Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [83]
Neither Ford nor Parker believed that everyone in the town had turned in their guns. A few people probably had some stashed that the FPS storm troopers hadn’t found. By and large, though, the town probably was disarmed.
Except for the tiny police force. That good-looking female chief had been interviewed several times, and she had declared that she and her officers would keep the town safe until everything was settled and the people had their guns returned to them.
The CIA agents knew that was never going to happen. Not with the way the President was smirking and preening for the cameras, obviously filled with arrogant pride that he had succeeded in taking away the guns of a whole town.
“What about Home?” Parker asked Earl.
“Look.” Earl put a finger on the map. “This is where Home is.”
Curious, Ford peered over the little scientist’s shoulder. “Yeah. So what?”
Earl moved his finger over a short distance, into a range of small but rugged mountains. “And this is where Casa del Diablo is.”
Parker frowned. “How far away is that? Fifty, sixty miles?”
“Yeah,” Earl said. “And the highway that’s closest to the lab is the same state road that runs right through Home.”
Ford and Parker glanced at each other, and each of them knew that alarm bells were going off in the other’s head.
“What exactly are you getting at, Earl?” Ford asked.
“I don’t know. I just got this uneasy feeling all of a sudden…. The project was getting pretty close to finished when I decided to jump ship. Enough time has gone by since then that they could have finished up the prototype batch of the nerve gas.”
“How much of the stuff are we talking about?” Parker asked.
Earl took a deep breath. “I don’t know for sure. I was high enough in the pecking order to be privy to some of the details of the project, but not all of them. My guess? Maybe a hundred canisters.”
“How big would those canisters be?”
Earl held up his hands to indicate dimensions. “About the size of an oxygen tank like the ones you see old guys using sometimes.”
Parker’s voice was sharp. “How would they be transported?”
“Very carefully,” Earl said. “Lots of protective packing, to make absolutely certain that they wouldn’t be jostled around and spring a leak.”
“What about temperature?” Ford wanted to know.
“Best to keep the stuff cool. It’s less volatile that way.”
Ford frowned in thought as he tugged at his earlobe a couple of times and then ran his thumbnail down the line of his jaw. “So we’re talking about refrigerated trucks, big enough to carry, say, fifty canisters each.”
“Yeah,” Parker agreed, “they wouldn’t put the whole shipment in one truck. They’d split up in at least two, maybe three or four.”
“And they’d have to take it somewhere, because it doesn’t do them any good just sitting in a lab,” Ford mused.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Earl said. “Homeland Security and the FPS put a ton of money into this project. The bosses are going to want to have the stuff where they can get at it easily in case they need to use it.”
A shudder went through Ford. “I hate to think about Weldon Stone having the capability to wipe out a whole town so easily.”
“Son of a …” Parker said in a low, stunned voice. His finger stabbed down on the map at the dot marking the location of Home. “You think there’s going to be a test, Fargo? Is that really why the FPS disarmed the whole town?”
Ford thought about it for a moment and shook his head. “No, if the stuff is really as fast and lethal as Earl says it is—”
“It is,” Earl said. “Don’t doubt it for a second.”
“Then it wouldn’t matter whether the people in Home still had their guns or not,” Ford went on. “All the FPS would have to do is fly over the town, release the gas, and then waltz in a little while later to collect the bodies. The citizens wouldn