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Letty did that. She attached the sprayer wand and, following De León’s instructions, hosed her down.
“Try not to get any on you,” De León said. “Hold it out at arm’s length. It’s not dangerous, but it is staining.”
In a few seconds De León was dripping amber fluid from head to toe. When she was thoroughly soaked, she waddled to a decorative stone at the side of the parking area, sat down, and lifted her feet so Letty could spray her soles.
“Now I need you to spray the box. I’ll turn it over with one of my feet…”
That done, they waited four or five minutes, then did it all over again. After another short wait, De León began to strip off the once-white suit. She was wearing yoga pants and a tank top, now soaked with sweat.
“Need a drink,” she said. “I smell like a gym sock.”
“We’ve got water bottles,” Letty said. She got one of the bottles supplied by the cops, handed it to De León, and asked, “What do you think?”
De León turned to look at the RV, then back to Letty. “I believe all three people in the bus have Marburg, or Ebola, or an adverse reaction to a vaccine. They claim they were paid to take part in a biological experiment and didn’t understand how bad it would be.”
“Probably lying,” Letty said.
“Probably,” De León said. “Because if this is the real deal, they’re all going to get the death penalty. Anyway, they say two of the experimental subjects died—they’re both buried up on the mountainside. One of them, a woman named Clarice, they don’t know exactly where. They said she was older and was the first to die. She was buried by Lionel Scott. The second man, whose name they didn’t know, was buried straight up the mountain from the back door of the house they were in. They said Scott put a big red stone on the grave, and he might have done something similar with Catton. Built a cairn.”
“How many are loose?”
“Wouldn’t say—claimed they didn’t know. Nobody knows any last names. Scott insisted on that as a security measure, but it didn’t apply to Catton and Scott, because they were the recruiters.”
“Did you believe them?” Letty asked.
“No. They were lying about some of it, and maybe all of it,” De León said. “The red stone thing would probably be checkable.”
“How sick are they?”
“They’re sick, but they’re not going to die. They’re already on the rebound, they’ll be walking by the end of the week.”
“Are they infectious?” Letty asked.
“They say they aren’t, but they don’t know for sure.”
“All right. I’ll pass this along to the DHS working group.”
De León said, “The box.” She looked back at the box, sitting in a drying puddle of the amber virus killer. “The box contains twenty transport tubes, glass tubes. They contain some sort of culturing media. I’m not a virologist, I don’t know exactly what it might be, but it could be the virus that they were planning to release. We need to get it to Detrick. Quick as we can.”
—
Letty stepped awayand called Greet. As she was filling her in, one of the Detrick crew turned a big translucent bag inside out, and De León picked up the metal box and held it out. The Detrick crewman rolled the inside of the bag over it, so the box was inside without ever touching the outside. He sealed it, carried it away from the RV, and put it on the rock that De León had been sitting on.
Greet listened to Letty’s report, then asked, “Has another chopper come in? A second one?”
“Not yet.”
“We need everything you can get off that bus and fly it straight back here. We should know more by tomorrow: Detrick has staff standing by, to work overnight when we get the material.”
“What do we do with the people in the bus?” Letty asked.
“That’s up to the Detrick team. I suggest we leave them where they are, in the RV, so they don’t contaminate anything else. Bring in food and water. We need IDs on them. And, you know, if they die, they die.”
“I’ll get one of the bio team to go in and try to get the IDs,” Letty said.
“Your father and this Moscowitz guy found an insulin pen in a garbage can, still with a prescription label on it. We’re checking to see who it goes back to,” Greet said. “I’m told we’ll know within the hour, so that should give us another name…unless it’s somebody on the bus.”
“Okay. What about closing down the roads out of Taos?”
