“Have you discovered why our Vice President was killed?”
Dawson shook his head. “I was hoping you could tell us.”
Margai’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“He was murdered by people from your country, all who grew up within fifty miles of your Major Koroma.”
Margai’s eyebrows shot up. “You are certain of this?”
Dawson nodded. “Yes.”
Margai bit his bottom lip, appearing slightly concerned. “How—” He paused, as if debating whether or not to continue.
Dawson decided to press him. “How?”
Margai looked at Dawson then away. “How did you find out so quickly?” The words were delivered slowly, as if he were reluctantly delivering each syllable.
“Our government can be very efficient when it wants to.”
Margai smiled, seeming to regain his composure.
“If only it had been efficient on the important things, then perhaps all of this could have been avoided.”
Somewhere in Sierra Leone
Sarah frowned. Another positive test. Tanya had worked all evening getting blood samples from those they suspected might be infected so they’d be ready for her when she took over. Tanya was now finishing her shift in the isolation wards before getting as much sleep as she could. They had no idea how long they’d be here, but they had both discussed it and decided it was best to try and maximize their usefulness but also to spend as little time alone as possible.
Sarah wasn’t sure who had been watching her in the shower, but she thought she recognized the driver who had groped Tanya. She just couldn’t be certain, it only being a brief glimpse. She hadn’t told Tanya, her friend’s grip on sanity hanging on by a thread, but the house they were sleeping in, apparently Koroma’s family home, had a bedroom door that didn’t lock. She had slept lying in front of it so no one could enter without having to push her aside.
Fortunately exhaustion had her to sleep quickly and soundly.
And now sample after sample was showing the virus, the outbreak worse than initially thought. Fortunately—or unfortunately—these people were in the early stages, and with proper care could be saved. She just wasn’t very confident in their ability to provide that care. They had no IV equipment which meant all they could do was try to feed them and have them drink plenty of well water.
She marked the result on the list of patients compiled by Tanya and prepared the next sample, looking up as Koroma walked into the nearly spotless administrative office, Mustapha true to his word.
“What have you found?” he asked.
“See for yourself.” She pushed the sheet toward him. “Out of the eleven tested so far I’ve found seven infected.”
Koroma frowned. “We just received word that the government has announced house to house searches in the cities.”
Sarah for a moment felt a surge of hope. If the authorities were searching house to house for them, her father must be placing a tremendous amount of pressure on the government here. But Koroma’s apparent lack of concern had her second guessing that hope. He had said cities, and they were in a small village of several hundred at best.
They’ll never find us.
“I guess they’re hoping to find all of the infected before they can spread the disease further.” Koroma pushed the list back toward her as she realized he hadn’t been talking about a search for them at all, but a search for the infected. “They won’t bother with us until they eradicate it in Freetown. Do you think they can?”
She was almost overwhelmed with disappointment, the one shred of hope, dangled out there purely based on a misunderstanding, yanked out from under her, the delicate balance she had been able to maintain crumbling around her.
“Doctor?”
She looked up at Koroma, her eyes unfocused as tears threatened to spill down her cheeks. “Wh-what?” she finally managed, looking away.
“Do you think they can stop the spread?”
She nodded slightly as she blinked the tears out of her eyes. “If they’re thorough, then yes, but only if they’ve got enough room for the sick. We know how to stop the disease, we just need the resources to fight it, and the people to stop hiding the sick.”
“Resources. I keep hearing that word and it makes me sick. That’s what they told us when I brought my wife and son to the clinic. Not enough resources. Not enough room. My wife and son died because there weren’t enough resources.”
Sarah turned toward Koroma, the villain seeming a bit more human if only for a moment. “I’m sorry about your family.”
He nodded, then pointed at a name on the list, a name she hadn’t tested yet. “My daughter.”
A pit instantly formed in Sarah’s stomach, words escaping her. She pictured her own son and how she would feel if he were infected. Then she wondered what she would do if she lived in a poor country like Sierra Leone.
Would I kill to save my own son?
She would like to think that she wouldn’t. She couldn’t imagine justifying killing another human being to save her own son.
Unless that person were directly threatening her child.
But if that were an exception, what constituted a threat? Would someone withholding medicine that could save her child justify her killing that person to get the medicine? Her moral side said no, it couldn’t possibly be used as a justification for murder, but her logical side said it could. If someone were denying her access to something that could save the life of her own flesh and blood, then yes, killing them would be justifiable.
And wasn’t that what Koroma was doing? Trying to save the life of his child, the lives of his village?
“How old is she?”
“Five.”
A lump formed in Sarah’s throat. “I-I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll test her next.”
“No.”
Sarah looked up from her chair at Koroma’s shaking head. “Why not?”
“She shouldn’t get preferential treatment just because of who her father is. That’s what’s happening in Freetown. Those who have the connections, those with money, they’re the ones getting the treatment and it’s disgusting—they should all be left to rot like those of us who are poor have been left to.”
“We don’t discriminate at our clinic, that I can assure you.”
Koroma laughed, dropping into a nearby chair. “You are so naïve. You apply your Western way of thinking to everything you see. You assume because someone smiles and is polite that they are honest by your standards. And that is the key—your standards. You Americans always express shock and outrage when you are asked to pay a bribe to get something done, but what you don’t realize is that the vast majority of the world works that way—it is simply common practice. You go into a store and pay the price on the tag, but in the markets of my country it is an insult to not try to negotiate the price down. You apply your values to us, and that in itself is an insult and one of the reasons so much of the world hates you.”
“Do you hate us?” Sarah nearly peed her pants at the words that had come out of her mouth on reflex.
She held her breath.
Koroma smiled slightly, as if impressed she had the balls to ask the question given her situation. “Yes. But not in the way you probably think. I hate your politicians for doing nothing while our people were dying. It wasn’t until your own might die that you took action. I hate your people collectively for ignoring our plight and not insisting their government do something to stop the horror we’ve been living with for months. But I don’t hate the individuals.”
“I don’t understand. How can you hate the people but not the individuals who are the people?”
“I make the distinction because the people act as a collective, the individual as himself. The people collectively did nothing, but individuals did do something, like yourself. And I think that individual Americans or Europeans, when shown the horror, would demand something be done. The problem is that your culture is so wedded to your television sets
and your Internet that unless someone does a cute viral video with a cat in it, you don’t pay attention. If one of your Hollywood stars came down with Ebola, maybe then you’d demand action, but when your own CDC says there could be a million cases of Ebola here within the next few months, and the only collective reaction is ‘what happens if it comes here?’, then your society has a serious problem. You care deeply about yourselves, individually you claim to care deeply about the downtrodden around the world, but collectively you do little.” He sighed. “And that is why I hate you, the people, but not you, the individual.”
Sarah didn’t say anything for a moment. There was nothing she could say. He was right. Doctors like her had been begging their governments to do more but their pleas had fallen on deaf ears until the first case was reported on US soil. Then there had been action, but still not enough. Why had it taken only one sick person on American soil for the government to react, when thousands of Africans had died already? It was indifference. No one cared unless it affected them personally and politicians only cared about what their voters cared about.
“I understand.” She put the next slide under the microscope and looked, shaking her head, the virus clearly visible yet again. She marked the sheet.
“Another one?”
She nodded.
“These samples. What would happen if you came into contact with them?”
Sarah pulled away from the microscope and the blood samples, suddenly nervous. “I could become infected. A single drop of blood can contain over a million copies of the virus.” Her eyes narrowed and her mouth-brain barrier failed her. “You know that. Why do you keep asking these questions?”
Koroma rose from his chair. “Let me know what the test result is for my daughter.”
“And if she’s positive?”
He paused, looking over his shoulder but not making eye contact. “Then I will have a decision to make.” He walked out of the room, leaving Sarah to wonder what decision he could possibly be talking about.
She looked back at the list and at his daughter’s name. Biting her cheek, she debated for a moment on what to do, then decided she had to know. She took his daughter’s sample and prepared it, her hands almost shaking in anticipation and fear. If she were positive, how might he react? He could go crazy, but she thought that unlikely. The man had already lost his wife and son and had maintained control.
Control? He beheaded Jacques!
But he had done that with some end goal in mind. If his daughter were confirmed sick, it just might give him the reason he needed to keep her and Tanya alive to try and save her, and if they were lucky, she might survive the ordeal, or at least survive a couple of weeks, long enough perhaps for her father to find them.
You’re hoping a little girl suffers for as long as possible to save yourself?
Her mouth filled with bile at the thought, guilt almost overwhelming her as she leaned back in her chair, her shoulders slumping.
What’s happening to me?
She thought of her own child then this sweet little girl who had never done anything to harm anyone in her life, who had already lost her mother and brother, who was now in a strange room with the sounds of the sick and dying on the other side of a soiled sheet with strange people in suits like nothing she had seen before tending to her.
Shame overwhelmed her, her chest heaving with sobs as she prayed to God for forgiveness, her selfishness so out of character, it shocked her to her core.
Sucking in a deep, slow breath, she calmed herself, blinking the tears out of her eyes otherwise she’d need to remove her gloves. It took a few minutes but gave her the time to think and she came to a decision. If Koroma’s daughter was infected, she would do everything she could to save the little girl despite Koroma’s objections. Self-preservation aside, she was an innocent, the youngest of the victims so far, but her survival could mean their survival, and she would be a fool not to recognize that.
She loaded the slide and looked.
“Oh no.”
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
“What’s that?”
It was Marc Therrien that vocalized what Leroux had already spotted—three dots on a road clearly visible on one of the Operations Center displays. They had been poring over satellite imagery from the hours during and after the kidnapping, and beyond spotting the trucks at the Port of Freetown, they had found nothing. Police reports from their point of contact in Freetown had suggested the trucks had been spotted heading south but nothing had been found. It was Leroux who had redirected the search north, toward the geographic region all of their suspects had come from.
And this might be their first hit.
“Zoom in.”
A mouse pointer dragged across the image, selecting the portion showing the dots and a segment of road. A pixelated image appeared then quickly resolved into a crisp new image.
Clearly showing three transport trucks heading north, not south.
“Do we have any shots from an angle?”
“Give me a minute.”
Leroux began to type a quick communique to his boss warning him of possible false intel, the reports of them heading south appearing to be a red herring. He glanced up at the main screen as Therrien ran a search to see what satellites might have images of the exact coordinates the trucks had been spotted on.
Suddenly a shot was displayed that looked like it was a view from the north, lower on the horizon.
Are you kidding me?
He jumped out of his seat, rushing forward. “Zoom in! Clean that up!”
Therrien was way ahead of him, everyone in the room forgetting what they were working on, instead all eyes now focused on the screen. The image changed, the large pixels resolving into the ridiculously fine imagery possible with modern spy satellites.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Alice Michaels, one of his analysts.
“That’s definitely four people in the front of that lead truck,” said Therrien. Leroux agreed, but what wasn’t clear was who was in the truck, it still a nighttime image seen through a specialized filter that gave a greenish glow to everything, the occupants almost outlines of themselves, no features distinguishable.
He snapped his fingers. “We know the two hostages are white, and most likely their kidnappers are black. Can you enhance that image to at least see if two of them are white?”
“Give me a second!” Therrien was clearly excited by the idea, his fingers expertly flying over the keyboard, his mouse clicking on icons furiously as the image slowly changed, moments later showing exactly what Leroux was hoping for.
Two white faces flanked by two black faces.
“That must be them,” said Michaels. “And they look much shorter than the driver and the one on the far left.”
“I think we’ve found our two missing hostages. Good work people, scratch that, excellent work. See if we can track where they went and cross-reference this with any records we have of legitimate shipments. We don’t want to send an armed team in unless we’re sure. And I want to know if there were any checkpoints along the way, see if you can pick up any chatter about them passing through. I’m going to go see the director and let him know.” He turned to Therrien. “Print those out and email them to me, CC the Chief.”
“Done and done,” said Therrien, pointing to a nearby printer.
Leroux grabbed the sheaf of papers off the high-speed color printer and headed for Director Morrison’s office, leafing through the pages. When he reached the office Morrison’s assistant was expecting him.
“He said to send you straight in.”
Leroux nodded, knocking on the door.
“Come!”
He stepped inside, closing the door after him.
“Is this what I think it is?” asked Morrison, pointing at one of his monitors.
“Yes, sir,” said Leroux, standing in front of Morrison’s desk, leaning over briefly to see what his boss was pointing at. “We found three transport trucks heading north, not s
outh like we were led to believe. That enhanced image is showing four people in the front of the lead truck, two we believe are Caucasian.”
“And these aren’t just a regular transport?”
“We’re checking that now, sir, but I doubt it.”
“Your gut?”
“My gut. And the fact that they’re heading toward the area where all of our known suspects are from, and that there are no clinics in that area.”
“When will you know for sure?”
“It could be hours, sir. It’s a little bit like the Wild West out there. Three trucks, heading into this particular area, with two white people in the lead vehicle, exactly as described at the Freetown checkpoint? That’s too much of a coincidence and I don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Neither do I. Get the intel to our team in Freetown. Warn them of the possible false intel as well. I assume you’re trying to find out where these went?”
“My team is on it as we speak.”
“Excellent. Pass on my compliments.”
“I will, sir.” He turned to make for the door when Morrison stopped him.
“Oh, and Chris?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Now you see the power of having a team. With the right supervisor, they can work twenty-four-seven.” He motioned at the screen. “And look at the results.”
Leroux felt himself flush, uncertain of what to say, the Director well aware of his reluctance to have a team. “Uh…”
Morrison chuckled, flicking him away with his fingers. “Go. And keep me posted.”
“Yes, sir.”
Leroux beat a hasty retreat, his cheeks burning as he quickly walked back toward the Op Center, his mind split between processing what Morrison had said, and the possibilities of this being a false positive in their search.
He’s right. I couldn’t have done this without my team.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He could have, but most likely it would have taken longer because sleep would have been an absolute necessity. But with his team large enough to do two shifts, it meant he could leave them working under his orders while he rested his brain.
Payback Page 13