by Fritz Galt
“Our little girl is growing up.”
He paused for a deep, satisfied breath. “Yes, she will be a big girl as soon as we find her a cure.”
“So, don’t you want to know what happened in Afghanistan?”
“Yeah, okay. I forgot about Afghanistan. I’ve been so focused on this malaria thing.”
“Okay, skip Afghanistan. I’ll tell you when you’re more interested. In the meantime, here’s the scoop on Dr. Rajiv Khan. I want you to be extra cautious around him. His brother may be al-Qaeda. He’s the one who kidnapped Keri Butler. Get this, his group made that failed bomb attempt on the World Trade Center some years back and leveled the American Embassies in Africa. He’s a very wanted man.”
“That’s hard to believe. This is a peace-loving group.”
“Did you find Keri Butler?” she asked, as if trying to prove him wrong.
“As a matter of fact. I’m looking at her right now. She loves this mystic stuff. You couldn’t tell she was kidnapped.”
“Believe me when I tell you that there’s more behind that group than joy peace pills. Rajiv is wanted for murder in the United States. It seems he left behind a few medical subjects who later died. I want you to find Dr. Rajiv Khan and look into what he’s up to, but watch your back. Then report to me as soon as you get something solid.”
“Yes, Chief. Where are you now?”
“I’m in Atlanta. The police are after me for violating the quarantine. I’ve alienated myself from the State Department. I just watched CNN Center get trashed on air by a Kashmiri separatist. And I’m off to interview one of Abu Khan’s bombing buddies, in jail.”
“I guess you’re making headlines these days,” he said. “And I’m not even watching the news.”
“Well, you’re probably better off, if you can live without that sort of thing.”
“That’s the curious thing. I haven’t missed any of it,” he admitted.
“I certainly could use less of it.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t be yourself without the controversy and the major world events happening around you.”
“May I remind you where you are now and who you’re dealing with? Don’t kid yourself. You thrive on action.”
“I’m doing this grunt work for Mariah’s sake. These last few months have taught me a few things about myself, and one thing is that I don’t need the excitement of the chase.”
“Well, hold that thought for retirement, because you’re a natural spook, and we need you right now.”
They agreed to talk again and said good-bye.
Mick stared long and hard at the “Off” button. He didn’t want to hang up the phone.
It frightened him that Natalie’s warnings about Dr. Khan’s brother excited him. It frightened him in a different way that he refused to turn off the phone.
He shivered in the steamy night air as the thought swept over him. He was addicted to action.
“Here you go, ma’am,” the jail guard said, opening a steel door. “One Wassim Shaikh.”
Natalie peered into a long room where the public could talk with prisoners while looking into each other’s world through plate glass windows.
There was only one prisoner.
Wearing an orange prison uniform, Wassim sat dejectedly behind a window. His arms looked stiff as his hands were cuffed behind his back.
“He won’t talk, so don’t waste your time. We’ll keep an eye on you electronically in case he gives you any trouble.”
“I appreciate that.”
“If you do manage to wring a confession out of him, we’ll get it on tape.”
“I’m not trying to get a confession,” Natalie said. “All I want is information.”
The man shrugged and pulled the steel door closed behind her.
She stood alone in a white-walled room. Wassim looked up expectantly at her from the rusty chair in his cubicle. The only light came from an air vent behind him. He looked down in disappointment when he didn’t recognize her.
“Whom were you expecting?” she asked, taking a seat behind the cloudy glass.
He didn’t answer.
“I’m Natalie,” she began, getting right to the point. “I’ve got a few questions for you.”
“Are you my solicitor?”
“No,” she said, and looked up at a camera that swiveled noisily toward her from behind a thick glass window above the door.
She studied the exhausted man. His shirttails weren’t tucked in, a beard had formed on his jaw and a comb hadn’t passed through his hair all day.
“Have they been pretty rough on you?” she asked.
He grunted and waggled his head in an indifferent fashion that could mean anything from “yes” to “no” to somewhere in between.
“Have you told them anything?” she whispered.
This elicited some interest on his part. He studied her briefly, then seemed to dismiss her in his mind.
She shot a wary glance at the camera and he caught her look. Again, interest flickered in his eyes.
She leaned forward conspiratorially. “I won’t ask you any questions. You see, I don’t want you to tell them anything.”
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I’m here to help you.”
He scowled and lumbered heavily away from her. Then she noticed that his feet were held together by iron shackles.
“Look,” she said. “I’ll do what I can to get you out of here. We’ve got money for your defense.”
He stopped and said, “Tell me this. Do I stand a better chance in a U.S. court or in India?”
“Here, of course.”
He looked satisfied. “Then I’ll need a lot of money for my defense.”
“Not a problem.”
He took up his former position in the chair and challenged her with a stare.
She didn’t flinch, and used the time to review what Abu’s father-in-law had told her. Abu was working on some sort of secret project.
“Who sent you?” he asked at last.
“I can’t divulge that. I only need to tell you one more thing.”
“Go ahead.”
Ah yes. Now she remembered. “I’m here for the Moghul Project.”
His large eyes fixed on hers, his eyelids drooping in disbelief. Then he cast a sideways glance at the camera. She watched him turning over her words in his mind.
Her heart was racing.
“I can’t believe they would send a woman,” he mused, still incredulous.
She let him work it out for himself. How cleverer could an Islamist group be than to use a woman for a contact?
“Of course, we don’t need to finance your lawyers,” she said at last, and stood up.
“Wait,” he whispered harshly. “Say it again.”
She paused and swung back to face him. “You heard me the first time.” She wasn’t sure what she had said that he wanted to hear again.
He rose slowly to his feet, his face casting a shadow over her. “Say it again,” he whispered fiercely.
She backed up to the door and slammed against it.
A key jangled behind her.
He whispered fiercely through the plate glass and she had to strain to hear his words. “Go to the Desert Jewel Motel outside El Paso, Texas. They will send you to Abu’s parents.”
The door opened, and she spilled backwards into the hallway.
Desert Jewel. El Paso.
“Take him back to his cell,” the guard ordered through the window.
Two guards approached Wassim from behind.
His terrified eyes implored her for help. “You will send me the best,” he shouted. “The best.”
He could find his own lawyer.
And the steel door slammed shut between them.
Chapter 29
By the next morning, Mick’s patience with Swamiji was running thin. Finally, after breakfast, Lena took him by the hand and led him deep into the jungle. Before them stood a glass, air-conditioned building in the shape
of a Quonset hut.
“Here it is,” she said. “Swamiji’s pride and joy. Come inside.”
Mick stepped through the front doorway into a small, sealed antechamber.
Lena shut the door behind them and spun a large lock to seal the compartment.
Moments later, Mick found himself fending off an acrid mist that sprayed at him from the ceiling.
“It kills insects,” Lena explained.
After the insecticide sank to the floor, Lena spun another lock and they entered the high-tech world of Dr. Rajiv Khan.
With large eyeglasses, a starched lab coat, and a thick crop of neatly flattened black hair, the handsome researcher sat erect behind a desk, typing nimbly at a computer.
Lena introduced Mick to Dr. Rajiv Khan over a steady hum of thousands of mosquitoes in breeding tanks along the walls.
Rajiv shook his hand and stared at him closely. “I think I remember you. I was at a party in Bombay. You said you didn’t know that there was such a thing as mefloquine resistance.”
Mick nodded. “I learned soon enough. My daughter caught malaria.”
“I’m sorry,” Rajiv said, pain creasing his forehead.
“So, are you part of this cult?” Mick asked.
“Not at all. I don’t have time for such nonsense.”
“But they’re funding you.”
“That’s right. Guru Swamiji has an intense interest in the sciences. He is a kindred spirit.”
“And he wants to fight malaria?”
“As much as I do. Most of his business comes from foreign visitors to his ashram. He doesn’t want the threat of malaria to keep people away.”
“It’s already happening, Rajiv. It’s not a threat any longer. Thousands are dying each day.”
“Where?”
Mick tried to see Rajiv’s eyes. The lenses of his large, horn-rimmed glasses had very little curvature, and thus seemed to reflect, rather than let in, light.
“Haven’t you seen the countryside?” Mick said gently. “Half the country is dying.”
Rajiv sank into his chair, suddenly looking old and fatigued like a runner who had lost a race. He crossed one leg tightly over the other, and from his twisted position faced away toward a row of tanks. “I could have prevented this. Now it’s up to me to solve it.”
“Can you explain yourself?”
Rajiv removed his glasses, closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I was hard at work in Atlanta testing protease inhibitors. We were not only looking for a therapy, but for a guarantee that the parasite wouldn’t develop a resistance to that therapy. The current thinking there is that a combination of inhibitors of malarial cysteine and aspartic proteases would provide the most effective therapy and best limit the development of parasite resistance to protease inhibitors.”
“That sounds like AIDS research.”
“Yes, we worked from the literature on AIDS. And we were making great progress because we had all the funding in the world. With the new U.S. strategy of disease surveillance, we made a concerted effort to eradicate various ‘foreign’ diseases, including malaria.”
“I thought the U.S. didn’t care about malaria anymore,” Mick said.
“On the contrary. Over the past few years, the U.S. has experienced one to two thousand new cases of malaria a year. Furthermore, the disease seems to be spreading locally through America’s own mosquito population and blood supply, rather than just from citizens travelling abroad and contracting malaria. We’ve had outbreaks in New York, New Jersey, Texas. You name it.”
“So there you were, looking for protease inhibitors, whatever they are.”
“So there I was, surrounded by all the latest lab equipment. I was testing the enzymes in food vacuoles where hemoglobin is degraded into heme and globin, and suddenly the thought penetrated my thick skull that what the government was funding was not a cure for malaria, but a cure for malaria in the U.S. If I were successful, and given the number of scientists at work on it, someone will be successful in the next five to ten years, I would have developed a drug cocktail that inhibited all the necessary proteases necessary to completely block the malaria cycle in a human being. Eventually, any patient, armed with twenty thousand dollars could buy a long-term, non-toxic treatment.”
“In short, you’re talking about a treatment for only those who can afford it,” Mick said.
“Exactly. Few people in the malaria-ridden world would ever have a chance of being cured of the disease. Furthermore, the cocktail ingredients we were trying to create would have had a hand in curing infected people, but not solving the much larger problem of preventing the infection in the first place. Malaria would remain rampant in Third World countries of the tropics and subtropics.”
“So then what did you do?” Mick asked, waiting for Rajiv to get to the point.
“So, realizing this, I reoriented our entire research toward developing a vaccine. Of course, anybody knows that to create a vaccine anytime soon, one would have to be Jonas Salk. It was highly speculative on my part. Furthermore, such a vaccine would have to be inexpensive for the Third-World citizen, it would have to be generally available to any patient, no matter how poor, and the vaccine would have to prevent any form of malarial infection.”
Rajiv stood and pulled an empty test tube from a stand.
“So I scrubbed all the Petri dishes of the hemoglobin proteases that I was trying to disrupt, and I set up aquariums full of infected mosquitoes. I was trying to isolate a malaria parasite in one of its stages and either kill or weaken it so that it would stimulate an immune response in humans. Within a year, I had turned from a biochemist into a microbiologist hunting in a jungle.”
He set down the test tube and picked up another, this one with a dead mosquito at the bottom. He turned the fragile glass tube around between two large fingers.
“To my great surprise, the more I compared interspecial malaria parasites, the more I realized that all genotypes of the parasite are basically the same in that they are all derived from a particular form present in monkeys. If I could transform the primate’s malaria parasite so that I could introduce it into humans successfully, then I could create a vaccine from that form that would prevent all forms of malaria in humans, period.”
He dropped the test tube into its holder with a bitter smile.
“I isolated the form of primate malaria that most closely resembled the form that invaded humans, and I began to alter it. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of asking for several human subjects along with my resupply of mice and apes. When CDC headquarters caught wind of what I was cooking up, they closed down my kitchen.”
“Why, because you used human subjects?”
“That’s what I asked myself. Why? My subjects showed no ill effects. Yet, why should the U.S. Government fund a long shot for mankind when they could have a permanent cure for Americans in the next five to ten years? Take a look at the AIDS research. Did any of that carry over to Africa? Even more sinister thoughts crossed my mind. What if the U.S. had a long-term strategy of allowing the disease to flourish in Africa, southern Asia and South America? So I took my mosquitoes and left.”
“You brought them here?” Mick asked, examining the rows of glass tanks. Airlocks had replaced doors, and air filters had replaced windows. Mosquitoes could neither enter, nor exit.
“Not at first. I had some pretty hefty U.S. Government biosecurity measures to defeat. But I had a jump on the security team. With my brother’s help, I was able to smuggle the mosquitoes to India. There, my brother safeguarded them. Understand that they were important to preserve, because by that point, I had isolated and reengineered a form of the parasite that actually took hold in the human liver.”
“You’re talking about genetic engineering?”
“Nothing that sophisticated. I cross-bred parasites until the result was a new biotype that I call the Hanuman type, named after the Hanuman Langur.”
“Isn’t that a breed of monkey: white beard, black face, long
tail?”
“Yes. In fact, I extracted the parasite from an actual Hanuman Langur. You see troops of them sleeping in the trees all around us. You can find them as far away as Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan, Kashmir and Sri Lanka.”
“I’ve seen them travelling with Hindu holy men.”
“One and the same. We protect them and they’re free to wander around our villages.”
“So you continued your research after the CDC pulled the plug on it?”
“That’s right. My brother took great interest in my efforts and wanted to preserve the mosquitoes for future research. I allowed him, and why not? Knowing that even though my three exposed human subjects were infected by the disease, I saw that the Hanuman type malaria showed no signs of metamorphosing into the next stage of its development, and the subjects never became sick.”
“But they did indeed become sick.”
“I learned that only too late. Exactly one month later, I received a phone call from a chap at the lab who had moved on to another division. He informed me that two of my three subjects had suddenly died. The third lay in a coma.”
He removed his glasses and rubbed tears from his eyes. Then he looked up blankly and continued.
“At that instant I realized what had happened. The Hanuman type parasite had lain dormant in the liver, much like P. malariae or the Korean form of P. vivax, and then suddenly exploded in the blood stream like P. falciparum, more commonly known as jungle fever.”
He slapped his glasses back onto his face and poked a finger at the air in triumph.
“It devoured all the hemoglobin it could find and left blood vessels, including those fragile ones in the brain, clogged with imploded fragments of red blood cells. It turns out that the Hanuman type malaria I had created was fatal to humans. I had introduced a new, severe form of cerebral malaria.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you spent years of complicated work to create a form of malaria that can kill everybody on the planet?”
“Ah, that’s the beauty of it. The more dangerous the form, the more it will cure. A dead form of this same killer parasite can be injected into humans, much like a smallpox vaccine, and prevent the disease in anybody and everybody. If we vaccinate everyone, the human host is no longer available for the parasite to complete its life cycle. Within a month, the disease will be eradicated from the face of the earth. So I came to India to finish creating a vaccine.”