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“So he was looking for other solutions?”
Sloam stared at Letty for several long beats, then she said, “I have this…dreadful…”
A long silence, still staring, until Letty asked, “What?”
“The very last time I saw Lionel, he said that he was going to the States to study more biology, and to study numbers. He told me that if you examined Gaia as a scientist, one thing that became apparent was that humans are analogous to a virus on the body of the earth. You need to find a cure for the virus. If you could knock the virus down—not eliminate it, but just knock it down, as has been done with AIDS and Covid—Gaia would survive.”
“You mean…”
“I don’t know exactlywhathe meant,” Sloam said. Again, she seemed to be groping for words. “But after Covid…you see, Covid went everywhere. We really couldn’t stop it. It killed millions of people, but we have billions of people, so overall, no change. But suppose it had killed billions of people? Suppose it killed five billion people? More than half the power generation is unneeded. Half the cars are gone. Half the houses don’t need heat in winter. Global warming stops, is even reversed. Gaia is saved.”
Letty blurted: “Oh Jesus Christ!”
—
There was moreabout the Gaia hypothesis, but as soon as they’d left Sloam, Letty looked up at Hawkins and said, “We both need to phone home.”
“Yes. Back to the inn, my girl. Can you still reach your senator?”
“I can. I have to.”
“I’ll write something tonight, and hand it in tomorrow after I putyou on your plane. I expect it will be taken to the director general himself. This may be far-fetched…but what do I know?”
“You think you can get right to the director?”
“I’m, mmm, somewhat fair-haired,” Hawkins said. “I’ll at least be listened to.”
—
In her roomat the inn, Letty called Colles’s office, and after some delay, was switched through to him.
“Did you locate him?” No names to be mentioned.
“No, but I had a tarot reading that said he’s still alive…”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. That came from a hippie ex-lover who has stashed her husband somewhere off the premises. But—we have the phone problem,” Letty said. “I don’t want to get into detail about an interview from this afternoon. We need to meet at your office as soon as I get back. If there aren’t any delays, I can be there by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon. And Chris…call my father. He needs to be at the meeting. He has a friend in the Marshals Service named Rae Givens, she should be there as well, and their boss at the Marshals Service, his name is Russell Forte.” She paused, and then said, “Here’s some double-talk for you, because of the phone problem. The relevant person’s supervisors at the two facilities where he worked in the U.S. need to be there, too. Get them on airplanes. And anyone else who needs to know. Billy Greet, for sure.”
Greet was an upper-level executive with the Department of Homeland Security, and had worked with Letty on other investigations.
“Why your father?” Colles asked. “And this Givens person?”
“Because of what they do.” They hunted.
“Ah. This doesn’t have anything to do with the tarot?”
“No. This is much more serious,” Letty said. “Much more serious than what happened in Texas two years ago, or California last year. Way more important.”
“Don’t tell me that,” Colles said.
“I’m telling you that.”
“Four o’clock tomorrow. I’ll clear the decks and get everyone here. I hope you’re right about the seriousness of this thing, and we don’t look like idiots and have to apologize and send everyone home.”
“No. You hope I’mnotright about this,” Letty said. “Because if I am…well—the phone problem.”
—
