Blind Eye; Silent Waters; Janus Effect

by Jan Coffey

  She looked at the mountains. More of the lake was visible from here. The farther they got away from Erbil, Fahimah’s anxiety grew. She had so many memories connected with Halabja and with the road leading into it. Every time she went there, or even passed through, her sadness would get the better of her. She’d lost so much there. So much…

  Fahimah had to remind herself that she should focus on the happiness of this journey. She was going to see her sister after five years. She wondered how adapted Rahaf had become to having only one leg…whether or not she had been fitted for a prosthetic leg. Whatever she had done about it, Rahaf lived in the mountains and traveled between the refugee camps, so Fahimah doubted the loss of her leg had slowed her down any.

  They would both need to make decisions now, once they were together again. Once they were free. A lot of those decisions would be hard. Where would they go? What would they do? Rahaf was the only person in this world that Fahimah had left. She didn’t want to be away from her sister any more. She’d be happy living wherever Rahaf chose to live. She’d teach at the camps if that was her sister’s decision.

  But a feeling kept gnawing away at her, a feeling that she’d had ever since talking to Ahmad, the Peshmerga leader. It was as if there were something that she didn’t know. She’d read it in Ahmad’s eyes, the way he would look away when they were talking about Rahaf.

  Tears welled up in her eyes and she closed them tight. A headache pulsed at her temples. Fahimah wished she still had the concentration she’d mastered in prison. She tried to meditate, to make herself leave this moment and all the anxiety that was building up, burying her. She wanted to drift off on the warm breeze brushing her face and be carried on the mountain air to Rahaf.

  Fahimah heard the BMW start up again. She opened her eyes and looked across the way. Austyn was coming toward them. He’d pulled on his sunglasses. A car going at the opposite direction, leaving the blockade, beeped at him. The backseat was packed with teenage Kurdish girls. They all screamed with excitement as they went by. Austyn was a very handsome man. But what stood out in him, as far as Fahimah was concerned, was the mixture of confidence and gentleness that defined his actions and his words. A couple of the girls poked their heads out the window and continued to scream as the car drove away.

  Fahimah didn’t remember ever being that free.

  Austyn seemed oblivious to it. He said something to the soldier standing by their car and then got in.

  “We can go,” he told her.

  “Boro,” she told their driver.

  “Chashm,” the man said, and pulled out into the traffic. The other car that had been part of their escort was waiting at the side of road just ahead of the roadblock. They pulled out, too.

  “What does chashm mean?” he asked.

  “It is another way of saying ‘yes.’ A polite way. Like ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘Yes, ma’am.’” Fahimah motioned over her shoulder at the barricade they had left behind. “What was that about?”

  “I’ve kept the cell phone off. Matt couldn’t reach me, but he knew we would be traveling on this road.”

  “More bad news?” she asked quietly.

  “There’s been an outbreak at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan,” he told her.

  “Isn’t that where we flew in from?”

  He nodded.

  Fahimah felt an uneasiness grip her middle. She’d been there. They could accuse her of infecting the people at the base before she’d left. But how could she? She’d been in their prisons for five years. But there’d be no trial. Like before, they could just lock her away.

  She was surprised when his hand closed over hers. It was warm and strong. Her fingers were freezing, and she hadn’t known until now that she was shaking.

  “This has nothing to do with you. No one is accusing you of having anything to do with it.”

  “How did you know what I was thinking about?”

  He gave a shrug. “There’s not much that you think about that isn’t reflected in your face.”

  “In your face, either.”

  “We’re both pretty transparent, I guess,” he said softly. “What a pair.”

  “How bad is it?” she asked. He was still holding her hand. She fought the urge to pull away. Such human comfort was foreign to her. But now, receiving it, she felt flustered and calmed at the same time. How was that possible?

  “Two dead. A third death is imminent. They don’t know how many more are infected,” he said gravely. “They pack them in that housing like sardines, so this could be the largest outbreak yet. I don’t even know how they’d start setting up parameters for any kind of quarantine. I don’t know if they’re equipped for clean-up or testing.”

  “And they have no idea how they contracted the bacteria?”

  “A box mailed from the U.S. is their only clue. The airmen were fine until they consumed something that was in the box,” he told her. “That’s all Matt knows so far. He told me he’d keep us abreast of what’s going on. Which reminds me…”

  Her hand felt cold again when he took his away. He reached into a duffel bag by his feet and took out a satellite phone and turned it on. “I want to make sure we leave this in Halabja. The last thing I need is to have Iranian border soldiers find it among my belongings.”

  She nodded in agreement, tucking her hands under her legs.

  “Rahaf had nothing to do with what happened in Afghanistan.” Fahimah felt the need to remind him again and again, or at least anytime he got fresh news of another outbreak.

  He nodded but didn’t say anything. She knew he trusted her but there was so much about her sister that he didn’t know. Rahaf had the knowledge, the motivation, and for the past five years she’d been free to act, as far as the Americans were concerned. This would be enough for them.

  “You asked me a question before we reached this last barricade,” she told him.

  He pulled his sunglasses off. His blue eyes focused on her face. “I asked what you were doing in Rahaf’s lab.”

  She nodded. “I was sent there by my sister, with her badge and her keys, to destroy all the documents for this research.”

  “Why did she want to destroy them?”

  “Americans were attacking. Saddam was capable of anything. She was terrified of Saddam or his supporters getting hold of what she’d discovered.”

  There was disbelief in his expression. “Why work on something that you know you need to destroy?”

  Fahimah shook her head. “I don’t know every single thing about what she was doing. She can explain that to you much better and in detail. But my understanding was that she was working on something completely different. Finding this microbe was not her intention. Once she had it, though, she knew she had to destroy it.”

  “Her facility was supported by the Iraqi government,” he reminded her. “Wouldn’t it be a feather in her cap if she passed on the information of this deadly strain?”

  “She is my sister,” Fahimah said passionately. “We lost both of our parents in the chemical attack on Halabja. She would never give them anything that could destroy people, regardless of who was paying her.”

  “She worked for them,” he said stubbornly, making it clear that he wasn’t convinced.

  “I worked for them, too, at the university. Half of the professional positions in the city of Baghdad were somehow funded by the government. That is the way things were. But that doesn’t mean we were all terrorists,” she told him.

  “You taught. She worked in a chemical lab.”

  “How many pharmaceutical research labs are there across the United States? Couldn’t every one of them be called a chemical lab? How about the research facilities at the universities? Aren’t most of them funded by government dollars? Even the clinics where there are experimental programs for cancer or mental illness or for different kind of dependencies.” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “You can call people whatever you want. Everyone’s jobs and the interpretation of them stand at the mercy of some political power. I
f you go back and really spend the time and study everything that Rahaf presented at all the conferences she attended around the world…if you read the papers she has published…you will see the truth. But you cannot just select the facts that suit your argument.”

  “What was her area of interest?” he asked.

  “Cancer in survivors of chemical warfare. Detection, treatments, cure,” Fahimah told him. “I told you before. Halabja is not behind us. The survivors are the ones who are facing the greatest battle right now. But she couldn’t spend all of her time on that, so there was other work she did, depending on the latest funding for her lab. Never, though, did she work on building bombs or anything that could be used for biological warfare.”

  Fahimah realized the two Peshmerga soldiers in front were quiet, with the driver every now and then sending a nervous glance in the mirror at her.

  “They think we’re fighting,” Austyn commented.

  “Aren’t we?”

  “No, we’re not,” he said. “I’m trying to understand the truth about your sister.”

  “I will tell you the truth about my sister,” she told him. “But believe it. I do not lie.”

  “She’s your sister.”

  “Do you think I would have wasted five years of my life in prison if I thought Rahaf was responsible for making weapons that could be used on our own people?”

  “Sometimes we’re blind to the faults of those closest to us.”

  “You haven’t heard anything I have been saying, have you?”

  “Of course, I have. Make me believe in her innocence,” he shot back as sharply. “Why did she send you to destroy her files? Why not go there herself?”

  He knew everything else. As well, he needed to learn this last bit of the truth.

  “She was exposed to the strain in her lab by accident. She told me a vial fell and broke. A very small amount of the contents touched the skin on her right leg where the broken vial had left a cut. As you already know the bacteria spreads through the body with great speed. She had some remedy, but it wasn’t enough.” Fahimah would never forget that day. “She called me. Asked me to find a surgeon, to convince the person to come to my house. She told me she was hurt, but no matter how much I pleaded she wouldn’t go to the hospital.”

  “Why not go to the hospital?”

  “I didn’t understand it myself until later, when she came over.”

  “How did she get to your house?”

  “By cab,” Fahimah told him. “I called a friend of ours who was a doctor. He called someone who knew someone else, and by the time Rahaf arrived at my house, the surgeon was there, too.”

  “Did she know she was exposing you to the microbe?” Austyn asked.

  Fahimah shrugged. “I believe everything was new to her, too. She wouldn’t let me near her. You said it is a similar strain to what you see in the US, but I think it must have slight differences She had a little more time to act, and what she contracted seemed to be less contagious. I was never infected but, then again, she would not let me touch the wound or dress it. Even the remedy was a solution that had been passed on to her from a friend for some other illness. As far as how effective it would be, she could not be sure. It had something to do with counteracting the bacteria in the blood stream, before it infected cells.”

  “What happened?”

  “She asked the surgeon to amputate her leg. But he wouldn’t do it at the house. Rahaf was in excruciating pain.” Fahimah found herself shaking again. “The surgeon convinced me that we should at least take her to a nearby clinic. The wound was growing on her leg. He agreed that the leg had to be amputated. Rahaf kept injecting herself with this solution, too, which seemed to make her horribly sick to her stomach. But she believed it was helping her.”

  “Did you take her to the clinic?” Austyn asked.

  “Yes. And when we got there, the surgeon amputated the leg,” she said, feeling chilled to the bone. She was no scientist. No physician. But she’d been in the room with her sister when her leg had been amputated. She’d gladly have given any part of her own body to relieve her sister’s pain. A tear dropped down her cheek. She reached up quickly and dashed it away.

  Austyn took her hand in his. “She did the right thing. The antidote obviously worked. The amputation saved her life. And no one else was infected?”

  “No one.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Rahaf was upset because the people at the clinic, even the surgeon, were asking too many questions. No one had seen this kind of flesh-eating wound. The surgeon knew Rahaf was a scientist. So she asked me to take her out of the clinic before more people started asking questions.”

  “Right after the amputation?”

  “The next morning, at dawn, before the nurses came to check on her. She was still bleeding. I took her back to my house. She wanted to hide in the basement. I wasn’t to tell anyone that she was staying with me. She was afraid.”

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Of how people could use this to their advantage. The wrong kind of people. The country was in chaos. No one seemed to be in charge. Every day, bombs were dropping on Baghdad. Saddam’s people were fighting back. Kurds were fighting alongside of the Americans, but that didn’t mean we could trust them, either.” They’d been crazy to stay in Baghdad. Both of them should have left as soon as things got worse with the war. “Rahaf knew the nurses and doctors at the clinic might talk. The surgeon would, for certain. And she would have no way to stop them.”

  “Did she ever say how she discovered this strain of bacteria?” Austyn asked.

  “She told me they were doing research on different types of streptococcus bacteria. It was during tests on the microbes that she discovered this monster.”

  “While she was recovering from the amputation, that was when she sent you to her lab?”

  Fahimah took a deep breath. The events of those two days were as clear in her mind as yesterday. “Yes, she sent me there with specific instructions on what to do, what to destroy, where the files were, what was important and what was not worth my time.”

  “Weren’t the other people who worked there suspicious of what you were doing?”

  “Only a few people at the lab that day, and they knew me. I stopped there occasionally and picked up Rahaf on the way to dinner. I used the excuse that Rahaf was under the weather, and I was taking some files home for her. In reality, I was taking the printed files to the basement and putting them through the shredder.”

  “None of the other people who worked in the lab were around when she had the spill?” Austyn asked.

  “No,” Fahimah said. “She’d been there all alone when that happened. None of them knew anything about it.”

  “Is that when the bombing started?” he asked.

  Fahimah nodded. “I was in the basement. I had all the files she’d told me to get. I was almost done shredding them when the first of the bombs hit the building.”

  “You didn’t stop, did you?”

  She shook her head. “I’d promised Rahaf I would finish it. And I did. When the power went out, I burned the last of them.”

  “And when the American soldiers poured into the building?” he asked, concern reflected in his face.

  “I never lied to them. They assumed I was my sister. I had the badge around my neck, all of her keys. We look similar enough. No one else seemed to have survived the attack, so there was no contradiction. I made the decision to say nothing and let events play out as they did.”

  “You had no idea how long your imprisonment would be.”

  She shook her head. “I thought perhaps in a day or two or a week they would realize they had the wrong person. By then, Rahaf would have heard of my arrest and would have gone to Kurdistan to hide.” She smiled bitterly. “After that, I imagined there would be a trial and the truth would come out.”

  “But there was no trial.”

  “No, there never was. They moved me out of Iraq and the chain of subsequent moves e
ventually brought me to Afghanistan.”

  “You never said anything, even when you were interrogated.”

  She could feel his distress in the pressure of his fingers on hers.

  “No,” she said, looking at their joined hands. How easy it was to get comfort by the mere touch of someone’s fingers. How she’d missed human touch. “But they were never abusive to me…not in the way that I read in those articles on Agent Sutton’s laptop. No, they asked questions and, by not answering, I let them believe what they already thought they knew.”

  “A month later, six months later, why didn’t you tell them the truth and try to get them to free you?”

  She shook her head. “If you had seen your own sister the way I’d seen Rahaf, you would have done the same thing. No, I could not do that. I did not know if she would be strong enough to avoid capture, if they were looking for her. I did not know if she could escape to Iran or anywhere. I only knew that if they freed me, they would go after her. No, I could not do that in a thousand years.”

  She was shocked when he brought her hand to his mouth and pressed a gentle kiss on the back.

  Thirty-One

  The research vessel Harmony

  The Atlantic

  Just as Josh raised the Strep-Tester to his tongue, his new friend Dan burst into the cabin breathlessly.

  “Mr. Link, my dad says he wants you to come up right away. It’s an emergency. There’s something wrong with Philip.”

  The strep test completely forgotten, David and Josh followed the other boy up on deck. Most of the students were standing around the small television. The crew and the parents were bending over the railing, some manually helping haul in the thick rope and others watching and waiting to help.

  “What’s going on?” David asked one of the crew who was reeling in the cable for the camera cage.

  “There’s something wrong with Philip. He seems to be in a lot of pain. He isn’t able to come to the surface on his own. Kirk is motioning to have him pulled up with the ropes.”

  Josh moved to the front of the television. David took a look that way. The water was murky. Beyond a few shadowy shapes, there wasn’t much anyone could see.