“Which leaves us with . . . ?” Lewis asked. For reply, Sasha appropriated the controls, bringing up another video on the screen. This one was better defined, but at an odd angle. One of the traffic cameras, maybe.
“We tracked the delivery van back, but we lost it in the warehouse district. They were damn careful. It took hours to trace them this far, but I don’t think we’ll get much farther, not with these methods. If they’re smart—and I think they are—they’d have had Earth Wardens ready to reduce the entire truck to slag and spare parts in a few minutes.” Sasha blanked the screen. “If I had to guess, I’d say we ought to be looking for warehouses rented out in the last two months.”
“Put somebody on it,” Lewis said.
Sasha folded his arms and sat back with a cocky smile. “Already done.”
Lewis turned his attention to another Earth Warden, young but sharp. Heather something or other; I’d heard good things. “What about the package itself?” Lewis asked her.
Heather ducked her head shyly and studied her interlaced fingers. “Still analyzing,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. “But there is definitely a high decay rate to what’s inside. It’s dangerous, most certainly.”
“But not a bomb.”
She looked up at him, then at us, wide-eyed. “Oh yes,” she said. “It had a delivery system and a trigger. If you’d opened the package, it would have gone off and spread the contents.”
“And the contents are . . . ?” David asked, in that cool, controlled voice so at odds with the look in his eyes.
“Antimatter,” Heather said. “Antimatter colliding with any kind of matter will produce a violently energetic reaction. The by-products are—”
“There was a trigger?” I asked. “What kind of trigger?”
Her gaze slid away from mine, toward Lewis, and then back, as if she’d been seeking approval. “It looked as if it was adapted from a more traditional bomb-making approach. Timer and a small charge designed to crack the shell holding in the antimatter, spilling it out into the world.”
“Not a skill you pick up at your local community college,” Paul grunted.
“Unfortunately, it’s not exactly rare, either. And with the Internet so helpfully offering tutorials for this kind of thing, it will be hard to track.”
“The paper?” Lewis got us back on track. “The wrapping, the card?”
Heather brightened immediately. “That’s a possibility, ” she said. “If the Djinn can help us, we may be able to trace the card’s history back and find out who came in contact with it.”
But that experiment failed. I could have told them it would. When they brought in the card—in a heavily shielded container, since it was saturated with radiation—and presented it to Rahel, she just shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I see nothing at all.”
It was the same with David, and I could see his frustration and growing alarm. He’d dismissed all this at first, but there were too many of us now, and we were too credible. The Djinn had to believe us—but believing us meant accepting half a dozen impossible things. Heather, disheartened, reclaimed the thing and began to have it carted back to the lab for more tests.
I stopped her. “Can I see it?” I asked. She looked surprised. “Well, it was addressed to me. It stands to reason that I might see something others don’t.”
I doubted she bought that theory, but I really did want to see it. It had been meant for me. So had the bomb—for me and David. I supposed the first explosion would have killed me, and the antimatter would have done the job for David. . . .
Heather handed me a pair of protective gloves, draped a heavy shielding vest around my chest, and put a protective hood on me before she allowed me to reach into the container and pull out the card. It was, as Lewis had told me, a greeting card—a fairly nice one, actually, with a graphic of a wedding cake, a bride, a groom. Inside, cursive preprinted script read, Congratulations to the happy couple!
But when I saw what was underneath, I felt cold, clammy, and sick. It said, in plain block letters pressed deep into the paper, Sleep with the enemy, pay the price.
Beneath it was sketched a symbol, kind of a torch. The kind that peasants carry to attack the monster-dwelling castle.
I cleared my throat and turned the card over. “Was there anything else?” My voice was muffled by the helmet, but clear enough. I distinctly saw Heather shoot another of those looks toward Lewis. “Well?”
“Give it to her,” Lewis said. He sounded grim and calm. “No point in hiding anything.”
Heather brought out another container. This one had several sheets of paper that had been folded in half—probably to fit inside the card or its envelope.
Plain white paper, no watermarking. Cheap quality. On it was printed in very small type a—I hesitated to call it a letter, because there was no hint of communication to it. A manifesto, maybe.
The Sentinels were declaring war on the Wardens, and they’d felt compelled to give us all their reasons. It was quite a list, starting with a detailed analysis of why the Wardens could no longer be trusted to put the interests of the human race first. Seems we’d been corrupted not by our own greed or weakness, but by contact with the Djinn.
Most of the manifesto was about the Djinn, and the crazy paranoia gave me the creeps. Sure, the Djinn could be capricious, even cruel; they certainly didn’t forgive those who trespassed against them, and turning the other cheek had never been a high priority for them. Added to that, they had millennia of pent-up anger against the Wardens.
But even so, the Sentinels’ position wasn’t that Djinn ought to be treated with care and caution—it was that none of them deserved to live. That every single Djinn in existence had to be hunted down and destroyed for the human race to survive.
That they had to be punished for their crimes before they were allowed to die.
I felt sick, and I’d barely skimmed the thing. David hadn’t been able to, saturated as it was with antimatter radiation that rendered it effectively invisible to him, but he could read my expression and mood like flashing neon. He stood up and said, “Enough. Jo, enough.”
I nodded and put the manifesto back into the container. Heather sealed it and took back her protective equipment. “They intended that to be found,” I said. “So they really didn’t intend the bomb to go off, did they?”
Lewis and Heather once again exchanged that look.
I was starting to really hate that look. “These weren’t in the box with the antimatter,” Lewis said. “They were in your mailbox, where they’d be found later. But they’re still saturated with radiation, enough to sicken anybody who touched them.”
No question, this was serious. If they’d succeeded with the bomb in the package, I’d be dead or badly injured, and David . . . David would be, too. Putting tainted, taunting letters in my mailbox was worse yet. It reminded me of the cruelest of terrorists, who detonated one explosion and waited for rescue workers to arrive before detonating another. My friends would have been the ones to suffer.
I tried to lighten my own mood. “Special Delivery Guy delivers the mail, too,” I said. “Give him credit, at least he’s a full-service assassin. Maybe we can get him to throw in a pizza and hot wings next time.” All my attempt at humor did was give everybody the opportunity to stare at me with faintly worried looks, as if they were afraid that I was going to scream, faint, or grow a second head.
At length, Heather said, “We’re following up on anyone who goes into the hospitals for treatment of radiation sickness or burns, but I have the feeling that a well-trained Earth Warden could have handled these letters without lasting damage, if he was careful. Or she, of course. And we have to proceed on the idea that whatever the Sentinels are, they’re well organized and well protected.”