“No US military personnel will assist you in violating this woman’s civil rights.” Normally Bennett was in command of the Tellis Medical Facility, and while he still retained command of the troops working there, he had been ordered to place all his resources at the disposal of Dr. Nathan Martin and the Centers for Disease Control. “Not even the President of the United States can order them to ignore their duty.”
“It’s an interesting legal point, but completely moot. I am not going to ask anyone to ignore their duty or violate this woman’s civil rights.” Martin pulled from his jacket pocket a single sheet of paper and handed it to Bennett. “Tomorrow a small group of technicians and physicians will arrive and perform these tests. They should be here less than a week, so we won’t inconvenience you too badly.” Martin turned back to the monitors as Bennett read the directive.
“What you are doing is immoral and unethical by all reasonable standards,” Bennett said. Appealing to Martin’s morality was an exercise in futility, but it was all Bennett had left. Martin had the legal authority to “examine and treat” Amanda Flynn; he was not bound by reasonable standards, moral or ethical. A decision had been made far above Bennett’s head that this woman posed an exigent risk, and Martin had been given the responsibility to quantify it, presumably by whatever means he felt prudent.
“I think it’s time I met Amanda,” Martin said, leaving the room without further comment.
CHAPTER 17
The isolation suit prevented Amanda from fully assessing the man who had just entered her cell. He was shorter than most of the soldiers who had attended her; dressed in the first business suit she had seen in months, he appeared to be someone of importance. “So someone is finally taking me seriously, and all it took was for me to hold my breath and turn blue.”
“That we could deal with, Amanda. I am Dr. Martin, one of the physicians looking after you.”
“Good. So let’s start with why you are keeping me in this cell?”
“I promise to get you into a less restrictive environment once we know it’s okay. So far everything looks encouraging.” He smiled and crossed his legs. “We have discussed your situation with some of the experts in the field of infectious disease and we are all in agreement that for now this is the best place for you.”
“Have you discussed this with my family?”
“I believe that they have been kept abreast of your condition.” He said confidently. “We need your full cooperation, Amanda. I don’t need to tell you how bad this could have been had this contagion showed up in Miami, as opposed to Tela, Honduras. And I’m sure that you understand that we need to know everything that happened down there, as well as everything there is to know about you, so that we can determine how you survived.”
“I understand that. I also understand that you haven’t answered my question.” Amanda stared into Martin’s eyes and realized that she didn’t like what was beneath them. He was more of a politician than a physician.
“Part of the difficulty we have with outside communication centers around our location.” He paused. “This is a military base that, shall we say, has no real address. Bringing unauthorized individuals here would violate about a half-dozen laws that would probably land a lot of people in jail.”
“All right, what about a phone call or the internet?”
“My hands are tied. Once here, no one has communication in or out of this base. It is the only way we can maintain the security that is required for these types of situations.” He gave her a pained smile. “Believe me, I want to leave here every bit as much as you.”
She waited a long minute staring at his shoes and then looked up at him. For a moment he held her stare, but then quickly stood to cover the effect she was having on him. “All right,” she finally said, “for now.” Martin’s suit made an irritating crinkle sound as he took a half step towards the airlock. “No more for today. I will take your silly tests, and answer your inane questions again tomorrow, but not today.”
“That sounds fair. With the way that we’ve been pounding away at you, I can see that you need a break.” He smiled again and then tried to open the airlock, but for a second it remained closed. She heard a very soft click and he was gone a moment later.
He was lying about something. She didn’t know how she knew, only that she was certain that he was hiding something. She hadn’t sensed any real dishonesty from any of the other twenty or thirty people who had visited her cell in the last two weeks—only disinterest. She heard the other end of the airlock cycle and after a few seconds knew that he was watching her. She imagined him standing just in front of the one-way glass studying her, his white lab jacket draped over a sink in the corner, and another man, a tall man just in front of it staring at her as well, a disapproving look on his face. She walked to the mirror, picked a spot, and then tapped her finger where she imagined his nose to be. I see you, she thought.
***
“You lie well,” Bennett greeted Martin at the airlock. “Just the right mixture of truth, deflection, and small lies, and poof! The truth disappears. For a moment I actually believed that you had an interest in her welfare.”
“I’m not a monster, Bennett. I don’t want to hurt that woman.” He watched as she turned to face the mirror. She had an odd and intriguing expression, as if she knew a secret. She walked directly in front of him and then tapped the glass less than an inch from his nose. He took a step back and a smile slowly crossed her face. His mind was split between Amanda’s strange behavior and the irritating Colonel Bennett.
“But you don’t want to treat her like a real person either,” Bennett countered.
“I don’t want to have this discussion. I appreciate that you have limited your focus to this one individual, and as a physician that is your responsibility. My responsibility extends well beyond her welfare.” Martin walked up the metal stairwell, trying to come up with another way of holding Amanda that didn’t involve the military.
***
“Unless you can give me a reason that this patient needs to remain in a restricted reverse laminar flow room, I can’t authorize the expense,” General Dixon said over the phone. “I have reviewed her four- and six-week culture results and they remain negative. Aside from the humanitarian aspects of keeping an individual in the same room for 46 days, you have spent eleven million dollars, a third of it directly related to isolation.”
Martin wanted to bang his head against the wall. It seemed that at every turn he had a military officer questioning his approach, and now they were pulling the plug on his financing, his one true Achilles’ heel. His executive order gave him control of the patient, but the funding flowed through a military spigot. He could fight this, but in the end he knew that he would lose. “I understand your position, General. I think it is reasonable to move her to a ward. I do not think that it would be prudent to move her offsite, as we are still waiting for more results.”
“Hmph,” the general responded. Martin knew that the general had played his best card, but also that he was stuck with this situation until Martin gave permission to release her. “Of course, once she has been transferred to a less restrictive environment we will look to your people to take over.”
It had been a month since Martin had last visited Tellis, and after his small group of technicians and physicians had finished their various biopsies of Amanda Flynn, Martin had become completely reliant upon military personnel to direct her care. “I don’t understand, General?”
“Read the charter, Doctor. We are responsible for acute care alone, not custodial care. Tellis will remain at your disposal, but with only minimal personnel. The labs, housekeeping, kitchens, those sorts of things. The medical personnel will need to be supplied independently.”
Martin pounded his desk, making his secretary jump at her desk. “Cut that out,” she screamed at Martin.
The general had tricked him. Interest in this virus, now
called EDH 1, had fallen exponentially with the passage of time and with no further outbreaks. Tela, Honduras, and Amanda Flynn were becoming old news in the circles that made decisions. For six weeks they had given him everything that he had asked for, and there was precious little to show for it. He could guarantee that no one would authorize another eleven million dollars chasing down an outbreak that was starting to look to the uninitiated as a one-trick-pony, and it was the uninitiated that were paying the bills.
Although, he thought, my own people would make things considerably easier. The funding of the CDC was always tight, but they did have discretionary and emergency funds. A couple-million-dollar expenditure on a potentially infectious patient could be justified with a little work. And as a bonus, Amanda was falling off of the radar; fewer people were inquiring about her. “Of course, General. I believe we can have everything in place in a couple of days.”
“Another option is to simply release her.”
Martin was always shocked by the short-sighted nature of the military mind. “Just a little longer, General.” His voice was almost smiling.
“That’s the response I was told to expect. Bye, Doctor.” Abruptly, the line went dead.
CHAPTER 18
At first Amanda was shocked as the door opened and Colonel William Bennett walked in without the now-ubiquitous white isolation suit. He was a good-looking man in his early fifties, his attractiveness enhanced by the fact that Amanda hadn’t seen a human face not wrapped in plastic in seven weeks.
“You are being moved to one of our wards, and as you are the only patient in the entire facility, my guess is that you will get first choice in beds.” He smiled and Amanda found him even more attractive.
“How long have I been here?” she asked as he sat in one of the now well-worn plastic chairs.
“About seven weeks.”
“Seven weeks,” she repeated. “I thought it was longer.” She dropped her eyes so Bennett wouldn’t see her face.
***
The last month of near-complete isolation, locked in the same ten-by-twelve room, had taken a heavy toll on Amanda’s mental stability. The first two weeks she had been at Tellis had been relatively busy, filled with daily physical exams and lengthy medical interviews, which were tedious, but innocuous. Then came the biopsies, which were uncomfortable, and occasionally worse. They had inserted needles into a variety of body parts for seven straight days using only minimal amounts of anesthetics, but the discomfort was a small price to pay for the chance to be free of her cell and to interact with someone besides herself.
It had been a month since they completed their procedures, and Amanda hadn’t been out of her room since. For the first few days she appreciated the solitude, but the last few weeks had taught her just how effective isolation could be as a technique of torture. Deprived of external stimulation, the brain’s defenses weaken and it begins to create its own reality. She had started to hallucinate about the world beyond these three solid walls and the mirror that watched her incessantly. She created complex and well-formed visions of the control room behind the glass and of the stairs that led to a larger control room, manned twenty-four hours a day with monitors for each of the cameras that tracked her. Sometimes she imagined that she was sitting in one of the black leather chairs, watching herself sleep, read, or watch television. But the visual hallucinations, although increasing in both frequency and complexity, were still relatively rare compared to the voices in her mind. These were with her every waking moment and hounded her even as she slept. Random thoughts, usually only peripherally related to her, seemed to be broadcast straight into her mind. Before, during, and after nursing school she had cared for mentally ill patients, and now she began to relate to them. Hallucinations and the broadcasting of thoughts were symptoms universally seen in patients with major psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. She was in the appropriate age group for it and had a family history of major depression, which made her more vulnerable to mental illness. Certainly she had had enough life-altering events to act as a trigger for almost any form of psychiatric illness.
A week earlier, her resistance had weakened enough that she almost asked to see a psychiatrist. Late in the afternoon, a technician had appeared with a needle and a handful of specimen tubes; after drawing her blood he paused and asked her if she needed anything. Without thinking, and a little too forcefully, she answered, “No.” He took a step away from her and backed his way into the airlock. She watched him leave with half her mind chastising the other half for being weak.
Later, after counting the ceiling tiles and confirming that none were missing, she made peace with herself. The visions and voices were a problem, but they were benign and non-threatening; in fact, they rarely addressed her. So long as they remained as background noise, and nothing more, she resolved to keep them to herself.
***
“Don’t worry about your things.” Colonel Bennett looked around the small room and it was obvious that she didn’t really have any things. “Well,” he said, slightly uncomfortable. “Just follow me.” He led her out of the airlock and into the small control room behind the glass. Amanda stood and stared, her mouth open. “Glad you’re out of there?” he asked, misinterpreting her hesitation.
She scanned the very familiar room. She had passed through it several times before, but with each trip she had worn the isolation suit and had usually been on a stretcher with its rails up. She had never really seen this room, except in her hallucinations, which had been exactly correct down to the small crack in the porcelain sink in the corner. “Yes,” she said, hiding confusion mixed with excitement and wonder. “Those stairs lead to another control room, only that one has monitors.” She asked and told him.
He nodded and his smile returned. “Good guess. We won’t need the monitors, or the cameras.” He reached for a panel that contained several switches and began to flick them off. “Or these microphones.”
She followed him up the stairs and found an exact replica of the room from her mental images. Her imagination had even supplied the correct smells: a mix of leather, coffee, and just a whiff of cigarettes. The three monitors were now dark, but she was certain that if they were on she would have seen her cell. She did a full circle in the dark room while Bennett patiently held a door for her. Her startlingly prescient hallucinations had never gone beyond this point. “Oh, I’m sorry. Thank you,” she said, passing under the arm that held the door open.
“No problem. I can only imagine how good it must feel to be out of that room.”
“The cell,” she said softly. “Can I ask you a question?” They were halfway down a long, dark, and deserted hallway. “I would like you to be completely honest.”
“Uh oh, I never like being COMPLETELY honest.”
“Did you or someone else put something in the air or my food, or even the water? Maybe to sedate me?”
“No. Absolutely and completely, no.” He stopped inside a doorway that led to a large, darkened hall. Voices from the opposite side echoed loudly. “We are not in charge of your care and are only peripherally involved with the investigation of the virus that killed your friends. This entire situation is being directed by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. I and others have had disagreements over the approach and course of this investigation, but if anyone had gone as far as poisoning you, or drugging you without your knowledge and agreement, I would have known and been able to intercede.”
The sudden change in his demeanor told Amanda that those disagreements had been substantial. “You’re taking quite a risk telling me this.” She said it as a statement, not a question. “In fact I would guess that you have been ordered not to tell me this.”
“Tell you what?” He feigned ignorance and resumed his walk down the dark corridor and into the bright light beyond.
“What do you do here?” she asked after several more turns.
“Anything we want,” he
said as a joke. “Actually, we provide medical support to all branches of the military. We generally take their more unusual cases.”
“Which makes me unusual,” Amanda teased, with just a trace of a flirtatious tone.
“As strange as they come,” he smiled down at her. “When we aren’t playing Doctor House, we provide laboratory support.”
The voices in her head were remote, except for one that quietly projected a sense of intrigue and uncertainty. She followed him through another dark hallway, then into and out of a brightly lit kitchen. He descended a set of stairs and into a short corridor lined with doors on each side. “Take your pick,” he said. “They’re all the same, though.”
She opened a door and said, “This one will be just fine.” There was a bed, a chest of drawers, a door that she surmised led to a shared bathroom, and a television hanging from the ceiling. “Cozy,” she said. “Where are the cameras?”
“No cameras; you now have complete privacy. Which reminds me.” He reached in front of her and closed the door. “Can I show you one more thing?”
He led her up the hall to a large recreation room, where ten soldiers were lounging, reading, or watching what looked like a NASCAR race on television.
“Officer on the deck,” someone yelled, and everyone stood and immediately came to attention.
“As you were. Mr. Lambert is from the Navy, and believes that we are aboard a ship at sea. Please excuse his delusions.” The ten young men turned to face Amanda, and she could feel the hormone level soar through the roof. “From this moment on, no one may use the south hallway. It is reserved exclusively for our guest. This is an order, gentlemen. Any infractions will lead to immediate reassignment. Am I clear?”
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