means of assassination by security services. The Americans got a sample of the toxin from German intelligence and manipulated it to make sure it was impervious to possible antidotes. Tildy thought it entirely suitable that Putin be given a dose of his own medicine.
Defense and State joined the meeting later. They had not been read into the assassination plan, although they would not likely object. The new president had been diligently eliminating the soft-on-Russia leftovers. Everyone knew the program now. Russian troops were massed on the border of Ukraine. No one understood Putin’s game better than Tildy: his goal since the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been to restore the empire. “The gambit in Iran was a misdirection play,” she said.
State concurred. “Now that we’re overcommitted in the Persian Gulf, his path to recapturing eastern Europe has been made easier.” The question was how to respond.
“An unfortunate accident has taken place in a plant in Kursk,” Defense said, admitting nothing, but allowing the ironic tone in his voice to convey the message. There were eleven older Russian nuclear reactors of the RBMK-1000 type, the same as the one in Chernobyl that suffered the catastrophic meltdown in 1986. Although the reactor was shut down within thirty-six hours, Defense reported, “a cloud of radioactive gas is drifting indolently northward toward Moscow. The capital is in a frenzy.” Similar plants near population centers were compromised throughout the country. The terror caused by radiation fallout was more advantageous than using actual bombs. It was a way of making Russia nuke itself. Even better, much of the world was blaming Moscow for its failure, once again, to safely contain its nuclear materials. Tildy thought the whole operation was handsomely done.
But it’s never just one thing.
That afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Bartlett arrived for her daily briefing. “Good news, I expect,” Tildy said dryly.
“The influenza season peaked in early July, and reported cases have dropped to their lowest point since early spring,” Bartlett said.
“Well, that actually is good news.”
“Yes, ma’am. And we are in trials with three different vaccines. We hope to have one of them ready and in production before the virus returns this fall.”
“You keep saying that. Why must it return?”
“That’s what influenza does. We don’t know why exactly. So far, this pandemic has resembled the pattern of the 1918 Spanish flu, and if that continues, we predict the second wave to be much worse than the first. It’s now been seeded everywhere on earth. You can expect it by October.”
Two months away.
“Will it be the same flu?”
“Or some variant. That’s what worries us in the vaccine department. We’re trying to anticipate how the virus may change, but it’s only educated guesswork. We’ve sequenced the virus thousands of times, but there’s no guarantee it will be the same virus when the vaccine is ready. Some years the formula we develop for seasonal flu is totally ineffective.”
“What about this Russian vaccine?”
“It’s for seasonal flu, not for Kongoli.”
“But I keep hearing that it has some magic ingredient.”
“Polyoxidonium.”
“If you say so.”
“As far as we can tell, it induces interferon production, which should cause significant side effects. We’ve been unable to validate its efficacy. We don’t know why the incidence of Kongoli is lower in Russia than in neighboring countries. It could be accounted for by ordinary variance in the virus.”
“What date will you actually have a real vaccine for Kongoli?” Tildy asked.
“If we do develop an effective vaccine, it won’t be in full production until mid-October.”
Tildy had always avoided hating the messenger for bringing hateful news, but Lieutenant Commander Bartlett tested her patience. Tildy had to keep her priorities straight. The idea that the Kongoli influenza would return in a couple months, in an even more virulent form, was nothing more than a theory—a worst-case scenario aired by people who thought of nothing else. Whereas this new kind of war with Russia was happening now and had to be dealt with.
Bartlett seemed to be reading her mind. “You still don’t understand, do you?” she asked.
Tildy bridled at the impertinence. “Understand what? That we’re possibly, in theory, facing another round of disease? We lived through it, most of us. We’ll march on. We always have.”
“I’m not talking about a setback,” said Bartlett. “If you paid any attention to the role of disease in human affairs, you’d know the danger we’re in. We got smug after all the victories over infection in the twentieth century. But nature is not a stable force. It evolves, it changes, and it never becomes