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“All right. Get us a house, then.”
—
They rang off,took a last look around, then walked over and sat in the SUV.
“What do you think now?” Rae asked.
“You mean about us?” Lucas thought about it, then said, “I think we’re okay. I didn’t think about the breeze before I shot Catton, but Underwood was right—it was blowing at our backs when we walked up there. And we were still twenty yards away. But, can’t take a chance.”
“It’s that goddamn measles thing that’s sticking it to us,” Rae said. “If it was just Marburg, we could handle it. People would die, but there wouldn’t be a pandemic. If it was just the measles, people who aren’t vaccinated would get it, but so what? Some people would get messed up, but ninety-nine percent wouldn’t. The combination…”
“I read once that if somebody dropped a one-megaton nuke on Wall Street, it wouldn’t have much effect on Central Park,” Lucas said. “You could take a nuclear war and most people would make it through. This really could be worse, if the Detrick guys are right.”
“Yeah. Though I’d like to see your sources on the nuke on Wall Street.”
28
Since dawn, Scott had been working his way along the mountainside a couple of hundred yards above the High Road. The piñons above the road were arrayed as they might be on a checkerboard, not a solid wall but a scattered design probably the result, he thought, of some kind of environmental necessity. Access to rainwater, perhaps, that kept them from growing too closely together.
If he stayed high enough, though, the checkerboard design cut off any sightlines from below. He still had to be careful about noise and dislodging rocks, especially as he passed above the checkpoint. The going was rough, treacherous, stones hiding in the weeds; the weeds pungent, like herbs, and the slope beneath his feet a slippery layer of dust and sand. He worried about rattlesnakes and he had to check every gap in the trees for sightlines that would allow somebody below tosee him. The bike was a pain in the ass, pushing it along, carrying it at times, slowing progress, but he would need it again after nightfall.
At ten o’clock, it occurred to him that Catton hadn’t called, and he made the same assumption that he’d made with Callister: she’d been stopped. Whether it had happened before or after spreading the viral media, he couldn’t guess.
At noon, perhaps a half mile past the checkpoint, he gave it up. He’d come to an eroded gap fifty yards wide, where he could be seen from the road should a car pass, and he would make an odd, memorable sight, pushing a bike across the mountain. Then again, the gap offered a space where he could more easily get the bike down to the road after dark.
He found a shallow bowl in the dirt, made sure there were no snakes—he’d never seen one in his whole time in New Mexico, but he knew they were out there—cleared a spot, lay down. He had been wearing his helmet, and he turned it around, put it on his face with his nose and mouth out in the air. Using the backpack as a pillow, and after smoothing out a few dirt clods, he went to sleep.
He slept reasonably well, much to his own surprise; but he’d gone for most of two days with hardly any sleep at all, and he was familiar enough with sleeping in the open. He woke sporadically, readjusted himself, moved the backpack to a better position. At five o’clock, he sat up feeling stiff, stretched, yawned, stood, weaved between piñons, peed on one of them as he checked the road. Did some toe-touches. He thought about chancing the gap, continuing to walk along the mountainside, but that seemed pointless. When he got down to the road, with his bike, he could make in five minutes the same distance that would take two exhausting hours on the mountain.
He ate the last chicken sandwich, sat down again in his dirt bowl, and looked up at the sky. Nothing up there except a vapor trail, the jet probably headed for Los Angeles or San Diego. If he or any of his accomplices had been on it, the deal would be done, Gaia would be saved.
He got bored with sitting, and neither of his burner phones was a smartphone, so he couldn’t browse. He lay down again and dozed. After a few cycles of dozing and waking, he felt evening coming on, cool air sliding down the mountain. He stood, leaving the bike and backpack behind, carefully walked down toward the road, feeling his way along, and made it without falling into a hole or off a hump.
There were no houses in sight, and no traffic at all. At the bottom of the slope, he carefully eased around a piñon and looked back toward the checkpoint. Two police cars were still parked across the road but were so far away that he couldn’t see the cops. He could see no cars approaching the checkpoint from either direction; whatever was happening, the traffic had been choked off. That was good, he thought—this checkpoint was probably the last one.
Although he tried to suppress his impatience, in the end, he couldn’t. He climbed back up the slope, pulled on the pack, and wheeled and half carried the bike down the hill while there was still light in the sky. At the bottom, he peeked around the piñon again. There was no activity around the police cars. He put his helmet on, hurried across the road, to be on the less visible side of the slight curve away from the police cars, and set off south, pedaling hard for the first ten minutes, taking advantage of the little light still left.
When that was gone, he slowed, but still moved as quickly as an easy jog, seven- or eight-minute miles. The road was not quiteinvisible beneath the bicycle wheels, and he pushed on, occasionally bumping onto the shoulder, ricocheting back onto the main blacktop. The road was bizarrely traffic-free. He passed a single house with a yard light, but there were no other lights, no car in the driveway, so he kept going.
—
He cautiously passeda clutch of small houses fifteen minutes farther on, showing lights, but too many to risk an intrusion. He passed more houses, and even accumulations of houses, but never felt in danger of being seen as long as he was careful. At four o’clock in the morning, he was feeling beat-up, and a little disoriented because he’d spent so long straining his eyes, trying to penetrate the darkness.
He coasted, slowly, slowly down a hill, feeling for the bottom and the following rise, when he saw yellowed headlights coming toward him, and watched as they turned down a dirt track. He pedaled that way for less than a minute, and when he looked right, saw an elderly man getting out of the truck, carrying a sack toward a dark, lonely house trailer. The man fumbled out some keys, went to the trailer, unlocked a door and went inside. A second later, interior lights came on: the man was almost certainly alone.
So here it was, Scott thought. He’d been present at two murders, both by Catton. Now he was on his own. A murder—he didn’t lie to himself—that had to be done. He rolled the bike off the road, took the revolver out of his pocket. Nothing to worry about with a revolver: pull the trigger, it fired. No safety, no complicated magazine. Nothing to think about but the trigger.
He kept the gun in his hand as he approached the door. The trailerhad one long, low window, and he saw a shadow moving on it, away from the door. He hesitated, then knocked, not too hard. The shadow on the window stopped, was motionless for a second or two, then turned toward the front of the trailer, toward the door.
“Who is that?”
“Been in an accident,” Scott said. “I’m hurt.”
“I’ll call an ambliance,” the old man called back.
“Do you have a towel or a sheet? I’m bleeding…”
The door cracked open and the man looked out. Scott was standing at an angle to the door, his hand at his side, the gun out of sight, his other hand over his stomach, like he was holding himself together.
