by Bobby Adair
Wycliffe looked down again at the money on the counter.
“Were you here when the flight to Nairobi left this morning?” Mitch asked.
“Yes.”
“Was there a group of Arab men on the flight?”
“No.”
“And yesterday’s flight?” Mitch asked. “Were you here then?”
“Of course,” Wycliffe said. “No Arab men were on that flight, either.”
“Did any other flights leave the airport?”
Wycliffe sucked on his lips and ground them between his teeth as he drew a loud breath through his nose.
“Was there another flight?” Mitch asked more firmly. “You’d know, wouldn’t you? With one scheduled flight a day, you’d know if another flight went out.”
Wycliffe seemed stuck between two choices. Mitch took a few more bills from his pocket and laid them on the counter. “Please, Wycliffe, I need to find these tourists.”
Wycliffe looked past Mitch and through a window on the far wall. Mitch followed Wycliffe’s gaze toward a small airplane hangar a couple hundred yards distant.
“What about that building?” Mitch asked.
Wycliffe drew a long breath to stall. “I was told to say nothing of this. Threats were made.”
Mitch looked at his watch. He looked at the clock on the wall. He wondered if grabbing Wycliffe by the back of the head and slamming his face into the counter a couple of times might change his mind. Instead, he scooped up the bills, and in a single motion stuffed them back into his pocket.
Wycliffe’s eyes went wide.
Mitch reached over, grabbed a telephone on Wycliffe’s side of the counter, and picked up the receiver. “Dial your supervisor’s phone number,” Mitch ordered.
“But—”
“Do it.” Mitch let his impatience boil up. Why not? He stood a full head taller than dithering little Wycliffe who was about to get a few knots on his forehead.
Wycliffe held up a placating hand as he pressed a finger to hang up the phone. He looked down to the spot on the counter where the money had been just seconds before. “For the gratuity you offered, I can tell you all I know of these Arab men.”
Mitch slammed the phone into its cradle, pulled the bills from his pocket, and smacked them on the counter. “Talk.”
Chapter 4
The hangar that Wycliffe pointed out to Mitch had a floor of disintegrating asphalt and smelled of old sweat socks. Several garden hoses snaked around mounds of clothes near one end. A couple of empty tables stood at the other. The hangar held nothing else of consequence.
In the dimness Mitch found a wooden rod that he used to rummage through the piled clothing, looking for clues. On the barest chance that he wasn’t yet infected, he didn’t touch the garments with his hands. In the dark, in the damp folds of those clothes, he had no doubt Ebola virions were alive—at least as alive as a virus could be.
All of the clothing was Western and modern: jeans, shirts, hoodies, athletic shoes, boots, and even loafers. Underpants, t-shirts, and a few baseball caps lay in the mix. Everything was dirty, streaked with reddish mud, and tinted in the same red dust that coated Mitch’s truck parked outside. Many of the items were stained with blood—not from the wearer’s wounds. There were no holes in the fabric. Mitch guessed the blood had belonged to the sick people of Kapchorwa.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed his boss.
“Yeah?” Jerry Hamilton picked up before the first ring finished.
“I’m in Kitale,” said Mitch. “I’m standing in an airport hanger that’s got to be full of the Ebola virus.”
“What’s going on there?”
“I got info from the airport manager that four loads of Arab men flew out of here between the hours of two a.m. and seven a.m. yesterday morning. It looks like maybe they showered and changed clothes in this hangar. It’s dark, damp, and warm in here, virus heaven. There’s gotta be a hundred sets of clothes on the floor.”
“Jesus,” said Jerry. “Tell me the hangar was locked, at least.”
“I walked right in,” Mitch told him.
“Shit.”
“I’m using a stick to poke through the clothes to see if I can find anything useful.”
“Anything yet?” Jerry asked.
“No, but I have to tell you, I’m torn between burning all this right here or spending more time going through it.”
Jerry asked, “Any idea on the planes’ destinations?”
“None,” said Mitch. “But Nairobi is the nearest international airport.
“Yeah,” Jerry agreed, defeated.
“What do you want me to do?” Mitch asked. “I can probably get to Nairobi in five or six hours.”
“No,” said Jerry. “We’ve already got people in Nairobi coming up to speed. We’ll have them at the airport hours before you can get there. You stay in Kitale for the time being. Lock that hangar down. Get yourself some protective gear, and go through that stuff. How many sets of clothing again?”
“About a hundred I’d guess.”
“Holy Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Mitch agreed.
“There may be something there that’ll give us a hint about what’s coming next.”
“I think we both know what’s coming next,” said Mitch. “This thing might be airborne. Almasi might know that, and he’s deliberately infected a bunch of his dimwit zealots to export Ebola around the world.”
“How certain are we on Almasi?” Jerry asked.
“I just have the delirious kid’s word for it.”
“I don’t know if that’s enough for me to get a cruise missile shoved up his ass, but I’ll work on it from this end.” Jerry sighed, and took a second to find his resolve. “We need to know as much as we can if we’re going to stop this. I’ll get a medical team sent your way. They’ll quarantine the site once you’re done.”
Mitch wanted some assurance that he wasn’t wasting his time. “That doctor in Kapchorwa told me it could be three days to three weeks before these guys are contagious, so as early as tomorrow I’m guessing. Have any new cases come up on the radar?”
“No,” said Jerry.
“You certain?”
“I know you’ve been out in the field, Mitch, but you don’t need security clearance to keep apprised of the Ebola situation. Every time there’s a new case in a Western country, the news flips out over it. Nothing new yet. Just the sprinkling of cases we’ve had—the ones linked to the East African outbreak.”
Mitch breathed a sigh of relief. There was still a chance.
“Let me know as soon as possible if you find anything. And Mitch—”
“Christ!”
“What? What’s that?”
“I found a passport. One of them dropped his passport here.”
Chapter 5
Najid Almasi stood at the end of the pier a hundred meters from shore and watched a transport ship being unloaded as the sun went down. Layers of old hull rust bubbled under the paint. Pieces of oxidized metal the size of playing cards flaked off and fell into the water. The cargo ship smelled of diesel and the sweat of men who’d been hauling goods on it since before Najid was born.
Dwarfing the cargo vessel, his father’s yacht, the Basima, sat anchored in the calm night waters of the Red Sea. The yacht’s handpicked crew of twenty, along with a dozen armed men, left room for twenty-four passengers in the luxurious staterooms. Behind the yacht sat anchored another rusty old ship, a near-obsolete tanker that had been delivering fuel to small islands in the Indian Ocean until just four days ago. Now its only purpose was to follow the Basima with a supply of fuel and provide her with the ability to stay out to sea for years.
That left the question of food and water. The Basima used ocean water to cool the engines, and the steam from that process was distilled into drinking water—dual-purpose and efficient. Food, or at least what would pass for food—canned, dried, and dehydrated—had already been loaded onto a third ship in Najid’s private little fle
et. Plenty of other goodies were loaded on that boat—goodies like weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies.
Those three ships represented a backup plan. Najid’s long-term goal—to emerge from the coming apocalypse as the undisputed ruler of Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the entire Islamic world—required that he stay in the country through the coming crisis. Only if things went badly—if the virus got out of hand, if the Saudi Army came in numbers he couldn’t defeat—would he escape on the ships, and ride out the apocalypse in grand comfort on the world’s oceans.
Najid shuffled slowly past pallets stacked high with bags of grain, each wrapped in clear plastic to keep the loads stable. He absently kicked spilled grains of rice between the pier’s boards and into the water twenty feet below. He wondered how many bags had been torn on their journey. He wondered how much rice had been lost during unloading. He wondered, as he watched the grains fall between the boards, if one day in the not-too-distant future, he might regret wasting half a handful of raw rice.
What he didn’t see in the dark between the lamps illuminating the pier in pools of yellow light were the rats, running to keep up with the food being offloaded from their floating home.
Najid did see Dr. Kassis trudging toward him under the weight of his weariness. He’d sacrificed his sleep to stay by Rashid’s bed in an effort that grew more futile with each passing hour. Rashid’s health had declined. No quantity of medicine, no degree of attention had any effect. Now, Dr. Kassis would be clomping up the length of the pier for only one reason. Rashid was dead.
Najid turned toward the water and leaned on a rail, compartmentalizing his grief as he watched lights glistening off the sea’s surface, looking like stars on a black sky. He thought about his father, already weak from his struggle with cancer. How would his father handle the news?
Najid turned his thoughts away from Dr. Kassis and Rashid, and wondered about all those villagers in Kapchorwa. He wondered about that American boy. What was his name? Austin Cooper? Had he died as well? Had all of them died? Was it possible that this airborne strain of Ebola was more lethal than any other before? Was it possible that instead of killing ninety percent of the sick, it killed them all? Neither Najid nor his men had seen any other survivors in Kapchorwa.
Realizing the weakness of those thoughts, Najid pushed them to the back of his mind. He couldn’t afford to allow doubt to grow in a field where his crops were already sown.
He cast a glance toward one of the buildings in the compound. There, on the second floor in the space of three guest rooms converted to offices, were his computer men—hardware guys, software guys, network guys—they were all the same to him. Najid’s cousin Hadi was responsible for all computer matters, gathering data, and analyzing information.
Forty-eight hours had passed since the last of Najid’s jihadists left Kapchorwa carrying the virus in their blood. Najid himself had been busy during that time, sleeping little and arranging what he could to prepare for the changes to come. Now, he had time, and he wanted information. Unfortunately, Hadi had no news yet to give.
Chapter 6
Salim Pitafi awoke disoriented. He’d dozed off sitting in a chrome-framed, brown-cushioned chair in an attached group of four that made up something of a couch. The chair was of pretty much the same design he’d seen on the concourses of airports in Lahore, Nairobi, Dubai, Frankfurt, Milan, Miami, and now...where was he? Atlanta?
Yes.
Atlanta was still a long way from home, but at least he was on American soil, no longer a foreigner with an alien accent.
He stared at an expansive, glossy terrazzo floor, and his eyes followed a pattern of glaring reflections toward a bank of windows. Outside in the rain sat a couple of big twin-engine jets, waiting for a refill of rushing, tense travelers, anxious to get to their important, personal somewhere.
Was it morning or was it afternoon? The clouded sky gave no hint. With countless layovers and time zone crossings, whenever he woke—wherever he woke—he felt lost. His world was a series of vignettes and déjà vu variations of a place he’d been before; different enough to instill confusion in his thoughts.
Salim didn’t know what day it was until he read it on his phone and confirmed it by looking at the ever-changing arrival and departure screens always hanging from ceilings, passively informing fliers of details for their comings and goings. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept in a bed. His body was rebelling. His stomach tormented him with heartburn, his knees and elbows ached, and his head throbbed. Gurgles in his abdomen were promises of unpleasantness to come.
Salim yawned, stretched, and rolled his neck around to work off a painful crick he’d developed when he’d dozed in his seat. Taking his bag off the cushion beside him, he pulled it into his lap, opening it to remove the envelope containing his travel documents. Searching through them was turning into a compulsion, an exercise in assertion, a claim to the tiniest bit of control over his life. Through the cumulative discomforts and pains of his ordeal, Salim counted the remaining flights until he’d reach his end. He told himself—no, promised himself—he’d then make a claim to his freedom.
Chapter 7
Paul Cooper’s brownstone faced east, so the front patio was shaded by the two-story shadow of his townhouse in the late afternoons and early evenings. Paul liked to sit at the wrought-iron patio table after work, feeling the cool crispness in the air while listening to the birds and the squirrels as he finalized any leftover work tasks, checked email, or generally killed time chatting with his friends on Facebook. Tonight, his laptop was open and animated browser ads tempted him to click. Inoculated against the allure of the flashy colors on his computer, Paul stared across the marigolds and deep purple petunias in the planter on the porch railing. He looked at the brickwork façade on the townhouse across the way. He wasn’t looking for anything, just staring, letting his eyes fixate on the pattern of gray mortar between tumbled red bricks. The wall looked so fashionably old—a century old perhaps—but was new construction only ten years prior. The bricks were a subtle detail; one of the reasons Paul had purchased a townhome in Town Center.
Off to his right, a jogger, a woman who ran by nearly every evening, trying to keep up with her lean gray Weimaraner, no worry on her face. She glistened with sweat, absently focused on the next step, the next hill. She didn’t have Paul’s problems to worry over. Her kids were probably at home watching scripted reality shows, eating potato chips, playing on their iPads, and worrying about whether their overpriced t-shirts and jeans looked fashionably old and raggedy enough around the seams.
Where was Austin?
Why didn’t he call?
What about that Mitch guy Heidi kept calling at the embassy in Kampala? Where the hell was he? His assistant, Art McConnell, wasn’t any help, either. He’d told Heidi—like, four or five days ago—that Mitch was on his way to Kapchorwa on other business and would call with word of Austin.
No word ever came.
Now both Austin and Mitch were gone, fallen into the African analogue of the Bermuda Triangle. Messages left for either of them were swallowed in the passive apathy of cyberspace. Art McConnell’s responses, cagey at first, were now not even that. He didn’t answer when Heidi called. Inquiries to other embassy personnel were now ignored. Dogged persistence hit a granite wall, and Heidi, for the moment, had met her match. Paul bet himself that by tomorrow Heidi would be calling higher-ups at the State Department in Washington. Then things would get interesting for Mitch Peterson and Art McConnell.
“Kenya closed its borders with Uganda.”
Paul looked up to see Heidi with two salad bowls in her hands. She set one on the placemat in front of Paul and the other on her placemat before seating herself. “I just heard it on the news while I was making dinner.”
Paul nodded. “I read a bunch about it on the Internet today. Ebola.”
“In Uganda?” Heidi stretched her face into a sad look. With her smile gone, her age showed through. “I’m worried.”
“I candied them in the oven, the way you like…” Heidi didn’t finish. She started to cry.
Paul laid his fork down and leaned over to hold Heidi.
He held her until she sniffled what seemed like the last of her tears. She wiped her face on his shoulder and laughed about leaving a streak of snot. Paul let loose and sat back in his chair. Heidi was a crier. She cried about anything. He’d stopped being distressed by her tears years ago. Trying to make it sound like he believed what he was saying, Paul said, “Austin’s probably fine. You know how he is.”
Heidi smiled weakly. “Everything always works out for him. But—” More tears.
Paul leaned over to hold her through another round.
When he let go the second time and sat back in his chair, he said, “If you don’t stop, our salads are going to wilt.”
Heidi laughed and wiped her damp cheeks. She stabbed her fork into her bowl. “I grilled the chicken with that new lemon pepper seasoning I got from that deli Lexi told me about.”
Paul tossed a chunk into his mouth. “Mmmmmm.”
Heidi smiled.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Paul told her again. “Thanks for making dinner.”
Heidi shrugged. “You said you were tired of going out to eat.”
“That’s a habit that might break itself if this Ebola thing gets out of hand.”
“Do you think it will?” Heidi asked.
Paul took a bite of salad and thought about it while he chewed. TBut thinking about it wasn’t necessary. He already knew his answer to that question. He liked giving his answers the gravity of contemplation, false or not. He nodded.
Heidi laid her fork in her bowl.