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“I’ll talk to Underwood,” Rocha said.
She did, they put the body back in the hole, and shoveled dirt backon top of it. Again, they had Letty hose them down with the antiviral solution.
When they’d done that, and waited a bit for the fluid to work, Rocha and Dyer peeled off their suits and Rocha asked, “You guys hear what they’re saying about that first tranche of samples from yesterday?”
“Yeah. Not good,” Letty said.
“Much worse than ‘not good,’ way worse,” Dyer said.
“You know what? I bet there are guys at the fort already looking to save some of it, to work with it,” Rocha said.
“Let’s not go there…if we want to keep our jobs,” Dyer warned.
“I don’t like what you’re hinting at here,” Hawkins said. “If I understand you…”
“Yeah, well, imagine you create an effective vaccine, stockpile it, and then turned the virus loose in, say, India or China or Russia…and when the first case came up, you started your vaccination program here in the States,” Rocha said. “Lot of problems solved, if you have the right ’Murican mind-set.”
“Except the Chinese or the Russians would figure it out, and the last one out the door would push the big red button and there wouldn’t be a ’Murica to worry about,” Hawkins said.
“There is that,” Cartwright said.
Wright asked, “What are you guys talking about?”
Cartwright said, “Nothing.” She batted her eyelashes at him. “Tell me again how gorgeous I am.”
“Other than that, what do you want me to do?” Wright asked, looking at the two from Fort Detrick.
“We’re done for now,” Dyer said. “A different crew will come back and look for more bodies, but that’ll probably be a few days.”
“You just gonna leave the body in the hole for now?”
“No. We’ll talk to your bosses about getting a regular car out here to watch it, until it can be moved,” Letty said. “If you could hang in for another couple of hours…”
Wright nodded: “Get somebody out here as soon as you can. I’m feeling a little kicked.”
Cartwright: “We outa here?”
“Taos,” Hawkins said.
Letty: “We’re gone.”
21
Callister didn’t call.
She’d had two of the burners with her, and even after disposing of one, she should have called from Santa Fe on the other. As the hours got longer, and the sun came up, Scott and Catton began to believe that something had gone badly wrong. Marilyn Wong owned a television with every channel known to mankind, but they couldn’t find anything about Callister.
“They won’t be showing any mercy—they can’t,” Scott said, wandering around the living room with his hands in his pockets. He fiddled with a turquoise cuff he’d bought when he arrived in New Mexico, a good luck charm. “Maybe she’s okay. Maybe she’s on her way to Dallas. Maybe the second phone didn’t work. Maybe they captured her and she infected them. I don’t think so. I think she’s dead. Ithink they plan to kill all of us like they killed Rose and Randy, shot on sight. They’re scared.”
“I can’t believe they could stop us at this point, we’ve worked too hard,” Catton said. “We can figure this out.”
“Before we can figure it out, we have to find out what the police are doing. We know they have checkpoints. If that’s the end of it, we should be able to get out,” Scott said. “I don’t think that’s the end of it.”
“What more could they do? Surround the whole city?”
“If they’re desperate enough, I think they might,” Scott said. He dropped into an easy chair. “Get your border patrol up here, they’ve got helicopters and those all-terrain vehicles…”
“You think we’re finished?”
