The Chemist

De la Fuentes was a drug lord, and drug lords – even the scrappy, upwardly mobile kind – rarely got any attention from her department. Generally the U.S. government didn’t much care if drug lords killed each other, and usually those drug wars had very little impact on the life of an average American citizen. Drug dealers didn’t want to kill their customers. That wasn’t good for business.

She had never in all her years, even with the high-security clearance that was a necessary part of her job, heard of a drug lord with an interest in weapons of mass destruction. Of course, if there was a profit to be made, you couldn’t count anyone out.

Profiting from the sale of was quite a different kettle from unleashing, though.

De la Fuentes had acquired a medium-size Colombian outfit in a hostile (to put it mildly) takeover in the mid-1990s and then made several attempts to establish a base of operations just south of the Arizona border. Each time, he’d been repelled by the nearby cartel that straddled the border between Texas and Mexico. He’d become impatient and started looking for more and more unorthodox methods to dispose of his enemies. And then he’d found an ally.

She sucked in a breath through her teeth.

This was a name she knew – knew and loathed. Being attacked from the outside was horrific enough. She felt the deepest revulsion for the kind of person who was born to the freedom and privilege of a democratic nation and then used that very privilege and freedom to attack its source.

This domestic-terrorist ring had several names. The department called them the Serpent, thanks to a tattoo that one of their late chiefs had possessed – and the line from King Lear. She’d been instrumental in shutting down a few of their larger conspiracies, but the one they’d accomplished still gave her the occasional nightmare. The file didn’t say who had made the first contact, only that an accord had been reached. If de la Fuentes did his part, he would receive enough money, men, and arms to take out the larger cartel. And the terrorists would get what they wanted – destabilization of the American nation, horror, destruction, and all the press they’d ever dreamed of.

It was bad.

Because what was better for destabilization than a deadly, laboratory-created influenza virus? Especially one you could control.

She could tell when the narrative shifted from the analysts’ point of view to the spies’. Much clearer pictures.

The spies were calling it TCX-1 (no notation in the files on what the letters stood for, and even with her rather specialized background in medicine, she had no idea). The government was aware that the TCX-1 superflu existed, but they thought they’d eradicated it during a black ops raid in North Africa. The lab was destroyed, the responsible parties apprehended (and executed, for the most part). TCX-1 hadn’t been heard of again.

Until it showed up in Mexico a few months ago, along with a supply of the lifesaving vaccine, already incorporated into a new designer drug.

She was starting to get a headache, the kind that was extremely localized. It was a hot needle stabbing directly behind her left eye. She’d slept a few hours after checking in and before diving into the files, but it hadn’t been enough. She made the short walk to her toiletry bag beside the sink, grabbed four Motrin, and swallowed them dry. She realized two seconds later that her stomach was totally empty, and the Motrin would no doubt burn a hole through the bottom as soon as it hit. In her bag she always had a stash of protein bars, and she quickly gnawed her way through one as she returned to her reading.

The terrorists knew they were always being watched, so what they’d given de la Fuentes was information. De la Fuentes would have to provide the manpower – preferably innocuous, unremarkable manpower.

Enter the schoolteacher.

From what the best analytical minds could piece together, Daniel Beach, all-around good guy, had gone to Egypt and acquired TCX-1 for a hungry, unstable drug lord. And he was clearly still part of the plot. From the evidence available, it appeared he would be the one dispersing TCX-1 on American soil.

The inhalable designer drug containing the vaccine was already in circulation; valued customers would never be in danger, and perhaps this was a second part of the plot. Even the most unstable drug lord had to be pragmatic where money was concerned. So maybe noncustomers would learn just where salvation waited – and that would create a whole new desperate clientele. Daniel Beach was no doubt immune by now. It wasn’t a difficult job to circulate the virus; it would be as simple as wiping an infected swab across a surface that was regularly handled – a doorknob, a countertop, a keyboard. The virus was engineered to spread like the proverbial wildfire – he wouldn’t even need to expose that many people. Just a few in Los Angeles, a few in Phoenix, a few in Albuquerque, a few in San Antonio. Daniel already had hotel reservations in each of these cities. He was due to embark on his deadly journey – ostensibly to visit more Habitat for Humanity sites as a preparation for next fall’s school field trip – in three weeks.

The Serpent and de la Fuentes were attempting to orchestrate the most debilitating attack that had ever been perpetrated on American soil. And if it was true that de la Fuentes already had the weaponized virus and the vaccine, they had an excellent chance of success.

Carston hadn’t been kidding. What she’d originally thought had been an act to play to her sympathies now appeared to be an amazing demonstration of self-control. Of all the potential disasters that had crossed her desk – back when she’d had a desk – this was one of the very worst, and she’d seen some bad things. There had even been one other biological weapon with the potential to do this kind of damage, but that one had never made it out of the lab. This was a feasible plan already in progress. And it wasn’t hundreds of thousands of people dying they were talking about here – it would be closer to a million, maybe more, before the CDC could get control of the situation. Carston had known she would discover that fact. He’d deliberately downplayed the disaster so that it would sound more realistic. Sometimes the truth was worse than fiction.