| |
AFTER ONE OF THE BETTER-tasting breakfasts he had eaten in the past month, they returned to the lab. They checked with Rogers to make sure all the employees had shown up for the day shift. They had. Nobody had run, which might mean nothing at all. Or it might mean Glenn had led them to the wrong place.
He and Nydia settled in for the day’s work. Glenn phoned the correct supervisor on the internal phone system and asked for the first person to come in for a follow-up interview.
A half-hour later, Burton Gist, the man accused of sexual harassment, twisted his ring. “It was just a joke,” he said.
Twenty minutes ago, he had been claiming he hadn’t done anything to the woman who had filed the charge against him.
Nydia stared at him with a flat expression and said nothing.
Gist shifted in his chair, touched his nose, and then dropped his hand to his lap.
Glenn glanced surreptitiously at the time. Thirty-three minutes in. Gist had been squirming for about ten minutes. Glenn tried to look sympathetic, though it was a challenge. The guy was creepy, and whoever the woman was who had charged him, Glenn already believed her, whatever she had said. But he schooled his expression into a credulous one and gave Gist an encouraging nod.
Gist glanced at him, back at Nydia, and then licked his lips. “It was nothing. I don’t know why women get so bent out of shape. If she’d said that to me, I’d have laughed.”
Nydia remained silent, her stare continuing to drill into the man.
“I don’t even see why it’s your business,” Gist said. He sat up straighter. “In fact, it isn’t. I’m going to call a lawyer.” He stood.
“Sit down,” Nydia said, pointing a finger at him.
“I refuse to answer any more questions.”
“That’s not an option,” she said.
“I’m still in America.”
“An America with a Patriot Act. This is an investigation into possible terrorism.” It was the first time she had used the word with any of the interview subjects. “You don’t get an attorney. Not unless I say you do.” She folded her hands in front of her chest.
The signal for Glenn. “Look, Gist, we don’t really care about this whole issue between you and the woman. What we care about is making sure no one here is doing anything to undermine the vaccine production.”
Gist looked genuinely puzzled. “Why would I do that?” He sat again.
“Anger at your employer for taking the charge against you seriously, maybe?”
“They changed my job. I liked my old job.” He sounded petulant, like an eight-year-old protesting getting grounded by his father.
Glenn nodded. “I bet that was disruptive. Talk to me about your work here. Do you enjoy it?”
“What, is this a job interview?”
Glenn smiled. “You never know.”
“I wouldn’t mind working at the CDC. Maybe not in Atlanta though. I hate humid summers.”
Over Glenn’s dead body, this guy would work for the CDC. “So what do you do here? What did you do, and what do you do now?”
Gist wiped sweat off his upper lip and settled in to his chair, looking distinctly more comfortable.
Glenn wondered if this was the right way to do it. Nydia had him almost panicked five minutes ago. Should Glenn be letting him off the hook? Well, she was the expert. She’d interrupt with a harder question if she wanted to keep the pressure up.
Gist described his work at the cell culture facility. He had worked in the early part of the process before, and now he had been moved to quality control in an intermediate stage.
Glenn nodded until he was done talking. “And if you were to impede the development of the vaccine, how would you go about that?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Okay, say one of your coworkers wanted to. By getting transferred, you know more about the whole process from beginning to end than most. If someone were to sabotage the process, how would she or he go about it?”
“I don’t know,” Gist said. He frowned in concentration. “The thing is, there are so many protocols. We mostly work in open labs, not in individual rooms. Anyone could walk by at any moment and look over anyone else’s shoulder, or through glass, and see what was going on. And later down the line, if you did manage to do something, everything is tested, checked and double-checked. I don’t see how it wouldn’t get caught.”
“Thank you. That’s very helpful.” It wasn’t. It was no different than what Glenn had known all along. He wasn’t sure where to go next with the guy. “You’re understandably angry with your bosses right now,” he said, hoping his expression didn’t reflect what he really thought. “I think what Special Agent Watt wants to know is, are you angry enough with them to destroy the vaccines in retaliation.”
“Of course not. It isn’t—” He puffed out a breath of air. “That’s between me and my bosses. And that person. The vaccine, that’s for people all over the country. I don’t even know them. Why would I want to hurt them? I mean, we’ll get vaccinated out of the first batch. It’d be like shooting myself in the foot, wouldn’t it?”
Glenn said, “It would be. A smart person could see that.”
Nydia said, “A crazy smart person might act anyway.”
“I’m not crazy,” Gist said. “And I might want to slap that bitch from time to time for being so thin-skinned, but I haven’t and I won’t, and I definitely don’t want to hurt anybody else but her.”
“Not all women?” Nydia said.
“No,” Gist said.
“Not even me?”
He hesitated, and then when he realized he had revealed something with the hesitation, he flushed. “No,” he said, the pout back on his face. He began to fiddle with his ring again.
Glenn thought the guy was a total ass, but he didn’t think he was a terrorist. But what did he know? It was up to Nydia to make that assessment.
“We may interview you again tomorrow,” Nydia said.
“I can’t stop you,” Gist said.
“No,” Nydia said, with a hint of a smile. “You can’t.” She turned her chair away.
Gist hesitated. He glanced at Glenn, back at Nydia—who continued to ignore him—and then stood. A hesitation suggested he was thinking of a parting shot at Nydia, but he seemed to think better of it and left the conference room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Glenn waited fifteen seconds before walking to the door and opening it a crack to make sure Gist wasn’t standing there listening. He wasn’t. He shut the door and said to Nydia, “The man’s a jerk, but I don’t see him as a terrorist.”
“I’m not so sure,” Nydia said.
A list appeared in Glenn’s mind’s eye, with a title of “Things Not to Say to Nydia.” Number one right now was “Suggest to her that being a woman makes her give the sexual harassment thing more weight than she should.” What he said aloud was, “He’s right about the protocols and checks and balances.” He looked at the time. “We only have five minutes until the top of the hour. Who is up next?”
“Ravindu Roshan. The one with the strange kinks.”
“And you’re going to ask him directly about them?”
“Yes.”
“And I have to be here.”
“Are you a prude?” she said.
“I—” He narrowed his eyes. “You’re teasing me.”
“Maybe a little. But are you?”
“I just think it’s personal, is all. If he wants to look at—uh, whatever—that’s his business.”
“The ‘whatever’ is—”
He held up a hand.
“Better to hear it now rather than blanch or blush in front of him.”
“I doubt he’ll be looking at me. Or at you. I’m pretty certain the floor will be very interesting to him at that moment. But go on, tell me. If you must.”
“Bugs.”
“Say what?”
“Well, more like slugs and snails. But, in a pinch, bugs.” She raised her brows. “Pinch. Nibble. Crawl.”
Glenn didn’t say “Ewww,” like a teenage girl, but he wanted to. “I see,” he said. “And that’s common?”
“No. Not at all. In the world of paraphilias, it’s quite rare.”
“Paraphilia? Part-love?”
“‘Next to love,’ I believe is the translation. It’s the scientific, non-pejorative term for what most of us call ‘kinks.’ It’s the term used in the DSM—a core reference book for diagnosing mental illness.”
“And it really is a sign of mental illness? I mean, a lot of people read that spanking novel that was so popular. I didn’t, but a lot of women did, right?”
“Let’s put a pin in that topic for personal discussion later on. For this purpose, bugs and slugs are odd enough among paraphilias. That he looks at these pictures so often is what sets off my alarms. A kink indulged in occasionally is one thing, hardly worth noting unless it’s criminally significant, like exposing oneself. But this sort of thing, almost daily? That’s a sign of significant emotional disturbance. Almost everyone agrees with that.”
She was the expert. But he wondered how something that couldn’t hurt anyone—maybe a snail or two at worst—translated into terrorism of the sort that could kill a billion people. The step needed between those two acts seemed vast to him.
After Nydia called for him, the snail guy—no, don’t, Glenn, don’t even think of him that way—came in and stared at the floor while mumbling answers to her questions.
Nydia gave Glenn the signal to take over after ten minutes. While Ravindu stared at his knees, Glenn tried to cajole him into engaging in conversation of any sort. But all of the man’s answers were short. Even being a good enough interviewer to know not to ask yes-no questions, Glenn was finding the experience like trying to pull an earthworm out of the ground. Damn, terrible analogy, but now he had creepy-crawlies on his mind.
“Honestly, we need your help,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out if someone is trying to impede the work you’re doing here, or sabotage it, and if so, how they’d do that. Do you have an idea? Any idea at all? Even something unlikely or odd or difficult to accomplish. Anything.”
Ravindu glanced at him for the first time since the interview had started. “I’m not a supervisor. Ask them.”
“We have.”
“I don’t think that way. Sorry.”
“Try. A thought experiment. Just whatever pops to mind. We’re feeling a little desperate here.”
He moved his gaze from the floor to the far wall as he thought. “It’d be easier to burn the place down.”
“Would it?”
“The safety checks are always done on the vaccines. So it would be simpler to destroy the whole facility.” He shifted in his chair and looked right at Glenn for a split second. “I mean, don’t you think so?”
“I see your point,” Glenn said.
“The sprinkler system would have to be disabled,” Ravindu said, in a musing tone, as if just now thinking this through. He was staring at the far wall again.
“And how would you do that?”
He looked surprised as his eyes darted again to Glenn. “I haven’t the slightest.” Then he looked down at his knees again, or wherever he was focusing when he dropped his eyes.
“I appreciate this. It might help us.”
Ravindu made a noise Glenn couldn’t interpret.
“Anything else you can think of that might be done to stop the vaccines?”
Ravindu shook his head.
This was strangely exhausting, trying to get someone to talk who didn’t want to. Glenn glanced at his watch. They were just beyond the thirty-minute mark. Except for the two minutes that had just passed, Ravindu hadn’t changed his demeanor in any way. Maybe him being willing to talk was his equivalent of “breaking,” or whatever Nydia had called it. Glenn glanced at Nydia, who gave a little shrug.
“Okay,” she said. “I know this is going to be uncomfortable, but I need to ask you about something personal.”
Ravindu tensed.
“Your parents. Did they immigrate for political reasons?”
He visibly relaxed. “No.”
“Why, then?” Nydia asked.
“Education.”
“They went to university here?”
“My mother had a fellowship.”
“To graduate school?”
He nodded.
“In what field?”
“Anthropology.”
“How interesting.” Nydia waited for nearly a minute before going on. “How about you? Are you interested in politics?”
“No,” he said.
“That matches what we know of your internet search history.”
Ravindu tensed again, the widening of his eyes visible even though he was staring down.
Nydia waited for him to ask the obvious question, but he didn’t. “We have checked that out, you know.”
Ravindu raised his hand to his chest and touched it once. Glenn could see it tremble before he dropped it again.
“You have some—unusual tastes in the sites you visit.”
“I,” said Ravindu, hardly audible. Nothing more, just the one word.
Glenn felt sorry for him. “Just breathe,” he said. “This will all be over in a few minutes.”
“I don’t want to speak of it,” he said.
“I totally understand,” Glenn said.
Nydia shot him a look. Apparently, this wasn’t the moment to be Mr. Sympathy. “You’re a scientist, Mr. Ravindu. Perhaps you can appreciate it when I say the correlation between people with abnormal sexual interests and criminal behavior is rather high.”
Ravindu shook his head.
“No, you didn’t know that?” Nydia said. “Or you disagree about the correlation? Because I could show you the raw data, if you’d like.”
Glenn wanted to be anywhere right now but in this room. He felt like squirming himself and had to force himself to look at Ravindu. Yeah, he had talked to people directly about their sexual behavior before to see where a disease might have been contracted, but in many cultures they were entirely comfortable about that discussion. Ravindu obviously felt what he did was shameful and did not want to talk about it. Maybe Glenn was projecting because he didn’t want to talk about it, but he thought not. The air in the room seemed to vibrate with their shared unease.
“Mr. Ravindu?” Nydia prompted.
“No, I didn’t do it.” His gaze was still cast down.
“Do what?”
“Whatever you want to accuse me of.”
“But you do use the internet to look at deviant pornography sites?”
He didn’t answer.
Glenn thought his approach had been doing more good than Nydia’s, but he hadn’t gotten anything significant out of the fellow either. Maybe there was nothing significant to get from him. He pitied the man.
What if he ends up being the terrorist? Will you pity him then?
The answer to that was still yes. He was so painfully shy and awkward. Glenn wouldn’t forgive him if he had unleashed the pandemic on the world. But he’d still feel sorry for him.
Nydia kept at Ravindu for the full hour, but by the time she dismissed him, they had learned nothing.
After a full minute of silence, Glenn said, “I feel like I’ve been kicking an abused puppy for an hour.”
“Abused puppies sometimes grow up into vicious dogs.”
“Do you think this guy is vicious?”
“I don’t know. I’m not getting enough from him to have any idea—not even a clear gut reaction. He’s a cipher.”
“It’s hard to trust someone who won’t look you in the eye.”
“A certain type of eye contact is sometimes a sign of guilt.”
“You have data on that too?”
“Yes,” she said. “There’s a natural rhythm to eye contact. Guilty people working at looking innocent tend to hold your gaze too long.”
“So you count the seconds?”
“Honestly? No. But I know a fake sincere look when I see it.” She made a face. “Or rather, I believe I know one. I’m trained, but I tested wrong about one out of every forty instances. Still better than average, even for the FBI. But with this suspect not looking at me, that doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe we should ask administration here—Rogers—if he has any friends.”
She cocked her head.
“It might take him months to warm up to someone. But he’s been here for how long?”
She shuffled through notes on her tablet. “Almost five years.”
“So even a very shy person might have friends here after that long. Maybe interview one of them about him.”
“Or have one in the interview room when we re-interview Ravindu.” She tapped a stylus on the table. “Anyway. I have to get ready for the next interview. Give me a minute or two to get my head on straight.”
Next up was Chase Dodd.
When he came in, Nydia started not by warming up in any way but with the matter that worried her most. “Mr. Dodd, you traveled to Philadelphia early last December.”
“No I didn’t.” Dodd had no problem with eye contact. He took a second to glance to Glenn, then went back to looking at Nydia.
Nydia frowned. “Perhaps you’re forgetting. On December 6, you took a United flight from San Francisco International to Philadelphia at 12:25.”
“I did not.”
“It arrived at 8:23 that night in Philadelphia. I have the records right here.” She tapped her tablet.
“I don’t care what records you have. I’ve never even been to—” He shook his head. “Check that. I remember now. I went to Philadelphia and DC in high school on a summer trip with my family. But that was over fifteen years ago. I’ve never been to Philadelphia as an adult. I went to New York about eight years ago, saw some Broadway plays, caught a Yankees game. That’s the last time I’ve been out east.”
Glenn didn’t know the scientific data on eye contact as Nydia did, but nothing about Dodd was telling him the man was lying. In fact, everything—his posture, his gestures, how his gaze moved easily from Nydia to Glenn and most of all his perplexed expression—everything said he was not lying. If Glenn’s gut reaction was to be trusted, this man did not do what Nydia—and the records—said he had done.
Did that mean he also wasn’t the right guy?
Nydia was still frowning. She looked at the tablet again and paged through. “Dammit,” she muttered, and she stood. “Take over,” she said to Glenn. “I have to make a call.”
“What’s going on?” Dodd said to Glenn.
“There is a record of someone with your name flying to Philadelphia,” Glenn said. “It’s not a common name.”
“Dodd is.”
“Chase Dodd? I bet you’re the only one in the Bay Area.”
“That’s likely so. Maybe it’s a typo. Maybe a Charles Dodd flew. I get that sometimes, people seeing my first name as Charles.”
“Do you have your credit card paid automatically? Or do you check every line every month?”
“I check.” He looked sheepish. “Okay, I check about half the time. Too busy otherwise. But I think I’d have noticed a three-hundred-dollar or better airline charge.”
“What’s your typical monthly bill?”
He hesitated, but then could be seen to relent as he seemed to realize that now was not the time to protect his privacy. “Around eight hundred. I pay it off in full every month. Except for mortgage and utilities and enough cash for coffee, almost everything else I spend goes through the credit card. Groceries, restaurants, plays, whatever. It’s pretty standard, seven hundred, eight hundred. Except for around Christmas when it usually goes well over a grand. Or if I go somewhere nice for a vacation, it’ll go higher, maybe even twenty-five hundred. But on a normal month, I’d notice an extra three hundred.”
Glenn studied his face. A sharp nose, olive skin, and dark brown eyes, vaguely a Mediterranean look to him. His expression was half confused, half irritated. Nothing about him suggested he didn’t want to be helpful. “So why did they find this airline ticket?”
“Maybe they just made a mistake. There was this case here, where the ATF got an address wrong and busted in on some eighty-year-old couple they accused of being major cocaine importers. I mean, no offense, but the government does make mistakes.”
“We try not to at the CDC.”
“But from time to time, surely you do.”
“Of course. How about here? Do mistakes get made here?”
“Rarely made but always caught. There are a lot of checks in the process. A lot. We can’t risk sending any active virus out there.”
“Can you think of any way at all that someone could do something here, somewhere along the line, to render the vaccines ineffective?”
Dodd shook his head. “I’ve been thinking, ever since you two showed up and I figured that’s what you were doing here. I figure if there is something going on with the vaccines, it’s going to happen after the vaccine leaves the facility.”
Glenn thought of the hijacking that had been attempted on the truck of strategic supplies. “Hmm.”
“I think you were more on target when you had those bomb-sniffing dogs in here. Or, I assume they were bomb-sniffing and not drug-sniffing.”
“I’m not sure, but I suspect you’re right.”
“That’s the only way to do it, what I said. Go for them after they’re out the door here, on the street, much easier to get to. And so what if someone could figure out a way to taint the first batch of vaccine here or render it ineffective? They’d have to replicate it next month, and the month after that. Surely they’d get caught one of those times.”
“But blow up the facility, and you’d cut it off for good.”
“In that case, I’d do it on a shift other than my own, for obvious reasons, or with some kind of time-delay mechanism. Should I be worried about this? For real?”
“The FBI has enough information to suggest something will happen next week. They have no idea what or where.”
“So they’re guessing? They don’t even know if something will happen here or not?”
“I’m guessing. It’ll be all my fault if that guess is wrong. It seemed a high-priority target to me. But I have a hard time thinking like a terrorist.”
“It is a strange way to think, but I’ve been trying since yesterday. It makes more sense to destroy the whole facility.”
“How?”
“I don’t know one thing about explosives. That’d be your FBI friend’s area of expertise.”
“I think there are other experts on that at the FBI she relies on.”
“Well, between you and me? It’s not me. Whatever, whoever you’re looking for, it’s not me, and I don’t know a thing about it.”
“I believe you,” Glenn said, and he did.
“On the other hand, just in case, I think I’m going to call in sick—next week, you said it was?”
Glenn would probably get yelled at by Nydia for revealing this much. “Monday.”
“We should be done by then, except for quality control checks.”
“That’s something that someone here planning a bombing or whatever would know?”
“Sure. You know, Stevens, you’ve made no secret of who you are or what you’re doing here. If you haven’t exactly announced it, there has been plenty of guessing. If I’m here, and I’m the guy, and I’m planning on blowing up the whole place, or part of the place, I’m going to push my timetable forward before I’m in jail. Or I’d leave town today. Or, best of all, one then the other. Slip in here Sunday night, do the deed, get the hell out of Dodge.”
“You’re right,” Glenn said, thinking about how the whole staff probably knew or had guessed why they were here. “I think you’d be a better person to have working with the FBI than me.”
“Fresh eyes, that’s all I have. And now you know everything I’ve thought of, so I’m of no more use to you. Can I go?”
“Not until the FBI agent says so. She’s the boss.”
On cue, Nydia walked back in. “Chase Dodd was on the flight.”
Dodd said, “He may have well been, but he wasn’t this Chase Dodd.”
“California Driver’s License number?” And she read some digits off her tablet screen.
“I don’t know. Let me look.” Dodd pulled out a wallet and Nydia read the numbers again. “Yeah, that’s my number.”
“It was shown at the gate.”
“I—” Now Dodd frowned in turn. “I have no idea why. I did not go to Philadelphia in December. I mean, who would? Winter up in the northeast? There’s a reason I choose to live in California.”
“And yet someone with your name and your driver’s license bought a ticket and flew.”
They were glaring at each other, and Glenn wanted to make the moment less adversarial. “Did you lose your driver’s license around then?”
“No. I haven’t ever lost my driver’s license. Maybe as a teenager or something, but not recently.”
“Been robbed?”
“No.”
“House broken into?”
“No.”
“Ever have a party? Invite people from work?”
“Of course. Doesn’t everyone? But what does it matter? The driver’s license photo would have to match the person getting on the plane, right?”
“Right,” Nydia said.
“How many people do the clerks process every day, though?” Glenn said. “They don’t always look that closely.” He had seen a few look from his ID to his face and back, but mostly they just stared at the ID while typing into a computer. He probably could have been wearing a red clown nose and they wouldn’t have noticed.
“So you’re suggesting someone faked being me?”
“I’m suggesting you went,” Nydia said.
“And I’m telling you something else is going on. Aren’t there security tapes or something?” Dodd said. “At the check-in counter or the TSA counter or at SFO?”
“There are,” Nydia said.
Glenn didn’t think she had seen them yet.
Dodd said, “What was the date again?”
Nydia looked. “December 6, just after noon.”
He pulled out his phone. “With a return when?”
“It was a one-way ticket, purchased in advance.”
Dodd scrolled through some pages. “I took a couple vacation days for a long weekend that week.”
“I know,” said Nydia. “I checked your personnel records.”
“Went to Bodega Bay. With a woman I was seeing. No longer am, but she should be able to confirm that.”
“I’ll want her name.” For the first time, Nydia sounded as if she was beginning to believe Dodd.
“Sure. I still have her number. Here it is.” He read it out while Nydia typed it into her tablet.
“Dodd has a thought,” Glenn said. “About what might happen and when.”
“Oh?”
“Could you explain to her what you said to me?”
Dodd went over his theory again.
Nydia pursed her lips as he finished. “If you were to set off a bomb in the facility, where would it do the most damage?”
“A couple of places would be devastating. The clean rooms, basically.” He looked at Glenn.
Glenn nodded that he understood.
“If I were you,” Dodd said, “I’d get those dogs back here and keep them here. And if I were me, I might take another vacation right about now.”
“We need the vaccine,” Glenn said. “You’re probably important to getting it made.”
“I know I am, no ‘probably’ about it. But I need me. You know, I’m sure, that there are only two other potential facilities in this country to do this work, but none of the staff there have our expertise in flu vaccines. You need to be protecting us as well as the building. Or we need to protect ourselves by staying away from work.” He shook his head. “And that means the process grinds to a halt, and the result is the same as the terrorist intended.”
“Damn it,” Nydia said. “You’re right. Don’t leave the building for lunch, Mr. Dodd.”
“Of course,” said Dodd, “all of this is predicated on your being right about something happening here.”
Nydia looked at Glenn, her expression not a happy one.
Glenn shook his head. “I’ll bet a year’s salary on it. It’s not him. So I talked to him a little.”
Nydia turned to Dodd. “I need the video from the airport. And I’m going to call this woman right now. If she alibis you, if you’re not on the video, you’re in the clear. But no, we’re not at all sure this is the target. We only know something is going to happen.”
“And on Monday,” Dodd said.
Nydia looked daggers at Glenn. She said to Dodd, “Do not mention that to anyone else. Not here, not at home, not at a bar. Nowhere. Either of you.”
“All right,” Dodd said.
“If you’re the guy, you’re one hell of an actor,” she said.
“I’m not the guy,” Dodd said. “From what it sounds like, there may not even be a guy, not here. But irrespective of that, don’t waste your time on me. Spend it finding the real danger.”
“Stay there for a second,” Nydia said. She made the phone call to the ex-girlfriend. She identified herself and left her number and said it was urgent, to get back to her immediately. “Does she check her messages often?”
“She’s a social worker, and she travels. She could be in the car or with a client. So an hour, ninety minutes, something like that.” He held up his phone. “You want me to call her too?”
“Couldn’t hurt. You’re still friendly?”
“It was a relatively amicable breakup. She broke up with me, and she wasn’t plate-throwing angry, just mildly exasperated, so I think she’ll be inclined to listen to my message.”
“Go on then,” Nydia said.
He dialed. “Hey, it’s me,” Dodd said. “Okay, I’ll wait.” He pulled the phone away and pressed it to his leg. “She’s driving and wants to pull off the highway so she can hear me.” He put the phone to his ear. The seconds ticked off. “Hey. How are you? Fine, fine. Look, I need you to talk to someone here. It’s really important. I’m going to hand over the phone, okay? Just tell her the truth.” He handed the phone to Nydia. “Jaylinn Albertson,” he said.
“Ms. Albertson? This is Nydia Watt, Special Agent with the FBI. We need you to tell us if you and Mr. Dodd were together last December, on a vacation. Mmm-hmm. Do you remember the dates? Okay, sure.” The phone buzzed in her hand. “Hang on. I don’t know how to—” She said to Dodd, “Viewing pictures?”
“Let me.” He took the phone back, tapped a couple of keys, and handed it back. “Just swipe. Looks like there are three.”
Nydia glanced through the photos and went back to talking.
Dodd said to Glenn, “I had forgotten she had taken pictures up there.”
Nydia said, “And you’re sure of those dates? Would you testify under oath to them?” She listened to the reply. “I can’t tell you that. Would you testify?” Nydia nodded, thanked the woman for her time, and then handed the phone back to Dodd, who checked it and pocketed it. “It isn’t impossible she’s an accomplice.”
“It actually is. She’s a very nice person. The kind who carries spiders outside instead of smashing them. No way would she hurt people, even if she knew how, which she doesn’t. She works with troubled high school kids. Drives to meet with their parents and tries to help screwed up families.”
“I have to call the regional office,” Nydia said. “You two, go down and get yourselves a soda. Together. Don’t go back to work yet, Mr. Dodd.”
Glenn led Dodd to the employee break room. It was lunch time for some. One of their other top six was in there, Miller, the guy who donated to good causes. He glanced at Glenn, shoved the remains of his lunch into a paper sack, and threw it away. “See ya,” he said to another person at his table, and he left.
“Want something to drink?” Dodd said.
Glenn shook his head. “We just needed to get out of her way.”
“I got that much. I hate to see a pretty woman be that—”
Glenn raised his eyebrows in a question.
“Sour. Aggressive. Masculine.”
Huh. Glenn read her entirely differently. Seriousness, dedication to an important and demanding job, competence, self-assurance, drive. That was Nydia. And he liked those qualities in a woman.
“She needs to smile more,” Dodd said.
“We both need something more to smile about,” Glenn said. “It has been a long, hard summer. Since the first week of May for me.”
“So gossip is, you were there in New Jersey, for the initial investigation? What was that like?”
“Frustrating. We did everything right, we got excellent cooperation from almost all of the locals, but there was no way to halt the flu. It was loose, and there was no stopping it by that point.”
“It’s here now.”
“Yes, it has been for some time. Your first case was over a month ago.”
“But it hasn’t taken hold,” Dodd said.
“I see a lot of masks on the street. Restaurant was empty this morning—not sure if that’s people being cautious or what.” He hadn’t hunted for specific numbers for San Francisco in the daily updates, though now that he was here, he probably should.
“Probably the restaurant was empty from caution. People have been doing more hand-washing. Sick people must be staying home. And we probably have more telecommuting in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the country in the first place, and more capacity to switch to it for people who usually go into work.”
Glenn noted that he’d heard this more than once. It seemed to be a point of pride for locals. “There’s still a rush hour. So some people must be going in to a job.”
“Well, stores, restaurants, all that—people have to.”
“As do you.”
“Right. Can’t telecommute this stuff.”
The last person but them left the break room.
Glenn’s phone buzzed. A text from Nydia. “Cut him loose. Have him send the photos to my number. Remind him not to repeat anything we said.”
Glenn relayed the message and said to Dodd, “Okay, you can get back to work, or take lunch or whatever. Again, man, I’d appreciate you not mentioning anything I said that perhaps I shouldn’t have. I won’t have to worry about dying of the flu if you do. Agent Watt will kill me first.”
Dodd offered his hand.
“Sorry, I’m trying to break people of hand-shaking for the duration of the flu. If I see you two years down the road, I’ll shake twice to make up for missing this one.”
“Gotcha.” Dodd left the break room.
Glenn turned back into the hallway and saw Nydia coming at him. “Let’s grab lunch real quick before we finish,” she said.
“You have the dog team coming back here?”
“Yeah. They’ll be here before our next interview is done. The conference room is locked up, so let’s go.”
Glenn patted himself to make sure he had his wallet, and then they hit a drive-through and ate lunch in the car. She had him describe again which areas were the clean rooms. “And I had another thought,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“We need to check where they are in the process. At some point, they are going to have fifteen thousand doses done and ready to ship. Do they have fifteen thousand not-ready doses right now? Or ten thousand entirely ready right now with more to come? The other possibility, if it’s impossible to sabotage the process, is you wait until they are done and destroy the finished vaccines. Or hijack them, like Dodd suggested.”
“But that leaves the place intact to get fifteen thousand more vaccine doses next month.”
“That’s true.” Glenn finished his sandwich. “Yeah, it’s much worse if you take down the building, including the equipment needed to create the vaccine.”
“Can that equipment be replaced?”
“Oh, sure. I’d have to find out how much is warehoused, where it is, if there are drivers to get it here. It’d be expensive, but I’m sure they could ask for a government bailout on whatever the insurance wouldn’t cover.”
“At least the flu hasn’t hit hard enough here to devastate the construction industry. If they needed to rebuild, they could.”
“Though I bet it would be faster to transfer the vaccine-making to another facility. I’m sure it’d take a year to establish another lab here.”
“If I’m the terrorist and that happens, I find a way to destroy that facility too.”
“If I’m the FBI or Homeland and lose this building, I put a goddamned army around that next facility.”
“I’d put one here if I could.”
“We don’t know that it is—” He had one of those light-bulb insights. “Wait. Right.”
“What?” she said.
“My estimate of the likelihood of this being the target just jumped from fifty percent to about seventy-five.”
“Why?”
“The plane ticket thing. Okay, here’s the scenario. I work with Dodd. I get to his driver’s license at work or at his home during a party or when we’re out to lunch together, and I copy down the number. I come up with a fake driver’s license with the same number—because it’d check out on any quick security check—but a different face in the photo.”
“Why Dodd?”
“Because he looks vaguely like the guy I’m giving the ticket to?”
“Why bother with that? If you know how to get a fake ID that can pass at an airport, then does it matter if they look the same?”
“Hmmm. So it’s just a convenience issue, then. Misdirection, in case we got this far. Maybe Dodd habitually leaves his wallet in a desk drawer or something like that. Here’s an ID you can borrow to get the real license number. You copy down all the information—date of birth and so on—and give that to your fake ID manufacturer.”
“Do you have one of those? You know how to get a fake ID?”
Glenn pointed at himself. “Me? No. Not a clue.”
“The people who work here probably don’t either.”
“Except one, maybe. The one who has been coached by an international terrorist.”
“You’re right.” She rubbed her temples. “I’m not thinking well.”
“Maybe you need a day off.”
“Between now and Monday? Don’t talk crazy talk.”
“Do we have enough evidence now to get the FBI to commit more resources here?”
She shook her head. “We don’t have enough, not yet. I had to promise unspecified favors stretching out until I retire to get the dogs back. Speaking of which, we should get back there too.”
“So you’ve taken Dodd off your list?”
“Not entirely. Not until we get hold of those airport security videos. I also have someone checking out the ex-girlfriend to make sure she’s not a radical. They could be co-conspirators.”
“You really think so?”
She shook her head. “But I can’t go by instinct alone. Every ‘t’ has to be crossed. If the target is this lab, and we don’t stop it from being blown up or whatever, in addition to the very real costs out there, I’ll probably lose my job for not stopping it. I know it’s a petty thing to think of right now, but I like my job. I don’t want to lose it.” She pointed to the steering wheel. “Drive.”
He started the car. “It wouldn’t be your fault. You’re working hard. Doing your best. Asking them for more resources. They can hardly blame you if they didn’t listen.”
She snorted. “How long have you worked for the government, again?”
“Point taken,” he said.
“I have more calls to make about Dodd and need to get those tapes from SFO,” she said, dialing her phone.
