“Mr. Minister, peace serves everyone’s best interests, does it not? America appreciates the actions of both parties in these informal proceedings. The People’s Republic has indeed been gracious in more than one way, and the government in Taiwan is willing to match your actions. What more is required than that?”
“Very little,” the Foreign Minister replied. “Merely compensation for the deaths of our four aviators. Each of them left a family behind.”
“Their fighters did shoot first,” Zhang pointed out.
“That may be true, but the question of the airliner is still undetermined.”
“Certainly, we had nothing to do that that.” This came from the Foreign Minister.
There were few things more boring than negotiations between countries, but there was actually a reason for that. Sudden or surprise moves could force a country into making impromptu decisions. Unexpected pressure caused anger, and anger had no place in high-level discussions and decisions. Therefore, important talks were almost never decisive, but were, rather, evolutionary in nature, which gave each side time to think through its position, and that of the other side, carefully, so to arrive at a final communique with which both sides could be relatively content. Thus the demand for compensation was a violation of the rules. More properly done, this would have been said at the first session, and Adler would have taken it to Taipei and probably presented it as his own suggestion after the Republic of China government had agreed to cooperate in the reduction of tension. But they had already done that, and now the PRC wanted him to take back the request for compensation instead of a formula for local detente. That was an insult to the Taiwanese government, and also a measured insult to the American government for having been used as a stalking horse for another country.
This was all the more true since Adler and the ROC knew who’d killed the airliner, and who had therefore shown contempt for human life—for which the PRC now demanded compensation! And now Adler wondered again how much of what he knew of the incident was known to the PRC. If they knew a lot, then this was definitely a game whose rules had yet to be decoded.
“I think it would be more useful if both sides were to cover their individual losses and needs,” Secretary Adler suggested.
“I regret that we cannot accept that. It is a matter of principle, you see. He who commits the improper act must make amends.”
“But what if—I do not have any evidence to suggest this, but what if it is determined that the PRC inadvertently damaged the airliner? In such a case your request for compensation might appear unjust.”
“That is not possible. We have interviewed our surviving pilots and their reports are unequivocal.” Again it was Zhang.
“What precisely do you request?” Adler asked.
“Two hundred thousand dollars for each of the four aviators lost. The money will go to their families, of course,” Zhang promised.
“I can present this request to—”
“Excuse me. It is not a request. It is a requirement,” the Foreign Minister told Adler.
“I see. I can present your position to them, but I must urge you not to make this a condition of your promise to reduce tension.”
“That is our position.” The Foreign Minister’s eyes were quite serene.
“... AND GOD BLESS America,” Ryan concluded. The crowd stood and cheered. The band struck up—there had to be a band everywhere he went, Jack supposed—and he made his way off the dais behind a wall of nervous Secret Service agents. Well, the President thought, no gunfire out of the blinding lights this time, either. He stifled another yawn. He’d been on the move for over twelve hours. Four speeches didn’t seem to be all that much physical work, but Ryan was learning just how exhausting public speaking could be. You had the shakes every time before getting up there, and though you got over it in a few minutes, the accumulated stress did take its toll. The dinner hadn’t helped much. The food had been bland, so carefully chosen to offend no one that it wasn’t worth anyone’s attention. But it had given him heartburn anyway.
“Okay,” Arnie told him, as the presidential party assembled to head out the back door. “For a guy who was ready to chuck it yesterday, you did awfully well.”
“Mr. President!” a reporter called.
“Talk to him,” Arnie whispered.
“Yes?” Jack said, walking over, to the displeasure of his security force.
“Do you know about what John Plumber said this evening on NBC?” The reporter was ABC, and unlikely to pass on the chance to slam a competing network.
“Yes, I’ve heard about it,” the President replied soberly.
“Do you have any comment?”
“Obviously, I do not like learning about all this, but as far as Mr. Plumber is concerned, that’s as gracious an act of moral courage as I’ve seen in quite a while. He’s okay in my book.”
“Do you know who it was who—”
“Please, let Mr. Plumber handle that. It’s his story, and he knows how to tell it. Now if you will excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” the ABC reporter said to Ryan’s back.
“Just right,” Arnie said, with a smile. “We’ve had a long day, but it’s been a good day.”
Ryan let out a long breath. “You say so.”
“OH, MY GOD,” Professor Klein whispered. There it was on the display monitor. The Shepherd’s Crook, right out of a medical text. How the hell had it come to Chicago?
“That’s Ebola,” Dr. Quinn said, adding, “That’s not possible. ”
“How thorough was your physical examination?” the senior man asked again.
“Could have been better, but—no bite marks, no needle marks. Mark, it’s Chicago. I had frost on my windshield the other day.”
Professor Klein pressed his hands together, and pushed his gloved fingers up against his nose. Then he stopped the gesture when he realized that he was still wearing a surgical mask. “Keys in her purse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“First, we have cops around the ER. Get one, tell him we need a police escort to go to her apartment and allow us to look around. Tell him this woman’s life is in danger. Maybe she’s got a pet, a tropical plant, something. We have the name of her physician. Get him up, get him in here. We need to find out what he knows about her.”
“Treatment?”
“We cool her down, we keep her hydrated, we medicate for pain, but there isn’t anything that really works on this. Rousseau in Paris has tried interferon and a few other things, but no luck so far.” He frowned at the display again. “How’d she get it? How the hell did she contract this little bastard?”
“CDC?”
“You get the cop up here. I’ll get a fax off to Gus Lorenz.” Klein checked his watch. Damn.
THE PREDATOR DRONES were back in Saudi, having never been discovered. It was felt that having them circle over a stationary position, like a divisional encampment, was a little too dangerous, however, and now the overhead work was being done by satellites, whose photos downloaded to the National Reconnaissance Office.
“Check this out,” one of the night crew said to the guy at the next workstation. “What are these?”
The tanks of the UIR “Immortals” division were grouped in what was essentially a large parking lot, all evenly spaced in long, regular lines so that they could be counted—a stolen tank with a full basic load of shells was a dangerous thing to have on the loose, and all armies took security of the tank laagers seriously. It also made things more convenient for the maintenance personnel to have them all together. Now they were all back, and men were swarming over the tanks and other fighting vehicles, doing the normal maintenance that followed a major exercise. In front of every tank in the first row were two dark lines, each about a meter across, and ten meters long. The man on the screen was ex—Air Force, and more expert on airplanes than land-combat vehicles.
His neighbor only needed one look. “Tracks.”
“What?”<
br />
“They’re rotating the tires, like. Tracks wear out, and you put new ones on. The old ones go into the shop to be worked on, replacing pads and stuff,” the former soldier explained. “It’s no big deal.”
Closer examination showed how it was done. The new tracks were laid in front of the old ones. The old ones were then disconnected, and attached to the new, and the tank, its motor running, simply drove forward, the sprocket wheel pulling the new track in place over the road wheels. It required several men and was hot, heavy work, but it could be done by a well-trained tank crew in about an hour under ideal conditions, which, the ex-soldier explained, these were. Essentially, the tank drove onto the new tracks.
“I never knew how they did that.”
“Beats having to jack the sumbitch off the ground.”
“What’s a track good for?”
“On one of these, cross-country in a desert? Oh, call it a thousand miles, maybe a little less.”
SURE ENOUGH. THE two couches in Air Force One’s forward cabin folded out to make beds. After dismissing his staff, Ryan hung up his clothes and lay down. Clean sheets and everything, and he was weary enough that he didn’t mind being on an airplane. Flight time to Washington was four and a half hours, and then he’d be able to sleep some more in his own bed. Unlike normal red-eye travelers, he might even be able to do some useful work the next day.
In the big cabin, aft, the reporters were doing the same, having decided to leave the issue of Plumber’s astounding revelation to the next day. They had no choice in the matter; a story of this magnitude was handled at least at the assistant managing editor level. Many of the print journalists were dreaming about the editorials that would appear in the papers. The TV reporters were trying not to cringe at what this would mean to their credibility.
In between were the President’s staff members. They were all smiles, or nearly so.
“Well, I finally saw his temper,” Arnie told Callie Weston. “Big-time.”
“And I bet he saw yours, too.”
“And mine won.” Arnie sipped at his drink. “You know, the way things are going, I think we have a pretty good President here.”
“He hates it.” Weston had one of her own.
Arnie van Damm didn’t care: “Fabulous speeches, Callie.”
“There’s such an engaging way about how he delivers them,” she thought. “Every time, he starts off tight, embarrassed, and then the teacher in him takes over, and he really gets into it. He doesn’t even know it, either.”
“Honesty. It really does come out, doesn’t it?” Arnie paused. “There’s going to be a memorial service for the dead agents.”
“I’m already thinking about it,” Weston assured him. “What are you going to do about Kealty?”
“I’m thinking about that. We’re going to sink that bastard once and for all.”
BADRAYN WAS BACK on his computer, checking the proper Internet sites. Still nothing. In another day he might start worrying, though it wasn’t really his problem if nothing happened, was it? Everything he’d done had gone perfectly.
PATIENT ZERO OPENED her eyes, which got everyone’s attention. Her temperature was down to 101.6, entirely due to the cold packs that now surrounded her body like a fish in the market. The combination of pain and exhaustion was plain on her face. In that way, she looked like a patient with advanced AIDS, a disease with which the physician was all too familiar.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Klein,” the professor told her from behind his mask. “You had us a little worried there for a minute, but things are under control now.”
“Hurts,” she said.
“I know, and we’re going to help you with that, but I need to ask you a few questions. Can you help me with a few things?” Klein asked.
“Okay.”
“Have you been doing any traveling lately?”
“What do you mean?” Every word she spoke drew down on her energy reserves.
“Have you been out of the country?”
“No. Flew to Kansas City ... ten days ago, that’s all. Day trip,” she added.
“Okay.” It wasn’t. “Have you had any contact with someone who’s been out of the country?”
“No.” She tried to shake her head. It moved maybe a quarter inch.
“Forgive me, but I have to ask this. Do you have any ongoing sexual relationships at the moment?”
That question shook her. “AIDS?” she gasped, thinking that was the worst thing she might have.
Klein shook his head emphatically. “No, definitely not. Please don’t worry about that.”
“Divorced,” the patient said. “Just a few months. No new ... men in my life yet.”
“Well, as pretty as you are, that’ll have to change soon,” Klein observed, trying to get a smile out of her. “What do you do at Sears?”
“Housewares, buyer. Just had ... big show ... McCormick Center ... lots of paperwork, orders and things.”
This was going nowhere. Klein tried a few more questions. They led nowhere. He turned and pointed to the nurse.
“Okay, we’re going to do something about the pain now,” the professor told her. He stepped away so as not to crowd the nurse when she started the morphine on the IV tree. “This will start working in a few seconds, okay? I’ll be back soon.”
Quinn was waiting out in the hall with a uniformed police officer, a checkerboard band around his cap.
“Doc, what’s the story?” the cop asked.
“The patient has something very serious, possibly very contagious. I need to look over her apartment.”
“That’s not really legal, you know. You’re supposed to go to a judge and get—”
“Officer, there’s no time for that. We have her keys. We could just break in, but I want you there so that you can say we didn’t do anything wrong.” And besides, if she had a burglar alarm, it wouldn’t do for them to be arrested. “There’s no time to waste. This woman is very sick.”
“Okay, my car is outside.” The cop pointed and the doctors followed.
“Get the fax off to Atlanta?” Quinn asked. Klein shook his head.
“Let’s look at her place first.” He decided not to wear a coat. It was cold outside, and the temperature would be very inhospitable to the virus in the unlikely event that it had somehow gotten on his scrubs. Reason told him that there was no real danger here. He’d never encountered Ebola clinically, but he knew as much about it as any man could. It was regrettably normal for people to show up with diseases whose presence they could not explain. Most of the time, careful investigation would reveal how it had been contracted, but not always. Even with AIDS, there was the handful of unexplained cases. But only a handful, and you didn’t start with one of those as your Index Case. Professor Klein shivered when he got outside. The temperature was in the low thirties, with a north wind blowing down off Lake Michigan. But that wasn’t the reason for his shaking.
PRICE OPENED THE door to the nose cabin. The lights were off except for a few faint indirect ones. The President was lying on his back and snoring loudly enough to be heard over the whining drone of the engines. She had to resist the temptation to tiptoe in and cover him with a blanket. Instead, she smiled and closed the door.
“Maybe there is such a thing as justice, Jeff,” she observed to Agent Raman.
“The newsie thing, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t bet on it,” the other agent said.
They looked around. Finally everyone was asleep, even the chief of staff. Topside, the flight crew was doing their job, along with the other USAF personnel, and it really was like a red-eye flight back to the East Coast, as Air Force One passed over central Illinois. The two agents moved back to their seating area. Three members of the Detail were playing cards, quietly. Others were reading or dozing.
An Air Force sergeant came down the circular steps, holding a folder.
“FLASH-traffic for the Boss,” she announced.
“Is it that important? W
e get into Andrews in about ninety minutes.”
“I just take ’em off the fax machine,” the sergeant pointed out.
“Okay.” Price took the message and headed aft. To where Ben Goodley was. It was his job to be around to tell the President what he needed to know about the important happenings in the world—or, in this case, to evaluate the importance of a message. Price shook the man’s shoulder. The national intelligence officer opened one eye.
“Yeah?”
“Do we wake the Boss for this?”
The intelligence specialist scanned it and shook his head. “It can wait. Adler knows what he’s doing, and there’s a working group at State for this.” He turned back into his seat without another word.
“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING,” Klein told the policeman. “Best for you to stand right by the door, but if you want to follow us around, don’t touch a thing. Wait.” The physician reached into the plastic trash bag he’d brought along, and pulled out a surgical mask in a sterile container. “Put this on, okay?”
“Anything you say, Doc.”
Klein handed over the house key. The police officer opened the door. It turned out that there was an alarm system. The control panel was just inside the door, but not turned on. The two physicians put on their own masks and donned latex gloves. First, they turned on all the lights.
“What are we looking for?” Quinn asked.
Klein was already looking. No cat or dog had come to note their arrival. He saw no bird cages—part of him had hoped for a pet monkey, but somehow he knew that wasn’t in the cards. Ebola didn’t seem to like monkeys very much, anyway. It killed them with all the alacrity it applied to human victims. Plants, then, he thought. Wouldn’t it be odd if Ebola’s host was something other than an animal? That would be a first of sorts.
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