The chamber of the International Court of Justice was a vault of chill, waxed wood and somber light. It was a place for the slow, grinding cogs of international law, rather than the gut-turning, life-and-death drama of a pandemic. Reuben Stone occupied the dock for the defence, feeling profoundly out of his depth.
He wasn't a warlord or genocidal despot; he was an epidemiologist wearing a plain dark suit.
Across the huge expanse of the chamber, the prosecution team, a phalanx of stylish, politically expedient lawyers supported by Crane's undisclosed funds, saw him as not a man, but a notion to be unwound.
The trial had nothing to do with the quarantine for smallpox, or the burned-out clinics, or the war of shadows. The prosecution of Crane had, with surgical precision, reduced it to one
