Guilder was running on coffee and adrenaline; he went down to the break room to get something to eat. All they had were vending machines; he’d already paid his three dollars for a Snickers when he realized it would take too much effort to swallow. He tossed it in the trash and got a Reese’s, but even that, with the sticky peanut butter, was difficult. He snapped on the TV, tuned it to CNN. New cases were suddenly popping up all over: Amarillo, Baton Rouge, Phoenix. The U.N. was vacating its New York headquarters, relocating to The Hague; once martial law was declared, the military would be recalled from overseas. What a fiasco that would be. It would make Pandora’s box look like a picnic basket.
Nelson appeared in the door. “Bow down,” he declared with a grin. “Houston, we have a sex offender.”
Nelson had already targeted the satellite. By the time they reached the terminal, the image was coming in.
“Where the hell is this?”
Nelson worked the keyboard, bringing the picture into focus. “Western Kansas.”
A grid of cornfields came into aerial view and, at the center, a long, low-slung building with a grid of parking spaces in front. A single vehicle, some kind of station wagon, was in the lot. A figure stepped from the building, pulling a suitcase.
“Is that the same guy?” Nelson asked.
“I’m not sure. Bring it in closer.”
The image faded, then resolved again, assuming an approximate aerial distance of eighty feet. Now Guilder felt certain he was looking at Lawrence Grey. He’d changed out of his jumpsuit, but it was him. Grey returned to the building; a minute later he reemerged with a second suitcase, which he deposited in the car’s cargo compartment. He stood a moment, as if lost in thought. Then a second figure emerged from the building, a woman. A little heavy, with dark hair; she was wearing slacks and a light-colored blouse.
What the hell?
They had less than thirty seconds left. Already the picture had begun to lose its crispness. Grey opened the passenger door; the woman lowered herself into the car. Grey glanced around the parking lot one more time—as if, thought Guilder, he knew he was being watched. He got into the vehicle and drove away, just as the image dissolved into sparkles of static.
Nelson looked up from his terminal. “Looks like our target made a friend. From the psych workup, I have to say I’m a little surprised.”
“Call back the last shot with the woman in it. See if we can enhance it.”
Nelson tried, but the results were only a modest improvement.
“Can we figure out what that building is?”
Nelson had slid his chair to an adjacent terminal. “Thirty-eight-twelve Main Street, Ledeau, Kansas. A place called Angie’s Resort.”
Who was she? What was Lawrence Grey doing with a woman? Was she from the Chalet?
“Which direction was he going?”
“Looks like straight east. He’s headed right into the thick of it. If you want to grab him, we’d better move.”
“Locate our nearest asset. Something outside the quarantine line.”
More taps of the keys; then Nelson said, “The closest for something like this would be the old NBC lab in Fort Powell. The Army shut it down three years ago, when they moved everything to White Sands, but it should be an easy matter to get the lights turned on.”
“What else is around there?”
“Not a lot except for Midwest State, which is about three miles east. It’s your basic football factory with a few classrooms attached. Otherwise you’ve got a National Guard armory, some hog and cattle processing, a little light manufacturing. There’s a small IAC hydroelectric facility, but it was mothballed when they built a larger one downstream. Pretty much the only reason the place exists is the college.”
Guilder took a moment to think. They were the only ones who knew about Grey, at least so far. Probably it was time to bring in the CDC and USAMRIID.
Yet he hesitated. Partly because of the bad taste in his mouth from his meeting with the Joint Chiefs. How would it go down when Central Command learned that they’d put Lear’s monstrosities under the surveillance of a bunch of paroled sex offenders? He’d never hear the end of it.
But that wasn’t the real reason.
A cure for everything. Weren’t those Lear’s exact words? Wasn’t that where the whole misbegotten thing had begun? And if Grey was infected but for some reason hadn’t flipped, was it possible that the virus in his blood had