Wally was silent for a moment, which was unlike him. When he spoke, the bluster had left his voice. “What I’m reading about the autopsy report worries me, Kiki. Do you have any contacts on the ground in Spain? Or Morocco? Maybe you can dig a little, see if you can come up with anything that hasn’t hit the net yet.”

“I’m on vacation, Wally.”

“Sure,” he said smoothly. “Honestly, Kiki, if anyone needs a break from work, it’s you.”

A break from work.

Work: sad though it is, not everyone is familiar with the Epidemic Intelligence Service. For that matter, not everyone is familiar with the Public Health Service, with the Centers for Disease Control, or even with the most basic principles of what constitutes an infectious disease. Some people still believe smallpox was eradicated by hand washing, or that chill air can make you sick, or that you can catch the flu from a flu vaccine. I spend most of my time these days in an office instead of in the field with EIS teams, but fieldwork remains my first love.

The EIS consists of a rapid-reaction squad of elite professionals deployed by the CDC in the event of a catastrophic disease outbreak. They’re the nerd version of the Green Berets or the Navy SEALs or Batman. During the two years of extra training the EIS provides to its enrollees, their members are prepared to dash to the four corners of the globe to investigate, combat, and constrain microscopic killers.

Although many of them are physicians, you don’t have to be a medical doctor to be accepted into the EIS. Wally, for example, possesses two degrees: a Ph.D. in virology and a master’s degree in epidemiology. Some attendees hail from the fields of dentistry or nursing or veterinary medicine. Once, one was even a lawyer. All of them undergo a vigorous application process, hoping to be one of seventy-some people picked for a slot out of an applicant pool of more than six hundred.

Once selected, the chosen ones commence two years of intensive training. This starts out with Epi Boot Camp, in which they smear black camouflage on their faces, slog through a nine-mile obstacle course, and then engage in near-lethal bouts of hand-to-hand combat, Hunger Games–style, to weed out the losers. Okay: not really. In reality, they begin by parking their butts in a lecture hall to review the fundamentals of statistical analysis. Not quite as sexy as a physical boot camp, but there’s still a certain intensity at the notion of using your intellect to outwit witless genocidal superbugs. I, for one, think Hollywood could make something quite special out of our collection of alluring brainiacs.