Pandemic

by Daniel Kalla

Satisfied his thoughts were in order, he put his glasses back on, reached for the computer keyboard, and began to type. He addressed the e-mail to his immediate superior, the hospital’s young director, Dr. Kai Huang.

  Dr. Huang,

  I am writing to inform you of a critical breach in hospital security that occurred seven days ago.

  I accepted money from a man, Kwok Lee, whom I know to be a black marketer. In return for the bribe, I arranged for Mr. Lee and two of his accomplices to see one of the afflicted patients. Mr. Lee claimed the two men were relatives of the dying man, but I knew differently as they appeared to be of Malaysian or Indonesian descent. I assumed they were reporters, but I did not dwell on their identity or intentions.

  They spent five unsupervised minutes with the patient The patient died an hour after the men left. While preparing the body, one of the nurses discovered recent puncture marks over the left jugular vein. No medical procedures had been performed at that site. My only possible conclusion is that the men withdrew vials of venous blood.

  From our experience, we know that body fluid of infected patients is highly contagious. Since he was suffering from overwhelming sepsis, this patient’s blood would have had a particularly high concentration of the virus.

  I have no knowledge of how they mean to use this infected blood, but I can only assume that it involves criminal intent. And I cannot exclude the possibility of terrorism or the use of the virus as a weapon.

  Yours,

  Ping Wu

  Wu reread the e-mail, satisfied. He intentionally left out any attempt to minimize his role or justify his actions. He did not owe them that. Without hesitating, he tapped the “send” button. As soon as the e-mail left his screen, he felt a weight lift off his shoulders. He had done his part to warn others.

  He reached down and opened the same desk drawer where he had twice deposited those dirty envelopes that had ruined his life and, possibly, countless others. The money was gone, but he pulled out the two bottles from the drawer. One was a popular Chinese wine, the other a pill bottle containing one hundred tablets of a major sedative.

  He popped the lid off the pill bottle. Bringing the hard plastic to his lips, he tasted the bitter-salty flavor as he stuffed as many pills as would fit into his mouth. He choked them down with a gulp of wine. He had another sip of wine, but the medicinal taste lingered. He took a deep breath, and then swallowed the rest of the tablets.

  CHAPTER 8

  CIA HEADQUARTERS LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  It was an ominous name: “Carnivore”. The software system electronically spies on e-mails from across the globe, trying to sniff out criminal activity and threats to U.S. national security. Among the several hundred million screened that day, Dr. Ping Wu’s final e-mail piqued Carnivore’s interest because it contained the words “terrorist” and “virus”. After translating it into passable though grammatically questionable English. Carnivore graded the e-mail as “moderately suspicious”, meaning it required review by human eyes.

  As did 68,435 other e-mails sent the same day.

  The overburdened CIA staffers who ran Carnivore were forever falling behind in their attempt to find the needle in an electronic haystack. Eavesdropping on the entire world was a challenge that the CIA had yet to master. Another “backlog debulking” loomed in the near future. The term was classic CIA-speak—a euphemism for a random, massive hard drive purge of all but the most suspicious of the unread e-mail backlog. The espionage world’s equivalent of Russian roulette.

  Even if Wu’s e-mail wasn’t destined to be lost in the “backlog debulking,” no one at Langley would have a chance to review it for a minimum of seven days.

  HARGEYSA SOMALIA

  A southern breeze stirred up flakes from the dirt road. It carried with it the faint smell of food that drifted in from the cooking fire of the militia posted a half mile down the road.

  Hazzir Kabaal and Abdul Sabri stood out front of the laboratory complex in the windy but warm dusk. Minutes earlier they had said prayers together with mats almost touching. Neither had spoken a word since.

  Kabaal had a knack for reading people, which helped explain his unfettered success in the cutthroat world of print media. But after four days spent in Sabri’s company, Kabaal still read nothing behind the man’s pale eyes and placid expression. From that alone, Kabaal realized that Sabri was a man to be reckoned with. Having witnessed the dispassionate and unhesitating manner in which Sabri executed the Malaysian—one of their own men—Kabaal knew he had chosen well.

  His choice was not made in haste. Kabaal had screened several candidates before settling on Sabri. He was not the only candidate with a history distinguished by ruthlessness. However, one report from the major’s thick blood-stained military file tilted the balance in his favor.

  Six years earlier, Sabri had led an elite team of Egyptian soldiers against an insurgency in the south of the country. After a bitter standoff, with heavy casualties on both sides, the government soldiers captured a rebel leader. Major Sabri was entrusted with interrogating the man to uncover the whereabouts of his fellow fighters who had melted away into the nearby hills. The rebel leader withstood twenty-four hours of torture without divulging a word. So Sabri changed tactics. He had the man’s wife led into the room. Chained to a chair beside the bed, the rebel was forced to watch as three of Sabri’s men viciously raped the woman. When the leader stayed mute, despite his wife’s screams, Sabri’s men brought in the man’s youngest daughter and strapped her to the bed. That was the breaking point. Sabri had the rest of the rebels rounded up and summarily executed within twelve hours of the incident.

  After hearing this account from the mouth of an eyewitness, Kabaal knew Sabri was the man he sought. A man of single-minded focus and unflinching violence capable of doing whatever necessary to achieve their goal: the preservation of Islam, at any cost.

  Why? Kabaal wondered again. Why had this secular enforcer swapped sides and become a defender of Islam? Kabaal mulled the question over, more out of curiosity than concern. Sabri was foremost a fighter, a man of action. The cause was secondary. Kabaal would, and in fact had, bet his life on this belief.

  Lost in his thoughts, Kabaal didn’t notice the woman until she was standing in front of them. At first, he didn’t recognize her in the dwindling light. He had only ever seen Khalila Jahal wearing a haik, the loosely fitted one-piece Moroccan robe that covers the head and body. Now, as instructed, she wore jeans, sandals, and a tightly fitted white blouse.

  Large brown eyes, perfect tawny skin, and long shiny black hair complemented Jahal’s hourglass figure. Most of the devout at the complex would have found her dress intolerably immodest, but Kabaal had spent enough time in the West to appreciate her sexiness without condoning her attire. In spite of his reinvigorated faith, his old habits died hard and he couldn’t resist a compliment: “Ah, Khalila, in the privacy of your home you would please a husband with your exquisiteness.”

  She met his eyes confidendy. “My husband is dead, Abu Lahab.”

  “He is in paradise, now,” Kabaal said, knowing that the twenty-three-year-old’s husband had died in the caves of Afghanistan, fighting alongside the Taliban.

  Abdul Sabri eyed Jahal with clinical detachment. “You will draw the attention of many Western men dressed that way.”

  “Even better,” Kabaal said. “More importantly, she will pass for a Western woman dressed like that.”

  “I will,” Jahal said with certainty.

  Kabaal nodded at her solemnly. “Khalila, you do not have to go, you know that?”

  “I will go,” Jahal said.

  “There are others,” Kabaal said. “You do not have to.”

  Jahal shook her head defiantly. “I will go, Abu Lahab. My husband would want this. I want this. It is my duty.” She bit her lip, and then smiled sadly. “It is my opportunity to serve.”

  Kabaal felt a pang of melancholic nostalgia. She had such obvious intelligence behind her alluring brown eyes. And her confidence
and selfless faith only enhanced her attractiveness. Under different circumstances, he gladly would have done the honorable thing and married this widow.

  “Are you familiar with the plan?” Sabri asked of her, his pale blue eyes seemingly indifferent to the loveliness of the woman.

  “Yes, Major.” Jahal nodded, showing the first hint of intimidation in his presence. “I will be inoculated in the morning. The truck will pick me up immediately following. I will fly out from Tangiers. I will pick up my new papers in Paris.”

  “Do you know all the rendezvous points?” Sabri’s eyes narrowed, still not convinced.

  “Yes, Major,” Jahal said. “I once spent several months in Paris. My French is impeccable. I could pass for a local,” she said without a trace of conceit.

  “And from there?” Sabri pressed.

  “My transit is all arranged,” she said “I will wait for the fever and cough to develop before I go out. I have gone through the routine a thousand times in my head.”

  Again, Kabaal was struck by her confident poise in the presence of two men; a rare trait for a young female Islamist. Had she grown up in the West, Kabaal decided she would have been a feminist. He was struck by another wave of nostalgia. He had bedded a few self-described feminists in London in the seventies, happily discovering that their passion wasn’t limited to gender politics.

  Major Sabri studied the Moroccan woman for a long while. “Good.” He finally exhaled, appearing satisfied but not pleased.

  “You understand what is at stake?” Kabaal asked her.

  “As I said, Abu Lahab, I know the plan to—”

  Kabaal cut her off with a wave of his hand. “No. No. No. Do you understand why we must do this?”

  She nodded calmly.

  “We are under siege, Khalila,” Kabaal went on though Jahal did not appear the least doubtful. “They have all the conventional weapons. Their army is camped at the gates of the Tigris. Their tanks and planes are within miles of Mecca. You understand, Khalila?”

  “I do,” Jahal said.

  “I am not a madman.” Kabaal looked away from her, pained by her lovely resolute face. “If there was another way.” His shoulders sagged and his head drooped. “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want others to die.”

  She reached out as if she might touch Kabaal’s shoulder, but her hand stopped short. Instead, she ran her hand through her hair like she meant to brush it all along. “It is what must be done,” she said.

  “It is the only way.” Kabaal cleared his throat. “We cannot let them take our holy sites ... take our way of life ... take our God.” He held his head up higher. “They will learn His vengeance for trying. They will learn it from you, Khalila.”

  He looked from the expressionless Sabri to the nodding Jahal.

  “And there will be no mercy for those who stand in His way,” Kabaal predicted.

  CHAPTER 9

  JIAYUGUAN REGIONAL HOSPITAL GANSU PROVINCE CHINA

  Dr. Kai Huang sat silently at his desk and trembled with rage.

  At thirty-two, Kai Huang was one of the youngest medical directors in all of China, and he had no intention of stopping there. But now his career teetered on the brink of ruin. All thanks to the now-deceased associate director.

  He read Ping Wu’s e-mail again, and the trembling increased. Huang had always sensed that the bitter little man would somehow be his undoing. That Wu had done it from beyond his grave only made Huang that much angrier. He would never have the satisfaction of wringing Wu’s neck. If only I had acted sooner! Huang thought bitterly.

  Huang was aware of how much Wu resented being overlooked for the director’s position. In the five years since the hospital opened, Huang had always kept a watchful eye on Wu. When Wu inexplicably jumped from self-righteous communism to shady profiteering, Huang opened a file tracking his under-the-table dealings. Huang would have intervened sooner, but Wu’s tireless and efficient work habits had come in very handy for the young director during his long absences on career-building trips to Lanzhou and Beijing.

  When the hospital had become the epicenter for treating the mysterious viral outbreak, Huang had to concede that Wu had responded well in his absence. Returning from the capital, Huang had stepped back and allowed Wu to continue managing the crisis, knowing that his career stood to gain a huge boost if Wu succeeded. And if Wu failed it left a convenient scapegoat and a simple solution to his problem with this unlikable little man.

  Animosity aside, Huang was still shocked by what Wu had allowed to happen. Especially as the man had seemed determined to single-handedly control the outbreak. Huang never dreamed that Wu would actually try to profit from an epidemic.

  Even in his state of panicky self-preservation, Huang understood that Wu’s treachery impacted far beyond his own career. But as he stared at the message taunting him on his computer screen, he realized that he was the only recipient specified in the e-mail’s “To” field. Unless Wu had written separately to someone else before his suicide or sent blind copies to others, which seemed unlikely considering the man’s basic computer skills, Wu had left Huang as the sole caretaker of his dirty secret.

  Huang sat for a long time, considering the implications of his next step.

  Whoever stole the virus was either dead or long gone, he rationalized. Aside from signing his own death warrant, what possible good would come from sounding the alarm to his superiors?

  With a shaking hand, Kai Huang reached for the keyboard and tapped the “delete” key.

  DEPARTEMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY NEBRASKA AVENUE CENTER WASHINGTON, B.C.

  Gwen Savard’s ankle ached even after she sat down at her desk. She blamed it on the colder weather, not willing to accept it as a sign of aging. D.C. had taken a turn for the colder in mid-November. Even her Lycra-suit, gloves, and lined hat couldn’t keep her jogs warm, when she headed out daily at 5:30 A.M. And this morning, she had tweaked her ankle again in the predawn darkness. The time had come to move inside to the gym for the winter, which meant twenty more minutes of commuting. So be it, thought Gwen. Her directorship of the counter-bioterrorism program with its demanding and unpredictable schedule had already cost her her spot on her women’s soccer team. She wasn’t about to give up her morning workout ritual, despite the ever-mounting workload.

  Gwen willed away her ankle pain as she scanned through her massive list of e-mails. Once she answered the most pressing of the messages, she logged onto the password-protected highest security zone of the Centers for Disease Control Web site.

  Gwen spent the next fifteen minutes, as she did every morning, reviewing the CDC’s global surveillance of the “hot spots.” A shigella epidemic had hit West Africa, but she was relieved to see that the reported outbreak of possible Ebola in Nigeria turned out to be no more than Dengue Fever, no walk in the park, but still no Ebola.

  Scanning the catalogue of infections sweeping the planet—antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis among New York’s drug addicts, syphilis in the San Francisco gay community, chloroquine-resistant malaria in the Philippines, and so on—she was reminded of the forest fires that had burned out of control in California. Just as one pocket of flames was doused, ten others would spring up around it. And so it was for the CDC and WHO in their attempts to contain the uncontainable.

  Savard shook her head, thinking of how twenty-five years earlier, in the days before HIV and bacteria resistant to all known antibiotics, some scientists had declared the war on infectious diseases over—a knockout victory for medical science. How wrong they were. Now microorganisms had the doctors against the ropes, not vice versa.

  Gwen clicked on the headline concerning the new virus in western China. She had kept a close eye on the story ever since the scattered reports of farmers developing atypical respiratory infections had surfaced two weeks earlier. She was not surprised to read that the virus had reached a small city in northwest China, but she knew it meant trouble. Urban spread was the epidemiological equivalent of flashpoint.

  She dec
ided it was time to speak to someone closer to the forefront of the outbreak. A name danced around the back of her head, but refused to surface into consciousness. She reached for the old-fashioned Rolodex on her desktop. She had to flip through it twice before her brain and fingers connected. There it was: Dr. Noah Haldane, professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown and WHO emerging pathogens expert. She had met him only once, six months earlier, when they were both lecturing at a conference. Though his talk was funny and irreverent, she most recalled his chilling description of how ill prepared the planet was for the pandemic, which he guaranteed was on its way. She couldn’t picture his face, but she remembered him as handsome. When they chatted afterward, he refused to accept any of the credit people ascribed to him for halting the SARS epidemic in the Far East.

  If anyone at the WHO had an inside track on this latest outbreak, she thought it would be Haldane. A knock at the door stopped her just as she reached for the phone. “Come in,” she called out.

  Alex Clayton, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Operations, strode in as assuredly as if Gwen had been expecting him all morning.

  Savard hit a button on the keyboard to close the CDC Web site. The screensaver she had been meaning to change—a picture of Peter and her with a number still pinned on her chest, hugging at the finish line of the Washington Marathon—popped up. She rose from her desk. A stab of pain shot up from her ankle, but she suppressed her wince out of reflex. She had been conditioned to believe that as a woman in the upper echelons of the D.C. power structure, she was not allowed to show any hint of weakness or fallibility.

  “Was I expecting you?” Gwen asked.

  “Can’t say,” Clayton said with a wide flirtatious smile. “But we weren’t scheduled to meet.”

  He wore a three-button, black suit with an olive green shirt, collar open, which highlighted his dark green eyes and Mediterranean complexion. With gelled hair, Armani suit, and perfect accessories, he struck Gwen as the consummate “metrosexual”—a straight, male urbanite with all the vanity and fashion sense of a stereotypical gay man.