had the flu, and then they'd be able to communicate the virus, and so infect more.
The question of how an epidemic spread was one of time and opportunity more than anything else. The more rapidly it got out from the focal center, and the more rapid the instrumentalities of travel, the farther a disease could spread laterally through a population. There were mathematical models, but they were all theoretical, dependent on a multitude of individual variables, each of which could affect the entire threat equation by at least one order of magnitude. To say the epidemic would die out in time was correct. The question was how fast? That would determine the number of people infected before protective measures took effect. One percent invasion of a society, or ten percent, or fifty percent? America wasn't a provincial society. Everyone interacted with everyone else. A truly airborne virus with a three-day incubation period… there was no model for that known to Moudi. The deadliest recent Zaireian outbreak in Kikwit had claimed fewer than three hundred lives, but it had started with one unfortunate woodcutter, then his family, then their neighbors. The trick, then, if you wanted to create a much wider outbreak, was to increase the number of index cases. If you could do that, the initial blossoming of Ebola Zaire Mayinga America could be so large as to invalidate conventional control measures. It would spread not from one man and one family, but from hundreds of individuals and families—or thousands? Then the next generational leap could involve hundreds of thousands. About this time, the Americans would realize that something evil was afoot, but there would be time for one more generational leap, and that would be an order of magnitude greater still, perhaps into the millions. At that point, medical facilities would be overwhelmed…
… and there might be no stopping it at all. Nobody knew the possible consequences of a deliberate mass infection in a highly mobile society. The implications might be truly global. But probably not. Almost certainly not, Moudi judged, looking down at the glass culture trays behind thick wire-glass panels, through the plastic of his mask. The first generation of this disease had come from an unknown host and killed a young boy. The second generation had claimed but a single victim, due to fate and luck and his own competence as a physician. The third generation would grow before his eyes. How far that might spread was undetermined, but it was generations Four, Five, Six, and perhaps even Seven which would determine the fate of an entire country—which happened to be the enemy of his own.
It was easier now. Jean Baptiste had had a face and a voice and a life which had touched his own. He could not make that mistake again. She'd been an infidel, but a righteous one, and she was now with Allah, because Allah was truly merciful. He'd prayed for her soul, and surely Allah would hear his prayers. Few in America or elsewhere could possibly be as righteous as she had been, and he knew well that Americans hated his country and distrusted his religious faith. They might have names and faces, but he didn't see them here and he never would, and they were all ten thousand kilometers away, and it was easy to switch the television off.
'Yes,' Moudi agreed. 'Testing for it will be easy enough.'
'LOOK,' GEORGE WINSTON was telling a knot of three new senators, 'if the federal government made cars, a Chevy pickup would cost eighty thousand dollars and have to stop every ten blocks to fill up the tank. You guys know business. So do I. We can do better.'
'It is really that bad?' the (alphabetically) senior senator from Connecticut asked.
'I can show you the comparative-productivity numbers. If Detroit ran this way, we'd all be driving Japanese cars,' Winston replied, jabbing his finger into the man's chest, and reminding himself to get rid of his Mercedes 500SEL, or at least garage it for a while.
'It's like having one cop car to cover East L.A.,' Tony Bretano was saying to five more, two of them from California. 'I don't have the forces I need to cover one MRC. That's major regional conflict,' he explained to the new people and their spouses. 'And we're supposed to—on paper, I mean—we're supposed to be able to cover two of them at the same time, plus a peacekeeping mission somewhere else. Okay? Now, what I need at Defense is a chance to reconfigure our forces so that the shooters are the most important, and the rest of the outfit supports them, not the other way around. Accountants and lawyers are useful, but we have enough of them at Treasury and Justice. My side of the government, we're the cops, and I don't have enough cops on the street.'
'But how do we pay for that?' Colorado the younger asked. The senior senator from the Rocky Mountain State had been at a fund-raiser in Golden that night.
'The Pentagon isn't a jobs program. We have to remember that. Now, next week I'll have a full assessment of what we need, and then I'm going to come to the Hill, and together we'll figure how to make that happen at the least possible cost.'
'See, what did I tell you?' Arnie van Damm said quietly, passing behind Ryan's back. 'Let them do it for you. You just stay pleasant.'
'What you said was right, Mr. President,' the new senator from Ohio professed to believe, sipping a bourbon and water now that the cameras were off. 'You know, once in school, I did a little history paper on Cincinnatus, and…'
'Well, all we have to do is remember to put the country first,' Jack told him.
'How do you manage to do your job and—I mean,' the wife of the senior senator from Wisconsin explained, 'you still do your surgery?'
'And teaching, which is even more important,' Cathy said with a nod, wishing she were upstairs and doing her patient notes. Well, there was the helicopter ride in tomorrow. 'I will never stop doing my work. I give blind people their sight back. Sometimes I take the bandages off myself, and the look on their faces is the best thing in the world. The best,' she repeated.
'Even better than me, honey?' Jack asked, placing his arm around her shoulder. This might even be working, he thought. Charm them, Arnie and Gallic had told him.
THE PROCESS HAD already started. The colonel assigned to guard the five mullahs had followed them into the mosque, where, moved by the moment, he'd worshiped with them. At the conclusion of the devotions, the senior of their number had spoken to him, quietly and politely, touching on a favored passage in the Holy Koran, so as to establish some common ground. It brought to the colonel a memory of his youth and his own father, a devout and honorable man. It was the usual thing in dealing with people, no matter the place or the culture. You got them talking, read their words, and chose the proper path for continuing the conversation. The mullah, a member of the Iranian clergy for over forty years, had counseled people on their faith and on their troubles for all that time, and so it was not hard for him to establish a rapport with his captor, a man supposedly sworn to kill him and his four colleagues should those orders arrive from his superiors. But in picking a man deemed faithful, the departing generals had chosen a little too wisely, because men who display true loyalty are men of thoughts and principles, and such men are ever vulnerable to ideas demonstrably better than those to which they adhere. There could be no real contest. Islam was a religion with a long and honorable history, neither of which attribute attached to the dying regime which the colonel had sworn to uphold.
'It must have been a hard thing, fighting in the swamps,' the mullah told him a few minutes later, as the conversation turned to relations between the two Islamic countries.
'War is evil. I never took pleasure in killing,' the colonel admitted. It was rather like being a Catholic in the confessional, and all at once the man's eyes teared up, and he related some of the things he'd done over the years. He could see now that while he'd never taken such pleasure, he had hardened his heart to it, finally not distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, the just from the corrupt, and done what he'd been told—because he'd been told, not because it had been in any way the right thing to do. He saw that now.
'Man falls often, but through the words of the Prophet we may always find our way back to a merciful God. Men are forgetful of their duties, but Allah is never forgetful of His.' The mullah touched the officer's arm. 'I think your prayers are not finished this day. Together we will pray to Allah, and together we will find peace for your soul.'
After that, it had been very easy indeed. On learning that the generals were even now leaving the country, the colonel had two good reasons for cooperating. He had no wish to die. He was quite willing to follow the will of his God in order to stay alive and serve. In demonstration of his devotion, he assembled two companies of soldiers to meet with the mullahs and get their orders. It was very easy for the soldiers. All they had to do was follow the orders of their officers. To do anything else was a thought that never occurred to any of them.
It was now dawn in Baghdad, and at a score of large houses, doors were kicked in. Some occupants they found awake. Some were drunkenly asleep. Some were packed to leave and trying to figure a place to go and a way to get there..All were a little too late in their understanding of what was going on around them, in a place where a minute's error was the difference between prosperous life and violent death. Few resisted, and the one man who came closest to doing so successfully was cut nearly in half by a twenty-round burst from an AK-47, along with his
