by Bobby Adair
Najid looked around. The doctors appeared to have lain down, expecting perhaps to be robbed, not executed.
He turned and looked through a window into the back of the first vehicle. Boxes of medical supplies and some cases with scraped paint and worn edges were stacked. Those medical supplies could have come in handy for the sick townsfolk, but the arrival of the doctors occurred earlier than Najid had hoped. That pushed up Najid’s timeline. The townsfolk had fulfilled their purpose of infecting his young, western jihadists. Now, the townsfolk were expendable.
To the men in the HAZMAT suits, he pointed at the doctors’ vehicles and said, “Take them to the village.” To the men on the roadblock, he pointed at the bodies and said, “Drag them into the jungle. Stay ready. Others will come.”
Najid walked up to the man in charge of the roadblock. “Did any of them have radios or telephones?”
“Yes,” the man answered.
“Did they call for help?”
“I don’t think so,” replied the man.
“Where are the devices?”
The man pointed to a spot on the road near the rear of the first vehicle. “Smashed.”
Najid looked over toward the broken pieces of electronics scattered in the dirt. “Good.”
Chapter 47
The gunshots startled Salim. He looked across the sick and the dying on the floor of the ward. Jalal was looking back at him, frozen. He’d heard the shots, too. Salim slowly looked down at his water pail and cup as if to say, “What do I do with this when we get attacked?”
Jalal shrugged.
Salim heard some shouting outside and the sound of a car speeding off. He looked back down at his pail. It wasn’t empty, not nearly. He motioned to Jalal—it was time for an early refill. He stepped over a woman whose eyes were rolling back as she seemed to go into seizures—gurgling, choking on something in her throat. Salim glanced over toward the Tyvek-covered man tending to the boy. He had to be a doctor or a nurse, but he didn’t even look up. Salim looked down at the woman. She was just another one dying.
With a shame in his heart that would surely disappoint his instructors from the past few months, he glanced back at the woman as he slowly headed for the door, seriously wondering if he’d died and gone to hell.
Jalal was out the door first and already going down the stairs when Salim let the door slam shut as he hurried down to walk beside him. “What do you think?”
“How many shots did you hear?”
Salim wasn’t counting. “Five? Ten? I don’t know.”
“Did it sound like a gun battle to you?”
Salim shook his head. “No. I didn’t hear any automatic weapons. Single shots, mostly.”
“Mostly,” Jalal agreed.
When they got to the communal well a hundred meters down the road from the hospital, Salim hung his pail on the hook under the pump and went to work slowly raising the handle, then slowly pushing back down. He watched the stream of cool water fall into the pail. Anything to keep his mind off the horrifically dying and their blood-red, lifeless, zombie eyes.
“Jalal, I can’t keep doing this.”
Jalal looked down the road and squinted, as though he might be able to divine some information from the cane field, far down where the road curved. “They won’t keep us here much longer, I think.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Salim, wiping sweat from his brow.
“They don’t want us to catch what is killing these people.”
“What if we already have it?” It was the first time Salim had that thought, and it frightened him.
“If we were in danger of contracting the disease, we wouldn’t be here.” Jalal nodded up and down the road. “Look how many of us are in the village. Why would they bring us in and train us, just to catch a disease and die while we’re trying to create a cover before going back to the states?”
Salim stopped pumping and looked around at what he could see of the village. “How many of us do you think are here?”
“I’d say a hundred,” replied Jalal.
“A hundred? Do you really think that many?”
“I don’t know. There are a lot of us.”
Salim pulled his pail down and Jalal hung his on the hook, taking his place at the pump.
Jalal, it turned out, had a talent for appearing to be working hard on the pump while delivering almost no water to the bucket. Salim silently thanked him for his theatrics and took the time to rest and let his mind drift off to oblivion. He didn’t want to think about anything. He didn’t want to see or smell or touch anything else. He just wanted to leave.
A Land Rover—one of the two dusty new ones that had been parked by the hospital—came speeding up the dirt road.
Salim observed, “Either that was quick, or we’ve been out here a long time.”
“Who cares?” Jalal took his pail off the hook, and the two started their slow walk back toward the hospital building.
The driver of the Land Rover got out, hurrying with weapon in hand into the hospital.
When Salim and Jalal had crossed half the distance to the steps, the HAZMAT guy with the AK-47 came out with the tidy kid’s attendant. They stopped on the porch and started talking.
Jalal hesitated. “Slow down. Let them talk.”
Salim pointed to the old hospital building off to the left of the new one. “Let’s do that one next.”
Jalal answered by altering his course a little to the left. However, when they were within a car’s length of the new hospital’s front porch, one of the men on the porch commanded, “You, there.”
Jalal stopped in his tracks. Salim turned and saw the HAZMAT men looking at them. One was pointing at him—it was the one who had heard Austin say the name, Sam.
Chapter 48
The pointing finger skewered Salim’s guilty, apostate thoughts, bleeding out their despair. He knew he was caught, and though exposure was tantamount to death, the shame of being caught was wholly consuming. With eyes unable to look at his accuser, he shuffled through the road dust toward the porch stairs with Jalal on his heels.
Salim knew the tidy Arab boy’s yellow clad attendant had ratted him out. Nothing had been said at that moment, but at the time there was no man nearby with a gun. But now there he stood on the porch, beside that plastic-covered rooster of a strutting, barking little man.
Salim twitched his face into a tired, innocent guise and went to work on his lie—the white American kid was delirious. It was that simple.
Salim repeated the lie in his head. No! He’d start with ignorance. The incident was so insignificant that it was hardly worth remembering. Who gave a care about the dying utterances of a delirious boy? What did the boy even say? Salim hadn’t even understood him.
Oh, the power of a well-spoken lie, from a face stretched in innocence, the essence of hope.
“Dump those water buckets,” said the rooster man, who gestured with a recently acquired AK-47.
Salim looked up and responded by emptying his water into the dirt. Jalal did the same.
The man with the weapon pointed toward the edge of town. “Down there, past that white-walled building, you’ll see a rusty tank raised on a metal framework. See if it contains diesel fuel. Let me know how much is inside. Go quickly.”
Salim bit his cheek, tasting the warm salt of his own blood. Anything to hide the unexpected joy that comes from sidestepping despair. A grin would have raised a question that he wouldn’t be able to answer. He turned on eager feet and took off at his fastest run.
Chapter 49
The nice thing about conference room D-3 was the window, which provided a view of open fields, tall loblolly pines, and sky. Because of the way the building curved back on itself—like an apostrophe with an extra leg—the mirrored glass walls of the cafeteria and another wing of the building were visible.
Rain falling from the overcast sky made Olivia Cooper think about the only thing she didn’t like about her job. The NSA’s Whitelaw building at Fort Gord
on lacked windows. Or that’s to say, the windows were there, but they offered views into offices and conference rooms. From the cubes, situated mostly in the center of the building, they couldn’t be seen. Days passed—mostly in winter—when she was absorbed in a project, coming in early, having lunch at her desk, and even staying a little bit late, when she wouldn’t see the light of day. There was one stretch during the previous winter when she’d worked six consecutive days without seeing the sun. That particular week, they’d worked on Saturday as they had for many Saturdays over those months.
Olivia was excited about the challenge of the new project and the added—though unofficial—responsibility. Her thoughts drifted as the day dragged on. Long hours had a cumulatively deleterious effect on her focus. She needed to jog some long miles. She needed a few good, full nights of sleep. She needed another cup of coffee, and she needed to stop staring out the window at the clouds. Barry was talking to Christine about phone records, and the mention of the name Almasi brought Olivia’s thoughts back into the room.
Almasi. Najid Almasi.
The credit card numbers had been tied to an account linked to him. Katherine, the CIA liaison, had nearly sloughed off her mannequin façade and turned into a real, live, excited person when Kevin Sylvan announced the name across the conference room. That was the moment when Olivia’s doubts about having wasted the time of overqualified people on a data association game disappeared.
Something real was happening. Something the data would help them sniff out.
Olivia looked at her watch. Eric would be in at any moment. He had a meeting in another wing of the building that had wrapped up ten minutes prior. Before going to the meeting, he promised he’d be right back—Eric was chronically punctual. Minutes later, the conference room door swung open and Eric entered.
He glanced around the room. “Looks like everybody just opened a Christmas present. Olivia, what’d I miss?”
All eyes turned to Olivia.
She drew a quick, calming breath and said, “The accounts have all been tied to Najid Almasi.”
Eric was surprised into silence. He looked around the room at confirming nods. “All right,” he said, settling back into the seat he’d occupied on and off since the project had taken over conference room D-3. He smiled slyly.
As Olivia started to say something, she couldn’t help but notice Barry and Christine—the two who’d been talking about Almasi just a moment before—were squirming in their chairs. To Barry, Olivia said, “You guys came up with something new just before Eric got here?”
“Yes,” Barry nodded, then looked over at Christine. “It’s good, but it’ll be more significant to talk about after you cover the account information.”
Olivia motioned toward the screen, “Kevin, would you mind going over the account data for Eric?”
“Sure,” he answered, as he stood up and commandeered the cord to the projector. Looking at Eric, he expounded, “I put together a flow chart.” Adept with the projector, Kevin got it plugged in quickly, hit a few keys, and seconds later the pull-down screen glowed with a six-foot image of his computer’s LCD. “We’ll go through this from a bird’s-eye view and drill down as necessary into the details.”
Kevin stood up and walked over to the wall. It was covered in glowing boxes and triangles connected by labeled lines. He spent ten minutes going through the steps, following the money from the transaction back to an account held by Najid Almasi’s father at a Swiss brokerage—an account controlled by Najid. Kevin talked for a moment about how the data had been acquired—at least where that extra information was available—as well as how confident he was with each step in the process. His bet, he explained, was placed on the money coming from Najid Almasi.
“How confident are you?” Eric asked.
Still standing in front of the room with the contents of his computer screen glowing behind him, Eric simply said, “Ninety-eight percent.”
“That solid?” Eric was not surprised.
“Yes,” Kevin confirmed.
Eric looked around the room. No one voiced disagreement. He stopped on Olivia. “This is your baby. What do you think?”
“I agree with Kevin,” she said.
“And you’ve been over all the data in detail?” Eric asked.
“In detail. As did Barry and Christine.” Olivia tried her best to keep a clinical air about her. Outward excitement over the importance of the account data would undermine her credibility with Eric. It would make him want to look at the data himself.
Eric leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. “Good. Very good. I think we can say for certain something is up. Katherine, please notify your boys at the CIA.”
“I have,” she answered. “Preliminarily. I’ll let them know you concur.”
“Let’s see if we can figure out what we’ve got here.” Eric looked to his right. “Barry—” He stopped and looked back at Olivia.
Olivia was surprised that he was deferring to her. He was trusting her to run the investigation. She swelled with pride as she turned to Barry. “Please tell us what you and Christine came up with.”
Barry smiled at Olivia, also deferring, which didn’t surprise her. Left to his own devices, Barry Middleton might turn into a brilliant troll living under a bridge, but with someone to lead him who appreciated his talents, Barry was a loyal team player.
He leaned over the table. “This is going to be really exciting.” All of his pent-up, squirmy excitement was coming through his voice. He took a deep breath and sat back, then looked over to his right. “Christine found it. I’ll let her go through the details.”
Barry motioned for Kevin to pass the projector connection cable across the table to him. He plugged it into his own computer.
Christine looked away and flushed. She clearly didn’t want to be in the spotlight. She cleared her throat, sat up straight in front of her laptop, and pointed at the image of Barry’s computer monitor, projecting only blue on the screen. “Barry will have something for us to look at in a second. Without going into the technical details, I was able to collect data that ties a couple of satellite phones to Najid Almasi.”
Eric sat up and smiled. “I already like where this is going.”
“One of the phones hasn’t been used in days,” Christine said, “but one has been steadily calling numbers all over Europe and the Middle East for the past forty-eight hours.”
“Who is he calling?” Eric asked.
“This is better,” Barry interrupted.
The computer screen projected on the wall flashed from solid blue to the image of a map.
Christine proceeded, “I’ve been focusing on the origin of the calls rather than gathering information about who’s on the other end.” She pointed at the projected map, and all eyes in the dimly lit room turned to the screen.
Olivia couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Christine continued, “This is a map of eastern Uganda. You know the departure city of each of the airline tickets we’re tracking put all of the men in Nairobi. This part of Uganda isn’t maybe but a six- or eight-hour drive from there. We think Najid Almasi is in or near a little town in Uganda.” She stood up and walked over to the map, pointed to a cluster of short roads at the intersection of two others, north of a big green-colored park area. “Kapchorwa.”
Olivia gasped.
Chapter 50
Najid turned away from watching the two young men run. “Seven doctors were coming this way up the road. They are dead now.”
Dr. Kassis nodded.
“More doctors will come with soldiers—or without—but there will be more soldiers eventually. We cannot hold out against the Ugandan army if they come in force. We didn’t come here prepared for that kind of confrontation.”
“So we leave,” replied the doctor.
“Yes, we leave. However, we need more time. We need to get these men on their planes before the world understands what evil face this Ebola virus has exposed here. Once they
understand that evil—the way that we understand it—we will be out of time.” Najid looked down the road at his two runners nearing the place where the diesel tank stood.
“But what do you hope to gain by burning the village?”
Najid turned and looked at Dr. Kassis, unable to read anything unspoken. The Tyvek, the mask, and goggles hid his face. The goggles pulled at the skin on the doctor’s face and contorted the subtle movement of muscles around his eyes, and the mask fogged and dripped inside with condensed sweat. Looking at Kassis wasn’t much more effective than looking at a telephone for unspoken inflections during a conversation.
Najid took a breath. “I am not an evil man.”
“Of course not,” Dr. Kassis instantly offered.
“It was never my wish to kill any of these people, certainly not these villagers. They have done nothing, aside from being unlucky enough to be here when airborne Ebola arose.” Najid thought for a moment about how to put his thoughts into words. “Perhaps one day if the West prevails, they will work their way back through events and figure out what happened here. If they do, their history writers will paint Najid Almasi in colors more evil than Adolf Hitler. My family’s name will become an epithet of evil in the next century.”
Najid drew a deep breath to cover the pain he felt at that possibility. Such a thought would be enough to break his father’s heart. “But if we prevail, this Kapchorwan incident will be seen as it is, a necessary tragedy. These people, like the soldiers in ten thousand armies since men first picked up swords and swung them at their enemies, unwittingly and unwillingly pay for the victories of their generals and kings.”
Najid looked in Dr. Kassis’s eyes and did his best to convey the gravity he saw in his decision. “I understand what I do, and why. It is not evil that drives me, but necessity. I wish to keep this strain of Ebola and knowledge of it hidden in this village for as long as I can.”
