“Fuck you, Yevchenko. This is on you. This blood is on your hands. You never should have started production.”

“Who told you we started production?”

“Please.”

“You better be careful what you say next,” Yevchenko said, but Sofia was past caring.

“Locking down the hospital? That’s going to end in bloodshed too.”

“Sofia, this is an open line.”

“I could give a fuck.”

“Someone’s listening, Sofia.”

“Let them listen. Let them hear this. You fuckers did this and these deaths are just the beginning. We’re going to see the whole nine yards. The cleaning trucks with the chlorine. The livestock culls. The pyres of corpses burning. This is all on you.”

Yevchenko let out a laugh. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “Tying your own noose.”

“Someone ought to hang you,” Sofia said.

“You’re the one who created this,” Yevchenko said. “This came from your lab, Sofia. The most deadly substance ever produced.”

“You gave me no choice.”

“But you outdid yourself, didn’t you? One picogram, Sofia? One picogram? You know how small that is?”

“That’s why I begged you not to start production.”

“It’s a trillionth of a gram, Sofia.”

“You shut up, Yevchenko. You shut up.”

“Seven times more toxic than Polonium, my dear. No one told you to do all that.”

“You told me to harvest the pathogen and that’s what I did.”

“This thing will silence entire cities,” Yevchenko said, sounding almost giddy at the prospect. “It was inevitable it would lead to an accident.”

“And what are you doing to contain it?”

“Whatever I have to, my dear.”

“I’m going to kill you, Yevchenko.”

“You did this, Sofia. You did this. And if this virus you created is anywhere near as deadly as this.”

“You better fucking destroy that virus, Yevchenko.”

“Or what, Sofia? Or what?”

17

Laurel and Lance went to the EconoLodge by taxi. They didn’t say much until Laurel broke the silence.

“How’s this going to turn out?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know why we’re here.”

He shrugged. “You haven’t told me much.”

“But it’s obvious there’s a reason. Roth’s got something in mind.”

“There’s a mission,” Lance said. “There’s always a mission. Some new crisis in the making.”

“And are you going to say yes?”

He looked at her. She knew he saw the other woman now. Clarice. A woman he’d loved.

There was power in that.

Maybe she’d write a psychiatry paper on it one day.

“It depends what he says.”

“But you know how it will go. You said it yourself. A new crisis. Life or death. He wouldn’t have come all this way if he didn’t need your help.”

Lance looked at her. He said, “I doubt there’s anything he could say that would make me come back.”