National Interagency Biodefense Command, Ft. Detrick, Maryland
“They’re close.” The Army colonel pointed at the enlarged depictions of material found on the slides rushed to Ft. Detrick from the Philippines, where Shake Davis and his team had found them in the rubble on Jolo.
“How close?” The man called Bayer had just sat through a full-scale scientific briefing on the weaponization of botulism and was still not sure what he’d heard. What he felt was that there was a loud and dangerous clock ticking somewhere out in the Pacific and they needed to smash it before the alarm went off and people started dying in droves.
“You heard what the science guys had to say.” The colonel commanding the military’s top biological warfare research team snapped on the projector and looked around the br
