Pandemic

Savard shrugged. "Look, Isaac, far as I'm concerned, you can have every African green monkey in the world. But what we don't have is more time. We might be facing a pandemic tomorrow. I mean, literally, tomorrow"

Moskor stared at her for several seconds without remarking. Finally, he said, "So you want to go straight to human trials?"

"No." Savard shook her head adamantly. "No more trials at all. We need to put this drug into mass production."

Moskor's face crumpled into a series of wrinkles. "Mass production?" he repeated.

"Today, Isaac," she said with authority. "If need be, we'll borrow every pharmaceutical plant in the country to mass-produce this drug."

Moskor's jaw dropped.

"How hard was it for you to manufacture the pills?" Gwen asked.

Still appearing stunned, he shrugged. "It's a simple organic compound. Easy to make a couple hundred pills. But what you're talking about?" He held his palms up.

"What I'm talking about is millions of doses," she said, already planning the logistics in her mind. "Isaac, have you got an intravenous preparation for this?"

"Yeah." He nodded. "We've had to use it on the sickest monkeys who aren't able to swallow tablets."

"Perfect," Gwen said. "We'll need to produce both."

Moskor cast his eyes down. "I knew this was a possibility when you sent me to Atlanta. And, kid, I know you are doing what you think you have to do," he said softly. "But to me this is still bad medicine. You don't jump from half-baked, half-finished studies to treating live sick people, no matter how tempting the results may seem. It's been done before." He paused. "And the literature is littered with stories of enough premature corpses to tell me that it's a very bad idea."

Gwen wished she could reach out and touch her troubled friend. Instead she just nodded. "Isaac, you have no idea how many premature corpses might be littered if we don't do anything. Of course, people might die. Even directly as a result of being treated with A36112," she acknowledged. "But what you've given me — what you've given the world — is more hope than we had yesterday. I know it's too early to know for sure, but you might have found a cure for the Killer Flu. And we don't have time to confirm that in a lab."

He leaned back in his seat, his expression somewhere between satisfaction and skepticism. "So the real world is going to be our lab, huh?"

"There is no other way," Gwen said.

CHAPTER 30

HARBOURVIEW HOTEL, VANCOUVER, CANADA

Free of quarantine, Noah Haldane stepped out of the elevator into the lobby for the first time in five days. He wanted to drop his suitcase and run out into the December sunshine that streamed in through the hotel's huge windows, but Duncan McLeod, bearing a tray holding three coffees, beckoned him from the other side of the lobby.

"Christ!" McLeod bellowed when Noah had made it halfway across the floor. "Now that it's safe to hug you, I got no interest. Funny that."

"I've overcome bigger disappointments," Haldane said with a slight smile as he eased a cup out of the tray. "Thanks. Any sign of Gwen?"

"Not yet," McLeod said. "She's probably getting herself all gussied up for me."

Haldane chuckled as he inhaled the sweet aroma of the coffee. Since childhood he had always preferred the smell to the actual taste, but after an anticipatory night of restless sleep, he needed every drop of the cup in his hand to keep him going.

"You laugh, Haldane, but the McLeod charm is a mysterious and powerful force." He fluttered his eyelids, making his lazy eye even more noticeable. "That my heart has already been claimed only drives the ladies that much madder."

"One can only imagine," Haldane said.

McLeod gestured at Haldane with his chin. "I thought I sensed a little something between the likes of you two up in your room. No?" He raised an eyebrow. "You didn't succumb to a mutual case of quarantine fever, did you?"

Haldane shook his head. As he was about to advise McLeod to let it go, he glimpsed Gwen emerging from an elevator. Rolling her suitcase behind her, she half jogged toward them. And Noah noticed that she still had a slight limp in her step as she approached.

She wore a knee length green suit, which showed off her lithe calves. Her tawny blond hair was clipped back behind her ears. As she neared, Noah saw that her face was flushed and her eyes wide with excitement.

Catching Noah off guard, Gwen threw her arms around him, almost spilling his coffee. The pressure of her firm body against his stirred something inside, but realizing the hug had lasted a moment too long, he let go at the same moment she did. The embrace might have been innocent enough — nothing more than any two friends might share — but it was their first physical contact beyond a handshake, and it left him even more confused.

"You missed a spot," McLeod said to Gwen and pointed to himself with a thumb.