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“Yes. He talked to the chief of staff, like I thought. Depending on what you guys get in the next couple of days, they’ll bump him up to the President. Or not.”
“Alec Hawkins should be in Albuquerque tomorrow night; I’ll coordinate with him. Things were a little thin at Hertz, you might want to make some calls so he’ll be sure to get a car.”
“I’ll do that in the morning, when we’re talking to MI5,” Greet said. “Be careful driving tonight; I know you’re tired.”
“Uh, we collected a Walter Packer in Washington.”
“Excellent. I was afraid he wouldn’t make the plane. He’ll have to car-share with one of you.”
Letty passed the conversation on to Lucas and Rae.
“Straight up I-25 to Santa Fe, let’s not try to convoy. Meet at eight tomorrow, we’ll get breakfast and figure out what we’re doing,” Lucassaid. Letty found it mildly irritating that Lucas assumed he was the leader of the pack, but said nothing.
Yet.
—
Packer collected threechecked bags, including one the size of a Prius. He found that his gear was intact and rode north with Rae.
Letty was the last one out of the car rental area, found her way to I-25 north. Ten minutes got her out of Albuquerque, running fast in the night. I-25 was three lanes wide for the first few miles, dropped to two lanes after going through a major intersection. She could see a wide band of house lights in what seemed to be miles to her west, and her iPad map suggested that the houses might be lining the far side of the Rio Grande. She quickly left that area behind, and was plunged into the kind of darkness you only saw on interstate highways in the rural Midwest or intermountain West.
An hour out of Albuquerque, she climbed a long, winding hill, pushing through the deep-dark; and when she topped the hill, saw what looked like a huge bowl of diamonds shining below, the lights of Santa Fe. I-25 at that point was running almost due east; following the map app, she got off at Cerrillos Road, driving north into the city. She couldn’t see a lot, but between the highway exit and the Hampton Inn, she saw a lot of car-related businesses, dealerships, car washes, tire stores, auto parts stores; and fast-food restaurants, mostly closed.
Nobody else was in the motel lobby when Letty arrived in her SUV, so she checked in and went to bed. She was back up at seven o’clock, looked at her email. Hawkins was in the air, flying directly to Denver, and would connect with a commuter flight into Santa Fe. Letty sent an email to Greet to update her on Hawkins’s plans to gointo Santa Fe instead of Albuquerque. It was nine o’clock in Washington and Greet was in her office: Letty got a thumbs-up in fifteen seconds, and a “good hunting.”
That done, she met Lucas and Rae in the lobby, and they went for a thirty-minute run, and at eight, they were all out in the parking lot. Rae said, “I found a place that looks like a deli, more or less on the way, if you want to follow me and Walt.”
Santa Fe, what Letty could see of it, was a little junky, but then, they were driving an old main-entry road which would be a little junky in any small city between the Appalachians and the Coastal Ranges. They got a table at the deli, pancakes and sausage and Diet Coke and coffee.
As they ate, Lucas said, “Letty, that scientist guy, McDonald, won’t be back from Washington yet, but he’s set you up to go to the lab and interview the people who knew Scott the best. Rae, Walt and I will go over to Scott’s house and tear it apart. The Los Alamos Police Department is sending a cop over—they should have a search warrant this morning. They’ve already been into the place but haven’t searched it.”
“Then…what’d they do?” Packer asked.
Rae: “It was a welfare check—they looked around and made sure he wasn’t dead in there.”
“The thing that I don’t really understand is how you could do this virus research at home,” Lucas said. “I just haven’t…I mean, could you actually set up a virus lab in your bathroom? Where would you get all the stuff you need?”
Packer rolled his eyes, and said to Rae, who had her phone sitting on the tabletop, “Call up eBay.”
She did that, and when she nodded and said, “Okay,” Packer said, “Put in ‘electron microscope.’ ”
She did, and a few seconds later said, “Whoa. There’s quite a selection. Starting at less than fifteen thousand dollars, going up to…I find one for $116,000.”
Packer said, “Put in ‘biological safety cabinet.’ ”
She did, and found dozens of them for sale.
“That would be the heart of your lab, if you knew what you were doing, and of course, Scott does,” Packer said, spearing a link sausage. “You’d need some other stuff, like a freezer and glassware, maybe some isolation cages for mice, but believe me, it’s all there on eBay, and would be delivered to your front door in brown paper wrappers. Sealing up a virus lab seems like it’d be a complicated process, and it is, if you do it to government standards in a place that will be used for years. But you could do a quick and dirty but effective job with stuff you get at Home Depot. All of it is made easier if you’re willing to take risks, as Scott apparently is.”
“It just gets better and better,” Letty said.
Packer put down his fork. “I’ll tell you something else, for you skeptics. A Chinese company set up an illegal virus lab in California and they were messing with stuff like HIV. It’s all over the ’net, if you want to read about it. Put in ‘illegal Chinese virus lab California.’ You’ll see. If they could do it, Scott could do it.”
“Better and better,” Letty said.
—
The drive northto Los Alamos took forty minutes. Letty had never been in northern New Mexico, and the landscape was new to her, and different than she’d imagined. Once outside of Santa Fe, the highway cut through a harsh high desert, tan dirt spotted with piñon and juniper, with the Sangre de Cristo range of the Rocky Mountainslooming in the background. They passed three Indian casinos and a marijuana outlet, along with various adobe houses and businesses in various stages of disrepair.
