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“It means ‘yes,’ usually sarcastically, in what’s called the ‘ten code’ that cops once used on their radios,” Letty said.
“Ah.”
As Callister passed under a light, they clearly saw her face, and Hawkins said, “Shit-shit-shit-shit.”
“Yeah.” Callister was getting close. Letty spoke to Cartwright: “Did you see her face?”
“I did. It’s her.”
“We’re stepping outside.” Letty prodded Hawkins with an elbow and said, “Let’s go.”
—
A little morethan an hour earlier, Callister had called Scott to tell him she’d gotten through the checkpoint in Taos.
Scott said, “If you’re stopped on the way down, or at the airport, we don’t want you to have the phone you’re on now. They might be able to pinpoint where these calls originated, so throw the phone out the window when I ring off. Both Clarice and I will try to get out of Taos today or tonight. We’re afraid they could start to do a house-to-house search.”
“How will you get out?”
“Haven’t worked that out yet, but one of us will take Marilyn’s Jeep and probably head north, or east across the mountains, if we can find a way to get there. In any case, best of luck to you, Danielle. I love you for this: you’re saving the world. You’re Joan of Arc and better than that.”
“I hope I don’t end like she did,” Callister said. “You know, burning at the stake.”
“You’ll live forever,” Scott said, and he was gone.
—
His last commentwas ambiguous, Callister thought, as she drove into the night. Live forever, like not dying? Or, live forever in the memories of the survivors of a cataclysmic plague, as one of the people who perpetrated it?
She drove south on cruise control; threw the phone she’d been using out the window. She was driving at exactly three miles over the speed limit…which, she’d calculated in a calmer moment, would get her there about four and a half minutes faster than if she drove exactly at the speed limit. She didn’t have many calmer moments, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that her hands ached before she was halfway to Santa Fe.
She had one small city to go through before Santa Fe. She hit the lights of Española, pressed on with even tighter, grim-fisted precision through the sleeping town, careful at traffic signals, watching all of her mirrors.
Like that, for eighty miles.
Just outside Santa Fe, she diverted down Highway 599, an interstate-style bypass, rolled without incident to Airport Road, took the right and the left, found she couldn’t park at the terminal, and so rolled through the drop-off area back to the first parking lot.
There, she sat for a minute, flexing her hands. One more task: she got her suitcase off the back seat, opened it, took out the fanny pack and fastened it under her blouse, which she wore loose, and above her butt. There was no metal on the pack, and the vials were glass: nothing that would show up on a routine security scan. Once she was behind security at Santa Fe, she would stay behind it anywhere she went.
She got her suitcase and the carry-on, left the car keys on the frontseat of the Subaru—nearly teared up, saying goodbye to the car, a good car, a great car, her all-time favorite—then crossed the road from the parking lot, and started walking toward the terminal.
Gonna do this.
—
No, she wasn’t.
She was twenty yards from the door to the terminal when Letty and Hawkins stepped out. Callister had had a number of conflicts with the law when she was tree-sitting, men in suits and sunglasses coming around to knock on her door wanting to know who sabotaged those Caterpillars and Kubotas and stinger-steer log trailers, who pounded those spikes into the redwoods…
She knew that the woman and the tall man were cops. Neither showed a gun, though the woman had a cell phone in her hand, near her mouth. Callister reached behind herself to pull the fanny pack around her body…
Letty reached out her left hand and cried, “Danielle, wait. Wait, please. You know…this is a terrible thing you’re doing. This is a terrible thing…Stop. Help us stop it. Save yourself.”
Callister shouted back at her, still pulling the strap to the fanny pack: “I know it’s terrible. We all know it’s terrible. But Gaia is dying. The whole world is dying, and this is the only way left to stop it. Don’t help the fascists kill the world…”
She had the fanny pack halfway around, was fumbling with the Velcro to open it, found the tab and pulled on it.
Letty: “We need to talk…”
