“Me neither, Cat.” He shrugged. Then a smile crept into his expression, shedding years from his face. “‘No guts, no glory.’ Isn’t that what the marines say?”

“Whatever.” Lopez leaned back in her seat. “David, we need to consolidate all King County patients infected with MRGAS in one hospital. The city’s health care system will be paralyzed if this superbug gets into every Seattle hospital.”

“We’re working on it now,” he said. “The tentative plan is to cordon off the entire fourth floor of Harborcenter-where the isolation rooms are—to contain all cases.”

Lopez nodded. “I saw Marilyn Carlyle earlier,” she said quietly.

Warmack frowned.

“Harry Wales’s daughter. She’s in isolation with MRGAS strep throat. She’s hardly even symptomatic.” She paused: “Imagine the repercussions of that! We may have carriers.”

“That’s all I’ve been thinking about, Cat.” His face sagged again. “We have no idea how many are out there.”

“So how do we control the spread if we don’t even know who is infected?”

“That’s tricky.” He rubbed his eyes. “But we do the best we can. To begin with, we run throat and nasal screening swabs on everyone who has encountered a case. Including every single patient in Seattle-area hospitals.”

Lopez rolled her eyes. “A logistical nightmare. And even if we succeed here in Seattle, there’s still the Vancouver outbreak.”

Warmack sat up straighter. He brought his fingers to his neck and buttoned up his shirt with one hand, before tightening his tie. “We can only take care of our own backyard,” he said, “and hope that they do the same.”

Lopez looked away from her colleague. “David, Marilyn Carlyle got to know Tonya Jackson before she died.”

He dropped his hands from his collar. “And?”

“Tonya said that somebody deliberately gave her tainted drugs.”

Warmack grimaced. “What?”

Lopez recounted Carlyle’s description of the dark-eyed dealer. As she spoke, it dawned on her how tenuous the link was: a secondhand account from a less than credible original source.

“Cat, does that make any sense to you?” Warmack asked.

She shrugged. “At the CDC, we were taught always to consider intentional spread.”

He viewed her skeptically. “But to an IV-drug user?”

She held up her hands. “Drug users are more susceptible to infections. Not only that but they’re frequent hospital visitors, noncompliant, and difficult to track.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Cat.”

Lopez felt a sudden resolve that almost made her shudder. “David, if someone wanted to deliberately introduce a new superbug in the community, what easier way can you think of than to give drug addicts contaminated drugs and turn them into unwitting vectors?”

26 - Vancouver, Canada

26

Vancouver, Canada