The head of watch strode in and closed the door. His name was Phillip Stevens, and he was a senior epidemiologist at the CDC who had also been deployed to Kenya. Phil had led the contingent assigned to investigate the Mandera airport. His group had been evacuated after Millen’s team was attacked. He was tall, with short blond hair, and didn’t beat around the bush or mince words. Millen liked him.

“Okay, I’ve got some important updates. First, we’re adding six new supervisors.” He pointed to the video camera at the back of the room. “Like each of you, they’ll have twelve operators. Their folks will work in the auditorium. IT has worked double-time to get it set up. That should ease some of the excess call volume.

“Last watch recorded a sharp increase in X1-Mandera fatalities.” Stevens glanced at a page. “New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago, and DC all report over four thousand deaths each. All told, at cordon sites nationwide, we saw over sixty thousand deaths in the past eight hours. There were only twelve thousand deaths during the shift before that. So we’re looking at the start of a potentially rapidly increasing fatality rate.”

Stevens paused. “That, in addition to what I’m about to show you, requires us to change our current approach. In thirty minutes, at your own pre-shift meetings, you’re going to brief your staff on this decision. It may be the hardest conversation you’ll ever have to have. Some may refuse to carry out our orders. There’s a plan for that. The worst part is, you can’t tell them the full truth about why we’re doing what we’re about to do.

“The truth is this: we have suspected for several days that the X1-Mandera pandemic was an act of bioterrorism. We know now that it was. We know who did it, and we know what they want.”

Chapter 86

Chapter 86

Elliott stood in his study, watching the BioShield convoy creep down the street. They usually came every afternoon and distributed food and medicine. Today they were early, and they weren’t distributing food. They were taking people with them, loading them on yellow school buses as they had before. The National Guard, Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force troops studied tablets outside the buses. They were apparently immune—they didn’t wear space suits, and they displayed no caution as they herded the people onto the bus, often touching and shoving them. Their warm breath came out in clouds of white steam as they worked.

Methodically, they moved down the street. Families weren’t taken together; they picked members seemingly at random. A father in his forties; a mother with gray-streaked dark hair who was slightly older than the man; a teenage girl; twin boys who were no older than twelve.