“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.”
“You think Cross was behind what happened here?”
“Don’t you, Ranger?” Paz eased closer to her, forcing Caitlin to turn her gaze even more upward. “People leave residue of themselves behind wherever they go,” he said. “Imprints of their actions as plain and recognizable as photographs. It’s why my mother almost never left the shack in the Venezuelan slum where I grew up; she couldn’t bear to be around the evil and ugliness so many left behind in their wake.” The colonel paused, seeming to need a moment to compose himself—a first, in Caitlin’s memory. “I recognized Daniel Cross inside that restaurant as soon as I entered. I might as well have been looking him in the face.”
Caitlin saw Jones addressing some uniformed officials who’d just arrived, and he approached her as soon as he sent them off.
“The colonel agrees Daniel Cross was behind this,” Caitlin told him. “If he’s really got something he wants to give to ISIS, we just found it.”
“You mean we found what it can do, Ranger.”
“Which still doesn’t provide even a hint about what he was doing outside that Indian reservation.”
Jones massaged his scalp through his high-and-tight haircut. “I can see why Captain Tepper finally hammered your ass to a chair.”
“As you can see, the nails didn’t hold. You suspected an ISIS plot in Texas, with Daniel Cross a primary part of it. Then he disappears and this happens. But, in between, he shows up to watch the Comanche protest from the peanut gallery. You telling me you don’t see a possible connection there?”
*