July Fourth: New York City Hundreds of thousands line the banks of the East and Hudson Rivers awaiting the nation’s largest fireworks display. Soon the sky will explode in cascading showers of silver and gold. Everywhere, faces will turn skyward in wide-eyed wonder. Then the sky will grow dark again―but it will not be empty. The air will be filled with clouds of smoke and specks of debris will rain down everywhere. Some will pick bits of paper from their children’s hair. Some will brush away still-burning sparks or embers. And some will absentmindedly scratch at the tiny, biting specks that dot their necks and arms. Will the beginning of the show mark the beginning of the end? That’s what FBI agent Nathan Donovan must decide. When he is forced to enlist the help of ex-wife Macy Monroe, and expert in the psychology of terrorism, the fireworks really begin―but she may be the only one who can help him stop the Plague maker in time. “ Plague Maker is a novel that can proudly be shelved beside any [book] featuring Crichton or Clancy and hold its own.” ―www.infuzemag.com Tim Downs is the author of nine novels including the Christy Award-winning PlagueMaker and the highly acclaimed series of Bug Man novels. Tim lives in North Carolina with his wife Joy. They have three grown children. Chapter One Special Agent Nathan Donovan lifted his tray table and peered down at the small plastic case wedged between his feet, just as he had done a hundred times before. It was a beverage cooler, really, nothing more, the kind he might have smuggled into a Mets game or taken to the Jersey shore. The simple red lid was unceremoniously duct-taped to the chalky white body, giving it an altogether unassuming appearance--as though it might contain nothing more than a frigid six-pack or a picnic lunch for two. Well-meaning scientists at the University Hospital in Kuala Lumpur had plastered the thing with every cautionary label imaginable. Long strips of neon-green tape flashed the word BIOHAZARD at regular intervals; fluorescent orange stickers warned of CORROSIVE MATERIALS and CHEMICAL HAZARD ; even the Radiology Department chipped in, adding a series of triangular black-and-yellow labels declaring: DANGER ! THIS EQUIPMENT PRODUCES IONIZING RADIATION WHEN ENERGIZED. Donovan had carefully removed all of them, for the same reason that half of his fellow counterterrorism agents in New York City declined to wear their FBI windbreakers: It just doesn't pay to advertise. The Malaysian authorities thought the shrieking labels would hold the curious at bay--Donovan knew they would have just the opposite effect. He might as well hang a sign around his neck that says, "Look what I've got!" Only a fool or a novice stamps SECRET on the front of a secret document. A professional will take a plain blue cover every time. At the University Hospital, words had buzzed around Donovan's head like Malaysian fruit bats. Microbiologists and disease specialists tossed around terms that he could barely pronounce, let alone comprehend--words like panenterovirus , cytomegalovirus , and respiratory syncytial virus . All he understood--all that was explained to him--was that Malaysian pig farmers were dying by the hundreds and no one knew why. The disease began with raging fever, followed by delirium, then sudden and irreversible coma. Those were the lucky ones; the less fortunate were left conscious to face the wasting agonies of vomiting, diarrhea, and internal hemorrhaging. Each path was different, but the destination was ultimately the same: a violent and certain death. No one knew what it was, how it was carried, or how it was transmitted. The disease resisted all known antibiotics, even the big guns like streptomycin. That's what set off all the bells and whistles at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: That kind of antibiotic resistance rarely occurs in nature. It suggests intentional genetic manipulation, and that raises the possibility that some idiot, or group of idiots, might be trying to play dice with the universe again. No one knew what do. On Malaysian hog farms, gas-masked soldiers trained their assault rifles on squealing pigs, decimating entire herds, while across town other farmers smuggled their own pigs past roadblocks to markets in other states, allowing the disease to leapfrog from region to region and, inevitably, from country to country. That's why the CDC wanted a look. It was only a matter of time; in the global village of the twenty-first century, there is no such thing as a local outbreak. A local pathologist had managed to isolate the virus from the blood and spinal fluid of two cadavers before becoming one herself. Before her own brutal demise, she succeeded in growing a fist-sized lump of the stuff in a culture of porcine kidney cells. Scientists at the University Hospital placed the mucosal mass in an airtight metal container, surrounded it with dry ice, and packed it carefully in a simple red-and-white cooler,