by Daniel Kalla
Anna sat alone in the chair facing the camera. In jeans and a white turtleneck, her black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Haldane had almost forgotten how beautiful his wife was. The realization didn’t engender the usual yearning in him. Whether spontaneously or by willful suppression—Haldane wasn’t sure himself—he had not thought of his wife in a sexual sense for some time.
With Chloe gone from the room, Anna’s carefree expression gave way to a grimace. “Noah, you are still okay, right?”
Haldane nodded. He forced a smile. “I’m not going to catch this virus.”
Her expression didn’t budge. “But you’re still in quarantine?”
“A formality. I’ve got less than twenty-four hours to go.” Haldane nodded reassuringly to her. ”Anna, I would have known by now.”
“That’s wonderful.” Anna exhaled heavily and for a moment it looked as if she might burst into tears, but she held her composure. “Noah, people are so scared here. Chloe’s preschool is two-thirds empty. Half the kids canceled for the party. A lot of people won’t leave their house.”
“I’ve seen it before.” Haldane nodded. “It’s only natural, Anna.”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing natural about any of this! What if the virus comes here? Washington would be the obvious choice for them.”
“If it comes, we’ll deal with it. It will be okay,” Noah promised. “Anna, believe me, they can’t win. All viruses are stoppable. This bug is no exception,” he said, sounding more definite than he felt.
“Will you come home tomorrow, once your quarantine is over?” Her brown eyes implored.
“It depends.”
She held her hands out in front of her. “Look if it’s about me ... us ... I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching, lately. Julie knows how confused I am. Nothing is written in stone. Maybe—”
“Anna,” Haldane cut her off. “It has nothing to do with us. I hate being away from Chloe a second longer than I have to.”
He realized from her fleeting wince that the comment might have come across as cold, which he hadn’t intended, but nor did he want to rip the scab off the wound again, so he let it stand. “I’ve already lost four precious days stuck here. I have to go where I am needed now. We’re running out of time.”
She nodded distantly. “Only two more days until the terrorists’ ultimatum expires.”
“A lot can happen in two days.”
Anna nodded grimly. “I better get downstairs to Chloe and Mom. The kids will be here any second,” she said.
Noah noticed with newfound ambivalence how Anna had withdrawn again. He was so tired of their constant emotional tug-of-war. “I wish I could be there. Good luck with the big party.” He forced a reassuring smile. “Anna, everything is going to work out.”
Haldane clicked the video box closed and stared at the blank screen.
Three hard raps at the door interrupted his thoughts. Haldane didn’t even remember ordering room service, but he hadn’t eaten today and his stomach had begun to growl. “Leave the tray at the door, thanks!” Haldane called out.
“Yeah, right!” a Scottish accent bellowed from the other side. “I’ve just flown four thousand goddamn miles so I can bring you your lousy lunch.”
Haldane hopped out of his chair pleased to hear his friend’s voice. He slipped on his N95 mask and walked to the door. “You wearing precautions, Duncan?” Haldane asked at the door.
“Again, Haldane, I want to reiterate that we don’t have that kind of a relationship.” McLeod unleashed a roar of laughter. “But I do have my clown mask and hat on if that helps.”
Haldane opened the door. Duncan McLeod stood on the other side with a surgical mask covering his scraggly beard. He wasn’t gowned. And a baseball cap stood in for the shower cap he was supposed to wear. His asymmetric eyes twinkled with the obvious humor he found in their situation. “Haldane! I’d give you a big hug, but I don’t particularly want to die.”
Haldane laughed. “Finally, there’s an upside to my quarantine.”
McLeod bellowed another laugh. “Ah, Haldane, I might actually have missed you if this fucking virus had killed you.” He sauntered into the room and flopped into the loveseat behind the desk. Pointing at the mountains outside the windows across from him, he said, “When I was quarantined with TB, I was stuck in a mud hut in Borneo. You’ve got a slightly better deal here.”
Haldane followed after the Scotsman. “Not that I am unhappy to see you, Duncan, but what are you doing here?”
“The great Jean Nantal sent me. He spewed some crap about me being the new authority on the Gansu Flu PCR probe test. Set up a bunch of meetings for me with the Vancouver infectious disease boys.” McLeod shrugged. “But let’s face it, he sent old expendable McLeod to keep an eye on his golden boy.” McLeod clutched his chest. “‘Tis a far far better thing I do than I have ever done’ and all that shite.”
Haldane rolled his eyes as he sat down in a chair across from McLeod. “How is London?” he asked, but judging by his colleague’s jovial mood he knew the reports about the stabilizing situation in England must have been true.
“It’s a buyer’s market, if you’re looking for real estate.” McLeod shrugged. “Hardly a soul on the street. But I have to hand it to Nancy Levine—delightful chatterbox that she is—her team has done a good job under trying circumstances. The new case rate has steadily declined for the past three days. And no deaths in almost forty-eight hours.”
“What are the latest totals?” Haldane asked.
“A thousand give or take infected. Two hundred dead.” McLeod pulled off his mask. “Christ! I’m tired of these things. I know you’re no risk to me.” He paused, before his lips broke into a crooked smile. “But do me a favor and leave yours on, all right?”
Haldane sighed a laugh. “What about the clusters in Europe, Duncan?”
“Far as I know they’re all contained.” McLeod scratched his beard. “But, Haldane, the entire damn outbreak was all caused by one lousy terrorist. Imagine what an army of the buggers could accomplish.”
Noah nodded. “We are more prepared now. It would be—will be—harder for them to spread the virus.”
“Harder. By no means impossible,” McLeod pointed out, stretching in his seat. “What’s the local news?”
“Latest report is that the virus is contained in Vancouver, too. The death toll stands stable at 45, with 240 infections. No new cases in the last day.” Noah nodded. “The photo of the dead terrorist has paid dividends, though. She was spotted several places, including the U.S.-Canada border. She and a young male Arab were turned back when their papers didn’t clear. And several people recognized her—traveling alone—on a flight in from Paris.”
McLeod sat forward in his seat. “And from Paris?”
Haldane shook his head. “She was traveling under a bogus alias with a stolen passport. So far the trail dries up in France.”
“Shite! The damn French!” McLeod said.
Haldane frowned. “Including Jean Nantal?”
“You mean the bugger who keeps dumping us in the middle of these plagues?” McLeod screeched. “He’s the worst of the bloody lot.”
They shared a long laugh. McLeod was the exact tonic Haldane needed for his state of mind.
Another knock came at the door. “I hope you ordered enough for two,” McLeod said. “I’m famished.”
Gwen Savard’s voice drifted through the door. “Noah, it’s me. I’ve got big news!”
Haldane was surprised by how much the sound of her voice pleased him, regardless of her news. He opened the door and Gwen flew in. She glanced over at McLeod with a look of surprise. “Oh, hello, Duncan.” She offered a quick smile. “Good to see you.”
“Lovely to see you upright, Gwen.” McLeod grinned mischievously. “I was expecting to have to identify both of your sorry corpses in some drab Canadian morgue.”
Gwen chuckled distractedly. “I just heard from Washington,” she said with her back to the window. “
We might have had a huge breakthrough.”
Haldane followed her back to the couches and stood between McLeod and her. “What’s up?”
She smiled widely. “We think we know who’s behind The Brotherhood of One Nation.”
“So tell us!” McLeod said.
“The CIA intercepted an e-mail sent by an Egyptian cop. In it he names the dead terrorist from Vancouver along with the leaders of the group.” Savard spat out the words rapid-fire. “Says they have a base in Somalia.”
“Oh, Christ,” McLeod moaned. “They’re going to dump us in Africa now.”
Haldane ignored him. “Who are ‘they’?” he demanded.
Gwen threw up her hands. “Some media mogul from Cairo, Hazzir Kabaal. And an ex-special forces army major. No one knows much about either of them.”
“Where in Somalia?” Haldane pressed.
Gwen shook her head. “The e-mail didn’t specify.”
“Well, why doesn’t someone bloody well ask the chap who wrote it?” McLeod piped up.
“Because he’s dead,” Gwen said. “He was found indented in the sidewalk below his nineteenth-floor apartment with a bullet in his back. Killed minutes after sending the e-mail.”
“That’s a reasonable excuse, I suppose,” McLeod grumbled.
“It’s all just happened in the last hour or so,” Gwen said. “We don’t know much yet.”
“Somalia,” Haldane said, falling back into his chair. “If I remember my geography that’s a fair-sized country.”
“And bloody hot,” McLeod added. “Not to mention anarchic, flea-bitten, and exceptionally violent.”
Gwen glanced at her watch. “Noah, our videoconference with the President is in ten minutes. Are you ready?”
Haldane nodded.
Gwen turned to McLeod. “Sorry, Duncan, you don’t have the security clearance—”
McLeod held up his hand. “I know. I know. You damn Yanks are worse than the Chinese when it comes to this kind of high-level paranoia.” He chuckled. “Much as it tears me apart, I’m going to take my leave of this merry little leper colony and find me some lunch.”
Haldane sat in front of the camera, as the technical team remotely assumed control of his computer. The split video window that emerged was unlike the ones he had grown used to in past days. He understood that this hookup was more secure than anything he had seen before, but he knew nothing of the technology behind it.
After a few minutes of technical futzing, Gwen appeared in the smaller box on the right side. In the larger box on the left four people sat on one side of a long oval table. Haldane instantly recognized them, but Ted Hart introduced the group as if Haldane had never heard of the nation’s leaders.
“Dr. Haldane, I would like to introduce you to the President, the National Security Advisor, Dr. Home, and the Secretary of Defense, Secretary Whitaker. I’m Ted Hart, the Secretary of Homeland Security,” he said equally as unnecessarily, having received more airtime than Larry King and Oprah combined in the past week.
The President leaned back in his leather chair. In his early fifties, he wore a navy suit with an open-collared light blue shirt, and he towered half a head above the others at the table. He had thick salt-and-pepper hair, expressive gray eyes, and a prominent chin. He wasn’t classically handsome, but he had a commanding and compassionate countenance. Haldane decided he had a perfectly presidential face for photo-ops.
On the President’s right sat his National Security Advisor, Andrea Horne, a handsome African American woman with curly black hair and stylish half-glasses perched halfway down her nose. To the President’s left sat his Secretary of Defense, Aaron Whitaker, a scrawny balding man in his mid-sixties with pasty skin and (Haldane knew from his press conferences) a wolverine’s disposition. To Whitaker’s left sat Ted Hart.
“Hello,” Haldane said, feeling unexpectedly bashful in the presence of such executive power.
The President smiled and nodded once into the camera. Home said, “Welcome, Drs. Haldane and Savard,” while Whitaker did not acknowledge either of them.
“Gwen, Dr. Haldane, you are up-to-date on the latest developments from Egypt, I trust?” Hart asked.
“Ted, we know of the intercepted e-mail but the details we’ve heard are sketchy at best,” Savard said.
“Allow me to elaborate.” Hart glanced at the President who nodded his approval.
A photo of a smiling handsome man, who looked to Noah like a playboy son of some rich emir posing for the paparazzi, appeared at the bottom of his screen. “Meet Hazzir Kabaal—an Egyptian publishing magnate who owns several papers which pander to the pan-Arabic and Muslim Brotherhood movements. Don’t let his dapper wardrobe fool you. Kabaal has financial ties to militant groups from the Hezbollah to the Abu Sayyef.”
The photo on Haldane’s screen switched from Kabaal’s unctuous grin to the expressionless face of an army officer with pale blue eyes. “Major Abdul Sabri. Formerly with the Egyptian Special Forces. He specialized in counterinsurgency, but we assume has since switched sides. Apparently, Kabaal, Sabri, and several known associates left Cairo three weeks ago to whereabouts unknown.”
“They’re in Somalia,” the Secretary of Defense grunted with confidence.
The face of an old Islamic cleric replaced Sabri’s on the screen. “Sheikh Hassan. A firebrand Islamist and, we believe, the spiritual leader of the group. The same officer who sent the e-mail arrested Hassan and his son at their Al-Futuh Mosque shortly before he was murdered. The Egyptian authorities are holding both men and several others they’ve rounded up from the mosque. The CIA has already sent a team to Cairo to begin interrogations.”
Haldane cleared his throat. “Mr. Secretary, do you believe the policeman’s information is correct about the base in Somalia?”
“We have nothing in the way of proof, Dr. Haldane,” Andrea Home answered for the Secretary in her clipped Ivy League cadence. “However, the rest of the officer’s information has thus far panned out.”
“Any idea where in Somalia they might be?” Savard asked.
“Somewhere north of Mogadishu,” boomed Secretary Whitaker in a surprisingly powerful voice for his shrunken form. “It’s the goddamn Wild West up there. Lawless!”
A map of Somalia popped up in the bottom frame of Haldane’s screen. Forming a sideways “V” that hugged Ethiopia and ran along the eastern coast of Africa, it stuck out into the Indian Ocean at its vertex.
“The CIA is reviewing the satellite imagery,” Hart explained. “But Secretary Whitaker is right, the north would be the easiest place to conceal a base.”
Whitaker shook his head. “We ought to go in en masse.”
“Do you remember our last Somali experience, Mr. Secretary?” Home glanced at her colleague with a flicker of annoyance. “The disastrous deployment in the early nineties?”
Whitaker snorted a laugh. “Andrea, we’re not talking about a humanitarian mission this time around. We find this terrorist base, and we replace it with a fifty-mile-wide crater.”
“Might not be so simple,” Gwen said.
“And why not, Dr. Savard?” Whitaker’s fierce eyes challenged through the computer screen.
“Because, Mr. Secretary, wiping out their base does not necessarily mean wiping out the virus,” Gwen said.
With fingertips touching a few inches from his chin, the President sat forward in his chair. “Please explain, Dr. Savard,” he said in his slight southern drawl.
“Initially, when the terrorists were trying to incubate the virus they would have needed a moderately sophisticated virology lab.”
“But now?” the President said.
“Mr. President, once they had established enough of a live base—say in eggs, chickens, primates, or even human volunteers,” Gwen stressed the last words. “They could take these live incubators anywhere and continue to infect more ‘suicide bombers.’ ”
“So they wouldn’t need their base anymore?” the President said.
“Mr. President, the
y may not need their base for a laboratory,” Secretary Whitaker said. “But they still need their base as a base. Where are a bunch of terrorists with infected chickens, monkeys, or whatever going to go?”
The NSA nodded. “The Secretary has a point, sir,” Home said. “They need a protected space from which to run their operations.”
“But if they know that we know ...” Ted Hart joined the discussion. “Then it’s hardly protected.”
The President tapped his fingers together and then nodded. “Seems to me the first priority is to find this base in Somalia.” He stared directly into the camera again. Haldane recognized the earnest expression for the one that had made his campaign ads so effective. “Doctors, do either of you have any suggestions?”
Haldane cleared his throat again. “Birds, sir.”
“Birds?” The President frowned.
“Birds are the natural carriers of all influenza viruses,” Haldane explained. “Without becoming sick themselves, they develop high levels of the virus in their bloodstream. If any of the virus has leaked from their lab, we would best find it among the local bird population.”
Whitaker shook his long narrow head angrily. “Let me get this straight, Dr. Haldane. You’re suggesting we go on a bird hunt through Somalia?” he scoffed. “Even if we did get lucky, wouldn’t it take weeks to check the blood of these animals?”
“Not necessarily,” Haldane said. “We have a rapid diagnostic test—what we call a PCR probe—for the virus that could give us a preliminary answer in less than two hours.”
“The terrorist’s ultimatum expires in forty-eight hours,” Home pointed out.
“Which means we have to act now.” Whitaker jabbed the tabletop with a fingertip. “We send the army and marines into Somalia, find this base, and eliminate it.”
Ted Hart turned to the Secretary of Defense. “Aaron, what if Gwen is right, and they’ve already left Somalia with their virus?”
“We know who they are. They are not ghosts anymore,” Whitaker boomed. “So wherever they go, we will find them.”
“We’ve known who Bin Laden is for over fifteen years,” Hart pointed out.