Pressure Point by Don Pendleton

Author:Don Pendleton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worldwide Library
Published: 2013-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“I’m sorry, but I don’t recognize him,” Lieutenant Dari Wais said, glancing at the composite. “If I could keep this, however, I’d like to show it to a few other witnesses.”

“Other witnesses?” Bolan said. “After what happened, I thought they were all dead.”

“There are a few consulate employees who worked yesterday but had today off or hadn’t come in yet when the bomb went off,” Wais explained. “Plus, we have one of the guards who was stationed out front yesterday when the service call was made. They all say they had a look at the repairmen, so hopefully they will be able to corroborate the description you’ve given here.”

“With any luck, maybe they got a look at the other guy, too,” Kissinger said.

Bolan and Kissinger were in the lieutenant’s fourth-floor office at the same government facility where they’d confronted Colonel Tohm the night before. A large plate-glass window took up most of the far wall and overlooked a large courtyard where other officers and employees could be seen moving from one quadrant of the complex to another. The office itself was small, and cluttered with paperwork. The lieutenant’s workload had been clearly heavy even before he’d assumed his additional duties as interim head of Military Intelligence.

“I take it we’re ruling out Colonel Tohm as a suspect,” Kissinger said. “Much as he seems to want credit.”

Wais nodded. “I didn’t put much weight in his claims to begin with, and when I talked to him it was clear he had no knowledge of the particulars behind the bombing. Or, more correctly, I suppose we should call this a gassing. After all, no one was even injured by the blast. It was the poison traveling through the vents that caused all the deaths.”

Bolan nodded. “I saw where the bomb went off. It looked like it was more of a triggering mechanism for the chemicals.”

“Correct,” Wais said. “I have our initial findings from the lab around here somewhere.”

The lieutenant’s disheveled mounds of paperwork may have appeared disorganized, but he knew where the report was and quickly glanced over it before passing along the details.

“The charge was a low-grade plastique derivative,” he told Bolan and Kissinger. “It was placed in the middle of the toner cartridge and flanked on either side by packets of bipyridyl separated from some sort of reactive agent by a thin membrane. I wish I could tell you what this other agent was, but so far the lab results have been inconclusive.”

“Some kind of aerosol propellant would be my guess,” Kissinger said.

“That’s the theory we’re working on,” Wais replied. “Hopefully we’ll have something more specific by morning. In any event, the explosion mixed the two ingredients, if you will, and pushed them out either end of the cartridge with enough force to send vapor clouds through the ductwork. Somehow the toxic byproducts managed to remain suspended inside the clouds as they filtered through the entire consulate.”

“So what you’re saying is that every time these clouds came out of the ductwork, they worked like those house foggers you use to kill fleas,” Bolan said.

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