Pandemic Page 93

MURDER

Steve Stanton sat up and turned on the light. He squinted, blinked. Was it still night? The heavy curtains shut out all traces of the outside. He looked at the alarm clock on the little nightstand next to his hotel bed: 11:52.

He squinted, saw a little red light at the bottom left of the time, next to white letters that read “AM.”

Eleven fifty-two in the morning. He’d slept all day, all night, and into the next day. Were hangovers supposed to last this long?

He reached to the nightstand and grabbed the bottle of Chloraseptic he’d paid a bellboy to bring him. He opened his mouth, sprayed the cooling, numbing mist against the back of his throat.

It helped a little.

Steve wondered how Cooper and Jeff were doing. Maybe they’d already checked out of the hotel and were headed back to Michigan.

He’d wanted to tell Cooper what had really happened, maybe get some help in case Bo Pan came back. Steve had worked it all out in his head the night before, thought he was safe … but maybe he wasn’t. Should he call the police? If he did, would that put his family in jeopardy? And for that matter, would the police turn him over to the CIA? Maybe even send him to China?

But … what if Cooper had contacted Bo Pan? What if Cooper and Jeff had given Bo Pan Steve’s room number … what if all three of them were on their way to kill Steve right now?

He sucked in a big breath. That was a crazy thought. It didn’t even make sense. How could Cooper reach Bo Pan? Steve didn’t need to make up illogical fears about Cooper and Jeff, not when there were plenty of very real things to worry about.

Like the small matter of a dead navy diver. Murder. An act of war.

Some “hero” Steve had turned out to be.

What was he going to do? Maybe he was missing something, not thinking it through because he felt so awful.

He sprayed again, letting the cool feeling spread through his throat. That was enough for now. He needed rest.

Steve put his head back down on the pillow. He closed his eyes.

The hero slept.

LEADERSHIP

Murray had never heard the Situation Room this quiet. The only sound came from a few monitors that played newscasts at low volume. He couldn’t hear anyone typing. No one talked. No one cleared their throats. No one even moved.

Blackmon folded her hands together, rested her forearms on the tabletop.

“How did it get off the flotilla?”

When she got mad, when the cameras weren’t around, her stare burned with intensity. She looked predatory.

“We don’t know, Madam President,” Murray said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.

The predator’s stare bore into him.

“Three cities,” she said. “Chicago, Minneapolis, New York. Is that all?”

“And western Michigan,” Murray said. “Doctor Feely thinks there will be more. He thinks a carrier went through one of the Chicago airports.”

She still had that presidential look about her, but how long would that visage stay at the fore? The disease had broken quarantine, spread to three areas of very dense population. Things were about to get bad in a hurry, and on her watch — she couldn’t blame Gutierrez for this one.

“Do we know who the carrier is? Can we trace the travel pattern?”

Murray shook his head. “No, Madam President. At this point we have no idea who the carrier is, or where the carrier went.”

Hands still folded, Blackmon tapped her left pointer finger against the back of her right hand.

“What do Doctor Cheng and Doctor Montoya think?”

Murray felt a little embarrassed.

“Doctor Montoya is still on the Coronado, so she can’t help us much right now.” Margaret was there, and mad as hell. She had predicted the infection would escape, said they needed to be preparing a “hydra strategy,” and Murray hadn’t backed her play. After all the times she’d been right, he’d doubted her: now he was paying the price.

Margaret was out of the picture, which meant he had to rely on the man who, frankly, wasn’t in her league.

“Doctor Cheng thinks we’re now in a race against time,” Murray said. “The vector is in the wild. He said the patterns show it’s highly contagious, on a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The only thing we can do to mitigate exposure is to inoculate as many people as possible, as fast as possible.”

Blackmon stared at Murray like she wanted to pin the blame on him. But she knew as well as he did that she couldn’t politic her way out of this one. Americans were going to die: what remained to be seen was how many.

The president turned to Admiral Porter. “What’s the status of inoculating our troops?”

The first batches of inoculant had come to Washington, of course. Murray had drank a bottle of the nasty stuff himself. The military was next in line. If the people with guns became converted, that would create another level of problems.

Admiral Palmer rattled off a litany of bases. The biggest of them — Fort Hood, Norfolk, Fort Bragg, and a few others — were inoculating their own troops and already creating starter cultures for other bases. Within three days, five at the most, every soldier, sailor and airman on U.S. soil would be protected. That was, of course, if the infection wasn’t already spreading through some of those garrisons.

“We’ve also ordered all bases on foreign soil to lock up tight,” Porter said. “No one in and no one out. They’re already constructing their own culturing plants. As soon as starter cultures are available, we’ll ship them. We project eight to ten days until all foreign bases are fully inoculated.”

Chapter end