The Skin Collector (44 page)

No choice. Off came the mask and she flung it behind her, inhaling the damp air, which, she hoped, contained only New York city drinking water and not poison powerful enough to kill her in all of five seconds.

Breathing, breathing …

But so far,
no symptoms. Or bullets.

She continued forward, swinging the gun from side to side. To her right she could see the dark form of the massive pipe; the puncture was about fifteen feet in front of her, she guessed; from a vague image of a thin white line – the stream of water – shooting up to the left and hitting the far wall about ten feet off the ground. The hiss grew louder with every step.

The whistle made her ears throb with pain and threatened to deafen; the good news was that it would also deafen him, so he wouldn’t sense her approach.

Smells of moist concrete, mold, mud. The sensation took Sachs back to her childhood, father and daughter at the zoo in Manhattan, one of the houses, reptile. ‘Amie, see that? That’s the most dangerous thing here.’

She’d peered inside but couldn’t
see anything other than plants and rocks covered with moss. ‘I don’t see anything, Daddy.’

‘It’s a
leeren Käfig
.’

‘Wow. What’s that?’ Snake, she’d wondered. Lizard? ‘Is it dangerous?’

‘Oh, the most dangerous thing in the zoo.’

‘What is it?’

‘It means “empty cage” in German.’

She’d laughed, tossing her tiny red ponytail as she’d looked up at him. But Herman Sachs, a seasoned NYPD patrol officer,
wasn’t joking. ‘Remember, Amie. The most dangerous things are the ones you
can’t
see.’

And now too she saw nothing.

Where was he?

Keep going.

Ducking and, with as deep a breath as she could take yet not choke on the mist in the air, she stepped through the cloud.

And she saw him. Unsub 11-5.

‘Jesus, Rhyme,’ she whispered, stepping closer. ‘Jesus.’

Only after some moments of hearing nothing
but the wail and hiss of the water did she remember that the mike and camera were off.

The experts from Fort Detrick had helicoptered into town in all of forty-five minutes.

When the poison in question is sufficient to kill a high percentage of the population of a major US city, the national security folks don’t fool around.

Once it was clear that the unsub was not going to be shooting anyone,
Sachs was politely but emphatically ordered out of the tunnel while eight men and women in elaborate self-contained biohazard suits went to work. It was clear from the start that they knew what they were doing. Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland, was home to the US Army’s Medical Research and Materiel Command and its Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. In effect, if the prefix
‘bio’ and the words ‘warfare’ or ‘defense’ were linked in any project of any kind, Fort Detrick was involved.

Rhyme’s voice clattered through the radio. ‘What, Sachs? What’s going on?’ She was standing, freezing, on the slushy sidewalk near Third, where she’d parked her Torino.

She told him, ‘They’ve secured the botulinum. It was in three syringes in a thermos. They’ve got them in a negative
pressure containment vehicle.’

‘They’re sure none got into the water?’

‘Absolutely positive.’

‘And the unsub?’

A pause. ‘Well, it’s bad.’

Rhyme’s plan to have the city announce falsely that the water supply was going to be shut down had had one unexpected consequence.

Unsub 11-5, wearing nothing more protective than Department of Environmental Protection coveralls, had been standing right
in front of the hole he was drilling. When he’d broken through the main, the stream of water, like a buzz saw, had cut straight through his chest, killing him instantly. As he’d dropped to the floor, the water had continued to slice through his neck and head, cutting them apart.

Blood and bone and tissue were everywhere, some blasted onto the far wall, many feet away. Sachs had known she should
get the hell out and let the bio team secure the scene but she’d been compelled, out of curiosity, to perform one last task: to tug the unsub’s left sleeve up. She had to see his body art.

The red centipede stared out at her with probing, human eyes. It was brilliantly done. And utterly creepy. She’d actually shivered.

‘What’s the status of the scene?’

‘Army’s sealing it – about a two-block
radius. I got prints and DNA from our unsub and pocket litter and bags he had with him before I got kicked out.’

‘Well, bring back what you have. He’s not working on his own. And who knows what else they have in mind?’

‘I’m on my way.’

The TV news was frantic but ambiguous.

A terrorist attack on the water supply in New York, improvised explosive devices …

Harriet and Matthew Stanton sat on the couch in the suite at their hotel. Their son, Joshua, was beside them in a chair, fiddling. One of those bracelets the kids wore nowadays, even boys. Colored rubber. Not normal. Gay. Matthew tried to frown his son to stillness
but Joshua kept his eyes on the TV. He sipped water from a bottle; the family had brought gallons with them. For obvious reasons. He asked questions that his parents didn’t have the answers to.

‘But how could they know? Why isn’t Billy calling? Where’s the, you know, poison?’

‘Shut up.’

The simple-minded commentators on the media (the liberal cabal
and
the conservative in this case) were offering
nonsense: ‘
There are several types of bombs and some are calculated to do more damage than others
.’ ‘
A terrorist could have access to a number of types of explosives
.’ ‘
The psychology of a bomber is complicated; basically, they have a need to destroy
.’ ‘
As we know from the recent hurricane, water in the subways can cause serious problems
.’

But that was all they could say because apparently the
city wasn’t releasing any real information.

More troubling, Matthew was thinking, was what Josh was stewing over. Why
hadn’t
they heard from Billy? The last word from him: After they’d reported that the city had shut down the valves, he was going to start drilling. The botulinum was ready to go. He’d have the toxin in the water supply within a half hour.

The talking heads kept droning on about
bombs and floods … which would be like some teenager’s pimple, when the true attack would be a cancer. Poison to destroy the poisoned city.

The stations kept repeating the canned purée of info over and over again.

But no word of people getting sick. Nobody retching to death. No word yet about panic.

Stealing the thought from her husband, Harriet asked, ‘He couldn’t’ve gotten the poison on him,
could he?’

Of course he could. In which case he’d die an unpleasant if brief death. But he’d be a martyr to the cause of the American Families First Council, strike a blow for the true values of this country and, not incidentally, solidify Matthew Stanton’s role in the underground militia movement.

‘I’m worried,’ Harriet whispered.

Joshua looked her way and played with his homosexual bracelet
even more. At least he’d fathered children, Matthew reflected. A miracle, that was.

He ignored both wife and son. It seemed inconceivable that the authorities had figured out the plot. The elaborate scheme – crafted and refined over months – had been as detailed as a blueprint for a John Deere tractor. They’d executed it exactly as planned, each step at precisely the right moment. Down to the
second.

And thinking of time: Now it passed like a glacier. Whenever a new anchor appeared, a new man in the street began talking into an obscene microphone, Matthew hoped for more information. But he heard the same old story, recycled. No news of thousands of people dying in horrific ways dribbling from the predatory journalists’ lips.

‘Joshua?’ he asked his son. ‘Call again.’

‘Yessir.’ The
young man fumbled the phone, dropped it and looked up, apologizing with a fierce blush.

‘That’s your prepaid?’ Matthew asked sternly.

‘Yessir.’

No testy retorts from Josh, ever. Billy was respectful but he had a backbone. Joshua was a slug. Matthew waved a dismissing hand to the boy, who rose and stepped away from the noise of the TV.

‘Water Tunnel Number Three is the largest construction
project in the history of the City. It was begun—’

‘Father?’ Joshua said, nodding at the phone. ‘Still no answer.’

Outside the windows, sirens made up the soundtrack of the bleak afternoon. All three in the room fell silent, as if plunged into icy water.

Then an anchor girl was speaking crisply: ‘… have an announcement from City Hall about the terrorist plot … Investigators are now reporting
that it was not a bombing that the terrorists had planned. Their goal was to introduce poison into the New York City drinking water. This attempt failed, the police commissioner has said, and the water is completely safe. There’s a massive effort under way to find and arrest the individuals responsible. We’re going to our national security correspondent, Andrew Landers, to learn more about the domestic
terrorism movement. Good afternoon, Andrew—’

Matthew shut the TV off. He slipped a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue. ‘Okay, that’s it. We leave. Now.’

‘What happened, Father?’ Joshua asked.

As if I know.

Harriet was demanding, ‘What happened to Billy?’

Matthew Stanton waved her quiet. ‘Your phones. All of them. Batteries out.’ He popped the back off his while Harriet and Joshua did the
same. They threw them into what the Modification Commandments called a burn bag, even though you didn’t really burn it. You pitched it into a Dumpster some distance from your hotel. ‘Now. Go pack. But only the essentials.’

Harriet was saying again, ‘But Billy—?’

‘I told you to pack, woman.’ He wanted to hit her. But there was no time for corrections at this point. Besides, corrections with Harriet
didn’t always go as planned. ‘Billy can take care of himself. The story didn’t say he was captured. It just said they’ve uncovered a plot. Now. Move.’

Five minutes later Matthew had filled his suitcase and was zipping up his computer bag.

Harriet was wheeling her luggage behind her into the living room. Her face was a grim mask, nearly as unsettling as the latex one Billy had showed them, the
one he’d been wearing when he attacked his victims.

‘How did it happen?’ she asked, fuming.

The answer was the police, the answer was Lincoln Rhyme.

Billy had described him as the man who anticipated everything.

‘I want to find out what happened,’ she raged.

‘Later. Let’s go,’ Matthew snapped. Why was it God’s will that he ended up with a woman who spoke her mind? Would she never learn? Why
had he stopped with the belt? Bad mistake.

Well, they’d escape, they’d regroup, go underground once more. Deep underground. Matthew bellowed, ‘Joshua, are you packed?’

‘Yessir.’ Matthew’s son twitched into the room. His sandy hair was askew and his face was streaked with tears.

Matthew growled, ‘You. You act like a man. Understand me?’

‘Yessir.’

Matthew reached into his computer bag, shoved
aside the Bible and extracted two pistols, 9mm Smith & Wessons (he wouldn’t think of buying a foreign weapon, of course). He handed one to Josh, who seemed to relax when he took hold of it. The boy was comfortable with weapons; they seemed to offer a familiarity that soothed. At least there was that about him. Guns, of course, weren’t a woman’s way and so Matthew didn’t offer one to Harriet.

He said to his son, ‘Keep it hidden. And don’t use it unless I use mine. Look for my cue.’

‘Yessir.’

The weapons were merely a precaution. Lincoln Rhyme had stopped the plan but there was nothing that would lead back to Matthew and Harriet. The Commandments had taken care to insulate them. It was like what Billy had explained: the two zones in a tattoo parlor, hot and cold. They should never
meet.

Well, they’d be in their car and out of the city in thirty minutes.

He surveyed the hotel suite. They had not brought much with them – two suitcases each. Billy and Joshua had moved all the heavier equipment and supplies ahead of time.

‘Let’s go.’

‘A prayer?’ Joshua offered.

‘No fucking time,’ Matthew snapped.

Clutching and wheeling their satchels, the three of them stepped into the
corridor.

The good news about using a hotel as a safe house for an operation of this sort was that you didn’t have to sweep it down afterward, Billy’s Commandments had reported – the hotel politely and conveniently supplied a staff of folks to do that for you, disgusting illegals though they undoubtedly were.

Ironically, though, having had that thought, Matthew noted that the two women on the
cleaning staff near the elevators, chatting beside their carts, were of the white race.

God bless them.

With Joshua behind them, the husband and wife walked down the corridor. ‘What we’ll do is head north,’ Matthew explained in a whisper. ‘I’ve studied the map. We’ll avoid the tunnels.’

‘Roadblocks?’

‘What would they be looking for?’ Matthew snapped, pushing the elevator button. ‘They don’t
know us, don’t know anything about us.’

Though this turned out not to be the case.

As Matthew stabbed impatiently at the elevator button, which refused to illuminate, the two God Bless Them They’re White maids reached into their baskets, pulled out machine guns and pointed them at the family.

One, a pretty blonde, screamed, ‘Police! Down! Down on the floor! If we don’t see your hands at all
times, we will fire.’

Josh began to cry. Harriet and Matthew exchanged glances.

‘On the ground!’

‘Now!’

Other officers were moving in from the doors. More guns, more screaming.

My Lord, they were loud.

After a moment, Matthew lay down.

Harriet, though, seemed to be debating.

What the hell is she doing? Matthew wondered. ‘Lie down, woman!’