Becks and I did the driving in shifts, six hours on, six hours off. After the first two shifts, the one who’d just finished a shift would move to the backseat to sleep, while one of the passengers would move up front to keep the driver from passing out. Mahir didn’t have a license to drive in the USA, and while Kelly could drive, she didn’t have her field license, and was too jumpy to drive safely. So it was just the two of us, and that meant taking turns.

Mahir and I worked on our strategy—such as it was—when Becks slept, using Kelly as a sort of a sanity check. “It’s not that I’m not willing to die for this story,” Mahir said, reasonably. “It’s just that I’d rather not be martyred and leave the tale half-told if there’s any other option.” Even George had to admit that this was a sound approach, and so the four of us put our three heads together and tried to come up with something that wouldn’t get us all killed for good. It was harder than it sounded, which was impressive, since it sounded pretty damn difficult. Finally, we decided to go with what we had: surprise, and the threat of going public without letting the CDC tell their side of the story.

The farther we got from Maggie’s house, the dumber our makeshift plan looked… and the more obvious it became that there wasn’t another way. When the corruption seems to go all the way to the end of the world, the only good approach is through the front door with a gun in each hand. No one was going to help us take on the CDC, not with our resources and reputation, and not with the radio silence coming out of the White House. That meant we needed to play to our strengths, and our strengths came from lifelong training in shoving microphones at danger and demanding that it explain itself. It wasn’t much. It was going to have to be enough.

We stopped at a seedy motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, the night before we got to Memphis. They took cash and didn’t look too hard at our IDs. No matter how high-tech the world gets, there will always be places designed for people who are looking to slip between the cracks. This was one of them. The man behind the desk didn’t know who we were, and better, he didn’t want to know. Becks and I checked in together, letting Mahir and Kelly wait in the van until the necessary transactions had been completed. The man was disinterested. He was also a modern American, which meant he might have seen Kelly’s face on the news, and might well wonder what a dead woman was doing wandering around Arkansas with a couple of disreputable-looking types like me and Becks.