“Twelve days someone could have this and be infecting people and not know it?”

“Possibly.” She finished her coffee. “It’s an airborne pathogen, so it can be dispersed, well, in various ways.”

“Now I’m terrified,” said Dodge.

Colt was doing the math. “I could be infected right now.”

“I thought of that, but it’s past the incubation period.”

It wasn’t lost on him that if he’d been infected, he would have also infected her. And his entire family.

“The really terrifying part is that smallpox is very old. The earliest evidence was found in mummies in third-century Egypt. But it’s mutated since then, so our more recent versions are the ones we have a vaccination for. It’s the ancient viruses that are unknown, unstudied.”

Outside, the wind had died, but the plane still shuddered. Their tents, staked down, rippled under the onslaught.

“The strain we found was first noted in Siberia, Russia, in the 1920s, in a gulag. It wiped out the entire prison, so they thought it had died, but we did some digging and found the story of a village near the Arctic Circle that had died of what they referred to as the krasnaya chuma. Red plague. The pox.”

The pox. Colt leaned his head against the cold window.

“With the recent thawing of permafrost land, some think animals might have picked up the variant, maybe passed it along, although . . .” Her mouth tightened. “I think maybe it was something else.”

More silence.

Then, “You think the Russians found this variant, developed it, and weaponized it,” Colt said.

She lifted a shoulder. “I don’t know. It might be my wild imagination, deep in the night.”

Yeah, that might keep Colt awake also. Along with all his other nightmares. “The guy who had Tae’s picture on his phone was Bratva, according to Deke Starr.”

“So you’re saying that the Russian mob weaponized it,” Echo said. “That’s deeply unsettling.”

“Not just the Russian Bratva, but the Petrovs, one of the more dangerous offshoots, headed by General Arkady Petrov,” Colt said.

“What’s even more unsettling is that I dated Sergei Petrov.” Tae drew up her knees, wrapping her arms around them. “I should have known that he wasn’t interested in me, really. I didn’t seem his type.”

“What type is that?” Dodge asked.

She lifted a shoulder. “Pretty. Sweet. You know, girlfriend material.”

What? Colt found her very pretty. And she’d been sweet—at least when she’d sat next to his bed, making sure he didn’t die in his sleep. As for girlfriend material . . . well, if a guy were to want a girlfriend, it might be her.

If a guy had a life that had room for a girlfriend.

If, maybe, that guy had no plans to return to his job working security with Jones, Inc.

If.