Anthrax. Ricin. Sarin.
D.C. was always on extra high alert, just like New York, and all the major cities, really, for any hint of terrorist activity. There was one plus to the situation—they were prepared for nearly anything. But the fallout from any of those kinds of attacks could last for days. She combed her memory—what was today? An anniversary of some sort, with meaning only to those involved?
Her line, the double-check line, she’d dubbed it, took only ten minutes, but it felt like hours. Sam was finally in front of Dr. Evans again.
“Name?”
“Dr. Samantha Owens. We met an hour ago.”
He was taken aback for a moment, then nodded. “I remember. Nashville. What are you doing here?”
“I went outside to see if I could help.”
“Brilliant, Doctor. We’ll need you on the back end of this, not in the middle. Any new symptoms?”
“No. I’m fine.”
“Since you’ve been in the contamination zone you have to stay isolated for the time being. Maybe you could keep an eye on the folks here, let us know if any of them start showing symptoms. The reports are coming in that the people who are sick took the Metro this morning. So we’re just being extra cautious with people who were in the area. Can you do that for me? Keep yourself out of any more trouble?”
“Of course. But what should I be looking for outside of respiratory distress? What are we dealing with?”
“We don’t know yet. They’re in the tunnels doing air-quality tests. HAZMAT is getting positives for an unidentified neurotoxin. Might be a false alarm, but I’ve seen too many people who aren’t looking good to think it’s just a mistake. Good news is, while we’ve got a few critical, none are dead yet. Hang in there. It’s going to be a while before we can release you.”
“I have HAZMAT training. I can help.”
“We’re fine right now. We’re the best in the country at response. Thanks, though.”
She was shuffled off to the right again, taken down a long hallway, then asked to sit on the floor and wait.
This was insane. She should be helping, not sitting in a hallway with a bunch of scared people waiting to see if any of them started coughing.
They couldn’t stop her from thinking about the situation, though. She knew exactly what the HAZMAT teams were doing, the tests they’d be running. If there was powder, they’d be able to analyze it on-site. If it was airborne, that was a whole different kind of response.
The logic of the situation started to eat at her. If Foggy Bottom was ground zero, why stage a biological or chemical attack at the Metro station closest to the best decontamination unit in the area? Remorse? Desire to allow innocents to live? Terrorists wouldn’t be kind, or allow for convenience. They’d stage as far away from help as they could to maximize the dead, then hit the first responders as they came in, as well.
Come on, Sam. You are really jumping to conclusions now. You don’t even know what’s happening—it could just as easily be a chemical fire as it could a terrorist attack. The Metro was constantly under repair, and steady work was being made on the new Silver Line to the airport. This was most likely just a local issue that needed extra precautions.
That made her feel better. It wasn’t like her to assume: she was a scientist, after all, logic and evidence her closest friends. But it felt different to be involved, not on the outside trying to figure out what was happening. Without a cadaver, a set of sharpened Henckel knives and a dissection tray, she was sometimes lost.
But she’d been involved in plenty of investigations in the past. She couldn’t help herself. She let her thoughts distract her. How many victims would there be? If it was a biological or chemical hazard, it could take hours until they knew what they were dealing with. If it was airborne, it could be ten times worse. So many of the airborne toxins took hours to manifest symptoms, and were practically impossible to contain. With this many people already down, perhaps it was something else. Chemical, most likely.
It was rather cruel and unusual punishment that there wasn’t a TV in the hallway they could tune to. She figured the media was going absolutely stark raving mad by now.