The Golden Chair

by A J Fontenot

  Finding Paul was important. Tano had told him that. But getting out of here right now felt more important.

  He hurried back to the paved road, watching over his shoulder as he did. He flagged down an approaching pickup, hopped into the back without it stopping. It sped off. Mofi looked behind him. He didn’t see any sign of the man in the white and red shirt.

  23

  A Few More Things

  Paul stood at the tailgate of his Land Rover, parked on the edge of the SERA campsite. He held up the small laminated badge he’d just created, examining it from different angles.

  Normally, he was pretty good at forging documents. Not the new kind — the ones with holograms — but the older kind, the kind they could often get away with in places like this. Ghana was a modern country, but they still had a long way to go before his skills would be obsolete.

  SERA, though, was completely above board. All legal and sanctioned. But that didn’t mean, from time to time, a few supplementary tools didn’t come in handy. It was a standard practice. He’d created a few different sets for all of his team. Some were press badges. Others looked vaguely similar to the diplomatic passes Americans in uniforms were not unlikely to be carrying. And if anyone looked closely, they just said something about being a nonprofit doing official work for the government. Good words that didn’t really mean much.

  As he looked closely at the seams, he could see where the original stopped and his new creation started, but it would work. His chop-shop was light, a small scanner, a portable printer, and a laminator, small enough to fit in a duffel bag and run off his truck’s DC power.

  Erin walked toward him. “Hey,” she said.

  “Morning,” he said, tossing the badge into the duffel. “How’d you sleep on your first night?”

  “Er…not that great. The accommodations were fine,” she added, “just…”

  “The jetlag,” he said, starting to work on another badge, “and too much booze,” he smiled. “Spend another couple years doing this, and you’ll be used to it in no time.”

  She leaned against the side of the truck, crossing her arms, and watched him work.

  “What’s the story with Keeler?”

  “How do you mean?” he asked, not looking up.

  “As in, the fake data he’s giving SERA,” she said. “Why go along with that?”

  Paul looked up at her.

  “Marisol told me,” she said.

  He glanced over at Marisol’s trailer, then looked back at Erin and put down his work-in-progress.

  “There’s something you need to understand about all of this. First,” he said, “we’re collecting our own data. We don’t even know how much they’re tampering with it, much less why.”

  “This is the same data that’s going into outbreak reports, right?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “So why didn’t you mention anything when you were in D.C.? To Carl. Or to the board. At least let them know—”

  “And second,” he continued on, gently. “If you rush these things, you get yourself into trouble.”

  “What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

  “Either all your leads disappear, or…,” he trailed off.

  She seemed to consider that.

  “Paul,” Erin said, “are they dangerous?”

  “Who, Keeler?”

  “Yeah,”

  He looked at her for a moment before responding.

  “Everyone’s dangerous in the right situation.”

  She looked back over her shoulder. Kwame and Ben were eating breakfast. Marisol was walking back to her trailer.

  Paul held up his new ID card.

  “What are you working on?” she said.

  He handed them both to her, and she took them, looking at them.

  “It’s…me,” she said. “What are these? It says I’m a—”

  “Don’t worry about what they say,” he told her, “just keep them close, in case you ever need them.”

  She handed them back to him, but he didn’t take them.

  “Think of them as insurance,” he said. “I hope you never need them. But sometimes the channels that should work don’t. And sometimes….you just need a little extra help. Besides, they’re standard issue. I make sure everyone’s got a pair.”

  She looked at them again and then slid them into her back pocket.

  “Paul,” she said, “can I ask — I mean…,” she hesitated and looked down.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “I’m not sure I can…I just…maybe I shouldn’t have come here. Maybe this was all a mistake.”

  He sat down on his tailgate, sliding his bag out of the way.

  “Look at me,” he said. “Back in D.C., I told you to stay away from this—no,” he said, seeing her response forming, “it’s not because you couldn’t handle it. It was because I didn’t know what it was yet. And…to be honest with you, I still don’t. But,” he let out a deep breath, “you’re more like your mother than I sometimes want to admit.”

  “But she…,” Erin started.

  “Gillian,” he cut her off, knowing where she was going, “could handle herself. And so can you.”

  He thought about the words as they were coming out. Paul was never very good at pep talks. He always felt like more of a doer than a talker. And he wasn’t lying. Gillian could handle her herself. But he couldn’t help thinking, she was ‘handling herself’ on her last assignment…

  She looked at him.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said, looking away from him.

  “I’m not worried about you,” he said.

  Neither of them said anything for a long moment. Erin watched the rest of the camp doing its morning routine.

  “Oh,” Paul said, “and there’s something else I have for you.”

  He turned and dug through his duffle. Not finding what he was looking for, he felt his pockets, “here it is,” he said, pulling out a folded card out of his shirt pocket.

  He handed it to her.

  “What’s this,” she said.

  “Just a precaution,” he said. “You’ll probably never need it. But, just in case, if you get into trouble and can’t get ahold of me, call this number.”

  She took the small folded card and looked at it.

  “Whose number is it? And why wouldn’t I be able to—”

  “Just a friend,” he said. “And, again, you’ll probably never need it,” he smiled.

  She folded it back and slid it into the pocket of her shorts.

  24

  Data

  Ben sat in the shade, preparing paperwork for an upcoming SERA project.

  In the last year, Paul had come to rely on Ben to run the administrative side of SERA. That mostly meant getting documents in order for the grants and working through any local permitting issues. But Paul still talked to the donors directly and did all of the fundraising. But Ben did a lot of the prep work. Ben’s ‘office’ was outside, under the supply trailer’s canopy. It was a makeshift table he shared with Gavin and his computers.

  Normally, on the days Ben had to do ‘office work,’ it would be complete by mid-morning, at the latest. Which is to say, as soon as possible.

  Except today.

  Today, now nearly noon, and he’s been carefully spell-checking all of his forms, and re-reading for the third time what he’d recently written.

  “Show me that again,” Erin said, as she leaned closer to Gavin, pointing to his screen. “How do you know that’s an anomaly?” she said.

  “Because of this,” Gavin said, typing on his keyboard. “This,” he pointed to the screen, “functions like a baseline. It’s the data we’ve been collecting directly. When you consider how an outbreak normally spreads, there’s a pretty normal distribution curve. The WHO — the World Health Organization — has given us access to a lot of their data for modeling purposes.”

  “So when we run the data we’ve collected against their data sets,” he said, “we see a pattern that looks lik
e this,” he pointed. “Namely, it’s not an outbreak. In fact, that data we’ve collected isn’t anything. It’s a complete false alarm.”

  “This is your data?” Erin said, pointing to the screen.

  “Yes. And when I first compared it, I thought I’d set the parameters wrong.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “WHO gave us a lot of data, and it would take a long time, not to mention, more computer-power than I’ve got here, to compare ours against all of theirs. So when the results showed nothing, I just assumed I’d made a mistake. Then I ran it several more times, and I kept getting the same results. Nothing.”

  “How does the data from Jonah Lennox compare?”

  “That,” he said, typing a few quick commands, “looks like this.” His screen flashed a new set of numbers. He typed another command, and a colorful line-graph appeared on his screen.

  “Now watch when I overlay what Lennox has been giving us with the data we’ve been collecting directly.” He typed a few more strokes.

  “Here,” he angled the monitor toward her. “Ours is the green line. His is the red. See that?”

  Ben leaned in, having now given up the pretense of paperwork. Of course, none of this was new to him. He’d been the one that collected many of the initial soil and water samples. That was the basis for the data Gavin was now discussing.

  In fact, it was Ben’s suspicions in the first place that set off their hunt. As soon as there was talk of the outbreak, Ben began visiting local populations, the places where an outbreak was most likely to start showing up. This was all standard operating procedures. SERA worked out in the bush for this very reason. But there was no sign of any outbreak. If there was something going on, it certainly didn’t look like a deadly outbreak.

  “The two aren’t even close,” Erin said.

  “Right,” Gavin said.

  “Exactly,” Ben said.

  Erin and Gavin both looked up at him.

  He sat there for a moment, wishing he had something else to add. “I…,” Ben started and then trailed off. He sat back and picked up his paperwork, feigning a fourth proofread.

  “Good point, Ben,” Gavin smiled.

  Ben didn’t look back up.

  “Any-way,” Gavin said, “that’s the problem in a nutshell.”

  “So…,” Erin said, “what do you do with the data Keeler brings?”

  “Well, I’m still analyzing it,” Gavin said. “If you notice here,” he pulled the comparison graph back up. “It’s not all wrong. This area here,” he pointed, “actually lines up quite nicely with what we’ve found on our own. And, in fact, most of the discrepancy on our end comes from when you compare it to the projections only.”

  “I’m not following,” Erin said.

  “Epidemics have a pretty standard bell curve. They’re logarithmic through here,” he said, pointing. “But this,” he motioned to a different area, “is all hypothetical. It hasn’t happened yet. But because it’s been studied so extensively, we know pretty confidently if certain markers happen, then this will happen. In other words, it’s what we expect to happen, based on what’s happened a lot of times in the past.”

  “So then how do you know the data you’ve collected is right?”

  “Because, again, if you look again at the WHO data,” Gavin said, “the timeline of Lennox’s data is all wrong. If there was any kind of outbreak, it would have leading indicators or markers. These are what we use to spot tipping points.”

  “What kind of indicators?”

  “The workers who were exposed, the ones who died, they’d have at least transmitted it to their families or to nearby village markets or something like that, right? But first, no virus or bacterium travels so fast that it kills people within a day or two. In fact, that’s often what makes some of these outbreaks so dangerous, there’s a latency that allows people to spread it around.”

  Erin leaned back in her chair. “So, you’re saying, Lennox’s data is consistent with the typical epidemic projections, but it doesn’t line up with the data you’ve collected yourself.”

  “Right.”

  “And if an epidemic was about to happen, then we’d see warning signs, like others getting sick. But so far…nothing.”

  “Exactly.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “How sure are you about all this?”

  “Quite. We have some more tests to do, and it would be good to have a larger data set, but…it’s pretty hard to see how it could be anything else.”

  “Can you print me copies of this?”

  “Sure, what do you want?”

  “All of it,” she said, standing up.

  “All of it…?” Gavin said, “okay.”

  The printer under their makeshift workstation started to hum, and paper with black and white graphs and columns of numbers filled the tray. Erin reached down and picked up a few pages and then walked back to her trailer.

  “What are you going to do?” Ben said.

  “I need to make a call,” she said.

  “Do you…need any help with that?” Ben asked.

  She turned to him. “You mean with making a call?”

  “Yeah, just…satellite stuff…it’s…and…,” he trailed off lamely.

  “I think I’ve got it under control,” she said.

  “Right…,” he said, “under control…good.”

  Her trailer door shut behind her.

  “What was that?” Gavin said.

  Ben held up a finger, about to make a point, and then, thinking better of it, pulled it back, and looked down again at his paperwork.

  25

  Plan A

  Carl Ibsen’s phone vibrated on his polished mahogany desk.

  He looked down at the screen. The D.C. morning sun was still low, raking across his desk, throwing long shadows.

  Erin.

  For a brief moment, he considered not answering.

  He picked it up and answered.

  “Hey, Erin,” he said, “how’s it going?”

  “Good,” her voice was a little distorted. Satellite connection. “I think I might have something,” she said.

  “Already…”

  “But, I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

  “What,” he said, not a question.

  “I don’t have anything solid yet. But someone is messing with the outbreak-data.”

  Ibsen closed his eyes and rubbed one of his temples. He leaned back in his chair, opened his eyes and looked out of his window.

  “You still there?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “What do you know for sure?”

  “Nothing for sure, yet.”

  “Tell me your guess.”

  “Lennox.”

  “Lennox what?”

  “Lennox,” she said, “is messing with the data.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I…can’t say yet.”

  “Can’t?”

  “It’s all just speculative still,” Erin said. “And I don’t have any hard proof to fall back on yet.”

  “Apparently solid enough to name Lennox, though,” he said.

  There was silence on the other end, and a brush of static.

  “Are you defending him?” she said.

  “Look,” Ibsen said. “This makes things…,” he paused to choose his next word carefully, “complicated.”

  “No kidding,” she said.

  Erin was good. Always good. And reliable. But she was an idealist. Not practical. These days, R4 needed friends. Ibsen needed friends. High-place friends. Business was, of course, good, but it was only that way because of the relationships he’d cultivated over the last few years. Powerful relationships. And if he’d learned anything since starting this company, survival wasn’t about skill or quality or any of the other business-school virtues.

  It was all about alliances.

  And right now, he was straddling an important one. Status quo wasn’t good enough anymore. If they — if he — wer
e going to survive, he had to play this one right.

  “Plan A,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Still the same. ITG needs a good report. That’s what you’re there for. Find that. Do what you need to do to get it. Ignore the rest.”

  “What about Lennox?” she said.

  Ibsen thought about that for a moment. Erin was now in the middle of something…something difficult. To Ibsen, there were no gray areas. Only objectives and finish lines. Everything in-between was either a help…or an obstacle.

  But Erin was different. And it’s what made them a good team.

  Now, however, he was concerned that their time might be coming to an end. Erin wasn’t a shark like he was. She didn’t have the stomach for what it sometimes took to make things happen. No, she was more like a bulldog. When she found something, she didn’t let it go.

  And the question Ibsen was now wrestling with was, could R4 afford to have a bulldog? Was there still a way forward, like there had been in the past?

  “Carl?” she said. “Are you still there?”

  “No…,” he said, “I mean, yes. Erin, stay away from Lennox. Get what we need — get the story for ITG — and come back. And Erin…

  “Yeah?”

  “The sooner, the better.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and one more thing… Have you talked to Paul about this yet?”

  The line was silent again for a moment.

  “No,” she said.

  “Good…good,” he said. “Keep it that way. Just, get the story and come back.”

  Ibsen ended the call and put the phone down on his desk. He picked up a pair of metal Baoding balls and rolled them over each other in the palm of his hand…thinking.

  Erin tossed the sat phone onto her bed.

  She’d had the charts from Gavin in her hand the whole time she was talking to Carl. Why didn’t she told him about those…this was hard evidence. The only thing better than this would be an on-the-record confession directly from Jonah Lennox himself. But…something about the way Carl was handling this made her think it wasn’t evidence he was after. Something else was going on. And while Carl had never exactly been a straight shooter, he’d always been honest with her. But now, however, she wasn’t so sure.