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There were no cars moving through the neighborhood after nightfall, none at all.
If he crouched in the courtyard, and listened carefully, Scott could hear something that sounded like diesel generators, a throbbing growl he recognized from his stints in rural Africa. He didn’t know what they were powering, or where they were, but they had a military feel to them; an expeditionary force. He’d expected chaos when word about the virus got out, but that was not what he was seeing or hearing.
Back inside, Catton had settled in Wong’s family room, watching television, switching from one channel to the next. Information was thin, the same news reports cycled and recycled.
“Another possibility,” Catton said, continuing the options conversation as Scott walked into the room, “would be to sit tight. Maybethere won’t be a search. Maybe they’ll convince themselves that we got out.” She was on a couch drinking red wine, most of a bottle already down.
“I don’t believe so,” Scott said, looking past her at the television. She was watching a sales pitch for women’s products, done by a long-necked movie star whose name he couldn’t remember.
“I’ve worked in a couple of countries where there’d be a bit of resistance, or something that the army didn’t like. They’d lock down a neighborhood until they found who they were looking for. It would be like this. Nothing moving. People afraid to go out.”
“I wish the news reports were better…”
“Nobody wants to come in. No reporters,” Scott said. “The virus rumors have frightened everyone, especially the comments from the President. I don’t think we’ll find out what’s really happening, without actually going out in the street.”
He stopped talking as a helicopter went over, seemingly right at rooftops.
“And that kind of thing…”—he pointed at the ceiling—“…is what’s keeping people inside. The famous black helicopters. Deliberate intimidation.”
The presidential comments were frightening because the President had been trying so hard to be upbeat, cheerful, reassuring, for which he was being taken to task not only by Fox News, but CNN and MSNBC as well. Although they knew little about the virus, the talking heads were asking why, if everything was so rosy and okay, was an entire town blockaded by the Army?
Their answer: nothing was okay. Nothing at all.
MSNBC had put up their producers’ cell phone numbers and had asked Taos residents to report for them, something that Fox and CNNthen copied. Dozens of people had apparently called in, but few knew anything—they’d seen soldiers and checkpoints, hadn’t been allowed to leave town, heard helicopters flying low, but knew nothing about the virus or the people who were trying to distribute it.
CNN took a report from a man who claimed to be an MP in Taos, who told the reporter that a house-to-house search was taking place in a Taos neighborhood, and houses were being broken into by the search teams without warrants or invitations.
And yet, outside Marilyn Wong’s house, all was quiet.
—
Scott had restlesslyspent the afternoon and evening in front of Wong’s computer, studying Google Maps, and especially the satellite views. He traced different pathways through town, yard by yard, inventing one route after another, looking at Google Street View, discarding them one after another.
“They can’t block every street, not yet,” he said to Catton. “They’ll block key intersections. They won’t care if you’re on a street, as long as you can’t get off it…and there’ll be leaks. I have to find the leaks.”
He would have one big unavoidable problem: dawn. He needed to be well out of town, and hopefully in a car, by the time the sun came up. He needed to leave late enough to avoid wakeful people, but early enough to actually go the distance on the bike. And he had to do the most difficult part of the ride in the dark.
He eventually decided that no matter what he did, there would be a strong element of risk. He spotted one narrow highway on the far west side, Highway 240, that would take him around most of the city. Along much of it, there was easy cover in roadside brush and trees, ifhe had to get off the road for a passing car, or if he had to go back because of a checkpoint. Logically, though, there’d be no point to a checkpoint on 240, except at the ends of it—he could put down a lot of mileage, but it would all be inside the cage.
If he took that route, he would have one major highway, 68, to cross. That was the main route south out of Taos and would be heavily guarded. There would likely be a checkpoint at the intersection of 240 and 68, but he would see that coming because of a traffic signal at the intersection.
And there, he thought, was a potential leak. An obscure jumble of neighborhood streets—they looked more like tracks in the satellite view—showed up a few blocks west and south of the intersection. He would cross the highway there. There would almost certainly be another checkpoint farther south on 68, and maybe more than one, but that was irrelevant. He wouldn’t be on 68.
He was aiming for a back highway, 518, better known as the High Road to Taos, that ran from a point just north of Santa Fe through the foothills of the Rockies to Taos. He’d driven it a few times, when investigating bike trails in the mountains, and it was only sparsely inhabited. One drawback: once he was on the High Road, there’d be no turning back, and no easy way off. If somebody smart had set a checkpoint halfway down the road, he’d have a problem. There were fire roads up through the mountains, but many of them dead-ended, and he could find no official fire road maps online.
After long consideration of both the distances and his own physical condition, he decided that he would have to find a car when he was somewhere well south of Taos, but before he got to any of the small villages along the High Road. That should be far enough along theroad to be outside the heaviest search area. How long would it take him to get there? By dawn, he hoped, but that might be too optimistic. Once it was light, he’d have to hide, and wait out the day, unless he already had a car.
“Find a route?” Catton asked, wandering in from the TV room.
“Penciling it out now,” he answered. “I’ll need a little luck to get out of town. If I can’t, I’ll come back and try to do what you’re planning. Find a heavily populated place to contaminate. The hardest part will be taking a car. If I take one too soon, and there’s a checkpoint beyond it, I’m in trouble. I might be able to slip by a checkpoint with a bike, but if I’m in a car, and they see me suddenly turning around, they’ll come after me.”
—
In the teno’clockhour before he’d make his break for it, Scott searched through Wong’s house, looking for supplies. He found most of what he needed, including a backpack that could be made to fit him. He put the box containing his allocation of virus vials into the pack, along with the fanny pack he’d use when he began the actual distribution of the virus. If he took falls on the bike, the box would provide impact protection.
To the pack he added four bottles of water, two packs of graham crackers, and a plastic bag full of Oreo cookies with “Extra Stuf.” He made two chicken sandwiches and sealed them in Ziploc bags. He included a knife, the revolver, and a homemade first aid kit scavenged from Wong’s bathroom and closet. He didn’t have to worry about infection, but he did have to worry about bleeding. He put a flashlight in his jacket pocket.
They’d found a box of pasta in the cupboard, and he’d set that tosimmering on the stove just before ten o’clock. He wore jeans and a dark green jacket for the ride, and ordinary hiking boots. The boots settled easily on the large flat pedals of the bike, one of the reasons he’d chosen them. He spent a few minutes stripping all the reflectors off the bike. That might spark something in the suspicious mind of a watcher, but then, there were enough idiot cyclists on the road without reflectors that he should be okay, and far less visible.
