“Shit,” hissed Blair.
“Can you make more of it?” asked the president.
“We can make a mountain of it, sir. Making it isn’t difficult. But it will take time to set up a production process for it, and then there’s manufacture time, bonding with the dry medium, payload assembly … Mr. President, at the very earliest we could have the first batches ready for you in six days.”
Six days.
Those two words hung burning the air.
“Scott,” asked the president in a leaden voice, “do we have that kind of time?”
“Without containment, sir?” Blair shook his head. “In six days we’ll have lost most of the East Coast and the entire South. In six days, Mr. President, fifty million people will be infected.”
Dr. Price had nothing to say. There was no possible response to a statement like that.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT
STEBBINS LITTLE SCHOOL
STEBBINS, PENNSYLVANIA
They went inside out of the rain. Sam Imura and his team—their weapons and gear returned to them, the cuffs removed—along with Dez, Trout, Uriah Piper, Mrs. Madison, and a small handful of the more sober and steady adults. Dez picked one of the smaller classrooms in order to limit the size of the crowd, and she closed the door. Several of the adults in the school clearly wanted to object, but none of them got farther than beginning to say something to her, and then clearly thought better of it.
“Where are the drives?” asked Sam as soon as the door was closed.
Trout started to answer, but Dez cut him off. “No. You first. You tell us what’s happening.”
“We don’t have time for that, Officer Fox,” said Sam urgently, “we—”
“Fucking make time for it.”
Sam turned appealing eyes to Trout, but he shook his head. “You heard the lady,” said Trout. “And if the clock is ticking, better cut right to it.”
Sam glanced at his people, then gave a short sigh. “Okay, in the spirit of us actually getting somewhere, I’m going to shoot straight with you.”
“Figuratively speaking,” murmured Trout.
“Figuratively speaking. Let me preface it by saying that my boss is Scott Blair, the national security advisor. He was the one who advised the president to drop a fuel-air bomb on Stebbins County.”
“Shit,” said Dez. “What an asshole.”
Sam shook his head. “No, he’s not. Put yourself in his place. He didn’t invent Lucifer and he wasn’t part of any group that kept that plague after it should have been completely eradicated. Blair’s only concern is just what his job title says—he advises the president on matters of national security. This plague threatens the entire nation. There was a window—a very small one—last night when it might have been contained. That window closed when Mr. Trout here broadcast his appeal to the world to save the kids here in the school.”
“You’re saying this is my fault?” demanded Trout.
“No, sir. I’m not in the business of assigning blame. Neither, I might add, is Scott Blair. I’m a response to a threat. Blair is probably the clearest-thinking person in Washington. When Volker first defected and gave Lucifer to our government, a set of response protocols were written that appropriately addressed the level of threat. If you spoke with Dr. Volker, Mr. Trout, then you understand how incredibly dangerous this plague is. Look at what happened to your town because of a single person being infected. Homer Gibbon. The spread was immediate and exponential; however, it reached that moment when the window could have been closed on the spread.”
“By killing children?” demanded Mrs. Madison.
Sam gave her a flat stare. “No. By killing everyone in this town. Every single living person. And, ideally, every animal, bird, and cockroach. Anything that could possibly carry the disease beyond these borders.”
“That’s insane.”
“No,” said Sam, “creating a doomsday weapon was insane. Using that weapon in an attempt to punish a death row prisoner was insane. That’s where the guilt and blame are, ma’am. If Dr. Volker’s handler—the CIA operative assigned to oversee his actions—had done his job, then we would not be having this conversation. If Dr. Volker has been properly assessed, he would have been put into a psychiatric facility and kept far away from any materials with which he could do harm. But, as I said, that was yesterday’s news. The truth is that the disease was injected into Homer Gibbon and now it’s loose.”
Mrs. Madison and several of the others were shaking their heads.
“Tell me,” said Sam with dwindling patience, “if you were in charge of the military response to this outbreak, tell me how you would have handled it differently. What could you—what could anyone—have done once this thing was known to be out?”