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Rae: “Have you ever been in the military?”
“I was a targeting analyst with the Air Force,” Mellon said. “Enlisted, not an officer, but I did have to go through an SSBI.”
Rae turned to Lucas: “Background check. Same as the one for top secret, but not SCI. We’re probably SCI now, but…we gotta trust some of these people.”
Mellon: “What’s SCI?”
“Sensitive compartmented information,” Rae said.
“Never heard of that,” Mellon said.
Lucas said to Rae, “You’re right. He’s got to know. His cops are going to be looking for these guys.”
Mellon was confused: “What the hell is going on?”
Rae and Lucas took turns explaining the problem, including what had happened up at Taos Ski Valley that day, and what had been found in Los Alamos and Santa Fe.
Mellon: “You don’t think these four are infectious…”
“No. But, given what they’re doing, they’re fanatics—or just plain nuts,” Lucas said. “Taos is a tourist town. You’ve got people here from all over the country, and probably all over the world…”
“We do,” Mellon agreed.
“If these guys see that they’re about to get busted, they could deliberately break open these tubes, these vials that they’re carrying, to try to infect anyone who gets close,” Lucas said. “If they do that, and those infected people are allowed to go…wherever, to travel through hub airports, the situation could get completely out of control.”
Mellon ran one hand through his thinning hair. “So what…”
“They can’t be allowed to do that,” Rae said. “I don’t know exactly how to put this, but…if you see them…”
“Kill them,” Lucas said. “If you can. Don’t give them a chance. Then stand back, way back. Ideally, we’d locate the four of them, and take them all out at once. If they’ve separated, and they may have, all trying to get out in different ways, then we may have to take them one at a time. Kill them one at a time.”
“Man, is that even legal?” Mellon asked, wide-eyed.
“We don’t know. We’re doing the best we can,” Rae said. “We’ve killed one of them, we’ve captured three more sick people, we’ve seized some of these vials supposedly full of virus. They’re on their way to Fort Detrick’s virus lab to get looked at…but we’re cutting across a lot of legalities.”
Lucas: “It’s like this. A guy is standing in an auditorium full of people and he’s holding a bomb that will kill everyone in the place. You’ve got a sniper. Do you kill him before he can trigger it? Or do you call a judge to discuss the legalities?”
Mellon nodded: “Pull the trigger. All right, what do you want us to do?”
—
Lucas: “I don’tknow what I want you to do, because I don’t know anything about Taos. And I’m not really great at organizing big groups of people, anyway. Rae could do it, but we need her on the street.Youneed to figure this out. You need to get a couple of your best guys in here and figure out what’s possible with what you have.”
“We can do that,” Mellon said. “After I talked to that Billy Greet person, I got most of the force headed over to city hall, next door.”
While Lucas and Rae waited, Mellon called a sergeant and a patrol officer, both off duty but on the way to city hall, and told them to get to his office as quickly as they could. Mellon’s two selected cops showed up in less than ten minutes. One was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, the other still in uniform.
They were briefed and they both agreed that what the marshals wanted them to do to the other town cops was crappy: the one named Tom was most reluctant to go along.
Lucas: “If we tell them what the real situation is, some of them will try to get their families out of town. Their families will want to get other friends out, and pretty soon we’ll have a panic and people will be running all over the place, trying to get out of town on four-wheelers and probably airplanes and even walking out.”
The cops looked at each other, and one nodded.
Lucas: “That’ll make it a lot easier for these assholes to get out. If they get out, then it’s possible that all those people will wind up dead. Along with the rest of us.”
“This is like the hydrogen bomb of diseases,” Rae said. “People will try to run, but it won’t help.”
“If we do this, we won’t be able to work with our guys anymore, they won’t trust us,” the one named Louis said.
