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“No. We have to work through it. We’re safe enough for the time being, here in this house, but eventually, they’ll do a house-to-house search. They probably don’t have the manpower for that, not yet, but they will. Our primary problem is, somebody smart figured out what we’re trying to do and they’ll do anything to stop us. Anything.”
Catton walked around the room, looked at some Hummel knickknacks on a shelf, thinking about it, walked off to a family room and looked at the TV, not for the news, but almost as a kind of meditation; some talk show out of New York, the panels of idiots laughing at the world that she and Scott were trying to end.
Scott trailed after her, looked at the TV, picked up the remote control and hit “mute.” The idiots were even more informative when you couldn’t hear them talk. Catton slumped on a couch, Scott took a chair again.
After a while she said, “I’m not going to make it out of here. I shouldn’t even try.”
Scott nodded: “Then what will you do? I’m listening.”
“How many times have you been in Taos?”
“A few,” Scott said. “It’s…a little too isolated. For my interests. Los Alamos is interesting, Santa Fe is, too. Albuquerque, not so much.”
“I’m here all the time in winter, and quite a few times the rest of the year. The thing about Taos is, it’s self-consciously weird and always has been. Major hippie outpost in the sixties,” Catton said. “That pulls in the curious. If you look around town, especially around the plaza, you realize that most of the people you’re looking at aren’t from Taos. They’re tourists. Texas, Colorado, Oklahoma, California. The shops around the plaza are tourist shops.”
“Okay. Where’s this going?”
“The incubation period of measles is a week or ten days. For Marburg, it’s two to five days. Right here, where we’re at, we’re about…mmm, I don’t know…not more than a ten-minute walk from Santa Dymphna Catholic Church. It’s baroque, for lack of a better word. Plaster statues of the saints. Hand-carved stations of the cross, done by folk artisans. Pope Francis gave them specific permission to continue saying the Latin High Mass. Incense, and all that. They have Masses every morning, and since the church is old and funky, it pulls in a lot of the tourists. I’ve had the vaccine, Marburg won’t kill me…”
“And you go to Mass and infect everybody in the church. If you get there ahead of time, you could wipe the culture around a bunch of the pews, so people would be sitting on it.” Scott cupped a chin, felt the beard sprouting there. “Since the incubation period is probably a minimum of two to five days, if we are either dead or surrender…they’ll let the tourists out of town.”
“I don’t know if I’ll surrender,” Catton said. “I think I might step away. You know…” She meant to kill herself.
“They’d still have to find you, to let everybody out,” Scott said. “A private suicide wouldn’t help us.”
“I’d turn myself in with an anonymous phone call,” Catton said. “I’d rush them. Suicide by cop.”
—
Scott scraped hislower lip several times, a habit developed in his first job, in a desert in Sudan. His lip, from that time, held a particular bitterness that never seemed to go away. He’d been in the Sudan for a month when he realized the taste was similar to the odor he encountered when he walked past a nearby camel corral. The taste of camel dung; now purely psychological, but never quite gone.
“That is an amazing idea, a way to save the project,” he said, eventually. “It’s not what we wanted, but it would work. If you decided at the last minute to…not suicide…you could actually surrender. Let them take you. And explain us to the world. Not mention the church.”
“I always liked being on television. I was, from time to time. Nothing dramatic, you know. I was on charity boards, sometimes they asked me to say something. I could PR for the apocalypse.” She half smiled, thinking about it, but then the smile faded. “What about you? We know they have your face…”
Scott interlinked his fingers, twisted them, then said, “I can’t be seen. At all. But. You know I was a mountain biker. Now I’m sorry we had to leave that bike at the ski house. But there’s a bicycle shop in town. You could go there—you don’t look like the photos they’re passing around, not at all. You could buy me a mountain bike. The place is called the Popcycle and they’ve got high-end bikes. We’ve got cash we’re not going to need…”
“I’ve seen the place, I know where it is. It’s not far,” Catton said. “Iagree about my appearance. I startle myself when I look in a mirror. But where would you bike to?”
“However far I have to go to get past their checkpoints. I can sneak down alleys, if Taos has alleys, down backstreets in the dark, follow arroyos out of town. Ride cross-country. When I’m sure I’m past the checkpoints, I get a car and head for Albuquerque.”
“How do you get a car?”
“We have your gun. You won’t need it.” The revolver had been Catton’s house gun at the ski valley.
“Okay. But if you get a car, why not Denver or Phoenix? You wouldn’t really even have to get in the departure areas, you could seed the area outside the gates, outside security.”
“I can do the same thing in Albuquerque, and Albuquerque is close and fast. If they decide that I got out of town, I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually begin setting up checkpoints at border crossings…this area isn’t New York. There aren’t that many roads out. If they’re desperate enough, they could literally blockade New Mexico.”
“When do you want to go?”
“Tonight. We’re probably okay here, for now. We’re comfortable, we can watch TV for any news—but you’ve got to get the bike.”
“Great. You get out tonight. I could go to church tomorrow. Nine o’clock Mass. Huh. All right. Let’s think about this—if this is the best we can do. If we don’t think of anything before the bike shop opens, I’ll go get you a bicycle.”
They didn’t think of anything better. At one point, Catton said, “We’ve got both of Marilyn’s cars…”
“But they’re looking for cars. Somebody might have figured out that we’re either hiding with friends, or we’ve taken hostages and we could try to get out with the hostages’ cars. The checkpoints will gettougher and tougher, knowing that Danielle got through them. Since they got the men on the bus, and Rose, they’ll know we have high-quality driver’s licenses. The only way Danielle could have been caught is that they must have figured out that she got through the checkpoint.”
