by Bobby Adair
“My friend Marco was in sales for this computer company, B2B type stuff.”
“Business to business?” Olivia asked.
“Yeah,” Barry confirmed. “He had to travel to Europe to see his customers, maybe once or twice a month. About half the time when he traveled, he’d get pulled out of line and hassled by customs, coming and going, here and in Europe.”
“Why?”
“That’s what he asked,” said Barry. “After missing some flights and dealing with a ton of frustration, it turned out that he had the same name as some fugitive from a Mexican drug cartel.”
“What?”
Nodding, Barry said, “Marco jumped through all kinds of hoops to prove he wasn’t this other guy, but the hassling never stopped. Eventually, he had to move his family to Europe to be close to his customers. He was missing too many flights and too many meetings.”
“Are our systems really that bad?” Olivia asked. “Surely Marco Vasquez had other identifying data—social security number or its Mexican equivalent, passport number, things like that.”
Barry nodded. “Yes, yes, and yes.”
She shook her head in disbelief.
“Do you remember our friend Salim Pitafi, one of the original members of our list?”
Olivia nodded.
Barry leaned in close again and in a hushed voice said, “Three Salim Pitafis have been detained, two here in the US.”
“But we had more than just his name,” she replied. “We have all of his identifying information.”
He shrugged. “We’ve got three, and none of them are the one we’re looking for.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He shook his head.
“Please tell me he’s the exception.”
Barry looked at Olivia with a blank face.
Chapter 26
Tiny even when compared to Kapchorwa, Chebonet was the first hamlet on the road to Mbale. Having taken longer and longer rest breaks throughout the morning, Austin walked the dirt road into Chebonet in the early afternoon. A familiar smell fouled the wind. Faint cries carried out of the houses. No people were on the road, on their porches, not working in nearby fields. Chebonet felt like Kapchorwa on the evening when he and Rashid had returned from Mbale to find Ebola marauding through the population.
On advice from Dr. Littlefield, Austin didn’t approach any house in Chebonet, though he examined the darkness he saw through open doors and windows. The shadows revealed nothing but an occasional pair of eyes peeking back. At what might have been the halfway point of the village, two teens came out of a ramshackle storehouse and followed Austin, keeping their distance. When Austin stopped and looked back, he saw that each held stones in their hands. Austin waved and said hello, hoping to assuage their fear of him with a smile and friendly words. One of the boys yelled something angry in the local language and hurled a stone. Austin sidestepped the rock, only to see another one hurtling toward him.
Austin lost his smile as he backed away, quickening his steps.
The boys started picking up stones, throwing each as soon as the stones were in their hands.
Austin ran.
The boys chased.
Before Austin’s weakened muscles gave out, the boys stopped and went back to standing in the middle of the road, casting themselves in threatening poses and shouting curses. Austin put some distance between him and the boys, but reached a point where he could run no more. He stumbled as he slowed, barely managing to keep his fatigued feet under him. He tried a fast walking pace and found he couldn’t even manage that. As he passed the last of Chebonet’s houses, he looked over his shoulder.
The boys weren’t coming.
Thank God.
Austin passed around a bend in the road. On the edge of a field, he spotted dark shade under squat trees. He left the road and walked far enough into the trees so that he couldn’t be seen. He dropped down by a tree trunk and caught his breath, then removed one of the water bottles from his bag and drank it down. His arms felt heavy, and his fingers tingled as he flexed his hands. He felt like he’d just run a fast mile, though he knew he hadn’t run more than a few hundred yards.
He felt like he was being lazy, but he couldn’t deny the fatigue he was feeling. He had to rest, again. He removed a banana from his bag, peeled it, and ate it. With a few hours of daylight left, he then closed his eyes, waited for his breathing to slow, and passed out from exhaustion.
Chapter 27
Austin woke to the sensation of a large bug crawling on his face. He shot upright, slapping at the bug and shivering at the sensation. He ran his hands over his arms and then rubbed them over his body, checking for anything, bug or reptile, that might have found him to be a comfortable sleeping bag. Thankfully, there were none. He looked around and realized it was morning. He’d slept through the night in the stand of trees by the road.
His muscles ached, reminding him to be careful. Trying to push himself at a pre-Ebola pace was a mistake. He needed to stop thinking in terms of miles. He needed to pay attention to how he was feeling. He needed to rest more frequently and for longer periods.
Austin took his time eating the last of his food: two mangos—one not quite ripe—and he drank the last of his water.
His number one priority for the day’s walking would be to keep an eye out for a well. The second priority would be to find some fruit trees growing close enough to the road so that he could harvest—steal—something. Better, he hoped to reach a village where the infection hadn’t already arrived. All of Austin’s belongings had been burned in the Kapchorwa fires, but he had money given to him by Dr. Littlefield and Kristin Mills. With that he could buy food, water, and more.
Chapter 28
Eric’s door was closed. Through the glass wall of his office Olivia saw him sitting at his desk, staring blankly at a computer monitor, doing nothing with idle hands. His shoulders were slack. He looked defeated. Olivia shoved the door open hard enough that it hit the doorstop with a startling bang.
Eric jerked out of his daze.
She stomped in, making little effort to hide her anger.
Eric sighed and motioned toward a chair. He rubbed his palms into his eyes as though his fatigue might be erased through the effort. It wasn’t. His eyes were redder than before.
Olivia planted herself between the chair and the desk, pursing her lips and glaring at Eric.
He sighed again. “Please sit.”
She stood her ground for a moment longer and then dropped into the chair.
“It’s clear you’re pissed about something, but I’m not in the mood to be yelled at by anybody.” Eric looked absently back at his computer monitor. “You’re not the only one with problems, you know.”
Olivia huffed once more to clarify the enormity of her effort to restrain her anger. “I read through your email and the attachments.”
Eric looked at his watch. “I sent that out like, six hours ago.”
“I was busy with something this morning and I didn’t read it until I got back from lunch.”
“Well you should have read it this morning.” Eric waved a hand across the expanse of his office. “You could have come in here and protested with the rest of them.”
Olivia’s tone softened. Half her anger was over the fact that she thought she was still being singled out. “I know this didn’t come from you—”
“I don’t make policy,” said Eric. “But just to be clear. I’m your boss. You’re my subordinate. I sent the email because you’re being directed to perform the specific duties listed. I’ve been directed to ensure that you do.”
She huffed again. “You know what we do here, right?”
Eric shook his head and rubbed his eyes again. “I told you, I’m not in the mood, Olivia. If you need to go out and run off your anger with another three or four miles, go do that. Get a shower, and then come back up. We can talk about all of this like rational adults. Hell, maybe you can skip the run and find some magical way to calm you
rself down.” He drilled a pair of hard eyes at Olivia. “Or, and I say this as a friend, you can get the fuck out of my office, and come back another time.”
Olivia held Eric’s gaze for a moment, then looked out through a window and chewed the inside of her cheek while she thought. Without any sincerity of tone to back it up, she said, “I’m sorry. I am angry. I know this isn’t your doing. I just…” Olivia ran out of words as her anger boiled back up.
Eric leaned forward on his desk, and his face softened. “Olivia, do you know what the average absentee rate across US businesses is?”
“No,” she replied.
“Nine percent,” Eric told her. “Do you know what it is this week? Nationally?”
“No.”
“Just over thirteen percent. What that means is fifty percent more people than usual decided to skip work last week. You know why?”
“Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, Eric.”
“Because they keep reading about Ebola in the news, on Twitter, on Facebook. They hear it on the radio. And everything they hear is exaggerated to scare the shit out of ‘em so they’ll come back and read or watch or listen some more.”
“And?”
Eric continued, “You understand, or should I say that a bright young lady such as yourself—someone who’s good with data, good with numbers—should be able to deduce that our economy is going to take a hit. Not to mention what’s happening because of the airlines.”
Olivia nodded.
“If it all continues, then next week absenteeism will hit fifteen percent, then twenty, then who knows.” Eric snorted. “There’s no reason for it other than people being scared when they don’t need to be.” Eric paused and looked her up and down.
Olivia said nothing.
“The directive I emailed this morning,” Eric asked, “what do you think it tells you to do?”
“There’s some kind of work queue set up—”
Eric interrupted, “And you have access to the queue. Did you check that your permissions allowed you in?”
“I can access the queue from my computer,” Olivia confirmed.
“Good.”
She continued, “I read the examples in the directive. I read through some of the cases in the queue.”
“And?” Eric asked.
“Some other group, maybe some group at the NSA, is actively censoring the Internet. Anything negative about the pandemic—”
Eric held up a hand to stop her. “Don’t use that word.”
Olivia huffed.
“You read the directive.”
“Dammit, Eric.” She pounded a fist on his desk.
“I know you’re frustrated.”
“Frustrated?” Olivia yelled. “It’s not just that I can’t use the word pandemic even though you and I—and everybody on the planet—can see that’s what’s going to happen.”
“No, I can’t,” said Eric. “That’s part of the problem. Smart people like you believe things are worse than they are. People are sick, lots of them, mostly in Africa. Elsewhere, we’ve got a few hundred cases getting hyped all to hell.”
She ignored Eric and proceeded. “I have to work through a queue of censored web pages, figure out who posted them, and pass those names back through the application to who knows what group. Eric, it frightens me that this application even exists. When the hell was it written?”
Eric leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. When he looked back down at Olivia, he’d passed his point of frustration and was now angry. “Don’t be stupid. Again, I say that as your friend. Don’t act like every movie you ever saw about big government conspiracies is true. You get paid to look at data and draw conclusions, and from those conclusions, the government takes action. Well guess what? I know you won’t believe it, but there are people in the government’s employ who are smarter than you, have more experience than you, have more access to classified material than you—”
“Everybody right now,” Olivia sniped.
Eric ignored the dig. “These people think of things that might happen, and then more people just like them decide what contingency plans can be made, and then even smarter people decide which of those contingency plans should be executed. These people are tasked with protecting Americans from tomorrow’s threats. You understand?”
Olivia understood, but didn’t grace Eric with a response.
“Whether you agree or not, America is under attack. You think it’s from terrorists with Ebola, and I agree that you’re right. Those shit stains are screwing the whole world, but it’s not as bad as you make it seem. It’s not as bad as anybody makes it seem. The real problem, and the reason they call these fuckers terrorists, is because right now America is under attack by fear.”
Olivia replied with a sneered, “Yes, FDR.”
He shook his head at that remark. “It doesn’t matter whether that fear is something planned by the jihadists, whether it’s a part of some bigger plot to destabilize Western economies, or whether it’s just the natural fear people feel over what looks like a disease crisis in the making. All of it has the same effect. People don’t come to work. Commerce grinds to a halt. A recession turns into a depression, and who can guess whether America or any Western country survives?”
Eric took a deep, calming breath, his anger having run its course. “The application was written to combat this kind of problem. The news channels, newspapers, websites, blogs, Facebook posts, and tweets are all feeding and amplifying the fear in a self-perpetuating feedback loop. If we can’t interdict this flow of information, the very real effects of what at some point will be pure, frenzied fantasy will destroy our economy and our country.”
“There are groups out there right now in the government,” Olivia asked, “searching through all these media sources and censoring them?”
Eric nodded.
“Then they add them to the queue I need to look at?” Olivia asked. “The people I need to identify and locate?”
He nodded again.
“Censorship alone isn’t enough?” she asked.
Eric shook his head.
“What’s going to happen to the people I find? Are they going to be warned, arrested…” Olivia gulped before she continued with her accusing question, “or killed by the CIA?”
He said nothing as Olivia waited for an answer.
She said, “Those weren’t rhetorical questions.”
Eric still said nothing.
“They’re going to be killed?” Olivia asked. “We’re talking about American citizens.”
“Olivia, I’m not saying that’s going to happen.” Eric looked down at his hands on the desk, and seemed to take an intense interest in their inactivity.
Olivia took the opportunity to let her anger run again. “This is censorship in the worst way. We’re taking away information the people might need in order to protect themselves. And I doubt—no—I truly hope that the government isn’t going to harm the people we’ve been directed to find. Either way, this whole thing stinks of the rankest form of censorship. This isn’t who we are. This isn’t the America I grew up in.”
Eric laughed bitterly.
“What?” Olivia was self-conscious. “What?”
“This is exactly the country you grew up in.”
Derisively shaking her head, she replied, “I never took you for part of the tinfoil hat crowd, Eric.”
Shaking his head, Eric responded. “You think all that white-cowboy-hat-wearing-good-guy bullshit you learned about in American History in the third grade is true? Is that why you came to work here, Olivia, because you’re a true patriot?”
“I can love my country without having to suffer your condescension, Eric.”
“Sorry.” He settled back in his chair. “That wasn’t called for.”
“I’m quite aware that America is not perfect. No country is. I do believe we’re closer to perfection than the majority of other countries, though.”
“I don’t disagree with that, Olivia. All I’m saying is c
ensorship has been rampant in this country for a long time. Hell, if you go back and read your history, you’ll know that the Espionage Act passed in World War I damn near took away anyone’s right to say anything remotely derogatory about the government or its policies.”
“I don’t understand exactly what we’re protecting here,” said Olivia, running out of steam.
Eric rubbed his eyes until he renewed the redness. “I’m tired of beating this argument to death.” He rolled his head around to stretch his neck muscles, and then looked at his computer monitor as though something there might be urgent enough to cause him to chase Olivia out of his office. “I don’t know how much of what I’ve heard about Ebola is real or bullshit. I do know things will get worse before they get better. I don’t know if chasing down the people who are spreading these stories is right or wrong. I’m just as pro free speech as anybody, but principles are easy to hold when you’re arguing for them in a college dorm while mommy and daddy pay your tuition. I don’t know what will happen to the people whose names we enter into the system. I’d like to believe they’ll get a stern talking to, and they’ll go back to posting porn pics, selfies, memes, and fart jokes. I have to accept that the ones who persist submit themselves to iteratively more severe punitive remedies.”
Olivia scoffed, “Punitive remedies?”
“I don’t know where this Ebola thing goes. I know what’s happening in Africa better than most. I have two children I’ve always told myself I’d do anything to protect.” Eric leaned forward, having finally found his strength. “Well, anything is here, and I’ll do what I need to do if I believe it helps keep my kids safe.”
“This doesn’t help your family,” Olivia weakly argued.
“You’re smart, young, and pretty. You won’t have a problem finding a new job if that’s what you want. This is what reality looks like now, Miss Idealism. Get on board with it, or pack your shit and go home.”
Chapter 29
From the middle of the road where he walked, cautiously keeping his distance from houses, cars, and the few people he saw, Austin suspected Ebola had beaten him to Sironko. He hadn’t yet seen a body lying with open eyes staring at an unforgiving sky. He hadn’t seen any people with bleeding ears or noses. However, the air did carry the putrid smell of bloody diarrhea. The mournful keen of dying children reached out from dark windows. The feeling of a town full of vibrant people withering into ghosts was unmistakable.