Pandemic

by Daniel Kalla

  “These lads don’t mess around when it comes to quarantining,” McLeod said, his wide eyes surveying the scene outside the window.

  “What the hell are they doing?” Haldane said.

  McLeod nodded. “They’re doing it right, Noah.”

  Haldane frowned at his colleague. “You don’t honestly believe that?”

  “How else do you stop it from escalating?” McLeod pointed out the window, as if identifying individual viral particles standing behind the barbed wire.

  “You set up a real quarantine with reasonable checks and balances,” Haldane said. “You don’t create a concentration camp for victims!”

  Their driver waved a hand and pointed ahead as the car approached a break in the barbed wire. “See, the people come in and out through there.”

  With a makeshift hut, a swing gate, and numerous masked guards, it resembled a sci-fi version of one of the old Cold War checkpoints between East and West Berlin. Their car pulled up across from the checkpoint. Before the driver had switched off his engine, Haldane and McLeod hopped out of the car and headed for the action.

  With back doors wide open, two empty ambulances had pulled up in front of the gate. Among the official personnel milling about, Haldane recognized the chief health officer, Yung Se Choy. His uniform resembled something the police or fire brass back home wore to formal occasions. It changed Choy’s appearance, filling him out and making him look more important than the nervous bureaucrat he had earlier seemed. But the tousled mop of hair and barely concealed cleft lip scar were unmistakable.

  Haldane caught up with Choy in front of the gate. “Hello, Dr. Haldane,” Choy said with a slight bow.

  “Mr Choy, what is all this?” Haldane indicated the barbed wire and guards.

  McLeod and their driver joined the two of them at the gate. The driver began to translate Haldane’s question, but Choy answered in English before he could finish. “A quarantine,” Choy shrugged, appearing amazed that it wasn’t self-evident.

  “This is not a quarantine,” Haldane shook his head angrily. “This is a siege.”

  The setting and uniform had influenced Choy’s attitude, too. Though he spoke through the translator in Chinese, his high-pitched voice was more authoritative and certain. “We are doing what your own WHO team recommended. What is necessary. We are controlling the spread of this virus. The people inside”—he pointed beyond the barbed wire—“are being looked after. We are sending food and supplies. And our doctors and nurses are monitoring them. If they require medical attention, we transport them to hospital.”

  As Choy spoke, two ambulance attendants in HAZMAT suits appeared at the gate. Once the arm of the gate rose, they pushed their stretcher unhurriedly toward him. The attendants moved without any urgency. As soon as they passed by, Haldane understood why. The patient on the stretcher was wrapped in a black body bag.

  Haldane nodded his chin at the corpse on the stretcher. “This is what you mean by looking after the people?”

  Unfazed, Choy answered through the translator. “This woman was found dead in her apartment. Apparently, she refused the neighbors’ help. She was too scared to go out even after she became sick.”

  “I wonder how many others are going to be scared to death in there,” Haldane grunted.

  Choy held up his hands. “What is the alternative, Dr. Haldane?” he asked through the translator. “Would you rather we allow this virus to escape from here and sweep across China and beyond, killing one in four who stand in its path?”

  CHAPTER 12

  PALACE HOTEL, LONDON, ENGLAND

  From her toenails to the roots of her hair, every inch of Khalila Jahal throbbed. She didn’t know it was possible to ache so badly. She tried to move, but her limbs seemed to pay no heed to the will of her brain. They were deadwood.

  Her sheets were soaked with sweat, but she had never felt colder in her life. Her body shivered uncontrollably under the wet sheets. The cough that had started as a tickle in her throat last night now racked her body with predictable waves of spasms. With each paroxysm, it felt as if a pillow had been stuffed down her throat.

  The light streaming in between the vertical blades of the blinds told her she had overslept, though she wasn’t clear whether what she experienced overnight was sleep or a coma. She tried to move again, managing to roll onto her side, exhausted from the effort.

  Please God, give me the strength, she prayed.

  She cursed herself for not heading out last night, when her arms and legs still worked. Dr. Aziz had instructed her to wait until the fever peaked. As of yesterday evening, her temperature hadn’t broken through the 102 degree Fahrenheit barrier, hovering instead in the 101 range. Still, she knew she was ill enough to venture out, but she had chosen to wait. She risked the entire mission. She could have died overnight. Then where would they have been?

  She no longer had the luxury of time to continue the moral wrestling match with herself that had seen her vacillate through the previous evening. It was not her place to judge, but to act. Still, the idea of releasing this thing that consumed her body—to the point where it felt as if she were being boiled from the inside out-gnawed at her as much as the pain did. How could this be God’s way? she wondered as she struggled to lift her legs off the bed.

  The shivers subsided and she knew from the sudden suffocating heat that her temperature had peaked. Her husband’s bearded face floated in front of her. She was happy for the hallucination. She missed Zamil desperately.

  They had played together as young children in their village, nestled in the shadows of the great pyramids on the Giza plateau. By the age of eleven, boys and girls were forbidden from mixing, but Khalila refused to accept the decree. And she convinced Zamil to risk beating or worse to explore with her the Nile riverbed and the desert beyond. Knowing better than to act upon the hormones that raced inside them, they maintained a platonic but clandestine relationship throughout those teen years, while the sparks between them built steadily into a white-hot flame.

  When they were both seventeen their fathers, ignorant of the pair’s preexisting relationship, decided they should wed. Khalila and Zamil were overjoyed. Khalila considered every moment of their time together blissful, even the year away from their friends and families when Zamil studied at the mosque in Paris. Zamil shared with Khalila his studies in the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam. In the privacy of their cramped bedroom under his parents’ roof, he tolerated, even encouraged, her thoughtful skepticism. With tender eloquence, Zamil won her mind and soul over. She grew into as devout a believer as he was.

  Then came 9/11 followed by the American offensive in Afghanistan. When the call came to join the Taliban brethren in their defense, Khalila begged Zamil not to go. She knew what awaited her peaceful scholarly husband. Though he pretended otherwise, he knew it too, but he refused to shirk what he viewed as his duty.

  Her heart ripped in two by her husband’s death in an Afghani cave and her nearly simultaneous miscarriage, Khalila accepted the path God had chosen for her. She would never bear Zamil’s or anyone else’s children, but she pledged to make herself useful to Him. She dedicated her life to Zamil’s cause. And she sought out the guidance of one of his teachers, Sheikh Hassan. Through the Sheikh, she met Hazzir Kabaal and his people.

  During all the training and planning that followed, she never once questioned the mission. Not until she grew feverish to the point of delusional in her dank London hotel room did the doubts of whether the means justified the end creep into her conscience.

  Zamil’s hovering face vanished. Without her husband around to explain it, everything seemed unclear. The room darkened. She fell back to sleep.

  Six hours later, she awoke trembling with vicious shivers. The fever was spiking again. She felt as if a heavy rock had been lowered onto her chest. She had to breathe twice as fast to avoid suffocating. The coughing spells grew longer and more frequent. But at least her arms and legs responded to her commands. She looked at the clock. which read 4:
28 P.M. Time was running out.

  Without allowing herself a chance to reconsider, she dragged herself out of bed. As per the plan, she didn’t shower, but instead changed into the provocative Western clothing that she had debuted for Kabaal and his henchman in the Somali desert. She staggered to the mirror. Her tawny complexion had whitened, and what was once alluring now came across as sickly. With a shaky hand, she applied extra blush and lipstick in an attempt to mask the pallor.

  She forced down two glasses of bottled water followed by two glasses of orange juice, convinced she might vomit with each sip, but knowing she needed the fluid and sugar to give her enough strength to make the trip. She didn’t vomit, but a coughing fit overcame her. She kneeled over the toilet and gasped for air, until she coughed up a wad of bloody sputum. Finally she caught her breath and pulled herself to her feet.

  She was relieved to see a row of taxicabs waiting in front of the hotel. She hobbled over to the first one, mumbled her destination to the driver, and collapsed across the backseat.

  The driver didn’t say a word to her, but she caught his concerned glances in the rearview mirror. By sheer will, she propped herself upright, scared that otherwise he might drop her off at a hospital. She forced her lips into what she hoped was a flirtatious smile for the sweaty, smelly cabdriver as she breathed heavily but quietly through her nose.

  The taxi pulled up in front of the lobby of the Park Tower Plaza. A recently constructed five-star hotel, the Park Tower Plaza was a favorite among affluent businessmen, especially Americans.

  Jahal paid the driver with a twenty-pound note. Clutching the door with two hands, she pulled herself out of the car. She had to pause for another coughing fit to pass. A tall, heavyset man in a cowboy hat, waiting for her cab, leaned forward and offered his arm, but she refused him with a shake of her head. She caught her breath and headed for the entrance.

  Inside the hotel, her staggering gait drew a few glances from the people in the crowded lobby. She smiled and waved away anyone who offered his or her assistance.

  According to the original plan, Jahal was supposed to have been at the hotel before 8:00 A.M., waiting for the morning exodus. But inadvertently her timing had worked out even better. At 5:00 P.M. on the nose, the bankers, lawyers, and other businesspeople were returning to their rooms from meetings and conferences all over London.

  Standing amid a group of American businessmen, she swayed on her feet waiting for the elevator with them. She let the throng of people carry her into the spacious elevator. Unsteadily, she elbowed her way to the buttons and pressed the top floor. As instructed, she ran her germ-filled hands along the surfaces of the buttons and surrounding walls.

  When a wave of coughs began, she covered her mouth but deliberately left a hole between her thumb and index finger, which allowed the now-bloody mucus to spray free into the air and onto the men surrounding her. Most of the men paid little attention to her, but a few of the ones nearest her stepped backward in an attempt to put as much distance between them and her coughs.

  Khalila rode the elevator to the top floor and disembarked with the few people remaining on the ride. As they headed for their rooms, she pressed the “down” call button and waited. She felt so weak. She had to rest against the closed elevator doors to stop from collapsing. When the doors opened, she staggered back into the empty elevator. She smeared her hands over all the buttons. She descended with the elevator, as more unsuspecting people boarded on their way down to dinners, shows, sightseeing, and for a few of them, a relatively imminent death.

  She repeated the pattern, riding the elevator up and down with groups of hotel guests, growing weaker with each trip. On her fourth trip back up, the door opened on the second floor. A striking young woman stepped into the elevator with her two small girls. The pretty sisters wore matching pink bathrobes. Their hair was wet, and each one held a pool towel. They were close in age; the older couldn’t have been more than six.

  Jahal watched in horror as the mother moved her two girls toward her and the elevator control panel. “I promised they could press the buttons,” the mother explained to Khalila with a warm smile.

  The room spun. Jahal felt another coughing spasm building. She turned her head to the wall and covered her mouth as she hacked, desperate to keep the bloody virus-soaked sputum from the two little girls.

  Jahal backed away from the mother and girls, making her way to the far side of elevator. She wanted to scream at them to leave the contaminated buttons alone, but she knew better. Tears welling in her eyes, Jahal watched as both girls took turns pressing the same button for their floor. And when the youngest daughter reached for the alarm button, her mother’s hand shot out and brushed against the steel panel, pulling her daughter’s hand away. The mother leaned forward and spoke in a hushed tone to the little girl. Scolded, the little girl’s lip began to quiver. And then, for comfort, she stuck the same thumb that had just touched the buttons into her mouth.

  CHAPTER 13

  POLICE HEADQUARTERS, CAIRO, EGYPT

  Sergeant Achmed Eleish patted the pockets of his jacket, desperate for a smoke. After an anxious moment, he remembered tossing the pack in the bottom drawer of his desk—his halfhearted stab at giving up smoking. Ever since the long night he’d spent in hospital with crushing chest pain, later diagnosed as angina, the detective had been under attack from all sides. Samira, his two daughters, his doctor, and even the mosque’s imam had been haranguing him to quit. While the others were concerned with Eleish’s health, the imam focused on what he perceived as a breach of Islamic taw—according to Mohammed it was a sin to deliberately harm your health or to waste money.

  Eleish had to admit they were right. At age fifty, he already carried fifty pounds too many on his tall frame along with his family’s propensity for coronary artery disease. But as a dedicated family man, policeman, and otherwise good Muslim, Eleish believed he had the right to one vice, even if it meant smoking himself into a premature grave. So he rummaged through the drawer until he found the pack. He slid a cigarette out and tucked the pack back into the pocket of his rumpled gray suit jacket, knowing that he would need another soon.

  He lit the smoke and savored two long puffs before turning his attention to the pile of “open case” files in front of him. As he was reaching for the top file—the tragic, but familiar story of an unsolved rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old prostitute in the slums of Cairo—his phone rang.

  “Eleish,” he said into the receiver. It was an unusual manner of salutation for a Cairo Police officer, but he had borrowed the idiom years earlier from one of his favorite detective novels, and it had stuck.

  “Sergeant, it’s me,” Bishr Gamal said in a hushed tone.

  Eleish could hear traffic noises in the background of the public pay phone, from where Gamal usually called. He could picture the little informer whispering nervously into the phone while constantly checking over his shoulder. He took another drag from his cigarette, then asked, “What is it, Bishr?”

  “I am getting back to you about the mosque,” Gamal said, referring to the Al-Futuh Mosque. A well-known hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, the mosque’s charismatic cleric, Sheikh Hassan, had enough political cunning and popular support to ward off the local authorities’ attempts to rein him in.

  “And?” Eleish asked.

  “Very interesting things, Sergeant.”

  “Bishr, I don’t have time for mind games,” Eleish said, though secretly he enjoyed the drama that Gamal always infused into their conversations.

  “But, Sergeant, this is worth more than our usual arrangement,” Gamal said.

  “Gamal, you always say that! And more often than not, your tips aren’t worth anything.” Eleish paid Gamal out of his own pocket on a tip-by-tip basis. “But tell me what you know,” he sighed. “If it’s useful, I’ll pay you double.”

  “Triple.” Gamal said.

  “Double and a half.” Eleish smiled to himself. “Not a piastre more!” He could imagine himse
lf in a raincoat and fedora, speaking the line Bogey style. He suppressed a laugh.

  “Okay, Sergeant, okay,” he said. “Your man disappeared.”

  Eleish’s smile vanished. He dropped his cigarette into the ashtray. “What do you mean he disappeared?”

  “He usually comes for prayer twice a day, but no one has seen him in over eight days,” Gamal said. “I asked others at the mosque. No one knows where he’s gone.”

  “Hmmm,” Eleish grunted. “Okay, Bishr, what else?”

  “He’s not the only one missing,” Gamal whispered, as if spies surrounded his phone booth.

  “Who else?” Eleish asked impatiently.

  “A number of other regulars, men and women, have been gone for the same time,” Gamal said.

  “And you’ve heard nothing about their whereabouts?”

  “No,” Gamal said. “I’ve been going to prayers regularly. I did overhear two men discussing a ‘desert base,’ but I couldn’t make out the rest of their conversation. And it’s not safe for me to be asking too many questions.”

  “Okay,” Eleish said, reaching for his cigarette. “Good work, Bishr. I will pay you triple for this. But I want you to stick close by the mosque. Report back to me if you hear anything new.”

  “I will, Sergeant Eleish, I will,” Gamal said in a solemn, hushed voice.

  Eleish hung up the phone. Distractedly, he reached into his desk drawer looking for the snack that his wife always packed for him. Then he realized that it was the middle of Ramadan. Like every day during the Muslim holy month, he had to fast until sunset, when he would say the evening prayers, or Taraweeh, with his family at their mosque. He was supposed to have forsaken smoking during Ramadan’s daylight hours, as well, but he had long decided he couldn’t manage both and opted for what he considered the lesser sin.

  His stomach rumbling, he reached for the file that he kept separate from the open cases. On the flap, “Hazzir Al Kabaal” was written in pencil. He flipped it open and scanned his own scrawled handwriting from the past eight years.