by Fritz Galt
That must have been the reason for the travel advisory that both Matt and Truman Christopher had warned him about.
“Is it possible to venture out of the city?”
“Large parts of the country are quarantined, if that’s what you mean.”
“I mean, will I risk catching anything fatal?”
“That,” Matt said, “is an open question.”
Jake looked out his window at the snowy field that disappeared off to a dark horizon. How much would the crisis interfere with his investigation? Was Amber aware of the danger?
Not only was Matt coping with a health emergency, he had out-of-town guests to entertain.
But before they reached the dinner party, Jake had some pressing questions.
“Have you heard from Bill Frost?”
Matt shot him a look, and almost failed to brake in time.
“Sorry about that.” He slowly edged forward in the long line of cars. “Heard from him?”
“Anything about him?” Jake rephrased.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve had to put Bill Frost on the back burner. I haven’t heard anything new about him since your call.”
Was Matt completely out of the loop? When he picked up the phone, Matt hadn’t even seemed aware of the massive manhunt for Jake. And fortunately, he hadn’t alerted the police.
“So where do you stand on Bill Frost’s disappearance?” Jake said.
“Disappearance?” Matt shot him another look. “Do you mean to say he’s still alive?”
“Maybe so.”
“Damn, that’s good news,” Matt said. “But frankly, I haven’t had a spare moment to think about it. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in this spreading disease.”
“So it’s a disease?”
Matt shrugged. “We don’t know.”
“So no word from Bill or his brother?”
“I didn’t know he had a brother.”
Matt was remarkably uninformed for someone at ground zero of a breaking international story.
“Do you know that the Russians are making a fuss about his supposed death?”
“I know the Russians were involved early on,” Matt said, trying to make a turn into slow-moving traffic. “A day or two after you called me, I received a folder from one of the junior Russian consuls.”
“Manila folder? About two inches thick?” Jake said, referring to the Mongolia file that Bill Frost must have brought with him to Mongolia to help him research the next episode of his show.
“How do you know about it?”
“Long story.”
Matt grimaced as aggressive drivers wouldn’t let him turn.
“So why didn’t you tell me about the folder?” Jake asked.
“That’s part of the issue,” Matt said. “Our ambassador has told the team to let the matter go. I don’t want to go against his wishes.”
There it was again. Pressure from on high to kill the story.
“So what was in the file?” Jake asked.
“I didn’t learn much, except that Bill was interested in mining. It was a list of mine locations, company names, minerals. That sort of thing.”
The information might not seem useful to Matt, but Jake had nearly lost his life over Bill’s China file. The Mongolia file could prove a valuable starting point.
“I’d like to see that file.”
“After dinner,” Matt said, steering hard toward an entrance gate. “We’re home.”
“You’re late,” Eve said, blowing away a wisp of straight black hair that had strayed from her bun. “Your food is cold.”
“Meet Jake Maguire,” Matt said, taking off his coat. “He’ll join us for dinner and then stay with us tonight.”
“Are you a doctor?” the diminutive woman asked.
Her frankness caught Jake off guard. Was she already mad at him?
“I am not a doctor,” he said.
“Good. We have enough doctors.”
Jake watched her rush off to the kitchen to warm up the food.
Matt Justice’s wife might need some getting used to, but her clipped speech with a slight, sophisticated British accent and the rounded shape of her otherwise Asian eyes made her intriguing and distinctive.
As the dinner party progressed, Jake grew to enjoy the off-kilter repartee between the rangy American and his petite bride, who, as he soon learned, Matt had recently married and swept away from her home in southern China. Rather than complete each other’s sentences, the young couple offered completely contradictory takes on things. To which they both agreed.
Their home was a warm, spacious townhouse. Warm from the festive atmosphere with guests chatting around the corner in the living room, but also just plain warm, which Jake appreciated as soon as he took off his coat.
“Would you mind if I washed up?” he asked his host.
Matt pointed out the bathroom, and Jake dove in, eager to clean away several days of travel that had begun with a frantic Halloween dash through Glover Park to escape Chinese assassins. What he saw in the mirror was a haggard man with circles under his eyes and a three-day growth of beard. He could also use a change of clothes. But supper was on, and he wouldn’t want to keep Eve waiting.
At last they settled down to eat. All the guests were seated around a rectangular table in Matt’s dining room, with Eve enthusiastically serving the local dumplings.
Just outside, Jake heard children’s excited voices and the sharply etched, jagged scrape of skates cutting across ice.
He was happy just to be inside.
He looked at the faces around the table.
Nils Andersson was an energetic Swedish epidemiologist with a graying brush cut and the beginnings of a pot belly. Although Nils was trained to be a medical doctor, his work on the first Ebola outbreak had led him to a career in public health at the World Health Organization, based in Geneva.
The other guest was Professor Tracy Woolman, a small, graying woman from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. From the way the research professor in mammalogy dissected her dumplings, the tiny, bent Tracy struck Jake as a dedicated lab scientist with little time for human beings.
“Why all the docs?” Jake asked, once he had taken in the general theme of the gathering.
“Well,” Matt said, “thousands of people and millions of animals across the country are growing weak and suffering from fevers, with many of them dying.”
“What was your thought process that led to a diagnosis?” Nils, the Swedish doctor from WHO, asked.
Matt stretched his long legs and looked at the ceiling. “Well, you should know that we don’t have a diagnosis. Apparently this has been brewing in the countryside for some time. Only this summer did hospitals in UB notice a spike in cases of nausea, low-levels of energy, and persistent fever.”
“How did they arrive at a consensus that these were related?” Nils pursued.
“After the Ministry of Health looked into it, it became clear that hospitals around the country had been dealing with similar cases for several years. The first theory, of course, was that people were suffering from a disease carried by animals. For example, there are a lot of horses in this country, and many were dying. Was it anthrax or hoof-and-mouth disease? But after some surveys, those were ruled out.”
“Wrong symptoms?” Tracy, the CDC mammalogist, asked.
“Exactly. Then they focused on the epidemic among sheep and goats that has struck many of the herds.”
“Peste des Petits Ruminants?” Tracy suggested.
“Right. PPR. But there was no history of that jumping species from ruminants to humans. So they turned their attention to camels.”
“Looking for MERS?”
“Yes. But the blood tests came back negative.”
“What animals are left?” Jake asked.
“Oh, there are plenty. Most importantly are the marmots and gerbils.”
“Oh, come on.” To Jake, they hardly seemed threatening. After all, they were among the cutest animals in the rodent
family.
Matt shook his head vigorously. “There is a consistent stream of patients each year with the plague.”
“You mean the plague?” Jake said. “As in the Black Death?”
Nobody around the room thought it funny.
“Ja,” Nils said gravely. “You’ll find it in rats and prairie dogs around the world. But here in Mongolia, marmots and gerbils are the reservoir.”
Jake didn’t understand the use of the term. “Reservoir?” He could only think of Reservoir Road, running past Georgetown to the city’s water supply.
The Swede was just warming up. “Marmots and gerbils carry the disease, but when fleas that live on the rodents bite humans, they can transmit the plague.”
Jake felt chastened.
“In fact,” Matt said, “the Black Death spread from my previous post in southern China to the rest of the world thanks to the Mongols.”
While others solemnly nodded, Jake was skeptical.
Matt explained. “Genghis Khan managed to connect the world for the first time, with passports, peace, paper money, and people moving goods from as far south as Vietnam to as far west as the Mediterranean. The disease began in Canton and spread within a few years throughout Asia and Europe, killing vast numbers of people along the way. It wiped out the Mongol dynasty in Beijing and sent the Mongols back to the steppe. The disease eventually died out in most of Asia and Europe, but still persists in small pockets of Mongolia among marmots, which Mongolians eat.”
“They don’t eat marmots, do they?”
“I’m told they’re tasty. When Russia occupied Mongolia, they paid people to kill marmots. They sold the fur, but forbade Mongolians from eating them. Some marmots managed to survive, and there has been an overpopulation of marmots in recent years. You’ll still find hunters and herders living off of marmot meat and organs.”
“Very dangerous,” the mammalogy professor declared.
“I can only imagine,” Jake said. “But is that what you’re dealing with?”
“The symptoms are similar: fever, chills, fatigue, abdominal pain, eventual death for those who don’t receive antibiotics. But ultimately, victims show none of the main clinical signs.”
“Swollen lymph nodes?” Nils asked.
“Correct. No lumps in the neck, armpits, or groin.”
“No symptoms of pneumonic plague?” Nils pursued.
“Their lungs aren’t particularly affected.”
Dr. Nils Andersson sat back with a relieved look.
“So where does that leave you?” Jake asked.
“Our latest theory was typhoid,” Matt said. “Patients have a sustained fever and cough, combined with stomach discomfort.”
“Vomiting? Diarrhea?” Nils asked.
“Both,” Matt said.
Jake pushed his plate away.
“One environmental factor in common,” Matt continued, “is that patients share the same water sources. Since global warming is affecting countries with climate extremes particularly hard, there has been a drying up of the Gobi. Instead of drinking from the streams that used to flow year-round, nomads have been forced to drink from the few wells that are scattered around the desert.”
“But if you don’t find the bacteria Salmonella typhi in blood and stool samples,” Nils said, “you can rule out typhoid.”
“And that’s what they’ve done,” Matt said. “Scientists have found no salmonella bacteria.”
“Which leaves us…?” Jake said.
The conversation came to a halt. The epidemiologist and mammalogist were stuck.
Jake felt like Mongolia had been given a thorough medical exam and the cause of the ailment had yet to be determined.
“What measures did the government take?” Jake asked.
“The Ministry of Agriculture has begun a spraying program for vehicles that enter urban centers.”
“Good for eliminating PPR,” Tracy said. “But that has been ruled out.”
“There’s a general rule in our embassy and a growing concern in the countryside not to drink tap water.”
Matt stared at the half-finished glass of water before him. Whose idea was it to serve water?
“Don’t worry,” Eve told her guests, with a sneaky smile. “We use Altai bottled water.” And she showed them a plastic bottle with a label that showed a snowy peak against a blue sky.
Matt continued. “The Department of Public Health has quarantined villages where outbreaks have occurred.”
“Important only if the disease is communicable among humans,” Nils said.
“The Tourism Ministry has steered groups away from affected areas.”
“Wise,” Nils agreed.
“Not only are people sick,” Matt said. “So are animals. The markets have already factored in the problem. Herders have sold most of their horses, beef, and camels in anticipation of a ban on meat products. So, with oversupply and possible contamination, the price of meat has plummeted.”
At that point, Professor Tracy Woolman held up her fork with the insides of a dumpling hanging from the tip of the tines. “What are we eating?” she asked.
Eve sat up, eager to share her recipe. “It’s horse meat,” she said.
Jake stared at his now-empty plate. That was interesting.
He decided to forget what he had just heard.
“So there’s an economic effect,” he said, returning to safer terrain.
“Major repercussions,” Matt said. “The food industry is suffering, starting with the third of the population that is engaged in livestock herding.”
“Have there been any protests?” Jake asked.
“That’s one of the government’s many concerns.”
Once again, the table fell silent.
“So basically,” Jake summed up, “you’re left with a medical mystery.”
He was looking at a frantic and frustrated team of disease detectives whose job was similar to his. They dealt in victims and culprits and had to avoid collateral damage.
Now Jake saw why the embassy hadn’t followed the Bill Frost case. They were overwhelmed by a political, economic, and health crisis.
He could easily take the position that the fate of a single person was insignificant compared to the deaths of thousands. But he refused to believe that. Not only did every life matter, caring for every life mattered. And beyond that, he had a sneaking suspicion that finding the environmentalist just might shed light on Matt’s pressing public health problem.
Part Four
Mongolia
Chapter 10
Tuesday
Election Day
The ramifications of Bill Frost vanishing paled in comparison with the monumental health challenge Mongolia faced. But Jake had to keep his eyes on the prize. He had the feeling that Matt’s health crisis and the Bill Frost case might somehow be linked. And as such, the best way to help Matt was to get to the bottom of the sudden eruption of lies, threats, deception, coverup, and international chest-pounding over Bill Frost. The best way forward for all was to find Frost.
It was still dark outside when Matt called Jake down to breakfast. As they waited for Eve to finish cooking, Jake asked Matt for a chance to read the Mongolia file, the folder that Bill Frost had brought with him to Ulaanbaatar.
“As soon as Eve’s breakfast is over,” Matt promised.
After a culturally mixed meal of fried turnip cakes and yak cheddar, Jake returned to his room to clean up.
There he waited for the diplomat to bring the folder. As he stood facing his dark window, he listened to the sounds of the city waking up. There was the morning cawing and chirping and chatter of birds and the whistle and clickity-clack of a train on the Trans-Mongolian Railway pulling through town.
His room faced the skyline. He would need to learn the ways of the city. He swung the window open and inhaled the smoke that had been so strong that night. There was a dull, distant flow of air moving out of the forested mountains down into the bowl-shaped valley of the city, where a
handful of car engines roared in meek reply.
“Here’s your folder,” Matt said. “And close the window. We spend a fortune on air purifiers.”
Jake shut the window.
“I know, I know,” Matt said. “Our electricity comes from coal, but we need electricity to combat air pollution. It’s all very circular.”
Jake thanked the busy environment, science, technology, and health officer and sat down next to a lamp with the Mongolia file.
Jake had nearly lost his life over Bill Frost’s China file that ended up burnt in Tom Weaver’s fire pit. It had taken just as much work to get his hands on this file, Bill’s findings about Mongolia.
He began to wonder how many hands it had passed through. Bill Frost had brought it to Mongolia to begin work on an exposé on the environment in Mongolia. Then Bill had vanished on the back side of Bogd Khan Mountain. Had he already handed it to the Russians? Was Bill in contact with the Kremlin? After all, it was the Russian consul who had delivered it to Matt.
More likely, they had taken it from Bill Frost at some point. Which brought up another possibility. Was Russia holding Bill?
Then there was the chance that Russia stole the file from Bill. If so, why give it to the Americans?
Maybe in gathering Bill’s personal effects to ship to America, the Mongolian police had found the file and given it to the Russians. That would have been odd.
Finally, maybe the Russians had learned of Bill Frost’s demise and gotten to his hotel room before anyone else. Maybe they sensed there was something incriminating in the file and wanted to scrub it first. Or maybe they wanted to prevent others, like the Chinese, from getting it.
In any of those scenarios, it seemed deliberate on the part of the Russians that the file end up in Jake’s hands as he sat there having been safely delivered by the Russians to Mongolia.
Jake opened the folder with the dirt on Mongolia and began to read. As Matt had said, there were lots of lists: company names, locations, mineral types. But one article from the Guardian stood out.
The headline read, “Fierce Competition over Rare Earths.”
The article didn’t mention Mongolia by name, but outlined a brewing international trade war. China was in cut-throat competition with other countries to manufacture high-tech products from turbines to smartphones. Yet China was the only country that mined the rare earth minerals necessary to manufacture those items. When China recently decided to stop exporting rare earths, it posed an existential threat to all high-tech manufacturing in the world, including the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. Simply put, China stood to take over the high-tech market.
