Introduction: The missing Americans -- PART 1. Prologue: The looking glass -- Dragon -- The making of a public-health officer -- The pandemic thinker -- Stopping the unstoppable -- Clairvoyance -- PART 2. The red phone -- The redneck epidemiologist -- In Mann Gulch -- The L6 -- PART 3. The bug in the system -- Optics -- Epilogue: The sin of omission. "For those who could read between the lines, the censored news out of China was terrifying. But the...