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microscope’s view of what we’re calling H1N1-Florida,” he said. “It’s a virus culture sent to CDC by a pathologist in Niceville, Florida, down in the Panhandle. Patient was a thirty-six-year-old male, a limousine driver who had been hospitalized for a case of severe pneumonia. He died on the ninth of July. The sample was logged in here on July 11, and two days ago was assigned to a lab tech for A and I—analysis and identification.”
    “Thereby wasting almost two weeks,” a woman sitting stiffly at the table did not quite mutter. The blue-black jacket draped over her chairback bore the gold shoulder boards of a Navy vice admiral and the bright silver caduceus of the medical corps.
    Porter reddened, but his voice was unfazed.
    “We get about a hundred and fifty culture samples here every working day,” he said. “More on Mondays. You do the math, okay?” He pressed another key and a new image appeared along side the first.
    “I’m not an expert,” the ferret senator said, “but I don’t see a difference.”
    “Genetically, there isn’t one,” Porter replied. “They’re the same bug. Except this one came from in from a pathology lab in Mary Esther, Florida. An eight-year-old female presenting what the clinic’s attending described as ‘mild flulike symptoms.’ That was last week—the sixteenth, I believe. We were sent the culture on July 18, the day the girl succumbed to severe respiratory failure.”
    Porter blew out hard. “Okay. We have a middle-aged male with pneumonia, which isn’t all that uncommon even in the summer. This guy had all kinds of risk factors: he was a smoker, grossly overweight and in a sedentary job—”
    He shrugged.
    “Well. And sad as it is, sometimes when a kid catches theflu, or even a common cold, there’s a toxic-shock reaction. So the cultures came in. The first thing our people do is look over the paperwork that comes with ’em. Seemed routine. The clinical symptomology didn’t raise any red flags, right? They had to wait in line for A and I.”
    “We all understand,” the senator growled. “Your ass is covered. Get on with it.”
    Porter ignored the interruption.
    “We ran the standard virological tests on the sample from the limo driver. It was an A-type, but we couldn’t get a match on the strain. Wasn’t Victoria, wasn’t PR-34, wasn’t WS. Then the lab tech ran an ELISA—that’s shorthand for ‘enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay’—and got some very confusing results. We seemed to have some kind of swine flu virus, non–type specific. That rang some bells—enough so the tech fast-tracked it to genetics for comparison.
    “Yesterday, the computer came up with a hit—a form of Type A influenza, H1N1. Not an exact match; there are some very interesting antigenic shifts in the hemagglutinin protein that have us puzzled. But it was close enough for identification. More than close enough to make us start rescreening the paperwork backlog, looking for any cases with similar symptoms. That’s how we found the other one, the girl.”
    He touched the keyboard again, and a map replaced the virus images. It was a detailed section of Northwest Florida, the stretch that ran along the Gulf Coast from the bulge of Applachicola to Mobile Bay in the west. Porter did something to the laptop that caused the display to zoom in, centering on the large patch of blue that was Choctawatchee Bay. Touching the northern shore was the town of Niceville; to the west, Mary Esther. Over both, a large red “1” was superimposed.
    Between them, on the left side of the bay where the blue of the gulf touched a forest green shoreline, lay the city of Fort Walton Beach. There, on the display monitor, a large yellow “4-?” blinked relentlessly.
    There was a stunned silence for a moment. Then the significance of what they were seeing dawned on those seated around the table, and several voices started to speak simultaneously.
    Porter’s next words rolled over the commotion