"You have." Bagins kept the smile and kept the pistol where it was. The yellow bulb threw a hard point of light off the metal. "Of course you do."
I worked it through fast.
He was standing in a locked room with four men outside a door he'd closed on purpose. That was not a man carrying out an execution. That was a man taking a meeting he didn't want recorded.
He wanted the government. He wanted whatever a CGI agent carried around in his head, and he was going to hold a gun on me while he asked for it so that neither of us had to call it a request. The pistol was the shape of the question. The closed door was the condition of the answer.
"So." The pistol didn't waver. The barrel stayed on the centre of my chest. "Why are you still breathing?"
"I know who started the infection," I said. "And I know how it can be stopped."
