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Council. There were only seven people in attendance, plus me. The Vice President had invited me. I wasn’t sitting at the table. I was standing against the wall, feeling completely out of place.”
    “Who was at that meeting?”
    Danvers shrugged. “The usual,” he said. “The President, the Vice President, the Secretaries of State, Defense and Energy, and General Wallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff… and the Director of National Intelligence.”
    I made a face. “That’s a high-powered meeting. Did you know why you were invited to attend?”
    Danvers nodded. “I had a good idea,” he said. “The Vice President had filled me in beforehand. I just wasn’t prepared for the kind of authority I was about to be handed.”
    I nodded. “So that was the meeting where the President nominated you as ‘the Architect’, right?”
    The man across from me looked almost embarrassed. He nodded his head slowly. “It fell to me to devise the Emergency Homeland Defense Plan.”
    I hesitated for a moment and then took a chance. Danvers was a formidable presence, almost intimidating in the way he seemed to fill the room with his energy. “That must have pissed a lot of those people off,” I said.
    Danvers blinked, and then slowly smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It did. General Wallace was furious. Almost everyone in that room saw the zombie outbreak as purely a military issue – a war that had to be fought on American soil. Naturally they thought the best qualified people to co-ordinate our defenses was one of their own.”
    “But the President didn’t agree.”
    “Not entirely.”
    “Meaning…?”
    Danvers closed his eyes for a moment like maybe he was assembling his thoughts, and the room became absolutely silent. I could hear myself breathing and the gentle hum of the air-conditioning. Finally he fixed me with narrowed eyes.
    “Let’s get one thing straight before we go on,” he said. “The reason we are alive today – the reason America still exists – is because we had a President at the start of the zombie outbreak who was a man who believed in his convictions. Our President was the kind of man the late great Ronald Reagan would admire. He believed in the might of America, and understood our rightful place in the world. He knew we had to be decisive, regardless of the protesting left wing sympathizers who called the outbreak a humanitarian disaster. It was – but it was also a fight for survival. The President understood that.”
    “How did that understanding affect America’s response when the first cases of the outbreak were reported in Miami?”
    Richard Danvers got out of his chair and went to a large map of the United States spread across the far wall. It was a hugely detailed map, almost ten feet wide and about six feet high, set within an ornate dark wooden frame and hung on the wall like it was a seventeenth century masterpiece. He beckoned me over with an abrupt wave of his hand.
    “By the time that NSC meeting was convened – just ten days after the first cases of the outbreak were reported, we had already lost the southern sector of Florida,” the man explained, sweeping his hand across the map and covering an area northward from Miami to Cape Coral. “The local police forces had been overwhelmed. The National Guard got swept away. Panic was quickly becoming a pandemic. The President acted swiftly.”
    “By appointing you.”
    Danvers shook his head. He turned to face me and we were eyeball to eyeball. He was taller than I had first thought. His eyes were like daggers. “The President’s plan was in three stages,” Danvers explained, and then began counting off his fingers. “Containment, Conquest and Compression. He tasked me with the role of coordinating the Containment phase. The rest of the plan was passed on to more suitable leaders.”
    I shrugged. “Why you?” It was a simple question that had puzzled so many commentators around the country. The answer seemed veiled in