“No so far.”
“How long?”
“You got till 1730 hours.”
Munroe looked at his watch. Almost 3.00. He had until 5.30. No time, and he didn’t have the manpower on the ground to run any kind of search off the books. He had two plays. Option one, call Starshak back, get Chicago PD on this, give them everything they’d worked out about al Din’s timeline and hope to hell they found these things before they went off. Option two; just let the clock run out. Have to ice the two guys out at Argonne, wouldn’t do to have it get out Uncle Sam had known tens of thousands of Americans were going to die and just sat on his hands. Once he’d heard about the bio angle, Munroe had made some preparations on the QT, had a shit load of Cipro in a National Guard armory up near O’Hare, had a mess of other shit either in town or teed up and ready to wing in on his say so – isolation units, HAZMAT suits, body bags. Had rough outlines for a couple different quarantine scenarios he could ram down the National Guard’s throat if it came to that. Of course, the Guard would only be running things until they could get regular Army in here. And he knew what was in the weapons, the medical confusion they were meant to cause. Be able to get word out so everybody knew exactly what they were dealing with. That meant they’d keep the body count down to the very low end of the projections. Problem being the low end was still around ten thousand – three times as many as 9/11.
Upside would be this. The coverage you’d get. Every talking head in the world doing stand-ups in front of the bodies stacking up in temporary morgues, some ghost town shots of the Loop, CDC guys wandering around in spacesuits, hospitals with beds lining the halls. Couple days of that, Munroe could probably get the President to sign off on nuking Tehran. And the Mexican problem? Tea Party ass hats would have to give up on their border fence. That thing would have to come down so we could get the armor over the border.
He walked over to the window, looked down at the plaza where they had the Calder sculpture. Thing looked like a giant red spider. Town sure did like its funny statues. Lots of people walking back and forth, a mom chasing a couple little ones around the legs of the sculpture, one of the kids giving out a happy squeal loud enough he could just hear it through the glass.
Not much of a shot. Have to get lucky as hell. Sensible thing was to let it play out, cover his tracks. But everybody’s got a line they won’t cross. It’s just that Munroe had never hit it. Was starting to think he didn’t have one. Turned out he did.
The Chicago guys would still be in the building. He called Hickman, told him to round them up and bring them back.
CHAPTER 99
Fifteen minutes later, two hours and twenty minutes to go. Starshak, Lynch, Bernstein and Munroe were on one side of the conference table in the windowless room across from the conference room they’d been in earlier. Hundreds of photos of al Din on the walls. Hardin and Wilson stood across the table. Munroe figured they’d been playing footsie with al Din all week, they might come up with something.
“Most of this is out of our system,” Lynch said.
“Your system and elsewhere,” said Munroe.
“So where was all this when you were supposedly cooperating with us?”
Munroe shrugged. “You really want to waste time on that right now? All this will be over one way or another in a few hours. You wanna step outside then, find out if you’re as big a badass as you think you are, fine.”
Lynch clenched his jaw, nodded, looked down at the pictures.
“Fucker’s been everywhere,” said Starshak. “Got him at Sears Tower, Aon Center, the Hancock. Hell, he’s been in and out of anything over fifty stories at least once. Pretty much every hotel within pissing distance of downtown. Illinois Center, all the pedestrian tunnels in there. It’ll take us a week to search that alone.”
“You’ll want to get into the HVAC centers for the bigger buildings,” said Wilson. “Get the building maintenance guys in there with them, they should know if something’s out of place. He gets one of those to pop into the duct work…”
“Good thought,” Munroe said, looking at her a little sideways.
“My ex was an AC guy,” she said. “Always said if you wanted to gas a building, that was the way to go.”
Starshak made calls, got units headed to the HVAC centers at the bigger targets.
“You sure we shouldn’t be starting an evacuation?” Lynch said.
“No time,” Munroe said. “Besides, evacuate to where? We got pictures of him in,” he picked up a sheet of paper, “Schaumburg, Aurora, Naperville, Joliet, Elgin – pretty much every population center you’ve got in fifty miles out in any direction. Malls, hotels, where you going to send ’em? And cranking up the pedestrian traffic while we’re looking for these things is just going to make it worse. Everything we got that can help is on its way here – drugs, docs, we got quarantine contingencies in place for every option we can think of. You let me worry about the worst case, you worry about finding the damn devices.”
Lynch stared at the pictures. Something was itching at him, and he couldn’t think what. Also, Munroe being in the room was hurting his concentration, because every time Munroe opened his mouth, Lynch wanted to stick a gun in it.
“Munroe, your guys took one of these apart,” Hardin said. “How do they work?”
“How about we have shop class later?” said Starshak.
“Hey, it’s a weapon,” said Hardin. “You understand how it works, then you know how it should be deployed.”
Starshak just nodded. Munroe held up an 11x17 sheet, exploded view based off the device.
“When the time hits zero, a CO2 cartridge is going to blow, rupturing the membrane at the end of the container and shooting the bugs out. This stuff is really fine. A particle of talcum powder is ten microns; all of this is smaller than that. Once it’s out, it’s going to float around very easily. Most of these infections will be through inhalation, but a couple of these agents will work transdermal. So his best bet is a confined space with high pedestrian traffic.”
“Which means he doesn’t have to get these up high to get people to inhale anything,” Bernstein said. “Particles that size, they’ll float around on the air. You could dump it on the floor, it would get kicked up like dust.”
“Yeah,” Munroe said.
“You’re al Din, you want to plant these somewhere public because you want traffic,” Hardin said. “You either have to break in and plant them when a place is closed, which ramps up your risk. Or you have to plant them while people are around.”
“If he was going to risk a break in, then he’d go for the HVAC system,” said Bernstein. “Maximum damage. Why risk a break in just to stick them somewhere he could hide them during business hours?”
“OK, that makes sense,” Starshak said. “We got people checking HVAC. So how’s he gonna do it if he’s in public? How do we narrow it down?”
“Shoulder to waist,” Munroe said. “Basic tradecraft, like marking a dead drop. He isn’t going to climb up on anything, get down on the floor, bend over, anything that draws attention.”
“Pointed up, I’d guess,” Lynch said. “If airborne is better, then get it airborne. Why wait for people to kick it up?”
Starshak waved his hand. “Best we’re gonna do. So, waist to shoulder height, somewhere he can just reach in quick, probably pointed up.”
Munroe nodded. “Tell your guys to just walk and look, ask themselves where they’d stick something if they had to.”
Starshak relayed the instructions to dispatch.
Bernstein was leaning on the table, looking down at the pictures.
“Something’s fucked up about this,” he said.
“That’s what I thought,” said Lynch. “Just can’t think what.”
Bernstein started picking up pictures at random: al Din in the lobby at the Hyatt, Sox cap on, but a good side angle, green nylon messenger bag on his shoulder. Al Din in the pedestrian tunnel running from City Hall to Macy’s, Bears’ cap this time, still with the messenger bag. He flipped the pictures over to check the dates and times. He picked up another photo. No cap this time, still with the messenger bag, pretty much looking dead into the camera. He flipped it over. Just a number on the back.