He ends the call. Caitlin looks at me.
“Doesn’t make sense,” she says. I know what she means.
“If Family First want to make sure the attack happens without interference, why warn the police?” I wonder.
“And why is a rapid response unit ready so fast?” Riya broods. “Honestly, we are not usually that organized.”
Luca has joined us and looks completely pissed off at the details that he’s picking up.
“The police? This is bullshit,” he says, stressed. “We’ve spent the past twenty-four hours creating a perfect shell around these girls, cutting off any possible contamination. And now cops are going to come barreling in here, opening doors, spreading radio waves, bringing in weapons. . . .”
He’s right, it is a nightmare. Our secure, sealed-off bubble is about to get blown out of the water. And who knows which one of those cops might have been persuaded to work with Family First in exchange for a handy retirement fund, or medical treatment for a sick family member? There are infinite ways that people become vulnerable to criminals waving cash. Or, as Riya seems to fear, perhaps this entire police operation is the handiwork of Family First.
“Let’s stay calm.”
This suggestion comes from Riya. Which is an irony that’s not lost on me.
“Going back to the task you gave me, Jessie,” she continues briskly, “there are only two things I could think of that might link to what’s happening here. One—we missed something at the lab that day.”
“The lab was empty except for the vials with the nanoparticles,” I say.
“Or, secondly, we haven’t properly explored the weapons you found at the warehouse,” she says. “We logged all those using the photos you took.”
She brings up a list on her phone screen. It’s a police inventory of every item found in the warehouse that Hassan led us to a few days ago. It feels like a lifetime away and it doesn’t feel like it means much, but I need to trust Riya’s instinct. I need to do something.
Taking a breath, I run my eyes down the page, past the itemized list of Jingo’s campaign caps and T-shirts, and down to the catalog of guns and explosives we found in the crates. I rack my brains. Which of these things could be fashioned into a trigger for this specific virus? What could touch all the girls and finish them off?
“Holy crap,” says Ethan from his post upstairs. “The cops are driving toward us. I have two vans, approaching from the east.”
Downstairs, here in the foyer, it’s just me and Riya with Caitlin and Luca. The girls and Jaya are on the same ground floor as us, but they are down the long corridor that leads through to the dining hall. I step away from my teammates for a moment. Because, even in the chaos of the police arriving, and with all the panic and commands flying around, I’m still thinking about the list that Riya showed me. The inventory of stuff from the warehouse. In my head, I replay that night now. Trying to remember if there was anything else in the warehouse. Because, amid our current state of panic, something is bothering me, teasing at me, crouching right outside the edges of my conscious mind.
Ethan’s voice comes in again. “There are eight special forces–type cops. Getting out, lining up near our perimeter, getting a pep talk.”
Luca and Caitlin look out from the nearest window.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” breathes Caitlin.
“I can take ’em all out,” Ethan says. “Just an idea . . .”
Li and Kit and Peggy simultaneously echo into our Athena comms.
“No one starts a shootout with the police. Is that clear?”
“Clear,” Caitlin says.
“Clear,” replies Hala.
Caitlin instructs both Luca and Ethan not to engage. They confirm.
In my peripheral vision, I see Luca peer out of the window again. I see Caitlin sneak a glance at her watch. I feel Riya standing right beside me, watching me. But I make myself ignore her, I make myself forget about the police and the countdown and the fact that there are only seven minutes left. I try to think about that night at the warehouse. I close my eyes for three precious seconds, maybe four. And then it hits me. There was something outside the warehouse. My eyes snap open, wide.
“I think I know what the trigger is,” I say. “I think that’s why Family First want the police to evacuate the girls and get them outside. They want to hit them with the ADS.”
28
FOR A MOMENT, EVERYONE JUST stares at me as if they all think I’ve lost my mind. Riya is the first to agree with me.
“That has to be it,” she says. “After that night at the warehouse, we never recovered the ADS.”
“And, at the lab, Raj mentioned microwaves as a possible trigger,” I tell her. “He was just spitballing, and I never made the connection because the ADS doesn’t really produce microwaves, but it does act on water molecules in the skin, sort of like a microwave would, except it can be directed and targeted. . . .”
I feel my mouth running at a hundred miles an hour. Luca puts up his hands, lost.
“Someone wanna fill me in?” he begs. “ADS? You mean an active denial system? Those things are huge, they sit on top of tanks last time I looked.”
“When did you last look?” Caitlin asks.
“Six, seven years ago.”
“Well, tech has moved on,” I say. “We were hit with one last week that’s still pretty big but more or less handheld.”
“From what distance?” Luca asks.
From her sniper post upstairs, Hala, following the conversation, answers into our comms: “Ours was around a hundred meters away,” she says.
Meanwhile Riya’s frantically looking through the documents on her phone. She finds something and looks up at
