“He’s a doctor,” she said. “Only he’s a little screwed up. Likes to sell drugs he took from work to schoolkids. Must have half a dozen aliases. Or did I get the wrong William Leary?”
The look on the man’s face told them she was right.
“What kind of doctor?” Quinn asked the man.
He hesitated, trying not to look at Orlando. “General practice.”
“Huh,” Orlando said. “Then they must have got it wrong on your record.”
“What’s it say?” Quinn asked.
“Says that Dr. Leary here is an anesthesiologist.”
“I-I haven’t done that for a while,” Leary stammered.
“How long is a while?” Quinn asked.
“I stopped a couple years ago, okay?”
“Stopped?” Orlando asked.
Leary let out a defeated breath. “My license was revoked. Happy? But then Mr. Rose found me. And he offered me a hell of a lot of money.”
“What did Mr. Rose want you to do?” Quinn asked.
“Keep the children sedated until we need them.”
“Need them for what?”
“You don’t know?” Leary said. “But isn’t that why you’re here?”
No one said anything.
Finally, Leary said, “As a diversion. To get the explosives in.”
No one said anything for nearly thirty seconds.
“What explosives?” Quinn asked.
“They’re built into the juice boxes,” Leary said. “Binary explosives. Clear liquid. Looks harmless.”
“How does it work?” Quinn asked.
“I didn’t work on them directly.”
“But you know,” Quinn said.
Leary looked away, then nodded. “I heard something.”
“What?”
“I was told the chemicals inside were kept in two different compartments inside the pouches. Apparently they’re only dangerous once the divider between them is removed and they mix together. The boxes will go in with the kids.”
“Into where?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Quinn said.
“I don’t! Really!”
Quinn stared at him, watching to see if he was lying. But he wasn’t. “How are the boxes triggered?”
The technician glanced at the floor. “One of the children,” he said. “One of the children is the trigger.”
Quinn heard Marion gasp, but she said nothing.
“How does it work?” Quinn asked.
“It… em … eh …”
Quinn’s hand shot out, shoving the man’s head against the wall.
“How does it work?” he repeated.
The man’s eyes were wild in fear; for a few seconds his gaze fell on Marion as if he were scared of her the most. “One of the children has the triggering device implanted in her thigh, just below the skin. It has to be activated first. A handheld device. I only saw it once, but it looked like a cell phone.”
“Who has it?”
“I don’t know. Mr. Rose or Tucker, I would guess.”
“So they activate it,” Orlando said. “Then what?”
Again he glanced momentarily at Marion. “When the trigger, the child, enters the room where the boxes are, a signal from her prompts the membrane inside to dissolve. Then thirty seconds later …”
“Jesus,” Orlando said.
“So one of the children is the trigger,” Quinn said.
Again the glance.
