by Tom Clancy
The dean turned to the Secret Service personnel. “From here on, I’m the boss,” he told them. “I won’t let him get into any danger, but we don’t have enough suits for you people. If you stay in the corridors, you’ll be safe. Don’t touch anything. Not the walls, not the floors, nothing. Somebody goes past you with a cart, get out of the way. If you can’t get out of the way, walk to the end of the corridor. If you see any kind of plastic container, stay clear of it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” For once, Andrea Price was cowed, POTUS saw. As was he. The psychological impact of this was horrific. Dr. James tapped the President on the shoulder.
“Follow me. I know it’s scary, but you are safe in this thing. We all had to get used to it, too, didn’t we, Tisha?”
The nurse turned, now fully in hers. “Yes, Doctor.”
You could hear your breathing. There was the whir of the A/C pack, but everything else was muted. Ryan felt a frightening sense of confinement as he walked behind the dean.
“Cathy’s in here.” He opened the door. Ryan entered.
It was a child, a boy, aged eight or so, Jack saw. Two blue-clad figures were ministering to him. From behind he couldn’t tell which one was his wife. Dr. James held his hand up, forbidding Ryan from taking another step. One of the two was trying to restart an IV, and there couldn’t be any distractions. The child was moaning, writhing on the bed. Ryan couldn’t see much of him, but he saw enough for his stomach to turn.
“Hold still now. This will make you feel better.” It was Cathy’s voice; evidently she was doing the stick. The other two hands were holding the arm in place. “... there. Tape,” she added, lifting her hands.
“Good stick, Doctor.”
“Thank you.” Cathy went to the electronic box that controlled the morphine and pushed in the right numbers, checking to be sure that the machine started functioning properly. With that done, she turned. “Oh.”
“Hi, honey.”
“Jack, you don’t belong here,” SURGEON told him firmly.
“Who does?”
“OKAY, I HAVE a line on this Dr. MacGregor,” the station chief told them, driving his red Chevy. His name was Frank Clayton, a graduate of Grambling, whom Clark had seen through the Farm some years earlier.
“Then let’s go see him, Frank.” Clark checked his watch, did the calculations, and decided that it was two hours after midnight. He grunted. Yeah, that was about right. First stop was the embassy, where they changed clothes. American military uniforms weren’t all that welcome here. In fact, the station chief warned, few things American were. Chavez noted that a car followed them in from the airport.
“Don’t sweat it. We’ll lose him at the embassy. You know, sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t a good deal when my folks got kidnapped out of Africa. Don’t tell anybody I said that, okay? South Alabama is like heaven on earth compared to this shithole.”
He parked the car in the embassy’s back lot and took them inside. A minute later one of his people walked out, started the Chevy, and headed right back out. The tail car went with him.
“Shirts,” the CIA resident officer said, handing them over. “I suppose you can leave the pants on.”
“Have you talked to MacGregor?” Clark asked.
“On the phone a few hours ago. We’re going to drive over to where he lives, and he’s going to get into the car. I have a nice quiet parking spot picked out for our chat,” Clayton told them.
“Any danger to him?”
“I doubt it. The locals are pretty sloppy. If we have anybody tailing us, I know what to do about it.”
“Then let’s move, buddy,” John said. “We’re burning moonlight.”
MacGregor’s quarters weren’t all that bad, located in a district favored by Europeans, and, the station chief related, fairly secure. He lifted his cellular phone and dialed the doctor’s beeper number——there was a local paging service. Less than a minute later his door opened, and a figure walked to the car, got in the back, and closed the door a second before it moved off.
“This is rather unusual for me.” He was younger than Chavez, John was surprised to note, and eager in rather a shy way. “Who exactly are you chaps?”
“CIA,” Clark told him.
“Indeed!”
“Indeed, Doctor,” Clayton said from the front seat. His eyes checked the mirrors. They were clear. Just to make sure, he took the next left, then a right, and then another left. Good.
“Are you allowed to tell people that?” MacGregor asked as the car pulled back onto what passed locally as the main drag. “Do you have to kill me now?”
“Doc, save that for the movies, okay?” Chavez suggested. “Real life ain’t like that, and if we told you we were from the State Department, you wouldn’t believe us anyway, right?”
“You don’t look like diplomats,” MacGregor decided.
Clark turned in the front seat. “Sir, thank you for agreeing to meet with us.”
“The only reason I did so—well, the local government forced me to disregard normal procedures for my two cases. There’s a reason for those procedures, you know.”
“Okay, first of all, could you please tell me all you can about them?” John asked, switching on the tape recorder.
“YOU LOOK TIRED, Cathy.” Not that it was all that easy to tell through the plastic mask. Even her body language was disguised.
SURGEON looked over to the wall clock behind the nursing station. She was technically off duty now. She would never learn that Arnie van Damm had called the hospital to make sure the timing went right for this. It would have enraged her, and she was mad enough at the whole world already.
“The kids started arriving this afternoon. Second-generation cases. That one in there must have got it from his father. His name is Timothy. He’s in the third grade. His dad’s on the next floor up.”
“Rest of the family?”
“His mom tested positive. They’re admitting her now. He has a big sister. She’s clean so far. We have her sitting over in the outpatient building. They set up a holding area there for people who’ve been exposed but don’t test out. Come on. I’ll show you around the floor.” A minute later they were in Room 1, temporary home of the Index Case.
Ryan thought he must be imagining the smell. There was a dark stain on the bedclothes which two people—nurses, doctors, he couldn’t tell—were struggling to change. The man was semiconscious, and fighting the restraints that held his arms to the bed bars. That had the two medics concerned, but they had to change the sheets first. Those went into a plastic bag.
“They’ll get burned,” Cathy said, pressing her helmet against her husband’s. “We’ve really dialed up the safety precautions.”
“How bad?”
She pointed back to the door and followed Jack into the corridor. Once there, with the door closed behind them, she poked an angry finger into his chest. “Jack, you never, ever discuss a patient’s prognosis in front of them, unless you know it’s good. Never!” She paused, and went on without an apology for the outburst: “He’s three days into frank symptoms.”
“Any chance?”
Her head shook inside the helmet. They walked back up the corridor, stopping in some more rooms where the story was dismally the same.
“Cathy?” It was the dean’s voice. “You’re off duty. Move,” he commanded.
“Where’s Alexandre?” Jack asked on the way to the former physicians’ lounge.
“He’s got the floor upstairs. Dave has taken this one himself. We hoped Ralph Forster would get back and help out, but there aren’t any flights.” Then she saw the cameras. “What the hell are they doing here?”
“Come on.” Ryan led his wife into the changing room. The clothing he’d worn to the hospital was bagged somewhere. He put on scrubs, in front of three women and a man who didn’t seem all that interested in ogling any of the females. Leaving the room, he headed for the elevator.
“Stop!” a female voice called. “There’s a case
coming up from ER! Use the stairs.” And obediently, the Secret Service Detail did just that. Ryan led his wife down to the main floor, and from there out front, still wearing masks.
“How are you holding up?”
Before she could answer, a voice screamed, “Mr. President!” Two Guardsmen got in the way of the reporter and cameraman, but Ryan waved them off. The pair approached under armed scrutiny, uniformed and plainclothes.
“Yes, what is it?” Ryan asked, pulling his mask down. The reporter held the microphone at full arm’s length. It would have been comical under other circumstances. Everybody was spooked.
“What are you doing here, sir?”
“Well, I guess it’s part of my job to see what’s going on, and also I wanted to see how Cathy is doing.”
“We know the First Lady is working upstairs. Are you trying to make a statement to the nation—”
“I’m a doctor!” Cathy snapped. “We’re all taking turns up there. It’s my job.”
“Is it bad?”
Ryan spoke before she could explode at them. “Look, I know you have to ask that question, but you know the answer. These people are extremely ill, and the docs here, and everyplace else, are doing their best. It’s hard on Cathy and her colleagues. It’s really hard on the patients and their families.”
“Dr. Ryan, is Ebola really as deadly as everyone has been saying?”
She nodded. “It’s pretty awful, yes. But we’re giving these people the best we got.”
“Some have suggested that since the hope for the patients is so bleak, and since their pain is so extreme—”
“What are you saying? Kill them?”
“Well, if they’re really suffering as much as everyone reports—”
“I’m not that kind of doctor,” she replied, her face flushed. “We’re going to save some of these people. From those we save, maybe we can learn to save more, and you don’t learn anything by giving up. That’s why real doctors don’t kill patients! What is the matter with you? Those are people in there, and my job is fighting for their lives—and don’t you dare tell me how to do it!” She stopped when her husband’s arm squeezed her shoulder. “Sorry. It’s a little tough in there.”
“Could you excuse us for a few minutes?” Ryan asked. “We haven’t talked since yesterday. You know, we are husband and wife, just like real people.”
“Yes, sir.” They pulled back, but the camera stayed on them.
“Come here, babe.” Jack embraced her for the first time in more than a day.
“We’re going to lose them all, Jack. Every one, starting tomorrow or the next day,” she whispered. Then she started crying.
“Yeah.” He lowered his head on hers. “You know, you’re allowed to be human, too, Doctor.”
“How do they think we learned anything? Oh, we can’t fix it, so let ’em all die with dignity. Give up. That’s not what they taught me here.”
“I know.”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes on his shirt. “Okay, back under control now. I’m off duty for eight hours.”
“Where are you sleeping?”
A deep breath. A shudder. “Maumenee. They have some cots set up. Bernie’s up in New York, helping out at Columbia. They have a couple hundred cases there.”
“You’re pretty tough, Doctor.” He smiled down at his wife.
“Jack, if you find out who did this to us ...”
“Working on it,” POTUS said.
“KNOW ANY OF these people?” The station chief handed over some photos he’d shot himself. He handed over a flashlight, too.
“That’s Saleh! Who was he, exactly? He didn’t say and I never found out.”
“These are all Iraqis. When the government came down, they flew here. I have a bunch of photos. You’re sure of this one?”
“Quite sure, I treated him for over a week. The poor chap died.” MacGregor went through some more. “And that looks like Sohaila. She survived, thank God. Lovely child—and that’s her father.”
“What the hell?” Chavez asked. “Nobody told us that.”
“We were at the Farm then, weren’t we?”
“Back to being a training officer, John?” Frank Clayton grinned. “Well, I got the word, and so I went out to shoot the pictures. They came in first class, by God, a big ol’ G. Here, see?”
Clark looked at it and grunted—it was almost a twin to the one they were using for their round-the-world jaunt. “Nice shots.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Let me see that.” Chavez took the photo. He held the light right up against it. “Ninja,” he whispered. “Fucking ninja... ”
“What?”
“John, read those letters off the tail,” Ding said quietly.
“HX-NJA ... my God.”
“Clayton,” Chavez said, “is that cellular phone secure?”
The station chief turned it on and punched in three digits. “It is now. Where do you want to call?”
“Langley.”
“MR. PRESIDENT, CAN we talk to you now?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, sure, come on.” He needed to walk some, and waved for them to follow. “Maybe I should apologize for Cathy. She’s not like that. She’s a good doc,” SWORDSMAN said tiredly. “They’re all pretty stressed out up there. The first thing they teach ‘em here, I think it goes primum non nocere, ‘First of all, do no harm. ‘It’s a pretty good rule. Anyway, my wife’s had a couple of hard days in there. But so have all of us.”
“It is possible that this was a deliberate act, sir?”
“We’re not sure, and I can’t talk about that until I have good information one way or the other.”
“You’ve had a busy time, Mr. President.” The reporter was local, not part of the Washington scene. He didn’t know how to talk to a President, or so others might think. Regardless, this one was going out live on NBC, though even the reporter didn’t know that.
“Yeah, I guess I have.”
“Sir, can you give us any hope?”
Ryan turned at that. “For the people who’re sick, well, the hope comes from the docs and the nurses. They’re fine people. You can see that here. They’re fighters, warriors. I’m very proud of my wife and what she does. I’m proud of her now. I asked her not to do this. I suppose that’s selfish of me, but I said it anyway. Some people tried to kill her once before, you know. I don’t mind danger to me, but my wife and kids, no, it’s not supposed to happen to them. Not supposed to happen to any of these people. But it did, and now we have to do our best to treat the sick ones and make sure people don’t get sick unnecessarily. I know my executive order has upset a lot of people, but I can’t live with not doing something that might save lives. I wish there were an easier way, but if there is, nobody’s told me about it yet. You see, it’s not enough to say, ‘No, I don’t like that.’ Anybody can do that. We need more right now. Look, I’m pretty tired,” he said, looking away from the camera. “Can we call it a day for now?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. President.”
“Sure.” Ryan turned away, walking south, just wandering really, toward the big parking garages. He saw a man smoking a cigarette there, a black man about forty, in defiance of the signs that prohibited the vice within sight of this shrine of medical learning. POTUS walked up to him, heedless of the three agents and two soldiers behind him.
“Got a spare?”
“Sure.” The man didn’t even look up as he sat on the edge of the brick planter, looking down at the concrete. His left hand held out the pack and a butane lighter at arm’s length. By unspoken consent they didn’t sit close together.
“Thanks.” Ryan sat down about four feet away from the man, reaching to hand the items back.
“You, too, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“My wife’s in there, got the sickness. She work with a family, nanny, like. They’re all sick. Now she is, too.”
“My wife’s a doc, she’s up there with ’em.”
“Ain’t g
onna matter, man. Ain’t gonna matter at all.”
“I know.” Ryan took a long pull and let it out.
“Won’t even let me in, say it too dangerous. Takin’ my blood, say I gotta stay close, won’t let me smoke, won’t let me see her. Sweet Jesus, man, how come?”
“If it was you who was sick, and you knew that you might give it to your wife, what would you do?”
He nodded with angry resignation. “I know. The doctor said that. He’s right. I know. But that don’t make it right.” He paused. “Helps to talk.”
“Yeah, I guess it does.”
“The fuckers did this, like they say on TV, somebody did this. Fuckers gotta pay, man.”
Ryan didn’t know what to say then. Somebody else did. It was Andrea Price:
“Mr. President? I have the DCI for you.”
That turned the man’s head. He looked at Ryan in the yellow-orange lighting. “You’re him.”
“Yes, sir,” Jack answered quietly.
“You say your wife is workin’ up there?”
A nod. A sigh. “Yeah, she’s been working here for fifteen years. I came in to see her, and see how it is, how it’s going. I’m sorry ...”
“What’d’ya mean?”
“They won’t let you in, but they let me in.”
He grimaced. “Guess you gotta see, eh? Tough what happened with your little girl last week. She okay?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. At that age, well, you know how it is.”
“Good. Hey, thanks for talking with me.”
“Thanks for the smoke,” the President said, standing and walking to Agent Price. He took the phone. “Ed, it’s Jack.”
“Mr. President, we need you back. We have something you need to see,” Ed Foley told him. He wondered how he would explain that the evidence was hanging on the wall of a conference room in CIA Headquarters.
“Give me an hour, Ed.”
“Yes, sir. We’re getting it organized now.”
Jack hit the END switch on the phone and handed it back. “Let’s move.”