This day, though, had been different. Something strange had arrived in Kaarta overnight. Something she had never seen before in her thirty-seven years. It began, for her, before dawn, when she had been awakened by an urgent knocking on the clinic’s back door.
“Please, please, will you come see?” A woman’s voice, speaking breathlessly, in Swahili. “Dr. Sandra! Can you come help? Please. I can’t wake him.”
Sandra Oku pulled on a sleeveless night dress and unlatched the door, pointing her flashlight at the ground. The eyes of Mrs. Makere, a farmer’s wife who lived across the dirt fields to the southeast, met hers with pleading urgency. Dew still glistened on the ground and in the baobab trees in the moonlight.
“What is it?”
“He won’t wake up. Nothing will wake him.”
“Your husband?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Okay. Let’s go see.”
Dr. Oku grabbed her bag and walked barefoot into the cool morning to her pick-up truck. It turned over after a reluctant whir-whir-whir sound. They rode together in silence, nearly a kilometer across the open plain to a cluster of mud homes where the Makeres and other farm workers lived—the route Nancy Makere must have just walked.
Like the others, theirs was a small, square-ish, mud-brick house, reinforced with sticks and cardboard and plastic bags. A pink light hung in the sky above the rusted tin roof as they arrived. The breeze smelled of wood smoke.
Joseph Makere, a large, gray-bearded man known to work ten or eleven hours a day harvesting soybeans this time of year, was asleep on a mattress in a corner room, as his wife had said. An open window faced the lorry route and the small produce stand Nancy Makere ran.
“There,” she said.
The two women watched him, inhaling and exhaling beneath a white sheet, as if struggling for air, his eyes closed. It was an eerie sound, one Sandra Oku had heard once years before—the sound of a man about to drown in his own lung fluids.
Dr. Oku pulled a surgical mask over her face. She knelt and touched his chest, and then felt his pulse, noticed a small, dried trickle of blood extending from each nostril. Hearing a cough, she turned; one of the Makeres’ four children was standing beside Nancy now, her face glistening with a thin film of sweat.
“Where are the others?”
Nancy Makere’s eyes pointed. “In there,” she said.
Dr. Oku followed her into the other bedroom. She set down her bag. The three boys were sleeping, unclothed, on a thin mattress, two on their backs, the other on his right side, breathing with the same deep raspy sound as their father.
She knelt beside them and gently shook the shoulders of one, and another. She opened the lids of the oldest boy and saw that his eyes were bright with fever.
“Have they been ill?” Dr. Oku asked, taking the boy’s pulse. “What sort of symptoms have they had?”
“None. Last night, when they went to sleep, they were fine. We’ve been trying to wake them for—” She looked at the battery clock on a shelf by her bed. “More than fifty minutes.”
“Okay. Help me carry them to the truck. I’ll need to bring them into the clinic. They’re contagious and are going to need to be quarantined.”
“Quarantined,” she repeated, a frightened look flickering in her eyes. Nancy Makere stood still, watching Dr. Oku. “And then what?”
“Then we’ll see. I don’t know yet. We’ll give them oxygen and antibiotics and see what we can do. Help me now, please.”
The two women bundled Joseph Makere in the sheet and dragged him to the back of the truck. One at a time, then, they carried the boys, laying them on the threadbare mattress that Dr. Oku kept in the truck-bed for transporting patients. As they rode silently across the field back to the clinic, the first crescent of sun appeared above the familiar distant mountains, silhouetting random trees on the plain.
At the clinic, Sandra Oku lay the four patients on cots and began to administer oxygen to them one at a time, monitoring their vital signs. It quickly became clear that there was nothing she could do to wake them. At 7:22, Joseph Makere stopped breathing. The youngest boy died twenty-three minutes later.
About an hour before the third boy stopped breathing, a station wagon arrived from the south village fields with seven passengers, four men and three women. Normally they would be in the maize and cassava fields by now. But Sally Kantanga, who owned the farm, could not wake them this morning.
“Not any of them. What’s the matter with them?” she asked. Dr. Oku saw that she was sweating profusely, even though the morning air was still cool.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m going to call Tihka Hospital on the radio.”
By ten o’clock, forty-three people had died at the clinic and in the still-moist grasses outside. Many others were lined up or lying in the dirt, waiting to see her. Sandra Oku had run out of blankets and sheets to cover the victims, and eleven of the bodies lay uncovered. Sixteen others, including Nancy Makere, her daughter, and Sally Kantanga, were sleeping deeply in what she had called the Recovery Room. No one was going to recover this morning.
THREE
Washington, D.C.
THE CALL FROM CHARLES Mallory had been scheduled for 8:30 A.M. Eastern Time. Fourteen minutes ago. For many people, fourteen minutes didn’t mean much; for Charles Mallory, it did. The missed connection could only be a message. That much, at least, was clear.
Jon Mallory knew very little about his older brother these days. Didn’t have an address; didn’t know if he was married or had children; couldn’t reach him if he needed to. He knew only that for the past several years, Charlie had operated an intelligence contracting firm known as D.M.A. Associates, and that it was based somewhere in Saudi Arabia.
He knew other things about his brother, though. Things that wouldn’t change over time—that he was a brilliant, headstrong man who harbored obsessions, one of which was punctuality. During the seven weeks that they had been in contact, Charlie had never missed an appointment. He had never been a minute late. If he hadn’t called this morning, something was wrong.
Still dressed in his pajamas, Jon Mallory breathed the cool morning air through the screen window of his rented house in Northwest Washington. He stared at the notes on his computer screen—records of previous conversations; encrypted e-mails; enigmatic instructions, seemingly unconnected phrases—combing through them for a telltale clue, some nuance that he might have missed.
It was one of those deliciously mild September mornings in Washington. Sixty-one degrees, 5 mph winds, 54 percent humidity. A perfect day for biking on the towpath or wandering among the museums and monuments of the National Mall.
This wasn’t a morning that inspired him to be outside, though. Something had happened overnight, something still outside his frame of reference. The answers that he had expected this morning were not going to arrive. Instead, he had been given a new problem, and it would take him several days, maybe longer, to figure it out.
“Just remember what I say,” Charlie had told him. “I’m going to meet a witness. After that, I’ll give you details that you need to report.… Don’t lose contact with me.”
“I won’t. I just wish we could talk in person,” Jon had said.
“We can’t. Not yet.… If I don’t contact you this way, I’ll contact you another way.”
A different conversation, weeks earlier:
“False fingerprints. That’s going to be part of the deception. You need to be a witness to something that hasn’t happened yet.…”
“How will I know?”
“I told you.”
“By paying attention.”
“Yes. Information will come to you.”
Jon Mallory heard the scuffles of rubber soles on the basketball court down the street, the ping of the ball against the rim, and he thought of the long summer afternoons of his childhood in the suburbs seven or eight miles north of here: playing Horse and Around the World at the junior high playground with his brother, aiming at a r
usted basket with a torn metal net. Visualize it: leaving your hand, arching perfectly, going in. The absence of Charlie in his life over the past decade had sometimes felt to Jon like a death in the family. They had been best friends, always finding ways to amuse and entertain each other, particularly during the years of their mother’s illness. Charlie had been a mentor and role model to his younger brother, becoming a star baseball and football player who never acted like a star. But it had all changed as they grew older. For a while, Jon had found himself intimidated by Charlie. His single-minded intensity, his obsession with subjects that were alien to Jon—statistics, ciphers, weapons, military history—had made his brother less and less accessible, and impatient with those who didn’t share his interests. In his late teens, Charlie had grown inward—called away, it seemed, from sports to places that he wouldn’t talk about; eventually, he came to live in those places, in rooms that Jon Mallory could never find, let alone enter. Like their father, he had become a statistician and a military analyst, then gone on to intelligence work, a vocation he couldn’t discuss. And then, ten years ago, he had seemed to simply disappear.
It had been a great surprise, then, when Charlie contacted him seven weeks ago out of the blue, saying that he wanted Jon to help him “tell a story.” The story, it became clear, was all that interested his brother. He did not want to know the circumstances of Jon’s life, and he wouldn’t talk about his own. His purpose in re-establishing contact was this story; a story that appeared to be about Africa, he said, but really wasn’t; a story that had to be told a certain way, and quickly.
Jon Mallory earned his living these days as contributing editor for a newsmagazine called The Weekly American, writing profiles and news features. He contributed a story every other month, working mostly at home. He’d developed a loyal readership and won a few awards. He had good people instincts, was able to draw out his subjects and figure out what motivated them. But his own brother remained a mystery.
Charlie’s tips had led him to write about the people of two African nations: a family of subsistence farmers, who got by without electricity or running water; an AIDS widow raising seven children by herself in a drought-plagued mud-hut farming village; two health-care workers who traveled on rusted bicycles over tire-track roads, distributing anti-malarial herbs; and the residents of a town nicknamed Starvation because it no longer had a source of food or water.
They were stories that had been told before, in other locales, human stories about dignity in the face of complicated social and political problems; about scarcity and disease and well-intentioned but short-sighted relief efforts.
What his brother had really steered him toward was something very different, though—a less visible human story, about large-scale aid and development projects in unlikely pockets of Africa. A story Jon hadn’t quite believed at first, which had drawn criticism and denials from two prominent American businessmen, both board members of the Gardner Foundation, one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations.
The rest is coming. That was what Charlie had said. There was a source who knew “details.” Jon’s brother was going to meet with him and pass those details to him the next time they spoke.
That was supposed to have been this morning. Wednesday, September 16.
FOUR
SANDRA OKU CUT HER engine and stared numbly through the windshield of her truck at what lay on the north side of the road. Many of them were still breathing, making deep wheezing sounds in the bright, breezeless afternoon. An eerie, out-of-tune chorus. Soybean and cassava farmers. Field workers. Families. Children clinging to parents. Elderly men and women lying beside one another. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. On her long journey to the edge of the village, Dr. Oku had stopped frequently to tend to victims who lay in the fields and alongside the road. Most of their eyes were closed, but some watched as she neared and called to her in weak, raspy voices. “Help me, please.” All along the road, the same muted request: “Help me, please.” Too weak to sound urgent. Just a simple plea. It was no good, though, and Sandra Oku had finally stopped trying. She had stopped even looking at them because she knew there was nothing she could do.
So was this it? she wondered again. The “ill wind?”
Staring into the distance beyond the village huts and chicken pens, she noticed an occasional glimmer, which she began to recognize as sunlight reflecting off handlebars. A figure on a bicycle was riding toward her in the late-afternoon light. A boy.
“Miss Sandra, Miss Sandra!” the shirtless boy shouted as he reached the road, letting his bicycle go.
It was Marcus Bkobe, whose family lived alone, far off in the farm fields, and whose uncle was the village’s only minister. He must have recognized her truck.
“Help! Back there!” he said. “You have to help!”
“Yes, okay,” she said, mechanically now, watching his face, which was streaked with tears and sweat. A large wet spot had dried on the front of his shorts. As if I could, she thought.
“My father. He won’t wake up. My uncle—” The boy saw the bodies in the field across the road and his eyes widened, before going to hers. “They can’t— They— They can’t make him get up, they can’t make him get up!”
“It’s okay,” she said, touching his head and turning him so he couldn’t see. She felt the moisture of his face on her belly.
“He told me to tell you.” He looked quickly at the field of bodies, then back at her. “It happened last night.”
“What did?”
“He heard it. My uncle. He heard the engines.”
“The engines.”
“Yes.”
Sandra Oku looked toward the sky, then at the gentle slopes of the western mountains where green forestland was being cleared by controlled fires. “What are you saying? What did your uncle mean?”
But the boy was too frightened, his eyes darting among the bodies, his face sweating. Instead of answering, he began to cry.
Dr. Oku reached into the back seat of her truck for a mask and the bottle of medicine. “Come on, let’s go see. Take this,” she said, giving him a pill. “Then I’m going to drive to the hospital and see what’s going on.”
The boy climbed in. She started the truck and shifted into gear. As they came to another group of farmer men crumpled beside the road, the boy, sitting on his knees to look, became hysterical. “No, no! They can’t! No, please, don’t! Help us!” he shouted, hitting his fists on the dashboard.
Sandra Oku drove faster along the two-lane road. Then slowed, seeing something in front of them. Accelerated, and slowed again. Ahead, what she had thought were optical illusions—late sunlight on the soil—were not tricks of the eye, after all. They were more people—farmers who had collapsed beside the road, trying to reach someone who could help. A winding ribbon of bodies.
“Shh,” she said, as the boy sobbed. “They’re just sleeping. Put your head down and don’t look. It’s going to be okay.”
But it wasn’t. This was like nothing she had ever seen. Too quick, too efficient, to outrun. Dr. Oku drove two-tenths of a kilometer farther and braked again, and she thought of the dream she had gone to sleep with the night before. Michael, the man she had planned to visit. What will he think when he hears of this?
Five people—a family—lay across the road in front of them, blocking the way. Two of the children were curled in fetal positions, another had been clinging to her mother, who was the only one still breathing. It was the Ndukas, a family of sorghum farmers who came to the clinic every few weeks for check-ups and antibiotics. She parked and stepped out of the truck. Looked back in the direction they had come, listening to the eerie sound of people struggling for breath, a sound that reminded her of crickets—a ragged chorus of death rasps across the sprawl of farm fields.
What was this? Superficially, at least, she knew: The symptoms resembled acute pulmonary edema—airborne viral particles had entered the victims’ bodies through their respiratory tracts, lodged in the lungs, and multipli
ed rapidly in the moist tissues there, filling their lungs with fluid until the victims literally drowned. The only frame of reference she had for it was the so-called Spanish flu of 1918, which spread mysteriously around the world for a year and a half, killing some forty million people, probably more, most of them within four or five days of catching the virus.
But this was different. These people had gone to bed with no symptoms. Could a much deadlier mutation have somehow occurred? It was possible, she knew, though hardly likely—most viruses were well-adapted to their environments and didn’t suddenly change milieus like this.
Sandra Oku walked back to her truck, where the boy was sleeping now, his head against the passenger door. She climbed into the driver’s seat and sat there, listening to the strange chorus of death rattles, stroking the boy’s moist head and looking toward the verdant western mountains, wondering, How far? How far has this gone?
And then, watching the sky, she began to think something else, as if her thoughts had turned away from all of this to a different reality: her cousin, Paul Bahdru, and the message he had left for her. She was starting at last to recognize what he meant. Paul had come to visit her six days earlier, on a pleasant, rain-cooled afternoon. They had sat on the deck behind her clinic, talking, drinking rooibos tea. He was traveling under an assumed name, he said. Driving a twelve-year-old car that he had just bought in the capital. En route to the airport and a meeting in another city. His story sounded a little fantastic to her, although many things about her cousin had seemed that way, particularly since his wife’s murder. He was investigating a network of business and investment interests in Sundiata, he said, in particular a well-funded, government-sanctioned medical research project. He was going to meet with a man called Frederick Collins. He didn’t say much about that, but as they drank their tea on the porch, watching giant black birds perched in the trees, he had told her other things. Things that he seemed to want her to remember—and which she did, now, with a sudden clarity: “There is a deadly force trying to push this way, and then north, like an ill wind. If it happens, it will happen very quickly. I hope that it doesn’t, but I will warn you when I know the details. If it does, you should be prepared to leave this village.”
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