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Underwood stood in place, looking after Lucas as he walked over to the truck and got in.
Rae asked, “What was that all about?”
“The guy’s freaking out,” Lucas said. “Now he’s got me freaking out. Christ, this whole thing seemed like a little bit of a fantasy, a movie. Then Underwood…I mean…gonna watch my kids dying right in front of me, nothing I can do about it…”
“Now I’m freaking out,” Rae said.
They drove down the canyon and hit a state police checkpoint at the bottom; the two patrolmen looked at their IDs, asked them what was happening, but Lucas told them he didn’t know exactly—that there was a government team at the top of the mountain that might know more. One of the cops said that every road out of Taos was being covered, and that there were some serious traffic jams going south and west.
“What’s west?” Rae asked.
“The Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. We’re not letting anyone across it, we’re routing them back through town if they want to go south. If we let them across the bridge, they could get lost on the back roads,” the cop said. “I’ll tell you what, there are a lot of pissed-off people out there.”
They continued toward Taos and Greet called again. “I got another name—a Randall Foss, who is diabetic. We got the fingerprints from the bus, and none of them go to anyone named Foss. There’s a Randall Foss who was fingerprinted for TSA airport clearance four years ago, from Indianapolis, and the insulin pen goes to a pharmacy in Indianapolis. He’s divorced, quit his job as a computer programmer at a steel fabrication plant two months ago. We’ll hit Foss’s house, pick up the ex-wife. We’ll have more records coming in, and NSA is looking at his online contacts and his phone. We’ve got decent photos. I’ll email them to all of you.”
“Then we probably know three of the four people in the car, or two cars, if Hawkins is right,” Lucas said. “We’ll be talking to the Taos cops in twenty minutes. I’m hoping we’ll have some kind of a net on the streets in an hour or two.”
“I’ve spoken to the Taos police chief, he’s expecting you, and he’s pulling in all his people. He seems competent enough. They’ve got an action plan in case of something like a school shooting,” Greet said.
“Did you tell him the problem?” Lucas asked.
“I left the details to you, you’ll have to feel him out a bit, see if he’ll panic. I told him it was a critical national security problem, that it was still being treated as top secret, and that they should give you whatever you want. He might need a little further encouragement, but I got his attention.”
Rae: “Billy, we need more marshals. I’ve got four particular guys that I’d like to see up here…”
“Give me the names and they’ll be on the way in an hour. We’ve got a jet on the runway at Alexandria,” Greet said. “Also—on my own, I’m sending you a woman named Barbara Cartwright. Letty worked with her last year, and they’re friends. She’s an operator with the CIA’s Special Activities Division. More importantly, she’s a sniper, and she’s bringing her main weapon, in case you need to stand off from someone. She’s got a green light to take out anyone you designate. She’s in the air, she’ll be in Albuquerque any time now.”
“Holy cats: you must be building some serious clout back there,” Rae said.
“We are. The Secretary sat down with the President and people from the National Security Council. They worked through it, and got some casualty estimates from us and the DOD. The Big Guy freaked and told us we could have whatever we need.Whatever we need.Andif we run into any bureaucratic interference, he would personally straighten it out.”
“Well, okay,” Rae said.
—
A minute afterGreet rang off, Rae got an alert on her iPad, and when she opened it, found four photographs of Randall Foss, including a passport photo. A note from one of Greet’s researchers said that the passport photo was definitely of Foss, but the passport had been issued under the name William R. Price with an address in Santa Fe.
“I don’t like this at all,” Lucas said. “They’ve got real passports under different names. Another thing that Hawkins got right. And if those germ vials are pure glass, they could walk through airport security with the vials on their bodies and not set off any alarms.”
“If there are real people behind the passports, I wonder if they’re cooperating? Or if the names were simply stolen?”
“You’d just need to find people who’d never left the country, and a way to get at their mailboxes. I wouldn’t be surprised if every one of them went to an apartment house with crappy mail security.”
“What about their New Mexico driver’s licenses?”
“Virgil and I worked a deal in San Diego,” Lucas said. “A cop there told us that you could go to any border state and find somebody who was selling valid driver’s licenses. The real thing, run off at night, right at the DMV. And New Mexico is…”
“A border state.”
—
At Taos, theywound through a confusing jumble of streets to the police station, which would have been almost unfindable withouttheir cell phone navigation apps. The station was adobe colored but wasn’t trying too hard to look like actual adobe. Rae took her iPad with her, and they went inside, talked to a woman behind a heavy glass window, and were led back to the chief’s office.
The chief was a midsized dark-haired man with a brown mustache, spade beard, and blue eyes, which made him look a bit like the last Russian czar. Rae introduced herself and Lucas—the chief’s name was Christopher Mellon—and they all shook hands and settled into chairs around his desk.
Rae: “Do you have any idea of what’s going on?”
“I know we’ve got a heck of a mess with the state police stopping every car going out of town. We can’t handle the calls we’re getting. What are you doing?” Mellon asked.
