by Daniel Kalla
“That’s a big relief,” she groaned. “When will you know for sure whether the virus is contained in Gansu?”
“If there are no new cases, anywhere, in the next week, then I will sleep a whole lot better.”
“Me, too.”
They said their good-byes, promising to touch base with updates and any new developments, but Haldane suspected that she no more intended than he did to follow up on their conversation.
After giving up on the prospect of sleep, Haldane headed down to the small dark bar in the lobby of the hotel. Someone was playing an Elton John tune passably enough on the baby grand piano, but he butchered the words in his heavily accented nasal voice.
Haldane saw Duncan McLeod sitting alone at the far booth, sipping from a highball glass with another empty glass on the table in front of him. As soon as McLeod spotted him, he hailed him over with a flailing arm. “Haldane, over here! Come listen to ‘Someone Shaved My Wife Tonight’ the way Sir Elton meant it to be played.”
Haldane sat down across from McLeod. “Vodka on the rocks?” the Scotsman asked.
Haldane nodded. McLeod waved three fingers in the air until he caught the attention of their waiter.
“I’m a little behind,” Haldane said, indicating the glasses on the table.
“I’ve no intention of letting you catch up, Haldane,” McLeod said with a slight slur.
Haldane had never seen McLeod drink as heavily before. Normally, McLeod looked ten or fifteen years younger than his forty-seven years. Not tonight. The creases around his mouth and eyes seemed deeper. His red hair was even more askew than usual. And there was something melancholic behind his asymmetrical eyes.
“What’s wrong, Duncan?”
“Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve spent my last week trapped in the capital of Nowheresville, China. Home of the Grim Reaper.”
“We’re going home very soon.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” McLeod shrugged his whole upper body. “Doesn’t matter much. I don’t even remember what home looks like,”
The white-coated waiter arrived at their table. He picked up both of McLeod’s glasses and replaced them with two fresh vodkas for McLeod and one for Haldane. “A man could die of thirst waiting for a second drink around here,” McLeod explained away his simultaneous drinks with an unsteady finger.
“So you’re homeless?” Haldane asked.
“In a manner of speaking.” McLeod took a large sip from the first glass. “We’ve got a cute little hovel in Glasgow, but I’m hardly ever there. With this WHO job, I live out of a suitcase.” He heaved a sigh. “Do you know I haven’t seen my boys in almost three months?”
Haldane knew that McLeod had twin teenaged boys,. but he hardly ever spoke of them or any personal aspect of his life. “How old are they, Duncan?”
“Fourteen. Both in their ‘O’ levels. What you’d call high school. Smart kids, too.” He shook his head as if their age surprised him. “Fourteen!”
“Do they look like Dad?”
“Christ, no! Thank God. I think the missus started sleeping around before the boys came along. Even if they got some of my genes, luckily they got her looks.”
“That is lucky.” Haldane tasted his drink for the first time.
McLeod glanced at Haldane askance. “You’ve never seen my wife.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
McLeod howled with laughter and slapped the table. “Haldane, thank God you’re on this miserable adventure with me.” He took another long tug from his glass. “I spoke to Alistair tonight, but Cameron was too busy to speak to his old man.”
Haldane nodded sympathetically. “Teenagers, huh?”
“Nab,” McLeod sucked at the first empty glass, as if the ice cubes were hiding precious drops of vodka. “I can’t blame them. Their old man hasn’t been around much. Too busy chasing little bugs around the world. Now I’m not much more than a stranger to them. Like the dad from that ‘Cat’s in the Cradle’ song.”’ McLeod turned to the piano player and yelled, “Hey, Elton, you know that song ‘Dogs on the Table’?”
“You’re still their dad,” Haldane said.
McLeod shrugged. He turned his attention to the second glass on the table.
“When this is through, why don’t you take some time off to catch up with your kids? Get to know them again,” Haldane suggested. “No doubt the WHO owes you some vacation time.”
McLeod stared at Haldane for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “And the others all say you’re dumb as a post.” He nodded again. “Truth be told, I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe I will, Haldane. It’s been too long since I’ve seen ugly old Glasgow. And for years now I’ve been talking about taking the family on a ski trip.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Haldane said.
“Apparently you haven’t seen me sid,” McLeod slurred. “And you, Haldane? You have to abandon your wee little one for long stretches, too.”
Haldane took a bigger sip from his drink. “Too long.”
“Ah, don’t beat yourself up. It’s not like she’ll remember any of it at her age.”
Haldane didn’t want to talk about Chloe. “Duncan, how does your wife deal with all the time you spend away from home?”
“Fine.” He shrugged. “Let’s face it, Haldane. Maggie never liked me that much in the first place.” His mischievous smile betrayed his obvious affection for his wife. He looked down and swirled the ice in his drink. “You know? Today’s our anniversary.”
“Congratulations.”
“Great. And here I am in a little backwater Chinese wasteland, which Chairman Mao probably didn’t even know existed, getting pissed by myself.”
Haldane punched McLeod playfully on the shoulder. “You got me now, buddy.”
“Fucking excellent, Haldane! But unlike those vacuous weak-kneed lasses back in Geneva, your movie-star looks are wasted on me.” He burped. “I’d trade ten of you in a heartbeat for Maggie.”
Haldane laughed. “How many years?”
“Twenty-four. We were just children, Haldane.” McLeod looked over to him. “Still, no regrets. She’s great, my Margaret. She raised the boys and put up with this”—he thumbed at his chest—”without ever complaining. And we can still laugh about it all. You can’t ask for much more than that in a marriage.”
Haldane shrugged.
“I can’t anyway.” McLeod squinted at Haldane, and then he pointed a swaying finger at him. “But you and your wife live the fairy tale, don’t you?”
Haldane didn’t reply. Instead, he reached for his glass.
“What?” McLeod’s wild eyes went wider. “Trouble in Camelot?”
“Maybe,” Haldane said noncommittally.
“Another man?” McLeod asked.
“Sort of,” Haldane said, deciding not to elaborate.
“Ach, shite!” McLeod dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “Affairs aren’t usually the problem.”
“Oh, really?” It came out a touch more defensively than Haldane had intended.
“It’s a symptom, Haldane. Like a bad sneeze from a virus,” McLeod said, nodding in agreement with himself. “You don’t treat the symptom, you treat the disease.”
Haldane shook his head, less than delighted at the comparison of his wife’s infidelity to a sneeze or a head cold. He drained the last of his vodka and changed the subject. “Duncan, they’re calling it the ‘Gansu Au.”’
“Catchy.”
“A bigwig from the States just phoned. She wanted to know if we had contained it.”
McLeod put his glass down. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her it was too early to say, but it looks like the spread has stopped. In this city, at least.”
“You know what, Haldane?” McLeod said as he held up three more fingers for the waiter. “I know we have to wait a few more days to find out, but my gut tells me it’s contained here.”
Haldane stared at his colleague. “So you think we’ve seen the end of ARCS?”
�
�Haldane ...” McLeod ran a hand through his tangled spears of red hair, then he put the glass down and eyed Noah with a deadly sober expression. “God help us if we haven’t!”
CHAPTER 15
ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL, LONDON, ENGLAND
Staring down at her unconscious four-year-old daughter, Alyssa, the lump cemented in Veronica Mathews’s throat. Tubes and lines hooked Alyssa to machine after machine as if suspending her from a nightmarish, high-tech spider-web. Her bluish-tinged skin had grown translucent. Her angelic face had gone sallow. Her cheeks seemed to have lost their padding, inverting to hollows overnight. Under the sheets and blankets, her little chest heaved up and down with each breath the ventilator wrestled to push in and out of her waterlogged lungs.
Garbed in mask, shower cap, gown, and surgical gloves, Veronica sat as she had for most of the last forty-eight hours hunched over the railing of her daughter’s bed, clutching Alyssa’s cool hand. She had stayed at the bedside since the moment Alyssa was rushed into the Royal Free Hospital’s Accident and Emergency, the British version of an E.R. In the past two days, Veronica had slept for only minutes at a time. She hadn’t eaten at all. But she had no intention of moving. She was not going to leave Alyssa. Ever.
It had happened so quickly. Alyssa had developed a fever and a cough two days earlier. Just a run-of-the-mill cold, Mathews had thought at the time, but within twelve hours of the first cough, her four-year-old was gasping for air. Then she turned dark blue.
Now her baby lay comatose in a pediatric ICU bed, struggling for life with a double pneumonia that left the specialists bewildered. At first they had thought Alyssa might have SARS, so unusual were the many blotches on her chest X-ray. But the blood tests had ruled it out. The doctors told Veronica that they suspected Alyssa might be suffering from severe complications of the flu, but they admitted that they did not know with certainty. As a result they were taking no chances, insisting that all staff and visitors use the same precautions as had been employed with the SARS outbreak.
The sterile physical barriers between Veronica and her daughter—her only allowable physical contact was through two pairs of latex gloves—compounded her helplessness. Veronica was tempted to rip off her mask, cover her daughter’s brow in kisses, and rub noses the way they had the other times one of the girls was sick. It was only the warning that such contact might lead to spread of the infection to her five-year-old daughter Brynne that stopped Mathews from breaking the strict contact precautions.
Veronica Mathews had grown up three miles from the picturesque Hampstead Heath—an oasis of natural park-land in the middle of London’s urban sprawl—at the corner of which the Royal Free Hospital stands. She had played in the heath often as a child. Since moving to New York, whenever she visited London the twenty-nine-year old former model always found time to return for a stroll or jog with one of her childhood friends. She had planned to bring her two girls to the heath on this trip, had the November rain ever lifted. But none of them would be visiting it this November. Alyssa might never see Hampstead Heath, or any other park, again.
Mathews felt another stab of guilt at how her thoughts had drifted from Alyssa to a patch of grassy moorland. Guilt had plagued her ever since Alyssa had been rushed to hospital. Veronica could not forgive herself for dragging the girls back to London in the middle of flu season, with people everywhere—on the plane, in the underground, and at the tourist attractions—hacking and sneezing all around them. The trip was Veronica’s idea, a pathetic attempt to salvage her marriage to her twenty-year older disinterested banker husband. Aside from saving face by proving to the world that she wasn’t just another trophy wife, what was the point of even having tried? she wondered bitterly. No marriage was worth risking her daughters’ health for, least of all hers.
Veronica didn’t understand most of the readouts and displays that flashed numbers and colored graphics on a large monitor at the head of her daughter’s bed. The one number that she fixated on was the oxygen saturation. A doctor had explained how the oxygen saturation, which normally ranged from ninety-five to one-hundred percent in healthy people, reflected her daughter’s lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen and pass it on to the tissue. In Alyssa’s case, even with the help of the jet ventilator and high flow oxygen she was barely able to maintain the number in the high sixties. Despite Veronica’s constant monitoring and her endless promises and threats to a God to whom she hadn’t prayed since childhood, the number refused to budge.
My baby can’t die, the thought repeated like a loop of tape in her head. It’s not possible! Only the week before Veronica had marveled at how big and independent Alyssa had grown, but now nestled in all the machinery she looked as tiny as a doll and even more helpless. “Please God,” Veronica implored aloud, “take me instead!”
The oxygen saturation dropped a percentage point to sixty-six.
HARGEYSA, SOMALIA
Like most things Kabaal touched, he had managed to infuse opulence into the once-utilitarian room, which had become his office, on the complex’s second floor. Ornate Moroccan rugs hung from the freshly painted walls. Even larger rugs adorned the floors. The massive antique oak desk behind which he sat had been shipped in pieces from France and painstakingly reassembled to perfection.
Like the six-hundred-dollar shoes he wore in the desert hideaway, he believed these material comforts brought with them a soothing constancy that enabled him to better focus on his sacred mission.
He flipped open his laptop computer and waited for it to link up to the satellite. Once he saw the little blue interlocking computers icon in the comer of the screen, he tapped a button and the new mail message downloaded. Moments later, it popped up on the screen. Written in English, it read:Dear Tonya,
Arrived in London with all our baggage. Dropped off the present. Everyone was surprised. We had a lovely time, but we couldn’t stay. I’ll be in touch soon.
Love, Sherri
Kabaal felt a rush of joy, tempered by bittersweet melancholy. It was the second such message “Sherri” had sent. The only difference being that the first one had been written from Hong Kong. Otherwise the wording was identical. He wasn’t surprised. After all, he had composed the message himself.
The e-mails indicated that the operation had proceeded without complication in two cities on two different continents. He could only infer one conclusion from the good fortune required for such flawless execution: God had to be on their side.
Now it was time to wait and see whether the virus claimed a beachhead.
The cosmopolitan cities were not chosen at random. Political retribution, expedience, and necessity all factored into the choice. But the superiority of the health-care systems and, in the case of Hong Kong, recent experience with the SARS epidemic, were the overriding factors. For now, Kabaal wanted cities that would react swiftly to an outbreak.
The e-mails also implied that his female couriers were already dead, fallen by bullets from their brothers’ guns; their bodies safely disposed of. Kabaal was saddened by the loss of the Hong Kong courier, but Khalila Jahal’s death hit him much harder. As inevitable as it was, the confirmation of her death still evoked an unexpected sense of loss.
Kabaal looked up to see Abdul Sabri filling his doorway and thoughts of Khalila slid from his mind. Kabaal wasn’t surprised by the major’s sudden stealth presence. He had grown to expect the abrupt appearances. When he chose to, the hulking man could move with the speed and silence of a tiger. “Major Abdul, please come in,” Kabaal said.
In a plain white robe, Sabri sauntered across the room and sat in the leather chair across from Kabaal.
Kabaal was struck again by the paradox of Sabri’s delicate features born on his dangerous frame. “The news from abroad is good,” Kabaal said.
Sabri shrugged as if there was no other possible outcome.
“Both operations were successful,” Kabaal added, annoyed that Sabri did not seem to share his pride in the news.
“It might be premature to label t
he operations a success,” Sabri said emotionlessly.
Kabaal shook his head. “Major, I’ve learned in my business that it is important to celebrate all victories in life. They are at times few and far between.”
Sabri shrugged again. “And I’ve learned from my business that premature celebration can cost you victory.”
“Not if you keep your guard up,” Kabaal countered.
“Always advisable,” Sabri agreed.
“Speaking of which, I heard from our people in Cairo this morning.”
When Sabri didn’t respond, Kabaal continued. “Someone at the mosque has been asking questions as to my whereabouts.”
Sabri leaned forward in his seat. His blue eyes narrowed. “Who?”
“His name is Bishr Gamal.”
Sabri shook his head.
“I have not heard of him either,” Kabaal said. “Apparently, he is not a man worthy of much respect. And I am quite certain he has no legitimate reason to be looking for me.”
Sabri nodded. “I will take care of it.”
“Personally?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Kabaal said
Sabri stood from the chair. He took two steps toward the door before he turned and eyed Kabaal intently. “When will you let them know?”
“Not yet,” Kabaal said.
Sabri tilted his head, questioning.
Kabaal held his palms open in front of him and smiled mischievously, as if letting Sabri in on an inside joke. “We will let them think nature has taken its own course.”
“Why?”
“When terror is your weapon, the unknown adds to its potency.” Kabaal stopped smiling. “We will let the panic simmer. That way, when we are prepared to announce ourselves, we will have their absolute attention.”
CHAPTER 16
COMMUNIST PARTY HEADQUARTERS, JIAYUGUAN CITY, CHINA
