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“Then we have to tighten the perimeter,” Lucas said. “What we got is what we got.”
He turned back to Foley and Vincent: “Nobody gets out, for at least the rest of today, or until we nail these two people and have made sure they haven’t turned the virus loose. We can run off copies of their photos for every MP you’ve got. We really jam up the town. Make it so nobody can go anywhere without getting looked at. Later on, we may be talking about a house-to-house search. We have an idea of what area they might be hiding in, two of them were seen last night on the street, walking.”
Mellon asked the two officers, “Have you heard anything about martial law?”
Foley shook his head. “Not yet. Have you?”
“Rumors so far. But as I understand it, if we get it, we might not have to worry about things like search warrants.”
“I’ll check with my CO, he can check with Washington,” Foley said.
—
Underwood stepped intothe office, looking like he’d been up all night. He nodded at Lucas, and Lucas said, “This is the guy who’ll tell you why youwillshoot to kill.”
The briefing was done in an hour; Underwood was specific and adamant about the worldwide threat. Foley and Vincent were appalled both by the threat and by the problem they’d have to contend with.
Vincent said, “Look, everybody. I’m sure we can help with jamming up the town, but we need to keep some of our people, our best people, together as a fast-reaction force. If you should locate Scott and Catton, we may need to surround a whole neighborhood, and fast.”
“Or worse, if we find out that they’ve deliberately infected a group of people, and we need to contain them,” Foley added.
Underwood said, “You catch on fast, Colonel.”
Halfway through the briefing, Mellon called the county courthouse and talked to the tax assessor about getting some large-scale maps for the MPs. A bureaucratic hassle erupted, which Mellon cut off by shouting, “I’ll tell you what, Don, you get those goddamn maps over here in fifteen minutes or I’ll have some cops come and get youandthe maps and drop your ass off at the jail. Yeah, yeah, you heard what I said. Fifteen minutes!”
“Good work,” Lucas said, when Mellon rang off.
The maps came in, they unrolled them, Foley and Vincent spread them out on a table and bent over them, and Foley said, tracing the edges of the city with an index finger, “We’re not gonna be able to keep everybody in the net…too big and too scattered out in the countryside…but Lucas, you’re telling me they’re most likely in town. Gonna need state police and local cops, sheriffs, people with cars to start hitting some of these outlying houses to check them out, and clear the people so we can pull in the edges of the net…”
Vincent to Foley: “I suggest we get all the NCOs together, right now, get Captain Feather to pull them together, we’ll need to distribute these maps…Is there a copy center around here?”
“There’s Copy Queen,” Mellon said. “I can show you where…”
—
The MPs werebetter than Lucas had hoped. Both Foley and Vincent had experience deploying large bodies of troops, and in the hour worked out a deployment plan. They made arrangements to communicate with Lucas, Underwood, and Mellon by cell phone “so we won’t have to fool around with radios.”
Underwood told them, “When you brief your troops, you have to emphasize that they can’t let these people get close to them. If they’re spotted, and they try to get close, kill them. Then stand way back—way back—and call me.”
When they hurried out of the police chief’s office—Foley headed toward the park where the MP unit was setting up, Vincent going to the copy center with the maps—Lucas said to Mellon, “I think we got a chance. We got a chance.”
“What do you want to do?”
“How many guys you got on checkpoints?” Lucas asked.
“All of them, that aren’t asleep.”
“Let’s figure out a way to get more state police in here, to take over the checkpoints. We need to get whole shifts of them, with the MPs as the outer ring. Your guys, we need on house-to-house.”
Mellon shook his head: “We can’t go busting into private homes without search warrants. Not until we hear about the martial law thing…”
“I believe we can,” Lucas said. “I’ll have somebody call you on that before you can get your people together. Somebody high up.”
“I dunno,” Mellon said. “Even if somebody says we can, I don’t like it.”
“I know, I know.”
—
