All in a Day
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers: Nothing specific, set mid third season.
A/N: Each chapter is told from a different point of view. To J for being such a patient and proficient beta reader.
The drive seemed to take ages. I had never been that nervous. Every red light appeared to take hours to switch to green. The normally rapidly pulsing traffic was crawling. I checked my watch every couple of minutes, each time both surprised at how little time had passed since the last time I had checked it and frightened at how unstoppably the time was passing. There is no stopping time, no matter what we do it inexorably passes. In every day life we don't notice, but in a situation when we are waiting for something to happen and at the same time hoping it won't we become painfully aware of how cruel time really is.
Finally, I was nearing the storage plant. A large parking lot in the front of it, a high brick wall topped with barbed wire and a porter's lodge. The main building was one story only, flat metal roof, not exactly top level security from the looks of it. According to the building records the storage plant had been built in 1959. Aimtec had bought it five years ago.
Luckily it was located in a non-residential area, so the immediate blast effects wouldn't be that disastrous. I had no idea which chemicals exactly were being stored there. Figuring that out would have only taken two or three more minutes and would have gotten us a lot further, but back at the lab, I hadn't thought that far. I was mentally cursing myself for that mistake, as I took the turn to the plant's parking space. I was just about to park when I drive by another parked vehicle. Something captured my attention. There was somebody in the car.
Procedure stipulates to wait for a police officer, but there was no time. I reached for my gun, planning to check out the vehicle, but I was reaching for nothing. My gun wasn't there. For a moment I was confused. Amazing how I had pushed the events at the hospital from memory. My gun had been taken then. It was probably in an evidence bag somewhere. I could wait for the police or Warrick to arrive, or I could at least take a look. I carefully drove back again, to catch another look without having to leave the car. I might have been on an adrenaline high, but my brain was still working enough to tell me that going out there unarmed, confronting a potential killer was a very bad idea.
If there was anyone in that car, they would have noticed me by now. Whoever was in there was dead. A man, head slumped back, dark stains on the shirt. No sign of the killer. I parked the car and got out. Carefully I looked around, and then approached the car. It was dangerous and under different circumstances I would probably not have done it, but waited for the police. I got lucky, the killer was already gone. I didn't have time to take a closer look before the sound of rotor blades tearing through the air startled me. I didn't recognize the sound before I looked up. It was the ATF helicopter. Having a larger budget allowed them to travel a lot faster. At the same time, the sirens of the police cars rushing towards the plant mixed themselves with the noise of the helicopter preparing to set down.
Then everything started to happen at once. The personnel were being evacuated from the building, while an ATF search team went inside along with trained sniff dogs. An agent standing in the inner yard was coordinating the efforts. By then, Brass and Warrick had gotten there as well. Warrick gave me the quick run-down of his visit to the house. Kevin Stein was missing and he'd had dealings with Charlotte May. She must have invited him to the compound at some point; maybe she was trying to recruit him. That would make the tenth set of prints at the compound those of Kevin Stein.
Warrick and I were standing in the yard, while the ATF agents were searching the building. I felt helpless. I knew it was their job to find and disarm the bomb. I can only imagine how it must have been for Warrick and Brass while Grissom and I were prisoners in that hospital. They too could only stand on the sidelines and watch. Brass had gone over to the evacuated personnel and started the questioning along with other police officers. The last thing we heard was that they weren't having much luck either. I had called the coroner concerning the body we had found in the car, but it was going to take a while as our case had left its share of bodies in its wake.
I felt bad for not being able to do anything. The chances were grim, we knew that. The storage plant was large, even a small amount of TNT would already have the potential to trigger a cascade reaction.
I nervously glanced at my watch. Nine minutes to go. The look on Warrick's face told me that he too was racking his brain, trying to think of some small detail that we had missed and which hopefully would give us some clue where the bomb was located.
"Sara, how would you make sure that your bomb goes off exactly at sundown?" Warrick interrupted my thoughts.
"I don't know, find out the time from the internet or the weather station and program some sort of timer accordingly. Or I could just observe and then trigger the bomb via some sort of remote control. But that's unlikely, too many chances of it going wrong. I mean she had to know that there was a risk of her getting caught before sundown. I think she had prepared for that case."
"Yeah, thought so too. But I just don't think she just programmed the bomb. The cultists are obsessed with precision and order. The farm, the apartment -all were in perfect order. The quadruple homicide was perfectly plotted. Things only started getting messy once Daryl Marks was shot."
"I see where you're going, the timer would never be that precise, at least not in Charlotte May's eyes. She's obsessed with Ecology. She would probably want to follow nature. There was something tugging at my brain, some idea. Maybe something I had seen on the report about the apartment. "
"She could be using a timer based on a solar battery," Warrick speculated.
"No, that isn't precise. While there is light, the battery is being charged, so it would continue to run even when there is no more direct sun light. But, you just gave me an idea. What if she isn't using a solar battery, but something like an LDR? If they have a transmitter linked to it, then it would stop transmitting a signal when there isn't enough light anymore, Sundown doesn't mean immediate darkness, but the closer you get to the equator the faster it's completely dark after sundown."
"Such a trigger would have to be placed somewhere exposed to sun. The roof, there are no windows."
"Warrick, we do have binoculars in the Tahoe, right?" I asked, hoping that they were still there.
"Yes, I think so, I'm gonna get them." He sprinted off. He was pretty fast considering the long day we had. I myself felt so wrung out, I thought I couldn't have run if my life depended on it.
While he was off getting the equipment, I spoke to the agent.
"We think that the cultists might be using a light sensitive trigger for the bomb. So the trigger is probably somewhere on the outside, or the roof if there is an easy access point."
"Got it, I'll tell them to look there. But the first objective is finding the explosives, so far nothing."
"Found two pairs, you go right, I'll go left." Warrick was breathing heavily.
"Ok, sun sets in the west, so our chances are best looking at the western edge of the roof." I grabbed the pair of binoculars and made my way right.
It was tedious and seemed to take forever. Running a few meters, watching then running again. The terrain was the only thing which was in our favor. The building was standing at the lowest point and a ridge sloped up next to it. That made it easier to have a look at the roof. The heat made the task even more taxing. I thought it was never going to work, when I finally spotted something. At first glance I wasn't sure I had really seen something, as I was hungry and exhausted from the heat. I looked again and was sure.
"Warrick I got it. It's on the roof, western edge." Warrick put in another sprint to tell that agent, while I carefully walked down the ridge trying not to fall over. I felt awfully tired and weak. It was probably a combination of the heat, lack of sleep, emotional shock and lack of food that brought me to the point where I felt like I could barely stand. It wasn't my fault, but still I hated feeling weak like this. It gave me the feeling of being a victim, something I wanted to avoid at all cost. The feeling of powerlessness had been all too real that day already. I was determined not to be stuck in that passive victim role.