Perhaps all young boys go through such a phase, largely ignorant of historical context, simply wanting to be savior heroes.

But when Braun considered this latest report, he knew he was in the middle of something as big as his childhood fantasies. The July 18 Pseudomimi and the advertising at the football match — together they amounted to an extremely well disguised test of a new weapon concept. In its developed form, such a weapon would make the Sunrise Plague look like a malignant toy. At the least, biological warfare would become as precise and surprising as bullets and bombs: slyly infect a population with the slow random spread of disease, all but undetected, and then bam , blind or maim or kill — singly with an email, or by the billions with a broadcast, too quickly for any possible "defense against disease."

If Braun had been a CDD person, this discovery would have precipitated immediate alarums to all the disease defense organizations of the Indo-European Alliance, as well as to the CDC in America and the CDCP in China.

But Gьnberk Braun was not an epidemiologist. He was a spook, and he was paranoid even for that. Braun's fire drill was under his personal control; he had no trouble suppressing the news there. Meantime, he used his resources in the EUIB and the Indo-European Alliance. Within hours, he was deep into a number of projects:

He brought in the best cult expert in the Indo-European intelligence community and set her loose on the evidence. He reached out to the military assets of the Alliance, in Central Africa and all the failed states at the edge of the modern world. There were solid clues about the origin of the July 18 Pseudomimi. Though this research was not bioscientific, Braun's analysts were very similar to the best at CDD — only smarter, more numerous, with far deeper resources. Even so, they were lucky: over the next three days, they put two and two (and two and two and two…) together. In the end, he had a good idea who was behind the weapons test.