Free Final Epidemic by Earl Merkel

have pulled something serious on that ol’ boy back when you were playing spy versus spy. He has Putin believing you’re some kind of genius, and Putin has the President thinking the same way. They all want you working on this. Doesn’t give you a lot of wiggle room, ol’ buddy.”
    “Even if I agreed to go—and I’m not—you need a medical expert who can—”
    “You wrote the plague analysis,” Carson interrupted flatly. “You were one of the Company’s resident experts on biological warfare. In Russia, it’s a matter of trust: we’re dealing with your old contacts—you know them, they know you. This is a matter of national survival, Beck. There is no time to waste. If somebody drops the ball because they weren’t up to speed with the people and issues involved, millions will die.”
    The national security advisor looked Beck squarely in the eyes.
    “I will not try to minimize what you went through,” he said. “But hear us out. You owe us that, at least.”
    Carson drew a thick packet from the briefcase at his feet and tossed it on the table beside Beck. On the cover was thepresidential seal, and stamped across the bottom were the words COROMANT / US ARMY ULTRA .
    “You’ll find the historical background in there,” Carson said. “Essentially, what we are now calling H1N1-AK—the original Spanish flu of 1918—was recovered by an Army medical expedition in 1951. In Alaska, hence the suffix. The expedition mission was to obtain any samples of a particularly virulent influenza virus. The theory was that the virus might be recoverable from corpses preserved in the permafrost.”
    “Whatever my opinion of the Army,” Beck said, “it doesn’t dig up dead Eskimos just for exercise.”
    “There was a weapons-development component,” Carson admitted reluctantly. “But, in the event, that was deemed secondary to the potential for developing new vaccines.”
    “Because CIA had just stumbled onto Stalin’s germ-warfare project,” Krewell interjected. He did not waver under Carson’s hard stare. “Let’s not pretend humanitarian motives here, Billy. Nobody in the room is a virgin.”
    Carson took a final pull on his cigarette before mashing it in the makeshift ashtray.
    “I suppose not. By coincidence, a civilian research project along much the same lines was also undertaken that year,” he continued. “In that case, they found that the bodies had been buried too close to the surface. Over the decades, there had been enough thaw-and-freeze cycles to allow at least partial decomposition of the corpses. That was certainly enough to kill any viruses, and none were found.” Carson waved a hand dismissively. “Their project was severely underfunded, and—if I may say—rather amateurish in approach. They simply did not look in the right places, and finally ran out of time and money. The Army had no such problems. It also knew to look farther north. The expedition targeted villages that had been on Army survey maps in 1906. They just had to identify those that had completely disappeared on maps drawn in 1925.”
    “The official story is that the Army mission was a failure,” Krewell said. “The Army, of course, encouraged this point of view. But in point of fact, a live virus was captured by the expedition.”
    “Did we release this thing?” Beck demanded. “Was there some kind of accident, or—”
    “No,” Carson said. “Not by us. As Dr. Porter told the group, the samples from the most recent victims show some specific, unusual genetic markers. They do not match the viral coding of the Army’s virus. That’s a definite, Beck.”
    “But we have the genetic map, the genome sequences,” Beck pressed. “You can use it to develop a vaccine.”
    “H1N1-Florida, the new one, is a not a natural mutation of the base viral codes,” Krewell said to Beck. “It is not what we call a wild virus.”
    “Not wild?” Beck repeated, puzzled. “How does a virus like this incubate if it