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a look, but finally masked and gloved up.
    If Japanese tourists do it on BA flights from Tokyo to Heathrow , Zack thought, we’ve got every reason.
    But then Dugan stopped with one glove on. “What the hell’s that?” he said. Dugan had eyes like a cop – he was usually dealing with problems before Zack had even clocked them. In this case, it was a big white tent billowing out from the side of the hospital. This was new. And not good. Zack knew what it was.
    “Quarantine tent.”
    This was the part where normal civilian people would run away from danger. But the Company men ran instead toward it. They were obliged to.
    “Come on,” Zack said. “Quick poke around. We won’t get too close.”
    “No problem, Zack,” Dugan said. “On me.”
    Fearing nothing, man or virus, he took the lead.
    * * *
    Their walk back from the hospital was a brisk one – brisk as in quick, not cold. Though Zack shuddered nearly half the way – not from the temperature, but from what he’d seen in there.
    As Zack and Dugan hoofed it at the double time, the sun was getting low behind the structures, and the wind picking up. And the town was even more deserted than it had been on their way out. This desolate vibe seemed to accelerate Zack’s dark thoughts about man’s deep inhumanity to man.
    It was because of what he just saw, and because the two were walking in silence, that he let his head get back into his two pet topics: terrorism and pandemics. And it was due to the dangerous confluence of these two that Zack knew so much about virology. Because bio-terror was on the Very Short List of Shit That Can Go Wrong Which Everyone Would Much Sooner Not Think About. And Zack didn’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.
    Also, the vibe in town conduced to brooding. Basically, everything had gotten spooky as hell, and when they were nearly back, Zack heard footsteps, heavy ones, from somewhere behind them, but of strangely indistinct origin. “Dugan…”
    “Yeah, check, I hear it, Zack. Move.” Zack broke into a run, trusting that Dugan was behind him, and ten seconds later reached the safehouse. He squared up to the door, jammed his card in the reader, and stuck his face in the camera. This resulted in Baxter buzzing them in, the buzz followed by the heavy steel clunk of the bar sliding away.
    He darted inside, breathless, and began pulling off his mask and gloves – while Dugan backed in, his scanning eyes still missing nothing out on the street. Zack imagined that some part of the operator was still seeing what got burned onto his retinas back there at the hospital. They took the stairs two at a time up to the TOC, where Baxter and Maximum Bob sat, ready to be briefed.
    Dugan took a seat, but Zack paused just inside the doorway. The others looked up at him.
    “I, uh… just give me a minute in my room, all right?”
    No one objected. Their guy had been in enemy captivity only hours ago.
    Zack ducked out down the hall and into the bedroom he shared with Baxter. He shucked his gear, then sat on the bed, just breathing. Why did he have such strong feelings about all this? Why did he jack up into condition yellow every time there was an outbreak of the sniffles in his area of operations (AO)?
    Because he once got too close to the fire.
    It was only a couple of years ago, in this very city, that Zack had helped foil a bioterror plot – one in which a certain familiar Islamist terror franchise had procured a bioengineered substance from an impoverished and disaffected Kazakh bioscientist. Al-Shabaab had planned to use this virus against the demining teams based at Camp Lemonnier – really good people who were already risking their lives trying to turn the booby-trapped hellhole that was the Horn of Africa into a livable place.
    In the end, that threat had been neutralized, and Zack and his team had destroyed the virus stocks, as well as the conspirators. But Zack knew that there was always another disaffected Kazakh, and always