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They turned west, away from the Rockies, toward Los Alamos, the three cars running in a loose convoy this time, now climbing toward the Jemez Mountains, which were actually the rim of a gigantic volcanic caldera. Stuck on the side of a cliff wall, they drove past an expansive canyon, then up a milder slope into Los Alamos. They passed an airport, with a couple of small prop planes tethered inside the fence along the road. They’d mapped out their destinations before leaving the diner, and now Lucas called Letty and said, “See you later.”
“I’ll probably be done before you are, I’ll come up and meet you there.”
—
Greet had setupa meeting at the National Laboratory Research Library, which was convenient for the people Letty was interviewing, and wouldn’t require any special clearances. She was stopped at a checkpoint, and a soldier in camo looked at her driver’s license and Homeland Security ID and waved her through. She found a parking spot outside a parking structure next to the library, got her briefcase, and walked inside.
The library study area was large and quiet—silent—with only a few people sitting at the collection of study desks. No books in sight. At the front desk, Letty was directed to a conference room across the floor. Three people were waiting for her, two women and a man, sitting around a conference table with a collection of Starbucks cups.
Letty stepped inside, shut the door and began, “Hi, I’m Letty Davenport with Homeland Security…”
One of the women asked, “Has Lionel done something?”
Letty put down her briefcase and said, “We don’t know. We have some people who’d like to find him, including some friends. We’re worried about his mental situation. He’s had some problems and we’re hoping he hasn’t harmed himself.”
The man said, “There are rumors that he might have been involved in some…troubling research. Is that true?”
Letty: “I honestly can’t tell you. Basically, we’re just trying to figure out what happened to him. We hope we can find him and he’s all right, that he’s gone off on a hiking trip or something.”
And she thought,McDonald has already talked, and he’s not even back from Washington.
Then they introduced themselves: the man was Dan Carpenter, the women were Sandra Bowers and Katherine Maynard. They all worked with the Statistical Sciences Group and were the mathematicians who most closely worked with Scott. They were dressed like academics, without style, unless you were an academic.
—
“Lionel does hike,mountain bikes, likes to ski,” said Bowers. “He hasn’t had much experience with mountains, outside of ski slopes in Switzerland. None at all with desert mountains. I warned him not to go out there alone. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can get hurt.”
“How?” Letty asked.
“This time of year, you can become dehydrated and that can leave you disoriented. You can fall, break bones. There are rattlesnakes out there, you can get lost…Lionel, most of the time, doesn’t even wear a hat.”
—
They spent mostof an hour talking. Scott enjoyed mountain biking, often going solo, and not just around Los Alamos, Letty was told. He would seek out trails around Santa Fe, to the southeast, and Taos, to the northeast. He’d occasionally shown up for work with scrapes and bruises from falls—which Maynard suggested happened often enough that he might well have killed himself. “He said he wasn’t reckless, but he was.”
He didn’t date at the lab, as far as any of them knew; he was distantly friendly with everyone but wasn’t known to socialize. Carpenter said he’d seen Scott having dinner with a woman who owned the town head shop, Tarantula Cards, and Maynard said she’d also seen him with the woman. Letty got the woman’s first name, Rose—nobody knew her last name—and the location of her shop.
“It’s a small town. If you live here long enough, you wind up knowing most of the shops and the people who own them,” Maynard said.
Letty asked if Scott might use weed or other drugs, since the woman ran a head shop. “We don’t have a recreational marijuana store here,” Carpenter said. “I never saw any sign of drug use…I mean obvious drug use. I wouldn’t know a subtle sign, I guess.”
—
Letty asked aboutthe possible application of the statistical studies to methods of spreading a disease, rather than determining how to slow the spread. Bowers said, “We’re not so much about…mmm…thepracticeof slowing the spread of a disease, as trying to find out exactly what factors determinehowit spreads. What slows it,what allows it to spread more quickly. That information might allow other groups to better fight the spreads of an epidemic.”
“Interesting stuff,” Letty said. “How did Lionel contribute?”
“He was more a student of the work, than a contributor,” Carpenter said. “He would step through our models as we developed them, to see both how the model was built—in the technical, software sense—and also, what the models might be able to predict, or reveal.”
“How capable was he with the math? With the software?” Letty asked.
“He was competent,” Maynard said.
“One of his tutors at Oxford said that he was bright enough, but perhaps a bit short of brilliant,” Letty said.
Carpenter and Maynard nodded, as if that was a reasonable assessment, but Bowers shook her head. She said, “That’s unfair, I think. There are probably eleven thousand people in the U.S. with IQs of 160 or higher, which is sometimes used as a marker of genius. Most of those eleven thousand are working in places like the post office or the agriculture department or they’re dentists or work for investment companies—routine, everyday jobs. Are they geniuses? I wouldn’t say so, because they don’t do much with their IQs. Lionel did things. Right from the time he was a college student. He excelled in college, went to one of the best medical schools in the world, and then devoted himself to saving lives in the Third World. Thousands of lives, by one account. Whatever his IQ, I think that qualifies him as a genius. He was not only very smart, he formed his intelligence into a weapon to fight disease.”
Carpenter looked at Letty and said, “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Lionel has run off the rails somehow. He’s joined up with a bunch of Gaia freaks and they’re off to save the world.”
