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“I’ll call Greet on the way and ask her to find out who owns the Santa Fe house and what they know about them, and get them to that website,” Letty said.
“Ask her to get some of Packer’s people down here to go through the computer. Leave a note on the password,” Lucas said. He took a last look around. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here. This whole Marburg thing is giving me the willies. You might be dead, and not know it.”
8
Billy Greet found an empty meeting room at the end of a Homeland Security corridor and hastily filled it with tables and computers, then brought in a carefully chosen six-person team to provide support for the people working in New Mexico.
Before getting a desk, Greet had spent years in the field, doing serious, complicated nuts-and-bolts work, sometimes dangerous, sometimes not. It amused her, in dealing with Letty and Lucas, that she had once had dealings with one of the Davenports’ best friends, Virgil Flowers, a Minnesota agent for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Neither of the Davenports knew that, and Flowers didn’t know Letty’s friend Greet was the mystery woman he’d met in rural Minnesota, tracking a terrorist. Greet didn’t plan to tell them.
When she moved inside and out of the field, she rapidly climbedthrough the bureaucracy, landing, at a reasonably young age, at the circle of professionals just below the top political ranks of the department.
High enough that she could walk into the Secretary’s office without an appointment, when she needed to do that; the Secretary was vaguely aware that she had some kind of influence with Senator Christopher Colles but wasn’t quite sure of the dimensions of the relationship, and hadn’t asked, in case it turned out to be sexual. With this case, the Secretary had made a brief appearance in the temporary workspace, suggested that more personnel might be needed, but Greet told him that for the work they were doing, six was adequate for the time being.
“We’re doing online research and financial support, and if we get too much larger, we’ll start risking leaks,” she told him. He’d walked down to the meeting room alone, without his weasels, and she filled him in with what the New Mexico investigators had found.
“We have a secret lab, and at least two people are on the run,” Greet said. “The marshals and our DHS investigator are on their way to a new site in Santa Fe. The DOD is sending a biological attack team from Detrick out to Los Alamos. They are in the air now and will be there in three hours.”
“DHS still has overall control?” the Secretary asked, betraying a bit of bureaucratic anxiety.
“Yes. Everything comes back to us,” Greet said. “That could change if somebody decides we need to bring in the FBI, which would be a mistake. This is fast-moving, and both the FBI and the DOD are somewhat slow-moving.”
“Yes. I’ve spoken to the President’s chief of staff again, and I’ll be going back to the White House at six o’clock,” the Secretary said. “I’llmake that point with him. I’ll call you from the car for the latest updates.”
“I will have something prepared and formatted for your phone, if you’d like to see it in type.”
The Secretary nodded: “Do that. We want to be right up to the minute, and we’ll want the White House to know that we’re all over it. That bringing in another agency would slow us down.”
“That will be clear in the context of what I’ll send you,” Greet said.
The Secretary reached out a non-sexual fist so they could bump knuckles; they did that and he left. A young woman researcher saw it, grinned at Greet and said, “Score.”
—
Greet called Lettyto tell her that the Santa Fe house was owned by a sixty-one-year-old single woman named Clarice Catton, who was apparently the heiress of a no-longer-extant chain of tire stores in Georgia.
“She supports environmental causes both nationally and around Santa Fe, gave a big chunk of land to the Nature Conservancy. The newspaper article about it mentions a companion named Jane Shepard, which probably means they’re gay, for whatever that means. We’re checking on her financials.”
She said that all the information requests from Letty, Lucas, and Rae were being answered piecemeal as the DHS researchers came up with them. “We’re sending it to you as fast as we get it. We haven’t truthed all of it, you’re getting it raw. By the way, Scott no longer owns a car. He sold it a month ago.”
“A lot happened a month ago,” Letty said.
“Yes.” Greet pushed Letty for more news—“Some nugget from theSanta Fe site to feed the bureaucracy,” not later than 3:30 Santa Fe time. “The Secretary is going back to the White House and he wants to be up to the minute with what’s happening in Santa Fe. If you find Scott or this Rose Turney woman…”
“Don’t count on it,” Letty said. “What about that other stuff I asked you to get? Turney’s credit cards and…”
“Working on it,” Greet said. “I spoke with your contact at NSA—I hate that bitch, but she’s good and she’s on it. I’ll call when we’ve got it.”
—
Letty was drivingalone, Lucas and Rae following. The third SUV had been left in Los Alamos with Packer. Her phone’s navigation app took them off the highway as soon as they got to the edge of Santa Fe, then through a twisting complication of streets to Camino del Monte Sol, and up a hill to the target house.
The house was a tan adobe, like most of the other houses on the street, with a short parking space both in front of, and behind, a black steel gate. There was no garage and no car.
They managed to squeeze both SUVs into the parking area, and Lucas, Letty, and Rae walked through a turquoise-painted entry gate into a heavily landscaped side yard and followed flagstone steps to the front door. The door looked ancient: carved, gray wood. On a closer examination they could make out a figure in the wood that might have been the Virgin Mary standing on a snake. A fully modern doorbell waited on a wall beside the door. Lucas pressed the doorbell. They heard it ringing, but no one answered, nor was there any sound or sense of someone moving inside.
Letty looked at the lock and asked Lucas, “You think the rake would get us in?”
“I don’t know…it looks solid.”
