by Fritz Galt
She found the covered shopping arcades much like those in the Orient. Merchants leaned out of every doorway pointing out their products to her. It was not easy to window-shop without attracting a shopkeeper’s attention, so at first she avoided eye contact and looked straight ahead, letting Peter take her to only the stores that were important to him.
After several blocks, however, she found that she could turn away a salesman with a smile, which they returned easily enough. My God, was she flirting with the men?
Peter wanted to visit a pipe shop.
“I’ll wait out here,” she said. Smoking was a total turnoff. She wasn’t so sure she was interested in diplomats anyway. Even if she could tolerate tobacco fumes, pipe smoking was so East Coast, so establishment.
A motor scooter pulled up in front of her, blocking the sidewalk. A taxi screeched to a halt beside her. She shot Peter a quick glance through the window, but he was busy comparing the bowls and stems of pipes.
Two men jumped out of the tiny black taxi with the yellow roof and grabbed her by both arms.
“Peter,” she cried.
Their vice-like grip pinched the skin of her biceps and lifted her off the ground. Her sneaker toes dragged across the sidewalk.
A strange question crossed her mind. Was this normal in Bombay?
“Peter,” she cried out again.
Then she noticed the stunned faces of pedestrians who were stopped in their tracks. It seemed for an instant that the entire city came to a standstill.
“Peter!” she screamed.
As the taxi sped past the pipe shop, he swiveled his head to look out the window.
She wasn’t sure if he saw her.
She turned to study the men sitting beside her. Their faces were like stone; their eyes, without expression.
“Are you from the consulate?” she asked. “Did my father send you?”
Chapter 11
Dr. Simon Yates raised his sandy-colored eyebrows, stared into the microscope again and scratched a scruffy cheek. Then he picked up his phone and called Mick’s hut.
After a dozen rings, Mick’s baritone voice came on the line. “Yes?”
“Did I catch you snorkeling?”
“No. Refueling the generator.”’
“How’s Mariah?”
“Seems fine. No fever. What did you find out?”
Simon shook his head. “The fishermen had the same parasite as Mariah, but damned if I can identify it. It doesn’t match any of the phenotypes of the four human varieties. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s some mutation or perhaps a new species.”
“I’m beginning to think someone should sound the alarm.”
“Yeah, it’s crossed my mind, too.”
“If you alert the public, other scientists will get to work on the problem,” Mick said hopefully.
“And create panic.”
“Hell, Simon. If you don’t call the papers, I will.”
“Okay, okay. Don’t be so hasty.”
“I’m not a scientist, Simon. I’m a father. And I want results now.”
“Let’s go halfway. I don’t want to see a bunch of over-hyped news stories hitting the papers. How about I tell one of my contacts within the World Health Organization?”
“That’s fine by me.”
Simon set the phone down slowly. He had to call someone who would treat his discovery seriously and not try to make a name for himself. One such person came to mind. He picked up the phone again and dialed long distance to Geneva, Switzerland.
“CDS Division. Hans Schroeder here.”
“What’s this CDS stuff? I thought you were in the Division for Control of Tropical Diseases.”
“Simon, it’s you. For God’s sake. Where are you?”
“I’m living in the Maldives.”
“Swatting mosquitoes in the Caribbean, eh?”
“Indian Ocean.”
“Ja, whatever. How are you?”
“Several million people on the Indian subcontinent are dying from The Plague, but I’m fine.”
“Oh.”
“But I suppose the World Health Organization doesn’t handle malaria anymore.”
“Oh, we still do. CDS stands for the Communicable Diseases cluster. We handle malaria along with TB, cholera, dengue fever, elephantiasis and other Probleme like that. The WHO is under what we call here a new Management Cluster Scheme.”
“Well, don’t cluster yourself out of the real world. Do you want to hear the gory details or not?”
“Are you researching this plague yourself?” Hans inquired, suddenly sounding cautious.
“Yes, I’m still in the business.”
“Ja, schön. What have you got so far?”
Simon spent the next fifteen minutes going over the characteristics of the new parasite. “In short, it’s probably an undocumented form of the Plasmodium genus. Curiously, it has some of the characteristics of P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale and P. malariae, but the organism looks different and the symptoms certainly are different.”
He described the physiology of the sophisticated single-celled protozoa. During various phases of the specimen’s complex life cycle, it took on different shapes. Sometimes it was a round ball, sometimes it looked like an amoeba, and sometimes like a small, wiggly boomerang.
Then he outlined the course of Mariah Pierce’s illness and her drug therapy. He knew far less about the fishermen, other than the fact that they all had the disease in the same advanced form, but he didn’t know if they had died from it or merely from capsizing during the monsoon.
“Have you seen this sort of thing before?” Simon asked.
“Never,” Hans said without hesitation.
“Any drastic change in India’s mortality rate?”
“Nein. Not that I’m aware of.”
“Well, pass the message around your cluster, then.”
“Sure Simon. How can I contact you there in the Indian Ocean?”
Simon gave him three different numbers in the Maldives, including Mick’s number.
“I’ll be in touch,” Hans said. “Auf wiedersehn.”
Simon set down the receiver confident that the information was in the right hands.
Fred Butler saw a white-clad figure lurking beyond the steamed-up window of his shower stall.
His swim in the hotel’s massive swimming pool had relaxed and revitalized him, and so far he hadn’t let the overly solicitous pool attendant ruin his day.
The young man in cricket whites had set out chairs for him and Linda in the shade, taken drink orders and supplied them with towels. Then as the congressman swam several laps, the attendant had stood by with a long pole, supposedly to fish him out if necessary.
“I’m a Californian, son,” Fred had told him. “We all know how to swim.”
Then the man had shadowed him back to the locker room and watched him undress.
“You have good muscle structure,” the man informed him.
That was worth a few rupees.
Fred had then sent him on an errand to find Kleenexes, and jumped into the shower.
The man was back.
Fred turned off the shower and opened the glass door. The man threw a fresh towel on the floor before him, then several more as he crossed, dripping wet, to the sink. Fred grimaced in the mirror and dried off. Then the man laid down further towels on the polished floor as Fred padded toward his locker.
Fred noticed that the attendant had changed the music from Indian to Country/Western for his enjoyment.
When Fred was dressed, the man wet a comb for him, then showed him a steam room with lemon grass oil scent, a roaring whirlpool and an exercise room. Fred plodded along for the show. Then the man jumped under a weight machine and began straining to demonstrate how it worked.
“That’s okay, buddy,” Fred said. He was sure that the man would perform his exercises for him, at a price.
“Listen, thanks for your help.” Fred reached into his wallet and pulled out a couple of hundred-rup
ee bills. “I’ll find my way out.”
The man pocketed the money and jumped to the door to open it for him.
“You’ll come back, I hope?”
Right, Fred said to himself. On a cold day in hell.
Hans looked out his office window at the busy Swiss autobahn.
The public had yet to become aware of the new health concern in India. Now that an American scientist, the renowned Dr. Simon Yates, had successfully isolated and characterized the new and deadly pathogen, it was only a matter of time before the world press would pick up on the threat.
Hans didn’t want the World Health Organization to create panic, and needed more information on the disease before going public.
Contrary to what he had told Simon, he already had some knowledge of the new parasite. However, details were sketchy, and he needed a handle on the origin of the deadly form of malaria. The first recorded outbreak had occurred in Bombay during over a month ago. A local doctor had reported an unusual strain of malaria. It was discovered, among other patients, in the child of an American diplomat. Hans had originally filed it away under “Unspecified.”
Then several weeks later, the same disease had resurfaced north of Bombay along the Indira Gandhi Irrigation Canal in Rajasthan. Hans had taken note and telephoned the WHO office of Malaria Prevention and Control. They told him to contact the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He had left a message with the director of the Division of Parasitic Diseases, but never heard back, and he had neglected to follow up.
Over the ensuing weeks, widely dispersed doctors reported cases of the strange disease almost simultaneously in the city of Madras on India’s southeast coast and several other southern coastal areas of India. Hans scanned the Internet and, curiously, found no news or scientific articles published on the disease.
He browsed electronically through the medical reporting sites. The number of diagnosed cases was rising sharply, an alarming trend for a disease with no name, but clearly doctors were describing the same pathogen at work.
What had struck him as strange about the widespread incidence of the disease was that a mosquito could only travel up to two miles from its home. In one month, mosquitoes couldn’t have distributed a new disease that far on their own.
Hans had then called a staff meeting of the heads of his new cluster for communicable diseases, the CDS. He described the scenario. The medical researchers and public health experts that headed various sections of his cluster had been mildly impressed by his detective work. They debated the findings and recommended that he assemble an epidemiological surveillance team and send it to India.
In response to their recommendations, he had pulled two medical researchers out of the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, and sent them to Delhi to interview the reporting doctors.
The two women had departed India a week later with negative results. They had examined patients with the disease, but had not witnessed any rapid decline in health that was reportedly symptomatic.
His eyes focused on cars coursing along the autobahn like blood in an artery. When he put the women’s report together with what Simon had just described over the phone, the truth couldn’t be more obvious.
Normally, malaria either progressed slowly in victims whose bodies were able to strike a balance with the parasite or progressed rapidly in the sick, elderly, or young. The more susceptible patients in India had already died and were no longer available for the team to examine. The team’s brief snapshot of the situation had not captured the progression that moved slowly in more robust patients.
It was time for him to get off his Arsch, yet where should he turn for help? As Simon had pointed out with his ever-perceptive sarcasm, Hans was operating in a new management environment that emphasized an interdisciplinary approach rather than hard science on specific diseases.
The World Health Organization, in which he had advanced from a medical researcher to a department head, had completely reorganized under a new, dynamic director general, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland.
While Hans had been encouraged and reinvigorated by the breath of fresh air that swept through management, the problem arose that he just didn’t know whom to call anymore.
Should he call the Cluster on Evidence and Information for Policy, the Cluster on External Relations and Governing Bodies, or the Cluster on General Management? He genuinely had no clue.
As he had done on several previous occasions, he could always go to the top. And that day he did. He picked up his phone and called the director’s secretary for an appointment that afternoon.
“She’s booked.”
“This is urgent. Can I meet her for dinner?”
After a pause, Gro came on the line. She had the reassuring voice of a doctor with gentle bedside manners, but the firmness of a general in battle. “Hans, how are you?” She said with her charming Norwegian lilt. “I can meet you for dinner at The Neptune in the Hotel du Rhône at eight o’clock tonight.”
“I’ll be there,” Hans said. The phone clicked off.
Hans gently placed the phone in its cradle and glanced down at his suit. He would need something more formal for gourmet dining.
Natalie’s driver waited patiently at the entrance to the U.S. Consulate in Bombay.
From the back seat, she stared at the metal gates that obstinately refused to open. Ticket to the Maldives in hand, she smiled to herself, thinking, “Final good-bye to Lou, and this is the last time I’ll ever have to wait at this gate.”
“New door for security,” her driver explained. “Electric.”
Natalie nodded. Luke Sharp, the newly arrived security officer, was trying to increase security while instituting another modern labor-saving device, in this case one destined to put several gatekeepers out of work. Most likely, the guards had sabotaged the mechanism.
When Natalie finally gained access to the consulate compound, locally hired security guards swept her car for bombs. She climbed out of the back seat and trotted up the front steps of the consulate building, the former palace of a Maharajah.
Inside the front doors, she flashed her identification badge at a young woman seated imperially behind a desk. Beyond a further window, guards noticed her arrival and unlocked the security door.
Natalie pushed the door open and entered a sitting area with leather furniture and the aggressive sting of antiseptic.
She crossed the lobby. As she walked down one hall, she passed an open door to the Visa Section. Consular officers heard her clicking heels and turned to look. Their chattering suddenly stopped as they stared at her. What a great way to say good-bye.
Sliding a hand up a thick wooden banister, she mounted two flights of stairs. As she ascended, she took one last look out the tall windows that overlooked a flat lawn rimmed by giant flowers, a tennis court and a swimming pool where she and Mariah had spent many happy hours. She paused on the top step and looked over the far security wall at the Arabian Sea washing against the rocky shore.
“Paying your final respects before you head off for greener pastures?”
The voice was that of Lou Potts, who stood just outside his spacious office.
“There are no pastures in the Maldives.”
Lou cocked an eyebrow just as Luke Sharp, the security officer, jumped out of his office waving a piece of paper.
“This is just in,” Luke interrupted. “Police have picked up a stash of submachine guns and explosives near Crawford Market. They’ve identified a terrorist heading for the Taj Mahal Hotel. Do we know anybody staying there right now?”
Lou and Natalie stared at each other in shock.
“Me, for one,” Natalie said. “And Congressman Butler’s family.”
“My contact told me the suspect’s on a motorcycle, and he’s heavily armed.”
“Luke, tighten security around the compound. Natalie, call the congressman at once.”
They were interrupted by a door flyin
g open at the bottom of the stairs. Peter Sloan leapt breathlessly into the lobby.
He saw the group at the top of the stairs, and shouted, “She’s missing. The congressman’s daughter is missing.”
“Oh no,” Lou said. “What happened?”
“I did just what Luke told me,” Peter said, climbing the stairs two at a time, “I kept a close eye on Keri at the Taj Mahal Hotel. I was escorting her on a walking tour, sort of a shopping trip, when she disappeared off the sidewalk. I swear, I turned my back for only a second, and when I looked back, she was gone. At first I figured we got separated, or she didn’t want my company any longer. Then I saw a taxi speeding off.”
“Jesus Christ, Mr. Vice Consul, you don’t just leave a congressman’s daughter stranded in the middle of a crowded downtown Bombay street. Now go out and find her.”
“Did you get the taxi’s license number?” Luke asked.
“I did. MH 01 something.”
“Just about every cab in Bombay starts with that,” Luke said. “Did you hear her calling for help?”
“No.”
“Do you think she intended to elude you?” Luke pressed.
Peter sunk his head in his hands. “I don’t think so. She seemed to like me. I have to believe that she was abducted.”
Lou glanced at Natalie. “I guess it’s up to me to inform the congressman,” he said.
Chapter 12
Fred Butler had to admit that the Taj Mahal Hotel was luxurious. His suite with Linda and Keri was a reproduction of a Maharajah’s personal quarters.
However, every fifteen minutes since he had arrived the night before, their doorbell had interrupted them. Someone had to replenish the fruit bowl, change the flowers, deliver new linens, turn down the sheets, clean house, or just walk in and look around. Fred had long since run out of coins for tips.
He was just changing from Bermuda shorts to slacks when the bell rang again.