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Lucas sprayed him with a yellowish liquid, until he was soaked and dripping wet. Then he sat on a stump and held up the soles of his boots, and Lucas sprayed those. Five minutes later, they did it all over again.
And five minutes after that, Packer took off the hood and the respirator mask and called, “You guys…you better talk to whoever sent you out here,” he said. “I’ll talk to my people at the fort, get a full team here, if they’ve got one together. You have to stay away from me and away from the house.”
“Got it,” Lucas said. “What all is inside there?”
“What we were talking about at breakfast—the whole eBay collection of lab equipment. Looks used, but functional. One thing I didn’t recognize but could be an electric kiln, and maybe they used it to burn contaminated stuff. One big thing: they did have cages for mice. They might have been trying to attenuate the virus, which means they were looking for a vaccine. They might not be doing the suicide thing.”
“What are the chances that one of us is infected?” Rae asked.
Packer said, “Low. Very low. Measles virus can live on surfaces for a couple of hours, Marburg for a few days. Scott’s been gone a lot longer than that. But if this guy is genuinely nuts, maybe he built a boobytrap of some kind, released some virus media when the door opened. I didn’t see anything like that, but we can’t take any risks if he’s actually made some of that hybrid shit.”
—
As Lucas andRae walked to Lucas’s SUV, Letty arrived. Lucas pointed her down the curb and when she got out of the truck, said, “We’ve got a problem. There was a hidden lab.”
“Ah…no.”
Lucas told her what Packer had found, and added, “I’ll call Russ at the service, and we need to call Greet and Colles to fill them in. You should do that.”
Letty nodded, and said, “Security circle is getting pretty big, Dad. Gonna be hard to keep a cap on it more than a couple of days. And…what about Walt?”
Lucas turned to look at Packer, who was on his phone. “Walt wants us to stay away. From him, and the house, both,” he said.
“What about you and Rae?”
“We didn’t get inside the lab,” Rae called. “Walt did, twice. He thinks we’re all probably okay, because viruses aren’t long-lived and we disinfected him with a spray thing. But…”
“But…hidden lab. Scott wasn’t making cheese in there,” Letty said. “Did you find anything else? In the house?”
“Not a thing, except the lab, which we can’t get into yet,” Rae said.
“So we have exactly nothing to work with,” Lucas said.
Letty: “I didn’t get much, either, but there’s one more woman I have to interview. There are some hints that she might have been his only friend here. His longtime lover back in Oxford ran what wassomething like a head shop, and this woman actuallyrunsa head shop, so that could be a link. I stopped at the shop on the way here, but the place was closed.”
“Closed like…she might have gone away with him?” Rae asked.
Letty shrugged: “Big sign in the window, ‘Closed.’ I wanted to get over here, see what was going on, so I didn’t dig around. I’ll go do that.”
“Then go,” Lucas said. “In the meantime, Rae and I’ll be standing around with our dicks in our hands.”
“That doesn’t actually apply…” Rae began, but then, “Never mind.”
—
Letty headed backtoward the downtown area, leaving Packer, Lucas, and Rae on their phones. On the way, she called Billy Greet and filled her in on the lab discovery. “All right, this is ratcheting up,” Greet said. “The Secretary’s probably at lunch…when you talk to this woman, call me and tell me what she says. If there’s more I need to pass on to the Secretary.”
The drive took Letty across a long bridge over what looked to be a bottomless canyon, through some improbable road-design curves, and finally down Trinity Drive, then over a block to Central Avenue. Tarantula Cards was in a dying strip mall off Central, in between a shoe repair shop and a Little Boy used-book store.
She parked in front, got out, cupped her eyes against the window and tried to look past the ‘Closed’ sign, but the interior was too dark. She could see furniture shapes, but nothing was moving. The bookstore looked as closed as the card shop, and when she tried that door, it was locked.
She saw a man behind the counter in the shoe repair shop, almost went inside, but at the last minute, turned away and went back to her truck. On the way to Dulles, she’d stopped at her apartment to pick up some working clothes, her gun and gear bag. Now she opened the gear bag and took out a cloth shoulder satchel and dropped her battery-powered lock rake inside it.
Leaving the SUV where it was, she noted the address on Tarantula Cards—suite 8—then walked to the end of the strip mall, around the corner, and down the alley in back. The back of the building was punctured by a line of paint-peeling metal doors. She found “8” on a door in about the right spot, looked around, slipped the rake’s pick into the lock, looked around again, and pulled the trigger.
The rake made a high-pitched rattling noise, which she muffled by wrapping the shoulder bag around it; and the lock turned. A minute after she got to the door, she was inside. She pulled the door shut, found a light switch, and turned on the lights.
She was in a near-empty, windowless room. A freestanding metal rack along one wall held a half-dozen boxes with open tops. She looked in one and found a jumble of paperback books, all apparently used, and feared for a moment that she’d broken into the wrong store.
