Contagion of Lies

After a jetliner out of JFK explodes shortly after take-off and an unrelated fear of a pandemic from a mutated virus grips the city, the President quarantines NY under martial law. Few suspect that it is a trial run for eliminating opposition to ultimate authoritarian control. Thus, CONTAGION OF LIES.Against an antagonistic bureaucracy, a President who cynically generates fear through the media, corrupt public officials, an NSA director who sees the freedoms of democracy as a weakness of the system, an influential anti-government activist who happens to be a violent drug lord who happens to be working with the government, and the moonlighting cop who works for him, the thriller follows the richly realized, nterconnected lives of ordinary people faced with extraordinary and unsettling circumstances, their lives subverted by events which compel them to act in situations never before imagined, with deadly stakes, in a driving plot of twists and surprises. Arthur Heimlich, a reserved, widowed defector from Ceaucescu's Romania working as an epidemiologist in the city's health department, whose trust in authority, in his relationships, even in his own self-narrative, is shattered. When his daughter is listed as a 'disease vector candidate at large' he takes action to protect her, and consequently finds himself identified as an enemy of the state, his apartment raided, his neighbor beaten to death for helping him. He is on the run, but has no where to go, no one to trust. Meanwhile his daughter, Sasha, negotiates her precarious situation through a maze of connections in an attempt to escape the city.Meanwhile, Thad Litmaus, a disillusioned dabbler in artisanal authenticity from the same office as Heimlich, but a world apart, growing up in private southern schools, who early on, in a chance encounter with Reggie Marsh, an astute local drug dealer who envisions a better life, tries to redeem the emptiness of his life by seeking to join the nascent Resistance and transforms himself into it's self-appointed leader, discovering a dark side to his personality.His encounter with Marsh, a young, perceptive, athletic black man skating effortlessly on the thin ice of his complicated life, a natural leader and former student of Sasha Heimlich, leads to a series of tragic events, ending in a fatal double-cross with the drug kingpin and the mob.Finally, there is the Upper East Side dealer in rare artifacts, Emerson Fosdick, whose weekend guest, Paul Harden, trapped in the city by the quarantine and who improbably, and perhaps not accidentally, becomes the linchpin holding the circumstances of these lives together Having seen his revenue stream collapse, Fosdick offers to smuggle Sasha and Harden out of the city, but at the last minute Harden bows out allowing Sasha to help her father escape.