Logan held up his hand. “Listen. I think the best thing would be for you to come with us to Atlanta. We’ll set you up in a lab.”

“Oh, good. A secret lab? Where I’ll be chained to the floor, required to work sixteen hours a day, food fed to me through a hole in a door—”

“Hey. We’re the good guys, remember?” Logan frowned. “What’s going on here?”

Okay, she was being a little rough on them. Of course she’d help develop a new vaccine. But, “I can’t help but feel like I’ve been lied to. I thought . . . I didn’t know that the lab I worked for is a secret defense department facility.”

“It’s not. It’s a private lab—really. But when we found the smallpox, we didn’t know where to take it, so we brought it to Project 534. Which we knew about because White used to sit on the board.”

“You don’t own it?”

“No. It’s owned by a private investor in Montana. I’ve just stepped in as the liaison to the board.”

“To the president.”

He nodded. “There will be no dungeons, whips, chains, or bread and water, Dr. Price.”

“What’s our timeline here? How close are you guys to finding the location of the attack?” she asked.

“We have a guy working undercover.” Logan put his hand on Pete’s shoulder. “And Pete needs to get going.”

At his words, Pete looked upstairs to where Noemi was holed up.

Yeah, well, Tae might do the same if she discovered her father was still alive and keeping it from her. Talk about a betrayal.

On the stove, the water was boiling, steam rising out from the lid. Ranger seemed to know his way around the stove without looking as he grabbed a hot pad, lifted the lid, and slid in the noodles. Added oil to the water.

Ranger had already combined the sauces with the meat, and now pulled off fresh basil leaves from a plant Echo had brought over.

“Why won’t the current vaccine work?” Dodge asked. “We were all vaccinated as kids.”

“I doubt that. Vaccines for smallpox stopped being compulsory in the United States in 1971,” Tae said. “The last endemic case occurred in Somalia in 1977.” She got up, unable to stop herself, went around the island, grabbed a knife, and began to slice a loaf of French bread. “Only two laboratories have stocks of the smallpox virus. The CDC in Atlanta, Georgia, and VECTOR in Koltsovo, Russia.”

Yes, just as she’d thought, her words shut everyone down. She finished slicing the bread. “VECTOR—the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology—said themselves, years ago, ‘All you need is a sick fanatic to get to a populated place.’” She put the bread in a basket. “We are completely unprepared for the virus to reach American shores.”