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“I know about that cure,” Letty said. “The famous three inches of Ben and Tom female cure. A Minnesota cop named Flowers mentioned it.”
“I’m insulted,” Ben said. A couple beats. “Tom isn’t.”
Tom: “Hey! You’re supposed to be my buddy.”
Hawkins looked at Cartwright and asked, “Where’d you get a flunky? And where is he?”
“He’s coming…”
—
They sat inthe airport eating fried rice and orange chicken. Cartwright told them that she was still wired and planned to stay up until eleven o’clock or midnight. Unless something crazy happened, she wouldn’t expect them to relieve her until eight the next morning. “If Scott doesn’t get here tomorrow, I think he might have gone somewhere else, and we’re all in deep-shit city. In the meantime, I’d kill for a shower.”
“If you want to take a sponge bath in the restroom, we’ll guard the door,” Ben the cop said.
“I will think seriously about that. I have clean clothes in my duffel,” Cartwright said.
“And we can check on you every few minutes to make sure you haven’t drowned,” Tom the cop said.
“Or even come in and help you scrub up,” Ben the cop said. “Help get to those hard-to-reach areas.”
“That’s so thoughtful,” Letty said.
Hawkins: “I hate to break up the comedy routine, but I wonder where Scott is? And what is he doing? He needs a car: has he murdered anyone yet, to get one?”
Tom the cop: “Are all Brits as cheerful as you are?”
29
Letty and Hawkins had patrolled through the night they arrived at the airport, while Cartwright slept and Scott pedaled away from Taos. Cartwright worked the next day, cooperating with the hidden cops, and scouting the airport area, while Scott dozed above the High Road and Letty and Hawkins slept.
That evening, when Letty and Hawkins finished eating their orange chicken, Cartwright suggested that they all walk the full terrain around the airport terminal. “All the way out to that street down the hill. What is it? Harvard? Yale? Princeton? Something Ivy League.”
They told the cops they were going out. The evening was warm and dry, with the first stars popping up overhead. They walked the full loop around the parking lots, and talked about the possibility that Scott, if he showed up, would ditch the car and come in on foot, oreven that he might hitch a ride partway in, contaminate the driver, and then leave the airport, never going inside himself. “He could do that,” Letty said, “and the only way to stop it would be to close the airport. They won’t let us do that, because…politics.”
“If he did do that, he might not get the level of contamination he wants,” Hawkins said. “The whole idea of going through airports would be to get the virus going to as many directions as possible, and through the biggest hubs. Somebody who only gets a touch of virus…it might possibly be contained.”
“From what they’re telling us, that’s not likely,” Cartwright said. “But it’s true that he might be thinking that way.”
The four-deck parking garage overlooked most of the airport approaches, as well as another parking area, and south to the Sheraton Albuquerque and its parking lot. A cop was stationed on the top level, and they talked to him; he had a pair of naval binoculars but said he couldn’t see much of anything before the cops on the ground did, because everybody arrived in cars, and all he saw was roofs.
“All I can do is warn them if I see somebody coming in at a hundred miles an hour…I don’t know what good that would do.”
They left the cop with his binoculars, walked down the exit ramps, and eventually over to the hotel; the street on the other side of the hotel was Yale Boulevard. “I knew it was something like that,” Cartwright said.
They went back to the main terminal, waited, and nothing happened. Letty called Lucas, who said he was already bored, but that he’d talked to the Army officers controlling the infected church, and that the church was now fully contained. “Whatever else happens, that is going to be awful, if the Detrick scientists are right about the virus,” Lucas said. “Those people think they’re fine, bitching twenty-four hours a day, threatening to sue, but a lot of them are going to die and there’s fuck all we can do about it.”
“Fuck all? That’s British. You’ve been infected by Alec.”
“Yeah. I just hope you haven’t been.”
“Dad!”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Lucas said. “Jesus, I’m bored.”
And Letty called Greet, who was as bored as Lucas. “Nothing can happen until we know where Scott is—if he’s gotten out, who he’s infected. Then we go nuts. Until then we stand around doing nothing and waiting for the Secretary to call to ask why we’re standing around doing nothing. What are you doing?”
“Standing around doing nothing,” Letty said.
