by Bobby Adair
“Let’s say five days.” Wheeler went on to ask, “What math are you doing in your head while you’re stuck in traffic?”
After a pause to finish her mental estimate, Olivia said, “It seems to me, the whole world’s population could get infected with this new strain in somewhere between four weeks and four months.”
“I’ll dig up a paper on that subject that you’ll enjoy. Very mathematical. It’s right up your alley.”
“Okay,” said Olivia.
“The problem gets complicated. Your assumption by doing your mental simulation based only on r nought is interesting but incorrect. It doesn’t take into account heterogeneous and geographically isolated populations.”
“Like people in Hawaii, perhaps.”
“To oversimplify, yes,” said Wheeler. “The upshot of the paper is that it’s nearly impossible to infect everybody.”
“Even if they’re not immune or vaccinated?” Olivia asked.
“Even if the whole population is susceptible.”
“So the good news is at least everybody won’t die?” Olivia laughed at the gallows humor.
“Yeah,” Wheeler joined in. “At least everybody won’t die.”
The joke about dying made her think about her dad and that turned into an emotion that she’d been trying to hide from all day. A sniffle that held back a tear escaped.
“What was that?” Wheeler asked. “Are you okay?”
Olivia didn’t want to say anything but with weighty topics on the table, what did one infected parent matter? “My dad caught it.”
“Ebola?” Wheeler was taken aback. “Your dad caught Ebola? How?”
“I don’t know. My stepmom called. They took him to the hospital. The test came back positive today.”
“Where?”
“Denver.”
“Your dad is the case in Denver?” Wheeler tried to hide his surprise. “I’m so sorry.”
“There’s more. I might as well tell you everything.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t tell you how I know this, but Austin—”
“Oh, no.”
“I don’t even know how to say it.” Olivia sighed in a way that sounded a lot like one of Wheeler’s dramatic sighs. “He caught it too.”
“My God,” he said. “How is he?”
“I don’t know. I said I couldn’t tell you details. I can say the only detail I got was that he had it and he wasn’t doing well. That news is nearly three weeks old. And that’s all I have.”
“I’m so, so sorry.”
“I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck.”
“You hide it well,” said Wheeler. “Listen. Get down here. I’ve got wine. I’ve got a guest room. I may try to get you a little drunk. You sound like you could use some inebriation. And I promise. I’ll be a gentleman. No worries there. Okay?”
“I’m on my way if I can ever get through this traffic.”
Chapter 51
Paul lay in his multi-adjustable hospital bed blankly staring at a television hanging from the ceiling across the room. He was confused and trying to put the pieces together. Everything seemed jumbled, like broken snippets of video, spliced together and running through his memory—incomplete, out of order.
You might be confused.
That phrase, in a doctor’s authoritative voice, repeated itself. Sometimes Ebola affects the brain.
You might be confused.
Paul wondered if he’d suffered brain damage. He wondered if he was going to die.
Wait, he’d been given some drug but couldn’t remember which one. He felt better. He was watching TV.
You might be confused.
The news was on the television. It was a story about him, Paul Cooper, complete with an image taken from his Facebook page. The video showed someone on a wheeled stretcher, covered in a thick pup tent of clear plastic, surrounded by faceless people in protective suits, pushing the gurney along.
Paul went to sleep.
Chapter 52
Austin sat alone in a weathered grass hut, looking through the open door, seeing rebels pass in the clearing outside, and hearing the voices of those rising to start their day. Smoke from the morning cook fire wafted in and aroused Austin’s hunger for a meager breakfast that would come later.
It was his third day in The General’s camp on the southern slope of Mt. Elgon. The routine was the same each day. Austin sat in the hut. Once in the morning, they brought him something to eat. In the late afternoon or early evening, he’d eat again, never anything like a full meal. He was given water when he asked for it, and a few times a day walked out into the woods to the camp latrine. They’d take him more frequently if he begged enough and the guard on duty wasn’t feeling lazy.
The sound of two people speaking just outside piqued Austin’s interest. A moment later, The General entered the hut. He smiled and said, “Good Morning, Ransom.”
Austin said, “Have you contacted my family yet?”
The General waved Austin toward the door. “Get up. I have something to show you.”
Wary, Austin pushed himself to his feet.
The General turned and exited the hut. “Hurry.”
Austin did as told. Once through the door, four guards in their late teens or early twenties fell in around them. Each of the guards carried an assault rifle, distinct from the others. Two of them wore ugly green and black camouflage military pants. One wore a grease-stained, olive-colored t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The others wore clothing that could have been worn by a bunch of high school kids—a t-shirt with a football team logo, a red and blue soft drink t-shirt, beige cargo shorts, and silky athletic shorts. Except, all of their clothing was filthy and stained in reddish dirt and green forest hues. Natural camouflage.
Glancing back, The General said, “You are my new houseboy, Ransom.”
“What?” Austin asked, understanding the words, just not the meaning.
Ahead, three painfully thin, bruised men—two Asians, and one Westerner—were being herded out of another hut as The General’s entourage neared. One of the Asians tripped over his feet and was summarily yanked back up. The General gestured at them. “From now on, you will sleep with them in that hut. You come to me at sunrise. When I dismiss you at night, you go back there and you sleep.”
The malnourished prisoners fell in behind The General’s entourage. Each of the prisoners had a length of frayed rope tied between ankles crusted with oozing scabs and buzzing with small, iridescent flies.
The General said, “Their names are Ransom too.” He loved his jokes.
“How long have they been here?” Austin asked.
The General replied, “I know what you are thinking right now.”
Austin, assuming The General was going to say more, waited. Instead, he stopped, and the whole entourage stopped with him. He looked at Austin, his face suddenly harsh. “Ask me.”
“Ask you?” Austin queried.
The General nodded slowly. “Yes, ask me to tell you what you’re thinking.”
Expecting some kind of punch or kick, and wondering a thousand things at once, Austin asked, “What am I thinking?”
The General pointed at the abused foreigners. “You want to know why those men stay when they only have a rope around their feet. They could untie the rope and run. They have no guard, though that may change.”
Austin didn’t know the other hostages had no guard, but he decided it was best not to point that out.
“They can go anywhere in the camp.” The General gestured grandiosely at the muddy ground, the trash, the huts—his kingdom. “They serve. They fetch water. They feed us. They do the women’s work. They are not watched. Yet, they do not run. They wait patiently for their ransoms to be paid, so they can go home.”
Austin looked around the dirty camp. Men were congregating lazily around a central clearing. The jungle rose up on all sides—thick, and full of places to hide. Austin figured he was about to be shackled with a piece of flimsy rope and tol
d like a dog to stay. Well, bad news for The General. Austin knew he didn’t have the strength to escape into the jungle that night, not even the next day. Three or four days from now—maybe a week—as soon as his captors got used to the idea that Austin wasn’t going to run, as soon as he had a little more of his strength back, he’d melt into the jungle, and run he would. And they’d never find him. Of that, Austin was sure.
The men who’d been gathering into a mob around the center of the camp parted to let The General through. Austin, the guards, and the other hostages followed along. Thirty or forty of The General’s fighters started chanting and dancing, with weapons raised in the air.
At the center of the circle, beside a dying cook fire, an emaciated Asian lay in the mud. Two rebels stood on his hands, pinning them in the sludge. One soldier sat on the Asian’s right leg. The Asian’s left leg was held with the foot lying on a thick log. The prisoner was crying and pleading in Japanese, or Chinese, or something.
Around the ankle being held down on the log, Austin saw a ring of worn skin and pus-leaking sores. The ankle matched the look of the other prisoners’ ankles, only the crying man had no rope.
Growing nervous, Austin looked around for clues as to what might happen next. No one was talking in a language he could understand. The chanting was riding up a crescendo.
A soldier with a worn piece of stained roped walked up to the crying Asian, knelt and pushed it roughly across his face. The soldier cursed and spat. He held the rope up and showed it to The General.
The General nodded in Austin’s direction.
The soldier came over, knelt in front of Austin, and tied the rope around each of Austin’s ankles. When he was finished, he stood up, drawing a machete out of a frayed canvas scabbard and presenting it to The General. Without any hesitation, without any thought, without any emotion, with all the ceremony of signing a check or entering a pin number while buying gasoline, The General hacked down at the foot lying across the log.
Blood sprayed. The prisoner screamed. Half a foot rolled off the log into the mud.
The General handed the bloody machete back to his soldier and looked at Austin. He pointed to a hut, different from the others, except that its metal roof appeared to have little rust. “Houseboy, be there when the sun rises. Sleep with your fellows at night. Stay until your ransom arrives.” He glanced down at the screaming, bleeding man who’d just lost half his foot. “Or run.”
Chapter 53
Olivia had just finished her lunchtime run—four miles at an easy pace. She walked along the edge of a green field bordered by thick trees. The office building, one she’d initially liked, she had come to despise. She turned away from it and looked at the trees. She wasn’t happy with the trees, either. Even though it was late September, the trees, for the most part, still held their green leaves. She wanted autumn color.
She took her phone out of her pocket and dialed Mathew Wheeler, hoping to catch him at lunch or between meetings.
“Hello?” he answered almost immediately.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey, yourself. What’s up?”
“Have you got time to talk?” she asked.
“Sure.”
Olivia hadn’t thought that far into it. She’d had the urge to call and talk. That was it. But she wasn’t ready to admit that, so she went with the first thing that came to mind, a ridiculous thing that had come up in the queue. Laughing a little, she said, “I came across a story this morning that I started to research. It’s probably a waste of time.”
“A medical story?” Wheeler asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ve got a few minutes. Maybe I can help.”
Laughing again, Olivia said, “The story was pretty much a list of accusations by a guy who’s supposedly a doctor. It dealt with misleading work being done by the CDC and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.”
“What kind of misleading work?” Wheeler asked, concerned.
“I’d say the core of it is that nobody actually isolated the new strain of the virus, and that all of the testing done on the monkeys to show it was airborne—and any work you’re doing now on a vaccine—is spurious. Yes, spurious is the word he used. He said because you hadn’t isolated the virus, you couldn’t possibly know if anything you were doing or any conclusions you were drawing were accurate. I laughed, because I knew that you guys had done that first. You guys did identify the new strain. You told me that, right?”
Wheeler paused for a long time.
Olivia stopped walking. “What?”
Wheeler heaved one of his tortured sighs. “The article has some truth to it, but at the same time, it’s not true.”
“That sounds like the kind of thing people tell you when they’re thinking up a good lie.”
“Don’t—” Wheeler stopped himself and said, “If you’ve got a minute, I’ll explain. You’re bright. You’ll understand.”
“Okay.” Olivia was starting to feel pretty sure she wouldn’t.
“For starters, we ran the new strain of Ebola through our electron microscope. We’ve tested it nine ways to Sunday. It’s unique. Definitely a new strain. That’s identification.”
“So far. It sounds like there’s no problem at all.”
“Identifying the new bug doesn’t mean all that you think it does. Identification and isolation aren’t the same thing. In order for us to be certain that symptoms we’re seeing in people and in the monkeys we tested are from the new strain, we would have to find a way to isolate and grow the new strain in some medium. You follow me so far?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a time-consuming process, sometimes very time consuming. If we’re lucky, it could take weeks. If not, it could take months, maybe longer.”
“Oh, crap.”
“Exactly,” confirmed Wheeler. “You ran your spreadsheet simulations after I gave you the r nought data. You know each day costs lives, and with every day that passes, the cost goes up. We don’t have months to spend on being absolutely certain we have the right bug.”
“You’re guessing? Are you telling me it could be something other than the new strain of Ebola that’s making everybody sick, and that the existence of the new strain of Ebola in the samples is a coincidence?”
“That’s it exactly,” said Wheeler. “I have to tell you, and you’ll know it’s true when I say it, that all the evidence points to Ebola K being the culprit. Nearly every researcher looking into this—hundreds, maybe thousands—believes it is. A handful don’t. Even their concerns aren’t so much that we’re wrong, as that we’re skipping a step in a well-defined, scientific process. We’re not doing science now, Olivia. We’re just trying to cobble something together to save lives.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Wrong?” Wheeler asked. “It won’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Think about it, Olivia. If we spend three months delaying a therapy, delaying a potential vaccine, how many billions, and I did say billions, might die?”
Olivia didn’t answer. She knew the number was more than one billion and less than seven.
“If we proceed and get it wrong, how many billions will die?”
“The answer doesn’t change much,” she admitted.
“That’s why, in this case, being wrong doesn’t matter. We’re rolling the dice and hoping for a seven.”
Olivia started to say something.
“Let me change that. We’re rolling the dice and hoping for anything but snake eyes.”
Chapter 54
“The confusion passes,” said Dr. Bowman.
“The last few days are a blur.”
“The good news is you’re responding spectacularly. How do you feel this morning?”
“Better,” Paul answered. Throughout the past several days, everything had hurt, he hadn’t been able to hold a complete thought in his mind, and then there was extreme gastrointestinal distress. Paul asked, “Did I have Ebola?”
> Dr. Bowman’s hooded head bobbed up and down. “You were lucky.”
“I’m going to make it?” Paul asked.
Nodding again, Dr. Bowman said, “Your viral load has plunged dramatically. You seem to be on your way toward recovery, but don’t get too optimistic. We need to be cautious. You’ve been given an experimental drug.”
Shaking his head, Paul said, “I don’t remember that.”
In a surprisingly defensive tone, Dr. Bowman said, “Your wife approved—”
Shaking his head emphatically, Paul said, “Oh no. I wasn’t making an accusation. I just—” He put a hand to his head. “Everything seems jumbled up.”
Back in a normal tone of voice Dr. Bowman said, “That’s not unusual. Blood clots in the brain. We don’t have much information on the long term effects of an Ebola infection, but what we do know indicates that people recover fully.”
Paul nodded and asked, “Is Heidi here?”
“Of course.”
“Can I see her?”
Dr. Bowman shook his head. “She can’t come into the quarantine room. You understand.”
No. He didn’t understand. If the doctor could wear a plastic tent, why not Heidi? Paul nodded anyway.
Dr. Bowman pointed at a telephone handset on a nightstand beside the bed. He then pointed over to a smallish window with a metal mesh in the glass, built through an interior wall. Heidi stood on the other side of the window with a handset pressed up to her ear. “You can talk to her through the intercom.”
Seeing Heidi’s pained smile and tearful eyes, Paul grabbed for the phone. “Heidi.”
“Paul,” she said as she shook her head and started to sob.
Paul looked over at the doctor then back at Heidi. “Dr. Bowman says I’m going to be fine.”
“You’re a liar, Paul Cooper.”
Paul looked back at the doctor for confirmation. “He said I’m responding well.”
“I know more about how you’re doing than you do,” she told him.
“So you know I’m going to make it, then.”
“You’re probably going to make it,” Heidi agreed.