“Functional enough. Do you want me to use it?”
Baylor shook his head. “Good lord, no. What’s inside of there isn’t quite the same as what I think is wrong with Roberts.” Baylor paused. “It’s not as discriminating.”
Baylor wasn’t sure what the canister would do if unleashed in a crowded area. The most likely scenario was the Mongolian prison experiment but this time on hundreds of police and rescue personnel. He decided to stay well clear of the location for the surrender.
Of course, if the material in the glass vial were released, it would solve the problem — at least partially — of the lack of evidence of aerosols at the other locations. If the object found in Roberts’ possession was shown to cause the rage on a large group of people, it would make a much stronger connection between him and the device.
“I might have you solve two problems at once. If it’s possible to spray it on Roberts and then get him in proximity to someone without a suit, I want you to take the initiative. If you can end-of-life him on the scene, we can clean things up more easily.
“Also, as a backup, keep a set of respiratory gear with you at all times in case we do need to activate it.” Baylor reminded himself to ask for a hazmat suit to keep in the back of his car if need be.
“Anything else?” asked Mr. Lewis.
“One more thing after this. I’ll send you the information. I’m going to need you to take the other two cylinders to Los Angeles. I have an Estonian post-doc working at UCLA in a lab theoretically capable of this. I think he would make a good point of origin.
“We’ve already got evidence of him soliciting the Chinese for certain things from the lab. I just don’t know yet if we want to go with a Chinese connection or a Middle-Eastern one.”
After Mr. Lewis left, Baylor walked over to a group of vans and trucks parked in the middle of the parking lot. The regional FBI director was talking into his cell phone while trying to get information and give orders to a dozen people. He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and looked at Baylor.
“I think you need to tell the press that you’re willing to meet Roberts’ request.” For Baylor’s plan to work, he needed to convince them that they were putting on a show for a man who wanted to believe he was contaminated, while making sure that they took the precautions they needed to avoid actually getting exposed to Mitchell.
“I’m with you,” said the director. He tilted his head toward the Super Center. “One more day of this and people aren’t going to want to leave their homes.”
“How’s the search going?” asked Baylor.
“We still haven’t found any cars with the license plates he stole last night. We’re trying to figure out why he’s still in South Florida if he has a car. We think he may have an accomplice that’s driving him around.”
Baylor knew that was an almost impossibility but nodded his head. There was still a possible third person in the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI was never fully clear on who was responsible for the anthrax scare. The Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph, also had supporters who were never charged. There was a precedent there. The more they bought into the idea that he was involved in a conspiracy, the less he would look like a victim.
Baylor told the director he would be available if he was needed and then walked back to his car to call Steinmetz back at the lab.
“Ari, I need you to come down here.”
“What’s going on? Is it …” asked the concerned scientist.
“We don’t know yet. But I want you to be on the scene so we can take possession of the body.”
“Body? What body?”
Baylor backtracked. “Sorry. It’s chaotic here. I mean when Roberts comes into custody I want us to run some tests on him.”
Baylor hung up the phone. It was stressful keeping track of who needed to know what. But that was the burden he had chosen.
44
After he heard the latest press conference announce that they took Mitchell’s claims seriously, Mitch had spent the night going over every police standoff he could remember. The first goal was to not get shot by some police sniper ordered to take him out if he looked like he was going to do something threatening to anybody else. Given that Mitchell’s own body could be considered a threat, this was going to be a little problematic. He had to make sure that proper distance was going to be kept from him.
To do that, he needed some kind of threat he could use that wouldn’t pose a risk to anybody else. When the location came to him, he thought of a way to make only himself vulnerable to the threat. Hopefully that would keep trigger-happy police from offing him.
Another contributing factor for the location was proximity to television news cameras. Mitchell didn’t want to get caught in some remote place like the little island he hid out on the day before. Rookman had made him paranoid enough to think that there might be some greater conspiracy going on. He stood no chance against anything like that. All he could do was look as much like a victim of circumstance as possible.
The next morning, Mitchell docked his johnboat on a seawall below the South River drawbridge. He waited until the morning rush hour was over and then climbed the stairwell that led up to the pedestrian walkway. Mitch took four road flares from his bag, lit them and then used them to block traffic coming from one side of the bridge.
He walked to the other side and did the same. Before the last road flare was lit, Mitch could hear sirens. He walked toward the middle of the bridge and shot three flares into the air before pulling one more thing out of his bag and then tossed the bag over the side. Mitch looked up at the bridge tender’s control room and waved his hands at the man to stay away.
When the bridge tender saw the crazy man in his underwear walk across the bridge and start throwing flares onto the road, he immediately called the police before he realized he was looking at Mitchell Roberts. He pressed the button that lowered the barriers that told traffic not to cross and then locked the door to his control room. He’d wait for the police to tell him what to do next.
Mitch hopped up on the railing and waited. It was embarrassing being in his underwear, but it seemed like the only way to convince people that he didn’t have a weapon. He knew it made him look like a loon, but he could explain afterward why he did it. It made sense to him, at least. He tried to put the idea out of his mind that governments had a habit of humiliating dictators and terrorists with leaked photos of them in a state of undress.
The other precaution made him look unstable, but it was the only way he could think of to make everyone stay clear. If he could have climbed to the top of a building and have a practical escape route, he might have done that. But he didn’t. He had to improvise.
A sales manager for Channel 8 heard the sirens and looked out his eighteenth-floor window that overlooked the South Bay bridge. “Holy cow,” he exclaimed. He shouted to the rest of the office to come look. “Hey guys, check this out!”
Half a dozen people rushed over. A minute later the newsroom upstairs was notified. A camera was aimed out the window down at the bridge. Mitchell was live on the air five minutes after the first police car arrived. The feed went national three minutes later when people realized the man on the bridge in his underwear with the orange electrical cord tied around his neck like a noose was Mitchell Roberts.
Mitch had no intention of snapping his neck with the noose he’d tied to the bridge. It was a desperate measure, but he needed a way to make himself look as vulnerable as possible. If the police stepped past his perimeter, he would threaten to jump.
He knew that in situations like that, where the only person at risk was the suspect, police had a lot more patience. The only life they had to protect was his. Or at least he hoped.