Strong Cold Dead (Caitlin Strong, #8)(48)

“Welcome to the party, Ranger,” Caitlin heard Jones say.

A combination of the suit’s confines and the encased building’s lack of ventilation left her feeling she was being roasted alive. At Quantico she’d been part of any number of drills to prepare her as a first responder to such calamities, but the props and stage dummies had in no way achieved their goal. The suit’s restrictions and independent air supply kept all odors from her, though, for which she was glad.

“Give me your first thoughts,” Jones said, alongside her now.

“Spacing of the bodies indicates a time lag that puts airborne transmission more in doubt,” Caitlin started, getting used to the echo of her own words inside the helmet. “That means the victims might have ingested whatever killed them, as opposed to breathing it in, making the means of delivery a toxin placed inside something they ate or drank.” She raised a glove to swipe away the sweat forming inside her helmet, forgetting the presence of the faceplate for the moment.

“Toxin,” Jones repeated. “Quantico must’ve treated you well, Ranger. Most would say ‘contagion.’”

“Contagion implies ‘spread from person to person.’ There was no spread here. It hit fast and it hit hard.”

“Are you ruling out natural causation?”

“That’s a new term on me, Jones. But if you’re asking if this could’ve been caused by poisoning through means other than a concentrated attack, I’d say the odds are slim to none.”

“You learn to make that kind of judgment in Quantico?”

“You asked me a question and the answer’s a matter of common sense. Naturally occurring disasters like this—Legionnaires’ disease, methane dumps, toxic sludge—aren’t unprecedented, but none of them carry a hundred percent mortality rate.”

“So,” Jones ventured, his faceplate misting up and then clearing in rhythm with his breaths and his words, “assuming enemy action was in play, what stands out the most in your mind?”

Caitlin walked about the restaurant, careful to step over the victims who had slipped from their chairs or died crawling for the door. To a man and woman, they looked to be in the throes of both pain and panic. She stopped at a table occupied by two boys and two girls wearing school uniforms, backpacks tucked under their chairs, their faces pressed against the tabletop as if they’d been glued there.

“Looks like they were all struck within maybe a thirty-second window,” Caitlin theorized, turning away from the kids.

“Makes sense.”

“No, it doesn’t, Jones. It makes no sense at all. Unless all the victims were sharing a toast or a piece of birthday cake, as it turns out there’s no way ingestion could’ve caused what we’re looking at here.” She started to turn back toward the table occupied by the facedown kids, then stopped. “What happened to all the other people who ate here before them? How is it they walked out of here to go about their day, none the worse for wear? Goes back to what I was saying before, what was bothering me about the notion of whatever did this being airborne. I assume you’ve taken air samples.”

“Preliminary analysis on-site doesn’t show a damn thing, Ranger.”

“Because this isn’t a disease, Jones. I wouldn’t expect the CDC to be much help, either.”

“Got a better idea?”

Caitlin looked around the restaurant again, her mind conjuring the smells of the place anew. “Whatever it is hits the anatomy like a sledgehammer, and it’s got to be something all the victims would have ingested within seconds of each other, for the timeline to work.”

“All well and good, Ranger,” Jones said, “only what you’re describing doesn’t exist, either in or out of nature.”

Caitlin met Jones’s eyes through the faceplate of his helmet. “You mean it didn’t until today.”





43

AUSTIN, TEXAS

Back at the staging tent, Caitlin couldn’t wait to yank off her hazmat suit and dump it into the orange drum stickered with warnings.

“What did the dead have to say, Ranger?” she heard Guillermo Paz ask her. She turned to see him leaning lightly against one of the poles holding the tent up.

“Not enough to be of much good,” Caitlin told him.

Shedding the suit hadn’t helped her shed from her psyche the residue of what she’d just experienced. One of those ultimate nightmare scenarios you train and prepare for but never for a moment believe will ever happen.

“Aristotle once said that ‘death is the most fearful thing,’” Paz noted. “But he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

“You tell me, Colonel.”

“You already know the answer, best articulated by my friend Heidegger, who believed that anticipation does not passively await death but mobilizes mortality as the condition of free will in the world.”

“In other words, by this happening, we’re enabled to stop it from happening again.”

“I believe that’s what Martin Heidegger was getting at, yes.”

“You don’t seem especially bothered by all that, Colonel.”

“Because it defines my purpose, my reason for being.”

“Is that Heidegger too?”

He smiled. “No, Ranger; yours truly. But Heidegger was very well acquainted with evil. He didn’t just endorse the Nazis with the coming of World War II, he joined them. Became rector of the University of Freiburg, where he did his best to mold young minds to the Nazi cause. The impressionability of young people makes them extremely dangerous when motivated. When I was in Daniel Cross’s apartment, I noticed the books on his shelves. He seemed as enamored by the Nazis as Heidegger.”