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“Of course, I should have known that without asking,” Letty said. “Did you know the word is out that Scott’s people are trying to spread a killer virus?”
“What!”
“Yeah. I’m thinking you might want to tell those MP bus drivers to lean on the diesel,” Letty said. “If Scott and Catton have released the virus in Taos…it’ll metastasize like a cancer.”
“Jesus Christ! I’m out the door on my cell phone. I’m walking down to the Secretary’s suite. I’ll call you back.”
—
Two members ofthe Fort Detrick team that Letty hadn’t met, Sam Dyer and Lily Rocha, showed up fifteen minutes later. Letty, Hawkins, and Cartwright had been wandering in circles around the body, trying not to look at Callister’s head. The Detrick team suited up and while everybody moved farther away, carefully cut open Callister’s fanny pack, removed five intact vials, and put them in a well-padded steel lockbox. The lockbox lid was sealed with antiviral tape, and the box moved to the team’s SUV. Letty, because she’d already done it once, was chosen to hose down the two team members with the antiviral spray.
Out of the suit, Dyer said, “We should be safe, unless she did something crazy, like deliberately use a vial and soak herself with it. But, all the other viral packs that we captured had five vials, and she had five, all intact.”
“But what do we do about that possibility that she contaminated herself?” Letty asked. “She’s right on an airport road with an airport that only flies out to major hubs.”
Rocha said, “It’s not my call, but if I were you, I’d get about a hundred gallons of gasoline, soak her with it, and keep burning the body until there’s nothing left.”
“I can’t do that,” Letty said, appalled. “That’s awful.”
“Like I said, it’s not my call, but that’s what I would do,” Rocha said.
“It’s not like it would hurt her,” Cartwright said, “Her being dead. But what do I know? I’m a simple Texas country girl.”
“Yes, you are,” Letty said. She looked around the parking lot, which was also a construction site, saw a front-end loader and asked, “Whatif we filled up that bucket with dirt and covered her with it, like two feet deep?”
“That would be better than just letting her lay out in the open,” Dyer said.
“Call back to your team leader, what’s his name? Underwood. Ask him.”
Rocha looked at Dyer and said, “Call him.”
Underwood agreed with Letty’s suggestion. “Put a lot of dirt over her. Better than burning. We need to isolate the body if we can, so we can run tests on it. We need to see if they are contaminating themselves. If they believe the vaccine is working, they could do that, figuring if they were captured, they’d spread the disease to their captors.”
The airport manager was waiting at the end of the entry road, and Letty had the cops escort him in, explained what she wanted to do.
“I don’t have anyone to operate the machinery, and I kinda don’t want to ask the guy who does, to come down here and risk his neck with these germs.”
“Wouldn’t be in any danger…”
“If he wouldn’t be in any danger, why are we covering the body? Why not just get it out of here?”
“Well, that’s…” Letty threw up her arms in exasperation.
“That’s what I thought,” the airport manager said.
One of the cops, who’d been listening in, said, “Hang on a minute,” went to his radio, called someone and asked, “Is Martha still out there?”
He got an answer and said, “Tell her to come in here.”
To Letty, he said, “One of our officers works part-time in her husband’s nursery business. I think she knows how to run Kubotas.”
Martha showed up, in uniform, and Letty pointed at an orange Kubota machine sitting on a pile of dirt and asked her if she could run it.
Martha looked and said, “That’s an SVL track loader. It’s bigger than what we’ve got, but I could figure it out pretty quick.”
“Don’t have a key,” the airport manager said. “And Larry lives in Albuquerque.”
“Should have a keyless ignition pad,” Martha said. “You could call him and get the combination.” She looked back at Letty. “What do you want me to do?”
