Nic Juliano, to Carter’s surprise, had elected to stay behind in order to assist him and Dr. Burke. The tall, dark-haired officer now sat at the conference table, bouncing his leg and staring at Burke expectantly.

Burke ignored them both. He hadn’t said a word or moved in nearly five minutes. He sat perfectly still, a pair of noise-isolating headphones covering his ears. He had asked that they turn off all the lights, leaving the room’s only illumination coming from Burke’s screen.

The pale glow lit Burke’s face from below, making him look like a kid telling a scary story with a flashlight held under his chin. Carter knew from past cases that Burke wasn’t actually listening to music. Instead, the over-the-ear headphones pumped out “isochronic tones and binaural beats,” which was supposed to realign brainwaves and allow for clearer thinking and deeper meditation, or some such nonsense. Carter was skeptical of anything that felt too new-age hipster, but if it helped Burke, he was all for it.

Burke picked his fingernails as his eyes shifted rapidly over the iPad’s screen. From time to time, he would use the Apple Pencil on the screen and then go back to his own little world, seeing the variables, analyzing the patterns. Carter had seen Burke’s elaborate sketch-notes before, but he couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of it. And he didn’t really care to understand. As long as it made sense and worked for his young protégé, then that was good enough for him.

Nic’s phone sat atop the conference table. It vibrated, and the screen lit up. Burke slipped off his headphones and asked, “Is that an update?”

“Yeah, a message from Bristol,” Nic replied. “She’s helping over at the medical quarantine.”

“Any luck with the poison?”

“St. Rose sent over a mobile lab, and the doctor doesn’t think it’s poison. He says that it looks like Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, but much more aggressive. He thinks it has to be a designer pathogen.”

Carter leaned back in his chair, deflated, and said, “So it is a bioweapon. Does he think it’s contagious? Do we have a pandemic on our hands?”

“I’ll ask Bristol,” Nic replied as he began tapping on the phone’s screen.

“After Romeo mentioned bio and chem weapons, I remembered a Russian scientist who had worked at Biopreparat,” Burke said. “I think it was in the MIT technology review. Let me see …” Burke surfed for the article on his iPad.

Carter felt a bit left out and antiquated, these kids were always tapping and clicking. He used his phone for calls and was proud of himself that he had learned to text and check Facebook on the device.

“What is Biopreparat?” Carter asked.

“It was the Soviet pharmaceutical agency that developed biological weapons. Before the fall of the USSR. It says here that Bolivian hemorrhagic fever was one that they weaponized, and that our government was doing the same before our programs were shut down.”

“So that could be what this is all about,” Nic said. “The CIA resurrected those old programs in GoBox’s basement.”