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She said, “I’ll start calling.”
She rang off, and Rae said to Lucas, “Call Greet.”
—
Lucas called Greet,who groaned, swore, and said, “This is gonna be a political black hole. Keeping a hundred churchgoers bottled up with Marburg, when half the people in the country think you should just let a pandemic burn out?”
“They won’t think that when half of them are dead,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, but if it doesn’t happen, because we stopped it, the cynics will say that it never would have happened.”
“Fuck ’em,” Lucas said. “We know what we gotta do.”
“I’ll talk to the Secretary now,” Greet said. “We’ll need massive medical care out there. Dying children…we need a military field hospital. And all the PPE we can find.”
“Maybe it won’t get quite that bad,” Lucas suggested. “Nobody’s gotten sick yet, not from the actual disease.”
“You got a dead guy in Lamy,” Greet reminded him. “And that’s not what I’m hearing from Detrick. They’re saying it looks worse and worse, the deeper they dig into it.”
“You need to talk to the Army guys out here,” Rae said, leaning forward to speak into Lucas’s phone. “They seem pretty effective at this kind of management.”
“I’ll do that. Goddamnit, Lucas…you’re out of it?”
“Rae and I are. There are four more marshals out here, talk to Andres Devlin, he’s a smart guy. I don’t know where they’ll put Rae and I, but…keep talking to me, too. I really need to know what’s happening out here.”
—
Underwood and Moscowitzwere in the church for half an hour, then walked out, hurrying a bit, low on air. They used the second antiviral spray tank to soak themselves twice, with the five-minute interval in between sprays, then clumped around Lucas and Rae, keeping their distance, to their SUV, and stripped off the suits. Underwood took out a cell phone and called Lucas, fifty feet away. Rae listened in.
“As I understand it,” Underwood said, “you tracked Catton here from a Realtor’s house?”
“Yes. The Realtor’s body is in a bathroom, it looks like she was beaten to death. I think the best thing would be to get the fire department over there and burn the house down. I don’t think the house is contaminated, but I don’t know. And I don’t know what you’d want to do with the body—maybe bag it and bury it.”
“We can handle that,” Underwood said.
“What’s the deal inside the church?”
“One hundred and thirty-four people, including twenty-three under eighteen, and most of those are under twelve. We put a blacklight on the pews, and we could see where she wiped the media on them. She infected at least fifteen pews, and Danny thinks he can see some red tint in the holy-water bowl. If he’s right, everybody who used the holy water to make the sign of the cross is contaminated. We asked the people inside how many did that, and most of them raised their hands. We took a sample. If Danny’s right, Catton did a bang-up job in there, from a killer’s point of view.”
“So it’s bad.”
“Bad as it can get. Now I’m wondering, what do I do with you and Rae?”
“Find another empty house, put us in there. We should know in ten days or so, right? Deliver food to the front porch. If we’ve got it, treat us, then burn the house down afterwards.”
“All right. I’ll have the local cops find a house.”
Rae took the phone: “We’ll need a TV and Wi-Fi to keep up with everything.”
“Give us an hour. Why don’t you go sit in the SUV? Be better than standing out here in the sun…and the breeze.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “You got this under control?”
“Barely. Maybe. Shit, I don’t know.”
Rae took the phone and said, “What if we went back to the Realtor’s house? We could pack up the body for you…”
“I don’t think so,” Underwood said. “If you got sick, it’d confuse the issue—is it the house that was infectious when you went in, or did you get it here, when you shot Catton? If you got it here, it’d tell us something about the throw weight of the virus.”
