camaro or Firebird, late model. Of course, the plate could’ve been taken off another vehicle—"
"It wasn’t."
"Results came back?"
"They sure did, and the plate goes with a late-model Firebird belonging to…God damn it."
"What?"
"Looks like we all screwed up."
"What does that mean?"
"We had him in our hands, and we let him walk. Let him walk right out."
She sank down slowly on her knees, still holding the telephone handset. "Who is it?" she whispered. But she already knew—even though it couldn’t be.
She’d looked into his eyes, right into his eyes, and there had been nothing.
Nothing at all.
He couldn’t have fooled her so completely. Couldn’t have.
But he had.
"It’s Hayde," Larkin was saying. "Our friend from the interrogation last night—Mr. William Hayde."
PART THREE
36
Mobius, underground.
He felt curiously at home here, in the subterranean deeps, one hundred feet below the city pavement. He liked the sense of entombment, of burial. He had died once, sinking into the bloody water, a shout of bubbles pouring from his mouth, and he had never really returned to life. It was appropriate that in his simulacrum of living he should find himself interred.
He waited, doing his best to attract no attention. Surveillance cameras were mounted around the station, and later the tapes were sure to be scrutinized, even digitally enhanced. The platform was brightly lit by banks of overhead lights, and he had to assume that the video would be of good quality.
To conceal his features, he was wearing a baseball cap and an oversize bomber jacket with the flaps turned up. On tape he would be a meaningless, unidentifiable smudge.
He glanced around at the other people gathered on the subway platform of the Hollywood/Highland station, waiting for the next northbound Metro Red Line train. Ridership was high on a Saturday night, and on the return trip—the run south into Hollywood from Universal City—there would be even more people, families returning from movies, couples finishing their dates.
There would be many people to kill on the southbound train.
"We’re putting out an alert," Larkin said. "Trouble is, he could be anywhere."
"Maybe not." Tess was thinking hard. "Michaelson told you to check Hayde’s background. Did you?"
"Sure. He told us the truth. Used to live in Colorado Springs. Moved here to—"
"Work on the Metro."
"Shit."
"It’s an ideal environment for a chemical attack. Sealed off from the outside, lots of people, public access…"
"I’ll tell LAPD to focus on the Metro stations. Call you back."
Larkin ended the call, and Tess stood there with the phone in her hand, still thinking.
She was right about this. She was certain of it. Not only was the Metro a logical target, but it was something Hayde was familiar with, something that had a personal association for him.
And for Mobius, she knew, it was always personal.
At 10:15 the train pulled into the station, six heavy-rail cars bearing the logo of a red M. Each car was seventy-five feet long and had a maximum capacity of 169 riders. One thousand passengers, more or less. It was crowded now, and on the return leg it would be full.
Mobius boarded with the others, choosing the central car, grabbing one of the few empty seats. He sat there with a paper bag on his lap, looking like any ordinary man.
The train started moving, and the dim walls of the Red Line tunnel blurred past. Other parts of the subway system had been drilled through loose sediment, but the segment from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley penetrated solid rock.
In the seventeen-mile network of subway tunnels, the Hollywood/Highland station was the westernmost point on the south side of the Hollywood Hills. From that station, the Metro Red Line proceeded northwest through the mountains toward its next stop, Universal City, a trip of a little more than two miles that would be covered in about four minutes.
The train accelerated, hitting its top speed of seventy miles per hour. Mobius and his fellow passengers were deep under the mountains now. At certain points in the trip the train would be nine hundred feet below the surface.
Nine hundred feet was not quite deep enough for Hell, but for the riders on the southbound train, it would be close enough.
Casually he reached into the brown paper bag and removed the device.
It would attract no attention even if someone looked his way. He had wrapped it in aluminum foil to resemble a sandwich. He made a brief show of starting to open it, then allowed it to drop on the floor under his seat.
Was anyone watching him? No.
He reached for the package. Instead of retrieving it, he pressed it to the underside of the seat, securing it with loose strands of duct tape he had left in place for that purpose.
Duct tape was such useful stuff. It bound wrists, sealed lips, and affixed a package of death to its hidey-hole.
Before straightening, he rustled the paper sack as if stuffing the package back inside. Anyone who had glanced at his little drama would have seen a man drop his sandwich on the floor, retrieve it, and shove it back into the bag in disgust.
Everything was set.
Minutes from now, after the train had reached its northernmost point and turned around to head south again, after it had picked up riders at North Hollywood and Universal City, after it had reentered this long stretch of tunnel under the Santa Monica Mountains—when the cars were crowded with distracted, tired, intoxicated people, people who were heading home early, frightened by the media reports, jamming the train to full capacity—then there would be an outbreak of chaos.
He could imagine it in clear detail—the screams, the bleeding arms and legs cut by flying glass.
And all the while, the invisible, odorless fumes of VX fanning out, entering the intake ducts of the air-circulation system, traveling throughout the train, until all six cars were filled with gas.
A fully loaded train meant roughly one thousand people.
The ones in the central car would be first to die. But others in the adjacent cars would follow.
Not all of them, of course. Some would be far enough away to escape the worst of the fumes. They would inhale a nonlethal dose of the gas and escape onto the platform of the next station in time to rid their bodies of toxins.
Unless the train stopped in the t
unnel, under the mountains.
That was possible. The trains were designed to cease operation automatically during an earthquake. There might be other emergency protocols, including one for a terrorist attack, that would initiate a shutdown of power.
He hoped so.
Because if the train did stop somewhere deep in the heart of the mountains, then no one—no one—would survive.
Mobius smiled, a calm, almost beatific smile that felt rare and beautiful on his lips.
It was all coming together. Everything was falling into place.
Tess bent over the corpse of Detective Jim Dodge, going through his pockets, feeling like a grave robber.
Well, there was no time for the respect ordinarily afforded the property of the dead. She needed a vehicle, and her bureau sedan was too badly damaged to be dependable. In Dodge’s pants pocket she found his car keys. She needed a cell phone also, and her own had been sacrificed back at the motel. She took Dodge’s phone out of his jacket.
She tried not to look at him. She wanted to believe he’d been unconscious the whole time. But she knew he hadn’t been. He’d died with his eyes open, and the duct tape binding his wrists to the headboard had been creased and twisted by the straining of his arms.
A phone rang—not the cell phone, but a landline. She answered and heard Larkin’s voice. "Found the car."
"So soon?"
"You were right about the Metro. LAPD found the Firebird illegally parked outside the Hollywood/Highland station."
"You have to stop the trains. Get the passengers off."
"I know that, Tess. We’re on it."
"It has to happen now. He has nerve agent; he can take out an entire train—"
"Tess. Chill. We’re on it. You’re not the only brain in this outfit. Subway operators are under orders from the dispatchers to stop at the next station and empty the trains. Everybody out. All Red Line traffic shut down, all sixteen stations evacuated. LAPD’s coordinating it with the ROC—Rail Operations Center, the Metro’s command post."
"Any idea which train he took?"
"There’s a couple that departed Hollywood/Highland at the right time. Could’ve gone east toward the center of town, or north into the Valley."
"The Valley," she said instantly. "He’ll want as long a stretch of uninterrupted travel as possible."
"In that case, he’s pulling into the Universal City station right now. And some friendly folks in blue are waiting for him. They’ve got Hayde’s DL picture, and they’ll be on the lookout."
"Then we’ve got him?" Tess could hardly believe it. "We’ve got Mobius?"
"If he’s on that train," Larkin said, "he’s fucked."
The platform of the Universal City station slid into view. Mobius was already on his feet and heading for the exit.
The train stopped, the doors eased open, and his breath caught in his throat.
They had caught him. Somehow they had tracked him here.
Two LAPD police officers waited directly outside the train.
Only two. He might have a chance to fight back.
He tensed his body, then heard the loudspeaker reverberating through the station, and he knew he was safe for the moment.
"This is an emergency," a recorded voice was saying in waves of amplified distortion. "Exit the station immediately."
Other cops were shouting above the loudspeaker’s repetitive message, telling the passengers that extra MTA buses were being requisitioned to get them where they needed to go. "Head to street level and you’ll be taken care of," the cops were saying.
He’d made it past the first hurdle, but there would be police at the main exit, checking every passenger. They might identify him. He couldn’t take the risk.
But he also couldn’t stand around on the platform, drawing attention to himself.
Things were getting unexpectedly complicated. But he would handle it.
Nothing worried him any longer. Not even Tess McCallum would be a problem now. She might have seen his license plate during the chase—but it didn’t matter.
He couldn’t be stopped. He had the power. A power he would unleash—soon—and with it, kill them all.
37
Tess hadn’t known what to expect as far as traffic was concerned. Of course she’d insisted at the ATSAC briefing that the city could cope with news of a crisis, but maybe she’d been wrong.
Or maybe not.
Because amazingly the freeways and the surface streets were clear. If anything, there was less traffic than usual for a Saturday night, and the drivers who were out here showed no signs of panic. They braked at stop signs and traffic lights, they signaled before changing lanes, they drove within the speed limit—or at least didn’t exceed the limit any more than on any other night.
At first she thought maybe they just hadn’t heard. They could have been at a party or a movie, insulated from the news. But idling at a red light, she clearly heard the radio from the minivan beside her, a newscaster’s voice talking about the threat of chemical attack. There was no anxiety in the newscaster’s tone or in the expression of the woman driving the van.
Down the street she saw a crowd of people gathered around a big-screen television in a bar. As she passed the plate-glass windows, she saw the image of Myron Levine switch to a basketball game. Someone had changed the channel.
There were more LAPD units on the street—black-and-white patrol cars, and detectives’ cruisers in the same color scheme, but lacking rooftop emergency lights. Plenty of cops, but nothing much for them to do. The streets were quiet. She passed a woman carrying a bag of groceries from a corner convenience store, a man walking his dog, kids skateboarding in a parking lot. There was no fear here.
When she shot onto the Ventura Freeway, speeding east to Universal City, she saw only a light stream of traffic moving at a steady pace.
She had been more right than she knew. The news hadn’t panicked the city. Its citizens were stronger, calmer, saner than the political leaders had been willing to admit. A degree of risk was part of the package of urban life—of all life these days.
If Mobius had hoped to terrify the city, he’d misjudged matters. Although, she had to add, if he succeeded in pulling off an attack, if the theoretical risk became real and tangible, the city’s sea walls against panic still might crumble.
Well, it was up to her and Andrus and Tennant and all the others to make sure that didn’t happen.
She parked near the Universal City Metro station, at a red-painted curb below a stern NO PARKING sign.
Let Dodge get a ticket. He wouldn’t be paying it.
Crowds milled around outside the station, apparently waiting for MTA buses to take them to their destinations. Some passengers were still filing through the doors, each one briefly stopped by uniformed police officers on a pretext of directing them to the waiting area. Tess knew they were actually checking each face and comparing it with William Hayde’s driver’s license photo.
Even here she saw no panic, not even any unruliness or complaining. Word of an emergency situation had spread throughout the trainload of riders, and they were responding calmly and reasonably—more calmly, in fact, than the bulk of the attendees at the ATSAC meeting.
Tess approached one of the patrol officers and showed her bureau creds.
"Sorry," the cop said. "No one gets in without Stage One clearance."
"Stage what?"
"Stage One," a voice said from behind her. She turned and saw Jack Tennant. "It’s a new wrinkle the Emergency Management honchos dreamed up. Basically you need one of these."
He fingered a laminated card hanging from a strap around his neck. The cop glanced at it and gestured to let him go through.
Tess thought Tennant was going to abandon her, but instead he jerked a thumb in her direction and said, "She’s on my dance card."
The cop let her pass.
She accompanied Tennant to the lower level of the station, past a few stragglers ascending from the platform. Every face th
at slipped by received her close scrutiny. But Hayde’s face was not among them.
"Thanks for getting me in," she told Tennant.
He shrugged. "I hear he went after you."
She nodded. "I guess you weren’t the only one who wanted me off the case." This was a cheap dig, but she felt entitled.
"I was wrong about that."
This surprised her. "Were you?"
"Never should’ve kept you off the task force. Tell you the truth, it wasn’t because I doubted your competence." He looked away, then seemed to realize this was cowardly and turned to meet her gaze. "In the LAX fiasco, one of my agents nearly got killed. A female agent."
"You weren’t trying to protect me because I’m a woman?"
He smiled. "What can I say? I’m a male chauvinist. At least I own up to it. How’d he try to take you out?"
"VX in the air conditioner of my motel room. I don’t suppose there’s any chance he used it all up."
"No way. He wouldn’t have needed more than a few drops. It was sort of a test run."
Tess thought it was a test she’d nearly flunked.
Tennant was looking her over. "Have you received medical attention?"
"Only the antidotes I self-injected."
"You should be at a trauma center, under observation."
"I’m fine."
"You don’t know that. Those the same clothes you were wearing during the attack?"
"Yes." They were, in fact, the same clothes she’d been wearing for the past thirty-six hours.
"You should’ve changed. Droplets of nerve agent can get trapped between your clothes and skin. You could be outgassing right now."
"Sounds more like a problem you’d encounter after a quick meal at Taco Bell."
"I’m serious."
"I think I’m okay. I got pretty thoroughly aired out over the last hour."
"If you feel any symptoms, report it immediately."
The evacuated train was sitting at the station platform, six cars, fully lighted, completely empty. There was something eerie about seeing it there, as if it were the last train still running in a depopulated world. Mobius’s kind of world. A world of the dead.
Next Victim Page 24