Pandemic: A Novel (Infected Book 3) by Scott Sigler

Author:Scott Sigler [Sigler, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780770436773
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2014-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

LEADERSHIP

Murray had never heard the Situation Room this quiet. The only sound came from a few monitors that played newscasts at low volume. He couldn’t hear anyone typing. No one talked. No one cleared their throats. No one even moved.

Blackmon folded her hands together, rested her forearms on the tabletop.

“How did it get off the flotilla?”

When she got mad, when the cameras weren’t around, her stare burned with intensity. She looked predatory.

“We don’t know, Madam President,” Murray said. He wasn’t going to sugarcoat it.

The predator’s stare bore into him.

“Three cities,” she said. “Chicago, Minneapolis, New York. Is that all?”

“And western Michigan,” Murray said. “Doctor Feely thinks there will be more. He thinks a carrier went through one of the Chicago airports.”

She still had that presidential look about her, but how long would that visage stay at the fore? The disease had broken quarantine, spread to three areas of very dense population. Things were about to get bad in a hurry, and on her watch — she couldn’t blame Gutierrez for this one.

“Do we know who the carrier is? Can we trace the travel pattern?”

Murray shook his head. “No, Madam President. At this point we have no idea who the carrier is, or where the carrier went.”

Hands still folded, Blackmon tapped her left pointer finger against the back of her right hand.

“What do Doctor Cheng and Doctor Montoya think?”

Murray felt a little embarrassed.

“Doctor Montoya is still on the Coronado, so she can’t help us much right now.” Margaret was there, and mad as hell. She had predicted the infection would escape, said they needed to be preparing a “hydra strategy,” and Murray hadn’t backed her play. After all the times she’d been right, he’d doubted her: now he was paying the price.

Margaret was out of the picture, which meant he had to rely on the man who, frankly, wasn’t in her league.

“Doctor Cheng thinks we’re now in a race against time,” Murray said. “The vector is in the wild. He said the patterns show it’s highly contagious, on a level unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The only thing we can do to mitigate exposure is to inoculate as many people as possible, as fast as possible.”

Blackmon stared at Murray like she wanted to pin the blame on him. But she knew as well as he did that she couldn’t politic her way out of this one. Americans were going to die: what remained to be seen was how many.

The president turned to Admiral Porter. “What’s the status of inoculating our troops?”

The first batches of inoculant had come to Washington, of course. Murray had drank a bottle of the nasty stuff himself. The military was next in line. If the people with guns became converted, that would create another level of problems.

Admiral Palmer rattled off a litany of bases. The biggest of them — Fort Hood, Norfolk, Fort Bragg, and a few others — were inoculating their own troops and already creating starter cultures for other bases. Within three days, five at the most, every soldier, sailor and airman on U.

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