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Hawkins muttered, “Oh, shit. It’s out.”
Letty shouted back: “We can’t talk about it. We need you to block the road and we need to evacuate a couple of people from the terminal. You can get there by going the other way around the traffic circle. Can you do that?”
The two cops talked again, then one got back inside his car and they saw him on his radio, and the other one called, “We’ll come and get them out. Is it safe to get that close?”
“We believe so,” Letty said.
“Believe, my ass,” the cop called. “Why don’t you go get the people who you want out of there and walk them around the circle and we’ll take it from there.”
Hawkins shook his head. “Oh, brother.”
And the cop added, “Tell that other woman to put the rifle down.”
Cartwright heard that, and she took the rifle down and shouted, “You’re not very friendly.”
Five minutes later, with the situation stabilized, and the two travelers moved out of the terminal and around the traffic circle to the cop cars, Letty called Lucas. He picked up, not quite groaning. “What happened?”
“You awake at all?”
“Asleep since I last talked to you.”
“We killed her,” Letty said.
“Aw, that’s excellent. Maybe we’ll save the world after all. Who pulled the trigger?”
“Barb.”
“Good. Ol’ MI5 seems a little shaky after what happened yesterday, and you’ve killed enough people for someone your age. What happened to the tubes, they okay?”
“They seem to be. She didn’t get her fanny pack open, so I’m like ninety-five percent on that. We’re isolating the body until somebody from Detrick gets here,” Letty said.
“Okay. I’ll try to get a couple more hours of sleep, I’m an old guy.”
“You know about the leak?”
“What leak?” Lucas asked.
“The cops down here asked if she was the germ lady…”
“Fuck me with a barbed-wire fence pole,” Lucas said, suddenly wide awake. “Call Greet. We may need a lot more help. The people up here are gonna go batshit.”
20
If the people in Taos were going batshit, Letty was not instantly aware of it, because she was almost a hundred miles away.
When she called Greet to tell her that Callister was dead, Greet said, “You’re doing well. I’ll call the Santa Fe police chief—I have him on speed dial now—and get the airport covered.”
Two members of the Fort Detrick team were on their way to Lamy from Taos to see if there was a body buried there. Greet said that they’d have to let that go, for the time being, and she’d divert the team to the airport.
“Now the unpleasant news,” Greet said. “The researchers at Fort Detrick have been working on the virus tubes and they say it’s quite possible that the reconstructed virus will perform as Scott intended. I don’t understand the biology, or virology, or whatever you call it, but the virus does seem to have the infectious characteristics of measles, and it is bound to a full Marburg particle, or whatever they call it. It’sscary enough that they seem fascinated, and they’re talking to the CDC about getting research started into a vaccine.”
The further bad news was that the CDC needed at least three committees and a middle school marching band to approve anything, so if either Scott or Catton managed to break out of Taos and release the virus, it was unlikely that a usable vaccine would arrive in time to help much.
And, she said, the Army, possibly fearful of the consequences of having allowed Scott to work at Fort Detrick, had cranked up the 93rd Military Police Battalion at Fort Bliss and put them on buses heading north. “The plan was to have them stage at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. From there they could be in Taos in three hours, so I’m told. I told them to fuck that, send them straight in. Blockade the town—no one in, no one out, until the other two are dead. Or captured. Preferably dead.”
“Why preferably?”
“This would actually be above your pay grade to know, but…since you can keep your mouth shut…it’ll allow the bureaucrats further up the line to obscure exactly what happened, and who might be to blame.”
