Dr. Farooq and I became more or less colleagues. We spoke online as many as several times a week. Then one day, Farooq disappeared. Just like that. Gone. I couldn’t find a word about him except that he had vanished one night, and the police were involved. Several months passed before I heard from him again, but not as Dr. Farooq. He called himself Ahmed Kazimi. It took me months to figure out who he was, and he did his best to keep his identity from me.

“How did he say he learned about you?”

He said he got my name from notes found in Farooq’s files. He swore me to secrecy and claimed to be the head of a government project tasked with creating workable defenses for fictitious biological terrorist attacks. I didn’t say anything after I realized Kazimi and Farooq were one and the same. He never told me why he disappeared or needed an alias. For my part, I was happy to be a member of this cutting-edge virtual team.

Fascinated, Lou barely breathed during the account. The deep chill in the room stopped affecting him.

“And you never told him about yourself?” he asked.

I used my real name at the very beginning of our online connection, so I kept that. But then I changed all the other details of my life. There were times when I couldn’t remember the story I had told. I made myself a hermit, who had shunned academia after my Ph.D. thesis was rudely and crudely rejected.

“It’s incredible you were that ashamed when you were so accomplished. What about Stephen Hawking?”

Humphrey sneered as though he’d played that argument out countless times and always to the same conclusion.

“Hawking known at school as Einstein,” he said. “ALS not begin until twenty-one. Already premier intellect then.”

“Point taken,” Lou said, raising his hands to defuse what he perceived as escalating tension.

Humphrey required a moment to regain his composure.

“Kazimi not entirely honest with me, or rest of team.”

“In what way?”

He told us our work on an antibacterial treatment for a germ that fluctuates between a Gram positive and Gram negative state was a fictitious scenario. There was no way for him to know that I worked in a hospital that had actually encountered a real case.

“The older lady with the foot ulcer.”

“Exactly.”

Thoughts of the woman’s horrible demise segued to Cap’s situation. Lou had to look away.

I said nothing to Kazimi about this. I didn’t want to jeopardize my role on the project. But I knew we weren’t part of any theoretical think tank. We were under attack by a real terrorist organization that had developed this potent biological agent capable of resisting any antibacterial treatment we could throw at it.

“So you and Puchalsky are both working on a treatment?” Lou asked.