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Colles bared his teeth, said, “He’s surrounded by weasels who’d leak the President’s atomic war codes if they thought they could make a buck out of it. But, I think we have to. I’ll call him, ask him to make a request to MI5. He’ll listen to me. I’ll make it clear that if anything leaks from his office, we’ll reserve a room for him at the supermax.”
“He’ll try to take it to the President,” Greet said.
Colles nodded: “Probably. He never misses a chance to go to the White House. Gets a boner just thinking about it. But the Oval Office can be reasonably tight when it wants to be. Nobody wants a nationwide panic in the year before a national election.”
“When you talk to the Secretary, tell him that you’ve worked with me before and would accept me as his nominee to head the search,” Greet said. “I know enough people who could do the research and still keep the secret.”
“Rae, Lucas, you okay with this?” Colles asked.
Lucas held up a finger: “When we find Scott, do we need biohazard suits? Does somebody need them? Are there biohazard teams inside the government who could deal with this if they had to, if he’s either infected himself or other people or has actually started spreading the disease? I don’t know this stuff. I only know what I’ve seen in movies, and that’s all sci-fi bullshit.”
Greet: “We can cover all of that and get you what you need. The information. I’ll be talking to you on an hourly basis. But we need to get you on-scene. Like tonight. I’ll check with the Air Force and see if we can get a plane out to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.”
Lucas shook his head: “The bureaucratic bullshit around that could take forever. Use your clout to get three business class seats on a commercial flight to Albuquerque. I’ll put them on my Amex. That’ll expedite things, and I can try to claim expenses later.”
Greet nodded: “Probably a better idea.”
McDonald: “What if itisall sci-fi?”
Colles: “Then we lock Mr. Scott in a quiet, secure hospital, send in the shrinks, have a couple beers and a few laughs, and pretend this meeting never happened.”
Greet asked Letty: “From what you know, what are the chances that this is real?”
Letty shrugged: “I believe the potential is there. It’s very likely he’s been looking at sources of measles and Marburg. He has an academic history in biochemistry and in infectious disease control, and he has spent time looking at viral research at Fort Detrick, and at Los Alamos studying the mathematics of viral spread. Could be innocent, I guess…but I don’t think so.”
Greet moved to the door: “Senator Colles—I’m going over to theDHS right now, get my group going. If you could call the Secretary, bring up my name, and suggest he talk to the President while keeping his mouth shut around the office. When I see him, I’ll recommend that he keep the weasels out of it. And I’ll get this what’s-his-name from MI5?”
Letty said, “Alec Hawkins.”
“I’ll get him on the way.”
Letty nodded: “Great. Alec has some useful skills.”
5
Dark of the moon, dark of his mind. Monsoon clouds blocking starlight.
Sitting on the back steps was like having a rug thrown over your head. Lionel Scott allowed himself one cigarette a day, an act of defiance. The goddamn liberals agreed tobacco was going to kill you but didn’t have the balls to do anything meaningful about the fact that the whole world was dying in front of their eyes.
America was the third biggest consumer of coal, hooked into it like a Texas meth junkie. China was worse, the biggest burner of the stuff, followed by India. The guilty libs barely bothered to talk to those countries, because that would be bigoted and white-centric. Besides, didn’t we burn all that coal in the twentieth century, so how can we expect them to do anything different?
Because we didn’t know back then, not really, that we were killing Gaia. We thought she’d go on forever.
But they know now, and do it anyway…
He wouldn’t expect the right-wingers to do anything, here in the USA, or in Europe, or anywhere else—they had their own belief system, and one of their beliefs was that God had anointed the internal combustion engine and the air conditioner as holy things, even if Gaia was choking to death on their fumes. As the saying went, you could sometimes talk to crazy, but there was no dealing with stupid.
—
The acrid smellof the Marlboro swirled around him, pleasant, reminiscent of the old days when he believed that something might be done. Now the choices were so narrow that they’d have to choose between horrific cataclysm on one hand, and certain death on the other.
He took a last drag on the cigarette and ground out the butt beneath his boot; yet he sat, for a while, in the peace and quiet, reluctant to go inside.
Then Catton came to the door and whispered, “I can’t get George plugged in again, I can’t find a vein.”
“All that fat,” Scott said. He put his hands on his knees and pushed down to help himself to his feet. He was tired, maybe terminally tired, he sometimes thought. But he couldn’t stop now.
He followed Catton into the house and into a bedroom where George Smithe lay on a single bed. He was too big for it, a two-hundred-forty pounder, but hardly aware, sweating, burning. The disease would take ten pounds off George, which made Scott almost smile at the thought: the Marburg Vaccine Diet, a ten-pound weight loss in ten days, or your money back, if you were alive to collect it.
