“That is statistically impossible.” said Ayala, shaking her head, “I personally injected over three hundred people with the vaccine. That was an average of ten ‘covert’ injections a day. I also enlisted several friends and ex-colleagues to distribute a further 250 of the doses, including the colonel.”

“But it has been months since that effort. It is out there. Each week it is spreading to millions of people. If we have less than a month left to the reach 100% dispersion in Europe, that means that ten percent of the population is already immunized. That’s one hundred million people in Europe alone. To noticeably speed the process up now we would need to manually immunize millions … and there is simply no way to do that, not without alerting the Agents to their actions. It is simply impossible.”

There had always been a diminishing marginal return from further injections, which they had matched against a serious and steadily increasing risk of discovery every time one of the team or its proxies stabbed another stranger with the drug.

A sad resignation settled over the room. People who had worked round the clock for months under the constant threat of discovery were now somewhat inured to it all, and faced with facts like these they knew they had to simply accept the potential for mass casualties, just as they had accepted the potential for their own. And so no one expected the next question.

“Umm, there is another thought,” said Martin Sobleski, “but first I have to ask: when we launch against the satellites, can I assume the gloves are off?” The group stared at him. His glance moved between Neal and the colonel and they both shrugged and nodded.

“What do you have in mind?” said Jack, voicing the room’s curiosity.

“Well, I was just thinking that maybe instead of looking at ways to speed the spread of the cure, maybe instead we could look at ways to slow the spread of the disease.”

Slow the spread? How do you slow down a doomsday virus released from space in a thousand capsules, each one of which is programmed to detonate in the stratosphere? But Martin didn’t seem to notice the group’s lack of enthusiasm and carried on, “Tell me, how many of you are familiar with thermobaric grenades?”

Jesus, thought Jack. Firebombs? A smile spread across his lips. This was going to be interesting.

* * *

It was their most ambitious plan yet. Martin would leave the remainder of the nose cone shielding deployment to Jack, Barrett, and the team that Admiral Hamilton had assigned to the project. This would allow him to redirect his considerable expertise to a new avenue of research. Ayala would go with him to North Dakota and once they were there they would use the resonance chamber to build a new type of warhead.