Golden in Death(21)

He swiveled around. “Kiss my ass. I’ve been here all night, got a couple hours down in my office. And I’m not the only one pulling all night on this.”

She saw it clearly now that he faced her. The bloodshot eyes, the dark circles under them. And the strain.

Dickhead, he might be, but at the moment, he was all in on the job.

“Peabody, how about getting Berenski some coffee to go with the doughnut?”

“Yours?” He perked up. “The real? Make it two large. We think we’ve got it. I want to call Siler out. He’s catching a couple z’s, but he should talk this through. He’s the expert on this around here.”

Eve held up two fingers, then turned back to Berenski. “You start.”

“We’ll start with the egg.”

“What egg?”

He swiveled again, brought up an image on-screen. Split-screened it. “You see there’s the container—the egg. We put it together from the pieces on the floor of the crime scene. The other’s what we’ve determined it looked like before it broke. You got a golden egg. Looks like cheap plastic, right? A piece of crap.”

“Okay.”

“And it is, except the inside of the piece of crap’s been coated with a sealant, lead based.”

“To beat a standard scan.”

“Sure. And there’s a seal—thin, airtight—around the edges. This here held the agent.”

“Sealed in, airtight.”

“Took awhile even with the comps to put it all together. Then we needed to identify the seal, the inside sealant. And see, it’s got the hook-and-eye lock on it, the back hinge? Simple—probably came that way. But the seal, that was added on. You unhook it, and you’d need to give it a little tug. Nothing muscular, right, but a good tug to break the seal. And when you did?

“That’s the end of that.”

“Morris said airborne.”

“Yeah, it hit the air when the seal broke, and the air—the oxygen triggered the agent. Inside the seal, it’s inert, get it?”

“So why wasn’t whoever put it in there, then sealed it up, on Morris’s slab?”

“Wait for Siler. Who was the DB?”

“A pediatrician.”

“Shit. That doesn’t make sense, and I lose twenty. I figured military. Siler went with CIA. Hey, I didn’t lose twenty. Nobody put in on a kid doctor. Siler.” He crooked one of those long fingers at a small man—maybe five-six—working his way through the labyrinth of the lab.

His white lab coat flapped around a pair of checked pants, a T-shirt that read SCIENCE RULES ALL. He had bright red hair that had never been found in nature springing out in every direction, a hooked nose, dark, sleepy eyes.

“Dallas,” Berenski said by way of introduction. “Abdul Siler.”

“Yo. CIA hit, right?”

Eve said, “No.”

“Damn. I could’ve used the twenty.”

“You’re getting coffee that’s worth more,” Berenski told him. “Here comes Peabody with the black gold. Siler,” he added, and took the coffees from Peabody.

Siler sniffed his, blinked his sleepy eyes, sipped. Closed the sleepy eyes and said, “Gooooood.”

“I got started on the egg. You take it, but don’t get all technical. They’re cops. Science is like a foreign fucking language.”

“Sure. So. We put the egg together—made in Mexico, according to the stamp. You’ll probably find a couple dozen shops in New York have them in stock for under twenty bucks. Cheap, gaudy. You could use them to put candy in or whatever. Bigger than a chicken egg, but maybe for like an Easter egg hunt or whatever.”

“That’s their job, Siler.”

“Right. The interior was coated with sealant, not unlike what you’d have in your field kit, but with a lead base. And a secondary seal, with an adhesive, was added around the edges of both sides of the egg to make it completely airtight. The fabricated wood box, which we assume held the egg, was also sealed, same method. The interior padding, that woulda been added to the box, woulda cushioned the egg.”

“So whoever did it was careful.”

“You bet. Mmmm.” He drank more coffee. “Padding inside the shipping box, inside the wooden box to protect the egg in case the package got dropped. It would probably work unless it got slammed or crushed. But it didn’t.”

“What was inside the damn egg?” Eve demanded.

“That’s the really frosty part.”

“Keep it simple, Siler,” Berenski warned.

“I want to say it wasn’t simple—it was pretty damn brilliant, and took some serious skill. What you had in there, probably in crystalline form—before it hit the air and vaporized—was sulfur trioxide.”

“Why is that brilliant?”

“Because that was mixed with sarin. With— What’s the word I want? A soup?on of sarin. And that? That was mixed with an agent that kills them both—but it kills them about fifteen minutes after the whole shebang hits the air.”

“So,” Eve deduced, “the agent had a … like a shelf life once released.”

“Exactamundo!” Siler gave her a happy look, a friendly slap on the arm she decided to let pass. “See, oxygen triggers the whole thing—releases the toxins that, merged together, are going to kill the shit out of you within like five minutes, and the clearing agent that’s going to kill the toxins inside about fifteen. Biowarfare-wise, it’s total mag because you can target specific, and anybody outside say, twenty feet’s not going to feel a thing, and anybody coming along a few minutes later, same deal.”