Next Victim (35 page)

No one was there.

Andrus had left the area.

So what to do?

Make a run for it, she decided, join the crowd fleeing out the door. Leave Andrus down here, if he chose to hide and die. The VX fumes would get him—and if not, he would be trapped, caught in another standoff, like the one that had started it all in 1968.

She started down the hall, checking every door she passed, aware that Andrus could be concealed behind any one of them. The PA system bleated its insistent message all around her.

Turning the corner, she saw the main room straight ahead. Already it had mostly emptied out. The two LAPD representatives—the ones whose voices she’d heard—were hustling stragglers through the doorway.

And on a chair in the middle of the room, neatly draped without a crease—Andrus’s jacket.

That was where he’d left the bomb. Under his jacket, on the chair.

She opened her mouth to cry out, tell the policemen to grab the jacket and fling it away—

And the room exploded.

44

Noise, light, a shattering blast, and Tess pivoted and dived around the corner before she could be spattered with debris.

Her ears chimed. Bluish lights shimmered across her field of vision.

This bomb had been more powerful than the one in the subway. Mobius—Andrus—wasn’t fooling around here.

She struggled to her feet and dared a look back.

The main room was hidden in a cloud of smoke and dust and shining droplets that made rainbows in the air. The droplets were VX, and they were everywhere in the room.

She peered toward the exit. Had the last evacuees made it out? She couldn’t tell. The haze of debris was too thick.

All she could make out were a few overturned chairs and smashed computer consoles, and ragged pieces of Andrus’s jacket fluttering in the breeze from the air-conditioning.

The air-conditioning…which even now was drawing in the mist of VX, to circulate it throughout the complex.

The filters were designed to screen out toxins only from outside. Against a nerve agent already inside the command center, the filters would be useless.

She couldn’t exit through the main room. To go in there would mean instant death.

But there was no other way out.

She was stuck in here, and all she could do was wait until the AC system brought the gas to her. It wouldn’t take long.

Her best bet was to take refuge in the rear of the facility, as far from the main room as possible.

She retreated down the hall to the last two doorways, the office and the storeroom. The office, she supposed, was a better refuge. It had a phone and a computer—maybe she could get in touch with the outside world. There was nothing in the storeroom except the PA system, still repeating its idiot spiel, and some boxes and gear and—

The hazmat suits.

A rack of them. She’d seen them when she’d entered, though she had barely registered their existence at the time.

She darted into the storeroom, and yes, there they were, five orange suits and matching helmets.

Five…

There had been six before.

Then she understood.

Andrus had forced open the door in order to draw her out. He hadn’t wanted to engage her in a firefight. He had wanted—needed—access to the suits.

While she’d gone down the hall and nearly walked right into the explosion, he’d been suiting up. Now he was in a mobile self-contained environment, breathing filtered air, protected from exposure. He was safe even in this toxic atmosphere.

And she could be, too.

She grabbed a suit from the rack and spread it out on the floor, then prepared to step into it. To do so, she would have to put down her gun. For a minute or two she would be completely vulnerable. If Andrus crept up, he could take her out before she had any chance to react.

Couldn’t be helped. She had to get into the suit or the fumes would kill her.

She set the gun down, then slipped her feet inside the baggy socks built into the suit. She pulled the suit up around her armpits, then worked her arms into the sleeves until her hands had filled out the heavy-duty rubber gloves attached by gaskets. A row of yellow rubber boots lay underneath the suits. She slipped into the nearest pair.

The suit wasn’t heavy, but it was large—at least one size too big for her—and awkward to handle, and she found herself struggling with the thick folds of neoprene rubber. A seam, similar to the closure of a Ziploc bag, ran up the suit from the midsection to the chin. She pressed the flaps together, sealing the front of the suit.

Now only her head was exposed. She removed a helmet from the shelf above the rack. It was not a hard plastic shell like an astronaut’s helmet, but rather a loose tent of cloth with a flexible face mask in front, and when she dropped it over her head she felt as if she were enclosed in a bubble. Another Ziploc seal secured the bubble helmet to the suit, and now she was fully protected.

A rush of claustrophobia drained her strength, and for a moment she had a suicidal impulse to remove the helmet. She fought off the fear.

The air trapped in the suit would go stale in only a few minutes. She groped for the battery-operated air pack at the back of the suit and turned it on.

The electric blower came to life, and the suit puffed up with an inflow of air. Filters in the built-in air circulation system would screen out VX and any other toxin. At least, that was the theory.

The suit, inflated, had swelled to twice its original size. Instead of hanging off her, it was now as hard and smooth as an exoskeleton. She must look like the Michelin Man. The thought almost made her smile, but the smile died when she noticed a fine mist clouding the room.

The VX had made its way through the complex’s air-conditioning vents. The storage room was filling with it. If she’d been a minute slower in donning the suit, she would be dying right now.

45

She picked up her gun, holding it awkwardly in her gloved hand. Carefully she tried inserting her forefinger between the trigger and the trigger guard. Couldn’t do it. The glove, swollen with air, made it impossible to get a grip on the trigger. She was unable to shoot.

Of course, Andrus couldn’t use his gun either.

Over the roar of the blower, the PA continued its announcement. She turned to the control panel and shut it off.

"Hi, Tess."

Andrus’s voice, close to her ear. He was right behind her. She tried to pivot, but the clumsy suit made any quick motion impossible. Slowly she turned in a graceless pirouette, an oversize ballerina in a puffy suit. She expected to come face-to-face with Andrus and see the lifted muzzle of his gun.

But he wasn’t there. The room was empty except for her.

"Hope I didn’t startle you."

His voice, as close as ever. She realized it was coming from inside her suit.

The bubble helmet was equipped with a radio set—microphone and speaker. He was addressing her over the air, from the transceiver in his own suit.

"I don’t startle that easily," she lied.

"Don’t you? Funny. I could have sworn I heard you gasp. But I could be wrong. After all, I also thought you’d be dead by now."

He’d assumed she’d been killed in the explosion. That was why he hadn’t lingered by the storeroom to get the drop on her.

But silencing the PA system had been a giveaway that she was still alive. And he must know where she was—at the control panel.

She had to get out of here before he came this way. Shuffling in her rubber boots, she moved toward the door.

"You’ve spoiled things, Tess." He was trying to sound cool, faintly amused, but she heard the undertone of raw anger in his voice. "My careful plans have been shot to hell—and all because of you."

"Sorry."

"You’re not. But I’ll make you sorry. You’re not getting out of this. You’re going to die down here."

"It’s your own future I’d be concerned about, if I were you."

Out in the hall now. Moving in the suit was hard work—like wading through thick silt or operating under the higher gravity of an alien planet. Her faceplate had fogged up with sweat. She rubbed her face against the visor to clear it.

"Not at all," Andrus said. "I intend to come out of this just fine. An hour from now, I’ll be safe…and free."

She glanced inside the office across the corridor. Andrus wasn’t there. The office looked eerily normal, a place of business like any other, except for the knife—Mobius’s knife, a knife that had slit throats—still stuck in the wall.

She hesitated, then took a step inside the office.

"How will you manage that trick?" she asked.

"Before long, a hazmat team will enter this installation. I’ll blend in with them, leave with them. Easy enough—these suits all look alike."

"They’ll be looking for you."

"Eventually—but at first they’ll assume I was killed in the blast. They’ll mourn for their beloved assistant director, I’m sure. But they’ll forget one thing."

"What’s that?"

"It’s Easter, Tess—and I am the resurrection and the life."

Brave words
, Andrus thought.

He could put up a front of bravado with Tess. But he couldn’t hide the truth from himself.

He was, to put it indelicately, fucked.

Oh, he hadn’t been lying to Tess. He still intended to survive this debacle. He would escape with his life and with the money he’d hidden in a secret bank account when he began moonlighting as Mobius three years ago.

Then there would be a new life under a new name. He had a variety of false IDs similar to the Donald Stevenson persona that had served him so well at the MiraMist.

But he would not have his triumph. He had meant to decapitate this city. He had meant to commit a crime that would elevate him to legendary heights.

She had ruined it for him. She had made a mockery of his comeback, the grand finale of his criminal career.

"That’s a hell of a plan, Gerry." Tess’s voice crackled over the headset in his hazmat suit. "You must have worked it out pretty quickly after you got hold of the VX."

"I worked it out beforehand. Remember how you told Tennant that Mobius would start to make mistakes because the VX wasn’t in the script? You were wrong, Tess, dead wrong. The VX
was
the script."

"You planned all this?"

"Yes, indeed. In the current climate of terrorist and counterterrorist activity, I knew it was only a matter of time until I obtained the kind of weapon I needed. I’ve been doing research for months. Don’t you recall my lecture on this command center? I knew a lot about the place, didn’t I? That’s because I always knew this would be ground zero. I had to know the installation’s layout—and its vulnerabilities."

"Wait a minute. You’re saying that when you picked up Amanda Pierce—"

"I already knew who she was and what she was carrying. Come on, Tess, honestly now. What are the odds of a serial killer meeting up, purely by accident, with a woman toting a canister of nerve agent?"

"Coincidences happen."

"Maybe so. But chance, said Pasteur, favors the prepared mind. And—if I might add an aphorism of my own—the prepared mind leaves nothing to chance."

46

Tess had reached the end of the corridor.

"So you arranged to meet Pierce?" she asked.

"Of course. I’d been briefed on the case. I knew Pierce was carrying a sample of a toxic agent used in chem-bio warfare. I wasn’t told what kind. I was hoping for anthrax, actually. I could have had a lot of fun with anthrax."

"You have a peculiar idea of fun."

She halted just inside the main room, surveying the destruction. Half of the workstations had been knocked over, the computer terminals smashed. Swivel chairs lay upended everywhere. The beige carpet was spotted with VX droplets.

At Universal City, she had thought of the evacuated subway train as the essence of Mobius’s world, but this was his true world, this hell of rubble and poison mist, deep underground, sealed off from light and air.

He must be somewhere in this room. He couldn’t afford to leave the exit unguarded. But the clouds of VX and pulverized debris stirred up by the air-conditioning limited her visibility. He could be hidden behind one of the long semicircular arrays of workstations or concealed behind a pile of overturned chairs. He could be two steps away from her, veiled by smoke and fog.

"Whatever it was she’d gotten hold of," Andrus said, "I wanted it. I waited until she was en route to LA—and then I called her."

"
You
called her?"

"Why not? I was able to learn her cell phone number without raising any suspicions. That’s an advantage of being on the fast track to a senior post. People are eager to do you favors. I knew that her phone was encrypted, and that if I contacted her on the road, there was little chance of Tennant listening in."

It was difficult to scope out the room. She could barely turn her head inside the bubble helmet, and the rippling plastic of the face mask warped her vision with shifting lines of distortion.

"And you told her…?" Tess prompted.

"That I was the person she would meet in LA. That our meeting place had been changed. That she should wait in the MiraMist, at the hotel bar."

"You got her to go right to you."

"Clever of me, don’t you think?" Andrus sounded obscenely pleased with himself.

No, she was wrong to think of him as Andrus. For Andrus, she might have some human feeling.

He was Mobius. He was the killer who’d taken Paul from her.

"Oh," he added, "and I warned her that she was under surveillance. The evasive action she took the next day, the way she lost Tennant’s team—it was all thanks to my timely heads-up. I couldn’t have Tennant interrupt our little tête-à-tête, after all."

"Suppose she hadn’t lost her pursuit."

"Then I would have aborted the mission. But she came through for me. I picked her up, I fucked her—she enjoyed it, I think—and then, well, you saw what I did then."