[Quinn 01] - The Cleaner

'Yeah,' she said. There was hesitation in her voice. 'What?' Quinn asked. Orlando stared at the monitor. 'What?' Quinn repeated. 'There are only fourteen boxes,' she said. 'So?' 'Last night there were twenty.' Quinn looked at the monitor. Silently, he counted

the boxes. She was right. There were fourteen. 'Are those labels on the boxes?' Quinn asked. 'Yes. But I wasn't able to get in close enough to

one to read it.' 'The sphere,' Quinn said. Orlando switched to a live view inside the

containment room. Quinn's eyes grew wide in surprise at the new image. 'I don't think this is good,' Orlando said.

There were four people in the room. All were dressed in bio-containment suits. Two were at the worktable against the wall on the right. On the table was a box that matched those still in the basement, its top open. On the floor were three more boxes, stacked. They looked like they were still sealed. Near the door, almost out of the camera's range, were the last two boxes. These were open and empty.

The other two men were positioned in front of the safety cabinets in the center of the room. One of the men had his arms and hands shoved into the cabinet nearest the door, while the other man looked on.

'What are they doing?' Orlando asked, pointing at the men standing at the worktable.

They were removing the contents of the open box. What they took out looked to be smaller metal boxes in groups of ten, stacked double-wide and held together by shrink-wrap.

Each man lifted a stack out and set it on the table. They then removed the wrapping and placed the smaller boxes side by side on a tray, popping each of them open as they did so. When the tray was full, two stacks' worth of tins, one of the men carried the tray to the center workspace and slipped it through a slot at the bottom end of one of the safety cabinets.

As the man was carrying the tray to the cabinet, Quinn was able to get a glimpse inside the tins. They were empty.

The hatch on the safety cabinet was now closed. The man who had brought the tray over had returned to the boxes at the other table. The man who was at the cabinet had removed his hands from the protective sleeves that allowed him to work inside the unit.

There were several buttons across the bottom of the cabinet. The man pushed one of them, and something in the cabinet moved.

As Quinn and Orlando watched, the bottom of the cabinet slid open. The tray that had been slipped in underneath it rose up. The man put his hands back into the sleeves. On the inside wall of the cabinet was a small shelf, and on the shelf was a container holding what appeared to be dozens of penny-size white pellets. They were rounded so that the middle was thicker than the ends. Quinn knew they had to have been the same ones he'd seen the men stowing in the small refrigerators earlier. The man at the cabinet removed the pellets one by one and placed them in the tins. Each box held six.

'Mints?' Quinn said.

'What?' Orlando asked, but Quinn's attention was fully on the monitor.

It took a while, but when all the tins were full, the man closed the tops on each box. That done, he removed his hands from the sleeves and pushed another button on the case. The tray dropped downward, and the bottom of the cabinet closed above it.

The man then pushed another button. Up from the bottom of the second cabinet came the same tray of tins. When they were securely in place, the second man turned a dial on the cabinet. The entire cabinet instantly filled with a fine mist.

'Is that. . . ?' Orlando left the question hanging.

'Disinfectant?' Quinn asked.

She nodded.

'Something like that, probably,' Quinn said. 'Only a lot stronger than what you can pick up at the market, I'd guess.'

'So the stuff inside the tins . . . ?'

'Is hot,' Quinn finished for her.

Quinn now knew what the delivery device was going to be. An innocent tin of candy. Brilliant. The agent had either been applied to the outside of the mint, or contained inside somehow. Quinn guessed the latter was the more likely. He was also able to surmise something about the biological agent itself. If it was fast-acting, the convention would be shut down and all the participants quarantined, so it couldn't be anything that would show up right away. It had to be something with a long incubation period. Could that have had something to do with the 'tailoring'Taggert had told Burroughs about? And how did it relate to the IOMP convention? That had been Duke's tip.

Quinn paused.

Duke.

'Son of a bitch,' Quinn said.

'What?' Orlando asked.

'I think I know how they're planning on distributing everything.' 'How?' 'Grob Promotions,' Quinn said. 'I should have seen it before.'

'What's Grob Promotions?' she asked.