Pandemic

He read Ping Wu's e-mail again, and the trembling increased. Huang had always sensed that the bitter little man would somehow be his undoing. That Wu had done it from beyond his grave only made Huang that much angrier. He would never have the satisfaction of wringing Wu's neck. If only I had acted sooner! Huang thought bitterly.

Huang was aware of how much Wu resented being overlooked for the director's position. In the five years since the hospital opened, Huang had always kept a watchful eye on Wu. When Wu inexplicably jumped from self-righteous communism to shady profiteering, Huang opened a file tracking his under-the-table dealings. Huang would have intervened sooner, but Wu's tireless and efficient work habits had come in very handy for the young director during his long absences on career-building trips to Lanzhou and Beijing.

When the hospital had become the epicenter for treating the mysterious viral outbreak, Huang had to concede that Wu had responded well in his absence. Returning from the capital, Huang had stepped back and allowed Wu to continue managing the crisis, knowing that his career stood to gain a huge boost if Wu succeeded. And if Wu failed it left a convenient scapegoat and a simple solution to his problem with this unlikable little man.

Animosity aside, Huang was still shocked by what Wu had allowed to happen. Especially as the man had seemed determined to single-handedly control the outbreak. Huang never dreamed that Wu would actually try to profit from an epidemic.

Even in his state of panicky self-preservation, Huang understood that Wu's treachery impacted far beyond his own career. But as he stared at the message taunting him on his computer screen, he realized that he was the only recipient specified in the e-mail's "To" field. Unless Wu had written separately to someone else before his suicide or sent blind copies to others, which seemed unlikely considering the man's basic computer skills, Wu had left Huang as the sole caretaker of his dirty secret.

Huang sat for a long time, considering the implications of his next step.

Whoever stole the virus was either dead or long gone, he rationalized. Aside from signing his own death warrant, what possible good would come from sounding the alarm to his superiors?

With a shaking hand, Kai Huang reached for the keyboard and tapped the "delete" key.

DEPARTEMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY NEBRASKA AVENUE CENTER WASHINGTON, B.C.

Gwen Savard's ankle ached even after she sat down at her desk. She blamed it on the colder weather, not willing to accept it as a sign of aging. D.C. had taken a turn for the colder in mid-November. Even her Lycra-suit, gloves, and lined hat couldn't keep her jogs warm, when she headed out daily at 5:30 A.M. And this morning, she had tweaked her ankle again in the predawn darkness. The time had come to move inside to the gym for the winter, which meant twenty more minutes of commuting. So be it, thought Gwen. Her directorship of the counter-bioterrorism program with its demanding and unpredictable schedule had already cost her her spot on her women's soccer team. She wasn't about to give up her morning workout ritual, despite the ever-mounting workload.

Gwen willed away her ankle pain as she scanned through her massive list of e-mails. Once she answered the most pressing of the messages, she logged onto the password-protected highest security zone of the Centers for Disease Control Web site.

Gwen spent the next fifteen minutes, as she did every morning, reviewing the CDC's global surveillance of the "hot spots." A shigella epidemic had hit West Africa, but she was relieved to see that the reported outbreak of possible Ebola in Nigeria turned out to be no more than Dengue Fever, no walk in the park, but still no Ebola.

Scanning the catalogue of infections sweeping the planet — antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis among New York's drug addicts, syphilis in the San Francisco gay community, chloroquine-resistant malaria in the Philippines, and so on — she was reminded of the forest fires that had burned out of control in California. Just as one pocket of flames was doused, ten others would spring up around it. And so it was for the CDC and WHO in their attempts to contain the uncontainable.

Savard shook her head, thinking of how twenty-five years earlier, in the days before HIV and bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics, some scientists had declared the war on infectious diseases over — a knockout victory for medical science. How wrong they were. Now microorganisms had the doctors against the ropes, not vice versa.

Gwen clicked on the headline concerning the new virus in western China. She had kept a close eye on the story ever since the scattered reports of farmers developing atypical respiratory infections had surfaced two weeks earlier. She was not surprised to read that the virus had reached a small city in northwest China, but she knew it meant trouble. Urban spread was the epidemiological equivalent of flashpoint.