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“That’s already baked in the cake,” the commander said.
“Just don’t get close to the body…what about the Jeep?”
“Ah, shit, I called out there and the first thing they did was tell me about Duane and I forgot to ask. Wait one.”
This time, it was two minutes, and the commander came back: “This Oaks, the old lady, said he had a yellow Jeep, and there’s no yellow Jeep here. But it looks like there was one not long ago, because there’s tire tracks in the dirt outside the garage, and the dirt’s soft like dust. The tracks are still clear. We’re looking up the registration information right now…”
Letty rang off and said to Hawkins and Cartwright, “Yellow Jeep. He could be here in the next ten minutes, if he’s coming here. Alec, go talk to the main cop guy, tell him to call everybody, then you go down to arrivals level. Barbara, by the doors here. I’ll get the garage.”
Hawkins hurried away, Cartwright caught Letty’s arm and said, “Talk to the guy on the garage roof.”
Letty nodded and ran out to the parking garage, rode an elevator to the top, found a different binoculars cop eating a sandwich. “He could be on the way,” Letty shouted, running toward him. “Yellow Jeep!”
The cop looked over the side of the garage, still chewing, and said, “You mean…like that one?”
Letty looked over the edge of the garage. A yellow Jeep had just pulled into the Sheraton parking lot.
—
Scott took theback way out of Cross’s home because he didn’t want anyone to see the yellow Jeep go by. The back way was rougher but just as quick; and instead of turning south on the main highway down to I-40, he crossed the highway onto a narrower road that cut diagonally cross-country toward the interstate. He was pressed with the feeling that things were coming to an end; he thought he would likely die, and only hoped that it wouldn’t hurt too much when he was killed.
The airport, he knew, might be a trap. He wouldn’t risk simply driving up to it, and then trying to go inside. There were two banks of elevators in the parking garage, six elevators total. He could pull into the hotel parking lot, jog across to the back of the garage, and then take an elevator between floors, never going all the way down to the terminal entry levels.
If he could get up to the fourth floor, he could ride down to three and contaminate every floor-selection button in the elevator, along with the elevator floor itself. Then he could go back up, and do it again, and again. If he could get all six elevators, he would contaminate dozens, or even hundreds, of passengers going all over the country.
If that worked, he could try the terminal itself. The terminal would be tough: that’s where he’d see the resistance.
He hit I-40, turned west toward Albuquerque, rode it a shortdistance, got off on a backstreet to the south, found his way to Yale Boulevard. The Sheraton was right there, and he could see the parking ramp above him, and pulled into the hotel’s parking area.
Life or death in the next fifteen minutes, he thought.
Life or death for him, and Gaia as well.
—
Letty took thebinoculars from the cop and watched as a man climbed out of the yellow Jeep. He might have sensed her gaze, because he looked up, directly at her, though she doubted he could see her clearly, half covered by the parking garage wall. When he did that, though, and she was looking straight at his face, she knew they had him.
She handed the glasses back to the cop, said, “That’s him, watch him,” and punched up Cartwright and then Hawkins on her phone and said, “He’s in the Sheraton parking lot, walking toward the back of the parking garage. Come on, come on…hurry.”
The exit ramps from the garage were on the back of the structure, one leading to another, and she ran down them, pausing at the second floor to look over the wall. Scott had started perhaps two hundred yards away, and was now jogging toward the back of the parking structure, and no more than a hundred yards out. Behind her, she heard Hawkins’s baritone “Where are you? Where are you?”
She didn’t want to shout back because Scott might hear. She continued running down the ramps to the lowest level, and punched up Hawkins on her phone: “Bottom level, all the way to the back. He’s closing in.”
“Wait for me,” Hawkins said, his breath harsh in the phone.
She punched off and her phone rang a second later, and she glanced at it: Cartwright.
She had no time to answer but pivoted around the last of the exit ramp walls and ran out into the street behind the parking structure and Scott was right there, coming fast. For a moment he didn’t recognize her as a threat and then she lifted her Sig and screamed, “Scott! Stop or I’ll kill you.”
Scott jerked a hand up and he had a revolver in it and he snapped a shot at her. She didn’t know where the slug went, but it didn’t hit her and she fired two fast but deliberate killing shots into his chest and he staggered and went down. His trail hand had been at his back: had he been trying to get at a virus vial? She wasn’t sure.
She didn’t want to get too close but stepped forward and then sideways toward Scott’s body and was looking at his fanny pack when he suddenly came up off the ground and charged her. She got off one more shot that staggered him but he came on and crashed into her, and they went down together and she managed to pull her gun hand up and push the muzzle of the Sig under his chin and pull the trigger.
He was gone in an instant.
Then Hawkins was there, lifting her off Scott’s body. Scott was dead this time, having taken four separate killing shots. Letty felt a dampness on her hands and looked at them: they were pink with fluid. She said, “Get away,” but it was too late. Hawkins was looking at his own hands, which he’d used to lift Letty, and they, too, had smears of the pink fluid.
Cartwright was running toward them and Hawkins jumped up and shouted, “Stay back, stay back, we’re contaminated. We’re contaminated.”
