AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There may have been a test,” Brickell said, groaning. “I heard Lionel talking to Clarice about a Lamy test. I don’t know what a Lamy test is, but it was a test of the virus.”
“The hybrid.”
“Yes.”
Hawkins looked at Lasch, the doctor: “What’s a Lamy test?”
“Nothing I’ve ever heard of,” Lasch said.
Hawkins asked the other two men, who shook their heads, and Long said, “I never heard of anything like that.”
—
Lasch, who hadbeen watching the interrogation, said to Hawkins, “You’re low on air. You should hear a beeping sound when you go on reserve. I just heard mine.”
Brickell: “You’re not leaving us here?”
“Yes, we are,” Hawkins said. “The doctors will be coming to look at you, from time to time, but this bus isn’t going anywhere until we get confirmed analyses of your illnesses. If you start feeling better, don’t even think of trying to escape: you will instantly be shot to death. There are people outside this bus who think they should be allowed in here now to shoot each one of you.”
Long: “You can’t do…”
Hawkins: “Yes, we can. What did you expect, given what you’re trying to do? We’ve got dragnets out for the others, and they’re to be shot on sight.”
Long: “You can’t…”
“Yes, we can. We will. We already have.”
Hawkins heard the reserve-air alert, the beeping sound, and said to Lasch, “We should go.”
15
Outside the bus, and out of the isolation suit, Hawkins told the others what he’d gotten in the interviews. That there were four people on the loose, that they were no longer sick, they undoubtedly had vials of the hybrid virus, that they were planning to contaminate international airports around the world.
They said the four were in one car, but Hawkins thought they were lying about that. “When we were driving up the canyon, I remembered seeing a silver SUV going down, a big one, and there was another car right behind it, and I had the feeling they were connected. They denied it in there, in the bus, but I think they were lying.”
Letty used her iPad to Google “Lamy Test” on the Wiki and found that the test was given to diagnose a dreadful childhood disease called Maroteaux-Lamy syndrome that led to distortions of the internalorgans and skeleton. Few untreated victims survived past adolescence, and even with treatment, life expectancy was greatly shortened.
“What the heck does that have to do with Marburg?” Rae asked.
“I dunno,” Letty said. She looked at Hawkins: “You sure you got the name right?”
“That’s what he said. Try different spellings.”
She tried Lamey Test and Lamie Test and didn’t come up with anything that seemed relevant. She’d typed the words in quickly, but then, in frustration, typed “Lamy,” with one finger, into the Google field, but before she could type in “Test,” Google suggested several possibilities and the first one was “Lamy, NM.”
She looked at it and said, “Jeez. There’s a Lamy, New Mexico. You think they could have tested the virus on a town?”
“Where is it?” Lucas asked. Letty entered the name in a map search field, and it came up with a tiny town south of Santa Fe.
“Three hours from here,” she said. She looked at the helicopter. “Unless we flew.”
Underwood said, “It’s heading down to Albuquerque to deliver our bus samples to the jet. That’ll take forty minutes or so…it could probably have you in this Lamy in an hour.”
“Could it drop me off on the way, and pick me up on the way back?”
“I’ll ask.”
Before they did anything else, they called Greet, who approved sending Letty and Hawkins to Lamy on the chopper.
