Hutchison clapped his hand on Juan’s shoulder, and for a moment, the older man flashed a sympathetic expression. “Listen, Doc. If you can’t come up with a cure… the president’s plan might be for the best. If this virus were to get out, uncontrolled…

“Think about it. Uncontrolled, without a way of really detecting the infection. Humanity could be wiped out within the next generation.”

Juan drew a shuddering breath. “I think I know what needs to be done.”

“Then go do it. I’ve done all I can. The rest is up to you, Dr. Gutierrez.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

The conversation with Hutchison had given Juan a singular focus. He only had ten days to fix this, or it wouldn’t even matter anymore. He had to direct his efforts to what could be done in that time.

And the truth was, coming up with a “cure” in such a short timeframe was pretty much impossible. The DNA changes were simply too vast. The best he could hope for was to save some of those people—the ones who weren’t infected—by finding a reliable method of screening them out. He imagined children, wives, entire families being rounded up simply because they’d been around one of the cancer patients and then developed some kind of harmless fever… from a flu or some other run-of-the-mill illness.

He couldn’t save everyone. But perhaps he could save them.

As he entered the lab the next morning, where his technicians were monitoring dozens of experiments, he felt a heavy burden of guilt. In days, likely hundreds of people would die. And it was all because of his research.

As he usually did, he went first to Kevin, who’d become his go-to man. “Kevin. How are things going?”

Kevin pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “Things are going well.” He gestured to a clear, sealed unit not much larger than the rat it held. “The units were actually a bit small for the species of rat we have under test. I suspect they were built for mice. But it works, and I created an air circulator with just a couple parts. Oxygen and carbon-dioxide detectors are sampling the air coming out of the chamber.”

Juan ran his finger along the tube connecting the clear compartment holding the rat to a box with a digital readout measuring the percentages of O2 and CO2 and asked, “These are sealed units, right?”

“Yes, but if you’re looking for especially accurate exhalation percentages, this isn’t going to work. For meaningful accuracy, we’d either need to teach these rats to blow hard into pipettes or measure them under sedation.”

Juan shook his head. “No, that’s fine. We don’t need exact numbers. Let’s go ahead and gather all the data and see if there’s any difference in the specimen groups.”