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Hawkins and Lettyspent most of the night talking about the Gaia concept, looking up and making notes on Scott’s publications and academic credentials. They still made time for the Reverse Cowgirl Laydown, along with a few other biological experiments. Hawkins delivered Letty to LHR at ten o’clock the next morning for the noon flight, pressed her against a pillar for a last kiss and said, “God. I hope thisisn’tthe last kiss. In the catastrophic sense of the word.”
“Could we be making too much out of what we’ve heard?” Letty asked.
“Pray that we have,” Hawkins said. He took several backward steps, holding her eyes, then turned and disappeared into the crowd, a tall lanky man in a hurry.
4
Eight people waited in Senator Christopher Colles’s office. One of his assistants had delivered a box of donuts and a cooler of Cokes, Diet Cokes, and iced coffee; two paunchy scientists had each taken two donuts and Colles had taken an iced coffee.
An air of impatience hung over the room like a third-rate rap song.
Blond, slender, sunburned Billy Greet stood in a corner with her arms crossed, eyes drifting between Colles and Deputy U.S. Marshal Lucas Davenport; Lucas, a heavy-shouldered man, dark hair touched with gray, hands in pants pockets, was perched on the sill of Colles’s only window. Like his daughter Letty, he took books with him when he traveled; in this case, a battered copy of Martha Grimes’s thrillerSend Bygraves, which he’d read perhaps fifteen times. He finished a familiar verse, slipped the book in his jacket pocket, turned to look outthe window, and wondered out loud, “Where the hell is she? It’s almost five o’clock.”
“Plane was late. We know she’s on the ground,” Colles said. “Traffic is getting heavy.”
“She could have called us,” Lucas said.
“Not about this, apparently,” Colles said. “Which is worrisome.”
Deputy U.S. Marshal Rae Givens, a tall, muscular black woman, lounged on a fuzzy beige sofa, a big, well-padded black canvas bag by her feet, along with a TUMI suitcase. She’d arrived twenty minutes earlier, had gotten a hug from Davenport and a handshake from Colles, who said, “Lucas and Virgil Flowers tell me you’re the cat’s pajamas.”
“That’s true, though both of them lie a lot, so you have to take that into account,” Rae had said.
Lucas had asked, “You bring guns?”
“Of course.” She’d touched the black bag with a toe. “Amazed I could get them in here.”
Russell Forte, Lucas’s contact in the Marshals Service management, had come over from Arlington and was leaning on a credenza, looking at his phone.
—
Greet said, “MaybeLetty stopped at her apartment to pick up her Sig. She’s not happy if it’s not in her pocket.” Greet looked like an Oklahoma rancher, not a ranking Homeland Security executive; Letty’s Sig was a sub-compact nine-millimeter handgun.
Colles: “If she stopped at her apartment, I’ll kick her ass. We’re too important to keep us waiting for that.” He glanced at Lucas: “With your permission, of course.”
“You got it,” Letty’s father said.
The two scientists had been sitting in a conversation cluster, eating their donuts and brushing powdered sugar off their jackets. They were both soft, bespectacled, and balding. Victor Sims was a group director with USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Harold McDonald held an equivalent job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They’d both been supervisors of Lionel Scott when he worked at their respective laboratories.
“What do we know about Scott that I haven’t been told?” Rae asked.
“We can’t find him,” Greet said. “Letty is on her way here to tell us why we need to find him.”
“Dead or alive,” Colles said. He looked at Lucas: “Unless your daughter has messed this up.”
“She doesn’t mess things up,” Lucas said. He stepped over to the cooler, took a Diet Coke, unscrewed the top.
“What’d Scott do?” Rae asked.
Colles: “We don’t know if he did anything…”
—
He stopped talkingas the door popped open again, and Letty stepped inside, carrying her travel bag. She looked tired and aimed a shaky smile at the room: “Hey, Dad, Chris, Russ. And you must be Rae…Hey, Billy.” She put her bag down, walked over to Lucas and gave him a hard squeeze. “How’s Mom?”
“She’s fine, where have you been?”
“In traffic hell.”
