Chapter 16: Opening Moves

Present Day

Days 15 - 27

Arlington, Virginia

Shelby Winters was the first Balustre Group employee to die. She was an administrative assistant at the Balustre Group’s Arlington office and was only twenty-three; she had been hired right out of college. As she drove home from work, she began to taste something garlicky, which was strange to her; she hadn’t had anything with garlic at lunch. There was also a sort of metallic taste, and she couldn’t keep her eyelids completely open. By the time she was halfway home, she felt severe nausea, and threw up as she passed out and ran off the road. Her car rolled once and ended up on the driver’s side, which caused problems for the two people trying to pull her out. By the time somebody got to her, she was sweating profusely, and her breathing was shallow. An ambulance got her to the hospital just in time for her breathing to stop.

The emergency room doctors tried their best, but Shelby never regained consciousness. They couldn’t determine why the young woman had suddenly stopped breathing and gone off the road. They were even more curious when a second woman, a thirty-year-old clerk named Alice Hastings, also from the Balustre Group, was brought in, along with a police officer who had been the first on the scene of the accident. By the time the ambulance arrived and began to treat Alice, he was on the ground, vomiting and suffering from breathing difficulty. Alice died shortly after getting to the hospital, though the officer simply ended up in a coma.

Six more people came down with the same symptoms in the general Arlington-Alexandria area, enough that the Centers for Disease Control were contacted. It didn’t take more than fifteen minutes to determine the pattern. Six of the victims had been driving and were employees of the Balustre Group; the other three were first responders. All six of the Balustre victims died, as did one of the first responders, a Virginia State Trooper. The other two were hospitalized and in comas but seemed to be responding to a variety of treatments. A response team from the CDC was taking samples and rushing them to their Atlanta headquarters.

The Balustre Group seemed to be the target of what was obviously an attack, and quickly became the target of three different Virginia police agencies. The security chief of the company stonewalled all three, citing national security even as the detectives assigned threatened subpoenas and warrants. The security chief smiled as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation claimed precedence and sent the local police packing; he didn’t smile when the FBI proved nowhere near as impressed by the national security roadblock. “We’ll be the ones to declare national security, not you!” was the response the security chief received when he tried to block their questions.

It took the CDC two days to determine what happened, after comparing results from blood samples of the nine victims. The Balustre Group had enough political pull in Washington that their security chief was given access to the investigation, which did not sit well with the FBI agent in charge. The results were given by a CDC researcher via a teleconference from Atlanta. “All nine individuals were exposed to a topical application of snake venom, specifically the venom of the Dendroaspis polylepis, the black mamba.”

“They were bit by a snake?” replied the security chief.

“Hardly. The black mamba is indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa. It is one of the most dangerous snakes in the world. The venom is incredibly lethal.”

“Then how did nine people get poisoned by a black mamba snake in suburban Virginia?” asked the special agent.

“It was a topical application. Also seen in the blood of the victims was a solvent called DMSO, for dimethyl sulfoxide. DMSO has a very interesting capability in that it can dissolve a variety of chemicals and carry them across the skin barrier into the bloodstream. A safe bet would be that somebody dissolved black mamba venom in DMSO and then managed to put the mixture on something that the six people from Balustre touched, and that the other three then touched as well. What that would be, I can’t say,” answered the doctor in Atlanta.

There was a bit more speculation on the subject and the CDC investigator promised to send the FBI their results. They were no longer interested, in that the problem was no longer a public health crisis but a crime. The local hospitals were being warned to stock up on Inoserp Pan-Africa, an antivenom that was useful against a variety of venomous African snakebites, in case whoever had managed to poison these people was still in the business. It was pretty obvious that Balustre was the target of somebody. The CDC investigator simply commented at the end, “Whoever this guy is, he’s smart. Don’t be surprised if he tries something else.”

Bart Jackson followed the case both on television and online through his tap into the NSA. The Balustre Group’s headquarters were in an office park on the Arlington-Alexandria line. Though the building itself was highly secure, the parking lot wasn’t. Its security consisted of a chain link fence partially hidden from view by some shrubbery. The day before the deaths, Jackson had mixed a vial of Dendroaspis polylepis venom in DMSO, and then poured the mixture into a small spray bottle. The next day at lunchtime he hopped the fence into the parking lot and sprayed the driver side door latches of ten random cars in the parking lot, then left the way he came.

He wasn’t sure why only six Balustre employees were affected; It was possible he had mis-sprayed some of the latches, or they were wearing driving gloves, or that something had washed off the mix. It was also possible they might manage to poison themselves over the next few days. Two days after the deaths, he drove by the place and discovered a large number of people wandering around the parking lot. He was sure that security was being increased and that cameras were being installed. That was fine with him. He planned to increase the pressure on Balustre; sooner or later they would screw up massively.

Janice Williams learned about the attack when she saw it on the Headline News feed at the Little Rock bar she had started working at. “So, it begins,” she muttered under her breath before filling a couple of glasses from the beer tap she was in front of.

The next day another eight people ended up in hospitals from a black mamba venom attack, though half survived because of antivenom treatment. The security detail at Balustre swore that nobody had gotten onto the property, and they were right. The police also figured out it hadn’t happened in the Balustre parking lot because all eight attacks occurred in the morning, when the victims were going to work. Somebody had obviously sprayed the cars involved the night before, and detectives and the FBI began scouring RING doorbells in all the neighborhoods. They also began trying to determine how the attacker had obtained the addresses of Balustre Group employees. In short order they discovered a man in a hoodie had been driving around in a stolen car, getting out and approaching the victims’ cars in driveways, and then leaving. The car was found torched the next day.

That was the end of the black mamba venom attacks. Bart Jackson had used all his black mamba venom in the single spray bottle. He left the empty bottle in the stolen car when he torched it. It was time for a different attack method.

With ten dead fellow employees, the remaining Balustre Group employees were freaking out! Multiple employee meetings did not settle things down and two lower-level employees quit. Shuttle busses were promised as soon as they could be arranged. In the meantime, with a dozen mid- and low-level employees dead or resigned, the Human Resources department was working overtime to rearrange the deck chairs, reassigning personnel as needed. At least another dozen security specialists were brought in from overseas.

The next attack on a Balustre Group employee was more direct. Gerald Carruthers was accustomed to taking the Washington Metro to and from his home in Largo, Maryland. He had rather smugly congratulated himself on taking the Metro to work rather than his car. He never noticed the individual standing next to him, who dropped his briefcase just before they arrived at the Morgan Boulevard station and bent down to pick it up. Carruthers was in the Executive Action division in an accounting capacity, not in any active capacity. He never noticed when the fellow bending over squirted his trouser leg with a syringe. He left the train at the station and the other fellow stayed on the train.

Once Carruthers started moving, the wet fabric of his trousers contacted the skin of his leg. He stopped and reached down to touch the fabric, curious, since it was a dry day. He rubbed his fingers on the fabric, and it felt strange, so he put his fingers to his nose to see if there was an odor. He noted a garlic taste and smell. Still, he figured he must have rubbed against something on the way home. He left the station and headed towards his car. He drove home and tossed his suit in the dry-cleaning hamper when he changed clothes.

He was heading down the hall of his colonial-style two-story when a bout of severe nausea hit him. He stumbled into the hall bathroom and vomited into the toilet, but then filled his pants with a terrible case of diarrhea. His wife heard him vomiting and went looking for him, only to find him lying on the bathroom floor, unresponsive and not breathing. She called for an ambulance but the EMTs couldn’t revive him. They told her it looked like he had suffered a massive heart attack. He was taken to the nearest trauma center, where he was pronounced Dead On Arrival.

Three other employees died of apparent heart attacks over the next sixteen hours, a second on the Blue Line at Capitol Heights that evening and the next two on the Green Line at the College Park station the next morning. All four individuals worked in either the Executive Action division or in the Corporate Security division. Again, it took another day before the coroner in Prince George’s County, Maryland, noted the similarities between the two heart attack victims who arrived at the University of Maryland Medical Center within minutes of each other. It took him a second day to determine that aconite poisoning was the cause of the two heart attacks. By then, three more Balustre employees had suffered heart attacks, two fatal, and the freak-out level at corporate headquarters was through the roof.

Balustre responded to the attacks by ordering up a group of luxury buses to shuttle employees to and from home. Since it was deemed impractical to have the buses cruise around picking up employees from their suburban homes, the buses would pick them up from various park-and-ride sites around the area. That they were still vulnerable while getting to and from the parking sites did not go unnoticed by the employees, most of whom grumbled about it. Still, enough signed up so that the program was put into place.

Banner Motor Coach was hired to transport Balustre’s employees. Banner had originally been named after its founders, George Feldmacher and William Updike, but as soon as they saw some of the advertising and banners from their first ad agency, they changed their name. The FU Bus Company just wasn’t the image they were looking for. They had a reputation for nicely appointed and clean motor coaches, with bathrooms and free coffee and snacks for their riders. They had sufficient capacity to bring in everybody who signed up, all of whom raved about the quality of the ride. Both Balustre and Banner began considering extending the program even after the current crisis was over.

That changed that afternoon when five employees of the Balustre Group suddenly developed severe nausea and then ran off to the bathrooms with uncontrollable diarrhea. By the end of the day, another ten were affected, and ambulances had been called and were shuttling employees to local hospitals. In all, by the next day, sixteen employees were suffering from what the doctors determined was cholera. To be honest, only one doctor had ever seen cholera before, and that was because he had done a tour in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders. He knew how to test for the disease, and the CDC was called in, again. The unaffected employees at Balustre were terrified when hazmat-suited doctors began testing the bathrooms and dining areas at the firm but were not relieved when it was determined that all sixteen employees had come to work the previous day on Banner Motor Coach busses and had drunk the free coffee. Over the next two days, six more employees came down with cholera.

Bart Jackson smiled when this hit the news. Vibrio cholerae had been one of the items he had snagged when he had done his midnight requisition. A midnight sneak into Banner had allowed him to lace the coffee cups so obligingly labelled with the Balustre Group’s logo. For his purposes, the disease was perfect. Cholera was an extremely unpleasant and deadly disease, but it was also quite curable in a rich and modern country like America.

Discontent at Balustre rose enormously. The company couldn’t take care of its employees even when they were trying to, but the bigwigs were driving around in armored limousines. Balustre had to promise that nobody would lose any pay or vacation time because of the ‘incidents’ that had happened. The freak-out level on the Board rose even higher!