It was midnight before Brisling made it back to his laboratory at King County Hospital in Seattle. Leaning against the door, he plumbed his pockets for his keys. He patted down his rumpled jacket. He rifled through his briefcase then checked his pockets again. For Christ's sake. There he was, literally inches from the most important scientific experiment of his life, and the only thing keeping him from it was a locked door, and a flimsy one at that. He wanted to scream.

Instead, he took a deep breath and tried to remember the last time he saw his keys. Obviously, he had used to them to lock his lab when he left for Washington, DC. And he had jangled them in his pocket as he stood before Flaherty's subcommittee. Did he lose them in Genevieve's office? Or when he punched De Soto in the face? Had they fallen out of his pocket in the ambulance?

Brisling took out his phone and called hospital security. Yes, the dispatcher promised, a security guard would be down in a jiffy to let him in. Fifteen jiffies later, a guard arrived with a clusterfuck of keys swinging from her hip. One by one, she tried them, losing her place more than once before happening on the right one. The knob turned, the door flew open, and Brisling rushed inside.

Apparently, the mailroom had a key, because a pile of overnight packages waited for him on the floor. He counted them, thirty-eight in all—more than he expected his mini telethon back in Atlanta to produce. They came from all over the world, Kinshasa, Boston, Melbourne, Beijing, Reykjavik, Buenos Aires, Moscow.

One of the packages, however, was from the CDC in Atlanta. Brisling opened it first. Inside were two bullet-sized plastic vials and a handwritten note from Lisa, Genevieve's lab tech.

Hi Dr. Brisling,

Here are the PCR primers you asked me to design based on the JCAV sequence. I tested them out and they work great! You should be able to use them on about any type of specimen you want. I hope they help. Genevieve says you're going to make history (again). ;)

-Lisa

P.S. When you win the Nobel Prize, don't forget where you got the primers! Lol

Lol? Prizes? History? These were the last things on Brisling's mind. Setting aside the plastic vials, he got to work opening the remaining packages.

For the most part, the specimens they contained were carefully packed, sealed up in polystyrene tubes and nestled in bubble wrap. But some had been collected in whatever lay at hand, it seemed, used water bottles, a pickling jar, Tupperware even. Thank God none of them had leaked.

Raw municipal sewage, Brisling knew, was the epidemiologist's best kept secret. From it, one could distill all sorts of juicy facts about human populations. In Europe, for instance, scientists had measured cocaine levels in Amsterdam's raw sewage to confirm its status as the Continent's premier party town. American epidemiologists were measuring estrogen and progesterone levels to predict baby booms. But it was the Canadians who had captured Brisling's imagination. They had sequenced every bit of DNA in Montreal's raw sewage and discovered a virtual zoo of bacteria, fungi, and viruses—all completely unknown to science.

Now, Brisling gloved up and began transferring the samples to the fume hood, which in theory vented 99.9 percent of the odors to the outside. Unfortunately, the remaining tenth of a percent smelled absolutely terrible.

With a micropipette, he injected a milliliter of each sample into its own clean microfuge tube. To this set of thirty-eight samples, he added four more. One was a urine specimen from the neonatal ward, a newborn baby ostensibly uninfected with JCAV. The second specimen Brisling had collected himself in the bathroom. The last two came from individuals known to harbor JCAV: Carl Lundquist and Anna Jankowsky. The thought of that girl lying dead on her apartment floor still drew a lump in Brisling's chest.

By two a.m., he had purified and concentrated the DNA from the thirty-eight raw sewage samples and the four urine specimens. His gloved fingers trembled slightly as he pipetted a drop of each into the tiny pill-sized chambers of the reaction plate. Adding free oligonucleotides and the primers Lisa had sent, he set the plate inside the benchtop thermal cycler machine and programmed it for ninety minutes.

While the machine hummed, he prepared the gels, partially dissolving the agarose powder in saline buffer then placing it in the microwave oven to boil. Once the super-heated solution had cooled a little, he poured it into four small clear acrylic trays, the steam rising up and fogging his glasses. Across each tray, near one end, he hung a white plastic comb with flat, rectangular teeth. When the gels solidified, the combs would be withdrawn, leaving behind tiny wells.

Ding! Brisling jumped at the thermal cycler's chime. Jesus Christ. Whoever invented that sound should be shot. Checking his pulse, he went over to the thermal cycler, removed the reaction plate, and set it on the bench. Gloving up again, he slid each of the now-solid agarose gels into its own shoebox-sized acrylic tank filled with saline buffer. Steadying his hand, he pipetted a drop of each PCR reaction into a well in one of the four gels. When all forty-two samples had been loaded, he covered the tanks with lids and attached them via black and red wires to a low-voltage power-supply unit. Flipping the switch, he snapped off his gloves, took an old egg timer from the shelf, and set it to thirty minutes.

He retreated to his desk, laid his head on the pillow of loose papers, and counted the timer's ticks. Somewhere around a thousand, Brisling's desk phone rang, its brassy clang muffled beneath the layers of paper. He sat bolt upright, hands swimming through the mess until they found the receiver. He put it to his ear and slipped on his glasses. "Yeah?"

"Good morning, R.K." It was Senator Joe Flaherty.

He switched the receiver to his other ear so he could keep an eye on the timer. "You know it's four in the morning, right?"

"And yet you're in your lab, just like the last time I called."

"What do you want?"

"I heard what happened in Atlanta."

"De Soto had it coming."

The senator snorted. "Yeah, you've got one hell of a right cross, but I was talking about the heart attack. Are you OK?"

"I'm fine. Is that really why you called?"

"Yes. And no. I need to talk to you about JCAV."

"Why don't you just ask De Soto? He took everything."

"I would if I could. But he's not talking right now."

"Why not? I don't think I broke his jaw."

"De Soto had a grand mal seizure yesterday. He's in the ICU at Emory right now, intubated and sedated."

Oh Shit. "Was it a brain bleed?" Brisling had hit De Soto as hard as he could, hard enough to cause a subdural hematoma.

"No, it has nothing to do with you hitting him. They scanned his brain, and it looks like he has JCAV, just like the vice president."

"Damn."

"Yeah."

As much as Brisling had wanted to break that man's face, he had never wished death upon him. Or had he?

"R.K., I need to know what you've discovered about JCAV."

Brisling glanced over at the egg timer, ticking away. "Genevieve Gervin at the CDC can tell you everything you need to know."

"Not everything. I know that after you left Atlanta, you visited University Hospital in Portland. I know you were snooping around one of the labs there, asking questions."

"So you had me followed."

"I did. The same way you're following your hunches."

"That's all they are, hunches."

"Your hunches are better than most people's facts."

Brisling shrugged off the compliment. "So why have me followed?"

"Because whatever you find, I can't have you shouting it to the mountaintops. Maybe you don't realize the situation here, but the internet's about to explode. One word from someone like you, an actual doctor, and there could be full-scale, nationwide panic. Global panic."

"That could happen no matter what I say."

"I know that. We know that. And we have contingency plans in place."

"Like you moving into the White House?"

"If Congress approves, then yes." There was static on the line. "So, what's the connection between Lundquist and JCAV?" Flaherty asked.

"You tell me. You're the one having me followed."

"The FBI can't tie them together. There's no motive and no opportunity. Besides, Lundquist's lab didn't have the technology to make something like JCAV. Hardly anyone did back then."

"What do you think about the Burns Ice Man?" said Brisling.

"What about him?"

"You don't think it's possible Lundquist got infected from handling those remains?"

"How could he? That body was ten thousand years old."

"Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was a hoax. Or maybe it was contaminated with JCAV after it was pulled from the ice."

"Possible," said Flaherty. "But why? How? Who?"

"I don't know. Ask the Feds. They confiscated whatever it was Lundquist discovered. They ripped the pages right out of his lab book." Over on the bench, the timer's ticking had grown laborious and expectant. "I have to get back to my experiment."

"Your experiment?"

"I'll tell you about it if it works."

"Fair enough. But can I have your word you won't go public with this?"

"Can I keep working on it?"

"Like I said, I want you to. I need you on this case, just like with HIV."

"Can I work alone?"

"You can, but you won't be alone. Not from here on out. So can I have your word on this?"

It occurred to Brisling how the senator might help him. "On one condition," he said.

"And what's that?"

"I need you to get me a name from the Feds."

"What name?"

"The name of the Indian who buried the Ice Man."

Brisling stifled the clanging egg timer with his hand. Gloving up, he disconnected the power cables from the acrylic tanks, removed the lids, and fished out the trays. One by one, he slid the floppy gels into a shallow bath of dilute ethidium bromide, a chemical that would tag the DNA and make it glow under UV light. When the gels had soaked long enough, he took the one loaded with control samples and let it slip like a fish from his gloved hands onto the platen glass of the UV light box. Lowering the translucent shield, he flipped the switch.

The gel glowed with two columns of salmon-orange hatch marks, one along either edge, like ladders, the spaces between the rungs increasing progressively from top to bottom. They were reference DNA markers of known molecular weight against which Brisling could compare his samples. Between the ladders, about halfway down at the expected molecular weight, two bands glowed side by side: DNA isolated from John Carl Lundquist and Anna Jankowsky. JCAV infection confirmed. Next over was an empty column: DNA from a newborn baby who could not possibly have been infected yet. Lisa's PCR primers were working perfectly.

Switching off the UV light, he swapped the gel with another. He lowered the shield, his finger hesitating beneath the switch. Adrenaline surged through his belly. It reminded him of Army Jump School, crouching at the back of the plane, watching the next guy in line step into the light and tumble away.

He flipped the switch. An unbroken chain of glowing bands stretched across the gel—from Moscow to Boston to Tokyo, Buenos Aires to Melbourne, Khartoum to Ottawa, Beijing to Riyadh. Every city infected, not one of them clean.

He raised the shield and threw the remaining two gels onto the glass, his face painted orange with horror. Every city infected, every goddamned city. He should have known.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but foresight is one in million.

He snapped off his gloves, set aside his glasses, and began massaging his temples. Then he remembered the last well he had loaded, the last sample—the sample he had collected himself in the bathroom. His own urine. He looked down and saw it, a blurry orange band. But its meaning was clear enough. The world was going straight to hell, and he was going with it.

Image: ethidium bromide-stained DNA in an agarose gel as seen under UV light. Taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos//2770835447