“We’ll get through this together, girl, and none of that ‘or die trying.’ We are not going to die, and our enemies will be sorry they ever thought they could make us run or blink first, or whatever they thought we might do. We are tougher, smarter, stronger.” I was only shivering because of the early-morning cold, not because I was scared.

I couldn’t figure out any reason my predators had taken Sonia’s papers. They didn’t contain secrets. Or maybe they did, hints of something that people—Kiel?—had spent thirty years keeping under wraps. I rubbed my forehead. Think, Warshawski. People do it all the time. You can, too.

Matt hadn’t been camping at the silo. Shirley said Kiel expected total loyalty from his students, no dividing your time with your family. Assuming Matt was Cady’s father, surely he would have spent—most? much?—some of his time with Jenny and Cady. The plague bacillus could have been at the silo, not just in Kiel’s lab. Matt carried it inadvertently perhaps?

Or—Sonia had cut out the innards of a book that dealt with secret tests on civilian populations.

I couldn’t remember the exact title. Clouds and tests on human populations, I told Google. Yes, here it was: Titheridge, Edelwart, and Zehner, Clouds Without Witnesses: Secret Weapons Tests on Human Populations.

A review in the journal Science said:

If you wanted to test the spread of disease agents in a lab the size of the Central Plains, the Department of Defense was eager to oblige. From 1940 until Richard Nixon outlawed bioweapons development in 1969, the United States Army and Navy conducted tests of how to spread anthrax. They diffused clouds of allegedly harmless anthrax analogs from airplanes over South Dakota, from generators on the tops of cars in St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg. They sprayed the California coast from ships in San Francisco Bay, and dropped lightbulbs filled with organisms into the New York subway system. “It spread pretty good,” according to one DoD observer.

The reviewer added:

Since President Bush reinterpreted the Nixon directive in 1989 to allow for defensive bioweapons research, the United States has been involved in tinkering with genomes of a number of disease agents. Some of this work has been outsourced to private labs.

The old Buffy Sainte-Marie song went through my head: My country ’tis of thy people we’re dying. I hadn’t known that the United States conducted those tests: when I’d seen the book in Sonia’s room, I’d assumed it referred to Russian tests.

I went back to the articles I’d found that explained how you turned a microbe into a weapon. You needed fermenters to brew large numbers of germs, then you dried them out, then you put them in lightbulbs or crop-dusting planes.