Coldwater Revenge, James Ross [books for 9th graders txt] 📗

in one of those rent-a-beds along the strip of fast food palaces and used car lots on the main drag heading out of Coldwater. It wasn’t the Hilton.

The corner door opened without a knock and three thick bodies crowded in. One took the straight-backed chair beneath the curtained window, one a corner of the twin bed against the wall and the other stood. The one on his feet introduced himself as Mr. Johnsen. “With an ‘e’,” as if Tom might need that information later. “With the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” He identified the others as National Bioforensic Analysis Center and something called BARDA. He did not volunteer names. A fourth person came in during the brief introduction, attached a laptop to the television and left.

“We’ve decided you should see this first,” said Johnsen. “Then we can chat.”

The time stamp at the bottom of the screen read that day’s date, but Tom could not quite make out the time. The screen showed a man at a podium and behind him a large map of the northeast United States and eastern Canada, with Coldwater at the center. Johnsen turned up the volume.

“As you can see,” said the man on the screen, “there are eleven outdoor stadiums located within a two-hundred-mile radius of the first contamination.” He aimed a laser pointer at the map projected on the wall behind him. “Each holds between twenty to sixty thousand people. All but two are on the U. S. side of the border. Absent extreme weather, two-thirds of those stadiums will be filled on either day of each weekend between now and the end of November.” He pressed the controller in his hand and the border map was replaced by a photo of the Plexiglas box that the diver had recovered from the water beneath the Pearce boathouse. He explained where it was found, its probable function and that the boathouse’s last occupant had tested positive for something called ‘abrin.’ “For those of you not familiar with the compound abrin, and I assume that’s virtually all of you, it is a close chemical cousin to that other terrorist toy, ricin, only about seventy-five times more potent.”

He clicked the slide changer again, and an image appeared of an open automobile trunk with a box the size of a footlocker wedged inside. The next slide showed the underside of the same car with a Frisbee-sized hole cut through the floor of the trunk and the bottom of the box inside it. The final slide was a crude diagram of a wire cable passing through a box and the back seat of a car, ending in a loop next to the driver’s seat. The opposite end of the cable was attached to a plastic disk that covered the hole in the bottom of the box and trunk. “Like an old-fashioned bathtub plug and chain,” he explained.

“We found two cars modified with this homemade device in a junkyard less than three miles from where we found the apparatus in slide number two. One was on a hydraulic lift inside a commercial garage and the other was parked in an adjacent junkyard with full tank of gas and an ignition key under the driver’s seat. We don’t know how many of these vehicles may have been cobbled together there or whether any have been made in other locations. But it’s ingenious, low-tech, easy to make and simple to use.”

Someone spoke from outside the range of the video monitor. The speaker cupped a hand to his ear and then leaned toward the microphone. “I’m just coming to that.” He opened a three-ring binder and consulted a tabbed section before resuming.

“Our wonderful planet is full of deadly compounds. That one may be seventy-five times more potent than another is hardly significant, if both are one hundred percent lethal and kill their victims one at a time. But what slide two and three are telling us is that someone has developed a way to deliver the toxin abrin in aerosol form, thus enabling murder by the thousands.

“We don’t have data on abrin in aerosol form. Until now, we didn’t know that it existed outside the lab, much less ready to be manufactured and delivered in mass quantities. But that’s what these slides seem to be telling us.

“Based on the delivery mechanisms we found at this site, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority has made modifications to the anthrax contamination model created by Dr. Inglesby at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense and which is still the most up to date scenario we have for aerosol bio-attack. The revised projected outcome is subject to a number of variables and is probably conservative.”

He turned to another tab in the note book and began to read:

“In Inglesby’s scenario, a car modified like the one in slide number four cruises by a sports stadium while a game is in progress. The driver pulls the plug at the bottom of the trunk using the cable device shown in the last slide. Several kilos of powered toxin spill from the bottom of the vehicle, spread over the highway and then start to blow across the cars in the nearby parking lot, into the stadium and through the surrounding neighborhoods. The model predicts that, depending on prevailing winds, one out of five people who attended the game will inhale a number of molecules of toxin sufficient to cause illness or death. From that point forward, the day-to-day progress of the contamination is as follows:”

The reader’s crisp voice was momentarily muffled by the undertone of Tom’s disbelief. What have you done, Susan?

“Hospital personnel are overwhelmed and confused, some fearing for their own safety. Those who can find them, begin to wear anti-contamination suits, photos of which are widely displayed on the news. Tests conducted by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center on blood samples taken from the first to die confirm the presence of abrin.”

“People who have not yet been infected begin to flee the city. Massive traffic congestion and widespread