“Diisopropylamine,” the sergeant read from the screen, noting the presence of the colorless, ammonia-smelling chemical. “There’s the base ingredient for the base of the binary.”
“So it was made as a binary,” Orwell commented. “Interesting.” He looked back to the screen. “Ethyl alcohol, dipropylene glycol monomethyl ether, and phosphine. There’s the whole base.”
“The guy was able to process it?” the sergeant wondered. “I would have bet he’d skipped the phosphine and used the extrusion method. This guy took risks.”
He sure did, Orwell agreed. Using phosphine, a gas that had the potential to spontaneously ignite on contact with air, put their man a step above advanced chemist. You had to have balls to play with this stuff in a crude environment. Balls and confidence. Strange. He chose to use a more difficult method of making the VX binary base. The only reason to do that was…quality control? The simpler method sometimes yielded inferior, even ineffective product because of the potential for poor manufacturing of the several reagents. Processing with phosphine was more dangerous, but it gave the chemist more control over the finished product. Very strange, Orwell thought.
“Did you get any quantity readings for the base?”
“Too much evaporation to tell,” Orwell answered, shaking his head. He scrolled further through the data. “Here’s our activator reagents.”
The binary chemical weapon consisted of two parts, separated until mixed for use: the base and the activator. The base, which was a sort of generous chemical receptor, mixed with the more important activator. This activator gave the weapon its “personality.” Several variations of known agents were possible depending upon how much one “tweaked” the activator, which made identification of its precise ingredients necessary in order to determine its lethality.
“Dimethyl sulfate, sulfur dioxide, ethyl — ethyl?”
The reading caught Orwell’s eye as well.
“This says ethyl mercaptan,” the sergeant said. “That should be methyl mercaptan.”
“I know.” Orwell was already reading the rest of the data on-screen, his heart rate rising.
“Sulfur dioxide,” the sergeant continued. “That’s right. Ethy—” He stopped, staring at the screen.
“Ethylene glycol dinitrate,” Orwell said, finishing the sergeant’s words.
“That’s got to be wrong! It has to be!” The sergeant took the printout and read the hard copy to confirm that what he saw on the screen was not some anomaly. It wasn’t. “It isn’t.”
“Dammit.”
“Did you get a quantity on this?” the sergeant asked.
“Yes.”
“How much?”
Orwell didn’t answer with words. His expression said Enough.
“Dear God.”
“Finish that sentence, Sergeant, and ask for His help,” Orwell said. He stood and slid by his subordinate, heading for the door. “We’re going to need it.”
TWO
Before the Horse
“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has just confirmed that the incident north of Los Angeles initially reported as only a hazardous chemical mishap was actually a potentially disastrous spill of a military-style chemical weapon known as VX,” the CNN anchor reported, reading from news copy just handed him. “VX is a nerve gas common to the stockpiles of the military forces of both the United States and the former Soviet Union. At a news conference just carried live on CNN, Special Agent in Charge Jerry Donovan of the Los Angeles FBI office reported that the nerve gas was manufactured illicitly by a still unidentified person and released during some sort of mishap. Donovan repeated assurances that there is no reason to believe any of the nerve gas has fallen into the wrong…”
Bud DiContino muted the television as his phone buzzed.
“DiContino.”
“Bud, it’s Gordy.”
“Hey, I just caught your man in L.A. on CNN,” Bud said. “He handled it well.”
The exasperation came through the phone in the form of a sigh before Director Jones spoke. “I’m not so sure. I’m faxing you something right now.”
Bud heard the low hum of the whisper-quiet machine and pulled the pages out as they came through, scanning them quickly.
“We’ve got trouble,” Jones said, using those words that no one at this level of government wanted to hear.
Bud scanned the last page just after the director’s warning. Fast reading was a necessity in government service, the need for such a skill increasing proportionally the higher one progressed. There wasn’t any higher than the West Wing of the White House, and few faster than the NSA. “When did this info come in?”
“Still the speed-reading champion, I see,” Jones quipped. “Less than an hour ago.”
“Did…what’s his name?”
“Donovan,” Jones prompted. “No, he didn’t know this. But he also didn’t have any authorization to say what he did.”
Bud tossed pages haphazardly onto his desk. “Dammit, Gordy! He goes on national TV and tells everybody things are under control, and then this!”
“I know, Bud.”
Bud picked up the last page and read the important section of the fax once more. “This is confirmed?”
“By the Army commander on-scene. He rammed this through channels and into the Pentagon at light speed to get it here.”
“Christ!” Bud exclaimed. “What’s Drew have out there — a four-star?”
“A young buck captain,” Jones replied. Secretary of Defense Andrew Meyerson was also sufficiently impressed with the young officer’s tenacity, the FBI director knew from the call the secretary had made to pass the info along.
“That takes balls,” Bud said. He thought again of the press briefing just completed. “I hope you’re going to bite a big chunk out of Donovan’s ass.”
“I will. Don’t worry. He’s only been running the show out there for a while, but he knows better than to give everybody the safe signal on something like this before checking with me first. No excuse at all.”
So a SAC was going to get the riot act read to him in a major way. As necessary as that was, it still wouldn’t undo the damage already done. “So what’s the plan now?”
“Silence,” Jones said.
“This may not be the best time to close our mouths, Gordy. Think of how the press will play it. FBI flubs first by telling the public all is A-OK, then they hide their mistake when it’s discovered. It doesn’t look good.”
“I’m not concerned with appearances right now, Bud. That was the mistake Donovan made. He jumped the gun because he wanted this wrapped up. I’ve seen it before.” And Jones had suspected the new SAC in L.A. might live up to those low standards. But the senior senator from a state that possessed forty-three electoral votes liked the smoothness of Donovan, and certain things in the political arena had to be accepted with bared teeth disguised as a smile. “I don’t want this out because it might hamper what my people are going to have to do. L.A. is going to have to figure out more than just ‘who’ and ‘why’ now. We have to add ‘where’ to that list The press is going to find out at some point in any case. I just don’t want it to hamper an investigation. Hey, I’ll stand up to the plate afterwards and say that we fucked up royally. Until then, I don’t need reporters hounding me or my agents about a bad situation gone worse.”
Jones did make his point with conviction. Bud was still uneasy about it, but he was not the number-two cop in the land. “You know what’s best, Gordy. So what is your read on this?”
“I won’t know until I get something from L.A.”