“Sure. Let’s hope there aren’t any.”
“Let’s hope.”
A pattern of medication consumption had revealed the Pinckney’s advanced level of infection. If the vector had somehow escaped the flotilla and made it to the mainland, the same consumption patterns would likely hold true. Through Kimber, Tim had programmed the CDC’s database to track spikes in the purchase of cough suppressant, pain medication and fever reducer.
Kimber typed with her mouth open. Damn, that girl had pretty lips.
“Here we are,” she said. “They just came in. Let’s see…”
She stopped talking. She just sat there.
“Kimber, what is it?”
She blinked, looked up at the camera, those dark eyes widening with fright.
“There’s a geospecific spike,” she said. Her words rattled with tension. “I read a nine hundred percent increase in cough suppressant, eleven hundred in pain meds, and a two thousand percent jump in fever reducer.”
Tim said nothing. He didn’t have to, because the numbers said it all — the infection had escaped quarantine. Could Cheng’s team on Black Manitou have fucked something up? That seemed impossible; Tim had seen the facilities there, knew how foolproof they were. Then how? Had something floated away from the Los Angeles, drifted for miles until it was picked up by some random boater?
He swallowed. There was still hope; maybe this was an isolated outbreak. A small town in Wisconsin, perhaps, something that Longworth’s semi-illegal DST soldiers could isolate and quarantine.
Tim closed his eyes. Before he spoke, he gave in to superstition.
God, please don’t let it be a major city…
“Where?”
She didn’t want to say it any more than he wanted to hear it.
“The one I just read you, that’s the biggest one… it’s from Chicago.”
Tim’s balls felt like they wanted to shrivel up and hide somewhere in his belly. Chicago — the third-largest city in America, the very heart of the Midwest.
“The biggest one? There are others?”
She nodded. “Statistically significant spikes in Benton Harbor, Michigan, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and” — she looked straight into the camera, dead into Tim’s eyes — “New York City.”
Minneapolis? Chicago? New York? It was already too late: nothing could stop it from spreading.
“Send me the data.”
He looked at the numbers himself, hoping Kimber had suddenly contracted a case of the stupids, hoping she was wrong.
She wasn’t.
Forty-odd hours had passed since the Pinckney and the Brashear went to the bottom. The statistical spikes indicated the Chicago infection had begun shortly after that battle.
The second-largest spike came from Benton Harbor, a town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. That infection looked to have started just a few hours after Chicago’s began, New York’s and Minneapolis’s three to four hours after that.
It had begun in Chicago. Benton Harbor was only two hours away… based on what Tim knew of incubation periods, someone could have driven there from Chicago. That matched what he saw in the data. But New York? A twelve-hour drive. The level of spikes indicated New York was only six to eight hours behind Chicago in the level of infection.
That meant one thing and one thing only: a carrier had been in an airport.
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.