Free Code Orange by Caroline M. Cooney

Mallon.”
    He could not think of another girl who would dare use disturbing words like
moral
in conversation with a boy she liked.
    When Olivia descended into the subway, Mitty lost her signal, so he called his father.“I didn't see you this morning,” said his father regretfully, “and I won't get homeuntil you're asleep.” His dad worked for an international firm, where everybody was happy to have one guy willing to hang out in the office at night for calls from the West Coast and Japan.
    “I'll be up working on my term paper,” Mitty told him. “Guess what, Dad. Mr. Lynch thinks the first half is outstanding.”
    His father had wanted to hear these words for a long time. “I want to read it,” he said eagerly.
    Mitty got off the phone. He was shivering again. It was not from cold.
    He had not yet mentioned the scabs to anybody, even Olivia. He had not written about it. He had visualized a clear plastic sleeve into which he would drop the envelope so he could include it with his report, but now he wasn't so sure.
    The thought of his father touching that envelope made Mitty shiver again.
    I know it isn't dangerous, he thought.
    But what if it is?

    Koplow, page 49:
    Hostile forces—covertly controlled by unrepentant national authorities or by rogue elements that operate independently of effective centralized governmental direction—may have stashed variola stocks, despite their country's overt acceptance of the Biological Weapons Convention and despite any WHOaction. It is also possible that other laboratories may continue to house variola repositories more by accident than by design … poorly labeled, inadequately inventoried and long forgotten—but still viable .
    If Mitty used language like that, Mr. Lynch would totally know he was copying. So Mitty wrote:
    If your country is run by bad guys or if you have gangs of bad guys who aren't running your country, but they're powerful, they might have smallpox even if their actual government claims they don't. And if your laboratory is second-rate, you could have smallpox around that you forgot about.
    Tucker, page 138:
    [In 1992,] a high-ranking Soviet official defected to the United States and gave the U.S. intelligence community some chilling news. He reported that in parallel with the global WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox—an effort in which Soviet virologists, epidemiologists and vaccine manufacturers had played a leading role—the Soviet military had cynically pursued a top-secret program to transform the virus into a doomsdayweapon. [They came up with a way to keep the virus in dried egg powder, which gave it] a significantly longer shelf life. [They also put it in aerosol form, which made it] extremely stable .
    Mitty reflected on this. So a virus was happy (so far as a virus had emotions) in a freezer or in egg powder. How happy was a virus in an envelope? And what did “extremely stable” mean? That it could still infect? And could it still infect just the following day or even a hundred years later?
    As to rogue states, it seemed to Mitty that scientists there would sell their knowledge—or virus—to the highest bidder. That guy in Pakistan just last week admitted he'd been selling nuclear weapons knowledge all over the globe. And what did their president, Musharraf, say? Don't worry about it. What's a little top-secret info between friends? Or even enemies?
    If a government could shrug like that about nuclear weapons, they'd shrug about missing smallpox virus, because it was a disease nobody remembered anyway and thought was just a skin problem.
    That morning, the librarian had been lying in wait for Mitty, holding out yet another book,
Smallpox As a Biological Weapon
, and several weeks' worth of
U.S. News & World Report
. Cornered, Mitty had read enough for the current events section of his paper.
    Whether to keep our smallpox stash is a big argument in the science community. Some people want to destroyit all. They say we know the DNA