“Where else?”

Nico drains the last sip of his espresso. “Speaking of the site, Marcello came over last night.”

“To see you?”

“I wasn’t home, but Isabella says he was beside himself. He begged her to talk to me. To put a good word in for him with the WHO.”

She grimaces. “Marcello really thinks your wife would try to intervene?”

“He is her favorite uncle.”

Alana senses how conflicted Nico must feel. Perhaps a fight with his wife over her uncle’s request had launched him on the previous night’s bender. Empathy edges out her frustration with him. She rests a hand on his wrist. He looks surprised, but makes no move to pull away. “Why is Marcello so opposed to a search for a few rats?” she asks.

“He thinks the search could bankrupt him. The delays and so on.”

“Or is it possible he’s just worried what they will find?”

“Perhaps. Marcello says that if the press learns that the WHO is searching his site, it will ruin the development. Even if they find nothing, the new condos will still be worthless.”

“He might be right. But his financial viability is the least of our problems.”

He slips his arm free. “Just another victim of the plague, no?”

She looks at him. “Not sure it will help, Nico, but I can ask Byron to conduct the search as discreetly as possible.”

“Discreetly? Byron? Have you met the man?”

She chuckles. “Good point.”

“So what are the next steps?”

“I heard from my boss this morning. NATO is willing to share the genetic architecture of all known plague bioweapons with the WHO lab. The entire genomes.”

“You don’t really believe it will be the source, do you? Bioterrorism?”

“It’s my job to consider the possibility.”

His tired eyes show a glimmer of pity. “Sounds like a morbid job, Alana. Do you not miss the clinical work?”

“Sometimes,” she admits.

He grins, and years dissolve from his face. “Remember Angola? During the cholera outbreak? We made a difference there, you and I.”

How could I forget? she thinks. But she refuses to let herself reminisce. “During the Cold War, the Soviets developed the most elaborate bioweapons program ever seen.”

“Using the plague?”

“There were other diseases, too, like anthrax and smallpox. But the Soviets recognized Yersinia for the ideal weapon it could be. Their scientists developed a highly contagious flea-borne form of the plague as well as an aerosolized version. We estimated that a single airborne release over a densely populated urban center would kill upward of a hundred thousand people.”

“A hundred thousand?” He cringes.

“And that was a conservative estimate. They never did use it, of course, but it didn’t stop them from mass-producing the stuff.”

“But this all would have been decades ago, no?”

“Maybe so, but after the Soviet Union fell apart, the Russians lost track of some of their supply of bioweapons. Particularly in their labs in former satellite states such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.”