The Chimera Sequence (18 page)

She slowly reached out a gloved hand and watched as the gorilla’s tiny black fingers closed onto one of her own.

“He’s beautiful,” she whispered.

“Does that mean you’ve changed your mind?” Cole said.

Leila placed her other hand under the animal’s tiny rump and lifted him out of Cole’s hands. The infant relaxed against her chest, his trusting gaze locked on her face. A novel sensation rushed through her veins, some strange combination of instinct and hormones that no human baby had ever triggered.

“You could say that, yes,” she answered, now running her free hand down the gorilla’s furry back. “I never thought I could feel this way about an animal.”

“You’re not the first to have that reaction, if it makes you feel any better.” Cole pulled a long cigar-shaped plastic container out of his coverall pocket. “Ever since Dian Fossey and
Gorillas in the Mist
hit the big time, these mountain gorillas have been doing their best to convince us humans that they’re worth keeping around.”

Leila looked up at Proper Kambale, sitting silently in the blankets. A bright blue surgical mask hid most of his long face, but the expression around his dark eyes added to the overwhelming sense of acceptance and purpose that was welling up inside her. She could understand a little better now why someone like this would risk life and limb to protect a forgotten corner of the world like Virunga National Park. What was that statistic Cole had shared on their drive up from the airport? Over one hundred and fifty Virunga park rangers killed on the job in the last twenty years alone. Men like the Kambale brothers, leaving their legacy of blood and toil on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes.

The tiny creature began to move against her, rubbing his little forehead and one open hand up along her chest. She flushed with embarrassment as the gorilla began to smack his lips on finding the target.

“Hang on, I think we have some formula made up already,” Cole said.

“Uh-uh, no way.” Leila shook her head as Cole pressed a bottle into her free hand.

“Yes, Madame,” Proper said. “I am trying to feed him all afternoon with no success, but now I see what I was missing.”

Leila reluctantly took the bottle and inserted it gently into Endo’s waiting mouth. Now with his face still and only inches from her own, she remembered the reason for their visit. The bare black skin around the gorilla’s lips and nose was covered in raised pustular lesions, all equal in size and developmental stage. They were just beginning to form the characteristic umbilication, caving in at the center like a volcanic crater, and several oozed a viscous milky yellow fluid. Perfect for a viral culture. She glanced at the hairless underside of the forearm stretched out along the baby’s emaciated torso. More of the same lesions, and there they were on the palms of his otherwise beautiful little hands, too.

“What did you say these lesions looked like when you first picked him up?”

Cole answered, “The rash was just barely visible.”

“So you’re saying a disease process that normally takes a couple weeks to play itself out has sped by in just forty-eight hours?”

Leila genuinely had a hard time believing it. But the evidence was right here in front of her, sucking away hungrily at the almost-empty bottle in her hand.

“Exactly,” Cole said. He pulled a long cotton-tipped probe out of its plastic packaging. “You still counting yourself among the doubters?”

“No, I guess I really can’t anymore.” She pointed to an open pustule on the gorilla’s forearm. “That looks like a good spot.”

“Alright, do you have a good hold on him?”

She nodded. “Go for it.”

Cole held the probe like a pencil, guiding it steadily into position and rolling it along the oozing skin several times. He raised his other hand, which held the clear plastic tube filled with viral culture media, and inserted the probe deep down into the gel. Then he broke off the protruding end and pushed the rubber stopper back into the top of the tube. There was something in the confident manner with which he went about the procedure that appealed to Leila’s geeky scientific core, but a rapid knock on the door and resulting movement of her startled patient prevented her from pursuing that line of thought any further.

Innocence Kambale poked his face into the room.

“Cole, Dr. Torabi, you must come!” he said breathlessly. “Marna cannot breathe—Musamba says run quickly.”

Fadi Haddad looked up from his computer screen to peer through the cheap white aluminum blinds. The window gave him a clear view out over the long curved drive leading up from Fairfax County Parkway.

Still nothing.

A glistening mirage shimmered on a patch of asphalt, but the rest of the drive was mercifully protected by a towering forest of oaks and tulip poplars. The trees were everywhere, healthy and vibrant in their summer foliage, and they were a comforting presence in this little suburban oasis. It was really only a half-hour drive but always seemed a world away from the buildings and bustle of his downtown restaurant. Growing up on the rocky hillsides of the Bekaa Valley, where Solomon’s famous grove of ancient cedars were the only trees left, Haddad had never seen such abundance. The trees were only one of so many things he had come to love about this adopted home.

He tried to imagine those rocky slopes, which would now be fading from their spring lushness to summer’s dry golden brown. There would be mixed flocks of sheep and goats picking their way around the boulders, and bored teenagers, like he used to be, half-heartedly following behind, dreaming of greater things. Would he do it again, answer that call that had taken him out of one world and into another? In a heartbeat, yes. But not, perhaps, for the same foolish reasons that once so captivated him.

Lebanon, land of his fathers. His
real
home. Why was it so hard to convince himself now that he was still doing the right thing?

Haddad looked back to his screen and reread the message in his Drafts folder for the hundredth time. Nothing on the “To” or “Subject” lines, just a simple block of Arabic text in the main content box. It was meant to look like a letter from one relative to another about an upcoming family wedding. Fresh eggs for cooking up copious quantities of a favorite Lebanese omelet, insulin syringes for the visiting diabetic grandmother, and space heaters to ensure the newborn nieces and nephews were warm enough. The quantities were a bit off, but it would take an especially attentive analyst to catch that fact.

It was a curious combination, but Haddad followed the instructions to the smallest detail. Eggs from his restaurant’s food service contractor. Bulk syringes from a medical supply company out in Leesburg. And the space heaters from Walmart.

Not because he wanted anything to do with whatever horror was now taking shape. No, Haddad complied because he was terrified of what would happen if he did not.

Where were they, anyway?

He looked around the simple office, grasping for something to organize, some way to take his mind off the one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about. But there was nothing left to do. He had sent the self-storage facility’s only employee home the day before, promising to pay twice his hourly wage if the simple man would stay home for the week. An allusion to needing a location for an adulterous sexual liaison was all Haddad needed to let slip, and the employee was all grins and encouragement as he willingly agreed to the underhanded arrangement. The thought made him sick. Regardless of his current reluctance to embrace the cause like he once had, Haddad was a faithful man. A good Muslim.

A movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention.

Two vehicles were making their way slowly up the drive. One of them, an older F-150 pickup with Maryland plates, belonged to his cousin. The other was a new Toyota compact, a rental that had been picked up near Dulles airport earlier that morning.

The moment had arrived.

Plane hasn’t even left South Africa yet.” Cole stepped back into the room and closed the door gently. “Apparently one of the doctors on call backed out when he got briefed on the details of Marna’s disease. They’re still waiting at Tambo International for his backup.”

“Hope that costs him his job, cowardly asshole,” Leila whispered.

“My thoughts exactly.”

He sat down beside the bed and shook his head in anger. Didn’t they realize a delay could cost Marna her life? She looked awful, stretched out there with her head cocked back at an unnatural angle, the plastic endotracheal tube sticking out of her gaping mouth. It wasn’t hooked up to anything—they never used gas on the gorillas and weren’t equipped with even the most basic anesthesia unit—but at least the tube let her rapid, shallow breaths flow freely. Leila sat on the other side of the bed, injecting small amounts of milky white propofol into an intravenous catheter whenever her patient showed signs of discomfort. The drug kept Marna just unconscious enough so that she wouldn’t fight the tube uncomfortably filling her trachea. Not ideal, but at least it was keeping her alive while they waited for the ambulance to arrive from Kigali.

Musamba was in the middle of intubating Marna himself when they arrived at the room an hour earlier, and Cole could tell that Leila was about to go off on him again for acting way outside his scope of practice. Marna’s gasping breath, and the rapid return of color to her lips when the tube slid into position, must have changed Leila’s mind, though, and Cole was glad she held her tongue. He would have done the same thing if he’d been in Musamba’s place, and he didn’t have anywhere near the same experience intubating large primates. Who was going to argue that the veterinarian should have just watched her suffocate right in front of him?

“Shit, her blood pressure just won’t stay where I want it.” Leila took the stethoscope from her ears and removed the manual cuff from the pilot’s toned bicep. “What I would do for a little dobutamine right now.”

“You really think she’s in danger of some kind of catastrophic heart failure?”

As much as he hated to acknowledge it, Cole knew there was a chance she could simply die on them right there.

“Yeah, she’s dancing along the sharp edge of septic shock right now, and I’m afraid all the indicators are going in the wrong directions.” Leila had two fingers on Marna’s wrist. “Pulse and respiratory rates are through the roof, and I’m beginning to think more fluids might push her straight into ARDS.”

Acute respiratory distress syndrome. It was often a point of no return for septic patients, especially when mechanical ventilation wasn’t available. Where in the world was that ambulance? It was supposed to have left Kigali two hours ago.

“Isn’t there something more we can do for her, with what we’ve got here?”

Cole didn’t like the first hint of a defeated look in Leila’s eyes. He knew she was in over her head, that she had never been forced to take care of a crashing patient in this type of setting, with two veterinarians to assist her and almost none of the drugs or equipment she needed. But still, she was the physician, a trained infectious disease doctor at that, and Marna was dying from an infectious disease. Couldn’t she come up with something?

“I’m doing the best I can,” Leila said softly. “Dr. Shackleton promised me that this was going to be a simple courier mission, in and out with the samples, that’s it.”

Cole felt the blood rush to his face.

“Feel free to call yourself a taxi back to Kigali, if that’s how you feel.” Now he was pissed. He wasn’t going to just sit here and watch another friend die right in front of his eyes.

Leila glared right back at him, her lips pressed thin and tight.

He knew he was being harsh, but was this really the best the U.S. government could send in the face of a potential pandemic? “When you get back to Atlanta, though, could you ask your boss to send over the big guns next time?”

“Sure,” she spat back, shaking her head. “I’ll put in a special request so that our team is able to fly through the middle of a hurricane. Definitely don’t want you or your investigation to be inconvenienced in any way, asshole.”

“Look, I’m sorry.” He took a deep breath. As much as he wanted to keep pushing, there was no use in escalating the already charged emotional atmosphere. “I know you’re doing all you can.”

Their painful vigil was interrupted by Katy Perry’s powerful voice coming from somewhere deep within Leila’s Tyvek suit.

“Shit, thought I changed that.” She stood up. “I need to get this—probably my boss.”

“Go for it, maybe he’s got some good news for us.”

Unlikely, but it was hard to imagine things getting worse than they already were. Cole watched her step out into the fading light, then turned back to the bed. How many cool evenings just like this one had he and Marna spent over good books and a bottle of wine? He would never have pushed so hard for that quick excursion across the border if he’d had any idea that their peaceful shared existence was going to come crashing down so dramatically. If they had not been there to find the dead gorillas and sound the early alarm, though, would it really have made any difference? The hospital outbreak in Goma would have gotten noticed eventually, but the international response could have been delayed by several days. Enough to make a difference, in the grand scheme of things? That remained to be seen.

“Come on, Marna,” he whispered over her. “You’ve got to pull through here.”

Leila tore off her gloves, mask and goggles and was working on the coveralls when her phone stopped ringing. She froze, then finally released the full-body sob that had been working its way out ever since Cole started attacking her with his nasty comments. Was she really this desperate for contact with the outside world? Apparently so.

A chorus of invisible insects droned on from the vegetation around Marna’s cabin, but they weren’t quite loud enough to drown out one more sob.
Stop it.
She could handle this.

At least the cool evening air was an unexpected mercy. It settled onto her exposed face and arms, almost seeming to lift away some of the tension from this day filled with unpleasant surprises. She dug into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the phone. Just like she thought—one missed call from the CDC. Couldn’t she get a break?