“I’m so glad to hear it. I can’t apologize enough for what happened in Greece. It was entirely my fault.”
“What did happen in Greece?”
Lowe sighed audibly. “I got the information about that lab in Wyoming from a man named Bóchéng. He’s a former Chinese intelligence operative who now works as a private contractor.”
“And a complete backstabbing piece of shit,” Egan added. Lowe’s didn’t speak up to disagree.
“What’s his beef with me?”
“Where is he now?” Fade asked, his gaze drifting across the infinity pool to the waterfall at its far end.
“Underground, it seems,” Lowe replied, his tone casual but edged with concern. “Maybe out of fear of retaliation by me, but I suspect much more out of fear of the Chinese government.”
“So if they catch him and question him, they’ll find out about you? About us?”
“I imagine so. Also, I think he knows more about Yichén than he’s telling me.”
“Seems like if that was true, he’d sell it. To you or to the Chinese. Judging by all the dishes they’ve been breaking around the world, they’d pay a lot.”
“That would be too rational. Bóchéng is obsessed with power and only in his forties. He can be a part of bringing down the world’s governments and killing more than three-quarters of a billion people. Quite a rush for a man like him. And frankly, quite an opportunity. His business is chaos, and he’s good at it.”
Fade looked out over the water, weighing the implications. “Did you learn anything from Gao?”
“We did. We learned that Yichén’s virus is extremely sophisticated and targeted and that it’s all but complete. Gao wasn’t working on the virus itself; he was working on vaccines against it.”
“Vaccines?”
“Yes. I imagine in case there’s an accident along the lines of what happened with COVID, or if the pathogen starts to mutate in ways he doesn’t anticipate.”
“Did he give you enough information to create your own vaccine?”
“Not entirely. But enough to be able to move quickly once we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”
“Sounds like you’ve got this under control. What am I missing?”
“You’re missing that the devil is in the details. Yichén’s virus will be very contagious and have an extremely long incubation period. Even if we discover it through random testing on people who aren’t symptomatic—something we’re already doing—we still have to develop the vaccine, produce it, and administer it. The first part won’t take much time. One of my colleagues is the CEO of Pfizer, and he’s already setting up rapid response teams for this. But the manufacture and distribution of hundreds of millions of doses isn’t trivial. Or fast.”
Fade smiled. “But plenty of time to whip up a few small batches and hand them out to your billionaire cronies.”
“Probably,” Lowe admitted. “Look, Fade, I believe I might have the power to deflect the current trajectory of the world. Not reverse it. There’ll always be a ruling class. My goal is to make sure it’s not made up of the worst of us.”
It sounded like more of the same to Fade, but it was also the truth. The food chain would always have apex predators. Maybe the best you could do was make sure it wasn’t the hyenas.
