Art nodded slowly. It felt right. There was no other way to describe the gut instinct a veteran street agent got when the pieces slid together seamlessly. He had no absolute proof yet that the scenario his partner had just laid out was anything but a theory, but he’d lay money on it being damn close to reality.
“So,” Frankie said. “King and Allen. Who was King and how did he get involved in this, and who was Allen working with?”
“We have the center of the puzzle,” Art said. “Now we have to find the edges.”
Frankie flipped the pages of her notepad closed and tossed it on her desk. She looked to the clock, then to the empty coffeepot on the small credenza to her side. “I’m gonna need some caffeine if this drags on too much longer.”
Art, who had his own small coffeemaker on his side of their workspace, might have agreed with her had he not sworn off caffeine. Five hours of sleep after leaving the site of the incident as the sun came up, followed by nine hours of poring through what little they knew about the entire affair at this early stage, left neither agent wanting to make this evening another long one that would stretch into the wee hours of the morning. Art knew they needed sleep, at least one good night of it, in order to start putting the final pieces of what led to the incident at 1212 Riverside together to form a coherent picture. From that picture they might then be able to identify those who had almost succeeded in obtaining what the internationally inclined politicians called a weapon of mass destruction, though Art knew that had any of Freddy Allen’s kind gotten their hands on it it would be a weapon of mass murder. Whoever those folks were, they deserved the cuffs for their intentions, and the gas chamber for causing the deaths of Luis Hidalgo, Jr., and the others. Art could supply the cuffs. The other would be decided once those were on.
The sound of the elevator door sliding open and two sets of footsteps drew the agents’ attention. Art stood and turned to see who…
“Orwell?”
Frankie joined her partner as Captain Orwell, dressed down in blue jeans and a leather jacket, approached with Lou Hidalgo.
“Art. Frankie. Have a seat.” The A-SAC pulled two more chairs over for the captain and himself.
There was no mistaking the expression Hidalgo wore like a red flag. Art had noticed it as he neared. There should have been grief, and sadness, but there was something masking those emotions instead. Art suspected it to be determination. The A-SAC knew it was rage.
“What is it, Lou?” Art asked.
“As of four o’clock today, per the director, I am overseeing this investigation.”
“Wait,” Frankie said. “Lou, they can’t dump this on you right now.”
Hidalgo shook his head. “It’s not like that. Cam is out of the country, and Jerry…well, he has other things to deal with.”
Oh, shit. Art straightened in his seat unconsciously. The director had called the A-SAC personally, and Jerry Donovan was busy? “Lou?”
Hidalgo faced the man who could have had the A-SAC position had his life not taken a personally tragic detour. “Art, don’t read into that. I know you. Jerry is busy, that’s all. The director wants me to watch over this thing, and, that said, you two are now running the investigation per me.”
That statement perplexed Frankie. Weren’t they already the de facto lead on the case because of their involvement with Allen? That silent musing lasted only until she noticed the look on Orwell’s face. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“This isn’t going to be just a cleanup investigation,” Hidalgo said. “Things are a lot worse than anyone wanted.”
Dammit! Art remembered the captain’s less-than-absolute assurances at the site. Probably, huh? “Some of it got out, didn’t it?”
The question was directed squarely at Orwell. “Not exactly.”
“Well, exactly what does ‘worse’ mean?” Art demanded.
“When I finished the analysis on the chemical residue in the containers there were some anomalies I wasn’t expecting,” the captain explained. “I want you to understand this, so let me be precise. VX can be manufactured into two stable reagents.”
“As a binary weapon,” Frankie recalled.
“You told us that at the site,” Art said impatiently.
“Give him a chance, Art,” Hidalgo said.
Orwell waited a second for the air to clear. “The two reagents are what we refer to as a base and an activator. For VX the base is ethyl 2-[diisopropylamino] ethylmethylphosphonite. We call it QL for brevity’s sake. The activator is a thicker substance called dimethyl-polysulfide. When those two are mixed they yield VX. I found residue that let me estimate King could have produced enough QL for three of those cylinders.”
“But there was only one,” Frankie said.
“Which made sense because there was only enough residue of the ingredients for the activator for that one batch in the cylinder. I was able to estimate that because there was a clear measurement of one of the activator’s components: methyl mercaptan.”
“Okay, I follow you so far,” Art said. “There was enough of the base for three cylinders of VX, but only enough activator for one.” The captain confirmed Art’s understanding with a nod. “Was the leftover base still there?”
“No. I was—”
“Wait,” Art cut off the captain. “It was not there? You mean someone out there has half of what is needed to make twice as much VX as we had on-site?”
“No,” Orwell said. “Let me finish.”
Frankie gave her partner a look that told him to ease up. He was a driven one, she knew, and sometimes needed a little mothering to keep him from letting that drive push him too quickly.
“While we were doing the residue analysis we found something unexpected,” Orwell went on. “Two chemicals: ethyl mercaptan and ethylene glycol dinitrate.”
“Wasn’t that other one methyl mercaptan?” Frankie asked.
“Right. These two chemicals, along with a combination of the others we identified, can be processed into an activator named triethylmonosulfide.”
“An activator?” Art said. “Like the dimethyl-whatever?”
“Similar.”
“What are you saying, that this other activator works with the base that isn’t accounted for?” Frankie asked.
“Yes. VX shares its base with another nerve agent that was derived from it. VZ is its name.”
The two agents shared a look before Art spoke. “You mean that there is a reason to believe that someone out there has all the ingredients to make a nerve agent like the one that got loose up on Riverside?”
“Not like, Jefferson,” Orwell corrected. “Worse.”
“Worse?” Frankie said with surprise. “You said VX was the most deadly thing we had.”
“It’s the most deadly nerve agent we’ve produced and stocked,” Orwell clarified. “VZ is more lethal, but it is not as useful to the military because its deliverable state reduces its persistence. Triethylmonosulfide as an activator is not a thickener, which means that, although VZ won’t stick to things as readily on the battlefield, it is more readily absorbed into the human body, both through inhalation and through the skin.”
“So we didn’t make this stuff because, even though it would kill you better, it wouldn’t hang around long enough?” Art asked incredulously.
“Basically, yes.”
Art let his body fall back in the chair. It was all clear now, why Lou was running the show. Jerry had put the cart before the horse and told the world that everything was A-OK before getting any final word. Idiot! “So someone has this stuff.”