He looked at her and tilted his head ever so slightly in a question. He didn’t have to verbalize it; they both understood what the implied risk was: what, my dear, do you propose we do if 90% of the world’s population is wiped out by a plague that would shame the old testament? She pursed her lips and nodded. Through a pragmatism born more of necessity rather than choice, she focused on what she could affect, rather than what she could not.

After a moment’s thought, she said, “The antigen spreads quickly now, but not in some areas. We feared this might happen and Martin and Neal have no doubt been trying to think of other ways to counter the viral attack, should it come before all areas are immunized. Those two always did like a challenge. Instead of fretting about this, why don’t we get Neal up here, sit down as a group and talk this through, with all the facts at our disposal?”

* * *

To an outsider, the movements of one Mark Jones from England might have seemed irregular. He would appear one day at a car rental agency or airport in or around DC and buy a ticket somewhere or rent a car for a few days. He would then be prominent on the grid for a couple of days, travelling wherever he needed, paying for hotel rooms, food, and fuel before returning to DC and vanishing again for some indeterminate amount of time.

If someone had been watching him, or if he had been flagged for some reason, then they may have thought this strange. But his behavior was far from being actively suspicious. No, Mark Jones had never done anything important enough to call particular attention to himself.

Well, nothing except dying two years beforehand in a car crash on the M5 near Hammersmith.

Shortly before his untimely demise, though, Mark Jones had applied for and been granted a green card to come and live in the US. The widely diverse national record systems around the world being as, well, widely diverse as they were, news of Mark Jones’s demise never found its way to the US, and thus his visa remained valid. The passport that bore Mark Jones’s name was also good, as long as its owner never tried to use it in Europe where records, by reason of proximity, were more up to date.

Combine the fact of Mark’s untimely demise with the fact that there are more than sixty thousand Mark Jones of varying sizes and shapes wondering the globe, and you had yourself an identity that would happily get you around any American airport, car rental agency, or credit card application without incident. At this particular moment, the man pretending to be the deceased Mark Jones was Neal Danielson, and he had used Mr. Jones’s credit card to buy a ticket on a train from DC to Boston.