Back in Wichita, very late that night, Sally Grinstone was far from pleased when Frank told her he’d gone the straight route with Sam MacIvers. “Trouble with you, Frank, you’re just too goddam honest,” she said as he munched away at fried potatoes and pork chops and she drank gin and orange juice. “I’m very nervous about giving too much away at this point. I wish I could tell you what I’m nervous about, but I can’t. Just one of old Sally’s famous hunches, I guess.”
Somewhere up on the second story of the big building Frank could hear voices arguing vigorously — Tom Shipman and Monique, having at it as usual, something that sounded very technical, unaware that he was back. “I figured it was the least I could do,” Frank said. “And there isn’t any doubt that those doctors are with us.”
“Oh, they’re with us, all right. Trouble is, they’re only with us second. First of all, they’re part and parcel of that community, that’s got to be their first concern, and there’s the rub. If they decide to second-guess us on the timing, or spring it to the wrong people … ” She sighed. “I suppose you had to give them our location and telephone contact too.”
“Just to MacIvers, and I made him swear he wouldn’t share it with anybody. I also warned him not to cry wolf, told him we’d bag the whole thing if he pulled that on us. He sees the picture. And I only gave him Running Dog’s number and address, not ours. The Dog can come flag us if word comes through.”
“Well, that’s all right, if that fat little bastard will just hang around for a while. I don’t know what I’d do without him, but you never know what he’s going to be coming up with next.” Sally had contacted Dog Runs Quickly two days after her first encounter with him, and the spaniel-eyed fat man with the drooping mustache had soon become Sally’s eyes and ears and feet. Despite appearances, Running Dog had proved uncommonly bright, perceptive and canny, possessed of a fascinating capacity to fade in and out of scenes with startling swiftness, entirely apt to turn up right at your shoulder when you thought he had to be five miles away on an errand. Fast on his feet, that man, and very quiet; once she had gotten him moving she couldn’t slow him down, and the nickname, which he first applied to himself, perfectly deadpan, stuck. He was only five feet two, round as a pumpkin and capable of eating more food than three normal people combined; Sally once ruminated aloud that maybe it was his thyroid but she was not about to check and find out. With security an ever-increasing concern, Dog’s quicksilver ability to be all places at all times, to see and hear everything and know everything that was happening within a two-mile radius had proven absolutely indispensable.
“Yes,” Sally agreed, “Dog will certainly flag us if he gets a message from Willow Grove. Meanwhile, I don’t worry about our doctor friends one-tenth as much as I worry about this public-health chap Haglund. He should have been there with bells on today. In a half-assed way, he is our CDC representative in Willow Grove, Nebraska, our sole and single and absolutely only claim to legitimacy. So you went up there specifically to review the setup and the plan, and make sure everybody understood what was going to happen, and really essentially to cock the hammer for the trigger-pull — and Haglund is out of town at this particular time? What other business could be more important?”
“There wasn’t any ‘other business,’ “ Frank said around a mouthful of potatoes. “And he wasn’t out of town, either. I saw him walking out of the Willow Grove Public Health office at three in the afternoon while I was driving around doing some last-minute geographicals before heading home. I recognized his face — he was one of the ones at Canon City.”
“Oh, boy.” Sally shook her head and took a belt of her gin. “Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so. But he was headed for the hospital; I followed him a little way. He seemed to be in quite a hurry.”
“Well, I don’t like this,” Sally said heavily. “I believe in my hunches, and I have a very bad hunch that when the time comes, we’re never going to get this stuff up to that town — we’re going to be intercepted and busted.”
“On what grounds?”
“We’re illegal, and from CDC’s point of view, maybe very dangerous. I rang Haglund in because he and the doctors were all they have up there, and he understood epidemiology-, and I would have sworn I had him sold — but maybe I didn’t. Maybe he turned right around and got on the horn.”
“To where?”
“Atlanta, maybe. Or the state bulls. Or Christ knows to where; anywhere that we wouldn’t want. We could get busted right out of orbit at the wrong time and the whole thing could go down the drain.”
Frank Barrington scratched his chin. “Maybe you’re just begging trouble,” he said finally. “Maybe Haglund was genuinely busy with something, maybe actually out of town in the morning. I don’t know. But as for moving the stuff north, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. If worst comes to worst, we can pull the old poacher’s trick for getting the dead elk down the mountain.”
“What’s that?”
“He knows the terrain and all the roads, and he knows where the warden is going to try to stop him if somebody’s blown the whistle on him. So he never goes up the mountain alone. His buddy takes a second rig, and they fill one rig with firewood and his buddy takes it down through the checkpoint first. If it’s all clear, his buddy comes back and they go on down together. If it’s not clear, he goes through the checkpoint and right on home. Then when buddy-boy doesn’t come back, the poacher ditches the elk and the tarps and comes down with a load of firewood himself and smiles sweetly at the warden and then comes back with his buddy at three A.M. — or else he goes down some other way, some long, hard, back road, figuring there’s only so much of that warden to spread around.”
Sally looked thoughtful. “I suppose you could take Running Dog to ride shotgun for you.”
“Not shotgun, not if we’re worried about state police. Just interference.”
“And then sprout wings and fly at the right time, I suppose.”
Frank grinned. “If we have to, we can get resourceful. But we’ll get that stuff through there.”
After a while Sally went back to her staging plans, and Monique and Tom apparently reached agreement upstairs, they were now talking quietly and using the blackboard, and Frank went to bed. There were lots of things to be done tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. They really needed at least two more weeks before they were ready to deal with Willow Grove, three would be better, but the word coming in on TV and radio, when there was any word, was that little places like Willow Grove all over the Midwest and South were getting hit fast, without warning, one by one, no rhyme nor reason why. There would be no guessing in advance when the call might come. All they could do was pray for three weeks.
They didn’t get their three weeks. The word came from Willow Grove exactly eight days later.