Chapter 12

“I CAN’T POSSIBLY HAVE a gun,” Glenn said, dropping his hand. “I just went through the metal detector!”

But it was no use. He was cuffed and hustled into a room, where a cadre of people who he suspected struggled to pass junior high arithmetic harassed him for a while, throwing their weight around.

Eventually, after he’d answered all his questions twice, he said, “Call the FBI. Call Homeland. Call the Surgeon General.”

No matter what they asked him from then on, he said, “Call Homeland Security.” He quit even listening to the questions. Whenever they paused, he said, “Call Homeland Security.”

One of them who seemed marginally less stupid than the others finally caved. “We’ll have to confiscate this, sir. It could be a bomb.” He had the respirator in hand.

“No. I’m not getting on a plane without it. I’ve been in contact with the killer flu, you understand, and I don’t want to infect anyone else. In fact, you should all probably see your doctors this week, being in a close room like this with me for so long while I haven’t been wearing it. Not great ventilation in here, is there? Eighty percent of people who get this flu die. That’s four of five.” Because they were in close contact with the public, he figured they had a higher chance than average of contracting it than the average citizen.

Distracting them with that news finally turned things around, and he did escape their clutches. He would have missed his plane except it had been delayed.

Idiots. Though what did anyone expect? Give powerless people a tiny bit of it, and they’ll abuse it. Besides, anyone who did have an ounce of intelligence could think of twenty ways to bring down a plane without alerting the TSA. The screening was a joke. The workers were a joke. If this flu had been planted by a terrorist, he’d probably walked smiling through a dozen or more security gates just like that one without raising the faintest alarm. Glenn fumed about it until the plane began to taxi, and then he shoved it out of his mind.

In Atlanta, he retrieved his car from long-term parking and detoured to his townhouse, which wasn’t but a couple miles out of the way. He dumped his dirty laundry onto the top of the washer, glanced at the bit of mail that had come, saw nothing that couldn’t wait, and he looked around the place. As always after a trip, it seemed like a stranger’s house, and it would until he’d been here again for a night.

There was a note from his sister in the middle of the kitchen table. She’d thrown out food before it could spoil. What a terrific sister he had.

He’d have to stock up on frozen meals and canned soup. He didn’t think he’d be finding the time to cook in the coming weeks.

The late afternoon he spent at the CDC, part of it in the Incident Command Center. Row after row of computers with big screens were staffed by people working hard. Some were on phones, and others were crunching numbers. He exchanged a few words with Harper, but her eyes kept drifting back to her computer screen, and he didn’t keep her from it for long.

He checked in with his assistant Makayla, and said, “I meant to bring you something. A gift. I’m sorry I forgot.”

“As long as you didn’t bring me the flu, I’m good.”

“I think I haven’t caught it. I haven’t had direct contact with patients in several days and I’ve been using a respirator in crowds.”

“Should my family be getting some of those?”

Glenn hesitated. It was imperative that every healthcare worker in the nation was wearing one. There was a limited supply. But he answered the question honestly. “If you can find one, yeah, get just one. When the flu hits Atlanta, you’ll want to designate one person to do all the shopping, and she or he can wear it while she or he is out there.”

“Everybody I know I already told to stock up. On canned food and cough drops and whatnot.”

“That’s smart. Best thing you can do for them.”

“I can imagine some of the young ones throwing a fit when all there is to eat is beans and rice and canned tomatoes.”

“You could survive on that for months. Throw in a few carrots or winter squash, and you have most of your nutritional needs taken care of.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that. Months, I mean.”

“When it comes to Atlanta, it should burn itself out within eight or ten weeks. So not that bad.”

“Eight weeks of being locked up with kids? Easy for you to say.”

“True enough. Anything I need to take care of here?”

“I did what I could, but there is still a pile on your desk as big as Stone Mountain.”

“Oh boy, can’t wait.” He’d get to it this evening.

A meeting of department heads and him lasted until early evening. He was glad to see no one here was sick yet. It was impossible to keep it that way, though, so they had to work hard while they were fully staffed.

He had cleared voicemails and was making a dent in the pile on his desk when Lorraine called him at about eight. “I need you tomorrow morning for a special project.”

“Of course. Tell me.”

“I want you to be in on a conference call with the President.”

“Of? Tell me, please, that you mean the President of the American Kennel Club or something like that.”

“Ha. Ha,” she said, without humor. “POTUS, Glenn.”

“Why me?” There were a dozen people hungry for career advancement who would jump at the chance.

“Because you were there for the initial outbreak. You witnessed it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he began.

But she cut him off. “It does. Nine sharp. Go home and get some rest so you don’t look like death warmed over.”

“I’ll put on my makeup.”

“Then I imagine you’ll match our Commander-in-Chief.”

And there was the rub. Glenn glanced down at his dress uniform. He was obliged to obey. His Commander-in-Chief ordered, and it was his duty to salute and do it. Also, he needed to press the uniform. It looked like he’d been sleeping in it.

He looked at the pile on his desk, and knew it was a fraction of the queue in his email inbox. “Sorry,” he said to them all, and he left the office to deal with shopping and laundry and normal-people tasks for an hour or two.

He came back to work at seven the next morning, neatly pressed this time, but sans makeup. He neither owned any nor had any idea how to use it.

After a quick prioritizing of inbox and voicemail messages, he checked in with the Incident Command Center and grabbed some printouts that they had taken to leaving on a table by the door. The piles were added to as new calculations were run, new cases were reported, and new graphics were designed. There were internal file addresses on most documents for anyone who wanted to study the raw data. There was a sign taped to the wall that said “Press” and a stack of multi-colored graphics that simplified things for the television viewer.

The system was working just as it should be, just as they had planned. Dedicated people, working hard, working long hours, doing all that they’d drilled on this past decade. And out there, all across America, there were doctors and nurses doing the right things too. And yet look at the swelling numbers of the infected.

There was a list of possible cases preceding the Trenton outbreak, spread through neighboring states, but it definitely had gotten its toehold there. Since Will Washington felt a tickle in his throat (he likely wasn’t the index case but was as good a person as any to count from), there had been a chance of infection moving six steps. That is, if Will had been exposed about twenty days ago—and he probably had been—and it took people an average of three days beyond exposure to begin shedding virus themselves, then Will could have infected person 2 who infected person 3 who infected person 4, and now person 6 was out there breathing in virus particles, or touching them on a doorknob and then reaching up to scratch his eyes, with that simple gesture sealing his fate.

But everyone with the flu didn’t infect just one person. On average, a sick person infected five others, with one super-spreader so far infecting many more than that. At this point, the numbers in Trenton alone could be 15,625 sick and 500 dead. In three days, multiply all that times five if they saw exponential growth in its purest form.

The numbers of reported sick weren’t that high, but the number of fatalities was almost exactly on target. This likely meant thousands of sick people weren’t coming in for treatment. Some of them weren’t feeling very bad yet. Some were but couldn’t afford to see a doctor. Some had insurance but hated doctors and would have to be gasping for air before they visited the ER. Most had been trained to never go in for a mere head cold and thought that was all they had.

They were wrong.

So the deaths being at projection but not the sick likely meant this: sick people were out on the street, going to work, going to church, going to dance clubs, shopping, all the while coughing and rubbing their noses and infecting other people. That the number of fatalities was as projected also meant that the epidemiological numbers Glenn’s team had identified were holding up.

He took cold comfort in that. It felt like being the Grim Reaper...or at least his efficient advance man. Glenn figured they were about a week away from overwhelming the burial capacity in New Jersey.

He’d seen the outcome of that once—a bulldozer shoving shrouded bodies into a pit. Weeping women, children staring with wide and shocked eyes. Local workers in hazmat suits with bags of lime. It had shocked him too, though he understood why it was happening and theoretically approved.

Americans were spoiled by an easy, safe life. They had fresh water coming from the tap they could trust. They did not have sewage running through the streets. They were going to be horrified at what was ahead, from food shortages to closed stores to forgoing their favorite foods and possibly going hungry as supply lines were cut off. Mass graves would stun them.

He shook off the memory of the bulldozers and the open pit as Harper walked in to the Command Center, yawning. “Gossip says you meet with the President today.”

“I hate gossip. I wonder what the R nought of that is.”

“Here? Hundreds.”

He studied her face. “Did you sleep?”

“Some,” she said, and held up a hand to forestall the lecture. “I know.”

“Nobody from the Jersey team has gotten sick, have they?”

“No one I’ve heard of.”

“Good. At least we did that right.”

“We did everything right. Didn’t we?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking about the numbers and what they’ll look like in a week, what it means. It’s hard not to feel pessimistic.” And guilty, but he didn’t want to plant that thought in her mind.

“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it? When you stop and think.” She shrugged. “I don’t, at least not often. Stop to think, I mean. I just do the calculations and try not to count the misery. That’s opposite of what you told me, I know.”

“It’s fine,” he said. Whatever it took to keep her working well, it was fine. They couldn’t have an Incident Command Center full of weeping people, that was for sure. They all had important work to do, work that might save thousands of lives.

He left Harper and found the studio in the Communications Center where he’d been told to report for the conference call with Washington. A tech there whom Glenn didn’t know said, “You going to be in on this thing at nine?”

“I am. Hi. Glenn Stevens.”

The tech didn’t introduce himself in response. “Great. Help me get levels on your voice. Where will you sit?”

“Wherever the least important person sits. That’s me.”

The fellow used Glenn for ten minutes for fine-tuning his microphones, making him sit in various chairs, and during the procedure Glenn’s trepidation steadily wore off. He still didn’t want to do it, but he wasn’t nervous.

When he was done, he paced in the hall and studied the figures on the printouts he had grabbed from the ICC. He checked the time on his phone and saw he had a few minutes. He called Roy Gillens back in Trenton. “Anything new there?”

“Starting to shut it down. And just in time, I think. The town’s feeling like—I don’t know. I never felt it before, not anywhere. Like it’s about to explode in some way. I don’t want people to be looking for someone to blame when it happens and us still be here.”

“No. I don’t want you there either if that happens. Get out safely. See you soon.”

The last few minutes dragged, but finally Lorraine and Chanchal arrived, and the three of them went in the studio, got set up, and waited.

When the screen on the wall went live, it showed a shot of the Oval Office. Some people were seated and some were standing, all of them dressed in good suits or uniforms. Despite how seldom Glenn watched the news, he recognized some faces, including the Secretary of State and the Attorney General. He could not see the screen that showed his own group here in Atlanta, but there must be one visible to them in DC.

The Secretary of HHS came in to the Oval Office, shook a few hands, and then a group of four people entered at once and everyone stood at attention. When Lorraine did too, Glenn stood and suddenly wondered about protocol, in particular if he was supposed to salute, as he was in uniform. No one else did, not even a general sitting in the Oval Office, and so he followed their lead. The President, Dusty Edmond, sixteen months in office, sat in a chair, and the Oval Office group began to settle down, some taking seats, some standing. Glenn supposed there was some rule—official or unofficial—about who had the right to sit, and where, but he had no idea what those rules were. Was proximity to the President a clue about their power?

He wished fervently to never get closer to that office than he was right now and have the need to learn all that etiquette.

The President said, “So, Ginger, you start.”

The Secretary of Health and Human Services said, “Not quite two weeks into understanding we have a flu epidemic, we have a total of five hundred known deaths and almost seven thousand reported cases, for now nearly all in the northeast of the nation. We have sent vaccines to healthcare workers in the affected states, as well as administered them to members of Congress, the Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs, and yourself and the Vice President, and to the other selected people deemed to be critical in the coming crisis.”

The President said, “And I was told when I got my vaccine that it probably would not work. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. For one thing, this flu is new, just enough different from prior versions that the vaccines probably won’t work. For another, the stockpiled vaccines are over three years old, and so they might not even be effective for the bug they were designed for.”

“And whose fault is that, that we let the stockpile expire?”

The Secretary opened her mouth, seemed to think better of what she was about to say, and said, “In the final analysis, mine.”

“And you let that happen why?”

“They’re expensive to manufacture, it needs to be done periodically, and we only have the budget we have,” she said.

“Budget more in the future.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” she said, though of course she didn’t choose her own budget. Congress did.

“And these pills I’m taking?”

“Those are antivirals. You’re on what is called a prophylactic course of them, a prevention dose. Two pills a day for forty-two days. The dose given to people actually ill with a virus is two per day for five days.”

“And are these expired too?”

“No, sir. They’re good. But their supplies are limited. There are enough antivirals on hand to treat only ten million sick people. We’ll hit that number of sick within a few months.”

“And so every one of us who is getting this preventative dose is costing eight people their lives, is that right? Five days of pills for them, but forty days for us.”

“No, sir. That’s not quite right.”

“My arithmetic isn’t that bad, Ginger. No matter what the press says.”

“Yes, sir. I mean no, Mr. President, of course it isn’t. I mean that the drug you’re getting seems to only cure one in ten people. So your prophylaxis means only one sick person dies who might have been saved, not eight. Theoretically.”

“All right. And can we gear up production of more of these—of both, the vaccine and these viral pills?”

“We can, sir, and we are. But if we gear up for this precise vaccine all of us here received, then we can’t gear up for the right vaccine in a week or two when the genes of the epidemic flu have been fully sequenced.”

“How long to a new vaccine?”

“One plant can manufacture twelve thousand doses in a month. That’s the fastest, but we only have one plant of that sort. Other plants, using older methods, will need six months. We can have over a hundred million doses in six months.”

“And will those vaccines work?”

“Pretty well, we think.”

“Pretty well. Six months plus, and that’s all you can give me.” He glowered at her. Glenn was glad it wasn’t him getting that look.

“Sixty percent effective.”

Glenn knew that was optimistic, the highest efficacy rate for flu vaccine they’d ever recorded.

“And there will be a vaccine for every man, woman, child in America in six months?”

“No, sir. It will take a year for that, or eighteen months.”

“Ginger.”

“Sir?”

“How many will be dead in six months?”

“It depends on how well we intervene—how well we contain the outbreak.”

“Give me a range.”

“One million to ten million deaths. This year alone.”

“Of United States citizens.”

“And visitors and illegals and foreign students and so on, yes. Worldwide, over ten times that many by year’s end.”

“And the one million Americans dead is if we work hard to contain it. This is the number if we’re not screwing around, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We can’t get that lower?”

“One million is getting it lower, Mr. President, as low as it’s possible to push it.”

“And if we don’t work at all?”

“If we just let it run its course, you mean? No treatment, no vaccine? Within three years, ninety percent of children under two will have died. A similar percentage of people over the age of seventy. Nearly everyone with an immune disorder of any sort, or the chronically ill, or the fashionably underweight. Over two years, without doing anything, two hundred fifty million Americans would die. Over half.”

There was a long silence, and more than a few shocked faces.

The president said, “Can we get more vaccines and more of these pills that don’t work very well from our allies?”

The Secretary of State said, “No, sir. They’ll be keeping all they have for their own use.”

“So this thing has shown up elsewhere on the planet?”

The Secretary of HHS answered him. “Not yet, sir. But it very likely will, any moment now.”

A different woman spoke up. “Almost four million passengers have left the country on an airliner since the first case was reported in New Jersey. Many more millions than that have driven into Mexico or Canada.”

The President said, “And, Lord, the security implications of us getting it first. We’re meeting after this in the sit room on that?”

“Yes, sir,” someone said, an Army general. Glenn didn’t recognize him, though doubted he’d recognize any general.

The President rubbed his temples for a moment. “Okay. So someone in Atlanta explain this bug to me. It’s just the flu. Why such a big deal?”

Lorraine gestured to Chanchal. Chanchal cleared her throat and said, “It’s highly pathogenic avian flu, abbreviated HPAI, coming from birds. Up until April of this year, this pathogen, though deadly, has not spread from person to person. The people who contracted it, mostly in China, got it directly from infected birds. And now it is. Spreading between people, I mean.”

“Now it is. Why is that?”

“We believe someone designed it that way.”

“Why the bloody hell would someone do that?”

“The first time that was done was in a lab, a legitimate lab. It was done with the thought that we needed to be prepared for such a time as it happened in nature, to know the enemy, if you will. But now that everyone—that is, everyone with the right equipment and training—knows how to do this, it seems someone has done it again. Somehow, it jumped from a lab out into nature, and then back to the human population.” Her voice had started out shaky, but she seemed to be calming down.

“In New Jersey.”

“It’s the first place we were informed of but might not be the first place it happened. Flu can be underreported.”

“We have a system for reporting flu?”

“We do, sir. But it’s voluntary, and anything that presents as the common cold might not be reported. So it might have been out there for a week or two before we found it. It probably was out there.”

“And it came from where? If it was a willful act, who did this?”

“Mr. President,” said someone Glenn suspected was the Homeland Security Secretary, “we’re looking into that. All available resources are focused like a laser on that question.”

“Hold that thought. We’ll circle back around to that. I’m not done with the CDC.” The President said, “One of you was there, at the outbreak in New Jersey.”

Oh, shit. Glenn said, “That would be me, sir.”

“And why didn’t you stop it?”

“Stop it? Stop the pathogen from moving between people? We didn’t stop it because that’s nearly impossible to do, Mr. President.”

“Why didn’t you put troops around that town, seal it off?”

“That’s well outside our right, sir,” Glenn said. Everyone knew the new President was a little weak with law and the Constitution and other such matters, but you would have thought he might have studied up on it in the past sixteen months and learned the basics by now. “We at the CDC record, identify, investigate, inform, and try to contain.”

“But you didn’t, did you? Contain it.”

“No, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Frankly, because it’s impossible. It’s out there. It’s in bird droppings and their saliva. It has been—or soon will be—on every door handle and countertop in New Jersey. If somehow the spread of it could have been stopped in New Jersey, it’d pop up someplace else in a day or a week because of the birds. As it did on that oil platform.” Those cases had been confirmed to be H5N1 as well, which meant either a second species of bird had it, or crows had visited a Gulf of Mexico oil platform, or someone in the crew had brought it back to the platform after a vacation on dry land. The cluster was still being investigated. “Birds fly. They can’t be contained.”

“It’s crows, is it?”

“Yes, sir. American crows. We know that’s one host. There could be other birds too, but we’re certain about the crows.”

“Then why don’t we shoot them all? Put a bounty on them?”

“Because that would spread it faster,” Glenn said. “Dead crows on the ground are far more dangerous to people than living crows in the trees.”

Someone next to the President said to Glenn, “You were there in New Jersey. How are people dealing with it? Are they cooperative?”

“They’re frightened. Some are grieving the loss of loved ones. I believe there was one fellow who was contagious but didn’t want to stay in isolation.”

“But they’re all coming in? Reporting to hospitals and doctors so they can be isolated if they’re sick?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Why the hell not?” said the President.

“They can’t afford to, some of them. Many of them. In Trenton, we estimated a quarter are indigent and without any form of healthcare. Another quarter have such a high deductible that they may as well be without healthcare insurance. Some of those might come into the ER when their lungs are half full of fluid and they can barely breathe, but by that point they’ve been shedding virus for a week, infecting every other person they’ve come into contact with. And because they are poor, and possibly don’t get paid for sick days, they’re more likely to go to work while sick.”

“So we build clinics. Make them come in.”

Lorraine rescued Glenn. “That’s a great idea, Mr. President, and after this crisis has passed, perhaps Congress will make sure the next pandemic can be dealt with by doing just that, having free public health clinics in every county in America. But right now, the situation is, there isn’t that infrastructure. This first round, we’ll have to make do with what we have.”

The Attorney General said, “There’s also the matter of the Bill of Rights, sir. We can’t force people to see a doctor. We can’t force them into isolation. We can’t quarantine a city or a state or even a household. Those limited measures we can take, we cannot take without due process first. And my understanding is, ten days after a person is exposed, they’re dead or getting well and are in either case no longer contagious. It would take far longer than that to deal with a legal challenge to any one isolation order. The only way we’ll stop the spread—and I don’t know the epidemiology, I’m talking about the law here—is to ask for cooperation and explain why it is in everyone’s best interest to cooperate. And, if I may say, it’s crucial to have a single message about this if we can. A simple message that everyone in every department repeats.”

Glenn was happy there was someone in that room who could see the big picture. And he was right. A simple, single message to hammer home would be a good place to start.

The President stuck his lower lip out. “It’s a national emergency. If I want people quarantined, then I’ll just sign an executive order or something.”

The AG shook his head. “No, sir. The courts would strike it down in an instant. People have the right to assemble. Nothing in the first amendment says, ‘unless there’s a disease going around.’”

“Well, they didn’t know about diseases back then. We do now.”

Glenn should have shut up, but he didn’t. “Smallpox.”

“Yes, sir,” said the Secretary of Health and Human Services. “Smallpox was a serious epidemic when the Bill of Rights was ratified. They didn’t know what a virus was, but they knew people caught diseases from other people. Though smallpox had a fatality rate about half of this flu, it was quite contagious. Franklin and Jefferson were proponents of the first smallpox vaccine.”

“We’re drifting,” said the man next to the President. Something about his tone or posture told Glenn he must be a staffer of some sort.

“Right,” said the President. “I need one of you to figure out what it is I can do. I have to do something. I can’t just sit here and let people die.”

The meeting went on without the focus being on Glenn, and he settled back and watched the dynamic, hoping he wouldn’t be called on again.

Twenty minutes later, Chanchal was asked to explain the structure of the virus, but after five minutes of effort, she clearly wasn’t getting through to the President. When she looked helplessly at Glenn, he caved. “It’s like the virus has two little keys on its surface, Mr. President. One unlocks its way into the cell, where it reproduces itself. The other key unlocks a different door on the way out. The H key gets it in, and the N key gets it back out.”

“And so the H5 is worse than H4 and H3 and H2, and H6 would be worse still?”

“No, sir. They are named—numbered—in order of their discovery. The flu epidemic in World War I was H1N1. H5—this flu’s—is the fifth kind of hemagglutinin discovered. That’s the one that unlocks its way into the cell, the ‘H.’”

“Is it the newest?”

“No, sir. This particular flu, H5N1, has been around for at least sixty years. Or rather we’ve known about it for sixty years. It may have been around for a thousand years before that. But the killer type, HPAI as we call it, seems to have evolved recently, in the last twenty years.”

“I don’t believe in evolution.”

Glenn had no idea what to say to that, it was such a ludicrous statement. It was like saying, “I don’t believe in gravity.” Okay, but it holds you to the planet nevertheless. He settled for “Ah.”

“According to the National Strategy, we need some sort of taskforce, as I understand it,” said a woman in the Oval Office who had remained silent until now. “Which of the agencies need to send someone?”

The staff fellow said, “We’ll talk about that later today. The President needs to get to the security briefing at this point. Thank you, everyone, for coming.”

The President stood and said, “Problems can be fixed. I want you people to just get in there and fix this.” Glenn remembered it was something he said often on the campaign trail too, as if massively complex problems could all be fixed like a dripping faucet, in five minutes with a wrench. “Do your damned jobs.” And he left the room.

Glenn waited until the screen was off and his microphone taken away before he said, “We are in such deep shit.”

Lorraine said, “We all will do our jobs. It doesn’t matter who understands that we’re doing it right or not. We know our charter. We know our responsibilities. We do the work. The FBI will do theirs. USDA theirs. FAA theirs. And so on.”

Glenn said, “What do you think the chances of your surviving this as Director are?”

“Slim. But until I’m fired, I’m working hard. Right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You know I will too.”

“Of course. We’re all professionals. The best in the world. Get back to it, all of us.”

Glenn was on the phone to hospital administrators and county and tribal public health directors for most of the day. The flu was taking hold. Cases were popping up all over the eastern seaboard now. The people on the ground wanted information. They wanted to know when the virus-specific rapid diagnostic tests would be sent out. They wanted to know when more antivirals would be coming and if a more effective treatment had been discovered. That Glenn didn’t know some of these answers yet did not make him a popular person that day.

By talking to so many people, he did get a better sense of how fast the flu was moving geographically. In less than a week, they’d see it take root in Atlanta. He had to remember to phone his mother and sister again and warn them of it.

He was in the Incident Command Center just after four Sunday afternoon, looking at the new figures, when he got a call from Emile. “My office, now,” he said.

Glenn read the printouts while he walked over. The CFR had come down a little bit, to .76, but it had gone up in people over sixty to .91. He really did have to try and get his mother to stay home for two months, though he knew the chances of convincing her were slim. He got out his phone and made a note to buy her a respirator if one was still out there to be had.

He leaned into Emile’s office. “What have I done now?” He was joking.

Emile waved him in but didn’t smile. “Come in and shut the door, please.”

Glenn worried that he really was in trouble. “What?”

“You’re headed to Washington. Tonight.”

“Washington State?” Glenn said hopefully, though he knew better.

“DC,” Emile said. “You were requested by name. Because, I hear, of your ability to interpret virology for the common man.”

Glenn sat heavily in the chair facing Emile. “Tell me I’m not going to have to do the Children’s Wonder Book of Sick and Boo-boos for the President. I’ll resign first. I swear I will.”

“No, for the taskforce. You impressed someone.”

“Can I get out of this?” He looked at Emile carefully. “Are you angry with me?”

“You’d do more good here.”

“No disagreement on that. I hate these things.”

“And yet there’s nothing to be done about it. You were called, by name, so you’ll go. I was ordered. You’re being ordered. You can pick one other person to go with you, but Lorraine has made it clear we won’t give up more staff than that to this. HHS will have to find other people from other agencies to fill the rest of their slots.”

“I won’t know who else to suggest until I know what we need them for.”

“Has to be someone who can work well with the other agencies. FDA, other Agriculture, Education, Interstate Commerce, FBI, FEMA, FAA, and so on. Your role will be our representative and a scientific advisor regarding the virus and epidemiology. Who else should go?”

“If we have to present data, I suppose I’d take Harper again. Or maybe Mindi to communicate with Agriculture? Maybe we should use the greenest person we have, so our experienced people can do more important jobs. I don’t know. Can I go there and see what the deal is first? If I need someone who’s good at politics, that’s different than if I need someone who’s good at statistics.”

“I wish you hadn’t impressed someone.”

“No more so than I, Emile. I’m sorry.”

“You took the vaccine? Taking the antivirals?”

“Yes to the first, no to the second.”

“Get them before you leave.”

“I plan to skip them. I doubt the prophylaxis will work any better than the treatment course did in New Jersey.”

“We won’t know for a month, as you well know. If it’s ten percent effective, a one in ten chance is better than a zero in ten chance. You don’t need a stats whiz to figure that out.”

Glenn hadn’t often seen Emile in this sour of a mood. “Something wrong? I mean, besides this whole mess?”

Emile tapped a pen on his desk and looked away. He stood and went to the window to look out over the CDC campus. With his back to Glenn, he said, “My younger brother. He’s in Connecticut, and he’s sick.”

“With this?”

“Looks like it.”

“I’m sorry, Emile.” His heart went out to his friend.

“He has a one in four chance of surviving, just like anyone else. It’ll be a rare person who doesn’t lose someone. In a year, we’ll all be grieving.” He cleared his throat and turned back. “So do your best in DC, and don’t let anyone seduce you away from us.”

“As if that could happen. Besides, you proposed marriage to me a couple of weeks ago, right?”

“Ha,” Emile said, with a ghost of a smile. “Don’t let them chomp you to bits up there.”

“I won’t,” Glenn said. He thought “bore me to death” or “frustrate me into a coma” the more likely scenarios.

“And sure, wait until tomorrow or the next day to pick someone else to join you. Good luck.”

Back at his own office, Glenn asked Makayla to check with airlines for a flight. She came in to his office and said, “I can get you there and I can get you a hotel room, but I can’t get you a car.”

“I suppose I can take cabs. What’s the driving time from here to there?”

“Ten hours.”

“Yeah, my driving there won’t work. Though if they shut down air travel, I’ll be stuck there.”

“You’re on a wait list for a car at three national firms. It might take a week, but something should come up. If you needed to, and the planes aren’t flying at some point in the future, you could drive it back down here.”

“Thanks. Good work with that.”

“Flight’s at eight. Good luck up there.”

“Thanks. And stay well while I’m gone.”

“You too.”

Glenn stopped by the Incident Command Center again and spoke to Harper, explaining that he might tap her for DC. “If you’re willing. I have no choice about going, but I won’t do it to anyone else who says no.”

“Whatever you think, sir. I trust your judgment.”

He took that trust seriously. “You’d learn something. You’d see if that sort of thing held any interest for you, politics or admin. You’d make contacts that will serve you for years to come. But you’d probably do more good right here.” When she didn’t say anything more, he said, “I’ll call you if I need you, okay?”

“Okay. And thanks for thinking of me.”

“See you soon.”

He drove home in heavy traffic, talking to his sister and mother as he waited in a long line of cars. His sister took him seriously and said she was already all set to hunker down for a month or two. “The only thing left is that when it hits the news, I’ll go to the library and get a bunch of books and DVDs for the kids the last day I’m out, along with milk and lettuce. When you do think it’ll be a problem here?”

“Two days at soonest, seven at latest, but that’s really a guess. And it depends on if air travel is limited to emergency only starting tomorrow, or that sort of thing.”

“Could grounding planes stop it entirely?”

“No, but it’d slow the spread.” He remembered the day Gillens had said they needed to do that right then. It would have slowed down the spread of the flu had it happened back then, but there was no way that was ever going to happen. Hell, planes were still flying now. “If we can slow it enough, the vaccine might be ready before it hits rural people in the west half of the country, or in Canada’s western provinces. But a big city in the east like Atlanta? That’s unavoidable at this point. Someone here probably already has it.”

His sister thanked him for being straight with her. “I love you. You know that, right? Take care of yourself.”

“You guys too. Tell Dave and the kids I’ll miss them. Keep ‘em well, sis. They’re my genetic investment in the future too.”

“You are so weird,” she said, laughing as she hung up.

His mother was a harder sell. “Mom, you can’t let yourself get sick.”

“I can’t stay cooped up at home for two months. Two months! I know that can’t be right. The TV said it lasts a week or two at the most.”

“Any one person’s does, Mom, but the population of a city this size takes longer to work through.”

“You worry too much.”

“The fatality number for your age group is over ninety. Nine out of ten of your friends who catch it will die. I don’t want you to die. It’s that simple.”

“I’ll wear a mask.”

“I’m trying to find you a respirator.”

“I wouldn’t wear that. I’d look like something out of a science-fiction movie. Independence Day Four: Revenge of the Old Ladies.”

“Mother,” he said, exasperated. Someone behind him in traffic honked at him. He moved forward the two feet that had opened up behind the car ahead of him. Happy now? he mentally projected at the guy in back of him.

He couldn’t stop the thought from popping into his head: Won’t be much rush hour traffic anywhere in America in six months, will there? At least the asshole behind him had only a one in four chance of survival.

Glenn made a mental note not to say such things aloud in Washington, DC among a bunch of strangers. They’d think he was a terrible person, not just someone with a sense of humor twisted by years of working with diseases and death. “I’m worried about you, Mom.”

“And I’m worried about you. You’re about to get on an airplane and you always said that was the worst place to be in a pandemic.”

“I have a respirator, and I’ll wear mine.”

“Sweetheart, I’ll be careful. Besides, I have to die of something one day. I’m seventy-two.”

“I want you to be alive to meet your grandkids. My kids, I mean.”

She laughed. “And that’s going to happen when?”

“One day. When I’m not so busy.”

“Right. Okay, I tell you what, you introduce me to a pregnant lady friend, and I’ll wear a respirator for a whole year. I’ll wear one at your wedding. Deal?”

“Okay. I’ll hold you to that.”

“I love you, Glenn. Even when I want to throttle you.”

“I love you. Stay safe.”

At home, he packed again and went back to the airport. This time at the airport security checkpoint, his respirator caused no comment. A fifth of people in the line were wearing masks. And the line wasn’t nearly as long as usual. Good, if it meant people were staying home and being cautious.

Sitting at the gate, waiting to board, he heard someone coughing behind him, and he hoped it wasn’t an infected person. If it were, the airplane would end up a box of exposed and infected people by the time it landed at National.

On the plane, a fellow sitting in his row across the aisle leaned over and said, “Where do you get those breathing things on your face?”

Glenn wrote a note on his laptop and held it up to show the man. He held up a finger and typed another note. “If out of these, get N95 masks.”

“Thanks, man.”

Glenn nodded his acknowledgment. He then spent a moment wondering if this respirator would become an item that got stolen right off people’s faces, as the white headphone cord of iPods had once triggered thieves to snatch and grab those from pedestrians in cities. Probably it would come to that.

There were plenty of cabs at the airport. He had to pull his respirator away from his face to say the name of the hotel to the cabbie. The device was uncomfortable and it made breathing difficult, but a cab was nearly as dangerous as an airplane, so he slipped it back into place.

The cab driver was friendly and told him about tourist events for the coming week. Until the driver had been talking for ten minutes, Glenn hadn’t realized it was Memorial Day weekend coming up next weekend. The month had flown by. He wondered why all the events the driver was describing had not been canceled. If they didn’t have the will to do that here, in the nation’s capital, how would anyone convince people in Poughkeepsie or Peoria to do the right thing?

Glenn glanced around the cab’s interior. If he was going to be taking cabs, he should be wearing plastic gloves before he touched the door handles. And he should buy some bleach and clean his own hotel room when he got there.

He lifted the respirator an inch. “Tell me when we’re within a mile of the hotel, please,” he said to the driver. When the driver said they were getting close, Glenn looked around to see if there were any stores. He wouldn’t mind having a room with a microwave were one available, so he could cook his own meals if need be. Letting other people cook and serve him food provided more chances for a disease to be transmitted. It was a fact he tried to forget about usually, lest he become crazy and obsessed. This was a good moment to become crazy and obsessed.

Also, as more people got sick and absenteeism increased, it would be harder and harder to find restaurants still open. By the time the first wave of the disease had moved through the country, he had no doubt that at least a third of restaurants in America would have folded because of lack of business. Sick people don’t go out to eat. Nor do frightened people.

He saw a corner store, and the driver pulled up to the hotel four blocks later. At the hotel counter, checking in, he asked that the maid not come in daily.

“What about towels and so on?”

“If there are two or three in there now, I can last a week.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” Glenn said with a smile. “There’s no reason to bother, really.” Or to introduce new germs into his room every day. The flu was already here, and within a week, it’d have a firm grip on the city.

“Whatever you say, sir.”

When he was unpacked, he went back down and asked at the desk about nearby carry-out and fast food places, was given some menus, and wandered outside to explore his neighborhood. He knew where he was in comparison to the Capitol Building and Washington Monument, but not much more than that. The neighborhood was okay—not great, but not seedy. Its neighbors were mostly office buildings, but a few older high-rise apartment buildings were scattered among them. A few restaurants were closed, but they were lunch places only, apparently catering to the office workers. At an open Chinese place, he stopped in and ordered some kung pao chicken to carry out, paid, and said he’d be right back to pick it up. He made his way to the store he had seen from the cab, bought cleaning supplies, more plastic gloves, and a can of mixed nuts and a box of crackers to tide him over if he missed a meal. He swung by for his dinner, and he returned to the hotel. He checked his email while he ate, read for a few hours, and set his alarm for early.

After he showered and shaved Monday morning, he cleaned the place himself with bleach, making sure to scrub every door handle, drawer handle, faucet, and anything else people touched. If the maid stayed out as instructed, it was now as safe an environment as a hotel could be—not very, in other words. Like airplanes, hotels re-circulated air, and it wasn’t impossible a virus could survive the trip through vents from room to room. Legionnaire’s disease, his memory provided as an example. “I know,” he replied to it.

He had asked the front desk to have a cab for him at 8:10, and if it was possible to turn that into a standing order with their preferred company. When he went down, wearing his dress blues again, a cab was waiting for him, and this driver was not talkative at all. Glenn gave him the address and followed the route on his phone, to see where he had been and where he was going. It was too far to walk, unfortunately—over eight miles.

He was let out at the Health and Human Services building and looked up at its glass façade. It looked vulnerable. It was vulnerable. And so was everywhere and everyone in the world. He was going to be stuck here for weeks, no doubt, and he hoped something good came of it.

At the gate, he tucked his respirator into his briefcase, showed his IDs to a uniformed guard, went through a metal detector, and was directed to the elevator. “Floor three, sir,” the young woman said.

In the hallway of the third floor, there were dozens of people milling around. Many seemed to know each other. That made sense. As the outsider, he assumed he’d know no one, but he did see two familiar faces. One was a USDA fellow he’d worked with during an outbreak of bovine campylobacteriosis some years back. The other was familiar but he couldn’t place him. Maybe someone he’d seen on the news? He waited until the USDA man had ended his conversation and went over and re-introduced himself.

“So crows, is it?” the man said.

“So far. You’ve been testing chickens, I assume?”

“Just started, but early results say domestic birds, food birds, are all disease-free. We’ve done a few turkeys and ducks too. They’re healthy.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“How did you get on the crows so quickly?”

“Interagency cooperation, speak of the devil,” Glenn said. “A state park worker in New York remembered some dead crows, so we prioritized testing them.”

“Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, right?”

“That’s the truth. Though it would have been luckier still to catch this sooner.”

“Think you could have stopped it?”

“Maybe, if we would have been told about the very first case a month or two ago. But by the time I was in New Jersey, there were probably a couple hundred humans infected there, not to mention the crow population. We’ve been looking at pneumonia deaths nation-wide this year. It might go back a few months before New Jersey.”

“I wonder why it made the species leap.”

If he didn’t know about the suspicions of an engineered virus, Glenn was not going to be the one to tell him. He assumed it would come out in the meeting before too long. For now, he merely shrugged.

“Let me introduce you to my colleague.”

And so it began, with Glenn trying to remember names, agencies, and responsibilities. People milled around, some eating muffins off napkins, but Glenn never did work his way around to wherever any food might be laid out. At 9:20, a microphone screeched inside an auditorium, everyone entered it, and the meeting was called to order.

“I’m Analee Pritt, Assistant Director at the Department of Health and Human Services. This is Jack Dibella of FEMA, who shares with us the responsibility for response to the flu emergency. First, some housekeeping.”

And then there was about a half-hour of instruction about wireless in the building, sharing of information, keeping in touch via email, how to find their operating documents online, security in the building, security for information shared here, and so on. Glenn made notes on his laptop and, during a lull between speakers, tried out the wireless. It was adequate, but if every person in here was on it at once, it wouldn’t be.

The co-chair was from FEMA, and he gave a mission statement and explained their goals. The third person was from Homeland Security, and he introduced two people in the audience of over a hundred. Glenn hoped not every single person was going to be introduced.

A stack of stapled papers were passed to him. He took one and passed it on. Four pages of names, positions, and agencies. A few email addresses were included. There were agencies represented he’d never heard of.

The HHS moderator took over again. One by one, as she called names, various other people stood so everyone else could see their faces. She called Glenn’s name and identified him as the top CDC person who had been at the outbreak in New Jersey. Glenn stood and glanced around. Most everyone in the place was turned his way.

And on it went, nothing getting done in the morning, but Glenn supposed that was to be expected. When they stopped for lunch, the moderator recommended using the cafeteria in the building, on the lowest level. “We’ve set aside half of the place for this group, so we can get to know each other in a casual setting before we break into workgroups.”

Glenn stood in line for the elevators. A woman edged her way past some other people to get to him, but when she got there, rather than speaking to him as he assumed she would, she just turned and stared at the elevator doors, so he supposed she hadn’t been trying to get to him at all. He registered some details: attractive woman, in her thirties, in a black pantsuit and flat shoes. Her shoulder-length black hair was held back with a plain silver clip. She wore no jewelry, and if she wore makeup, he couldn’t detect it.

Other people on the elevator were talking together, but she stayed quiet until they got off, following the crowd toward the cafeteria. “Dr. Stevens,” she said, stepping to the side of the hallway, out of the main flow of foot traffic.

“Yes?” He sidestepped a compact man and joined her as she came to a stop.

“I’m Special Agent Nydia Watt. FBI.”

“Happy to meet you.”

“I hear you’re the only one here from the CDC. You understand this bug?”

“To a degree,” he said.

“Gossip says you were able to explain it to the President.”

“I,” Glenn said, and then stopped himself to weigh his words, suddenly made aware of his proximity to the center of government. “—suppose,” he finished, lamely. “Yes.”

She gave him half a smile. “Perhaps I’ll be able to pick your brain about it later on?”

“Sure.”

“If you’re willing to give me an hour later on, I’d appreciate it. Today would be best. If not, no later than tomorrow?”

“Of course. Whatever I can do. We could talk about it now, over lunch.”

She shook her head. “I’d rather be able to feel free to ask you anything I want. And in private.”

“Okay. Sure.” He felt a bit out of his depth and was wondering about security clearances and what he could say to whom—not something he had considered until this very moment. “Here or wherever. I don’t have anything scheduled yet but the main session.”

“Where are you staying?”

He gave her the name of his hotel. “Great. I’ll get in touch again before the day is out.” And then she walked away.

He followed others into the cafeteria. A big woman in a silk print dress with big red flowers on it was ahead of him in line. She turned, and he saw her face was quite striking. “You’re the CDC fellow?”

“I am.” He introduced himself. And it was with her and her fellow transportation workers that he had lunch. They talked shop at lunch, and their concern was mostly about keeping goods moving around the country as the flu got worse.

“You know,” said the red-dress woman to Glenn, “ninety percent of all vegetables and fruits grown in the US are grown in California. A lot of the rice too. So to get those products from there to here is quite a feat, if you stop and think about it.”

“That’s the thing,” said a man down the table. “People don’t usually stop to think about it. And now we all must.”

Another of her colleagues said, “What is the challenge you see to that, from your perspective, Glenn?”

“I don’t know anything about your area of expertise,” he said.

“Then guess. I won’t hold you to anything you say. What are you thinking that we’re not thinking of? I think that’s part of the point of the taskforce here, right?”

“It is,” said Glenn. Theoretically, the purpose of their being here would be that and coordination, so that people weren’t working at cross-purposes or duplicating effort. “I suppose if I were a truck driver in California and learned the whole eastern third of the US was sick with a killer flu, I’d think twice about driving a load of lettuce here. If I did drive, I’d want to stay in my truck and not step outside it—just dump the pallets, turn right around and drive back, though of course I’d have to get fuel at some point. And,” he said, warming to the topic, “if I’m giving instructions to truck drivers going out from a warehouse in California, I’d tell them not to get out, not to mingle, not to shake hands with a warehouse guy. If I’m his wife—or her husband—I’d probably tell him that too.” He thought for a second. “But you probably already thought of all that. From my perspective as an epidemiologist, if the truck driver does get out, shakes hands, catches the flu, and drives the illness back to California, then there’s yet another outbreak in his town, and another truck driver does the same, and yet another, then the epidemic moves faster in California with more points of origin. Any interstate commerce is bad from an epidemiological perspective. Every truck driver returning from the East Coast could begin his own local outbreak.”

“Though having no interstate commerce is untenable from an economic perspective,” said the man.

Red-dress lady said, “Not to mention the nutritional impact of eating no vegetables. Or acquiring equally as important goods from their point of manufacture or import. Medicine, toilet paper, disposable diapers, you name it.”

“Summer is just beginning,” pointed out a pale, thin woman who had been quiet until now. “People could grow their own vegetables.”

“Maybe we need someone from USDA to mention that to,” said the man. “I might know a guy.” He made a note on his phone, then said, “Like victory gardens.”

That shifted the conversation to a debate on the will of the people to do what might need to be done, on how they’d react when fewer goods were on the shelves. Glenn stayed quiet for most of the discussion. These were obviously smart people, and they seemed to really care about what was going to happen to the citizens as this got worse, but he couldn’t help but think that he could still be doing more good out in the trenches—or at least on the phone with hospitals and public health departments, helping them prepare for the day when the flu swept over their own towns in earnest.

The afternoon’s only interesting bit of information was that he’d be expected to make a presentation to the larger group tomorrow morning. Not much warning, but he could manage it.

He was outside in the hall during a break, leaning against the wall, looking up the number for calling a cab in case he couldn’t flag one outside, when the female FBI agent approached him again.

“I was hoping we could talk.”

“Now?” Glenn said.

“If you’re free, after you’re done here. I’d appreciate it if you could delay your dinner plans by a couple hours, so we can get finished today.”

“I have no dinner plans. If you want to do it over dinner? That’d work for me.”

“We need to have privacy.”

“Ah. Well, where then?”

“Your hotel would do. Is your room comfortable? Have a table and space to work?”

“It does have a table. Or we could see if there’s a conference room open there if you need to spread out more.”

“Either. Let’s get started on this. I’ll drive straight there when you’re done here.”

“If you’re driving straight there, you could drive me, if you would. I couldn’t get a rental car.”

“Of course. Happy to. I’ll meet you right here when they let you go for the day, okay?”

She was as good as her word. After the last long taskforce session, he found her leaning against the same wall. “Ready?” she asked him.

“Sure.”

He followed her out, down the street to a parking garage, and gave her the cross streets for his hotel so she could program her GPS with it. When she was pulled up at a stoplight, he said, “Did you volunteer for the taskforce, or did you get assigned?”

“Neither. I’m not really on the taskforce. I’m doing something else, and yes, it’s my assignment.”

“Oh? Can I ask what?”

“I was there in large part to meet you.”

“Lots of meetings to sit through to accomplish that.”

“I didn’t sit through the afternoon sessions.”

“Okay. So, what’s up?”

“I need to pick your brain. Possibly at length.”

He wondered why she hadn’t just phoned the regional CDC office and found someone there to talk with. And surely they had a bioterror expert in the FBI, someone who knew the science. Still, he was here to cooperate, so he didn’t ask her why she’d selected him. “Pick away.”

“Tell me about the virus.”

“Okay. It’s avian flu,” he began, but stopped when she shook her head.

“I’ve read up on it. Wikipedia, WHO, CDC, flu.gov. It’s new. That’s what I’m interested in. Tell me about that. Its newness.”

“Oh, okay. It’s nothing we’ve seen before.”

“And that’s not just the humans giving it to humans part.”

“That’s some of why it’s different. Or it’s why we knew it was new, that it had mutated enough to make that happen.”

“But it hasn’t mutated. That’s the whole point, right?”

“No, it didn’t mutate on its own.” He hesitated. “Should I be asking for your ID, or your security clearance, or something?”

“Yes. Both of those. And you might also call the FBI to make sure I’m who I say I am.”

He didn’t. “I’d tell you my security clearance, but I can’t recall what it is.”

She told him.

“And, while I’ll check with my director on this question too, what’s the FBI’s opinion on how much I should be discussing this sort of thing at the taskforce?”

“It’s not for me to say. But not everyone there has your clearance, much less mine.”

“I have to warn you, much of what I’m going to tell you is likely to leak out to the press anyway.”

“Why do you say that?” She made the last turn to the street the hotel was on when the GPS cued her to.

“Because back at the CDC, they’re calling all possible labs in the U.S. to make sure they didn’t create the bug. Or, rather, they’ve probably talked to everyone domestic by now, as well as the couple of labs in Canada who have the ability, and are reaching out internationally by this point. They may even have on-site investigations started.”

“Hmm,” she said, as if she didn’t entirely approve of some part of that.

Glenn hadn’t thought about it from a security standpoint. He wondered if Lorraine had. Had she talked to the FBI or Homeland about those calls to labs before instructing someone to make them? “It’s probably done by now. Though I’m starting to see the point of a taskforce.”

“Too slow and unwieldy,” said Agent Watt. “But your point is that it will leak out?”

“Yeah. Someone in a lab will mention it casually at home, or to colleagues. At least within the community of virologists and microbiologists working in the U.S., they’ll be wondering where a new subclade came from too—asking questions, gossiping amongst themselves. If a reporter does some basic research and thinks to phone one, I’m not sure they won’t answer any and all questions put to them. Is that really so bad?”

She parked the car. “Could be bad, could be useful. Hard to predict. If the CDC hadn’t phoned them, would they still be able to guess that this might be a terrorist act?”

“Yes, of course. It would be on anyone’s mind who understood virology, as would accidental release. If I were employed in a lab, I’d be triple-checking our own protocols and feeling great relief when I knew it wasn’t us responsible, but then I’d start wondering who was responsible. It doesn’t take much of a leap to go from imagining an accidental to a planned release.” They walked to the hotel’s front door and he said, “Do you—does the FBI—think it was a planned release?”

She didn’t answer. “Ready to go up?” she said instead.

“Sure. Are you hungry? I could order food.”

“I’m fine. Maybe coffee or water?”

“I can brew two cups in the room.”

“Great.” They walked through the lobby in silence and rode the elevator without speaking. He swiped his room card and let her in, glancing around to make sure he hadn’t left the place a mess. Not too bad. The bed wasn’t made as a maid would have done it, but he’d yanked the bedspread up. He tossed his laptop case onto the bed and set about making coffee. “Regular, I assume, and not decaf.”

“Whichever,” she said, looking out the curtain. She pulled the drapes shut, then sat at the round table and slid a laptop onto it. She also produced a small legal pad and a felt-tipped pen and a pencil.

“Few minutes until it’s ready,” Glenn said, sitting opposite her. “So. What is it you want to know?”

“Explain, Dr. Stevens, if you can in simple terms, how exactly this virus is different from the last virus. I understand that the vaccine won’t work on it, so it’s different, but it’s still H5N1, right?”

“Right. But call me Glenn if you’d like.” Glenn set about explaining how viruses mutated, and what exactly had changed. “We don’t have it completely sequenced, but we know these differences exist.”

“And what about this told you it wasn’t a natural mutation?”

“It could be natural. But that’s so unlikely the possibility was rejected.” It was tricky to explain, but he did his best. She asked questions when she didn’t understand, and he thought by the end of his explanation she had grasped the fundamentals. “Sorry if that was dull,” he said.

“Not at all dull. If I had another life to live, perhaps I’d take a degree in microbiology.”

“What’s your degree in?”

“Psychology. It really is fascinating, how just a couple atoms can shift around, and you have a new disease. Something deadly turns benign, or something benign can become deadly.”

“In this case it’s ‘something deadly becomes more so.’”

“Right. And this fellow in the Netherlands a few years ago, he did this too?”

“Yes.” He was surprised she’d done that much background reading on it. “He got it moving between ferrets.”

“Why ferrets? I couldn’t figure that out.”

“They get sick much like people do, and they transmit flu much the same.”

“I thought it was usually guinea pigs you people used. Or mice.”

“Hamsters work too. And ferrets, while used a lot with respiratory disease research, are not without controversy.”

“Animal rights activists, you mean?”

“No, I mean scientists bickering. Is the ferret the best model or not? The debate gets pretty technical and pretty boring, at least to me.”

“And is not germane to our discussion here, I take it?” she said.

“No, Special Agent, it’s not.”

“I’m Nydia, please. So that it jumped to humans so easily wouldn’t depend on the sort of animal that was used to develop the strain of flu in some lab.”

“No.” A light bulb went off. “Oh, you were thinking of tracking test animal orders or deliveries or whatever.”

“Not going to spend a lot of time on that now, thanks to you, if it could be many different animals. Now, my understanding is that subsequent to the Rotterdam experiment with the ferrets, there was a lot of controversy.”

“Indeed there was.”

“And there has been a moratorium, voluntarily, on similar research in the U.S. since then.”

“It’s best to err on the side of caution, many believe. Others believe we need to research for such time as this happens naturally, this sort of mutation, and then we’ll be ready for it.”

“Would we have been? Better prepared today if the moratorium wasn’t in place these past few years?”

“In that short of a time? It’s doubtful research would have taken us very far.”

“So it didn’t cost us an effective vaccine or better treatments to stop that line of research?”

“No. People really don’t understand—” He heard the phrasing and stopped himself. “I’m not trying to be condescending in saying this, but it’s not widely known how limited our capacity is for production of vaccines in this country. Or for production anywhere in the developed world, for that matter. Even if there were a bad bout of some less dangerous sort of flu next winter, a flu we know a lot about, one that has had an effective vaccine for years but might kill eighty thousand, the demand for a vaccine would quickly outstrip both supplies and the ability to create new. There is no way that had we even known ahead of time what the vaccine for a hypothetical H5N1 influenza would look like that we’d have asked for those vaccines to be produced in the facilities there are, instead of asking for the ones that we actually do think we’ll need. We have to request vaccines six months in advance. We ask for a vaccine designed against strains that exist, not pie-in-the-sky ones.”

“Sometimes you guess wrong?”

“We do. Though ‘guess’ is perhaps an unfair word. There are standard methods to arrive at the recommendation, based on epidemiological data from around the world. But yes, a flu can sneak up on us and make us look as if we guessed wrong or don’t know our field very well because of the time involved to produce the vaccines. For six months, pharmaceutical firms are creating the formulation of three to four influenza vaccines combined that we tell them in spring, so that by the first of October, anyone who wants one can get a flu vaccine.”

“So this next winter’s regular flu vaccine is already in production.”

“Well, it was.”

“And they had to stop that and switch to this, is that right? There aren’t enough labs to do both?”

“Not enough labs to do either, really. They are stopping the regular vaccine production, though I’m not certain if they’re throwing out infected eggs or what at this point. They should soon be ready to produce new and will begin as soon as possible. We’re not there yet, though our researchers should have what information is needed within days. And plenty of flu samples.”

“Do you think the timing of this matters?”

“I’m sorry?” He didn’t understand what she was asking.

“Assuming—and that’s why I’m here, that I’m assuming this, part of an FBI work group that is basing our work on this assumption—that this is a terrorist act and not an accident, could it have been timed any better?”

“I—” He bit back an automatic denial. “It’d be hard to time. The first cases of dead crows we know of were three—no, four now—four months ago. A park worker came across some dead crows. We have to assume that if it was introduced or if it escaped from a lab, either way, that it happened at least five months ago.”

“I hadn’t heard of that crow thing. Where was it?”

“Upstate New York.”

“That’s the only case of dead birds?”

“I honestly haven’t kept up on Fish and Game reports, but I could check for you. The testing and so on got shuffled on over to a different agency after we heard of the one incident I just mentioned. But if this is an act of terror, and the way it was introduced was to capture and infect crows, and then release them, there’s no way to know how long that would take to move to humans, or for the human outbreak to take hold. Nor even where crows are in the line of transmission. The first introduction of the disease into their population could have been only two weeks before that half-dozen died in the New York park. Or it could have been six months. Or it could have been a year and a half ago, and introduced into some other bird altogether that we’ve not yet found, which then passed it to crows.”

“So no, to the question on timing.”

“No. It’s too much of a crapshoot. You could help the flu get started, but not control the date the first person became ill, not at all.”

“He got lucky then.”

“Or she.”

Nydia shook her head. “He.”

Glenn sat up straighter. “You have a suspect? You know who it is?”

“Nope, haven’t a clue.”

“But you know it’s not a she.”

She gave him a wintry smile. “I haven’t explained what I do at the FBI, have I?”

“Special Agent, you said.”

“I’m a criminal profiler specializing in domestic terrorists. It’s my job to determine what sort of person would do this. And I conduct interviews.”

“No offense intended, but does that profiling stuff work? Can you with any certainty know who to look for?”

“It’s not as exact a science as, say, discovering the strain of the new flu must be. But we can predict with fair accuracy certain things.”

“Sex of the terrorist being one.”

“Yes. One of the easier matters to predict.”

“How do you do it?”

“Much of it is pure statistics. A smaller portion comes from clinical experience. In training, I interviewed dozens of terrorists in prisons and watched filmed interviews of a thousand more, both known ones and suspects, from all over the world. Profiling is not quite the job that you see in the movies, which is a little more like—I don’t know, tea-leaf reading, the way they portray it. Even without a suspect, I can help narrow the searches that need to take place to find him. I can look at a suspect found through other methods and say ‘possibly’ or ‘doubtful it’s him’ with high accuracy.”

“Really.” Glenn tried to think what that must be like, especially the parts where you have to be locked in a room interviewing a dangerous criminal. “But women can be terrorists, right?”

“Yes. But almost always they act at the behest of men. We’ve yet to find a cadre of women working alone who planned and executed a major terrorist act. Closest we’ve come is a couple of times a pair of women exacted retribution on a rapist who was not convicted of a crime they thought he should be, the crime being perpetrated on one of them, or on one of their close friends, or children. In international terrorism, though? No. Not yet. Not even in domestic. Never women working alone. There are no anti-government, all-female bomb-building communes out in the woods of Montana. And when someone close to him turns in a domestic terrorist, it’s usually a woman with children who is frightened for them—or for herself.”

“What do you think about this time? I’ll play along, assuming we can’t find an accidental release from a lab, including one in Europe. The strain created was there and then carried here. Assuming it’s terrorism, you say it’s a man. Two men? Forty? Americans? Not?”

“Historically, bioterrorism is domestic. Most terrorism is. This holds true around the world. In 2001, it was one of you.”

“One of me? A man, you mean? What happened in 2001?”

“A professional in your field mailed anthrax to various people, including members of Congress.”

He had forgotten that had happened. “Right. Some crazy guy at USAMRIID.”

“A crazy, as you say, white guy scientist. And despite the references to Allah in the notes he sent, not religious at all.”

“Did you catch him?” It had been so long ago, he had forgotten.

“Eventually we knew who it was. We could have done better. We do better, in fact, having learned from those very mistakes in 2001.”

“So you think it’s the same thing here?”

“I’m not willing to commit to that yet. After I process what you tell me tonight, I might be able to hazard a better guess. Let’s start with this. What would it take to create this modified flu? Could you do it in your basement?”

“No,” Glenn said. “Or, it’d be one hell of a basement. A full lab with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment would do it. You’d need to look for a very rich person. And a crazy one.”

“Just to be clear, ‘crazy’ is not quite the term I typically use, but yes. He’ll be narcissistic, and smart, and a psychopath.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Glenn said. “I mean, you’re the expert on mental health, I’m sure. He may well be all those things you said too. But he’s crazy—in the sense of irrational—to develop a killer flu in his own backyard. Or anywhere, but particularly where he lives or works.”

“We’re looking at microbiologists and other known researchers who have left the country in the past six months. Ph.D. students as well. Those who applied for long-term visas or have not returned to their home country, who have overstayed a tourist visa, which would make me suspicious, and then left just this past month.”

“Really?” He had no idea they’d be doing this sort of thing, certainly not already.

“I don’t think it’ll come to anything, but you never know.”

“But leaving the country won’t protect them. In one conversation today, I heard that millions of people leave on planes every day. A few of them would likely have been infected these past few weeks. They flew away infected and disembarked from their planes in a hundred countries, I’ll guarantee you, and it’ll be everywhere within a month. Everywhere. You set off a killer pandemic, and there is no place to hide from it in the 21st century. It’ll be in base camp at Mount Everest in three months. Releasing a killer flu is a form of suicide, a kind of Russian roulette with a virus. That’s the kind of crazy I meant.”

“And yet there are suicide bombers. So it’s something people do. Or, how about this? Could he have developed a vaccine at the same time? Be immune himself?”

“Maybe,” Glenn said, wondering what it would take to do that. “But double the cost and size of the lab, in that case. And for vaccines, you’d need a different sort of expertise, so it wouldn’t be the lone wolf terrorist anymore.” He looked down at his coffee, which was empty, though he didn’t recall drinking it. “Am I a terrible person for finding this interesting? Trying to figure out the person who would do this?”

She shook her head. “If you are, then I’m a terrible person as a career choice.” She looked at her coffee cup too but didn’t pick it up.

“More coffee?” he said.

“No thanks. Water, maybe. I’ll get it.” She took the cup into the bathroom.

He called, “If you’re hungry, I could order in food.”

She walked back, checking her phone as she sat again. “Getting late. I have kept you for a while, haven’t I?”

“No, it’s fine. Really. But I could eat, and something other than cafeteria food. Chinese, pizza?”

She said, “There’s an Indian place that delivers, not too far from here.”

He was pleased she’d said yes. He liked her. And he was getting into the puzzle of this. They took a break to order dinner and then got back to talking.

Nydia said, “So, to reiterate, he might not care if he dies or not. The anthrax terrorist killed himself when he knew he was about to be arrested.”

“How?”

“Over-the-counter drug overdose. Why?”

“Prurient curiosity, I guess. Is that a common form of suicide?”

“No, stats are all over the place. Suicide by cop is probably most common. They get into a shootout, knowing they won’t survive it. But maybe not scientists. Drugs, poison, something like that seems a more likely method for people in your field.”

“Back to our theoretical terrorist today. Is it a political agenda? Just personal—that makes no sense.”

“A political agenda makes more sense to you?” She cocked her head and watched him.

“None of it makes sense to me. All it’s going to do is to cause misery and kill. Yes, in the U.S. first, but all of the Americas too. It will move around the globe, and only draconian measures will slow its spread. Maybe, if some nation closes its borders today, and bans air travel, and sends troops through the streets patrolling to keep people at home, with the government leaving boxes of emergency rations at every door, maybe they could hold it off until there’s a vaccine—if they even have the labs to make vaccine themselves. Totalitarian regimes that have the power to keep people locked in their homes and the will to shoot those who disobey that order tend not to also have labs. But that’s a lot of ifs, and I suspect you won’t see any country successful at preventing its spread.”

“The agenda of the terrorist,” she reminded him.

“My point, which I really was circling around vaguely, wasn’t I, was that it’s an illogical choice as a form of state terrorism, or international terrorism. No country could win. Do you have any hint it’s an international thing? North Korea maybe? They might be the one place isolated enough that could avoid importing it and totalitarian enough to contain it.”

“No,” she said. “Not our job, of course, to check on that. But the NSA and CIA are tracking communications, and I’ve no doubt North Korea is high on their list. Metadata is being combed. Content is being analyzed. Personal communications of course, but also they are searching for hints contained within any policy change or political speech. As I understand it, nothing has set off an alarm yet, suggesting a nation is behind it.”

“So you really think it will be domestic?”

“I’m going on that assumption because that’s what’s under my purview. If it’s not domestic, my next guess—educated guess—would be that it’s someone living elsewhere and acting alone—if that’s even possible, to act alone. Could one person do this? Would it take a whole lab? A hundred workers? Three? How many?”

Glenn wasn’t sure. “With time, maybe one person could.”

“How much time? Two months? Two years? Ten?”

“It wouldn’t take ten years. Two months isn’t long enough, not even for a dozen people working together. Two years is plenty of time. It depends on what he started with.”

“What he started with?”

“The pathogen itself. He’d have to begin with one of the subtypes of known H5N1. If it were me, and I started from a known strain, I’d use what they used in Rotterdam, because that’s a sure thing.”

“And that’s some Indonesian strain, is that right?”

He was impressed. “You really have done your homework.”

“You don’t make it easy to memorize these names, do you? There were some numbers, a date, a string of nonsense to the name, but ‘Indonesia’ is what stuck with me.”

“Right. I’d have to look it up too, to tell you the truth.”

“So he’d start with that strain.”

“I would. I mean, I’d never do this, and no reasonable person would. But a clever and unreasonable person might start there. Catch-22, isn’t it? I’m having a hard time thinking like him. If he’s crazy enough to do this, who knows what he’d do?”

“Terrorists can be great planners, rational at the micro level even though they seem entirely mad otherwise. Good tactics supporting fanatical strategy. Can you tell by looking at the bug itself which strain he did start with? Beyond the H5N1 thing, I mean.”

“I’ll have to check with Chanchal, a colleague. She’s our flu expert. The sequencing of the genome should be almost completed. That’s not normal, by the way. They’re cranking on it, getting it done in record time. It would eliminate some source strains from consideration, I’d think. But I’m not sure it could tell us which exact one was the starting point.”

“And a qualified lab can order supplies of any of those strains, or any disease, correct?”

“Right, but they could also have them on hand, in the freezer.” He thought. “Or....”

“Or?” she said.

“He could have found a new subclade first. In nature, in some host out there. Gulls, geese, ducks, chickens. Maybe something on some island nation, so it was isolated. Or in a bird that no one knew about. And then he used it direct from the natural reservoir. You’d never find a record of an order, then, or an inventory, no matter how far back you looked.”

“So we should be looking at people who investigate disease outbreaks too.”

“Right, people like me. That’s what I do.”

“Here in the U.S., right?”

“Mostly, but I investigate outbreaks everywhere, as do investigators from most of the West. Or from most of the industrialized world, including Japan. Not a lot of nations outside Europe have the resources we do. And since a pandemic can start in Zaire or Bolivia or Tasmania but end up here, it behooves us to do that work for selfish as well as humanitarian reasons. If we can contain it there—if we can understand it while it’s there and isolated and contained—we may never have to suffer infection from it.”

“So while we can—and we already are—running down every lab, every person who has ordered a supply of H5N1 since 9/11, you’re saying they could have had it in the lab, on hand, for years before that. Or they could have taken it out of nature, like by taking a blood sample of an infected animal. And it could have been collected by an investigator like you, or anyone from the CDC, or anyone from the CDC equivalent in other countries?”

“Sure, either. Any. All of those are possible. And in a country like China, where they think admitting to new outbreaks is the equivalent of admitting their political system doesn’t work, discovery of a new strain might not have leaked out to the international community.”

She frowned. “Okay, but I need something for our data guys. They need to program their searches. What are they looking for?”

“Who are they looking for, you mean?”

“Who, what, and where. Searchable items. Orders for supplies. Terms used in emails. Conventions the suspects might have attended. Colleagues they might have contacted. Journals they might subscribe to. Websites we might not have found—something only you guys in the field know about.”

“Oh, right, I see.” He had thought that the Snowden revelations on how much the government monitors citizens were frightening, but he could see how it was good to have that capacity now. If indeed this was an act of terrorism, they might find the culprit by such searches.

So until the food came, he brainstormed lists for her—people, places, websites, searchable terms. The food was delivered, they ate, and they continued to talk for another hour.

“You’re getting tired,” she said.

“I am, and I have to throw together a presentation for tomorrow morning. The taskforce.”

“Right. How’s that going?”

“Slowly so far. They mentioned something about work groups. If it could be like what we did here tonight, maybe that would be useful.” He felt himself reddening. “I mean, if it was useful to you. Because I was engaged in the topic doesn’t mean you learned one damn thing from me.”

“I did learn things. I’ll be contacting you again, and probably soon. The Director was right.”

“Director. Of the FBI?”

“Yes. He said you had a lot on the ball and hated bullshit and stupidity, a little too obviously, but that you were also able to explain things quickly and clearly.”

“Well thanks, but....” He shrugged. There was really nothing to say to that. “Was he at the White House thing?”

“Yes. And he’s not bad at profiling himself, it seems.” She offered her hand.

He wanted to take it. But he shook his head. “The first thing I’m going to say tomorrow, at the taskforce, is to quit shaking hands. Quit air-kissing. Keep five or six feet between you and the next guy if you can.”

“Ah. Yes, I see your point.” She looked down at her hand and reeled it back in. “Weird feeling, though, isn’t it?”

“Almost an impossible habit to break. And you feel like a total ass saying no—rude, or worse.”

“We need a new gesture then.” She gave him a girly toodle-oo wave, then chuckled. “No, not real professional.”

“And I can’t see the President doing it with the generals.”

She laughed again, a real laugh this time. “I might pay to see that. Again, thanks. Here’s my card, with cell phone written on the back. Any time you have a thought, call me. Day or night.”

“Okay. Same thing goes for me. If you wake up and need to run something by me, I’ll be happy to help.”

“Good luck with your speech tomorrow.” She left.

He cleaned up the remnants of dinner. The room was redolent of chicken curry. And a vague scent beneath that, which was Nydia’s.

I like her.

He shook off the thought and got down to work. While he’d been playing spy, his emails and voicemails has piled up. He sorted them by urgency and got to work.

He was more than a little groggy the next morning as he stepped up to the microphone to give his presentation. He hadn’t prepared until this morning over breakfast. At least as a result he was using the very newest stats in his speech. The Incident Command Center back in Atlanta was humming along, people working around the clock. He even had a cool animation package from Harper.

Well, cool if you didn’t stop to think it was about suffering and death.

He started, as he’d promised Nydia, with a warning to quit shaking hands with people. “And if you forget, which you will at first, go wash your hands, and make sure not to touch your face before you do. Hot water, as hot as you can bear. Soap. At least two minutes of washing too. Pretend you’re a TV surgeon, except you can stop at your wrists and not go up to the elbows.”

He saw someone at the back of the room hurry out the door, holding up their hands as if they were afraid of them. Good. He’d rather have people paranoid about it than careless. “Avoid airplanes, busses, and crowded lecture halls.”

That got a nervous laugh.

“I understand that everyone here has been offered the vaccine we have on hand. Take it. We don’t know yet if it’s effective, but if it is and you refused it, you’ll feel like an idiot when you’re dying of something you could have prevented. And for pity’s sake, when the vaccine targeted for this particular flu comes out, get your kids vaccinated. There is absolutely zero risk of any mental illness from vaccines. That’s nonsense and superstition. Try to think smarter than a primitive who can’t read and is living in the jungle with a witch doctor explaining illness. Vaccines save lives. And moreover, with wide vaccination, we can stop a pandemic in its tracks. And that’s what we have here, folks—a pandemic in its early stages.”

He had their attention. He ran the scariest of the animations. “These red dots represent Americans becoming infected and the black ones represent them dying. Every dot is a thousand people.” The animation ran and he called out the time markers. “Today. One week from now. Two weeks. One month.” He stopped it at three months. Everything from Boston to Miami was solid black. Only west of the Mississippi were there any bare patches remaining and then most of it was bright red. There were some blanks left in Wyoming and Montana where population density was low.

“Three months from now, we may have over a million dead, and over forty million infected, three quarters of them doomed to death as well. And that’s if we do everything entirely right. If we stop having public gatherings like concerts and sporting events. If people stay at home from work and telecommute instead. If we pump up the healthcare infrastructure to the greatest extent we can in this short time available to us. If we train the Red Cross and other NGOs to take some of the burden of testing. And even if we come up with an antiviral drug cocktail that works, which we have not, it will still be bad. And here’s the animation that takes us out a year.”

Within a year, the whole country—the lower forty-eight states, which is all it showed—was dark. “Each dot, a thousand dead. But you need to think beyond that number. Orphaned children. Cemeteries too full to bury people, so we’ll need landfills for corpses or vast funeral pyres. Economic and social breakdown in the cities is likely, though perhaps we here can do something to mitigate that. Starvation is not an impossible outcome. And I tell you what. If we don’t do anything at all, or if we all do a terrible job here, we could lose two hundred million people in two years. That’s how bad this flu is. Don’t tell yourself that it’s only the flu. Don’t fool yourself. This is our own Black Death.” He gestured at the screen that ended the animation, a nation painted in black.

Overdramatic? Maybe. But not a word was untrue.

He had planned his speech to increase in optimism as he went on. He explained how very close they were to a vaccine formula, how there were labs geared up and waiting to begin production immediately. He reminded them about the National Strategic Stockpile of antivirals and medical supplies, which would be dispersed as needed to the afflicted areas. He told them that every hospital and public clinic worker in the country was being administered the vaccine on hand, in the hope that there’d be enough healthcare workers to care for all the sick.

He had been told not to take questions, but when he was done, three dozen hands shot up, and questions were called out. If some of them hadn’t been aware how serious the situation was before this morning, he had just driven the news home to them.

He looked to the chair of the taskforce and shrugged, meaning, “Do I answer these questions or not?”

She came up to the microphone. “If you can write your questions down, I’ll collect them later, at the lunch break. And we can squeeze in Dr. Stevens again at the end of the day, and he’ll answer them then. All right, here’s Cassandra Jakes of the Federal Aviation Administration on the new air travel advisories.”

Glenn returned to his seat. A woman about his age who he had been sitting next to before the speech stared at him, white-faced, as if he were a space alien who just sat next to her rather than the same man she had been seated next to before the presentation. He smiled at her and she recoiled.

He didn’t really care. If he had scared them, good. If he made them work smarter and pushed them to make more conservative decisions, ones that valued healthcare priorities over political ones, great. It would save lives.

There was a lot to take in that morning. Two people referred to him, one saying, “At least that was our plan before I heard the CDC doc here. Maybe we should reconsider some of that.”

Glenn took the fifteen-minute mid-morning break to phone Emile. “How’s your brother?” he said.

“In hospital.”

“I’m so sorry to hear it.”

“Breathing on his own, still. I hope that continues.”

“So do I, man. Look, I only have a few minutes, and I apologize for changing the subject so quickly, but I think if Roy is free, I should have him here, or someone like him.”

“A generalist?”

“That, yeah, but more to the point, someone glib and friendly. I think I just scared the crap out of everyone, and they may want a more friendly type to interact with than mean old me.”

“Done. If Gillens isn’t free, I’ll send Jackson.”

“He’s back from the MERS?”

“Yeah, we’ve recalled everyone. Other countries—other diseases—are going to have to fend for themselves right now.”

“Understood. Sure, Jackson is great. Couldn’t ask for better.”

When he was off the phone, he had three people staring at him, obviously with questions. He smiled and said, “Okay, who’s the most terrified?”

“Me,” said one woman. “I have three kids of my own and two foster kids. Should I cancel everything for them? Summer camps? No public swimming pool?”

“You’re great for doing the foster care parenting,” he said. “And yes. If they were my kids, I would cancel. Break the news to them tonight, but give them a day to say goodbye to best friends in person, maybe? I don’t know about being a mom. I admit I’m only an uncle and that’s my best guess at what might be a compromise the kids could live with.”

“You think we have a couple safe days still?” a skinny man asked.

“It’s here, but it’s not like it is in New York and Jersey yet. I don’t want to reassure you and have you and your family contract it because I said you have two days, understand. But I think you have time to stock up on groceries and entertainments for the kids.”

“I wonder if Amazon will still deliver once it gets going,” said the woman.

The group around him was larger now. A big man with a James Earl Jones voice said, “Until the truck drivers are too sick to drive, they should.” In that voice, it sounded a mournful prediction.

“Yeah,” said the skinny man. “That’s the thing. Everybody gets sick. It’s not like it passes over mail carriers and nurses. Right?” The last was directed to Glenn.

“In a lot of disease outbreaks, half the people who get sick and half who die are healthcare workers. They’re brave people, the ones on the front lines working with the sick.”

“Is this it?” asked one of the first three who had waited for him, a chubby guy with a shaved head. “The end of the world as we know it, and I should bug out to my cabin in the woods?”

Someone else said, “Jim, if you do, who will be on the taskforce?”

“Fuck a bunch of taskforces,” he said, which got him some dirty looks.

“There’s no reason to panic,” Glenn said. “Look, if anyone should panic, it’s me, right? I know how the disease works. I knew immediately when we identified it as H5N1 a few weeks ago that we were in for very bad times. But I stayed put in New Jersey and did my job—along with twenty other CDC people, and a couple from Fish and Wildlife—until we had all the facts. None of us contracted it. Be afraid, but be afraid sensibly, if you understand my point. Panic leads to bad decisions, and bad decisions can kill you too.”

“You’re not exaggerating this, are you?” asked a slight woman, with Philippine ancestors, he thought, from her looks.

“No. The fatality rate is seventy-eight percent, with higher rates for children and the elderly and slightly better for adults in their prime, like most of us here.”

“So fifty-fifty for me?”

“Close to a fifty-fifty chance of surviving it if you get it,” he said, though it was more like a forty percent chance of surviving, even for the healthiest young adults. “And you can work at not getting it—work smart at that, and the fatality rate won’t ever come into play.”

Another woman stepped forward and said, “Is it worth wearing a mask to these meetings? Or everywhere?”

“If you can tolerate it, it certainly won’t hurt. In fact, I’ll put that on my question-and-answer agenda, showing everyone how to use a mask most effectively.” There must be a YouTube video on it he could play for them.

“We should have a big box of masks here,” said someone.

“Can we just go to the drugstore and get some?” someone else asked.

When his phone rang, Glenn apologized and backed away from the crowd. It was a number he didn’t know, but it was a DC area code, and he thought it could be Nydia’s, so he answered it.

It was her. “Hey, Glenn, a question.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“We’re modifying our searches, based on some of what you said. I was wondering, if there were people communicating—thinking maybe there’s a small team of scientists, two to four researchers involved, perhaps emailing each other—would they ever use the names of other scientists? Like the guy in Rotterdam, or the other names on that paper. Would they say, ‘we should consider the 2015 whoever results?’ or ‘use so-and-so’s method?’”

“They might.”

“Then could you get me a list of whatever papers might be referenced? I’ve done searches in the scientific literature databases, but there’s so much that’s too technical for me. I can’t tell which is applicable and which is irrelevant.”

“Sure, I could do that. But Chanchal would be better. She’s the CDC head of virology. She’d probably be able to recite you fifty names without having to look them up.”

“Can you do it, though? I hate to add to your workload, but I’d rather keep this between us. Just in case, you know.”

It took him a minute to connect the dots. “Chanchal is no way involved in this if that’s what you’re thinking. I can’t imagine anyone at the CDC would be.” Then the other shoe dropped. “Damn, I bet you’re monitoring all our communications, aren’t you? Making sure no one is reporting back to some co-conspirator. That wouldn’t happen, Nydia. For one thing, nearly everything we know is public knowledge, or soon will be, so revealing any secret would be just revealing it a few days before it’s common knowledge.”

“Like the sequencing of the genes? You publish that already?”

“I—I don’t know. Eventually we will. But I don’t know when. Or if someone—I guess that’d be your boss, huh? Or maybe the head of Homeland. In either case, if someone may have told our Director that everything has changed and we can’t publish, then we probably wouldn’t. Damn, I wouldn’t want to be in on that argument. I take your point, though.”

“Why would there be an argument with your Director over that topic?”

“Well, your perspective—and Homeland’s—must be that everything possible should be kept secret. Whereas ours is that science only progresses when everything is made public, and others can replicate research or use it to go further.”

“I’d like to have this debate with you one day, which view is right, but for now we’re trying to get the data mining searches set up.”

“Right, of course. So you want me to do it, not Chanchal.”

“If you can.”

“I’ll be slower than she would be, but yeah, I can get it done. I’ll skip the rest of the morning’s sessions and call you before lunch.”

“Write it out longhand, and I’ll send a courier. I’d rather not get the list over a cell phone.”

“Right. Spy stuff.” He was amused and it probably showed in his tone.

“That’s right.” She was clearly not amused.

He meant it seriously when he said, “So will the courier use a password or something, then? So I know he’s for real?”

“He’ll have a badge with ‘FBI’ on it,” she said dryly. “Thanks for the help.”

Glenn figured he’d just said something quite stupid. He had a flash of high-school-level insecurity about girls and then shook it off. Women were just like men. There was nothing mysterious about them.

Okay, maybe there was a little bit mysterious about them.

Instead of attending the rest of the orientation lectures, he went to the cafeteria, ordered a large coffee, and did some research for the FBI. Luckily, he had a pad of paper in his case and a pen from the hotel. He suspected the FBI had scientists on staff too, but perhaps it was specialized enough information that whoever they had couldn’t get together this list as quickly as he. He thought about phoning Chanchal anyway because she could do it faster but then thought better of it. All he needed at this point was for them to suspect he was part of a terrorist cell and—

Wait. They didn’t think that, did they? Nydia hadn’t been investigating him rather than brainstorming with him last night?

No. Surely not. But a tickle of paranoia settled at the back of his neck. He really did not think it was so, but he couldn’t shake the odd feeling that he was being watched. When he looked around, no one was paying him any attention at all.

Yep, paranoia.

By eleven-thirty he had done as well as he could, and he phoned Nydia. He left a message and got a text back. “Meet him on front steps of building in :15.”

Glenn took the elevator up and waited outside, watching people coming and going, trying to pick the FBI guy out of the crowd. When he arrived, Glenn had no problem seeing who he was. So much for clever spy stuff. The guy might as well have been wearing a neon sign with “FBI” on it. White guy, straight-backed, haircut from 1962. The only incongruous note was the tablet computer he held in his left hand.

He trotted up to where Glenn waited and said, “Dr. Stevens?”

“Yes. Do you need to see ID?”

“No, I saw a photo of you on the CDC website. Here’s my identification.”

Glenn glanced at it, realizing it could have been from a box of cereal, for all he knew. He had no idea what an FBI badge looked like in real life. Probably should have Googled that first.

Without looking at the papers Glenn handed to him, the fellow folded them and tucked them in an inner pocket. Glenn had thought little of the tablet computer the man held, but now he handed it to Glenn. “This is for you.”

“It is? Why? I have a laptop.”

“It’s encrypted. For communicating sensitive information.”

“Oh, I see. But if I connect to a cell service or WiFi, doesn’t that become insecure?”

“Government satellite. It’s linked up.”

“Aha.” He looked at it, found the on button and turned it on.

Enter password.

“Enter a new password to set it. Twelve letters, uppercase and lower, numbers, symbols, no real words, no birthday or soc numbers.”

“Right.” He looked at it. No brand name on it. Spy stuff. He said, “I bet you can track me with this too, can’t you?”

The agent gave him a wintry smile. “Dr. Stevens, you have a cell phone. We ping them all the time. We can know where almost anyone in America is at any moment if we want to.” With that, he pivoted smartly and left.

“Thanks,” Glenn muttered. “Like I wasn’t paranoid enough already.”

In the elevator, he came up with one of those phrases you’re taught to use for passwords in the government. You come up with a quote you know and use the initial letters. Like, “Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.” TwDnRhAc2Ri! Voila, a password of twelve characters.

He chose Pasteur’s line, “Messieurs, c'est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot.” In English, “Gentlemen, it is the microbes who will have the last word.” Not so famous it was guessable, but one he would remember. Change each ‘i’ to a 1, put in a colon after the G, and he had a password he could remember—G:11tMwWhTlW

He returned to the floor the taskforce was on, saw people milling about in the hall, and wove his way into the conference room to see how collecting of questions was going.

The moderator waved him over and said, “I noticed you left.”

“Yeah, sorry. Someone needed me for something that couldn’t wait. What did I miss?”

“You should probably try and get notes from someone.” Her tone was officious, as if Glenn had sinned by missing a session—part of the reason Glenn had no patience for these sorts of alphabet soup meetings. People jockeying for position, getting offended over nothing, taking on the worst qualities of second grade teachers—or of second-graders, as often as not.

He only smiled, insincerely, and said, “You have a list of questions for me to answer?”

“A few will be coming in on your email. But yes, here are some notes.” She handed him a pile of torn paper, Post-it notes, and one piece of official HHS stationary. “I’ll have to schedule you for the very last thing. I can’t promise people will still be paying much attention.” She made it sound as if it were no less than he deserved for not attending the last two hours of lectures.

“Thanks,” was all he said, and he turned away. He was recognizing a few faces now, putting names to them, putting agencies to them. He followed the herd out to the hallway. The foster-mother woman from earlier spotted him and approached him. “Could you do me a favor?”

“If I can, sure.”

“Keep me up to date on your numbers about DC metro area.”

“You know, that’s a good idea anyway. I could send a group email, perhaps, every morning. There must be a lot of worried people here.”

“You know what else we need?” she said.

“What’s that?”

“A website, just for the taskforce.”

“That’s a great idea,” Glenn said.

“Thanks. That means it’ll never happen. Or it’ll get finalized about six months from now.”

He laughed. “I’m not used to Washington myself.”

“Oh, you lucky, lucky man.”

“I’m sorry, but I didn’t get your name.”

“Em Hailey. DOC, Economics and Statistics.”

“Ah.”

“I know. Not very useful, you’re thinking, not in this situation.”

“I’m sure it’s important.”

She smirked. “Whatever it is that I do, you mean.” She waved off any apology he was thinking of making. “Economics. I know. It seems like little better than the horoscope to a lot of people. But we do the census. Not me personally—my department. I’m a financial economist.”

Glenn thought economists did have a poor track record in predicting the future, though census information was useful to projecting the outcome of the disease.

“We need a handle on the impact of this thing, via tracking economic indicators.”

“I’m not being adversarial, but to what end? I mean, tell me the practical use of predicting how much GDP we’ll lose or whatever.”

“The Fed can change interest rates. We can print more money. Try to stabilize the dollar. There are actions we can take. Or that someone else can take—I’m not part of that. I crunch numbers, report, and others decide how to respond.”

“That much, I understand. We do our own number crunching.”

“Yeah, the animations this morning showed that. Effective, if you meant to scare.”

He hesitated and then said, “I suppose I did. I mean, I intended to be accurate, and reality is scary right now. I wasn’t unaware of that.”

“Tell me about it. If your numbers are right, and I have no reason to doubt that they are, it’ll take us two generations to recover economically from this. At least two.”

“Is there someone here from INS? I’m thinking we’ll be begging for immigrants before it is all said and done.”

“Good point. I hope the IRS is thinking about it too. Probably once this is over, we will raise the per-child income tax deduction to encourage bigger families again.”

“Oh.” The discussion had made a light bulb go off for him. “You’ll have to excuse me.”

“Find me in the cafeteria tomorrow. We can have lunch together.”

“Sounds good,” he said, as he got back on the elevator, just to get some privacy.

He took out his new tablet, typed in the password, and emailed Nydia:

Subject: Have you thought about this?

What if instead of politics, or religion, this is an act of T. about overpopulation? Everyone knows it’s a problem. And the first—and only guaranteed—effect of this flu will be depopulating humans, first in the US and then throughout the world. Maybe that’s the agenda, nothing more, nothing less. Is there such a thing as a radical zero population activist?

He rode down, saw a soda machine, and grabbed himself a can. About a quarter of the way through drinking it, he heard his tablet ping. He signed on again and looked at his inbox.

RE: Have you thought about this?

There are radical EVERYTHING activists.

Good thinking. - Nydia

He felt inordinately pleased at the praise.