by Thomas Hopp
“That’s better,” said Nagumo.
Hawkins sigh with relief. Then he said, “You best git yo’ ass back in bed.”
He looked down and behind me, and I followed his gaze. The back ties of my gown were undone and my butt was in plain view. I clutched the gown to cover myself and backed away into the room.
McKean chuckled as I got back in bed. “Anyway,” he said, “Dr. Erwin’s about to declare this ward free of smallpox. We’re all healthy again. You couldn’t infect him if you wanted to.”
I called out to Nagumo. “I am sure Jameela is completely innocent. I’ll testify - “
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied. “Don’t be too upset. She’s only being held as a witness. She’s not charged with anything right now.”
“I want to hear about it immediately if she is,” I fumed. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” A wise-guy smile rippled on Nagumo’s mouth. “We’ll keep you informed.” He turned to Jameela and motioned toward the airlock. “Come on, Ms. Noori. We’d better get going.”
“Where to?” I asked as Hawkins led her down the hall.
“The Federal Building,” said Nagumo. “She’ll be held there in very comfortable quarters.”
I tied my gown and put on my blue bathrobe while Jameela went through the decontamination shower and dressed. She reappeared outside the glass wall in the riding outfit she had worn when we escaped the ranch. I went to the window and she came to stand opposite me near the speaker. Nagumo waited near the elevator.
She looked at me fondly. “I have enjoyed getting to know you, Fin Morton.”
“I hope I didn’t offend you too much with whatever I said in my fever.”
She smiled. “You are a romantic man. You spoke your heart.”
“Miss Noori?” Nagumo called.
“I must go,” she said. “I will miss you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll come and find you as soon as I get out.”
“Miss Noori?” Nagumo called more insistently, waving her to the elevator.
She left me at the wall and went to join him. We looked at each other one last time as the elevator doors closed.
Feeling morose, I wandered back into the room. McKean watched me curiously.
I sighed. “I wish there were more I could do.”
McKean started reading another medical journal, but his gaze moved between the page and me as if the article were not quite compelling enough to make him ignore my emotional state.
I sat down on my bed, my shoulders slumping. “I’m afraid I’ll never see her again.”
“She’s a remarkable young woman,” said McKean. “We’d be dead a couple of times if she hadn’t been there.”
“She’s a pretty good shot with a can of Pringles,” I said. “Remember the car chase?”
“Of course,” said McKean. “And it strikes me she is lucky to have you to look out for her. I’ve noticed something about you, my friend, over the course of the last few days.”
“What’s that?”
“You are a very caring fellow.”
“Caring, huh?” I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant.
“Some people care deeply about other people, and about right and wrong. I see you’re one of those, Fin, and I am proud to know you. Jameela should be glad.”
“Thanks, but I’m feeling just a little useless right now.”
“You’ll find a way to help her. I’m sure of that.”
“I’d go after her right now, if I weren’t stuck in here.”
McKean paused to make yellow mark in the journal. “That won’t be an issue much longer. I anticipate we’ll be free within the hour. Kay Erwin is meeting with the hospital’s medical board as we speak. She proposes to lift our quarantine, based on our recovery and our impressive antibody levels. I am sure the board will agree. I’ve already called my wife. She and my son will be here soon to pick me up. I would be packing my toothbrush right now, except I want to finish this article.”
“We can leave that soon?” I could hardly believe what he was saying.
“Um hmm,” he murmured absentmindedly, his eyes playing over a data graph. “We’ve done our service as guinea pigs and we’re on the way to full recovery. After Kay’s meeting, we can be gone as quickly as they bring our street clothes.”
“I’m going straight after Jameela,” I said.
McKean smiled. “I foresee much time spent in bureaucrats’ offices.”
PART FIVE: ATTACK AND COUNTERATTACK
Chapter 21
Within two hours, Kay Erwin signed our release papers. An orderly brought our clothes to the decontamination chamber. I showered and dressed and went out, stopping briefly to say goodbye to McKean at the window wall. He was up and about, having finished his reading. As I headed to the elevator, the doors opened and McKean’s wife and son stepped out, Sean rushing ahead of his mother. Father and son reunited at the window wall, placing their hands together through the glass as before.
“I got a sore shoulder,” Sean said. “They gave me a shot of your vaccine, and it hurts!”
McKean smiled. “But it will keep you from getting sick. That’s a pretty good deal, right?”
“Yep.”
McKean broke into a grin. The elevator doors closed as the family chatted at the window.
I made my way out through the hospital’s main entrance and gladly took the sunshine of a clear Seattle morning. I walked quickly to the hospital’s parking garage and reclaimed my Mustang. I was pleased to find her washed and detailed. When I got in, I noticed a faint aroma of disinfectant, but the blown-out side window provided more than adequate ventilation. The punctured front windshield was patched with duct tape.
I drove out onto the streets of Seattle, jazzed at the sight of bustling lunchtime crowds. I heard people conversing at street corners, saw them going about their business without fear. Joy filled me nearly to bursting. But I still had a serious matter to deal with. I drove to the Federal Building, parked on a nearby Diamond Parking lot, and put twenty dollars into the pay machine - enough money to last all night if necessary. Then I hurried inside to start my quest for Jameela.
I took an elevator to the floor where the FBI’s Regional Directorate was located. Nagumo’s office was at the end of a hallway paneled in honey oak. Inside a scalloped glass door, his receptionist, a bleach-blond middle-aged lady, sat behind an oak bureau wall with scalloped glass sliding panels that could be closed and locked. No, she said, she couldn’t tell me when I could see her boss. And ditto for his witness, Jameela Noori. She directed me to have a seat in the small waiting room outside her windowed bastion.
I sat on a worn old taupe couch, idly pawing the magazines piled on the coffee table. I went through the motions of reading about movie stars as the wall clock, a formerly modern one with dark brass hands mounted directly on the wood of the wall, moved slowly past two, then three, then four o’clock. My stomach growled. I groaned when one or another of my joints throbbed with a dull echo of my fever. I realized the disease had ravaged me more than I wanted to acknowledge. Weariness added to the frustration of my continuing neglect by Nagumo and his receptionist. I inquired at the reception window regularly, but was told repeatedly, “No. They’re not ready for you to see her yet.”
As I sat with little to occupy my thoughts, an image recurred in my mind - that moment on the North Cascades Highway when I had looked in the Mustang’s mirror and saw Jameela’s eyes, so wide, frightened, beautiful, and brave, framed by her dark hair blowing in the wind. In that instant when our eyes met, I had felt a timeless connection, as if I were looking back two millennia to glimpse Cleopatra’s regal, tragic beauty.
Something had occurred in that instant, on that highway, in those desperate circumstances, that now tore at my heart.
As the wall clock neared 5 pm, the receptionist made noises with her purse that suggested she was about to leave. I cursed under my breath, “I’m not going to let the federal bureaucracy have you, Ja
meela!”
Frustration turned to rage. Rationality fled. I stalked to the window and smashed my fist down on the ledge. “Right now!” I demanded in a madman’s voice. Blondie had fished some keys out of her bag. She dropped them back in and stared at me with wide, pale blue eyes, but said nothing.
“Did you hear me?” I smashed my fist on the ledge again. A flowerpot of primroses jumped off the edge and smashed on the floor. Terra cotta shards and potting soil scattered across the carpet.
“Sir,” she said harshly. “You can’t - “
“Yes, I can!” I shouted. “I’m going to see her right now or there’ll be hell to pay.” I smashed my fist down harder and the ledge snapped in two like a board in a karate demonstration. The halves tumbled to the floor and one landed on my foot. A jolt of pain shot from my toes to the top of my head. I bellowed in a rage and kicked the board across the waiting room. When I turned to the secretary again, her right hand was under her desk. She was pressing a button to summon help. “Go on!” I shouted. “You can put me in a cell right along with Jameela!”
As soon as I’d said it, I thought better. The last thing Jameela and I needed was to be jailed separately. Then, I would be no help to her at all. My best choice was obvious. I wheeled and went to the hallway door. As I threw it open, an alarm bell went off somewhere down the hall. I turned in the doorway and pointed a finger at Blondie, who was peeping over the bureau top. “I’ll be back,” I growled. Then I slammed the glass door, putting a crack in it, and rushed to the elevator. Fortunately, it arrived quickly, and empty. I went down, hurried out onto the street, and all but ran to my car.
I drove home, muttering that my vigil had been a waste of time, anyway. I tromped up the stairs to my apartment, puffing from the unaccustomed exercise after my long bed-ridden confinement.
Penny Worthe was waiting at our mutual landing. She was dressed in a blue skirt suit, white silk blouse, white hose and incongruous silver-and-lime-green jogging shoes. Her mousy brown hair was pulled back in a bun. She had probably just gotten home from work and paused when she heard me coming. She looked me over with a quizzical expression.
“Hi, Penny,” I mumbled.
“You’re not infectious, are you, Fin?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“I was so worried about you! You were on the news, you know.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“That isolation place sounds scary.”
“It is - was.” I unlocked my door and opened it.
“I got the Super to loan me a spare key,” she said. “I let myself in and watered your plants.”
“Thanks. I guess I expected them to be dead.”
“No. They’re fine.”
I went in and closed the door. I shambled to my loft bed, shedding clothing onto the floor along the way. I climbed the ladder and flung myself down on the mattress naked, planning to pass out as quickly as possible. I stared at the ceiling, by degrees admitting to myself that my chances of seeing Jameela Noori again hinged on people over whom I had no influence.
Eventually, my eyelids came down like curtains. I fell into an exhausted sleep.
A short time later, loud thumping jolted my eyelids open in the evening darkness. Someone was pounding on my apartment door. I climbed down from my loft bed, slipped on the T-shirt and boxers I had shed on the floor, and then went to the door.
“Who is it?”
“Penny.”
I opened the door and found her standing there in the frumpy, quilted, pink housecoat and fuzzy pink slippers she habitually wears. She clutched the housecoat together at the neck.
“Have you heard?” she asked excitedly.
“Heard what?”
She flew past me and went for the TV remote on the coffee table, navigating the dark room like an echolocating bat.
“Channel 44,” she said, switching on the television and plunking down on the couch.
Irritated, I closed the door, went to the couch, and sat down beside her. “Heard what?” I repeated.
“Just listen!”
A combat-helmeted reporter stood, floodlit against a dark sky, with streams of tracer fire arcing above him into the night. Covering his earpiece with one hand and holding his microphone near his mouth with the other, he hollered over the rumble of bomb detonations in the background.
“This is Jerald Rivers reporting from the Sultanate of Kharifa.” Beyond him, red cordite flashes silhouetted a mountainous horizon.
“I am embedded with a U.S. Marine expeditionary force that is in action here, reacting on a massive scale to information tracing the DNA of the jihad virus to this small country on the Arabian Peninsula. Air strikes are pounding the hills around me. A full-scale invasion is underway by air, land, and sea. Somewhere offshore lies a task force including the aircraft carrier Kittyhawk and several dozen support and assault ships.”
Three transport helicopters woofed loudly overhead, silhouetted black against red smoke and tracer fire and moving toward a distant city, which could be seen by the glow of several burning buildings.
“Kharifa has only a small military force,” the reporter continued breathlessly, shouting over the noise of the chopper blades, “but that force has been under assault by B-2 stealth bombers and cruise missiles since just after nightfall, about six hours ago. I came ashore with an amphibious force of Marines, and now a wave of troops is going in on helicopter gun-ships. This is the second flight of transport helicopters we’ve seen heading for the capital in the last fifteen minutes. The Marines are using overwhelming force. This tiny sultanate’s defenses are expected to fall by dawn, which is not far off.
“A major objective is the only hospital here, the Saqadat Hospital and Research Center near the middle of the capital. It is there that the original stock of smallpox virus used to produce the jihad virus, is said to be housed. Back to you, Heidi.”
The scene segued to an Atlanta news desk. “Recapping,” said a redheaded anchorwoman. “Government researchers used DNA evidence to trace the source of the jihad virus to a sample given to Saqadat Hospital for vaccine research purposes. Our sources tell us there was a time when Kharifa was considered friendly to the U.S. and such laboratory work with smallpox was viewed positively.”
“A prime target of tonight’s invasion is the ultra-modern Kharifa Medical Research Institute, located in Saqadat Hospital. We take you there now, where our Mariah Brahmaputra is embedded with the troops. Mariah?”
A dark haired woman stood with microphone to mouth as soldiers in dark green rubber combat suits with hoods and gas masks moved past her into the front doors of the hospital. She held her own gas mask and hood under one arm. “Good evening,” she said. “Actually it’s almost dawn here in Kharifa. The troops behind me are storming the hospital, where resistance has so far been, well, nonexistent. I am told that the objective is to seize and destroy anything related to biological weapons and to capture the head of the institute, a Dr. Ibrahim Taleed, who is rumored to have returned here just yesterday. The troops plan to destroy any biological agents with chemical disinfectants, confiscate microbiological equipment, and leave nothing of Dr. Taleed’s institute but empty rooms.”
She turned to watch the action behind her. Squads of soldiers with assault rifles moved unopposed into a new looking five-story flat roofed research laboratory with Arabic lettering above the main entry.
The reporter turned to face the camera again. “It appears the situation here is well in hand. Back to you, Atlanta.”
The frame shifted back to the anchor desk again. “Thank you, Mariah,” said Heidi. “We have more, regarding the link between the jihad virus and the Institute. For that, we take you to Fort Detrick, Maryland, where reporters caught up with General Vincent Moralez of the U.S. Army’s Biological Warfare Division earlier today.”
The scene shifted to a marble staircase outside a government building, where a uniformed general was surrounded by reporters. One asked, “Tell us, General, about the DNA code that enabled you
to identify the source of the virus. How was it discovered and by whom?”
“Sorry,” replied the General. “That’s classified information. If I told you, I would have to shoot you.” Smiling at his own chestnut, the general walked away. The reporter turned to face the camera. “Apparently that’s all we’re going to get from military sources, an acknowledgement that a DNA code was involved in the identification of the virus, but no further detail.”
I murmured, “So Peyton McKean has once again been passed over where credit is due.”
As the broadcast paused for a commercial break, Penny asked, “Are you hungry Fin?”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but, yeah, now that you mention it.”
She bustled across the hall and came back with a New York steak about the size of Manhattan. Acting on my instructions, she cooked it bloody rare and dished it up with broccoli and potatoes and gravy. I sat at the kitchenette counter and gulped it all down in big bites, even though I would have guessed my appetite could be satisfied by a cup of chicken soup. Afterwards, I flung myself on the couch like a python curling up to digest a water buffalo.
The TV sound had been down while I ate, but now Penny sat down on the other end of the couch, grabbed the remote from the coffee table, and turned the volume up.
Another a reporter with microphone was standing in front of an airport drop-off zone that looked distinctly American.
“Recapping,” he said, “a man identified as Sheik Abdul-Ghazi was arrested here today at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport while trying to board a plane for Yemen.”
“Abdul-Ghazi’s the man who infected you, right?” Penny asked.
“Yeah.”
The scene changed to a shot of another reporter standing at the side of a courthouse corridor, as armed bailiffs brought a man past the camera, one officer grasping each of the man’s elbows. The man was handcuffed and in an orange prisoner’s outfit. He had dark eyebrows and a dark stubble on his recently pig-shaved scalp, as well as on his bare cheeks and chin. The reporter did a voice over. “The Sheik was captured at the airport this morning while checking in under an assumed name.”