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Letty, going bureaucratic: “I’d ask you to keep that kind of speculation to yourself. To all yourselves. Where did you hear the word ‘Gaia,’ if I might ask?”
“Lionel used to kick it around, in conjunction with some of our global models,” Carpenter said. He added, “If we talk about it, you’ll do what? Put us in jail?”
“You all have top secret clearances or better, so you know what that means. This is a highly classified matter. I’ll tell you that I was in a meeting in a U.S. senator’s office yesterday, and a supermax was mentioned. Not in a kindly way.”
Carpenter said, “Whoa! What exactly do you think he’s doing?”
Letty looked at each of them directly, in turn, then said, “I got brief vitas on the three of you, and all of you have top secret clearances because of the way you move through the labs here. I’m going to share with you something that I perhaps shouldn’t—but something the three of you might be able to plug into your models. I’d ask you not to share it further on, with others in your group, without calling me. I would then have that person cleared through DHS and the DOD. Don’t share it in advance of clearance.”
“We can do that,” Maynard said, and the others nodded.
“I’ll say it again, to be sure you understand. If you talk about what I tell you, you’ll be fired and could be prosecuted.”
They looked at each other, then all nodded again.
Letty said, “It’s possible that Scott is trying to determine whether it’s feasible to cleanse the earth, Gaia, of what he considers to be a disease that will destroy Gaia, that disease being humanity. It’s possible that he will try to do that—and maybe has done it—by loading the Marburg pathogen into a measles virus. Or something like that. I don’t understand the mechanics of it.”
All three looked horrified—which frightened Letty as much as anything she’d yet encountered in her research of Scott. “Do you believe that’s possible?” she asked.
“We’re not biologists, we’re mathematicians,” Bowers said. “But we know about Marburg, we have some numbers there, and we know about measles, we have those numbers. If somebody came up with a carefully considered scheme for transmitting the measles virus, you could have a very fast-moving pandemic. An unstoppable pandemic, faster and more thorough than Covid.”
“Maybe,” Carpenter objected. “We have an effective measles vaccine and can manufacture it in mass quantities very quickly…”
“What if he did gain-of-function research on measles to defeat the current vaccines?” Letty asked.
“That would be problematic,” Carpenter said.
“Even if we could manufacture vaccines for eight billion people, and it was effective, how would we distribute it?” Maynard asked Carpenter. “That’s a huge problem that hasn’t had enough study. There’s no way to do fast mass distribution in most of Africa, South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia…not fast enough. Most cases, Marburg kills in eight or nine days.”
Bowers had taken a small spiral notebook out of her purse. She wrote in it for a minute or so, passed the note to Letty, who read two short lists: (1) LAX, Kennedy, Houston, Miami. (2) London, Shanghai, Singapore, New Delhi, Cairo, Lagos. “If you did those, simply had a person infected with a measles virus spend a few hours in each airport, you’d have a pandemic in days. In my opinion, if the Marburg-measles hybrid was effective, you could have a worldwide panic when the death counts started coming in.”
Carpenter cocked his head sideways, read the list, and said, “Imight add Frankfurt, Hong Kong, and Cape Town to the list. But no matter, Sandy’s right. Several people could create an unstoppable pandemic before anyone caught on, if they knew what they were doing, and of course, Lionel does. Their technique would matter.”
“How?” Letty asked.
“One almost unstoppable way would be for a group of people to infect themselves with Marburg-measles, knowing they would probably die, and then travel through those cities,” Carpenter said. “Unstoppable because they wouldn’t be seen to be carrying anything dangerous. But, if it’s possible that they simultaneously developed a vaccine that would defeat the virus, and vaccinated themselves, they could spread the disease by carrying virus cultures and releasing them in those airports. That would be more difficult, but a few people could hit that whole list of airports in maybe…two days? Three days?”
They all sat with their own thoughts, until finally Bowers said, “I can’t believe Lionel would do anything like this. There must be some other explanation. This is monstrous; he’s not a monster.”
“Think about what cults have done, what Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot did. All in the name of logic and progress,” Maynard said. “I think hecoulddo it.”
7
Scott had purchased a home when he arrived in Los Alamos, Lucas had learned from Letty’s research the day before. That had surprised his coworkers, because homes were expensive, even not-so-good homes, and because his tenure there was expected to be short.
He’d bought one anyway, telling the lab workers that he’d spent two decades overseas, banking a decent salary, spending almost nothing, and “It’s time I actually had a place of my own.”
When Lucas, Rae, and Walter Packer arrived at his address, off Ildefonso Road, they found a white Los Alamos cop car parked in the street, with a cop inside, reading his phone. He saw them getting out of their two SUVs, put the phone down, and climbed out.
They introduced themselves—the cop’s name was Tom Miranda—and he had a key. “The first time we came in, we didn’t want to bustthe door, so we had a locksmith open it for us. He made a key in case we had to come back.”
Lucas looked up at the house, which was perched above the street. A flat-roofed, brown-boards-and-stone construction, with a tuck-under garage at one end, it looked like it was stuck in the 1960s, except for a solar power array on the roof. A flagstone walk led to the front door. They went up single file, Packer trailing, and the cop opened the door for them.
“I can stay or I can go, whatever you want,” Miranda said. “I’m not doing much.”
“Then stick around,” Lucas said. “Extra eyes are good when you’re doing a search.”
“What are you looking for?”
