Termez, Uzbekistan. Formerly U.S.S.R.

July 13, 2010

A small, one-bedroom stone house is nestled at the base of a soaring black mountain range. Inside, a family of three sleeps, sharing one room. The embers of a fire smolder in the rock fireplace, the burned, smoky odor hanging in the air.

A baby wakes in the middle of the night. She has had a nightmare. She stands up in her crib but loses her balance. Her legs slip through the slats and her body falls like dead weight, her jaw crashing down on the top rail, throwing her head back violently.

She screams as blood trickles down her chin.

Her parents are sound asleep in the bed next to the crib. Her father is caught up in a dream; her mother slumbers peacefully, exhausted from a hard day's work.

Eventually, the child tires of crying and falls back to sleep as well.

When the sun rises and pours through the lone window in the room, the mother awakens to see that her child's cheek is stained with dried blood. She screams and reaches out for the girl, brushing her hair back to reveal the bruised and swollen neck.

"Vlad," she says to her husband. "Wake up."

Her husband does not stir.

"Vlad, get up. What is the matter with you?"

No response.

The mother runs to the phone to call a doctor.

There is no dial tone.

She dials frantically anyway—no ring. No answer. She thinks the phone is dead.

July 20, 2010

"It starts with nausea and vomiting. And it's much worse than the food poisoning I had a few years back," the frail man said.

"Then what happens?" Nathan asked, lifting the stethoscope from the right side of the man's chest and placing it nearer to his heart.

"It gets worse, much worse. The migraines are unbearable. Then more nausea, flashes of brilliant white lights, and squiggles racing through my vision. Can't stand the light. Can't stand any sounds. I just want to go crawl in a dark hole someplace and die."

"How long before the vertigo sets in?"

"A day or two, maybe longer."

"Do you have it now?"

"Oh, hell no. I wouldn't be here if I did. Can't get off the floor when that happens. Everything just spins around. You feel like you're about to be flung off the face of the planet."

"Anything else?"

"The ringing. Nonstop ringing. It's like I'm standing next to a giant church bell, or maybe right inside it. It's awful; I can hardly describe it. Then, after a few minutes, it goes away. But it always comes back. And of course, you can't hear a damn thing for hours afterward."

"Does everyone in town go through the same thing?" Nate asked, making another notation on his pad.

"Pretty much. Some of them have had seizures. I've seen people fall down in the store and just start flopping around like a bass out of water. We've only got the one clinic in town, so it's hard for them to get to everyone. It's been going on now for a week, and you know what?"

"What?"

"It's gettin' a lot worse. The doctors from Spokane, the ones who said they were specialists, came and went and were totally baffled. No one knows what it is. They said someone would come from the CDC, but we haven't seen them yet.

"That's when I decided to call the EPA. We had nothin' to lose."

* * *

Watching the wide-open evening sky shift from dark blue to violet over the town of Troy, Montana, Nathan Bannister sat at a desk in the town's only medical clinic—a small, sparse, gray room—and rubbed the soft stubble of beard on his chin.

He was a rugged man: tall, with big shoulders and thick forearms toned by years spent digging fence-post holes at his parents' ranch. He wore a flannel long-sleeve shirt, a pair of faded Levi's and heavy Justin cowboy boots; uncommon clothing for someone working for the Environmental Protection Agency. Combing his fingers through his thick mahogany hair, he realized that he was long overdue for a shower.

At the end of that first day in July, he had interviewed ten people on his list, and each time the story was identical. As far as he could tell, more than half of the citizens shared the same confounding symptoms.

He was one of a handful of scientists with the EPA that specialized in the monitoring and research of airborne contaminants, and after the Homeland Security Agency had become the umbrella agency for infectious disasters, it seemed that airborne threats were becoming more and more common.

In fact, hardly a week passed anymore without some sort of threat to the nation's security: bomb scares or chemical disbursements—tainted water supplies, plagues, diseases—anything to kill, maim, or at least scare people and ultimately shut down infrastructure and the economy.

Today, he was in Troy, about twenty-five miles north of the last disaster he'd investigated—the asbestos poisoning in Libby, Montana. Thank God, Nathan thought, most of these things don't pan out to be anything as serious as that.

But the Libby incident had been a different situation. It involved the asbestos that came from the mines. First it killed miners. Then it killed their wives and children, slipping into their homes on the sooty clothing of the hard-working men. Eventually, the mine was closed, but the dying went on.

The fatal symptom of the asbestos poisoning was the coughing up of blood. It was a slow, painful, and ugly death where each individual literally drowned in his own blood or simply stopped breathing.

That was ten years ago in 2000, and Nathan's investigation was the reason a national scandal was uncovered—the government had tried to sweep it all away—hide it as if it had just been a minor misunderstanding. As if it wasn't enough to deal with potential terrorism, Nathan thought, we also have to deal with fraud and cover-ups from our own government—cover-ups that cost lives.

Paris, France. Amarante Hotel. July 28, 2010.

"Ladies and gentlemen. Can we have order? Will the members of the summit please come to order?" the chairman asked, pounding a heavy wood and brass gavel on the podium in front of him.

Seated in a large oval auditorium in the five-star hotel were thirty of the world's leading biochemists representing the U.S., France, Germany, Spain, Britain, Canada, and twenty-four other countries.

The room was filled with the chatter of anticipation as the chairman continued to bang the podium.

One notable representative—the Russian delegate—was not yet in his seat. His name was Dr. Sergi Revchenko, a specialist in biochemistry, and he had been invited to the summit to discuss environmental issues, emerging technologies and, in particular, breakthroughs in the hot-button topic of personalized medicine and the use of nano-technologies in chemistry.

Revchenko was the eastern counterpart to the three American scientists, Robert Fleishman, Craig Venter, and Francis Collins who had nearly simultaneously published the first full genome (map) of a living organism in 1995—an obscure bacteria that can transmit meningitis. That had begun the revolution in research to map the human genome.

Revchenko's tardiness was not unusual the chairman thought. Though brilliant, he'd always been a little scattered. Besides, he was now over eighty years old.

The chairman decided to start the meeting without Revchenko's...