1
Washington, DC
“They’re all infected.”
“What?”
President of the United States, Bobby Gibbons, stared at his secretary of health and human services, Andrew Richards, like he had two heads.
The president continued. “Just yesterday you said only half of the town had become ill.”
“It’s not happening as fast in Yupak as the other town, but it’s a terrible situation.”
Two weeks ago, and the day after President Gibbons was sworn in, officials brought him into his office and told him that a small town in Alaska had all died from some fast-moving, ultracontagious virus. Just over a hundred people were dead within a week. Something completely unheard of, and alarm bells had gone off that this wasn’t just some fluke. Everyone in Gibbons’s cabinet thought it smelled of biowarfare. Or at least the beginnings of it. The reason it was even more of a red flag than usual was because Dmitry Kuznetsov, a world-renowned Russian biochemist and virologist, flew into Seattle from Moscow several months ago for a World Health Conference . . . and he never left. Now that the people in another town, not far from the one that had been wiped out, had all fallen ill as well, there was almost zero doubt left that something was amiss. And President Gibbons was happy he’d already made the decision to send in an agent to try to dig in to where they thought the problem could be brewing.
“Somebody is testing a virus,” CIA Director Robert Lucas said with confidence. “I can feel it.”
“All right, Robert,” the president said. “We can get into that in a minute.” The president shifted his focus to the secretary of health. “Right now, I want to hear from who you brought with you, Andrew.”
Andrew cleared his throat. “Of course, Mr. President, this is Donna Ingram. She’s been a top virologist for years. I’ve given her all the data, as you asked.”
The president reached across the couch in the Oval Office and shook Donna’s hand. Next to the tall and big-shouldered Andrew, Donna looked even more petite. Her short dark hair bobbed as the president shook her tiny hand. She seemed young, but the president could never tell anymore. When you get above sixty, everyone seems young.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice, Ms. Ingram. Give it to me straight. We need to know what engines to fire next to get ahead of this thing.”
“Thanks for having me. I won’t waste your time. This is absolutely a manufactured virus. But that isn’t what scares me.”
The president sat back in his seat. “Well, it is what scares me, so now I’m really nervous.”
“You should be,” Donna said.
She produced a folder and took a sheet of paper out. She extended it toward the president. He took it, but it all looked like a foreign language to him. “Just explain it to me.”
“Chart one shows the incubation period from the town that was completely wiped out. As you can see, there was little to none. It just wiped people out. Chart two, fresh data from my biologist who was sent in to Yupak yesterday shows that the last few people to get sick had been in contact with the first people to get it over a week ago. Only just showing signs of being sick this morning.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” the president said.
“It’s much worse,” Robert chimed in. “If this really is a manufactured virus, whoever is creating it will want a long incubation period.”
“That’s right,” Donna said. “If someone is wanting to infect a massive amount of people, they are going to want the symptoms to lie dormant for as long as possible.”
The president understood now why it was bad. “So those who are infected will go on about their lives not knowing they have it, meanwhile infecting a much larger amount of people.”
“Exactly,” Donna said. “It seems to me that they unleashed two different strands of this at the same time. One to Eleanor, Alaska, where the town died off in a week, and the other to Yupak where only two have died in probably two weeks, but still everyone is sick. They’ve already learned a lot about their virus, just in this one test. I’m afraid it’s time to clear out that region of Alaska, Mr. President. There could already be another testing strain in another town, and we don’t even know it.”
President Gibbons stood. “Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Ms. Ingram, for coming. Please continue to update me by the half hour. We’ll take it from here.”
Donna shook his hand and stopped as she walked toward the door. “Mr. President, call me Donna. And if I may?”
“Of course.”
“If this is what we all think it is, if this makes it to the lower forty-eight states, this could be the one we’ve all been fearing. It could bring all of North America down.”
2
Utqiagvik (Barrow), Alaska
Alexander King began his walk to the only bar in town. Everything was frozen. Not in a hypothetical sense but literally: all things outside were frozen solid. And had been for months. When King met with the president of the United States two weeks ago, and he’d asked King to take the most important assignment of his career, even though President Gibbons told him it was Alaska, King had no idea it would be like this.
Pure misery.
The ice crunched beneath his feet as he walked the snow-covered dirt road. There was no pavement in Barrow. The weather would never allow for any such thing. All the roads had to consist of gravel and dirt. The road he walked along was just that under the four inches of frozen snow he plodded through. On both sides of the road were rows of wooden houses. All just like the one he was staying in. His one-bedroom, four-room house was as basic as it gets. While he thought he would never long for the small flat he’d stayed in for months in London almost a year ago, he did. And he certainly never imagined he’d long for the weather. But London now seemed like a tropical paradise.
Not only had the average temperature been negative five degrees Fahrenheit, but until a week ago, there had also been no sun. Zero. He supposed he felt fortunate that his assignment hadn’t started until Barrow’s sixty-five days of night were over, but today had exactly two hours of sun. That’s it. Oh, and a couple of hours of what they called civil twilight, which basically meant you could walk the streets without tripping over something in front of you. It was like a lamp on in the other room in your house. You could see, just not very well.
King wrapped his scarf a little tighter around his neck. He was thankful that it wasn’t as windy that night as it had been the previous six days. This was the third night in a row he’d made this walk after his day sleep due to his night shift at the Volkov Mining Company. Normally he would never leave the house if he didn’t have to in weather like this, but the weather and the days filled with night weren’t even the worst part about Barrow. The worst part was that you couldn’t buy liquor without a city-issued permit. Which meant no permit for an undercover special agent like King. He obviously wouldn’t be going to the police station to obtain that permit under any circumstance, because he had to keep his head down and do his work. He also prayed to the gods that he wouldn’t be there in Frozen Land long enough to really need it.