CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
For now, the charge against Parsons would be assault on a federal agent.
That was what had been written on the arrest paperwork, and that was what would move her through booking.
It was a solid charge backed by a federal witness and a stun gun collected from the pavement where Parsons had dropped it.
It would hold while the rest of the case was built around it.
But assault on a federal agent was not why Tim Hahn had come to Portsmouth, and everyone in the lot understood that.
The cruiser's brake lights came on briefly at the lot exit and then turned onto the waterfront road and were gone. As Hahn watched it, he was aware of a uniformed officer approaching. Her name was Correa; she had taken Hahn’s statement while others had handled the formal arrest. Correa came across the lot toward him at a brisk pace.
She had been on her radio for the last ten minutes while the scene was being processed, and she currently had the look of someone delivering good news they had been waiting to deliver.
"You've got the go-ahead on the storage unit," she said. "The warrant came through about five minutes ago in light of what happened here. Your office called ours and it was cleared at the federal level."
Hahn nodded. He had been watching the empty road where the cruiser had turned out of sight. "Good," he said. "Thank you.”
He stood there for another moment after Correa walked away, looking at the waterfront and the flat gray sky above it.
For just a moment, he let himself bask in sharp satisfaction of having been right.
He had identified a genuine threat and developed it from a single tip without task force resources or institutional support.
While it would need verification, it seemed that he had put an active Kane disciple in handcuffs before she had been activated by her mastermind.
He had done it in under three days with no backup, at a warehouse on a waterfront in a city he'd never worked before.
He was twenty-nine years old and he was damned good at this job, and he had just proved it in a way that would forever stay in his file.
That mattered to him. He was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that it mattered considerably.
The Kane task force was the highest-profile operation in the bureau right now, and what happened inside it would define careers.
Sterling and Stone were already established and were more or less the rock stars.
Meanwhile, he was still the rookie with the undercover background and the occasionally irregular methods.
He had understood from the beginning that the margin for error assigned to him was thinner than it was for the others.
The way you closed that margin was by producing results that were difficult to argue with.
He thought about what Ortega would say in the debrief, and what Hayes would say after that. He took one last deep breath, feeling certain that this was all the start of something very big for him, and then made his way to his car.
***
The sky had gone the flat gray-orange of a New England dusk by the time he pulled into the facility lot.
The manager was waiting for him at the office entrance, her reading glasses down on her nose now rather than pushed up, which somehow made her look more official than she had that morning.
She had his warrant confirmation on her phone screen, and she checked it against his badge before she said anything.
"Unit thirty-four," she said. "Back row, east side."
She walked him there herself, which he did not discourage.
The facility was quiet at this hour, the rows of corrugated metal units running in their orderly parallel lines under the orange-gray sky.
Unit thirty-four was the second from the end of the back row, indistinguishable from the units on either side of it.
The manager produced a bolt cutter from a cart she'd brought along and handed it to Hahn without being asked.
The lock on the unit was not the facility's standard issue, which she noted with a slight compression of her lips.
Hahn cut it off, set it aside, and gripped the handle of the rolling door.
He slid it open and stared inside. The unit was ten feet wide and eight feet deep, and it was not empty.
Along the right wall, a metal utility shelving unit held twelve sealed containers arranged in two rows of six.
They were cylindrical, roughly the size of large paint cans, each one labeled with chemical supplier markings and lot numbers.
Between the containers, a handheld radiation detection meter sat in a molded foam case alongside a box of nitrile gloves and two disposable Tyvek suits, still in their packaging.
A separate shelf below held two sealed drums of a different compound, marked with a biohazard placard and a handling instruction label that listed restricted use.
Hahn recognized cesium chloride from the compound names on two of the canisters.
The others he would need a chemist to identify, but their physical placement alongside the dosimetry equipment suggested they were not unrelated to it.
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.
At the end of this, there was one disciple, identified and stopped. One contamination event that had not happened and would not happen because of eight months of patient, careful, covert purchasing by a woman who was now in a holding cell and would not be returning to this storage unit.
Hahn looked at the email printout still in his hand.
The sender's address, the unnamed contact above Parsons, in whatever structure Kane had built around his people, the one who had written Patience, is required.
The one who had not sent the activation signal in four months and whose identity remained completely unknown…
though he was all but certain it was Kane himself.
One disciple. One prevention. And beyond that, an architecture of others the task force was still only beginning to map, built by a man who was still at large and still building.
There was a long road ahead. Hahn was aware of this with the same matter-of-fact clarity with which he was aware of the ache in his jaw and the cold coming in off the water.
He took a few steps back to photograph the front of the unit, then stepped aside and waited as patiently as he could for the forensics team to arrive.