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—
The RV waslarge, but not as big as a Greyhound bus—maybe half that size. Both sides of the interior were lined with gray leather-look couches, with a compact kitchen halfway down the length, and a bedroom in the back. The sick men were lying on thin plastic camping mattresses, on the floor between the couches, rather than on the couches themselves. They wore what looked like hospital scrub suits, and when Lasch checked, found that all three were wearing adult diapers. The RV stank of intestinal gas and sweat.
All three men were awake and aware.
Hawkins, in an isolation suit, boarded the bus and squeezed past Lasch, not touching, and made his way to the bedroom and began pulling open drawers, which were empty, and a storage closet, which was not. Inside were four mid-sized suitcases, stacked atop each other, and four smaller carry-on flight bags, and a purse.
He pulled them out and lay them on the bed. None of the suitcases were locked, and inside, he found travel gear for three men and a woman, and in each, dopp kits full of the usual travel items—toothbrushes with travel-sized toothpaste tubes, travel-sized deodorant containers, fingernail clippers, travel-sized bottles of Scope mouthwash, and a tube of Frizz Ease, a hair cream. The three suitcases with male clothes also contained disposable razors and travel-sized cans of shaving cream.
The items in each dopp kit were identical, except that those with male clothing had the shaving gear. After thinking about that, Hawkins realized that they’d probably all been bought by the same person at the same time and were chosen so the traveler could make himself or herself look as respectable as possible—no body odor, no fly-away hair, no terrible breath, no beard stubble. The stuff was intended to groom the wearers for TSA eyes at the airports.
The rest of the contents of the suitcases was more variable—men’s clothes in different styles and sizes in three of them, women’s clothes in the fourth, but again, all of it bland, respectable-looking.
None of it meant much, except for the conclusion that everything had been carefully chosen, as part of a well-thought-out plan. He picked out several of the grooming items—those with hard sides, that would hold fingerprints, carried them to the front door and handed them off to one of the Detrick crew, who was waiting with an isolation bag. “More possible fingerprints,” he said.
Back at the closet, he went through the four carry-on bags, and found a U.S. passport in each one. The first one he looked at belonged to a Sandra Klein, but had a photo of Rose Turney, taken recently: she looked exactly as she had an instant before Hawkins had shot her inthe heart. A wallet held what looked like a real New Mexico driver’s license for Sandra Klein, again with Turney’s photo.
He found more passports and wallets in the other travel bags, and each of the wallets contained a correct-looking New Mexico driver’s license and a matching passport.
The documents named the men on the floor: John Brickell, Rory Long, Cameron Johnson, all probably fake. Hawkins stood over them, one at a time, checking their faces against the photos in the passports and driver’s licenses, then carried the documents to the RV entrance door where more collection bags were waiting for him. He dropped each of the passports and licenses into separate transparent bags, which were immediately sealed. The bags were big enough that the passports could be opened and manipulated without breaking the seals.
Using the radio, he told those outside the bus that he thought the passports and licenses were “real, but with fake names and photos. We need to check the names and addresses to see if there are real people behind them, and if they are active accomplices. We should do that as quickly as possible.”
—
“I’ll get thenames to Billy,” Letty radioed back. “See what pops.”
Finished in the bedroom, Hawkins worked his way through storage areas in the rest of the bus, not finding much except a rental agreement for the RV; the signature at the bottom of the page was illegible.
Lasch had been interviewing the three men about their physical symptoms. All three showed what appeared to be bruised faces, and the one she was examining complained of lower stomach pain, madeworse when she gently pressed his stomach. He told her that he and the others all had had episodes of diarrhea, which was why they were wearing diapers. The worst pain, he said, was in the muscles of his thighs, both quads and hamstrings, in the joints of his elbows, shoulders and fingers, and in what felt like his internal organs.
His eyes were clear and his voice was shaky, but understandable.
When Lasch moved to the man in the middle of the three, Hawkins sat on the couch next to the head of the first man on the floor and began lying. “I’m a friend…well, a former friend…of Lionel Scott. We were classmates together at Oxford. We were on our college rowing team for two years, and after graduation, I went on to a career in the military. Because of our relationship, the British and American governments sent me here to talk to his…associates…in this experiment. I need to ask you some questions…”
The man on the mattress claimed that he knew nothing of an effort to spread a disease; he said that Scott was attempting to find a vaccine that would be effective against Marburg and Ebola, and that the three of them were volunteers in the experiment. “Volunteers, but we got paid ten thousand dollars up front. I needed the money, and he said it would be safe, so I signed on.”
Hawkins shook his head: “We know that’s not true, Cameron,” he said, using the name in the man’s passport. “I just looked through the passports with the fake names. We have compiled a lot of evidence that you knew exactly what was going on—why else would your friend Rose have opened fire on us this morning?”
“I, I don’t know. I did hear gunshots, but I didn’t know what was happening…”
“Rose was shot to death on the hillside here, by one of the investigators,” Hawkins said. “She’s dead. I have to say, as politely as I canmanage, that you will be, too. Dead, that is, and fairly soon. We don’t have the death penalty in Great Britain, but you certainly do here in the United States. And, my friend, if you don’t begin cooperating, you are going to be strapped down to a table and given a lethal injection, not too far in the future.”
“But I don’t know anything…” the man wailed.
“You know some things,” Hawkins said. “You know how many people were in the car that went out of here ahead of you. How many were there, Cameron?”
One of the other men, overhearing the question, called, not loudly, but clearly, “We have the right to remain silent, we have the right to an attorney…”
Lasch turned to look at Hawkins and moved so he could see the face of the man who had called out.
“Those rights have been suspended by order of the President,” Hawkins lied again. “Just as Americans do have a right to free speech, you do not have the right to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theater. In other words, those rights are not absolute. In the face of the critical problem you have created for us, you no longer have the right to remain silent, or to have legal counsel. In fact, if you don’t cooperate, it has been hinted that some very impolite men will take you to a dark place and ask the same questions, and they will not take no for an answer.”
“You mean torture,” said Rory Long, the middle man. He appeared to be the strongest of the three.
“I mean interrogation,” Hawkins said. “Enhanced interrogation, as you Americans call it.”
“We’ve already held up with the Marburg vaccine in us, so waterboarding isn’t going to scare us,” Long said.
