Ebola K: A Terrorism Thriller: Book 3 (15 page)

Tired and angry, Paul stared at the book in his lap.  It wasn’t one that he’d have ever picked up at the bookstore.  He didn’t like the cover.  He didn’t know the author.  It wasn’t his genre.  It was, however, available.  He’d traded his previous book and a tin of Army rations to the guard who’d decided to make his black market living in the books-for-rent business.  Because that’s effectively what it was.  One tin of rations to read the book.

The sharing of books—the paper kind—was banned by state law.  Everyone feared the Ebola virus could live forever on a porous surface, but it couldn’t.  Laws had been made in a hurry on hunches and rumor.  Who knew how many of the laws did more bad than good?

Paul sure didn’t. 

What he did know was that he was bored and books provided entertainment.  He knew he’d come to despise every authority that lorded its rules over the smallest details of his life.  So whether he liked the books or not, he traded for them.  They were an expression of his rebellion against his new masters.

And then there was the argument he’d had with his new friend, knucklehead Larry.  As had become his new habit, Paul hauled half the load of contraband plasma up the hundred-foot ladder, following Larry to the surface every evening.  The last time up, Larry had taken Paul’s bag and proceeded into a vein-bulging rant of accusations and flying spittle.  Something about ratting him out to Captain Willard and fucking everything up.

Larry, not the most articulate of men, lost his ability to construct a cohesive point during his diatribe.  When Paul decided it was going to come to blows, he prepared himself to preemptively punch Larry in the throat, a way to bring the fight to a quick close.  Before that happened, Larry surprised him by turning and stomping toward the warehouse.

Paul stood in the dark trying to sort out the accusations, wondering what he’d been guilty of.  Had he not kept his contraband plasma bags hidden in his lab well enough? Had he slipped up and said something to one of the guards? Paul didn’t think so.  The only thing he was sure of was that Larry was going to drop a larger load of empty bags in his lab overnight, and Paul had damn well better fill every bag, or he’d be sorry.  They were no longer in the business of helping those sick kids, except for the extra bags Larry could steal from the stash of contraband bags.  They were now in the business of enriching a cabal of corrupt officers.

Everything about this camp, everything about the world stank of corruption, of people tossing their ethics aside to get a better spot in line for a cure.  It disgusted Paul so much he didn’t even think about the path he’d taken to immunity, getting himself first in line in all of Denver.

Of course, that thought nagged at the edges of his conscious mind only to be pushed away as he stared at the pages of his book, not reading, not even thinking about the content.  He ignored the sounds in his clinic.  He ignored the volunteers on their beds, connected to the machines.  All he had any interest in were dark thoughts that needed every bit of his attention.

It was the panicked hollering of one of the three volunteers that finally snapped Paul out of his trance.

When Paul looked up, all three machines were chirping and one was making another noise, a cyclic, muffled grind.  The girl in the middle was trying to lift a restrained hand to point to her right.  She was shouting fast, frightened words.  The guy to her left was trying to sit up to see.  The woman on her far right was lying on her bed, mouth agape, eyes wide and staring at nothing.  Her skin was translucent white in a way that punched Paul with a painful familiarity he couldn’t quite grasp.

Then he saw the wide pool of crimson beneath her bed.  He saw blood pulsing out of the seams in the plasmapheresis machine’s plastic housing.

The woman was bleeding out.

The machines chirped on. 

The grinding one was sounding alarms Paul had never heard before.

The woman in the center cot screamed at Paul to do something.

Paul didn’t know what to do.  He didn’t know what was wrong, didn’t know what was happening.

He ran to the door and swung it open.  “Guards!”

He sprang across the room.  He reached down and yanked the plug out of the wall to stop the grinding, chirping, dripping machine.  He pulled the pencil-thin plastic tube and the needle in the woman’s arm pulled free, taking the tape with it.  The needle left a hole, small but seeming to gape with gurgles of blood pumping out in heartbeat regularity.  Paul took some cotton pads from his pocket and pressed them to the holes in the woman’s arm, then taped them in place.

“Shit!” Paul had no idea what to do next to help the woman.

A guard came into the room and shouted something.  A doctor was on the way.

He looked down at the woman’s face.  He couldn’t tell if she was breathing.  He couldn’t feel a pulse in her wrist.  But the blood had been a weak, pulsing fountain.  He ran through in his mind what he’d done when he hooked her up.  Sure, he’d tried several times to find the vein; he’d poked her three, four times? He didn’t know. 

Could that have had anything to do with the malfunction?

Paul was on the verge of panic, driven by a life on the precarious edge of death and a pending guilt he didn’t want to bear. 

Paul didn’t want another death on his conscience.

He looked at the woman’s face again.  He stared, willing her to life.  But he saw a hint of something else.  All he saw was familiar, dead, bloodless flesh he’d seen once before, the day when he’d come home and found Heidi dead in the dining room.

The problem, Najid thought, as he listened to the man on the other end of the telephone, was that Ebola had made the men of government a fluid rather than static problem.  Dubai was handling it better than most countries.  The Sheikh had declared early in the epidemic that every civil servant—every official—have a list five men long of replacements, the line of succession.  When the top man fell ill, the next in line would step up and fill in at the end of the line with his choice for successor.  When vacancies came up in the middle of the list, he’d fill in from the end.

Of course, much infighting followed, the more important the positions.  And few men who were experienced in their positions stayed there.  They died just as quickly as everyone else, leaving inexperience and incompetence in their wake.  So while much of Dubai’s government appeared to be intact, it was nothing more than a mask over a bureaucracy growing more ineffective by the day.

The problem was the same across the UAE and Oman.  They’d adopted the same solution. 

The problem became acute for Najid because the men he’d actively recruited in the governments often died, leaving Najid to recruit again, mostly in the form of bribery, sometimes in gold or silver, sometimes with food or promises of powerful positions in a post-Ebola world. 

So it was that Najid was on the telephone, “You said your name is Saeed Dalelv?”

Dalelv confirmed.  He explained his position.  He named the man he’d replaced, an Ebola victim just four days prior.  Dalelv had been the man’s assistant and knew the job well, or so he said.  One of the instructions that Dalelv’s predecessor had left him with was to inform Najid Almasi about anything having to do with any Western government’s interest in Dubai, especially if that government was the United States.

During the negotiation for payment, Dalelv said something that piqued Najid’s interest. 

“Say that again,” Najid ordered.

Dalelv, startled by Najid’s sudden change in attitude, said, “The Americans are requesting permission to fly through our airspace, to possibly land in a remote location at their discretion and then fly away again.”

“Do you have more details?” Najid asked.

“I do not,” said Dalelv.  “I found it vague and interesting enough I thought I should pass the information on to you.”

“What became of the request?”

“It was denied.” Dalelv said it as if it was a matter of course.  “Insufficient information was supplied.  I was not privy to the conversation, but the man who complained of it to me intimated that the Americans were planning one of their covert operations on sovereign Dubai territory and that it would be in everyone’s best interest not to allow them to proceed.” Dalelv couldn’t help but add his editorial views.  “With all that is happening in the world, can the Americans not satisfy themselves with their own problems for a change?”

Najid did not answer.  The question was obviously rhetorical.

Into the silence, Dalelv said, “There is one other thing.”

“Tell me.”

“The man who provided me the information about the denial of permission told me the Americans contacted his counterpart in Oman with a similar request.”

“Was that request granted?”

“It was.”

Najid, healthily paranoid from the bombing he’d survived, believed he might be the target of this American interest.  “Do you have a date and time when this incursion is due to arrive?”

“I do.”

Najid listened and then told Dalelv, “This must be delayed.  I do not care if it is stopped, but it must be delayed.  I need an extra day to make arrangements.  My gratitude to the man who could arrange such a thing would be significant.”

Salim watched Paul make his way slowly up through the jungle gym of ladders and catwalks until he came to a stop again at Salim’s door.  Salim knew he’d return.  Even Salim knew the story he’d spun up with half-truths and lies wouldn’t stand up to inquisitive contemplation.

He’d wished a thousand times he hadn’t said anything to Paul Cooper, but in those days leading up to that one in Paul’s clinic when he’d gotten Paul’s attention, he’d felt a compelling need that grew and grew until he’d had no choice.  Each time he saw Paul, he looked like a man carrying a burden that would soon crush him.  Salim believed that news of Austin might help him.  Unfortunately, Salim never thought much past that point.  Hence, the hastily constructed, amateur lies. 

Paul came to a stop and glared.  “A woman died today.”

“The rumor is that she was alive when they took her out of your clinic,” said Salim.

“When I talked to the doctor a couple of hours ago, he said she had a lot of problems.  She died when they were trying to revive her.”

Salim shook his head and looked down.  Death lurked everywhere, taking anyone.  Salim had seen too much of it.  “Why are you telling me?”

“It was your fault.”

Salim knew that to be true.  How did Paul know it as well?

“Tell me the real story about what you were doing in Africa.  Tell me the truth about my son.”

Salim turned and walked a slow circle in his cage.  He thought about his dead sister, mother, and father.  He thought about all those bodies he’d seen in Kapchorwa, Dallas, and Denver.  So many dead.  He knew his guilt.  Maybe he deserved to have Paul make good on the threat to drain him dry.  No, he deserved something a million times worse.  Ten million times worse.

“I went to Pakistan to do my part for jihad.”

“You are a terrorist, then.”

Meekly, Salim said, “Was.”

Paul waved a hand at the Arab men and women in the other cages.  “These are your terrorist buddies?”

“I don’t know who these people are.  I never saw any of them before they put me in here.” Salim drew a deep breath.  “Before I tell you the true story you need to know this: everything I told you about Austin is true.  I saved him from the burning hospital.  He was alive when I left him there.”

Paul’s anger flared.  “When you left him to die?”

“Maybe.” Salim forced himself to look into Paul’s fiery eyes.  “I didn’t start out to kill everybody on the planet, but that’s what I was a part of.”

“What did you do it for then?”

“Not this.” Salim stared into the rusty dimness of the silo.  “I was stupid.  I wanted to fight for a cause I believed in.”

“Jihad?”

Salim shook his head as he spoke.  “Not that.  I thought it was that, but I was wrong.  I only know it made sense to me at the time.  I was stupid.  What they put me in by sending me to Kapchorwa, I never would have agreed to do that.  We were all tricked.  When I started to suspect something truly evil was in the works, I did my best to save Austin.  I saved some other people too.  I could have been killed for it.”

“You weren’t killed because you were too much of a coward to stand up to the terrorists holding your leash.”

Salim accepted that.  It was probably true.  He could have hauled Austin into the trees and stayed with him but at the time, he—he didn’t know what he was thinking.  He was out of his head with fear that night and doing his best to hold onto the tatters of his humanity by saving those he could.

Salim sat down on the floor of his cage and asked Paul to sit down as well.

He told Paul his whole story; from the minute he boarded a plane to leave Denver on his way to Pakistan, to the moment he found his parents and his sister dead at the house after traveling halfway around the world to get home.  He left out no detail.  He admitted every sin.

Within a couple of days of arriving home, the police arrested him and brought him to the detainment facility where he eventually ended up in a cage in silo K3.

By the time the story was done, Paul was leaning against the support bars that served to keep Salim in.  Nothing was said between them for a long time until Salim said, “If you drain me dry tomorrow, I’d deserve it.”

“You would.” Paul’s voice had lost the angry edge.  He sounded defeated.

“I can’t make up for what I’ve done.”

“Nope.” Paul turned and looked at Salim.  “Why haven’t you killed yourself?”

Salim turned away.

“Seriously.  How do you live with the guilt?”

Salim got angry and glared at Paul.

“I’m not asking you to kill yourself.  I sincerely want to know why you haven’t.”

“I don’t know.” Salim put his head in his hands.  “I think suicide compounds my stupidity with cowardice.  Death brings an end to my suffering.”

“Life in the silo is shit.” Paul looked around.  “But you’re not suffering, not like most people out in the rest of the world.”

“My suffering is spending every moment I’m awake feeling the weight of my choices, knowing what I’ve done to hurt more people than I can imagine, knowing that every person I meet for the rest of my life is almost certainly the relative of somebody I killed by bringing Ebola here.  If you want to strangle me, Mr. Cooper, reach your hands through the cage and do it.  I will not resist.  I deserve that, and more.”

Paul didn’t reach through the cage.  He didn’t know what to do.

Salim said, “Until the day when somebody takes my life I’ll gladly give my blood or anything I can.  I hope it saves some lives.”