Sirens wailed on Broadway.
Two black sedans screeched to a halt in front of the Standard Oil Building.
Federal Marshals jumped out. They wore dark suits and grim expressions. They pushed through the revolving doors, flashing badges at the terrified security guards.
"Where is he?" the lead Marshal barked. "Where is Prentice?"
Upstairs, in the executive suite, Jason stood by the window. He watched them come.
Junior was pacing the room, hyperventilating.
"They're here, Ezra! They're actually here! You committed treason! You printed that headline and now the Liberty Loan drive is ruined! Philadelphia is a ghost town! The President is going to hang us!"
"Philadelphia is safe," Jason said calmly.
He turned from the window. He picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol and poured it over his hands. The smell was sharp, medicinal.
"The parade was canceled because no one showed up," Jason said. "Two hundred thousand people stayed home. That's two hundred thousand people who aren't breathing on each other right now."
The double doors burst open.
The Marshals stormed in.
"Jason Underwood Prentice!" the lead Marshal shouted. "You are under arrest for violation of the Sedition Act! Inciting panic! Interfering with the war effort!"
He marched across the room, reaching for his handcuffs.
Jason didn't move. He didn't run.
He watched the Marshal.
The man looked terrible. His skin was grey. Sweat was pouring down his face. He was breathing in shallow, ragged gasps.
The Marshal took another step. He stumbled.
"You... you traitor..." the Marshal wheezed.
He reached for Jason's lapel.
But his hand didn't make it.
The Marshal's knees buckled. He collapsed forward, hitting the carpet with a dull thud.
The other Marshals froze.
"Boss?" one of them asked.
The lead Marshal rolled onto his back. He coughed—a wet, hacking sound that brought up pink foam. His lips were turning blue.
Cyanosis.
The room went dead silent. Junior backed away until he hit the wall.
Jason walked over to the fallen man. He didn't touch him. He stood over him like a judge.
"He's sick," Jason said.
He looked up at the other agents.
"You're all sick. You've been in the barracks. You've been on the trains. The virus is already inside you."
The agents looked at each other. They looked at their fallen leader gasping for air on the expensive Persian rug.
The fear in the room shifted. It wasn't the fear of the law anymore. It was the fear of death.
"Call an ambulance," Jason ordered his secretary. "Tell them it's the flu. Tell them to bring oxygen."
He looked at the Marshals.
"You can arrest me later," Jason said. "Right now, you need to go home. Lock your doors. Don't touch your families."
One by one, the Marshals lowered their weapons. They backed out of the room, dragging their coughing leader with them.
They didn't want to arrest Jason anymore. They wanted to survive.
By the next morning, the government had collapsed. Not officially, but functionally.
President Wilson was bedridden (historically accurate). Half the cabinet was sick. The bureaucracy was paralyzed by the very panic they had tried to prevent.
But Jason wasn't paralyzed.
He had spent five years building the most efficient logistics machine in history. Now, he repurposed it.
"Activate the contingency," Jason ordered into the phone.
Across the country, the Standard Oil machine shifted gears.
At 10,000 gas stations from Maine to California, the signs changed.
NO GAS TODAY.
MEDICAL DISTRIBUTION POINT.
Standard Oil tanker trucks, usually filled with fuel, rolled into cities carrying fresh water. Delivery vans dropped crates on street corners.
Inside the crates weren't car parts. They were masks. Cotton masks sewn in the textile mills Jason controlled. Bottles of disinfectant alcohol distilled in his chemical plants.
Jason effectively privatized the pandemic response.
He sat in his office, now converted into a command bunker. An air filtration system (a prototype from the mines) hummed in the corner.
He looked at the map on the wall. It wasn't marking oil wells anymore. It was marking infection rates.
"Chicago is stabilizing," he noted, moving a green pin. "The quarantine held."
"New York is bad," Junior said, reading a report. "The tenements are a breeding ground."
"Send the food trucks to the Lower East Side," Jason commanded. "If they don't have to go out to shop, they won't spread it. Free rations for everyone who stays inside."
"Free?" Junior winced. "Ezra, this is costing us millions a day!"
"It's buying us loyalty, Junior," Jason said. "Look at the papers."
He tossed a copy of the Sun onto the desk.
The headline didn't call him a traitor anymore.
STANDARD OIL SAVES THE CITY.
PRENTICE: THE QUARANTINE KING.
The people didn't trust Wilson. They trusted the man who gave them masks. They trusted the man who told them the truth when the government lied.
Jason was building a new kind of power. A power based on survival.
The red phone on his desk rang.
It was the trans-Atlantic line.
Jason snatched it up.
"Prentice."
"Jason?"
The voice was weak. Threadbare.
Sarah.
"Sarah!" Jason gripped the phone. "Where are you? Are you safe?"
"I'm in Paris," she whispered. The connection crackled with static. "Field Hospital Number Four."
"Are you wearing your mask? Are you staying away from the wards?"
A pause. A long, wheezing breath.
"I tried, Jason. But... there were so many of them."
She coughed. It sounded wet.
"I can feel it," she said. Her voice broke. "My chest is so tight. It feels like... like someone is sitting on me."
Jason's blood turned to ice.
"No," he said. "No, Sarah. Listen to me. You have to rest. Don't move."
"It's funny," she murmured, sounding delirious. "I survived the shells. I survived the gas. And now... a sneeze is going to kill me."
"You're not going to die!" Jason shouted. "Do you hear me? I forbid it!"
"You can't buy this, Jason," she whispered. "You can't fix this with a check."
"Watch me."
He slammed the phone down.
He spun around.
"Junior! Get me the airfield! Get me the pilot of the prototype!"
"The bomber?" Junior asked. "The Handley Page? It's not tested for trans-Atlantic flight! It can't make it to Paris!"
"It can if we strip the guns," Jason said. "If we fill the bomb bay with extra fuel tanks."
"What are you sending?"
"Plasma," Jason said.
He ran to his safe. He pulled out a file marked EXPERIMENTAL.
He knew the science. Convalescent plasma. The blood of survivors contained antibodies. If you transfused it into a sick patient early enough, it could reverse the cyanosis.
Doctors in 1918 were experimenting with it, but they lacked the supply chain to move it.
Jason was the supply chain.
"I have fifty donors in the company hospital downstairs," Jason said. "Survivors. We draw their blood now. We fly it to Paris tonight."
"It's suicide!" Junior yelled. "The pilot will crash! The Atlantic is a graveyard!"
"Pay him fifty thousand dollars!" Jason roared. "Pay him a hundred! I don't care! Just get that plane in the air!"
Three hours later.
Jason stood on the tarmac of a private airfield on Long Island.
It was raining.
The massive bomber, stripped of its paint and guns, sat idling. Its engines roared, spitting blue flame into the night.
The cargo hold was packed with insulated crates of blood plasma.
The pilot, a crazy barnstormer named Eddie, gave Jason a thumbs up from the cockpit. He knew the odds. But he also knew the payout.
"Go!" Jason signaled.
The plane taxied. It gathered speed. It lifted off, heavy and lumbering, disappearing into the dark clouds over the ocean.
Jason watched until the sound of the engines faded.
He was trembling.
He had changed history to save millions in Philadelphia. But he would trade them all—every single one of them—to save the woman in Paris.
He walked back to his car.
The city was silent.
The streets of New York were empty. No cars. No pedestrians. The lights of Broadway were dim.
It was a ghost town. A city holding its breath.
But it was alive.
Because of him.
He climbed into the back seat.
The car phone buzzed (an early, clunky radio phone he had installed).
"Mr. Prentice?" It was the White House operator. "The President is awake. He wishes to speak with you."
"Put him on."
"Ezra?" Wilson's voice was weak, raspy. He sounded like a broken man. "I... I owe you an apology. You were right. The parade... it would have been a massacre."
"Save your apologies, Woodrow," Jason said coldly.
"We need help," Wilson said. "The federal distribution system has failed. We need your trucks. We need your network. I'm... I'm asking you to coordinate the national relief effort."
Jason looked out the window at the silent city he ruled.
The government was kneeling. The President was begging.
Jason Underwood had become the de facto dictator of the United States, not by coup, but by competence.
"I'll do it," Jason said. "But on my terms."
"Name them."
"When the war ends," Jason said, "Standard Oil sits at the peace table. Not in the lobby. At the table."
"That's... unprecedented," Wilson stammered.
"So is the plague," Jason said. "Take the deal, Mr. President. Or I park the trucks."
"Done," Wilson whispered.
Jason hung up.
He leaned back.
He closed his eyes.
He prayed to a God he didn't believe in that the bomber would make it to Paris.
"Fly fast, Eddie," Jason whispered. "Fly fast."