Pandemic

She decided it was time to speak to someone closer to the forefront of the outbreak. A name danced around the back of her head, but refused to surface into consciousness. She reached for the old-fashioned Rolodex on her desktop. She had to flip through it twice before her brain and fingers connected. There it was: Dr. Noah Haldane, professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown and WHO emerging pathogens expert. She had met him only once, six months earlier, when they were both lecturing at a conference. Though his talk was funny and irreverent, she most recalled his chilling description of how ill prepared the planet was for the pandemic, which he guaranteed was on its way. She couldn't picture his face, but she remembered him as handsome. When they chatted afterward, he refused to accept any of the credit people ascribed to him for halting the SARS epidemic in the Far East.

If anyone at the WHO had an inside track on this latest outbreak, she thought it would be Haldane. A knock at the door stopped her just as she reached for the phone. "Come in," she called out.

Alex Clayton, the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations, strode in as assuredly as if Gwen had been expecting him all morning.

Savard hit a button on the keyboard to close the CDC Web site. The screensaver she had been meaning to change — a picture of Peter and her with a number still pinned on her chest, hugging at the finish line of the Washington Marathon — popped up. She rose from her desk. A stab of pain shot up from her ankle, but she suppressed her wince out of reflex. She had been conditioned to believe that as a woman in the upper echelons of the D.C. power structure, she was not allowed to show any hint of weakness or fallibility.

"Was I expecting you?" Gwen asked.

"Can't say," Clayton said with a wide flirtatious smile. "But we weren't scheduled to meet."

He wore a three-button, black suit with an olive green shirt, collar open, which highlighted his dark green eyes and Mediterranean complexion. With gelled hair, Armani suit, and perfect accessories, he struck Gwen as the consummate "metrosexual" — a straight, male urbanite with all the vanity and fashion sense of a stereotypical gay man.

Gwen knew Clayton had inherited his brooding good looks from his Greek father. When she had once asked him about his baseball-and-apple-pie surname, he explained that his immigrant father had anglicized their last name from the original Klatopolis in a failed attempt to better fit into the small Pennsylvanian town where he had grown up.

Gwen sat back down on her chair, thankful for the opportunity to take the weight off her ankle. "What's up, Alex?"

Clayton slid into the seat across from her desk. He unbuttoned his jacket and crossed a knee over his other leg. Once he made himself comfortable, he asked, "Got a minute?"

"No," she said with a laugh. "But what's up?"

"I've been thinking about what you said at the meeting last week."

"Oh?"

"About terrorists getting their hands on SARS."

"And?"

The smile left Clayton's lips. "It disturbs me."

"Good." Savard nodded. "It damn well should."

Clayton made a clicking sound with his tongue, before speaking. "Gwen, we've been picking up a lot of cell-phone chatter lately."

"Terrorists?"

"We think so."

"Who?"

Clayton shrugged. "Not sure."

"That's not very helpful, Alex."

"Christ, Gwen, it's not like they get on the phone and say, 'Hello, terrorist X speaking,' " he snapped.

Savard leaned back in her chair, unperturbed. "Your job wouldn't be much of a challenge if they did."

Clayton chuckled. "Golf and dating are challenges enough. Who said I needed my job to be one?" His expression darkened. "You know, everyone expects us to be watching what goes on in every nook and cranny of the planet, but we can't. We're spies, Gwen, not fortune-tellers."

"You can't be everywhere at once, huh?"

"It's not so much that." He shook his head in disgust. "Today's enemies have become like the bugs you study under your microscope "

She cocked her head and frowned. "How so?"

"When I joined the CIA in the mid-eighties, there was a definable enemy. The Soviet bloc and a few other rogue states." He sighed, sounding to Gwen like one of those CIA relics who truly missed the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear annihilation. "Sure, they had operatives around the world up to what we considered no good. But at least they were linked, albeit obliquely, into a command structure. You could take down an entire operation by cracking one piece of the puzzle."

"Not now?" Gwen asked.