McKean 01 The Jihad Virus

by Thomas Hopp

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Sally Ann has been a doll. She’s kept a steady flow of caffeine and food coming from the executive kitchen. I’ll be okay.”

  “Good,” said McKean. “There’s still plenty of time to get the first dose of vaccine in our arms before the virus takes hold. We’ll be immune to the virus days before its growth rate accelerates to dangerous levels.”

  Janet now went ash white. “But you said you weren’t in danger.”

  McKean shrugged his angular shoulders. “Let’s stay optimistic about that. For now, don’t let me keep you any longer. We’ll chat again soon.”

  After goodbyes, McKean turned off the video feed. He turned to us with a philosophical look on his face. “Janet is incredibly good at what she does. I doubt things would move much faster if I were there. The vaccine should be ready for injection within forty-eight hours.”

  “Barring any unforeseen problems” I muttered.

  “We’ve worked together on a few other chemical synthesis projects. It’s fairly straightforward. She’ll chemically link the amino acids, one by one, onto microscopic plastic particles, by a process called Merrifield synthesis. When the vaccine is finished, sometime tomorrow, she’ll remove it from the beads by simply extracting with hydrofluoric acid.”

  “Extraction with hydrofluoric acid is simple?” I asked.

  McKean smiled and dismissed the question. “From there, just one last treatment yields a product pure enough to go into our arms - the vaccine must be freeze-dried. It’s the same process that turns instant coffee from a liquid to a solid. You freeze the liquid as a shell of ice inside a glass jar, and then subject the jar to a vacuum until the ice sublimates to dryness. Whatever remains in the jar is freeze-dried. In the case of our vaccine, I expect a fluffy white powder with the consistency of cotton candy.”

  I was dubious. “I’ve never heard of anyone making a vaccine overnight. Doesn’t it usually take years to develop one?”

  “An old notion,” said McKean. “The potential of chemically synthesized vaccines has scarcely been recognized, but I’ve puttered with the technique for years. It’s good to finally get a chance to put it to the test. And I’m confident we’ll have this vaccine in hand very soon.”

  “In arm,” I said, pointing at my shoulder. We all forced a laugh. And then I noticed that the gauze on my wrist was stained with orangish fluid that had seeped from my wound.

  “Yes. In arm,” said McKean. “And the sooner the better.”

  Chapter 13

  Janet reappeared on the computer screen at the duty station several hours later and we gathered around.

  “What is it?” McKean asked.

  “There’s someone here who would like to talk with you.”

  A hefty body in a gray suit and pink shirt appeared over her left shoulder. She moved aside and the owner of the body plunked into the chair. It was Stuart Holloman.

  “Sorry to hear about your, uh, bad luck,” Holloman said.

  “Thanks for the concern,” said McKean.

  “You seem to have a way of winding up right where the action is, in the lab or out of it. But you took off without official leave from work.” Holloman glared across cyberspace. Veins stood out on his bald head.

  “A last-minute thing,” McKean replied unapologetically. “I would have told you, but it seemed more important to get where we were going as soon as possible.”

  Holloman was unappeased. “I’ll overlook your unexcused absenteeism, given how important your escapade turned out to be. But I gotta say, Peyton, you’re not regular guy, not a team player.”

  “I don’t suppose I ever will be.”

  “No,” Holloman agreed. “But you can’t flout my authority forever. Just a friendly warning. You’ve got to toe the line sometimes, no matter how brilliant you think you are. Other people’s opinions matter, too.”

  “I’ll take that into consideration,” said McKean.

  Holloman sat silent and sour-faced for a moment, obviously not getting what he wanted out of the conversation. Then he got up and walked off-screen without a goodbye or a backward glance.

  McKean sat tugging on his chin, uncommunicative. Janet took her seat again and watched off-screen for a moment. “He’s gone now,” she said.

  “Good,” said McKean. “Let’s get back to work, then.”

  “Okay.”

  “Once you’ve set the freeze-dryer running,” he said, “you’ll have at least an eight-hour wait while the vaccine peptide dries. You can go home and get some well-deserved rest.”

  In the next few minutes, Janet and Peyton focused their attention on the work at hand, discussing the synthesis without remark or reaction to what Holloman had said. Jameela and I drifted away as they discussed Merrifield synthesis in too much detail for my overstressed brain to comprehend. But I paused, a few paces off, to note how casually McKean chatted into the computer video camera, laughing and making small talk with Janet.

  Jameela whispered, “He gets along well with her.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “He’s quite pleasant with his coworkers. But he and his boss - “

  ” - hate each other,” she concluded for me.

  McKean’s videoconference concluded when Hawkins, in his isolation suit, brought us a dinner of roast beef, mashed potatoes and green beans. The three of us took the meal at a small table in McKean’s and my room, which had become a central meeting place for the three of us. After dinner and some animated discussions of international politics, epidemics, and jihad, McKean got up and stood in the hallway on our side of the glass as if waiting for someone’s arrival. He was.

  Shortly past 6 pm two people got off the elevator. A trim blond woman dressed in a tan business suit led a sandy-haired boy, a child of perhaps seven, dressed in blue jeans and a green coat, by the hand. She brought him with her to the window.

  Peyton approached the window closely. There was an odd silence, as if no one was prepared for this moment. The boy said, “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, Sean,” McKean replied warmly. He bent down to exchange smiles with the boy. Then he stood and addressed his wife more coolly, “Hi, Evvie.”

  Overwrought-looking, she shook her head slowly. “Peyton…” she began, but seemed at a loss for words. “I think maybe you’ve gone too far this time.”

  “Perhaps I have,” he agreed.

  “You - ” she began in a harsh tone, but stopped herself. “It wouldn’t have hurt you to think about us before you got into this.”

  He nodded. Then he knelt by the window glass to be near his son. “How’s my boy?” He asked with a smile.

  “Fine, Daddy,” Sean replied. “When are you going to get well?”

  “Soon,” said McKean. “Just a few days.”

  “Good,” said the boy. “Mutley wants to play with you, Dad. He doesn’t wag his tail very much. He misses you.” He put a small hand against the window glass.

  McKean covered the same spot on his side of the window with his own hand. “I miss you and Mutley, both,” he said. Their gazes joined and their hands communed through the barrier, reaching out through glass, quarantine, time, evil, hate, and desperation to take comfort in their nearness.

  Jameela and I moved away to give the family time alone, walking to the end of the hallway while McKean and his loved ones discussed their private concerns. McKean’s wife seemed argumentative, but the boy and McKean kept their hands together on the glass. Eventually, an orderly came and spoke softly to Mrs. McKean. She took her son’s hand from the glass and led him to the elevator. When Sean waved goodbye, McKean’s face took on an uncharacteristically remorseful look. He waved back, and then the elevator doors closed and they were gone.

  He stood at the window wall for some time before returning to his bed. There, he seemed to take solace in a medical journal, marking it prodigiously with a yellow highlighter he had appropriated from the duty desk.

  The visit by McKean’s loved ones reminded me I had people, too. But I didn’t call my folks in P
hoenix. I didn’t want to hear my mother cry, or take my father’s chiding about harebrained schemes. And if I died, somebody else could call them.

  Confined to the ward as we were, time slowed to a crawl. My only relief came from chatting with Jameela. In the evening, she and I played chess on a table in our room. She trounced me and then provoked McKean into a match. I watched them play from my bed. They played several slow-paced games that went on for a long time. By the time they were tied at a game apiece, I had grazed through every channel on the room’s wall-mounted television set without news of smallpox or kidnapped redheads. All I got was CNN reports on Middle-Eastern fighting, and then a local late-night news story about a man shooting his neighbor over the noise his wind chimes made. Sometime past 10 pm, after a narrow loss to McKean, Jameela bid us both goodnight and went to her room. McKean went back to his bed and his medical journals and his yellow highlighter.

  On the nightstand beside my bed was a stack of used paperback books, brought in by Kay Erwin. One was entitled, “The Holy Qur’an.” I thumbed through it for a while, reading a passage here and there. There seemed to be too many verses about how the souls of the damned would burn in hell for eternity, too many faces being dragged through hot coals, too many flaming victims screaming for mercy while good Muslims looked down from heaven and mocked them. It was a bit much for me, given my circumstances. Better were the rarer descriptions of heaven, which according to Mohammed, was a place of date palms and sandy streams. But after reading the umpteenth warning that unbelievers would burn for eternity, I flopped the book back on the pile and closed my eyes.

  I dozed until Peyton McKean raised the sound volume on the TV. I opened my eyes to see a female reporter under camera lights on the shoulder of a dark county highway. The road behind her was the one we had roared along that morning in the Methow Valley.

  “Details are sketchy,” she began, “but officers of the Okanogan County Sheriff’s Department, acting in concert with the FBI, have surrounded a ranch not far from us here on the North Cascades Highway. We are barred from the area until it is declared safe by the Sheriff’s Department. All we know at this time is that the incident is somehow connected to the smallpox cases reported in Sumas. Apparently one or more persons of interest in that matter are being sought by agents here.”

  Beyond that, the reporter had little information.

  “She should be here,” I said, when the segment came to an end. “I bet she’d like to interview us.” We watched the station for half an hour but got only a sports note about a Seattle Mariners’ pitcher with tennis elbow, the weather forecast, which unsurprisingly called for rain, and a long feature about West Seattle High School in an uproar over changing their mascot from the Indians to something less ethnically offensive. Surprisingly, several members of the Duwamish tribe, the original West Seattle Indians, weighed in in favor of keeping the Indians name.

  “Times are screwy,” I said.

  “Hospital confinement,” said McKean, “is a bore punctuated by bad news.” He switched off the TV. I killed the room lights and drew the green privacy curtains around my bed, just after eleven.

  For hours, I tossed on top of the covers, drifting in and out of sleep.

  Dozing, I dreamed I was riding the black stallion again, this time with slack reins, in Mohammed’s vast garden of date palms, moseying along a peaceful sand-banked stream. Beside me, Jameela rode the white mare. Looking smart in her riding outfit, she smiled at me. Her dark Cleopatran eyes seemed to beckon me closer.

  “Jameela,” I began, but the twittering of a bird high among the date clusters made her turn and look away.

  I raised my voice and spoke to her more loudly.

  An odd noise interrupted the dream. It wasn’t a sound you would hear in a garden of date palms. It was the clatter of curtain hangers sliding on an overhead track.

  “Fin?” The voice was Jameela’s. But she had vanished from the dream scene, which dissolved as I sat up in the dim light of the hospital ward room. The green hospital curtains around my bed were parted. Standing over me was -

  “Jameela!” I exclaimed. “Where - ?”

  She looked at me with one eyebrow raised like a beautiful teacher who had caught a schoolboy up to some mischief. “You were talking in your sleep. You called my name.”

  She was dressed in pajamas and a blue robe. I had expected the riding outfit, but it had vanished along with the dream. Momentarily confused, I blinked at her stupidly.

  An inscrutable smile crossed her beautiful face. She leaned close and cooed, “You said more than just my name. Don’t you remember?”

  The warmth of a red flush crept over my face. “You’ve got me on that one. I don’t remember exactly what I said.”

  “But I do,” she whispered. “And I am…flattered.”

  “You should be flattered,” Peyton McKean chuckled from beyond the curtains. “To be paid such compliments by the wordsmith, Fin Morton. And in such…graphic detail!”

  My face must have gone from red to purple. Jameela watched my discomfort and laughed melodiously. “Fin!” she teased. “You are embarrassed?”

  McKean showed no mercy. “You talk most charmingly in your sleep, Fin. But you had better make such suggestions in private, next time.”

  “I could not sleep,” Jameela explained. “I came to see if I could borrow one of your books. That’s when you…said what you said.”

  “What did I say?” I demanded.

  McKean laughed outright. “That is not a suitable topic for mixed company.”

  Jameela laughed too. But she seemed to think I had suffered enough. She leaned near and whispered softly, “My answer, Fin Morton, is, ‘Maybe’.”

  She chose a book from the pile and then went out, pulling the curtains closed after her. She paused a moment by the doorway, and whispered, “Goodnight, Fin.” Then she was gone, leaving me sputtering and Peyton McKean chuckling.

  “What the hell did I say to her?” I asked.

  “Nothing I care to repeat. You’ll have to get it from her.”

  “Thanks for the help,” I muttered. “I’ll be embarrassed to see her tomorrow.”

  “Humiliation goes with the territory.”

  “What territory?”

  “Masculinity. Being the aggressive gender. We males are instigators. Half the time we make fools of ourselves.”

  “That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

  “My point is, she’s sure you’re interested in her now, isn’t she? However lamely you did it, you’ve got her thinking.”

  “You wouldn’t know by her reactions.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said McKean. “But I would. She’s shy. Easily embarrassed. She’s gone away to think it over.”

  McKean was silhouetted on the curtain divider by the dim light of his reading light, sitting on the edge of his bed. “I think she likes you.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” McKean arranged the covers over his legs. “It’s just a theory. A hypothesis I’m working on. I could just as easily be wrong as right. But I advise you to proceed on the assumption I am right.”

  He lay down and snapped off his reading light, darkening the room. “Goodnight, Fin.”

  “Goodnight, Peyton.” I shook my muddled head, lay down and closed my eyes.

  Chapter 14

  The next morning Jameela joined Peyton and me for breakfast at the small table in our room. Over ham and eggs, orange juice, and toast, we talked awhile and watched Nurse Hawkins in his isolation suit changing the sheets and blankets on our beds. He put the old ones in a black plastic bag marked INCINERATOR and left us.

  To break the long silence that followed, I asked Jameela, “Is this food all right for you? I mean, do you usually eat some other kind of food?”

  She looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Halal, you mean? Do you expect me to be so different?”

  “I just meant - ” I didn’t know what I meant.

  “I have eaten Big Mac hamb
urgers at McDonalds in Giza,” she said. “I buy Levis blue jeans at the shopping mall in Cairo. I learned to drive my father’s car at sixteen. I got drunk on wine at seventeen. And at eighteen I lost - ” She stopped.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. There are rock concerts in Cairo, you know. I watched American movies and TV shows dubbed in Arabic. My life there was nice. Not so different from America.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

  She still looked mildly offended, so I tried to explain myself. “You know, Jameela, beneath this coarse, rude exterior lies a very delicate - “

  ” - posterior,” McKean finished for me.

  Jameela laughed. I got red and clammed up. But McKean took over.

  “A little more family history please, Jameela,” he said.

  “I was raised in good circumstances,” she said. “My father is a physician trained at Oxford. We lived in one of Cairo’s best suburbs. I was one of three children. I have one older brother and one younger one. My eldest brother is in England, training to be a doctor like my father. I was studious too. But, above all, I loved horses. I learned to ride at one of the finest Egyptian riding academies while my father was treating the director’s arthritis. I studied at the American University to improve my English. I got my master’s degree in veterinary science from Cairo University and went on to the National Arabian Horse Stables in Giza, in the shadow of the pyramids. I learned the care and training of Arabian horses there. And it was there I met my beloved mare, Zahirah.”

  “And Sheik Abdul-Ghazi?” McKean prompted.

  “My life,” she replied, “has taken some unhappy turnings.”

  “How so?”

  “Sheik Abdul-Ghazi arrived from America one day, to look over horses for breeding stock. He purchased Zahirah the same day, for cash money, a large amount. I was heartbroken. When the director told him this, he instantly offered to take me to America. I agreed, thinking only that he wanted me to tend to Zahirah. Soon after I arrived, however, he made his real intentions known. When he told me he wished to make me his second wife, I refused, of course. But then my father was arrested in Kharifa. He was lured there by a request to tend the arthritis of the Sultan, but his passport was taken and he is held there now without charges. They forced him to call and urge me to marry Sheik Abdul-Ghazi. I still refused, but my dear father remains under house arrest in the court of the Sultan. My mother joined him there of her own free will. She is a loyal wife.”