by Ross Pennie
Saramin braked and followed the sign onto a smooth dirt road. About 500 metres in, she pulled to a stop a few metres short of a Dodge Ram pickup. There were two men in the cab. She unlocked the doors and told Hosam to join the others.
“They’re expecting you.”
Hosam’s heart leapt into his throat. His tongue felt like a piece of ten-day-old pita. Saramin had not brought him here to steal bits of copper for the Caliph. The boss had ordered his execution. Merde! Merde! Merde!
He swallowed hard and ran his tongue across his lips. He grabbed the dashboard with both hands. “Come on, I know nothing. I bet Saramin is not your real name. I cannot get any of you in trouble. I have no idea who the Caliph is or where he lives. You do not need to kill me. Please . . . my wife and son, they need me. Badly. They cannot do without me. Please . . .”
She put the truck in park and faced him. “For God’s sake, Hosam. No one is going to kill you. Honestly, we’re here to snatch a grand’s worth of copper wire and get the hell out of here.”
He could not take his eyes off the men in the Dodge. The driver was opening the door. He had something in his hand, and it was not just a set of keys.
She reached over and touched his arm. The gesture seemed sincere, but as a gangster’s girlfriend, she had to be a good actress. As he looked out the window, he could not believe anywhere could be this black. The big-city lights of Aleppo and Gaziantep had extended well into the countryside. And when the power went out, there had always been the overwhelming brilliance of mortar fire.
“It’s okay. Really. Go on. You know these two guys. They’ll show you how it’s done. Watch what they do and work fast.”
He squeezed the door handle hard with his shaking hand. He had no choice but to face the men. If he tried to run in the dark, he would fall and break his neck.
He stepped out of the truck and nearly collided with what had to be the short guy from the other night, the man from Homs City. The man raised his arm. Hosam planted his feet and said nothing. He was not going to beg, and he was not going to let them shoot him lying on the ground like a sick dog.
A shot of light came out of the man’s hand. No noise, no pain, no smell. Just a weak glow.
“Here,” he said, flicking his extended arm. “Put on this lamp or you’ll break your goddamn leg in the dark.”
Chapter 23
Hosam donned the headlamp and looked around. The baseball diamond seemed to be in the middle of a large, flat field far from any sign of human habitation. They could spend all night here tearing apart the wires linking the diamond’s four tall lighting poles, and no one would notice.
Saramin’s men opened the cover of their Dodge Ram’s cargo box and took out their tools. Theirs was no fine set of surgical instruments, just a shovel, an axe, a crowbar, heavy pliers, and three pairs of heavy-duty leather gloves. The tall, super-muscular guy, who still reeked of chewing tobacco and was no less taciturn tonight than he had been on Friday, removed three empty industrial spools from the back of the truck. He motioned for Hosam to take three more from the fifteen or twenty others like them.
“We are going to wrap the wire around these, uh . . . spools?” Hosam asked, again taking care not to look the tall guy directly in the face.
“That’s gonna be your job,” said the short guy from Homs City. “It won’t take you long to get the hang of it.” He threw Hosam a pair of the gloves. “And wear these, or it’s gonna be a long time before you get back to your clippers and scissors.”
The tall guy led him to the closest lighting pole, and they dropped their spools at its base. Hosam inspected the pole in the light from his headlamp. He gave it a tap with his knuckles. “Aluminium?”
The man shrugged and led Hosam across the dewy grass to where his mate was standing next to a utility pole two hundred metres from home plate. This pole was wooden, well-weathered, and connected to a line of similar posts running alongside the access road. Fifty or more years ago, there had been something here that required a connection to the electrical grid. Perhaps a pump drawing well water.
The short guy pointed to a long pipe attached to the side of the pole. The smooth, grey line of plastic tubing ran from the wires at the top of the pole, down its side, and into the grass-covered ground at its base. “The live feed is inside there,” he said. “We cut the power here, and we’re safe for the rest of the night.”
Before Hosam could ask him how they were going to turn off the power when there was no apparent switch, the man picked up the axe from where he had laid it on the grass. “This is the fun part,” he said. “The sparks fly like crazy, so stand back.”
“You can do this safely?” Hosam asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Done it lots of times.”
Hosam backed five paces away from the pole, then three more for good measure. The tall guy backed up only three casual paces and gave a condescending smirk.
The short guy wiped the axe blade with his thumb. Then, like a golfer, he checked his grip and took a couple of practice swings at the pipe.
“Hey, Mo, you going to wear the gloves?” Tall Guy said, breaking his silence.
Mo examined his hands then shrugged. He wiped his left palm on his jeans, then adjusted his grip and swung at the pipe.
As the axe head severed the wires, Hosam was not sure which was more impressive, the white-hot flash that temporarily blinded him or the roaring boom that set his ears ringing. As he stood there, seeing nothing but a black void peppered with a myriad of coloured spots, his nose filled with the pungent smell of ozone and burnt plastic. And then burnt flesh.
When the ringing had marginally subsided, he heard footsteps and what sounded like the tall guy shouting, “Mo? Mo? You okay?”
A few seconds later, Hosam’s vision cleared enough for him to see Tall Guy standing over a human form that was inert and semi-prone on the ground. Tall Guy, his arms extended, was bending forward to rouse his mate.
“Ya Allah!” Hosam screamed. “Do not touch him. You will get electrocuted.”
Tall Guy froze, his eyes huge in the beam of Hosam’s headlamp. The smirk was long gone from his lips.
Hosam shuffled forward, sweeping the grass with the beam from his headlamp. Above everything else, he had to locate the axe. As long as it was in contact with the live feed, it was a lethal weapon. After several fruitless sweeps, he spotted the axe head glinting in the grass a couple of metres from the utility pole. He left it there where it posed no danger.
The next step was to ascertain whether any part of Mo was touching the pole or its wires. “What do you think?” he asked Tall Guy. “Is he clear of the wires?”
“Clear,” said Tall Guy.
Hosam agreed. Mo had fallen well away from the pole. Electrically speaking, his body was not live. But whether the man himself was alive was another question.
“Help me roll him onto his back,” Hosam said. “But for the love of Muhammad — peace be upon him — do not touch that pole. Any part of the damned thing could be live.”
Once they had turned Mo onto his back, they dragged him two paces farther away from the pole and put his arms at his sides. Without the black paint on his face, he looked surprisingly young. Twenty-something.
Hosam told Tall Guy, “Aim your lamp at his chest. I need every bit of light you can give me.”
He knelt on Mo’s right side and told Tall Guy to kneel on the left. Hosam pressed his fingers into the man’s neck, desperate to feel a carotid pulse. Nothing. He tried the other side. Still nothing. He unzipped Mo’s windbreaker jacket, popped the buttons on his shirt, and pressed his left ear against Mo’s chest below the left nipple. Nothing here either. Electrocution had put the man’s heart either into asystole (no action whatsoever), or into ventricular fibrillation (a useless squirming of the heart muscle).
Still on his knees, Hosam straightened up and took a deep breath. If Mo’s heart had stopped com
pletely, it was game over for him. Asystole resisted most interventions, even by experts wielding the latest equipment. But if his left ventricle was fibrillating, Mo had a chance. Sometimes a good whack in the chest set the heart pumping again. Hosam made a fist with his right hand and brought it down like a sledgehammer onto Mo’s sternum.
Mo showed no reaction to what should have been a painful blow. Still, there was no carotid pulse. Hosam whacked the sternum a second time. Nothing. He threw off his jacket, put one hand over the other, and started cardiac compressions. He had done this so many times — often with the sound of fighter jets and mortar fire booming in his ears — that pumping 110 beats per minute was second nature.
“Shine your light on his face,” he told Tall Guy without breaking his rhythm. “What colour are his lips?”
Tall Guy did not answer. His hand was clamped over his nose and mouth and a choking sound was coming from his throat. Clearly he wasn’t used to the overpowering smell of freshly burnt flesh. But Hosam had to give the man credit: he had not run away, and his headlamp’s beam on Mo’s face was unwavering.
“His lips?” said a female voice from somewhere in the darkness. “It’s hard to tell under that soot. But they look blue to me. What happened?”
“Glad you are here, Boss,” Hosam told her. “You can call 911 and tell them a man has been electrocuted. They need to know he is unconscious, VSA, and we are doing CPR.”
“How did it happen?”
“Fool did not wear gloves,” Hosam told her between compressions. “Let his axe get wet. Head and handle.”
“How?”
“Laid it on the grass. Covered in dew. Water conducts 240 volts . . . rather too nicely.”
“Is he gonna make it? He’s the only one of you the Scarpellinos trust.”
“How close to the nearest hospital?”
“Who cares? Nobody’s calling 911.”
“That is crazy. You have to.”
She extended her arm and swept it toward the ball diamond. “How detailed a picture do I have to draw for you?”
“We cannot let him die here. He deserves a fair chance.”
“He looks barely even alive to me. If he dies here or in an ambulance, what does it matter?”
Hosam grabbed Mo’s jaw with his right hand and pinched the man’s nose with his left. He gave him two good mouth-to-mouth breaths. The lungs offered no resistance. It was like blowing into a corpse. Though heartless, Saramin was probably right. Hosam was probably doing CPR on a cadaver. But Mo was under thirty, still warm, and probably healthy until he had swung that damned axe. Hosam resumed the compressions and pondered his next move. How many more minutes of compressions, and how many more blows to Mo’s sternum until it was time to give up on the man?
After three more minutes, Hosam was exhausted and could barely catch his breath. It was time for one final manoeuvre. He stopped the compressions, raised his right fist, and whacked the sternum twice as hard as he dared.
A moment later, Mo grimaced and gave a little cough. His eyelids flickered, and drops of red spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. Hosam’s own heart rate shot up twenty points. Tall Guy jerked backwards as if he had just seen Muhammad’s ghost.
Hosam dug again into Mo’s neck and could barely believe what he found thumping against his fingertips. Alhamdulillah! Praise be to God!
He looked at Saramin. “Now, will you call 911?”
She tightened her lips. “We’ll take him in the Ford. On the rear seat. And drop him at the hospital.”
“An ambulance would be better. The paramedics have the right equipment. His heart has suffered a significant injury. It could stop again at any moment.”
She was not going to be swayed. “We can be at Caledonian in ten minutes. We unload him there at Emergency. And as soon as they get him on their stretcher, we take off. We’ve gotta get these vehicles back to YYZ.”
Chapter 24
Shortly after nine thirty on Tuesday morning, Natasha stepped from the elevator onto the cardiac ward of Caledonian University Medical Centre. Muriel Simon was expecting her visit.
“Ah, Miss Sharma,” Mrs. Simon called from her bed as Natasha stood at the doorway. The woman pointed to the only chair in the cramped four-bedded room and added, “Come in and pull up a seat.” Even from this distance, her tiny, sharp-featured face was lined and pinched.
The chair was the sort of simple folding model they sold at IKEA. There was no space in the room for any others. “That one doesn’t look particularly comfortable, I’m afraid. But there isn’t anywhere more private for us to talk. They say I’m not allowed to leave my bed.”
The slight but legendarily commanding school principal appeared dwarfed by her high-tech hospital bed and the flashy machinery surrounding it. The menacing jungle of tubes and wires attached to her arms and chest clashed with the whimsy of her penguin-print pyjama top. The garment’s fine piping and classic tailoring suggested Ralph Lauren, but perhaps he didn’t do penguins. Natasha couldn’t see any logo embroidered on the pocket.
She pulled the chair in close and sat down. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Simon?”
“Well, thanks to you, I’m still in this world. I hate to think what would have become of me had you not been there to call 911.” She tapped the hefty-looking intravenous line snaking from the side of her neck into the digital monitor beside the bed. A dazzling array of ever-changing data displayed itself on myriad colourful channels. “This temporary pacemaker has raised my energy level to prodigious heights. But I’m tethered to it, and they won’t let me get up in case I dislodge it.”
“You are looking rosier. I’m relieved to see it.”
“Frankly, I don’t know why I haven’t been discharged. Those people languishing in the hallways down in Emergency need this bed a great deal more than I do.”
Natasha smiled to herself at the woman’s understatement of her condition, then took her notebook from her briefcase and studied her surroundings. The space felt confined, airless, and positively claustrophobic. Hamish had once explained that the rooms in this wing were each originally built to house two patients each, not four. But the moment the hospital opened its doors, it was clear it could not satisfy the needs of the city’s expanding population. Extra beds were shoehorned into every room, and joyless grey curtains were installed around every bed in an attempt to create the illusion of privacy.
“I gather you feel up to a few questions?” Natasha asked.
The woman ran a hand through the uncombed mousy curls of her salt-and-pepper hair, then made a face as she inspected the greasy film on her fingers. Clearly, she wished someone would come and give her a shampoo. “Be my guest,” she said, hiding her hand under the covers. “But first I need to know about my kids. How are Céline and Juan-Carlos?”
“Our nurses were in touch with their families yesterday, and they’re doing well. Compared to the other cases, their polio was mild and they’ve had no setbacks.”
“That’s a relief. But what about my twelve little ones you have under quarantine?”
Natasha hated the Q-word. Quarantine sounded accusatory and hostile. It reminded her of overcrowded sailing ships of the nineteenth century carrying immigrants infected with cholera, tuberculosis, and typhus. “They appear to have the usual assortment of minor illnesses that school kids get. Nothing suspicious of polio. I expect they’ll be back to school quite soon.”
“What about their blood work?”
“Until Friday, we had no idea what we were looking for. But now, we think we’re making progress. We’ll be contacting the families today to arrange for some simple blood tests.”
Now that they knew to look for evidence of Parvo-W and Zika virus infection among the close contacts of polio victims, active surveillance of potential new cases was becoming possible. It was a relief to be finally infusing hard science into their investigation. Three weeks of
empty hypotheses had been exasperating.
“But please,” Natasha told her, “let me know if you need a break.”
“Seriously, I’m fine.”
“I’m wondering about school trips. Has Cathcart Elementary made any in the past few months?”
“That’s an easy one. The grade sixes and sevens have been studying the evolution of agriculture, so we took them to the Niagara Peninsula. It’s Ontario’s fruit basket, of course, and right next door. So an obvious choice for a field trip.”
“When was that?”
She paused and gazed at the ceiling for a moment. “A month ago. Early April.”
“It would be helpful to know exactly where the students went and what they visited.”
“You’re not asking difficult questions, Miss Sharma. The region’s hydroponic greenhouses were the object study. Tomatoes, cucumbers, ornamental flowers, and . . . well, you get the idea.” A guilty look invaded her face and she looked away.
Muriel Simon had more to say. And whatever it was, it could be an important piece in the puzzle. “I understand,” Natasha said, “that there have been significant advancements in the way hothouse tomatoes are raised. They’re so much tastier than they used to be. Perhaps you and the students were shown other agricultural innovations?”
The principal was uncomfortable about where the conversation was headed. “Well . . . I suppose innovation is one way of putting it.”
“Yes?”
“It . . . it wasn’t part of the original plan.” She looked away again. “It just sort of happened.”
“Oh, that sounds interesting,” Natasha said, hoping she sounded disarmingly chirpy. “What just sort of happened?”
Mrs. Simon studied the chips in her nail polish. The colour was unquestionably Cajun Shrimp. “It’s a bit embarrassing. Not the sort of thing I’d like anyone to make a fuss about.”
Natasha put down her pen and notebook, suggesting that whatever Mrs. Simon had to say would be off the record. “I’m not in the business of making fusses, Mrs. Simon. Just gathering facts. Anything that has no bearing on the polio epidemic, I will keep to myself.”