Tess was walking on the palisades, the high bluffs that towered over the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach beyond. The salt air blew through her hair and caressed her cheeks. The sun was high in the sky, bright but cool, a California sun.
She wasn’t sure how far she had walked. Looking back, she saw the MiraMist in the far distance, its tiered balconies gleaming. A mile away, she guessed.
After the ATSAC briefing, she had lined up with the others to receive packets of pyridostigmine bromide-"a single thirty-milligram pill every eight hours," Dr. Gant said, "starting now." The medicine was a prophylactic that would enhance the effectiveness of antidotes to VX, if and when they were used.
The antidote kits were passed out next. Gant spent some time demonstrating how to unclip and use the two self-injector syringes. "Carry this pouch with you at all times," he said. Tess thought he was being a little melodramatic. Even so, she had put the kit inside her purse, which she intended to keep on her person until Mobius was caught.
After that, she had found herself excluded from the activity around her. She was not part of any squad or task force. Tennant didn’t want her there, and Andrus was preoccupied with a hundred logistical and bureaucratic priorities.
No one was willing to talk to her, anyway. She was the crazy bitch who wanted to open up the investigation to media scrutiny and start a panic and get all the incumbent politicians recalled in a special election. She was persona non grata.
So she’d left. Andrus’s driver had chauffeured her back to the MiraMist, where her car was parked. She’d thought about revisiting the crime scene, but there was nothing for her to do up there.
So she had gone for a walk along the bluffs, wondering what to do next. She thought about informing Michaelson of the ATSAC meeting. It was an act of insubordination, but at least it would piss off Tennant. Unfortunately, she disliked Michaelson even more than she disliked Tennant. Besides, there was no wiggle room in her orders-Michaelson and the rest of the RAVENKIL task force were to be kept in the dark. They were out of it.
Effectively, so was she. She knew what was going on, but she’d been frozen out.
"Then go it alone," she murmured to herself.
She had threatened Andrus that she would investigate on her own. Big words, but what sort of investigating could she do without resources in an unfamiliar city?
She stopped at a railing and gazed at the blue mist of the ocean’s horizon.
An unfamiliar city. No Rockies here, a sheer granite wall rising out of the mile-high plateau. No crisp winter mornings when new snow crunched underfoot and the only colors were the achingly pure blue of the sky and the flit of red as a robin hunted for seed. No summer rodeos, no autumn hayrides.
She didn’t know this town.
But she did know him.
Mobius. Her nemesis. The man who had taunted her, hounded her, taken over her life.
In the surveillance room she’d bragged that she had some insight into Mobius’s mindset, that she knew what he was like when he was being himself.
Now was the time to prove it.
Mobius had taken the VX from Amanda Pierce’s suitcase. How had he known about it? Had Amanda told him? Had he tortured the truth out of her?
Unlikely. A room with thin walls in a crowded hotel was not a place for torture. And Amanda Pierce, even in death, had not looked cowed or broken. Tess remembered the glare fixed on her face, the anger in her dead eyes.
Mobius must have taken the canister of VX merely on a hunch. Perhaps he’d felt its liquid contents sloshing inside. Perhaps he’d guessed that Amanda Pierce was not an ordinary tourist.
But there was no way for him to guess what the liquid was. He would need to find out. How?
Taste it, sniff it? If so, he was dead. But he would not be so stupid. Mobius might be insane, but Mobius.
That name. A reference, it was thought, to the Mobius strip. Something that a person trained in math or science would know about.
She had been going about this all wrong. She should not ask what a serial killer would do. She should ask what a scientist would do.
Faced with an unknown substance, a scientist would have it analyzed.
A sailboat drifted past, but Tess didn’t see it.
After a long time she turned away from the railing and headed back toward the MiraMist and her car. She knew what she had to do.
There might be no need to run, but she found herself running anyway, as she retraced her route along the bluffs.