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“How about dress? Standard business casual?”
“That will do. You can’t take your usual equipment.” He meant,gun. “I’m told by one of the gentlemen here that Oxford has some nice places to run, so you might take running gear.”
“Thank you,” Letty said.
“Three hours and thirty-nine minutes, now, according to my infallible Apple Watch,” said Senator Christopher Colles (R-Florida), who was actually, if not technically, Letty’s boss. He hung up.
—
Letty technically workedfor the Department of Homeland Security, but in practice worked for Colles, who was chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He claimed to have the DHS secretary’s nuts in a vise, possibly because of the secretary’s governmental affairs. However that worked, when Colles spoke, the DHS listened.
Letty didn’t exactly have what preppers called a bug-out bag, but she had something close: selected clothes in her closet hung in dry-cleaning bags, waiting to be packed, and a man’s large dopp kit containing the cosmetic and medical necessaries, ready to go. She added her running gear, passport, and the Robb novel.
She traveled with a forty-liter Black Hole duffel from Patagonia and had learned to roll her dressier clothes into tube shapes, still wrapped in the dry-cleaner plastic, so they’d be fresh-looking and unwrinkled when she got to her destination. Frequent travel does teach you things, mostly about packing.
Forty-five minutes after Colles’s call, she was out the door to a waiting cab; twenty-five minutes after that, they rolled up to Dulles, and five minutes after that, she ambled through security with herDHS credentials and passport and made her way to the United gate. A young man, but older than she was, with a spray of acne across his forehead and an annoyed look on the rest of his face, walked up to her and asked, “Davenport?”
“Yes.”
He handed her a manila envelope, thick with the paper inside, said, “Don’t lose it,” and walked away. Far too important to be sent with an envelope to meet a woman younger than he was, and it showed in his body language. Nothing to be done about that.
Letty found a seat, opened the package, extracted a thin business envelope with her air tickets. She put that in the front pocket of the duffel bag and moved on to a much thicker report on a Dr. Lionel Scott, a British subject now somewhere in the United States; exactly where, nobody knew.
Under the binder clip that held the report together was a folded piece of notepaper with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three of Scott’s friends in Oxford. She was to inquire as to what they might know about his whereabouts and activities, and whether any of them were in touch with him. A final instruction from Colles was scrawled at the bottom of the sheet: “Wring them dry.”
Letty checked her watch: she had time before the flight, so she settled down to read.
—
Lionel Scott wasa doctor, first of all, a graduate of the Oxford medical school. After graduation, he’d done two foundation years, somewhat the equivalent of American medical residencies, then three more years studying viral and bacterial diseases in humans. Later, he’d joined Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders—and had spent nine more years working in Bangladesh and Myanmar in Asia, and Uganda, Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa.
He’d left Médecins Sans Frontières for health reasons, had returned to England, where he spent a year at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, then moved again, this time to the United States, where he’d worked for a year at Fort Detrick in Maryland, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Although still technically employed at USAMRIID, he was temporarily working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and had been for almost a year.
He had gone missing from there.
The mention of both USAMRIID and Los Alamos rang alarm bells with Letty, and she thought,Uh-oh.
She checked the time again and took the iPad out of her duffel, read about the Fort Detrick installation and about Los Alamos. Detrick was known as the primary research facility into diseases that might be weaponized by an enemy, which was why it was run by the Department of Defense. That job made sense; Scott was an infectious disease specialist with a lot of time in the field. She couldn’t pin down why he would be at Los Alamos, which was known for creating the plutonium pits from which thermonuclear weapons were manufactured.
She read further into Scott’s biography: he’d been treated for what was called nervous exhaustion after his last assignment at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh with its refugee camp Kutupalong, home to nearly a million occupants. He’d also been treated for a recurrence of malaria that he’d originally contracted in Africa, and tuberculosis.
A note from a Médecins executive credited “…Dr. Scott withsaving quite literally thousands of lives though his work with TB patients.”
Altogether, Letty thought, an admirable human being. Now, just past forty, and apparently recovering from his various health problems, he’d vanished. Since he’d had extensive contacts with scientists developing atomic weapons, and other scientists doing what was called “gain of function” research on viruses—a euphemism for “making more deadly”—a number of high-ranking functionaries further up the bureaucratic ladder than Letty had also said, “Uh-oh.”
—
Her flight wascalled, and after waiting for what seemed like eight or ten priority boarding groups, she worked her way halfway down the plane and took her aisle seat next to an overweight man in the middle seat, who’d already seized both armrests—not because he was a jerk, but because the seats were too small.
Unlike the man in the window seat, who was already squirming, she was small enough to survive the flight. Letty, at twenty-five, was dancer slender, perhaps because she did YouTube dancer workouts, along with weight work and a daily run. As she was settling in, pushing her carry-on under the seat in front of her, the window-seat man, who wore a clerical collar, leaned around the man in the center and said, “I wonder if we’d all be more comfortable…”
After some negotiation, they shuffled.
Letty, in making her application for sainthood, took the middle seat, with the obese man moved to Letty’s aisle seat. With the big man leaning a bit into the aisle, they all had arm rests; when the plane was in the air, the priest on the window took out a laptop, typed a few words, turned the screen toward Letty and nudged her.
She looked: “Thanks. You saved my life.”
She took the laptop, typed, “Say a prayer for me.”
