Many of them wore surgical masks.
He came to a complete stop by a low, brick building: the Germantown Community Recreation Center. Hastily made signs declared that PEOPLE WITH SYMPTOMS SHOULD NOT GET VACCINATED — SEE YOUR DOCTOR. Officials in masks directed people to various lines that came out of the doors and wrapped around the building. They were handing out masks, so everyone in line was wearing one. Paramedics waited lazily by ambulances; volunteers took down information with clipboards. Pete could see, inside the center’s double doors, hundreds of people in a dozen lines, or maybe it was just one line winding throughout the building. On the sidewalk near him, a mother was frantically talking to a bewildered volunteer. Her child, a girl maybe four years old, stared at Pete, only her eyes visible above a mask that was far too big for her small face.
A car behind him honked. Traffic had opened up. He pulled forward and found his way back to I-270.
Back in the office in Frederick, Pete flipped through Strack’s presentation from that morning.
“Do you realize you’re looking at my slides?” said Strack.
“I do,” said Pete.
“You’re going to ruin your reputation around here if you start participating.”
“It looks like it’s getting worse,” said Pete, stopping on a chart with the last six months of data.
“That’s why you’re in charge,” said Strack. “You read a bar graph like none other.”
Pete smiled. “Is it getting… deadlier? It seems like, looking at these numbers, the mortality rates are climbing.”
Strack shrugged. “The flu is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Other diseases — lots of diseases — have higher mortality rates. Like Ebola. Or rabies. If rabies is untreated, you die, almost every time. But year after year, for most of modern history, the flu kills more people than anything else in terms of sheer numbers. And historically, it thrives during times of war, when people are traveling all over the place, food supplies and medical supplies are scarce. The 1918 flu pandemic, a direct result of World War I, might have killed a hundred million people: five percent of the world’s population. So yes… if that’s what you’re asking me. It’s real.”
“I wasn’t asking that,” said Pete.
Strack laughed. “Of course you were, don’t be shy. It’s hard to know what to believe right now, god knows. Hell, we’re at the heart of the bullshit machine right here in this office. But I’ve got the data, I’ve been to the hospitals, I’ve looked at the blood. This is real.”
“But just because it’s real—”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not propaganda,” said Strack. “Which is why, I’m sure, we’ve been given these luxurious accommodations and a communications specialist. And you.”
“So it is deadly. But is it anything new?”
“The flu is always new, that’s the devious nature of it. Each strain is unique. But overall — no. It’s not remarkably different in deadliness or virulence than any flu we’ve seen in the last hundred years. More deadly than some historical strains, less deadly than others. But no question we should be wary of it. Which is how I’m able to get to sleep at night.”
“How so?” said Pete.
Strack shrugged. “I’m not a dumbass. I know we’re milking this for propaganda value somehow, keeping the people in a panic. But maybe the work I do—we do — will help prevent the spread of it. Maybe we’ll stumble on something that helps keep influenza at bay from now on — it wouldn’t be the first time that a war effort has led to some concrete, lasting good. So that’s how I sleep at night.”
“I see.”
“How about you?”
“Me?” said Pete. “I don’t sleep at night. Ever.”
Strack chuckled nervously, but stopped when he saw that Pete wasn’t laughing with him.
Pete broke the silence and shoved a stack of a paper toward Strack. “Look at this.”
Strack looked them over. “Evacuations?”
“Mostly in coastal areas. To prevent the spread of the flu.”
“Where did you get these?”
“I’ve been requesting them for weeks, finally somebody slipped up and sent them to me.”
“But these don’t even… these areas have nothing to do with the flu. There’s no correlation at all.”
“I know,” said Pete. He’d already made some crude comparisons between the evacuations and Strack’s latest projections.
But they did correlate to areas that had been hit by drones, at least according to the radical blogs he was following now from Internet cafes across town.
“Weird,” said Strack. He squinted at the data again, and then back up at Pete, with newfound respect. “So let me ask you a question. As long as we’re being chummy with each other.”
“Go ahead,” said Pete.
“Why are you here? I mean, I looked you up. I know you were the hero of the drone program for a while. You’ve done more network news interviews in your life than anybody I know personally. Way more than Harkness, which I’m sure galls him, by the way. So how did you end up in this backwater of the Alliance?”
Pete thought it over for a long moment. “I think in part they put me here to get me out of the way. They didn’t think they could trust me anywhere near the drones anymore.”
“But why here, though? Why working on an obscure flu project? You used to be one of the chief badasses in the Alliance. Surely they could use you somewhere else.”
“Have you ever heard of Admiral Hyman Rickover?” asked Pete.
“No.”
“He was the father of the nuclear submarine. An engineering genius. Dreamed it up, fought for a decade to make it a reality while virtually everyone in the Navy and the Pentagon told him he was crazy. He’s a hero of mine.”
“Did he send you here?”
Pete laughed, something he didn’t do much anymore, but Strack had that ability. “No. But he once said something I think about a lot. ‘If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won’t.’”
“So which did you sin against to end up here?”
Pete paused. “Both. But my point is: don’t make the mistake of trying to attribute too much logic to the bureaucracy. There might not be any good reason I’m here. I think they probably thought I could do very little damage here, while at the same time they could keep an eye on me.”
Strack shook his head. “As much as I hate to admit it, I don’t think you’re giving them enough credit.”
“How so?”
“You’re an inventor, right? You invented the drones. Now they want you to invent a flu epidemic. You convinced everybody that the drones were a game changer. They want you to do the same thing with the flu.”
Pete looked down at Strack’s slides again and pointed.
“Not me,” he said. “You’re the resident genius here, Strack.”
The young doctor held his arms up. “That’s what I keep telling everybody!”
“Are you the only one working on a cure for this thing?”
He shook his head. “No, not at all. My mission is really the epidemiology — the actual victims, the rates of transmission, things like that. Empirical data about the actual disease.”
“But somebody’s working on a cure, right?”
“Of course,” said Strack, shuffling through some papers on his desk. “Teams everywhere, in every Alliance country. But if you ask me, based on the reports I’m getting, the most promising work is being done here.” He handed Pete a black-and-white aerial photo of an island. “This is our most productive research station. They’re working in almost total isolation, and we have reason to think they’re getting close.”