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“Marburg vaccine made you sick. Enhanced interrogation will dofar worse things to you than Marburg, far worse than waterboarding. And it will still keep you alive for the lethal injection.”
“You can’t—”
“I can’t, but the people waiting outside this bus certainly can,” Hawkins said.
He looked down at the man named Cameron Johnson. “Cameron, how many people were in the car?”
Johnson called, “Rory…”
“Do what you have to,” Rory Long, the middle man, said. “Nobody told us anything about torture.”
Johnson, his face red, still burning with fever, said, “There were three. I don’t know their names. Their whole names. There was Lionel Scott, and a woman whose first name was Marsha and a man named Carl. We weren’t supposed to reveal our last names to anyone, even each other.”
“You’re still lying to me, and I’ll have to report that,” Hawkins said. “We have video confirmation, and eyewitness confirmation, that Clarice Catton was in the car.”
Johnson’s eyes widened fractionally, and he said, “Clarice is dead. We were told she’s dead. That she was buried. We were in her house, but we never saw her after she got sick. Are you sure she was in the car? Marsha was in the car…”
Rory Long backed him up. “Maybe Clarice is alive, but you couldn’t prove it by us. She was an older lady with gray hair…but we were given our injections and were already sick before I saw her that one time, and she was sicker than we were, and later we were told she died and was buried up the mountain. If you have video and eyewitnesses, you’re probably seeing Marsha, who is also older with gray hair.”
Hawkins moved closer to Long, so he could talk to both Long andJohnson at the same time. He pressed them on whether the measles-Marburg hybrid virus had been successfully created and tested, and both Long and Johnson said they didn’t know about a hybrid. He eventually left them and went to the third man.
—
John Brickell, alarge man, probably the sickest of them, had nothing to say at all. “Leave me, I’m dying,” he groaned. “I want to die now. I want to die. I can’t…the pain…I can’t.”
Hawkins looked at Lasch, who shook her head. She didn’t say it, but she was clear enough: he wasn’t dying. Not yet, anyway.
Hawkins said, “Dr. Lasch, I suggest that you let him go, if he’s dying. We don’t have the time or the medical supplies to waste on people who can’t help us. It would be a mercy to let him go.”
“You’re right,” Lasch said. “I can pump him full of analgesic, hydrocodone, that’ll keep him unconscious and more-or-less comfortable until he passes.”
Brickell turned his head to Lasch, “You can’t do that. You’re a doctor, you’re supposed to treat me. Get me well.”
“I don’t believe I can get you well. I will be keeping you as comfortable as possible with the supplies we have…” She worked through her bag and produced a syringe and a bottle of transparent fluid.
Brickell said, “Wait, wait. I’m a human being…”
“Who’s trying to kill five or six billion other human beings, including hundreds of millions of children,” Hawkins said.
“Wait…”
Hawkins: “How many people are running, Brickell?”
Long said, “Keep the faith,” and Brickell turned his head that way, then back to Hawkins and muttered, “Three.”
Long: “Goddamnit.”
Hawkins said, “We know it’s not three. I’m going to ask you again: how many? We have an idea of how many, from searching Catton’s house. If you lie again, I swear to God, I’ll pull Dr. Lasch out of here, and you’ll be left to stew in your own shit. No more treatment. No more nothing.”
Johnson groaned, and Long said, “You can’t…”
Hawkins: “The number…”
Brickell: “I, I…four.”
“So Catton is alive, well, and in that car.”
Brickell didn’t speak, but nodded, then looked away.
