Page 39 of Wrong Way

On the left side of the unit, a folding table had been set up with a laptop at its center. The laptop was closed. Beside it, a manila folder held a stack of printed documents, the top sheet showing an aerial photograph of a reservoir with access roads marked in red pen and annotations in small, precise handwriting along the margins. Hahn lifted the top sheet carefully and looked at the one beneath it: a printed schematic of a water treatment facility intake system with handwritten notes identifying where in the process a contaminant introduced upstream would be least likely to be caught by standard filtration. The third sheet was a timeline, divided into phases, with estimated quantities listed against each phase in units he did not immediately recognize but which the chemist would.

The fourth sheet was a printout of an email exchange. The first message was from an address Hahn did not recognize, addressed to a name that was not Jennifer Parsons and not Nelson Banks. The message was six sentences long. It instructed the recipient to continue preparation and to wait for the activation signal, which would come through a specific secondary address. It said the timing was being coordinated at a level above the recipient's current visibility and that patience was required. The reply from Parsons's end was three words: Understood. Standing by.

The email was dated four months ago. There had been no reply from the original sender since.

Hahn stood in the doorway of the unit for a long moment, looking at all of it. The manager had stayed back at a respectful distance near the end of the row and was looking at her phone. The sky above the facility had gone a darker gray, the last of the orange draining out of it.

Why keep paper copies? It was the one question that ran through his mind. If you could keep your communications digital, it seemed safer. Paper copies left around like this were basically an advertisement. He wondered if this was an instruction from Kane. He wondered if the instructions and methods had been printed out so that they could immediately delete digital communications in an attempt to cover their tracks. He wasn’t sure, but he knew it was important enough to make a note of.

He took out his phone and called Ortega.

She answered on the second ring. "Hahn. Portsmouth called and told me about the arrest. So why am I only hearing from you now?”

“Because I wanted to check the storage unit, I finally got the green light on.”

“You’re there now?”

“Yeah.” He touched the side of his neck where the stun gun contacts had hit him. It still ached, a deep throb that had settled in along the jaw and wasn't going anywhere for a day or two.

"And?"

"It’s all here…pretty much everything I’d said. We’ve got twelve containers of cesium compounds, from multiple suppliers…pretty consistent with what we'd been tracking. Contamination equipment, dosimetry gear, Tyvek suits. And there's a laptop." He looked at the closed computer on the folding table. "I haven't opened it yet but there are printed documents that include reservoir schematics, a water treatment intake diagram with annotations, and a contamination timeline with quantities."

Ortega was quiet for a moment. "Correspondence?"

"Email printouts. She was in contact with someone above her. Activation instructions pending. The last message from their end was four months ago and she'd been standing by since. I’m assuming from Kane."

“So, you have printed email addresses?”

“Yeah. But I suspect they’re dead by now.”

"So, she was ready," Ortega said. “She was ready to move at a moment’s notice.”

"Everything in here says she was ready. She was waiting for the word."

He heard Ortega exhale slowly on the other end of the line. He knew what she was thinking because he was thinking it, too. Jennifer Parsons had been ready. She had her materials, her plan, her target, and her instructions. If Hahn had not followed the tip from Reyes, if the cesium purchases had continued to sit below the task force's primary threshold, the activation signal could have come at any point. And if that had happened, a water reservoir in Portland, Maine would have had a very different week.

"This is the first one," Ortega said. She said it quietly, as a statement of fact. "The first prevention before activation. That's significant, Hahn. I know there’s no hard proof that it’s connected to Kane, but it’ll be verified."

"I know."

She was quiet again for a moment and he wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. After all, she had basically sent him out here to shut him up. In a way, she had been proven wrong. "The approach has been under pressure,” she finally said. “You know that. The resources we've been putting into proactive screening, the pushback from the oversight committee. And finally…this is a result."

"It is," he said. "And it came from outside the standard screening protocol, which is its own conversation."

"One we'll have when you're back." Her voice was flat on that point, and he understood it. The source question had not gone away and it was not going to go away. But it was also not the conversation for tonight, with a storage unit full of contamination equipment in front of him and a detained suspect on her way through booking. "Get the laptop to our tech team tonight if you can. I want everything photographed and cataloged before it's moved."

"Already on it."

"Good." She paused one more time. "You did well, Hahn."

“Do you think you can swing it so that I can get the first crack and questioning Parsons?”

There was a brief silence before Ortega said “I’ll see what I can do.”

He thanked her and ended the call.

He stood in the doorway of the unit and looked at the shelving, the containers, the folding table with its laptop and its stack of printed plans. The manager was still at the end of the row, still on her phone, the orange glow of the screen the only warm light left in the facility now that the sky had fully gone to dark. One of the overhead lot lights had clicked on above the row and threw a flat, sodium-yellow light across the asphalt.