Vancouver! Alarms went off in Cohen’s head. He pulled the newspaper off his desk and scanned through the article until he found the sentence: “Public-health officials in Vancouver, B.C., are wrestling with an identical outbreak.”

“Sergeant?” the manager prompted. “Are you still there?”

“You said ‘roundtrip’?” Cohen’s voice was calm but his mind raced.

“Yes, he booked an open-ended return for the twenty-third … .” The man’s voice trailed off as he tapped away at the keyboard. “It seems that Mr. Tyler has yet to take the return flight back. At least not with us.”

Maybe the man who called himself Dennis Tyler drove down to Seattle instead of flying home, Cohen thought after he hung up. He turned back to the article and scanned it for timelines. It didn’t say when the first case was reported in Vancouver—and Cohen didn’t have a clue how long it would take between exposure and development of infection—but by doing the math he realized that Tyler flew to Vancouver ten days before the first case was seen in Seattle and almost two and a half weeks before Carol met Tyler in Portland. Was Tyler the connection between all three cities?

34 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

34

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Horton sat at her desk, chewing on a fingernail and staring at her phone. Two days had passed without word from Dr. Kilburn as to how his patient with flesh-eating disease had responded to Oraloxin. Hope had begun to fade. Her self-destructive musings, which briefly disappeared, had crept back. And after two decent nights, sleep was again as elusive as ever.

A new worry had wormed its way into her thoughts concerning the emergence of the latest superbug. The more she had read in the past days about the MRGAS outbreak, the more her unease grew. Something was disturbingly familiar about this new strain of multiresistant strep. Something from her own labs.

Horton desperately wanted to talk her concerns through with a friend. She picked up her phone and called Neil Ryland’s office again but was met only by his upbeat voicemail greeting. She dialed Viktor Leschuk’s phone number. No answer. Horton considered calling Luc Martineau, knowing she could count on him to bolster her spirits, but she decided against this. His reassurances were at best fleeting; they seemed to evaporate as soon as she was away from his dizzying physical presence.

The ringing phone startled her into action. She grabbed for the receiver. “Ellen! It’s Graham Kilburn.”

“Oh, Graham.” Her chest tightened with an equal mix of apprehension and anticipation. “What’s happening with your patient?”

“She died, but I don’t—”

“Oh, Graham, no!”

“Ellen, listen to me,” Kilburn said evenly. “Oraloxin never stood a chance with her.”

“What does that mean?” she asked despondently.